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US Report Sees Perils To America's Tech Future
dcblogs sends this excerpt from ComputerWorld:
"The ability of the U.S. to compete globally is eroding, according to an Obama administration report released Friday. It described itself as a 'call to arms.' Titled 'The Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the United States (PDF),' it points out a number of 'alarms,' including: the U.S. ran a trade surplus in 'advanced technology products,' which includes biotechnology products, computers, semiconductors and robotics, until 2002. In 2010, however, the U.S. 'ran an $81 billion trade deficit in this critically important sector.' In terms of federal research, in 1980 the federal government provided about 70% of all dollars spent on basic research, but since then the government's share of basic research funding given to all entities has fallen to 57%. It also says real median household income has stalled, and argues for policies that foster innovation."
You want to foster innovation? Make it so a company doesn't have to spend zillions on lawyers to deal with trolls.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Not just software. Biotechnology patents appear headed for the same sort of train wreck from what little I know of them.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Why limit it to software patents? Our country did so well at the beginning (in part) because we completely ignored the old world's patents. Patents exist to hinder competitors, and are slowing down our progress.
Folks have been shouting these warnings from the rooftops for quite a while. First we sent the factory, now we are sending the associated engineering/science jobs over too. Other countries are investing more in education, while we have been busy making mocking of smart people an art form.
I always become concerned about the objectivity of something when I see statistics like this: "In terms of federal research, in 1980 the federal government provided about 70% of all dollars spent on basic research, but since then the government's share of basic research funding given to all entities has fallen to 57%." That's pretty meaningless. the government could be giving 300% more than before but private entities are giving so much more it erodes the government's percent share. I'd take this report with a HUGE grain of salt.
1995 - Intel/MS and a few other US companies sold dell some parts, dell made a computer in texas and exported it
2011 - intel/ms and others ship the parts to china and the computer comes back to the US
the numbers only look at the cost of products coming in. it's been well established that apple and every other US company keeps most of the value of tech products and the manufacturing cost the chinese get is tiny. that's why acer and asus have net margins like food companies
What we need is to extend copyright, broader and stronger patents and generaly to beef up all IP laws. How about automatic injunctions for all accusations of patent infringement, like SOPA and PIPA gives copyright holders? That should spur on innovation!
Oh, and cut taxes and gov't spending!
Yeah, well maybe if large chunks of our congress and populace didn't spend time spouting how scientists and technical people are biased and corrupt and don't know any better than plain folks, and we didn't pass laws that strangled technical innovation in a fashion obvious to anyone with a technical background, more kids would be interested in those fields
30+ years chiseling away at workers rights, outsourcing skilled trade to other countries, and eviscerating education funding
only to reflect upon your work and remark, "gosh, people arent that smart and we dont do much with technology but consume it"
you chose it as a model of hypercapitalism. when we agreed to shuffle the working class, the middle class, into early retirement, fast food dead end jobs, and bankrupted private pensions it was a choice. when we caved the stock market and drained dry the last cent from the 401k of the middle class, we did so knowing it could only make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. as we danced in our lemon socialism and hapilly bailed out the wealthiest conglomerates and banks, we were instructed that the hardship would be socialized and the profit would be privatized. "americans," the ones that do most of the living and working in our society, dont do much because they cant do much; this has been assured by the government of the people, for the people, and it has no right to question its work.
we are reaping the benefit of generations of obscene wealth, fueled by trickle down reagonomics and stoked by politicians who consider market capitalism a golden calf that does no evil. Our society is driven by profit, and so long as the goal is profit, the outcome and returns will be consolidated to a plutocracy that doesnt care if little johnny learns to read or write, so long as he works enough hours at the walmart to consume the products at the walmart.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This one?
Make me remember Discworld's gods, that were pretty dumb in general because there is no evolutionary pressure when you are omnipotent. Why try to innovate if you can simply patent common sense and copyright culture forever, push your patent/copyright laws in all the world and take money from that?
An empire that is starting to buckle under its own weight of ridiculous spending and incessant world conquest. Sound familiar?
But it also does the opposite. Imagine spending years to bring a product to market only to see it reverse engineered and copied (and sold cheaper, to a wider audience) by a company with the resources to do it -- you're out of business before you even get started. You essentially just did their R&D for them.
The patent system has much room for improvement, but it does serve a useful purpose.
Instead they can spend a ton of money on research and development, produce a product, and a month later find themselves competing with a dozen competitors who invested nothing in research and developement and can therefor sell the product for a fraction of the cost and still make a profit. The innovators find themselves in a situation in which they made all the investment but cannot recoup the costs, while others are enriched without taking on the risk.
Explain to me how that fosters innovation.
There's a shade of grey in there to be discovered somewhere between everything and nothing.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Nobody can figure out why fewer Americans want to study for STEM careers, but everybody agrees that the solution is bring in more visa workers to take the jobs of US STEM workers.
In regard to STEM training, the report makes an argument for immigration reform that enables foreign students to remain in the U.S. It doesn't offer specifics on an approach for accomplishing this, or look at the debate around this issue. In 2010, there were 7.6 million STEM workers in the U.S., representing about one in 18 workers. Computer and math occupations account for close to half the STEM employment.
The U.S., the report said, produces fewer STEM graduates relative to other developed countries. Citing data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED), the report said that in 2009, nearly 13% of U.S. graduates with bachelor's degrees were in STEM fields, near the bottom of OCED countries.
