My ISP scans incoming email for viruses. If the scan detects a possible virus the message is transfered into quarantine then puts a message that the message was quarantined into your inbox. My ISP also uses both whitelists and blacklists.
The people who grant patents should be liable to be fired for gross incompetence?
I don't think that will work. I bet patent examiners has to either accept or reject a number of applications in a given tyme period. The examiners don't have much tyme the check either old patents or the public domain.
Given SPAM filtering on news groups and other pre-TCP/IP messages
News groups are pre-TCP/IP? That's funny, as TCP/IP dates from 1974 when RC 675 was specified and V4, RFC 793 specified in 1981. Usenet was established in 1980, before 1981 but after 1974.
I for one would love to see the day where corporations are not considered to be persons in any way, including paying taxes(all the profits go to someone and would be taxed at the personal level anyway), or sheltering guilty executives from liability when their decisions cause harm to actual people.
Actually corporations but not people should be who pays income taxes. Someone who works to earn money shouldn't have government taking their money. However because corporations grant stockholders limited liability they should be made to pay taxes.
Even if you do patent something, if someone else makes a similar thing from scratch, and sells it for less or makes it free, well tough, you shouldn't be able to sue them for it. If you find that you have competition, you improve your own product, things should be sold by their value, not by destroying competition.
Adam Smith thought pretty much the same. He called patents a necessary evil.
I personally believe that the current problem with our system is that the patent office (due in large part to a decision by the Supreme Court) didn't grant software patents (in the form of business method or machine patents) earlier.
I think this totally wrong. The problem, one of them that is, with the patent system in the US that the US Patent Office issues patents for software. Software should never be patented as it is only instructions on how a computer will perform a calculation. In other words software are algorithms. All that should be patentable is a unique solution to a given problem, if someone were to create a new solution they should be able to use it without worrying they'll infringe on someone else's patent.
The hobbyist software creator didn't exist in large part thirty years ago, and the fights would have been between large companies like IBM and its challengers.
Sure they did, it was hobbyist hardware hackers who built up Homebrew computers, from which the Mac and PC came from. Prior to the hardware hackers were the software hackers from places like MIT's Model Railroad Club though they also hacked hardware, though Stanford had it's share of hackers. It was there that the imagine of the hacker sitting in a basement all night programming came from. It's also where open source really comes from, part of the hacker ethic was to share.
The case referred to above was Gottschalk v Benson409 US 63. The Court held that mathematical expressions could not be patented, and essentially found that all computer programs were mathematical expressions. The patent in question was for a bit shifter (converting decimal numbers into binary). IMO, we would be better off today had they simply found the patented material to be obvious, which is what many amici suggested.
Now I'm confused. Here you're arguing similarly to what I said above whereas in your second paragraph you argue software patents should have been granted earlier.
You should not be able to violate a patent by typing.
What if I type out code to program a robotic arm to construct a patented physical object?
You would only be violating a patent, in this case the patent on the physical object, if you make the physical object without the approval of the patent owner.
Falcon
Oh, and I patented "You would" as well as "you would" and any other way to capitalize those words.
Perhaps you were not clear enough explaining what you wanted. Or perhaps this is indicitive of a problem with using inches and pounds.
I used to work in construction and I met too many that didn't understand what 9" 1 1/2" meant. While metric measurements are easier to understand for some others don't understand it.
A rather useless law. Unless you ask the inspector to your house, how would they ever know your detectors are not working?
I first learned smoke detectors were required when a house I was living in was remodeled. It's a two story house with the top floor the main living area but the bottom floor was converted into an apartment with it's own kitchen and bath.
I now live in an old house, a different one, that was converted into apartments. The city requires apartment buildings to be registered, and taxed, and as part of that it inspects the buildings.
Think about it - one per apartment, two or more in the hallways for each floor, equivalent numbers in commercial buildings.
I have a 1 bedroom apartment and there's 3 smoke detectors in it. One is in the living room the second in the hallway, and the third in the bedroom. And the city I live in requires them.
After all, a bad detector could get tripped by someone cooking and cause a panic.
While I was cooking once a smoke alarm went off so I removed the batteries. Later a city inspector checked the alarms and said the batteries had to be in the alarms, that the alarms had to be working at all tymes. Later my landlord called and said the city had threatened to fine them.
What should be done is regulate them these devices like smoke detectors. You are encouraged to have them, but you pay a fine if the authorities are summoned on a false alarm.
Then when people don't raise alarms politicians will wonder why no one raised an alarm. "Hey I may be fined for raising a false alarm so I'd better keep my mouth shut."
Good luck changing the government with guns. How'd that work out for those in Waco, or the Branch Dividian?
