If the patent examiner has thrown out a claim because of prior art reasons, then obviously the patent examiner has some prior art in mind which caused his/her decision.
How do you decide whether something is owned by the corporation or not, and/or if someone is making an official proclamation on behalf of the corporation? They've already got tests for that stuff (usually for working out the relative liabilities between employees of the company vs. the company itself), including mechanisms for arbitrating out the gray areas.
One thing is quite clear, however: if corporations were not granted the same free speech rights as people, then the ability of corporations to use their massive monetary assets to influence legislators & public media could be easily limited (since those assets are not legally owned by a "real" person).
If the patent description is hard to understand & difficult to verify its validity, then the default choice should be to NOT grant the patent. Then the patent applicant can fight its way through the court system to show why its patent is non-obvious & has no prior art.
You wouldn't happen to know of a reference to a peer-reviewed study that shows the validity of those "positives", would you? Every patent proponent I've met keeps saying that the patent system has positives, but they never have anything other than proof-by-anecdote.
On the contrary, I challenge you to find a "real" economist who does not describe intellectual property as a form of monopoly, and then challenge you to describe how a "free market" can cope with a form of monopoly while still remaining "free".
I'd also like to see your reference on where Adam Smith supports "intellectual property" rights, since I have not seen anything in his actual writing that suggests this. I've seen a lot of bullshit where corporate libertarians mindlessly SAY that Adam Smith supports IP law, but they never actually provide any quotes to support their argument.
Decent web page against your interpretation of Adam Smith:
It's not a free market if you can't negotiate the price at which you wish to sell your own creations.
If you can't sell your own creation for a particular price, then it isn't worth that amount, no matter how much you think it is. Getting special laws passed to have your own business model enforced by the government doesn't count as free market, no matter how much you pretend it does. Although you were very polite about it and your post was well-written, the contents of your response was incorrect in almost every way.
Encouraging people to innovate by making sure they retain the right to sell what they create at the price they manage to get on a market place of ideas is not social engineering.
There is no such thing as a "marketplace of ideas". This is a fantasy which can only be created by using government enforcement to create an artificial scarcity of "ideas".
I'll hazard a guess that because your choice of vocation revolves around concepts & ideas, your desire to control those concepts & ideas is distorting your viewpoint of what constitutes a free market.
I'm a programmer, so I work with concepts & ideas too, but I make the assumption that people are paying me for my service. If I want to keep getting paid, then I have to keep providing service. I don't expect to create a piece of software once, then be paid every time that software is used even when I don't do any more work. That would be greedy, but that's exactly what intellectual property proponents want to be able to force people to do.
Encouraging people to innovate by making sure they retain the right to sell what they create at the price they manage to get on a market place of ideas is not social engineering.
Setting up artificial control of the flow of ideas through government enforcement for the purpose of "encouraging" innovation IS, by definition, using government enforcement to manipulate free market dynamics for the purpose of a social goal. How can you not call that social engineering?
Monopolies are not harmful when they are guaranteed to expire.
This is also incorrect. Monopolies are not harmful only when they don't use their monopoly status to prevent competition. If the time period of their existence is short enough, then perhaps they cause very little harm - but that harm still exists.
Encouraging innovation by restricting the spread & use of information seems highly counterintuitive to me.
Patents don't do that.
That's why I added the "& use" in my statement, since patents definitely prevent you from USING ideas (at least not without paying someone something). Copyrights are definitely about restricting the spread of information.
As far as patents are concerned, if I come up with an idea independently (which happens a lot), why should I be forced to pay someone because they happened to file something similar with the Patent Office a little earlier?
As I stated at the beginning, in a free market, a product or service is only worth what people are willing to pay you for it. You don't get to decide the value of your product or service: the market does. And if you have to depend on government enforcement of a bad business model make your good or service artificially more valuable, then your business model has nothing to do with a free market.
No, the fundamental problem with all forms of "intellectual property" is that they attempt to perform a form of social engineering (encouraging innovation) through the violation of free market principles (using government enforcement to reduce competition in the marketplace).
Encouraging innovation by restricting the spread & use of information seems highly counterintuitive to me.
Can you imagine what Google could really do if they were utterly unscrupulous about manipulating the political process in their favor?
Every politician who crossed them would have every possible scandal associated with them come up on the front search page whenever somebody was looking for info about them. Politicians who did what Google told them to would have all their scandals banished to the 300th page.
Muck-raking reporters would be mysteriously signed up for Google Alerts on Google-hostile politicians, and might "mysteriously" receive private documents from the hard drives of those politicians & their interns who happen to be running the "Google Desktop" toolbar.
