How does your incessent tripe keep getting modded up? No one cares that you are going to waste billions of dollars in vapor-ware.... and no one can understand why you are defending something that doesn't exist and trying to turn this into an anti-American flame-fest. Go ahead, reinvent google. I have every assurance in the world that google will compeltely and utterly dominate a multi-national politically motivated attempt at "marketing first, product second" that is based entirely on reinventing something because you don't like America... Everything about this screams failure... but I'm all for trying. Why are you getting mad at us, Americans? Because we think your idea is stupid? Why do you care this much? Go ahead... nationalize your google... try to preserve your identities so you aren't dependant on google.
Spend all the money, justify it however you want... the lessons of nationalizing things like this have been learned 100 times over, and I realize your arrogance on the matter doesn't let you see the forest for the trees. I got a hot tip for you, just because someone and something threatens American dominance in a field doesn't make it automatically a good idea or a successful one. Guess what? Nothing about an idea being "anti-America" makes it good.. despite your ramblings. Nothing about GPS or American arrogance makes trying to nationalize a search-engine a good idea. It's a bad idea. But go ahead, prove me wrong.
Last, but not least, the idea of -funding- research to make progress is a good idea. That's a noble and useful expendinture of money. The legitimate problems that you state (in between inane anti-American ramblings) are not easily solved. Throwing money at them isn't going to solve them. Throwing 5 layers of beauracracy and government oversight is definitely not going to help. I'm all for governments helping to fund artificial intelligence... however to pretend that somehow, because American is being cut out of the loop, and America is bad, therefore this is good... well.. that's just patently absurd.
Good luck with your search engine vapor-ware. At least you will be able to sleep at night, knowing that the evil Americans had nothing to do with it.
At a state level, the government bends over backwards to assist companies like Boeing in order to make their state more attractive for the employer. They'll build roads, offer tax packages and so on. They may be doing this for the purposes of their state (jobs!) and nothing else, but the effect is still a form of subsidy.
They do that for Walmart, the NFL, and whole host of other industries also. If we broaden our definition of "subsidy", then yes, the defense industry and almost every single other major job producing industry counts as well... however, then, we fall into the classic equivocation fallacy whereby we weaken the defintion of a word to prove a point, then use the original stronger defintion when further arguing. In other words, you weakly define "subsidy", as you have, and I agree... and then later someone comes along and say "Defense industries are subsidized by the government".. using our logic... but not with our 'weaker' definition.
This aptly describes US defence and areospace industry.
No it doesn't, at all. For some reason you people misunderstsand the 'military-industrial' concept so badly that you make mistakes like this, and get modded up. You are unable to stop confusing the difference between a single customer (the government) and a single supplier (nationalized industry). There is competition in the defense sector between the major players for government money. None of it (of any consequence) is handed out without a bidding process. We can go into the shortcoming of oversights and whatnot, forever, but the bottom-line is that there is no subsidies on the aerospace industry like there is on the argiculture and lumber industries. It's simply not true.
Well, at least they're building search engines and space exploration vehicles instead of nuclear weapons.
Considering France has nuclear weapons, and the US is building both search engines and space exploration vehicles... I am reminded of the great quote by Pauli... your statement, frankly, "isn't even wrong".
5% mac users equals 5% of the virusses and other malware, wich should be equal to tens of thousands.
Holy statistical fallacy batman! Mod parent -1 (Terrible math). This assumes an independance of "virus writers" to the platform they write virus's for. This is definitely not the case... there are more factors involved then the one you implied (Macs are safer). There is also the bias of virus' writers intention of infecting many people, and the bias involved in REPUTATION alone. The reputation of the mac and of windows may bias the results whether it's necessarily true or not.
In short, the statement "5% mac users = 5% of virusses (sic)" is founded on assumptions that are just plain wrong. Given two identically secure operating systems, one with 95% and one with 5% market share... there is absolutely no way there is "independance" on the part of virus writers to claim the 5% of virus' should occur on the smaller platform. That's just plain garbage.
