Of course, as I indicated, that would be an absolutely blatant anti-trust violation and MS would be swiftly slapped for it. While I agree that MS also violated anti-trust law against Netscape, the situation required much more review and technical knowledge to establish.
A) This is why we have patents. Google has novel technology and they have (hopefully strong) patents on it. It's not very likely that MS will find a method that is as good without walking into a lawsuit. Netscape had no strong IP--they bet on their market penetration and headstart.
B) There's not much MS can do to google short of blatantly re-jiggering IE to stop functioning with google (and google's inevitable responses). Unlike the situation with Netscape, google does not have to contend with network effects. They don't have to install anything on the users machine and they don't have much exposure to MS' API antics. There's not much that MS can "add" over and above what Google does. MS can try to embed their own search engine interface into IE (I think they already do by default)--but it's a nominal advantage and something that can easily be matched by 3rd party tools.
I can't stand MS, but fortunately Google is one of the few companies that MS can't kill with their traditional techniques. Their best option would be to try to acquire it, but given Google's popularity and MS's lack of leverage on them, they'd take a huge hit (mucho dinero) to do so. That and I don't think Google really threatens MS so there'd be little incentive for them to do so.
Ummm, you may try updating the bios (and possibly the video drivers). I had a similar annoyance with my docking station after I put XP on it. The bios update solved that problem and a couple others.
Hello. I have an Inspiron 8000 with GeForce2Go and I had the same problem (well mine would graphically glitch, slow to a halt very rapidly, and remain totally unresponsive, but I believe it would BSOD in 2k after an update...) for a long time until very recently (this got really bad after I ugpraded to XP from 2k and got the video drivers) despite numerous driver updates off Dell's website, turning off acceleration and other advances features, etc. You may not believe this, but I found that changing the Windows desktop theme solved all my problems. I had a fairly standard supplied theme even (though I changed the color). I switched to Windows Classic theme, looks like Win2k but not quite right...but it's faster and I've yet to crash for 2 weeks now (previously I was crashing 1-5 times a day). You may want to try it as it's so easy. I suspect this is some kind of wierd interaction with XP theme and nvidia's unified drivers.
That said, the factory system that I had with Win2k and older drivers was perfectly stable. It's only with newer nvidia drivers and/or XP that this problem reared its head.
While the theory may well be crap, there is plenty of empirical evidence that strong IP protection, especially of the nonsensical variety seen nowadays, strangles innovation. Instead, any new idea is already coopted by existing patent laws, thus the only people who can take advantage of them are those who have no incentive to do so - the incumbents.
There is not. I challenge you to produce this plentiful empirical evidence and present and defend a working alternative to IP (Obviously no IP protection does not work in so many important markets today). I have first and second hand experience with the patent system. The "little" guys do in fact use it successfully. There is also a tremendous amount of innovation in industry today whether you measure it by product or R&D expenditures....
While I cannot argue that the IP system today is perfect, I will say that what you read on slashdot is a distortion. They ignore the many thousands of successful and reasonable patents. They hold up a select few patents as being evidence that the system in broken and many of those patents that are at worst in a gray area, yet they present them as being black/white by misreading the claims and understanding their significance (Patents are often much more narrow in reality than they are interpreted by the layman). They completely lack the understanding that it is NOT the USPO that decides patents; the USPO is a glorified filing service (they always have been and they always will be--as it should be)--they're just an upfront scrubber to keep some of the clutter out so the system is a little more managable. In other words, the real hurdle is not to get a patent approved but to get your claims to stand up in court, so many people just don't understand this. In short, the concrete harms that slashdot can really name (and be correct in) are really very few.
A position contradicted by a recent slashdot article. The article in question is far more eloquent than I am, so I will just mention that most of the innovation in this country happened in spite of strong IP. Strong IP protection protects the established power structure - not a recipe for innovation.
What a load of crap. If you mean the paper published by David Levine and Michele Boldrin, then you're being ridiculous. Firstly, it's JUST a theory, an untested, undemonstrated, and not even a widely agreed upon one (in fact, most economists roundly reject it). Secondly, the focus of the paper is NOT that IP reduces innovation (though that's one of the authors' contentions)--it's devoid of that sort of empirical data, but that we might not need it based on their mathematical models. Thirdly, if you wish to dwelve into the details, it makes many key assumptions that are fatally incorrect--assumptions that run contrary to the well understand reasons why IP exists in the first place. Here's the crux of their argument (and their flaw):
In fact, said Boldrin, "in a competitive market, the very first few copies are very valuable because those are the instruments which the imitators--the other people who will publish your stuff--will use to make copies. They're more capital goods than consumption goods. So the initial copies will be sold at a very high price, but then very rapidly they will go down in price."
The problem is that this disallowance of downstream control totally shirks the idea of how those distributors will sell the idea in the first place. In an ideal world where the product can be sold extremely rapidly this idea might hold some water. However, in the real world this is very rarely ever realistic. Sure, if you're, say, Britney Spheres you may be able to sell a bunch of advance copies of your music to eager fans, but what if your name is Joe? Of course this ignores all the fans that would simply opt to wait a day for the virtually free CD, mp3, or what have you to appear (in an IP free or IP unenforced market ala Napster 2010). This is known as a free rider syndrome and is a very common issue in economics. It also ignores the many goods that simply cannot be sold before it can be cheaply copied and reproduced. For instance, if I develop a drug that should be taken once a week to ward of heart attacks. Let's be generous and presume that it takes 1 year to copy. Well the fact of the matter is that most drugs are not going to pay off with just 1 year's sales. Although you might attempt to argue that the users will pay any price before that years time, that's not born out by the facts even in the case of such valuable drugs (i.e., users can't afford to pay that much up front) and there are yet many more examples where that's mathematically insane. In other words, this model depends upon my being able to sell more than a years worth of drugs to any user, but no user would have any incentive to buy more than a years dose (and would be prevented legally anyways) since it could be had for a fraction of the cost at a slightly later date. Their claims are especially absurd when you get to software that can generally be fully copied with in hours of a product hitting the shelf (sometimes even days BEFORE). How do I sell any single (few) user(s) a copy of Excel (a productivity application that makes me, say, 20% more efficient) for a million dollars for the sole marginal benefit of being able to use it a few days more than the users paying 5 dollars for the same software and manuals? I can't--it's a ridiculous assertion and one that they don't even answer in any meaningful way (OK, it'd probably be a fair amount more than 1 user, but the development costs and hence the necessary sales price is also a lot more than the 1m USD or any amount any niche group is going to pay for such minimal advantage.
Lastly, you must be absolutely disconnected from reality if you want to assert that it is just the established powers that benefit from IP. My parents have started many tech companies between the two of them and patents have been necessary and extremely helpful in all of them. The same for many of my friends and peers. I will likely do the same.... It's not all megacorporations.
It is relevant because the idea that strong IP necessarily reduces innovation is clearly false. We have seen quite the opposite in fact. China and India to name two. A good part of europe... Why is it that China and India produce so little of note, whether you're talking about scientific research or technical/product innovation, despite having tons of educated people and little to no concept of IP. Why is it that the USSR did so little when no one could "lock ideas up" for themselves? I grant you that they have fewer resources to invest, but that does not explain why even their basic/academic research so uninspiring. The common thread is incentive and IP.
In fact, I bet a few hours of research into Sociology, Psychology, and Linuquistics papers will turn up generic proofs and observations of the very same things that page rank takes care of in a different context. A context shift shouldn't be patentable. Much software (but not all) involves making these logical leaps. Many times they are leaps from pure science that is copyrighted (on the one hand) but (increasingly less so) open on the other. This is human knowledge we are dealing with. The Scientific Method... all that crap. It doesn't work unless everyone shares their toys. Start locking them up and you stifle innnovation (at the least) or become dictatorial master of (increasingly more of) everyone's lives.
