MS was unethical because they were paid to develop OS/2 in the first place and used that position to, against the terms of the agreement they signed, copy the best features into their own OS AND to write the original OS/2 so as to make it work less well than it could have.
That being said, ultimately the failure of OS/2 resulted from IBM's original attempt to keep PCs from advancing beyond the 80286 chip. While they abandoned that position, it left them with a major PR hurdle that they were never able to overcome.
Nah, this will be reserved for people who do not have sufficient political connections...or more likely for people who fall out of favor with the political powers that be.
I do not believe that the reason Google's first version was lack of obviousness, more likely it was lack of miniaturization. The first cellphones were huge as well, but that was not because people thought that big portable phones was the way to go.
I am sorry, but how is this not obvious? The only thing that is not obvious is why one would want to do this (although once you consider what Google is doing with Streetview, etc, even that goes away). However, as soon as one has a reason to do what this does, the solution (which is what they are patenting) is obvious.
It would be pretty easy for HFTs to abuse this,...
But very hard to do in a way that is not relatively easy to detect (that is, relative to other ways to do this). And this type of practice is already illegal.
The person you are replying to never said it was capital gains. When you have a business, there are expenses which can be deducted from any revenue that business generates. In the case of bitcoins. If I have buy a computer which I dedicate to mining bitcoins, I can deduct the cost of that computer from the money I earn selling bitcoins. There would be additional expenses which could be deducted as well, but since I am not an accountant I will not try to list more because I may be mistaken about which of the other expenses would be legally tax-deductible.
I was debating posting this as a separate post because I did not see any comments that related to what I wanted to say. However, the point you made is a different but similar point to mine. HFT became a big deal because the speed of computers and communication was accelerating fast enough that those who could get the latest and greatest of both were able to move enough faster than everyone else to skim some money off of the transactions. However, we have now reached a point where computer and communication speeds are now so much faster than all other signals that enough people are able to make HFTs that the amount of money to be made from doing HFTs is approaching the point of being no higher than the actual value they bring to the market. In addition, the risks of these automate HFT systems is starting to become apparent (yes, lots of other people got hurt as well, but several HFT companies took a bath in the last couple of flash crashes caused by HFT systems). Without government intervention it will not be much longer until the ROI on HFTs drops to the point where it will not be worth it to invest in the equipment to do so, except as an adjunct to some other trading business.
What happens is that HFTs cause flash crashes by selling large quantity of a stock when the price drops below a certain threshold. So, what happens is that HFT Computer A interprets its data as a signal to sell all of its stock in Company Z. This causes the price of the stock in Company Z to drop below the threshold for HFT Computer B, which then unloads all of its stock in Company Z. A cascade is triggered and many (or all) of the HFT computers sell the stock of Company A. Most of the time the signal which HFT Computer A interpreted as a signal to sell indicates that Company Z was several percentage points overvalued. All of the companies using the HFT computers downstream of HFT Computer A lose money because the stock price had dropped below what they had paid for stock in Company Z AND the stock in Company Z would be worth more than they sold it for based on an evaluation of Return On Investment*.
*Calculating what Return On Investment one should get for one's money can be a tricky thing. My experience suggests that if your Return On Investment is over 5%, you have probably made a good investment and if it is over 10% you have certainly made a good investment. The main reason why a Return On Investment under 10% may not be a good investment is because of the "opportunity cost". If your money is invested at a 5% ROI when it could be invested at a 10% ROI you are losing 5% for the term of the investment. The risk of any investment with an ROI over 10% is high (at least going in, hindsight may tell us that the risk was actually low but that is only because of things that were not known in advance).
I don't see any reason to expect Red Hat to fail, but I can think of several ways that they could fail (one of them being reinventing the wheel when it comes to build, test and QA processes rather than using the processes they already have).
I think this is a headline that breaks the law of headlines which says the answer to a headline that is a question is always no. Red Hat certainly CAN do for OpenStack what they did for Linux. That does not mean that they will do so, even if they put the necessary effort into it. The last statement of the summary is irrelevant because Red Hat certainly knows that and almost certainly understands the magnitude of the project they are undertaking here. Red Hat is the sort of company that can do this. However, the project is complicated enough that they may fail.