I can imagine that they don't do a lot of flying during the day over there. The real interesting thing would be to watch them with a high-powered telescope with night vision attachment.
Yea, strapping on a night-vision high powered telescope and looking into a pair of afterburners sounds pretty interesting.
Hey now.... easy with the rational thought... Clearly you've lost your Karma Whorer's manual. Even if Microsoft gave money to dethrone Bush, got some lobbying for patent reform, and announced that the new Vista would be disabled on all military/spying computers, and the splash screen was Jack Thompson getting reamed up the ass by Tux... slashdotters in need of karma would still be honor bound to decry the great Satan.
If they respected Chinese law and American law to the same degree, then they wouldn't have so enthusiastically pulled down the offending post, would they?
Not without a long, drawn out court fight.
They did get a "long, drawn out court fight" by Chinese standards. They were taken into a room and told what to do. End of trial.
Who exactly is going to spend billions on cancer research if they have no market share following their discovery of the cure?
There's humanity in a nutshell for you. If reading that doesn't make you sick, then I feel very, very sorry for you.
Why? Why should that make me feel sick? Because we have to "put a price" on the cure for cancer? Are you implying it should be "priceless"? That no matter how much money it costs, we should spend it, and give it out for free, to everyone? Where is this money coming from? Me? Have you actually thought this through? It is my "human" duty to give every single penny I earn (read: my time...), to the study of the cure for cancer? Why cancer? Why not AIDS or poverty or paralysis? Should my kids eat rice every day, so I can squeeze every possible dime into curing cancer? Is this my duty? Is it that sacred?
He is absolutely 100% correct. Without the monetary gain from curing cancer, the progress would be 1/100th of what it is. I know you can pump all your "money is evil" plattitudes, but the simple fact is this... working to cure cancer puts food on people's table. Period. The more food it puts on the table, the more people will want to do it. Human beings have greater needs then scientific pursuit of the cure of cancer. We've lived millions of years w/o medicine to cure it, but we don't go a month without food.
I am given, depending on when the cancer kicks in, 70 years on this planet. I choose to give up a certain percentage of that time to do services for other people, in return for "food" and other necessities. My priority, in life, isn't "curing cancer"... in any form, whether it's giving money away for free, giving my time away for free, or having my money taken from me earmarked for that purpose.... I will spend my "money" on the things most important, first, and of what remains I will give what I choose to give.
So since the cure cancer should have no profit, who is going to pay for it? Me? The government? Who? Money doesn't conjure up in thin air. By asking scientists to work for free, you accomplish one of two things: You make them quit or you take their time (read: which is their money, which is their food).
If you are going to tell me that it is my "human" duty to rob from my children's dinner to help cure cancer, you are the one that is sick, and I feel sorry for you, and your children.
Really, I thought Euler had already deduced that space might be curved due to the properties of the universe, but was unable to find corroborating evidence and failed to publish his theories after decades of searching. At one time, he chose to try and determine the angles between three mountain peaks using techniques he developed for measurement, but was unable to establish that space was curved because the difference was within acceptable error for his equipment. Laser inferometry showed that he would have had to be accurate between 1-10 and 1-20 degrees in order to show that space was curved. The fact that he deduced this and sought evidence for it without any prodding or any recorded reason make Euler clearly the intellectual superior.
That is a great story, but attributed to the wrong person. Gauss was the man, not Euclid, who set about finding evidence of a curved universe by measuring the angles between three mountains. He had a strong suspicion that Euclid's fifth postulate was not true, and had done much of the work, but never published it because he did not believe his proof was definitive enough. In his lifetime, another man, Bolyai, did publish similar work, which Gauss claimed to have also discovered previously.
The entire premise of curved space comes about from the idea that Euler's fifth postulate may not, in fact, be true. Science spent 2000 years trying unsuccessfully to prove it was.
On that note, does anybody know where I can find the official hierarchy of causes?
