This guy has three screens, and uses one for his list of emails, one for his open emails, and one for a browser. So, basically, what he does the whole day is browsing the net and reading/answering emails. And that he calls "productivity".
True. And that is exactly which the USPTO is unfit to judge the validity of patent claims. And that is also why so many overly broad, trivial, and just worthless patents are actually awarded. That, and the fact that they get paid for each patent awarded, which is why they (a) tend to be in favor of awarding the patent, and (b) try to spend the least amount of time possible on a patent.
Yep, that might be true. However, the problem is that the USPTO employees are notoriously inadequate in recognizing what is fluffy and what is not. So they grant these fluffy patents, as you also seem to admit. Now, the patent might in itself be worthless, but sueing someone over it might not be. Faced with years of litigation and continuously rising costs of a defense lawyer, most small business will pay off the patent extortionist, even if he only sports fluffly patents.
Battlespire had your character naked on the inventory screen. With pretty high-resolution boobies, I might say (for the time, that is). Unfortunately it basically NEEDS MS-DOS to run, so I can't show you a screenshot. That is what you wanted, no?
There was a time when the Internet did not exist. Suddenly it was there, and there was a way of navigating it easily from scratch: by using domain names. The problem was that every domain name had to be unique. Big companies jumped in quickly and reserved.com. A few small companies were also lucky. Then we saw the rise of the domain-name-grabber: suddenly EVERY domain name.com,.net,.org, and . was registered. The domain name grabbers had no use for any of these names, they just wanted to place their big butt in a spot that was desirable, even necessary, to occupy by others, so that they could receive a fat stack of bills to move that butt.
There is not much difference between the domain-name-grab and the patent-grab. It is not that hard to generate patents nowadays. It is no longer required to have an actual implementation of a patent ready, it is enough to formulate an idea. Hell, I could (with the help of a lawyer) write a computer program that generates patent claims and automatically sends them off to the USPTO. Most of the texts will be silly, but a few will have meaning; those will be awarded (maybe I make it sound a bit too easy here, you need to do a prior art search for each patent claim, but I guess I can come up with a program that uses the text of previously awarded patents to generate new patents, and then list those previously awarded patents as prior art). The only snag is that it costs too much money to get all those patent claims verified. But with a little bit of insight, it is pretty easy to write down a patent claim (by hand) for something that does not exist yet, but that someone will probably invent in the coming ten years. Maybe only one in ten of such patent claims will actually come true, but if your pockets are deep enough, no problem: the one that actually comes true will bring in enough dough in the end to make you rich. At the expense of the actual innovator.
But it is worse: even those patent claims that seem to be worthless can be made worthwhile by a lawyer who just starts litigating some successful startup claiming that they violated this worthless patent. The startup might see that the claim is worthless, but cannot afford the costs involved in defending his case, and rather pay off the shark on his back. And make no mistake: the patent troll companies are all filled with lawyers and only lawyers; they make their living by sueing the crap out of people who actually produce something.
So, it is not "the more patents, the worse we are off", but "the more worthless patents without supporting implementation, in the hands of patent trolls, the worse we are off."
John Brunner (the internet, in the mid 70s, with privacy concerns for all. OMG)
Brunner managed to mix brilliance up with utter boredom. I have read several of his heavy volumes, but I will read each of them only once.
Philip K Dick (mad as a bag of hammers)
Wonderful, wonderful. After reading SF for fifteen years, after which I started to appreciate other literature too, Dick is the ONLY writer I still think is really good. Sure, I still read SF for entertainment now and again, but most of it is simply trash, and almost none of it has any real depth. Dick, on the other hand, remains great.
Ray Bradbury (mostly for his non-SF short stories, funnily enough, but for Farenheit 451)
OK, Bradbury has his great moments too.
Robert Heinlein (just for the idea that when you don't know what to do, keep the readers on their toes by saying "the door dilates". Got to love that)
For me, Heinlein went from cheap but fun entertainment immediately to pretentious psychobabble. The borderline here was "Stranger in a Strange Land" -- already quite pretentious, but entertaining nonetheless.