Perhaps someday we—men and women alike—can all be treated like the grown-ups we theoretically are, and be trusted to judge a game by its content... not its double-D cover
This indicates that the person does not understand what is going on. The people doing the marketing don't want you to judge the product on the basis of its content. They want you to be distracted and by it because of things like the hot babe promoting it.
Let me see if I got what they are saying straight:
It is impossible for Snowden to have gained access to the information he claims to have gained access to.
It is impossible for anyone to know what information Snowden has in his possession
These two points are contradictory. If no one knows what information Snowden has in his possession, how can they know that it is impossible for him to have gained access to it? If you know what information it was possible for him to access, you know that the information in his possession is a subset of that.
What I find funny is that the "strict constitutionalists" in our politics today have no problems with IP. People like Clarance Thomas talk about "original intent" but never have a problem with these matters.
Care to give me a reference for that claim? The only reference I could find referring to Clarence Thomas and copyright was that he supported the ruling that applied to first sale doctrine to textbooks purchased overseas.
the population has been increasing at an accelerating rate and there's no sign that it's going to slow down.
Actually there are plenty of signs that it is going to slow down. So many signs that population is expected to peak around the year 2011 and start decreasing.
The problem is that your proposal does not actually address the true source of increased (and increasing) tuition costs...increases in number of and pay for administrators.
All of the issues you are discussing are not stopped by regulations of a particular market, but by anti-trust laws that apply to every market. We could discuss whether or not anti-trust laws are good for the economy and/or the consumer, but that is another discussion. The poster I was replying to said that markets must be regulated and I suppose he might have meant things like anti-trust laws, but usually when we discuss market regulations today we are talking about things like the Louisiana State Board of Funeral Directors regulating the sale of caskets or the federal Raisin Marketing Order,
The point of regulation is to prevent companies from market manipulation....So regulation is required to facilitate a healthy market. Rules are put in place to ensure that established companies can not prevent competition from entering a market.
A couple of points, first, the effect of regulation is to make it harder for new companies to compete with established companies in a particular market. So, in reality rules are put in place to ensure that new companies cannot enter a market to compete with established companies (unless the new companies are larger than the existing companies in the market).
Second. how exactly do established companies prevent new companies from entering the market to compete with them? Please list only those which are not illegal without market regulation (for example, breaking someone's legs is already illegal).
I do not have the link handy at the moment, but Japanese living in the U.S. have a higher life expectancy than the life expectancy for Japan. I have seen similar numbers for several other countries, although I do not remember the countries at the moment. They were however countries which, like Japan, were for the most part ethnically homogenous and had a higher life expectancy than the U.S.
Well, I am a Mennonite and I don't own a big screen TV or a video game console. Although the reason is not particularly about my religious beliefs. I don't watch TV because I don't find enough of it entertaining enough to justify the cost. The same goes for video game consoles.
Reading some of the responses to your post, I think people are missing your point. So. I am going to rephrase it so that they might understand.
The summary compares apples to oranges. It compares the sentence which the rapists actually received to the maximum sentence that the hacker MIGHT receive. The rapists MIGHT have received a much stiffer sentence than they did and it would be a travesty of justice if the hacker DID receive a sentence longer than that received by the rapists.
Right because corporations have so much less power today than they had in the 50s...wait, no, as government power has increased, so has corporate power. Maybe you need to re-examine your assumptions
I know a man who never sought wealth, who nevertheless became rather wealthy. He was a farmer who owned a couple hundred acres (my memory may be overstating the size of his farm, it may have only been somewhere around 100 acres). The state put a major highway through the middle of his land making it impractical to continue farming it. Since his land was now on either side of the exit from the new highway, developers showed up offering him multi-million dollars for land which had only been worth a couple hundred thousand, at the most, before the highway went through.
