Firstly, you can choose between buying the Treo with the thumb keyboard OR with the graffiti/stylus instead. Secondly, if you've ever used a Blackberry/RIM pager, I really don't think you'd think you can write faster with a Palm. I've been using Palm for years, but I could quickly beat my own graffiti speed within, say, 2 or 3 hours of using a blackberry. Honestly. The only problem with such a keyboard, as I see it, is that it requires a certain form factor and that you need to find some alternative pointing device, which may be inferior to a stylus for pointing, but on the aggregate... I suspect this thumb keyboard would be much more desirable.
Meanwhile, I don't think you need to worry too much about the cost of low-end systems being affected, since we l33t coders "know" that building it yourself will always be cheaper, especially since you don't have to pay the Microsoft Tax...;#)
I disagree. I am plenty capable of building my own system, but I haven't done so in years. Put simply, the level of competition amongst PC OEMs is so high that it is extremely unlikely that you, as an individual, can even hope to purchase the parts (or software, depending your your needs), assemble, service (e.g., replacing defective parts), and purchase the software as cost effectively as the OEM can. Yes, they enjoy some profits, but their margins are almost certainly less than your increased costs due to your relative inefficiencies. This is especially true if you take into account that your time is, hopefully, worth more than the people that normally handle the grunt work. Anyways, I think the mistake that many people make, ignoring the ego factor, is they compare apples and oranges. They'll assemble an overclocked system from a variety of less reputable vendors and compare it a similar performing Dell system, but they ignore the poorer reliability, trouble in replacing/returning parts, the cost of their time (less an issue when you're young I guess), etc. It may be true that you don't need or want things like technical support or the bundled software, but it's not as if you can't purchase a PC without these options at the appropriate price. Sigh
But there wasn't any such food in the room. The part that was flawed was the implication that the BG measuring watch (the Glucowatch) is reliable enough to depend on like that. In a pinch, without having an actual BG meter around, sure, they'd use it. But you wouldn't want to use it otherwise, in the course of normal events, to make adjustments with because the accuracy is pretty poor and it can drift a lot (especially when the person is sweating, etc.)
While I can relate to you in your criticism of Katz, you, like most other watchers and reviewers, are mistaken about the insulin. She was given Glucagon, because her insulin was too low (as indicated by her Glucowatch). Insulin has the effect of lowering blood glucose levels and would have almost certainly have killed her if she was admistered it (especially in that quantity). Glucagon is a hormone that raises BG.
So, what's my option if I want people to be able to *use* my work without compensating me, while preventing people from being *compensated* based on my work without compensating *me*?
Your option is quite clear, obtain it by reverse engineering, either your own efforts or someone elses. If you reserve the right to ensure that you have a say about what happens with works that are derived from yours (e.g. GPL code), then I don't see how you can say MS can't do the same thing with their own.
GPL advocates don't claim that they're giving anything away; they claim there giving something away with restrictions.
But they are giving it away with restrictions. There's nothing at all natural with saying that I can't take source code, distribute the changes and NOT allowing me to keep the source to myself. Even in a world free of government intervention, this is not going to happen.
And if you think its hypocritical to bash people for licensing code as they wish, why've you been fighting the GPL for 12 years?
The GPL's proponents say, in so many words, that it is immoral to have any form of intellectual property. For them, it SIMPLY is a contradiction to assert intellectual property rights (e.g., you must share your modifications) and at the same time say that it's unethical. I, and others like me, on the other hand, assert that the inventor has every right to dictate the terms and conditions of their own IP, so I _allow_ the GPL. However, that doesn't mean that I have to, nor do I, agree with it. I believe its ends are foolish and naive and I believe its means (e.g., the GPL license) are sub-optimal even to achieve the substantive part of its ends.
I absolutely agree with what you are saying, it's irks me to see slashdot's repeated dismissal of all things corporate and praise for all things academic. While I don't necessarily agree that upper management at publically held firms are always or generally right, slashdot is seriously deluding themselves if they think it's that easy.
