Sure. Go to a system based upon trade secrets. Our current system is set up so that the first person to a tech, even if it is the obvious next step, gets to have a monopoly on it. To make matters worse, they don't even need to develop the tech, just get a rough outline and then they can declare a monopoly. In a system based upon trade secrets (which we already have laws in place for), the basic idea is that you can merrily reverse engineer all you want, or if the solution is obvious simply go out and do it. You still have laws in place so that you can't steal ideas directly, but once an idea is out, it is out.
If you have a novel idea and want to cash in on it, before you show it to someone they sign an agreement that more or less gives you patent protection from that company. We actually already do this in parallel with the patent system. So, if I show my widget, you can't use anything you see, and if you do, you get brutalized by the courts. That way, small companies can still act as incubators. You would probably want to toughen up these laws if you eliminate patent protection, but the basic idea is sound and already being done.
For everyone else, it is a merry free-for-all. Industrial espionage is still very much illegal and I would likely jacked up the punishment for that, but otherwise, as soon as you develop something you, better start using it because the competition is going to be right behind you.
The cell phone industry is a great example of where this system would kick ass and take names. Apple isn't going to stop innovating because they can't patent some piece of technology that is going to be outdated in a couple of years. They won't even notice anything has changed except that their legal fees have gone down. For everyone else though, it means an explosion in the market. Now, any Silicon Valley startup can design their own cell phone. They can design it in the states, order the parts off the shelf from wherever, and have it assembled in China. The market would explode, volumes would go up, innovation would get blisteringly hot as everyone battles to eat a piece of the market pie, and prices would plummet. Instead of getting one size-fits-all phones, you would have an infinite number to pick from that would be customized for what it is you find to be worthwhile in a phone.
The whole point of patent law in the first place was to keep medieval guilds from holding onto technology and get the technology to spread. It was a trade off for the guilds. They have to worry less about security and get their government enforced monopoly, and in return the technology eventually gets out and published to the world. We don't need this any more.
We don't live in a time when spreading information is hard. We live in a time where setting up road blocks to spreading and using information is by far the most destructive thing we can do. To a medieval guild, a 20 year patent might be a perfectly reasonable amount of time. In modern society though, it might as well be a government granted monopoly from now until the end of time. 20 years ago we didn't have the fucking world wide web and we were running 386s on 2400 baud modems. My smart phone would have been considered a super computer and its data access speed capabilities better than an entire ISP. 20 years might as well be forever. Should we really be granting monopolies on technologies forever?
If you want to know why smart phones are $600+ a pop, crap like this is why. The patent arsenals these companies amass are there to destroy competition and nothing else. It isn't like Apple or Nokia would stop innovating if suddenly they didn't have patent protection. What it would mean is that 600 Silicon Valley startups could also jump into the cell phone game and drive the price into the dirt and innovation through the roof.
Smart phones are red hot. Everyone and their dog should be making these things using Chinese foundries. The fact that you need to be a multi-billion dollar company that can buy up patents and create your own arsenal (as Apple did) to touch the market means that patent law has effectively made this something only massive companies can do... not because of any great competitive advantage, but just due to government created legal blocks. Hell, even the companies currently in the game right now couldn't be in if they were not all cross licensing this crap, effectively making sure that no nasty upstarts can jump in offer up competition.
I'm happy Apple didn't lose, but the problem remains. Anyone without a few billion to their name an arsenal of patents is prevented from even putting a toe in the market. What a horrible waste.
Your skepticism of this guys is well founded. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that he knows jack shit about the semi-conductor industry and shows a profound lack of understanding of how these chips work.
Lets say you hit a hard physical limit on the size of transistors. Do you think that these chips are just one big pile of transistors? They are not. There are other components that need to shrink. Do you think that the design of the chips are optimal? They aren't. They are good enough. We can redesign them smaller.
Okay, lets say you hit the component limit and design limit. So now, you have a chip with the components as small as they can possibly and arranged perfectly so that they can not get any smaller. But wait! We forgot something. We currently build chips more or less in two dimensions. A chip might be a few mm wide and long, but it is only a few microns thick of actual functional device. Most of a 99% of the "chip" is bare silicon doing nothing other than acting as a support. The "device" piece that actually does stuff is only a layer few microns thick on the top of the chip. Layer another slab of transistors on top of the first slab and you suddenly just doubled your transistor count while making the entire package only slightly and imperceptibly taller. We already do this to a very limited extent, but we are not even close to having a chip that is a cube of nothing but functional stuff. Chips in real 3D is freaking hard.
Further, this all ignores the fact that even if you did hit some limit, it wouldn't mean we stop producing. All the stuff that needs chips still needs them. It just means that the focus for people who make things with chips shifts. If you really do hit a limit on ow cheap you can make a chip (and frankly, we are so far away from that point it is stupid to talk about it), it just means you now need to go after all of the other things. My phone isn't a fat slab because some microchip is too big or not fast enough. It is big because of big battery, radios, etc. Ever heard of MEMs? The semi-conductor industry hasn't even scratched the surface.
The whole dooms day scenario is sensationalist crap.
In the words of the awesome 80s flick WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play." Apple decided to play. They ban apps that are objectionable. Hell, Apple bans apps because they don't like how they use the volume key or they think your icon is ugly. As soon as they start making value judgments, they get to be judged on what they do and do not allow into the market. The simple alternative is just to play it like Google, allow everything, and only ban truly malicious code.
Personally, as much as I think those "gay cure" pieces of shit deserve to rot in hell (pity it isn't real) for the vast amounts of human suffering and misery they have inflicted upon the world, I also think that they should be allowed to preach their stupid. Then again, I also think it is okay if a camera app can use the volume control as a shutter button.
Where do you get that "we" don't understand that many people are too dumb to use an Android? "We" do understand and agree. Most people are dumb, or at the very least, uninterested. There is a reason why I am trolling around Slashdot instead of watching FoxNews or Regis and Kelly. While I don't think that "99% of the population" is as dumb as you seem to think they are, I certainly think that a substantial portion is. I'm not most people. So if I am not most people and I am one of those "tech geeks" (you say that like it is a bad thing) with an interest in technology, why the bloody fuck would I want a phone built for an idiot, and why would I give two shits if other of people want something simpler and more dumbed down? Why can't you iPhone fans understand that I don't give a shit if my mother can't operate my phone? It isn't for her. It is for me.
