* Trayvon was not a "stranger randomly wandering down the street"; he was a guest of someone in the neighborhood and he was walking home. Sure, Zimmerman may not have recognized him, but do you suppose he recognizes everyone who lives in the entire gated community? What do you suppose made him suspicious of this particular person...? I wonder.
* It was not an "early morning hour." It was at about 7PM.
I agree! That's why I said "Note that I don't agree with all of the powers that the government claims flow from this." I think that the legality of seizing hard drives is a closer call than most/.ers do, but I ultimately agree that it's unconstitutional. I think it's usually more helpful, though, for me to make the legal case against the/. conventional wisdom when I can than to just report my own opinion. (And, honestly, the/.ers are often so confidently smug in their completely incorrect legal opinions that that disagreeing is sometimes irresistible. -- IAAL, btw.)
Also note, though, that customs enforcement was just an example. The government also, of course, has a particular national security interest at the border that, coupled with the fact that travelers should expect to be searched, causes them (and, unfortunately also the law to some degree) to conclude they can do just about anything they want within 100 miles of the border. This is a little ironic because they actually can't search your person without probably cause, even at the border -- that would violate your privacy!
First remember that the 4th Amendment does not actually require a warrant before the government can search your property. It just requires that searches be "reasonable." It's just that in most cases the courts have held that reasonableness requires a warrant. Not so, they have said, at the border where travelers expect that they might be searched and where the government has a heightened interest in controlling what moves in and out of the country. Imagine trying to enforce customs regulations without an ability to search! (Note that I don't agree with all of the powers that the government claims flow from this, but this should help to explain why at least some of what they do is OK under the 4th Amendment.)
But the government can't enforce its laws in a way that infringe on other rights. So, for example, the police can't decide to only pull over black people for speeding, even if they were actually speeding. Or, here, the government can't decide to only seize the property of people who belong to the wrong organizations (such as the Bradley Manning Support Network). That would violate the 1st Amendment just as pulling over only black people for speeding would violate the 14th.
This is true, and interesting. I do think, though, that a lot of people around here could use to develop more reasonable (not to mention kind) expectations about the state of other peoples' knowledge and its relationship to their intellect. Here's an obvious place to start: the more specialized one's knowledge becomes, the less likely it is that failure to posses it is a good indicator of stupidity. (Of course possession of specialized knowledge probably is a good indication that the person in question is intelligent. This is probably part of the problem.).
Maybe the GP AC should not have been so glib, but he has a point. There are a lot of very smart people (including young people) who have never compiled a kernel, or fired up Eclipse, or who don't even know what HTML is. You just think they are dumb because you have, presumably, structured much of your intellectual life around these concepts, much like other/.ers. They seem obvious to you and you can't see how others could fail to understand.
But imagine how your relatively careless writing (no criticism here, by the way, this is/. after all, so who cares?) would look to someone who writes for a living like, say, a New York Times reporter. To someone like that, who has spent most of their intellectual efforts learning how to write well, you yourself probably would seem "literally so dumb that they don't even know what smart looks like."
At least, that is, if they shared your apparent view that everyone has to know the same sorts of things that you know in order to be any more than an idiot. But we can probably agree that they shouldn't judge anyone's efforts by that standard. And neither should you.
Or, on the contrary, mightn't the Theseus's Ship paradox suggest that the "feels right" distinction is the only distinction that matters for these sorts of questions?
Yes, in discussing the importance of the separation of church and state, of course we only count state-sponsored executions. It would be one thing if crimes like the one you mention were systematically under prosecuted -- maybe then those private crimes could be imputed to the state (such as many lynchings in the first half of the 20th century). But I've never seen any evidence to indicate that to be the case when it comes to religious belief. The individual who committed the murder you mention is currently serving life in prison without parole-eligibility until 2060.
It's beside the point but I feel like piling on: a doctor killed for performing abortions by religious fundamentalists is also a pretty strained example of someone being killed for their religious beliefs.
Let's separate questions of wisdom and power. I was arguing that allowing people to refuse pat downs and walk away was a bad idea. You seem to be suggesting that they don't have the power.
So, for the sake of argument, let's agree that the TSA's policy of not letting you walk away is a good one from a policy perspective. In that case, indeed, we should then ask if the TSA has the legal power to do this. But it seems clear that they do; as agents of the executive branch acting pursuant to federal law and within the confines of their constitutional power...why exactly doesn't the TSA have the power to require that you be screened if you enter a screening area?
Would allowing people to walk away be pretty stupid? If you could just walk away instead of being patted down then there would be no risk of being caught if you attempt to get through a checkpoint with something concealed on your body.
