OK, So Let Me Get This Straight... When MS does it, it's Pure Evil (TM). When Stanford does it, it's Happy Fluffy Bunnies. I'm glad we're all clear on that.
Using "prior art" to overturn a patent isn't as easy as you think. If you go to court, and the other guy has a patent and you don't, then you have to prove that his patent is invalid. All the patent holder has to do is wave a piece of paper in front of the judge. By default, the patent holder has the patent. The "prior art" claimant has to change the status of the situation.
In other words, you are blaming MS for not putting the burden of proof on itself.
The stock of VA Linux (LNUX), Slashdot's corporate parent, rose more than 30% on this news while Transmeta (TMTA) was slightly down. LNUX has nothing to do with Linux development. TMTA employs Linus Torvalds and while they don't own the copyright on Linux or the trademark "Linux" (Torvalds retains them both) they arguably have much more influence on the direction that Linux will take than LNUX does.
/me wonders if there will be a 256-bit kernel for TMTA's soon to be released Astro CPU.
This proves a few things: 1. Daytraders are still out there. 2. When MS talks, day traders listen. 3. Choosing the symbol LNUX was certainly slick marketing.
Aside from the fact that OpenTV is trying to resolve a legal issue, is there anything interesting in the code? I mean, is it just gcc and some *NIX utilities ported to their hardware, or is there actually something new and different about it? Aside from this legal stuff, I've never heard anything about OpenTV. "Interactive TV" has been a buzzword for years...
...way, way, back in the mid 80s when scrambled UHF was still a hot thing (oh the joys of being a 12-year old boy catching glimpses of boobies through SuperTV's faulty scrambler) they had something called TV Answer with offices in Tysons Corner, and its very own UHF channel that did nothing but say "coming soon, TV Answer". Needless to say, they were never heard from again.
So, OpenTV claims it's deployed its interactive TV tech at umpty-ump places. So what? Does anybody here actually use an interactive TV system, and if so, what value does it add?
...patent, that is. If MS didn't patent this, AOL/TW or some other company might have. If MS patents it, everybody accuses them of being part of the patent problem.
The companies aren't the problem. The system is the problem. The patent system is set up to encourage an escalation of silly patents. Patents are the weapons, the patent office is the arms merchant, and small companies are buffer states between superpowers. Until that changes, MS, SBC, AOL/TW, IBM, and every other corporation on the planet will be filing silly patents to get ahead of their enemies who might file the same silly patent.
There are plenty of reasons to point fingers at MS, this isn't one of them.
Whoah! Hold on there pardner. I said nothing to that effect. Go back and read the thread, and pay attention to the Slashdot IDs this time. I am defending this guy against the Astroturf accusation, not myself.
If something like that is setup by default, fine. After I posted, I realized that this reminds me a lot of the DB-oriented file systems which have been discussed before on Slashdot. I think something like this would be cool at a low-level. Having a powerful database engine built into the file system is great. Having one table in a relational database is not great. In other words, this strikes me as something to be concerned about at the lower level, and not something that should be used to change the user interface.
Being able to search my entire system for "stuff Martha said" and get results in OlogN time. Good. Having the UI tell me that everything is in "the file". Bad. Having the UI default to a conventional HFS/Explorer type view, and offering me an alternative of "browse by date", and doing it schnell. Good. Having a new DB configuration chore on top of all the other computer related chores. Bad.
In other words, I think that if this Haystack thing was implemented properly, most users wouldn't notice the difference and the powerusers would be pleased.
combining Email, IM, web pages, etc. into a single inbox
Whatever happened to the "does one thing, and does it very well" philosophy? If I sorta remember that I got something in an e-mail, I look in my e-mail. What's the advantage of throwing away that piece of information (where it came from)?
Yes, it's nice to use the computer to do grunt work for us, but there are some things that are better left to the user. Some of us like to come up with little "systems" for organizing things that are unique to us. We've all heard stories of the receptionist who files contacts under 'D' because new contacts are always invited for Drinks. An AI is not going to be any more rational than that, and the kooky system it devises won't be in our heads--it'll be in some obfuscated format that nobody will understand, not even the ditzy receptionist.
Perhaps you should think that the poster to whom we are referring has been brainwashed into believing that whatever is newer is better. Many people have that misguided belief. That's a far more likely scenario than Microsoft actually paying a guy to write something like that. The Astroturf accusation is borderline conspiracy theory. I have a personal distaste for it because I've been accused of being an Astroturfer and I know it wasn't true. It's also an ad hominem attack. If you can't argue effectively against the guy's points, maybe you shouldn't argue at all.