If you find technology scary, confusing, or just don't want to think about it, just get an iPhone. It is so locked down and idiot proof that I would happily hand one to my grandmother and feel pretty confident that she can't screw it up. If you are one of those "tech geeks" who finds technology exciting and interesting and you want to frig around with your device, get an Android.
As someone else already pointed out, ethical and legal are two vastly different things. If I grow some shrooms in my back yard, eat them, have a merry old time in my house harming no one, and then tell a cop what I did, I will find my ass in jail. Ethically, I clearly did nothing wrong. I did no harm to anyone and had a grand old time with myself. The cop doesn't give a shit, nor does the judge that enforces punishment, or politician who crafted the law. Despite having acted ethically, I'll still be spending some quality time behind bars and more or less having my life ruined.
The US has more laws than you literally can imagine. You break them all the time, some knowingly because they are stupid, and some without knowing because you can't read the literally millions of pages of law that we have crapped out. Hell, if the last three presidents were actually prosecuted for the JUST the drug laws they had broken, all three would have found themselves in jail for a few years instead of in the White House. Nail the average person for every shred of copyright infringment they have committed and most citizens would owe literally billions of dollars, and most techno-savvy teenagers would owe trillions.
Worry for your privacy, and worry about what the police are allowed to dig for. Someone given access to enough information on you WILL find a law you have broken. In a nation with so many laws that we make them faster than you can read, you are going to be royally fucked the day someone is able to place you under tight surveillance or (worse) data mine your past easily. When that happens, anyone with the power to prosecute is going to have the power to arbitrarily destroy any fellow human he wants, ethics be damned.
Give your grandmother an iPhone because she is ignorant and gullible. If you are not ignorant or technophobic and don't regularly fall for magazine subscription and timeshare scams, buy an Android.
Second, you mix like half a dozen bullshit numbers together.
Third, your bullshit numbers don't even fucking make sense. If iOS sold 99.4% of all smart phone apps in 2009, and the very next year they had their lunch eaten by apparently everyone and are down to 25%, I would say that they are pretty well fucked. Going from near 100% of the market to a quarter of it in a single year is a sure sign that you are flat dead. Better sell you stock in Apple and buy some in RIM, because they apparently had at least 2600% growth from 2009 to 2010 according to your clearly non-fucking-sense numbers.
I think the real issue here is that Nokia is trouble. Big as they are, their market share is sloughed off at an alarming rate. They are dying. Symbian is doomed. They are way behind in terms of technology and certainly had to make some change. They really had only two viable options. They could either jump into the Android market and join the blood bath, or go to Microsoft.
Going into the Android market would have meant going back to what they were doing half a decade ago, which is to say that they compete on hardware and price. Plowing into the Android market means that you are one competitor among many and that you are in a commodity market. This isn't some place Nokia has never been. They did their best when they were slugging it out on in the cheap cell phone market. It is scary for Nokia in that every time a customer goes to buy a phone there is nothing to differentiate Nokia other than price, hardware, and reputation, but this is a market Nokia knows and did well in. Nokia is afraid that all things being equal, when a consumer is presented with a list of options, Nokia is not going to be offering the best hardware at the best price with the best reputation. Getting in bed with Android is basically a declaration that you think you can make the cheapest, best, highest quality piece of hardware and that you can win on the merit of what you have done with the hardware.
The other option was to jump in bed with Microsoft. Getting into bed with Microsoft means that you try and win by promoting a platform. You are trying to get people to buy a Nokia phone not because it is cheap, the hardware is good, or because Nokia has a good reputation for quality, but because the person in question wants a Microsoft phone. Nokia is essential terrified of competing in the hardware market, and so is going to link their desirability to software which they don't control control.
Personally, I think their plan is insane. Microsoft is lagging well behind Apple and is light years behind Android. Stuff Android has been doing for years, and things Apple has been doing for a year are still not implemented on WiMo7. Maybe Microsoft is going to come blazing ahead of the technology pack, but I really doubt it. It would take a pretty extreme overhaul of the OS to get within technological striking distance of Apple or Android. Microsoft just doesn't show a capacity for rapid development that Android thrives on. Apple isn't so extreme in their rapid development as Android, but they have shown a capacity to develop at a pretty moderate pace and maintain a very stable OS. Microsoft has shown no capacity to develop at stability and moderate pace as Apple does, nor at the rapid and frantic pace that Google pushes. MS is behind and shows no signs of catching up. None of their non-phone products show that they the management potential to develop like Google or Apple does.
I think Nokia has hooked their wagon to a dead horse. They are going to try and win in a market based upon an OS, and the OS they have picked shows no signs that it can even begin to close the gap, much less maintain pace.
Consider it this way. Lets say I am poor and I spend 80% of my income on things I need to live (shelter, food, gas, heat, etc). Lets say that sales tax increases the cost of those things so that I spend 90% (a roughly 12% income tax) of my income on things I need to live. The amount of extra disposable income I have is cut in half by the sales tax.
Now consider someone who is rich. They spend 5% of their disposable income on things they need to live. That same sales tax increases the total amount they spend on things they need to 5.6%. It essentially has no impact on what they have left for luxuries.
So for the poor person, the tax has a drastic impact on the amount of luxuries they can consume. What they can consume suddenly gets cut in half. For the rich person, it has a negligible influence. While they might be technically be paying the same rate, it is going to have a disproportionate impact on the life of someone who is poor than someone who is rich.
You can argue about the justice of such a thing, but clearly, a sales tax is going to hurt someone who is poor much more than someone who is rich.
That's quite racist and seriously underestimates the enemy. For example, Mohamed Atta was well-educated and studied architecture. al-Qaeda was well-funded and headed up by a son of an extremely wealthy businessman with ties to royalty.
No, at worst it is culturalist. Yes, I am very happily judging Afghan sheep herders as not worthy opponents. That "scary culture" in question managed that managed to sink Afghanistan's per capita GDP to one of the absolute lowest in the world. Compare them to the Soviet-fucking-empire that had a few hundred million well educated people, the resources of a sizable chunk of the world, and enough technological merit to launch a few thousand nuclear tipped missiles at the drop of the hat, and Al-Qaeda is scary only to pampered cowards. It is like facing down a tank, and then pissing yourself when a small infant with a nerf bat shows up.