Fredric Brown (short stories about time travel that work)
For a looooong time, Brown was my favorite author. I recently acquired his collected novels and collected short stories, and read them all again. Yes, he is still fun, but there is no depth at all.
The one author I would like to add is Damon Knight. Yes, he is of the likes of Fredric Brown, and provides little depth, but his bundles "Off Centre", "Far Out", and "In Deep" provide some of the most original SF I have ever read. There are stories here which have such a weird premise, that it is a surprise that one author could fill a whole bundle of with this kind of stories. While Knight has not changed my philosophy of life, he showed me that weird ideas can actually work.
Soljaris (Tarkovsky's Solaris) is a movie that exists in the mind of the viewer. It purposefully provides the viewer with an experience of travel, to strengthen the impact of the loneliness of the space station.
Incidentally, the US version of the movie is certainly far from bad and probably one of the least Hollywoodized movies of recent years. It is no Tarkovsky, but what would be the point of making a second Tarkovsky version? As it is, most people will regard Soljaris as boring, mainly because they are not used to slow movies with few camera changes. So there is definately a role here for the US version.
How about commerce? The US might think it does not need other countries, but it does want to SELL stuff to them. And selling and the Internet go hand in hand nowadays.
There is a limitless number of ideas, but there is a limited number of experienced workers who can turn ideas into a product. Instead of collecting huge stacks of ideas and let the workers browse through them, the idea-makers should actively sell their ideas to the workers. I mean, workers usually have good ideas of their own, and don't need someone sueing them because they implemented an idea (which they thought up themselves) that already existed in the huge stack. I have no problem with people making money from generating ideas, but they should be part of the team that implements it. Usually it is not the basic idea that is implemented, but the implementation changes the idea until it is workable. The "idea-maker" could help in that, if he or she is really worth anything. But as it is proposed now, I see a huge stack of hare-brained ideas with, purely by chance an unintentionally, a few good ones among them. Which worker would want to go through that rubbish for inspiration?
Not much, they'll still have a reputation for eventually shipping, as they always have done
Even if it means they have to remove many of the promised features, or if they just have to take the old version, slap a few new graphics in the interface, and change the version number.
It is virtually impossible to create RPG quests that are not Fedex, dialogue, or kill quests. That is the way the human interacts with the game: by moving objects, going through conversations, and killing things. What makes a quest interesting is the motive you have for doing these things. It is especially cool to have quests surprise you in some way, or if the outcome of the quest determines different ways in which the story will continue. In that vein, the best quests are found in story-driven games, such as Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, and the top dog of them all: Planescape Torment.
"AI: Artificial Intelligence," written and directed by Stanley Kubrick instead of written and directed by Steven Spielberg based on a rejected script by Stanley Kubrick.
A modern version of "The Power," this time true to the novel by Frank M. Robinson. This book is so written to be turned into a movie that there was no good reason to dumb it down and remove all the cool philosophical and psychological bits from the book. Of course, in 1968 movies could not be that dark, but today it should be possible to turn this book into a kickass SF/mystery movie.
ANY book by Philip K. Dick, directed by Terry Gilliam.
having a significant portion of players run the game as a business operation damages the realism that the game hopes to instill.
No, having a significant portion of players run the game as a business operation damages the fantasy that the game hopes to instill. It only helps the realism.
Or a child used her credit card to open an AOL account... And that there is someone in her household who uses the internet she is paying for to share music on p2p? That happens all the time in these cases.
Yeah, but that is the point, isn't it? The RIAA just randomly pick someone to sue, and then go try to get the case together after the fact. "You are breathing, so you must steal music. It is just a question of determining how you are doing that." And with enough lawyers, against someone who cannot afford a lawyer, they are going to win, or at least scare the person they are sueing into settling out of court.
The RIAA, and every other institution for that matter, should have sufficient grounds to sue a particular person, not just the fact that they know their name and where they live.
How they managed to find this woman and sue her is beyond me...
Oh, that is simple. The RIAA imagines that everyone uses a computer and shares music, and is therefore a thief. And when they have convinced themselves of that, they just have to open the phonebook and pick any name to sue.
