That's a reasonable argument. On the other hand, business seems to be going global. And there is going to come a point were you can't legislate whatever jurisdiction you are competing against because it falls outside the scope over which you can create rules (i.e. out of state, out of country, out of trade area).
I don't know if there is a solution to that or not.
I don't know that I disagree with anything that you said. But I think you missed the point of what I was saying.
Apple et al are companies that are about profit and making money. One of the side effects of these companies setting up shop in a town is there is some level of job creation and economic benefit. It is all about supply and demand, really. My main point was that taking away the possibility of tax incentives will not solve this problem because if competition is large enough and regions see it as being desirable enough they will come up with other ways to entice companies to set up shop in their area.
I'm not in any way saying this is necessarily good or how it should be. I was just responding to the notion of not allow cities to offer tax incentives to big organizations as being a solution to this problem. I really don't think it is.
I have a feeling you're totally missing the point.
The problems with this are so enormous and obvious, I'm surprised you're in business at all.
I'm a business owner too - and I understand a simple concept: my business is only as good as the people in it. I would rather close my doors than pay a person one penny less than what they are worth - this is basic common sense on so many levels, that it is difficult for me to understand how anyone can fail to see it, but I'll try to explain:
Who determines what somebody is worth? If I pay somebody $200K a year and he increases profitability of my company by $250K a year, he is worth $200K a year. But he may only be able to increase the profitability of some other company by $75K a year. Does that mean he is worth less? And perhaps the choice comes down to closing the doors. If the employee can only make $180K a year working at another company is it better to go under than to pay him anything less than $250K a year?
1) My success depends on the success of those who work for me, whether contractor, employee or vendor. If they fail, I fail. Short changing them doesn't help anyone.
Nobody said anything about short changing the employee.
2) Good developers know what they are worth. If they are getting short changed, they'll leave. Do the basic math! How much does it cost to go through the hiring process? How much to you have to pay headhunters, or time spent scraping resumes on Dice? How much do you have to pay in salary before the new guy comes up to speed (assuming you can even find a decent person, which is hard, hard)? How much have your project timelines been impacted by losing a key person? What you've described is business insanity, and pretty much a recipe for "how to fail in business".
A person's worth can depend on the organization they are in. I would think that one generally tries to choose an employee's salary somewhere below the actual dollar value they bring to the company but somewhere around or above the value that somebody else would want to hire them for (i.e. enough to keep them but not too much that they are costing your business money). A business can't afford to pay somebody $80K a year if they are only increasing profitability by $75K a year - that is a losing proposition (obviously these are simplified terms - there is a subjective factor to a worker's affect on profitability that is sometimes hard to measure). A business can't really afford to pay somebody $75K a year if they only increase profitability by $75K a year - there is absolutely no incentive for the business to hire that person at that wage - the risk and costs involved to have that person in board is too much.
3) If you treat people like a commodity, they'll act like a commodity. Why would someone give you their best work when you're treating them like a replaceable cog? Now start to factor in the costs of mediocre/shoddy development, bugs, customer dissatisfaction...
I'm not really sure anything was said about treating people like commodities. That being said, in some types of business, people are very close to being commodities. If I have a lawn care business, what am I selling? I am selling people's time and charging more than what I pay for that person's time to my client. I had better pay that employee less than what I am charging - if I'm not, I'm either volunteering the organizational work or I'm out of business. This doesn't preclude giving the worker a fair wage and it doesn't preclude treating the worker with respect/dignity/value. It only recognizes the fact that your business adds value to their labour.
You say "Welcome to profitable business" but it is clear to me that you're just guessing, from what you've said I'm pretty sure you've never actually run a business, if you had, you'd know that you just can't treat people like that, or you would have been driven out of business
Other people have commented on why it isn't necessarily exploitation. I just thought I'd chime in on another angle.
Let us, for argument sake, say that a person should be paid exactly what they are worth to a company.
Now let us suppose, that we hire a production manager. Without the production manager properly organizing the plant, operations cost $500 000 per year. With the production manager's presence at the plant efficiencies are found and operations cost $425 000 per year. Obviously the production manager is worth $75 000 per year. Reasonable enough. One might make the argument that from a management perspective why would you take the extra risk of paying the production manager when you aren't making any more money, but we'll set that aside for now.