I'm not here to apologize for the TSA in general -- I believe those who say that very little of what they do actually makes us significantly safer -- but on this point I think they might have it right. If they people walk away, we would ridicule them for being incompetent. If they don't, we call them oppressive.
This is quite a leap. It presupposes that artistic (and other) works enter the world ready and able to be copied, while physical things come into the world with property rights already attached. This is not at all obvious to me. Then again, I don't believe that property rights are natural rights -- I think they are created by law to achieve policy goals (albiet very important ones, for the most part, and goals that history has shown to be very difficult to achieve through any other means). But even if I believed that they were natural rights, by way of, say, the labor theory of property, I think a good case could be made that copyright should be a natural right or, if you prefer, just a type of property right. Indeed, this is apparently an influential view, among copyright scholars.(In short, if one has a right to exclude others from the fruits of one's own labor, then you should be able to exclude others from enjoyment of your creative works just as you can exclude them from taking your stuff.
Of course, you may have an argument to the contrary. I'd like to hear it. I might even agree. But hopefully we can at least agree that a lot of your claims are a little hasty, and that reasonable people might disagree with them.
This seems pretty clearly to be fake. Look at, for example, at 1:13-1:16 and, in particular, the "exhaust" from the yellow car thing as it is rendered on top of the track instead of being obscured by it.
How many times do I have to say it? You can only patent a method of implementing a system, not just the idea of a system itself. Take a moment, click the link in the summary to the actual patent, read the claims section (not just the abstract), and then tell us whether you still think the prior art you list is actually prior art.
I don't understand what you're saying in your first sentence. But, as for the rest:
I don't disagree that "food, clothing, shelter, and comfort" are a sort of wealth. But it isn't the sort of wealth Marx (or I) had in mind. Marx had his sights on the excessive food, clothing, and shelter that people accumulate not just to provide for their own comfort, but to differentiate themselves socially from others. Marx thought that so long as every could be made sufficiently comfortable, they could learn to derive their senses of status and self worth from other things besides still more food, clothing, and shelter. I don't say that this is right. I don't know. I say only that it is not crazy.
I think this isn't quite right. Marx believed that you could transform man's greed for material wealth into greed for something else, not that it could be eliminated.
Marx, being a Hegelian, believed that man's psychology could be altered through social changes; he thought that changes in social structure could create corresponding in the peoples' incentive structure. Thus, in a successful Marxist state as Marx envisioned it, peoples' greed for gold would be replaced with a zeal for contributing to society (and, perhaps, greed for the social recognition that would come from those contributions). So, in a way, a successful communist system would be as much driven by greed as a capitalist one.
It may not be possible, of course, to modify peoples' incentives in this way, though it's never truly been tested since the prerequisite social structure has never actually been created (and I don't think it's accurate to say he "assumed" that they could; it was certainly something he explicitly argued for). It doesn't seem crazy on its face, though, that people can be conditioned socially to value something other than material wealth.
That is sort of what they're doing. Except they're not installing GPS in the driver's car, they're using historical data to predict arrival times and sending (e.g.) a text message with the estimate.
As usual, actually reading the patent helps. The patent is not on "shipping" or on "shipment notifications" and is obviously not on "telling time." It is on a process whereby a third party can analyze status information provided by the shipper, possibly in light of historical data, to predict an arrival time (not just date). This sounds like a new and useful service to me.
As usual, I'm open to the suggestion that this is obvious, but could we at least begin our discussion with a remotely accurate description of what is claimed in the patent? Here's a tip for reading patents: glance at the abstract for context but know that it doesn't mean much; the meat of a patent is in its "Claims" section.
I agree that there are problems with the patent system, but posts like these get in the way of having real discussions about them. This is totally unserious journalism from a site that will use any excuse to mock the US patent system, actual merits of the patent be damned.
I agree with everything you say in general about the "obviousness" test. Though I might point out that patents exist not, as is often said around here, just to reward large investments of resources into a problem. The idea behind a patent is also that you (the inventor) get exclusive use of you invention in exchange for telling everyone how your invention works so that, eventually, everyone else can benefit. They are designed to correct the problem of inventors keeping the workings of devices secret, thus impeding (or failing to advance) the broader progress of technology. This difference matters because, on this view, it still makes sense to reward patent protection to good ideas that required little resource investment to product (so long as they're not obvious).
But either way, your point is well taken: if nobody really benefits from your making the workings of your invention public (i.e., if it was obvious to everyone already), then why protect it?
