The only reason corn is being used for the ethanol production is because of the corn-based agricultural subsidies being pushed by the U.S. government. If a lot of those highly-targeted laws were relaxed (or eliminated), farmers would figure out the most cost-effective way of making ethanol/biofuels in no time.
How about compulsory licensing after a certain amount of time without a product on the shelve and even longer time if you are selling something.
Seems like a tweak of the existing system...
Here's a completely different setup that I've been thinking of (please give feedback):
Limit the total # of valid patents to some reasonably small number. The idea is to have a database of valid patents small enough so that people can easily search it to make sure they aren't violating anything, and also to limit the probability that doing little things is going to violate some tiny little patent somewhere.
As an alternative, perhaps break down the patent "pools" by industry (have a small # of valid patents per industry).
As they currently do, valid patents will become invalid either when they expire, or be found obvious or have prior art.
As valid patents expire or are invalidated, their "slot" will become open to be filled by a new valid patent.
Every year, anyone can file a patent application. In the process of filing the patent application, they are giving up ownership of that idea & putting it up for potential "purchase" by a bidder.
Each year, there is a patent "auction" on all of the patent applications which have been submitted that year. Any bidder can put in their bid to try and "own" a patent on any of the ideas that have been submitted as patent applications.
Since any given patent can be invalided due to obviousness or prior art, it is in the bidder's interest to figure out exactly how much any given patent application is worth before they bid on it.
Between the limited # of patent slots available, and the competition between bidders to own the "best" ideas, this should weed out all of the really stupid patents that currently get granted. In addition, you don't need any patent examiners for this step (since the bidders should be doing all the work).
(You will probably still need patent examiners to rule on obviousness or prior art claims.)
Whichever set of patents "win" (i.e., become valid patents), all of the money that the bidder paid to own that patent will go to the person who submitted the patent. If the idea was considered really valuable by the bidder, this could be an immense jackpot for the patent idea submitter.
My basic goal for this system was to use market-forces to figure out how valuable (in a financial sense) a patent idea REALLY was, and to make sure small innovators got potentially big payoffs while the patent ideas were delivered into the hands of organizations that had enough resources to immediately use those patent ideas.
I've got more details & rationale, but I figured this description was plenty for a discussion:-)
Considering the difference in power (both financial & legal) between a large company & a single individual, a "job" is hardly going to be the shining light that motivates a lot of small innovators. If, as a society, it is decided that it would be a good thing to encourage innovation, then you've got to think about what ways might be more effective than just leaving it up to individuals.
The small inventor gets absolutely nothing if he 'locks up' the idea and nobody builds it. The incentive is clearly there for him to see the invention realized.
The problem is, the small inventor may have an unrealistic expectation of what it's going to take for him to bring the idea to full fruit. In the meantime, someone with more resources could implement the idea very quickly, and make it available for society to use.
Of course, patent trolls have no intention of building anything - they just want to extort as much money as possible without bringing any real value to society.
But requiring the inventor to build the invention breaks all sorts of very productive business models.
I'm not sure this is relevant to my response - are you perhaps responding to someone else's message?
The patent officers are pretty much immune from any such lawsuits, as long as they don't get caught taking bribes. They can get overridden through the appeals process, but the only reason they'll get fired is if they don't meet their "patent-granted" quotas.
Actually, from a "societal-good" viewpoint, it is actually bad to allow a "small inventor" (or a patent troll) to lock up an idea & prevent anyone from using it, when a larger entity would have the resources to easily take that idea and make it available for the rest of society to use.
As a society, there needs to be a way to reward the "small" inventor/innovators for their ingenuity, without preventing the exploitation of those ideas by the rest of the society.
I wonder how hard it would be to create little mini-factories that attracted all those mosquitoes & turned them into fertilizer? Reduce the mosquito population & find some way to get nutrients back into the soil at the same time...
The mosquitoes are only carriers in this scenario, so unless being a carrier causes some sort of significant evolutionary disadvantage, there is no particular selection pressure to cause an "immune" mosquito to crowd out the other mosquitoes.
Maybe there should be some genetic engineering to make humans immune to Denque Fever:-)
If they're so incompetent or unwilling to spend money to protect their control systems from something as stupid as an Internet-based attack, then they should be liable for ALL damages that occur to their customers.
This is definitely one situation where passing new laws to try and catch/punish the culprits is going to do diddly-squat, so they'll have to expend resources necessary to make a defense so solid that the matter becomes irrelevant.