What a bunch of psychobabble. Google should be able to patent what they have done because:
A) The algorithm is highly useful.
B) It required a significant amount of risk and technical effort to make it worthwhile.
C) The scope of the patent really just covers what it is that they've added, i.e., the ideas that they are supposedly deriving from are not being locked up.
What more do you really need to know? Regardless of what language you wish to put your claims in, that they've just made a "context shift" or what have you, it is a worthwhile effort and it is the kind of effort that requires the potential for substantial profits to secure continued efforts. People don't take risk without at least the potential to profit and the greater the potential reward the greater risks people are willing to take. Are you really going to argue that the idea was obvious or easy? If so, then explain why no one did it before, when billions of dollars and many years were (and are) being spent on such internet technology. There was a considerable lag time between the appreciation of the need for a good search engine (and the resources to develop them) and google's appearance. What's more, keep in mind that:
a) Google's core methodology is no secret now
b) The patent's life is limited.
c) The ideas that they presumedly derived from a still as open as they were prior to this patent
d) This country produces far more than any country despite the fact that we arguably "share our toys" less than most countries, even more than countries with much larger populations (even technically educated ones)....
Now I agree that there are dangers in allowing people to patent any and everything, e.g., well known sorting algorithms and other fundamental building blocks, but this clearly is not happening here.
Wrong, I do. I'm not a fan of MS, but I actually bought an Xbox for the select few games that it can run. While I will not argue that there are more games on Xbox or that those games are overall higher quality, you should keep a couple things in mind:
a) some people (like me) will buy xbox just to play a few games that they really like, even if they don't play them all that often. In other words, I'm willing to pay a premium and accept (much) fewer choices in games if those few games that I do choose play better or are offered only in Xbox (or at least with unique features, i.e., internet play).
b) xbox live (internet/multiplayer support) is far superior to what is offered on for playstation and gamecube. For some people (again, like me) the ability to play online games is HUGE, especially since I find most single player games absolutely mind numbingly dull.
c) the graphics are in fact substantially better on xbox. Although I hate most single player games, I do enjoy Splinter Cell, in large part because of the graphics. It's not just "oh wow I have a powerful video card", but that it adds depth to the environment and contributes substantially to playability. I don't believe that you'll see a good port of it on PS2 or a game approaching that level of graphics on the other platforms.
Now this is not to argue that this constitutes a successful business model for MS. Most kids may be deterred from buying xbox because of the relative lack of games and the prices. Players like me (i.e., those that will opt for xbox for xbox live, graphics, and those select few games) are probably too small of a niche to profit from on this sort of venture, but that still does not mean that it is not the best choice for players such as myself. Frankly, I'd love to see MS fail here, even if I did purchase Xbox:)
Oh give me a break. While I admit that these companies were foolish to invest in high end real estate, and real estate cost undoubtably played some minor role, none of that explains the many MILLIONS of dollars spent on marketing, sales, give aways, selling things for below cost, and so on. In a more normal company, without the dotcom hype, the real estate cost has a much larger impact, but most of these dotcoms were flush with plenty of cash to cover real estate (via IPOs, VC money, etc--while that doesn't make them is a good and had relatively small need for office space and, if they were even halfway sensible, they could have negotiated short term leases (one of the many advantages of doing business in this country) that would have allowed them to back out in enough time if they had half a clue. Certainly the cities themselves was not that big part of the problem...perhaps too much real-estate...perhaps overly expensive locations (e.g., water front, main street, whatever)...many successful companies have come out of these same cities both before and after the dotcoms (i have been involved with some). Their total overhead was certainly a large part of the problem, but the problems ran a lot deeper than mere city of location.
I would say the reason that Kuro5hin, slashdot, and others survived is mainly a function of the fact that they had little to no costs to begin with other than bandwidth and some minor handware costs. Neither produce content; salon and the others had to produce superficialy professional content and that costs a significant amount of money ("journalists", editors, fact checkers, etc)
The disturbing thing to me is that no one looks at the obvious - creators don't generally own the rights to what they create.
Companies bitch and whine about how copyrights and patents are required. They need the ability to own their creations to make innovation worthwhile. Wait a sec, here - there's a glaring problem with this: Michael Eisner didn't create Mickey Mouse. Neither did the entity we call Disney. Some schmoe cartoonist working for Disney created Mickey Mouse.
Let's assume for a second that the current common premise about copyright and patent is correct. Let's say that monopoly power over innovations are required to drive further innovation. Why do programmers write programs? Why to researchers in pharmaceutical companies do any research? Why do musicians make music?
If I were to write some ground-breaking code while employed for a corporation, I sure as hell wouldn't get rich. I'd get paid my normal wage, and I might get a promotion for doing good work. Where's my incentive to create? I can get the same paycheck by mindlessly doing what I'm told, and I can get the same promotion by brown-nosing well enough.
I suppose the main point I'm making is: Corporations, and particularly CEOs of corporations, don't create anything. Individuals or groups of individuals, perhaps employed by corporatoins, do. By their own assumptions, corporations that own IP instead of the individuals that created the IP destroy the drive to innovate.
You fail to ask yourself the one key question (amongst others): Who is taking the risk? The corporation is. The employees are generally being compensated well enough to do what they do, a wage that is obviously sufficient to keep them there. If the compensation is not sufficient or if that employee is sufficiently able, then he can either start his own company or pitch his talent for much more generous compensation at another company. If the product that the employee "invents" fails to pan out, then they still will likely draw a steady salary regardless. Nor does that employee have to wait till that product starts generating revenues (in some cases 10+ years) to receive a paycheck. Furthermore, with most of these products, there is a lot of non-inventive work that MUST go into the product until it can start making real money. For instance, in the case of a new drug, you have testing, clinical trials, equipment, marketing, sales, distribution, etc. These all cost a lot of money.
Now let's presume for a minute that you could somehow devise an algorithm to compute the proper share of the IP that each employee would receive on this new drug. OK, fine. So then who is going to pay for the other 9 drugs that were heavily invested in but failed due to things that couldn't be forseen? The employees in your probable idea would not be absorbing their fair share of risk to actually create a product from start to finish. It's one thing to cash in on an idea after it has succeeded; it's another thing entirely to actually incur all of the costs and risks to fund a whole effort that is necessary to generate those few successes.
In any event, the markets are pretty efficient in reality. If, say, an engineer is very good at what he does, then he can take his skills to a higher bidder or start his own company. As long as the company can maintain margins sufficient (through IP) to make that engineers compensation worthwhile, in a competitive market you will see that engineers compensation rise to a point that is reasonably close to his value. It is a fact that in many companies you have large bonuses for such innovations and stock options. I personally know a couple engineers who are now millionares today just by working for the right company: they took stock options, they absorbed part of the risk and they got a good piece of the pie. The point is that strong IP ultimately benefits the employees too. Even if they're not as lucky to get a lot of options, their salary is at least somewhat derived from IP. Now I grant you that not every company compensates their employees as well as they should, but there's a certain amount on inefficiency built into everything; eventually the company will either improve compensation or risk losing market share by producing marginal products--in other words, it's in the corporations best interest here.
I disagree. Have you ever actually USED one?