"Significant economic competitors -- such as South Korea (26.3%), Germany (24.5%), Canada (19.2%), and the United Kingdom (18.1%) -- are on the long list of countries producing a much higher percentage of STEM graduates," the report said.
One in five STEM workers is foreign born, with 63% coming from Asia, the report said. The foreign-born share of STEM workers with graduate degrees is 44%.
NASA was doing small science on a big science budget, and was notoriously risk adverse, avoiding innovation in order to run the same tired old experiments.
The report on page 1-8 has a nice graph of average math scores. However it occurs to me that what matters most for innovation is not average scores but the number of students above a certain level of ability. Basically, if a country has enough high-scoring math students to fill the pipeline of scientists and engineers, it doesn't matter how many low-performing students are dragging down the mean. One of the reasons large Asian countries (China, India, and I would guess Indonesia) are well poised for technical progress is that they have a large population and hence a large talent pool. As long as they can efficiently discover and cultivate their talent they should be fine.
I have never seen anyone talk about the number of high-performing students a country really needs to fill its pipeline. But if you want to talk about being competitive, especially in the next decade where pressure on public budgets at all levels will go from bad to worse, doesn't it make more sense to concentrate on finding the good students and giving them opportunities (scholarships, etc.), and on bumping the above-average ones over that threshold into excellence, than to continue vain attempts to improve the average?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
The world is facing a major economic turmoil.
Basic manufacturing labor is in 2 forms
1) local construction this is non-portable and while modernization gains have happened. It is still taking many man hours to make a house.
2) assembly (this is gadgets or cars) the finished good is portable modernization has applied the Ford factor and there is incredible pressure to reduce the man/hour cost.
a) finished goods are globally transportable, means manpower is used where manpower is lowest cost
b) mechanization is reducting the needed manpower for assembly, every year there is less for someone to do to assemble 100 of something
c) this somewhat applies to farming
The great industrial revolution provided jobs for lots of people to move from farming to manufacturing. We are now facing the reverse prospect where the mechinical revolution is displacing manufacturing jobs. There really are no replacement jobs, "tech" jobs require education and there are not really enough demand.
The post-industrial age is upon us. There really are not places for most of the people to work.
You want to foster innovation? Make it so a company doesn't have to spend zillions on lawyers to deal with trolls.
Might also want to see there are fewer tax breaks available to companies who shift work out of the country.
I spent a portion of my life in Michigan, where tax incentives were all over the place, trying to keep GM, Ford, Chrysler in the towns they were in, but even after all the tax breaks and assistance the companies still moved a lot of manufacturing to Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Japan, etc. Now almost everyone is moving manufacturing to Thailand, China or Vietnam - with reform efforts in Burma expect investment (read: moving manufacturing and research there as well.)
Discouraging the outright offshoring of everything isn't necessarily protectionist and certainly is in line when confronting countries like China, where they've pegged their currency artificially low to draw in research, manufacturing, etc. It's how they are growing their economy, not entirely unlike how the Japan government subsidised exports for decades, which drew jobs and wealth into Japan, by way of research, manufacturing, etc.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Anything that is trivial to reverse engineer and steal in such a manner probably didn't require that much R&D and isn't worth a patent, certainly for the length of time current patents grant a monopoly.
The current situation is that companies with lots of money can hold smaller competitors to ransom by abusing the patent system. The worst case of abolishing patents is that companies with lots of money can spend more on marketing than smaller competitors and therefore dominate the market. At least with the latter we have a system where more people can build upon those products and try to do something novel, rather than the absurd situation we end up with at the moment where you HAVE to have a valuable patent portfolio that you're willing to use in legal action on other companies in order to compete.
Moreso that there is not enough privately funded research , especially "basic" or "theoretical" research. Theoretical research does not pay off quickly enough for those that privately finance research. Most modern tech was based on theoretical discoveries from 25-50 years ago.
Why limit it to software patents? Our country did so well at the beginning (in part) because we completely ignored the old world's patents. Patents exist to hinder competitors, and are slowing down our progress.
Yes, we did better because we were able to ignore the "old world patents". Meaning, patents were bad when we weren't the ones that held them. I'm not sure that's really a good argument for getting rid of patents as it doesn't really speak to whether patents help or hinder innovation; it only shows that any nation not at the top of the patent pyramid has a vested interest in ignoring them.
Not saying I disagree with the premise that patents can actually hinder innovation, I just don't think your example provides any support for your claim. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I think that the larger issue with America these days is connected to our cultural tendency about measuring success in terms of money and power. In the newer generations, this is displacing the very values that made the nation great, and resulting in short term and immediate results kind of thinking. We are teaching our youth to think like a 5-year old with a tantrum, with an insane sense of entitlement and no responsibility. And the older generations are not much better. Add to this the fact that there are no visionaries among the people with power to make changes in the nation, be it the heads of large corporations, the congress, or elected officers. Long term is thought as "5 years down the road". That does not scale for the size and complexity of America today. We need a 100-year plan, not a "will do whatever necessary to get re-elected next year" plan. And this long term plan should not be based on controlling the rest of the world or waging wars when other countries do not submit to our might; we should use our resources wisely to take care of our own people instead, and shift to a sustainable economic model so we do not need resources from other countries. The only reason we have not collapsed onto ourselves is that the rest of the world is messed up too. But we can do so much better than that. My impression is that unless we start thinking long term and incorporate healthier values into education, to slowly revert this tendency, the decline of America will not only continue but accelerate in all areas, including technology, quality of life for the average citizen, and the position of our country in the world. At this rate, we will be a part of the 3rd world in 50 years. We can do better for our children.
thats all fine and dandy but it went into full force in the mid 1980's, place blame where it belongs
You want to foster innovation? Make it so a company doesn't have to spend zillions on lawyers to deal with trolls.
