How many thousands of dollars per patent, do you expect patent examiners to spend in their search for prior art?
As many as it takes to find it if it exists.
That is meaningless rethoric. No matter how carefully you've searched through all existing publications from the entire recorded human history, it's always possible that you'd find something if you simply searched again. Since there's no upper bound to how many times you should check, there's no upper bound to how much money you can spend searching.
But the bill should be footed by the person applying for the patent, not by the taxpayer.
So only the richest corporations can afford patents, giving them yet another way to lord over everyone else.
You'd see people thinking very hard about whether it's worthwhile to apply for a patent, with the possible risk of spending tens of thousands only to have the patent office say "Sorry, someone already did this a couple years ago."
Hey, I'm all for removing patent laws entirely. But if we do, let's do so openly; let us not pervert law so that they still exist but are too expensive to use.
You have the right to not support this business by canceling your service. No one forces you to use them.
Indeed. You can punish yourself and voluntarily suffer the same penalty that a corporation can impose upon you. That'll show them!
This entire "you don't have to do business with them" was a valid argument back when businesses were small and plentiful; nowadays it's complete rubbish. You either get Internet access through whatever provider has monopoly in your area - if you're really lucky, there might be two or even three, but of course they like to coordinate to discourage meaningful choice - or not at all. For all intents and purposes, a corporation - especially an ISP, but really any corporation - is a branch of government: you do business with it or not at all. The only difference is lack of any oversight.
Plenty of people simply lack the technical skills to do more than check their E-mail. Finding movies online and downloading them (whether through bittorrent or whatever the chinese equivalent is) may well be beyond a large portion of the population.
I refuse to believe that installing a BitTorrent client, typing the name of the movie being searched into a torrent search engine, and clicking a link in the result list is beyond the intellectual abilities of any human being. Lacking technical skills does not make someone a retard incapable of learning to perform simple tasks.
Eircom are a private company, they can choose to do business with whoever they please. I'm not even sure you could get a court order to reinstate your broadband.
So that's the real reason behind privatization - when everything's private, you can enforce arbitrary rules by withholding access to various parts of society as punishment and say it's okay because the government is not directly involved.
What the hell is this? A country race to see who can be the biggest corporate ass monkey the fastest?
Well, yeah. Whatever made you think democracy would last forever? It's not the first form of government, nor will it likely be the last; it seems we're heading towards some combination of plutocracy and corporatism.
MAYBE, but in your country you walk a block to the local DVD store and choose from a selection of thousands of pirated DVDs, each selling for the equivalent of 1.25 USD per disc?
In my country, people download pirated copies from the Internet for free. They will in China too, as Internet continues to propagate and the Great Firewall continues to be bypassed in more and more effective ways.
Technically these shops are breaking the law, but the relevant laws are not enforced.
And why would they? Enforce copyright law -> send money to Hollywood, don't enforce copyright -> money stays home. It acts as an effective toll barrier, helping Chinese economy grow. We should learn from that, not condemn it.
These are decisions that should be made by communities and teachers, not bureaucrats.
And if they were, and a teacher decided to feed his students propaganda... would anyone ever heard of it?
Vital decisions should have visibility, and that means they must be done at high enough level that doing stupid ones causes an outrage. If you let individual teachers or community leaders decide what's taught to children, you're basically condemning a significant part of each generation to be fed lies by crazy or just plain evil people. Apart from the moral issues, can the nation really afford that?
You've actually contradicted yourself in the same sentence - surely if you believe your culture is *superior* to anyone else, that makes you a racist.
No. Racism is a belief that your - or more generally, any - race is inherently superior to another race. Culturalism is the belief that a culture is inherently superior to another culture. The difference is that a racist would believe that members of inferior race would still be inferior than members of superior race even if both grew and lived in similar conditions, while a culturalist would not.
Basically, it's the difference between "you're stupid" and "you've been taught stupid things".
A right-wing buffoon wouldn't be providing public wi-fi, he'd be building them with public money and then giving them to private enterprise to charge the public to access what they already paid for. He's a left-wing buffoon.
The idea of "profit" or "revenue" IS simply transferring wealth from one account(s) to another. There is no "creation" of wealth, just aggregation. If I come up with a life-changing product that everyone on Slashdot chooses to pay me $1 USD for, I have not created any wealth in the literal sense. I've only transferred a portion of all of your individual wealth to mine; aggregated.
