Similar solution, yes. See my comment above - a working model should be included in any patent application. And I can take your model and use it if I pay you, or I can invent my own without paying you. That was the whole idea of the patent system, wasn't it?
Software patents make the "I can invent my own" impossible. And that is where they went wrong.
The problem (or, if you prefer, great part) with this line of reasoning is that if you follow it to its logical conclusion, it strongly suggests that what you would need to submit as a "software patent" is, in fact, the source code, at least for the portion of the program that you wish to patent.
Correct.
Wasn't it that to get a patent you had to submit a working prototype or model? The same should be required for software.
Of course, we already have intellectual property protection for source code: copyright. So should there be software patents at all? Or should software patents replace copyrightable source code? Or should there be some kind of hybrid system, where you can have your source code patented, or copyrighted, but not both...?
I don't care, really. But if you claim the protection of two completely different laws with different time periods, intentions and consequences for the same thing, then there's something wrong.
history tells us that bombing and shelling cities full of your own civilians doesn't exactly instill a sense of gratitude and acceptance toward the government.
Even the most oppressive and tyrannical governments on the planet very, very rarely need to do that.
Look at tyrannies around the globe. You don't see tanks on every corner. You just need to have them, and bring them in once a decade to remind people.
Rebellions rarely have a whole city rising up in unison. They usually start small and if the government can ROFLstomp the whole thing before it has more than a hundred or so people in it - remember Waco? They probably thought the rest of the US would rally in their support, defend their freedoms and get out the guns. What makes you think your "freedom fighters" group will be different?
Actually, nations with lawfully armed populaces that are subjected to such social engineering for political desires by the ruling elites... tend to shoot the ruling elites and elect or coronate new ones.
All the high tech tanks and planes of the USA military proved useless against a determined insurgency in Vietnam. The Russians encountered the same thing in Afghanistan, as did the Israelis in their occupation of Lebanon.
I don't need a book to know that.
Now look at Vietnam, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Would you like to live there? The Vietnam war ended around the time I was born, and they still are suffering through its aftermath. Afghanistan and Lebanon will not be rebuilt for at least two generations.
If the USA government can't defeat a few thousand lightly armed insurgents in a country the size of Afghanistan, how are they going to fight a few million similarly armed U.S. citizens in a country 12x (lower 48 states) the size?
If you seriously think that lazy americans who freak out completely when 3000 people die in a terror attack would stand 10% of an Afghan war equivalent, you are seriously deluded.
Most patents on software are fundamentally wrong the way they are being issued.
A patent should be about your brilliant invention of how to do something, in detail, that nobody else could figure out. It should not be about what to do, without any details on the how.
The patent on the steam engine did not read "a machine that produces torque". Everyone could see that such a machine would be useful, the devil is in figuring out how to build it. But a lot of software (and design) patents are of the "a button that makes you do this cool thing" kind. They leave out the actual technical details, which is why they are so broad and abusable.
The ideology of civilian disarmament depends on constantly keeping people terrified of sensationalized emotional and irrational fallacies.
Nonsense. The ideology of political control depends on that, with or without guns. Just look around the world, and you see governments using this very strategy in all countries, all government types and irrespective of gun controls or not.
The only difference is that people without guns react with demonstrations and civil unrest, while people with guns react with mass shootings and conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile the government doesn't care because if it comes to it, you have your guns, but they have tanks and planes.
As I said, I buy average insurance, not the most cheap possible. Always done it like that, always been happy with it. When you have a case, they don't try to fuck you over.
But $10k is a joke. A serious fender bender is half that. If someone goes to hospital, especially in the US with its inflated health treatment prices, you're instantly above that.
And yes, 10 mio or 15 mio - almost no difference in price.
Unless they plan on making ownership of a smart phone as a mandatory condition for providing insurance, which I question the legality of, they simply can't make this obligatory.
They will make it the usual reverse way. If you give them permission to monitor your driving, they will give you a big number of percents off - about the same number that they've just raised their premiums.
So basically, you have a choice - you can pay more, or you can be monitored.
For example, a common one is $100k per person, $300k per incident coverage, my 'step up' from that which is $250k per person/$500k per incident.
You are not messing up the digits there? I have a basic insurance in my country (Germany) and the insurance sums are 100 million total, 15 million per person.
That explains a lot. If insurance coverages are so tiny in the US, of course the company backing suddenly becomes crazy important.
Because there is a difference between one and one hundred. Even very small children who can't yet count till three intuitively understand that.
The problem with spam is the sheer volume. It's a classic tragedy of the commons: If you allow one company to send UCE, you have to allow all of them, which - due to the cost being near zero - means all of them will do it, which means e-mail becomes useless.
Actually, did someone put me into a time machine back to the early 90s? Why do I even have to explain that? I thought that discussion has long been concluded. I feel like talking to someone who just went "explain me that gra-vi-ty thing, again".
a more proximate cause is Yellow Cab losing an $8 million accident liability suit by a passenger who is now paralyzed. [...] So much for the medallion cab argument that they offer superior liability coverage.
