To be pedantic, the patent system was created to encourage the production of more useful stuff.
Well yes, but by encouraging invention. You can't produce what hasn't been invented yet.
In practice trolls don't actually produce anything. A NPE doesn't seek to make the invention. The troll doesn't seek to sell the invention to someone to have it made. The troll waits under its bridge until someone tries to to make something useful and then slithers out and demands protection money.
This hints at bad patents. Otherwise the patent should be useful without any need to "slither out". Many patent holders have the opposite problem -- they can't get anybody to produce what they invented!
A Patent Troll is a non-practicing entity (NPE). The sole aim of a patent is to encourage the creation of new inventions. The mechanism to do that involves remuneration, but that's not the aim. A NPE doesn't produce anything, so it doesn't encourage the creation of new inventions. It sure encourages the creation of new patents, but is doesn't encourage the creation of new 'things'.
You've got a contradiction in your logic there. The "NPE" is also known as an inventor. The patent system was created to separate the roles of invention from the roles of production. The troll, or NPE, has already done their part by creating the invention and gets paid for it via licensing fees, as intended. Even if the invention is sold by the original inventor to another NPE, the patent system still served the function for providing a market for inventions.
Now personally I hate all the bad patents floating around, and seriously question if the patent system isn't doing more harm than good anyways, even if only "good" patents were allowed, but the "troll" patent owner, as defined, is what patents are essentially there for.
Transportation: I can and do walk, rarely needing a vehicle. No need for mass transport either. I live on a farm and work there as well as in the forest. No need to drive. I often go months without getting in a car or truck.
Great, so you're a hermit who doesn't enjoy easy access to modern conveniences. Meanwhile, people live in cities because there are jobs there and not everybody wants to live on a farm.
The only question is where else do we put all those people?
Exactly, which is why cities are better than human sprawl for the environment and society. You might want to read up on the horror story of Pol Pot: "An attempt by Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot to form a Communist peasant farming society resulted in the deaths of 25 percent of the country's population from starvation, overwork and executions."
Both tap water and bottled water are available for purchase. The idea of economically mining asteroids for water in the near future is absurd. An article from 2007 says:
"And almost all municipal water in America is so good that nobody needs to import a single bottle from Italy or France or the Fiji Islands. Meanwhile, if you choose to get your recommended eight glasses a day from bottled water, you could spend up to $1,400 annually. The same amount of tap water would cost about 49 cents."
feel free to declare yourself winner after I don't reply back
It's easy to declare myself the victor when you don't make an argument and throw out the word troll. Yes, anybody can read the thread, and I even quoted the essentials in a convenient format in a later post. Since you don't have an argument to make, your support for the "victim" means nothing to me.
How in the FUCK do you deduce, from that post, that I approve of torture?
What you endorsed was the threat of torture, which many consider a form of torture in and of itself. What you're ignoring is the context of the rest of the thread:
==
_KiTA_: "We caught Bin Laden DESPITE using torture, not BECAUSE of it."
Anonymous Coward: "And you KNOW this how?"
Runaway1956: "We KNOW this because of testimony from the CIA operatives who worked with the captives who provided information about Osama. [..] AFTER all the torturing was finished, different operatives approached the same "informants" in a more friendly manner, and basically bribed useful information from the "informants"."
zakkudo: "Are you sure they weren't doing the well known, "good cop, bad cop"? [..] The torturing effects how someone responds to bribery later."
Runaway1956: "The "good cop, bad cop" routine does not require the use of torture. It only requires the THREAT of torture, or some other unpleasant things occurring. The routine is very effective, of course, in certain situations."
Runaway1956: [in an attempt to justify the previous remarks] "The bad cop hasn't done anything illegal, he's merely stretched the truth."
==
I'll stop there.
Go, get that education. And, maybe get a life while you're at it.
More ad hominem. You can have the last word in this thread, as it's all been laid bare.
I though the current Uncle Tom Obama approved definition is 'No Permanent Organ Damage'. He must have approved it because there has been not attempt to prosecute for the repeated practice.