The only reason I'd bother paying a dollar (or any amount) to you is I perceive whatever I get in return to be more valuable than that dollar. And the only reason you would give something to me in exchange for a dollar is that you consider that dollar to be more valuable to you than whatever you gave away. So yes, if you make something and sell it to me, you've created wealth: we're both better off than we were before.
Another way to look at this is that while the amount of money in the system has not changed, a life-changing product worth some amount of money has been added to it, making the total monetary value present in the system greater than it was before said product was created. In other words, wealth has been created.
You need to view things in this manner in order to debate this topic. Note that I'm leaving ideology out, this is simply the mathematics of it.
Yes, and you fail them: $1 + life-changing product > 1$.
Basically, you are confusing "value" and "money". Money is just a token system to make bartering easier.
You're actually all cowards. Rather than just getting on with your normal life and not letting something pathetically trivial getting to you, you sit there behind your cloaks of anonymity drawing your silly cartoons knowing that it's unlikely anyone will ever *REALLY* find out who you are anyway.
Well, pandrijeczko, it's good that you're so much braver. It really gives your words some weight that you're complaining that we're not giving our names and addresses to homicidal religious maniacs while keeping yours hidden too. Really, it does.
I'll tell you what will impress me and make me believe you're fighting for Free Speech and not just creating a channel to justify your own racism - go sit outside a mosque and hand out your cartoons, or even better, go spraypaint a cartoon on its walls. Then I'll actually start believing your conviction in Free Speech.
Oh dear. You are not impressed? That's just terrible! Clearly, we should commit suicidial stupidity just to convince you.
And we're not being racist, we're culturist - we believe our culture is far superior to Pakistan, or any other Islamic hellhole. Then again, I suppose that's not really saying much.
How we humans love to tear down success. It's in our social nature. So it's perhaps ironic that Facebook, the top predator in the land of social acceleration, is having a bad week and we are all enjoying the schadenfreude.
Hey, we've been taught since Reagan's time that it's okay to crush those weaker than you beneath your feet to act as a stairway to success, and the people most eager to preach this right-wing message have been the CEOs. Time and again have I heard that the weak deserve to starve, that the strong should not be forced to care for them, that it's okay to exploit other people for your benefit as long as you can get away with it. So why wouldn't we descend on a CEO like a pack of starving hyenas the second one shows any weakness? Live by greed, die by greed, or something to that effect.
That's like saying: Why should Hitler be investigated, when Attila wasn't.
If Hitler and Attila both lived under the same jurisdiction, and were suspected of similar crimes, then yes, either both should be investigated or neither should. This is because everyone is supposed to be equal before law, rather than law being something some people are subjected to and others not. Selective enforcement is not acceptable.
One wrong does not make another wrong right.
However, saying that someone else was allowed to get away with similar crimes is a perfectly valid defence. I believe the legal term is "doctrine of precedent", or "equality before law".
I strongly believe in freedom of religion, but I can't help but think that some time in the future (50 years/500 years/who knows) that mankind is going to say "wtf were we thinking?", and just as we have cast aside Roman and Greek mythology as a religion, I believe the Abrahamic religions (Islam, Judaism and Christianity) will also be set aside.
Perhaps, but only because another religion outcompetes them. By then Scientology, if it still exists, should have shed its more psychotic aspects, New Age stuff has matured and got more depth to its mythology, and if we have colonies in other planets, neo-Wicca might offer a way to "spiritually connect with your new home" or something like that.
Then again, sheer cultural inertia likely keeps Abrahamic religions from disappearing, unless China gets to space first.
I fully support your right to worship as you please, I simply think you are mistaken, just as you think I am mistaken.
You are mistaken. Perhaps not in your religious beliefs - I have no idea what they might be, so I couldn't comment on them - but in thinking that being right or wrong has anything to do with what people believe. Religions don't disappear because they are wrong, they disappear because they are outcompeted by another wordview; and Abrahamic religions have proven themselves to be extremely adaptable and, for a lack of a better word, contagious.
We can just agree to disagree.
No. This is the Internet. We can't allow people being wrong here slide. What would generate the entertainment here if we behaved like mature, reasonable adults?
If you seek to understand the average Muslim perspective though, conduct the following though experiment: that you are black and some is chanting "nigger nigger nigger nigger" in your face, stopping only to pompously congratulate themselves on what champions of freedom they are. Don't get mad, you don't have to right to tell people what they can say. Well no, you don't but it certainly is offensive and contemptuous.
