You didn't say it directly, but you did compare Obama's preacher, Rev. Wright to Jerry Falwell. Obama and Wright were clearly buddies. Falwell and McCain are not.
I'm not sure you're aware of this, but Wright was actually quoting the comments of a former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq in that soundbite. How dare a pastor quote a leading expert on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East when discussing a consequence of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East...
And of course if you actually read what Wright said in that speech you'll notice how pointed and insightful his remarks are, just as you'd expect from a preacher of national renoun for over a decade. (He was the preacher that Bill Clinton repented to with much fanfare during the Monica mess.)
Neither is misrepresenting someone's position ("McCain wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years" or "Obama is a Muslim")
Those aren't even remotely similar misrepresentations. McCain does want to stay in Iraq for 100 years subject to a specific condition (that it's within U.S. interests as he sees them). Given the poorly defined limits on the types of U.S. interest the current administration has deemed sufficient to justify invasion and occupation of sovereign nations, the limiting condition on McCain's statement offers little comfort for those who do not wish the U.S. to be engaged in wars of whimsy across the globe. I'm still waiting to hear what U.S. interest led us to invade Iraq and occupy it for five years. PBS just had a pretty good documentary of how the current administration created a separate office to manufacture "actionable intelligence" that contradicted what our own experts (and the rest of the intelligence community) was saying in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Being a Muslim isn't a position, and this portrayal of Obama as a Muslim is a misrepresentation of an immaterial fact meant to foment a bigoted response. He's never said anything to the effect that he is a Muslim and, if he were, it should have no impact on his suitability as a candidate to lead our country through a period of great domestic and diplomatic hardship.
While you may not disagree with them because they are not as far left leaning as the rest of them, they do go out of their way to represent all sides and have never celebrated the deaths of Americans in Iraq.
Do you actually watch Fox news? In most of their attempts to "represent all sides" that I've seen, they put on some minor player on the "other side" with little or no experience in TV commentary and yell at them. Their purpose isn't to serve as some reasonable counterpoint, but to be lampooned and caricatured in order for the fringe right-wing audience to feel comfortable in their disdain of the center and left. Fox news is theatre.
60 minutes for example just did a puff piece on Al Gore and global warming. They did not post an opposing view, and there is plenty to choose from.
Pray tell which "opposing view" has some traction in the non-crackpot scientific community, makes a distinction that is important to present, and can be clearly conveyed and properly qualified in a 2 minute dissent interview? Just because some wingnut disagrees with the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community doesn't mean he deserves national airtime, especially on a show like 60 minutes.
First, a "lowly" court judge in the United States CAN "make" law. If his/her decision is accepted as precedent (as it MUST, unless reason is later demonstrated to overturn it), then even a municipal judge can "change law". Further, it does not even have to be a judge. A jury can change law, and that decision too would have to be overturned by a higher court in order for that change to be invalidated.
Wow. Rarely have I seen such wildly inaccurate information, even on the internet. A court's decision is only binding on lower courts. No other courts are bound by the decision. They can (and often do) completely ignore it. They can elect to use it in explaining their own decision on the issue, but they could also elect to use inane internet ramblings. A judge at any level could formulate a rule that is later adopted by superior courts, and even the Supreme Court, but they certainly can't "make" law.
Juries have absolutely no role in changing law in the U.S. They aren't even supposed to consider issues of law, and their verdicts aren't even necessarily binding on their own trial court for the issues of fact that juries are supposed to consider! (The only jury verdict that can't be overturned/reversed by the presiding judge is an acquittal in a criminal case).
Please educate yourself on the function of a system before spouting off on it. The legal system of the U.S. is complicated but well documented. There's no good reason to speak about it with ignorance.
An example, say $100 for the processor, and $60 for lawyers and $50 for patent charges, total $210 per processor.
Your numbers are off by a few orders of magnitude. If intel did spend $60/u on lawyers, lost, and only had to pay $50/u for a license then they'd probably be able to get a chunk of that back through malpractice.
The last thing the world needs is incontestable rights that were wrongly granted in the first place.