Slashdot Mirror
MS was unethical because they were paid to develop OS/2 in the first place and used that position to, against the terms of the agreement they signed, copy the best features into their own OS AND to write the original OS/2 so as to make it work less well than it could have.
That being said, ultimately the failure of OS/2 resulted from IBM's original attempt to keep PCs from advancing beyond the 80286 chip. While they abandoned that position, it left them with a major PR hurdle that they were never able to overcome.
Nah, this will be reserved for people who do not have sufficient political connections...or more likely for people who fall out of favor with the political powers that be.
I do not believe that the reason Google's first version was lack of obviousness, more likely it was lack of miniaturization. The first cellphones were huge as well, but that was not because people thought that big portable phones was the way to go.
How many uses do you imagine for such a device? Once one has a use for such a device, the device itself is obvious.
I am sorry, but how is this not obvious? The only thing that is not obvious is why one would want to do this (although once you consider what Google is doing with Streetview, etc, even that goes away). However, as soon as one has a reason to do what this does, the solution (which is what they are patenting) is obvious.
It would be pretty easy for HFTs to abuse this,...
But very hard to do in a way that is not relatively easy to detect (that is, relative to other ways to do this). And this type of practice is already illegal.
The person you are replying to never said it was capital gains. When you have a business, there are expenses which can be deducted from any revenue that business generates. In the case of bitcoins. If I have buy a computer which I dedicate to mining bitcoins, I can deduct the cost of that computer from the money I earn selling bitcoins. There would be additional expenses which could be deducted as well, but since I am not an accountant I will not try to list more because I may be mistaken about which of the other expenses would be legally tax-deductible.
I was debating posting this as a separate post because I did not see any comments that related to what I wanted to say. However, the point you made is a different but similar point to mine. HFT became a big deal because the speed of computers and communication was accelerating fast enough that those who could get the latest and greatest of both were able to move enough faster than everyone else to skim some money off of the transactions. However, we have now reached a point where computer and communication speeds are now so much faster than all other signals that enough people are able to make HFTs that the amount of money to be made from doing HFTs is approaching the point of being no higher than the actual value they bring to the market. In addition, the risks of these automate HFT systems is starting to become apparent (yes, lots of other people got hurt as well, but several HFT companies took a bath in the last couple of flash crashes caused by HFT systems). Without government intervention it will not be much longer until the ROI on HFTs drops to the point where it will not be worth it to invest in the equipment to do so, except as an adjunct to some other trading business.
What happens is that HFTs cause flash crashes by selling large quantity of a stock when the price drops below a certain threshold. So, what happens is that HFT Computer A interprets its data as a signal to sell all of its stock in Company Z. This causes the price of the stock in Company Z to drop below the threshold for HFT Computer B, which then unloads all of its stock in Company Z. A cascade is triggered and many (or all) of the HFT computers sell the stock of Company A. Most of the time the signal which HFT Computer A interpreted as a signal to sell indicates that Company Z was several percentage points overvalued. All of the companies using the HFT computers downstream of HFT Computer A lose money because the stock price had dropped below what they had paid for stock in Company Z AND the stock in Company Z would be worth more than they sold it for based on an evaluation of Return On Investment*.
*Calculating what Return On Investment one should get for one's money can be a tricky thing. My experience suggests that if your Return On Investment is over 5%, you have probably made a good investment and if it is over 10% you have certainly made a good investment. The main reason why a Return On Investment under 10% may not be a good investment is because of the "opportunity cost". If your money is invested at a 5% ROI when it could be invested at a 10% ROI you are losing 5% for the term of the investment. The risk of any investment with an ROI over 10% is high (at least going in, hindsight may tell us that the risk was actually low but that is only because of things that were not known in advance).
I don't see any reason to expect Red Hat to fail, but I can think of several ways that they could fail (one of them being reinventing the wheel when it comes to build, test and QA processes rather than using the processes they already have).