You're wrong. There was a policy of torture from the previous administration. This was rescinded. What is true that Obama explicitly decided he was not going to prosecute any of the past torture. Example article here. I could understand that point of view, and easily debate both sides, but to say that Obama didn't recognize what went on before as torture is wrong.
Some of the problems are with patenting the obvious or having overlapping patents. Too many patents overlap each other or are painfully obvious that are granted with the idea that these issues should be settled later in the courts.
You don't provide any way to prevent this. Practice has shown that dubious patents will be issued. Just saying "don't do that" isn't a compelling argument.
If society also decides that patents are only for the purpose of financial gain and the deliberate hinderance to scientific progress and the betterment of mankind then they deserve what they get.
You, again, haven't provided an alternative. At least two other posters that replied to me have. It's difficult to get laws changed, especially when entrenched, powerful interests are against you and the issue doesn't directly impact most people.
Most people are just unaware of the current gaming of the system and don't feel this way.
True enough, but even worse, I think the Apple vs. Motorola case demonstrates that juries aren't qualified to decide on these issues.
Full of shit, much? You got caught in a bad position and are trying to weasel your way out of it.
I'm even opposed to the "good cop - bad cop" routine.
You didn't state that originally. What you tried to do, in two separate posts, is give a way that wasn't torture for the bad cop routine. Both times you clearly invoked the use of threats, and in the first post one of those threats was the use of torture (key word there being "or"). You can't say you can solve your problems by "evil thing or some other unpleasant things occurring" and pretend you didn't advocate evil thing.
You will never find anyplace where I have approved of the use of torture, or the threat of torture.
Your attempts to work around the principle remind me of "enhanced interrogation", and backpedaling to boot. You explicitly said, "THREAT of torture", which is explicitly forbidden. See how easy it is to become that which you hate?
It's generally considered a form of psychological torture to threaten to torture somebody. For example, from the Geneva Conventions:
"No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind."
Actually most of those agencies believed that they didn't, and stated as much. As did the non-Cheney controlled American analysts. It was pretty obvious at the time that the Bush/Cheney were looking for a pretext for war.
I'll await your citations. I've debated this position with others in the past, and even France, the poster child for the "wise" Europeans counciling against war by the brash Americans, wanted more time for inspections. They never said they believed there were no WMD.
I'm not against patents. It's just that the current way it's being run isn't working to help move tech progress forward, it only helps a few to make money and also keep control over the rate of progress.
Then propose a viable alternative, because patents lead to exactly this situation. Do you find it odd that somebody granted a monopoly abuses it to their maximum potential?
yes, that's one of the 101 things that are wrong with it, as I pointed out.
In other words, you are part of the problem, but you still endorse this as "but anything that converts a feeling of mild impotent rage into a feeling of vengeful satisfaction is a good thing in my book"?
"Sponsored content" without informing the reader is fraud, pure and simple. The people facilitating it should be in jail.
Check the article. It was labeled as "SPONSOR CONTENT", highlighted in bright yellow even, with a link to "What's this?" that explained it was from advertisers.
Edit should be supported until moderation or a reply occurs.
No, because reading counts too. No editing. If you really insist on an edit feature, then make it an option that your post doesn't appear for 15 minutes or something, which lets you edit in the meantime.
There were at least two serious petitions that were blown off - legalization of marijuana and elimination of TSA.
The marijuana one got a response. You can argue about how valid the response was, but it wasn't blown off. The TSA one didn't pass the threshold, as noted in your link. Maybe there were some shenanigans with "maintenance" to thwart it, but if it had overwhelming support it could have easily passed the threshold without waiting for the last minute.
Kudos to the White House for changing the URLs so that Google searches return bad links, and no search on the petition page.
It's easily fixable by comparing the new URL scheme with the old one. While I think it's a really shitty practice by web devs/admins to break links without redirects, it happens all the time and wasn't necessarily intentional.
Oddly, searching for "Neill Franklin" the author of a petition, returns no results.