That's happening now - every postgraduate at our university is required to take courses in developing their "soft personal skills" as well as gaining technical qualifications.
I was working for a bank once, in telecommunications. We built lots of applications for our clients, up to the point that over 95% of all money that went through the bank entered digitally, was processed digitally, and left the bank digitally, without a human touching it.
Now, the average bank consists of more than 50% managers. And these managers realized two things: (a) that the bank's core business actually is computer science, not economics, and (b) that they did not have a clue about how their core business was conducted.
So they tried to get the information they needed from the engineers, but found they could not understand them. Their solution was: send the engineers on courses to teach them how to talk in manager's language. They made people on whom their core business depended spend lots of time learning useless skills, so that they would not have to learn to understand their business. Of course, most engineers could not get the hang of manager's speak either, but at least they knew how to do their job well.
I don't know of such a directive, but if it exists no doubt The Netherlands signed up. However, there is of course a difference between the working hours you specify on your timesheets and the number of hours you actually work. In my line of work, most people work many more hours than they get paid for, just to be able to finish all the work that has to be done.
I think what we need to see in America isn't Communism , it's Socialism
As someone who lives and works in a Socialist country (The Netherlands) I can tell you that Socialism is in some aspects even worse than Capitalism. The problem with Socialism is that the government needs lots of money to spread around to those who are not willing or able to work. That basically means that many people feel that they are better off NOT working than spending their valuable time at a workplace. The consequence is that those who DO work have to work VERY hard to make up for all those who do NOT work, and that the taxes on wages are excessively high too. For the work I do the salaries in the US are three to four times as high, and I have a 60 hours work week to boot. Anyway, it seems to me that a mixture of Capitalism and Socialism could be the solution: if you take the best bits of both systems.
Once a friend of mine commented that VHS was superior in quality to Betamax but that the only reason VHS won was because Sony refused to license porn on their format. Whether this is true or not is probably debatable.
AFAIK it was Philip's V2000 format that refused to bring porn, and died off as a consequence (presumably).
But I don't think the new format race will be decided by porn. When video hit the streets, people could watch porn in the privacy of their home instead of in sleazy cinema's. But most people do not care whether their porn is in HD format or grainy VHS, as long as it is porn.
However, if porn can become something completely new, then it might be the drive for new developments. But I think "something completely new" requires new peripheral hardware, not a widescreen television.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy has three screens, and uses one for his list of emails, one for his open emails, and one for a browser. So, basically, what he does the whole day is browsing the net and reading/answering emails. And that he calls "productivity".
Perfect to play all my Britney Spears songs with!
True. And that is exactly which the USPTO is unfit to judge the validity of patent claims. And that is also why so many overly broad, trivial, and just worthless patents are actually awarded. That, and the fact that they get paid for each patent awarded, which is why they (a) tend to be in favor of awarding the patent, and (b) try to spend the least amount of time possible on a patent.
Yep, that might be true. However, the problem is that the USPTO employees are notoriously inadequate in recognizing what is fluffy and what is not. So they grant these fluffy patents, as you also seem to admit. Now, the patent might in itself be worthless, but sueing someone over it might not be. Faced with years of litigation and continuously rising costs of a defense lawyer, most small business will pay off the patent extortionist, even if he only sports fluffly patents.
Battlespire had your character naked on the inventory screen. With pretty high-resolution boobies, I might say (for the time, that is). Unfortunately it basically NEEDS MS-DOS to run, so I can't show you a screenshot. That is what you wanted, no?
There was a time when the Internet did not exist. Suddenly it was there, and there was a way of navigating it easily from scratch: by using domain names. The problem was that every domain name had to be unique. Big companies jumped in quickly and reserved .com. A few small companies were also lucky. Then we saw the rise of the domain-name-grabber: suddenly EVERY domain name .com, .net, .org, and . was registered. The domain name grabbers had no use for any of these names, they just wanted to place their big butt in a spot that was desirable, even necessary, to occupy by others, so that they could receive a fat stack of bills to move that butt.