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Palm PDA Roundup
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· Score: 2, Informative
Although I, too, own a Palm Vx and love it, the 705 is even better for me. Having built in email, IM, and other internet functionality is very nice (e.g., mapquest, google, etc) and handy. While you are correct that the underlying technology on the 705 is almost the same as the Palm VII, it is the minor changes that make all the difference. First and foremost, the 705's size and shape is much better from a strict usability point of view. Second, the screen is better, much crisper and easier to read in poor light conditions (e.g., outside). Third, it's more attractive. Fourth, it's got an LED and a vibrating alarm to notify you without having to physically check your email (i.e., it pushes notification out to you in a battery efficient manner). Fifth, it integrates with real email well, like the blackberry (not like Palm VII's, if i remember correctly, psuedo email). Sixth, the minikeyboard rules (I couldn't imagine trying to write most emails w/ grafitti)
In short, it does its job very well, that is to say PDA (contacts, scheduling, etc) + email + minor browsing. I don't think it's the greatest looking and I wish it were metal, but there is nothing else that really competes yet, other then the Blackberry and maybe the Treo. Of course with the blackberry you've got too few lines on the traditional model for web and the newer one is too big. The Treo's coverage is lacking and I really don't want my phone integrated just yet. IMHO, it's the best at what it does right now, and will probably be until the Tungstun W (presuming that data coverage is anywhere near as comprehensive and if the battery life holds up), so it does deserve to be there. The 705, like the blackberry, is one of those devices that you just have to actually use for a couple days to appreciate it.
That's a false dichotomy. All that stuff doesn't mean squat if it doesn't translate into better code.
Yeah sure, then explain why MS WIndows and numerous applications (even non-MS ones) have managed to both retain users and keep them on an upgrade path (over older and more stable code bases) despite Linux and related open source projects with supposedly higher quality code? It's not all marketing mumbo jumbo. Your Linux code may be very pretty, but that prettiness is not terribly relevant to the user if they can't even install it easily. You won't find me defending MS very often, but I'd argue that crashing a couple times a day under various versions of MS Windows even is FAR preferable for most users than putting up with Linux's (yes yes, I know) lack of features and overall poor UI (even completely ignoring Linux's crashes in X, its various competitive apps, etc)
While I would tend to agree that, all things being equal, having millions of people reviewing the same lines of code and having a large number of people actively partaking in the authorship will contribute to quality, it is disingenious to assert that participation (and hence quality) naturally and necessarily flows out of open source code. Just because code participation can happen does not mean that it does. Linux is exceptional. It is #1 out of a very small group of open source code bases (e.g., Apache, Bind,...what else) that really enjoys that substantial levels of participation. Not only is most open source code currently not popularly participated in, even essential and important packages (e.g., Open Office), but I do not believe that this such popular attention can scale in the future to support other kinds of code or a much larger quantity of code. Linux enjoys being the most prominent open source code package and it enjoys a relatively narrow scope, i.e., it's just a kernel. [The open source community loves to use the varying definitions of Linux interchangably, they talk about Linux as if it is Windows, i.e., a complete OS, but then when, say, security bugs come out for one of the numerous utilities, they assert that Linux is just a kernel (the correct definition)] Under the smaller kernel definition, Linux enjoys a couple key advantages over most of the areas that the open source community presumes to conquer:
A) Linux is percieved as being a worthy task of a "hacker" (e.g., elite, low level, etc)--as opposed to, say, a word processing suite or one of the many mundane but important features that may save users millions of hours.
B) It is so popular for users and such an exclusive focus, you can be sure that a significant contribution will be seen by many geeks, again, unlike a word processing suite
C) Because it is relatively small, especially if you throw out all the drivers and the experimental stuff, and leave it to things like the very popular TCP/IP stack (which was reviewed in this article)
Linux and some of its associated code are very good in some respects as a result of their incremental improvements and bug fixes. The trouble with this is that when you significantly expand the scope of Open Source efforts things start to fall apart. In such a relatively unstructured environment as the popular open source method, i.e., little to no centralized development/testing/etc, there is every reason to believe that the overlap is key. In other words, since there is really no official QA or group of individuals that can be told or expected to methodically test, evaluate, or fix areas, the open source community essentially depends on random overlap. When you have a sparse group of competent developers or testers, you will run into trouble, as in the case of word processors. Likewise, when you depart from the relatively well established world of the kernel, when you start having to develop everything, not just the code, but the framework, the UI, the API, etc, from scratch the dependence on overlap becomes more and more of an issue. It's one thing to accept the a small patch for a well established tcp/ip stack, it's another thing entirely to have to coordinate the changing of a whole API, to make multiple pieces fit together seamlessly, without a more concrete organization (which can just barely happen in the manner popular open source development method).
Code review is a good thing, in and of itself, if nothing else, for its ability to make those many incremental enhancements and bug fixes. From a strictly technical perspective "open source" code can work as addititive, i.e., you develop, say, your Word processor with a more traditional software group, and then you allow the public to contribute. THe trouble with that is that for most code there simply isn't a viable business model that can support that sort of development effort, or at least, I don't see one and none of the current methods really compute, and as a result open source fails to deliver. I think that there are areas where open source code can thrive. For instance, I'd love to see IBM and a coalition of other software and hardware companies band together to make Linux (or some other kernel) into a complete OS that is every bit as easy to run as Windows and more stable, flexible, etc. It'd be good for everyone involved (except for MS of course) and it's quite doable. However, except for cases like that, where you have a very definite common good, i.e., a reasonably priced OS/API that allows strong and equal footing for 3rd party developers and manufacturers, there simply isn't a formula to actually pay for development. Consequently, open source will not produce better code by and large.
Actually for many companies the taxes have relatively little to do with it, other then to the extent that DE's tax code is flexible and not terribly punitive to corporations that choose to incorporate in DE but do a majority of business outside of it. A DE based corporation still pays a large amount of taxes regardless to federal, other states, and for income generated in DE. A great deal of the motivation for incorporationg in DE has to do with their very well developed legal system for corporate governance, both in terms of adjudicating disputes (e.g., bankruptsy, shareholder lawsuits, etc) and in terms of the corporate law itself. It is relatively flexible, predictable, and speedy--all very important issues for any sizable company.
Do you mean this seriously? I don't think this would work very well. The difference is that skateboards are cheap to develop, cheap to manufature, and (relatively) cheap for the consumers to buy--this means that there's little to risk in its getting confiscated and it makes it easy for kids to buy (or at least for their parents)...who is the primary market. These are two very different user groups, given the dramatic cost and performance characteristics (i can hardly see kids trying to do stunts on them or trying to outrun the authorities...) of these devices. Skateboards are really not designed to be transportation devices; they can be used as they're designed--for fun, in many areas (e.g., skateparks, driveways, private roads, some parks, etc), without running affoul of the law. IT's intended use, transportation, on the other hand, demands its legality in most, if not all, areas that consumers may travel to.
Its funny, if he hadn't had such high expectations, he could have a small but profitable and growing company, it sounded like he had orders for 10 per week or 520 per year, if he had not leased a 70,000 sq. ft. manufacturing facility, and planned to revolutionize the world selling thousands a week, which increased his fixed costs, and the numbers he needed to sell to be profitable, this would be a completely different story. Google did it right, grow at a sustainable rate, and do not try to get too big too fast.
I agree that his sales expectations were way too high (and hence the very product is just financially unworkable), but many businesses cannot be grown that organically. Google is an unusual case, for such a visible business, as their costs are pretty low, i.e., low fixed costs and low variable costs, no need for massive cash layouts just to get started, and they could trivially step it up without huge jumps in expenses (with a little bit of ingenuity). His bet, from my minimal reading of what he's done, was that he'd reduce the production costs by mass producing them and thus expand his potential market dramatically and improve his company's margins. This, unfortunately, cannot be done in small quantities. Furthermore, I believe he was expecting to change city regulations through various forms of lobbying--which is expensive--that prevent its legal use in most, if not all, possible (safe) niches. This too makes it very hard to grow gradually. The biggest problem is that it simply does not make financial sense to invest in a business that promises huge cash layouts to even develop the product, take 5 years to get to market, expect to grow by, say 10% a year, and even then only offer slim margins--especially when you factor in the risk and what not involved. In other words, if he said that he'd only grow at 10% a year, or what have you, given the cost structure, not only would actual (wise) investors today be very reluctant to invest, but it'd simply be very bad way to allocate resources. Some businesses are simply hit or miss. You either hit it big with large upfront investment or you don't do it at all.
