The only difference is, what's the window of time you can hold onto that invention while you try to get your shit together?
The current period (I think it's seventeen years, but I Could Be Wrong.) is the product of centuries of experience with patents. Before tweaking it, you really should look at the history of patents and find out why it was picked.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the patent system doesn't need some reworking, but I don't think the term is the main problem. I'd start out by amending the part of the patent code that says that a method in and of itself can't be patented but only it's implementation by explicitly stating that using a method on a computer is not sufficient, unless the computer is a specially-built piece of equipment that can't be used for anything else. While I was at it, I'd also specifically ban patents on business methods. I'd like to see patent trolling outlawed as well, but I'm not sure, yet, how that can be done without unfairly penalizing inventors who are simply having difficulty either getting financing or producing a marketable product. One thing I do know, however: simplistic solutions to complex problems don't work.
Alright, since everyone is so concerned with making a profit, how about: 7 years, or when you make a good return on your investment, whichever comes first.
I see: you want to allow patent trolls to sit on their portfolio indefinitely, never making any attempt to use their patents until somebody else stumbles on the idea and they make a profit by suing them.
Now, not everything's an iPhone, but you see the point
Yes, I do: you're taking an exceptional case, where the product in question is a new version of an existing product with high consumer awareness and pretending that it's typical of all new inventions coming to market. Just because Apple made a huge, quick profit when it introduced the new model of iPhone doesn't mean that the average inventor profits that much, or that soon. Most inventions take years to pay off, if they ever do.
Now you know why there's an old saying, "Figures don't lie, but liers figure."
Grab them all for an afternoon, put them in a pub, sit down with them and get them drunk. Really drunk
That works great, until you try it with somebody like me. I'm Type II and never drink, except on Very Special Occasions, and then only one small drink. I'm also indifferent to sports and like music that was recorded before most slashdotters were born.
I spent years working for a company that had several barbecues every year to build employe morale. I went, had a nice, early dinner and possibly one beer (I hadn't developed Type II yet, but it was about 30 miles by freeway home.) and then left, about the time the dancing started. Outside of shop talk, I had nothing in common with my co-workers, who were mostly half my age or less, didn't like the music they did and saw no reason to be a wet blanket.
Once it is in a usable state, your patent lasts at most 1-2 years.
The main point of a patent is to give the inventor a chance to recover the development costs and make a profit from their hard work before anybody else is allowed to copy them. If you think that this can be done in such a short time, you have a very simplistic idea of the costs of research and development. Before coming up with any more unrealistic suggestions, I'd advise you to learn a little bit about how the Real World(TM) works.
Here in the LArea, "fire season" is defined as "no significant rain for sixty days," and can come at any time of year. It's not unusual for fire season to transform into flood season in less than 48 hours.
Not to sound callus, but doesn't this happen every year around there?
Yes and no. Yes, there are fires every year, some of them bad, some minor. This one is bad for two reasons: first, there's not been a serious fire in that area for about sixty years, so there's quite a bit of fuel. Second, the local government was told to clear out the dead brush but didn't bother.
LA is in the DESERT, which is generally where wild fires happen, but never seems to realize this simple fact.
Not quite; it's semi-desert here, and without the water we get from the Owens Valley and the Colorado River we couldn't support a population anywhere near this big. However, we do understand this, and prepare. If private citizens ignore a brush clearance order, the city will do it and charge them about three times what it would have cost them to do it themselves. We have, and maintain, fire roads and fire breaks wherever practical. (I don't know the situation around Mount Wilson, as I don't live in that area, but I do know it's pretty rugged there.) And, we don't have to wait for all those tanker planes to fly in to start dropping water, because most of the ones you've seen on the news are based right here, where they're most likely to be needed. We also do controlled burns, when the conditions are appropriate, but that's mostly in areas where it's easy to get fire crews on the scene ahead of time, and Mount Wilson may not qualify.
In case you haven't noticed, the observatory is at the top of a steep, rugged mountain. Not only would what you suggest be very difficult, it would be useless. You see, fires move up hills very easily, because heat rises. And, of course, burning embers have been known to jump much larger gaps than a mere 50 meters, making the "firebreak" useless.
Same here. Karen Anderson, Poul Anderson's widow, has had to evacuate to Burbank, but is OK.
One of the reasons the Station Fire is so bad is that there's not been a significant fire in that area in at least 60 years. Another is that the Fire Marshall told the local government to do some brush clearance there, and the response was, "Whatever."