I've been tarred and feathered as a Commie. Anybody who knows me would laugh at this. I have much more to say, so I think I may take the unusual step of writing about this in my/. journal. Maybe in the next few days. TTFN.
China goes without power, and the western world continues to get fat and happy using our own dams, nuclear plants and coal fired power stations and sweet sweet Iraqi oil
China goes without power, and the western world continues to get fat and diseased using our own dams, nuclear plants and coal fired power stations and foul smelling Iraqi oil.
In some ways, the Chinese have the advantage of industrializing at a later date. For example, when people get phones there, they are much more likely to get wireless. They're skipping over the cumbersome copper phase of telecom to a large degree.
OTOH, they've failed to learn our lessons in other areas. I recall reading an article about how the once ubiquitous bicycle is being pushed out by cars. People who try to stay with their bikes are riding around in smog, finding it hard to breath, and of course they are dead meat in a collision now. Smog was a major point of contention in granting the Olympics to Beijing. Solution? Nearby industry will be shut down during the games.
It's too bad the government there is sold on this particular vision of "progress". If I were dictator, I'd tax cars and gasoline like crazy and use the revenue to build public transit. As for electricity, many Chinese did fine without it for most of history. If China wants to play a global game of "keeping up with the Joneses" they are free to do that, but it's just a larger scale version of the yuppie who knocks himself out 70 hours a week to keep the Mercedes and the crackerbox mansion, only to discover that his wife is sleeping around and his children don't respect him.
So what if 50% of the nation plows with oxen and washes clothes by hand? With appropriate and judicious distribution of resources, with effective management, with proper education, I daresay that people will live longer and more happily in such a nation.
Of course I doubt that there are very many nations with the wisdom to persue such a course, when the shiny, jingly "stuff" of industrialization is so tempting because... well... "everybody else is doing it". Maybe Africa still has a chance.
Oh pulleeze... why are you low Slashdot-number types so quick to trot out the Astroturf accusation? At least you put a smiley on it. I was going to respond to the parent and say that instead of reminding me of someone who didn't want a car in favor of a horse, this reminded me of someone who didn't want a car because the trolly tracks were being ripped out, and warned that if we took away the trollies we'd have to pay a thousand times more to get them back in the form of "The Metro" which wouldn't go half the places that trollies used to go.
You could have done that too, but instead you went for the cheap, baseless, Astroturf accusation. What a shame.
Should be accompanied by a visit to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for your Daily Dose of Defending Digital Freedom."
Oooohh! It's the leader! All hail the leader. Look! I found a bean shaped like the leader. I'll put it with the others...
Not that I don't agree with at least some of what these groups represent, but sheesh! certainly not all of what they say, and I certainly don't need a "daily dose" of any argument if it is based on logic, morality, fairness, precedent, or other healthy systems we use to judge these matters. To suggest otherwise is to imply that their ideas would fade without heavy reinforcement.
Great truths don't need daily reinforcement. They are either self evident or emerge as truths on their own when we stray from them. You can draw your own conclusions from the fact that most major religions reinforce on a weekly basis.
I didn't mean to come off quite so cynical as to assume that the only valid reason for doing the contest is to make money.
However, I was being... well... logical about it. If you enjoy doing puzzles, then the contest has a value for you apart from the prize money. I guess I should have emphasized that point more.
Sorry. I meant more than zero. I'm not sure how "less" got in there. I think that I was originally going to say "vacuum goes from perfect to less than perfect" but then I realized space wasn't a perfect vacuum, and changed to pressure from vacuum but didn't change the "less" to "more".
Now I hope hope I make more silly mistakes like that.
Actually, when the gas goes by the pressure goes from zero to something less than zero. The supernova does indeed have a sound, and it probably is some kind of "boom" full of turbulent white noise. Of course, that sound never reaches us in any meaningful way, and if it did we'd probably all be dead.
IIRC, one of the NASA probes once recorded the sound caused by interractions in the rarified gas associated with Jupiter's intense magnetic fields.
So yes, there are indeed acoustic waves in space. It's just that they aren't like the atmospheric waves we are used to. That doesn't mean they aren't sound. You can't hear very well under water, but dolphins can. You wouldn't say that the ocean is silent just because humans have lousy hearing there. Likewise, we shouldn't say that space is silent just because the pressure is extremely low and we'd immediately die there.
