We agree that you shouldn't be able to patent something if it's obvious or someone else did it first.

> The specific method you developed. Sure, that might mean an alternative method is trivial to develop and you get nothing - but guess what? All that means is that your "invention" was trivial in the first place.

This argument is invalid. Sure, seeing a particular invention and seeing the result it gets, it may then be obvious how to achieve that same result by alternative methods. But it doesn't follow that the invention itself is trivial. This is precisely why patents can't just cover mechanisms.

If you're the first person to develop a mechanism to get a particular result, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to patent the result (within reason). Otherwise, it would be too easy to get around patents by making trivial changes to the mechanism.

Imagine if you're the first person to think of routing cars around areas of high traffic in real time and develop a method to do so. Why shouldn't you be able to get a patent on the result -- routing cars around areas of high traffic for a reasonable amount of time? And, if not, what "mechanism" should your patent be tied to?

Are they arguing that they should be prohibited by law from doing this? If not, what's their point? If so, they are incredible douches.

The water pressure in the higher reservoir is a direct result of atmospheric pressure.

That's totally incorrect. There is no "surface" involved. (What surface do you think is involved?)

By "atmospheric pressure differential" we mean the difference between atmospheric pressure at the upper part of the siphon and the pressure in the lower part of the siphon, which is not atmospheric pressure.

That's like arguing that men don't cause women to become pregnant because a pregnancy takes nine months no matter how many men a woman has had sex with.

It can't work both ways. The government can't say "sure, you can have limited liability, something only the government can give you and that you pretty much need to run a business, but in exchange, you must give up some of your Constitutional rights". That's basically the definition of an unconstitutional condition.

So if the New York Times publishes an article critical of the government and the government responds by seizing their printing presses, that's Constitutional in your view because the New York Times is a corporation -- nothing more than a piece of paper?

You mean polar bears don't really drink Coca Cola?

Right, like Papa John's claiming their pizza is "better" when it's basically the same as every other pizza. What a bunch of cheaters and liars they are.

That's certainly one view of how search engines should work, and there are search engines that share this view. But the most popular search engine in the world, Google, does not share this view, and its commercial success suggests that that's not what most people want. Google biases search results based on characteristics of the person searching to try to get them the results they are personally most likely to be interested in. This tends to produce results people consider more relevant, but it does not provide an unbiased view of the Internet.

She can't give the school permission to access Facebook's computers, only Facebook can do that.

Of course not. Paying for bandwidth asymmetry is only used where its logic makes sense. The basic underlying assumption is that traffic that begins on one network and terminates on the other benefits both sides equally and thus the costs should be split roughly evenly. Paying for bandwidth asymmetry is an approximation to cover the case where one side pays more than the other, usually because one side has to carry the traffic further than the other. (Generally, you carry inbound traffic further than outbound.) Historically, this is the way it's done.

But when you're talking about Comcast, which has a large number of small endpoints, and Netflix or Crashplan, which have a small number of large endpoints, more of the costs are borne by Comcast regardless of the direction. So settlement-based peering makes sense regardless of traffic ratios.

Settlement-based peering based on traffic ratios makes sense when you're talking about two ISPs with roughly similar business models, types of customers, and service areas. But it's just a simple approximation of the underlying logic -- traffic benefits the sender and receiver about equally, so they should split the costs about equally. When design asymmetries make one party pay more than their fair share, settlement-based peering is the norm.

Comcast is not an end user, they are a peer. When two networks exchange traffic as peers, that means they exchange only traffic that originates on one of their networks and terminates on the other. This is precisely what Comcast and Netflix want to do -- exchange traffic that originates on one network and terminates on the other. That is, by definition, peering.