In anycase since you mention it : Microsoft are pragmatic, and their idea of a microkernel may not fit an academic's thoughts on the subject, but nevertheless retain much of the benefit. The same could be said for OS X. The emphasis to be found in Windows and OS X is healthy.
Linux, meanwhile, is bogged down trying to sort out 2.6. Despite having been releaseed some time ago nevertheless linux webhosts won't touch it. Though we can never be certain I would expect that the monolithic nature of linux is the prime factor in its troubles.
Most reasons given for Linux being so much better than Windows are superficial and would be defeated were Linux the majority OS. Windows has problems but since win2k, as far as I can see right now, they boil down to three major issues. Linux, however, has a show-stopper.
Windows problems:
No condition variables (instability inducing "events" instead)
Absence of least privilege security
Terrible low-level developer docs (which are critical for a closed source OS)
Without that last I suspect that Windows might have been the "Undisputed" even despite the first two. In anycase the first two were understandable since no one knew then what they know now about events and least-privelege
Linux has one problem that over-shadows all others:
A monolithic kernel
Torvald's Sun shone brightly for a day, but his OS is fundamentally flawed and already he is turning into a red dwarf, with the added unattractiveness of seeming arrogance.
None of the reaons you give for why linux is so marvellous are intrinsic to either Linux or XP. If XP didn't exist and linux were the only monkey in town the chumps would be feeding it unsuitable substances instead.
Although science and religion are distinct they are not mutually exclusive. The probabilities against evolution that have lead to theories of an infinite number of universes would be solved by considering a more complete picture than the simplistic and rather dry, and incomplete, account of creation given by fervent science atheism. Science that assumes the non-existence of God is already non-scientific.
So I propose the following union of evolution and intelligent design, based on the idea that God works with the nature he creates rather than completely overriding it, or even acting against it:
God creates a universe that is fertile and ready for life but, like a female body, is not itself able to begin life. God 'inseminates' life, perhaps via a providential lightening strike, and so the process of developement/natural-selection/evolution or whatever begins.
Ref : C.S Lewis : "God is the infinite masculin, creation the feminine." Or something like that (but note : not male or female, except in the person of Christ). Perhaps the masculin is to instigate or give, and the feminine is to accept and recieve.
In anycase science has bigger problems than ID and creationists. It has still to explain why anything exists at all, with a scientific explanation. The religious already have existence as an axiom that doesn't require proof since God has demonstrated, in some spiritual fashion, his existence and the reciever of that proof is satisfied.
If a creature can't see itself, and therefore doesn't even know that it exists then its doubtful that it can suffer, though it might still be able to experience pain.
However these days such distinctions are sacrificed on the high-alter of sentiment : "If I feel sympathetic distress then such-and-such-interesting-ethical-situation-involv ing-mice is wrong". One can be fairly certain that it is pointless to symnpathise with a mouse; it is only interested in cheese, and probably doesn't really know why.
Why does slashdot give the software-whingers so much air time? It gets really quite boring after a while to hear for the 10,000th time the badness of the software from Apple/MS/you-name-it/but-not-open-source.
"Science relies on testable, falsifiable predictions."
...which doesn't get us truth. Despite its reputation science never gives facts; only that which is less false. If you think that seeing something is proof then think again, or consider The Matrix somewhat more deeply. Similarly mathematics cannot prove anything (consider maths attempting to describe maths and perhaps you'll see the problem).
At least non-scientists have the luxury of asserting truth, even if unverifiable. he he
I think this error is the fault of the manuals. The docs for exception usage that I have seen have tended to show examples of inappropriate exception usage. Real example (in Borland's Object Pascal language guide, modified to pseudo-code):
a=1
b=0
try
___return a/b
except
___puts 'divide by zero'
end
return -1;//indicating an error
Thus removing 50% of the advantage that exceptions give, or at least structured exception handling. So now, many years later, we have a generation of developers who think that they are supposed to catch exceptions within the method that generated them instad of letting them spin right out to the top level (or they trap in the caller, which is usually almost as bad).
Disaster!
Even worse that Java re-inforced this heretical use of exceptions (see the Artima website for some interesting articles about how crappy java's exceptions are for larger projects).
The poor mites are generating reams of error display code because they weren't told the truth right from the beginning: that raising exceptions should out-number trapping by at least 10 to 1, and the better the underlying libraries the less the trapping. For example its poor form for a library to raise an exception for a non-exceptional condition wihtout a non-excepting alternative, for example : not being able to make a connection, which in many circumstances is non-exceptional. But many libraries do this, and so innapropriate trapping is necessary, .