They completely wiped out internationally recognized office buildings that were part of the crown jewels of New York City -- they changed the fucking skyline. They flew a plane into the Pentagon. These were high-valued targets, not just some random Joe getting into his accident on his way home from work.
As for actual property damage, your analogy is way off. This paper [rms.com] estimates the World Trade Center losses at around $20 billion. For hurricanes, this paper [noaa.gov] shows a mean loss of $7 billion for a Category 3 hurricane -- not exactly minor. Categories 2 and 1 show mean losses of $2 billion and $1 billion.
Woohp-di-fucking-do. 20 billion against a 14 trillion dollar economy? We literally lose vastly more money than that each year by accident. Those "crown jewels" of the New York skyline could have been rebuilt in a couple of years if we were not busy multiplying 20 billlion dollars worth of lost assets into a few TRILLION dollars worth of lost assets. In terms of financial damage, the terrorist inflicted a pin brick (20 billion), and we turned around and chopped our arm off (many trillions). We could have a 9/11 every single fucking month from 9/11 to now and the property damage will still be a drop in the bucket compared to our own cowardly self inflicted wounds.
You mean like the concentration camps that we rounded up American citizens of Japanese descent into? Or how about the Sedition Act of 1918?
Too recent? Surely the Founders wouldn't tread on us? How about the Alien and Sedition Acts from 1798? Thank you, John Adams.
First, we were actually facing REAL threats so you can almost give them a pass on acting like cowards in those cases. Second, and far more importantly, we pulled back from our cowardly ways in all of those cases within three years, recognized we had acted like cowards, and swore to never do it again. We are going on 10 years and still pissing our selves. It has been 10 years and instead of backing off as we come to our senses, we continue to beg, plead, and mew for the government to take our liberty and save us from the horrible scary terrorist. Americans can't get on an airplane without pissing themselves in terror and demanding that the government strip search everyone.
Those threats haven't been ignored. They've been getting press and funding all along.
Fuck that.
NCIs entire research budget for 2009? 4.97 billion plus another 1.26 billion from the stimulus. The budget for defense? $1.01 and $1.35 TRILLION in fiscal year 2010. Hrm, cancer kills basically every single fucking American who isn't killed by heart disease and we spend fuck all on it. Terrorist kill fewer people than suicides or accidental drownings and we spend a trillion dollars each year. Americans are litterally more likely to kill themselves because they hate their own life than to be killed by a terrorist, and yet we piss away billions running around in circles and crying like little girls because we are so struck stupid with fear of terrorist. Fucking awesome.
Um, okay. You can pass on my TED talks. Otherwise, the point stands.
Molybdenum is generally gathered as a byproduct of other mining operations. The "free" molybdenum in soil that plants uses is utterly unaffected when you tear open a mountain to get at it. The original point of "OMG BUT PLANTS USE IT!" was dumb and reactionary. Hell, just re-read the original post if you are in doubt. This is like if someone declared that they found a novel use for nitrogen and someone else freaked out be cause OMFG nitrogen is critical for all life!!!11!!
There are actual legitimate road blocks to using molybdenum in place of silicon. OMFG the plants!11!!! isn't one of them.
I'll keep that in mind before I strip mine any farms for molybdenum. Otherwise, I am pretty sure the plants inside of the middle of a mountain are not going to mind.
There are countless stupid things you could do to try and minimize the risk of harm. You could mandate that speed limits can not be higher than 30 and that anyone caught breaking the speed limit gets a 10 year jail sentence. That would pretty much end car based fatalities. If you really want to save lives, you could make food that is bad for you illegal. You could bring back alcohol prohibition. You could do all of these things and save lives. Of course, you would be pissed when it takes thee hours to get to work, you can't enjoy a chocolate chip cookie, and having a pint gets you tossed in jail.
There are trade offs. The best way to deal with any such social ill is to start by targeting people that do harm. Perhaps after you have ruthlessly gone after people who do harm, then you start to think about collectively punishing the rest of society. We have hardly been 'ruthless' in how we go after drunk drivers. American laws are extremely weak. How about we target criminals first, then go and brutalize the rest of the citizenry?
The tubes say that each year roughly 20,000 people die in alcohol related car accidents. That is tragic for sure, but it is also only 0.006% of the US population. Now, if you are willing to force every single person who owns a car, regardless of their record of responsibility, to install a device that, besides being a pain in the ass, probably costs a couple of hundred dollars, and consider that a reasonable way to reduce the risk of death, you have just set a very fucking low threshold to doing stupid and asinine things.
As an American, you are almost certainly going to die of heart disease or cancer. Those two alone claim over a million lives each year. Drunk driving sucks for sure, but it is small change in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't even make the top 10 list of ways to die America. It well below blowing your own brains out intentionally. As Americans, we need to get a fucking grip on reality and realize what are the real dangers in this world. The terrorist are not going to kill you. Drunk drivers are very unlikely to kill you. All of the stupid shit that you fear and mew to the government to save you from WILL NOT FUCKING KILL YOU*. You are going to die when your own body turns cancerous or when your heart clots up. Further, these two things are probably going to happen to you because you ate too much fucking food and didn't exerciser enough. If you want to fear something, fear that. Beg the government to throw money at those things save you from those REAL killers. Instead of pissing away a few hundred dollars annoying everyone who gets up to go work in the morning without downing a few shots of vodka, save the money, and spend it on safer cars or research into real killers like heart disease and cancer.
The vast majority of people don't drive drunk. You don't punish the entire population for the action of a few. I live in the Northeast. It was -5F (-15 C) the other day. I wore my fucking gloves at all times. I never drive with any alcohol in my system, period. I picked where I live for the fact that I can walk wherever I need to go, except for work. If I want to go drink myself into oblivion, it is a short walk away to get the job done. No car is needed. It is stupid, wasteful, annoying, and flatly unfair that I have to shoulder the cost of this stupid system, suffer my car being incapacitated if it fails, and have to take my damned gloves off every fucking morning in the sub-zero cold to prove to my car that no, I didn't wake up and do a few shots before work.
If you want to install these things on first time drunk driver offenders, I am all for it. Installing these stupid things on the car of every single citizen on the other hand is wasteful, insulting, and frankly, fucking stupid. Save the money you were going to waste on this asinine system on something that might actually be helpful. A sleep detection system that you can fucking turn off if it is malfunctioning or not working for you would be wonderful. Better yet, just take all of the money you were about to piss away and use it to improve health care, or make better roads, give the damned money back, or do something that benefits all citizens, not punishes the vast majority because of the actions of a few.