I think this is a headline that breaks the law of headlines which says the answer to a headline that is a question is always no. Red Hat certainly CAN do for OpenStack what they did for Linux. That does not mean that they will do so, even if they put the necessary effort into it. The last statement of the summary is irrelevant because Red Hat certainly knows that and almost certainly understands the magnitude of the project they are undertaking here. Red Hat is the sort of company that can do this. However, the project is complicated enough that they may fail.
Perhaps someday we—men and women alike—can all be treated like the grown-ups we theoretically are, and be trusted to judge a game by its content... not its double-D cover
This indicates that the person does not understand what is going on. The people doing the marketing don't want you to judge the product on the basis of its content. They want you to be distracted and by it because of things like the hot babe promoting it.
These two points are contradictory. If no one knows what information Snowden has in his possession, how can they know that it is impossible for him to have gained access to it? If you know what information it was possible for him to access, you know that the information in his possession is a subset of that.
What I find funny is that the "strict constitutionalists" in our politics today have no problems with IP. People like Clarance Thomas talk about "original intent" but never have a problem with these matters.
Care to give me a reference for that claim? The only reference I could find referring to Clarence Thomas and copyright was that he supported the ruling that applied to first sale doctrine to textbooks purchased overseas.
the population has been increasing at an accelerating rate and there's no sign that it's going to slow down.
Actually there are plenty of signs that it is going to slow down. So many signs that population is expected to peak around the year 2011 and start decreasing.
Eventually, Malthus will be right.
Eventually, the universe will reach heat death where all useful energy has been used.
The problem is that your proposal does not actually address the true source of increased (and increasing) tuition costs...increases in number of and pay for administrators.
All of the issues you are discussing are not stopped by regulations of a particular market, but by anti-trust laws that apply to every market. We could discuss whether or not anti-trust laws are good for the economy and/or the consumer, but that is another discussion. The poster I was replying to said that markets must be regulated and I suppose he might have meant things like anti-trust laws, but usually when we discuss market regulations today we are talking about things like the Louisiana State Board of Funeral Directors regulating the sale of caskets or the federal Raisin Marketing Order,
The point of regulation is to prevent companies from market manipulation....So regulation is required to facilitate a healthy market. Rules are put in place to ensure that established companies can not prevent competition from entering a market.
A couple of points, first, the effect of regulation is to make it harder for new companies to compete with established companies in a particular market. So, in reality rules are put in place to ensure that new companies cannot enter a market to compete with established companies (unless the new companies are larger than the existing companies in the market).
Second. how exactly do established companies prevent new companies from entering the market to compete with them? Please list only those which are not illegal without market regulation (for example, breaking someone's legs is already illegal).
I do not have the link handy at the moment, but Japanese living in the U.S. have a higher life expectancy than the life expectancy for Japan. I have seen similar numbers for several other countries, although I do not remember the countries at the moment. They were however countries which, like Japan, were for the most part ethnically homogenous and had a higher life expectancy than the U.S.
Well, I am a Mennonite and I don't own a big screen TV or a video game console. Although the reason is not particularly about my religious beliefs. I don't watch TV because I don't find enough of it entertaining enough to justify the cost. The same goes for video game consoles.
Reading some of the responses to your post, I think people are missing your point. So. I am going to rephrase it so that they might understand.
The summary compares apples to oranges. It compares the sentence which the rapists actually received to the maximum sentence that the hacker MIGHT receive. The rapists MIGHT have received a much stiffer sentence than they did and it would be a travesty of justice if the hacker DID receive a sentence longer than that received by the rapists.
Right because corporations have so much less power today than they had in the 50s...wait, no, as government power has increased, so has corporate power. Maybe you need to re-examine your assumptions
As I said there are a few more verses that contribute to their understanding.
I know a man who never sought wealth, who nevertheless became rather wealthy. He was a farmer who owned a couple hundred acres (my memory may be overstating the size of his farm, it may have only been somewhere around 100 acres). The state put a major highway through the middle of his land making it impractical to continue farming it. Since his land was now on either side of the exit from the new highway, developers showed up offering him multi-million dollars for land which had only been worth a couple hundred thousand, at the most, before the highway went through.