...but perhaps the Slashdot crowd could offer advice on a better business model than spam and merchandising?
It seems to me that this company is actually asking for a concious effort at the email equivalent of 'word of mouth'. I think that its an admirable idea and doesn't truly constitute SPAM except by a looser definition than I, personally, would accept.
That, I believe, is a serious over-simplification of what constitutes a decent scanner driver. Support for a SCSI interface isn't the same as support for a scanner. Scanner manufacturers put in effort to have their software/drivers effectively offer advanced features. Did I say like-for-like? I thought I did, so why this feeble argument of exactly the same kind (comparing apples to oranges)?
This is like the justification used by the crazy Australian court that recently connived to undermine the Shazaam p2p network. The judges are either corrupt, insane, or middle-class.
The final reason given for the denial sounds very sensible.
It may seem like a good idea, in the first few seconds, but providing a radio service of this sort in the case of a large-scale crisis is a medium term strategy, with plenty of need of coordination. The denial of the license in the short term isn't really surprising, isn't really news, and isn't really interesting.
In any case, as far as i can tell, from a long way away, the people who wanted the info would not have been able to get it from a source of this sort; it's not just the transmitter that needed batteries.
And there are lots of other problems with providing such a service. I doubt one single life was lost due to this broadcat denial (I can even see it going the otherway, particularly if the service were in the wrong hands, a possibility that the "lower down administrator" must have been acutely aware of).
The unwise slashdotter who promoted this feeble article into existence needs to self->terminate(weapon=revoltingSelfRighteousnessJ udgementalism).
That's a lovely story, with no substance.
The trouble with stories of this kind is that they don't test like for like. Windows 2000 is 6 years old, and has barely had any feature updates (USB2 is just about the only one).
Further, when it comes to external devices Microsoft's policy is to let the manufacturer produce the driver, which may result in a crappy driver, as describe [by parent] but is alot more sensible (think about it) and usually more flexible than the linux half-baked equivalent produced by people who aren't good enough to get adequate satisfation from the their day jobs.
Ok, ok, so the last statment was unfair and anti-social; I reluctantly withdraw it.
If Fujitsu produce crappy drivers for their scanners then sack the person responsible for buying it, and stop blaming Microsoft.
Security in Java is multi layered and complex, you cannot possibly cover all its faces.
Complexity is itself a security issue, and it is a bad thing for Java's security model to be described this way. The latter part of your sentence proves the point.
".Net" managed code is very rare and all.NET applications I know of (that are real applications) use native code thus removing any sense of security.
Most desktop applications aren't candidates for serious security. Server apps almost always need serious security, as do browser applets. So, Mr Coward, your comment needs qualification if it is to be useful.
Java has had years of full source code visibility (not open source) and had several holes plugged by the community,.NET has no such thing.
This comment is at a tangent to the study's remit, which is the design of.NET/Java. They only use the comparison of flaws to suggest their hypothesis, not to prove it.
Saying that.NET is more secure is just about the stupidest thing someone can say
The nature of this assertion is self-describing, in any context, since one would have to know all possible stupid statements which is impossible since there are an infinite number.
I am surprised that your post recieved such high mod points, particularly as you are a coward.
The developer doesn't have as direct a responsibility for a project as those above, and is much more likely to make a risky choice out of convenience or some other poor motive. A developer is a grunt, and they will be thinking of the effect a language has on day to day grunt work, and not the higher and more important aspects of the project (such as the goal). I've seen this happen.
Certainly it makes sense to involve the developers, but not to give them that degree of power. And further : to involve them in such a way that the eventual choice is not resented, or not resented much; and I think that giving them the impression of choice is one way to eventually get a lot of resentment.
I should also add that allowing developers to choose the language is an unhealthy precendent that has a significant potential for eventually undermining management. Don't give an inch...
"Your rant kind of wanders all over the play without making any real straight foreward point. Can you maybe clear up exactly what you meant to say with this post?
"
Rant? You're kidding, right?
If you read the post to which I replied perhaps you'll see why I wasn't trying to make a point; rather I adding to the parent post's point.
As for only eating meat, I don't believe I was suggesting that. Perhaps you are having a bad day. My commiserations....
"Do you realize how many more resources -- land and fresh water -- are consumed in producing meat than in producing vegetable crops? "
This is an old myth. There is enourmous amounts of land that cannot be used for crops and edible plants and which can be used for animals.