Pearl Harbor was a real threat. A nation that had already taken out a handful of allies and were on their way to occupying a large portion of the world attacked. It shocked us into standing up and helping our allies beat the snot out of the Axis powers which were a true existential threat to US and certainly its allies.
9/11 was when a handful of sheep herders armed with box cutters killed fewer people than we lose to accidental drowning each year and did property damage that is pittance next to one of the many minor hurricanes that hit the US each year. This shocked us into the most cowardly display Americans have ever managed. We ratcheting back liberties we had defended for a few hundred years in the face of much scarier opponents, and then precoded to spend money as fast as humanly possibly, build new worthless bureaucracies, and implement countless asinine 'security' measures against a threat that ranks right up there with being struck by lightening. We did this, all the while ignoring real threats that actually kill millions of Americans... like cancer, heart disease, and eating too much fucking food.
Pearl Harbor was a tragic catalyst that moved the US to action that it should have taken earlier. 9/11 was when we pissed ourself in the face of sheep herders armed with box cutters and ratcheted back our civil liberties and threw money in the air in terror of something that IS NOT GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU. If you are an American, you are going to die a very boring death due to eating too much. If you are very lucky, you might die in a car accident. The fucking terrorist are not going to get you. Pearl Harbor was tragic a moment that brought us to action. 9/11 was the day we pissed ourselves and surrendered to sheep herders. Please don't try and draw parallels between the two.
What is happening here is that a hyped company is trying to get investments in it without opening the books and disclosing WTF it is they are actually doing. It is shady as hell. GS is looking for a way to let FB keep their massive information asymmetry. There isn't an economic theory alive that endorses massive information asymmetry as an efficient or "good" (no matter how you define good) way of allocating resources. There is a legitimate argument to be had that SOx goes too far or does it wrong, but FB has opted for complete and total opaqueness and has offered up absolutely no information on what is on the books.
I am all for people being able to make risky investments. I am all for reduce regulation with the exception that if you are going to be classed as a fucking bank, you need act like a boring ass bank, not a venture capital firm. That said, in addition to lighter regulations on financial firms that want to do risky things, they need to submit to openess and transparency. The whole point of our markets are to allocate resources. This is their job and nothing else. They are not running high stakes gambling rings. Resources are better allocated with information. Yes, this might ruin some dumbass pyramid schemes and this casino style investing that GS is offering where you can buy shares in a company that refuses to disclose any financial information, but that isn't the fucking point of investment. The point of investment is to move capital to where it will do the most good.
Frankly, I shed no tears that this missed "opportunity" to blindly invest in a company with closed books. Oh shit, we missed a pull on a Vegas slot machine. Shed me some tears. There are problems with US regulations, demanding that markets that are supposed allocate resources actually have to supply information on said resource instead of relying on the amped up "feelings" of traders isn't one of them.
No, they aren't. The moon is tidally locked with Earth. That means that the moon always faces Earth, not that it always faces the sun. This is why you always see the same face of the moon. What part of the moon is getting hit by the sun does indeed change. The "dark side of the moon" is the side Earth doesn't see, but the Sun sees it all the time.
Grown up people and their BB's just laugh all the way to the kitchen with the pizza and the keys in their pants pockets.
For the record I don't own any of them, but I'd go with BB if I need to. BB people seem to be busy doing stuff rather than commenting how cool is their $marthphone and how $other_people FAIL for not being enlightened like them.
If having a gimpy device a few years behind the technology curve makes you an 'adult', I'll be childish. BB people don't engage in debates on phone technology because they clearly don't give a shit about phone technology. If they did, they wouldn't be using a BB which is, by any metric, an inferior device to an Android or iOS phone.
A lack of interest in technology isn't a sign of being an 'adult'. It is a sign of being uninterested and nothing else. Personally, I would be weary about how caviler you are about your lack of interest in technology. In the professional world people care about results. Being able to harness a computer early and often due to my interest in technology let me steamroll over more than a couple of competitors who were slow to understand, harness, and utilize technology. I can think of more than one unemployed person who probably wishes that they had had more interest in 'childish' things after getting run down by someone half their age.
Symbian never gets mentioned because 90% of the Symbian phones would be called "feature phones" in the US. The line is fuzzy, and I hear Nokia is desperately trying to jump back into the game, but if you gave most people who have an Android or iPhone a Symbian phone and told them it was a smart phone, they would laugh at you. Most Symbian phones don't pass the "this is a smart phone? lolz" test. You can dice it up any way you want... but in the US the assumption is that when you talk about a smart phone, it has to be an actual smart phone with a data plan where you might end up using some data. Maybe this isn't fair to Symbian, but Symbian clearly is not in the same class as Android or iOS. Hell, Blackberry is just barely in the same class with Android and iOS.
Clearly you don't own a smart phone. Android has no more ads than any other piece of the web. If anything, it has less. If you get an application for free and it will probably have an easily ignored ad bar somewhere that you can turn off by paying a dollar or two. The phone doesn't push ads to you, pop them up on your home screen, or anything of that nature.
Uh, no. It is perfectly accurate. It just depends if you are a consumer or a stock holder. If you are a stock holder, knowing that iPhone has more sales and bigger profit margins than the rest of the individual makers is important. If you are a consumer, knowing that there are a shit ton of competing phones with a single operating system and ecosystem is important. One assumes that Slashdot is not the business section, so what people care about is the largest platform with the most phones. Apple clearly is not that. They have almost zero selection in terms of phones, and they are not the largest ecosystem.
Next time I get a new Android phone, I'll have dozens of phones to pick from that all of my stuff will happily migrate over to. The iPhone users get the choice of the current generation phone, or the old generation phone which they are busy patching to its destruction. From a consumer perspective, having the most phones running Android, with the greatest phone selection, with brutal competition by multiple hardware makers is a GOOD thing. For stock holders, Apple milking the crap out of a minority of consumers and scoring high profit margins off of them and creating an ecosystem where others can't compete is a good thing. Guess which one of those two the Slashdot crowd cares about?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. Go to a system based upon trade secrets. Our current system is set up so that the first person to a tech, even if it is the obvious next step, gets to have a monopoly on it. To make matters worse, they don't even need to develop the tech, just get a rough outline and then they can declare a monopoly. In a system based upon trade secrets (which we already have laws in place for), the basic idea is that you can merrily reverse engineer all you want, or if the solution is obvious simply go out and do it. You still have laws in place so that you can't steal ideas directly, but once an idea is out, it is out.