Try doing the same for any author of any petition. You'll note that petition signatures and creators only include the first name and last initial.
I find it astonishing that anyone with an IQ over 120 supports this administration.
I don't think this is about the joke petitions but about the speed of getting 25000 signatories for the removal of publicity hound Carmen Ortiz because of her part in Aaron Swartz's suicide. She's part of The Establishment, they want to keep her so it is far better to raise the bar than address a perceived problem.
"[..] although petitions already underway as of Wednesday, such as the one to remove the federal prosecutor in the Aaron Swarz case, will only require the original 25,000 for White House review."
And the petition has already passed the threshold:
"SIGNATURES NEEDED BY FEBRUARY 11, 2013 TO REACH GOAL OF 25,000: 0"
Yes, but how much of the Go software's decision process relies on scanning through thousands of professional games?
I don't know about Zen, the current strongest program, but other programs have gotten pretty far without it. It doesn't really matter anyways, since the pros learn from those who came before them. If a computer learns too it doesn't diminish the accomplishment.
Software might be good at fighting locally, but last I knew programs still relied heavily on professional games to determine where to play outside of a fight.
No, the real revolution came several years ago from monte carlo approaches, and one of its main strengths is it has an innate sense of direction without having to be told.
Go of course occupies the uttermost extreme in terms of being utterly simple in form and yet so immensely complex in both strategic and tactical depth that no software yet written even approaches the better human players.
Go software is not as far away as you think. Zen on KGS is 5d/6d, depending on time controls, and has recently beaten a pro with only 4 handicap stones.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that people look at Perl - without having learned it - and say "unreadable!"
The problem is even people who have learned Perl find it unreadable. Sigil hell.
To be pedantic, the patent system was created to encourage the production of more useful stuff.
Well yes, but by encouraging invention. You can't produce what hasn't been invented yet.
In practice trolls don't actually produce anything. A NPE doesn't seek to make the invention. The troll doesn't seek to sell the invention to someone to have it made. The troll waits under its bridge until someone tries to to make something useful and then slithers out and demands protection money.
This hints at bad patents. Otherwise the patent should be useful without any need to "slither out". Many patent holders have the opposite problem -- they can't get anybody to produce what they invented!
A Patent Troll is a non-practicing entity (NPE). The sole aim of a patent is to encourage the creation of new inventions. The mechanism to do that involves remuneration, but that's not the aim. A NPE doesn't produce anything, so it doesn't encourage the creation of new inventions. It sure encourages the creation of new patents, but is doesn't encourage the creation of new 'things'.
You've got a contradiction in your logic there. The "NPE" is also known as an inventor. The patent system was created to separate the roles of invention from the roles of production. The troll, or NPE, has already done their part by creating the invention and gets paid for it via licensing fees, as intended. Even if the invention is sold by the original inventor to another NPE, the patent system still served the function for providing a market for inventions.
Now personally I hate all the bad patents floating around, and seriously question if the patent system isn't doing more harm than good anyways, even if only "good" patents were allowed, but the "troll" patent owner, as defined, is what patents are essentially there for.
Transportation: I can and do walk, rarely needing a vehicle. No need for mass transport either. I live on a farm and work there as well as in the forest. No need to drive. I often go months without getting in a car or truck.
Great, so you're a hermit who doesn't enjoy easy access to modern conveniences. Meanwhile, people live in cities because there are jobs there and not everybody wants to live on a farm.
The only question is where else do we put all those people?
Exactly, which is why cities are better than human sprawl for the environment and society. You might want to read up on the horror story of Pol Pot: "An attempt by Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot to form a Communist peasant farming society resulted in the deaths of 25 percent of the country's population from starvation, overwork and executions."
Potable water is literally priceless.
Both tap water and bottled water are available for purchase. The idea of economically mining asteroids for water in the near future is absurd. An article from 2007 says:
"And almost all municipal water in America is so good that nobody needs to import a single bottle from Italy or France or the Fiji Islands. Meanwhile, if you choose to get your recommended eight glasses a day from bottled water, you could spend up to $1,400 annually. The same amount of tap water would cost about 49 cents."