Waco's a bad example, in part precisely because the Branch Davidians looked like kooks but mostly because they were are located in one easy to target place. Even then though Janet Reno had to burn down a building with children inside to end it. A better example was the DC sniper. Two people in a vehicle were able to terrorize a large area in 2 states and the District of Columbia. Now imagine if one 2 man team like them were in just 5 states. Or 2 in 10. They could conceivably bring the US to it's knees with fear. Further imagine if some teams targeted railroads and major interstate highways, blowing them up. Minneapolis still hasn't fully recovered from the collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis.
Lets not even go into the fact that if the government wants you in chains, a hundred guns wont stop them.
Despite it's mass the US military hasn't been able to stop all the insurgents in Iraq. So you're right the US's thousands of "guns" hasn't stopped them. And that's in a foreign country, if the US military were to try pacifying the US population it's be even harder. I don't know how many/.es have served in the military but I have and I as well as a number of others who served with me would not follow any order to shoot on civilians, instead we'd more likely shoot whoever gave such an order. Fragging was not an uncommon action soldiers took when they were given an order they disagreed with. I can easily see it becoming popular if US troops were ordered to shoot on US citizens.
I actually would love to own a firearm in canada, because they probably do make you feel more safe and in control, but I dont get how they make you more free. Can you explain this elementary reasoning that non americans might not see as so elementary?
Do you think the NAZI would of been able to carry out the holocaust if the Enabling Act of 1933 hadn't been passed thus disarming the population? Do you think the genocide in Rwanda would still have happened if more people had been armed there? Or do you think firearms won't stop a possible genocide in Zimbabwe? A fellow Canuck, well Canadian, who once was against the right to bare arms now believes "The Right to Bear Arms is the only reliable way to prevent genocide in the modern world."
I wouldn't be quoting John Lott as an authority on anything. Have a look through Tim Lambert's weblog [scienceblogs.com] for a very extensive collection of stories on Lott's utter lack of credibility.
I have trouble saying Tim Lambert is any more credible than is John Lott. Take his article "Another fabrication from John Lott". In it he critics Lott as saying that laws "that require guns be locked up and unloaded face a five-percent increase in murder and a 12 percent increase in rape" and provides a paragraph from a study in the AMA's "JAMA" that supposedly supports his position. Yet not once in the paragraph is either murder or rape mentioned once. All it talks about is how laws that held firearm owner responsible saw a 23% drop in children under 15 being unintentionally shot and die. And there are more way of holding owners responsible than by requiring firearms to be inaccessible to children.
There are many people who grow up with firearms yet only a small number of them ever commit a crime with a firearm. For instance in the neighborhood I grew up in I knew a bunch of kids who grew up with and shot firearms if they didn't own one themselves. I was given my first firearm, a.22 long rifle, before I was 13. My dad and my best friend's dad used to take the two of us out for target practice, as were other kids in the neighborhood. Yet the only person from the 'hood I knew who was ever accused of a violent crime was someone who stabbed a person, no firearms involved. On the other hand a friend of mine was shot and killed, we were in the army and stationed in Germany then and he was shot while in the unit's armory cleaning weapons. The armorer was playing around with a.45 and not realizing it was loaded, how he became an armorer I don't know as it's easy to tell if a.45 is loaded, he pointed it at my friend and saying "bang" he pulled the trigger killing my friend.
I am all for allowing people to get gun permits etc, not the other way around.
I am all for people not needing any permits for firearms. Requiring permits defeat the purpose of the 2nd amendment, that being that people can fight an oppressive government. The USA's Founding Fathers knew how important having an armed citizenry was to prevent government from becoming oppressive, and in the modern era I have to add genocidal.
The point though, is that using a bad Geiger counter does not cause any direct harm
Well, yes it *does*, if you then go and phone the police screaming about some massive radiation reading that your $4.99-from-eBay Geiger counter is going berzerk over.
It's not the alarm that's causing any harm, it's the person using it that causes the harm.
We can trust adults to use simple measurement tools safely.
I don't know, I've met people I wouldn't trust to measure something with my tape measure. I've seen people asked to measure and cut a 2X4 to measure it wrong.
Get a smoke alarm in your house, and repel the NYC police if they try to 'certify' it.
Smoke alarms are required where I live. And they have to work, I took out the batteries in the alarms I have and I was told they had to be in the smoke alarms by city inspectors.
Creating laws to combat hypothetical future situations is a waste of time. Let there be some evidence that the situation is actually feasible or enevitable before we pass a law preventing it.
Unfortunately many politicians don't use common sense.
The title is very misleading, its actual a response to a possible panic caused by people using bad detectors.
