Each network pays for half of the costs of transferring the bits. The ISP charges its customers for its half. The data source pays part of its half to the customer's network because they do more than half the work.

Businesses like Netflix and YouTube necessarily emit large amounts of information from a small number of sources to a large number of destinations. This is always going to be much cheaper than delivering traffic to a very large number of destinations, like ISPs have to do. We assume the traffic benefits both networks evenly, so each side should pay half the costs. If not to the ISP, who should Netflix or YouTube pay the costs to? They don't bear them directly, because the traffic is necessarily much cheaper for them to carry than it is for the ISP.

"Note that he claims he built a nuclear reactor when he was 14.."

Which he did. Nobody seriously disputes this claim. He held the record for the youngest person to build a fusion device until Jamie Edwards did so at 13.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...

Nothing special. The prosecution just gives you "production immunity", agreeing not to use the contents of the password itself in court.

"Boy am I glad my client talked to the police!" exclaimed no lawyer ever.

Yeah, those things are a lot like choosing not to use Google or Facebook.

Equating those we voluntarily choose to associate with to those who we are forced to associate with is about as close as you can come to equating guns with arguments. If you don't like Google or Facebook, you don't have to use them. If you don't like the government, you can't exactly choose the other government.

"Because of the manner in which the NSA conducts upstream collection, and the limits of its current technology, the NSA cannot completely eliminate 'about' communications from its collection without also eliminating a significant portion of the 'to/from' communications that it seeks."

It sounds like this board completely fails to understand how oversight of surveillance is supposed to work. To government can *always* defend a dragnet on the grounds that it takes a dragnet to get the information they want. The purpose of oversight is to ensure they *don't* use dragnets, even where it's the only way to get what they want. The prohibition against general warrants is needed precisely because they can be so effective. The role of surveillance oversight is to prevent oppression, not inefficiency.

You can't get a patent on a result if there are obvious ways to achieve that result. If the result is "rank web pages in order of quality", well anyone can think of a dozen obvious ways to do that. For example, you could have people vote on them or track their usage. I don't believe anyone argues that one should be able to patent a result if there's an obvious way to get that result. The scope of a patent's protection can't include anything obvious. When you file for a patent, you have to set out the legal scope of your patent's protection in the claims, and any claims that can be violated by a solution that would be obvious to people skilled in the art to which the patent pertains are invalid.

The main problem is that things that are obvious, like one-click ordering, are getting patent protection.

The development of the mechanism is the invention. But if you're the first person to figure out a non-obvious way to obtain a result that cannot be obtained any obvious way, then you should be (and mostly are) entitled to protection of that result. The scope of the invention for patent purposes is not the common sense notion of "the invention", nor should it be. This is why patents have a section called "claims" that sets our precisely the legal scope of the invention. They can't quite claim results, but they don't have to claim specific mechanisms either. The law is, justifiable, a complex balance.

If patents lasted forever, your hypothetical about ball point pens would be correct. But patents don't last for all that long. So all that would happen is Birome, in exchange for innovating using a small ball bearing to deposit ink, would get a market lead and about 20 years of exclusivity. But, after that, would have to compete on a level playing field.

It's easy to say that 20 years with just one pen manufacturer is too long. But the alternative could be 40 years with none.

And in this example it wouldn't be, since it's obvious how to do that.

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?)