I'm not going to debate somebody who needs to pepper their speech with "Uncle Tom Obama". I pointed out your factual error, and will leave it at that.
feel free to declare yourself winner after I don't reply back
It's easy to declare myself the victor when you don't make an argument and throw out the word troll. Yes, anybody can read the thread, and I even quoted the essentials in a convenient format in a later post. Since you don't have an argument to make, your support for the "victim" means nothing to me.
How in the FUCK do you deduce, from that post, that I approve of torture?
What you endorsed was the threat of torture, which many consider a form of torture in and of itself. What you're ignoring is the context of the rest of the thread:
==
_KiTA_: "We caught Bin Laden DESPITE using torture, not BECAUSE of it."
Anonymous Coward: "And you KNOW this how?"
Runaway1956: "We KNOW this because of testimony from the CIA operatives who worked with the captives who provided information about Osama. [..] AFTER all the torturing was finished, different operatives approached the same "informants" in a more friendly manner, and basically bribed useful information from the "informants"."
zakkudo: "Are you sure they weren't doing the well known, "good cop, bad cop"? [..] The torturing effects how someone responds to bribery later."
Runaway1956: "The "good cop, bad cop" routine does not require the use of torture. It only requires the THREAT of torture, or some other unpleasant things occurring. The routine is very effective, of course, in certain situations."
Runaway1956: [in an attempt to justify the previous remarks] "The bad cop hasn't done anything illegal, he's merely stretched the truth."
==
I'll stop there.
Go, get that education. And, maybe get a life while you're at it.
More ad hominem. You can have the last word in this thread, as it's all been laid bare.
I though the current Uncle Tom Obama approved definition is 'No Permanent Organ Damage'. He must have approved it because there has been not attempt to prosecute for the repeated practice.
You're wrong. There was a policy of torture from the previous administration. This was rescinded. What is true that Obama explicitly decided he was not going to prosecute any of the past torture. Example article here. I could understand that point of view, and easily debate both sides, but to say that Obama didn't recognize what went on before as torture is wrong.
I see now that you have abandoned argument and resorted to ad hominem. Ho hum.
Some of the problems are with patenting the obvious or having overlapping patents. Too many patents overlap each other or are painfully obvious that are granted with the idea that these issues should be settled later in the courts.
You don't provide any way to prevent this. Practice has shown that dubious patents will be issued. Just saying "don't do that" isn't a compelling argument.
If society also decides that patents are only for the purpose of financial gain and the deliberate hinderance to scientific progress and the betterment of mankind then they deserve what they get.
You, again, haven't provided an alternative. At least two other posters that replied to me have. It's difficult to get laws changed, especially when entrenched, powerful interests are against you and the issue doesn't directly impact most people.
Most people are just unaware of the current gaming of the system and don't feel this way.
True enough, but even worse, I think the Apple vs. Motorola case demonstrates that juries aren't qualified to decide on these issues.
Reading comprehension, much?
Full of shit, much? You got caught in a bad position and are trying to weasel your way out of it.
I'm even opposed to the "good cop - bad cop" routine.
You didn't state that originally. What you tried to do, in two separate posts, is give a way that wasn't torture for the bad cop routine. Both times you clearly invoked the use of threats, and in the first post one of those threats was the use of torture (key word there being "or"). You can't say you can solve your problems by "evil thing or some other unpleasant things occurring" and pretend you didn't advocate evil thing.
You will never find anyplace where I have approved of the use of torture, or the threat of torture.
Except I did, in black and white.
Your attempts to work around the principle remind me of "enhanced interrogation", and backpedaling to boot. You explicitly said, "THREAT of torture", which is explicitly forbidden. See how easy it is to become that which you hate?
It only requires the THREAT of torture
It's generally considered a form of psychological torture to threaten to torture somebody. For example, from the Geneva Conventions:
"No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind."