Maybe, now that the product is developed, he can eak out a niche, but I highly doubt that the investors will ever see a return on their investment. The technology is simply flawed. It's too expensive to develop and manufacture for such marginal gains and its real utility is questionable in the first place. It's a neat idea, but it should have never left the lab, there's better, more practical, ways that those resources could have been spent.
Not only did the winner of the popular vote lose the election, but the election was held in a deadlock waiting for the results of a single state. In effect, the US didn't elect Bush. Florida did.
There WAS no popular vote taken. Tallying all the presumed votes does NOT constitute a popular vote. Such a count is misleading and irrelevant for three reasons:
A) Both candidates campaigned with the electoral college in mind and Gore lost. Your so-called "popular vote" outcome is merely a side effect for them, but now that Gore lost he wants to have it decided differently. This is sort of like losing a game of basketball, but then insisting on that you actually won because you controlled the ball for a longer period of time, i.e., it's just plain stupid.
B) Voters would behave differently under a popular vote system. In other words, if you're Republican and you live in California, then you may as well stay home during most Presidential elections in our current (electoral college) system. A popular vote would change voting behavior radically in many states.
C) Well a third effect, you have the media feedback effect, whereby they sway opinion based on their analysis through the lens of the electoral college.
You just can't take the total votes and call it a popular vote. This is especially true in the past election where the total vote margin was very small. Hell, you can't even say that we'd have had both candidates running under a popular vote, whereby everyone acted as if the popular vote was the determinant, because the calculus of each political party may likely have been different.
Lastly, Florida didn't elect Bush, they were merely one part of a whole that voted for Bush. That'd be sort of like arguing that the 200k people would have elected Gore under your imaginary popular vote. Absurd!
Who is to say that with the combined ability of every nation on earth that there wouldnt be a way to put enough explosion on target to move such an object?
Just don't let France in on it. They'd probably call for us to "double, triple" the number of telescopes
Paper can be re-counted in real democracies....CANADA does it low tech and has less problems
I absolutely agree with you that computerized voting systems are stupid. Unless each voter can physically verify his vote that is actually being counted, there's too much opportunity for massive fraud.
That said, you seem to imply that there's a huge problem in US voting systems. OK, so we had the Florida recount event, but put it in perspective:
A) The error margin itself, though very low when you look at it across the country, was very unusual--we have little reason to think otherwise.
B) That that margin of error might have been a deciding factor in the race was extremely unusual--very few races are that close.
C) It was pure user error, plain and simple. The paper didn't get jammed, a couple users did. (No counting system is going to change that)
D) It is random error, not fraud, and it was not skewed in its design towards any party or person. The only real cause for complaint is that there is no standardization across all parts of the country (so that an area with a high number of say, democrats, may be effected more by error) and the slightly awkward design of the particular arrangements of candidates on the cards. That is to say that there's really no reason why you couldn't take Florida's famous paper ballot system and use it everywhere in the country with excellent results, what little mechanical error there is would be irrelevant...and just double check the card design so people can't argue confusion again.
E) There's little evidence other than this isolated incident to show that we're significantly worse off than Canada or most other developed democracies.
In summary, though I must admit that I would have hated to see Gore being elected, it's pretty ridiculous to argue that these sorts of errors have a real direct effect on the health of a democracy. The only way it can really be significant is when two candidates have almost exactly the same number of votes. Therefore, to act as if this is denying the will of the people, when virtually everyone knows that so much as a mouse fart 5 seconds before could throw the balance the other way, is absurd. These sorts of errors don't get fringe parties or unpopular candidates elected; they can't in this country. The argument for massive change because it presumably in this particular case would have gotten the "right" candidate elected is sort of like arguing that, say, Presidents must never be allowed to drive past book stores (?) because it would have saved JFK. Sure in hindsite if may have been worth it to change a particular outcome, but that doesn't make it sensible for the future. What few relevant flaws existed can be fixed by minor tweaks really.
Even if you fix the system, no matter what you do, you're always going to have some potential for error (very very small to smaller) and dispute--there should be stricter rules against contesting elections, so that it can only be raised in cases of wide spread fraud --that is the real threat to democracy. We have a rule of law. You play the the game by a set of rules that you agreed upon ahead of time, this is known as THE (as in the first) count, but you shouldn't try to change the results after the game has been played just because you don't like the outcome. It's a very slippery slope and it, the contention itself, not the possible error itself, is the real threat. The only real fix for that is character.
Re:BFD. You can do the same thing to the 10k CS
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Unreal Security Hole
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TheCarmack is a god, but he and the Counter-Strike team are in completely different arenas. TheCarmack and others at Id are generally more interested in doing the infrastructure for games (thus the proliferation of games based on the various Quake engines, while the Id-created games tend to be fairly straight-forward and more or less boring), while the Counter- Strike team is more along the lines of what Legend or Digital Etremes is to Epic, or Raven software is to Id -- they create content (Wheel of Time, Unreal 2, various Quake-based games, etc), while the engine developers (Id, Epic) create the infrastructure. It seems to be a very profitable relationship for both parties, and is highly indicative of the way the game industry is moving -- some companies compete to create infrastructure (a la Windows vs. Linux), while other companies use that infrastructure and compete by making games (a la Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice).
I agree that both the infrastructure and the providers of "content" are important. That said, although CounterStrike is one of my all time favorite games by a large margin, I don't think it is fair to put the CounterStrike development effort on the same level that the original HalfLife and other similar heavy licencees are even. What they did was innovative. They had a good idea and they did a pretty good job at implimenting it. However, their marginal improvement in playability over and above halflife is primarily derived from their idea and what little tweaking they did. Not only did they not have to do much coding, but the amount of art work and just general effort exerted to make it a success was pretty minimal. The fact is that most of that work was already done for them by Id software and the halflife team. That's not to say that I don't appreciate what they did. It is pretty impressive that such a small team could be the (necessary) catalyst (ok, maybe that's overstating the case a bit...) to create such a sensational hit and I think they deserve whatever benefits accrue to them, but I think you slight both the real infrastructure providers (e.g., Id) and the real content creators (e.g., Valve) by putting CS's efforts on par with the likes of them. Most of the heavy lifting was done by Id and Valve--CS is just a mod and a fairly lightweight, albeit important, one at that.
Umm, hello? People were saying the same thing about mp3s. "Whats this you say??? People listening to mp3s exclusively? But all they have is Pentiums with dinky speakers! Surely you jest". Yet, today, we have dozens of devices that are able to play mp3s conveniently and with excellent sound quality and they're very user friendly to boot. The situation is much the same with movies. Firstly, you CAN easily burn many of these pirated movies to VCDs and play them in many modern DVD players. Secondly, we have DVD-Rs coming outs and they are capable of creating high quality movies in a format which most DVD players can read and with high quality to boot. I actually have one in my new PCs and I can actually do this. It may be slightly beyond the price range and technical abilities of most people today, but in a short year or two, this will be very common. Thirdly, broadband is growing. When people can download these movies faster and easier and have more people to download them from, then it will be even easier for more people to obtain these movies. Do the math.
More specifically, Congress should instruct NASA to expose all its science programs to the normal process of peer review used to make funding decisions in the sciences. Congress should then abide by those decisions. This would have the effect of eliminating the manned space program, which has a ridiculously low ratio of scientific results to funding. Unmanned probes are the real workhorses of space science and planetary exploration.
