Think about where our innovations come from. In order to have significantly innovative ideas with market potential, you really need to be immersed in the subject matter of the innovation you want to make.
In other words, people innovate in the areas they work in, because they are paid to think about those things all day, and in their free time.
I did a lot of COM and ATL development for years, and had tons of great ideas during that time. But I was learning new technologies because I had to learn them for my projects. I didn't have enough time to learn non-work-related technology.
When most or all of U.S. companies' coders are in India and China, what is the obvious result? Americans are not cramming the latest technology at Barnes and Noble, because they don't have to do so for the latest project. They are not having eureka moments because they are not the ones solving the heinous problems. And those who remain to architect the systems to be outsourced -- those people gained their experience and wisdom about software architecture not from college, but from designing and coding systems, and running into problems over and over again that needed to be solved.
The result is that eventually, few innovations will be by Americans, and few Americans will be able to accumulate real experience and wisdom in software architecture. You NEED people to do the work for a while in order for them to really have a friggin clue.
I would support a law that taxed outsourcing such that no more than a reasonable fraction of a key knowledge industry like this would likely be outsourced. Something less than 1/2 maybe. It's hard to come up with a number, but I think it's obvious that our coders are our future entrepreneurs and architects and gurus. It's just stupid to throw that away. It's destroying our knowledge ecosystem.
You can't just keep amending like that unless the examiner is voluntarily giving you an easy time, or he screwed something up. All the rules about amendments are geared towards making the PTO money. They will often do things just so you'll have to pay another fee.
Also, I don't know if you realize that they basically reject every single application the first time around. They are swamped with applications, so they are doing everything they can to reduce the numbers. The fact that something was rejected does not necessarily mean it lacks merit...
Geez, you guys can be dense. I'm not saying it's the same as breaking into a store.
I'm saying that if you use software against the wishes of the people that made it, and in violation of the agreement they want to make with you for using it, this is the same as using someone's physical object without their knowing or condoning it.
In the case of software, the company loses the ability to (1) negotiate with you, (2) sell it to you, or (3) rent it to you.
In the case of physical property, if the owner can't prevent you from using it at your whim, he can't (1) negotiate with you, (2) sell it to you, or (3) rent it to you.
See any similarities there? Using something against the permission of the owner completely vitiates their property rights in the thing, and prevents proper economic transactions based on that thing. Ever heard that there are gains from trade? Win-win or at least pareto-superior transactions?
Maybe a more concrete example:
I want to rent or sell you my bike. You figure you can use it whenever you want, because I just keep it in my front yard and never use it myself. How can I rent or sell you my bike??
Now, I want to rent or sell you my software. You figure you can use it whenever you want, because you can d/l a cracked copy. How can I rent or sell you my software??
See any similarity?
Who gives a crap what the thing is made out of? Bits or hadrons make no difference whatsoever. The important thing is what it does to our economy. Our economy is engineered. It is shaped by the laws that support it -- the laws that support property. There is no trade, and therefore no economy without property, first and foremost.
Yes, I think things do happen sometimes like the scenario you described.
But in general, don't you think that when warez put pressure on software pricing, they may have to eventually cut costs? Maybe not at U.S. piracy levels, but if piracy went up to 90% or so, as it is in China, I think it would be difficult for companies even to QA, let alone new development.
It's not a black and white problem, clearly. But I do think piracy has to be kept at a reasonably low level for U.S. companies to continue to hire U.S. coders, and offer a decent product.
Well, I did say basically "unless they have monopoly power"... What I meant was that, sure, they'll set the price at the optimum point to maximize profits, but in most cases, if there is at least some competition, they can only get a comparable profit margin to their competitors.
Yes, I am a law student, and I took criminal law as well. So I am not talking out of my ass. I was making a comment to prompt people to think about the idea of using someone else's product without harming it.
I am asking a moral and economic question, not strictly a legal question. As I'm sure you know, just because something is not criminal, that does not mean it is necessarily beneficial behavior.
By the way, your statement that "the law considers that the toy stores aren't actually losing anything" is incorrect. The correct statement would be that the law does not consider the actor in this case to have sufficient mens rea to be found guilty of a crime. These are not the same. Many losses occur for which the causal actor may not be convicted of a crime, due to lack of mens rea. Furthermore, you ignore private law completely.