You're overstating the problem. For 100 gold I can hire a fighter and a cleric. Problem solved.
If it's that trivial to reverse engineer is it really worth the patent? For discussions sake let's take James Dyson's vacuum cleaners. They are of a novel design, likely took a fair bit of R&D, and by most standards are probably worth a patent (despite copying the basic principles from elsewhere and simply applying them to a vacuum cleaner).
How long a monopoly should he have been granted for that design? Ten years? Twenty? If the answer is one to two years then that is probably the lead time on designing a good product in that sector even when you are reverse engineering the design. That time would still be enough for Dyson to establish themselves in the market, make a good return on their R&D, and then compete against the established players in a free market. Dyson would have been forced to compete on quality, value, and other traditional differentiators rather than being able to just benefit from the patent granted monopoly.
That introduction of competition soon after the initial release is actually likely to spur more innovation from many more companies and will ultimately benefit the consumer far more than granting any single entity a monopoly.
Perhaps a high quality patent system with a shorter time limit on patents is a lot better than the current system; but I would argue we are unlikely to ever get that, and that having no patent system at all is at worst the next best option.
Most things, software and mechanical, are trivial to reverse engineer.
A slight tweak on a screw can mean all the difference in a number of applications, leaving many engineers shaking their heads; this tweak, however, can easily be copied in a week's time.
Ease of replication is not a measure of effort, novelty, or invention.
I am John Hurt.
> Instead they can spend a ton of money on research and development, produce a product, and a month later ...
> find themselves competing with a dozen competitors who invested nothing in research and developement
This isn't an either/or -- regardless of what some comments here would imply. :) It's not a binary solution set: either we do away with all patents, or continue with the present system.
As originally envisioned, patents were to protect novel and unique ideas and inventions. The problem, of course, is that nowadays, virtually anything can be patented, regardless of prior art or lack of novelty.
So to answer your (implied) question: if you spend a ton of money on research and produce a product, it depends. If it's something truly new and unique, yes, you should have patent protection. But if it's just a slight rework of an older idea, no, I DON'T think taht should be patentable. In that case, yes, you WILL get killed by competition, but I would argue that if it took you "tons of research and development" to come up with something like that, your R&D department is incompetent and maybe economic darwinism ought to put YOU in its sights. :)
My own humble proposals are actually simple. This isn't rocket science.
1. Eliminate so-called "design" and "method" patents.
2. If it can be demonstrated that a person of similar intelligence could have developed the same idea in a "clean room" environment (i.e., without reverse engineering), the idea isn't patentable.
We could argue about this one, but here goes anyway:
3. No device that uses, as a primary component, a patented device, can itself then be patented. Example: I patent a new type of widget. You develop a way to use that widget in an airplane wing and try to patent that use. My patent is approved, but yours should be denied.
Finally, for the nth time: LOSER PAY LEGISLATION. The US is one of the few industrialized nations that doesn't have this OBVIOUS protection. If the loser of a spurious lawsuit had to pay the costs, this would take care of the remaining litigation surrounding scurrilous, stupid patents.
Just my opinion, and worth exactly what you paid for it. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
You must be new here.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Alright, reverse your thinking then:
Some of the best inventions are simple and elegant solutions to historically cumbersome problems. You might one day have a eureka moment in which you realize that a very easily implemented bit of code can increase computations exponentially or work around some issue.
In today's world you can spend $1000 and wait a few weeks to get a patent that will allow you to retire in style. Whereas with no patents, that big evil corporation can sick 10 coders(or engineers, or whatever, pick your industry) on your design and have the idea unraveled in a day or two and implemented in their code within a month. Your retirement is canceled. THAT is the worst case scenario if you abolish patents.
The possibilities for anyone EXCEPT the massive corporations really coming out well with no protections on invention are miniscule. With the funding available to those corporations they can take your idea and have it produced at 1000x the rate and quantity, strongarm distributors and retailers, and saturate the market with a cheaper product. Do you think a bank is going to give you a loan to roll that product out knowing full well that there will be mimics on the market within weeks of your release that are cheaper and probably better? Do you think you can sell your idea to a corporation? Why would they buy it knowing their competitors will steal it?
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
So, Idiocracy was a prophetic documentary ;)
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You assume that the inventor is a corporation that can continue a trend of innovation, and not instead you or me in a garage somewhere.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
"In terms of federal research, in 1980 the federal government provided about 70% of all dollars spent on basic research, but since then the government's share of basic research funding given to all entities has fallen to 57%."
You mean to tell me that this is part of the beef? That Great God Government (beat head three times on the floor in the direction of Washington) now has less control over what people can research?
Can someone explain to me why this is a bad thing?
Regards;
> You might one day have a eureka moment in which you realize that a very easily implemented bit of code can increase computations exponentially or work around some issue.
Do you have any examples?
From my point of view, very little is done as a small, isolated invention these days. I would indicate, for example, Facebook. The idea of Facebook is trivial to reverse engineer, and numerous attempts at improved versions have been attempted, but most have failed with a few (LinkedIn springs to mind) carving out small niches for themselves. The secret ingredient is no longer in a single trivially replicated invention, but in a process (how Facebook has evolved as a platform has kept it ahead of the competition - although I'll admit getting market share early also helped a lot).