I can just hear the bill's defenders saying 'but this limitation would not be incontestability'. But patents are rights that can be asserted against the public generally. So this limitation on who can contest them, would be incontestability by a large section of the persons affected by the rights.
A patent only grants the holder the presumption of validity. If they ever wish to assert their patent rights, their victim may prove by clear and convincing evidence (IIRC) that the patent is not valid (or more importantly that the specific claims supporting the suit are invalid). This litigation process is a far more involved, effective review than is otherwise practical.
The post-grant review is largely pointless. Only a tiny handful of patents will be overturned by it and those would be so weak as to never support litigation.
The only practical way to solve the patent problem is to adopt changes that prevent bad faith litigation (patent trolling).
No, this is a common misconception. There is no broad "spending power." The spending power was limited "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." But obviously, that doesn't mean the spending can be on anything related to those things. That is a description of what follows in the rest of Section 8: a preamble, not a broad enumeration of power. The person who wrote the Bill of Rights, including the Tenth Amendment, dismissed this faulty interpretation many years ago:
I'm sorry, but this is just wrong. Pretty much the only thing that Congress can't do with money is spend it on religion. Madison's writings on the subject are irrelevant. Congress can pay states to hire and fire specific employees. Congress' spending and commerce powers allow for federal regulation of almost every aspect of your life, so long as they frame the legislation correctly. The only authority on the constitutionality of a given action is the judicial branch, most importantly the Supreme Court. Of course if you have your nose stuck in 1780's political pamphlets you'd believe that the Supreme Court did not have the power to determine the constitutionality of legislation, so make sure you bring that up should you have opportunity to present arguments before that august body.
No Child Left Behind is just as much, if not more, a violation of my rights under the Constitution
You don't even have standing to challenge non-religious spending as a taxpayer. You have a much stronger argument against warrantless wiretapping if you have been tapped.
There's also nothing unconstitutional about time/place/manner restrictions on public speech that are content-neutral. The problem with "Free Speech Zones" as implemented is that they are not content-neutral. They are also pretty unreasonable, and a challenge under those grounds would probably add a reasonableness requirement (though to my knowledge no such challenge has been brought).
I'd at least argue that public subsidy of higher education is in the USA's best interest.
The Constitution does not give the authority to the U.S. to do things that are in the USA's best interest, but only those things which the Constitution specifically allows the U.S. to do (Tenth Amendment).
Hmmm...
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States
The spending power is easy to miss. It's up there at the beginning of the enumerated powers in Article I, section 8.
Showing them that it exists, and having them independently decide it would be possible absent any evidence are two completely different things. You've subtly changed the argument to make a point that was never in contention.
What exactly are you arguing then? That the form factor for a prop in a pulp 60's TV show demonstrates that people of the early 20th century had no idea that wireless communications were possible? Or was your comment just a complete non sequitur?
Voice over radio was first practiced in 1900. It actually existed, in practice, then. Wireless telecommunications have changed a great deal in the last 100 years, but those are differences in degree. I communicate voice over radio waves like Fessenden did ~107 years ago.
If you were to draw any conclusions from Star Trek, it's probably be that the show's creators had no insight into the impact of miniaturization or that the prop department preferred doctored household items to custom designed and manufactured props. It certainly doesn't tell you what the people of the 60's were thinking, much less the people of 1908. Much of the "far future" technology of star trek had nothing on the technology of (say) Dick Tracy. Were the relevant aspects of Star Trek technology any more advanced than that depicted on the Batman TV series airing contemporaneously?
Going back to the original question:
How many people 100 years ago would have thought it possible that the people of the future would have magic electric devices that allowed them to communicate through the air and all the way across the world?
Answer: All of them that could read. There's no need for you to apply your assumptions about people living 60 years after the fact based on a TV show to answer this question.
Ah, and so everybody at the time envisioned cell phones, for example? I posit (and use as evidence the "far future tech" of communicators in Star Trek) that they did not. Yet cell phones are the logical evolution of that telegraphed conversation.
The first trans-Atlantic radio transmission was in 1901. The telephone (considered an improved telegraph) was invented in the 1870's. I don't think any literate westerner from 1908 would be surprised by our wireless telephony. They'd be far more surprised by our display devices.
