sleepy wrote:We are literally in the golden age of communication,and yet there is so little real communication going on.I think most people on this forum believe Bessler did it.I also think that every member thinks they have the answer at some point or another.But out of the thousands of ideas that we have collectively come up with,we see only a handful each year.I understand that this is because of a general (and well-earned) distrust of the human race.So we all keep going around in circles,looking for others to give creedence to our ideas,without actually sharing our ideas.We are purposely vague,and we expect others to cheer us on,and when they don't,we have tantrums.We want everyone to say,"good for you,your idea is great,you have the secret,"but we don't actually want them to know the secret.We enjoy being the center of attention,even though that attention is for something we haven't yet accomplished.So very little REAL information is passed around.We have all probably run into the same dead ends,but we'll never know that.At this point,we are all wrong about our ideas.If your wheel is not running,you are wrong.Several of us are probably mirroring each others efforts right this second.And we will never know.
Yes, very well put! Here is my idea of what would solve this problem: The reason people don't want to reveal their ideas, is because they are afraid someone else will take the idea and claim it as their own, get credit for it and perhaps even profit from it. That is what the Patent system came about to address (or do I have that wrong). What someone needs to do (and I assume the way things are going, this will happen eventually) is to have a Patent system online. If you get an idea, you can go and record it online, associate your identity to it, have a date and time associated with it. Then no one can claim credit for your invention, and yet it will be out there for all to see. Then the development of new technologies could proceed much faster. Because as soon as someone thinks of an improvement, they can record it for all to see (and get credit) and then this can be built on, etc. Of course the problem is in the details. With our current Patent system, you usually want to do it using special people who know how to write patents and it has become all institutionalized, where certain kinds of patents are no longer allowed. What I would like to see is something more user-oriented. You go and put your idea online, and that's it. Trouble is, most people are going to just put a messy looking drawing and that isn't any good either. You would need to maintain certain standards. Oh well, just an idea. But just think, if such a system were to be created on the Internet, then immediately, everyone with an idea would be highly motivated to put their idea down, because they would be afraid someone else had their idea and would record it before they did. That is how our current Patent system works I think.
I just thought of something else. In order to maintain a consistency between patents, in order to make sure people wouldn't just record messy drawings, we could come up with some software that the submitters of these online patents would be required to use. The software would force you to make everything explicit and hopefully self-explanatory. For example, as with current patents (not that I know about patents at all, just going by what I have observed looking at them) you might have every part of the patent labeled with a number. Then you would have to explain what the purpose of each part was and how it related to other parts it was connected to. Anyway, by requiring this special software to submit your online patent, you could thus force some standards on them. But the drawback would be, the more complicated this software became, the more institutionalized would the online patent system become. People would find it harder and harder to learn to use the system, just like it is getting harder and harder to just get a regular patent for your idea.
