I've gotten the first reply to my sig.

I'm a little confused as to what this guys is talking about - I actually identify with the dictionary definition, which is why I posted it. Perhaps this poster thought I was being sarcastic, although I don't see why.

Also, why do people take "Naive" to mean "not cynical"? This implies being cynical is normal - who wants to be naive? - but cynicism leads to nothing but inaction.

I just made my first foe! Just minutes after I posted something critical about republicans!

When GW said he was going to "change the tone in Washington", I presumed he meant he was going to make it better.

After an ever increasing deluge of spam, I just received an email for something that I actually thought was interesting. (No, not pornography, a linux controlled gizmo of some sort.) I was tempted to open it up. But it had all the classic spam tricks - random letters in the email address and subject line, as well as the message body.

In the end I decided that it's not just the content of spam that's bad, it's the deceptive techniques. And any reward of anyone who uses deception, no matter what the message, should not be rewarded. So I deleted it.

But I wonder how much this is the problem of spam. One in 10000 emails look interesting, so you follow it up - and suddenly you've justified the other 9999.

I'm sitting here furiously writing a patent application (not for software - for a bono-fide, physical THING). When you write these things, you first describe what you're doing in detail (take a piece of brass, cut a square into it, etc.) then try to generalize (well, ANY piece of metal, ANY shape, etc.) So you end up making claims ranging from the very specific to the very broad.

This gets me thinking about the business of panIP. They have broad, riduculous claims. Some of the claims I'm making now I think are overly broad, but you put them in because they just might stand up.

The part of the system that seems to be broken is that, once a patent is accepted, and most are, then the threat of legal action is scary enough to most people that settling is easier. Most of the power of lawyers is the perception that they are right, and that they will win in court, or have means of harassing you until they do.

So I say, let's even up the balance of power. IT work for attorneys should cost $300/hour (including time chatting with them in the hallways.) And we should randomly threaten them with the bugbear of unfixed technology problems, network security problems, etc. Leave them in the dark and let them sweat about whether the other guy is being straight with them.

Or I may have just had too much soda to drink for this time of night.