Hey, I'm going to heaven. I would disgust me to have embryo's walking around. Or are embryos allowed to develop further? If I strike a conversation with attractive soul: "Hey, how was your life?", will that be the same faux pas as I make here on earth?
How much resemblance is there between MySQL and Postgresql? In other words, would porting a web app be a time-consuming and complicated matter or well doable?
Publishing is a fine way to create prior art, effectively inhibiting any further patents for that very idea. However, make sure you add as much detail as possible to give a patent attorney as little leeway as possible.
If you blog it, the content may get lost. Is it possible for you to (crudely) implement your ideas and put that code on sourceforge or some other repository, together with a description. In the comments of the code you can elaborate on things not implemented. In such a repository, the ideas may be longer lived, and more people may see it (and if necessary bring it to the attention of a patent office).
That means that no patient is going to be cured by the drug. Getting a drug to pass all the tests is so expensive, that no drug company is going to do that without patent protection for the drug. It is only then that they can earn their money back (and make a profit) .
Only if the government is going to step in and provide the funds does it give patients a chance.
No, it is bad for their business. Surrounded by a dozen of them, you can negotiate a bargain while being carried away to the hospital just before you lose consciousness. Their profit margins will drop.
No, you're not paying for the knowledge and the ideas. Newton, Einstein, Feynman, or any of the relatively anonymous scientists or even volunteers (astronomy and biology owe a lot to them) didn't get a dime, and they put a lot of hard thinking in it. Your university money goes to the professor's salary and is used for various services. You don't pay for the ideas, you pay for the presentation of the ideas.
You should do it, because that Joe Schmuckatelli would have to do all the programming legwork too. I've seen Firefox, it would cost me a fortune to pay my programmer to make a similar program, and it would take a lot of time. While I could use a better browser, copying software ideas is not trivial. The actual programming work is the bottleneck. So, if you forge ahead and put your program on the market, Joe will have a hard time keeping up even to get close to you. If you, in the mean time, keep innovating, he'll always be behind and you'll make a fortune without having a patent. But I'm sure of one thing: If you bring your program to the market, you'd sleep a lot better if you knew nobody was going to sue you because of one little detail in your program (or by various people over 10 or 50 little details in your program, because a program consists of thousands of little details). And, undoubtedly, you couldn't write your program without the benefit you got from learning from others by seeing what they created. And I doubt that you ever wrote Andy Hertzfeld, Jef Raskin, etc. etc. a cheque. You may not even know when programming that you're actually using their ideas.
The European patent office grants patents for software illegally, after years of wriggling and twisting by one (Dutch) member of the Board of Appeal, who stepwise expanded the scope of what was deemed patentable. The current chaos in the different European countries on how this should be dealt with is in no small part due to this, as the grant clearly goes much further than the law (your reference was written by a patent attorney of Philips who did an excellent job of presenting a biased story). Even the British felt compelled to not ignore the EPO in this completely, recently. That doesn't bode well for innovation, as companies will develop software even if they don't have software protection for it (I have software developed and I know I do).
Mind you, there is nothing wrong with inventions where software is used to control stuff, but the inventive step must not reside in the software, otherwise you're granting patents for software despite Art. 52(2) EPC.
Bert Who thinks that the halfway house is in practice a 3/4 way house.
I'm a patent attorney and I think software patents are a bad idea, for many reasons. One is that coming up with an idea is easy in software, it is the implementing that takes the time and money. I have software developed for my own company. I think up what I want (and I'm not a software engineer, just a user), and tell the programmer. He tells me one of two things: That is easy (meaning that there are tools called APIs available. It is like programmers never having to write a lot of code to display a window on your screen. Just one of two lines, and everything including the close button etc. is there) or it is going to cost me (the APIs aren't there). He never tells me that it is impossible or that he has to do an invention for it. So, it is not the ideas that is the bottleneck for the progress of , but just the plain labour. Like you can sketch your ideal house in 5 minutes, and it takes years to build if you could afford to pay the people to do that for you. (With software, the cost is not in the raw materials, it is just man-hours). When I use my program, I use the ideas of thousands of people (who came up with the way the disk is formatted, how a character is displayed on a screen, and a gazillion other details). I don't want progress to halt because a programmer has to do a search in the patent literature whether someone else came up with such an idea earlier. Or worse, not for progress to halt but that I'm not allowed to use my own program because of some detail I'm not even interested in (the way the disk is formatted, for example). The good thing about no software patents is that companies are free to innovate. Yes, investors like it when a company has patents, but they would also like it if they knew 100% certain that the company is not going to be sued over a software patent.