Of course we can only speculate, but I think people will look back at Gates the way they look back at Henry Ford. Gates never claimed to invent the GUIs or OSs. He simply produced an OS that was popular and you could have your applications in any color you liked, as long as they were Windows applications. Likewise, Ford never claimed to invent the automobile. Daimler and Benz had the first practical car, but it was Ford that put them in the hands of millions of Americans and sparked the real revolution. Much like Gates' OS, Ford's cars were "good enough" and offered little choice in style. That was the right tactic for the first few years of the auto, and it was the right tactic for the first few years of computing.
Ford's cars were more than just "good enough", this implies that he was somehow lucky to land that. What he did required great engineering and manufacturing abilities, not to mention vision and persistance, to bring to fruition. To say that his cars were merely good enough is to blindly dismiss his accomplishments. He may not have made the first car, or even the second, but his were the first cars that actually ran reliably and his cars were the first to be produced at an economical price. That is no small task.
Gates, on the other hand, can make no such claims. While I agree with you to some extent that Xerox PARC was like the Daimler-Benz of its day, that is to say too much in the lab but lacking most of the engineering and development time to take it out, you are ignoring the likes of Apple and other groups that did and could have done just as well. Without getting into a holy war, I believe it is quite reasonable to assert that Gates' Windows and MS-DOS won the industry because of the nature of the PC industry (e.g., compatibility) and because of the backing of IBM and such. Gates could have easily have been replaced by IBM and we would be looking at an entirely different company. (That said, I will give Gates some credit for having the intelligence and tenacity to grab other markets,...but that's a seperate argument).
There is a viable niche that the "one-off" software can fill: vertical markets. Right now, you can buy a Palm that has been mounted in a shock-case and fitted with a bar-code scanner. This is meant to be used for inventory control, and includes some generic software. If you could easily (for a programmer anyway) customize the software, a corporation would buy several hundred for their various inventory systems.
This is one example of a vertical market, but there are plenty of others. Think of the notepads doctors carry around, and let your mind go free.:-)
Well yes, I'm aware of and appreciate those applications and I agree they are relatively lucractive, but they are still a niche. I don't believe that niche or those like it are large enough to justify to the development of an entire PDA (as opposed to the relatively minor modifications and support that Palm and other OEMs do for these markets) in and of themselves. In other words, were it not for the consumer market that actually purchaces Palms en masse to justify the bulk of the development and continued production of the Palms, those so-called vertical markets are unlikely to exist.
What's more, the fact is that they do exist on Palm. This is because even though those applications are relatively trivial by corporate standards (to be distinguished from the typical hacker 1 off project), they are not terribly bothered by the additional "10 minutes", so to speak, or they are willing to pay for these higher level frameworks or runtime environments that are available on Palm.
In short, what's left over for platforms like the Zaurus is almost infinitesimal. As I see it, it is comprised of people (hackers) that want Linux's particular flavor of ease of development (that is to say that it is easy because the limitations are few and their familiarity with Linux), but that aren't able to justify any special accommodation from the PDA or development houses and are willing to shell out 500 some dollars for such a platform.
This is the sound of me skipping the remainder of the post upon reading the word "r*bust".
Friends dont let friends sound like marketroid drones.
100% Buzz-Word Free for over 27 years.
* woosh *
That is the sound of this going over your head. The very fact that you need to, never mind can, make the active decision to read an individual part of a 3 line explanation implies that you are not terribly literate. We, more literate people, read whole paragraphs at a time. Can you say "Would you like fries with that..."?
I've written a one off application for the Palm and while I agree the API is justifiably limited you can't say it's easy. For a large application you can come up with your own memory allocation strategies and you want to write your own hash tables and search trees.
For a one off which you might spend a total off 8 hours developing you want something like Java or at least STL or just the basic C libraries (strings,math,stdio). I spent half my time on this app implementing data structures that I take for granted or writing wrappers around their API to make it more standard C like. Now this may have been just a few hours but I just wanted to make a simple lists application with a small database. (It was to keep track of who showed up at a weekly party.)