Unless "everybody" is going to be named in the lawsuit, they cannot ask to see that information. It violates the reasonable level of privacy that a person expects between them and a corporation.
What legal basis do you have for a privacy right contained in someone else's property? In the U.S. you should have no standing to contest this action. The case could take an interesting turn if the libeler wrote from a foreign computer or through a foreign proxy.
What they are really looking for is a list of people who accessed a resource. To what end? How do you identify your defendant? Based on what evidence? Do they already have suspects?
Presumably they will find a pattern in the access logs to the relevant articles matching a single IP (or equivalent) to the records at the time they would have been accessed. If 100,000 IP's fit their query then they're probably out of luck. If one or two do then they'd probably be able to find their defendant.
They are gathering information, and IMO, harming people that were never party to the original action by doing so.
What harm comes to those who don't meet their search criteria?
I can only accept that law enforcement has the rights to conduct investigations in this manner. Gathering a list of 100 people and investigating them till they have suspects. It just scares me to think that any lawyer can start doing the same.
It's probably better to wait until we know how many users their search turns up before we freak out. It's unclear whether this search would even be useful, and if it is not then they would not be able to file the subsequent subpoena that would allow them to determine the identity of the libeler. Then no one's identity is compromised.
Please name one substantive change to patent law passed by Congress and signed into law by the President since 1982. We have had a few minor changes to bring us into compliance with treaties we've signed with other countries, and we've made changes to prevent submarine patents, but the changes to patent law causing so much trouble now (patenting of algorithms, living things, and business methods) were all the result of court decisions.
Of course funds for the USPTO, for better or for worse, came from Congress. It's how our system of government works. I should note, though, that the USPTO generates a great deal of its own revenue in the form of fees related to the filing and prosecution of patents.
in the U.S., Congress couldn't have cared less about patent and trademark law until they were paid by the private sector to revise it.
The gradual relaxing of subject matter restrictions on patentability over the last 30 years in the U.S. has been the result of court decisions, not congressional action. Arguably, the establishment of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals facilitated an acceleration in change in patent law, but that's about as close as you can get to a link between congress and the explosion in patentable subject matter.
The large, consolidated, established industries best able to lobby congress also, with a few notable exceptions (pharma), benefit the least from patents. Their dominant players often have market power without having to result to patents (which rarely grant market power anyway).
It's an irrelevant point regardless. In the least case, all the amendment shows is that Congress cannot take arms from a well-regulated militia. Now show me, in the Constitution, where it says that they can take arms from anyone else.
The commerce clause? The constitution limits the federal government to its enumerated powers, but the commerce clause can cover just about anything, even a farmer growing wheat on his own land for his own consumption. If congress can regulate wheat in that manner, they could regulate guns (without the 2nd amendment in the way). Of course the framers likely didn't intend for the commerce clause to become the behemoth that it has become, but that's another issue entirely.
My example of a geostationary satellite is one example where someone tried to patent an idea and the patent was rejected on the grounds that Arthur C. Clarke had fully described the invention in a previous story.
What exactly was this geostationary satellite patent trying to claim? For anything I've ever read about in science fiction, using the description provided by the author would make very poor prior art material. Generally the disclosure necessary to support useful claims requires a level of detail that far exceeds anything you'd find in a work of fiction. Working out all the details and disclosing them, provided they were new, useful, and nonobvious, is what earns you the patent. Merely propounding on the possibility of geostationary satellites without providing the necessary information to reduce them to practice would not constitute prior art for an otherwise valid patent application.
I was referring to a different writer (forgot his name) who around the end of the 19th century said we would communicate using a network of satellites made of bricks and powered by water.
The pre-granting discussion/prior art system I was referring to is http://www.peertopatent.org/, which is being done in cooperation with the USPTO and seems to so far be doing a reasonably good job.
Effort put into the pre-granting review process is wasted. Simply, it's not where our system has problems. The particular site you link to is garbage (no offense). Very few comments I've seen there demonstrate understanding of the legal concepts involved and many misunderstand the technical subject matter. There are several companies looking at methods for automated rating of patents which, if applied to patent applications, could flag some for additional scrutiny. Beyond that, though, having an army of people who don't understand prior art, novelty, or obviousness and who can't properly read a patent review applications is just going to create more work for the already overburdened PTO.