First, let's see if the blacks reading Slashdot will give you death threats over posting a message with the word "nigger" here. I kinda doubt it.
Second, nobody's "chanting in their face". These Muslims are getting upset because other, non-Muslim people, are refusing to take their precious prophet seriously in conversations with each other. And, comically enough, when those other people express the opinion that Muhammed was a bloodthirsty butcher who wanted all non-Muslims dead, these muslims respond with some variation of "Silence! I kill you!", thus proving the opinion entirely accurate.
Third, I for one am getting very tired of worrying what a homicidal bunch of barbarians happens to find offensive. If Pakistan, Iran, or any other islamic hellhole wants to cut communication with the rest of world to stay in Dark Ages, fine: let them. Neither they nor their prophet will be missed. Those of their numbers who insist on living on civilized world, however, better get it through their heads once and for all that their prophet will not be revered, honored or respected by the rest of us, and all of their threats and violence will only get him hated and reviled more and more as the originator of such evil.
You do realize we've moved to journaling file systems for quite some time, now? It would be fairly trivial to find out when a particular file was around.
You're thinking of versioning file systems, which aren't in mainstream use. Journaling file systems are merely those that don't need lengthy recovery in case of failure, since all updates are done in atomic transactions.
A home user should get a warranty, but medium to large corporatations should buy reliable computers and deal with failure themselves. Buying one spare for every ten computers costs far less than a warranty on all of the computers an gives you immediate repacement instead of one day. The pulled computers can be refurbed at your liesure.
But that requires storage space for the extra computers, extra IT staff to manage the replacement, and a good accounting system to keep the pulled and spare computers separate and prevent your store of spares from getting empty.
Also, the replacement computers won't be ready immediately. They have to have a zillion+1 patches installed first. That takes time, possibly a lot of time, and runs the risk of getting the machines p0wned before the process is complete - unless, of course, you install the patches offline, which takes even more time and effort.
Of course, having a few spares around might be a good idea anyway, but relying on them as your primary recovery plan can be both costly and inconvenient.
Because if they are able to gain access to these phones before they're remotely wiped, then other people can gain access to your phone before it can be remotely wiped. 99.999% of those people do not have your best interest at heart.
Not a single one of them has your best interests at heart. If you're very lucky, they aren't outright malicious creeps trying to find some excuse to throw you in jail. But not one of them steals your phone to serve your interests.
Somebody who messes with children is mentally SICK IN THE HEAD.
Someone who messes with children is willing to cause grievous harm to others for the sake of his own pleasure. Does this make him sick? Perhaps, but we do not forcibly treat people who kill thousands out of greed, so why should we make an exception for child molesters?
EVIL - take your religion and shove it. It has no place establishing itself upon us. You can't convince me that a pedophile is SANE but is just EVIL. Why don't you just send them to Satan or remove their demons or thetans?
Informally, "insane" means that someone is unable to comprehend the consequences of his actions while "evil" means that he just doesn't care about them. They are not the same concept. It's entirely possible to have rationality but no empathy, making you sane but evil.
As a side note, the notion that religion shouldn't have official sanction because long dead people wrote it shouldn't is quite ironic:).
Abuse: Yes, you could say the state labels opposition as crazy (literally instead of metaphorically) and arrests everybody (who'd have to commit a crime 1st.)
Why would they have to commit a crime first? If being forcibly committed is not intended as a punishment but as protecting others from you, it's irrelevant whether or not you've committed crimes. Unless, of course, you are trying to guard your own back here, in which case I have some bad news for you, you damn jaywalker.
Where does the Federal government (and SCOTUS) think it gets the authority to do this?
"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." - Mao Zedong (the authority to do anything)
"The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." - Joseph Stalin (the immunity to consequences)
"All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach." - Adolf Hitler ("Think of the childdreeennnnn!!!!")
This type of law is absolutely forbidden. Period. There's no amount of rhetoric, sophist pin-ballet, or writing of "opinion" that will change that. Pointing and screaming "sex offender" doesn't change it either, as much as the media-terrified rank and file might wish it were so.
Apparently it does.
That's the problem with laws: the Constitution is just a God damned piece of paper, and the judges are human who can ignore it if they want. Who's going to call them on it, except other judges? Who guards the guards? No one.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's different from any business how?
That is meaningless rethoric. No matter how carefully you've searched through all existing publications from the entire recorded human history, it's always possible that you'd find something if you simply searched again. Since there's no upper bound to how many times you should check, there's no upper bound to how much money you can spend searching.