From Chapter 7 of the Karma Whorer's Manual:
In order of precedence, and to maximize your karma-whoring potential, you should always speak out against the first thing you find on the list:
1. Microsoft
2. The US Government
3. The military
4. The patent system
5. The republicans
6. Any government agency collecting information via the internet
7. emacs
8. karma-whores
9. Jack Thompson
10. CowboyNeal
I've always found slashdot and anyone with an IQ over 120 to be usually liberal-leaning and usually left-wing.
This one of my all-time favorite lines. Do you do IQ tests to your friends? Or do you infer IQ on slashdot? What exactly is your need to justify your politics based on 'intelligence'? Does it make you feel better to think you are smarter then people you disagree with? Do you realize that no matter how much things work out, on average, there are right-wingers in this world smarter then you and all your friends....? From whose ass did you pull the 120 number? Did you know that probabilisitically speaking, there exists a person in this world whom is far right-wing and has a higher IQ then every single one of you and your friends? Do you realize the fallacy of attempting to prove a statement with anecdotes?
To me, one of the dumbest all time political rationales is, "I've found that smarter people lean to the left". I lean to the right, and I'd be happy to put my 3 college degrees, SAT, and IQ score up against any of the dimwits who consider that a reasonable line of logic.
WTF, if the internet is in another country, the government of that country can do whatever they hell they want with it. That's how international law works. It's called respect for sovereignty.
Don't be silly. Slashdotters aren't very "consistent" in their desire for the US to respect other countries. It's only acceptable when it suits their own personal politics.. It doesn't matter which side the US came down on, the karma-whores and left-wingers on this site would have blamed the US.
The US was either going to be at fault for "ignoring the wishes of the Soverign nations for the sake of 'corporations'" or for "screwing legit owners and helping to censor the internet". This entire topic is going to be based in ignorance, politics, and fear-mongering... and if you are ever dilligent and intelligent, you will ignore 99.9% of it to find the tiny bit of truth scattered about.
I'm wondering if the spammers are changing tactics. I used to get one spam message at a time but now I get up to a dozen messages from the same slimeball, all with the same subject line..
Anyone know why this is happening?
Because the wonders of the uniq command have not yet descended to their circle of hell yet?
Why do they always have to use the atomic bomb as an example of the applications of quantum mechanics? It really gives it a bad name.
Maybe because it's one of the most impressive inventions to result from it? I thought we here at slashdot don't let our politics mix with our science (evolution, cough, cough)... or does that rule only apply when it supports our own personal politics.
You realize that a giant "proof by anecdote" is still nothing but a giant fallacy, right, no matter how you dress it up? You can run 10000s of business without patents, because 99.9% of businesses do not require patents. Very few fields do... so I fail to see what that anecdote adds to the conversation.
Saying there are lots of books and lots of people who agree with you doesn't change that. I can probably go point for point if I bothered, and we can line up all the people that agree with us and have a nice democratic vote on what the "truth" is (hint: sophistry).
I know, for an absolute fact, that specific types of research is done and is profitable solely because of patents that exist in the field and because they are protected. If there weren't patents, there'd be no profit, and consequently very little research. Does my personal counterexample to your giant anecdote prove me right... no... it doesn't. Without the "monopoly" granted by the patent, there'd be no profit, and the amount of research and progress in the field would be orders of magnitude less. It would turn into the Arts, only able to survive on some pity handout of funding from the government (NEA).
The concept of "Invent, patent, stop inventing" is quaint and a cute platitude.. it would come as one hell of a surprise to the people I work with, though. You have a sexy vision of what the patent world must be like.... trying to get "a patent" so you can retire is like trying to win the lottery.. and only someone on the outside viewing inside via the microscope of a smattering of news article would buy that nonsense.
Reading arguments on Slashdot is like watching the Special Olympics - it's retards all the way down.
Reading slashdot comments and being upset that there are arguments is like watching the special olympics and expecting not to find retards. It's the entire point.
When the dust has settled I'm sure Europe, Canada and the rest of the free world will give asylum to the ones of you that decide to depart from the united states of previous freedom.