On the health side it would seem that plant based foods are associated with all sorts of problems : allergies, auto-immune diseases, gut problems, asthma, etc. Carbs are heavily implicated in syndome X (a clutch of symptoms going towards diabetes) and other ills, such as PCOS, thyroid problems, water-retention, abcesses and many many more. And carbs don't come from meat (except a little from liver).
Perhaps reflecting out near-carnivore hunter-gatherer origins (according to anthropologists) its very rare for people to have problems with unprocessed meat. One might point at saturated fat as a cause of heart disease but current research indicates that it is contributory at most, and that the actual cause of heart disease is much more likely to be either sugar, vegetable oils, a type of chlamydia infection and one or two other things. As for meat and cancer : the most authoratitive study (WHO in 2000) found no relation between unprocessed meat and cancer; you can discount the recent nonsense about meat and cancer since that recent study is no where near the WHO study in terms of integrity and reliability, and in anycase the emphasis was on processed meat.
Who ever heard of a meat allergy (other than related to added nitrates)? It exists, AFAIK, but is very very rare, perhaps reflecting that meat is totally natural to us.
The irony is that western nutritionists have everyone believing that muesli is nature's way, when it is anthroplogically the opposite of an original and natural human diet. Sure evolution will have compensated in the last 10,000 years, but it takes time to adapt to a 180 degree change in dietary direction from 2 million years+ of meat; I've read one source claim that we need 20,000 years to see a significant adaption, and we are only half-way through.
Worse still while we may have had 10,000 years adapting to farmer foods, we've only had 100 years to adapt to industrial foods such as margarine, vegetable oils, sugar and other forms of unnatural foods (at the very least unnatural to us, even if technically natural which margarine totally isn't).
Compare Office 97 to OpenOffice and then you might have a valid comparison. Even then feature and interface-wise OpenOffice is a pile of cr*p compared to Office 97. Performance-wise Office 97 beats the cr*p out of Open Office.
And don't tell us that being able to create pdf's and swf's make OpenOffice superiour to MS Office; Open Office has a hefty wodge of features that aren't suited to document editing and are out of place. You can't really compare Open Office's capabilities to MS Office since it does so many things that it shouldn't be doing; at the most they should be optional add-ons.
I've had the displeasure of using OpenOffice for some time now, and I yearn to return to MS Office which due to circumstances I can't. And no, I'm not trolling: this is months of hard labour talking.
Which reminds me: its time to re-visit AbiWord and see if its ready for prime-time yet....
The concept of a 'State' is a novelty, relatively speaking.
The primary and natural educational perogative is to the parents. If the parents want their children to learn X or Y or Z then so long as the parents exercise that perogative with the intention of attempting to teach truth then time and reality (Truth itself) will work out the errors they teach. And if time doesn't succeed in the first generation, then maybe in the succeeding generations. And we had just better learn patience.
Otherwise its down to who is right or wrong on any particular issue. That question is philosophically very tricky. The film 'The Matrix' is a modern illustration of one dimension of that problem.
The alternative is a BBS ('Big Brother State') taking one particular line on what it considers to be true, and the rest of us had better believe it. Philosophically the State's position on a particular issue is arbitary unless an omniscient (and benevolent) entity happens to be controlling the state.
The manipulation of law by means of church/state separation to remove one or another party's assertion of truth is a step in the direction of a BSS. The same applies to the emotional manipulation involved in the unbalanced and bogus assertion that "the interests of the child are paramount": no they are not.
So I say, at least for the time-being, that the State should trust those that love their children the most and are most suited to parenting them and who themselves have been children. That State has never been a child, nor has ever had children, except in the driest and most clinical sense.
It has a great overview of how the system has evolved and how much it favours the big patent holders, and suggests 3 specific fixes:
...and the fixes that follow are complicated Band-Aids which are likely to create their own distortions, and don't address the fundamentally flawed principles that caused the problem in the first place (like allowing business rule software patents and a PTO that is funded by the appliquees).
I can only wonder at the motivation of the writers of this piece: it looks like a device to distract people into thinking that there is a solution to the patents problem that does not involve returning to what was before. These solutions are too complicated or difficult: they will be born with malformations due to undue influence from those with an interest in the status quo, and their complexity is likely to allow ample scope for being abused by clever people.
These solutions remind me of the attempt in the UK to make everything absolutely fair with the result of weighing everyone down with unlimited amounts of complicated paper-work.
I may have one myself : but I really do hate hate hate the product of mediocre minds.
