I'm sick of the entire geek community lining up against software patents. Why is it okay for inventors of physical machines to get patents, but not for inventors of algorithms?
RSA is a really clever algorithm. Its creators deserved to make money off it. Principal component analysis, the fast Fourier transform, and MPEG compression are all very clever algorithms whose inventors deserved to have gotten rich off them.
Being able to patent algorithms is a good thing. The problem was the USPTO's standard for obviousness, which was too low, and let people patent stupid stuff like one-click shopping, hyperlinks on cell phones, or email over wireless.
Everybody who posts something against software patents, but does so not from actually knowing anything about software patents, but because they believe that patent, copyright, and all intellectual property is inherently bad, and all software and music should be free, should post a note to that effect so we know they're crazy.
Windows XP wants a gig of RAM only because it will start swapping out the OS and any applications you're running interactively when you have less than about 600M of RAM free.
So this may just mean that Vista will start swapping your applications out to disk when you have less than 3G of RAM free.
(I'd put a smiley after that, but it's not really a joke when it might be true.:P )
You completely ignored my point, which was that you could lower the cost of the drugs by lowering the cost of FDA approval. European approval is not so outrageously expensive.
$3 billion, after 10 years at 20% interest, is $18 billion.
To make money at a rate such that, after 10 years, they will have made as much money as if they had invested it at 20%, the company has to make a profit of about $600,000,000 per year.
The figure of 20% may be too high for large, stable companies. I don't know what the right figure would be. 10% is obviously too low.
By your reasoning, nickv111, everybody would get everything cheaper if patent terms were shorter, or eliminated. And copyrights - they're a lot like patents. We should eliminate them, too. Then everybody could get everything for free!
Just like Soviet Russia. You can have everything in an empty shop for free.
The real cause of high prices in medications is the FDA approval process. It costs, on AVERAGE, about a BILLION dollars to get a drug approved in the US. A patent lasts 20 years, and it takes at least 10 years to get a drug approved. This means the pharma company has 10 years to recover their $1 billion investment.
Only, $1 billion invested over a period of 10 years is not the same as $1 billion at the time they start selling the drug, let alone $1 billion at tne END of that 10-year window! In order to have high enough profits to maintain their stock value, their investments have to appreciate at roughly 20% per year. If you spend $1 billion over 10 years, at the end of those 10 years, that $1 billion now is worth $3.01 billion. That doesn't mean that you have 10 years to make back $3 billion - that investment's sunk cost keeps increasing, to $9 billion by the end of those 10 years!
So, in fact, the pharama company has to make $900,000,000 in PROFIT, each year for 10 years, just to make up for the cost of getting FDA approval. That's apart from the cost of inventing the drug, manufacturing it, advertising it, and distributing it.
I started replying to posts individually, but it seems most of them were pretty similar.
Very few of the people who posted seem to have read the article. For instance, I didn't say Civ was a RTS game.
Yes, I was unfair to Civ IV. I feel bad about that. All I did was download the demo and play it for a few hours. I didn't see any evidence of the sophisticated UI that people spoke about here. It might have been there, but it wasn't obvious. I really should have played longer, but my 3-year-old computer wasn't powerful enough to keep up with the animation, so I gave up.
But pointing out that unit automation is BETTER in Civ 4 is beside the point. I'm arguing that unit control, at all, is not necessary. That's why I felt I'd played Civ IV enough once I'd convinced myself it still had a unit-based UI. I'm arguing for a radically different user interface. Units are there to accomplish tasks. In a game with hundreds of units, you're typically only focused on a few tasks per turn. If you have a task-based interface instead of a unit-based interface, you could accomplish that task with fewer clicks. No one seems to have understood this. It isn't just delegation. It isn't about grouping units together, or adding waypoints (tho both are good things). I'm saying you could control what happens to almost the same level of detail, by re-conceptualizing the user interface, organizing it around tasks rather than around units. You could still point out the specific points to defend, the specific places to build your cities, the points where roads begin and end - but without choosing which units do the work. The computer can allocate them. It's much better at that sort of stuff than you are.