Or some hacker might "discover" how to get the search histories of selected politicians, and suddenly the politician has to explain why he keeps searching for child porn photos.
You might check out Range Voting then (Approval Voting is a subset version of Range Voting), where you can express preferences between candidates, but that's also more complicated to explain to people. I still prefer Approval Voting myself.
As far as difficulty in explaining to people, try and imagine explaining IRV to a 5-year old (just old enough to count & compare how big numbers are).
I can probably explain plurality voting easily (everyone picks one candidate, the candidate with the most votes wins), and I can probably explain approval voting easily (everyone picks every the candidates they like, the candidate with the most votes wins), but trying to explain any voting system with multiple voting rounds & shifting 1st-2nd-3rd-etc rankings is going to take a while.
When you multiply that by a large # of voters, I don't think the possible extra benefit of other voting schemes is worth it.
In case you don't think you have to have something simple enough to explain to a 5-year old, I could make a cynical comment about Floridians & butterfly ballots. Also, given how badly the various voting machine companies have done at counting simple majority ballots, can you imagine how much worse they could make a voting machine that was supposed to do IRV? And it would be even harder to figure out whether the counting was being done correctly.
From a less cynical viewpoint, I usually go for the "can I explain the voting scheme to my family members & friends who don't normally care about stuff like politics"? They don't really care about all the relative benefits of different voting schemes. They're kind of aware that plurality voting doesn't work right when you've got more than one candidate, but they don't want a voting scheme that's any more complicated than plurality voting. Approval Voting fits that description pretty well, and it makes an intuitive sense to them.
The first sentence pretty much covers the fundamental principle of Approval Voting.
There are lots of web pages which discuss the relative merits of different kinds of voting, but Approval Voting seemed to me to be the easiest to explain to other people, felt very intuitive to them, and still had most of the advantages of IRV.
(Also, would probably not be too hard to implement just by tweaking existing voting procedures.)
Given how poorly Diebold programmers seem to have implemented a simple plurality system, I don't even want to imagine how badly they'd implement something even a tiny bit more complicated.
Dogs are loyal to the people they live with. In most cases, they probably also like the people they're with (although there's that whole "who's the alpha dog" pecking order thing to deal with).
OTOH, if a cat shows that it likes you, then it probably really does like you. (I mean long-term behavior, of course - all short-term affection might mean is that the cat is jonesin' for a treat:-)
As a Catholic who is very interested in keeping up with the latest in science, there is no conflict between my beliefs and the evidence of the world around me. The same can generally be said for (most) Christians, Jews, Buddhists and many other religions.
That will work as long as you are willing to discard "beliefs" that you discover to directly conflict with the evidence of the world around you.
Actually, these types of cases there are competing claims about what is "true", and the proof lies on the shoulders of the person who is making the more extraordinary claim. (Now we can argue about what makes a claim "extraordinary":-)
I don't respect his belief. Furthermore, it's MY chair that has the aardvark, not yours, and my aardvark is both PINKER and more INVISIBLE than YOUR aardvark (which you don't have).
I disagree - there are plenty of cases where people have insisted that their "faith" dictates what reality is (shamans for instance), only be to be eventually discredited when physical reality proved to be independent of their faith.
Only those people who were flexible enough to modify their definition of faith to become something non-testable were able to keep it. In either situation, however, it was physical reality which was stronger than blind faith.
The problem with trying to reconcile science & faith, is that when you have make a physical observation where your faith is conflicting with what you're observing, you've got two possible responses:
If you're a rational "scientist", your "faith" is going to lose (or at least be reevaluated to fit your observations). In other words, your so-called faith is "weaker" than your observations of physical reality. The logical extension of this kind of resolution is that all aspects of your faith will eventually be relegated to concepts which have no physical relevance (other than to affect your own internal motivations).
If you're a fundie, and the absolute correctness of your faith is more important to you than anything else, you'll go into denial & will probably attack (not necessarily violently) anyone who tries to bring up that conflicting observation again, in order to preserve your own beliefs. If you can, you will get other fundies who believe the same way you do, to cooperate with you to try and suppress any mention of that "blasphemous" observation, so that it doesn't challenge your belief.
You underestimate the sheer about of "dumbness" that a single developer can create when he/she is considered the only expert for a particular subject, and there is no one around who is reviewing his/her work.
Slashdot Mirror
It's only temporary - I would imagine IBM is doing everything in its power to get it lifted ASAP.