What you say about the obviousness of this particular patent may also be true. I'm not sure. It may be true that anyone thinking about this problem would converge on the same solution. Or it may not be. Unfortunately this is an empirical question that is very difficult for anyone to answer persuasively, whether they're correct or not. This is a problem for patent law.
Well, there are two problems you might have with this patent:
1. You might think (as most here seem to) that the problem is that this patent just covers rotating a screen from portrait to landscape. This is the interpretation that the headline and summary seem to advance, but it's just irresponsibly wrong. This is the misunderstanding I'm trying to dispel, because I'd be a lot happier if the conversation could move away from the relatively ignorant "omg, the USPTO is so stupid, don't they know screens have been rotating for decades?" and towards your more thoughtful objection that...
2. The invention is obvious. I have a lot more sympathy for this complaint, at least in theory. The problem is that it's inherently difficult to answer the question: "what is obvious"? In this case, though, I don't think I agree that the improvement is obvious. Remember that the patent isn't just on the idea of using touch gestures to reorient a screen; it is on a particular implementation of this idea. In this case, it describes the actual gestures (describing angles, finger placement, etc.). I don't think the invention is obvious at that level of specificity...but it's close. (It should be no surprise that it's right on the edge; smart patent lawyers will always word patents in as broad a way as the law will permit. That's why they're written so strangely.)
I certainly agree that just "reorient a screen using your fingers" would have been too obvious. But Apple's lawyers and the patent examiners know that too; that's why this patent says something more specific.
Slashdot Mirror
Two important corrections:
* Trayvon was not a "stranger randomly wandering down the street"; he was a guest of someone in the neighborhood and he was walking home. Sure, Zimmerman may not have recognized him, but do you suppose he recognizes everyone who lives in the entire gated community? What do you suppose made him suspicious of this particular person...? I wonder.
* It was not an "early morning hour." It was at about 7PM.
See: http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-04-02/news/os-trayvon-martin-qa3-20120402_1_civil-rights-gated-community-robert-zimmerman
Nevertheless, yes, you're right that there are a number of ways this could have unfolded in which Zimmerman could have been acting reasonably, and I think it's good for everyone to be reminded of that. I'm suspicious myself for a few reasons: the stories coming from Zimmerman's family are not consistent, Zimmerman appears at most slightly injured in the police video, and the voice calling for help on the 911 tape is apparently not Zimmerman (according to some independent analysis: http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-03-31/news/os-trayvon-martin-george-zimmerman-911-20120331_1_voice-identification-expert-reasonable-scientific-certainty). I think it also looks pretty unlikely that Martin was shot anywhere near Zimmermen's truck. Trayvon was shot in an area that was not directly accessible by vehicles (see the map here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/02/us/the-events-leading-to-the-shooting-of-trayvon-martin.html), so I don't think the "he was confronted at his truck" theory holds up.
But I do think it's helpful to be reminded of what we don't know.
I suggest you attempt to unremember that principle. It is a very radical overgeneralization. (IAAL)
Am I safe in assuming that the invitation does not extend to American lawyers? :(
I agree! That's why I said "Note that I don't agree with all of the powers that the government claims flow from this." I think that the legality of seizing hard drives is a closer call than most /.ers do, but I ultimately agree that it's unconstitutional. I think it's usually more helpful, though, for me to make the legal case against the /. conventional wisdom when I can than to just report my own opinion. (And, honestly, the /.ers are often so confidently smug in their completely incorrect legal opinions that that disagreeing is sometimes irresistible. -- IAAL, btw.)
Also note, though, that customs enforcement was just an example. The government also, of course, has a particular national security interest at the border that, coupled with the fact that travelers should expect to be searched, causes them (and, unfortunately also the law to some degree) to conclude they can do just about anything they want within 100 miles of the border. This is a little ironic because they actually can't search your person without probably cause, even at the border -- that would violate your privacy!
First remember that the 4th Amendment does not actually require a warrant before the government can search your property. It just requires that searches be "reasonable." It's just that in most cases the courts have held that reasonableness requires a warrant. Not so, they have said, at the border where travelers expect that they might be searched and where the government has a heightened interest in controlling what moves in and out of the country. Imagine trying to enforce customs regulations without an ability to search! (Note that I don't agree with all of the powers that the government claims flow from this, but this should help to explain why at least some of what they do is OK under the 4th Amendment.)
But the government can't enforce its laws in a way that infringe on other rights. So, for example, the police can't decide to only pull over black people for speeding, even if they were actually speeding. Or, here, the government can't decide to only seize the property of people who belong to the wrong organizations (such as the Bradley Manning Support Network). That would violate the 1st Amendment just as pulling over only black people for speeding would violate the 14th.