But as I said before, I am prompting a moral and economic question, not a legal one.
I'm not saying you would taint anything. I'm just asking indirectly whether you think really this is an acceptable practice, even when something is not tainted at all.
Hmmm. Let's assume that companies lose some sales because some people would have bought the software but for free versions. So the company is out some sales -- unless they reduce their price, right?
But actually, their price is based on a profit margin calculated to give them only a reasonable return on their R&D. There is no 'rent', unless they have _no_ competitor. There is only a reasonable profit, comparable to other industries. They have to pay the coders' and managers' salaries. They are in competition with other software companies, and can't afford a larger profit margin than their competitors. So what happens?
R&D, or other costs, must be reduced along with any reduction in price. If not, the price would actually have to increase, to cover their costs with a smaller number of sales. If the price doesn't increase then, the company either gets smaller, gets more efficient, or goes away.
Gee, I guess that toy stores wouldn't actually be losing anything either, if you broke in at night, played with all the toys, and put them back when you were done...
1. They are going to invest money because they can free-ride on the research of another company, now that its patent has expired. Whenever you can get someone else's work for free, there's a big opportunity for financial gain.
2. How do you know these companies would have had any clue about iris recognition if this patent had never been made public? The patentee could have instead kept it as a trade secret -- would these companies have invested in iris recognition then??
3. Iris scanners may be less common because of the patent, but that's by design. We allow them to set the price to whatever the market will bear, in order to receive extra compensation for inventing a technology first, and making it public.
The fact that he wanted to make money, and sponsored competitions to prove the layout's worth, may be reasons to be skeptical, but certainly don't prove anything.
I have been using dvorak since sometime in my junior year of college ('97), and can tell you the following:
1. It feels a lot smoother and more comfortable, because of the reduced finger movement. This aspect of dvorak is proven for English.
2. It's a bit less of an improvement over qwerty for coding in something like cpp, because of all the punctuation (ML would be nice). It's actually sort of a pain sometimes for using unix commands, because so many of them are just consonants -- the layout is designed to alternate hands when typing English with vowels, so 'ls' hits two characters with your right pinkie -- less than ideal.
3. I can switch pretty easily back and forth, but barely ever have to anymore. When and if I do have to, I can type qwerty right away, but make a few mistakes for about the first 5 minutes. And this is when it's been a month or two since I last used qwerty...
I am glad I made the switch, basically because of the reduced finger movement and the feeling of comfort...
First, we do have _some_ choice in the matter, because we can set the employment laws for U.S. companies. If such laws become too inconvenient, the companies may move out of the U.S. altogether, but we needn't go so far as that.
Second, there are basically 2 reasons why poor countries don't get the bread: low IQ, or bad systems. Most developing countries are in the former category, while China is in the latter. It doesn't have so much to do, IMHO, with how hard one works, as how smartly one works.
The average IQ of the U.S. is about 98. The average IQ of black African nations is about 70. The average IQ of China, Japan, and Korea, is about 105.
This is why China is _at least_ going to be a superpower in Asia. We will have plenty of difficulty competing with them on our own terms; we really don't need to be giving them all of our know-how as well.
It's not about rights. It's about whether or not you think it's wise to give away an advantage that you currently have.
If you think that letting jobs go overseas will redound to our benefit in the end, then you're making sense. If you think we may permanently lose out if this goes too far, but you still support outsourcing because it's good for your competitor employees in these other countries, then you're not thinking rationally.
If I have bread and someone else doesn't, I'm just not going to give it away. That would be dumb, unless I'm going to get something of at least equal value in return.
"So, when will we stop issuing patents for using a computer to do EXACTLY the same thing that was previously done without it?"
Generally speaking, I would just like to point out that doing something automatically, or by computer, is not 'the same' as a human doing it.
For example, just because you have been able to listen to people's instructions in English, and perform actions based on them, for many years, that does not mean that a computer system able to understand and act upon a natural language like English is 'the same'.
It takes varying degrees of difficulty and problem-solving to automate everyday actions in software. Some are obvious, but many are not.
No one here has mentioned the difficult line that the Supreme Court must walk.