That said, given that space is almost a vacuum, you can't produce sound in the usual manner. You have to introduce a gas into space that allows sound to propogate, and a supernova does just that.
the US Puzzle Championship, which they describe as a "a national online competition to identify America's most logical minds."
Ummm... are the "most logical minds" going to be drawn to a contest where, given that your skill is an unknown, your odds of winning are 1 over all the participants?
You can expend considerably less labor at many other endevours, and expect a much greater return. You can put $10,000 in corporate bonds these days, and still get $500 or more at the end of the year. Not too shabby. If you don't have the $10,000, just google for cheaper rent, get a 2nd job, or whatever. The really logical (though not particularly scrupulous) minds are fleecing marks in Vegas and scheming on Wall Street all the time.
With venues like that favoring the success of a "logical mind", why fuss with some silly puzzle contest?
Prediction: they will attract a lot of people who love puzzles, and the most logical mind within that subset will have a good chance of winning, but they will most certainly not attract the most logical minds of all, unless... there is a mind out there that's so uber that it knows it can solve any puzzle they throw at it with minimal effort. I suspect there are enough egoists who think they are that mind, but probably very few who are that good. So, unless you are the ubermind, why bother?
Last time I heard, TechTV is owned in part by Paul Allen. Is it just possible that this whole brewhaha is nothing more than a charade designed to get us to say "X-box" all the time? Oh no... it's working. No thanks. I'll keep my $24.99-20%+shipping and spend it on beer or something.
Caffeinated soap??? What will ThinkGeek caffeinate next...
...condoms, for when your partner keeps falling asleep on you?
...combs, for when your hair is just "laying there"?
...steering wheels?
...lecture/concert hall seats.
Can you actually caffeinate any of this junk? What's scary is that if the soap has enough caffeine in it to get into your system, what would happen if you actually ate a chunk of it?
A landslide from one of the Hawiian volcanoes could send similar waves throughout the Pacific rim. There are 10s of millions of people (more than 100 million?) living in cities that would be wiped off the map by that.
The Discovery channel occasionally re-runs that bit about an island in the east Atlantic that could do the same thing to the east coast of the US.
So, before we start fussing about asteroids in 2880, perhaps we ought to come up with a way to figure out how to control the geology right hear on Earth.
IANAG, but perhaps we could safely remove material from the tops of these peaks without triggering an eruption, and use that material to build a wall that would contain the slide. Not only would the potential energy release from the slide be reduced, but it might also be possible to contain the wave behind the wall. If the slide displaces nothing but air and then hits a wall, there is no wave to propogate.
Of course that doesn't work for an asteroid, because you don't know where it's going to hit.
...the standardization process can. At least it has for C. Look at C99, and it's got a few tweaks here and there, and some of it's dubious. I wonder who was requesting some of these features. Meanwhile, C's biggest problem IMHO, the lack of any standard for graphics, network programming, standard data structures, etc. that most new languages have, remains unadressed.
Some of the stuff that gets introduced into standard C comes from gcc. You know it's bad when Open Source is consistantly innovating more than you are (asbestos suit on).
Now, to counter this, there are plenty of defacto standards used with C. The standardization body could save itself a lot of work by endorsing OpenGL, BSD-style sockets, etc. They won't even do that!
So, very few useful applications are written in pure ISO standard C. Thus, standards don't slow innovation, but if you want to innovate you have to work outside the standard.
For something like C, the standard remains valuable if you isolate the standard code from the non-standard code. For other things, isolation may not be practical. In that case, the standard doesn't stifle innovation--the standard itself just falls to a very low value. Case in point: VRML, which I used to mess with. It's now relegated to a small enthusiast niche. Why? Because it can't keep up with other 3-d formats. In that field, performance matters more than standardization.
I assume this [sucking in the entire planet] won't happen, but can anyone explain why?
Because the scientists, engineers, and the people who manage them would never make such an awful mistake. I mean, come on! These are the people who build unsinkable ocean liners... no wait... safe hydrogen dirig... no wait... space travel safe enough for school teach... no wait... ummm... We'll get back to you on this one. I hope.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, So Let Me Get This Straight... When MS does it, it's Pure Evil (TM). When Stanford does it, it's Happy Fluffy Bunnies. I'm glad we're all clear on that.
