The only argument for getting paid in this article is that sweat deserves a return.
That was Marx's labor theory of value. Marx was wrong.
You deserve a return only when you efficiently meet someone else's needs. The secret to economic success is not sweat, but creative sloth.
We measure value against the cost of substitutes, and other people already entertain me for free (without piracy).
Maybe entertainment just isn't a hard problem. Maybe the bottom 99% of entertainers are basically tagging cat pictures. Maybe we shouldn't encourage them.
I guess if you're an app dev, and want to learn one thing from the music industry, I'd find a way to connect with fans and give them a reason to buy: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/12695
Then look for ways to be creatively lazy, and make sure your app can't be replaced by going for a walk on a spring day.
This is a search game. If your opponent constrains himself to a small subset of legal positions to avoid detection, your strategy is working, not failing.
Think about it this way: Suppose we are playing battleship on a board with one patrol boat and five squares in a line. There are only five possible places to put a patrol boat on this board. The three middle squares are equally likely to be chosen by a random arrangement, so we might as well choose the middle square for an opening move.
This is where this falls down. Since I know it's optimal for you to choose one of those three middle squares, I do not want any boat configuration that covers two of them, so I will always pick either the far left patrol boat or the far right patrol boat.
Except if I always pick the far left or right, why would you ever pick middle to start? You wouldn't. Finding an equilibrium to these games is hard, but I'd guess a 50/50 mixed strategy of placing a boat either on the extreme right or extreme left and a 50/50 guessing strategy of B1 or D1 would be a Nash Equilibrium of this game. And the boat arrangement would look nothing like what you'd expect from a random arrangement, in fact there'd be a giant black probability square right in the middle of the board.
I like your simplified model, and I know random strategies are sometimes helpful. My point was that random strategies are not always helpful.
I worry people don't believe this, so let me use a silly outlandish example to prove my point.
Here's a game:
Suppose we have a countably infinite number of boxes, all numbered. You pick one to hide under, and I have to find you by looking under boxes which I choose, one at a time. I get to look at as many boxes as I like until I find you or get tired and go home.
Under box 1 is famed astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was spying on you with his (perhaps magical) telescope all morning. He will gladly tell me where you hid.
I now announce my strategy for this game, namely, to pick Box 1 and ask Tyson how to win.
Will you now respond with the original, "From the point of view of game theory, this is not an optimal strategy since it merely invites the opponent to avoid box 1. ..."?
The point of this silly example game is that randomized strategies aren't necessarily helpful for certain classes of games where one strategy gives you disproportionate information about the state of the game.
Guess my number games and battleship games risk being very similar to my extreme illustrative example, but I'll admit I don't know how much.
Bottom line: I just resent the insistence that good game theorists dogmatically REQUIRE randomness in all competitive situations. This is not necessarily the case.
In my experience mixed strategies are very important to pushing the boundaries of game theory but are rarely important in applying it (I come from business/economics so that biases the kinds of models that are useful). For example, when we think about how to optimally design an executive compensation contract the resulting equilibrium usually has no randomness at all or at least the actors are not playing a mixed strategy. The executive knows what "effort" level she will exert and the compensation committee knows what it will pay her (not in absolute dollar terms but in terms of an explicit contract). The only mixing example I can think of is that Soccer goalies appear to be mixing with which direction they dive and kickers kick http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/courses/game-theor... although I think duopoly product competition is often viewed that way (not competing on price or production size but whether to launch a new product)
Obviously, if there is a single move that wins you the game every time - being able to consult the oracle, in your example - then this pure strategy is dominant, and no mixed strategy is called for.
No, it is not. I have not tried proving it, but I would think the winning strategy is not "to avoid detection", but to "make it as hard as possible to detect your smallest ships".
I tend to place the large ships as close together as rules allow, in order to leave as much freedom to place the smaller ships. Something like (if ships can lie along a border; periods are squares where no ship can lie):
Clarification: apparently, I tend to play a different game than what this text is about. The game I know forbids placing ships so that they touch (sometimes allowing corner touches). With those rules, finding a large ship can rule out lots of spaces from the search space. For example, a 5x1 ship has up to 16 bordering squares.
The way that I read the term "randomized strategies" in the original comment is that you opponent sometimes uses the clustering approach, and sometimes doesn't. Your search algorithm doesn't know whether the opponent has chosen to cluster or not. Or to partially cluster. And this decision will likely change each time the game is played.
The phrase "measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory" jumps out at me. What does that really mean?
Myers-Briggs is 'widely used' and proponents would probably argue it has been 'empirically validated' (by this one study no one can reproduce...). Myers-Briggs still lacks the "retest reliability" necessary for this sort of analysis.
In fact, in most personality tests, you'd expect wild swings in personality without drugs, even by just waiting a day.
Now, stop giving any attention to campy press release results. I don't even really disagree with the thesis here, but without a full description of the methods, and probably a metanalysis of previous work in this field, the 'canned results' buzzers should be ringing loudly in all of our heads.
I imagine you're right, that the Amish aren't particularly interested in online music services, but I remember reading an article that pointed out that the Amish aren't really anti-technology per se, they're anti-labour-saving devices.