This is true, and interesting. I do think, though, that a lot of people around here could use to develop more reasonable (not to mention kind) expectations about the state of other peoples' knowledge and its relationship to their intellect. Here's an obvious place to start: the more specialized one's knowledge becomes, the less likely it is that failure to posses it is a good indicator of stupidity. (Of course possession of specialized knowledge probably is a good indication that the person in question is intelligent. This is probably part of the problem.).
Maybe the GP AC should not have been so glib, but he has a point. There are a lot of very smart people (including young people) who have never compiled a kernel, or fired up Eclipse, or who don't even know what HTML is. You just think they are dumb because you have, presumably, structured much of your intellectual life around these concepts, much like other /.ers. They seem obvious to you and you can't see how others could fail to understand.
But imagine how your relatively careless writing (no criticism here, by the way, this is /. after all, so who cares?) would look to someone who writes for a living like, say, a New York Times reporter. To someone like that, who has spent most of their intellectual efforts learning how to write well, you yourself probably would seem "literally so dumb that they don't even know what smart looks like."
At least, that is, if they shared your apparent view that everyone has to know the same sorts of things that you know in order to be any more than an idiot. But we can probably agree that they shouldn't judge anyone's efforts by that standard. And neither should you.
Or, on the contrary, mightn't the Theseus's Ship paradox suggest that the "feels right" distinction is the only distinction that matters for these sorts of questions?
Ha. Yeah, you may be right. Chicago or West Virginia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caperton_v._A.T._Massey_Coal_Co.
Appeal! (And I can tell you that, as an empirical matter, this almost never happens.)
In general state courts in the United States are bound to apply both state and federal law (as are federal courts). IAAL
Yes, in discussing the importance of the separation of church and state, of course we only count state-sponsored executions. It would be one thing if crimes like the one you mention were systematically under prosecuted -- maybe then those private crimes could be imputed to the state (such as many lynchings in the first half of the 20th century). But I've never seen any evidence to indicate that to be the case when it comes to religious belief. The individual who committed the murder you mention is currently serving life in prison without parole-eligibility until 2060.
It's beside the point but I feel like piling on: a doctor killed for performing abortions by religious fundamentalists is also a pretty strained example of someone being killed for their religious beliefs.
Let's separate questions of wisdom and power. I was arguing that allowing people to refuse pat downs and walk away was a bad idea. You seem to be suggesting that they don't have the power.
So, for the sake of argument, let's agree that the TSA's policy of not letting you walk away is a good one from a policy perspective. In that case, indeed, we should then ask if the TSA has the legal power to do this. But it seems clear that they do; as agents of the executive branch acting pursuant to federal law and within the confines of their constitutional power...why exactly doesn't the TSA have the power to require that you be screened if you enter a screening area?
Would allowing people to walk away be pretty stupid? If you could just walk away instead of being patted down then there would be no risk of being caught if you attempt to get through a checkpoint with something concealed on your body.
I'm not here to apologize for the TSA in general -- I believe those who say that very little of what they do actually makes us significantly safer -- but on this point I think they might have it right. If they people walk away, we would ridicule them for being incompetent. If they don't, we call them oppressive.
This is quite a leap. It presupposes that artistic (and other) works enter the world ready and able to be copied, while physical things come into the world with property rights already attached. This is not at all obvious to me. Then again, I don't believe that property rights are natural rights -- I think they are created by law to achieve policy goals (albiet very important ones, for the most part, and goals that history has shown to be very difficult to achieve through any other means). But even if I believed that they were natural rights, by way of, say, the labor theory of property, I think a good case could be made that copyright should be a natural right or, if you prefer, just a type of property right. Indeed, this is apparently an influential view, among copyright scholars.(In short, if one has a right to exclude others from the fruits of one's own labor, then you should be able to exclude others from enjoyment of your creative works just as you can exclude them from taking your stuff.
Of course, you may have an argument to the contrary. I'd like to hear it. I might even agree. But hopefully we can at least agree that a lot of your claims are a little hasty, and that reasonable people might disagree with them.
Because it affects people other than himself when he is killed in a car accident.
This seems pretty clearly to be fake. Look at, for example, at 1:13-1:16 and, in particular, the "exhaust" from the yellow car thing as it is rendered on top of the track instead of being obscured by it.
How many times do I have to say it? You can only patent a method of implementing a system, not just the idea of a system itself. Take a moment, click the link in the summary to the actual patent, read the claims section (not just the abstract), and then tell us whether you still think the prior art you list is actually prior art.
