Well if anyone, on any forum, ever said they were a below average driver, you might have a point. But since we all claim to be safe drivers, I can only assume we're both average drivers.
A few other arguments: plane crashes are not at all unsurvivable. I don't know which tend to be more survivable, and it's somewhat an apples and oranges comparison, but at least I can admit when I haven't done the research. And there are extremely strict requirements for being an airline pilot, and their performance is regularly checked, something you certainly can't say about cars. So those pilots are much better qualified to fly than you are to drive.
What it boils down to is you feel more confident with a higher-risk activity that gives you more illusion of control. I guess there's nothing wrong with that viewpoint, as long as you don't pretend it's logical.
If they really want to reduce the number of no-shows so they needn't overbook as much, they could try not requiring you to book a flight six months in advance to get a decent price.
I'd add software to the list of things that shouldn't be patented. Even if we fix the obviousness problem, the patents still wouldn't be achieving their goal. The language of patents is purposefully made even more inscrutable than machine code, so as to be as general as possible while divulging as little as possible. The result is that software patents don't contain the equivalent of "schematics" for physical processes or designs. It's far easier to guess or infer the block diagrams than to coax them from the language of the patent, so never actually look to patents to implement anything.
Clearly the real "schematics" of software are source code. If English could capture software's function as well, we'd all be out of a job. So to adequately do their job, software patents would need to include full source code and accompanying documentation. But since source code is indisputably covered under copyright law, the patent system would thus become more of a source code escrow system, mandatory for copyright protection. The real question is whether the trade secret nature of proprietary source code is a big enough problem to warrant the incredible added overhead of such a system. I don't think it is.
In short, copyright serves the industry well enough, with minimal overhead. Patents cause more problems than they fix, and their overhead excludes basement coders, the modern equivalent of garage inventors. The best way to fix the patent system is to push it back into physical realms where it can do some good. The tech industry can do just fine without them, thanks.
The problem is that we're all potential outside agents or criminal elements to everybody else. There is a balance, but if you go to far in using the government to control the crazies, it starts to control you as well.
I'm many orders of magnitude more likely to be screwed by being unable to travel freely, than I am to be hurt by a terrorist who doesn't think to get a ticket 72 hours in advance.
I think Global Thermonuclear Patent War would be a good thing. We only tolerate patents because the actual harm the cause is so much less than the harm they could cause in such a situation. And we need something to spark a revolution. (Non-physical of course.)
That wasn't the summary, that was the first claim. My understanding is that that is the part that's legally binding. And I know that claims tend to get thrown out in ascending order, but you still get sued before that can happen.
The constitutionally mandated purpose is "To promote the progress of science and the useful arts." Historically the idea was that patents were a way of encouraging inventors to disclose their inventions, in return for a temporary monopoly. (If the purpose were only to protect, why would they be public?) Obviously software patents are failing here, because nobody ever uses expired patents as a guideline to build new software.
Now that we call this stuff property and assume a right to corporate profit, this has shifted somewhat towards protecting investment. But software patents don't do that, either. The actual investment in software is not the high-level design someone wrote on a napkin and a lawyer obfuscated, it's the man-years of effort required to actually write the software. That investment is protected by copyright. It is, however, endangered by software patents, because that investment can be endangered on a whim from a patent troll like NTP, or a larger competitor like IBM or Microsoft.
If copyright law disappeared overnight, it would ruin the software industry. If software patents disappeared, the software industry would be largely unchanged. Just less overhead and fewer unknown risks. (As evidence, note that the software industry was doing just fine before the 90s). Because of software's unique status as both expression and (arguably) apparatus, software patents and copyright are trying to protect the same thing. The difference is that copyrights actually work, fairly towards entities of all size and without a lot of legal overhead.
I understand that it's HOW and not WHAT that is supposed to be patented. My argument is that this is not how software patents work in practice. They are at best obfuscated, verbose descriptions of block diagrams.
For example, here's the first claim of 6,317,592, which Wikipedia says is involved in the NTP dispute:
What is claimed is:
In a communication system comprising a wireless system which communication system transmits electronic mail inputted to the communication system from an originating device, mobile processors which execute electronic mail programming to function as a destination of electronic mail, and a destination processor to which the electronic mail is transmitted from the originating device and after reception of the electronic mail by the destination processor, information contained in the electronic mail and an identification of a wireless device in the wireless system are transmitted by the wireless system to the wireless device and from the wireless device to one of the mobile processors connected thereto, the originating device comprising:
a programmed processor which executes electronic mail programming to originate the electronic mail, the electronic mail containing an address of the destination processor and the information contained in the electronic mail to be transmitted to the destination processor.
