You’re just repeating the justification for patents with zero skepticism and apparently no awareness of how they actually get used.

Hell, I said the following to you a day before you made this comment, and you haven’t replied. Are you happy to just ignore the counter arguments then?

Edit: the fact both this comment and the other one just got downvoted with no reply would indicate they are in fact not interested.

I don’t see it that way. The systems we have in place now are the alternative to just sharing. The secret-keeping monopolistic behaviour of capitalists is preserved by things like the patent system, because they lend the appearance of legitimacy to an illegitimate system.

If you want to see the horror of the patent system, you juat have to look at the millions it killed in the pandemic.

The covid vaccine was developed by public and private researchers and paid for by the state, with a promise it would be made open source to allow anyone to manufacture it and hasten the end of the pandemic.

Bill Gates was one of the fucking vampires who blocked the open sourcing efforts, so poor countries couldn’t manufacture it, allowing the pandemic to run unchecked in those places and of course mutate and inevitably make its way back to wealthier countries for yet another outbreak that actually makes our news because it affects us. The patents killed people.

These companies were funded to do it. There’s no way they wouldn’t have worked on the vaccine otherwise. The pandemic showed us what governments can do when a crisis actually threatens the status quo and they’re forced to do the bare minimum of solving a problem. We didn’t need patents for it, just the will.

I don’t see it that way. The systems we have in place now are the alternative to just sharing. The secret-keeping monopolistic behaviour of capitalists is preserved by things like the patent system, because they lend the appearance of legitimacy to an illegitimate system.

If you want to see the horror of the patent system, you juat have to look at the millions it killed in the pandemic.

The covid vaccine was developed by public and private researchers and paid for by the state, with a promise it would be made open source to allow anyone to manufacture it and hasten the end of the pandemic.

Bill Gates was one of the fucking vampires who blocked the open sourcing efforts, so poor countries couldn’t manufacture it, allowing the pandemic to run unchecked in those places and of course mutate and inevitably make its way back to wealthier countries for yet another outbreak that actually makes our news because it affects us. The patents killed people.

These companies were funded to do it. There’s no way they wouldn’t have worked on the vaccine otherwise. The pandemic showed us what governments can do when a crisis actually threatens the status quo and they’re forced to do the bare minimum of solving a problem. We didn’t need patents for it, just the will.

Also, what does it mean to “tolerate” the existence of minorities? What exactly are we “tolerating”? Tolerance in every other context means to accept deviation from a standard or some negative outcome.

Framing anyone’s mere existence as a thing to be “tolerated” is to imply they are deviant or negative.

That’s where the paradox of tolerance loses me. I don’t think we should be tolerant in general. I think we should make value judgements about what is good or bad and act accordingly. Every society does this, and pretending we’re above it all and completely neutral is dishonest.

And if the “tolerance” is of differing views, diversity of thought is also good, not a bad thing to be tolerated.

It’s simple: we identify behaviour that is bad, like bigotry and hatred, and we say no. We’re not rejecting it because it’s merely different, and to accept that framing is to accept the cry-bullying of fascists. We reject them because they suck, and we don’t owe them shit about it.

More or less what I was going to say. The covid vaccine was developed by public and private researchers and paid for by the state, with a promise it would be made open source to allow anyone to manufacture it and hasten the end of the pandemic.

Bill Gates was one of the fucking vampires who blocked the open sourcing efforts, so poor countries couldn’t manufacture it, allowing the pandemic to run unchecked in those places and of course mutate and inevitably make its way back to wealthier countries for yet another outbreak that actually makes our news because it affects us. The patents killed people.

These companies were funded to do it. There’s no way they wouldn’t have worked on the vaccine. The pandemic showed us what governments can do when a crisis actually threatens the status quo and they’re forced to do the bare minimum of solving a problem. We didn’t need patents for it, just the will.

And we would be free to reverse engineer and lift their stuff without people defending their right restrict us because otherwise they wouldn’t make it.

The vast majority of serious innovation - not just incremental improvements like this patent represents - is done on public resources, not private. The patent system allows corporations to swoop in, monopolise the patents and keep us from free access to knowledge.

It’s so predictable too. Did someone do something indefensible and you don’t want to face up to it? Try blaming the victim today! Ask your propagandist if victim blaming is right for you.

The point being made in the video is that the second patent doesn’t correctly reference the prior art - the numbers are wrong - and it is not substantially different. The patent office didn’t do their due diligence.

As for the first, it’s not just code or the staggered idea. There is quantitative research that determines a specific and non-obvious methodology. (Edit: that’s my opinion, but it would be subject to interpretation whether something is obvious - I could easily be wrong)

The video critcises that patent for being overly broad, but there’s no need to attack it because it’s expired anyway. If you want to, here’s the specific link: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5653925A/en

My broader critique of patents isn’t that they fail to stand up to their own rules - although they frequently do - but that the law itself runs counter to innovation.

If you’re saying this one is obvious, there is maths and research involved, not just "hey lay it down like this.

The basic concept is easy, the implementation details are not.

Yeah, it seems like it’s the fear of legal action that’s stopping them, but this information might change that.

Also, I mean “bad patent” according to the standards of patents themselves. I don’t actually think patents are good for anything.

Also, you’ll talk to me after it’s a solved problem? Why would I be interested in that? You have no interest in helping solve it now and I see no reason why you’d magically become useful after the fact.

