Article: Patents Are An Economic Absurdity
Dear all, I just completed an article that I wish to submit to the European Commission during its consultation on the opportunity to extend european patent law to cover software: "Patents Are An Economic Absurdity" http://fare.tunes.org/articles/patents.html This article contains a detailed analysis of economical, technological, and social effects of patents, in terms (I hope) understandable by anyone. I'd appreciate your comments and suggestions so as to amend and better it, before I submit it. After it has been proof-read and corrected, I would also like to publish it the most widely in newspapers, journals, etc, or wherever it can reach the widest readership. I request your advice and opinion as to how this can be done. Yours freely, [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | ReflectionCybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ] [ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ] What a lot of trouble to prove in political economy that two and two make four; and if you succeed in doing so, people cry, 'It is so clear that it is boring.' Then they vote as if you had never proved anything at all. -- Frederic Bastiat, "What Is Seen and What is Not Seen", 1850
fairness
When conducting question and answer sessions for large audiences, why do speakers often try to distribute their attention (pick questioners) randomly? This may be an attempt to distribute their attention evenly throughout the audience (in the limit these two notions are probably the same). The popular idea seems to be that if the speaker picks his questioners from a localized part of the audience, he is being unfair. Is there a rational reason for the random choosing? Unless the audience is composed of a few large groups, with members sitting near each other, it would seem perfectly fair to start at a random point and proceed in a regular manner from there, such as choosing the nearest questioner after that and so on. John
Re: fairness
Hi Not true. If the audience is randomly distributed, then even a sequential selection of questioners gives everyone an equal chance of being chosen. I admit that it would appear biased, which is important to the audience, but from a purely rational viewpoint, is it helpful to choose from different parts of the audience? John With the method you propose, after the speaker picks the first member of the lucky group, the chance that other members of the audience have to ask questions immediately falls to zero. Although your method is technically fair, I think speakers prefer to choose questioners at random because all audience members continue to have a chance to ask questions throughout the q a period. Chris