There is not much difference between the domain-name-grab and the patent-grab. It is not that hard to generate patents nowadays. It is no longer required to have an actual implementation of a patent ready, it is enough to formulate an idea. Hell, I could (with the help of a lawyer) write a computer program that generates patent claims and automatically sends them off to the USPTO. Most of the texts will be silly, but a few will have meaning; those will be awarded (maybe I make it sound a bit too easy here, you need to do a prior art search for each patent claim, but I guess I can come up with a program that uses the text of previously awarded patents to generate new patents, and then list those previously awarded patents as prior art). The only snag is that it costs too much money to get all those patent claims verified. But with a little bit of insight, it is pretty easy to write down a patent claim (by hand) for something that does not exist yet, but that someone will probably invent in the coming ten years. Maybe only one in ten of such patent claims will actually come true, but if your pockets are deep enough, no problem: the one that actually comes true will bring in enough dough in the end to make you rich. At the expense of the actual innovator.
But it is worse: even those patent claims that seem to be worthless can be made worthwhile by a lawyer who just starts litigating some successful startup claiming that they violated this worthless patent. The startup might see that the claim is worthless, but cannot afford the costs involved in defending his case, and rather pay off the shark on his back. And make no mistake: the patent troll companies are all filled with lawyers and only lawyers; they make their living by sueing the crap out of people who actually produce something.
So, it is not "the more patents, the worse we are off", but "the more worthless patents without supporting implementation, in the hands of patent trolls, the worse we are off."
For the novels: 1886778175. Title: Martians and Madness.
Both published by NESFA Press, in 2002.
Brunner managed to mix brilliance up with utter boredom. I have read several of his heavy volumes, but I will read each of them only once.
Philip K Dick (mad as a bag of hammers)
Wonderful, wonderful. After reading SF for fifteen years, after which I started to appreciate other literature too, Dick is the ONLY writer I still think is really good. Sure, I still read SF for entertainment now and again, but most of it is simply trash, and almost none of it has any real depth. Dick, on the other hand, remains great.
Ray Bradbury (mostly for his non-SF short stories, funnily enough, but for Farenheit 451)
OK, Bradbury has his great moments too.
Robert Heinlein (just for the idea that when you don't know what to do, keep the readers on their toes by saying "the door dilates". Got to love that)
For me, Heinlein went from cheap but fun entertainment immediately to pretentious psychobabble. The borderline here was "Stranger in a Strange Land" -- already quite pretentious, but entertaining nonetheless.
Fredric Brown (short stories about time travel that work)
For a looooong time, Brown was my favorite author. I recently acquired his collected novels and collected short stories, and read them all again. Yes, he is still fun, but there is no depth at all.
The one author I would like to add is Damon Knight. Yes, he is of the likes of Fredric Brown, and provides little depth, but his bundles "Off Centre", "Far Out", and "In Deep" provide some of the most original SF I have ever read. There are stories here which have such a weird premise, that it is a surprise that one author could fill a whole bundle of with this kind of stories. While Knight has not changed my philosophy of life, he showed me that weird ideas can actually work.
Soljaris (Tarkovsky's Solaris) is a movie that exists in the mind of the viewer. It purposefully provides the viewer with an experience of travel, to strengthen the impact of the loneliness of the space station.
Incidentally, the US version of the movie is certainly far from bad and probably one of the least Hollywoodized movies of recent years. It is no Tarkovsky, but what would be the point of making a second Tarkovsky version? As it is, most people will regard Soljaris as boring, mainly because they are not used to slow movies with few camera changes. So there is definately a role here for the US version.
How about commerce? The US might think it does not need other countries, but it does want to SELL stuff to them. And selling and the Internet go hand in hand nowadays.
There is a limitless number of ideas, but there is a limited number of experienced workers who can turn ideas into a product. Instead of collecting huge stacks of ideas and let the workers browse through them, the idea-makers should actively sell their ideas to the workers. I mean, workers usually have good ideas of their own, and don't need someone sueing them because they implemented an idea (which they thought up themselves) that already existed in the huge stack. I have no problem with people making money from generating ideas, but they should be part of the team that implements it. Usually it is not the basic idea that is implemented, but the implementation changes the idea until it is workable. The "idea-maker" could help in that, if he or she is really worth anything. But as it is proposed now, I see a huge stack of hare-brained ideas with, purely by chance an unintentionally, a few good ones among them. Which worker would want to go through that rubbish for inspiration?