Some people like micromanagement. Fine. Let micromanagement be a game option. But the point of section on the Rule of 7 is that micromanagement makes you a less competent manager. You are playing a dumber game when you micromanage. I'm surprised that players don't show more interest in doing things the way the military does, and that they seem to think they know more about effective command than the military does. I'm surprised to hear people saying that letting a player focus on strategy, instead of stopping his helicopters from chasing the enemy when they run out of ammunition (C&C), is "dumbing down" the game. I take the opposite point of view - the strategy game is the thinking person's game. Setting priorities and planning tasks or large actions is strategy. Moving individual units is tactics.
Finally, the article was about a lot of other things besides Civ. It has a bunch of concepts in there - UI profiling, work calculations, theoretical efficiency, off-line orders and opening up the AI to the player - that are a lot more important than how good Civ 3 or Civ 4's UI is. I said, without giving details, that it's possible to calculate how near a UI is to its theoretical optimum - that's a radical claim, with significant implications going far beyond computer games; you'd think someone would challenge it. Or wonder how efficient a strategy game UI could be, or how you'd go about measuring that. But nobody seems to be paying any attention to those things. Most replies are from people who are hurt because they think I insulted a game that they like. I wish I could have avoided this by writing about a game that nobody played, or that everybody hated, but I couldn't. Get over it, and see the big picture.
First, I didn't say Civ was a RTS. To quote from the article:
"Overclick isn't limited to Civilization. Real-time strategy games will leave
you with even worse carpal tunnel."
First, I didn't write that Civ was a RTS. The guy who started the slashdot thread did.
Second, what's wrong with making something better? Yes, you/could/ take hours to make a move in Civ. It's boring. And it makes my friends give up and not play Civ with me.
Third, the article is about UIs in general - not just for RTS, not just for games.
IIRC, the mines do get depleted eventually - not to zero, but to a very low output.
I didn't think the campaigns were terrible so much as that they were of wildly uneven difficulty. The easy but time-consuming ones were more irritating than the difficult ones.
On one hand, you're right - I didn't give Civ IV a fair shake, mostly because my 3-year-old computer wasn't powerful enough to keep up with the 3D user interface, which made it painful to play.
On the other hand, you're missing the point (or, rather, one of the several points of the article). It isn't necessary to think about individual units. Players typically must use a whole bunch of units to accomplish some task. Instead of grouping all those units together (like you're advocating), why not just deal with the task? Say "I want to clear this area of swamp", or "I want to settle this peninsula", instead of directing a lot of units this way and that.
It seems to me that Philip Goetz - despite writing six pages and appending weighty academic references at the end of his piece - is mostly just complaining that he doesn't like this particular style of game.
Sure, you could put it that way - and what's wrong with that? I don't like the style of game where the point is micromanagement and fast clicking. And I'd like to have other styles available. And they aren't. Leave micromanagement available as an option, but give us another option, too.
And I don't think that Civ "is" the micromanagement style of game. Civ is bigger than that. I think that a UI with less micromanagement would play to Civ's strength as a strategy game of very wide scope.
Another feature that would work well for RTS is to have 2 or more people working on the same team (online obviously). Not 2 separate teams who happen to work together, but the same team where they can both control the same units. That way, you could have one guy in control of guarding the base, while the other guy fights the battle, and maybe a third person to go off on scouting missions.
That's an awesome idea! I see somebody commented that you could do this in Starcraft? I never noticed that feature.
The ultimate extension of this would be a MMORG where each player played one soldier (of differing ranks) in an army, with opportunities for promotion. I think some air-strike games have done something with this, but I haven't played them.
Isn't this good news for AMD? The reason Intel developed EFI, after all, was to patent it and require AMD to license it from Intel, right? Now AMD doesn't have to license it in order to run Windows.