There's also a legislative effort underway to greatly expand the pre-granting review process within the PTO, which is what I was referring to. It's a waste of resources because the problem isn't bad patents being granted, but bad patents being used in litigation (and good patents being misused in litigation).
Patents are just pieces of paper until litigated, when they give the patent holder the ability to impose huge costs on their party opponent with very little exposure. This allows a patent holder to extract millions of dollars in rents using patents that, even when valid, don't read on the target subject matter. Bluntly, a perfect system that granted only valid patents would have very little effect on troll activity.
Before a troll can prevail at trial, his patent will have to survive a challenge to validity several million dollars in the making, brought by an interested party who has focused those resources on the specific nuance of the patent that covers his accused product. That's where review really happens in our system, and it's an incredibly efficient method for focusing the overwhelming majority of our review resources on those few points of disagreement that actually matter. I'd guess that every patent on that website combined gets less effective scrutiny in a month than any one claim gets during litigation.
The problem with the current system is that people can take advantage of these high defensive litigation costs to engage in rent seeking. A true "troll" very rarely goes to trial, as he knows his case is garbage and that the real value is in allowing the other side to dig themselves out for less than their anticipated defense costs. The way to fix this inefficiency is to expose patent plaintiffs to risk of loss while giving incentive to patent defendants to invalidate or otherwise defeat bad faith claims in litigation. An appropriately written bonding statute would make current pre-gr
use of science fiction as prior art (as in the geostationary satellite),
Made of bricks and powered by a waterfall? Please tell me you're joking. Read a few patents before saying something this silly.
and a better pre-granting discussion process (which is already being experimented with)
This would be a terrible idea as well, unless you want patent applications to cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars (per country, no less). Perhaps the presumption of validity should be relaxed a bit, but increasing the screening function of patent examiners by a meaningful margin would be prohibitively expensive. It would also do nothing to prevent a "troll" with a valid patent from inflicting millions of dollars in legal fees on a noninfringing company.
Currently, one patent out of every 10,000 or so granted is litigated and subjected to the appropriate level of scrutiny, and it's incredibly costly. It makes far more sense to expose patent holders to greater risk of loss in litigation if they have a flawed patent or a flawed theory of infringement. That way there's no penalty inflicted upon small businesses seeking legitimate protection and the misuse of valid patents is curtailed.
i guess it takes an MIT education to know this is wrong.
they *know* the computer, NOT THE PERSON OPERATING IT.
they aren't fining the computer, which they know, rather, they are fining the operator WHICH THEY DON'T KNOW.
so they have to prove it was the person who actually operated the computer.
innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent.
Relax, buddy. Guilty isn't even an option here. It's a civil suit. I don't believe any courses at MIT cover such trivia, but it's the sort of thing you'd pick up in the course of a standard high school education. Forgive my previous brevity, but in a case such as this an IP address is as good as a name.
Knowing which physical machine was used for the infringement is quite useful (here, the machine owned and registered by defendant with MIT). The plaintiff can then compel discovery of defendant's computer as well as any other computers, documents, or storage devices that may be relevant.
Once ownership is established and evidence is gathered, plaintiff would probably not have to argue the issue of control in court. Mere ownership would probably meet their evidentiary burden (here, preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt). The jury would be allowed to infer that defendant, as exclusive owner of a personal computer in his residence, had exclusive control over its use. Even if defendant can prove that he was not operating the computer at the time(s) that infringement occurred, he could likely be held liable under a theory of contributory copyright infringement if the jury finds that he knew or should have known that the operator of his computer was violating copyright.
In the unlikely event that a very close and personal friend stepped up and claimed that he had used defendant's computer to distribute copyrighted works on a P2P network, defendant is likely still hosed. Even if this friend convinced a jury that he had secured the use of defendant's computer by deceit and had not informed defendant of the infringement, if defendant could reasonably be expected to discover the existence of the P2P program or the illegal copies then the contributory infringement claim would likely stand. The friend would fail in saving defendant, and would be jointly and severally liable for copyright infringement. His computer, storage devices, documents, etc would be subject to discovery as well.