Even if it means they have to remove many of the promised features, or if they just have to take the old version, slap a few new graphics in the interface, and change the version number.
It is virtually impossible to create RPG quests that are not Fedex, dialogue, or kill quests. That is the way the human interacts with the game: by moving objects, going through conversations, and killing things. What makes a quest interesting is the motive you have for doing these things. It is especially cool to have quests surprise you in some way, or if the outcome of the quest determines different ways in which the story will continue. In that vein, the best quests are found in story-driven games, such as Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, and the top dog of them all: Planescape Torment.
Don't forget: there was actually one Dwemer still left in the world. It was amazing to meet him.
No number is too neat to be random. That is the point of randomness.
At least it would make all the religious nuts of all creeds violently attack one and the same company. Perhaps an idea for Microsoft?
A modern version of "The Power," this time true to the novel by Frank M. Robinson. This book is so written to be turned into a movie that there was no good reason to dumb it down and remove all the cool philosophical and psychological bits from the book. Of course, in 1968 movies could not be that dark, but today it should be possible to turn this book into a kickass SF/mystery movie.
ANY book by Philip K. Dick, directed by Terry Gilliam.
If I spray this coating on myself I never have to use the bathroom anymore!
No, having a significant portion of players run the game as a business operation damages the fantasy that the game hopes to instill. It only helps the realism.
Yeah, but that is the point, isn't it? The RIAA just randomly pick someone to sue, and then go try to get the case together after the fact. "You are breathing, so you must steal music. It is just a question of determining how you are doing that." And with enough lawyers, against someone who cannot afford a lawyer, they are going to win, or at least scare the person they are sueing into settling out of court.
The RIAA, and every other institution for that matter, should have sufficient grounds to sue a particular person, not just the fact that they know their name and where they live.
Oh, that is simple. The RIAA imagines that everyone uses a computer and shares music, and is therefore a thief. And when they have convinced themselves of that, they just have to open the phonebook and pick any name to sue.
I was working for a bank once, in telecommunications. We built lots of applications for our clients, up to the point that over 95% of all money that went through the bank entered digitally, was processed digitally, and left the bank digitally, without a human touching it.
Now, the average bank consists of more than 50% managers. And these managers realized two things: (a) that the bank's core business actually is computer science, not economics, and (b) that they did not have a clue about how their core business was conducted.
So they tried to get the information they needed from the engineers, but found they could not understand them. Their solution was: send the engineers on courses to teach them how to talk in manager's language. They made people on whom their core business depended spend lots of time learning useless skills, so that they would not have to learn to understand their business. Of course, most engineers could not get the hang of manager's speak either, but at least they knew how to do their job well.
I don't know of such a directive, but if it exists no doubt The Netherlands signed up. However, there is of course a difference between the working hours you specify on your timesheets and the number of hours you actually work. In my line of work, most people work many more hours than they get paid for, just to be able to finish all the work that has to be done.
As someone who lives and works in a Socialist country (The Netherlands) I can tell you that Socialism is in some aspects even worse than Capitalism. The problem with Socialism is that the government needs lots of money to spread around to those who are not willing or able to work. That basically means that many people feel that they are better off NOT working than spending their valuable time at a workplace. The consequence is that those who DO work have to work VERY hard to make up for all those who do NOT work, and that the taxes on wages are excessively high too. For the work I do the salaries in the US are three to four times as high, and I have a 60 hours work week to boot. Anyway, it seems to me that a mixture of Capitalism and Socialism could be the solution: if you take the best bits of both systems.
AFAIK it was Philip's V2000 format that refused to bring porn, and died off as a consequence (presumably).
But I don't think the new format race will be decided by porn. When video hit the streets, people could watch porn in the privacy of their home instead of in sleazy cinema's. But most people do not care whether their porn is in HD format or grainy VHS, as long as it is porn.
However, if porn can become something completely new, then it might be the drive for new developments. But I think "something completely new" requires new peripheral hardware, not a widescreen television.