Now let us suppose that our business grows. We are now ten times the size. Operations cost $5 000 000 per year without the production manager. It turns out the efficiencies scale really well and with the production manager the efficiencies reduce operations cost to $3 500 000. The result is that the production manager is worth $1 500 000. Obviously we don't want to exploit the production manager so we pay him the entire $1 500 000.
This always lead to a conflict with me. The question of how you determine fair wage is not as easy as it sometimes appears to be. Whatever method you choose there are going to be difficult questions to answer.
I guess the important question then is whether they have managed to increase the transmission density of a certain amount of spectrum. If you can increase the amount of data that you can transmit over a certain slice of spectrum then it is likely a big win because I would imagine spectrum is one of the major costs in a cellular network.
But this is entirely the point of why Facebook is fighting this. If anybody believes it is about their terms of service or about standing up for their users out of benevolence they are ignorant.
Facebook *has* to try to stop this. If this practice becomes too invasive then it could possibly affect Facebook usage. This is bad for Facebook's business.
Facebook has to convince its users that they can freely share information and maintain some sense of control over who gets their data. They can't allow the precedence to be set of employers asking for account information and expecting to get it.
Now, when it comes to those who say they would just say no, I would say that it is a great situation to be in. You must keep in mind however that this practice isn't specific to the IT industry - it seems to be happening in industries where competition is steeper. There are some industries where opportunities for interviews are few, let alone jobs. When faced with the choice between potentially not getting a job or giving up a little bit of privacy, some people see little choice other than to make that sacrifice. If the practice becomes too commonplace and prevalent, then it could mean that this becomes the norm rather than the exception, and you too could one day face that choice.
Is that what is happening? Wikipedia says that term means "imposing unfair and abusive loan terms on borrowers." But suppose the terms of the loan are not at all abusive - say, a typical car loan, with a financing rate of say, 2% per year, which most would consider more than fair.
Is it unethical to loan somebody money to buy a car at a fair and equitable rate if you know the person can't afford the loan?
or 3. Recognize that there is legitimate room within patents for doing something that has already been done but doing it in a non obvious, novel way.
I'm not saying this is the case for this particular patent, but just pointing out that in my understanding patents aren't always about doing a certain thing but rather doing a certain thing in a certain way. Obviously this limits the scope of the patent to that one certain way.
So, to put it in slashdot terms (i.e. a car analogy), pretty much every car sold today has shock absorbers, and the standard way of doing this is to use metal coil springs. If somebody were to put time and research into improving the design of shock absorbers and came up with a design that used marshmallows instead of metal coil springs, I would consider that novel and I think you would agree that it is non-obvious. To me, if we have the patent system that we have, that is at least a legitimate use of it. You aren't patenting shock absorbers, you are patenting shock absorbers that use marshmallows to absorb the shock of the impact.
Right. And that was directly the result of a child watching an Indiana Jones movie. The idea of hiding in a fridge while playing hide and seek would never cross a child's mind had they not watched the movie.
It seems odd that the testimony was 'could prove to be a major threat to the Internet as it's known today'. If we are going to have a patent system it seems unreasonable that the argument that the technology in the patent in question is too critical to the way society operates and is so central should be a reasonable argument for invalidating the patent claim.
I'm not intending to make any claim about this particular patent. I only wish to say that that seems like a stupid reason to invalidate a patent based on the patent framework that we seem to have.
Slashdot Mirror
But why not go with biometric and a thumb??
I guess you could go thumb now that Arduino runs on Arm.
That's a reasonable argument. On the other hand, business seems to be going global. And there is going to come a point were you can't legislate whatever jurisdiction you are competing against because it falls outside the scope over which you can create rules (i.e. out of state, out of country, out of trade area).
I don't know if there is a solution to that or not.
I don't know that I disagree with anything that you said. But I think you missed the point of what I was saying.