When discussing any legal action, remember that the judge is insanely busy, the jury is pissed, and both are going to spot a lame argument a mile away. On a campus with many more computers than students, how credible will defendant's argument that someone used his computer without his knowledge be? Keep in mind that plaintiff will likely be able to document continuous activity over an extended period of time and, if contested, the question of control would certainly go to the jury. You'd have the opportunity to convince 6 angry people that you did not have control or knowledge over the contents and operation of your computer. Making stuff up under oath in a federal court is a very bad idea, by the way.
Pretty much the only way for defendant to prevail would be to show that he had no access to his computer when the infringement took place (for example, in a different country) and that he had not given permission for anyone else to use his computer.
I don't practice in the field of copyright law, though. I'm sure someone who does will clarify any mistakes I may have made.
If that is true... he is doomed. However my guess is the RIAA still can't produce enough evidence save say a BT tracker site so if he gets the EFF he still might win.
Bittorrent tells you the IP addresses of your peers. I don't know what other information is available, but I would assume that it is possible to tell whether any particular member of a torrent is uploading. If he was uploading, he's boned.
Unless they can link his specific IP to his computer that he specifically downloaded files he can use several excuses, not to mention he can probably get the EFF on his side who have very good lawyers to stop this kind of thing.
MIT has a class-A subnet (18.*.*.*) and used to give each student their own static IP address. If they still do that, it may be the easiest place for the *AA's to gather evidence. MIT may not "resist" as other campuses have for the reason that every student using P2P on their network is easily identifiable to the outside world.
The videogame industry continues to fight meaningful accountability for selling inappropriate material to children. The industry has been exposed repeatedly for its reprehensible behavior and now they are looking for ways to buy friends in the government,' said PTC President Tim Winter. 'Let me be clear of our intentions: Any public servant who cashes a check from the videogame industry will be exposed by the PTC as taking a stand against families, and his or her actions will be communicated to constituents in his or her congressional district.
I'd like to announce a new program to help screen inappropriate material from children. Tentatively titled the "Federal Universal Child Kinship Oversight and Family Force Act" or F.U.C.K.O.F.F. Act for short. This act empowers the states to appoint guardians over minors based on whatever criteria they find reasonable, though it is expected that minors will be assigned based on a matching of their genetic makeup to that of available guardians. These guardians will be allowed to control the media the minor is exposed to, including but not limited to internet, television, radio, video games, and print media. It is the hope of Congress that this formal delegation will clarify the role of the government in the care of minors.
The kind of "visit" an alien intelligence would pay us would be most unwelcome.
No civilization is crossing the vast emptiness of space for any reason other than settlement. The investment of resources required for such a journey would be too massive to be undertaken for any other reason.
Most treatments of the Fermi Paradox assume intelligent beings that evolved on planets would remain on and exclusively colonize planets. If an intelligent species colonizes a system by exhausting its resources (constructing a true Dyson sphere consisting of millions upon millions of independent platforms, not the one from Star Trek) then the delay between system colonizations would be much greater. I doubt it will make sense to colonize a nearby star until our local population exceeds 420 quintillion, assuming we take such a path.
Said intelligent species would probably also evolve or engineer itself to live without gravity, making our planet and perhaps our entire solar system uninteresting.
Even if an alien species wanted to travel for hundreds or thousands of years through the vacuum of space to step on another planet, they'd probably prefer a planet with little or no preexisting life. The aspects of our ecology that allow us to thrive may be toxic to a species with a completely independent evolution.
The most puzzling aspect of the Fermi Paradox is how anthropocentric most supposed "solutions" for it are. We don't see little green men because we aren't that interesting and our planet that we value so highly as a non-space-faring civilization holds little or no appeal to a space-faring civilization. We don't see widespread evidence of colonization across the universe because colonies would contribute little or nothing to their source systems in terms of commerce or communication and it would take many millions of years to fill a given system to the point where sending colonists to a new system made any sense. A species that took to the stars 60 million years ago may hold dominion over no more than a handful of star systems, and would have little incentive to expand geometrically to fill the universe.