If the patent examiner has thrown out a claim because of prior art reasons, then obviously the patent examiner has some prior art in mind which caused his/her decision.
How do you decide whether something is owned by the corporation or not, and/or if someone is making an official proclamation on behalf of the corporation? They've already got tests for that stuff (usually for working out the relative liabilities between employees of the company vs. the company itself), including mechanisms for arbitrating out the gray areas.
One thing is quite clear, however: if corporations were not granted the same free speech rights as people, then the ability of corporations to use their massive monetary assets to influence legislators & public media could be easily limited (since those assets are not legally owned by a "real" person).
If the patent description is hard to understand & difficult to verify its validity, then the default choice should be to NOT grant the patent. Then the patent applicant can fight its way through the court system to show why its patent is non-obvious & has no prior art.
You wouldn't happen to know of a reference to a peer-reviewed study that shows the validity of those "positives", would you? Every patent proponent I've met keeps saying that the patent system has positives, but they never have anything other than proof-by-anecdote.
On the contrary, I challenge you to find a "real" economist who does not describe intellectual property as a form of monopoly, and then challenge you to describe how a "free market" can cope with a form of monopoly while still remaining "free".
I'd also like to see your reference on where Adam Smith supports "intellectual property" rights, since I have not seen anything in his actual writing that suggests this. I've seen a lot of bullshit where corporate libertarians mindlessly SAY that Adam Smith supports IP law, but they never actually provide any quotes to support their argument.
Decent web page against your interpretation of Adam Smith:
http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/intelpropertycomments/olshovedonpaul.htm
Decent web page against Ayn Rand's interpretation of intellectual property:
http://sandefur.typepad.com/freespace/2005/05/some_thoughts_o.html
If you can't sell your own creation for a particular price, then it isn't worth that amount, no matter how much you think it is. Getting special laws passed to have your own business model enforced by the government doesn't count as free market, no matter how much you pretend it does. Although you were very polite about it and your post was well-written, the contents of your response was incorrect in almost every way.
There is no such thing as a "marketplace of ideas". This is a fantasy which can only be created by using government enforcement to create an artificial scarcity of "ideas".
I'll hazard a guess that because your choice of vocation revolves around concepts & ideas, your desire to control those concepts & ideas is distorting your viewpoint of what constitutes a free market.
I'm a programmer, so I work with concepts & ideas too, but I make the assumption that people are paying me for my service. If I want to keep getting paid, then I have to keep providing service. I don't expect to create a piece of software once, then be paid every time that software is used even when I don't do any more work. That would be greedy, but that's exactly what intellectual property proponents want to be able to force people to do.
Setting up artificial control of the flow of ideas through government enforcement for the purpose of "encouraging" innovation IS, by definition, using government enforcement to manipulate free market dynamics for the purpose of a social goal. How can you not call that social engineering?
This is also incorrect. Monopolies are not harmful only when they don't use their monopoly status to prevent competition. If the time period of their existence is short enough, then perhaps they cause very little harm - but that harm still exists.
That's why I added the "& use" in my statement, since patents definitely prevent you from USING ideas (at least not without paying someone something). Copyrights are definitely about restricting the spread of information.
As far as patents are concerned, if I come up with an idea independently (which happens a lot), why should I be forced to pay someone because they happened to file something similar with the Patent Office a little earlier?
As I stated at the beginning, in a free market, a product or service is only worth what people are willing to pay you for it. You don't get to decide the value of your product or service: the market does. And if you have to depend on government enforcement of a bad business model make your good or service artificially more valuable, then your business model has nothing to do with a free market.
No, the fundamental problem with all forms of "intellectual property" is that they attempt to perform a form of social engineering (encouraging innovation) through the violation of free market principles (using government enforcement to reduce competition in the marketplace).
Encouraging innovation by restricting the spread & use of information seems highly counterintuitive to me.
I'm so tempted by the idea of seeing a pair of disembodied hands lunging through my screen, but I'd better not risk it...
Can you imagine what Google could really do if they were utterly unscrupulous about manipulating the political process in their favor?
Every politician who crossed them would have every possible scandal associated with them come up on the front search page whenever somebody was looking for info about them. Politicians who did what Google told them to would have all their scandals banished to the 300th page.
Muck-raking reporters would be mysteriously signed up for Google Alerts on Google-hostile politicians, and might "mysteriously" receive private documents from the hard drives of those politicians & their interns who happen to be running the "Google Desktop" toolbar.