If you have a novel idea and want to cash in on it, before you show it to someone they sign an agreement that more or less gives you patent protection from that company. We actually already do this in parallel with the patent system. So, if I show my widget, you can't use anything you see, and if you do, you get brutalized by the courts. That way, small companies can still act as incubators. You would probably want to toughen up these laws if you eliminate patent protection, but the basic idea is sound and already being done.
For everyone else, it is a merry free-for-all. Industrial espionage is still very much illegal and I would likely jacked up the punishment for that, but otherwise, as soon as you develop something you, better start using it because the competition is going to be right behind you.
The cell phone industry is a great example of where this system would kick ass and take names. Apple isn't going to stop innovating because they can't patent some piece of technology that is going to be outdated in a couple of years. They won't even notice anything has changed except that their legal fees have gone down. For everyone else though, it means an explosion in the market. Now, any Silicon Valley startup can design their own cell phone. They can design it in the states, order the parts off the shelf from wherever, and have it assembled in China. The market would explode, volumes would go up, innovation would get blisteringly hot as everyone battles to eat a piece of the market pie, and prices would plummet. Instead of getting one size-fits-all phones, you would have an infinite number to pick from that would be customized for what it is you find to be worthwhile in a phone.
The whole point of patent law in the first place was to keep medieval guilds from holding onto technology and get the technology to spread. It was a trade off for the guilds. They have to worry less about security and get their government enforced monopoly, and in return the technology eventually gets out and published to the world. We don't need this any more.
We don't live in a time when spreading information is hard. We live in a time where setting up road blocks to spreading and using information is by far the most destructive thing we can do. To a medieval guild, a 20 year patent might be a perfectly reasonable amount of time. In modern society though, it might as well be a government granted monopoly from now until the end of time. 20 years ago we didn't have the fucking world wide web and we were running 386s on 2400 baud modems. My smart phone would have been considered a super computer and its data access speed capabilities better than an entire ISP. 20 years might as well be forever. Should we really be granting monopolies on technologies forever?
If you want to know why smart phones are $600+ a pop, crap like this is why. The patent arsenals these companies amass are there to destroy competition and nothing else. It isn't like Apple or Nokia would stop innovating if suddenly they didn't have patent protection. What it would mean is that 600 Silicon Valley startups could also jump into the cell phone game and drive the price into the dirt and innovation through the roof.
Smart phones are red hot. Everyone and their dog should be making these things using Chinese foundries. The fact that you need to be a multi-billion dollar company that can buy up patents and create your own arsenal (as Apple did) to touch the market means that patent law has effectively made this something only massive companies can do... not because of any great competitive advantage, but just due to government created legal blocks. Hell, even the companies currently in the game right now couldn't be in if they were not all cross licensing this crap, effectively making sure that no nasty upstarts can jump in offer up competition.
I'm happy Apple didn't lose, but the problem remains. Anyone without a few billion to their name an arsenal of patents is prevented from even putting a toe in the market. What a horrible waste.
Your skepticism of this guys is well founded. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that he knows jack shit about the semi-conductor industry and shows a profound lack of understanding of how these chips work.
Lets say you hit a hard physical limit on the size of transistors. Do you think that these chips are just one big pile of transistors? They are not. There are other components that need to shrink. Do you think that the design of the chips are optimal? They aren't. They are good enough. We can redesign them smaller.
Okay, lets say you hit the component limit and design limit. So now, you have a chip with the components as small as they can possibly and arranged perfectly so that they can not get any smaller. But wait! We forgot something. We currently build chips more or less in two dimensions. A chip might be a few mm wide and long, but it is only a few microns thick of actual functional device. Most of a 99% of the "chip" is bare silicon doing nothing other than acting as a support. The "device" piece that actually does stuff is only a layer few microns thick on the top of the chip. Layer another slab of transistors on top of the first slab and you suddenly just doubled your transistor count while making the entire package only slightly and imperceptibly taller. We already do this to a very limited extent, but we are not even close to having a chip that is a cube of nothing but functional stuff. Chips in real 3D is freaking hard.
Further, this all ignores the fact that even if you did hit some limit, it wouldn't mean we stop producing. All the stuff that needs chips still needs them. It just means that the focus for people who make things with chips shifts. If you really do hit a limit on ow cheap you can make a chip (and frankly, we are so far away from that point it is stupid to talk about it), it just means you now need to go after all of the other things. My phone isn't a fat slab because some microchip is too big or not fast enough. It is big because of big battery, radios, etc. Ever heard of MEMs? The semi-conductor industry hasn't even scratched the surface.
The whole dooms day scenario is sensationalist crap.
Sorry Southern US, maybe next year.
P.S. Austin, TX isn't in the south. It is San Francisco colonizing you.
In the words of the awesome 80s flick WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play." Apple decided to play. They ban apps that are objectionable. Hell, Apple bans apps because they don't like how they use the volume key or they think your icon is ugly. As soon as they start making value judgments, they get to be judged on what they do and do not allow into the market. The simple alternative is just to play it like Google, allow everything, and only ban truly malicious code.
Personally, as much as I think those "gay cure" pieces of shit deserve to rot in hell (pity it isn't real) for the vast amounts of human suffering and misery they have inflicted upon the world, I also think that they should be allowed to preach their stupid. Then again, I also think it is okay if a camera app can use the volume control as a shutter button.
...is like fucking for virginity!
Worth a shot? Better than fucking yourself?
Where do you get that "we" don't understand that many people are too dumb to use an Android? "We" do understand and agree. Most people are dumb, or at the very least, uninterested. There is a reason why I am trolling around Slashdot instead of watching FoxNews or Regis and Kelly. While I don't think that "99% of the population" is as dumb as you seem to think they are, I certainly think that a substantial portion is. I'm not most people. So if I am not most people and I am one of those "tech geeks" (you say that like it is a bad thing) with an interest in technology, why the bloody fuck would I want a phone built for an idiot, and why would I give two shits if other of people want something simpler and more dumbed down? Why can't you iPhone fans understand that I don't give a shit if my mother can't operate my phone? It isn't for her. It is for me.
