tc

Let me address your last sentence, though. Your statement presupposes a utilitarian moral system. That is, it assumes that a person's position is completely determined by which policy will result in the greatest growth in technology.

I've studied the history of patents as well, and I share your practical uncertainly over which policy inspires more growth. Patents may, in fact, grow certain types of technology faster while inhibiting growth in other areas. Since we need to weigh the harm caused by the lack of things that never existed against the benefits brought by things that do, it's probably impossible to do a quantitative analysis that is fair to both sides.

However, I and many others oppose patents on deontological grounds. That is, even if the existence of a patent monopoly produces some technological benefits as compared to a non-monopolistic system, we would choose freedom from monopoly.

John Carmack may have stated the essence of this position better than anyone since Jefferson [1]:

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." -- John Carmack

[1] "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." -- Thomas Jefferson

Big companies that use patents as a revenue stream (MSFT, IBM, etc.) typically bide their time and bring a patent lawsuit once a new company is established and there is blood to drain. It's the threat of such a lawsuit in the future that can negatively impact investment in a startup, as the right collection of patents could conceivably capture much of the economic surplus of a new venture. Alternatively, a big company might use the threat of a patent lawsuit, now or in the future, to push a young company to agree to an early acquisition.

The pledge doesn't seem to have much impact on these scenarios, even if a big company were to follow it rigorously.

Most of us, I believe, would prefer to see companies make a stronger commitment: "No first use of software patents" [period]. Google hasn't made this pledge, but to the best of my knowledge, they've acted in this way so far. It does seem in line with "don't be evil."

That said, I think I see what PG is going for here. He wants companies to make a pledge that, at a minimum, allows a new product or service to be tested on the market. That way, if it gathers traction, it will attract investment despite the threat of patents, and the new company will be able to mount a reasonable defense.

Perhaps more importantly, though, by allowing the product to succeed first, even in a modest way, it makes the offensive use of patents worse PR for the big company. Killing a successful product with patents is no longer an abstract issue. It takes away from customers and the market something very real.

This is bad news.

They're going to backtrack on this. The sooner they do it, the better for them politically.

I understand the problems of setting a precedent. And there really is no getting around the fact that the hosts do have the final responsibility for screening travelers (and travelers for screening hosts).

But rightly or wrongly, they're going to end up on the wrong side of this story unless they make things right for this gal and can tell Arrington and other journalists, "we've made sure our customer is whole."

After saying that, they can use this as a learning exercise for their community about how screening hosts and travelers yourself is important.

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[Edit]: Is she in San Francisco? It looks like she is. She called SFPD. This is an easy one. Brian, Joe, or Nathan needs to be out there to provide a shoulder to cry on and an open checkbook to fix anything that money can fix. Nothing in that apartment costs more than the value of the ammunition this is going to give to their enemies.

The earlier they do this, the more quietly they can do it, which serves their purposes as well.

[Edit #2]: Some form of insurance might be a worthwhile addition to their offering, but that's something they can debate and decide on after they put out this fire. [added:] Also, insurance doesn't solve the safety issues involved here, so they're still going to need to emphasize the importance of screening travelers (and hosts) carefully.

[Edit #3]: EJ doesn't sound particularly litigious in her post, but consider what happens if she does decide to sue AirBnB and any part of it makes it to a jury. I mean, HackerNews is lining up against them. Consider what 6-12 normal people might decide. The wise move would be to make sure that she's fully satisfied with the way they treated her.

[Edit #4]: Arrington updated the article after speaking with Brian Chesky. Brian, Joe, Nathan and company did the right thing here, as you would expect.

The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the bath, which was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray to deliver breakfast. I'm partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely, "Ohayo, gozai masu," which means, "Good morning."

Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude. She turns to him and with equal composure says, "Ohayo, gozai masu ," and puts the tray down for us.

Pais looks at me and says, "God, are we uncivilized!"

We realized that in America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy's standing there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a big fuss. But in Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more advanced and civilized about those things than we were.

If you want to actually understand your books, use something simple and powerful like John Wiegley's ledger:

https://github.com/jwiegley/ledger/

Pain is part of the price of freedom. That's a truth that could use to be applied more widely.

"I've got friends in low places."

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[1] I agree, as noted by Nathan below, that this isn't helping Wikileaks' reputation any (despite, of course, WL having nothing to do with this). That's the problem with (and sometimes, benefit of) friends in low places -- no one ever accused them of being sophisticated.

[2] A related thought.... The system consisting of [ Person who leaks info + Wikileaks ] seems to be a modern instance of the Robin Hood archetype. Instead of "robbing from the rich to give to the poor," this system takes information from the powerful and gives it to the (relatively) powerless. Just as with Robin Hood, there's room for debate about the moral characteristics of this approach (particularly on the taking side). And just as with every Robin Hood reincarnation, this system is despised by modern aristocrats.

