For the record: I would never drive to the library personally. It takes me about 10 minutes to walk there.
As for the expense: well, by the time I go to the library, find the book I want, check it out, and get back home, I have spent 45 minutes. Say a fiction hardcover is worth about $45 new. So by saving those $45 I would "make" about $60/hour, which is below my regular salary, and MUCH below my consulting rate, so one could argue that I would actually be losing money if I went to the library. And that is for hardcover. Anything paperback isn't even worth thinking about.(*)
Non-fiction books, where I spend most of my money, are of course much more expensive, but there I usually want them around long-term too look up facts later. Borrowed books are out for that reason.
Ad to that the limited business hours of libraries (I often order from amazon in the middle of the night), as well as my earlier point about selection, and libraries are simply not very attractive to me. For example, I just read a nice book about color theory that is not available in the library system. Or back in the summer, when I bought the new Harry Potter book, the library didn't have it yet. Sure I could have waited a few weeks, but that's like watching the superbowl on video 2 months after it happened.
(*) that is one of the key lifestyle choices few people recognize. If going to the library is an activity that you enjoy, then good for you. But if you do it to save money, then you really ought to compare the cost savings to the time investment required to achieve those savings. Once you start looking at things this way, you will see that many people are willing to "work" for less than minimum wage in their "spare time" by doing stupid stunts like saving a few bucks on grocery shopping by driving for half an hour. If you do this kind of stuff, you would be better off to just buy at your local mom-and-pop grocery store and spend the saved time working at McDonalds for a few hours a week. Of course if you are technically skilled and are able to work as a consultant for a few hours a month, the math is even more in your favor. Once you realize this, you will be both wealthier and happier (since you'll have more true off-time).
I think your concern can be addressed by a single word: amazon.
By far the most convenient way to get to books. No driving to either the bookstore or the library. And let's face it: the selection of most rural or suburban libraries is dysmal, on the science side essentially non-existant. You pretty much have to go to the main branch of a major city to find anything remotely interesting. Rural and suburban bookstores aren't much better, of course, but with amazon you have pretty much all (recent) books available at your fingertips 24/7 (well, you can order 24/7, although admittedly you can't start reading right away).
BTW: I live just a few blocks from the main branch of the Vancouver library, and STILL find amazon both more convenient and having a better selection for my needs.
You'll excuse if I am sceptical. Unless you live waaay in the boondocks, there are incoming calls all the time, just not for your cellphone. Shouldn't you wake up from those other calls as well?
Also, it is very unlikely that, if you literally woke up 1/2 second before the display of your cell lighting up, you'd actually be able to consciously process it. The most likely explanation is that you have a very light sleep, and when the display lights up, it just seems as if you woke up just prior to it.
This is the kind of stuff that out bains really suck at. We are so trained to see "patterns" anywhere that we take a few random chance occurrances and interpret them as "rules". It is the same mechanism that causes people to believe in ghosts and other "supernatural phenomena". Don't fall for it.
According to the specs, fuel consumption is 4L/100km. That's better than my sport touring motorcycle and only 10% worse than a modern Yamaha BWS scooter with a 49cc two stroke engine. Compared to ancient or cheaply hacked together motorcycles, the car would win hands down, even on the CO2 front.
That is simply not the case. Just because you buy a Coke does NOT entitle you to the recipy. For food and drugs you are at least entitled to basic nutritional information since it can be important for mainatining your health, but even there the specifics are trade secrets. For anything else, you can try to reverse engineer, but the manufacturer has no obligation whatsoever to provide you with additional info.
Trade secrets have centuries if not meillenia of tradition. Any attempt to get rid of them like you propose, would face serious constitutional challenges in all jusrisdictions where I know a bit about the law (US, Canada, where I live, and contintental Europe, where I am from). Admittedly, I don't know much about constitutional situation in the UK, but it if it allows for the abolishion of trade secrets, it is pretty fucked up.
Clearly we won't see eye to eye on this issue, so I will stop posting about it now. I am just glad I don't live in a country where you or the likes of you run the show.
You did not pay for the specs, so you don't have the "right" to get them. Just because you want something does not make it a right.
There is no constitution on this planet that defines the right to obtain product specs as a basic human right. Since it isn't a basic human right, it is subject to contractual negotiations. You loose. Get over it.