Using "prior art" to overturn a patent isn't as easy as you think. If you go to court, and the other guy has a patent and you don't, then you have to prove that his patent is invalid. All the patent holder has to do is wave a piece of paper in front of the judge. By default, the patent holder has the patent. The "prior art" claimant has to change the status of the situation.
In other words, you are blaming MS for not putting the burden of proof on itself.
The stock of VA Linux (LNUX), Slashdot's corporate parent, rose more than 30% on this news while Transmeta (TMTA) was slightly down. LNUX has nothing to do with Linux development. TMTA employs Linus Torvalds and while they don't own the copyright on Linux or the trademark "Linux" (Torvalds retains them both) they arguably have much more influence on the direction that Linux will take than LNUX does.
/me wonders if there will be a 256-bit kernel for TMTA's soon to be released Astro CPU.
This proves a few things: 1. Daytraders are still out there. 2. When MS talks, day traders listen. 3. Choosing the symbol LNUX was certainly slick marketing.
Aside from the fact that OpenTV is trying to resolve a legal issue, is there anything interesting in the code? I mean, is it just gcc and some *NIX utilities ported to their hardware, or is there actually something new and different about it? Aside from this legal stuff, I've never heard anything about OpenTV. "Interactive TV" has been a buzzword for years...
...way, way, back in the mid 80s when scrambled UHF was still a hot thing (oh the joys of being a 12-year old boy catching glimpses of boobies through SuperTV's faulty scrambler) they had something called TV Answer with offices in Tysons Corner, and its very own UHF channel that did nothing but say "coming soon, TV Answer". Needless to say, they were never heard from again.
So, OpenTV claims it's deployed its interactive TV tech at umpty-ump places. So what? Does anybody here actually use an interactive TV system, and if so, what value does it add?
...patent, that is. If MS didn't patent this, AOL/TW or some other company might have. If MS patents it, everybody accuses them of being part of the patent problem.
The companies aren't the problem. The system is the problem. The patent system is set up to encourage an escalation of silly patents. Patents are the weapons, the patent office is the arms merchant, and small companies are buffer states between superpowers. Until that changes, MS, SBC, AOL/TW, IBM, and every other corporation on the planet will be filing silly patents to get ahead of their enemies who might file the same silly patent.
There are plenty of reasons to point fingers at MS, this isn't one of them.
Whoah! Hold on there pardner. I said nothing to that effect. Go back and read the thread, and pay attention to the Slashdot IDs this time. I am defending this guy against the Astroturf accusation, not myself.
Just make one of your attributes "WhereItCameFrom
If something like that is setup by default, fine. After I posted, I realized that this reminds me a lot of the DB-oriented file systems which have been discussed before on Slashdot. I think something like this would be cool at a low-level. Having a powerful database engine built into the file system is great. Having one table in a relational database is not great. In other words, this strikes me as something to be concerned about at the lower level, and not something that should be used to change the user interface.
Being able to search my entire system for "stuff Martha said" and get results in OlogN time. Good. Having the UI tell me that everything is in "the file". Bad. Having the UI default to a conventional HFS/Explorer type view, and offering me an alternative of "browse by date", and doing it schnell. Good. Having a new DB configuration chore on top of all the other computer related chores. Bad.
In other words, I think that if this Haystack thing was implemented properly, most users wouldn't notice the difference and the powerusers would be pleased.
combining Email, IM, web pages, etc. into a single inbox
Whatever happened to the "does one thing, and does it very well" philosophy? If I sorta remember that I got something in an e-mail, I look in my e-mail. What's the advantage of throwing away that piece of information (where it came from)?
Yes, it's nice to use the computer to do grunt work for us, but there are some things that are better left to the user. Some of us like to come up with little "systems" for organizing things that are unique to us. We've all heard stories of the receptionist who files contacts under 'D' because new contacts are always invited for Drinks. An AI is not going to be any more rational than that, and the kooky system it devises won't be in our heads--it'll be in some obfuscated format that nobody will understand, not even the ditzy receptionist.
About as much as cigarette taxes are taken as tacit approval of smoking.
What am I supposed to think?
Perhaps you should think that the poster to whom we are referring has been brainwashed into believing that whatever is newer is better. Many people have that misguided belief. That's a far more likely scenario than Microsoft actually paying a guy to write something like that. The Astroturf accusation is borderline conspiracy theory. I have a personal distaste for it because I've been accused of being an Astroturfer and I know it wasn't true. It's also an ad hominem attack. If you can't argue effectively against the guy's points, maybe you shouldn't argue at all.