As I believe pg noted in an essay, during the time-setting of Robin Hood, wealth was nearly a zero-sum game. Today, wealth is not zero-sum, but power still is -- making this archetype all the more fitting.

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[1] As as aside.... There must be some serious arm-twisting going on here. I cannot fathom a reason, outside of garnering favor with an increasingly powerful and arbitrary government, that a profit-seeking business would allow fear-mongering within their premises. This cannot be good for retail. Amazon must be licking their lips.

[2] It's doubly unlikely that this will ever appear at Whole Foods, as the founder seems to be a libertarian. If he was interested in political favors he wouldn't have posted that WSJ op-ed on health-care.

[3] Orwell parallel: in 1984, only the members of the Inner Party could turn off their telescreens... though they also left the proles more or less in peace.

[4] Regarding the suggestions below that this could be good business for Walmart... there's truth in what you say, but I doubt it applies in this case. A fearful message such as, "It's hurricane season. Stock up!" would likely be effective (in certain geographies). Reminding people that gathering at your particular establishment might be dangerous, though, seems less likely to engender repeat business. "There may be terrorists lurking in our parking lot. Beware!"

Thank you. Thank you for ensuring that a clean, root-able, modern phone is available for developers and all those who like to fully own the devices they purchase.

I've operated an ISP, and I'm deeply familiar with the issues involved here. I posted my main comment quickly and updated it as I thought more deeply about the press release. To my mind, a legitimate use of the editing feature is to improve a comment upon reflection.

Again, I want it to be clear on the thread that I'm comfortable that your (and wmf's) comments weren't copied from mine, but neither is your accusation fair. I expect that we've all simply worked in or around the same industry and have seen similar things.

Leave it. Level3 set a terrible precedent here by paying the shakedown money. Even with their subsequent complaints, they've now put Comcast in a much better position by implicitly acknowledging (whether true or not) that Comcast brings more value to the table by providing access to its subscriber base than content-providers bring to the table by supplying content to subscribers.

Like the old Churchill story goes, "now we're just negotiating the price."

(See PS #4 below for a more benign interpretation.)

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PS #1: Yes, of course it might have been expensive for them to play hardball here, with respect to the short-term harm it might cause their customers. That's exactly the point. By acknowledging that the harm to Comcast would be lower (which I actually doubt), they've significantly strengthened Comcast's position against other carriers and perhaps even with regulators.

PS #2: Game theory would suggest that it's critical for Netflix to repel this assault now, even at the cost of short term pain. Once this precedence is established, Comcast will be able to extract nearly all of the profit from Netflix sales to Comcast customers. Each time Comcast raises the toll, it would be in Netflix's rational self interest to go along so long as they are still making some net profit on the channel (modulo opportunity costs and whatnot).

PS #3: It's not uncommon for carriers to play hardball. The big Tier 1's have been trying to prevent the ascension of Cogent into their club for years, which (along with Cogent's aggressiveness) resulted in some nasty peering dispute stalemates in 2005 (with Level3) and 2008 (with Sprint), each time "breaking the internet."

PS #4: It's also possible that Level3 is representing this as a net neutrality issue when in reality it's just a peering dispute. Traditionally local ISPs have had to pay for transit across the networks of the big carriers. When a local ISP becomes a large regional or national one (Comcast), they have enough leverage to extract no-charge ("settlement-free") peering agreements with most of the major carriers. This is probably the first case, though, of a cable-company ISP becoming large enough to extract transit fees from a big international carrier. That's noteworthy, but if it is content-neutral, it's still the way the internet has always worked.

Why didn't she? Perhaps she was in the middle of a row. But often the reason that no one helps is that everyone is expecting someone else to do it -- someone more official or someone better located.

If a person needs help, don't look around for who else is moving. Go help.

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A story, while we're on the subject: I'm eating at this sushi place with a girl when I hear a chair hit the floor. I look up, and there's this big fellow a few tables over who appears to be choking. He's with a date, but it's clear she's shocked and doesn't know what to do. As I'm sliding out of the booth to get to my feet, a guy blows past me. He must have noticed the poor fellow choking sooner, because he came flying from the bar at the other side of the restaurant. He just seemed to appear out of nowhere.

He gives the big fellow the Heimlich Maneuver. The guy starts coughing after two or three hard thrusts. The rescuer makes sure the guy is OK, then disappears out the front door and into the night.

The total time from him blowing past me to breezing out the front door was no more than 30 seconds. It was a terribly efficient rescue.

I've always imagined he wanted out of there quickly and anonymously because of liability concerns.

You could argue that these are somehow related, that the young and hip would be attracted by the Think Different ad. I don't dispute that. But the later ads of kids jamming with their iPod ear buds communicate a message that is much closer to the general perception of Apple as a brand today.