Much of its history has been an exercise in attempting to assert a little influence and have a little backbone in the face of a very powerful congress and a very powerful executive. The Supreme Court did not have much respect in the beginning, and had to be very careful to maintain its position and not incite the President or congress into just blowing it away. FDR didn't just want to "pack the court," he wanted to increase the number of Justices to 21 (IIRC) and appoint all the new ones.
The SC, in order to avoid being made completely irrelevant, had to consider the political realities of the situation. They folded, and tried to make it look like they hadn't. They stayed to fight another day. Even now, consider what the republicans might be able to do if the Court repeatedly shot down their attepmts at anti-terrorism legislation. They really would go insane; they would throw everything they could at the problem, rule of law be damned. We clearly saw that attitude with respect to Terry Schiavo.
So just remember that the power of the Court is not absolute. They have to be very careful to avoid being made irrelevant, or being ignored. So some of the things they've done are actually theoretically 'wrong', but many of the 'wrong' decisions probably had to be that way for larger reasons.
I think this is actually a bit of a shortsighted way to look at the issue.
Consider the possibility that a change of perspective is required for us to elegantly represent string theory. Consider that maybe current string theory is working towards an elegant representation, but may just not quite have gotten there yet. I think both are possible. For instance, many thought that something was seriously wrong when so many different particles were discovered in the 80's. Eventually, they were able to deflate this complexity into combinations of quarks. A change in perspective radically simplified the picture.
There are many areas of math where a change of perspective can turn complexity into elegance. Trigonometry is just one example. Changing your perspective between trig functions and exponentials can greatly simplify things sometimes...
Thinking about a problem in cartesian, parametric, or radial coordinates can sometimes make it radically simpler or more elegant to solve.
My point really is that we should not judge the elegance of the mathematics completely based on the perspective we ourselves apply, and the notations we ourselves have used for it. We may yet discover that these perspectives or notations are less than ideal for use with the subject matter in question.
This is likely why you will be successful, but your son is less likely to be. Wealth goes to those with motivation and pragmatism. It is wasted by those who feel comfortable enough not to bust their asses all the time.
This is a standard, and sometimes good, way to do error handling in C, or cpp without exceptions.
Without going into it too much, it can be more efficient and practical in certain cases. Limited to such error handling, it's not really that bad, it's just old-skool.
This is by design. The Supreme Court has some of the facts, but without a full trial, they should not decide the final result.
Nor should they really be setting the law through ivory-tower guidelines, unless there is sufficient case law to make it abundantly clear they are right. Our system works best when the trial courts with the facts decide cases, and the appellate courts later develop rules based on those decisions. It is an evolutionary process, based in the facts of each situation.
* Authority figures can run roughshod over the poor and/or uneducated, so long as they don't have a lawyer to represent them.
As for point 2, you're right, mostly. Parents shouldn't leave their kids to get tagged with something they don't deserve. But neither should they let it go. The kids should get the suspension or revocation of use privileges they deserve, plus get chewed out for being asshats by their parents.
I think it's time to say that that balance has shifted. Most people hacking into others' machines are not doing it for fun anymore.
How can we make this inference? Because hacking is not that fun anymore. Doing actual hacking has become the equivalent of doing petty crime. Anything interesting enough to be fun is probably more of a computer security research problem, and not often actually taken advantage of by the people who work on it.
Old skool hacking groups are giving powerpoint presentations on low-level network technology. What they're actually doing is research, because it's more fun than doing the hacking...
You are only right if there's an equal playing field. If we don't allow an equal playing field to foreign countries for our domestic markets, guess what? We have an advantage, and we effectively protect our own markets while skimming a bit off foreign companies profits from the U.S.
Whoever thought that it made more sense to give away a strategic advantage rather than maintain it was smoking crack.
What was it, Queen Victoria?, who said "I do not think it wise to give away that which we have."
It may make sense for some people, but people should know that the government is likely to act in their own interests. If they have to choose between allowing a deduction and not allowing it, they will probably not allow it. If most people are as lazy and dumb as I think they are, they will just go along with 99% of what is done, and lose out.
If they make this choice with the proper information, that's fine though.
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree, and to elaborate:
Think about where our innovations come from. In order to have significantly innovative ideas with market potential, you really need to be immersed in the subject matter of the innovation you want to make.
