nimble

While empowering patent examiners to say "no" will probably help, it's not going to fix patents. Changes I would make to fix patents:

- Get rid of license negotiation before the fact and replace it with attribution after the fact. All patented ideas should compete for a bounded slice of the pie of products. Attribution should be incentivized, but failure to attribute shouldn't be penalized excessively.

- Instead of just letting a panel of experts (patent examiners) determine which ideas are novel and which aren't, we should further let them determine how novel they are and award the most novel ideas bigger rewards. The current system of granting a monopoly on an idea allows the patent holder to collect a large potion of the total value of an idea, which would be fair only for ideas that occur to just one person in the world. In reality, almost all patented ideas (the good ones, anyway) occur to a number of bright people, even if they wouldn't occur to a person having ordinary skill in the art.

- The patent database should be more like the collection of peer reviewed academic knowledge. Ideas should be rewarded based on impact, rather than just who technically had the idea first. We should reward high quality exposition of ideas instead of our current system that mostly rewards obfuscation.

Of course, all of this is even less likely to happen that the idea in the OP. Abolishing patents or at least software patents would be preferable to the system we have now.

Over 3 billion devices run java

That was sarcasm. My point was that if this level of critical thinking deficiency is really present, then there is something seriously wrong with the way kids are being taught, and calls that you hear for extra funding to pay for things like laptops in the classroom are really a giant waste of money until we fix whatever that is.

This would never happen if there was a laptop in every classroom. (EDIT: Sarcasm alert -- see my response below before you downvote me)

EDIT: Just watched the video. Scary.

> An extra banker produces a lot of value.

For some value of "value".

(Also, the example of two superheros isn't a good one - they will probably collude and get something much closer to their full value)

That is if they're not paying him for it.

And is that policy billed as a "zero tolerance for drinking and driving policy" or a "zero tolerance for drunk driving" policy?

There is a law against drunk driving that mentions a 0.08 threshold. There is a law against speeding that doesn't mention 10mph leeway.

You're sort of right. If he'd said "we have zero tolerance for anyone going over 10 mph," it certainly wouldn't have been as funny. Instead, he proclaimed proudly that "we have a zero tolerance policy" and then explained it only applied to people going 10+ mph over the limit in the next sentence.

There's a difference between using the phrase "zero tolerance" to describe what happens in a certain situation and using the phrase "zero tolerance" to describe your policy when it has tolerance built into it.

(I un-downvoted your first post)

Once when I was riding passenger with a friend, a cop pulled him over and told him that he was getting a ticket as part of their new "zero tolerance" policy: anyone caught exceeding the posted limit by more than 10 mph was going to be ticketed. I sometimes wonder if cops say stupid things just to identify the smart asses out there (I kept my mouth shut).

My point was that learning that they leave most frequently in the first three months might not be the Eureka moment the post implies.

> Essentially this means that if we can make a customer stick with us longer than three months, they will stay.

This isn't true (try making your service free for the first three months and see what happens!) and is the wrong way to think about. You need to dig deeper to understand why they're leaving. Part of it probably has to do with three months as a habit forming period, but some percentage probably decide your service isn't worth it for them.

This seems to muddle cardinality. First he defines cardinality as "number of elements" and notes that infinite sets have infinite cardinality, but doesn't explain what that might mean. Then he introduces "same cardinality" as a new definition instead of letting it arise out of sameness of number. And next, without any new definition, starts referring to larger cardinality.

Actually, 3-5 years sounds pretty reasonable. If you think about it, you should be glad that she didn't get a crazy "send a message" punishment of 20 years or life in prison. She'll never work in that capacity again, so it's not like there's a need to separate her from society for the protection of society.

A better question to address is how a single rogue person could do so much damage. This is institutional failure. Just going after this woman misses the big problem.

Do you agree that everyone deserves a fair share of the natural resources of the earth?

> outstanding innovations

Which proposal from your first paragraph is going to ensure outstanding-ness of inventions? I recall company lawyers making the rounds asking us to write down any possible inventions among the things we'd already built. I don't remember the lawyers ever asking whether those possible inventions were outstanding.

Shouldn't there be at least one option for people working less than 40 hours a week?

Basic income is a good idea but you have the rationale wrong.

The right theory for a basic income should be that all people deserve a stake in the accumulated knowledge and technology of mankind, just as they deserve equal stake in the land and other natural resources. As general advancement accelerates and allows for greater production with less labor, a greater percentage of that wealth ought to be shared with everyone. So in the thought experiment where no one really needs to work and the robots take care of all of our basic needs, eventually distribution of resources should be more or less uniform.

If you view basic income as handouts then you have to answer all of the objections that you'll find in this thread: you're stealing from someone else to pay for them, you're disincentivizing work, etc. Basic income should instead be viewed as arising from principles of fairness.

Maybe they detected fraud

Bigger nit: If lisps just have expressions (and not statements), then they clearly have a separation between the two :).

Clever use of bomb threats.

> Governments can't do anything well because they are bureaucratic nightmares.

And what's the difference between a government and a large corporation? "No government can do anything well" is lazy thinking.

No, it isn't. Unless you mean that governments don't relinquish power unless they're designed to, but that's a big difference. Nor is it true that governments can't due anything well by virtue of being governments. What is true is that governments are complex (and thus difficult to get right) and usually have a high inertia. It's also true that individuals tend not to relinquish power, both out of self-interest and a lack of trust/belief in the other guy.

Thinking about this more, I don't understand the importance of your fair-weather mining idea. If the parties collaborating on the ES attack are willing to betray each other, then isn't a much simpler form of betrayal to steal the block that someone else in the group found and claim it for yourself?

Bitcoin attempts to create a protocol that doesn't require trust between parties, but needs to robust against large groups (e.g. blocks of Chinese) who trust each other. So I don't think it's ironic that the ES attack is not incentive compatible, nor do I think it's really a flaw.

It's not clear to me that Felten's response you've linked to identifies a fatal flaw in the ES attack, because the ES attackers aren't limited to following just the bitcoin protocol. The ES attackers could follow a protocol under which coalition members are required to prove to each other that they are working on the ES chain and not "fair weather mining". For example, coalition members could log cyptographic proof that they were working on certain chains, and then keep a certain number of bitcoins in virtual escrow that will be forfeit if fair weather mining is discovered.

Can someone explain why, if I change the slider to indicate that I have only one friend, the number of "friends of friends" is 163? Is my only friend really so popular?

> Why don't physical property rights expire?

No, but real (dirt) property rights are usually taxed. How about an escalating tax on older copyrights?

This idea reminds me of the ones I used to get from my boss for how we should change the software system I was building for him when it wasn't working the way he expected. His solutions would (usually) fix the immediate problem he was seeing, but in a completely ad hoc way that would usually introduce numerous other problems.

For some reason I read their name as "Intellectual Vampires."

Yeah, I had the same idea while reading the title of the post, having only seen MRI machines on TV. So yeah, this isn't rocket science. They're just not focused on that aspect.

Shouldn't the control group have had a non-apology comment about the weather or something? Instead of comparing, "Sorry for the weather. May I use your phone?" to "May I use your phone?", it would seem much preferable to compare it to "Lousy weather we've been having. May I use your phone?"