I want to discuss another argument with you. You're talking about spending lots of money at the university. What you learn there is knowledge shared by others, that often took them years to figure out. You are not paying those people. You're just paying for the professor and the university building and facilities. If you had to pay for the KNOWLEDGE/IDEAS, you'd quit the university in a week or so, completely broke.
"Here's what the web site suggests for changing patent law. >> Patents should be allowed for: * 1) devices with mechanical components * 2) physical compounds that can be weighed on a scale. Patents should never be awarded to: * 1) Ideas * 2) processes, recipes, software programs This prohibits far more than software patents - some types of medical treatments, manufacturing processes, and so on. That might be a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it."
That is what is a quote of someone on that website, it is not necessarily what ESP proposes. The quote you give worried me, because it would seriously undermine any effect that ESP's actions may have.
Bert Patent attorney who is against software patents
From the previous discussion on this subject on Slashdot:
"Hmm -- that's a somewhat different scenario. See, I've spent the last five years at a startup (also in Austin) making highly specialized software that does some really darned nifty things within our vertical -- and among our company's assets are some patents. They certainly make it easier for us to get investment money -- so why do I think they're a bad idea?"
I think it would also have been easier for you to get investment money if there were no software patents so your investors would know you didn't infringe.
Bert (Patent agent who thinks software shouldn't be patentable)
Thanks for your reply. Allow me to add a few thoughts.
As to the max charges, let met take the opportunity to add something I forgot to mention. Things must have been settled within a year (the money will be taxed if it hasn't been settled). And the invalidity amount spreads over years (no lump sum). People shouldn't have to pay with pain for waiting for some money. It would also make it much easier to get medical mistakes out in the open (and not covered up), which would help prevention of further cases, much like in the airline industry where every crash investigation may help to prevent the next crash.
While insurance companies are pleased to sell you any insurance, people should understand that you should only insure for things that would devastate your life. By way of example, a computer or window insurance is ridiculous. You buy a new computer if the other one gets stolen/dies. You can pay for the broken window. You will not be able to pay for heart surgery, however. So, that is something worth to be insured for. If you're healthy, you paid money without getting anything in return. But hey, you wouldn't want to switch with the guy who got the heart failure, right? So, it is a kind of win-win situation. And it only works if everyone pays. I'm convinced that a society is better of with some basic health, but there will always be individuals not willing to pay. Laws help here.
Here (NL), we have a system where you have a basic insurance (so, not everything is covered, but it isn't very expensive either). Companies are not allowed to refuse you, so everyone is guaranteed of basic insurance. If you want more insurance, you can get that (although a company may refuse that, or charge you a lot for it).
So, I think we're basically on the same leaf, except that I live in a country where we have the system, and you don't.
Bert As to the bureaucratic issue. It may be better to have prescribed (web) forms/XML stuff. Some competition is not a bad thing.
Knowing who is at risk and who's not doesn't make the health care cost for treatment go up. It is not that suddenly more people get heart attacks if you know who is at risk and who is not.
Instead of making the cost go up, it could make the cost go down (insurers would spend some money on preventive medicine like statins and save a bundle compared to the expense if the disease actually develops). This remains true even if you take the cost of the actual tests in account, because only those tests would be performed for which the cost of testing results in a net surplus.
All that needs to be done is legislation that requires any insurance company to accept anyone, and that the rates for individuals may not differ more than by a factor of 3. More legislation to help drive the cost down: Set a max to the amount of money in case a person dies because of a medical mistake at $100,000 and for invalidity at $500,000. Of course, expect to lose a couple of more quarters for ambulance chasers turned into beggars.
Oh, and there are health insurance organisations without profit motive (like Unive in the Netherlands).
Unless their patent application is kept confidential by the government for reasons of national security, it will be published within 18 months. You'll be able to learn how the trick works from it (if you're an expert in the field and you cannot make it work, no patent should be granted). You're not allowed to exploit that commercially, of course, but at least you can have fun and pull a few pranks with it. You could claim you're psychic.
I'm wondering how you ever could tune in to the correct conversation, with thousands of mobile phones transmitting at the same time.
I just invented the oxygen bomb. OK, it doesn't work on all planets, but that is OK. After all, earth is the peace planet, and we bring peace wherever there are hydrocarbons.
But on the bright side, these economists will probably be very rich because every time they drive through a red traffic light and don't get a fine, they earn $100.
And not only that, but also in the telecom and beer market huge fines have been given.
Back to Siemaens. This happened even though Neelie Kroes is befriended with the CEO of Siemens.
