I totally agree. IMO, patent durations should never be 20 years in the software industry. Software has a much faster time to market than physical goods and is more purely innovative. Any company that can't capitalize on a software patent in 4 or 5 years has something wrong with its process. I, too, have used this fix to translate dates to 4-digits, by the way.
Why not create a business whose main purpose is to comes up with 10 minute ideas that sound novel enough to low IQ judges to earn a patent, then make money off lawsuits? There must be some venture capital out there for such a project.
It's the difference between countable (cardinality of the integers) and uncountable (cardinality of real numbers). Consult any undergraduate real analysis textbook for elucidation. You should find it interesting.
But I believe that Midnight Coder is wrong, if we assume that the original premise, that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters can, indeed, produce the complete works of Shakespeare, is true.
The reason is that monkeys do not have the manual dexterity to change typewriter ribbons or reload paper. You cannot write the complete works of Shakespeare without changing the ribbon at least once, and defintely cannot write them on one sheet of paper. Therefore, the complete works of Shakespeare must be an aggregate work of over 1000 monkeys, each of whom has written one page.
Since the monkeys are not ordered, we can presume that the original author of the quotation wished to allow us to use any permutation of monkey pages to compile the tome.
There may be only a countably infinite number of monkeys, but the number of monkey page permutations is uncountable, and can map, I believe, to the set of all works that can ever be written.
Wealthy parents can pay tens of thousands of dollars extra to get their scholastically challenged kid into Harvard. This may tend to work out badly, but at least it would subsidize tuition costs for the rest of the students.
You claim the death star was 2000 km above the planet and a diameter of 800+ km? That would be over 23.07 degrees (if 2000 km is the distance to the center) or 19.19 degrees (if 2000 km is the distance to the nearest point of the death star) when viewed from the planet surface.
I like this idea. A good implementation for this would be to compute a post's score by a median-like function of its moderation scores:
Each post keeps an array tally of the number of moderation scores it has received between -1 and 5. It is initialized so that its median is the desired value (0 for cowards, 1 for others) and the tally is 1 for every internal value in the array:
When someone assigns a score S to a post, that post's scoreTally[S] += 2. This moves the median exactly one spot toward the S.
If moderating up == a target score of 5 and moderating down == a target score of -1, this implementation is identical to the current system (AFAIK).
If this system is implementated, moderators should probably get extra moderation points, since moderating a post toward a lesser number works against that post getting a large score. Perhaps giving each moderator one point where he must assign a -1, one point where he must assign a 0, etc., plus a quantity of general purpose moderator points.
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Using a median-like function to compute a post's score works better than other simple methods. Taking a mean would not work well because moderators will tend to enter the maximum positive or negative score to maximize their effect. Scoring incrementally would not work well because it is strongly order dependent (later scorers are more important than earlier scorers).
Another possible solution would be to change the moderator point allocation system to promote each moderator to do both upward and downward moderation. Try this:
Keep the number of moderation points per moderator at 5. Make a moderator's first 3 +1 moderations cost him/her only 1/3 of a point each; further +1 moderations cost 1 point each. Make a moderator's first 3 -1 moderations cost him/her 1/3 of a point each; further -1 moderations cost 1 point each.
This method allows a moderator to moderate three trolls downward while sacrificing only one moderation point -- he/she could decide to raise 7 posts, or he/she could raise 6 and lower 3.
Slashdot Mirror
I totally agree. IMO, patent durations should never be 20 years in the software industry. Software has a much faster time to market than physical goods and is more purely innovative. Any company that can't capitalize on a software patent in 4 or 5 years has something wrong with its process. I, too, have used this fix to translate dates to 4-digits, by the way.
Why not create a business whose main purpose is to comes up with 10 minute ideas that sound novel enough to low IQ judges to earn a patent, then make money off lawsuits? There must be some venture capital out there for such a project.
It's the difference between countable (cardinality of the integers) and uncountable (cardinality of real numbers). Consult any undergraduate real analysis textbook for elucidation. You should find it interesting.
But I believe that Midnight Coder is wrong, if we assume that the original premise, that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters can, indeed, produce the complete works of Shakespeare, is true.
The reason is that monkeys do not have the manual dexterity to change typewriter ribbons or reload paper. You cannot write the complete works of Shakespeare without changing the ribbon at least once, and defintely cannot write them on one sheet of paper. Therefore, the complete works of Shakespeare must be an aggregate work of over 1000 monkeys, each of whom has written one page.
Since the monkeys are not ordered, we can presume that the original author of the quotation wished to allow us to use any permutation of monkey pages to compile the tome.
There may be only a countably infinite number of monkeys, but the number of monkey page permutations is uncountable, and can map, I believe, to the set of all works that can ever be written.
Wealthy parents can pay tens of thousands of dollars extra to get their scholastically challenged kid into Harvard. This may tend to work out badly, but at least it would subsidize tuition costs for the rest of the students.
You claim the death star was 2000 km above the planet and a diameter of 800+ km? That would be over 23.07 degrees (if 2000 km is the distance to the center) or 19.19 degrees (if 2000 km is the distance to the nearest point of the death star) when viewed from the planet surface.
I don't remember it looking quite that big.
I like this idea. A good implementation for this would be to compute a post's score by a median-like function of its moderation scores:
Each post keeps an array tally of the number of moderation scores it has received between -1 and 5. It is initialized so that its median is the desired value (0 for cowards, 1 for others) and the tally is 1 for every internal value in the array:
coward post's scoreTally[-1..5] = {4,1,1,1,1,1,0};
other post's scoreTally[-1..5] = {2,1,1,1,1,1,0};
When someone assigns a score S to a post, that post's scoreTally[S] += 2. This moves the median exactly one spot toward the S.
If moderating up == a target score of 5 and moderating down == a target score of -1, this implementation is identical to the current system (AFAIK).
If this system is implementated, moderators should probably get extra moderation points, since moderating a post toward a lesser number works against that post getting a large score. Perhaps giving each moderator one point where he must assign a -1, one point where he must assign a 0,
etc., plus a quantity of general purpose moderator points.
-----
Using a median-like function to compute a post's score works better than other simple methods. Taking a mean would not work well because moderators will tend to enter the maximum positive or negative score to maximize their effect. Scoring incrementally would not work well because it is strongly order dependent (later scorers are more important than earlier scorers).
Another possible solution would be to change the moderator point allocation system to promote each moderator to do both upward and downward moderation. Try this:
Keep the number of moderation points per moderator at 5. Make a moderator's first 3 +1 moderations cost him/her only 1/3 of a point each; further +1 moderations cost 1 point each. Make a moderator's first 3 -1 moderations cost him/her 1/3 of a point each; further -1 moderations cost 1 point each.
This method allows a moderator to moderate three trolls downward while sacrificing only one moderation point -- he/she could decide to raise 7 posts, or he/she could raise 6 and lower 3.