The question is really, why is this kit done without a receptacle of some type that does not require simulated mutilation? It could be built that way, but has not been. Does this simulated mutilation have long term psychological impact on young person? The potential is there and proven. We should question the implementation not for the AI's sake, but for the sake of the kids doing the experiments.
Because what the kit is supposed to teach is how a cockroach works, not robot design. I understand your concern, but kids everywhere have to dissect frogs when they're relatively young, and they're not turning into psychopaths everywhere.
The ethical issue isn't the mutilation (surgeons have to amputate people's limbs on occasion, but you wouldn't call that unethical). What you need to be careful is the motivation behind the action of the child. You should, of course, never teach a child to hurt any animal for no reason. No human being should ever enjoy witnessing any life suffer. And when you dissect frogs, you first anesthetize the frog to eliminate any suffering. When you install this kit, you first numb the cockroach with ice, for the same reason. The ethical issue here is whether the control of cockroach itself is torture, and I argue the cockroach isn't capable of the level of awareness that would imply. It can't know that it's being controlled, it can't know that there's anything different, because it doesn't know anything at all.
The brain is an input/output system at any level. Where are you drawing the line?
Obviously it's hard to draw an exact line where you can easily say whether an animal should deserve rights or not. If there's any question, you should ethically err on the safe side. That said, cockroaches are so far away from the line, that even though the line is fuzzy, you still know which side they're on with 100% confidence, in the exact same way that you wouldn't argue a human being is on the other side of that line just because you don't know where the line is.
The line should be drawn at the point where the organism has some sense of self-awareness (which can be very difficult to test, therefore the fuzziness). The cockroach has the electronics connected to its antennae. it gets the obstacle signal, it turns. There's no question it's going to turn. And regardless of the fact that there are no obstacles, it's still going to turn, even though it also has vision, which is giving it the contradictory signal that there's no obstacle. When I pretend to throw a toy to a dog, it's going to anticipate my throw, and start running. After enough pretend throws it's going to start making the connection that the throw movement doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to send the toy flying. And now it's going to flinch in preparation to run, but stop itself if it doesn't see the toy leaving my hand. It changed the output to the same input purely through internal processes.
Cockroaches are capable of some rudimentary learning behavior, but it's very, very limited. Like I said, my e-mail spam filter is capable of more complex learning.
You are mentally ill if you believe that torture is the same thing as gathering honey, which requires almost no interaction with the bees and does not cause them any harm.
I'm not a PETA member, and eat meat. I would not eat meat if I found the producer advocating or allowing inhumane treatment however. To believe that you must have one to get the other is idiocy. So I think you are a troll.
Although I agree with you on the whole torture thing, there's a certain level of awareness that must exist in the life at hand before it becomes possible to torture it. It's just like I consider all the people talking about AI rights to be doing so prematurely at the moment, but I do believe eventually there will be AI which is deserving of rights. It's just that right now the level of complexity doesn't warrant it. There's no self-awareness in any of our code.
What this kit does is it sends signals via the electrode to mimic the navigation antennae signal. The cockroach gets the signal that there's an object it can't go past, and it turns to avoid it. The entire reason it works is because at that level of life, the brain is just an input / output system. Cockroaches don't think. Their brain sees light, they get signal to run. They sense other cockroaches pheromones, they get the signal to fuck. Their antennae senses an object, they get the signal to one. They're already robotic, you're just controlling the signal now. As far as cockroaches go, my spam filter is a more complex beast than they are, and if we think they deserve any rights, we need to start worrying about my treatment of the filter. Imagine spending your entire life reading through viagra spam!
This is a human rights prize, not a guts prize. Utilitaristically, Snowden has done a lot more for a lot more people than Malala Yousafzai.
What's the purpose of the prize? Typically it's the increase awareness of the issue, in order to help motivate change. Everyone's talking about Snowden and NSA surveillance. Plenty of people are talking about Yousafzai as well, but I think that cause would benefit from the extra attention more than the anti-surveillance issue would benefit. Snowden getting the prize is really just going to deteriorate into a conversation about anti-US sentiment in Europe, instead of the real issue.
The statistic he cited still has mathematical credibility though when you look at the raw numbers. Again, this is only owing to the relative infrequency of rape compared to voluntary copulation, and shouldn't be taken as giving his statements any credibility, only being pointed to indicate where he could have got the initial idea in the first place.
That doesn't really excuse it. Does it really matter if the flawed premise I'm using to justify my beliefs is a result of drawing bad conclusions from real data or not? In the end, it's still a flawed premise, a bad conclusion is a bad conclusion.
The lesson here is that people should check with experts before making public statements, lest they make asses of themselves.
It's worth noting that a lot of the outrage against Akin was caused by people who were taking the word "legitimate" in that context to mean some synonym of "acceptable", and it's quite natural that they should be offended by such a notion. Nonetheless, giving Akin the benefit of the doubt about the meaning of the terms, it's slightly less offensive to assume he meant "genuine"
Nobody interpreted "legitimate" in the way you're describing. The reason everyone harped upon his usage of it is that it implies women who became pregnant after being raped weren't really genuinely raped. "You see, if you had been actually raped, it would be extremely unlikely that you would have gotten pregnant, so we think you're making it up, and are really just calling it rape now because you didn't like the consequences."