So only the richest corporations can afford patents, giving them yet another way to lord over everyone else.
Hey, I'm all for removing patent laws entirely. But if we do, let's do so openly; let us not pervert law so that they still exist but are too expensive to use.
Indeed. You can punish yourself and voluntarily suffer the same penalty that a corporation can impose upon you. That'll show them!
This entire "you don't have to do business with them" was a valid argument back when businesses were small and plentiful; nowadays it's complete rubbish. You either get Internet access through whatever provider has monopoly in your area - if you're really lucky, there might be two or even three, but of course they like to coordinate to discourage meaningful choice - or not at all. For all intents and purposes, a corporation - especially an ISP, but really any corporation - is a branch of government: you do business with it or not at all. The only difference is lack of any oversight.
Like I said, it's bloody ingenious.
I refuse to believe that installing a BitTorrent client, typing the name of the movie being searched into a torrent search engine, and clicking a link in the result list is beyond the intellectual abilities of any human being. Lacking technical skills does not make someone a retard incapable of learning to perform simple tasks.
So that's the real reason behind privatization - when everything's private, you can enforce arbitrary rules by withholding access to various parts of society as punishment and say it's okay because the government is not directly involved.
It's pretty ingenious, really.
Well, yeah. Whatever made you think democracy would last forever? It's not the first form of government, nor will it likely be the last; it seems we're heading towards some combination of plutocracy and corporatism.
Oh well, one more reason to use TOR and Freenet.
In my country, people download pirated copies from the Internet for free. They will in China too, as Internet continues to propagate and the Great Firewall continues to be bypassed in more and more effective ways.
And why would they? Enforce copyright law -> send money to Hollywood, don't enforce copyright -> money stays home. It acts as an effective toll barrier, helping Chinese economy grow. We should learn from that, not condemn it.
And if they were, and a teacher decided to feed his students propaganda... would anyone ever heard of it?
Vital decisions should have visibility, and that means they must be done at high enough level that doing stupid ones causes an outrage. If you let individual teachers or community leaders decide what's taught to children, you're basically condemning a significant part of each generation to be fed lies by crazy or just plain evil people. Apart from the moral issues, can the nation really afford that?
No. Racism is a belief that your - or more generally, any - race is inherently superior to another race. Culturalism is the belief that a culture is inherently superior to another culture. The difference is that a racist would believe that members of inferior race would still be inferior than members of superior race even if both grew and lived in similar conditions, while a culturalist would not.
Basically, it's the difference between "you're stupid" and "you've been taught stupid things".
A right-wing buffoon wouldn't be providing public wi-fi, he'd be building them with public money and then giving them to private enterprise to charge the public to access what they already paid for. He's a left-wing buffoon.
The only reason I'd bother paying a dollar (or any amount) to you is I perceive whatever I get in return to be more valuable than that dollar. And the only reason you would give something to me in exchange for a dollar is that you consider that dollar to be more valuable to you than whatever you gave away. So yes, if you make something and sell it to me, you've created wealth: we're both better off than we were before.
Another way to look at this is that while the amount of money in the system has not changed, a life-changing product worth some amount of money has been added to it, making the total monetary value present in the system greater than it was before said product was created. In other words, wealth has been created.
Yes, and you fail them: $1 + life-changing product > 1$.
Basically, you are confusing "value" and "money". Money is just a token system to make bartering easier.
I think you should have more faith in the ability of financial geniuses to come up with new and amazingly efficient ways of screwing up.
Well, pandrijeczko, it's good that you're so much braver. It really gives your words some weight that you're complaining that we're not giving our names and addresses to homicidal religious maniacs while keeping yours hidden too. Really, it does.
Oh dear. You are not impressed? That's just terrible! Clearly, we should commit suicidial stupidity just to convince you.
And we're not being racist, we're culturist - we believe our culture is far superior to Pakistan, or any other Islamic hellhole. Then again, I suppose that's not really saying much.
Hey, we've been taught since Reagan's time that it's okay to crush those weaker than you beneath your feet to act as a stairway to success, and the people most eager to preach this right-wing message have been the CEOs. Time and again have I heard that the weak deserve to starve, that the strong should not be forced to care for them, that it's okay to exploit other people for your benefit as long as you can get away with it. So why wouldn't we descend on a CEO like a pack of starving hyenas the second one shows any weakness? Live by greed, die by greed, or something to that effect.