Actually, it is deeper than that. Before investors give you money, they expect a certain level of security. Startups are risky investments under the best conditions, of course, but at least you want to make sure that if everything goes as well as it could, you are not going to fall prey to a rip-off at the end.
I'll give you a non-startup example of how things can go wrong if you don't patent. A colleague of mine at the university invented a really cool technology that would blend in nicely with existing firmware in certain consumer products (sorry I don't think I should be more specific, since I obviously don't have his permission). He didn't patent, and in fact published his work on his web site and in scientific journals. He then tried to get companies to include the stuff in their product. To his surprise, he was told in no uncertain terms that yes, it is a good invention, and yes, they would license it if he had a patent, but no, absolutely not will they touch it since the technology is unprotected.
The problem? They would have had to spend in th eneighborhood of a million introduce the technology in their products, and and because the method was not protected, they could not assess how many other companies were going to do the same, which made it unclear how much return they would be able to get on the initial investment.
The end result is that even now, 4 years later, the technique has yet to show up in any commercial product. Needless to say, my colleague has started to patent his inventions if he thinks they have commercial applications.
P.S: the thread is kind of drifting away from the original topic, so this will be my last repsonse here.
The freedom to make use of your own hardware is more important than the power to withhold information from the people who paid your wages, and that freedom is what government should be protecting. Absolutely, definitely, positively NOT.
Freedom of speech, including the right to say nothing is a basic human right. The right to use some crappy piece of hardware is a privilege you have won through contractual negotiations, and is not even close in importance to freedom of speech. One of the other pillars of free societies is the right to negotiate any contract (so long as it doe not violate basic human rights (*)), and have the contract enforced by the court system. Well, the vendor of your hardware offered you the hardware without specs at a certain price. You accepted the deal, and a contract was formed. If you didn't insist on the specs as part of the contract, you are shit out of luck, my friend.
And yes, I do realize that in practice it would be very hard and expensive to strike a contract that provides you with specs. So what? The right to negotiate a contract does not guarantee that you will find a partner who accepts your conditions.
(*) Note that this point addresses your slavery example.
Well, I am at a university, and I have been through the whole startup thing (we sold out earlier this year). Let me assure you that of course you patent when you do commercially relevant research at a university. It is a bare necessity for raising investment capital. And you do need capital to take university research and turn it into a product. That process takes years and is not cheap.
Patents and trade secrets are key pillars of any technology startup. Take those away and there is NOTHING that prevents the big fish from ripping off your work.
$500 say you won't see quality open source drivers for your card within the next 3 years. By quality I mean something that supports all features, is robust, and within 10% or so of the performance of commercial drivers.
No, I am not trolling. This is a serious offer to you h4rm0ny. If you agree, just reply to this posting within the next 2 days.
Ah, but in the world wars, the bill was footed by the taxpayers. Only the influx from government money was able to push forward the necessary research under these conditions.
If you change the rules to treat all products as commodities, then only commodities will get built. If you abandon patents, companies will try to protect their knowledge keeping more trade secrets. Products will become less open. If you legislate that possiblity away(*), then research and advanced development will simply stall, because there would be no way to exctract a decent return on investment from such activities (**). As I said above, companies will start to focus on commodization (i.e. building the same stuff cheaper).
(*) As an aside, it is beyond me how some (note I say some) supposed libertarians can advocate mandatory opening of product specs. Apart from the irony of a "libertarian" requesting more regulation, this would reduce freedom, not improve it. One of the key aspects of freedom of speach is the freedom to shut the fuck up and not tell you what I don't want to.
(**) Note how already today the companies that are the real innovators are often not the ones who are commercially most successful and leading their market. Abandoning patents and similar measures would just bias the system more thoroughly towards replication rather than innovation.
Depends on research area. Most of the life science and physics journals do charge. In CS it is less common, since a) most journals are run by professional non-profit organizations liek the ACM, and b) the journals face strong competition from peer-reviewed conferences. That said, ACM "encourages" you to pay an optional fee for publishing an article as well.
Thank you for describing religion as an "emotional phenomenon". That just made my day. Now if all you fellow believers understood that that's what it is, the world would be a better place.
So what would yotu rather have? That companies and individuals use random frequencies and interfere with each other's products? If there ever was a resource that needed to be regulated, the radio spectrum is it.
This kind of nonsense is precisely why Ron Paul and his followers aren't gaining traction in the general public.