And last, to put this in perspective for all of you slashdotters who aren't familiar with the LArea, the area burnt by the Station Fire is already larger than that of the City of Chicago, and it's not the only fire burning in the Southland.
I live in Southern California, slightly North of LA. Oregon is at least 700 miles from here, probably farther; not exactly what I'd call "not too far" in terms of a fire spreading from here to there.
From what I've heard from some sysadmins, living in jail can't be much worse than that job.
In jail, nobody expects you to help them with stupid problems (e.g., people complaining that their number pad doesn't work because Num Lock isn't on.) on computers you're not responsible for, or running an OS that's not included in your job description. For some sysadmins, this would be enough to make jail bearable.
The best demo we managed was to take a big rubbermaid container and fill it about ankle-deep with the stuff, which took maybe 4 kilos of corn starch and about 10 liters or so of water.
If that's the best you could do, you're a piker. My sister likes to watch The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and told me about a demo of this they did about a year or so ago. Their tub of Oobleck was about the size of a bathtub, and they had an adult from the audience running back and forth over it.
Re:Early detection doesn't always improve outcomes
on
A Breathalyzer For Cancer
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Even just a biopsy for prostate cancer can't be 100% risk-free,
...and is considerably more unpleasant than they tell you it will be. They also tend not to tell you how messy it can get while you're healing afterwords. When I was finished, I told the doctor that IMO, before he performed another prostate biopsy, he should undergo it himself to find out just how bad the "slight sting" was, and he told me that he'd refuse the procedure.
Incidentally, one thing I learned from the experience is that although a fair percentage of older men die with prostate cancer, very few die of it because it generally doesn't start until fairly late in life and grows very slowly. Much of the time, about all that's done is keep an eye on it to see if it's getting bad enough to need treatment.
I took a look at your article, and found it interesting, and not obviously biased. Very good!
I also noticed that you were very careful to specify that your temperature graph only went back 300 years. This is significant in a way you didn't mention: it means that the first half of it records temperatures at the end of The Little Ice Age, and the portion between about 1830 and 1900 (roughly) shows the climate "recovering" from that. As the graph doesn't go far enough back to show The Early Medieval Warm (Yeah, I know: you have to work with what you've got.) it gives the impression that the climate hadn't changed for thousands of years, then suddenly began to warm at or near the beginning of The Industrial Revolution.
Generally speaking, a myth either has religious overtones or is used to explain the origin of some custom or facet of culture. As this story is just an embellishment of the story of the battle, I referred to it as a legend, because it seemed more appropriate. As far as spreading the word to the rest of Greece, do you have a cite for that?
Other things aside, I like your current.sig, having used something similar myself a few years ago.
Probably not, although they wouldn't be wrong if they did. Most of the time, of course, the term is reserved for those inheriting large amounts of money, and by that standard, Paris Hilton seems to qualify.
Yeah, attempts like the victory at Marathon in 490BC..
No. The legend has a runner (who had fought in the battle) running back to Athens to announce the victory. He was so exhausted by the combination of the battle and the long run home that he died just after gasping out the good news. Nowhere in any account of the battle is there any mention of pigeons being used.
The point I was trying to make was that News Corp.took advantage of a loophole in the law to get away with what they'd done, and as far as I know, they have every right to do that, just as you and I do. Instead of (or, if you prefer in addition to) complaining about it here on Slashdot, complain to the people who have the power to close the loophole and keep it from happening again.
That's not quite how I see it. AIUI, the final decision was that as the law currently read, distorting or falsifying the news was not unlawful, so the whistleblower law didn't apply. If you don't like it (and I, for one, don't) write to your congresscritters and senators and try to get the law changed.
use the quote to indicate what they've said about the topic in the past.
And of course, don't forget to say that they "declined to comment when asked if this still applied." Not only is it true, it's almost guaranteed to give everybody the wrong impression and generate letters to the editor (or blog comments, or whatever) and it's hard to see the downside to that.
I know what I'd do: I'd make an FTP connection over SSH to my desktop at home and move everything personal off of my laptop. Then, I'd let them image my hard disk to their heart's content because not only isn't there anything left on it to worry about it, the average customs worker probably wouldn't know how to read an ext4 filesystem anyway.
Every time I hear argument "it is against constitution" it does sound very, very much like a religious argument.
I don't know how things go in Finland, but here in America, our Constitution is the highest law of the land. It was established very soon after it was ratified that if a law is found by the courts to violate the Constitution or contradict it, that law is null and void, and is removed from the books. When it comes to law, this gives the Constitution the same force that the Bible has in Christianity.