I'm trying to figure out which side you are on and which side is responsible for the "previous freedom" comment... Could it be Microsoft, the defendant of a patent lawsuit.. somehow attacking our freedoms... or is it maybe Visto... the benefactor of some percieved flaw in the patent system whom is stamping out the precious liberty...
... or, the dreaded third option, who seeks to destory us all... the wretched karma-whore! Is this what happens when karma-whores can't figure out which is more likely to net them Karma? Anti-Microsoft or Anti-Patent.... Oh, I know.... Patriot Act!
What doesn't make sense, oh wise and knowing AC? Allow me to distill out the useful parts for you:
He said: don't invent if you can't compete with what you invent. Someone else will come out with the same idea soon enough.
I said: Sign me up for that poorly thought through "utopia" of yours. The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
If you need me to translate it down further, try this: I know that sounds great in the 9 seconds it took you to actually think that up, but it's a really stupid way to build a "perfect society" if you bother to put some more thought into it... Ie, discouraging invention is a pretty piss-poor first step on the road to utopia. You may not like our patent system... but the concepts of patents are incredibly useful and valuable to society as a whole.
Not for me. Patents are scummy ways of avoiding competition. In my non-existant "utopia" I would never accept them -- don't invent if you can't compete with what you invent. Someone else will come out with the same idea soon enough.
Hahah. Your "non-existant" utopia sounds like alot of fun. Sign me up for that poorly thought through "utopia" of yours. The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
Slashdot Mirror
How does your incessent tripe keep getting modded up? No one cares that you are going to waste billions of dollars in vapor-ware.... and no one can understand why you are defending something that doesn't exist and trying to turn this into an anti-American flame-fest. Go ahead, reinvent google. I have every assurance in the world that google will compeltely and utterly dominate a multi-national politically motivated attempt at "marketing first, product second" that is based entirely on reinventing something because you don't like America... Everything about this screams failure... but I'm all for trying. Why are you getting mad at us, Americans? Because we think your idea is stupid? Why do you care this much? Go ahead... nationalize your google... try to preserve your identities so you aren't dependant on google.
Spend all the money, justify it however you want... the lessons of nationalizing things like this have been learned 100 times over, and I realize your arrogance on the matter doesn't let you see the forest for the trees. I got a hot tip for you, just because someone and something threatens American dominance in a field doesn't make it automatically a good idea or a successful one. Guess what? Nothing about an idea being "anti-America" makes it good.. despite your ramblings. Nothing about GPS or American arrogance makes trying to nationalize a search-engine a good idea. It's a bad idea. But go ahead, prove me wrong.
Last, but not least, the idea of -funding- research to make progress is a good idea. That's a noble and useful expendinture of money. The legitimate problems that you state (in between inane anti-American ramblings) are not easily solved. Throwing money at them isn't going to solve them. Throwing 5 layers of beauracracy and government oversight is definitely not going to help. I'm all for governments helping to fund artificial intelligence... however to pretend that somehow, because American is being cut out of the loop, and America is bad, therefore this is good... well.. that's just patently absurd.
Good luck with your search engine vapor-ware. At least you will be able to sleep at night, knowing that the evil Americans had nothing to do with it.
At a state level, the government bends over backwards to assist companies like Boeing in order to make their state more attractive for the employer. They'll build roads, offer tax packages and so on. They may be doing this for the purposes of their state (jobs!) and nothing else, but the effect is still a form of subsidy.
They do that for Walmart, the NFL, and whole host of other industries also. If we broaden our definition of "subsidy", then yes, the defense industry and almost every single other major job producing industry counts as well... however, then, we fall into the classic equivocation fallacy whereby we weaken the defintion of a word to prove a point, then use the original stronger defintion when further arguing. In other words, you weakly define "subsidy", as you have, and I agree... and then later someone comes along and say "Defense industries are subsidized by the government".. using our logic... but not with our 'weaker' definition.
if people are excited about this, maybe it's time they broadened their horizons and examined some non-d20 games. Really!