'create incentives and opportunities for parties to challenge the novelty and nonobviousness of an invention before the PTO grants a patent,'
.. which creates a system dependent on people motivated enough to bother doing the job of the PTO (the PTO is HUUUGE!).
examine the important patents meticulously; don't waste effort on the unimportant ones that can be ousted early
And who is to make the judgement call over those that are important and those that are not. I bet the one-click patent was seen as nothing much really by the guy(s) who examined it. Further the judge becomes very important and therefore a point of corruption.
and for examining prior art, use judges and special masters rather than uninformed juries."
Sounds great, doesn't it, but experts are not without their own set of problems as seen in the judicial system; I doubt many would be comfortable with juries composed of "experts". Choosing these "special masters" is not a trivial matter. There are good reasons for picking juries from 12 "ordinary" men and women.
Slashdot Mirror
In anycase since you mention it : Microsoft are pragmatic, and their idea of a microkernel may not fit an academic's thoughts on the subject, but nevertheless retain much of the benefit. The same could be said for OS X. The emphasis to be found in Windows and OS X is healthy.
Linux, meanwhile, is bogged down trying to sort out 2.6. Despite having been releaseed some time ago nevertheless linux webhosts won't touch it. Though we can never be certain I would expect that the monolithic nature of linux is the prime factor in its troubles.
Windows problems :
Without that last I suspect that Windows might have been the "Undisputed" even despite the first two. In anycase the first two were understandable since no one knew then what they know now about events and least-privelege
Linux has one problem that over-shadows all others :
Torvald's Sun shone brightly for a day, but his OS is fundamentally flawed and already he is turning into a red dwarf, with the added unattractiveness of seeming arrogance.
None of the reaons you give for why linux is so marvellous are intrinsic to either Linux or XP. If XP didn't exist and linux were the only monkey in town the chumps would be feeding it unsuitable substances instead.
So I propose the following union of evolution and intelligent design, based on the idea that God works with the nature he creates rather than completely overriding it, or even acting against it :
God creates a universe that is fertile and ready for life but, like a female body, is not itself able to begin life. God 'inseminates' life, perhaps via a providential lightening strike, and so the process of developement/natural-selection/evolution or whatever begins.
Ref : C.S Lewis : "God is the infinite masculin, creation the feminine." Or something like that (but note : not male or female, except in the person of Christ). Perhaps the masculin is to instigate or give, and the feminine is to accept and recieve.
In anycase science has bigger problems than ID and creationists. It has still to explain why anything exists at all, with a scientific explanation. The religious already have existence as an axiom that doesn't require proof since God has demonstrated, in some spiritual fashion, his existence and the reciever of that proof is satisfied.
I hate people different from me: including my girlfriend, negros and blacks.
I am purple with yellow spots due to an alien condition.
hello!
we come in peace!
lay down your weapons, we come in peace, if you do not comply in 10 seconds we will blow the planet. 10..9..8...
If a creature can't see itself, and therefore doesn't even know that it exists then its doubtful that it can suffer, though it might still be able to experience pain.
However these days such distinctions are sacrificed on the high-alter of sentiment : "If I feel sympathetic distress then such-and-such-interesting-ethical-situation-involv ing-mice is wrong". One can be fairly certain that it is pointless to symnpathise with a mouse; it is only interested in cheese, and probably doesn't really know why.
Why does slashdot give the software-whingers so much air time? It gets really quite boring after a while to hear for the 10,000th time the badness of the software from Apple/MS/you-name-it/but-not-open-source.
...which doesn't get us truth. Despite its reputation science never gives facts; only that which is less false. If you think that seeing something is proof then think again, or consider The Matrix somewhat more deeply. Similarly mathematics cannot prove anything (consider maths attempting to describe maths and perhaps you'll see the problem).
At least non-scientists have the luxury of asserting truth, even if unverifiable. he he
Its a lovely irony.
You really can't write that.
For a proportion of readers writing the spoken word, as above, causes a traffic jam of words, and the sentence has to be re-read.
a=1 //indicating an error
b=0
try
___return a/b
except
___puts 'divide by zero'
end
return -1;
Thus removing 50% of the advantage that exceptions give, or at least structured exception handling. So now, many years later, we have a generation of developers who think that they are supposed to catch exceptions within the method that generated them instad of letting them spin right out to the top level (or they trap in the caller, which is usually almost as bad).
Disaster!
Even worse that Java re-inforced this heretical use of exceptions (see the Artima website for some interesting articles about how crappy java's exceptions are for larger projects).