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[1] In the clothing industry, this type of positioning wouldn't be noteworthy or distinguishing. But in consumer electronics, advertising more like Abercrombie & Fitch and less like IBM has worked out brilliantly for them.

[2] The pre-2000 perception of Apple's brand was also somewhat tangential to the idea of changing the world. Their core message was "we're not IBM." In the talk, Jobs mentions this shouldn't be their core message, but clearly it was. The 1984 ad reinforced this, and even the 1997 Think Different ad retrenched this ground by riffing off of IBM's motto.

[3] Edit: The idea that Apple's core customer is someone who "values their time" and is not a computer geek is meaninglessly broad. Every customer values his or her time, and in any mainstream industry, the vast majority of customers are not computer geeks.

[4] Edit: Was it the success of the iPod that made Apple hip, or was the perception of the iPod being hip part of what made it such a success? Clearly it did become a fashion accessory. The product's clean design was congruent with this message.

Did Google believe that this was going to succeed as a consumer product, à la Facebook?

Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to transcend email.

Maybe Google just hoped Wave would appeal to a different market than it really does.

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PS #1: I'm sure that corporate uptake of Wave in its current form was limited as well because of the absence of a reasonable client/server that you could run on your own network.

PS #2: Hopefully there are enough of us who like the protocol that, over a number of years, we can build Apache Foundation-quality F/OSS implementations of the needed components.

PS #3: It would be truly ironic if, say in 10 years time, Google finally integrated the Wave Protocol with Gmail because there had been enough private (but federated) uptake as an email replacement.

1) The author here is being lighthearted; your comment implies instead that he's being a demagogue.

2) This sort of pattern is far more common in "public" discussions such as public policy than in science, so I think you are directing your ire incorrectly.

  (defconstant tau #.(* 2 pi))

All it really takes to catch on is adoption by a handful of elementary school textbooks -- and those publishers have adopter much crazier things in the past. As the manifesto points out, this is distinctly pedagogically useful, so it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility.

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[1] Correction: Julian/Gregorian years begin with 1 A.D. (I still prefer the AD/BC convention, as the two identifiers have an equal number of characters.)

[2] I'll admit that my perception of prevalence here may be strongly influenced by the fact that Wikipedia has adopted this convention.

"With ever more people trying to innovate and thus seeking patent protections for their inventions, the patent law faces a great challenge in striking the balance between protecting inventors and not granting monopolies over procedures that others would discover by independent, creative application of general principles. Nothing in this opinion should be read to take a position on where that balance ought to be struck."

The entire court held that the patent application in question should be denied as it represented only an abstract idea. The majority opinion declined to give much further guidance other than to emphasize that 1) the law should be interpreted using the plain meaning of words in the statute, and that 2) the machine or transformation test is not an exclusive test of whether a claim is patent-worthy.

Stevens, Ginsberg, Breyer, and Sotomayer concurred with the decision, but would have denied the application based on a more strictly defined interpretation of the word "process," noting that the majority's acceptance of a looser interpretation "can only cause mischief. The wiser course would have been to hold that petitioners' method is not a 'process' because it describes only a general method of engaging in business transactions—and business methods are not patentable."

Breyer and Scalia separately emphasized that the machine or transformation test is still useful, though not exclusive, and that there is much agreement between the majority opinion and the concurring one.

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At the end of the day, it appears that this decision will lead lower courts to continue ruling, with new reassurance, that patents on software and business methods are valid as long as the patent claims meet the statutory criteria of being novel, useful, and non-obvious. Patent applicants simply need to be more careful than Bilski in ensuring that their claims don't on their face seem like common abstract ideas.

Given the language of the statute, the history of prior rulings, and the broad Constitutional authorization given to Congress to grant patent monopolies, it's difficult to take issue with their narrow ruling. The real problem we face is one of modern information theory colliding with an 18th century experiment in government-granted monopolies.

This is the end of the road (in the US) for challenging these types of patents en masse via the courts in our lifetime. The fight, if it is to continue, will now shift to influencing Congress to make changes.

As for thrift, I subscribe to the notion that it's a virtue, and I reject the supposed paradox. We're not going to settle that in this thread, though. That argument has been going on for a hundred years. The Wikipedia page covers the history.

He promotes the notion that: 1) Germany creates wealth better than other countries, and 2) by saving and investing that wealth rather than consuming it, Germany does a disservice to the world and impoverishes its neighbors. [1]

By the same logic, we should applaud billionaires for building mansions and enormous yachts rather than living modest lives and investing in startups and other businesses. And what of all the arguments about the US and other first world countries consuming such a disproportionate share of the world's resources? If we were to consume less, and by necessity save and invest instead, we'd be impoverishing the rest of the world!