You have a point here, but consider what it all means. I mean sure, you may be able to write a simplistic application in 10 minutes on a platform like Zaurus (although I suspect *MOST* developers would run into a lot more trouble weeding their way through GCC, Linux, and other documentation issues) but what does it buy you? Put bluntly, the ability to write applications that easily comes at the cost of only being able to target a much smaller niche, due to the problems that Palm (and WinCE to a lesser extent) manage to work around (e.g., battery, size, memory, etc). From the users perspective, what does this platform buy them? The ability to buy 1 off applications? Is that worth all the drawbacks? I think not. 99% of the applications that users buy and actually use (to be distinguished from downloading and trying) on Palm are hardly *that* simple in nature where an extra day, even, of the developers time is troublesome.
I'm not saying there's absolutely no buyers for a product like this, but I sincerely doubt that the niche is sufficiently larger than the development costs.
Firstly, POSE and XPilot require a Palm ROM to operate. Because Palm would be none too eager to provide the competition with their ROMs, Sharp or its users would have to do it illegally.
Secondly, it doesn't allow the user to run their conduits, so many of these applications would be crippled at best.
Thirdly, the emulators are not perfect from an emulation point of view and also generally have problems from an interface stand point.
I have. I've actually developed a fairly large scale commercial application for Palm and I don't get what you are talking about. The documentation is excellent and the API is robust and elegent. Now there may be some limitations due to the memory limitations, but those limitations are not arbitrary. The constraints appropriate due to the physical constraints (e.g., battery life, size, cost, etc) when the system was designed and they are largely still justifiable today.
Calling the WTC's collapse an engineering failure is kind of like taking C4 to slashdot's servers and saying that the code failed somehow. You just can't reasonably have expected them to anticipate this. Expecting a building of similar requirements (e.g., height, usable space, windows, etc) to withstand both the impact of a modern airliner and the jet fuel may well be an impossible task, especially when trying to do it within any reasonable budget. Please think about what you are saying and try to be a little less arrogant. Thank You
Possibly, but you're assuming that all Linux developers had previous experience with Unix. Some did this is true,but by no means all.
Not necessarily. Even if NONE of the developers had experience with Unix, the fact that Linux was based on Unix, a pre-existing platform and way of doing things, gave a framework to the developers. Without that framework, I wouldn't be too suprised if the developers energies were wasted almost entirely arguing and dividing their time attacking different ways of doing things. Unix had the benefit of being developed, at any given moment, under one or a couple roofs, not amongst thousands of volunteers around the country with wildy different perspectives.
Such cross licensing has not taken place yet. Maybe it's just a matter of days until one of your relatives' competitors realizes that they hold a patent that your relatives infringe (or maybe even the competitor has been letting your relatives' company slowly gain market share while slyly waiting for one of their previously- filed "submarine" patents to issue) and BOOM the game is up?
It may be technically possible today, but:
a) The competition has already been trounced in the past, as in 5 or more years ago. It's unlikely, to say the least. One has even picked up and left the market that it used to dominate.
b) My parents, amongst others, have already made their investment back and then some, so their patents has filled their needs.
c) My parents, amongst others, did and continue to innovate because they could obtain adequate patent coverage. So from society's point of view, the patent system is filling its function in at least their case (and if you follow the news at all, it's hardly an isolated event)
d) At least one of my parents now has a thing known as patent insurance which provides adequate backing by a major insurance company. So it's unlikely that the current competition would have such an easy time of it. (The very fact that an insurer would insure these and other patents speaks volumes)
e) My parents have, in fact, fought patent infringement cases and won or settled, but they're not nearly as common as you make them out to be. They're certainly not show stoppers in the vast majority of cases.
In summation, this is a point of view that is really out of touch with reality. People like RMS take the fact that most patents are loosers as evidence of failure of the patent system. Most of these patents aren't failing due to the competition, they're failing due to miscalculation of the inventor(s). They generally over-estimate the size of the market, under-estimate the R&D and marketing costs, or simply have worthless IP to begin with. These may be failings, but that doesn't mean that the system is failing any more than the fact that something like 9 out of 10 new restaurants fail within 5 years. That doesn't mean the system is like the lottery; the lottery returns a negative expected value, whereas the patent system as a whole has a positive expected value (Hint: look at the continuing investment in technology). Like any other pursuit, most people are just not that good at it, but we don't throw in the towel because most people loose.
