awesome things like making it illegal to sell Word and therefore Office
How about just making your open source alternative to Word and Office that much better and competing with them?
* edit: downmodded without justification. Wonderful. Which just forces the quality of discussion on HN WAY down. Ironically, understanding that concept requires understanding incentives, which are the basis of patents in the first place :)
I downmodded you because you demonstrated a total misunderstanding of cookiecaper's point, quoted him out of context, and made a totally irrelevant response. He wasn't making any kind of attack or criticism against Microsoft Word or Office, he was arguing that this kind of disruptive litigation will provide an impetus to lobby against software patents.
The problem with your just simply build your own open source competitor theory, aside from being a glib response, is that you are quite likely to be violating a patent Microsoft or someone else holds when you build said system.
Complaining about downvoting is itself noise, which will generally only get you downvoted further.
discojesus - the ENTIRE point of patenting "Office/Excel/Spreashdeet/Word" processes and systems is to PREVENT open source alternatives to Word and Office.
We're talking about _patents_, not copyrights here. Nobody is suggesting that Software Copyrights aren't perfectly valid and an important part of the industry - without even having to Poll, I'm going to guess that 90% of HN residents are strong proponents of Software Copyrights. The Free-Software proponents, even those on the GPL V3 bandwagon, _rely_ on Copyrights to further their aims and ambitions.
I don't think this is the criterion you want - if I won the lottery, for example, my to-do list would explode with all the new possibilities presented before me; however, if that happened, I certainly wouldn't consider it a bad day. :)
Good point, I had in mind that all things being otherwise equal and being occupied with more or less the same stuff for the duration of the existence of said list.
"I had in mind that all things being otherwise equal and being occupied with more or less the same stuff for the duration of the existence of said list."
"Honestly if you were to work like this you may as well work for a big corporation where you can save yourself the hassle of having to audit your time – as some jerk of a manager will do it for you."
Your managers have other crap to do than to watch what you're doing 24/7 (or "8/5" for that matter) - they're much more likely to just hand you something so they can get it off their own plate and just expect you to handle it.
" You’ll end up spending your entire day “being productive” without actually achieving anything."
"Being productive" == achieving things. If you're not achieving something, you're not being productive (either because you're not doing anything [procrastination] or because you are doing the wrong things [i.e. your priorities are not set properly])
"Rather than this stupid auditing crap, come up with 3 tasks that are most important to your success. Do each one first thing in the day (my day is backwards btw, as in my day starts at around 9pm at night, im a bit wierd). Take a break in between each task and then feel free to procrastinate after."
This DOES NOT WORK. The only case in which this is a viable strategy is if you work for yourself and have no hard deadlines and you just want to keep yourself from reading reddit all day long - it doesn't work in most real-world situations. Like for example, your boss puts another project on your plate. But that never happens...
Take the advice of the late Randy Pausch - keep a time journal [http://www.scribd.com/doc/2519267/Time-Log-Sheet], and REVIEW that data (the data is useless if you just fill out time journals and let them sit in some folder somewhere).
Inheriting money might make someone a millionaire - that doesn't make "Have a rich uncle" a viable financial plan. "Having a rich uncle" therefore "does not work". The same goes for making a simple list of your three goals for the day - for 99% of people, it just doesn't work because your simple plan is most likely going to be blown to hell by some emergency/meeting/new project that just landed on your plate. I believe you when you say that it works for you, but it just doesn't work for the vast majority of people.
" i think you missed the joke about being productive and not achieving anything"
I got the joke - you almost certainly meant that someone who is "being productive and not achieving anything" is engaging in busywork but not doing anything worthwhile, which would mean that they are active (i.e. they are not procrastinating), but they are not properly prioritizing the actions they take. I covered that case explicitly.
I didn't say doing three things a day would work for everyone, but im willing to put my name on the line by saying its more effective then auditing 100% of your time. See this post: http://blog.liferemix.net/lazy-productivity-10-simple-ways-d... - I take no credit for the concept. Many smarter people have already shared this concept.