That's just science, of course. NASA shouldn't even be involved in commercial stuff, which can be handled more efficiently by private enterprise than by a government agency.
Peer review is not the answer for christs sake. Peer review might work for exposing flaws in a particular scientific study or debunk its conclusions, but it does NOT engineer and it cannot do cost effective cost vs benefit analysis. About all it can tell you, in essense, is whether something is true or false. What NASA is doing does really not lend itself to this sort of scrutiny.
Do you really want to tell me that this fabled peer review process has delivered us highly efficient research in academia? Well there exists no such process for the actual studies themselves, only for the results, but even the results themselves have problems. MOST academic research is unproductive, wasteful, and even stupid. What are you comparing NASA's supposed wastefulness to? NASAs mission does not lend itself to peer review. Sicking a bunch of academics at a problem, who have no practical experience building machines that really work, who have not even studied space travel, rocketry, or whatever is just plain stupid. NASA has expertise today that practically no one else has. Yes, NASA has to cater, to some extend, to the whims of voters, tax payers, and politicians and that creates some problems, but that is nothing in comparison to engineering and scientific study by committee.
Furthermore, I think you're being a bit too dismissive of the commercial angle. I'm normally very pro-privatization, but this is just not an area that is practical just yet to privatize. There are certain fixed costs and risks that only a government agency can incur, that industry cannot. Yet industry, as a group, can serve a function for NASA in helping to deflect some of the costs. Strapping sattelites to rockets may be the most cost effective method if your sole objective is to haul stuff into orbit, but that does not mean that it is cheaper on the aggregate if you assume greater goals for NASA (e.g., manned space flight, safe landings w/ humans, and the ultimate objective of regular and cost effective space flight). Rockets offer no such path.
Slashdot is reading way too much into this. It is common knowledge in the financial industry that 10-Qs are little more than a way of management teams protecting themselves from shareholder lawsuits. It is common practice to state virtually every conceivable risk, no matter how unlikely it is, no matter how far beyond control of management it is to minimize that risk, no matter how unlikely a different investment is to minimize that risk, etc..., so that management cannot be so easily sued if, god forbid, that event actually occurs. Unfortunately in our overly litigious society managements teams have been destroyed financially by frivilous lawsuits like that. In any event, as a result of all of this, it is really a mistake to read anything into 10-Qs. The shear volume of all the disclaimers and the generalities that they must make prevent management from being able to make an honest assesment of the far more likely threats; they get lost in the clutter and in the generalities. They are practically pointless to read these days. In other words, this is not proof that MS takes OSS seriously.
Nope, it won't do anything. The same thought was behind harsh anti-drug sentancing, and it made no difference. Anyone can still get pot, anytime.
What will happen is that it will be quasi-legal; technically illegal but it's just your own bad luck if you become the one-in-a-million patsy.
I disagree. There are major differences with drugs. Unlike with copyright piracy, the are huge incentives, i.e., lots of cash, to produce, smuggle, and deal drugs. There aren't any real incentives to trade copyrighted music and there isn't apt to be in the future. Perhaps P2P might go to a ratio system, where one can only download if one shares some proportional amount, but there are at least a couple problems with this: a) it's unlikely to be tamper proof in a decentralized environment [esp. with open source software] b) the incentive would be much less than what is available with drugs c) trust can not be established nearly as well, i.e., when you share with everyone, you open yourself up that much more d) those that are most capable of "dealing" prolifically also have the most to lose (e.g., affluent suburbanites as opposed to down and out people w/ drugs) e) the demand for illegal music on a per unit basis is much less than it is with drugs (e.g., no addicts, there are legal alternatives, etc).
The reason that P2P is so prolific is because it made it so easy and so efficient to download and share. Piracy of software and music was around long before Napster, but it was a minority of technologically literate people and primarily young people with lots of free time on their hands. The reason that it didn't catch on was that it took time to learn how to do it (e.g., operate FTP, IRC, etc), to make the right "friends", to develop trust, to acquire the software, and so on. Efforts by industry to make sharing a risky behavior would essentially force piracy back to where it was. When sharers, whether explicit or not, have a significant fear and virtually no incentive to share, they will alter their behavior to minimize their risk, i.e., stop sharing. The more idealistic ones might attempt to go to some different framework that employs a model of trust of what have you, but this will inevitably raise the barriers to entry and increase the transaction costs back to where they were. It will lessen the numbers and make those few sharers that persist that much more likely to be prosecuted, which will in turn lessen the numbers further. The few that remain could not support the vast demand for sharing and the excess demand would make sharing impossible for most users.
Note: This prosecution or punishment need not be a cumbersome legal process. For instance, they could require the ISP to investigate claims of piracy within 24 hours (providing some form of official log and channel); any user accused of piracy would be checked for P2P services and the sharing of illegal files the following day, any significant number of pirated files would result in the instant revokation or suspension of service. It could in many cases simply involve the prompt denial of internet service and maybe even the blackballing of that user from all services. This might be negotiated privately between RIAA et. al and the various ISPs or it might be effectively mandated by Congress. It would be sufficient disincentive for most sharers as their broadband options are few and far between and the loss of broadband would certainly be a significant loss for most anyone that shares. Unlike with drugs and with most crimes, the high probability of prosecution and the low mean time till punishment would serve, in many ways, as a stronger deterrent than drug sentencing (most research shows that it is the probability and immediacy of punishment, not the severity, that really counts).
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, as I indicated, that would be an absolutely blatant anti-trust violation and MS would be swiftly slapped for it. While I agree that MS also violated anti-trust law against Netscape, the situation required much more review and technical knowledge to establish.
Two points.
A) This is why we have patents. Google has novel technology and they have (hopefully strong) patents on it. It's not very likely that MS will find a method that is as good without walking into a lawsuit. Netscape had no strong IP--they bet on their market penetration and headstart.
B) There's not much MS can do to google short of blatantly re-jiggering IE to stop functioning with google (and google's inevitable responses). Unlike the situation with Netscape, google does not have to contend with network effects. They don't have to install anything on the users machine and they don't have much exposure to MS' API antics. There's not much that MS can "add" over and above what Google does. MS can try to embed their own search engine interface into IE (I think they already do by default)--but it's a nominal advantage and something that can easily be matched by 3rd party tools.
I can't stand MS, but fortunately Google is one of the few companies that MS can't kill with their traditional techniques. Their best option would be to try to acquire it, but given Google's popularity and MS's lack of leverage on them, they'd take a huge hit (mucho dinero) to do so. That and I don't think Google really threatens MS so there'd be little incentive for them to do so.
Ummm, you may try updating the bios (and possibly the video drivers). I had a similar annoyance with my docking station after I put XP on it. The bios update solved that problem and a couple others.
Hello. I have an Inspiron 8000 with GeForce2Go and I had the same problem (well mine would graphically glitch, slow to a halt very rapidly, and remain totally unresponsive, but I believe it would BSOD in 2k after an update...) for a long time until very recently (this got really bad after I ugpraded to XP from 2k and got the video drivers) despite numerous driver updates off Dell's website, turning off acceleration and other advances features, etc. You may not believe this, but I found that changing the Windows desktop theme solved all my problems. I had a fairly standard supplied theme even (though I changed the color). I switched to Windows Classic theme, looks like Win2k but not quite right...but it's faster and I've yet to crash for 2 weeks now (previously I was crashing 1-5 times a day). You may want to try it as it's so easy. I suspect this is some kind of wierd interaction with XP theme and nvidia's unified drivers.
That said, the factory system that I had with Win2k and older drivers was perfectly stable. It's only with newer nvidia drivers and/or XP that this problem reared its head.
