Patents are supposed to encourage people to solve problems that would not otherwise get solved. The system supposedly does this by allowing the solver to make money with the solution before others do. I am not familiar enough with the current system to analyze it very well, but might something like the following work better...
Suppose that the first step in getting a patent is to state a problem and let it hang out there for some time (say 6 months). It would be the job of the patent office to compare the problem statement with previous problem statements and reject any that match too closely.
For this watch, the statement might be "How can mechanical power be generated from thremal fluctuations using less than 20 cubic millimeters of space?"
During the six months, the problem statement would be public and open to challenge so that any entity feeling that the statement poses too general a problem, or one already essentially solved, could submit a limited (say 2000 word) document explaining the challenge, and the PTO would take it into consideration. The challenger would have to pay a fee that more than covers the costs to the PTO to analyze the challenge.
The PTO would accept or reject patent application problem statements based on whether or not the problem is specific enough and/or has already been solved. This still puts PTO analysts in a position better occupied by experts in a particular field, but rather than understanding the solution, they need only understand the problem. I think that would be an improvement.
I sent the following email to the two senators of California, but never got any answers:
I'm trying to establish the real link between elected officials and their constituents. So here are a few questions:
Suppose that for some bill, only 100 constituents care what the senator votes, and 90 of them want her to vote "YES".
Does the senator find out about the 100 caring constituents, and,
if
so, how?
Will she definitely vote yes, or might she vote NO because of her personal beliefs? In other words, does she sacrifice her own reason
to be democratic, or does she sacrifice democracy in favor of reason?
Do the answers for 1 and 2 change if the numbers are 1,000,000
caring
constituents, of which 900,000 wanted the YES vote? If the answers
do change, what would the new answers be?
Suppose that the senator makes a logical error while analyzing the
issue,
and one or several constituents would be able to correct it. Is
there any
system set up through which the senators logical error could be
corrected
by
the constituent or constituents?
I believe that these questions highlight some of the fundamental
issues in
our country and the whole world. If we could examine the answers, we
would
either vastly improve the system, or we would use it far more
effectively.
I think that if more people think about this kind of stuff, the world will become a better place at a faster pace.
I believe that consciousness is ubiquitous. Everything is conscious. The question is then how conscious is any given collection of particles?
That, I think, depends on how readily signals travel through it. The Internet is very connected, but the components that decide what signals to propagate (that would be us) do not do a very good job of propagating useful signals, so I would say the Internet is not very conscious.
Here are some other things that are probably more conscious:
Ant hills.
Forests.
Groups of people (as mentioned earlier).
Bee hives.
Schools of fish.
SlashDot and other servers that run slash.
Couldn't M$ still ship their own JVM along with Sun's if Sun was stupid enough to put bugs in their own software? Of course, M$ would have to implement it without breaking the license.
Dave.
You're looking in the right places, but the fact is that the support doesn't yet exist. This doesn't happen with software you pay for unless it comes from lame companies. The nature of OSS makes it possible for non-programmers to use the software before it's ready, and there are problems associated with that. Since you don't have the time to contribute, you may want to stick with OSS projects with versions over 1.0 since that is typically what signifies a project's readiness for public consumption.
Figure out what it is worth to you to have software that does what Nagios does and how much you're willing to spend on using it. Now you have a budget to spend on Nagios consultants to train your IT folks.
SourceForge provides lots of statistics about the projects it hosts. Since everyone has their own idea of success, it would probably be pretty pointless to assign a single metric as the definitive measure of success.
Nagios has had over 7000 downloads per month since last June. SourceForge page views on the project recently rose logarithmically from 3500 during 10/01 to over 50,000 during 10/02.
Dave.
Slashdot Mirror
Patents are supposed to encourage people to solve problems that would not otherwise get solved. The system supposedly does this by allowing the solver to make money with the solution before others do. I am not familiar enough with the current system to analyze it very well, but might something like the following work better...
Suppose that the first step in getting a patent is to state a problem and let it hang out there for some time (say 6 months). It would be the job of the patent office to compare the problem statement with previous problem statements and reject any that match too closely.
For this watch, the statement might be "How can mechanical power be generated from thremal fluctuations using less than 20 cubic millimeters of space?"
During the six months, the problem statement would be public and open to challenge so that any entity feeling that the statement poses too general a problem, or one already essentially solved, could submit a limited (say 2000 word) document explaining the challenge, and the PTO would take it into consideration. The challenger would have to pay a fee that more than covers the costs to the PTO to analyze the challenge.
The PTO would accept or reject patent application problem statements based on whether or not the problem is specific enough and/or has already been solved. This still puts PTO analysts in a position better occupied by experts in a particular field, but rather than understanding the solution, they need only understand the problem. I think that would be an improvement.
Suppose that for some bill, only 100 constituents care what the senator votes, and 90 of them want her to vote "YES".
I believe that these questions highlight some of the fundamental issues in our country and the whole world. If we could examine the answers, we would either vastly improve the system, or we would use it far more effectively.
I think that if more people think about this kind of stuff, the world will become a better place at a faster pace.
I believe that consciousness is ubiquitous. Everything is conscious. The question is then how conscious is any given collection of particles?
That, I think, depends on how readily signals travel through it. The Internet is very connected, but the components that decide what signals to propagate (that would be us) do not do a very good job of propagating useful signals, so I would say the Internet is not very conscious.
Here are some other things that are probably more conscious:
Ant hills.
Forests.
Groups of people (as mentioned earlier).
Bee hives.
Schools of fish.
SlashDot and other servers that run slash.
Couldn't M$ still ship their own JVM along with Sun's if Sun was stupid enough to put bugs in their own software? Of course, M$ would have to implement it without breaking the license. Dave.
You're looking in the right places, but the fact is that the support doesn't yet exist. This doesn't happen with software you pay for unless it comes from lame companies. The nature of OSS makes it possible for non-programmers to use the software before it's ready, and there are problems associated with that. Since you don't have the time to contribute, you may want to stick with OSS projects with versions over 1.0 since that is typically what signifies a project's readiness for public consumption.
Figure out what it is worth to you to have software that does what Nagios does and how much you're willing to spend on using it. Now you have a budget to spend on Nagios consultants to train your IT folks.
SourceForge provides lots of statistics about the projects it hosts. Since everyone has their own idea of success, it would probably be pretty pointless to assign a single metric as the definitive measure of success. Nagios has had over 7000 downloads per month since last June. SourceForge page views on the project recently rose logarithmically from 3500 during 10/01 to over 50,000 during 10/02. Dave.