I was thinking the same thing right up until the last few words. I would have gone with "the beach" or "outside" or maybe even "a girl".
This aptly describes US defence and areospace industry.
No it doesn't, at all. For some reason you people misunderstsand the 'military-industrial' concept so badly that you make mistakes like this, and get modded up. You are unable to stop confusing the difference between a single customer (the government) and a single supplier (nationalized industry). There is competition in the defense sector between the major players for government money. None of it (of any consequence) is handed out without a bidding process. We can go into the shortcoming of oversights and whatnot, forever, but the bottom-line is that there is no subsidies on the aerospace industry like there is on the argiculture and lumber industries. It's simply not true.
Well, at least they're building search engines and space exploration vehicles instead of nuclear weapons.
Considering France has nuclear weapons, and the US is building both search engines and space exploration vehicles... I am reminded of the great quote by Pauli... your statement, frankly, "isn't even wrong".
5% mac users equals 5% of the virusses and other malware, wich should be equal to tens of thousands.
Holy statistical fallacy batman! Mod parent -1 (Terrible math). This assumes an independance of "virus writers" to the platform they write virus's for. This is definitely not the case... there are more factors involved then the one you implied (Macs are safer). There is also the bias of virus' writers intention of infecting many people, and the bias involved in REPUTATION alone. The reputation of the mac and of windows may bias the results whether it's necessarily true or not.
In short, the statement "5% mac users = 5% of virusses (sic)" is founded on assumptions that are just plain wrong. Given two identically secure operating systems, one with 95% and one with 5% market share... there is absolutely no way there is "independance" on the part of virus writers to claim the 5% of virus' should occur on the smaller platform. That's just plain garbage.
I can imagine that they don't do a lot of flying during the day over there. The real interesting thing would be to watch them with a high-powered telescope with night vision attachment.
Yea, strapping on a night-vision high powered telescope and looking into a pair of afterburners sounds pretty interesting.
So much for corporations being less in control at the hands of the communities.
Maybe I'm crazy but... isn't that exactly what happened? A company had to give up control at the hands of the community?
Hey now.... easy with the rational thought... Clearly you've lost your Karma Whorer's manual. Even if Microsoft gave money to dethrone Bush, got some lobbying for patent reform, and announced that the new Vista would be disabled on all military/spying computers, and the splash screen was Jack Thompson getting reamed up the ass by Tux... slashdotters in need of karma would still be honor bound to decry the great Satan.
If they respected Chinese law and American law to the same degree, then they wouldn't have so enthusiastically pulled down the offending post, would they?
Not without a long, drawn out court fight.
They did get a "long, drawn out court fight" by Chinese standards. They were taken into a room and told what to do. End of trial.
That's ok. MR JAMES MCCALLA read an email a week ago about how to get out of debt by declaring bankruptcy.
No need. He knows a prince in Nigeria.
Who exactly is going to spend billions on cancer research if they have no market share following their discovery of the cure?
There's humanity in a nutshell for you. If reading that doesn't make you sick, then I feel very, very sorry for you.
Why? Why should that make me feel sick? Because we have to "put a price" on the cure for cancer? Are you implying it should be "priceless"? That no matter how much money it costs, we should spend it, and give it out for free, to everyone? Where is this money coming from? Me? Have you actually thought this through? It is my "human" duty to give every single penny I earn (read: my time...), to the study of the cure for cancer? Why cancer? Why not AIDS or poverty or paralysis? Should my kids eat rice every day, so I can squeeze every possible dime into curing cancer? Is this my duty? Is it that sacred?
He is absolutely 100% correct. Without the monetary gain from curing cancer, the progress would be 1/100th of what it is. I know you can pump all your "money is evil" plattitudes, but the simple fact is this... working to cure cancer puts food on people's table. Period. The more food it puts on the table, the more people will want to do it. Human beings have greater needs then scientific pursuit of the cure of cancer. We've lived millions of years w/o medicine to cure it, but we don't go a month without food.