Where's the obviousness? Just because we have erasers and pencils doesn't meant that it's obvious to attach an eraser (especially via a non-obvious means!) to a pencil. Similarly, just because one can contort paper clips into various shapes doesn't meant that it's obvious how to make a phone holder out of one.
Look at my other reply to you. Abstract ideas like, "I want to attach an eraser to a pencil" aren't patentable. Before they had pencil erasers, if you asked a manufacturing expert, "how would you go about attaching an eraser to a pencil?" I'm sure he'd rapid-fire several methods in which this can be done. Make the eraser the same shape of the pencil, but slightly lesser diameter, drill a hole in the pencil, insert eraser. Make the eraser the same diameter as the pencil, wrap the connection point with something rigid (functionally equivalent). Make the eraser the same diameter of the pencil, place the whole in it, allow it to stretch around the pencil...
Now let's say I want to attach rockets to boots in order to fly. The concept of attaching rockets to boots isn't patentable whether I can make it work or not. But if I ask an expert in rockets how to go about doing that, he won't be able to tell you how to do it. He'll be able to tell you all the technical challenges that make it currently impossible to do. The solution is not obvious. Come up with a solution to any of those technical challenges, and those are patentable.
The reason patents exist is to give an incentive for inventors to not keep trade secrets. The obstetrical forceps were a family secret of the surgeons who invented it, and nobody else was able to use it to assist in childbirths. Other doctors knew they had a tool to help grab the head of the baby and assist in childbirth, but they couldn't replicate the tool. That makes it non-obvious. If somebody says, "I have an eraser attached to a pencil", other manufacturers don't need to see your advice in order to figure out how to attach an eraser to a pencil. That makes it obvious. If I told you, "make this paper clip into a stand for your phone", I'm sure you could play with it enough to figure out a position that works. That makes it obvious.
If it can't be a trade secret, it can't be patented.
I don't get why people think that there wasn't something new here. It's a terrible patenting example because of that.
I'm going to reply to you again, because I think I've figured out the flaw in your reasoning, and why nobody is seeing eye to eye here:
You seem to think you can patent an idea. You can't. It says so right in the uspto website.
So if you want to figure out if the patent is valid, and not obvious, you take the idea over to an expert in manufacturing. Ask him, "I want to attach an eraser to a pencil. Do you know how to go about doing that?" If he can come up with different ways on the spot, it's obvious.
On the other hand, I want rocket boots. I can go to a rocket scientist and ask him, "I want to attach rockets to boots. Do you know how to go about doing that?" He's going to tell me, "yeah, there's a ton of problems with this. We need to figure out where to put the fuel, rockets have a way of exploding, which make them not very safe, they're not particularly stable, and when you combine that with legs that can move all around you've got serious problems, etc." There are serious technical challenges to all of that. Solve any one of those challenges that experts in the field current have, and you can get a patent on it. The idea of putting rockets in boots still isn't. Your particular solution that makes it possible, or brings it closer to reality, that's patentable, if it's new and non-obvious to experts in the field.
AGAIN. How many pencils could erase out of the box?
None, and still none. The pencil doesn't erase, the eraser that came attached to it does. An eraser erasing isn't surprising or revolutionary.
How do you attach that common pencil to that common eraser?
By your ridiculously low standards, this guy from a post I saw on reddit should be able to patent his phone stand made out of a paper clip. And it's actually more ingenious than the pencil eraser because the paper clip wasn't made for that purpose.
As people have already explained to you, the requirement for a patent isn't just that it be something new. It has to also be something that is not obvious. If you didn't encounter any technical challenges you had to solve to make your idea work once you had your idea, it's not patentable. If people had constantly tried to put erasers on pencils before, but nobody succeeded until this guy came out with a way to manufacture an eraser such that it could go on a pencil, that design would have been patentable, but others would have been free to come up with their own alternative designs to put erasers on pencils. Turns out that's not necessary, because the design is trivial.
I don't know about toll roads, but California definitely requires you to mash your thumb on the fingerprint scanner at the DMV every time you renew your drivers license.
Interesting. I live in South Carolina. People here would throw a fit if somebody tried to implement that.
I think the point here is that you have to submit fingerprints sometimes when entering a foreign country/continent.
Fair enough point. I completely forgot this is the case, as I have dual citizenship and generally enter the US and EU countries without submitting fingerprints. That said, when did France start copying the US nonsense? I entered France using my US passport instead of my Italian one back in 2007, and wasn't fingerprinted.
Some recent uses of my fingerprints in which I had no real say:
1. Passport check at CDG airport
2. Applying for a Speedpass for CA toll roads
3. Getting some papers notarized
What the hell? I have a passport, and didn't submit any fingerprints to get it. I didn't submit my fingerprints to get an identification document such a driver's license and california would expect me to submit them to get through toll roads?? Why the hell did you need fingerprints to get a document notorized? Usually you show up at a bank, hand them an ID, and sign the paper in front of the notary.