If you wish to say that patents are hindering the little guy, then at least demonstrate that investments in startups has fallen over the past 20 years (you can't). If you wish to say that patent abuse is common, then show me some statistics that demonstrate how staggering these figures are, because what you say flies in the face of the behavior of innovators, investors, etc.
Can you cite a concrete example of a time when any of your relatives' patents stopped some "much larger" competitor from successfully competing with them in their market (or any market)?
Better yet, can you give us the patent #'s so we can look them up ourselves, and do searches for any case law or reporting about the patents in question?
I could very easily but I won't, because I enjoy having some semblance of anonymity on this forum. I do, however, suggest that if you can't name at least a couple examples (even if you disagree with my opinion) then you haven't done your homework.
Or are you actually doing what Stallman is talking about and assuming that the patents actually provide your relatives with protection rather than considering the likelihood that some "much larger" competitor could use their own (presumably correspondingly "much larger") patent portfolio to force your relatives to cross- license and lose all of the competitive advantage of the patents?
Huh? There is nothing to assume. I know for a fact that this is not the case as no such cross-licensing has taken place here. I also know for a fact that the competition was and is much larger and fierce and that great headway has been and is still being made against the competition.
If you have examples like the ones I cite, do you also have some concrete statistical data to inidicate that this scenario is the rule rather than the exception?
If you can't provide these examples and statistics, I'd suggest that the term "baseless" applies quite well to your own assertions in turn, don't you agree?
Firstly, I'm not the one suggesting a radical departure from the status quo and, in debating terms, the onus is on you. Secondly, the original poster at least implied that patents could only be successfully used by large MNCs and this is just NOT the case here and just a hassle to smaller companies (at least a wild overgeneralization). Thirdly, there are many studies out there showing the worth of patent protection, you just need to do your homework. Fourthly, I have first and second hand experience of what I speak so the term "baseless" most certainly does not apply to me. Fifthly, the poster's ignorance in his blanket statement demonstrated a profound ignorance of the hi-tech industry in this country thus I can reasonably state that his assertions are indeed baseless. EOF
Although that may seem like a valid argument, I would disagree. Sure a company has the right to ensure their investments, but in this particular case, I disagree. The problem I have with said company who patents the use of Prozac for PMS, is that it leads to stupid research which promotes excessive drug use. Sure there are women who suffer from extreme symptons, but I would argue the right thing to do isn't to sell prozac. It's only problem because society or in this case companies define it as a problem. If you were to base all patents based purely on it's monitary value, everyone should just be a drone and stop thinking.
I'm not an expert on PMS, but I doubt you are either. While I must admit I am somewhat skeptical of PMS (although the FDA approving it makes me think there is at least SOMETHING there), it's really besides the point. I, and I suspect most others, got the impression that you were attacking the notion that the application of a pre-existing drug might be patented. That's really what I was talking about. Now whether or not PMS is real or a significant problem is really irrelevant to the question of whether or not we should allow this patent. If PMS is basically bogus, what is the harm of allowing this patent? Nothing really, except possibly the promotion of a drug that is needless. But if that is your argument, then that is a job of the FDA and the prescribing doctors. It would be a folly indeed to have the patent examiners (in present incarnation or any form in the future) try to determine the worth to society in such obscure terms. If PMS is a valid condition though, then we should by all means encourage this patent...
What's more, I disagree with your implication that marketing a drug is necessarily destructive or of no value to society. Drugs may be abused by society (what isn't?), but they're under-used even more often (and thats WITH marketing). Even "perfectly" good drugs don't sell themselves. I can tell you this from personal experience. I can also point to plenty of worthwhile drugs and medical devices that have come to be widely accepted for their benefits but needed that push from sales and marketing before they really took off. We spend billions of dollars a year treating conditions in hospitals that could be handled safer, quicker, easier, and cheaper with the proper use of drugs.