I work as a patent examiner, but nothing I say represents the views of the USPTO. I've been thinking about problems with the process. In no particular order:
There is a type of patent called a Statutory Invention Registration. Receiving one will prevent anyone else from being able to patent the same invention, but doesn't let you stop anyone from selling devices embodying the invention. As I read the patent laws, applying for an SIR costs the same as applying for a regular patent. This is because a patent examiner still has to review it. (I think. I've never seen one in real life.)
I propose that there is really no point in examining a SIR, since its only purpose is to be used as prior art to reject a later application. We should simply register SIRs, and charge no fee or a very minimal fee. Then, the EFF could have volunteers submit SIRs on lots of different ideas, and we could use them to reject patents applications.
Software is more like Legos (TM) than like machine parts. You have different subunits - databases, graphical displays, network protocols - and you can snap them together in different ways. You shouldn't be allowed to patent the combination of A and B, where A and B individually are well-known, just because you were the first person to snap them together.
I think this is more a matter of legal precedant than a matter of how the law reads. The law says that something is not patentable if it is obvious, but precedent says, roughly, that "obvious" means that part A is known, and part B is known, and someone has suggested combining part A with part B.
Legally, you can't patent algorithms. This is silly, because people get around it by patenting any device or any recording of a program to implement the algorithm. This results in needless pain to patent examiners, because a patent application for an algorithm that can be described in three pages is embedded in ten pages of descriptions of how it is embodied in a computing device with an operating system and magnetic hard drives, connected to a network, blah blah blah, and variants thereon. I have an application in front of me now which has the same 6 claims repeated 4 times over - once to patent an apparatus, once to patent a method, once to patent a computer readable medium containing computer readable instructions implementing that method, and once to patent a programmed computer system.
I say, let people patent algorithms. They're doing that anyway, and those patents are being upheld. Some algorithms are non-obvious, such as RSA, which accomplishes something most cryptologists previously believed was impossible.
Laws of nature should also be patentable. Is it right that Einstein never made a dime off quantum mechanics or the law of relativity? Because they aren't, we have no money for basic research in the US, except a little bit from NIH, NSF, NIAC, and sometimes DARPA. Everything else called "research" is just engineering. This is why we're losing jobs overseas. America used to come up with new basic science fast enough to stay ahead of the rest of the world. It doesn't anymore; all the money goes into engineering. Moore's Law is not a sign that technological progress is accelerating; it is a sign that it is stagnating, because we're still working on improving the same basic approach after sixty years.
An invention would be held to violate a law-of-nature patent if understanding the law of nature were held to be a requirement for making the invention. In the cases I just mentioned, QM and relativity, this would be an easy judgement to make.
Ironically, I have read many patent applications on new ways to organize and search through large databases, including one that used the Patent Office database as an example. We don't use any of them.
The patent office has a culture of considering only other patents as prior art. If someone tries to patent something that has been described dozens of times in academic journals, odds are
Patent law is LAW. We can't just say, "I think this is obvious." We have to point to a specific sentence of the law and show how it applies to a specific patent application.
First, the law says that it must be obvious to one of/average/ skill in the art, not to someone with a brain in their head. But, more importantly, it's very difficult to reject a patent application, under the current laws, unless a) each of the elements in the application has been used before (perhaps separately), and b) someone has suggested combining them, or they are all modifications of the same process.
For example, one of the training examples used for new patent examiners is an application for a bookmark that has a cartoon figure drawn on it. I said, in class, that this should be obvious, because a bookmark is a flat thing, and it's obvious that you can decorate flat things by drawing anything, including cartoon figures, on it. The instructor said we could not deny the patent unless we found that someone had specifically drawn characters on bookmarks before. I was shown cases where people
had drawn characters on the tops of bookmarks, but because nobody had drawn characters on the bottoms of bookmarks, it appeared that would be allowable as a patent.