Bert Who would like to think that the people who think that the investigation of MS is anti-americanism are just jealous that in the EU at least an attempt at justice is made, but who knows better and has to blame
these objecting muslims had some faith in their god. If Yagolah is almighty, he will punish the picture-showers to the extent they deserve. If Yagolah doesn't exist, there is no reason to object to the pictures, is there?
"Archimedes...., we might understand why he started running naked on the street when he finally got the idea."
And that gave another Greek watching him a flash of inspiration that there was a market for, eh, male enhancement products, if only he could bring those to the attention of many men. It took a couple of thousand of years, but of hard work, but now this process has become highly efficient.
Bert Who wonders whether that proves or disproves the thesis.
Sorry, but your post will not help. In my country we have a newspaper called the Telegraph. If people have brains, they avoid it. If they don't have brains, they don't have the brains to understand any explanation why they should avoid it. Catch 22, I believe.
No reference either, but varying the mutation rate is very easy. Cells have a correction facility when copying DNA, enzymes that proof-read the copied DNA. All a cell has to do is to suppress the expression of these proof-read enzymes and the mutation rate goes up (because errors are no longer corrected). If it does so in response to physical stress (lack of ATP or something), then you have a nice survival mechanism.
"Those kinds are bad not because they believe in some Skydaddy, but because they actively refuse to acknowledge scientific fact."
Well, however much refusal of scientific facts is not my cup of tea, I could even live with THAT, but what I find utterly unacceptable is that they impose their beliefs on other people and making their lives (including private life such as sex life) miserable (gays, women, blacks etc.).
"If 2 gigs are the most it can handle, that could be a problem as well."
I just took a look at a E2600 Sony TZ21. It comes with 2 GB as well. It runs Vista Business on 1.2 GHz; would that qualify for the Guiness Book of records?. The 64 GB solid state thing may scream, if SSD is indeed much faster than a HD, left alone a 4200 tpm HD like in the cheap MacBook Air (or the Sony, for that matter).
The lack of the video-port will not make it the favourite of video-enthousiasts, but the pro world is larger than that.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I'm going to heaven. I would disgust me to have embryo's walking around. Or are embryos allowed to develop further? If I strike a conversation with attractive soul: "Hey, how was your life?", will that be the same faux pas as I make here on earth?
Bert
Heaven is a stupid concept, For a clearer understanding, go here: http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank
How much resemblance is there between MySQL and Postgresql? In other words, would porting a web app be a time-consuming and complicated matter or well doable?
Bert
Publishing is a fine way to create prior art, effectively inhibiting any further patents for that very idea. However, make sure you add as much detail as possible to give a patent attorney as little leeway as possible.
If you blog it, the content may get lost. Is it possible for you to (crudely) implement your ideas and put that code on sourceforge or some other repository, together with a description. In the comments of the code you can elaborate on things not implemented. In such a repository, the ideas may be longer lived, and more people may see it (and if necessary bring it to the attention of a patent office).
Bert
Patent agent
I did see a list of music used in a US holiday camp south of Florida to entertain the people there, recently.
I found this URL using my favourite friendly non-evil search engine.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2008/03/torture-playlist.html
Bert
"On top of all the drug is not patent encumbered"
That means that no patient is going to be cured by the drug. Getting a drug to pass all the tests is so expensive, that no drug company is going to do that without patent protection for the drug. It is only then that they can earn their money back (and make a profit) .
Only if the government is going to step in and provide the funds does it give patients a chance.
Bert
No, it is bad for their business. Surrounded by a dozen of them, you can negotiate a bargain while being carried away to the hospital just before you lose consciousness. Their profit margins will drop.
Bert
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/18/dalek_fcs_uav_ducted_fan_war_robot/
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9757072-7.html
But perhaps that's better than being poisoned by chinese robots.
Bert
Thanks for the reply.
No, you're not paying for the knowledge and the ideas. Newton, Einstein, Feynman, or any of the relatively anonymous scientists or even volunteers (astronomy and biology owe a lot to them) didn't get a dime, and they put a lot of hard thinking in it. Your university money goes to the professor's salary and is used for various services. You don't pay for the ideas, you pay for the presentation of the ideas.
You should do it, because that Joe Schmuckatelli would have to do all the programming legwork too. I've seen Firefox, it would cost me a fortune to pay my programmer to make a similar program, and it would take a lot of time. While I could use a better browser, copying software ideas is not trivial. The actual programming work is the bottleneck. So, if you forge ahead and put your program on the market, Joe will have a hard time keeping up even to get close to you. If you, in the mean time, keep innovating, he'll always be behind and you'll make a fortune without having a patent. But I'm sure of one thing: If you bring your program to the market, you'd sleep a lot better if you knew nobody was going to sue you because of one little detail in your program (or by various people over 10 or 50 little details in your program, because a program consists of thousands of little details). And, undoubtedly, you couldn't write your program without the benefit you got from learning from others by seeing what they created. And I doubt that you ever wrote Andy Hertzfeld, Jef Raskin, etc. etc. a cheque. You may not even know when programming that you're actually using their ideas.