I'd also argue that if you simply have a eureka moment, why is that enough to let you retire? Surely we should be looking to reward effort expended over luck?
0) Most ideas are a dime a dozen, the difficult bit is actually doing it well and successfully. Despite all their efforts on copying China isn't going to get a man on the moon by next month. Why should someone who just happened to patent some obvious idea be able to stop others who could be better able at implementing the idea?
China wont be in the moon next month because they dont have the technology. If China had hands-on all of our space tech, they would most certainly be in a position to do anything we can do, and do it cheaper. That's the whole point. That's why we keep or space and military tech secret ; So that we remain dominant and the advantages inherent in our investment remain ours, at least for some period of time.
Why would an innovator not want to be protected in the same manner?
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
You assume that while Dyson is out talking to banks, pitching his plans, trying to reel in investors, and setting up his first assembly location, no one with readily available funding, manufacturing and distribution ties is paying attention.
Without patent protections there's nothing preventing one of the people he's pitched the idea to deciding that paying him for the idea is a hell of a lot less profitable than just doing it for themselves. And that's just one example of where his hopes and dreams could be derailed.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
The poster didn't say kill *all* patents. Just software patents. That makes a HUGE difference.
For example, producing a useful drug costs a fortune and takes forever due to the ridiculous amount of experimentation involved. Software development does not have those costs.
Furthermore, the patents being granted are to very obvious things which are having a chilling effect on software development. Not a stimulating effect. Software patents are doing the *exact opposite* of what patents are supposed to do (to software).
So, your example doesn't apply in the context of software development, and software patents should absolutely be abolished in order to foster software innovation.
Its not the issue of racism. Its the wholesale destruction of entire sectors of the work force as companies look for ways to cut their bottom line. I'm looking for a tech job in the silicon valley. Over the last 3 months I have to say I'm getting sick and tired of not having spoken to a single person who is American, speaks without an intense Indian or Chinese accent (in fact I may have passed over perfectly good jobs because the person speaking to me was completely and I mean completely unintelligible.) I've worked with hundreds of people from India and China (hell I'm half Chinese, my Mother is Chinese, I was born in Taiwan.) I don't have a problem with these people's race, I like them, I like their food, I love their cultures. I have a problem with the fact that I've watched my salary slowly erode to about 50%. How am I supposed to compete with a tidal wave of HB-1 visas who come from a country with a billion people so the fact that they represent the top half a percentile and have a Masters degree, still means there are millions of them and they're perfectly willing to take my job at half the price. If it now takes a Masters Degree to get a job pushing a broom in the valley because of the glut of skilled foreign workers, there's no room for native workers, how is a native worker supposed to compete. there's no finance for older native workers to improve themselves (the collapsing state economy has steadily made going back to school harder and harder.) There's no market for young fresh native workers coming out of school. All the while, money that would be spent here to improve our State's economy is being pumped into making China or India more wealthy.
Out sourcing jobs in general and the tech market in particular is, in my opinion the very best way possible to implode both America's economy and future ability to determine it's own technological future. All you have to do to make something disappear in America is stop investing in it. Stop investing in skilled American workers, and surprise, in no time at all, they'll just go away. I have good friends who used to be happy engineers, engineering away. Now they cook food, or sell real estate (good luck with that), or they've moved into the health care industry. What they don't do is engineering. All it took was two massive economic busts since 2001. I look at the ads today on DICE, and its crazy what they're asking now for a customer support engineer. If you're tired of talking to people with Punjabi accents think enough to dull a knife when you call for technical support, tell the vendors you deal with, that you want to speak to an American support engineers in the future, in fact let them know you will now stop doing business with companies that outsource their support. OR, you won't have to worry any more, because very soon there won't be any here to do the job anyway.
Outsourcing makes sense for tiny start-ups paying to realize a dream out of there own packets in the midst of the bootstrap (though as our currency meets parity with the yuan and the rupee, even this use is quick disappearing.) I'm just saying, we need to provide serious tax incentives for companies that use native workers and even more serious tax liabilities for companies that heavily outsource. The world is flattening out economically, and that's probably a good thing at a number of levels. But until we reach that point, if we don't protect our working class, we'll destroy the American consumer, and then where's our economy? We're in the midst of the economic spasms caused by American corporations trying to squeeze the beast from both ends and killing off the American workforce in the process. Its time to say enough. its time to ensure that Americans have meaningful work first, because short-sighted runs to profit ultimately hurt everyone save a vanishingly small few. This blind free-fall to the bottom of the pig trough by Corporate America needs to come to a crashing halt, while there's something still left to save.
"We came up with a plan to increase competitiveness and innovation," an administration spokesman said, "but we discovered that the process had already been patented, so we had to cancel the project."
Proverbs 21:19
I currently translate Japanese academic documents to English for an Indian company while living in Seattle Washington for less than minimuim wage. This is your future folks. You as might as well get ready to sell your things now because you aren't going to be able to afford to keep any of it.
The thought of hanging myself at my student loan organization doesn't bug me as much when I think it might make a differ
so no one has to worry - heroes of Wall Street will save the day for everyone....
Any of those companies could have taken the concept of Facebook and implemented their own, but they would have remained playing catch-up with features in Facebook (as it moved from a college-centric system to a more generalised social media platform, as the API was released, etc.)
I would also point out that Facebook patent filings appear to have first been done in 2006 ( http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/01/facebook-patent-filings/ ), two years later.
As it stands, it took Google 7 years to get its own Facebook-clone out, and that's doing decidedly mixedly so far. I don't recall patents being amongst G+'s issues, though...