When evaluating the value of patents you should not simply look at how well they serve the patent owners, but at how well they serve society as a whole. The system "has worked quite well" if you are looking at it from the perspective of big multinationals but for smaller companies they are, in practice, more of of an encumberance than a utility. So the system is only really working well if you believe that what is in the interest of the mega-multinationals is also in that of the general public.
I'm sorry, but this is really a baseless assertion. Both of my parents and a couple of my family members hold patents and have successfully used patents to start and run successful small to medium sized businesses. I can tell you in their case it's not only not an encumbrance; it's a necessity to go head to head against the often much larger competition. Now maybe Jane C. Schmoe can't afford a patent and its legal costs, but the odds are also high that she can't afford to do anything useful with it either. Do not forget that even if the person is "poor", there is a thing called outside investment (e.g., venture capital, angel investors, family, etc) that will invest in a worthwhile idea if they can be convinced.
As for the case of treating PMT sufferers with Prozac, what you really need to ask is: "would this have been discovered without the incentive of a patent being issued?"
No, that's the wrong question to ask. Prozac has already been invented. Some doctors may even believe Prozac can help PMS suffers (and some may even prescribe it off-label), but you're not going to see doctors prescribing prozac to PMS suffers in significant numbers without some company proving the clinical viability of it and then marketing it to them. Both of these are expensive and risky pursuits that are simply unlikely to be pursued without IP protection. Without IP protection, the generic manufacturers can quickly run into the markets of the person that spent hard cash on clinical trials and marketing and get a free ride, effectively destroying the market for the innovator.
Like the company that patented the use of Prozac for treating PMS for women. Ideas should not be patented, since it's not possible to police thought.
Why not? It may sound ridiculous to people that are ignorant of the regulatory and business realities, but this company likely had to clinically show, in so many words, that Prozac offered more benefits than risk in the treatment of PMS. Then this same company has to market the idea to doctors around the country, which costs a lot of money too. As absurd as it may sound, it's not just the idea, it's the execution of the idea that you're rewarding that person for. Both the marketing and the clinical costs offer substantial benefit to society and cost money and demand risk taking on the part of the innovator. This risk may not be as great as actually inventing a drug and bringing it to market, but I can easily see it being substantial enough to require a patent.
For a previous job, I had to research patents and write up a patent application. The instruction from the lawyer was "make it more general than it needs to be." His reasoning is the patent application shouldn't go through the first try. It should take atleast 2 or 3 tries, to make sure the patent is as broad as possible.
The lawyer likely didn't feel like explaining the reality to you. The reality is that these cases are tried in courts and if you try to make it too specific to what you are doing they often don't hold up well. For instance, there have numerous cases where competitors have done things like adding a third wheel to a two wheel device to effectively render the patent worthless. Now you can argue that the system is flawed till you turn blue in the face, but: a) the system is not as evil as you make it out to be b) this is real life and there are flaws in most things, that doesn't mean we should try to radically overhaul a system that has worked quite well.
but all things are not equal. Open source is simply not the same as an ordinarily commericial software product + the source code. It's an entirely different proposition. The level of support of most of these open source companies is, at best, unproven. Now you may counter that the companies have the source code, but that's really not terribly relevant. Having the development company that has responsibility and experience with that product fix that product is not only more cost effective, but is also generally the only feasible way to solve the problem. Solving these kinds of problems in house is just not feasible. You can't afford to keep a bunch of programmers around just to solve those occassional problems with varying pieces of software and even then the programmers would be inefficient because they'd have to scale the learning curve first (this is made harder by the piss poor documentation of most open source software). And if you want to approach some 3rd party, you're going to pay out of the ass and they too are not well configured to do that kind of work.
The company that developed the software and is actively supporting it though is going to already know about the ins and outs of it and will have the necessary skills and procedures in place. They may or may not profit from your support requirements, but that profit is more than made up for by their increased efficiency.