In other words, people innovate in the areas they work in, because they are paid to think about those things all day, and in their free time.
I did a lot of COM and ATL development for years, and had tons of great ideas during that time. But I was learning new technologies because I had to learn them for my projects. I didn't have enough time to learn non-work-related technology.
When most or all of U.S. companies' coders are in India and China, what is the obvious result? Americans are not cramming the latest technology at Barnes and Noble, because they don't have to do so for the latest project. They are not having eureka moments because they are not the ones solving the heinous problems. And those who remain to architect the systems to be outsourced -- those people gained their experience and wisdom about software architecture not from college, but from designing and coding systems, and running into problems over and over again that needed to be solved.
The result is that eventually, few innovations will be by Americans, and few Americans will be able to accumulate real experience and wisdom in software architecture. You NEED people to do the work for a while in order for them to really have a friggin clue.
I would support a law that taxed outsourcing such that no more than a reasonable fraction of a key knowledge industry like this would likely be outsourced. Something less than 1/2 maybe. It's hard to come up with a number, but I think it's obvious that our coders are our future entrepreneurs and architects and gurus. It's just stupid to throw that away. It's destroying our knowledge ecosystem.
Although, I should add that you can file continuances indefinitely -- you just have to keep paying more fees...
You can't just keep amending like that unless the examiner is voluntarily giving you an easy time, or he screwed something up. All the rules about amendments are geared towards making the PTO money. They will often do things just so you'll have to pay another fee.
Also, I don't know if you realize that they basically reject every single application the first time around. They are swamped with applications, so they are doing everything they can to reduce the numbers. The fact that something was rejected does not necessarily mean it lacks merit...
Geez, you guys can be dense. I'm not saying it's the same as breaking into a store.
I'm saying that if you use software against the wishes of the people that made it, and in violation of the agreement they want to make with you for using it, this is the same as using someone's physical object without their knowing or condoning it.
In the case of software, the company loses the ability to (1) negotiate with you, (2) sell it to you, or (3) rent it to you.
In the case of physical property, if the owner can't prevent you from using it at your whim, he can't (1) negotiate with you, (2) sell it to you, or (3) rent it to you.
See any similarities there? Using something against the permission of the owner completely vitiates their property rights in the thing, and prevents proper economic transactions based on that thing. Ever heard that there are gains from trade? Win-win or at least pareto-superior transactions?
Maybe a more concrete example:
I want to rent or sell you my bike. You figure you can use it whenever you want, because I just keep it in my front yard and never use it myself. How can I rent or sell you my bike??
Now, I want to rent or sell you my software. You figure you can use it whenever you want, because you can d/l a cracked copy. How can I rent or sell you my software??
See any similarity?
Who gives a crap what the thing is made out of? Bits or hadrons make no difference whatsoever. The important thing is what it does to our economy. Our economy is engineered. It is shaped by the laws that support it -- the laws that support property. There is no trade, and therefore no economy without property, first and foremost.
Yes, I think things do happen sometimes like the scenario you described.
But in general, don't you think that when warez put pressure on software pricing, they may have to eventually cut costs? Maybe not at U.S. piracy levels, but if piracy went up to 90% or so, as it is in China, I think it would be difficult for companies even to QA, let alone new development.
It's not a black and white problem, clearly. But I do think piracy has to be kept at a reasonably low level for U.S. companies to continue to hire U.S. coders, and offer a decent product.
Well, I did say basically "unless they have monopoly power"... What I meant was that, sure, they'll set the price at the optimum point to maximize profits, but in most cases, if there is at least some competition, they can only get a comparable profit margin to their competitors.
Yes, I am a law student, and I took criminal law as well. So I am not talking out of my ass. I was making a comment to prompt people to think about the idea of using someone else's product without harming it.
I am asking a moral and economic question, not strictly a legal question. As I'm sure you know, just because something is not criminal, that does not mean it is necessarily beneficial behavior.
By the way, your statement that "the law considers that the toy stores aren't actually losing anything" is incorrect. The correct statement would be that the law does not consider the actor in this case to have sufficient mens rea to be found guilty of a crime. These are not the same. Many losses occur for which the causal actor may not be convicted of a crime, due to lack of mens rea. Furthermore, you ignore private law completely.