Apple et al are companies that are about profit and making money. One of the side effects of these companies setting up shop in a town is there is some level of job creation and economic benefit. It is all about supply and demand, really. My main point was that taking away the possibility of tax incentives will not solve this problem because if competition is large enough and regions see it as being desirable enough they will come up with other ways to entice companies to set up shop in their area.
I'm not in any way saying this is necessarily good or how it should be. I was just responding to the notion of not allow cities to offer tax incentives to big organizations as being a solution to this problem. I really don't think it is.
Meh. If it wasn't tax give backs it would be other incentives to encourage companies to create jobs.
I have a feeling you're totally missing the point.
The problems with this are so enormous and obvious, I'm surprised you're in business at all.
I'm a business owner too - and I understand a simple concept: my business is only as good as the people in it. I would rather close my doors than pay a person one penny less than what they are worth - this is basic common sense on so many levels, that it is difficult for me to understand how anyone can fail to see it, but I'll try to explain:
Who determines what somebody is worth? If I pay somebody $200K a year and he increases profitability of my company by $250K a year, he is worth $200K a year. But he may only be able to increase the profitability of some other company by $75K a year. Does that mean he is worth less? And perhaps the choice comes down to closing the doors. If the employee can only make $180K a year working at another company is it better to go under than to pay him anything less than $250K a year?
1) My success depends on the success of those who work for me, whether contractor, employee or vendor. If they fail, I fail. Short changing them doesn't help anyone.
Nobody said anything about short changing the employee.
2) Good developers know what they are worth. If they are getting short changed, they'll leave. Do the basic math! How much does it cost to go through the hiring process? How much to you have to pay headhunters, or time spent scraping resumes on Dice? How much do you have to pay in salary before the new guy comes up to speed (assuming you can even find a decent person, which is hard, hard)? How much have your project timelines been impacted by losing a key person? What you've described is business insanity, and pretty much a recipe for "how to fail in business".
A person's worth can depend on the organization they are in. I would think that one generally tries to choose an employee's salary somewhere below the actual dollar value they bring to the company but somewhere around or above the value that somebody else would want to hire them for (i.e. enough to keep them but not too much that they are costing your business money). A business can't afford to pay somebody $80K a year if they are only increasing profitability by $75K a year - that is a losing proposition (obviously these are simplified terms - there is a subjective factor to a worker's affect on profitability that is sometimes hard to measure). A business can't really afford to pay somebody $75K a year if they only increase profitability by $75K a year - there is absolutely no incentive for the business to hire that person at that wage - the risk and costs involved to have that person in board is too much.
3) If you treat people like a commodity, they'll act like a commodity. Why would someone give you their best work when you're treating them like a replaceable cog? Now start to factor in the costs of mediocre/shoddy development, bugs, customer dissatisfaction...
I'm not really sure anything was said about treating people like commodities. That being said, in some types of business, people are very close to being commodities. If I have a lawn care business, what am I selling? I am selling people's time and charging more than what I pay for that person's time to my client. I had better pay that employee less than what I am charging - if I'm not, I'm either volunteering the organizational work or I'm out of business. This doesn't preclude giving the worker a fair wage and it doesn't preclude treating the worker with respect/dignity/value. It only recognizes the fact that your business adds value to their labour.
You say "Welcome to profitable business" but it is clear to me that you're just guessing, from what you've said I'm pretty sure you've never actually run a business, if you had, you'd know that you just can't treat people like that, or you would have been driven out of business
Other people have commented on why it isn't necessarily exploitation. I just thought I'd chime in on another angle.
Let us, for argument sake, say that a person should be paid exactly what they are worth to a company.
Now let us suppose, that we hire a production manager. Without the production manager properly organizing the plant, operations cost $500 000 per year. With the production manager's presence at the plant efficiencies are found and operations cost $425 000 per year. Obviously the production manager is worth $75 000 per year. Reasonable enough. One might make the argument that from a management perspective why would you take the extra risk of paying the production manager when you aren't making any more money, but we'll set that aside for now.
Now let us suppose that our business grows. We are now ten times the size. Operations cost $5 000 000 per year without the production manager. It turns out the efficiencies scale really well and with the production manager the efficiencies reduce operations cost to $3 500 000. The result is that the production manager is worth $1 500 000. Obviously we don't want to exploit the production manager so we pay him the entire $1 500 000.
