Rare to find an article that so efficiently touches on so many simultaneous points of awfulness.
I realize it's only one aspect of the article, but it's tough to talk about patent reform when stuff like this that is so obviously not a real invention is still so regularly slipping through the system. There's a real conversation to be had about how much of a patent monopoly we should be granting businesses for legitimate patents, but there's an even bigger conversation to be had about how we ended up with a patent office that's willing to rubber-stamp everything they're handed. Under the current system we have today this patent shouldn't have been granted, it's not a novel invention. That's not even a reform problem it's an... I don't know, caring problem? A lack of review problem?
This serves to filter out everyone except those with deep pockets and highly paid patent attorneys.
When I filed for a patent a few years ago, we got back prior art from the patent office that was very far fetched. We paid $3500 to the attorney for the initial application and then each time it would come back, we would pay a few hundred more.
Our patent attorney estimated that we would end up paying around $10k, but he was fairly certain that we would get through. He said most of his applications followed this same pattern.
We decided to cut our losses at around $5k and move on. A few years later, some large company patented very similar technology. We submitted prior art but they just had to pay for a few more iterations to get around it.
At the very least, software patents in the sense of "if your implementation uses exclusively general purpose computers and software, it cannot be violating a patent".
This company has about a 0% chance in the next 20 years of producing high quality VR. There is already prior art here.
So many ways to make patents better, including: - making it more expensive, with annual fees - increase the cost over time - just generally setting a target to reduce acceptance by 50%
Patents are ok in theory, when they promote true, material innovation via government enforced monopoly. However, the cost to society is high, so the cost should be high. And patents floating around more than 5-10 years are the ones with the most damage.
The only main counterexample is pharma. But here, it's also broken because most patents are not for groundbreaking drugs. We can also incentivize in other ways, like grants and contests (e.g. first person to cure X disease gets $1B, second person $500M).
You would need to quadruple healthcare r&d spending to make up for private spending (in 2018 it was 130 billion private to 43 billion public r&d spending). Not impossible, but a tough sell.
How much of the public spending went to $60k/yr scientists rather than $600k/yr lawyers?
I have also noticed that programmers have a tendency to sometimes distrust the stuff they make. I for one will never install "smart" home devices, I'm happy with my classic light switch that won't spy my on/off status and send it to China, or my toaster that needs a monthly subscription.
If we want to control that as a society, we first have to fight back in the war that's been waged for decades, claiming that any sort of "control" over what people do - even against things that are blindingly obviously bad/cruel/etc - is bad. We've been sold a bill of goods that any control over people doing bad things will simply result in the government doing bad things itself, ignoring that (a) bad things are already happening and (b) none of this moral outrage is actually very effective at stopping the government from doing bad things anyway. We need to be more active, period, in order to fight cruelty in both the public and private space.
The new version has "always on connectivity" and an App that allowed you to know where the car was, and a bunch of other stuff.
I was so happy that my used car didn't have any of that.
Yeah we can maybe give your granny (with 6 months to live) another 2 years of life by taking $250,000 out of her estate and putting her through hell for 4 months, including no visitors for part of that.
The Pythons pioneered the "comfy chair" torture technique, which was supposed to be a joke. But if got the brief use of a comfy chair then had to go back to a hard bench it would be worse than before.
Though this all seems a little insensitive to be complaining about our white color concerns when this seems to be an innovative new method to torture inmates for some reason.
The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is that it's least cruel to keep all people in solitary confinement rather than remove a single freedom.
That's obviously asinine.
It was a video of a woman basically going through the stages of raising her daughter and having her boyfriend come back into her life.
The end is basically her only having 30 minutes to decide for abortion and would have to sit through it again for another chance at abortion.
So now that might become a real thing, brought to you by one of the shittiest and exploitative companies in existence.
Edit: here's the original article https://medium.com/@shanesnow/how-soylent-and-oculus-could-f... and this might be the critique I read: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2016/06/22/the-worst-thing-i-read...
Edit: This breaks my heart. I found the hand written notes from inmates. One guy just wants to see his kid he doesnt know, one guy wants an aerial shot of his old neighborhood so he can stroll mentally down his street, and another just wants a photo of, as he put it, "A nice looking young lady wit banging body and some tights, shorts, showing that phat ass but able to see her face and pretty eyes at the same time, she can be black or spanish or white it all cool wit me. "
I don't know how serious these folks are, or if they get the photos, but I feel motivated to at least try and indulge a few of them.
I'm not sure if thanks is the right word, but thanks.
Telling each other about the evils of software patents might be satisfying, but it has zero effect. The proof is that they're still there after almost 30 years, and programmers have hated them from the start.
Here's the problem:
(1) lawyers, as we know, don't want to solve problems -- they want to make them part of their practice.
(2) your corporate managers have already spent millions on patents, and they listen to their lawyers.
(3) your professional associations (ACM & IEEE, looking at you here) are not on your side either. I don't know enough about their reasons to speculate here but you're free to.
Do a search on "abolish software patents." There are organizations devoted to doing that. Join one.
The EFF has a lengthy article [1] and note the date: 2012.
When I was at Google an engineer / lawyer (yes, there are a few of those) wrote up a one-page bill for Congress, declaring all software patents obvious. I picture you all asking a Congressional candidate at a town hall "Do you support abolishing software patents?" and watching him or her panic and stall, and direct their staff to look into it.