So, there are many current uses of fingerprinting in routine life that one has to comply with,
No, there are not! The only people I've ever personally met in the US who were fingerprinted were either arrested at some point or were applying for a security clearance. Routine life here doesn't and shouldn't require such a thing. I haven't heard of this non-sense in california until you mentioned it in your post.
Me? I want better security on my phone, as I use it for purchases and banking. I think biometrics is a move in the right direction, what do you think?
The 4-digit pin is way more secure than your fingerprint. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, your fingerprints are all over your phone.
I don't listen to music very much, and it always annoys me when people ask "what kind of music do you like", as if it were some basic human need like eating.
I don't listen to music very much either, and have trouble answering that question myself. When my entire office was exploding with the twerking news and asked me if what I thought about Miley Cyrus's performance my answer was, "back up. Who's Miley Cyrus, and what performance?"
That said, music is a basic human need like eating. If you've never listened to any song that emotionally moved you, even though you had no idea what song it was or who was playing it, you've missed out on a basic human experience. You should work to correct that, and go in search of interesting music. It doesn't mean it needs to become the most important thing in your life, it doesn't mean you need to know every popular artist and be able to enter into a conversation about music with other people. It most certainly doesn't mean you need to like the same music as other people. You just need to have that experience, at least once, of really identifying with a piece.
Think of it this way: your brain has awesome circuitry you haven't used. It's capable of a deep emotional connection with language and sounds. You're not curious what that's like?
If it's not possible for you to hit your cap during the billing period, then why would you have a cap in the first place?
Bingo. That's what we're saying. Data limit caps are bullshit.
I'm on 100Mbs cable. I get 200GB/month. I'd much rather this than be limited to 0.6Mbs which would would render me physically incapable of hitting my cap in a month.
But it doesn't work that way. Some people are going to download a terabyte a month. Others are going to download less than a gigabyte. As long as the average of all of the customers is around 200 GB / month, they can still support 100 Mbps.
If I want to download more (remember that this data transfer isn't free to my ISP) then I can pay more. Simple economics.
Except it's not exactly that fair, is it? After all, how often do you use the 200 GB month? So you're paying for data you're not using!
The ISPs want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to charge you for data usage you're not taking advantage of, and simply bill you for the speed tier you've signed up for, under the understanding that most of their customers won't hit the cap. Then if their customers hit the cap, they want to charge them for the extra data, even though they've already charged you for that extra data, which you didn't use. Either you're average it across your customers or you don't. If the ISP wants to charge me by the byte such that at around 200 GB month I pay what I'm paying now, but when I use less I pay less, then yes, sure, charge me by usage. I won't object. However, if I still pay the same amount the month I've only downloaded 1 GB, then they can't charge me more for the month I've downloaded 399 GB.
Well, they are linked. Would you rather max your speed at 50KB/s or reach 1.0MB/s but be limited to 130GB per month? They amount to the same monthly hard limit (unless my math is off), but with the faster connection you can simply burn through your allowance faster.
Sure, and that's the problem. It should not be possible for you to physically hit your allowance within the billing period.
So, what do ISPs do? They oversubscribe. Since I'm not using my link 24/7 at full speed, it is easy to "share" my bandwidth.
That's not the problem. That's perfectly reasonable, and there's no reason why they should do it any other way. All that this means is that during peak usage hours, people aren't going to hit their max.
If you have enough users using enough of your bandwidth that your customers can't hit your peak speeds for a reasonable amount of the time, or it's just too slow during peak, then you're selling too high a bandwidth. You don't have the infrastructure to sell 30 Mbps, you should be advertising 15 Mbps. Alternatively, you can upgrade your infrastructure and raise costs. Either way, I have no problems with my speeds being limited, I have a problem with the amount of data I transfer being limited.
"Let's see how the population reacts, if they just shrug to it, let's see how much else we can get away with. If it causes an outcry, we can always say it was the idea of a solitary lunatic"
It's not like it would be the first time...
Alternatively, it's a well-thought plan to get a new job. Maybe his career has plateaued at the Time, and if he manages to get fired for a controversial opinion he has a bit of publicity when Fox (or some other conservative outfit) hires the journalist whose speech was "censured by the liberal media".
I was schooled in the late 1970's/early 1980's - way before the advent of computers in the classroom. We were taught that writing things down (even copying from a book) helped the content to 'sink in' to your memory far better than just reading it and I believe this to be true - even now when I take my own notes I remember the content pretty well.
I was taught the same thing but didn't really believe it for most of my time in school. That is, until I got to college and had this professor for diff eq. that had the oddest teaching method ever:
At the start of the class he would start writing on the blackboard, not saying a word. He just copied his (very organized) notes to the board. Very dense writing, a lot of content. When that board was filled, he would continue on and do the same thing on a second blackboard that was located on a side-wall of the classroom. About half the class time was spent that way. Then when the boards were filled, and we were finished copying everything, he would go back to the beginning and start talking about what he had written.
It sounds like a colossal waste of class time, but not only did we cover everything the classes in other sessions covered, I never had to study for an exam in that class. While we're copying things down we're reading it and we're paying attention to what we're reading because we need to replicate it. Then when he was actually there explaining things, we already had an idea of what he was going to talk about, we had already thought about it and understood a few things and not others. We weren't distracted by trying to take notes and were actually listening to what he was saying. In fact, when he said something that cleared something up in our minds that wasn't clear from the notes, I'd just jot something quickly in the margin. Which is funny because although that notebook contains the most detailed notes I've ever taken for any class, I've never had to go back to re-read it. Everything just stuck for the exam.