The first ten amendments are called The Bill Of Rights, because they consist, for the most part, of a listing of civil rights possessed by all citizens. We take those rights very seriously, and regard any attempt to erode them with suspicion. (If you're wondering why there's so much controversy about gun control here, consider that the Right To Bear Arms is written into The Bill Of Rights, and read again what I wrote above.) And last, when you take into consideration that one of the main reasons we broke loose from England is that we believed that our rights were being violated ("No taxation without representation" had long been a prinicple of English Law, and the colonists felt that it should apply to them as well as the people back home.) you will understand just why we've always guarded our rights so fiercely.
RTFS a little more closely. It doesn't say that the satellite didn't achieve a stable orbit, it says (as does TFA) that it didn't end up in the designated orbit. It may well be in a (reasonably) stable orbit, just not quite the one they wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
The current period (I think it's seventeen years, but I Could Be Wrong.) is the product of centuries of experience with patents. Before tweaking it, you really should look at the history of patents and find out why it was picked.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the patent system doesn't need some reworking, but I don't think the term is the main problem. I'd start out by amending the part of the patent code that says that a method in and of itself can't be patented but only it's implementation by explicitly stating that using a method on a computer is not sufficient, unless the computer is a specially-built piece of equipment that can't be used for anything else. While I was at it, I'd also specifically ban patents on business methods. I'd like to see patent trolling outlawed as well, but I'm not sure, yet, how that can be done without unfairly penalizing inventors who are simply having difficulty either getting financing or producing a marketable product. One thing I do know, however: simplistic solutions to complex problems don't work.
I see: you want to allow patent trolls to sit on their portfolio indefinitely, never making any attempt to use their patents until somebody else stumbles on the idea and they make a profit by suing them.
Yes, I do: you're taking an exceptional case, where the product in question is a new version of an existing product with high consumer awareness and pretending that it's typical of all new inventions coming to market. Just because Apple made a huge, quick profit when it introduced the new model of iPhone doesn't mean that the average inventor profits that much, or that soon. Most inventions take years to pay off, if they ever do.
Now you know why there's an old saying, "Figures don't lie, but liers figure."
That works great, until you try it with somebody like me. I'm Type II and never drink, except on Very Special Occasions, and then only one small drink. I'm also indifferent to sports and like music that was recorded before most slashdotters were born.
I spent years working for a company that had several barbecues every year to build employe morale. I went, had a nice, early dinner and possibly one beer (I hadn't developed Type II yet, but it was about 30 miles by freeway home.) and then left, about the time the dancing started. Outside of shop talk, I had nothing in common with my co-workers, who were mostly half my age or less, didn't like the music they did and saw no reason to be a wet blanket.
The main point of a patent is to give the inventor a chance to recover the development costs and make a profit from their hard work before anybody else is allowed to copy them. If you think that this can be done in such a short time, you have a very simplistic idea of the costs of research and development. Before coming up with any more unrealistic suggestions, I'd advise you to learn a little bit about how the Real World(TM) works.
Here in the LArea, "fire season" is defined as "no significant rain for sixty days," and can come at any time of year. It's not unusual for fire season to transform into flood season in less than 48 hours.
Yes and no. Yes, there are fires every year, some of them bad, some minor. This one is bad for two reasons: first, there's not been a serious fire in that area for about sixty years, so there's quite a bit of fuel. Second, the local government was told to clear out the dead brush but didn't bother.
LA is in the DESERT, which is generally where wild fires happen, but never seems to realize this simple fact.
Not quite; it's semi-desert here, and without the water we get from the Owens Valley and the Colorado River we couldn't support a population anywhere near this big. However, we do understand this, and prepare. If private citizens ignore a brush clearance order, the city will do it and charge them about three times what it would have cost them to do it themselves. We have, and maintain, fire roads and fire breaks wherever practical. (I don't know the situation around Mount Wilson, as I don't live in that area, but I do know it's pretty rugged there.) And, we don't have to wait for all those tanker planes to fly in to start dropping water, because most of the ones you've seen on the news are based right here, where they're most likely to be needed. We also do controlled burns, when the conditions are appropriate, but that's mostly in areas where it's easy to get fire crews on the scene ahead of time, and Mount Wilson may not qualify.
In case you haven't noticed, the observatory is at the top of a steep, rugged mountain. Not only would what you suggest be very difficult, it would be useless. You see, fires move up hills very easily, because heat rises. And, of course, burning embers have been known to jump much larger gaps than a mere 50 meters, making the "firebreak" useless.
Same here. Karen Anderson, Poul Anderson's widow, has had to evacuate to Burbank, but is OK.