Patenting of genes really doesn't matter in this context - it can at most delay the application by 17 years, a duration that is irrelevant for evolutionary timeframes. And that is a worst case scenario; more likely patents will just make things a little more expensive in the first few years, before generic versions become legally available.
Copyright is a different issue. I guess it has never really been applied to genes (at least not that I know of), and I am not sure you could copyright something that self-replicates. Seems kind of counterintuitive. However, if at some point it DID become possible to copyrigth certain genes, then that would only serve as further evidence that extendign the duration of copyright is a bad idea.
As other have pointed out, thi si snot a fair analogy becuase nobody dies if your car breaks down. A better analogy would be if your car was leaking break fluid. That should at least make you think hard about what the heck you are doing before you are exposing yourself and your wife and unborn child, as well as aeverybody else on the road to the danger of driving a car where the breaks could fail.
True, if you completely restart emacs for each edit. What I do when I log in is start emacs in the background with the server on, and then use emacsclient as my editor. Connects lightning fast, and has the added benefit of dealing easily with multiple files in different buffers (as opposed to in different emacs processes).
I like pdflatex for when I am still writing on a document. For the final version, though, I find that ps2pdf gives me better control over image resizing, compression, and, most importantly, font embedding.
Latex and pdflatex can create thumbnails with the hyperref package, but I don't know if there free tools for creating them from any old document format.
In a civil case you don't need to prove beyond reasonable doubt. Instead, the party with the most plausible argumentation wins. And yes, that could mean 51% probability against 49% in the eyes of the jury.
Illegally Well, that is the part where I said "not very nice" (OK, I admit I am prone to understatement;-)
Still doesn't mean it isn't sustainable, since they have sustained it for 2 decades, and it doesn't look like they are facing any particularly dire consequences from their illegal activity any time soon. Financially they are doing well enough, even if double-digit growth rates seem to be a thing of the past. Anyways, they are doing much better than, say, General Motors, and even General Motors isn't going to go away any time soon (so it is "sustainable").
This must be the first time I have heard somebody call the MS business model unsustainable. Sure, it isn't very nice, but unsustainable? How exactly did they end up in that dominant market position for close to the last 2 deceades, then?
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes I dream about Jack Thompson
Curse you! I am never going to get that picture out of my brain. This is worse than goatse.For the record: I would never drive to the library personally. It takes me about 10 minutes to walk there.
As for the expense: well, by the time I go to the library, find the book I want, check it out, and get back home, I have spent 45 minutes. Say a fiction hardcover is worth about $45 new. So by saving those $45 I would "make" about $60/hour, which is below my regular salary, and MUCH below my consulting rate, so one could argue that I would actually be losing money if I went to the library. And that is for hardcover. Anything paperback isn't even worth thinking about.(*)
Non-fiction books, where I spend most of my money, are of course much more expensive, but there I usually want them around long-term too look up facts later. Borrowed books are out for that reason.
Ad to that the limited business hours of libraries (I often order from amazon in the middle of the night), as well as my earlier point about selection, and libraries are simply not very attractive to me. For example, I just read a nice book about color theory that is not available in the library system. Or back in the summer, when I bought the new Harry Potter book, the library didn't have it yet. Sure I could have waited a few weeks, but that's like watching the superbowl on video 2 months after it happened.
(*) that is one of the key lifestyle choices few people recognize. If going to the library is an activity that you enjoy, then good for you. But if you do it to save money, then you really ought to compare the cost savings to the time investment required to achieve those savings. Once you start looking at things this way, you will see that many people are willing to "work" for less than minimum wage in their "spare time" by doing stupid stunts like saving a few bucks on grocery shopping by driving for half an hour. If you do this kind of stuff, you would be better off to just buy at your local mom-and-pop grocery store and spend the saved time working at McDonalds for a few hours a week. Of course if you are technically skilled and are able to work as a consultant for a few hours a month, the math is even more in your favor. Once you realize this, you will be both wealthier and happier (since you'll have more true off-time).
I think your concern can be addressed by a single word: amazon.
By far the most convenient way to get to books. No driving to either the bookstore or the library. And let's face it: the selection of most rural or suburban libraries is dysmal, on the science side essentially non-existant. You pretty much have to go to the main branch of a major city to find anything remotely interesting. Rural and suburban bookstores aren't much better, of course, but with amazon you have pretty much all (recent) books available at your fingertips 24/7 (well, you can order 24/7, although admittedly you can't start reading right away).