Upon realizing the Jon Katz drivel is almost deterministic and could be pieced together with the most simplistic of algorithms, scientists devised a way to code Katz's job out with a 50 line perl script.
Athletic ability and intellectual ability are two entirely seperate things and are not mutually exclusive by any means. Just because so-called nerds don't engage in sports doesn't make this any less true. Especially when you take into consideration the fact that "nerdiness" and intelligence are often divergent qualities.
I've known many stupid nerds.
I've known many highly intelligent and intellectual people that not only have substantial athletic ability, but also enjoy playing a number of sports whenever they have the time and opportunity.
In fact, there are many people in education that would be quick to point out that athletic success/ability is correlated with academic success (likely because those that succeed in sports also have the drive to succeed in academics and other pursuits).
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, you can choose between buying the Treo with the thumb keyboard OR with the graffiti/stylus instead. Secondly, if you've ever used a Blackberry/RIM pager, I really don't think you'd think you can write faster with a Palm. I've been using Palm for years, but I could quickly beat my own graffiti speed within, say, 2 or 3 hours of using a blackberry. Honestly. The only problem with such a keyboard, as I see it, is that it requires a certain form factor and that you need to find some alternative pointing device, which may be inferior to a stylus for pointing, but on the aggregate... I suspect this thumb keyboard would be much more desirable.
But there wasn't any such food in the room. The part that was flawed was the implication that the BG measuring watch (the Glucowatch) is reliable enough to depend on like that. In a pinch, without having an actual BG meter around, sure, they'd use it. But you wouldn't want to use it otherwise, in the course of normal events, to make adjustments with because the accuracy is pretty poor and it can drift a lot (especially when the person is sweating, etc.)
I mean...because her BG (not insulin) was too low....
While I can relate to you in your criticism of Katz, you, like most other watchers and reviewers, are mistaken about the insulin. She was given Glucagon, because her insulin was too low (as indicated by her Glucowatch). Insulin has the effect of lowering blood glucose levels and would have almost certainly have killed her if she was admistered it (especially in that quantity). Glucagon is a hormone that raises BG.
But they are giving it away with restrictions. There's nothing at all natural with saying that I can't take source code, distribute the changes and NOT allowing me to keep the source to myself. Even in a world free of government intervention, this is not going to happen.
The GPL's proponents say, in so many words, that it is immoral to have any form of intellectual property. For them, it SIMPLY is a contradiction to assert intellectual property rights (e.g., you must share your modifications) and at the same time say that it's unethical. I, and others like me, on the other hand, assert that the inventor has every right to dictate the terms and conditions of their own IP, so I _allow_ the GPL. However, that doesn't mean that I have to, nor do I, agree with it. I believe its ends are foolish and naive and I believe its means (e.g., the GPL license) are sub-optimal even to achieve the substantive part of its ends.
Without saying "me too", in so many words...
I absolutely agree with what you are saying, it's irks me to see slashdot's repeated dismissal of all things corporate and praise for all things academic. While I don't necessarily agree that upper management at publically held firms are always or generally right, slashdot is seriously deluding themselves if they think it's that easy.
Gates, on the other hand, can make no such claims. While I agree with you to some extent that Xerox PARC was like the Daimler-Benz of its day, that is to say too much in the lab but lacking most of the engineering and development time to take it out, you are ignoring the likes of Apple and other groups that did and could have done just as well. Without getting into a holy war, I believe it is quite reasonable to assert that Gates' Windows and MS-DOS won the industry because of the nature of the PC industry (e.g., compatibility) and because of the backing of IBM and such. Gates could have easily have been replaced by IBM and we would be looking at an entirely different company. (That said, I will give Gates some credit for having the intelligence and tenacity to grab other markets,...but that's a seperate argument).
What's more, the fact is that they do exist on Palm. This is because even though those applications are relatively trivial by corporate standards (to be distinguished from the typical hacker 1 off project), they are not terribly bothered by the additional "10 minutes", so to speak, or they are willing to pay for these higher level frameworks or runtime environments that are available on Palm.