Lowest amount of work and greatest amount of retention I've ever had for any subject in a classroom. It's been about a decade, and I still remember a good deal about slope fields, bifurcations, characteristic equations, and laplace transforms, among other topics. I think the prof also got a kick out of not explaining to anyone that this was his teaching method the first day of class. We were all sitting there and saw this guy just start writing a ton of stuff up on the board. He waited until he got the boards filled up before introducing himself.
I am voting electronically this year in the Norwegian election. If somebody is stupid enough to give me money for voting for a certain party, then let them. I can vote as many times as I want, and it is only the last vote that counts. If I want to be even more evil, I can vote by paper as well, and let the guy paying money to see me vote on the net be there until the end. The paper vote superseded the electronic one.
That implies you guys don't have a secret ballot. After all, how would they know which vote to cancel on the subsequent electronic votes? Or worse, they're even able to match up your paper ballot to your electronic vote to know to cancel your electronic vote. Which necessarily implies that if somebody is coercing you to vote a certain way, all they need to do is bribe someone in government that has access to that information, to verify that you actually voted the way you were supposed to.
Of course, that's not even the worst problem with electronic voting. How do you know your vote was actually counted if there's no physical record of it that can be verified? I think electronic voting can work, but you can't do it from home, and it must have a paper trail. You go to a voting booth, electronic select your choices, submit your votes, get a human-readable printout with which you may confirm your vote, deposit human-readable printout in ballot box. Votes get counted based on electronic submission, but if anyone requests a recount, or if a recount is automatically triggered because the election is close, we count the paper.
..just move the voting to sundays, like every other sensible western nation does it.
Some sensible nations do it on Saturdays!
That would lower turnout not increase it. People can be convinced to leave their jobs to go stand in line for a few hours, but giving up their weekend time? Fuck that.
I'd rather not play such a game if it means infringing upon the rights of non-citizens (and yes, I do believe they have rights).
Absolutely they have rights. There are lines I think we shouldn't cross no matter what. As an American, it embarrasses the crap out of me that we've engaged in torture, for example. This disagreement between you and I is a clear example that different people place that line in different places, though. And that's between two people from a fairly similar culture (I assume). What happens when you add a very difficult culture to the mix? The obvious example is the treatment of women in Muslim countries or their view of free speech when it concerns religions (any place with a blasphemy law). Alternative we could bring up the point that many (not all) Chinese citizens feel it's the duty of the government to spy on them and control the dissemination of information to maintain an ordered society. However, we don't need to go to this extreme. Several European nations have declared access to broadband internet a human right, something most Americans laugh at. Or look at how many people believe health care should be a human right while half the people in the US are complaining about the the Affordable Health Care Act and believe government should stay completely out of it.
What rights people have, what duties the government has, how people should behave toward one another...there is no consensus on any of it! You think spying on anyone is immoral, I think it's not necessarily so, unless you're breaking a social contract (for example, by violating the laws of the land or properly ratified treaties). The best that we do is group ourselves around our common beliefs and form a government around that shared view. And there are things we do that we believe is absolutely right but others think it is wrong. And they're going to try to stop us from doing that "wrong" thing. And if we want to protect our rights to keep doing it anyway, we need to defend ourselves. We do the same thing to them. Remember the whole, "spreading democracy to the Middle East" justification for the Iraq war. Whether or not that was the goal is irrelevant: the point is that most people here thought it was an worthwhile thing to do. Did anyone ask if they want democracy? We know it's the best form of government, and if they don't want it, they just don't understand it! Let them live with it and get used to it, and they'll thank us for it (while welcoming their liberators with flowers).
Nobody has intrinsic rights. We have whatever rights we've agreed upon in our particular group, and we have them for as long as we can defend them. So defending them is a good idea. Not at all costs, I agree with you. Sometimes the price is too high. I think we should never torture anyone for any reason. You go above that and don't think we should violate anyone's privacy for any reason. But I'm sure you have your own list of acceptable behavior. I assume you think killing is wrong, but if your country is invaded, do you approve of killing in order to defend it? Why? What if you knew more lives would be saved by surrendering, but you knew your way of life under the new government was going to be incompatible with your current beliefs now?
The TL;DR version: we're not going to convince each other, we have fundamentally different beliefs. That said, my personal justification for my belief is that if it's not codified in our laws that this isn't something we don't do, then people should assume we believe it's alright to do. In fact, they should assume we're going to do it whenever it suits our interests and prepare accordingly. On the other hand, if we're violating our law books we should be held responsible for it.
They don't, and as a result I lock my car when I leave it.
Which doesn't violate anyone's privacy or do any other such thing.
Ok, I can come up with a different example. How about security cameras at stores?
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The question is really, why is this kit done without a receptacle of some type that does not require simulated mutilation? It could be built that way, but has not been. Does this simulated mutilation have long term psychological impact on young person? The potential is there and proven. We should question the implementation not for the AI's sake, but for the sake of the kids doing the experiments.