The ruler doesn't exactly need to be at the top of the pins - it can be located where the pins penetrate the fabric. I suppose the place where my analogy breaks down is that the ruler is a "magic ruler" since it is made out of light, which behaves differently when crossing "stretched" space-time than if we were using a ruler made out of matter (which would be the equivalent of trying to use the fabric to measure itself).
The "self-respecting" scientists anticipate how the movement & change in a space-time curve affect the relationships between the objects which are embedded in that space time, much like you would be able to measure distances between a bunch of pins stuck in a fabric while the fabric is twisted & stretched, even if your ruler was forced to follow all the dips & crannies of the fabric between the pins.
If their measurements don't come close to what they were expecting from their theories, then that demonstrates a problem with either their measurements or the theory.
If I'm paying $12 for a 2 hour space movie, there had better be some goddamn swoosh & rocket sounds when those spaceships go by! How entertaining is it going to be to see a space fight & not hear a damn thing except your own breathing?
Don't try and mix corrupt implementation when you're talking about the rationale behind a legal philosophy. My "implication" was intended to be that laws which cannot be justified for the "good of society" do not have a legitimate rationale for their existence. This does not mean, of course, that in the real world that such laws won't get passed, but it does provide a starting point for arguing against their continued existence.
I'm assuming you're referring to my post rather than the post I was responding to (which seems to be the reference of most of my other responders).
To be frank, your question doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Why would a society make laws which apply to its members if the laws aren't going to be good for the society? Even laws which supposedly restrain what kinds of actions the society can do to its individual members (i.e., statements of individual rights) can find justification because helping individual rights can be good for the society as whole in the long run.
Bullshit. Copying is not stealing. Copying is _copying_. If you're arguing otherwise, you're arguing from incorrect axioms & any conclusion you reach is pointless.
There's a reason why "Intellectual Property" laws have a whole separate framework of legislation that sets them apart from basic criminal legislation like theft of physical property, and that reason isn't because the legislators thought it would be fun to write the same sorts of laws twice. It's because legislators have to treat the concept of IP protection with a legal rationale which is completely separate from the idea of theft of physical property.
If you want to argue that IP protection is a good thing, then to make any sort of logical headway you're going to have to show (either through logic or empirical evidence) that IP protection provides some sort of net good to the general society. In addition, the issue is so emotionally charged that the argument that "it is obvious" isn't going to fly: you're going to have to provide references to either peer-reviewed economic studies that show a net benefit to society via IP protective-type mechanisms, or references to case studies of comparable societies with and without IP protective-type laws, where an analysis has been done on the relative pros & cons between each society.
There should be very few things that the government does which can't be revealed to the public. If there are a lot of such things, that should be a warning indication to the society that it is no longer possible for the society to determine whether the government is operating in their best interests anymore.
I was thinking of the upside-down glasses as well. There are a few other similar stories:
1. a journalist (for Wired I think) who wore a belt (made out of blocks) which always vibrated in the northern direction (compass). The journalist described it after awhile as having a supernatural sense of direction, and how it was really difficult to adjust after stopping using the belt.
2. Some people have tried to surgically implanting small powerful magnets into their fingertips (ouch!). Once things heal over & they get used to the magnets, they can actually feel the "shape" of magnetic fields (they can tell where the motors are located in a washing machine for instance).
3. There was some research on hooking a camera to an array of pins covering a blind person's back, where the picture from the camera was poked into their back. The blind folks could get a crude form of vision this way, enough so they could walk around with using their sticks.
I think there are a number of other interesting stories like that, but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. I'm firmly of the opinion that, as long as the additional sensory data has some sort of coherency & is hooked into the body's normal sense-gathering mechanisms, the brain will eventually figure out how to adapt it to the brain's own "model" of the person's body & environment.
There are some questions, however, about how much additional stress might be placed on the brain to process the additional data, and how that might affect the long-term functioning of the brain.
Faith is fine - as long as it doesn't directly contradict physical observation. At that point, you're into serious irrational denial of reality, and it is quite proper for people who recognize this to question your competency.
Even adult brains have quite a bit of flexibility when exposed to additional or replaced sensory information. It might take some training, but there's no fundamental biological reason why adding artificial sensors to our own biological senses couldn't be handled by the brain.
With the electronic counting systems that people are using, there is no way for "scrutineers" to realize that something funny is going on. About the only method left is checking whether exit polls are "close enough" to the voting results, and some people have gone out of their way to try and cast doubt on whether exit polls are reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason corn is being used for the ethanol production is because of the corn-based agricultural subsidies being pushed by the U.S. government. If a lot of those highly-targeted laws were relaxed (or eliminated), farmers would figure out the most cost-effective way of making ethanol/biofuels in no time.