If Hitler and Attila both lived under the same jurisdiction, and were suspected of similar crimes, then yes, either both should be investigated or neither should. This is because everyone is supposed to be equal before law, rather than law being something some people are subjected to and others not. Selective enforcement is not acceptable.
However, saying that someone else was allowed to get away with similar crimes is a perfectly valid defence. I believe the legal term is "doctrine of precedent", or "equality before law".
Perhaps, but only because another religion outcompetes them. By then Scientology, if it still exists, should have shed its more psychotic aspects, New Age stuff has matured and got more depth to its mythology, and if we have colonies in other planets, neo-Wicca might offer a way to "spiritually connect with your new home" or something like that.
Then again, sheer cultural inertia likely keeps Abrahamic religions from disappearing, unless China gets to space first.
You are mistaken. Perhaps not in your religious beliefs - I have no idea what they might be, so I couldn't comment on them - but in thinking that being right or wrong has anything to do with what people believe. Religions don't disappear because they are wrong, they disappear because they are outcompeted by another wordview; and Abrahamic religions have proven themselves to be extremely adaptable and, for a lack of a better word, contagious.
No. This is the Internet. We can't allow people being wrong here slide. What would generate the entertainment here if we behaved like mature, reasonable adults?
First, let's see if the blacks reading Slashdot will give you death threats over posting a message with the word "nigger" here. I kinda doubt it.
Second, nobody's "chanting in their face". These Muslims are getting upset because other, non-Muslim people, are refusing to take their precious prophet seriously in conversations with each other. And, comically enough, when those other people express the opinion that Muhammed was a bloodthirsty butcher who wanted all non-Muslims dead, these muslims respond with some variation of "Silence! I kill you!", thus proving the opinion entirely accurate.
Third, I for one am getting very tired of worrying what a homicidal bunch of barbarians happens to find offensive. If Pakistan, Iran, or any other islamic hellhole wants to cut communication with the rest of world to stay in Dark Ages, fine: let them. Neither they nor their prophet will be missed. Those of their numbers who insist on living on civilized world, however, better get it through their heads once and for all that their prophet will not be revered, honored or respected by the rest of us, and all of their threats and violence will only get him hated and reviled more and more as the originator of such evil.
You're thinking of versioning file systems, which aren't in mainstream use. Journaling file systems are merely those that don't need lengthy recovery in case of failure, since all updates are done in atomic transactions.
But that requires storage space for the extra computers, extra IT staff to manage the replacement, and a good accounting system to keep the pulled and spare computers separate and prevent your store of spares from getting empty.
Also, the replacement computers won't be ready immediately. They have to have a zillion+1 patches installed first. That takes time, possibly a lot of time, and runs the risk of getting the machines p0wned before the process is complete - unless, of course, you install the patches offline, which takes even more time and effort.
Of course, having a few spares around might be a good idea anyway, but relying on them as your primary recovery plan can be both costly and inconvenient.
They are using patents as a defensive measure; namely, as a defense against being outcompeted by superior products.
And Microsoft has never been well-behaved, they earned their reputation as the Mordor of computing.
Not a single one of them has your best interests at heart. If you're very lucky, they aren't outright malicious creeps trying to find some excuse to throw you in jail. But not one of them steals your phone to serve your interests.
Because they are neither the president of the USA or a foreign dignitary?
Someone who messes with children is willing to cause grievous harm to others for the sake of his own pleasure. Does this make him sick? Perhaps, but we do not forcibly treat people who kill thousands out of greed, so why should we make an exception for child molesters?
Informally, "insane" means that someone is unable to comprehend the consequences of his actions while "evil" means that he just doesn't care about them. They are not the same concept. It's entirely possible to have rationality but no empathy, making you sane but evil.
As a side note, the notion that religion shouldn't have official sanction because long dead people wrote it shouldn't is quite ironic :).
Why would they have to commit a crime first? If being forcibly committed is not intended as a punishment but as protecting others from you, it's irrelevant whether or not you've committed crimes. Unless, of course, you are trying to guard your own back here, in which case I have some bad news for you, you damn jaywalker.
"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." - Mao Zedong (the authority to do anything)
"The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." - Joseph Stalin (the immunity to consequences)
"All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach." - Adolf Hitler ("Think of the childdreeennnnn!!!!")
Apparently it does.
That's the problem with laws: the Constitution is just a God damned piece of paper, and the judges are human who can ignore it if they want. Who's going to call them on it, except other judges? Who guards the guards? No one.