The problem starts with TFA to begin with. The subtitle says "A city councilman and the cops don't want you to have that Geiger counter without their permission". Nowhere else in TFA are Geiger counters specifically mentioned.
It seems to me that NYC is turning more and more into a nanny city.
And think how much harder it is for a President to get things done when NEITHER Party is willing to work with him.
The parties as a whole won't however factions within the parties will be willing. For instance fiscal conservatives will work with him to reduce government spending. Some Democrats will work to end the war in Iraq, as well as a few Republicans. It'll be hard to get enough to support many things but if done right I think it can be done.
And what happens when Congress sends him the Bill he wants, with a "small" addendum funding the rest of the Government?
Then he can veto it. With the cameras rolling in the Oval Office he can explain why he is vetoing it as he does.
You keep insisting that if he asks for something, there is some moral/religious obligation on the part of Congress to give him what he asks for.
Can you provide me one place where I insist Congress has to give him, or any other president, what they ask for? All I recall is saying he can ask Congress to send him someting Constitutional.
That isn't the most important issue, though. That's just tactics.
It's not just tactics. Democrats want unemployment to be extended by any economic stimulus package and are threatening not to pass something without it. And I think they mean it. To me that's more strategic than tactical.
Sang. "She sang", not "she sung".
You still understood it therefore I can only conclude it's an avoidance tactic.
Seeing as how you only offer critiques or avoidance tactics, and won't offer solutions I see no reason to continue.
because ultimately, the judiciary in this country can't override Parliament; it can only clarify).
I wish Canada worked that way.
Though I don't like all the rulings the US Supreme Court hands down I'd rather have the 3 legs the USA Constitution set up than only have one or two legs. It sets up checks and balances that way.
The amount of money given to the patent office as well as the time a patent is active should correlate to the amount of inventions (patents) there are per year. Since innovation has been accelerating the time a patent is active should go down while the patent office should get more money.
This won't work. Because the patent office wants the money it will grant more patents, even frivolous and onerous ones.
Slashdot Mirror
My ISP scans incoming email for viruses. If the scan detects a possible virus the message is transfered into quarantine then puts a message that the message was quarantined into your inbox. My ISP also uses both whitelists and blacklists.
FalconThe people who grant patents should be liable to be fired for gross incompetence?
I don't think that will work. I bet patent examiners has to either accept or reject a number of applications in a given tyme period. The examiners don't have much tyme the check either old patents or the public domain.
FalconGiven SPAM filtering on news groups and other pre-TCP/IP messages
News groups are pre-TCP/IP? That's funny, as TCP/IP dates from 1974 when RC 675 was specified and V4, RFC 793 specified in 1981. Usenet was established in 1980, before 1981 but after 1974.
FalconI for one would love to see the day where corporations are not considered to be persons in any way, including paying taxes(all the profits go to someone and would be taxed at the personal level anyway), or sheltering guilty executives from liability when their decisions cause harm to actual people.
Actually corporations but not people should be who pays income taxes. Someone who works to earn money shouldn't have government taking their money. However because corporations grant stockholders limited liability they should be made to pay taxes.
FalconEven if you do patent something, if someone else makes a similar thing from scratch, and sells it for less or makes it free, well tough, you shouldn't be able to sue them for it. If you find that you have competition, you improve your own product, things should be sold by their value, not by destroying competition.
Adam Smith thought pretty much the same. He called patents a necessary evil.
FalconI personally believe that the current problem with our system is that the patent office (due in large part to a decision by the Supreme Court) didn't grant software patents (in the form of business method or machine patents) earlier.
I think this totally wrong. The problem, one of them that is, with the patent system in the US that the US Patent Office issues patents for software. Software should never be patented as it is only instructions on how a computer will perform a calculation. In other words software are algorithms. All that should be patentable is a unique solution to a given problem, if someone were to create a new solution they should be able to use it without worrying they'll infringe on someone else's patent.
The hobbyist software creator didn't exist in large part thirty years ago, and the fights would have been between large companies like IBM and its challengers.
Sure they did, it was hobbyist hardware hackers who built up Homebrew computers, from which the Mac and PC came from. Prior to the hardware hackers were the software hackers from places like MIT's Model Railroad Club though they also hacked hardware, though Stanford had it's share of hackers. It was there that the imagine of the hacker sitting in a basement all night programming came from. It's also where open source really comes from, part of the hacker ethic was to share.
The case referred to above was Gottschalk v Benson 409 US 63. The Court held that mathematical expressions could not be patented, and essentially found that all computer programs were mathematical expressions. The patent in question was for a bit shifter (converting decimal numbers into binary). IMO, we would be better off today had they simply found the patented material to be obvious, which is what many amici suggested.