Because what the kit is supposed to teach is how a cockroach works, not robot design. I understand your concern, but kids everywhere have to dissect frogs when they're relatively young, and they're not turning into psychopaths everywhere.
The ethical issue isn't the mutilation (surgeons have to amputate people's limbs on occasion, but you wouldn't call that unethical). What you need to be careful is the motivation behind the action of the child. You should, of course, never teach a child to hurt any animal for no reason. No human being should ever enjoy witnessing any life suffer. And when you dissect frogs, you first anesthetize the frog to eliminate any suffering. When you install this kit, you first numb the cockroach with ice, for the same reason. The ethical issue here is whether the control of cockroach itself is torture, and I argue the cockroach isn't capable of the level of awareness that would imply. It can't know that it's being controlled, it can't know that there's anything different, because it doesn't know anything at all.
The brain is an input/output system at any level. Where are you drawing the line?
Obviously it's hard to draw an exact line where you can easily say whether an animal should deserve rights or not. If there's any question, you should ethically err on the safe side. That said, cockroaches are so far away from the line, that even though the line is fuzzy, you still know which side they're on with 100% confidence, in the exact same way that you wouldn't argue a human being is on the other side of that line just because you don't know where the line is.
The line should be drawn at the point where the organism has some sense of self-awareness (which can be very difficult to test, therefore the fuzziness). The cockroach has the electronics connected to its antennae. it gets the obstacle signal, it turns. There's no question it's going to turn. And regardless of the fact that there are no obstacles, it's still going to turn, even though it also has vision, which is giving it the contradictory signal that there's no obstacle. When I pretend to throw a toy to a dog, it's going to anticipate my throw, and start running. After enough pretend throws it's going to start making the connection that the throw movement doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to send the toy flying. And now it's going to flinch in preparation to run, but stop itself if it doesn't see the toy leaving my hand. It changed the output to the same input purely through internal processes.
Cockroaches are capable of some rudimentary learning behavior, but it's very, very limited. Like I said, my e-mail spam filter is capable of more complex learning.
You are mentally ill if you believe that torture is the same thing as gathering honey, which requires almost no interaction with the bees and does not cause them any harm.
I'm not a PETA member, and eat meat. I would not eat meat if I found the producer advocating or allowing inhumane treatment however. To believe that you must have one to get the other is idiocy. So I think you are a troll.
Although I agree with you on the whole torture thing, there's a certain level of awareness that must exist in the life at hand before it becomes possible to torture it. It's just like I consider all the people talking about AI rights to be doing so prematurely at the moment, but I do believe eventually there will be AI which is deserving of rights. It's just that right now the level of complexity doesn't warrant it. There's no self-awareness in any of our code.
What this kit does is it sends signals via the electrode to mimic the navigation antennae signal. The cockroach gets the signal that there's an object it can't go past, and it turns to avoid it. The entire reason it works is because at that level of life, the brain is just an input / output system. Cockroaches don't think. Their brain sees light, they get signal to run. They sense other cockroaches pheromones, they get the signal to fuck. Their antennae senses an object, they get the signal to one. They're already robotic, you're just controlling the signal now. As far as cockroaches go, my spam filter is a more complex beast than they are, and if we think they deserve any rights, we need to start worrying about my treatment of the filter. Imagine spending your entire life reading through viagra spam!
This is a human rights prize, not a guts prize. Utilitaristically, Snowden has done a lot more for a lot more people than Malala Yousafzai.
What's the purpose of the prize? Typically it's the increase awareness of the issue, in order to help motivate change. Everyone's talking about Snowden and NSA surveillance. Plenty of people are talking about Yousafzai as well, but I think that cause would benefit from the extra attention more than the anti-surveillance issue would benefit. Snowden getting the prize is really just going to deteriorate into a conversation about anti-US sentiment in Europe, instead of the real issue.
The statistic he cited still has mathematical credibility though when you look at the raw numbers. Again, this is only owing to the relative infrequency of rape compared to voluntary copulation, and shouldn't be taken as giving his statements any credibility, only being pointed to indicate where he could have got the initial idea in the first place.
That doesn't really excuse it. Does it really matter if the flawed premise I'm using to justify my beliefs is a result of drawing bad conclusions from real data or not? In the end, it's still a flawed premise, a bad conclusion is a bad conclusion.
The lesson here is that people should check with experts before making public statements, lest they make asses of themselves.
It's worth noting that a lot of the outrage against Akin was caused by people who were taking the word "legitimate" in that context to mean some synonym of "acceptable", and it's quite natural that they should be offended by such a notion. Nonetheless, giving Akin the benefit of the doubt about the meaning of the terms, it's slightly less offensive to assume he meant "genuine"
Nobody interpreted "legitimate" in the way you're describing. The reason everyone harped upon his usage of it is that it implies women who became pregnant after being raped weren't really genuinely raped. "You see, if you had been actually raped, it would be extremely unlikely that you would have gotten pregnant, so we think you're making it up, and are really just calling it rape now because you didn't like the consequences."