One of the reasons the Station Fire is so bad is that there's not been a significant fire in that area in at least 60 years. Another is that the Fire Marshall told the local government to do some brush clearance there, and the response was, "Whatever."
And last, to put this in perspective for all of you slashdotters who aren't familiar with the LArea, the area burnt by the Station Fire is already larger than that of the City of Chicago, and it's not the only fire burning in the Southland.
I live in Southern California, slightly North of LA. Oregon is at least 700 miles from here, probably farther; not exactly what I'd call "not too far" in terms of a fire spreading from here to there.
In jail, nobody expects you to help them with stupid problems (e.g., people complaining that their number pad doesn't work because Num Lock isn't on.) on computers you're not responsible for, or running an OS that's not included in your job description. For some sysadmins, this would be enough to make jail bearable.
It sounds to me more like they're afraid he's left one or more back doors into the system.
If that's the best you could do, you're a piker. My sister likes to watch The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and told me about a demo of this they did about a year or so ago. Their tub of Oobleck was about the size of a bathtub, and they had an adult from the audience running back and forth over it.
Incidentally, one thing I learned from the experience is that although a fair percentage of older men die with prostate cancer, very few die of it because it generally doesn't start until fairly late in life and grows very slowly. Much of the time, about all that's done is keep an eye on it to see if it's getting bad enough to need treatment.
I also noticed that you were very careful to specify that your temperature graph only went back 300 years. This is significant in a way you didn't mention: it means that the first half of it records temperatures at the end of The Little Ice Age, and the portion between about 1830 and 1900 (roughly) shows the climate "recovering" from that. As the graph doesn't go far enough back to show The Early Medieval Warm (Yeah, I know: you have to work with what you've got.) it gives the impression that the climate hadn't changed for thousands of years, then suddenly began to warm at or near the beginning of The Industrial Revolution.
Other things aside, I like your current .sig, having used something similar myself a few years ago.
Probably not, although they wouldn't be wrong if they did. Most of the time, of course, the term is reserved for those inheriting large amounts of money, and by that standard, Paris Hilton seems to qualify.
No. The legend has a runner (who had fought in the battle) running back to Athens to announce the victory. He was so exhausted by the combination of the battle and the long run home that he died just after gasping out the good news. Nowhere in any account of the battle is there any mention of pigeons being used.
The point I was trying to make was that News Corp.took advantage of a loophole in the law to get away with what they'd done, and as far as I know, they have every right to do that, just as you and I do. Instead of (or, if you prefer in addition to) complaining about it here on Slashdot, complain to the people who have the power to close the loophole and keep it from happening again.
I don't know what definition you're using, but most people define heiress that way.
That's not quite how I see it. AIUI, the final decision was that as the law currently read, distorting or falsifying the news was not unlawful, so the whistleblower law didn't apply. If you don't like it (and I, for one, don't) write to your congresscritters and senators and try to get the law changed.
And of course, don't forget to say that they "declined to comment when asked if this still applied." Not only is it true, it's almost guaranteed to give everybody the wrong impression and generate letters to the editor (or blog comments, or whatever) and it's hard to see the downside to that.
I know what I'd do: I'd make an FTP connection over SSH to my desktop at home and move everything personal off of my laptop. Then, I'd let them image my hard disk to their heart's content because not only isn't there anything left on it to worry about it, the average customs worker probably wouldn't know how to read an ext4 filesystem anyway.
I don't know how things go in Finland, but here in America, our Constitution is the highest law of the land. It was established very soon after it was ratified that if a law is found by the courts to violate the Constitution or contradict it, that law is null and void, and is removed from the books. When it comes to law, this gives the Constitution the same force that the Bible has in Christianity.
The first ten amendments are called The Bill Of Rights, because they consist, for the most part, of a listing of civil rights possessed by all citizens. We take those rights very seriously, and regard any attempt to erode them with suspicion. (If you're wondering why there's so much controversy about gun control here, consider that the Right To Bear Arms is written into The Bill Of Rights, and read again what I wrote above.) And last, when you take into consideration that one of the main reasons we broke loose from England is that we believed that our rights were being violated ("No taxation without representation" had long been a prinicple of English Law, and the colonists felt that it should apply to them as well as the people back home.) you will understand just why we've always guarded our rights so fiercely.
RTFS a little more closely. It doesn't say that the satellite didn't achieve a stable orbit, it says (as does TFA) that it didn't end up in the designated orbit. It may well be in a (reasonably) stable orbit, just not quite the one they wanted.