but I can't help myself.
The whole point of patents is to encourage public disclosure of the idea. It protects the person who discloses their invention so that they will do so. Otherwise people would merely rely on trade secret and contract. Imagine if you bought a computer and you had to sign a contract promising you would never open the thing up or be liable for millions of dollars for theft of trade secret. Now, instead, you can open the thing up to see how it works and tinker with it all you want, but you can't profit off the inventor's ideas.
Our current system actually discourages this by allowing people to keep secret what they have invented for a while and then claim to have invented it first. The first-to-file will encourage quicker disclosure of inventions, and reduce court costs as it will be a lot easier to prove who was first. This will reduce the cost of litigation for small companies, as it will be obvious who filed first most of the time.
What I would like to see is public review and challenge of patents. If the USPTO is too busy to prior art search. Let patents be easily challengeable on the basis of prior art. Put up the patent, a comment thread to point out prior art, and should the patent-holder try and enforce the patent, let that thread be examined for prior art to see if the patent is valid. So we presume a patent is valid (since this is what happens anyway), but we make it a thin presumption. To encourage only valid patents, we can just make the invalid patentholder responsible for returning all sums gained from the invalid patent plus all costs incurred in disproving the patent and government court costs.
The costs of patent battles are absurd, but this is a prisoner's dilemma where everyone has their hand in the cookie jar. New regulation is the only way to break out of the impasse, and this, at least, should be a bit better.
The problem with games is even the humor is programmed and ridiculous. Can you imagine Takeshi's Challenge coming out nowadays?
Xcom is still far superior to any other game in its genre out there. And Ultima IV was definitely a pinnacle.
Graphics have their role in story play... but if you can't take a current game and reduce it to blocky animations and find it fun, then the gameplay itself is fundamentally flawed. I would love to see how Gears of War and God of War stand up without the graphics. I think they would do okay. I don't think a lot of the sports games would do as well.
I have yet to see anyone really even try and take on Outlook for real. Thunderbird is a competent e-mail client, nothing original, but nice enough. There are very few calendar programs out there that are really any better than Outlook, all the functions are basically the same... Sending out invitations, organizing meetings, seeing other people's free time... all that stuff just isn't there.
Here is a simple study. Turn off your css. You should be able to see a page that still makes logical sense. If you don't then you shouldn't be designing websites, because you have no idea how to properly code HTML semantically. That means using H1 tags instead of [span class="heading1"] and all the other nonsense I have seen out there.
HTML is creaky and needs the work. But nothing says that you can't just turn off the css functions and customize pages the way you want, except for idiot-coders.
Even the cell phone industry hates this model. They could just come out with something innovative that works well. Or even buy a company that produces such a product. But no, instead, they choose to become the low price discounter.
MS, you will have had 9 months or so to come out with a competitor to the soon-to-come iPod video. Instead you waste your time on marketing gimmicks instead of product. Why not bring out a nano-sized movie player with touchscreen controls? Give me an e-mail and I will design it for you and it will be better than that piece of crap Zune for a very minimal amount of money.
Although I have to admit a subscription based music service is probably the long term way to go if for no other reason than to have access to music wherever without having to drag along a hard drive (or 200GB iPod).
So that means those of us in cities still have to go without? The real problem is universal access requirements which subsidize people in those outskirts by making everyone else pay for their choices.
Why not have a spray-on pressure suit then? You just coat yourself in a disposable flexible material that shrinks slightly when it dries? Peel it off or dissolve it somehow when you are done...
A fishbowl helmet would be awesome though.
The US cell phone market is the poster-child for failed free market standards setting. We continually lag behind the rest of the world, pay more for the same services and get worse service (even in population dense areas). The big four have carved up the spectrum into incompatible nightmares and have generally f'ed things up.
I will admit that with the 3G switch, the FCC mucked that up and failed to free up the same frequencies to be sued elsewhere, so we have an another generation of being in the "ghetto" of mobile phones.
This is all tied together. The less educated the populace, the more mob rule and political control authority can put on us. The oligarchs can lead the uneducated into anything including unfounded wars. It just happens to destroy our country's competitiveness and require massive importation of foreign-educated individuals to meet demand.
The problem is that terrorist might be able to disarm an air marshall. Plus giving weapons that can perforate the planes hull is probably not the best idea in the world. Knives might not have this problem, but they may.