But as I said before, I am prompting a moral and economic question, not a legal one.
I'm not saying you would taint anything. I'm just asking indirectly whether you think really this is an acceptable practice, even when something is not tainted at all.
Hmmm. Let's assume that companies lose some sales because some people would have bought the software but for free versions. So the company is out some sales -- unless they reduce their price, right?
But actually, their price is based on a profit margin calculated to give them only a reasonable return on their R&D. There is no 'rent', unless they have _no_ competitor. There is only a reasonable profit, comparable to other industries. They have to pay the coders' and managers' salaries. They are in competition with other software companies, and can't afford a larger profit margin than their competitors. So what happens?
R&D, or other costs, must be reduced along with any reduction in price. If not, the price would actually have to increase, to cover their costs with a smaller number of sales. If the price doesn't increase then, the company either gets smaller, gets more efficient, or goes away.
Gee, I guess that toy stores wouldn't actually be losing anything either, if you broke in at night, played with all the toys, and put them back when you were done...
1. They are going to invest money because they can free-ride on the research of another company, now that its patent has expired. Whenever you can get someone else's work for free, there's a big opportunity for financial gain.
2. How do you know these companies would have had any clue about iris recognition if this patent had never been made public? The patentee could have instead kept it as a trade secret -- would these companies have invested in iris recognition then??
3. Iris scanners may be less common because of the patent, but that's by design. We allow them to set the price to whatever the market will bear, in order to receive extra compensation for inventing a technology first, and making it public.
The fact that he wanted to make money, and sponsored competitions to prove the layout's worth, may be reasons to be skeptical, but certainly don't prove anything.
I have been using dvorak since sometime in my junior year of college ('97), and can tell you the following:
1. It feels a lot smoother and more comfortable, because of the reduced finger movement. This aspect of dvorak is proven for English.
2. It's a bit less of an improvement over qwerty for coding in something like cpp, because of all the punctuation (ML would be nice). It's actually sort of a pain sometimes for using unix commands, because so many of them are just consonants -- the layout is designed to alternate hands when typing English with vowels, so 'ls' hits two characters with your right pinkie -- less than ideal.
3. I can switch pretty easily back and forth, but barely ever have to anymore. When and if I do have to, I can type qwerty right away, but make a few mistakes for about the first 5 minutes. And this is when it's been a month or two since I last used qwerty...
I am glad I made the switch, basically because of the reduced finger movement and the feeling of comfort...
First, we do have _some_ choice in the matter, because we can set the employment laws for U.S. companies. If such laws become too inconvenient, the companies may move out of the U.S. altogether, but we needn't go so far as that.
Second, there are basically 2 reasons why poor countries don't get the bread: low IQ, or bad systems. Most developing countries are in the former category, while China is in the latter. It doesn't have so much to do, IMHO, with how hard one works, as how smartly one works.
The average IQ of the U.S. is about 98. The average IQ of black African nations is about 70. The average IQ of China, Japan, and Korea, is about 105.
This is why China is _at least_ going to be a superpower in Asia. We will have plenty of difficulty competing with them on our own terms; we really don't need to be giving them all of our know-how as well.
Right on.
It's not about rights. It's about whether or not you think it's wise to give away an advantage that you currently have.
If you think that letting jobs go overseas will redound to our benefit in the end, then you're making sense. If you think we may permanently lose out if this goes too far, but you still support outsourcing because it's good for your competitor employees in these other countries, then you're not thinking rationally.
If I have bread and someone else doesn't, I'm just not going to give it away. That would be dumb, unless I'm going to get something of at least equal value in return.
"So, when will we stop issuing patents for using a computer to do EXACTLY the same thing that was previously done without it?"
Generally speaking, I would just like to point out that doing something automatically, or by computer, is not 'the same' as a human doing it.
For example, just because you have been able to listen to people's instructions in English, and perform actions based on them, for many years, that does not mean that a computer system able to understand and act upon a natural language like English is 'the same'.
It takes varying degrees of difficulty and problem-solving to automate everyday actions in software. Some are obvious, but many are not.
No one here has mentioned the difficult line that the Supreme Court must walk.