Seems like a tweak of the existing system...
Here's a completely different setup that I've been thinking of (please give feedback):
Limit the total # of valid patents to some reasonably small number. The idea is to have a database of valid patents small enough so that people can easily search it to make sure they aren't violating anything, and also to limit the probability that doing little things is going to violate some tiny little patent somewhere.
As an alternative, perhaps break down the patent "pools" by industry (have a small # of valid patents per industry).
As they currently do, valid patents will become invalid either when they expire, or be found obvious or have prior art.
As valid patents expire or are invalidated, their "slot" will become open to be filled by a new valid patent.
Every year, anyone can file a patent application. In the process of filing the patent application, they are giving up ownership of that idea & putting it up for potential "purchase" by a bidder.
Each year, there is a patent "auction" on all of the patent applications which have been submitted that year. Any bidder can put in their bid to try and "own" a patent on any of the ideas that have been submitted as patent applications.
Since any given patent can be invalided due to obviousness or prior art, it is in the bidder's interest to figure out exactly how much any given patent application is worth before they bid on it.
Between the limited # of patent slots available, and the competition between bidders to own the "best" ideas, this should weed out all of the really stupid patents that currently get granted. In addition, you don't need any patent examiners for this step (since the bidders should be doing all the work).
(You will probably still need patent examiners to rule on obviousness or prior art claims.)
Whichever set of patents "win" (i.e., become valid patents), all of the money that the bidder paid to own that patent will go to the person who submitted the patent. If the idea was considered really valuable by the bidder, this could be an immense jackpot for the patent idea submitter.
My basic goal for this system was to use market-forces to figure out how valuable (in a financial sense) a patent idea REALLY was, and to make sure small innovators got potentially big payoffs while the patent ideas were delivered into the hands of organizations that had enough resources to immediately use those patent ideas.
I've got more details & rationale, but I figured this description was plenty for a discussion :-)
Considering the difference in power (both financial & legal) between a large company & a single individual, a "job" is hardly going to be the shining light that motivates a lot of small innovators. If, as a society, it is decided that it would be a good thing to encourage innovation, then you've got to think about what ways might be more effective than just leaving it up to individuals.
The problem is, the small inventor may have an unrealistic expectation of what it's going to take for him to bring the idea to full fruit. In the meantime, someone with more resources could implement the idea very quickly, and make it available for society to use.
Of course, patent trolls have no intention of building anything - they just want to extort as much money as possible without bringing any real value to society.
I'm not sure this is relevant to my response - are you perhaps responding to someone else's message?
According to the people who DO like the outcome of the election, yes.
The patent officers are pretty much immune from any such lawsuits, as long as they don't get caught taking bribes. They can get overridden through the appeals process, but the only reason they'll get fired is if they don't meet their "patent-granted" quotas.
Actually, from a "societal-good" viewpoint, it is actually bad to allow a "small inventor" (or a patent troll) to lock up an idea & prevent anyone from using it, when a larger entity would have the resources to easily take that idea and make it available for the rest of society to use.
As a society, there needs to be a way to reward the "small" inventor/innovators for their ingenuity, without preventing the exploitation of those ideas by the rest of the society.
I wonder how hard it would be to create little mini-factories that attracted all those mosquitoes & turned them into fertilizer? Reduce the mosquito population & find some way to get nutrients back into the soil at the same time...
Some species ARE more important to the ecosystem than others, and mosquitoes happen to form a fairly large food source for quite a few creatures.
The mosquitoes are only carriers in this scenario, so unless being a carrier causes some sort of significant evolutionary disadvantage, there is no particular selection pressure to cause an "immune" mosquito to crowd out the other mosquitoes.
:-)
Maybe there should be some genetic engineering to make humans immune to Denque Fever
If they're so incompetent or unwilling to spend money to protect their control systems from something as stupid as an Internet-based attack, then they should be liable for ALL damages that occur to their customers.
This is definitely one situation where passing new laws to try and catch/punish the culprits is going to do diddly-squat, so they'll have to expend resources necessary to make a defense so solid that the matter becomes irrelevant.
The ruler doesn't exactly need to be at the top of the pins - it can be located where the pins penetrate the fabric.
I suppose the place where my analogy breaks down is that the ruler is a "magic ruler" since it is made out of light, which behaves differently when crossing "stretched" space-time than if we were using a ruler made out of matter (which would be the equivalent of trying to use the fabric to measure itself).