I am given, depending on when the cancer kicks in, 70 years on this planet. I choose to give up a certain percentage of that time to do services for other people, in return for "food" and other necessities. My priority, in life, isn't "curing cancer"... in any form, whether it's giving money away for free, giving my time away for free, or having my money taken from me earmarked for that purpose.... I will spend my "money" on the things most important, first, and of what remains I will give what I choose to give.
So since the cure cancer should have no profit, who is going to pay for it? Me? The government? Who? Money doesn't conjure up in thin air. By asking scientists to work for free, you accomplish one of two things: You make them quit or you take their time (read: which is their money, which is their food).
If you are going to tell me that it is my "human" duty to rob from my children's dinner to help cure cancer, you are the one that is sick, and I feel sorry for you, and your children.
Really, I thought Euler had already deduced that space might be curved due to the properties of the universe, but was unable to find corroborating evidence and failed to publish his theories after decades of searching. At one time, he chose to try and determine the angles between three mountain peaks using techniques he developed for measurement, but was unable to establish that space was curved because the difference was within acceptable error for his equipment. Laser inferometry showed that he would have had to be accurate between 1-10 and 1-20 degrees in order to show that space was curved. The fact that he deduced this and sought evidence for it without any prodding or any recorded reason make Euler clearly the intellectual superior.
That is a great story, but attributed to the wrong person. Gauss was the man, not Euclid, who set about finding evidence of a curved universe by measuring the angles between three mountains. He had a strong suspicion that Euclid's fifth postulate was not true, and had done much of the work, but never published it because he did not believe his proof was definitive enough. In his lifetime, another man, Bolyai, did publish similar work, which Gauss claimed to have also discovered previously.
The entire premise of curved space comes about from the idea that Euler's fifth postulate may not, in fact, be true. Science spent 2000 years trying unsuccessfully to prove it was.
Please, no more storms. Not only are they terribly worrisome, but the bush administration canot even clean up what's already happened.
It's not Bush's fault you godless heathens struck down Intelligent design. You are about to get Robertson'd.
We also had two category 5 hurricanes, making it one of the most intense seasons on record.
Just to add to your little stats refuting the first point:
This season we had 3 of the 6 strongest hurricanes ever recorded (by pressure).
On that note, does anybody know where I can find the official hierarchy of causes?
From Chapter 7 of the Karma Whorer's Manual:
In order of precedence, and to maximize your karma-whoring potential, you should always speak out against the first thing you find on the list:
1. Microsoft
2. The US Government
3. The military
4. The patent system
5. The republicans
6. Any government agency collecting information via the internet
7. emacs
8. karma-whores
9. Jack Thompson
10. CowboyNeal
I've always found slashdot and anyone with an IQ over 120 to be usually liberal-leaning and usually left-wing.
This one of my all-time favorite lines. Do you do IQ tests to your friends? Or do you infer IQ on slashdot? What exactly is your need to justify your politics based on 'intelligence'? Does it make you feel better to think you are smarter then people you disagree with? Do you realize that no matter how much things work out, on average, there are right-wingers in this world smarter then you and all your friends....? From whose ass did you pull the 120 number? Did you know that probabilisitically speaking, there exists a person in this world whom is far right-wing and has a higher IQ then every single one of you and your friends? Do you realize the fallacy of attempting to prove a statement with anecdotes?
To me, one of the dumbest all time political rationales is, "I've found that smarter people lean to the left". I lean to the right, and I'd be happy to put my 3 college degrees, SAT, and IQ score up against any of the dimwits who consider that a reasonable line of logic.
WTF, if the internet is in another country, the government of that country can do whatever they hell they want with it. That's how international law works. It's called respect for sovereignty.
Don't be silly. Slashdotters aren't very "consistent" in their desire for the US to respect other countries. It's only acceptable when it suits their own personal politics.. It doesn't matter which side the US came down on, the karma-whores and left-wingers on this site would have blamed the US.