Also, still does not address the whole blowing up the plane thing...
If they taketh away, perhaps they should give a bit too. Provide internet terminals and free unlimited drinks. Then we can stream music and movies to our seats, do work if necessary, and you really don't lose anything. Provide guarantees on laptops that are checked in, there is no reason that luggage should be so abused except that they were cheap when they designed the airports...
Given the allegations of voter fraud and abuse, the computer hackery that seems to be incipient, I don't know if there is any legitimacy left in the government as it stands. The basic premise is that voting grants democratic legitimacy, but instead of making voting unquestionably honest and correct, they have allowed the polls to turn into a nightmare of malfeasance
Correlation/causation yet again. Perhaps failing companies have to pay more to get CEOs to try turnarounds than healthy ones? And just maybe those companies are so crappy, that they can't be turned around?
So it is only okay if your job goes to someone in Wyoming or Georgia or somewhere where Americans are or are you saying you would follow your job anywhere?
It interferes too much with their hardware strategy unless they put upgradeable GPUs in the iMac somehow. The problem being that to have a gamer computer, they would have to offer a low end upgradeable box which will never happen. I guess they could come out with a gamer's Mac, somewhat patterned after the Mac Mini, but seems a bit silly overall.
Hopefully the school board settles quickly and cans the people. Last thing they want to do is lose all that money they are going to in a clear-cut 1st amendment case....
With a multiparty system you get nothing. Everyone compromises their one issue to form a coalition that backs numerous issues. Just look at the Democratic party to get a sense of how pathetic a coalition party is. Now imagine that they are even less effective and less interesting. There you go... coalition politics.
Our two-party system is a pretty good idea. Equating money with speech is where our system fails. Everyone is equal, just some are more equal than others...
Besides being one of the worst names to ever be attached to a major consumer product ever (the Nova probably being the worst) the name is also reflective of one thing here in the US: that the console is for the under-12 crowd. Nobody even near adolescence is going to touch the thing and you can kiss goodbye to the 20+ year old crowd that actually has money. Nintendo keeps making this mistake...
Sounds like someone passing the buck here. While Aperture works, Apple obviously realises the given the codebase is crap, the work expended thus far gives them nothing to build on. Obviously with Lightroom out already in beta, Apple is now in a competition that they probably won't win because of the huge advantages Adobe has in leveraging Photoshop and cross-platform flow. If Adobe starts to really push integration with asset management software across all three programs then Apple will be completely out in the cold for professional workflow.
Apple was right to recognise that there was a space to create something better than what was out there, but without the ability to quickly move and innovate (i.e. having a clean codebase that doesn't require rewrites) they will not be able to solidify any lead.
Actually a PVR is completely antithetical to Apple's business which is going to be selling you TV shows and getting you to cancel your cable service. Why would they enable you to bypass that model by recording shows? I think they should offer PVR functionality, but it isn't going to happen unless they have to.
Just having lived in Japan, you really want a large screen on your phone for using the data services which include just about everything from GPS mapping to paying vending machines and banking. So a flip is much more space efficient in that case, especially when you also want a large keypad for typing out messages.
Nobody cares about size. Girls will have huge stuffed animals hooked on with a keitai strap to their phone. Guys will have stuff on their phone too. What matters is the large screen and keypad.
The problem is that they don't understand they need to massively subsidize the tasting of these services, i.e. let you have so much for free and provide compelling content. Then those services you start using you will pay for.
So, for example, they could just let you IM two messages a day, not quite enough to have a conversation, but enough to be useful. The free for a month thing seems less effective because it frankly takes me longer than that to get around to using all the features of the phone. It is like when HBO periodically has free weekends to get people addicted, imagine if VCast sent you a free episode of 24 or something like that...
Basically get people used to using the service and then start making money.
Nice reply, to bad you didn't notice that I called for reform, not elimination of patents. We could make them shorter to minimize their damages, but it would be better to make the bar for granting a patent much higher or perhaps make the challenges much easier.
That is probably true despite the rent-seeking nature of those profits (an obvious effect of granting monopolies). The worst part of course being as we force IP regimes on everyone, nobody can show how anti-innovative this whole thing is by leapfrogging and out-competing us.