Usually, this approach doesn't cause problems. It's a special problem with software, because as soon as someone invents a new concept - say, a new security authentication protocol - then every possible combination of that protocol with previously-existing network applications becomes patentable. Also, because approaches are often obsolete by the time the patent expires, it isn't like in other fields, where the damage to society caused by a wrongly-approved patent is only 20 years out of many decades or centuries of usage.
Finally, patent officers are intelligent, but often not familiar with the tasks they were assigned to perform. Because of the need for many new examiners, very few new hires have been placed in their fields of expertise, although they are in generally related areas. For example, my studies were in artificial intelligence, but I'm reviewing patent applications for three-dimensional animation.
I don't speak for the USPTO. Everything I said could be wrong.
You are completely wrong. I am a patent examiner. Patent examiners are under continual pressure to approve patents. We all have quotas, set by our payscale and by the area in which we work, and failure to meet the quotas results in being fired. Also, failing to respond to an amendment in time can result in being fired, even if you have been 30% over quota up till now and then three amendments land on your desk in one week that are all due because they were delayed somewhere else along the way.
There is no lack of upward mobility - patent examiners can move up all the way to GS-13, I believe, without any competition.
I know a fellow who has over the past 3 years analyzed several viruses created by the Chinese government and inserted into fake Falun-Gong websites, to install keyloggers into the computers of Falun-Gong practitioners overseas. So I know the Chinese government is using electronic warfare aggressively. As to whether China would go after the UK that way, I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, they're left-wing nutjobs, not right-wing nutjobs.
RSA is a really clever algorithm. Its creators deserved to make money off it. Principal component analysis, the fast Fourier transform, and MPEG compression are all very clever algorithms whose inventors deserved to have gotten rich off them.
Being able to patent algorithms is a good thing. The problem was the USPTO's standard for obviousness, which was too low, and let people patent stupid stuff like one-click shopping, hyperlinks on cell phones, or email over wireless.
Everybody who posts something against software patents, but does so not from actually knowing anything about software patents, but because they believe that patent, copyright, and all intellectual property is inherently bad, and all software and music should be free, should post a note to that effect so we know they're crazy.
So this may just mean that Vista will start swapping your applications out to disk when you have less than 3G of RAM free.
(I'd put a smiley after that, but it's not really a joke when it might be true. :P )
You completely ignored my point, which was that you could lower the cost of the drugs by lowering the cost of FDA approval. European approval is not so outrageously expensive.
$3 billion, after 10 years at 20% interest, is $18 billion. To make money at a rate such that, after 10 years, they will have made as much money as if they had invested it at 20%, the company has to make a profit of about $600,000,000 per year.
The figure of 20% may be too high for large, stable companies. I don't know what the right figure would be. 10% is obviously too low.
Just like Soviet Russia. You can have everything in an empty shop for free.
The real cause of high prices in medications is the FDA approval process. It costs, on AVERAGE, about a BILLION dollars to get a drug approved in the US. A patent lasts 20 years, and it takes at least 10 years to get a drug approved. This means the pharma company has 10 years to recover their $1 billion investment.
Only, $1 billion invested over a period of 10 years is not the same as $1 billion at the time they start selling the drug, let alone $1 billion at tne END of that 10-year window! In order to have high enough profits to maintain their stock value, their investments have to appreciate at roughly 20% per year. If you spend $1 billion over 10 years, at the end of those 10 years, that $1 billion now is worth $3.01 billion. That doesn't mean that you have 10 years to make back $3 billion - that investment's sunk cost keeps increasing, to $9 billion by the end of those 10 years!
So, in fact, the pharama company has to make $900,000,000 in PROFIT, each year for 10 years, just to make up for the cost of getting FDA approval. That's apart from the cost of inventing the drug, manufacturing it, advertising it, and distributing it.
Very few of the people who posted seem to have read the article. For instance, I didn't say Civ was a RTS game.