Now, if you parse that abomination unto the English language into an outline so you can simplify the language, you get:
Unless we say so, you can't have a push server running a program that sends email along with the address of a cell tower, in a system with a wireless network that sends email from the push server, cell phones that get email, and a cell tower that gets email from the push server and then sends it, along with the address of a cell phone's radio, to the cell phone's radio and finally it's CPU.
Now, wouldn't you say it's obvious that you need a device's address to send data? And that you need a radio to communicate with a cell phone? And that all this stuff would be done with computer programs? If so, the only novel, non-obvious part that remains is,
Unless we say so, you can't have a program that sends email to a cell tower that will then send it to a cell phone.
I am aware that the patent also contains 664 (!) more claims, which describe the process in more detail, though with even more painful obfuscation and an explosion of permutations. But even if yon only infringe the first claim, you get sued, and you have to pay lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour to convince a judge that the patent is worthless.
Basically, the software patent restricts any implementation of an obvious idea, because the restriction is only on what you can do, not on how you can do it. It also doesn't serve its Constitutionally mandated purpose, because nobody in their right mind would learn how to send email to a cell phone by reading that patent.
We have a great deal of evidence for the existence of fingers, so we don't have to rely on touch. But suppose we had no other evidence. Your experiment shows that our sense of touch is unreliable. Would it be rational to believe in an otherwise unknown appendage, if your only way of sensing its presence can be fooled so easily?
That said, clearly this is not evidence against the existence of God. Probably no such evidence can exist, God being such an untestable hypothesis. It is, however, an interesting step on the path to understanding why certain irrational beliefs concerning feelings of "presence" are so common in cultures that otherwise aspire to reason.
Our ability to think and reason, and our sense of right and wrong, can be adequately explained by evolutionary psychology.
Science can't explain how or why the initial conditions of the universe came about. But religion can't either. All it does is replace those unknowns with totally unsubstantiated story, and in doing so creates even more unknowns. For example, religion can't explain how or why an omniscient personal God came about.
I presume there's evidence that you love your three daughters, so you can "prove" it to me. Otherwise, no, I wouldn't believe it. If I claim the plate of spaghetti I am about to eat loves you, but I can't prove it, should you believe it? I certainly hope not, because there's no evidence that my spaghetti even exists, let alone that it has exhibited love for your daughters.
Not all drugs cause chemical dependence. And one of the points this article makes is that religious experiences, like drugs, can be in some sense explained in physiological ways. Also I think it's pretty clear one can become addicted to hamburgers.
I would argue that the "technology that enables the idea" is actually a bunch of source code that NTP isn't showing anyone. So it is the idea that's being patented in this case. Which is of course wrong, as patents are not supposed to encumber ideas.
If you were to take somebody from 1984 and tell them about the ubiquity of cellular networks and the internet, and ask them to design an email system, push would be obvious to them. It genuinely is an obvious idea. That it hadn't been invented before whenever it was isn't because it was hard, it was because there was no need. In 1984, being constantly connected to a network was the exception, not the rule.
Evolution is cool precisely because, despite being an inanimate process, it does have a goal. In layman's terms, to survive and procreate. The only difference between this and "natural" evolution is the environment (and possibly procreation methods) was created by us, rather than just existing for whatever reason the rest of the universe does. And if we get something that survives in an environment of "receive these WiFi signals or you die", well that's useful.
B% of those designs would be copied by someone else
C% of those small companies would be driven out of business by the copy
D% of those designs would not be copied under the current system
where A * B * C * D = 99%. I'd estimate that it's actually far below the noise floor, and other factors, such as the insane cost of patent litigation (allowing the use of bogus patents a weapon against small companies).
That's not sessionless. When the server gets the announcement packet, it has a session with the client, and the client assumes it has a session with the server. What you described is TCP, except without ACKs. The server is pushing data to the client; the fact that the client initiated the connection is immaterial. Using elm over telnet in 1986 would be prior art.
How can a physical entity exist inside a non-physical entity? Dualism may be a compelling philosophy for some, but lacking any evidence of violations of known physical laws in the brain, it's scientifically useless.
I realize you're joking, but it actually makes a lot of sense: ls lists files, and cat concatenates the files you give on the command line (or standard input) to standard output.