Bert
The European patent office grants patents for software illegally, after years of wriggling and twisting by one (Dutch) member of the Board of Appeal, who stepwise expanded the scope of what was deemed patentable. The current chaos in the different European countries on how this should be dealt with is in no small part due to this, as the grant clearly goes much further than the law (your reference was written by a patent attorney of Philips who did an excellent job of presenting a biased story). Even the British felt compelled to not ignore the EPO in this completely, recently. That doesn't bode well for innovation, as companies will develop software even if they don't have software protection for it (I have software developed and I know I do).
Mind you, there is nothing wrong with inventions where software is used to control stuff, but the inventive step must not reside in the software, otherwise you're granting patents for software despite Art. 52(2) EPC.
Bert
Who thinks that the halfway house is in practice a 3/4 way house.
I'm a patent attorney and I think software patents are a bad idea, for many reasons. One is that coming up with an idea is easy in software, it is the implementing that takes the time and money. I have software developed for my own company. I think up what I want (and I'm not a software engineer, just a user), and tell the programmer. He tells me one of two things: That is easy (meaning that there are tools called APIs available. It is like programmers never having to write a lot of code to display a window on your screen. Just one of two lines, and everything including the close button etc. is there) or it is going to cost me (the APIs aren't there). He never tells me that it is impossible or that he has to do an invention for it. So, it is not the ideas that is the bottleneck for the progress of , but just the plain labour. Like you can sketch your ideal house in 5 minutes, and it takes years to build if you could afford to pay the people to do that for you. (With software, the cost is not in the raw materials, it is just man-hours). When I use my program, I use the ideas of thousands of people (who came up with the way the disk is formatted, how a character is displayed on a screen, and a gazillion other details). I don't want progress to halt because a programmer has to do a search in the patent literature whether someone else came up with such an idea earlier. Or worse, not for progress to halt but that I'm not allowed to use my own program because of some detail I'm not even interested in (the way the disk is formatted, for example). The good thing about no software patents is that companies are free to innovate. Yes, investors like it when a company has patents, but they would also like it if they knew 100% certain that the company is not going to be sued over a software patent.
I want to discuss another argument with you. You're talking about spending lots of money at the university. What you learn there is knowledge shared by others, that often took them years to figure out. You are not paying those people. You're just paying for the professor and the university building and facilities. If you had to pay for the KNOWLEDGE/IDEAS, you'd quit the university in a week or so, completely broke.
Bert
"Here's what the web site suggests for changing patent law.
>> Patents should be allowed for: * 1) devices with mechanical components * 2) physical compounds that can be weighed on a scale. Patents should never be awarded to: * 1) Ideas * 2) processes, recipes, software programs
This prohibits far more than software patents - some types of medical treatments, manufacturing processes, and so on. That might be a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it."
That is what is a quote of someone on that website, it is not necessarily what ESP proposes. The quote you give worried me, because it would seriously undermine any effect that ESP's actions may have.
Bert
Patent attorney who is against software patents
From the previous discussion on this subject on Slashdot:
"Hmm -- that's a somewhat different scenario. See, I've spent the last five years at a startup (also in Austin) making highly specialized software that does some really darned nifty things within our vertical -- and among our company's assets are some patents. They certainly make it easier for us to get investment money -- so why do I think they're a bad idea?"
I think it would also have been easier for you to get investment money if there were no software patents so your investors would know you didn't infringe.
Bert
(Patent agent who thinks software shouldn't be patentable)
Thanks for your reply. Allow me to add a few thoughts.
As to the max charges, let met take the opportunity to add something I forgot to mention. Things must have been settled within a year (the money will be taxed if it hasn't been settled). And the invalidity amount spreads over years (no lump sum). People shouldn't have to pay with pain for waiting for some money. It would also make it much easier to get medical mistakes out in the open (and not covered up), which would help prevention of further cases, much like in the airline industry where every crash investigation may help to prevent the next crash.
While insurance companies are pleased to sell you any insurance, people should understand that you should only insure for things that would devastate your life. By way of example, a computer or window insurance is ridiculous. You buy a new computer if the other one gets stolen/dies. You can pay for the broken window. You will not be able to pay for heart surgery, however. So, that is something worth to be insured for. If you're healthy, you paid money without getting anything in return. But hey, you wouldn't want to switch with the guy who got the heart failure, right? So, it is a kind of win-win situation. And it only works if everyone pays. I'm convinced that a society is better of with some basic health, but there will always be individuals not willing to pay. Laws help here.