As per the joke - no im annoyed as I need to explain my pun. Obviously, its impossible to be productive and not achieve anything. I was writing an oxymoron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron) and also using satire to bring to light, what I believe are flaws in common "productivity" knowledge. Honestly, did I really need to explain this. anyone?
I like taking out the trash because it makes my place less smelly. Like, there's a logic to doing some of those things beyond just "somebody told me." But in other situations you find yourself doing things maybe you don't have to do.
Taking out the trash is not intrinsically pleasurable, like playing Call of Duty, or masturbating. Or masturbating while playing Call of Duty. You take out the trash, study instead of playing games, or save your money for the longer-term effects, which is precisely my point. Saving money sucks in the short term, which by "Hedonistic GTD" would disqualify it for almost everyone.
The article is pretty much contentless fluff, and would be made 100x better if it was just replaced with the quote "do what you love and the money will follow." Still debatable, but at least it has brevity going for it.
Understandably I disagree. Specifically: I'd like you to point out where I say delayed gratification is a bad thing. If you want a house, you save money until you can buy a house. Otherwise you're not getting what you want. But if you have a house, and you have comfortable money, and still you find you're working long hours for the sake of making money and nothing else, then there's a problem because you're not really doing the things you'd like to be doing.
But it's not about money. It's specifically not about money. It's about being happy with your life. And it's less about doing what you love than it is about not doing what you hate. There's an important distinction.
However, I do know people who have reduced their lives to maximize alcohol, pot, and/or video games, and minimize everything else. It wouldn't be fulfilling to me, but it seems to work for them.
Even if they still have a job.
I remember someone on Reddit/IAmA who hated working for others so much that they figured out how to live on 2,000 dollars a year, and worked 1-2 months a year as a laborer. It happens.
I often find getting organized and clean to be intrinsically pleasurable, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. The larger problem is the rigid work/play dichotomy that many people feel obligated to stick to.
One of the reasons I wish to amass currency is so that I can wirehead myself if the world still sucks when I reach retirement age (and the surgery is available).
Wireheading's great and all, but really what you're talking about is an IV drip of heroin. Why wait? It's cheap, it's available, and the world sucks now!
In all seriousness, I have a certain grudging respect for the directness of the addict's solution to the Happiness Problem. My indoctrination was thorough enough as a child that I've no interest in it for myself, though.
If I thought that by taking heroin I wouldn't be missing out on anything else in life, I'd have no problem with it. Problem is, I think life is pretty awesome.
I feel bad for people who think that life sucks. It takes a certain willingness to hunt down the flaw in everything, to ignore all the incredible pieces.
it bugs me when parents inflict worldviews on their children without grasping the gravity of the fact that could very well be holding it for life. I don't want to be a parent because I take parenting extremely seriously.
Despite his condition, he wrote the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by blinking when the correct letter was reached by a person slowly reciting the alphabet over and over again.
Man, how did they not work up a system like morse code? That's horrible. Mad props for the patience, though.
Being clever would have taken time away from the goal of writing a book. It's arguable that the book would have been done sooner had they both taken the time to learn Morse Code (or Huffman Coding), but they quickly found a workable solution and got on with it.
They did one clever thing, though:
To make dictation more efficient, Bauby's interlocutor, Claude Mendibil, read from a special alphabet which consisted of the letters ordered in accordance with their frequency in the French language.
You might argue that employment is optional, but this is not the case in practice especially if you have a family to support.
OK so let's engage in a thought experiment - we make employment optional, so you don't have to work even if you have a family to support. But now, in order to get the resources to support your family, you have to force someone else to do something they don't want to do.
So protecting you from the "slavery" of employment necessarily implies some degree of slavery for some third party, because the resources needed to support your family don't come from nowhere. That's really not fair to the third party, don't you think?
How about just making your open source alternative to Word and Office that much better and competing with them?
* edit: downmodded without justification. Wonderful. Which just forces the quality of discussion on HN WAY down. Ironically, understanding that concept requires understanding incentives, which are the basis of patents in the first place :)