You can't 'get out of the way' and hope it will all magically work out when other governments are investing in innovation.
How many government 'investments in innovation' have ever produced any long-term benefit? I remember the Japanese government continually talking about the wonderful new computer technologies they were funding over the last couple of decades, yet those projects never actually seemed to produce anything.
There are lots of different ways to do that, you could for example, directly fund solar power companies, you could subsidize power from solar sources, you could directly build solar power and a government enterprise and then sell it off if you are so inclined.
Because American 'investments in solar power' have proven so wonderfully successful over the last couple of years.
In the real world history has shown that government is incredibly bad at picking winners.
"Anything that is trivial to reverse engineer and steal in such a manner probably didn't require that much R&D and isn't worth a patent, certainly for the length of time current patents grant a monopoly."
Once a new drug is on the market its exact formulation is known, so reverse engineering is a trivial matter. However the required R&D for a new drug is typically around 10 years and $1 billion.
I spent a portion of my life in Michigan, where tax incentives were all over the place, trying to keep GM, Ford, Chrysler in the towns they were in, but even after all the tax breaks and assistance the companies still moved a lot of manufacturing to Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Japan, etc. Now almost everyone is moving manufacturing to Thailand, China or Vietnam - with reform efforts in Burma expect investment (read: moving manufacturing and research there as well.)
Of course this happens, and I don't know why anybody is surprised. Even with taxes at 0, the companies in the US would still need to pay the workers' wages, and comply with various environmental and work safety laws. All the kowtowing to corporations states and municipalities do is just pathetic and sad - states and municipalities don't use any stick and just don't have enough carrot, since even with no taxes at all, the balance sheet is still very much in favor of corporations moving their production elsewhere. That's a direct result of unfettered globalization, and that's why I think politicians peddling economic revival via tax cuts are mostly liars, and people buying into this concept are mostly idiots.
The taxes aren't and haven't been the problem (and neither are environmental regulations, no matter what the Wall Street Journal whines about). The problem is rather the fact that corporations are allowed to game the system. They use the freedom of trade to create jobs where wages and regulations are low, and to sell the merchandise where the money (still) is. The money corporations get isn't invested it back nor used to pay wages in the rich countries, where it comes from; instead corporations pay a pittance to the workers, some good bribes to a few select politicians, to make sure the status quo is maintained, and the rest is profit.
IMHO, the government should take a much harder look at outsourcing; a corporation that has outsourced its factories should be forced by law to respect the USA environmental and labor standards for any product it wants to sell back into the USA. This would go some way towards making production in the USA a more interesting alternative, and it would also help the workers everywhere. Unfortunately the government doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to even look askance at corporations
Are you kidding me? Ir's always easier to reverse engineer something than it is to make it in the first place, especially in things like pharmaceuticals and mechanical designs. But that's not even important, because companies routinely outsource manufacturing. That would become corporate suicide in a world with no IP. Every company would need to produce everything itself. You couldn't have fabless semiconductor companies... instead every company would need to build its own multibillion dollar fab.
The abolishment of IP would be the death of engineering.
What's so sad about all this is that anyone outside of the government and the (pardon the term) 1% have known this was coming for a long time now. Hell, I'm sure they knew it was coming too, they just didn't care because they are traitors out to corrupt capitalism and democracy to line their own pockets. I have no problem with capitalism, it's the only viable economic system, but you cannot allow people to corrupt the system of government to tilt the playing field in their favor. That's not capitalism.
I love how the Republicans whine about liberals being in favor of "wealth redistribution" when their own policies are clearly aimed at wealth redistribution in the other direction. Neither strategy is capitalistic and neither strategy is viable in the long term. How, exactly, is propping up the music industry, an industry with a completely outdated business model and declining content quality, capitalism? How is it helpful to the country to do so? The answer, of course, is that it isn't. It's just what happens when you let executives of the failing industry bribe politicians legally. Meanwhile, the copyright legislation they have pushed for is wreaking havoc on the innovation which made America competitive in the first place. They sell this to voters under the illusion that the US will be on top of the food chain forever, regardless of what we do, and we can just dictate new rules when we don't like the old ones. It's not going to work that way for long.
There have been articles on the decline of basic research in this country for years now. I remember posting links to USENET on the same ever so long ago. It's the same thing that has happened to manufacturing that people have been decrying for decades. The US is moving towards an economy based entirely on gambling in the stock market. We don't produce things anymore, hell we don't even INVEST in things anymore, we just let bankers find new ways to wring more money out of the middle class. High frequency trading? Seriously? No one sees a problem with an industry that produces absolutely no value and no product whatsoever? This is all well and good for them...until the rest of the world catches on that they are adding no value they can continue to exploit them as well. However, they'll be driving their Mercedes through endless ghetto with bullets whizzing by their windows.
It's not a sustainable model for a society, but it is exactly what we are heading for and it's exactly what we deserve. We've chosen to become fat and stupid and to allow ourselves to support people who offer nothing in return. Liberals are certainly NO better, but where I see it the most is in the Republican party. People are willing to go to the mat for people who make more in a year than they will in their lifetime, even though those people are demonstrably bad at their jobs. Executives are leaving companies worse off than when they started and yet somehow still receive massive bonuses...and the right leaning middle class supports this! Their ostensibly "capitalism friendly" political opinions lead them into arguments with leftists...and they forget that they're not just supposed to oppose leftists, but they're supposed to be capitalists themselves and support capitalistic policies. They shout down people who decry poor copyright legislation and invest in companies which are just garbage. Look at the tech bubble. All you had to do was get an IT kid fresh out of college, pay him 40 grand a year, and he could tell you that investing in a company that had no product and provided no service, but had a nifty website, was a bad idea.