The US was either going to be at fault for "ignoring the wishes of the Soverign nations for the sake of 'corporations'" or for "screwing legit owners and helping to censor the internet". This entire topic is going to be based in ignorance, politics, and fear-mongering... and if you are ever dilligent and intelligent, you will ignore 99.9% of it to find the tiny bit of truth scattered about.
I'm wondering if the spammers are changing tactics. I used to get one spam message at a time but now I get up to a dozen messages from the same slimeball, all with the same subject line.. Anyone know why this is happening?
Because the wonders of the uniq command have not yet descended to their circle of hell yet?
Why do they always have to use the atomic bomb as an example of the applications of quantum mechanics? It really gives it a bad name.
Maybe because it's one of the most impressive inventions to result from it? I thought we here at slashdot don't let our politics mix with our science (evolution, cough, cough)... or does that rule only apply when it supports our own personal politics.
You realize that a giant "proof by anecdote" is still nothing but a giant fallacy, right, no matter how you dress it up? You can run 10000s of business without patents, because 99.9% of businesses do not require patents. Very few fields do... so I fail to see what that anecdote adds to the conversation. Saying there are lots of books and lots of people who agree with you doesn't change that. I can probably go point for point if I bothered, and we can line up all the people that agree with us and have a nice democratic vote on what the "truth" is (hint: sophistry).
I know, for an absolute fact, that specific types of research is done and is profitable solely because of patents that exist in the field and because they are protected. If there weren't patents, there'd be no profit, and consequently very little research. Does my personal counterexample to your giant anecdote prove me right... no... it doesn't. Without the "monopoly" granted by the patent, there'd be no profit, and the amount of research and progress in the field would be orders of magnitude less. It would turn into the Arts, only able to survive on some pity handout of funding from the government (NEA).
The concept of "Invent, patent, stop inventing" is quaint and a cute platitude.. it would come as one hell of a surprise to the people I work with, though. You have a sexy vision of what the patent world must be like.... trying to get "a patent" so you can retire is like trying to win the lottery.. and only someone on the outside viewing inside via the microscope of a smattering of news article would buy that nonsense.
Reading arguments on Slashdot is like watching the Special Olympics - it's retards all the way down.
Reading slashdot comments and being upset that there are arguments is like watching the special olympics and expecting not to find retards. It's the entire point.
When the dust has settled I'm sure Europe, Canada and the rest of the free world will give asylum to the ones of you that decide to depart from the united states of previous freedom. I'm trying to figure out which side you are on and which side is responsible for the "previous freedom" comment... Could it be Microsoft, the defendant of a patent lawsuit.. somehow attacking our freedoms... or is it maybe Visto... the benefactor of some percieved flaw in the patent system whom is stamping out the precious liberty...
... or, the dreaded third option, who seeks to destory us all... the wretched karma-whore! Is this what happens when karma-whores can't figure out which is more likely to net them Karma? Anti-Microsoft or Anti-Patent.... Oh, I know.... Patriot Act!
What doesn't make sense, oh wise and knowing AC? Allow me to distill out the useful parts for you:
He said:
don't invent if you can't compete with what you invent. Someone else will come out with the same idea soon enough.
I said:
Sign me up for that poorly thought through "utopia" of yours. The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
If you need me to translate it down further, try this: I know that sounds great in the 9 seconds it took you to actually think that up, but it's a really stupid way to build a "perfect society" if you bother to put some more thought into it... Ie, discouraging invention is a pretty piss-poor first step on the road to utopia. You may not like our patent system... but the concepts of patents are incredibly useful and valuable to society as a whole.
Not for me. Patents are scummy ways of avoiding competition. In my non-existant "utopia" I would never accept them -- don't invent if you can't compete with what you invent. Someone else will come out with the same idea soon enough.
Hahah. Your "non-existant" utopia sounds like alot of fun. Sign me up for that poorly thought through "utopia" of yours. The path to hell is paved with good intentions.