Now I'm confused. Here you're arguing similarly to what I said above whereas in your second paragraph you argue software patents should have been granted earlier.
FalconYou should not be able to violate a patent by typing.
What if I type out code to program a robotic arm to construct a patented physical object?
You would only be violating a patent, in this case the patent on the physical object, if you make the physical object without the approval of the patent owner.
Falcon
Oh, and I patented "You would" as well as "you would" and any other way to capitalize those words.Perhaps you were not clear enough explaining what you wanted. Or perhaps this is indicitive of a problem with using inches and pounds.
I used to work in construction and I met too many that didn't understand what 9" 1 1/2" meant. While metric measurements are easier to understand for some others don't understand it.
A rather useless law. Unless you ask the inspector to your house, how would they ever know your detectors are not working?
I first learned smoke detectors were required when a house I was living in was remodeled. It's a two story house with the top floor the main living area but the bottom floor was converted into an apartment with it's own kitchen and bath.
I now live in an old house, a different one, that was converted into apartments. The city requires apartment buildings to be registered, and taxed, and as part of that it inspects the buildings.
FalconThink about it - one per apartment, two or more in the hallways for each floor, equivalent numbers in commercial buildings.
I have a 1 bedroom apartment and there's 3 smoke detectors in it. One is in the living room the second in the hallway, and the third in the bedroom. And the city I live in requires them.
FalconAfter all, a bad detector could get tripped by someone cooking and cause a panic.
While I was cooking once a smoke alarm went off so I removed the batteries. Later a city inspector checked the alarms and said the batteries had to be in the alarms, that the alarms had to be working at all tymes. Later my landlord called and said the city had threatened to fine them.
FalconWe must take action before it happens to avert it, isn't that what's going on in TFA?
Take what action before what happens?
Talking hypothetically.
FalconWhat should be done is regulate them these devices like smoke detectors. You are encouraged to have them, but you pay a fine if the authorities are summoned on a false alarm.
Then when people don't raise alarms politicians will wonder why no one raised an alarm. "Hey I may be fined for raising a false alarm so I'd better keep my mouth shut."
Falconi think you just took the definition of direct to a whole new level
Directly it's the person who causes the harm. The alarm fro the detector didn't cause any harm, the person calling an alarm causes the harm.
FalconGood luck changing the government with guns. How'd that work out for those in Waco, or the Branch Dividian?
Waco's a bad example, in part precisely because the Branch Davidians looked like kooks but mostly because they were are located in one easy to target place. Even then though Janet Reno had to burn down a building with children inside to end it. A better example was the DC sniper. Two people in a vehicle were able to terrorize a large area in 2 states and the District of Columbia. Now imagine if one 2 man team like them were in just 5 states. Or 2 in 10. They could conceivably bring the US to it's knees with fear. Further imagine if some teams targeted railroads and major interstate highways, blowing them up. Minneapolis still hasn't fully recovered from the collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis.
FalconLets not even go into the fact that if the government wants you in chains, a hundred guns wont stop them.
Despite it's mass the US military hasn't been able to stop all the insurgents in Iraq. So you're right the US's thousands of "guns" hasn't stopped them. And that's in a foreign country, if the US military were to try pacifying the US population it's be even harder. I don't know how many /.es have served in the military but I have and I as well as a number of others who served with me would not follow any order to shoot on civilians, instead we'd more likely shoot whoever gave such an order. Fragging was not an uncommon action soldiers took when they were given an order they disagreed with. I can easily see it becoming popular if US troops were ordered to shoot on US citizens.
I actually would love to own a firearm in canada, because they probably do make you feel more safe and in control, but I dont get how they make you more free. Can you explain this elementary reasoning that non americans might not see as so elementary?
Do you think the NAZI would of been able to carry out the holocaust if the Enabling Act of 1933 hadn't been passed thus disarming the population? Do you think the genocide in Rwanda would still have happened if more people had been armed there? Or do you think firearms won't stop a possible genocide in Zimbabwe? A fellow Canuck, well Canadian, who once was against the right to bare arms now believes "The Right to Bear Arms is the only reliable way to prevent genocide in the modern world."
FalconYou don't suddenly have Burma or North Korea the second you leave the USA.
But would tyrants control Burma and North Korea if the people were armed?
FalconI wouldn't be quoting John Lott as an authority on anything. Have a look through Tim Lambert's weblog [scienceblogs.com] for a very extensive collection of stories on Lott's utter lack of credibility.