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but I can't help myself. The whole point of patents is to encourage public disclosure of the idea. It protects the person who discloses their invention so that they will do so. Otherwise people would merely rely on trade secret and contract. Imagine if you bought a computer and you had to sign a contract promising you would never open the thing up or be liable for millions of dollars for theft of trade secret. Now, instead, you can open the thing up to see how it works and tinker with it all you want, but you can't profit off the inventor's ideas. Our current system actually discourages this by allowing people to keep secret what they have invented for a while and then claim to have invented it first. The first-to-file will encourage quicker disclosure of inventions, and reduce court costs as it will be a lot easier to prove who was first. This will reduce the cost of litigation for small companies, as it will be obvious who filed first most of the time. What I would like to see is public review and challenge of patents. If the USPTO is too busy to prior art search. Let patents be easily challengeable on the basis of prior art. Put up the patent, a comment thread to point out prior art, and should the patent-holder try and enforce the patent, let that thread be examined for prior art to see if the patent is valid. So we presume a patent is valid (since this is what happens anyway), but we make it a thin presumption. To encourage only valid patents, we can just make the invalid patentholder responsible for returning all sums gained from the invalid patent plus all costs incurred in disproving the patent and government court costs. The costs of patent battles are absurd, but this is a prisoner's dilemma where everyone has their hand in the cookie jar. New regulation is the only way to break out of the impasse, and this, at least, should be a bit better.
The problem with games is even the humor is programmed and ridiculous. Can you imagine Takeshi's Challenge coming out nowadays?
Xcom is still far superior to any other game in its genre out there. And Ultima IV was definitely a pinnacle.
Graphics have their role in story play... but if you can't take a current game and reduce it to blocky animations and find it fun, then the gameplay itself is fundamentally flawed. I would love to see how Gears of War and God of War stand up without the graphics. I think they would do okay. I don't think a lot of the sports games would do as well.
I have yet to see anyone really even try and take on Outlook for real. Thunderbird is a competent e-mail client, nothing original, but nice enough. There are very few calendar programs out there that are really any better than Outlook, all the functions are basically the same... Sending out invitations, organizing meetings, seeing other people's free time... all that stuff just isn't there.
Here is a simple study. Turn off your css. You should be able to see a page that still makes logical sense. If you don't then you shouldn't be designing websites, because you have no idea how to properly code HTML semantically. That means using H1 tags instead of [span class="heading1"] and all the other nonsense I have seen out there. HTML is creaky and needs the work. But nothing says that you can't just turn off the css functions and customize pages the way you want, except for idiot-coders.
Even the cell phone industry hates this model. They could just come out with something innovative that works well. Or even buy a company that produces such a product. But no, instead, they choose to become the low price discounter.
MS, you will have had 9 months or so to come out with a competitor to the soon-to-come iPod video. Instead you waste your time on marketing gimmicks instead of product. Why not bring out a nano-sized movie player with touchscreen controls? Give me an e-mail and I will design it for you and it will be better than that piece of crap Zune for a very minimal amount of money.
Although I have to admit a subscription based music service is probably the long term way to go if for no other reason than to have access to music wherever without having to drag along a hard drive (or 200GB iPod).
So that means those of us in cities still have to go without? The real problem is universal access requirements which subsidize people in those outskirts by making everyone else pay for their choices.
Why not have a spray-on pressure suit then? You just coat yourself in a disposable flexible material that shrinks slightly when it dries? Peel it off or dissolve it somehow when you are done... A fishbowl helmet would be awesome though.
That doesn't stop them from using Windows even though it has sucked pretty much throughout...
The US cell phone market is the poster-child for failed free market standards setting. We continually lag behind the rest of the world, pay more for the same services and get worse service (even in population dense areas). The big four have carved up the spectrum into incompatible nightmares and have generally f'ed things up. I will admit that with the 3G switch, the FCC mucked that up and failed to free up the same frequencies to be sued elsewhere, so we have an another generation of being in the "ghetto" of mobile phones.
This is all tied together. The less educated the populace, the more mob rule and political control authority can put on us. The oligarchs can lead the uneducated into anything including unfounded wars. It just happens to destroy our country's competitiveness and require massive importation of foreign-educated individuals to meet demand.
Wasn't helping out an evil totalitarian regime oppress their citizens sufficiently evil for you? Apparently not... but enforcing a trademark is?