While I cannot argue that the IP system today is perfect, I will say that what you read on slashdot is a distortion. They ignore the many thousands of successful and reasonable patents. They hold up a select few patents as being evidence that the system in broken and many of those patents that are at worst in a gray area, yet they present them as being black/white by misreading the claims and understanding their significance (Patents are often much more narrow in reality than they are interpreted by the layman). They completely lack the understanding that it is NOT the USPO that decides patents; the USPO is a glorified filing service (they always have been and they always will be--as it should be)--they're just an upfront scrubber to keep some of the clutter out so the system is a little more managable. In other words, the real hurdle is not to get a patent approved but to get your claims to stand up in court, so many people just don't understand this. In short, the concrete harms that slashdot can really name (and be correct in) are really very few.
The problem is that this disallowance of downstream control totally shirks the idea of how those distributors will sell the idea in the first place. In an ideal world where the product can be sold extremely rapidly this idea might hold some water. However, in the real world this is very rarely ever realistic. Sure, if you're, say, Britney Spheres you may be able to sell a bunch of advance copies of your music to eager fans, but what if your name is Joe? Of course this ignores all the fans that would simply opt to wait a day for the virtually free CD, mp3, or what have you to appear (in an IP free or IP unenforced market ala Napster 2010). This is known as a free rider syndrome and is a very common issue in economics. It also ignores the many goods that simply cannot be sold before it can be cheaply copied and reproduced. For instance, if I develop a drug that should be taken once a week to ward of heart attacks. Let's be generous and presume that it takes 1 year to copy. Well the fact of the matter is that most drugs are not going to pay off with just 1 year's sales. Although you might attempt to argue that the users will pay any price before that years time, that's not born out by the facts even in the case of such valuable drugs (i.e., users can't afford to pay that much up front) and there are yet many more examples where that's mathematically insane. In other words, this model depends upon my being able to sell more than a years worth of drugs to any user, but no user would have any incentive to buy more than a years dose (and would be prevented legally anyways) since it could be had for a fraction of the cost at a slightly later date. Their claims are especially absurd when you get to software that can generally be fully copied with in hours of a product hitting the shelf (sometimes even days BEFORE). How do I sell any single (few) user(s) a copy of Excel (a productivity application that makes me, say, 20% more efficient) for a million dollars for the sole marginal benefit of being able to use it a few days more than the users paying 5 dollars for the same software and manuals? I can't--it's a ridiculous assertion and one that they don't even answer in any meaningful way (OK, it'd probably be a fair amount more than 1 user, but the development costs and hence the necessary sales price is also a lot more than the 1m USD or any amount any niche group is going to pay for such minimal advantage.
Lastly, you must be absolutely disconnected from reality if you want to assert that it is just the established powers that benefit from IP. My parents have started many tech companies between the two of them and patents have been necessary and extremely helpful in all of them. The same for many of my friends and peers. I will likely do the same.... It's not all megacorporations.
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It is relevant because the idea that strong IP necessarily reduces innovation is clearly false. We have seen quite the opposite in fact. China and India to name two. A good part of europe... Why is it that China and India produce so little of note, whether you're talking about scientific research or technical/product innovation, despite having tons of educated people and little to no concept of IP. Why is it that the USSR did so little when no one could "lock ideas up" for themselves? I grant you that they have fewer resources to invest, but that does not explain why even their basic/academic research so uninspiring. The common thread is incentive and IP.
A) The algorithm is highly useful.
B) It required a significant amount of risk and technical effort to make it worthwhile.
C) The scope of the patent really just covers what it is that they've added, i.e., the ideas that they are supposedly deriving from are not being locked up.
What more do you really need to know? Regardless of what language you wish to put your claims in, that they've just made a "context shift" or what have you, it is a worthwhile effort and it is the kind of effort that requires the potential for substantial profits to secure continued efforts. People don't take risk without at least the potential to profit and the greater the potential reward the greater risks people are willing to take. Are you really going to argue that the idea was obvious or easy? If so, then explain why no one did it before, when billions of dollars and many years were (and are) being spent on such internet technology. There was a considerable lag time between the appreciation of the need for a good search engine (and the resources to develop them) and google's appearance. What's more, keep in mind that:
a) Google's core methodology is no secret now
b) The patent's life is limited.
c) The ideas that they presumedly derived from a still as open as they were prior to this patent
d) This country produces far more than any country despite the fact that we arguably "share our toys" less than most countries, even more than countries with much larger populations (even technically educated ones)....
Now I agree that there are dangers in allowing people to patent any and everything, e.g., well known sorting algorithms and other fundamental building blocks, but this clearly is not happening here.
Wrong, I do. I'm not a fan of MS, but I actually bought an Xbox for the select few games that it can run. While I will not argue that there are more games on Xbox or that those games are overall higher quality, you should keep a couple things in mind:
:)
a) some people (like me) will buy xbox just to play a few games that they really like, even if they don't play them all that often. In other words, I'm willing to pay a premium and accept (much) fewer choices in games if those few games that I do choose play better or are offered only in Xbox (or at least with unique features, i.e., internet play).
b) xbox live (internet/multiplayer support) is far superior to what is offered on for playstation and gamecube. For some people (again, like me) the ability to play online games is HUGE, especially since I find most single player games absolutely mind numbingly dull.
c) the graphics are in fact substantially better on xbox. Although I hate most single player games, I do enjoy Splinter Cell, in large part because of the graphics. It's not just "oh wow I have a powerful video card", but that it adds depth to the environment and contributes substantially to playability. I don't believe that you'll see a good port of it on PS2 or a game approaching that level of graphics on the other platforms.
Now this is not to argue that this constitutes a successful business model for MS. Most kids may be deterred from buying xbox because of the relative lack of games and the prices. Players like me (i.e., those that will opt for xbox for xbox live, graphics, and those select few games) are probably too small of a niche to profit from on this sort of venture, but that still does not mean that it is not the best choice for players such as myself. Frankly, I'd love to see MS fail here, even if I did purchase Xbox
Oh give me a break. While I admit that these companies were foolish to invest in high end real estate, and real estate cost undoubtably played some minor role, none of that explains the many MILLIONS of dollars spent on marketing, sales, give aways, selling things for below cost, and so on. In a more normal company, without the dotcom hype, the real estate cost has a much larger impact, but most of these dotcoms were flush with plenty of cash to cover real estate (via IPOs, VC money, etc--while that doesn't make them is a good and had relatively small need for office space and, if they were even halfway sensible, they could have negotiated short term leases (one of the many advantages of doing business in this country) that would have allowed them to back out in enough time if they had half a clue. Certainly the cities themselves was not that big part of the problem...perhaps too much real-estate...perhaps overly expensive locations (e.g., water front, main street, whatever)...many successful companies have come out of these same cities both before and after the dotcoms (i have been involved with some). Their total overhead was certainly a large part of the problem, but the problems ran a lot deeper than mere city of location.
I would say the reason that Kuro5hin, slashdot, and others survived is mainly a function of the fact that they had little to no costs to begin with other than bandwidth and some minor handware costs. Neither produce content; salon and the others had to produce superficialy professional content and that costs a significant amount of money ("journalists", editors, fact checkers, etc)
Now let's presume for a minute that you could somehow devise an algorithm to compute the proper share of the IP that each employee would receive on this new drug. OK, fine. So then who is going to pay for the other 9 drugs that were heavily invested in but failed due to things that couldn't be forseen? The employees in your probable idea would not be absorbing their fair share of risk to actually create a product from start to finish. It's one thing to cash in on an idea after it has succeeded; it's another thing entirely to actually incur all of the costs and risks to fund a whole effort that is necessary to generate those few successes.