In short, what's left over for platforms like the Zaurus is almost infinitesimal. As I see it, it is comprised of people (hackers) that want Linux's particular flavor of ease of development (that is to say that it is easy because the limitations are few and their familiarity with Linux), but that aren't able to justify any special accommodation from the PDA or development houses and are willing to shell out 500 some dollars for such a platform.
Well sure, if you already own a Palm you can export the ROM off the device, but that's just splitting hairs as it kind of defeats the point.
* woosh *
That is the sound of this going over your head. The very fact that you need to, never mind can, make the active decision to read an individual part of a 3 line explanation implies that you are not terribly literate. We, more literate people, read whole paragraphs at a time. Can you say "Would you like fries with that..."?
Friends don't let friends be marginally literate.
100% Literate for over 20 years
I'm not saying there's absolutely no buyers for a product like this, but I sincerely doubt that the niche is sufficiently larger than the development costs.
Firstly, POSE and XPilot require a Palm ROM to operate. Because Palm would be none too eager to provide the competition with their ROMs, Sharp or its users would have to do it illegally.
Secondly, it doesn't allow the user to run their conduits, so many of these applications would be crippled at best.
Thirdly, the emulators are not perfect from an emulation point of view and also generally have problems from an interface stand point.
I have. I've actually developed a fairly large scale commercial application for Palm and I don't get what you are talking about. The documentation is excellent and the API is robust and elegent. Now there may be some limitations due to the memory limitations, but those limitations are not arbitrary. The constraints appropriate due to the physical constraints (e.g., battery life, size, cost, etc) when the system was designed and they are largely still justifiable today.
Calling the WTC's collapse an engineering failure is kind of like taking C4 to slashdot's servers and saying that the code failed somehow. You just can't reasonably have expected them to anticipate this. Expecting a building of similar requirements (e.g., height, usable space, windows, etc) to withstand both the impact of a modern airliner and the jet fuel may well be an impossible task, especially when trying to do it within any reasonable budget. Please think about what you are saying and try to be a little less arrogant. Thank You
a) The competition has already been trounced in the past, as in 5 or more years ago. It's unlikely, to say the least. One has even picked up and left the market that it used to dominate.
b) My parents, amongst others, have already made their investment back and then some, so their patents has filled their needs.
c) My parents, amongst others, did and continue to innovate because they could obtain adequate patent coverage. So from society's point of view, the patent system is filling its function in at least their case (and if you follow the news at all, it's hardly an isolated event)
d) At least one of my parents now has a thing known as patent insurance which provides adequate backing by a major insurance company. So it's unlikely that the current competition would have such an easy time of it. (The very fact that an insurer would insure these and other patents speaks volumes)
e) My parents have, in fact, fought patent infringement cases and won or settled, but they're not nearly as common as you make them out to be. They're certainly not show stoppers in the vast majority of cases.
In summation, this is a point of view that is really out of touch with reality. People like RMS take the fact that most patents are loosers as evidence of failure of the patent system. Most of these patents aren't failing due to the competition, they're failing due to miscalculation of the inventor(s). They generally over-estimate the size of the market, under-estimate the R&D and marketing costs, or simply have worthless IP to begin with. These may be failings, but that doesn't mean that the system is failing any more than the fact that something like 9 out of 10 new restaurants fail within 5 years. That doesn't mean the system is like the lottery; the lottery returns a negative expected value, whereas the patent system as a whole has a positive expected value (Hint: look at the continuing investment in technology). Like any other pursuit, most people are just not that good at it, but we don't throw in the towel because most people loose.
If you wish to say that patents are hindering the little guy, then at least demonstrate that investments in startups has fallen over the past 20 years (you can't). If you wish to say that patent abuse is common, then show me some statistics that demonstrate how staggering these figures are, because what you say flies in the face of the behavior of innovators, investors, etc.
Huh? There is nothing to assume. I know for a fact that this is not the case as no such cross-licensing has taken place here. I also know for a fact that the competition was and is much larger and fierce and that great headway has been and is still being made against the competition.