The problem is that terrorist might be able to disarm an air marshall. Plus giving weapons that can perforate the planes hull is probably not the best idea in the world. Knives might not have this problem, but they may.
Also, still does not address the whole blowing up the plane thing...
If they taketh away, perhaps they should give a bit too. Provide internet terminals and free unlimited drinks. Then we can stream music and movies to our seats, do work if necessary, and you really don't lose anything. Provide guarantees on laptops that are checked in, there is no reason that luggage should be so abused except that they were cheap when they designed the airports...
Given the allegations of voter fraud and abuse, the computer hackery that seems to be incipient, I don't know if there is any legitimacy left in the government as it stands. The basic premise is that voting grants democratic legitimacy, but instead of making voting unquestionably honest and correct, they have allowed the polls to turn into a nightmare of malfeasance
Correlation/causation yet again. Perhaps failing companies have to pay more to get CEOs to try turnarounds than healthy ones? And just maybe those companies are so crappy, that they can't be turned around?
So it is only okay if your job goes to someone in Wyoming or Georgia or somewhere where Americans are or are you saying you would follow your job anywhere?
It interferes too much with their hardware strategy unless they put upgradeable GPUs in the iMac somehow. The problem being that to have a gamer computer, they would have to offer a low end upgradeable box which will never happen. I guess they could come out with a gamer's Mac, somewhat patterned after the Mac Mini, but seems a bit silly overall.
Hopefully the school board settles quickly and cans the people. Last thing they want to do is lose all that money they are going to in a clear-cut 1st amendment case....
With a multiparty system you get nothing. Everyone compromises their one issue to form a coalition that backs numerous issues. Just look at the Democratic party to get a sense of how pathetic a coalition party is. Now imagine that they are even less effective and less interesting. There you go... coalition politics. Our two-party system is a pretty good idea. Equating money with speech is where our system fails. Everyone is equal, just some are more equal than others...
Besides being one of the worst names to ever be attached to a major consumer product ever (the Nova probably being the worst) the name is also reflective of one thing here in the US: that the console is for the under-12 crowd. Nobody even near adolescence is going to touch the thing and you can kiss goodbye to the 20+ year old crowd that actually has money. Nintendo keeps making this mistake...
Sounds like someone passing the buck here. While Aperture works, Apple obviously realises the given the codebase is crap, the work expended thus far gives them nothing to build on. Obviously with Lightroom out already in beta, Apple is now in a competition that they probably won't win because of the huge advantages Adobe has in leveraging Photoshop and cross-platform flow. If Adobe starts to really push integration with asset management software across all three programs then Apple will be completely out in the cold for professional workflow.
Apple was right to recognise that there was a space to create something better than what was out there, but without the ability to quickly move and innovate (i.e. having a clean codebase that doesn't require rewrites) they will not be able to solidify any lead.
Actually a PVR is completely antithetical to Apple's business which is going to be selling you TV shows and getting you to cancel your cable service. Why would they enable you to bypass that model by recording shows? I think they should offer PVR functionality, but it isn't going to happen unless they have to.
Just having lived in Japan, you really want a large screen on your phone for using the data services which include just about everything from GPS mapping to paying vending machines and banking. So a flip is much more space efficient in that case, especially when you also want a large keypad for typing out messages.
Nobody cares about size. Girls will have huge stuffed animals hooked on with a keitai strap to their phone. Guys will have stuff on their phone too. What matters is the large screen and keypad.
The problem is that they don't understand they need to massively subsidize the tasting of these services, i.e. let you have so much for free and provide compelling content. Then those services you start using you will pay for. So, for example, they could just let you IM two messages a day, not quite enough to have a conversation, but enough to be useful. The free for a month thing seems less effective because it frankly takes me longer than that to get around to using all the features of the phone. It is like when HBO periodically has free weekends to get people addicted, imagine if VCast sent you a free episode of 24 or something like that... Basically get people used to using the service and then start making money.
Nice reply, to bad you didn't notice that I called for reform, not elimination of patents. We could make them shorter to minimize their damages, but it would be better to make the bar for granting a patent much higher or perhaps make the challenges much easier.
That is probably true despite the rent-seeking nature of those profits (an obvious effect of granting monopolies). The worst part of course being as we force IP regimes on everyone, nobody can show how anti-innovative this whole thing is by leapfrogging and out-competing us.