If you find technology scary, confusing, or just don't want to think about it, just get an iPhone. It is so locked down and idiot proof that I would happily hand one to my grandmother and feel pretty confident that she can't screw it up. If you are one of those "tech geeks" who finds technology exciting and interesting and you want to frig around with your device, get an Android.
As someone else already pointed out, ethical and legal are two vastly different things. If I grow some shrooms in my back yard, eat them, have a merry old time in my house harming no one, and then tell a cop what I did, I will find my ass in jail. Ethically, I clearly did nothing wrong. I did no harm to anyone and had a grand old time with myself. The cop doesn't give a shit, nor does the judge that enforces punishment, or politician who crafted the law. Despite having acted ethically, I'll still be spending some quality time behind bars and more or less having my life ruined.
The US has more laws than you literally can imagine. You break them all the time, some knowingly because they are stupid, and some without knowing because you can't read the literally millions of pages of law that we have crapped out. Hell, if the last three presidents were actually prosecuted for the JUST the drug laws they had broken, all three would have found themselves in jail for a few years instead of in the White House. Nail the average person for every shred of copyright infringment they have committed and most citizens would owe literally billions of dollars, and most techno-savvy teenagers would owe trillions.
Worry for your privacy, and worry about what the police are allowed to dig for. Someone given access to enough information on you WILL find a law you have broken. In a nation with so many laws that we make them faster than you can read, you are going to be royally fucked the day someone is able to place you under tight surveillance or (worse) data mine your past easily. When that happens, anyone with the power to prosecute is going to have the power to arbitrarily destroy any fellow human he wants, ethics be damned.
Give your grandmother an iPhone because she is ignorant and gullible. If you are not ignorant or technophobic and don't regularly fall for magazine subscription and timeshare scams, buy an Android.
Troll.
First, cite a fucking source. I call bullshit.
Second, you mix like half a dozen bullshit numbers together.
Third, your bullshit numbers don't even fucking make sense. If iOS sold 99.4% of all smart phone apps in 2009, and the very next year they had their lunch eaten by apparently everyone and are down to 25%, I would say that they are pretty well fucked. Going from near 100% of the market to a quarter of it in a single year is a sure sign that you are flat dead. Better sell you stock in Apple and buy some in RIM, because they apparently had at least 2600% growth from 2009 to 2010 according to your clearly non-fucking-sense numbers.
I think the real issue here is that Nokia is trouble. Big as they are, their market share is sloughed off at an alarming rate. They are dying. Symbian is doomed. They are way behind in terms of technology and certainly had to make some change. They really had only two viable options. They could either jump into the Android market and join the blood bath, or go to Microsoft.
Going into the Android market would have meant going back to what they were doing half a decade ago, which is to say that they compete on hardware and price. Plowing into the Android market means that you are one competitor among many and that you are in a commodity market. This isn't some place Nokia has never been. They did their best when they were slugging it out on in the cheap cell phone market. It is scary for Nokia in that every time a customer goes to buy a phone there is nothing to differentiate Nokia other than price, hardware, and reputation, but this is a market Nokia knows and did well in. Nokia is afraid that all things being equal, when a consumer is presented with a list of options, Nokia is not going to be offering the best hardware at the best price with the best reputation. Getting in bed with Android is basically a declaration that you think you can make the cheapest, best, highest quality piece of hardware and that you can win on the merit of what you have done with the hardware.
The other option was to jump in bed with Microsoft. Getting into bed with Microsoft means that you try and win by promoting a platform. You are trying to get people to buy a Nokia phone not because it is cheap, the hardware is good, or because Nokia has a good reputation for quality, but because the person in question wants a Microsoft phone. Nokia is essential terrified of competing in the hardware market, and so is going to link their desirability to software which they don't control control.
Personally, I think their plan is insane. Microsoft is lagging well behind Apple and is light years behind Android. Stuff Android has been doing for years, and things Apple has been doing for a year are still not implemented on WiMo7. Maybe Microsoft is going to come blazing ahead of the technology pack, but I really doubt it. It would take a pretty extreme overhaul of the OS to get within technological striking distance of Apple or Android. Microsoft just doesn't show a capacity for rapid development that Android thrives on. Apple isn't so extreme in their rapid development as Android, but they have shown a capacity to develop at a pretty moderate pace and maintain a very stable OS. Microsoft has shown no capacity to develop at stability and moderate pace as Apple does, nor at the rapid and frantic pace that Google pushes. MS is behind and shows no signs of catching up. None of their non-phone products show that they the management potential to develop like Google or Apple does.
I think Nokia has hooked their wagon to a dead horse. They are going to try and win in a market based upon an OS, and the OS they have picked shows no signs that it can even begin to close the gap, much less maintain pace.
Consider it this way. Lets say I am poor and I spend 80% of my income on things I need to live (shelter, food, gas, heat, etc). Lets say that sales tax increases the cost of those things so that I spend 90% (a roughly 12% income tax) of my income on things I need to live. The amount of extra disposable income I have is cut in half by the sales tax.
Now consider someone who is rich. They spend 5% of their disposable income on things they need to live. That same sales tax increases the total amount they spend on things they need to 5.6%. It essentially has no impact on what they have left for luxuries.
So for the poor person, the tax has a drastic impact on the amount of luxuries they can consume. What they can consume suddenly gets cut in half. For the rich person, it has a negligible influence. While they might be technically be paying the same rate, it is going to have a disproportionate impact on the life of someone who is poor than someone who is rich.
You can argue about the justice of such a thing, but clearly, a sales tax is going to hurt someone who is poor much more than someone who is rich.
That's quite racist and seriously underestimates the enemy. For example, Mohamed Atta was well-educated and studied architecture. al-Qaeda was well-funded and headed up by a son of an extremely wealthy businessman with ties to royalty.
No, at worst it is culturalist. Yes, I am very happily judging Afghan sheep herders as not worthy opponents. That "scary culture" in question managed that managed to sink Afghanistan's per capita GDP to one of the absolute lowest in the world. Compare them to the Soviet-fucking-empire that had a few hundred million well educated people, the resources of a sizable chunk of the world, and enough technological merit to launch a few thousand nuclear tipped missiles at the drop of the hat, and Al-Qaeda is scary only to pampered cowards. It is like facing down a tank, and then pissing yourself when a small infant with a nerf bat shows up.