Where's the obviousness? Just because we have erasers and pencils doesn't meant that it's obvious to attach an eraser (especially via a non-obvious means!) to a pencil. Similarly, just because one can contort paper clips into various shapes doesn't meant that it's obvious how to make a phone holder out of one.
Look at my other reply to you. Abstract ideas like, "I want to attach an eraser to a pencil" aren't patentable. Before they had pencil erasers, if you asked a manufacturing expert, "how would you go about attaching an eraser to a pencil?" I'm sure he'd rapid-fire several methods in which this can be done. Make the eraser the same shape of the pencil, but slightly lesser diameter, drill a hole in the pencil, insert eraser. Make the eraser the same diameter as the pencil, wrap the connection point with something rigid (functionally equivalent). Make the eraser the same diameter of the pencil, place the whole in it, allow it to stretch around the pencil...
Now let's say I want to attach rockets to boots in order to fly. The concept of attaching rockets to boots isn't patentable whether I can make it work or not. But if I ask an expert in rockets how to go about doing that, he won't be able to tell you how to do it. He'll be able to tell you all the technical challenges that make it currently impossible to do. The solution is not obvious. Come up with a solution to any of those technical challenges, and those are patentable.
The reason patents exist is to give an incentive for inventors to not keep trade secrets. The obstetrical forceps were a family secret of the surgeons who invented it, and nobody else was able to use it to assist in childbirths. Other doctors knew they had a tool to help grab the head of the baby and assist in childbirth, but they couldn't replicate the tool. That makes it non-obvious. If somebody says, "I have an eraser attached to a pencil", other manufacturers don't need to see your advice in order to figure out how to attach an eraser to a pencil. That makes it obvious. If I told you, "make this paper clip into a stand for your phone", I'm sure you could play with it enough to figure out a position that works. That makes it obvious.
If it can't be a trade secret, it can't be patented.
Sure. This is one of many reasons why software patents are a horrible idea. I completely agree with you.
I don't get why people think that there wasn't something new here. It's a terrible patenting example because of that.
I'm going to reply to you again, because I think I've figured out the flaw in your reasoning, and why nobody is seeing eye to eye here:
You seem to think you can patent an idea. You can't. It says so right in the uspto website.
So if you want to figure out if the patent is valid, and not obvious, you take the idea over to an expert in manufacturing. Ask him, "I want to attach an eraser to a pencil. Do you know how to go about doing that?" If he can come up with different ways on the spot, it's obvious.
On the other hand, I want rocket boots. I can go to a rocket scientist and ask him, "I want to attach rockets to boots. Do you know how to go about doing that?" He's going to tell me, "yeah, there's a ton of problems with this. We need to figure out where to put the fuel, rockets have a way of exploding, which make them not very safe, they're not particularly stable, and when you combine that with legs that can move all around you've got serious problems, etc." There are serious technical challenges to all of that. Solve any one of those challenges that experts in the field current have, and you can get a patent on it. The idea of putting rockets in boots still isn't. Your particular solution that makes it possible, or brings it closer to reality, that's patentable, if it's new and non-obvious to experts in the field.
AGAIN. How many pencils could erase out of the box?
None, and still none. The pencil doesn't erase, the eraser that came attached to it does. An eraser erasing isn't surprising or revolutionary.
How do you attach that common pencil to that common eraser?
By your ridiculously low standards, this guy from a post I saw on reddit should be able to patent his phone stand made out of a paper clip. And it's actually more ingenious than the pencil eraser because the paper clip wasn't made for that purpose.
As people have already explained to you, the requirement for a patent isn't just that it be something new. It has to also be something that is not obvious. If you didn't encounter any technical challenges you had to solve to make your idea work once you had your idea, it's not patentable. If people had constantly tried to put erasers on pencils before, but nobody succeeded until this guy came out with a way to manufacture an eraser such that it could go on a pencil, that design would have been patentable, but others would have been free to come up with their own alternative designs to put erasers on pencils. Turns out that's not necessary, because the design is trivial.
I don't know about toll roads, but California definitely requires you to mash your thumb on the fingerprint scanner at the DMV every time you renew your drivers license.
Interesting. I live in South Carolina. People here would throw a fit if somebody tried to implement that.
I think the point here is that you have to submit fingerprints sometimes when entering a foreign country/continent.
Fair enough point. I completely forgot this is the case, as I have dual citizenship and generally enter the US and EU countries without submitting fingerprints. That said, when did France start copying the US nonsense? I entered France using my US passport instead of my Italian one back in 2007, and wasn't fingerprinted.
Some recent uses of my fingerprints in which I had no real say: 1. Passport check at CDG airport 2. Applying for a Speedpass for CA toll roads 3. Getting some papers notarized
What the hell? I have a passport, and didn't submit any fingerprints to get it. I didn't submit my fingerprints to get an identification document such a driver's license and california would expect me to submit them to get through toll roads?? Why the hell did you need fingerprints to get a document notorized? Usually you show up at a bank, hand them an ID, and sign the paper in front of the notary.
So, there are many current uses of fingerprinting in routine life that one has to comply with,
No, there are not! The only people I've ever personally met in the US who were fingerprinted were either arrested at some point or were applying for a security clearance. Routine life here doesn't and shouldn't require such a thing. I haven't heard of this non-sense in california until you mentioned it in your post.