Actually most of those agencies believed that they didn't, and stated as much. As did the non-Cheney controlled American analysts. It was pretty obvious at the time that the Bush/Cheney were looking for a pretext for war.
I'll await your citations. I've debated this position with others in the past, and even France, the poster child for the "wise" Europeans counciling against war by the brash Americans, wanted more time for inspections. They never said they believed there were no WMD.
I'm not against patents. It's just that the current way it's being run isn't working to help move tech progress forward, it only helps a few to make money and also keep control over the rate of progress.
Then propose a viable alternative, because patents lead to exactly this situation. Do you find it odd that somebody granted a monopoly abuses it to their maximum potential?
That's funny, but for those that don't know: XOR is a well-known, poor man's encryption/obfuscation trick.
So you stand by a bonus premised on targeting innocent victims for revenge?
yes, that's one of the 101 things that are wrong with it, as I pointed out.
In other words, you are part of the problem, but you still endorse this as "but anything that converts a feeling of mild impotent rage into a feeling of vengeful satisfaction is a good thing in my book"?
Or maybe you'd like to rescind your endorsement?
"Sponsored content" without informing the reader is fraud, pure and simple. The people facilitating it should be in jail.
Check the article. It was labeled as "SPONSOR CONTENT", highlighted in bright yellow even, with a link to "What's this?" that explained it was from advertisers.
Edit should be supported until moderation or a reply occurs.
No, because reading counts too. No editing. If you really insist on an edit feature, then make it an option that your post doesn't appear for 15 minutes or something, which lets you edit in the meantime.
There were at least two serious petitions that were blown off - legalization of marijuana and elimination of TSA.
The marijuana one got a response. You can argue about how valid the response was, but it wasn't blown off. The TSA one didn't pass the threshold, as noted in your link. Maybe there were some shenanigans with "maintenance" to thwart it, but if it had overwhelming support it could have easily passed the threshold without waiting for the last minute.
Kudos to the White House for changing the URLs so that Google searches return bad links, and no search on the petition page.
It's easily fixable by comparing the new URL scheme with the old one. While I think it's a really shitty practice by web devs/admins to break links without redirects, it happens all the time and wasn't necessarily intentional.
Oddly, searching for "Neill Franklin" the author of a petition, returns no results.
Try doing the same for any author of any petition. You'll note that petition signatures and creators only include the first name and last initial.
I find it astonishing that anyone with an IQ over 120 supports this administration.
Did somebody with an IQ over 120 write your post?
I don't think this is about the joke petitions but about the speed of getting 25000 signatories for the removal of publicity hound Carmen Ortiz because of her part in Aaron Swartz's suicide. She's part of The Establishment, they want to keep her so it is far better to raise the bar than address a perceived problem.
Failed hypothesis:
"[..] although petitions already underway as of Wednesday, such as the one to remove the federal prosecutor in the Aaron Swarz case, will only require the original 25,000 for White House review."
And the petition has already passed the threshold:
"SIGNATURES NEEDED BY FEBRUARY 11, 2013 TO REACH GOAL OF 25,000: 0"
TOTAL SIGNATURES ON THIS PETITION: 39,825"
Yes, but how much of the Go software's decision process relies on scanning through thousands of professional games?
I don't know about Zen, the current strongest program, but other programs have gotten pretty far without it. It doesn't really matter anyways, since the pros learn from those who came before them. If a computer learns too it doesn't diminish the accomplishment.
Software might be good at fighting locally, but last I knew programs still relied heavily on professional games to determine where to play outside of a fight.
No, the real revolution came several years ago from monte carlo approaches, and one of its main strengths is it has an innate sense of direction without having to be told.
Go of course occupies the uttermost extreme in terms of being utterly simple in form and yet so immensely complex in both strategic and tactical depth that no software yet written even approaches the better human players.
Go software is not as far away as you think. Zen on KGS is 5d/6d, depending on time controls, and has recently beaten a pro with only 4 handicap stones.