No; the question asks what things would have existed. This is a concept people use all the time in everyday life without provoking ontological crises. E.g. if you say "he would have scored a touchdown if that last defender hadn't tackled him," everyone knows exactly what you mean. You can never be 100% certain about things that would have happened, so you qualify your conclusions, but it's not the case that you can't reasonably talk about such things.

I can't believe I just had to write that. This is why forums are such a time sink. If you were watching a football game with your friends and someone said "he would have scored if that guy hadn't tackled him" and you replied "how can you talk about touchdowns that don't exist?" everyone else would just roll their eyes and not invite you over anymore. But here in the world of text these subtly graduated social cues don't exist; all you can do is reply with more text. I wonder if there is some kind of solution to that.

> This is a concept people use all the time in everyday life without provoking ontological crises.

+1 for common sense; however:

> This is why forums are such a time sink.

I doubt that you can realize the benefits of an open forum without paying what we might call the free speech tax - the inevitable disruptions of pedantry and/or trolling, which under the right circumstances are insightful and even revelatory.

Sadly, you're probably right. What's depressing is that HN wasn't like that for a very long time (2 or 3 years, maybe?), but it seems to be descending into a Reddit-like cesspool of crazy very rapidly.

Having said that, this is still by far the best non-trivial online community that I know of.

EDIT: Wow... downvoted in 4 minutes, for a mostly harmless comment. I guess we've become closer to Reddit than I thought. I normally hate elitist groups, but there's a part of me that would like to see every account newer than, say, 200 days just get nuked. <sigh>... I really loved this site.

Please note that I'm not saying HN is turning into reddit - I don't believe my score is high enough for me to be allowed to make that claim. (I do believe HN would benefit from a measure of reddit-style levity: right now it's all Serious Business, all the time.)

What I'm saying is that real constructive critical debate requires strong-willed, pedantic, even curmudgeonly debaters. The marketplace of ideas doesn't work without the push and pull of challenges, refutations and even meta-refutations ('You're asking the wrong question').

If Paul Graham wants good answers to his question, the price he has to pay is an allotment of bad answers - answers that are revealed as such on the marketplace of ideas. You can't get the good stuff without also allowing the bad stuff (and having reasonable filters to distinguish them).

P.S. Not sure why I was downvoted for my comment above.

The tone might have been better, but it's a valid argument that I have heard in conversations in person. Unlike football physics, society is a much more complex system and it's really hard to play what-if scenarios with any confidence about it.

In society usually there are many forces acting in opposing directions and the outcome depends on how strong they are, which is a quantitative difference we currently have no way of estimating.

Solution = Emoticon with rolling eyes = &_&

First things first, Brett Favre should not have thrown that pass last night. Vikings would have won.

Second, I'm taking this from the perspective that we have a college professor (most likely) being asked by a student to cite examples of cases where software patents have stifled innovation.

So, does this professor just want his student to start making up random ideas that infringe on patents and argue that those random ideas don't exist because of patents?

Seems unlikely.

I'm arguing the question itself because I am trying to help this poor student who may be faced with more of a paradox than a fair assignment.

I think it is a perfectly valid question. If someone got sued by the holder of a patent and withdrew a piece of software or an application then that's proof positve.

http://brej.org/yellow_star/letter.pdf

Would be a nice example, in http://brej.org/yellow_star/ there is a bit that says "There are instructions which are patented by MIPS and have been removed.".

That's a clear impediment to progress, once the MIPS instruction set was documented and people started to write software for it anybody ought to be free to re-implement these instructions for the express purpose of interpreting MIPS object code.

By analogy - name a great business impeded by corruption in the government. Unm. We know there are great businesses in America and not that many in (more) corrupt countries, but we can't point at killed businesses themselves.

I can name you a great business from one country that was impeded by corruption (or at least a connection to industry that should not have existed) in the government of another though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon

My point is that those examples will never be representative of the magnitude of the problem.

But the magnitude can only be determined by having lots of examples. You are saying that there is no point in collecting any examples at all but when you don't have any then the magnitude could still be '0'.

By showing examples, preferably lots of them the magnitude will get at least a lower bound.

I'm not sure it's possible for people to imagine a different world that easily. The differences caused by software patents not existing are pervasive and cumulative. Like the surprising effects of compound interest, I think a world without the 20 years of software patents would be in many ways unpredictable or even inconceivable for those of us who lived through this reality.

The original question may make sense in a limited fashion, but it frames things poorly as it's asking for specific incidents to illustrate a systemic effect.