I'd just like to point out that numactl is merely one of several command line interfaces to that particular system call, which is actually named sched_setaffinity().
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Well if anyone, on any forum, ever said they were a below average driver, you might have a point. But since we all claim to be safe drivers, I can only assume we're both average drivers.
A few other arguments: plane crashes are not at all unsurvivable. I don't know which tend to be more survivable, and it's somewhat an apples and oranges comparison, but at least I can admit when I haven't done the research. And there are extremely strict requirements for being an airline pilot, and their performance is regularly checked, something you certainly can't say about cars. So those pilots are much better qualified to fly than you are to drive.
What it boils down to is you feel more confident with a higher-risk activity that gives you more illusion of control. I guess there's nothing wrong with that viewpoint, as long as you don't pretend it's logical.
If they really want to reduce the number of no-shows so they needn't overbook as much, they could try not requiring you to book a flight six months in advance to get a decent price.
I'd add software to the list of things that shouldn't be patented. Even if we fix the obviousness problem, the patents still wouldn't be achieving their goal. The language of patents is purposefully made even more inscrutable than machine code, so as to be as general as possible while divulging as little as possible. The result is that software patents don't contain the equivalent of "schematics" for physical processes or designs. It's far easier to guess or infer the block diagrams than to coax them from the language of the patent, so never actually look to patents to implement anything.
Clearly the real "schematics" of software are source code. If English could capture software's function as well, we'd all be out of a job. So to adequately do their job, software patents would need to include full source code and accompanying documentation. But since source code is indisputably covered under copyright law, the patent system would thus become more of a source code escrow system, mandatory for copyright protection. The real question is whether the trade secret nature of proprietary source code is a big enough problem to warrant the incredible added overhead of such a system. I don't think it is.
In short, copyright serves the industry well enough, with minimal overhead. Patents cause more problems than they fix, and their overhead excludes basement coders, the modern equivalent of garage inventors. The best way to fix the patent system is to push it back into physical realms where it can do some good. The tech industry can do just fine without them, thanks.
I didn't know Wikipedia had a policy for that, and I was taught to put punctuation inside quotes. But that is a seriously braindead convention.
I realize complaints about stuff you did for free get really annoying. But on the other hand, when in Rome...
The problem is that we're all potential outside agents or criminal elements to everybody else. There is a balance, but if you go to far in using the government to control the crazies, it starts to control you as well.
I'm many orders of magnitude more likely to be screwed by being unable to travel freely, than I am to be hurt by a terrorist who doesn't think to get a ticket 72 hours in advance.
I think Global Thermonuclear Patent War would be a good thing. We only tolerate patents because the actual harm the cause is so much less than the harm they could cause in such a situation. And we need something to spark a revolution. (Non-physical of course.)
That wasn't the summary, that was the first claim. My understanding is that that is the part that's legally binding. And I know that claims tend to get thrown out in ascending order, but you still get sued before that can happen.
The constitutionally mandated purpose is "To promote the progress of science and the useful arts." Historically the idea was that patents were a way of encouraging inventors to disclose their inventions, in return for a temporary monopoly. (If the purpose were only to protect, why would they be public?) Obviously software patents are failing here, because nobody ever uses expired patents as a guideline to build new software.
Now that we call this stuff property and assume a right to corporate profit, this has shifted somewhat towards protecting investment. But software patents don't do that, either. The actual investment in software is not the high-level design someone wrote on a napkin and a lawyer obfuscated, it's the man-years of effort required to actually write the software. That investment is protected by copyright. It is, however, endangered by software patents, because that investment can be endangered on a whim from a patent troll like NTP, or a larger competitor like IBM or Microsoft.
If copyright law disappeared overnight, it would ruin the software industry. If software patents disappeared, the software industry would be largely unchanged. Just less overhead and fewer unknown risks. (As evidence, note that the software industry was doing just fine before the 90s). Because of software's unique status as both expression and (arguably) apparatus, software patents and copyright are trying to protect the same thing. The difference is that copyrights actually work, fairly towards entities of all size and without a lot of legal overhead.
For example, here's the first claim of 6,317,592, which Wikipedia says is involved in the NTP dispute:
Now, if you parse that abomination unto the English language into an outline so you can simplify the language, you get:
Now, wouldn't you say it's obvious that you need a device's address to send data? And that you need a radio to communicate with a cell phone? And that all this stuff would be done with computer programs? If so, the only novel, non-obvious part that remains is,
I am aware that the patent also contains 664 (!) more claims, which describe the process in more detail, though with even more painful obfuscation and an explosion of permutations. But even if yon only infringe the first claim, you get sued, and you have to pay lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour to convince a judge that the patent is worthless.