They completely wiped out internationally recognized office buildings that were part of the crown jewels of New York City -- they changed the fucking skyline. They flew a plane into the Pentagon. These were high-valued targets, not just some random Joe getting into his accident on his way home from work.
As for actual property damage, your analogy is way off. This paper [rms.com] estimates the World Trade Center losses at around $20 billion. For hurricanes, this paper [noaa.gov] shows a mean loss of $7 billion for a Category 3 hurricane -- not exactly minor. Categories 2 and 1 show mean losses of $2 billion and $1 billion.
Woohp-di-fucking-do. 20 billion against a 14 trillion dollar economy? We literally lose vastly more money than that each year by accident. Those "crown jewels" of the New York skyline could have been rebuilt in a couple of years if we were not busy multiplying 20 billlion dollars worth of lost assets into a few TRILLION dollars worth of lost assets. In terms of financial damage, the terrorist inflicted a pin brick (20 billion), and we turned around and chopped our arm off (many trillions). We could have a 9/11 every single fucking month from 9/11 to now and the property damage will still be a drop in the bucket compared to our own cowardly self inflicted wounds.
You mean like the concentration camps that we rounded up American citizens of Japanese descent into? Or how about the Sedition Act of 1918?
Too recent? Surely the Founders wouldn't tread on us? How about the Alien and Sedition Acts from 1798? Thank you, John Adams.
First, we were actually facing REAL threats so you can almost give them a pass on acting like cowards in those cases. Second, and far more importantly, we pulled back from our cowardly ways in all of those cases within three years, recognized we had acted like cowards, and swore to never do it again. We are going on 10 years and still pissing our selves. It has been 10 years and instead of backing off as we come to our senses, we continue to beg, plead, and mew for the government to take our liberty and save us from the horrible scary terrorist. Americans can't get on an airplane without pissing themselves in terror and demanding that the government strip search everyone.
Those threats haven't been ignored. They've been getting press and funding all along.
Fuck that.
NCIs entire research budget for 2009? 4.97 billion plus another 1.26 billion from the stimulus. The budget for defense? $1.01 and $1.35 TRILLION in fiscal year 2010. Hrm, cancer kills basically every single fucking American who isn't killed by heart disease and we spend fuck all on it. Terrorist kill fewer people than suicides or accidental drownings and we spend a trillion dollars each year. Americans are litterally more likely to kill themselves because they hate their own life than to be killed by a terrorist, and yet we piss away billions running around in circles and crying like little girls because we are so struck stupid with fear of terrorist. Fucking awesome.
Um, okay. You can pass on my TED talks. Otherwise, the point stands.
Molybdenum is generally gathered as a byproduct of other mining operations. The "free" molybdenum in soil that plants uses is utterly unaffected when you tear open a mountain to get at it. The original point of "OMG BUT PLANTS USE IT!" was dumb and reactionary. Hell, just re-read the original post if you are in doubt. This is like if someone declared that they found a novel use for nitrogen and someone else freaked out be cause OMFG nitrogen is critical for all life!!!11!!
There are actual legitimate road blocks to using molybdenum in place of silicon. OMFG the plants!11!!! isn't one of them.
I'll keep that in mind before I strip mine any farms for molybdenum. Otherwise, I am pretty sure the plants inside of the middle of a mountain are not going to mind.
There are countless stupid things you could do to try and minimize the risk of harm. You could mandate that speed limits can not be higher than 30 and that anyone caught breaking the speed limit gets a 10 year jail sentence. That would pretty much end car based fatalities. If you really want to save lives, you could make food that is bad for you illegal. You could bring back alcohol prohibition. You could do all of these things and save lives. Of course, you would be pissed when it takes thee hours to get to work, you can't enjoy a chocolate chip cookie, and having a pint gets you tossed in jail.
There are trade offs. The best way to deal with any such social ill is to start by targeting people that do harm. Perhaps after you have ruthlessly gone after people who do harm, then you start to think about collectively punishing the rest of society. We have hardly been 'ruthless' in how we go after drunk drivers. American laws are extremely weak. How about we target criminals first, then go and brutalize the rest of the citizenry?
The tubes say that each year roughly 20,000 people die in alcohol related car accidents. That is tragic for sure, but it is also only 0.006% of the US population. Now, if you are willing to force every single person who owns a car, regardless of their record of responsibility, to install a device that, besides being a pain in the ass, probably costs a couple of hundred dollars, and consider that a reasonable way to reduce the risk of death, you have just set a very fucking low threshold to doing stupid and asinine things.
As an American, you are almost certainly going to die of heart disease or cancer. Those two alone claim over a million lives each year. Drunk driving sucks for sure, but it is small change in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't even make the top 10 list of ways to die America. It well below blowing your own brains out intentionally. As Americans, we need to get a fucking grip on reality and realize what are the real dangers in this world. The terrorist are not going to kill you. Drunk drivers are very unlikely to kill you. All of the stupid shit that you fear and mew to the government to save you from WILL NOT FUCKING KILL YOU*. You are going to die when your own body turns cancerous or when your heart clots up. Further, these two things are probably going to happen to you because you ate too much fucking food and didn't exerciser enough. If you want to fear something, fear that. Beg the government to throw money at those things save you from those REAL killers. Instead of pissing away a few hundred dollars annoying everyone who gets up to go work in the morning without downing a few shots of vodka, save the money, and spend it on safer cars or research into real killers like heart disease and cancer.
*...probably. Hey, shit happens.
The vast majority of people don't drive drunk. You don't punish the entire population for the action of a few. I live in the Northeast. It was -5F (-15 C) the other day. I wore my fucking gloves at all times. I never drive with any alcohol in my system, period. I picked where I live for the fact that I can walk wherever I need to go, except for work. If I want to go drink myself into oblivion, it is a short walk away to get the job done. No car is needed. It is stupid, wasteful, annoying, and flatly unfair that I have to shoulder the cost of this stupid system, suffer my car being incapacitated if it fails, and have to take my damned gloves off every fucking morning in the sub-zero cold to prove to my car that no, I didn't wake up and do a few shots before work.