The poor mites are generating reams of error display code because they weren't told the truth right from the beginning: that raising exceptions should out-number trapping by at least 10 to 1, and the better the underlying libraries the less the trapping. For example its poor form for a library to raise an exception for a non-exceptional condition wihtout a non-excepting alternative, for example : not being able to make a connection, which in many circumstances is non-exceptional. But many libraries do this, and so innapropriate trapping is necessary, .
It seems to me that this company is actually asking for a concious effort at the email equivalent of 'word of mouth'. I think that its an admirable idea and doesn't truly constitute SPAM except by a looser definition than I, personally, would accept.
This is like the justification used by the crazy Australian court that recently connived to undermine the Shazaam p2p network. The judges are either corrupt, insane, or middle-class.
It may seem like a good idea, in the first few seconds, but providing a radio service of this sort in the case of a large-scale crisis is a medium term strategy, with plenty of need of coordination. The denial of the license in the short term isn't really surprising, isn't really news, and isn't really interesting.
In any case, as far as i can tell, from a long way away, the people who wanted the info would not have been able to get it from a source of this sort; it's not just the transmitter that needed batteries.
And there are lots of other problems with providing such a service. I doubt one single life was lost due to this broadcat denial (I can even see it going the otherway, particularly if the service were in the wrong hands, a possibility that the "lower down administrator" must have been acutely aware of).
The unwise slashdotter who promoted this feeble article into existence needs to self->terminate(weapon=revoltingSelfRighteousnessJ udgementalism).
That's a lovely story, with no substance. The trouble with stories of this kind is that they don't test like for like. Windows 2000 is 6 years old, and has barely had any feature updates (USB2 is just about the only one). Further, when it comes to external devices Microsoft's policy is to let the manufacturer produce the driver, which may result in a crappy driver, as describe [by parent] but is alot more sensible (think about it) and usually more flexible than the linux half-baked equivalent produced by people who aren't good enough to get adequate satisfation from the their day jobs. Ok, ok, so the last statment was unfair and anti-social; I reluctantly withdraw it. If Fujitsu produce crappy drivers for their scanners then sack the person responsible for buying it, and stop blaming Microsoft.
Complexity is itself a security issue, and it is a bad thing for Java's security model to be described this way. The latter part of your sentence proves the point.
".Net" managed code is very rare and all .NET applications I know of (that are real applications) use native code thus removing any sense of security.
Most desktop applications aren't candidates for serious security. Server apps almost always need serious security, as do browser applets. So, Mr Coward, your comment needs qualification if it is to be useful.
Java has had years of full source code visibility (not open source) and had several holes plugged by the community, .NET has no such thing.
This comment is at a tangent to the study's remit, which is the design of .NET/Java. They only use the comparison of flaws to suggest their hypothesis, not to prove it.
Saying that .NET is more secure is just about the stupidest thing someone can say
The nature of this assertion is self-describing, in any context, since one would have to know all possible stupid statements which is impossible since there are an infinite number.
I am surprised that your post recieved such high mod points, particularly as you are a coward.
They sure do have their reasons. Its founded on fairness. Or to call it by its proper name : Justice.
To quote another famous author :
Christ came to save a planet of lunatics. G.K. Chesterton
Cliff's insane comment would appear to be a neat illustration of Chesterton's assertion.
Certainly it makes sense to involve the developers, but not to give them that degree of power. And further : to involve them in such a way that the eventual choice is not resented, or not resented much; and I think that giving them the impression of choice is one way to eventually get a lot of resentment.
I should also add that allowing developers to choose the language is an unhealthy precendent that has a significant potential for eventually undermining management. Don't give an inch...
Rant? You're kidding, right?
If you read the post to which I replied perhaps you'll see why I wasn't trying to make a point; rather I adding to the parent post's point.
As for only eating meat, I don't believe I was suggesting that. Perhaps you are having a bad day. My commiserations....
"Do you realize how many more resources -- land and fresh water -- are consumed in producing meat than in producing vegetable crops? " This is an old myth. There is enourmous amounts of land that cannot be used for crops and edible plants and which can be used for animals.
On the health side it would seem that plant based foods are associated with all sorts of problems : allergies, auto-immune diseases, gut problems, asthma, etc. Carbs are heavily implicated in syndome X (a clutch of symptoms going towards diabetes) and other ills, such as PCOS, thyroid problems, water-retention, abcesses and many many more. And carbs don't come from meat (except a little from liver).