Star Trek has done so much to harm our minds when it comes to realistic expectations for future space travel. Space is not, and never will be, a loosely connected network of brothels full of nubile green women.
Studies have suggested that the decline in violent crime is pretty much a result of locking up almost everyone that might step out of line. Some people won't be satisfied until all violence has been suppressed (except, of course, violence done by the state or their subcontractors). I don't expect reason will be an impediment to their agenda.
More importantly, if you lock up violent offenders early and inadequately document their violent crimes while in prison then your crime rate has a huge selection bias problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure you're aware of this, but Wright was actually quoting the comments of a former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq in that soundbite. How dare a pastor quote a leading expert on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East when discussing a consequence of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/21/meet-the-white-man-who-_n_92793.html
And of course if you actually read what Wright said in that speech you'll notice how pointed and insightful his remarks are, just as you'd expect from a preacher of national renoun for over a decade. (He was the preacher that Bill Clinton repented to with much fanfare during the Monica mess.)
Those aren't even remotely similar misrepresentations. McCain does want to stay in Iraq for 100 years subject to a specific condition (that it's within U.S. interests as he sees them). Given the poorly defined limits on the types of U.S. interest the current administration has deemed sufficient to justify invasion and occupation of sovereign nations, the limiting condition on McCain's statement offers little comfort for those who do not wish the U.S. to be engaged in wars of whimsy across the globe. I'm still waiting to hear what U.S. interest led us to invade Iraq and occupy it for five years. PBS just had a pretty good documentary of how the current administration created a separate office to manufacture "actionable intelligence" that contradicted what our own experts (and the rest of the intelligence community) was saying in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Being a Muslim isn't a position, and this portrayal of Obama as a Muslim is a misrepresentation of an immaterial fact meant to foment a bigoted response. He's never said anything to the effect that he is a Muslim and, if he were, it should have no impact on his suitability as a candidate to lead our country through a period of great domestic and diplomatic hardship.
Do you actually watch Fox news? In most of their attempts to "represent all sides" that I've seen, they put on some minor player on the "other side" with little or no experience in TV commentary and yell at them. Their purpose isn't to serve as some reasonable counterpoint, but to be lampooned and caricatured in order for the fringe right-wing audience to feel comfortable in their disdain of the center and left. Fox news is theatre.
Pray tell which "opposing view" has some traction in the non-crackpot scientific community, makes a distinction that is important to present, and can be clearly conveyed and properly qualified in a 2 minute dissent interview? Just because some wingnut disagrees with the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community doesn't mean he deserves national airtime, especially on a show like 60 minutes.
I'm sure you could get pizza puffs in space if you really wanted some.
http://www.iltaco.com/fsp/if.html
Juries have absolutely no role in changing law in the U.S. They aren't even supposed to consider issues of law, and their verdicts aren't even necessarily binding on their own trial court for the issues of fact that juries are supposed to consider! (The only jury verdict that can't be overturned/reversed by the presiding judge is an acquittal in a criminal case).
Please educate yourself on the function of a system before spouting off on it. The legal system of the U.S. is complicated but well documented. There's no good reason to speak about it with ignorance.
The post-grant review is largely pointless. Only a tiny handful of patents will be overturned by it and those would be so weak as to never support litigation.
The only practical way to solve the patent problem is to adopt changes that prevent bad faith litigation (patent trolling).
There's also nothing unconstitutional about time/place/manner restrictions on public speech that are content-neutral. The problem with "Free Speech Zones" as implemented is that they are not content-neutral. They are also pretty unreasonable, and a challenge under those grounds would probably add a reasonableness requirement (though to my knowledge no such challenge has been brought).
Voice over radio was first practiced in 1900. It actually existed, in practice, then. Wireless telecommunications have changed a great deal in the last 100 years, but those are differences in degree. I communicate voice over radio waves like Fessenden did ~107 years ago.
If you were to draw any conclusions from Star Trek, it's probably be that the show's creators had no insight into the impact of miniaturization or that the prop department preferred doctored household items to custom designed and manufactured props. It certainly doesn't tell you what the people of the 60's were thinking, much less the people of 1908. Much of the "far future" technology of star trek had nothing on the technology of (say) Dick Tracy. Were the relevant aspects of Star Trek technology any more advanced than that depicted on the Batman TV series airing contemporaneously?