Much of its history has been an exercise in attempting to assert a little influence and have a little backbone in the face of a very powerful congress and a very powerful executive. The Supreme Court did not have much respect in the beginning, and had to be very careful to maintain its position and not incite the President or congress into just blowing it away. FDR didn't just want to "pack the court," he wanted to increase the number of Justices to 21 (IIRC) and appoint all the new ones.
The SC, in order to avoid being made completely irrelevant, had to consider the political realities of the situation. They folded, and tried to make it look like they hadn't. They stayed to fight another day. Even now, consider what the republicans might be able to do if the Court repeatedly shot down their attepmts at anti-terrorism legislation. They really would go insane; they would throw everything they could at the problem, rule of law be damned. We clearly saw that attitude with respect to Terry Schiavo.
So just remember that the power of the Court is not absolute. They have to be very careful to avoid being made irrelevant, or being ignored. So some of the things they've done are actually theoretically 'wrong', but many of the 'wrong' decisions probably had to be that way for larger reasons.
I think this is actually a bit of a shortsighted way to look at the issue.
Consider the possibility that a change of perspective is required for us to elegantly represent string theory. Consider that maybe current string theory is working towards an elegant representation, but may just not quite have gotten there yet. I think both are possible. For instance, many thought that something was seriously wrong when so many different particles were discovered in the 80's. Eventually, they were able to deflate this complexity into combinations of quarks. A change in perspective radically simplified the picture.
There are many areas of math where a change of perspective can turn complexity into elegance. Trigonometry is just one example. Changing your perspective between trig functions and exponentials can greatly simplify things sometimes...
Thinking about a problem in cartesian, parametric, or radial coordinates can sometimes make it radically simpler or more elegant to solve.
My point really is that we should not judge the elegance of the mathematics completely based on the perspective we ourselves apply, and the notations we ourselves have used for it. We may yet discover that these perspectives or notations are less than ideal for use with the subject matter in question.
This is likely why you will be successful, but your son is less likely to be. Wealth goes to those with motivation and pragmatism. It is wasted by those who feel comfortable enough not to bust their asses all the time.
This is a standard, and sometimes good, way to do error handling in C, or cpp without exceptions.
Without going into it too much, it can be more efficient and practical in certain cases. Limited to such error handling, it's not really that bad, it's just old-skool.
This is by design. The Supreme Court has some of the facts, but without a full trial, they should not decide the final result.
Nor should they really be setting the law through ivory-tower guidelines, unless there is sufficient case law to make it abundantly clear they are right. Our system works best when the trial courts with the facts decide cases, and the appellate courts later develop rules based on those decisions. It is an evolutionary process, based in the facts of each situation.
On point 1, not really.
I rather would see it this way:
* Authority figures can run roughshod over the poor and/or uneducated, so long as they don't have a lawyer to represent them.
As for point 2, you're right, mostly. Parents shouldn't leave their kids to get tagged with something they don't deserve. But neither should they let it go. The kids should get the suspension or revocation of use privileges they deserve, plus get chewed out for being asshats by their parents.
I think it's time to say that that balance has shifted. Most people hacking into others' machines are not doing it for fun anymore.
How can we make this inference? Because hacking is not that fun anymore. Doing actual hacking has become the equivalent of doing petty crime. Anything interesting enough to be fun is probably more of a computer security research problem, and not often actually taken advantage of by the people who work on it.
Old skool hacking groups are giving powerpoint presentations on low-level network technology. What they're actually doing is research, because it's more fun than doing the hacking...
You are only right if there's an equal playing field. If we don't allow an equal playing field to foreign countries for our domestic markets, guess what? We have an advantage, and we effectively protect our own markets while skimming a bit off foreign companies profits from the U.S.
Whoever thought that it made more sense to give away a strategic advantage rather than maintain it was smoking crack.
What was it, Queen Victoria?, who said "I do not think it wise to give away that which we have."
I agree.
It may make sense for some people, but people should know that the government is likely to act in their own interests. If they have to choose between allowing a deduction and not allowing it, they will probably not allow it. If most people are as lazy and dumb as I think they are, they will just go along with 99% of what is done, and lose out.
If they make this choice with the proper information, that's fine though.