BTW: I live just a few blocks from the main branch of the Vancouver library, and STILL find amazon both more convenient and having a better selection for my needs.
You'll excuse if I am sceptical. Unless you live waaay in the boondocks, there are incoming calls all the time, just not for your cellphone. Shouldn't you wake up from those other calls as well?
Also, it is very unlikely that, if you literally woke up 1/2 second before the display of your cell lighting up, you'd actually be able to consciously process it. The most likely explanation is that you have a very light sleep, and when the display lights up, it just seems as if you woke up just prior to it.
This is the kind of stuff that out bains really suck at. We are so trained to see "patterns" anywhere that we take a few random chance occurrances and interpret them as "rules". It is the same mechanism that causes people to believe in ghosts and other "supernatural phenomena". Don't fall for it.
According to the specs, fuel consumption is 4L/100km. That's better than my sport touring motorcycle and only 10% worse than a modern Yamaha BWS scooter with a 49cc two stroke engine. Compared to ancient or cheaply hacked together motorcycles, the car would win hands down, even on the CO2 front.
That is simply not the case. Just because you buy a Coke does NOT entitle you to the recipy. For food and drugs you are at least entitled to basic nutritional information since it can be important for mainatining your health, but even there the specifics are trade secrets. For anything else, you can try to reverse engineer, but the manufacturer has no obligation whatsoever to provide you with additional info.
Trade secrets have centuries if not meillenia of tradition. Any attempt to get rid of them like you propose, would face serious constitutional challenges in all jusrisdictions where I know a bit about the law (US, Canada, where I live, and contintental Europe, where I am from). Admittedly, I don't know much about constitutional situation in the UK, but it if it allows for the abolishion of trade secrets, it is pretty fucked up.
Clearly we won't see eye to eye on this issue, so I will stop posting about it now. I am just glad I don't live in a country where you or the likes of you run the show.
You did not pay for the specs, so you don't have the "right" to get them. Just because you want something does not make it a right.
There is no constitution on this planet that defines the right to obtain product specs as a basic human right. Since it isn't a basic human right, it is subject to contractual negotiations. You loose. Get over it.
Actually, it is deeper than that. Before investors give you money, they expect a certain level of security. Startups are risky investments under the best conditions, of course, but at least you want to make sure that if everything goes as well as it could, you are not going to fall prey to a rip-off at the end.
I'll give you a non-startup example of how things can go wrong if you don't patent. A colleague of mine at the university invented a really cool technology that would blend in nicely with existing firmware in certain consumer products (sorry I don't think I should be more specific, since I obviously don't have his permission). He didn't patent, and in fact published his work on his web site and in scientific journals. He then tried to get companies to include the stuff in their product. To his surprise, he was told in no uncertain terms that yes, it is a good invention, and yes, they would license it if he had a patent, but no, absolutely not will they touch it since the technology is unprotected.
The problem? They would have had to spend in th eneighborhood of a million introduce the technology in their products, and and because the method was not protected, they could not assess how many other companies were going to do the same, which made it unclear how much return they would be able to get on the initial investment.
The end result is that even now, 4 years later, the technique has yet to show up in any commercial product. Needless to say, my colleague has started to patent his inventions if he thinks they have commercial applications.
P.S: the thread is kind of drifting away from the original topic, so this will be my last repsonse here.
Freedom of speech, including the right to say nothing is a basic human right. The right to use some crappy piece of hardware is a privilege you have won through contractual negotiations, and is not even close in importance to freedom of speech. One of the other pillars of free societies is the right to negotiate any contract (so long as it doe not violate basic human rights (*)), and have the contract enforced by the court system. Well, the vendor of your hardware offered you the hardware without specs at a certain price. You accepted the deal, and a contract was formed. If you didn't insist on the specs as part of the contract, you are shit out of luck, my friend.
And yes, I do realize that in practice it would be very hard and expensive to strike a contract that provides you with specs. So what? The right to negotiate a contract does not guarantee that you will find a partner who accepts your conditions.
(*) Note that this point addresses your slavery example.
Well, I am at a university, and I have been through the whole startup thing (we sold out earlier this year). Let me assure you that of course you patent when you do commercially relevant research at a university. It is a bare necessity for raising investment capital. And you do need capital to take university research and turn it into a product. That process takes years and is not cheap.