The "self-respecting" scientists anticipate how the movement & change in a space-time curve affect the relationships between the objects which are embedded in that space time, much like you would be able to measure distances between a bunch of pins stuck in a fabric while the fabric is twisted & stretched, even if your ruler was forced to follow all the dips & crannies of the fabric between the pins.
If their measurements don't come close to what they were expecting from their theories, then that demonstrates a problem with either their measurements or the theory.
If I'm paying $12 for a 2 hour space movie, there had better be some goddamn swoosh & rocket sounds when those spaceships go by! How entertaining is it going to be to see a space fight & not hear a damn thing except your own breathing?
Don't try and mix corrupt implementation when you're talking about the rationale behind a legal philosophy. My "implication" was intended to be that laws which cannot be justified for the "good of society" do not have a legitimate rationale for their existence. This does not mean, of course, that in the real world that such laws won't get passed, but it does provide a starting point for arguing against their continued existence.
I'm assuming you're referring to my post rather than the post I was responding to (which seems to be the reference of most of my other responders).
To be frank, your question doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Why would a society make laws which apply to its members if the laws aren't going to be good for the society? Even laws which supposedly restrain what kinds of actions the society can do to its individual members (i.e., statements of individual rights) can find justification because helping individual rights can be good for the society as whole in the long run.
Bullshit. Copying is not stealing. Copying is _copying_. If you're arguing otherwise, you're arguing from incorrect axioms & any conclusion you reach is pointless.
There's a reason why "Intellectual Property" laws have a whole separate framework of legislation that sets them apart from basic criminal legislation like theft of physical property, and that reason isn't because the legislators thought it would be fun to write the same sorts of laws twice. It's because legislators have to treat the concept of IP protection with a legal rationale which is completely separate from the idea of theft of physical property.
If you want to argue that IP protection is a good thing, then to make any sort of logical headway you're going to have to show (either through logic or empirical evidence) that IP protection provides some sort of net good to the general society. In addition, the issue is so emotionally charged that the argument that "it is obvious" isn't going to fly: you're going to have to provide references to either peer-reviewed economic studies that show a net benefit to society via IP protective-type mechanisms, or references to case studies of comparable societies with and without IP protective-type laws, where an analysis has been done on the relative pros & cons between each society.
Some people could argue that, but they would be wrong.
That's why they changed their name. Now that they have a new name, nobody is going to associate them with the "old" Diebold.
There should be very few things that the government does which can't be revealed to the public. If there are a lot of such things, that should be a warning indication to the society that it is no longer possible for the society to determine whether the government is operating in their best interests anymore.
A little Xanax or weed before heading off to the airport, a so-called terrorist would probably be mellower than most of the other passengers.
I was thinking of the upside-down glasses as well. There are a few other similar stories:
1. a journalist (for Wired I think) who wore a belt (made out of blocks) which always vibrated in the northern direction (compass). The journalist described it after awhile as having a supernatural sense of direction, and how it was really difficult to adjust after stopping using the belt.
2. Some people have tried to surgically implanting small powerful magnets into their fingertips (ouch!). Once things heal over & they get used to the magnets, they can actually feel the "shape" of magnetic fields (they can tell where the motors are located in a washing machine for instance).
3. There was some research on hooking a camera to an array of pins covering a blind person's back, where the picture from the camera was poked into their back. The blind folks could get a crude form of vision this way, enough so they could walk around with using their sticks.
I think there are a number of other interesting stories like that, but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. I'm firmly of the opinion that, as long as the additional sensory data has some sort of coherency & is hooked into the body's normal sense-gathering mechanisms, the brain will eventually figure out how to adapt it to the brain's own "model" of the person's body & environment.
There are some questions, however, about how much additional stress might be placed on the brain to process the additional data, and how that might affect the long-term functioning of the brain.
Faith is fine - as long as it doesn't directly contradict physical observation. At that point, you're into serious irrational denial of reality, and it is quite proper for people who recognize this to question your competency.
Even adult brains have quite a bit of flexibility when exposed to additional or replaced sensory information. It might take some training, but there's no fundamental biological reason why adding artificial sensors to our own biological senses couldn't be handled by the brain.
With the electronic counting systems that people are using, there is no way for "scrutineers" to realize that something funny is going on. About the only method left is checking whether exit polls are "close enough" to the voting results, and some people have gone out of their way to try and cast doubt on whether exit polls are reliable.