Or some hacker might "discover" how to get the search histories of selected politicians, and suddenly the politician has to explain why he keeps searching for child porn photos.
You might check out Range Voting then (Approval Voting is a subset version of Range Voting), where you can express preferences between candidates, but that's also more complicated to explain to people. I still prefer Approval Voting myself.
As far as difficulty in explaining to people, try and imagine explaining IRV to a 5-year old (just old enough to count & compare how big numbers are).
I can probably explain plurality voting easily (everyone picks one candidate, the candidate with the most votes wins), and I can probably explain approval voting easily (everyone picks every the candidates they like, the candidate with the most votes wins), but trying to explain any voting system with multiple voting rounds & shifting 1st-2nd-3rd-etc rankings is going to take a while.
When you multiply that by a large # of voters, I don't think the possible extra benefit of other voting schemes is worth it.
In case you don't think you have to have something simple enough to explain to a 5-year old, I could make a cynical comment about Floridians & butterfly ballots. Also, given how badly the various voting machine companies have done at counting simple majority ballots, can you imagine how much worse they could make a voting machine that was supposed to do IRV? And it would be even harder to figure out whether the counting was being done correctly.
From a less cynical viewpoint, I usually go for the "can I explain the voting scheme to my family members & friends who don't normally care about stuff like politics"? They don't really care about all the relative benefits of different voting schemes. They're kind of aware that plurality voting doesn't work right when you've got more than one candidate, but they don't want a voting scheme that's any more complicated than plurality voting. Approval Voting fits that description pretty well, and it makes an intuitive sense to them.
I pretty much did the same as you did(Google Search):
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/approvalvote/center.htm
The first sentence pretty much covers the fundamental principle of Approval Voting.
There are lots of web pages which discuss the relative merits of different kinds of voting, but Approval Voting seemed to me to be the easiest to explain to other people, felt very intuitive to them, and still had most of the advantages of IRV.
(Also, would probably not be too hard to implement just by tweaking existing voting procedures.)
Approval Voting FTW. It's a lot simpler to explain to people than IRV, and has all of the good characteristics that IRV was created to promote.
Given how poorly Diebold programmers seem to have implemented a simple plurality system, I don't even want to imagine how badly they'd implement something even a tiny bit more complicated.
It jumps up and down on the server until the server crashes from embarrassment.
Dogs are loyal to the people they live with. In most cases, they probably also like the people they're with (although there's that whole "who's the alpha dog" pecking order thing to deal with).
:-)
OTOH, if a cat shows that it likes you, then it probably really does like you. (I mean long-term behavior, of course - all short-term affection might mean is that the cat is jonesin' for a treat
That will work as long as you are willing to discard "beliefs" that you discover to directly conflict with the evidence of the world around you.
Actually, these types of cases there are competing claims about what is "true", and the proof lies on the shoulders of the person who is making the more extraordinary claim. (Now we can argue about what makes a claim "extraordinary" :-)
I don't respect his belief. Furthermore, it's MY chair that has the aardvark, not yours, and my aardvark is both PINKER and more INVISIBLE than YOUR aardvark (which you don't have).
It was also considered fairly effective as an early form of insecticide.
Feel free to fork the kernel and make something better. If not, unless you have something useful to say, then STFU.
I disagree - there are plenty of cases where people have insisted that their "faith" dictates what reality is (shamans for instance), only be to be eventually discredited when physical reality proved to be independent of their faith.
Only those people who were flexible enough to modify their definition of faith to become something non-testable were able to keep it. In either situation, however, it was physical reality which was stronger than blind faith.
The problem with trying to reconcile science & faith, is that when you have make a physical observation where your faith is conflicting with what you're observing, you've got two possible responses:
If you're a rational "scientist", your "faith" is going to lose (or at least be reevaluated to fit your observations). In other words, your so-called faith is "weaker" than your observations of physical reality. The logical extension of this kind of resolution is that all aspects of your faith will eventually be relegated to concepts which have no physical relevance (other than to affect your own internal motivations).
If you're a fundie, and the absolute correctness of your faith is more important to you than anything else, you'll go into denial & will probably attack (not necessarily violently) anyone who tries to bring up that conflicting observation again, in order to preserve your own beliefs. If you can, you will get other fundies who believe the same way you do, to cooperate with you to try and suppress any mention of that "blasphemous" observation, so that it doesn't challenge your belief.
s/about/amount/
(sigh)
You underestimate the sheer about of "dumbness" that a single developer can create when he/she is considered the only expert for a particular subject, and there is no one around who is reviewing his/her work.