If you know what he's doing with it? Damn right you go to jail. You're an accessory.
I don't understand what you're saying in your first sentence. But, as for the rest:
I don't disagree that "food, clothing, shelter, and comfort" are a sort of wealth. But it isn't the sort of wealth Marx (or I) had in mind. Marx had his sights on the excessive food, clothing, and shelter that people accumulate not just to provide for their own comfort, but to differentiate themselves socially from others. Marx thought that so long as every could be made sufficiently comfortable, they could learn to derive their senses of status and self worth from other things besides still more food, clothing, and shelter. I don't say that this is right. I don't know. I say only that it is not crazy.
I think this isn't quite right. Marx believed that you could transform man's greed for material wealth into greed for something else, not that it could be eliminated.
Marx, being a Hegelian, believed that man's psychology could be altered through social changes; he thought that changes in social structure could create corresponding in the peoples' incentive structure. Thus, in a successful Marxist state as Marx envisioned it, peoples' greed for gold would be replaced with a zeal for contributing to society (and, perhaps, greed for the social recognition that would come from those contributions). So, in a way, a successful communist system would be as much driven by greed as a capitalist one.
It may not be possible, of course, to modify peoples' incentives in this way, though it's never truly been tested since the prerequisite social structure has never actually been created (and I don't think it's accurate to say he "assumed" that they could; it was certainly something he explicitly argued for). It doesn't seem crazy on its face, though, that people can be conditioned socially to value something other than material wealth.
That is sort of what they're doing. Except they're not installing GPS in the driver's car, they're using historical data to predict arrival times and sending (e.g.) a text message with the estimate.
As usual, actually reading the patent helps. The patent is not on "shipping" or on "shipment notifications" and is obviously not on "telling time." It is on a process whereby a third party can analyze status information provided by the shipper, possibly in light of historical data, to predict an arrival time (not just date). This sounds like a new and useful service to me.
As usual, I'm open to the suggestion that this is obvious, but could we at least begin our discussion with a remotely accurate description of what is claimed in the patent? Here's a tip for reading patents: glance at the abstract for context but know that it doesn't mean much; the meat of a patent is in its "Claims" section.
I agree that there are problems with the patent system, but posts like these get in the way of having real discussions about them. This is totally unserious journalism from a site that will use any excuse to mock the US patent system, actual merits of the patent be damned.
I agree with everything you say in general about the "obviousness" test. Though I might point out that patents exist not, as is often said around here, just to reward large investments of resources into a problem. The idea behind a patent is also that you (the inventor) get exclusive use of you invention in exchange for telling everyone how your invention works so that, eventually, everyone else can benefit. They are designed to correct the problem of inventors keeping the workings of devices secret, thus impeding (or failing to advance) the broader progress of technology. This difference matters because, on this view, it still makes sense to reward patent protection to good ideas that required little resource investment to product (so long as they're not obvious).
But either way, your point is well taken: if nobody really benefits from your making the workings of your invention public (i.e., if it was obvious to everyone already), then why protect it?
What you say about the obviousness of this particular patent may also be true. I'm not sure. It may be true that anyone thinking about this problem would converge on the same solution. Or it may not be. Unfortunately this is an empirical question that is very difficult for anyone to answer persuasively, whether they're correct or not. This is a problem for patent law.
Well, there are two problems you might have with this patent:
1. You might think (as most here seem to) that the problem is that this patent just covers rotating a screen from portrait to landscape. This is the interpretation that the headline and summary seem to advance, but it's just irresponsibly wrong. This is the misunderstanding I'm trying to dispel, because I'd be a lot happier if the conversation could move away from the relatively ignorant "omg, the USPTO is so stupid, don't they know screens have been rotating for decades?" and towards your more thoughtful objection that...
2. The invention is obvious. I have a lot more sympathy for this complaint, at least in theory. The problem is that it's inherently difficult to answer the question: "what is obvious"? In this case, though, I don't think I agree that the improvement is obvious. Remember that the patent isn't just on the idea of using touch gestures to reorient a screen; it is on a particular implementation of this idea. In this case, it describes the actual gestures (describing angles, finger placement, etc.). I don't think the invention is obvious at that level of specificity...but it's close. (It should be no surprise that it's right on the edge; smart patent lawyers will always word patents in as broad a way as the law will permit. That's why they're written so strangely.)
I certainly agree that just "reorient a screen using your fingers" would have been too obvious. But Apple's lawyers and the patent examiners know that too; that's why this patent says something more specific.