4K streaming inside a browser running Linux? I thought they specifically disallowed this. https://news.ycombinator.com/i.... https://help.netflix.com/en/no...

> tech companies are especially hard

Wiring harnesses from some entity in China I only have email contact with. Steel sheet metal fab across the country that likely needs months to get my order in. Surprise tariffs on my embedded boards due to Trump's trade war on China. Failures on some of these boards that leave the HDMI displaying, but frozen, and even a serial connection stops responding, so I have no way to diagnose it and suddenly a bunch of support incidents where the box needs to be shipped back.

The tech piece of this is by far the easiest bit of the operation. I guess what I'm asking is, "hard, compared to what?"

Dude, calm down. I know where your stapler is, I'll get it to you.

The Internet is not a thing like the 'winter olympics' or recording industry. The Internet is a series of tubes which allow the transfer of information

ftfy

Let's do a thought experiment!

Let's say I had a samurai sword, and I was swinging it wildly in public. If someone with no arms slowly walks into my blind spot and I injure them, am I more or less responsible than the other person? Note especially that this person can't harm me, while I can kill them without thinking.

Replace sword with car, and the armless walker with bicycle, and the moral argument is the exact same. It's the ethos of Spiderman: with greater power comes greater responsibility.

I think that if the patent were valid (under the 20 years of non-implementation/non-description standard I described), it wouldn't matter. What bothers people about patent trolls is that they are getting in the way of you doing normal work. It shouldn't matter if someone wants to patent the idea then license it without an implementation, IF the patent is for something genuinely non-obvious. I think that 90% or more of peoples' issues with "patent trolls" are over obvious patents.

Even if you added the "good-faith effort to manufacture" standard, people could get around it pretty trivially by creating a small, failing business, then when it goes out of business they can claim it's because people are infringing.

I do see one advantage of the kind of standard that you're talking about, which is that for a company like IBM or Microsoft, if someone actually is in a legitimate business, it's likely they are infringing on one of MS or IBM's patents, so they can do the horse trade reciprocal licensing thing. But that's a huge waste of lawyer time compared to not actually having any obvious material patented, I think.

Since it's basically impossible to say what would be "surprising to an expert in the art" (or whatever the standard is), and since soooooo many obvious things have been patented that were patently obvious, you adopt a new standard.

A product (or even a business technique) is patentable if and only if:

(a) It has been economically feasible to do for 20 years
(b) It has not been publicly described or implemented

The idea is this:

Even a simple idea, which for whatever reason has not been described or implemented, could be brought to market because of this. If you have a simple improvement on, say, the broom, you are just going to sit on it, because (a) you don't know who to talk to at the many many broom manufacturers (b) if it's simple anyone else could copy it, so it's not worth it to start making brooms yourself, etc.

It should prevent the current patenting of obvious things that simply haven't been done because people haven't been doing business over the internet or selling stuff on cell phones or whatever. The obvious stuff that any smart engineer would figure out will get done in that first 20 years, and only the hard (or easy, but hard to think of) stuff will be left.

The justification for granting a patent is that the world has been given time to figure this out, and they haven't. Therefore, it makes sense to give you monopoly for 20 years (short time in the big scheme of things) so that the idea gets out there, which is the whole point of it from the Constitution's perspective.

Another way to do it:

(a) It has been feasible for X years, but not described or produced, you can have patent for X years. That way if you're working in a new field, you can still get protection, but not lock everyone out for 20 years. So, one-click could have gotten protection, but only for four years or whatever.

Obvious flaw: how do you decide when it started to be "feasible"? But I think that's a lot easier to come up with a standard for than "obviousness", which is plagued by the fact that a lot of things seem obvious after you see them.

In the world of computers it's usually a bit of both.

Stockholm ptsd--when you can't distinguish it from nostalgia.

One thing is for certain: you gotta pay when somebody else was responsible. That's just how your betters and masters like it. Hey, did you know that a threat to injustice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere?

Hey, buddy, in general I agree with you. It's mostly a cash grab spun really well. But. The water thing is real. We are messing with the fresh water cycle in a way that has, historically, ended civilizations. Overview: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/world/2000/world_water_crisis/default.stm Most shocking to me are the Aral Sea and Mexico City. Aral Sea because it already happened, and Mexico City because if it destabilizes, well, North America gets a hell of a lot more interesting. Aral Sea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea Mexico City http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125270169029204249.html

They haven't even done anything yet you douche.

...not...sing...Iron...Man