The ethos is apparently to work hard and with your hands, and they have no qualms in letting people with physical issues use tech; the example given in the article was a farmer who had arthritis and whose sons had moved out, who was permitted to use a tractor in order to keep his farm going.
The Fifth Amendment states "[No person shall] be deprived of... property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
In other words, this means a lawsuit for every existing software patent to determine its hypothetical value were the law left as is. The Federal Government is suddenly the defendant in millions of civil cases. It will essentially have to buy every software patent out there. The fallout would destroy everything you love and more.
I know it seems like a sad compromise, but there might be huge practical difficulties with that sort of ex post facto rejection of existing patents. Just tell them to stop issuing new software patents, and urge the judiciary to vigorously scrutinize existing software patents which come before the bench for obviousness or prior art.
I seem to have lost edit ability, so here's revision 3:
The US Patent system is badly broken with respect to software patents. Patents are being issued to companies for “inventions” that are, in fact, common knowledge included in any introductory software textbook. The result is that the large software corporations are buying up reams of patents and using them to bully small, innovative companies out of business or into paying ridiculous licensing fees.
Quite apart from encouraging innovation, patents are now stifling it.
The software industry is one of the few industries still strong in America. Even in a time of recession, there are not enough computer programmers to fill all the available positions. Startup companies are forming and growing readily. But if every line of code written brings with it a potential violation of someone else's intellectual property, this will cease to be the case.
To solve this problem, we petition the Obama Administration to direct the Patent office to cease issuing software patents and to instruct the judicial system to take a long hard look at existing patents for validity. With these two steps, those of us in the software industry can stop worrying about mutually assured patent destruction and get back to doing what we do best.
A lot of responses are claiming that patents aren't property, or there isn't public use.
35 U.S.C. § 261 claims that "patents shall have the attributes of personal property."
Kelo established the broad reading of 'public use.' Just about any economic intervention could fall under public use, it isn't limited to the government taking permanent ownership.
These are muddy questions debated in legal journals, but if the government is depriving that many people of significant value, then everyone who owns any patents will pitch in to the legal fund. The case is going to be made in its strongest possible terms, and it's something that government would have to seriously worry about.
Yeah, the only way for this to play out is in the courts. You cant just have the gov't (executive or legislative) just broadly declare "no more software patents". All that would do is make the existing software patents much more valuable and reward those who have them. Because you can be sure that you won't be able to get them away from everyone that has them.
So the only real course would be for the courts to declare that they weren't valid to begin with.
Patents aren't actually property, so I don't think the 5th ammendment applies. Invalidating a patent doesn't deprive the holder of anything. It just stops the law from injoining others from engaging in protected activities.
I am aghast at the disastrous amount of disinformation about patents in this community. Patents are fundamentally and in the libertarian sense of the word, inalienable property rights, that have value, and that can be bought and sold.
A patent is not an inalienable right. Definetly not in the libriterian sense.
1. A patent is, fundamentally anti-libriterian. It's an example of the government interfering with private action, buy granting exclusive rights solely to a single entity. When the government enforces a patent it intervenes in the market place, picking winners and loosers. In most contexts, that's called corpatism. The fact that the rights conveyed by government granted monopoly can be bought and sold doesn't make them a libriterian concept.
2. The monopoly granted by a patent is not inalienable. Congress has the express power to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" through granting of monopolies. Any monopoly rights conveyed by congress impede the natural rights of man. They prevent me from manufacturing, selling, or reproducing what I see fit to manufacture, sell, or reproduce. As an action that is fundamentally abhorrent to liberty, congress's power to grant such a monopoly is only valid within the scope of it's enumerated powers. Software patents do not "promote the progress of science or the useful arts", they impede it. So, not only are they not inalienable, they are unconstitutional.
If NPEs are trolls, that implies 'lacking starting capital' is trollish. Small company locked out of an industry? Troll.
Robert Kearns pitched his wiper system to Ford and Chevy, but they preferred to build it without paying him. "NPE = troll" means he was the villain. (He should have, what, kept his invention secret until he built a rival car company?)
There are several other definitions of 'troll.' Lawyers who own patents. Groups who buy patents from others. All of these catch some sheep with the goats. (I'm leaving these as an exercise for the reader.)
It's far more direct to attack patents rather than people. Attack the patents which are obvious or prior art.
As a bonus to this approach, it smacks less of a sort of blind bigotry against the poor, lawyers, or investors. (Even if you do hate one of those groups, attacking the problematic patents directly affords a way of being discrete about it.)
That was Marx's labor theory of value. Marx was wrong.
You deserve a return only when you efficiently meet someone else's needs. The secret to economic success is not sweat, but creative sloth.
We measure value against the cost of substitutes, and other people already entertain me for free (without piracy).
Maybe entertainment just isn't a hard problem. Maybe the bottom 99% of entertainers are basically tagging cat pictures. Maybe we shouldn't encourage them.
I guess if you're an app dev, and want to learn one thing from the music industry, I'd find a way to connect with fans and give them a reason to buy: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/12695
Then look for ways to be creatively lazy, and make sure your app can't be replaced by going for a walk on a spring day.