Patents and trade secrets are key pillars of any technology startup. Take those away and there is NOTHING that prevents the big fish from ripping off your work.
$500 say you won't see quality open source drivers for your card within the next 3 years. By quality I mean something that supports all features, is robust, and within 10% or so of the performance of commercial drivers.
No, I am not trolling. This is a serious offer to you h4rm0ny. If you agree, just reply to this posting within the next 2 days.
If you change the rules to treat all products as commodities, then only commodities will get built. If you abandon patents, companies will try to protect their knowledge keeping more trade secrets. Products will become less open. If you legislate that possiblity away(*), then research and advanced development will simply stall, because there would be no way to exctract a decent return on investment from such activities (**). As I said above, companies will start to focus on commodization (i.e. building the same stuff cheaper).
(*) As an aside, it is beyond me how some (note I say some) supposed libertarians can advocate mandatory opening of product specs. Apart from the irony of a "libertarian" requesting more regulation, this would reduce freedom, not improve it. One of the key aspects of freedom of speach is the freedom to shut the fuck up and not tell you what I don't want to.
(**) Note how already today the companies that are the real innovators are often not the ones who are commercially most successful and leading their market. Abandoning patents and similar measures would just bias the system more thoroughly towards replication rather than innovation.
Depends on research area. Most of the life science and physics journals do charge. In CS it is less common, since a) most journals are run by professional non-profit organizations liek the ACM, and b) the journals face strong competition from peer-reviewed conferences. That said, ACM "encourages" you to pay an optional fee for publishing an article as well.
Thank you for describing religion as an "emotional phenomenon". That just made my day. Now if all you fellow believers understood that that's what it is, the world would be a better place.
Yawn.
So what would yotu rather have? That companies and individuals use random frequencies and interfere with each other's products? If there ever was a resource that needed to be regulated, the radio spectrum is it.
This kind of nonsense is precisely why Ron Paul and his followers aren't gaining traction in the general public.
Patenting of genes really doesn't matter in this context - it can at most delay the application by 17 years, a duration that is irrelevant for evolutionary timeframes. And that is a worst case scenario; more likely patents will just make things a little more expensive in the first few years, before generic versions become legally available.
Copyright is a different issue. I guess it has never really been applied to genes (at least not that I know of), and I am not sure you could copyright something that self-replicates. Seems kind of counterintuitive. However, if at some point it DID become possible to copyrigth certain genes, then that would only serve as further evidence that extendign the duration of copyright is a bad idea.
As other have pointed out, thi si snot a fair analogy becuase nobody dies if your car breaks down. A better analogy would be if your car was leaking break fluid. That should at least make you think hard about what the heck you are doing before you are exposing yourself and your wife and unborn child, as well as aeverybody else on the road to the danger of driving a car where the breaks could fail.
True, if you completely restart emacs for each edit. What I do when I log in is start emacs in the background with the server on, and then use emacsclient as my editor. Connects lightning fast, and has the added benefit of dealing easily with multiple files in different buffers (as opposed to in different emacs processes).
I know! The British truck drivers are the worst! They are all driving on the wrong side of the road! /ducks
I like pdflatex for when I am still writing on a document. For the final version, though, I find that ps2pdf gives me better control over image resizing, compression, and, most importantly, font embedding.
Latex and pdflatex can create thumbnails with the hyperref package, but I don't know if there free tools for creating them from any old document format.
Repeat after me: "civil case, not criminal case!"
In a civil case you don't need to prove beyond reasonable doubt. Instead, the party with the most plausible argumentation wins. And yes, that could mean 51% probability against 49% in the eyes of the jury.
No, no! You get it all wrong! It is Intelligent Falling!
Still doesn't mean it isn't sustainable, since they have sustained it for 2 decades, and it doesn't look like they are facing any particularly dire consequences from their illegal activity any time soon. Financially they are doing well enough, even if double-digit growth rates seem to be a thing of the past. Anyways, they are doing much better than, say, General Motors, and even General Motors isn't going to go away any time soon (so it is "sustainable").
This must be the first time I have heard somebody call the MS business model unsustainable. Sure, it isn't very nice, but unsustainable? How exactly did they end up in that dominant market position for close to the last 2 deceades, then?