Finally, I got the "file wrapper" for this patent. It was amazingly quick: less than two years. The PTO rejected it and then they amended it, and that's pretty much all there was. These things are incredibly boring to read and I can't summarize the details in any quick way.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/06/want-abolish-software-...
1. A method for personalizing a virtual reality session, the method comprising: receiving, from a device located within a controlled environment, a request to initiate the virtual reality session, wherein the request includes user information for a user associated with the device; receiving a second user request for a second device to join the virtual reality session; responsive to receiving the request, initiating a registration process for registering the user to participate in the virtual reality session; responsive to completing the registration process, retrieving a profile associated with the user information, wherein the profile includes first user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving a second profile associated with a user of the second device, wherein the second profile includes second user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving session initiation information and the first user preferences from the profile; detecting a conflict between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; determining, based on the conflict, a higher priority preference between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; and initiating, based on the session initiation information and the higher priority preference, the virtual reality session.
=> A VR call in a "controlled environment" using shared hardware.
...
11. A method for initiating a virtual reality session within a controlled environment, the method comprising: receiving, from a device located within the controlled environment, a request to initiate the virtual reality session, wherein the request includes user information for a user associated with the device; responsive to receiving the request, initiating a registration process for registering the user to participate in the virtual reality session; receiving a second user request for a second device to join the virtual reality session; responsive to completing the registration process, retrieving a profile associated with the user information, wherein the profile includes first user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving a second profile associated with a user of the second device, wherein the second profile includes second user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving session initiation information and the first user preferences from the profile; detecting a conflict between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; determining, based on the conflict, a higher priority preference between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; transmitting authentication information to a monitoring system; receiving, via a network, an approval message from the monitoring system based on the authentication information; and initiating, based on the session initiation information, the higher priority preference, and the approval message, the virtual reality session.
=> A monitored version of 1.
...
19. A non-transitory computer-readable medium having instructions stored therein, which when executed by a processor in a wireless device cause the processor to perform operations, the operations comprising: receiving, from a device located within a controlled environment, a request to initiate a virtual reality session, wherein the request includes user information for a user associated with the device; responsive to receiving the request, initiating a registration process for registering the user to participate in the virtual reality session; receiving a second user request for a second device to join the virtual reality session; responsive to completing the registration process, retrieving a profile associated with the user information, wherein the profile includes first user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving a second profile associated with a user of the second device, wherein the second profile includes second user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving session initiation information and the first user preferences from the profile; detecting a conflict between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; determining, based on the conflict, a higher priority preference between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; and initiating, based on the session initiation information and the higher priority preference, the virtual reality session; transmitting session information to a monitoring center; and receiving, from the monitoring center, an alert associated with the session information.
=> Monitoring system plus alerts.
Here's the patent:
https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=...
No. But there's nothing redeeming about state prisons either. The whole system is broken regardless of who's letterhead the warden's pay stubs are on.
The typical argument for "for profit" prisons is that it provides a motive to keep costs under control, a motive that is very obviously in too short supply in most other government endeavors. Furthermore, the government is far more willing to screw its contractors to satiate public outrage (when the prisons are inevitable caught abusing prisoners and failing to deliver the services the state is paying for) than it is to screw its own departments. In my observation this breaks down in practice because of the revolving door and the government's willingness to absolve itself of responsibility for actions of its contractors and people's willingness to entertain that.
I think 3rd party contractor prisons could work in a state where the people both have high expectations of ethical behavior in both government and business AND strongly care about controlling the costs of government. The catch is that no state satisfies both those criteria as far as I can tell and state operated prisons would work just fine in any state that did so IMO it's a wash.
The reason we hear so much about for profit prisons and not the abuses within state prisons and jails is mostly one of ideological convenience. It's harder to get the people who care about prison reform to get angry at the .gov for mismanaging prisons than it is to get them angry at private contractors doing the same thing.
I no longer recall the statistics she cited but if you want to date a black man in LA, you first have to find one that is not in jail, which diminishes the dating pool substantially.
I'm glad that decriminalization is also including early release and voiding of criminal records but once you start down that path it's hard to walk that back. Recidivism is high not just because the same conditions exist post-incarceration, but also because finding a good job with a record is difficult. We are only really fixing things for people who were recently convicted/released and haven't had to make those kinds of choices yet.
Pretty sure they just described VRChat's feature of inviting a friend to join your room.
Whenever I hear about a pharma company getting held accountable, it's for even more egregious violations (put a token lab in every building now it's all R&D wheee).
Point is: I have my doubts.
Which is a huge problem, because now you again need an army of lawyers just to determine whether something is patentable, and can redesign/argue around stuff to make it look patentable even where it should not be.
It would be much nicer if you could say "Here is a mass market consumer grade laptop I purchased at Walmart this morning. Here is the software running on it. Your patent claim is invalid. Your honor, I'd like my legal fees reimbursed and the plaintiff's attorney sentenced to sixty lashes for wasting everybody's time".
And yeah, this system seems to be the worst of all worlds: needlessly punishing for small players and needlessly lucrative for large ones.
The patent system, as it is implemented, clearly behaves as an instrument of power, not an instrument for fixing incentives.
And no, the intent to file and then sell the patent is not a good "commercial intent."
But they still take the money. If you take the money you should do a good job.