Me? I want better security on my phone, as I use it for purchases and banking. I think biometrics is a move in the right direction, what do you think?
The 4-digit pin is way more secure than your fingerprint. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, your fingerprints are all over your phone.
I don't listen to music very much, and it always annoys me when people ask "what kind of music do you like", as if it were some basic human need like eating.
I don't listen to music very much either, and have trouble answering that question myself. When my entire office was exploding with the twerking news and asked me if what I thought about Miley Cyrus's performance my answer was, "back up. Who's Miley Cyrus, and what performance?"
That said, music is a basic human need like eating. If you've never listened to any song that emotionally moved you, even though you had no idea what song it was or who was playing it, you've missed out on a basic human experience. You should work to correct that, and go in search of interesting music. It doesn't mean it needs to become the most important thing in your life, it doesn't mean you need to know every popular artist and be able to enter into a conversation about music with other people. It most certainly doesn't mean you need to like the same music as other people. You just need to have that experience, at least once, of really identifying with a piece.
Think of it this way: your brain has awesome circuitry you haven't used. It's capable of a deep emotional connection with language and sounds. You're not curious what that's like?
And if that kid ending up shooting the other one, and it turned out the police knew of this incident and didn't even investigate, that'd fine, right?
They did more than investigate, they arrested him. I'm not sure what the charges could possibly be.
four is right out.
If it's not possible for you to hit your cap during the billing period, then why would you have a cap in the first place?
Bingo. That's what we're saying. Data limit caps are bullshit.
I'm on 100Mbs cable. I get 200GB/month. I'd much rather this than be limited to 0.6Mbs which would would render me physically incapable of hitting my cap in a month.
But it doesn't work that way. Some people are going to download a terabyte a month. Others are going to download less than a gigabyte. As long as the average of all of the customers is around 200 GB / month, they can still support 100 Mbps.
If I want to download more (remember that this data transfer isn't free to my ISP) then I can pay more. Simple economics.
Except it's not exactly that fair, is it? After all, how often do you use the 200 GB month? So you're paying for data you're not using!
The ISPs want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to charge you for data usage you're not taking advantage of, and simply bill you for the speed tier you've signed up for, under the understanding that most of their customers won't hit the cap. Then if their customers hit the cap, they want to charge them for the extra data, even though they've already charged you for that extra data, which you didn't use. Either you're average it across your customers or you don't. If the ISP wants to charge me by the byte such that at around 200 GB month I pay what I'm paying now, but when I use less I pay less, then yes, sure, charge me by usage. I won't object. However, if I still pay the same amount the month I've only downloaded 1 GB, then they can't charge me more for the month I've downloaded 399 GB.
Well, they are linked. Would you rather max your speed at 50KB/s or reach 1.0MB/s but be limited to 130GB per month? They amount to the same monthly hard limit (unless my math is off), but with the faster connection you can simply burn through your allowance faster.
Sure, and that's the problem. It should not be possible for you to physically hit your allowance within the billing period.
So, what do ISPs do? They oversubscribe. Since I'm not using my link 24/7 at full speed, it is easy to "share" my bandwidth.
That's not the problem. That's perfectly reasonable, and there's no reason why they should do it any other way. All that this means is that during peak usage hours, people aren't going to hit their max.
If you have enough users using enough of your bandwidth that your customers can't hit your peak speeds for a reasonable amount of the time, or it's just too slow during peak, then you're selling too high a bandwidth. You don't have the infrastructure to sell 30 Mbps, you should be advertising 15 Mbps. Alternatively, you can upgrade your infrastructure and raise costs. Either way, I have no problems with my speeds being limited, I have a problem with the amount of data I transfer being limited.
"Let's see how the population reacts, if they just shrug to it, let's see how much else we can get away with. If it causes an outcry, we can always say it was the idea of a solitary lunatic"
It's not like it would be the first time...
Alternatively, it's a well-thought plan to get a new job. Maybe his career has plateaued at the Time, and if he manages to get fired for a controversial opinion he has a bit of publicity when Fox (or some other conservative outfit) hires the journalist whose speech was "censured by the liberal media".
Now congress HAS to do something about it!
Yeah. They're going to increase the NSA budget so they can implement an internal office of surveillance review or something like that.
I was schooled in the late 1970's/early 1980's - way before the advent of computers in the classroom. We were taught that writing things down (even copying from a book) helped the content to 'sink in' to your memory far better than just reading it and I believe this to be true - even now when I take my own notes I remember the content pretty well.
I was taught the same thing but didn't really believe it for most of my time in school. That is, until I got to college and had this professor for diff eq. that had the oddest teaching method ever:
At the start of the class he would start writing on the blackboard, not saying a word. He just copied his (very organized) notes to the board. Very dense writing, a lot of content. When that board was filled, he would continue on and do the same thing on a second blackboard that was located on a side-wall of the classroom. About half the class time was spent that way. Then when the boards were filled, and we were finished copying everything, he would go back to the beginning and start talking about what he had written.