Firstly, I'm not the one suggesting a radical departure from the status quo and, in debating terms, the onus is on you. Secondly, the original poster at least implied that patents could only be successfully used by large MNCs and this is just NOT the case here and just a hassle to smaller companies (at least a wild overgeneralization). Thirdly, there are many studies out there showing the worth of patent protection, you just need to do your homework. Fourthly, I have first and second hand experience of what I speak so the term "baseless" most certainly does not apply to me. Fifthly, the poster's ignorance in his blanket statement demonstrated a profound ignorance of the hi-tech industry in this country thus I can reasonably state that his assertions are indeed baseless. EOF
What's more, I disagree with your implication that marketing a drug is necessarily destructive or of no value to society. Drugs may be abused by society (what isn't?), but they're under-used even more often (and thats WITH marketing). Even "perfectly" good drugs don't sell themselves. I can tell you this from personal experience. I can also point to plenty of worthwhile drugs and medical devices that have come to be widely accepted for their benefits but needed that push from sales and marketing before they really took off. We spend billions of dollars a year treating conditions in hospitals that could be handled safer, quicker, easier, and cheaper with the proper use of drugs.
No, that's the wrong question to ask. Prozac has already been invented. Some doctors may even believe Prozac can help PMS suffers (and some may even prescribe it off-label), but you're not going to see doctors prescribing prozac to PMS suffers in significant numbers without some company proving the clinical viability of it and then marketing it to them. Both of these are expensive and risky pursuits that are simply unlikely to be pursued without IP protection. Without IP protection, the generic manufacturers can quickly run into the markets of the person that spent hard cash on clinical trials and marketing and get a free ride, effectively destroying the market for the innovator.
The lawyer likely didn't feel like explaining the reality to you. The reality is that these cases are tried in courts and if you try to make it too specific to what you are doing they often don't hold up well. For instance, there have numerous cases where competitors have done things like adding a third wheel to a two wheel device to effectively render the patent worthless. Now you can argue that the system is flawed till you turn blue in the face, but: a) the system is not as evil as you make it out to be b) this is real life and there are flaws in most things, that doesn't mean we should try to radically overhaul a system that has worked quite well.
but all things are not equal. Open source is simply not the same as an ordinarily commericial software product + the source code. It's an entirely different proposition. The level of support of most of these open source companies is, at best, unproven. Now you may counter that the companies have the source code, but that's really not terribly relevant. Having the development company that has responsibility and experience with that product fix that product is not only more cost effective, but is also generally the only feasible way to solve the problem. Solving these kinds of problems in house is just not feasible. You can't afford to keep a bunch of programmers around just to solve those occassional problems with varying pieces of software and even then the programmers would be inefficient because they'd have to scale the learning curve first (this is made harder by the piss poor documentation of most open source software). And if you want to approach some 3rd party, you're going to pay out of the ass and they too are not well configured to do that kind of work.
The company that developed the software and is actively supporting it though is going to already know about the ins and outs of it and will have the necessary skills and procedures in place. They may or may not profit from your support requirements, but that profit is more than made up for by their increased efficiency.
Heh the logic may well be just 3-4 lines, but the excess verbiage that he adds to his typical 1/2 line of content would be at least 30 ;)
Upon realizing the Jon Katz drivel is almost deterministic and could be pieced together with the most simplistic of algorithms, scientists devised a way to code Katz's job out with a 50 line perl script.
Athletic ability and intellectual ability are two entirely seperate things and are not mutually exclusive by any means. Just because so-called nerds don't engage in sports doesn't make this any less true. Especially when you take into consideration the fact that "nerdiness" and intelligence are often divergent qualities.
I've known many stupid nerds.
I've known many highly intelligent and intellectual people that not only have substantial athletic ability, but also enjoy playing a number of sports whenever they have the time and opportunity.
In fact, there are many people in education that would be quick to point out that athletic success/ability is correlated with academic success (likely because those that succeed in sports also have the drive to succeed in academics and other pursuits).