If you want to install these things on first time drunk driver offenders, I am all for it. Installing these stupid things on the car of every single citizen on the other hand is wasteful, insulting, and frankly, fucking stupid. Save the money you were going to waste on this asinine system on something that might actually be helpful. A sleep detection system that you can fucking turn off if it is malfunctioning or not working for you would be wonderful. Better yet, just take all of the money you were about to piss away and use it to improve health care, or make better roads, give the damned money back, or do something that benefits all citizens, not punishes the vast majority because of the actions of a few.
Pearl Harbor was a real threat. A nation that had already taken out a handful of allies and were on their way to occupying a large portion of the world attacked. It shocked us into standing up and helping our allies beat the snot out of the Axis powers which were a true existential threat to US and certainly its allies.
9/11 was when a handful of sheep herders armed with box cutters killed fewer people than we lose to accidental drowning each year and did property damage that is pittance next to one of the many minor hurricanes that hit the US each year. This shocked us into the most cowardly display Americans have ever managed. We ratcheting back liberties we had defended for a few hundred years in the face of much scarier opponents, and then precoded to spend money as fast as humanly possibly, build new worthless bureaucracies, and implement countless asinine 'security' measures against a threat that ranks right up there with being struck by lightening. We did this, all the while ignoring real threats that actually kill millions of Americans... like cancer, heart disease, and eating too much fucking food.
Pearl Harbor was a tragic catalyst that moved the US to action that it should have taken earlier. 9/11 was when we pissed ourself in the face of sheep herders armed with box cutters and ratcheted back our civil liberties and threw money in the air in terror of something that IS NOT GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU. If you are an American, you are going to die a very boring death due to eating too much. If you are very lucky, you might die in a car accident. The fucking terrorist are not going to get you. Pearl Harbor was tragic a moment that brought us to action. 9/11 was the day we pissed ourselves and surrendered to sheep herders. Please don't try and draw parallels between the two.
Bullshit.
What is happening here is that a hyped company is trying to get investments in it without opening the books and disclosing WTF it is they are actually doing. It is shady as hell. GS is looking for a way to let FB keep their massive information asymmetry. There isn't an economic theory alive that endorses massive information asymmetry as an efficient or "good" (no matter how you define good) way of allocating resources. There is a legitimate argument to be had that SOx goes too far or does it wrong, but FB has opted for complete and total opaqueness and has offered up absolutely no information on what is on the books.
I am all for people being able to make risky investments. I am all for reduce regulation with the exception that if you are going to be classed as a fucking bank, you need act like a boring ass bank, not a venture capital firm. That said, in addition to lighter regulations on financial firms that want to do risky things, they need to submit to openess and transparency. The whole point of our markets are to allocate resources. This is their job and nothing else. They are not running high stakes gambling rings. Resources are better allocated with information. Yes, this might ruin some dumbass pyramid schemes and this casino style investing that GS is offering where you can buy shares in a company that refuses to disclose any financial information, but that isn't the fucking point of investment. The point of investment is to move capital to where it will do the most good.
Frankly, I shed no tears that this missed "opportunity" to blindly invest in a company with closed books. Oh shit, we missed a pull on a Vegas slot machine. Shed me some tears. There are problems with US regulations, demanding that markets that are supposed allocate resources actually have to supply information on said resource instead of relying on the amped up "feelings" of traders isn't one of them.
No, they aren't. The moon is tidally locked with Earth. That means that the moon always faces Earth, not that it always faces the sun. This is why you always see the same face of the moon. What part of the moon is getting hit by the sun does indeed change. The "dark side of the moon" is the side Earth doesn't see, but the Sun sees it all the time.
Grown up people and their BB's just laugh all the way to the kitchen with the pizza and the keys in their pants pockets.
For the record I don't own any of them, but I'd go with BB if I need to. BB people seem to be busy doing stuff rather than commenting how cool is their $marthphone and how $other_people FAIL for not being enlightened like them.
If having a gimpy device a few years behind the technology curve makes you an 'adult', I'll be childish. BB people don't engage in debates on phone technology because they clearly don't give a shit about phone technology. If they did, they wouldn't be using a BB which is, by any metric, an inferior device to an Android or iOS phone.
A lack of interest in technology isn't a sign of being an 'adult'. It is a sign of being uninterested and nothing else. Personally, I would be weary about how caviler you are about your lack of interest in technology. In the professional world people care about results. Being able to harness a computer early and often due to my interest in technology let me steamroll over more than a couple of competitors who were slow to understand, harness, and utilize technology. I can think of more than one unemployed person who probably wishes that they had had more interest in 'childish' things after getting run down by someone half their age.
Good thing I am not average.
Symbian never gets mentioned because 90% of the Symbian phones would be called "feature phones" in the US. The line is fuzzy, and I hear Nokia is desperately trying to jump back into the game, but if you gave most people who have an Android or iPhone a Symbian phone and told them it was a smart phone, they would laugh at you. Most Symbian phones don't pass the "this is a smart phone? lolz" test. You can dice it up any way you want... but in the US the assumption is that when you talk about a smart phone, it has to be an actual smart phone with a data plan where you might end up using some data. Maybe this isn't fair to Symbian, but Symbian clearly is not in the same class as Android or iOS. Hell, Blackberry is just barely in the same class with Android and iOS.
Clearly you don't own a smart phone. Android has no more ads than any other piece of the web. If anything, it has less. If you get an application for free and it will probably have an easily ignored ad bar somewhere that you can turn off by paying a dollar or two. The phone doesn't push ads to you, pop them up on your home screen, or anything of that nature.
Uh, no. It is perfectly accurate. It just depends if you are a consumer or a stock holder. If you are a stock holder, knowing that iPhone has more sales and bigger profit margins than the rest of the individual makers is important. If you are a consumer, knowing that there are a shit ton of competing phones with a single operating system and ecosystem is important. One assumes that Slashdot is not the business section, so what people care about is the largest platform with the most phones. Apple clearly is not that. They have almost zero selection in terms of phones, and they are not the largest ecosystem.
Next time I get a new Android phone, I'll have dozens of phones to pick from that all of my stuff will happily migrate over to. The iPhone users get the choice of the current generation phone, or the old generation phone which they are busy patching to its destruction. From a consumer perspective, having the most phones running Android, with the greatest phone selection, with brutal competition by multiple hardware makers is a GOOD thing. For stock holders, Apple milking the crap out of a minority of consumers and scoring high profit margins off of them and creating an ecosystem where others can't compete is a good thing. Guess which one of those two the Slashdot crowd cares about?