This always lead to a conflict with me. The question of how you determine fair wage is not as easy as it sometimes appears to be. Whatever method you choose there are going to be difficult questions to answer.
I guess the important question then is whether they have managed to increase the transmission density of a certain amount of spectrum. If you can increase the amount of data that you can transmit over a certain slice of spectrum then it is likely a big win because I would imagine spectrum is one of the major costs in a cellular network.
But this is entirely the point of why Facebook is fighting this. If anybody believes it is about their terms of service or about standing up for their users out of benevolence they are ignorant.
Facebook *has* to try to stop this. If this practice becomes too invasive then it could possibly affect Facebook usage. This is bad for Facebook's business.
Facebook has to convince its users that they can freely share information and maintain some sense of control over who gets their data. They can't allow the precedence to be set of employers asking for account information and expecting to get it.
Now, when it comes to those who say they would just say no, I would say that it is a great situation to be in. You must keep in mind however that this practice isn't specific to the IT industry - it seems to be happening in industries where competition is steeper. There are some industries where opportunities for interviews are few, let alone jobs. When faced with the choice between potentially not getting a job or giving up a little bit of privacy, some people see little choice other than to make that sacrifice. If the practice becomes too commonplace and prevalent, then it could mean that this becomes the norm rather than the exception, and you too could one day face that choice.
I'm glad I'm not in the job market.
I would question the wisdom of talking things through with fruit.
I just feel sorry for the poor information that just so desperately wants to be free but is destined to live its life trapped behind a paywall.
Don't forget Netflix.
Oh come on you can't possibly be saying that airplane entertainment devices are anything less than top of the line, state of the art equipment!
Either way, according to my reading of ODbL (http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/) they have to attribute and give back.
If I understand the summary correctly, it allows apps designed for X to use your phone as the display.
Is that what is happening? Wikipedia says that term means "imposing unfair and abusive loan terms on borrowers." But suppose the terms of the loan are not at all abusive - say, a typical car loan, with a financing rate of say, 2% per year, which most would consider more than fair.
Is it unethical to loan somebody money to buy a car at a fair and equitable rate if you know the person can't afford the loan?
or
3. Recognize that there is legitimate room within patents for doing something that has already been done but doing it in a non obvious, novel way.
I'm not saying this is the case for this particular patent, but just pointing out that in my understanding patents aren't always about doing a certain thing but rather doing a certain thing in a certain way. Obviously this limits the scope of the patent to that one certain way.
So, to put it in slashdot terms (i.e. a car analogy), pretty much every car sold today has shock absorbers, and the standard way of doing this is to use metal coil springs. If somebody were to put time and research into improving the design of shock absorbers and came up with a design that used marshmallows instead of metal coil springs, I would consider that novel and I think you would agree that it is non-obvious. To me, if we have the patent system that we have, that is at least a legitimate use of it. You aren't patenting shock absorbers, you are patenting shock absorbers that use marshmallows to absorb the shock of the impact.
Would the same thing apply to the person in charge of financing at the car dealership?
Are you replying to me? Or to the OP? I guess I omitted the sarcasm tag, but I thought it was fairly obvious.
Right. And that was directly the result of a child watching an Indiana Jones movie. The idea of hiding in a fridge while playing hide and seek would never cross a child's mind had they not watched the movie.
It depends on where you are going and where you are from.
I don't know that I disagree. I was grasping at straws, really.
Maybe it was Garage Band which apparently is half decent? I dunno.
And most users of those two operating systems know almost nothing about the shells.
It seems odd that the testimony was 'could prove to be a major threat to the Internet as it's known today'. If we are going to have a patent system it seems unreasonable that the argument that the technology in the patent in question is too critical to the way society operates and is so central should be a reasonable argument for invalidating the patent claim.
I'm not intending to make any claim about this particular patent. I only wish to say that that seems like a stupid reason to invalidate a patent based on the patent framework that we seem to have.
That significantly reduces the changes of successfully making a warranty claim, and that is probably the issue.