I've been tarred and feathered as a Commie. Anybody who knows me would laugh at this. I have much more to say, so I think I may take the unusual step of writing about this in my /. journal. Maybe in the next few days. TTFN.
China goes without power, and the western world continues to get fat and happy using our own dams, nuclear plants and coal fired power stations and sweet sweet Iraqi oil
China goes without power, and the western world continues to get fat and diseased using our own dams, nuclear plants and coal fired power stations and foul smelling Iraqi oil.
In some ways, the Chinese have the advantage of industrializing at a later date. For example, when people get phones there, they are much more likely to get wireless. They're skipping over the cumbersome copper phase of telecom to a large degree.
OTOH, they've failed to learn our lessons in other areas. I recall reading an article about how the once ubiquitous bicycle is being pushed out by cars. People who try to stay with their bikes are riding around in smog, finding it hard to breath, and of course they are dead meat in a collision now. Smog was a major point of contention in granting the Olympics to Beijing. Solution? Nearby industry will be shut down during the games.
It's too bad the government there is sold on this particular vision of "progress". If I were dictator, I'd tax cars and gasoline like crazy and use the revenue to build public transit. As for electricity, many Chinese did fine without it for most of history. If China wants to play a global game of "keeping up with the Joneses" they are free to do that, but it's just a larger scale version of the yuppie who knocks himself out 70 hours a week to keep the Mercedes and the crackerbox mansion, only to discover that his wife is sleeping around and his children don't respect him.
So what if 50% of the nation plows with oxen and washes clothes by hand? With appropriate and judicious distribution of resources, with effective management, with proper education, I daresay that people will live longer and more happily in such a nation.
Of course I doubt that there are very many nations with the wisdom to persue such a course, when the shiny, jingly "stuff" of industrialization is so tempting because... well... "everybody else is doing it". Maybe Africa still has a chance.
Oh pulleeze... why are you low Slashdot-number types so quick to trot out the Astroturf accusation? At least you put a smiley on it. I was going to respond to the parent and say that instead of reminding me of someone who didn't want a car in favor of a horse, this reminded me of someone who didn't want a car because the trolly tracks were being ripped out, and warned that if we took away the trollies we'd have to pay a thousand times more to get them back in the form of "The Metro" which wouldn't go half the places that trollies used to go.
You could have done that too, but instead you went for the cheap, baseless, Astroturf accusation. What a shame.
...I was gonna post and say "who cares about the interview, why not just go straight to the pictorial?" but you beat me to it. Well done!
Should be accompanied by a visit to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for your Daily Dose of Defending Digital Freedom."
Oooohh! It's the leader! All hail the leader. Look! I found a bean shaped like the leader. I'll put it with the others...
Not that I don't agree with at least some of what these groups represent, but sheesh! certainly not all of what they say, and I certainly don't need a "daily dose" of any argument if it is based on logic, morality, fairness, precedent, or other healthy systems we use to judge these matters. To suggest otherwise is to imply that their ideas would fade without heavy reinforcement.
Great truths don't need daily reinforcement. They are either self evident or emerge as truths on their own when we stray from them. You can draw your own conclusions from the fact that most major religions reinforce on a weekly basis.
I didn't mean to come off quite so cynical as to assume that the only valid reason for doing the contest is to make money.
However, I was being... well... logical about it. If you enjoy doing puzzles, then the contest has a value for you apart from the prize money. I guess I should have emphasized that point more.
Sorry. I meant more than zero. I'm not sure how "less" got in there. I think that I was originally going to say "vacuum goes from perfect to less than perfect" but then I realized space wasn't a perfect vacuum, and changed to pressure from vacuum but didn't change the "less" to "more".
Now I hope hope I make more silly mistakes like that.
Actually, when the gas goes by the pressure goes from zero to something less than zero. The supernova does indeed have a sound, and it probably is some kind of "boom" full of turbulent white noise. Of course, that sound never reaches us in any meaningful way, and if it did we'd probably all be dead.
IIRC, one of the NASA probes once recorded the sound caused by interractions in the rarified gas associated with Jupiter's intense magnetic fields.