Basically, the software patent restricts any implementation of an obvious idea, because the restriction is only on what you can do, not on how you can do it. It also doesn't serve its Constitutionally mandated purpose, because nobody in their right mind would learn how to send email to a cell phone by reading that patent.
We have a great deal of evidence for the existence of fingers, so we don't have to rely on touch. But suppose we had no other evidence. Your experiment shows that our sense of touch is unreliable. Would it be rational to believe in an otherwise unknown appendage, if your only way of sensing its presence can be fooled so easily?
That said, clearly this is not evidence against the existence of God. Probably no such evidence can exist, God being such an untestable hypothesis. It is, however, an interesting step on the path to understanding why certain irrational beliefs concerning feelings of "presence" are so common in cultures that otherwise aspire to reason.
Our ability to think and reason, and our sense of right and wrong, can be adequately explained by evolutionary psychology.
Science can't explain how or why the initial conditions of the universe came about. But religion can't either. All it does is replace those unknowns with totally unsubstantiated story, and in doing so creates even more unknowns. For example, religion can't explain how or why an omniscient personal God came about.
I presume there's evidence that you love your three daughters, so you can "prove" it to me. Otherwise, no, I wouldn't believe it. If I claim the plate of spaghetti I am about to eat loves you, but I can't prove it, should you believe it? I certainly hope not, because there's no evidence that my spaghetti even exists, let alone that it has exhibited love for your daughters.
Not all drugs cause chemical dependence. And one of the points this article makes is that religious experiences, like drugs, can be in some sense explained in physiological ways. Also I think it's pretty clear one can become addicted to hamburgers.
It's not incompatible, that's sort of the point. If it doesn't explain anything better than the physical laws can, how is it useful?
I would argue that the "technology that enables the idea" is actually a bunch of source code that NTP isn't showing anyone. So it is the idea that's being patented in this case. Which is of course wrong, as patents are not supposed to encumber ideas.
If you were to take somebody from 1984 and tell them about the ubiquity of cellular networks and the internet, and ask them to design an email system, push would be obvious to them. It genuinely is an obvious idea. That it hadn't been invented before whenever it was isn't because it was hard, it was because there was no need. In 1984, being constantly connected to a network was the exception, not the rule.
Well, just because something is implemented in UDP doesn't make it sessionless. You can, for example, implement TCP over UDP.
:-)
I think we agree on the main point, so carry on.
Are you saying the mind is some unknown form of energy?
Evolution is cool precisely because, despite being an inanimate process, it does have a goal. In layman's terms, to survive and procreate. The only difference between this and "natural" evolution is the environment (and possibly procreation methods) was created by us, rather than just existing for whatever reason the rest of the universe does. And if we get something that survives in an environment of "receive these WiFi signals or you die", well that's useful.
To prove that point, you'd have to show that:
where A * B * C * D = 99%. I'd estimate that it's actually far below the noise floor, and other factors, such as the insane cost of patent litigation (allowing the use of bogus patents a weapon against small companies).
The original US patent system required sending a working model of the (physical) invention to the patent office.
That's not sessionless. When the server gets the announcement packet, it has a session with the client, and the client assumes it has a session with the server. What you described is TCP, except without ACKs. The server is pushing data to the client; the fact that the client initiated the connection is immaterial. Using elm over telnet in 1986 would be prior art.
Well there are only two methodologies, push and pull. And in a given situation, one will have clear advantages. And both are obvious.
How can a physical entity exist inside a non-physical entity? Dualism may be a compelling philosophy for some, but lacking any evidence of violations of known physical laws in the brain, it's scientifically useless.
I realize you're joking, but it actually makes a lot of sense: ls lists files, and cat concatenates the files you give on the command line (or standard input) to standard output.
I'd just like to point out that numactl is merely one of several command line interfaces to that particular system call, which is actually named sched_setaffinity().
Have you ever met anyone who's seen any more than a JPEG of the Mona Lisa? For most purposes it's good enough.
(Would like a Flac or Vorbis option, though.)
If the average TSA employee can't open your briefcase lock with a paper clip, they'll destroy it and leave you a condescending brochure.