Here (NL), we have a system where you have a basic insurance (so, not everything is covered, but it isn't very expensive either). Companies are not allowed to refuse you, so everyone is guaranteed of basic insurance. If you want more insurance, you can get that (although a company may refuse that, or charge you a lot for it).
So, I think we're basically on the same leaf, except that I live in a country where we have the system, and you don't.
Bert
As to the bureaucratic issue. It may be better to have prescribed (web) forms/XML stuff. Some competition is not a bad thing.
Knowing who is at risk and who's not doesn't make the health care cost for treatment go up. It is not that suddenly more people get heart attacks if you know who is at risk and who is not.
Instead of making the cost go up, it could make the cost go down (insurers would spend some money on preventive medicine like statins and save a bundle compared to the expense if the disease actually develops). This remains true even if you take the cost of the actual tests in account, because only those tests would be performed for which the cost of testing results in a net surplus.
All that needs to be done is legislation that requires any insurance company to accept anyone, and that the rates for individuals may not differ more than by a factor of 3. More legislation to help drive the cost down: Set a max to the amount of money in case a person dies because of a medical mistake at $100,000 and for invalidity at $500,000. Of course, expect to lose a couple of more quarters for ambulance chasers turned into beggars.
Oh, and there are health insurance organisations without profit motive (like Unive in the Netherlands).
Bert
Unless their patent application is kept confidential by the government for reasons of national security, it will be published within 18 months. You'll be able to learn how the trick works from it (if you're an expert in the field and you cannot make it work, no patent should be granted). You're not allowed to exploit that commercially, of course, but at least you can have fun and pull a few pranks with it. You could claim you're psychic.
I'm wondering how you ever could tune in to the correct conversation, with thousands of mobile phones transmitting at the same time.
Bert
I just invented the oxygen bomb. OK, it doesn't work on all planets, but that is OK. After all, earth is the peace planet, and we bring peace wherever there are hydrocarbons.
Bert
But on the bright side, these economists will probably be very rich because every time they drive through a red traffic light and don't get a fine, they earn $100.
Bert
And not only that, but also in the telecom and beer market huge fines have been given.
Back to Siemaens. This happened even though Neelie Kroes is befriended with the CEO of Siemens.
Bert
Who would like to think that the people who think that the investigation of MS is anti-americanism are just jealous that in the EU at least an attempt at justice is made, but who knows better and has to blame
these objecting muslims had some faith in their god. If Yagolah is almighty, he will punish the picture-showers to the extent they deserve. If Yagolah doesn't exist, there is no reason to object to the pictures, is there?
Bert
"Archimedes ...., we might understand why he started running naked on the street when he finally got the idea."
And that gave another Greek watching him a flash of inspiration that there was a market for, eh, male enhancement products, if only he could bring those to the attention of many men. It took a couple of thousand of years, but of hard work, but now this process has become highly efficient.
Bert
Who wonders whether that proves or disproves the thesis.
Sorry, but your post will not help. In my country we have a newspaper called the Telegraph. If people have brains, they avoid it. If they don't have brains, they don't have the brains to understand any explanation why they should avoid it. Catch 22, I believe.
Bert
No reference either, but varying the mutation rate is very easy. Cells have a correction facility when copying DNA, enzymes that proof-read the copied DNA. All a cell has to do is to suppress the expression of these proof-read enzymes and the mutation rate goes up (because errors are no longer corrected). If it does so in response to physical stress (lack of ATP or something), then you have a nice survival mechanism.
Bert
"Those kinds are bad not because they believe in some Skydaddy, but because they actively refuse to acknowledge scientific fact."
Well, however much refusal of scientific facts is not my cup of tea, I could even live with THAT, but what I find utterly unacceptable is that they impose their beliefs on other people and making their lives (including private life such as sex life) miserable (gays, women, blacks etc.).
Bert
"If 2 gigs are the most it can handle, that could be a problem as well."
I just took a look at a E2600 Sony TZ21. It comes with 2 GB as well. It runs Vista Business on 1.2 GHz; would that qualify for the Guiness Book of records?. The 64 GB solid state thing may scream, if SSD is indeed much faster than a HD, left alone a 4200 tpm HD like in the cheap MacBook Air (or the Sony, for that matter).
The lack of the video-port will not make it the favourite of video-enthousiasts, but the pro world is larger than that.
Bert
No need to complain. A dollar ain't worth much these days, so for Mail and Notes it is a steal, actually.
Bert