Perhaps reflecting out near-carnivore hunter-gatherer origins (according to anthropologists) its very rare for people to have problems with unprocessed meat. One might point at saturated fat as a cause of heart disease but current research indicates that it is contributory at most, and that the actual cause of heart disease is much more likely to be either sugar, vegetable oils, a type of chlamydia infection and one or two other things. As for meat and cancer : the most authoratitive study (WHO in 2000) found no relation between unprocessed meat and cancer; you can discount the recent nonsense about meat and cancer since that recent study is no where near the WHO study in terms of integrity and reliability, and in anycase the emphasis was on processed meat.
Who ever heard of a meat allergy (other than related to added nitrates)? It exists, AFAIK, but is very very rare, perhaps reflecting that meat is totally natural to us.
The irony is that western nutritionists have everyone believing that muesli is nature's way, when it is anthroplogically the opposite of an original and natural human diet. Sure evolution will have compensated in the last 10,000 years, but it takes time to adapt to a 180 degree change in dietary direction from 2 million years+ of meat; I've read one source claim that we need 20,000 years to see a significant adaption, and we are only half-way through.
Worse still while we may have had 10,000 years adapting to farmer foods, we've only had 100 years to adapt to industrial foods such as margarine, vegetable oils, sugar and other forms of unnatural foods (at the very least unnatural to us, even if technically natural which margarine totally isn't).
Generalizations always suck.
Yeah! You should be using the calendar and to do list on a mobile phone.
And don't tell us that being able to create pdf's and swf's make OpenOffice superiour to MS Office; Open Office has a hefty wodge of features that aren't suited to document editing and are out of place. You can't really compare Open Office's capabilities to MS Office since it does so many things that it shouldn't be doing; at the most they should be optional add-ons.
I've had the displeasure of using OpenOffice for some time now, and I yearn to return to MS Office which due to circumstances I can't. And no, I'm not trolling: this is months of hard labour talking.
Which reminds me: its time to re-visit AbiWord and see if its ready for prime-time yet....
...in this case.
The concept of a 'State' is a novelty, relatively speaking.
The primary and natural educational perogative is to the parents. If the parents want their children to learn X or Y or Z then so long as the parents exercise that perogative with the intention of attempting to teach truth then time and reality (Truth itself) will work out the errors they teach. And if time doesn't succeed in the first generation, then maybe in the succeeding generations. And we had just better learn patience.
Otherwise its down to who is right or wrong on any particular issue. That question is philosophically very tricky. The film 'The Matrix' is a modern illustration of one dimension of that problem.
The alternative is a BBS ('Big Brother State') taking one particular line on what it considers to be true, and the rest of us had better believe it. Philosophically the State's position on a particular issue is arbitary unless an omniscient (and benevolent) entity happens to be controlling the state.
The manipulation of law by means of church/state separation to remove one or another party's assertion of truth is a step in the direction of a BSS. The same applies to the emotional manipulation involved in the unbalanced and bogus assertion that "the interests of the child are paramount": no they are not.
So I say, at least for the time-being, that the State should trust those that love their children the most and are most suited to parenting them and who themselves have been children. That State has never been a child, nor has ever had children, except in the driest and most clinical sense.
And therefore : let the parent's dicate.
I can only wonder at the motivation of the writers of this piece: it looks like a device to distract people into thinking that there is a solution to the patents problem that does not involve returning to what was before. These solutions are too complicated or difficult: they will be born with malformations due to undue influence from those with an interest in the status quo, and their complexity is likely to allow ample scope for being abused by clever people.
These solutions remind me of the attempt in the UK to make everything absolutely fair with the result of weighing everyone down with unlimited amounts of complicated paper-work.
I may have one myself : but I really do hate hate hate the product of mediocre minds.
'create incentives and opportunities for parties to challenge the novelty and nonobviousness of an invention before the PTO grants a patent,'
examine the important patents meticulously; don't waste effort on the unimportant ones that can be ousted early
And who is to make the judgement call over those that are important and those that are not. I bet the one-click patent was seen as nothing much really by the guy(s) who examined it. Further the judge becomes very important and therefore a point of corruption.
and for examining prior art, use judges and special masters rather than uninformed juries."
Sounds great, doesn't it, but experts are not without their own set of problems as seen in the judicial system; I doubt many would be comfortable with juries composed of "experts". Choosing these "special masters" is not a trivial matter. There are good reasons for picking juries from 12 "ordinary" men and women.
What a load of rubbish.