In any event, the markets are pretty efficient in reality. If, say, an engineer is very good at what he does, then he can take his skills to a higher bidder or start his own company. As long as the company can maintain margins sufficient (through IP) to make that engineers compensation worthwhile, in a competitive market you will see that engineers compensation rise to a point that is reasonably close to his value. It is a fact that in many companies you have large bonuses for such innovations and stock options. I personally know a couple engineers who are now millionares today just by working for the right company: they took stock options, they absorbed part of the risk and they got a good piece of the pie. The point is that strong IP ultimately benefits the employees too. Even if they're not as lucky to get a lot of options, their salary is at least somewhat derived from IP. Now I grant you that not every company compensates their employees as well as they should, but there's a certain amount on inefficiency built into everything; eventually the company will either improve compensation or risk losing market share by producing marginal products--in other words, it's in the corporations best interest here.
Although I, too, own a Palm Vx and love it, the 705 is even better for me. Having built in email, IM, and other internet functionality is very nice (e.g., mapquest, google, etc) and handy. While you are correct that the underlying technology on the 705 is almost the same as the Palm VII, it is the minor changes that make all the difference. First and foremost, the 705's size and shape is much better from a strict usability point of view. Second, the screen is better, much crisper and easier to read in poor light conditions (e.g., outside). Third, it's more attractive. Fourth, it's got an LED and a vibrating alarm to notify you without having to physically check your email (i.e., it pushes notification out to you in a battery efficient manner). Fifth, it integrates with real email well, like the blackberry (not like Palm VII's, if i remember correctly, psuedo email). Sixth, the minikeyboard rules (I couldn't imagine trying to write most emails w/ grafitti)
In short, it does its job very well, that is to say PDA (contacts, scheduling, etc) + email + minor browsing. I don't think it's the greatest looking and I wish it were metal, but there is nothing else that really competes yet, other then the Blackberry and maybe the Treo. Of course with the blackberry you've got too few lines on the traditional model for web and the newer one is too big. The Treo's coverage is lacking and I really don't want my phone integrated just yet. IMHO, it's the best at what it does right now, and will probably be until the Tungstun W (presuming that data coverage is anywhere near as comprehensive and if the battery life holds up), so it does deserve to be there. The 705, like the blackberry, is one of those devices that you just have to actually use for a couple days to appreciate it.
While I would tend to agree that, all things being equal, having millions of people reviewing the same lines of code and having a large number of people actively partaking in the authorship will contribute to quality, it is disingenious to assert that participation (and hence quality) naturally and necessarily flows out of open source code. Just because code participation can happen does not mean that it does. Linux is exceptional. It is #1 out of a very small group of open source code bases (e.g., Apache, Bind,...what else) that really enjoys that substantial levels of participation. Not only is most open source code currently not popularly participated in, even essential and important packages (e.g., Open Office), but I do not believe that this such popular attention can scale in the future to support other kinds of code or a much larger quantity of code. Linux enjoys being the most prominent open source code package and it enjoys a relatively narrow scope, i.e., it's just a kernel. [The open source community loves to use the varying definitions of Linux interchangably, they talk about Linux as if it is Windows, i.e., a complete OS, but then when, say, security bugs come out for one of the numerous utilities, they assert that Linux is just a kernel (the correct definition)] Under the smaller kernel definition, Linux enjoys a couple key advantages over most of the areas that the open source community presumes to conquer:
A) Linux is percieved as being a worthy task of a "hacker" (e.g., elite, low level, etc)--as opposed to, say, a word processing suite or one of the many mundane but important features that may save users millions of hours.
B) It is so popular for users and such an exclusive focus, you can be sure that a significant contribution will be seen by many geeks, again, unlike a word processing suite
C) Because it is relatively small, especially if you throw out all the drivers and the experimental stuff, and leave it to things like the very popular TCP/IP stack (which was reviewed in this article)
Linux and some of its associated code are very good in some respects as a result of their incremental improvements and bug fixes. The trouble with this is that when you significantly expand the scope of Open Source efforts things start to fall apart. In such a relatively unstructured environment as the popular open source method, i.e., little to no centralized development/testing/etc, there is every reason to believe that the overlap is key. In other words, since there is really no official QA or group of individuals that can be told or expected to methodically test, evaluate, or fix areas, the open source community essentially depends on random overlap. When you have a sparse group of competent developers or testers, you will run into trouble, as in the case of word processors. Likewise, when you depart from the relatively well established world of the kernel, when you start having to develop everything, not just the code, but the framework, the UI, the API, etc, from scratch the dependence on overlap becomes more and more of an issue. It's one thing to accept the a small patch for a well established tcp/ip stack, it's another thing entirely to have to coordinate the changing of a whole API, to make multiple pieces fit together seamlessly, without a more concrete organization (which can just barely happen in the manner popular open source development method).
Code review is a good thing, in and of itself, if nothing else, for its ability to make those many incremental enhancements and bug fixes. From a strictly technical perspective "open source" code can work as addititive, i.e., you develop, say, your Word processor with a more traditional software group, and then you allow the public to contribute. THe trouble with that is that for most code there simply isn't a viable business model that can support that sort of development effort, or at least, I don't see one and none of the current methods really compute, and as a result open source fails to deliver. I think that there are areas where open source code can thrive. For instance, I'd love to see IBM and a coalition of other software and hardware companies band together to make Linux (or some other kernel) into a complete OS that is every bit as easy to run as Windows and more stable, flexible, etc. It'd be good for everyone involved (except for MS of course) and it's quite doable. However, except for cases like that, where you have a very definite common good, i.e., a reasonably priced OS/API that allows strong and equal footing for 3rd party developers and manufacturers, there simply isn't a formula to actually pay for development. Consequently, open source will not produce better code by and large.
Actually for many companies the taxes have relatively little to do with it, other then to the extent that DE's tax code is flexible and not terribly punitive to corporations that choose to incorporate in DE but do a majority of business outside of it. A DE based corporation still pays a large amount of taxes regardless to federal, other states, and for income generated in DE. A great deal of the motivation for incorporationg in DE has to do with their very well developed legal system for corporate governance, both in terms of adjudicating disputes (e.g., bankruptsy, shareholder lawsuits, etc) and in terms of the corporate law itself. It is relatively flexible, predictable, and speedy--all very important issues for any sizable company.
Do you mean this seriously? I don't think this would work very well. The difference is that skateboards are cheap to develop, cheap to manufature, and (relatively) cheap for the consumers to buy--this means that there's little to risk in its getting confiscated and it makes it easy for kids to buy (or at least for their parents)...who is the primary market. These are two very different user groups, given the dramatic cost and performance characteristics (i can hardly see kids trying to do stunts on them or trying to outrun the authorities...) of these devices. Skateboards are really not designed to be transportation devices; they can be used as they're designed--for fun, in many areas (e.g., skateparks, driveways, private roads, some parks, etc), without running affoul of the law. IT's intended use, transportation, on the other hand, demands its legality in most, if not all, areas that consumers may travel to.
Maybe, now that the product is developed, he can eak out a niche, but I highly doubt that the investors will ever see a return on their investment. The technology is simply flawed. It's too expensive to develop and manufacture for such marginal gains and its real utility is questionable in the first place. It's a neat idea, but it should have never left the lab, there's better, more practical, ways that those resources could have been spent.
A) Both candidates campaigned with the electoral college in mind and Gore lost. Your so-called "popular vote" outcome is merely a side effect for them, but now that Gore lost he wants to have it decided differently. This is sort of like losing a game of basketball, but then insisting on that you actually won because you controlled the ball for a longer period of time, i.e., it's just plain stupid.