I could rant all day about this stuff. Won't do any good though. The stupid have won and the system is beyond hope. Hopefully I can eek out a decent living and die before the inevitable crash.
I have found, the hard way, that one's choice of words matter a lot when the moderators are handing out points. But it's not just liberals who are opposed to tracking -- it's any parent whose kid is not in the "A" track.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Glancing through the "executive summary", I see a blatant case of bias right off the bat. The summary mentions three pillars: research, education, and infrastructure. It fails to mention the real pillar: healthy private enterprise. With that, you can fund the three pillars above. Without it, you're eventually going to fail. Even if you can find the funds to support the three pillars, you have no way to bring it to the market, meaning someone else will reap the rewards of your effort.
Second, it makes the assumption that government spending on these pillars works. As I noted in a recent thread about government funded engineering and research, there are vast differences of several orders of magnitude in how efficient research projects are from the best to the worst.
Perhaps the Obama administration has enough of a clue to set up effective research operations though I haven't seen any indication of that. But even if so, we still have to face that Congress, holder of the purse, has little interest in efficient research operations nor do most of the likely recipients of the funding.
This particularly holds for the least accountable of scientific research, so-called "blue sky" research. Obviously, the US government is quite capable of spending lots of money on blue sky research, but I don't grant that it is similarly capable of getting lots of blue sky research in return for that money.
We see similar problems with the other two pillars. Educational loans are notorious for having massively driven up the cost of education while simultaneously resulting in a drop in quality of many college degrees. And infrastructure building is a shifty past time that often results in near useless, overly expensive, or shoddy infrastructure that doesn't serve the role for which it was constructed.
This incidentally was the original topic of the thread when someone alleged that engineers are envious of China because of its ability to order massive engineering projects (which also happen to be infrastructure building projects). My original disagreement a few posts up that thread was that such projects had several serious problems with them, chiefly a deeply flawed implementation (but also bad economics) that made them unworthy of an engineer's consideration. That didn't go over well for some reason.
None of these address the gap between coming up with something in the lab and transporting that to something useful to society. It's not innovation, if that gap cannot be jumped.
You're overstating the problem. For 100 gold I can hire a fighter and a cleric. Problem solved.
A muscle bound men at arms is cheap... However, the last I checked, the price of a decent healer is a lot of money and keeps on going up every year.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
(Sarcasm) See? It's just that simple. But of course, outsourcing must be right because the market never makes mistakes. (End Sarcasm).
We lose a lot of engineering competence when college students see a 4-year engineering degree as a way to compete with folks making $10 an hour at most, while a business, law or medical degree are easier and almost guarantee a higher income. Not only that, we tend to give away what expertise we do have every time we outsource the manufacture of a new item to a foreign country.
So what do you *expect* to happen?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
A certain segment of the /. population loves to decry government involvement in anything, stating that business, unhindered, would naturally step-in to cure the various evils and ills that the government is so inept at dealing with, and the service would be better, people would be happier, and a modest profit could be made on the side.
Having seen the results of this sort of thinking first hand, I can honestly say that these people are delusional. Of course, I know that I won't ever convince them to change their minds (especially when I insult them), but I feel like typing, so here goes.
I used to be a lab assistant working in a large U.S. university's biomedical research facility. The area I worked was devoted to the keeping, raising, and study of cephalopods. We were the largest such facility in the US and among the top in the world for that type of science. Granted, it is a very specialized field, but the prestige was genuine and we attracted top talent.
Most of our funding came from government grants. The NSF and a few others were our bread and butter even though most of our research was directed toward marketable technologies and techniques. We also sold squid parts to commercial labs. Turns out, squid have a massive axion connecting their eye and the optical lobe of the brain. If humans had a T1 running from our eyes to our brains, squid have an OC-198. We also researched the color changing properties of cephalopod skin, their hydraulic muscle structure, their three heart circulatory system, their corneas and eye lenses (they match ours btw. If you've ever had eye surgery to replace a torn lens, thank a squid), their ink, and their behavior.
To keep all of these critters in one building took a lot of large equipment and a lot of highly skilled people; people that could have made buckets of cash in a commercial setting but chose the lab because we were figuring out thinks like why squid don't get cancer or suffer nearly as many degenerative diseases of the eye. We were trying to figure out why squid and octopuses suffered dementia near the end of their lives and how we could help prevent it. See, once we do that in squid, the way to doing it in people is considerably shorter.
Anyway, all that work took money and that meant begging Uncle Sam for more and more cash which seemed to take more and more paperwork every year. What the government couldn't or wouldn't fund, we supplemented with corporate donations and gifts. The whammy here is that a bunch of biologists who would rather be in 30 feet of water in the Caribbean watching squid fuck are notoriously terrible at convincing others of the need for their research. Still, it had to get done, and done it got. Once you knew the way to fill everything out for the government, it was much easier. They were concerned that you weren't fucking off with the money, that you weren't engaged in monkey torture or feeding rat poison to children, and that you were accounting for every penny. If they were going to give you money, they wanted to know what you did with it. Ok, cool, keep our receipts and stop feeding rat poison to the local children, easily done. The corporate "gifts" and donations were another kettle of squid. They too wanted to know that you weren't fucking off with the money, and wanted it accounted down to the penny, but they were neutral on most ethical subjects. They also wanted to give suggestions. Hey, it would really help out BigCo. if you could figure out a way to reliably and cheaply extract or synthesize cephalotoxin or some tetrodotoxin. In fact, it would help so much that your grant rides on your ability to do so.