Yes, I was unfair to Civ IV. I feel bad about that. All I did was download the demo and play it for a few hours. I didn't see any evidence of the sophisticated UI that people spoke about here. It might have been there, but it wasn't obvious. I really should have played longer, but my 3-year-old computer wasn't powerful enough to keep up with the animation, so I gave up.
But pointing out that unit automation is BETTER in Civ 4 is beside the point. I'm arguing that unit control, at all, is not necessary. That's why I felt I'd played Civ IV enough once I'd convinced myself it still had a unit-based UI. I'm arguing for a radically different user interface. Units are there to accomplish tasks. In a game with hundreds of units, you're typically only focused on a few tasks per turn. If you have a task-based interface instead of a unit-based interface, you could accomplish that task with fewer clicks. No one seems to have understood this. It isn't just delegation. It isn't about grouping units together, or adding waypoints (tho both are good things). I'm saying you could control what happens to almost the same level of detail, by re-conceptualizing the user interface, organizing it around tasks rather than around units. You could still point out the specific points to defend, the specific places to build your cities, the points where roads begin and end - but without choosing which units do the work. The computer can allocate them. It's much better at that sort of stuff than you are.
Some people like micromanagement. Fine. Let micromanagement be a game option. But the point of section on the Rule of 7 is that micromanagement makes you a less competent manager. You are playing a dumber game when you micromanage. I'm surprised that players don't show more interest in doing things the way the military does, and that they seem to think they know more about effective command than the military does. I'm surprised to hear people saying that letting a player focus on strategy, instead of stopping his helicopters from chasing the enemy when they run out of ammunition (C&C), is "dumbing down" the game. I take the opposite point of view - the strategy game is the thinking person's game. Setting priorities and planning tasks or large actions is strategy. Moving individual units is tactics.
Finally, the article was about a lot of other things besides Civ. It has a bunch of concepts in there - UI profiling, work calculations, theoretical efficiency, off-line orders and opening up the AI to the player - that are a lot more important than how good Civ 3 or Civ 4's UI is. I said, without giving details, that it's possible to calculate how near a UI is to its theoretical optimum - that's a radical claim, with significant implications going far beyond computer games; you'd think someone would challenge it. Or wonder how efficient a strategy game UI could be, or how you'd go about measuring that. But nobody seems to be paying any attention to those things. Most replies are from people who are hurt because they think I insulted a game that they like. I wish I could have avoided this by writing about a game that nobody played, or that everybody hated, but I couldn't. Get over it, and see the big picture.
It took hours because after every single keypress or mouse click, I made a checkmark on a sheet of paper.
No. I counted screen pans separately. They're a mouse movement, but they require more time than a movement that doesn't scroll the screen. Try it.
Clue to the clueless: Read an article before you summarize it.
Second, the sections called "Objects don't have to be objects" and "On-line vs. off-line control" present what I think are some viable alternatives.
Second, what's wrong with making something better? Yes, you /could/ take hours to make a move in Civ. It's boring. And it makes my friends give up and not play Civ with me.
Third, the article is about UIs in general - not just for RTS, not just for games.
It's pretty stupid to write a post about someone's article calling them stupid, when you obviously haven't read the article.
I didn't think the campaigns were terrible so much as that they were of wildly uneven difficulty. The easy but time-consuming ones were more irritating than the difficult ones.
On the other hand, you're missing the point (or, rather, one of the several points of the article). It isn't necessary to think about individual units. Players typically must use a whole bunch of units to accomplish some task. Instead of grouping all those units together (like you're advocating), why not just deal with the task? Say "I want to clear this area of swamp", or "I want to settle this peninsula", instead of directing a lot of units this way and that.
And I don't think that Civ "is" the micromanagement style of game. Civ is bigger than that. I think that a UI with less micromanagement would play to Civ's strength as a strategy game of very wide scope.