Germany is perhaps culpable here -- culpable for making bad investments which enabled wealth destruction. And they're further culpable for bailing out Greece, which perpetuates the problem and supports our world's already out of control situation with respect to moral hazard.

[1] I'm ignoring his point about currencies here, because I don't really disagree with the notion that Germany engaged in a counter-productive vendor-financing scheme on consumer goods. That's the same boat that China's in with the US. What I'm trying to emphasize is that the problem is who they loaned money to and for what purpose, whereas the author seems to imply that any increased German consumption would have been better than increased savings.

[2] The author also seems to think it is misguided to blame the spendthrift politicians in Greece. Whatever you think of the economy of Germany, I can't see what's mistaken about blaming spendthrift politicians.

Edit: To your main point, I think your emphasis on the fact there is still a court order is misplaced. Of what practical value is a court order if there is no burden to show probable cause (instead only 'relevance to an ongoing investigation'), and you have no opportunity to challenge (or even know about) the order. How many requests under such a standard do you really think are going to be turned down?

The bonds were 'toxic' because if the banks sold any of them for their market value, the banks would have had to mark down the value of the bonds still on their books. That would have shown that the banks were insolvent. By not allowing a market value for the bonds to emerge, the banks could maintain the illusion that their assets were greater than their liabilities.

1) Because of how governments deal in collective punishment, private aviation is likely to suffer further regulatory decimation even though events of this type are extremely rare, statistically speaking.

2) His rambling, narcissistic screed will be broadcast widely, and his immature and senseless actions used to paint those with legitimate and sensible criticisms of our tax system or systems of governance.

Businesses, of course, do the opposite when facing a budget crisis. They cut as far back as possible while still delivering as many of the things that their customers care about as they can [3].

It always seems silly to me when people worry about private sector pseudo-monopolies when we haven't figured out how to fix the incentives of that singular cartel that currently controls about half of our GDP.

[1] In part they are just living up to the implicit promises they make when asking for the tax hike. The message is never, "we need to raise taxes or else we'll be forced to cut the salaries and benefits of overpaid bureaucrats and work to operate more efficiently." No, it's always, "we need to raise taxes or else the lights will go out, and you wouldn't want that." You wouldn't expect them to let people down?

[2] Another commenter here usefully pointed out that this is an example of the Washington Monument Syndrome:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome

[3] When I say 'businesses' above, I'm principally referring to the millions of private companies in the US, not the handful of attention-grabbing public firms where management can extract wealth from the shareholders (and the government, in the case of GM and the banks). There is a different set of perverse incentives operating there. An entrenched (government-supported) monopoly could act the same way, as could (to some degree) a politically entrenched department head of a private organization. The bad incentives derive from high switching costs resulting in monopoly economics.

[4] Regarding rigor (questioned below): 1) my claim about what is usual in these circumstances is based on my own personal observations working with local governments; 2) I cited the Wikipedia article for naming of the phenomenon, not for rigorous support of its existence (be your own judge for that), and 3) this is already more rigorous than I intended to be for a simple comment about a common phenomenon that others have observed and noted long before the internet was available for us to debate every ontological question at length.

An example is set at the top, by those in power, that self-dealing and self-interest above all ethical standards is standard operating procedure. Eventually this moral decay 'trickles-down' and people start to realize that they are chumps if they don't start playing by the same rules.

You can create far more attraction in person within five minutes than this poor ("nice") guy did with untold hours of work. And no matter how much he liked learning WPF, spending those hours with an attractive and attracted other would surely have been more fun.

Edit: I'm suggesting that if wooing her was his ends (which seems clear), then the means he chose was predictably poor. Given the opportunity cost of his time, a plane ticket doesn't seem so unreasonable.

Your life will be happier if you don't follow this fellow's courting model.

I sympathized with that line of reasoning much more before reading Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government. Now I'm convinced that he should either resign or be held as equally complicit [1].

http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html

[1] He should either be willing to defend the current system, or he should stop being its agent. Enforcing a law brings the same moral responsibility as writing a law.

Timely, in another thread we are celebrating Google for ceasing to be an agent of the Chinese government. We should never allow moral actors to absolve themselves of responsibility by pointing to a far-away law.

There appears to be a growing disconnect between what we consider right and what we consider practical. It seems right that you should be able to peacefully question any non-emergency procedure, expect basic respect even if you're not being the most pleasant person, and retreat a step or two reflexively if you feel threatened.

Of course, we know that the practical approach to take is to be docile, passive, sickeningly submissive, and compliant nearly to the point of being patronizing.

The border guards train and drill repeatedly on how to behave aggressively and militantly in this situation. Most adults have no corresponding practice at acting completely flaccid and defenseless on command, which is what it seems we've come to expect.