Ehem, you did notice that the first and last sentence contradict each other? If they had to pay out $8 mio. then obviously they do offer liability coverage, otherwise the cab driver and/or his insurance would have paid.
What I don't get is why that requires Minecraft. It seems counter-productive due to complexity. A good fraction of people don't have very good 3d imagination and would finding a top-down 2d world much easier to comprehend.
Yes, that's the same shit they use to teach students programming in university these days.
I admit it teaches about loops and conditions. I still think it's a stupid idea because it doesn't teach about error handling, for example, one of the most important things to learn as a programmer.
But in any case this is for teaching programming. Something that I'll argue is completely unnecessary for 99% of the population. (and yes I know that there's this idea to teach programming to everybody, I just consider it totally insane.)
Teach them to change the colors of anything in the game. Teach them hex and how to count to 16.
Isn't that a little the wrong way around, like a solution searching for a problem? 99% of the population never need the hexadecimal system in their real life, and the rest will pick it up in much easier ways. A website with a javascript colour picker would serve the same purpose.
I've checked the MinecraftEdu website after reading is has been used for 5 years already. I still don't get what it is that it teaches. Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of edutainment and consider learning through playing a fantastic thing. I just don't understand what Minecraft brings to that. It seems like a massive waste of time where teachers do some half-assed job of putting together something they think will appeal to students who then go through it, rolling their eyes all the time. You know, like most of the "do it yourself" software kits that look fantastic in the trailers where trained experts and the magic of video make it seem easy and great.
Or maybe I'm completely wrong about it. Care to enlighten me?
Millions of women would be happy if they could get out in front of a parking space and let the car handle the rest. With this feature alone, Tesla guaranteed that the wives of every rich man on the planet will ask for a Tesla as their next car.
I gave a perspective, including reasons why Uber failed in Europe. This is one of them, because many (certainly not all, but many) europeans think like that. We are more calm than americans or russians or arabs, more interested in a good life without nasty surprises, even if it means smaller chances in the lottery that makes one in every 50 million people rich.
Slashdot Mirror
This exactly. One of the very rare ACs that deserve to be modded up.
Similar solution, yes. See my comment above - a working model should be included in any patent application. And I can take your model and use it if I pay you, or I can invent my own without paying you. That was the whole idea of the patent system, wasn't it?
Software patents make the "I can invent my own" impossible. And that is where they went wrong.
The problem (or, if you prefer, great part) with this line of reasoning is that if you follow it to its logical conclusion, it strongly suggests that what you would need to submit as a "software patent" is, in fact, the source code, at least for the portion of the program that you wish to patent.
Correct.
Wasn't it that to get a patent you had to submit a working prototype or model? The same should be required for software.
Of course, we already have intellectual property protection for source code: copyright. So should there be software patents at all? Or should software patents replace copyrightable source code? Or should there be some kind of hybrid system, where you can have your source code patented, or copyrighted, but not both...?
I don't care, really. But if you claim the protection of two completely different laws with different time periods, intentions and consequences for the same thing, then there's something wrong.
You assume the military would side with a tyrannical government, which is questionable
But you assume the situation would be "US military vs. US citizen".
In reality, it would be "Police and FBI supported by military specialists are rooting out a cell of terrorists"
history tells us that bombing and shelling cities full of your own civilians doesn't exactly instill a sense of gratitude and acceptance toward the government.
Even the most oppressive and tyrannical governments on the planet very, very rarely need to do that.
Look at tyrannies around the globe. You don't see tanks on every corner. You just need to have them, and bring them in once a decade to remind people.
Rebellions rarely have a whole city rising up in unison. They usually start small and if the government can ROFLstomp the whole thing before it has more than a hundred or so people in it - remember Waco? They probably thought the rest of the US would rally in their support, defend their freedoms and get out the guns. What makes you think your "freedom fighters" group will be different?
Actually, nations with lawfully armed populaces that are subjected to such social engineering for political desires by the ruling elites... tend to shoot the ruling elites and elect or coronate new ones.
Bwuahahahahahahaha... Huahahaha.... omg.... hihihih... bwuahahhhahahaa
In which fantasy world?
All the high tech tanks and planes of the USA military proved useless against a determined insurgency in Vietnam. The Russians encountered the same thing in Afghanistan, as did the Israelis in their occupation of Lebanon.
I don't need a book to know that.
Now look at Vietnam, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Would you like to live there? The Vietnam war ended around the time I was born, and they still are suffering through its aftermath. Afghanistan and Lebanon will not be rebuilt for at least two generations.
If the USA government can't defeat a few thousand lightly armed insurgents in a country the size of Afghanistan, how are they going to fight a few million similarly armed U.S. citizens in a country 12x (lower 48 states) the size?
If you seriously think that lazy americans who freak out completely when 3000 people die in a terror attack would stand 10% of an Afghan war equivalent, you are seriously deluded.
Most patents on software are fundamentally wrong the way they are being issued.