The ultimate extension of this would be a MMORG where each player played one soldier (of differing ranks) in an army, with opportunities for promotion. I think some air-strike games have done something with this, but I haven't played them.
Isn't this good news for AMD? The reason Intel developed EFI, after all, was to patent it and require AMD to license it from Intel, right? Now AMD doesn't have to license it in order to run Windows.
Wouldn't the problem be that makers of Mac hardware would write EFI device drivers, not BIOS device drivers?
The Patent Office gets about $1000-$2000 of that. The rest goes to patent lawyers.
I propose that there is really no point in examining a SIR, since its only purpose is to be used as prior art to reject a later application. We should simply register SIRs, and charge no fee or a very minimal fee. Then, the EFF could have volunteers submit SIRs on lots of different ideas, and we could use them to reject patents applications.
I think this is more a matter of legal precedant than a matter of how the law reads. The law says that something is not patentable if it is obvious, but precedent says, roughly, that "obvious" means that part A is known, and part B is known, and someone has suggested combining part A with part B.
I say, let people patent algorithms. They're doing that anyway, and those patents are being upheld. Some algorithms are non-obvious, such as RSA, which accomplishes something most cryptologists previously believed was impossible.
An invention would be held to violate a law-of-nature patent if understanding the law of nature were held to be a requirement for making the invention. In the cases I just mentioned, QM and relativity, this would be an easy judgement to make.
Just replying to a post without having any idea what you're talking about, or making any attempt to find out, is also pretty easy.
Patent law is LAW. We can't just say, "I think this is obvious." We have to point to a specific sentence of the law and show how it applies to a specific patent application. First, the law says that it must be obvious to one of /average/ skill in the art, not to someone with a brain in their head. But, more importantly, it's very difficult to reject a patent application, under the current laws, unless a) each of the elements in the application has been used before (perhaps separately), and b) someone has suggested combining them, or they are all modifications of the same process.
For example, one of the training examples used for new patent examiners is an application for a bookmark that has a cartoon figure drawn on it. I said, in class, that this should be obvious, because a bookmark is a flat thing, and it's obvious that you can decorate flat things by drawing anything, including cartoon figures, on it. The instructor said we could not deny the patent unless we found that someone had specifically drawn characters on bookmarks before. I was shown cases where people
had drawn characters on the tops of bookmarks, but because nobody had drawn characters on the bottoms of bookmarks, it appeared that would be allowable as a patent.
Usually, this approach doesn't cause problems. It's a special problem with software, because as soon as someone invents a new concept - say, a new security authentication protocol - then every possible combination of that protocol with previously-existing network applications becomes patentable. Also, because approaches are often obsolete by the time the patent expires, it isn't like in other fields, where the damage to society caused by a wrongly-approved patent is only 20 years out of many decades or centuries of usage.
Finally, patent officers are intelligent, but often not familiar with the tasks they were assigned to perform. Because of the need for many new examiners, very few new hires have been placed in their fields of expertise, although they are in generally related areas. For example, my studies were in artificial intelligence, but I'm reviewing patent applications for three-dimensional animation.
I don't speak for the USPTO. Everything I said could be wrong.
You are completely wrong. I am a patent examiner. Patent examiners are under continual pressure to approve patents. We all have quotas, set by our payscale and by the area in which we work, and failure to meet the quotas results in being fired. Also, failing to respond to an amendment in time can result in being fired, even if you have been 30% over quota up till now and then three amendments land on your desk in one week that are all due because they were delayed somewhere else along the way. There is no lack of upward mobility - patent examiners can move up all the way to GS-13, I believe, without any competition.
I know a fellow who has over the past 3 years analyzed several viruses created by the Chinese government and inserted into fake Falun-Gong websites, to install keyloggers into the computers of Falun-Gong practitioners overseas. So I know the Chinese government is using electronic warfare aggressively. As to whether China would go after the UK that way, I don't know.