And there is the hook. Sure, it is the corporation's money to do as they see fit, but when they step in to "help" they don't want base research, they don't want behavior studies, and they don't give a shit about learning to understand cephalopod communications or the possibility of sentience, they want something that will help their bottom line and they want it right god damn now.
No
This is wrong.
Slavery is cheap labor that you don't care about (you wouldn't give a shit about the quality of life of slaves when you determined your country's average quality of life of), and that doesn't cost the public much (don't need to factor those bodies in when building roads, hospitals, courts, schools, etc., etc.).
This is not wrong. Economics has been called The Dismal Science. A lot of people think it's called that because of all the boring numbers and supply and widgets and demand and aggregate statistics. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Economics was named The Dismal Science by Thomas Carlyle who was in favor of slavery. He got really frustrated by economists who kept publishing papers showing that slavery was economically inefficient. Carlyle wrote an article called Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question in which he advocated slavery as a means of regulating the labor market.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
Except that it was signed under the Clinton Administration. True, Bush (the elder) did start the whole thing, but Clinton came into office, made some changes, and endorsed it.
The backing of patenting an "IDEA" is ludicrous, sorry but there is no other way to describe it.
Do you think that only 1 person had the idea of using a shopping cart icon, or calling their on line store "a Shopping cart" back when the WWW became available to the average consumer? or even back during DARPA when we were dreaming of the WWW?
If you answer "yes", quite frankly you are a moron so please don't read any further. If you answer "no", then why would the USPTO give 1 company a patent for a shopping cart icon, an on-line store, or a name for an idea on a web page? Before you say "but.. but.. but.." it was done, and lawsuits have been flying ever since on the stupid things that they allow to be patented.
Microsoft is now suing B&N over 5 patents, all relate to either: Background downloading, Icons changing based on activity, or status bars and their placements. These are not things that should have ever been patented. It's like GM getting a patent on the wheel, and Ford getting a patent on the gear.
How can anyone think that it's beneficial? I'm baffled, and every person I talk to only likes patents for 2 reasons. 1, it gets their name on one and 2. they can now barter with other people that have patents. It does nothing for innovation and only protects people now a days from other people with patents.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
You know, this is a really difficult problem and because everything is part of a larger dynamical system, so often pressure applied anywhere has unexpected results. that said, I'm less interested in punishing foreign products, and far more interested in splinting the break in our economic system. I believe the best thing to to do is applying firm but even pressure on corporations to do what in the end is actually in their own best interest (healthy workforce = healthy consumer = healthy economy = happy corporation), and explain to them openly, all along the way we're all trying to do 'X', because we want to create 'Y', and 'Y' is good for you and me both, so please don't struggle too much.
In the end its a little like being a good parent. You can't be your children's friend. A child will want to eat candy and not their vegetables. This is perfect childhood logic, candy is delicious. Its up to a responsible party (the Parent) to ensure the child does want is good for the child and good for society (grows up to be a good citizen.) For the exact same reason, a corporation (an entity with only one purpose, make profit), needs a responsible external party to make certain it does what's good for it and society. We do this by creating a body of laws and regulations. Just as a parent manages a child by regulating that which is important to the child, a government must regulate that which is important to the corporation, as we already said, that would be profit. If it profits a corporation to be responsible, they will be responsible. Just put the dots close together and point the way and let them figure it out for themselves.
And for the "Objectivists" among us who think there is something magical in the intelligence of the marketplace, I would posit that the average corporation is no brighter intrinsically than a 5 year old child. It will kill itself in the long term for short term profit, it happens every day. I'm somehow fascinated by people who'd never dream of letting an out of control 5 year old run amok, but would never dream of constraining corporate mischief and misbehavior. CAN YOU SAY CREDIT DEFAULT SWAP!!! We are now chewing on the broken dreams of greedy men and women. Its time for our society to grow a pair, and spank the wicked, reward the steadfast, and tell the entire class to be quiet and do as they are told.
I appreciate the distinction between "we" and "the US." :D
Personally, I'm ready to surrender. About ten years ago I supported some of the stuff we did, and I'm sorry for my role in that. I have no intention of doing more of the same to make things worse under the guise of "We have to now because people are mad at us!" With any luck they will not be able to afford to get across the ocean with enough strength to hit most of us.
http://billstclair.com/blog/open_letter_of_conditional_surrender_in_the_war_on_terror.html
I am more than ready for the US to lose its immunity for the consequences of its actions.
And I'm also ready for those who want to profit from the silk road to bear the full expense of their own security, rather than distributing it onto the rest of us.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
No, we need to go back to the rule that only landowners can vote. Of course, that's a little obsolete these days (lots of upper-middle-class people rent by choice because they're mobile, or live in NYC), so instead, there should be some kind of educational standard to vote, which doesn't discriminate based on race or sex, only educational level (i.e., if you can't understand Darwin's theory, regardless of whether you agree with it, you're too stupid to vote; also, if you don't understand the basic structure of the nation's government, and don't understand that the President doesn't make laws, you have no business voting). Things started really going downhill when any moron on the street could vote, and also when Senators were popularly elected.
Slavery is cheap labor that you don't care about (you wouldn't give a shit about the quality of life of slaves when you determined your country's average quality of life of)
First of all, this doesn't parse.