A patent should be about your brilliant invention of how to do something, in detail, that nobody else could figure out. It should not be about what to do, without any details on the how.
The patent on the steam engine did not read "a machine that produces torque". Everyone could see that such a machine would be useful, the devil is in figuring out how to build it. But a lot of software (and design) patents are of the "a button that makes you do this cool thing" kind. They leave out the actual technical details, which is why they are so broad and abusable.
The ideology of civilian disarmament depends on constantly keeping people terrified of sensationalized emotional and irrational fallacies.
Nonsense. The ideology of political control depends on that, with or without guns. Just look around the world, and you see governments using this very strategy in all countries, all government types and irrespective of gun controls or not.
The only difference is that people without guns react with demonstrations and civil unrest, while people with guns react with mass shootings and conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile the government doesn't care because if it comes to it, you have your guns, but they have tanks and planes.
Because nobody ever died from a 9mm shot.
As I said, I buy average insurance, not the most cheap possible. Always done it like that, always been happy with it. When you have a case, they don't try to fuck you over.
But $10k is a joke. A serious fender bender is half that. If someone goes to hospital, especially in the US with its inflated health treatment prices, you're instantly above that.
And yes, 10 mio or 15 mio - almost no difference in price.
Unless they plan on making ownership of a smart phone as a mandatory condition for providing insurance, which I question the legality of, they simply can't make this obligatory.
They will make it the usual reverse way. If you give them permission to monitor your driving, they will give you a big number of percents off - about the same number that they've just raised their premiums.
So basically, you have a choice - you can pay more, or you can be monitored.
For example, a common one is $100k per person, $300k per incident coverage, my 'step up' from that which is $250k per person/$500k per incident.
You are not messing up the digits there? I have a basic insurance in my country (Germany) and the insurance sums are 100 million total, 15 million per person.
That explains a lot. If insurance coverages are so tiny in the US, of course the company backing suddenly becomes crazy important.
I don't give a shit about what some asshole in marketing believes is the free speech of his company.
Of course the solution is simple: Companies shouldn't have free speech. Free speech should be for people.
Because there is a difference between one and one hundred. Even very small children who can't yet count till three intuitively understand that.
The problem with spam is the sheer volume. It's a classic tragedy of the commons: If you allow one company to send UCE, you have to allow all of them, which - due to the cost being near zero - means all of them will do it, which means e-mail becomes useless.
Actually, did someone put me into a time machine back to the early 90s? Why do I even have to explain that? I thought that discussion has long been concluded. I feel like talking to someone who just went "explain me that gra-vi-ty thing, again".
a more proximate cause is Yellow Cab losing an $8 million accident liability suit by a passenger who is now paralyzed. [...] So much for the medallion cab argument that they offer superior liability coverage.
Ehem, you did notice that the first and last sentence contradict each other? If they had to pay out $8 mio. then obviously they do offer liability coverage, otherwise the cab driver and/or his insurance would have paid.
There a non-bad ads?
True, familiarity provides a benefit here.
I get that.
What I don't get is why that requires Minecraft. It seems counter-productive due to complexity. A good fraction of people don't have very good 3d imagination and would finding a top-down 2d world much easier to comprehend.
Yes, that's the same shit they use to teach students programming in university these days.
I admit it teaches about loops and conditions.
I still think it's a stupid idea because it doesn't teach about error handling, for example, one of the most important things to learn as a programmer.
But in any case this is for teaching programming. Something that I'll argue is completely unnecessary for 99% of the population. (and yes I know that there's this idea to teach programming to everybody, I just consider it totally insane.)
Teach them to change the colors of anything in the game. Teach them hex and how to count to 16.
Isn't that a little the wrong way around, like a solution searching for a problem? 99% of the population never need the hexadecimal system in their real life, and the rest will pick it up in much easier ways. A website with a javascript colour picker would serve the same purpose.
So if pretty much every manufacturer is doing this, how is this not equal to a kind of mass civic protest?
Because corporations are not citizens, no matter how much the legal system screws up the definitions.
I've checked the MinecraftEdu website after reading is has been used for 5 years already. I still don't get what it is that it teaches. Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of edutainment and consider learning through playing a fantastic thing. I just don't understand what Minecraft brings to that. It seems like a massive waste of time where teachers do some half-assed job of putting together something they think will appeal to students who then go through it, rolling their eyes all the time. You know, like most of the "do it yourself" software kits that look fantastic in the trailers where trained experts and the magic of video make it seem easy and great.
Or maybe I'm completely wrong about it. Care to enlighten me?
Millions of women would be happy if they could get out in front of a parking space and let the car handle the rest. With this feature alone, Tesla guaranteed that the wives of every rich man on the planet will ask for a Tesla as their next car.
I gave a perspective, including reasons why Uber failed in Europe. This is one of them, because many (certainly not all, but many) europeans think like that. We are more calm than americans or russians or arabs, more interested in a good life without nasty surprises, even if it means smaller chances in the lottery that makes one in every 50 million people rich.