Going back to the original question: Answer: All of them that could read. There's no need for you to apply your assumptions about people living 60 years after the fact based on a TV show to answer this question.
Please name one substantive change to patent law passed by Congress and signed into law by the President since 1982. We have had a few minor changes to bring us into compliance with treaties we've signed with other countries, and we've made changes to prevent submarine patents, but the changes to patent law causing so much trouble now (patenting of algorithms, living things, and business methods) were all the result of court decisions.
Of course funds for the USPTO, for better or for worse, came from Congress. It's how our system of government works. I should note, though, that the USPTO generates a great deal of its own revenue in the form of fees related to the filing and prosecution of patents.
The large, consolidated, established industries best able to lobby congress also, with a few notable exceptions (pharma), benefit the least from patents. Their dominant players often have market power without having to result to patents (which rarely grant market power anyway).
What exactly was this geostationary satellite patent trying to claim? For anything I've ever read about in science fiction, using the description provided by the author would make very poor prior art material. Generally the disclosure necessary to support useful claims requires a level of detail that far exceeds anything you'd find in a work of fiction. Working out all the details and disclosing them, provided they were new, useful, and nonobvious, is what earns you the patent. Merely propounding on the possibility of geostationary satellites without providing the necessary information to reduce them to practice would not constitute prior art for an otherwise valid patent application.
I was referring to a different writer (forgot his name) who around the end of the 19th century said we would communicate using a network of satellites made of bricks and powered by water.
Effort put into the pre-granting review process is wasted. Simply, it's not where our system has problems. The particular site you link to is garbage (no offense). Very few comments I've seen there demonstrate understanding of the legal concepts involved and many misunderstand the technical subject matter. There are several companies looking at methods for automated rating of patents which, if applied to patent applications, could flag some for additional scrutiny. Beyond that, though, having an army of people who don't understand prior art, novelty, or obviousness and who can't properly read a patent review applications is just going to create more work for the already overburdened PTO.
There's also a legislative effort underway to greatly expand the pre-granting review process within the PTO, which is what I was referring to. It's a waste of resources because the problem isn't bad patents being granted, but bad patents being used in litigation (and good patents being misused in litigation).
Patents are just pieces of paper until litigated, when they give the patent holder the ability to impose huge costs on their party opponent with very little exposure. This allows a patent holder to extract millions of dollars in rents using patents that, even when valid, don't read on the target subject matter. Bluntly, a perfect system that granted only valid patents would have very little effect on troll activity.
Before a troll can prevail at trial, his patent will have to survive a challenge to validity several million dollars in the making, brought by an interested party who has focused those resources on the specific nuance of the patent that covers his accused product. That's where review really happens in our system, and it's an incredibly efficient method for focusing the overwhelming majority of our review resources on those few points of disagreement that actually matter. I'd guess that every patent on that website combined gets less effective scrutiny in a month than any one claim gets during litigation.
The problem with the current system is that people can take advantage of these high defensive litigation costs to engage in rent seeking. A true "troll" very rarely goes to trial, as he knows his case is garbage and that the real value is in allowing the other side to dig themselves out for less than their anticipated defense costs. The way to fix this inefficiency is to expose patent plaintiffs to risk of loss while giving incentive to patent defendants to invalidate or otherwise defeat bad faith claims in litigation. An appropriately written bonding statute would make current pre-gr
Currently, one patent out of every 10,000 or so granted is litigated and subjected to the appropriate level of scrutiny, and it's incredibly costly. It makes far more sense to expose patent holders to greater risk of loss in litigation if they have a flawed patent or a flawed theory of infringement. That way there's no penalty inflicted upon small businesses seeking legitimate protection and the misuse of valid patents is curtailed.
Knowing which physical machine was used for the infringement is quite useful (here, the machine owned and registered by defendant with MIT). The plaintiff can then compel discovery of defendant's computer as well as any other computers, documents, or storage devices that may be relevant.