It sounds like a colossal waste of class time, but not only did we cover everything the classes in other sessions covered, I never had to study for an exam in that class. While we're copying things down we're reading it and we're paying attention to what we're reading because we need to replicate it. Then when he was actually there explaining things, we already had an idea of what he was going to talk about, we had already thought about it and understood a few things and not others. We weren't distracted by trying to take notes and were actually listening to what he was saying. In fact, when he said something that cleared something up in our minds that wasn't clear from the notes, I'd just jot something quickly in the margin. Which is funny because although that notebook contains the most detailed notes I've ever taken for any class, I've never had to go back to re-read it. Everything just stuck for the exam.
Lowest amount of work and greatest amount of retention I've ever had for any subject in a classroom. It's been about a decade, and I still remember a good deal about slope fields, bifurcations, characteristic equations, and laplace transforms, among other topics. I think the prof also got a kick out of not explaining to anyone that this was his teaching method the first day of class. We were all sitting there and saw this guy just start writing a ton of stuff up on the board. He waited until he got the boards filled up before introducing himself.
I am voting electronically this year in the Norwegian election. If somebody is stupid enough to give me money for voting for a certain party, then let them. I can vote as many times as I want, and it is only the last vote that counts. If I want to be even more evil, I can vote by paper as well, and let the guy paying money to see me vote on the net be there until the end. The paper vote superseded the electronic one.
That implies you guys don't have a secret ballot. After all, how would they know which vote to cancel on the subsequent electronic votes? Or worse, they're even able to match up your paper ballot to your electronic vote to know to cancel your electronic vote. Which necessarily implies that if somebody is coercing you to vote a certain way, all they need to do is bribe someone in government that has access to that information, to verify that you actually voted the way you were supposed to.
Of course, that's not even the worst problem with electronic voting. How do you know your vote was actually counted if there's no physical record of it that can be verified? I think electronic voting can work, but you can't do it from home, and it must have a paper trail. You go to a voting booth, electronic select your choices, submit your votes, get a human-readable printout with which you may confirm your vote, deposit human-readable printout in ballot box. Votes get counted based on electronic submission, but if anyone requests a recount, or if a recount is automatically triggered because the election is close, we count the paper.
..just move the voting to sundays, like every other sensible western nation does it.
Some sensible nations do it on Saturdays!
That would lower turnout not increase it. People can be convinced to leave their jobs to go stand in line for a few hours, but giving up their weekend time? Fuck that.
I'd rather not play such a game if it means infringing upon the rights of non-citizens (and yes, I do believe they have rights).
Absolutely they have rights. There are lines I think we shouldn't cross no matter what. As an American, it embarrasses the crap out of me that we've engaged in torture, for example. This disagreement between you and I is a clear example that different people place that line in different places, though. And that's between two people from a fairly similar culture (I assume). What happens when you add a very difficult culture to the mix? The obvious example is the treatment of women in Muslim countries or their view of free speech when it concerns religions (any place with a blasphemy law). Alternative we could bring up the point that many (not all) Chinese citizens feel it's the duty of the government to spy on them and control the dissemination of information to maintain an ordered society. However, we don't need to go to this extreme. Several European nations have declared access to broadband internet a human right, something most Americans laugh at. Or look at how many people believe health care should be a human right while half the people in the US are complaining about the the Affordable Health Care Act and believe government should stay completely out of it.
What rights people have, what duties the government has, how people should behave toward one another...there is no consensus on any of it! You think spying on anyone is immoral, I think it's not necessarily so, unless you're breaking a social contract (for example, by violating the laws of the land or properly ratified treaties). The best that we do is group ourselves around our common beliefs and form a government around that shared view. And there are things we do that we believe is absolutely right but others think it is wrong. And they're going to try to stop us from doing that "wrong" thing. And if we want to protect our rights to keep doing it anyway, we need to defend ourselves. We do the same thing to them. Remember the whole, "spreading democracy to the Middle East" justification for the Iraq war. Whether or not that was the goal is irrelevant: the point is that most people here thought it was an worthwhile thing to do. Did anyone ask if they want democracy? We know it's the best form of government, and if they don't want it, they just don't understand it! Let them live with it and get used to it, and they'll thank us for it (while welcoming their liberators with flowers).
Nobody has intrinsic rights. We have whatever rights we've agreed upon in our particular group, and we have them for as long as we can defend them. So defending them is a good idea. Not at all costs, I agree with you. Sometimes the price is too high. I think we should never torture anyone for any reason. You go above that and don't think we should violate anyone's privacy for any reason. But I'm sure you have your own list of acceptable behavior. I assume you think killing is wrong, but if your country is invaded, do you approve of killing in order to defend it? Why? What if you knew more lives would be saved by surrendering, but you knew your way of life under the new government was going to be incompatible with your current beliefs now?
The TL;DR version: we're not going to convince each other, we have fundamentally different beliefs. That said, my personal justification for my belief is that if it's not codified in our laws that this isn't something we don't do, then people should assume we believe it's alright to do. In fact, they should assume we're going to do it whenever it suits our interests and prepare accordingly. On the other hand, if we're violating our law books we should be held responsible for it.
They don't, and as a result I lock my car when I leave it.
Which doesn't violate anyone's privacy or do any other such thing.
Ok, I can come up with a different example. How about security cameras at stores?