I have trouble saying Tim Lambert is any more credible than is John Lott. Take his article "Another fabrication from John Lott". In it he critics Lott as saying that laws "that require guns be locked up and unloaded face a five-percent increase in murder and a 12 percent increase in rape" and provides a paragraph from a study in the AMA's "JAMA" that supposedly supports his position. Yet not once in the paragraph is either murder or rape mentioned once. All it talks about is how laws that held firearm owner responsible saw a 23% drop in children under 15 being unintentionally shot and die. And there are more way of holding owners responsible than by requiring firearms to be inaccessible to children.
There are many people who grow up with firearms yet only a small number of them ever commit a crime with a firearm. For instance in the neighborhood I grew up in I knew a bunch of kids who grew up with and shot firearms if they didn't own one themselves. I was given my first firearm, a .22 long rifle, before I was 13. My dad and my best friend's dad used to take the two of us out for target practice, as were other kids in the neighborhood. Yet the only person from the 'hood I knew who was ever accused of a violent crime was someone who stabbed a person, no firearms involved. On the other hand a friend of mine was shot and killed, we were in the army and stationed in Germany then and he was shot while in the unit's armory cleaning weapons. The armorer was playing around with a .45 and not realizing it was loaded, how he became an armorer I don't know as it's easy to tell if a .45 is loaded, he pointed it at my friend and saying "bang" he pulled the trigger killing my friend.
FalconI am all for allowing people to get gun permits etc, not the other way around.
I am all for people not needing any permits for firearms. Requiring permits defeat the purpose of the 2nd amendment, that being that people can fight an oppressive government. The USA's Founding Fathers knew how important having an armed citizenry was to prevent government from becoming oppressive, and in the modern era I have to add genocidal.
FalconThe point though, is that using a bad Geiger counter does not cause any direct harm
Well, yes it *does*, if you then go and phone the police screaming about some massive radiation reading that your $4.99-from-eBay Geiger counter is going berzerk over.
It's not the alarm that's causing any harm, it's the person using it that causes the harm.
FalconWe can trust adults to use simple measurement tools safely.
I don't know, I've met people I wouldn't trust to measure something with my tape measure. I've seen people asked to measure and cut a 2X4 to measure it wrong.
Get a smoke alarm in your house, and repel the NYC police if they try to 'certify' it.
Smoke alarms are required where I live. And they have to work, I took out the batteries in the alarms I have and I was told they had to be in the smoke alarms by city inspectors.
FalconCreating laws to combat hypothetical future situations is a waste of time. Let there be some evidence that the situation is actually feasible or enevitable before we pass a law preventing it.
Unfortunately many politicians don't use common sense.
FalconThe title is very misleading, its actual a response to a possible panic caused by people using bad detectors.
The problem starts with TFA to begin with. The subtitle says "A city councilman and the cops don't want you to have that Geiger counter without their permission". Nowhere else in TFA are Geiger counters specifically mentioned.
It seems to me that NYC is turning more and more into a nanny city.
FalconAnd think how much harder it is for a President to get things done when NEITHER Party is willing to work with him.
The parties as a whole won't however factions within the parties will be willing. For instance fiscal conservatives will work with him to reduce government spending. Some Democrats will work to end the war in Iraq, as well as a few Republicans. It'll be hard to get enough to support many things but if done right I think it can be done.
And what happens when Congress sends him the Bill he wants, with a "small" addendum funding the rest of the Government?
Then he can veto it. With the cameras rolling in the Oval Office he can explain why he is vetoing it as he does.
You keep insisting that if he asks for something, there is some moral/religious obligation on the part of Congress to give him what he asks for.
Can you provide me one place where I insist Congress has to give him, or any other president, what they ask for? All I recall is saying he can ask Congress to send him someting Constitutional.
That isn't the most important issue, though. That's just tactics.
It's not just tactics. Democrats want unemployment to be extended by any economic stimulus package and are threatening not to pass something without it. And I think they mean it. To me that's more strategic than tactical.
Sang. "She sang", not "she sung".
You still understood it therefore I can only conclude it's an avoidance tactic.
Seeing as how you only offer critiques or avoidance tactics, and won't offer solutions I see no reason to continue.
Falconbecause ultimately, the judiciary in this country can't override Parliament; it can only clarify).
I wish Canada worked that way.
Though I don't like all the rulings the US Supreme Court hands down I'd rather have the 3 legs the USA Constitution set up than only have one or two legs. It sets up checks and balances that way.
FalconThe amount of money given to the patent office as well as the time a patent is active should correlate to the amount of inventions (patents) there are per year. Since innovation has been accelerating the time a patent is active should go down while the patent office should get more money.
This won't work. Because the patent office wants the money it will grant more patents, even frivolous and onerous ones.
Falcon