But if you're trying to say that slave owners don't care about the quality of life of their slaves, that's wrong too. Back in the days of slavery, it was normal for owners to take rather good care of their slaves, and buy decent (but practical) clothes for them. First of all, slaves were really expensive back then. $800 for a slave was a lot of money in 1800. Cheaper than paying a white person to be your full-time live-in servant, yes, but still expensive. Second, just like now, people always wanted to show off to their neighbors how much money they had, so they didn't let their slaves (esp. the domestic ones) run around in torn-up clothes, because when their neighbors visited, this would look bad. Slaves were considered possessions (obviously), but along with that came a certain amount of care, just like anyone would want to take good care of some expensive item they purchased (car, etc.) instead of neglecting it.
Now obviously, they didn't worry much about the slaves' mental well-being, if they felt fulfilled with their job, whether they were depressed, etc. But it's not like they gave them rags to wear and starved them to death (except perhaps for a few especially cruel and stupid owners--slaves in poor health aren't going to be very productive workers).
The only economic argument against slavery is that the cheap labor prevents people from inventing faster, easier, and more efficient ways of doing things.
The other economic argument is that it can greatly reduce employment for your lower classes in your normal population; it's a bit like outsourcing. If those lower classes can find other work to do (that's more profitable than picking crops), then it works out OK, but if not, you end up with a bad economy and discontent. From what I've read, the economy in the South before the Civil War wasn't very good, and part of the reason for the war was that their economy was on the verge of collapse anyway. There were tons of poor people who had little work because the slaves did the menial work, and there was no industrialization to employ the poor white people like in the North. But of course the rich people got the poor people to blame the North for their problems instead of their own leaders at home.
If you are filing a patent as part of your job then the "extra effort" becomes part of your duties doesn't it?
Nope. Not many employees have the job title "patent filer". Usually, they're doing something else in the realm of engineering, and they come up with some improved method to do something, and that turns into a patent filing. Their normal job is NOT to file patents, it's to do their normal job, such as RTL design, or whatever. That's the job that their time has been budgeted for.
As with anything your boss asks you to do, you need to allocate and schedule the time to do it.
Not if you don't tell the boss, "hey boss! I came up with this great new method to do X, and I think we should file a patent on it!!". Instead, if you say, "yes, I came up with an improved method to do X, which should save up a little time." and the boss asks, "do you think we should file a patent on it", and you reply after thinking "the last thing I need right now is more work piled on me!", "Sorry boss, I don't think so. I think it would fail the non-obvious test and in my professional opinion it's not patent-worthy.", then he's much less likely to push the issue.
Why would anyone, employee or employer, expect this to be done on the filer's personal time?
Because filing a patent takes a lot of extra time, and as I said before, the employee who invents something (to scratch an itch so to speak, to make their regular job easier) still has to do his normal job. You think they're going to push back all their schedules just so the employee can meet with the patent lawyer and go through draft after draft of his patent filing? No, they're going to ask you to do what you have to do to meet the schedule and also get the patent filed. "Yeah, I'm going to need you to come in on Sunday too..."
Sorry, I've spent too many years in corporate environments and have seen how it works. There's no big reward for filing patents, other than the "prestige" of having it on your resume (whoopee) and maybe a $500 or $1000 cash award, and the idea that management will rearrange a project's schedule just so an employee can file a patent is naive at best.
"Explain to me how that fosters innovation. "
Because it causes deflation -- everything is cheaper, which makes it easier to live on less and have more free time for innovation.
After hundreds of years of innovation, we've now reached the point where most human labor is spent on "guarding", not "production".
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
See also:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" by Dan Pink
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
And on how Bill Gates learned to program in part from dumpster diving to read other people's code:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952
People like Eric von Hippel at MIT have written about how about 80% or so of innovation comes from customers, anyway...
What we really need is a "basic income" so anyone who wants to focus on innovating and giving away the results without enforcing "artificial scarcity" can afford to do so.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Tell that to BMW, BioWare and Ubisoft montreal, Airbus, Volkswagon, GM etc. All those game companies who set up shop in texas with local grants (notably in austin), and so on.
You don't see the long term benefit of japanese investments in computing? Remember floppy disks? How about RAM, lots of that stuff was Japan first in innovation. Innovation doesn't necessarily completely change the paradigm of how technology is used, it can be incremental and still be hugely valuable.
And then there's the whole internet. No, that wasn't useful to have been a government sponsored programme at all was it?
Even in the solar arena, the problem they have in the UK with subsidies for power from solar panels being subsidized at some ridiculous rate, is that the cost of solar is dropping so fast that the subsidies are basically free money, and they can't afford the programme. It was too successful. Who's making those innovations? The US.
And yes, american investments in solar have been enormously successful. You've increased solar generation by a factor of 5 in 4 years, brought the cost down by about that same factor per KW/h. Sure, on the scale of total US power generation it's still a drop in the bucket, but when you add a drop to a bucket, you're only going to get a drop. The way I do the math you're looking at doubling that capacity again in the next 3 or 4 years, if not more than that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_States).
Part of the thrust of the topic is that investment in the US has been inadequate. If I hire you to write a game engine for me, but I only offer you 500 bucks to do it, well guess what, it's going to be bad. The US can (not necessarily will) do a lot of things differently, and could throw a lot more money at the problem. How much is the 'right' amount I have no idea though.
American innovation is faltering! This is a call to arms!
1) Lower taxes on the rich
2) De-regulate corporations
3) Extend copyright
Whew! Problem solved!