If you can demonstrate that you even understood the concept of decentralised torrent-like hosting then I’ll pay attention to whatever else you had to say.

What are you talking about? I don’t think you understood the concept of decentralised torrent-like hosting.

I’m currently talking to a peertube hoster about server costs, which I may be able to justify to host my own videos plus a little extra to pitch in for others who can’t justify the expense. Plenty of professional creators could easily justify it as an exit strategy or backup for youtube.

These conversations are happening, just not with you, presumably because you’re just being negative about it and not actually doing something, so why would anyone bother to bring it up with you?

Take out the phone part and allow users to host videos in a decentralised way on their home computers and it’s a genuinely good idea though. I have a server running with plenty of storage and reasonable upload speed. I could easily dedicate a terabyte or so, as long as I’m not the sole hoster.

It would be a hell of a lot cheaper than dedicated hosting. The only issue is legal problems when someone is unknowingly hosting abuse material, which is something that happens from time to time on all services like this, and an individual could be done for distribution without the protection big centralised services have. You’d just have to hope mods are on top of it.

Actually something like a debrid service but for peertube might work. You can get huge amounts of storage for cheap because a lot of it is shared, you might ask them to host a huge torrent file, but most torrent files serve multiple users, so the cost is distributed. Peertube could work a similar way if it were more mainstream.

If the judge said it then it would have been established fact in the case. This can be established by evidence and found as fact in the case, or it can be part of the agreed facts of the case, in which case the court doesn’t waste time hearing evidence. All it takes to become agreed fact is for the defence to present it as part of their case and for the prosecution to not dispute it.

In that context the finding of fact by the court is more than enough for the paper to report on it, and the two versions presented by you of it being said by the defence and by the judge, are entirely compatible with one another. Nobody is going to demand to see the boy’s medical history to verify an uncontroversial point like this. That would just be a waste of time.

The papers presented it as stated by the defence and the judge, they said nothing false or misleading, and I don’t see any problem with that part of their reporting.

Now, if you have an issue that it was reported because it casts autistic people in a bad light, the issue becomes whether you think it’s something the papers should leave out. Well, the defence considered it important, and it became news. Not much we can do about that after the fact.

Federated communities that make decisions on consensus, with the fundamental rule that “those affected get to decide”.

There’s a lot more to it and there’s a lot to unpack in just the above paragraph, but if the only alternative you can imagine is a global military dictatorship then it’s hard to know where to even start explaining it to be quite honest.

With your username I’m not surprised you’re in cybersecurity lol.

And I never said all managers are bastards. I said that they act that way as a group.

Ultimately the incentive structure reinforces PMC workers who toe the company line. It could never be any other way in a capitalist framework. Yes, it’s possible for knowledge workers to operate outside capitalist organisations, but they are going to have a harder time with less money. The bulk of the work will always be done where the money is. You see this very clearly in FOSS circles - the work involves people who are either too tired from their 9 to 5 to put a lot of effort in, they’re the sort of person who can’t work in a capitalist org, or they’re paid by a capitalist org which will have certain demands on their work. The result is that FOSS tends to be rough around the edges which inherently reinforces the belief that only top-down capitalist structures can make polished software.

You’ll find knowledge workers in general are going to be hard to unionise. They are better compensated and privileged so they have more to lose, and they have to adopt the ideology of their bosses to some extent in order to reproduce it in their work. We’ve seen union action with actors and writers for a long time, and it seems to be bleeding over from them into the videogame space. I hope it will keep spilling over into other technical spaces, but I don’t think we can rely on that happening to fundamentally change the character of that class.

I thought I’d have to explain this part - the technical knowledge workers are also managerial, but in a more indirect way.

All three of the professions you listed make decisions about the function of the systems that workers use every day. They are responsible for taking the policy decisions that are made to serve the owning class, and giving those policies shape.

They literally design our environment, and as the Well There’s Your Problem podcast points out, engineering and other technical decisions are political. The preferences of the bosses are built into them.

I guess this is pretty unpopular though. I guess there are a lot of knowledge workers on this platform and they don’t like being compared to cops.

Sure, they are technically part of the working class, but they’re similar to cops. Cops aren’t the owning class, they take down a salary, but they’re also class traitors.

The middle class - aka professional managerial class - as a group fulfill a similar role of keeping the rest of the working class in line in exchange for certain privileges. They just use paychecks and memorandums rather than guns and laws.

Also like cops, they provide an ideological shield for capitalists. Cops are overtly the “thin blue line” between “order and chaos”. The middle class are a shield for aspirations. People are encouraged to identify as middle class so they think they have something to lose if they were to upset the status quo.

So it makes sense to identify this group, but too often it’s as a shield. Like the implication in this article that a housing crisis for the middle class is a huge problem, but who cares about the housing precarity that’s existed in the working class since its inception? Well one reason it would be a big problem for the ruling class is that they would lose their buffer. If it’s just lords and serfs and a sharp distinction between them, then overturning the whole thing is a lot easier to contemplate.

Thanks, I don’t think it’s worded quite right though, because “in exchange for” implies the vote itself does something. The reality is that people are convinced to give away their power because they believe in the piece of paper.

The oiece of paper itself is almost worthless.

I only say that because I’m sure someone will want to split hairs over it.