So yes, there are indeed acoustic waves in space. It's just that they aren't like the atmospheric waves we are used to. That doesn't mean they aren't sound. You can't hear very well under water, but dolphins can. You wouldn't say that the ocean is silent just because humans have lousy hearing there. Likewise, we shouldn't say that space is silent just because the pressure is extremely low and we'd immediately die there.
That said, given that space is almost a vacuum, you can't produce sound in the usual manner. You have to introduce a gas into space that allows sound to propogate, and a supernova does just that.
the US Puzzle Championship, which they describe as a "a national online competition to identify America's most logical minds."
Ummm... are the "most logical minds" going to be drawn to a contest where, given that your skill is an unknown, your odds of winning are 1 over all the participants?
You can expend considerably less labor at many other endevours, and expect a much greater return. You can put $10,000 in corporate bonds these days, and still get $500 or more at the end of the year. Not too shabby. If you don't have the $10,000, just google for cheaper rent, get a 2nd job, or whatever. The really logical (though not particularly scrupulous) minds are fleecing marks in Vegas and scheming on Wall Street all the time.
With venues like that favoring the success of a "logical mind", why fuss with some silly puzzle contest?
Prediction: they will attract a lot of people who love puzzles, and the most logical mind within that subset will have a good chance of winning, but they will most certainly not attract the most logical minds of all, unless... there is a mind out there that's so uber that it knows it can solve any puzzle they throw at it with minimal effort. I suspect there are enough egoists who think they are that mind, but probably very few who are that good. So, unless you are the ubermind, why bother?
Last time I heard, TechTV is owned in part by Paul Allen. Is it just possible that this whole brewhaha is nothing more than a charade designed to get us to say "X-box" all the time? Oh no... it's working. No thanks. I'll keep my $24.99-20%+shipping and spend it on beer or something.
Vote for Larry and Moe on '04.
Caffeinated soap??? What will ThinkGeek caffeinate next...
...condoms, for when your partner keeps falling asleep on you?
...combs, for when your hair is just "laying there"?
...steering wheels?
...lecture/concert hall seats.
Can you actually caffeinate any of this junk? What's scary is that if the soap has enough caffeine in it to get into your system, what would happen if you actually ate a chunk of it?
A landslide from one of the Hawiian volcanoes could send similar waves throughout the Pacific rim. There are 10s of millions of people (more than 100 million?) living in cities that would be wiped off the map by that.
The Discovery channel occasionally re-runs that bit about an island in the east Atlantic that could do the same thing to the east coast of the US.
So, before we start fussing about asteroids in 2880, perhaps we ought to come up with a way to figure out how to control the geology right hear on Earth.
IANAG, but perhaps we could safely remove material from the tops of these peaks without triggering an eruption, and use that material to build a wall that would contain the slide. Not only would the potential energy release from the slide be reduced, but it might also be possible to contain the wave behind the wall. If the slide displaces nothing but air and then hits a wall, there is no wave to propogate.
Of course that doesn't work for an asteroid, because you don't know where it's going to hit.
...the standardization process can. At least it has for C. Look at C99, and it's got a few tweaks here and there, and some of it's dubious. I wonder who was requesting some of these features. Meanwhile, C's biggest problem IMHO, the lack of any standard for graphics, network programming, standard data structures, etc. that most new languages have, remains unadressed.
Some of the stuff that gets introduced into standard C comes from gcc. You know it's bad when Open Source is consistantly innovating more than you are (asbestos suit on).
Now, to counter this, there are plenty of defacto standards used with C. The standardization body could save itself a lot of work by endorsing OpenGL, BSD-style sockets, etc. They won't even do that!
So, very few useful applications are written in pure ISO standard C. Thus, standards don't slow innovation, but if you want to innovate you have to work outside the standard.
For something like C, the standard remains valuable if you isolate the standard code from the non-standard code. For other things, isolation may not be practical. In that case, the standard doesn't stifle innovation--the standard itself just falls to a very low value. Case in point: VRML, which I used to mess with. It's now relegated to a small enthusiast niche. Why? Because it can't keep up with other 3-d formats. In that field, performance matters more than standardization.
I assume this [sucking in the entire planet] won't happen, but can anyone explain why?
Because the scientists, engineers, and the people who manage them would never make such an awful mistake. I mean, come on! These are the people who build unsinkable ocean liners... no wait... safe hydrogen dirig... no wait... space travel safe enough for school teach... no wait... ummm... We'll get back to you on this one. I hope.