Once ownership is established and evidence is gathered, plaintiff would probably not have to argue the issue of control in court. Mere ownership would probably meet their evidentiary burden (here, preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt). The jury would be allowed to infer that defendant, as exclusive owner of a personal computer in his residence, had exclusive control over its use. Even if defendant can prove that he was not operating the computer at the time(s) that infringement occurred, he could likely be held liable under a theory of contributory copyright infringement if the jury finds that he knew or should have known that the operator of his computer was violating copyright.
In the unlikely event that a very close and personal friend stepped up and claimed that he had used defendant's computer to distribute copyrighted works on a P2P network, defendant is likely still hosed. Even if this friend convinced a jury that he had secured the use of defendant's computer by deceit and had not informed defendant of the infringement, if defendant could reasonably be expected to discover the existence of the P2P program or the illegal copies then the contributory infringement claim would likely stand. The friend would fail in saving defendant, and would be jointly and severally liable for copyright infringement. His computer, storage devices, documents, etc would be subject to discovery as well.
When discussing any legal action, remember that the judge is insanely busy, the jury is pissed, and both are going to spot a lame argument a mile away. On a campus with many more computers than students, how credible will defendant's argument that someone used his computer without his knowledge be? Keep in mind that plaintiff will likely be able to document continuous activity over an extended period of time and, if contested, the question of control would certainly go to the jury. You'd have the opportunity to convince 6 angry people that you did not have control or knowledge over the contents and operation of your computer. Making stuff up under oath in a federal court is a very bad idea, by the way.
Pretty much the only way for defendant to prevail would be to show that he had no access to his computer when the infringement took place (for example, in a different country) and that he had not given permission for anyone else to use his computer.
I don't practice in the field of copyright law, though. I'm sure someone who does will clarify any mistakes I may have made.
I'd like to announce a new program to help screen inappropriate material from children. Tentatively titled the "Federal Universal Child Kinship Oversight and Family Force Act" or F.U.C.K.O.F.F. Act for short. This act empowers the states to appoint guardians over minors based on whatever criteria they find reasonable, though it is expected that minors will be assigned based on a matching of their genetic makeup to that of available guardians. These guardians will be allowed to control the media the minor is exposed to, including but not limited to internet, television, radio, video games, and print media. It is the hope of Congress that this formal delegation will clarify the role of the government in the care of minors.
Sincerely,
-Ron Paul
The kind of "visit" an alien intelligence would pay us would be most unwelcome.
No civilization is crossing the vast emptiness of space for any reason other than settlement. The investment of resources required for such a journey would be too massive to be undertaken for any other reason.
Most treatments of the Fermi Paradox assume intelligent beings that evolved on planets would remain on and exclusively colonize planets. If an intelligent species colonizes a system by exhausting its resources (constructing a true Dyson sphere consisting of millions upon millions of independent platforms, not the one from Star Trek) then the delay between system colonizations would be much greater. I doubt it will make sense to colonize a nearby star until our local population exceeds 420 quintillion, assuming we take such a path.
Said intelligent species would probably also evolve or engineer itself to live without gravity, making our planet and perhaps our entire solar system uninteresting.
Even if an alien species wanted to travel for hundreds or thousands of years through the vacuum of space to step on another planet, they'd probably prefer a planet with little or no preexisting life. The aspects of our ecology that allow us to thrive may be toxic to a species with a completely independent evolution.
The most puzzling aspect of the Fermi Paradox is how anthropocentric most supposed "solutions" for it are. We don't see little green men because we aren't that interesting and our planet that we value so highly as a non-space-faring civilization holds little or no appeal to a space-faring civilization. We don't see widespread evidence of colonization across the universe because colonies would contribute little or nothing to their source systems in terms of commerce or communication and it would take many millions of years to fill a given system to the point where sending colonists to a new system made any sense. A species that took to the stars 60 million years ago may hold dominion over no more than a handful of star systems, and would have little incentive to expand geometrically to fill the universe.
Star Trek has done so much to harm our minds when it comes to realistic expectations for future space travel. Space is not, and never will be, a loosely connected network of brothels full of nubile green women.
The impending heat death of the universe may prevent us from having enough time, however.