B) Voters would behave differently under a popular vote system. In other words, if you're Republican and you live in California, then you may as well stay home during most Presidential elections in our current (electoral college) system. A popular vote would change voting behavior radically in many states.
C) Well a third effect, you have the media feedback effect, whereby they sway opinion based on their analysis through the lens of the electoral college.
You just can't take the total votes and call it a popular vote. This is especially true in the past election where the total vote margin was very small. Hell, you can't even say that we'd have had both candidates running under a popular vote, whereby everyone acted as if the popular vote was the determinant, because the calculus of each political party may likely have been different.
Lastly, Florida didn't elect Bush, they were merely one part of a whole that voted for Bush. That'd be sort of like arguing that the 200k people would have elected Gore under your imaginary popular vote. Absurd!
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Haha mod the parent up! Truly funny.
That said, you seem to imply that there's a huge problem in US voting systems. OK, so we had the Florida recount event, but put it in perspective:
A) The error margin itself, though very low when you look at it across the country, was very unusual--we have little reason to think otherwise.
B) That that margin of error might have been a deciding factor in the race was extremely unusual--very few races are that close.
C) It was pure user error, plain and simple. The paper didn't get jammed, a couple users did. (No counting system is going to change that)
D) It is random error, not fraud, and it was not skewed in its design towards any party or person. The only real cause for complaint is that there is no standardization across all parts of the country (so that an area with a high number of say, democrats, may be effected more by error) and the slightly awkward design of the particular arrangements of candidates on the cards. That is to say that there's really no reason why you couldn't take Florida's famous paper ballot system and use it everywhere in the country with excellent results, what little mechanical error there is would be irrelevant...and just double check the card design so people can't argue confusion again.
E) There's little evidence other than this isolated incident to show that we're significantly worse off than Canada or most other developed democracies.
In summary, though I must admit that I would have hated to see Gore being elected, it's pretty ridiculous to argue that these sorts of errors have a real direct effect on the health of a democracy. The only way it can really be significant is when two candidates have almost exactly the same number of votes. Therefore, to act as if this is denying the will of the people, when virtually everyone knows that so much as a mouse fart 5 seconds before could throw the balance the other way, is absurd. These sorts of errors don't get fringe parties or unpopular candidates elected; they can't in this country. The argument for massive change because it presumably in this particular case would have gotten the "right" candidate elected is sort of like arguing that, say, Presidents must never be allowed to drive past book stores (?) because it would have saved JFK. Sure in hindsite if may have been worth it to change a particular outcome, but that doesn't make it sensible for the future. What few relevant flaws existed can be fixed by minor tweaks really.
Even if you fix the system, no matter what you do, you're always going to have some potential for error (very very small to smaller) and dispute--there should be stricter rules against contesting elections, so that it can only be raised in cases of wide spread fraud --that is the real threat to democracy. We have a rule of law. You play the the game by a set of rules that you agreed upon ahead of time, this is known as THE (as in the first) count, but you shouldn't try to change the results after the game has been played just because you don't like the outcome. It's a very slippery slope and it, the contention itself, not the possible error itself, is the real threat. The only real fix for that is character.
Umm, hello? People were saying the same thing about mp3s. "Whats this you say??? People listening to mp3s exclusively? But all they have is Pentiums with dinky speakers! Surely you jest". Yet, today, we have dozens of devices that are able to play mp3s conveniently and with excellent sound quality and they're very user friendly to boot. The situation is much the same with movies. Firstly, you CAN easily burn many of these pirated movies to VCDs and play them in many modern DVD players. Secondly, we have DVD-Rs coming outs and they are capable of creating high quality movies in a format which most DVD players can read and with high quality to boot. I actually have one in my new PCs and I can actually do this. It may be slightly beyond the price range and technical abilities of most people today, but in a short year or two, this will be very common. Thirdly, broadband is growing. When people can download these movies faster and easier and have more people to download them from, then it will be even easier for more people to obtain these movies. Do the math.
Do you really want to tell me that this fabled peer review process has delivered us highly efficient research in academia? Well there exists no such process for the actual studies themselves, only for the results, but even the results themselves have problems. MOST academic research is unproductive, wasteful, and even stupid. What are you comparing NASA's supposed wastefulness to? NASAs mission does not lend itself to peer review. Sicking a bunch of academics at a problem, who have no practical experience building machines that really work, who have not even studied space travel, rocketry, or whatever is just plain stupid. NASA has expertise today that practically no one else has. Yes, NASA has to cater, to some extend, to the whims of voters, tax payers, and politicians and that creates some problems, but that is nothing in comparison to engineering and scientific study by committee.
Furthermore, I think you're being a bit too dismissive of the commercial angle. I'm normally very pro-privatization, but this is just not an area that is practical just yet to privatize. There are certain fixed costs and risks that only a government agency can incur, that industry cannot. Yet industry, as a group, can serve a function for NASA in helping to deflect some of the costs. Strapping sattelites to rockets may be the most cost effective method if your sole objective is to haul stuff into orbit, but that does not mean that it is cheaper on the aggregate if you assume greater goals for NASA (e.g., manned space flight, safe landings w/ humans, and the ultimate objective of regular and cost effective space flight). Rockets offer no such path.
Slashdot is reading way too much into this. It is common knowledge in the financial industry that 10-Qs are little more than a way of management teams protecting themselves from shareholder lawsuits. It is common practice to state virtually every conceivable risk, no matter how unlikely it is, no matter how far beyond control of management it is to minimize that risk, no matter how unlikely a different investment is to minimize that risk, etc..., so that management cannot be so easily sued if, god forbid, that event actually occurs. Unfortunately in our overly litigious society managements teams have been destroyed financially by frivilous lawsuits like that. In any event, as a result of all of this, it is really a mistake to read anything into 10-Qs. The shear volume of all the disclaimers and the generalities that they must make prevent management from being able to make an honest assesment of the far more likely threats; they get lost in the clutter and in the generalities. They are practically pointless to read these days. In other words, this is not proof that MS takes OSS seriously.
The reason that P2P is so prolific is because it made it so easy and so efficient to download and share. Piracy of software and music was around long before Napster, but it was a minority of technologically literate people and primarily young people with lots of free time on their hands. The reason that it didn't catch on was that it took time to learn how to do it (e.g., operate FTP, IRC, etc), to make the right "friends", to develop trust, to acquire the software, and so on. Efforts by industry to make sharing a risky behavior would essentially force piracy back to where it was. When sharers, whether explicit or not, have a significant fear and virtually no incentive to share, they will alter their behavior to minimize their risk, i.e., stop sharing. The more idealistic ones might attempt to go to some different framework that employs a model of trust of what have you, but this will inevitably raise the barriers to entry and increase the transaction costs back to where they were. It will lessen the numbers and make those few sharers that persist that much more likely to be prosecuted, which will in turn lessen the numbers further. The few that remain could not support the vast demand for sharing and the excess demand would make sharing impossible for most users.
Note: This prosecution or punishment need not be a cumbersome legal process. For instance, they could require the ISP to investigate claims of piracy within 24 hours (providing some form of official log and channel); any user accused of piracy would be checked for P2P services and the sharing of illegal files the following day, any significant number of pirated files would result in the instant revokation or suspension of service. It could in many cases simply involve the prompt denial of internet service and maybe even the blackballing of that user from all services. This might be negotiated privately between RIAA et. al and the various ISPs or it might be effectively mandated by Congress. It would be sufficient disincentive for most sharers as their broadband options are few and far between and the loss of broadband would certainly be a significant loss for most anyone that shares. Unlike with drugs and with most crimes, the high probability of prosecution and the low mean time till punishment would serve, in many ways, as a stronger deterrent than drug sentencing (most research shows that it is the probability and immediacy of punishment, not the severity, that really counts).