the inability to patent and protect your invention greatly reduces the incentive to continue your work, bringing your invention to market and likely employing others.
Unless your idea is very truly novel (very rare among patents) your invention is something that people other than you can and will come up with. You just happened to come up with it first. Inventions were invented, brought to market, and sold for profit long before patents existed. They will continue whether patents exist or not. Is there a way for patents to be implemented without the ridiculousness that exists today? I'm sure there is. But right now, patents hurt creativity and hinder invention much more greatly than they might help it. Particularly in the case of software.
I don't personally advocate the abolishment of patents altogether. However, I'd prefer the removal of patents to the current state of things.
The point of a defensive-only use of patents is that if someone sues you, you use your patents to say "Hey, if you sue us...we'll sue you for these patents of ours that you infringe so you might not wanna do that." Essentially its the mutually assured destruction route, acquiring patents because you need them to defend yourself if sued, but acknowledging that you only have patents because the system requires you get them to survive.
Do not punish people who have taken advantage of an unjust situation - blame the people who created the unjust situation: the local government politicians
How about we blame both? Though, according to most conservatives, it is perfectly fine for the local governments to create the monopolies just not for the federal government to do it. What should happen is that the monopolies given to local companies should be eliminated so that some competition can start to form. In addition, Net Neutrality needs to be enforced to protect consumers and innovation. Maybe when there's enough competition we won't need to enforce Net Neutrality and a "free market" may actually work, but right now there is no "free market" with ISPs. Telecommunications companies should be divested from content producing companies. ISPs should be a utility selling a dumb pipe.
Public property should not exist
So, public parks, nature reserves, etc. should all be privately owned? Gimme a break. The only reason why parks and such still exist is because governments use public property to prevent corporations from bulldozing it and building on it.
It's amusing, because many opponents actually agree that the problems that Net Neutrality seeks to prevent are valid problems that should be dealt with, they just don't believe those problems will actually occur and thus government regulation to prevent them is unnecessary.
Except for the fact that those problems are occurring? Have you been living in a hole for some time now?
Read the very next sentence after that
This is proven false by the multitude of situations where ISPs have violated Net Neutrality principles and by the number of ISPs who've publicly stated they'd be willing to make specific services faster if they paid for it.
I know it's already happening and specifically said so.
Except majority of that "property" that is being spoken of here (the cables, pipes, etc.) was paid for by the government subsidizing the ISPs in order to promote the building of infrastructure. Instead of continuing to build the infrastructure that they were given money for, they kept it. Instead of increasing capacity by building infrastructure they are overselling and shaping.
Let's give it by a different example, look at phone lines. Net neutrality is analogous to the common carrier law in respect to telephony. According to that article and your argument, you must believe that the common carrier designation in the telephone industry should never have happened. That it is wrong for the government to have regulated and told a private entity how to use "its property". The argument is absurd on the face of it, the Internet should be considered a utility, a public resource. ISPs provide access to this intangible thing over which data is sent not only over their "property" but over the "property" of others. The innovation of tools, technologies, utilities, and services has flourished for years due to Net Neutrality.
It's amusing, because many opponents actually agree that the problems that Net Neutrality seeks to prevent are valid problems that should be dealt with, they just don't believe those problems will actually occur and thus government regulation to prevent them is unnecessary. This is proven false by the multitude of situations where ISPs have violated Net Neutrality principles and by the number of ISPs who've publicly stated they'd be willing to make specific services faster if they paid for it.
The question is not about property, and if that's the only argument that is made then you have no argument. An electricity company can't charge you more for your electricity if you're running a pool or if you have a big screen tv. Your water company can't change the rate of water flowing to your house if you're using hot water vs cold water, using a tub vs a faucet. So why should your ISP be able to slow your web browser down vs streaming video? Why should your ISP be able to give preference to Hulu over Netflix just because Hulu paid them money?
You want a solution to the problem of bandwidth supplying? Build infrastructure, throttle a PERSON who is using too much bandwidth, not the protocol.
Every language has retarded idiosyncrasies, the skill and talent in programming is to learn a language and know how to properly use that tool to solve a particular problem. Well written C++ can be very elegant and not look at all like a train wreck. Poorly written code in any language is still poorly written code and will look like a train wreck.
The software with the most usage and that becomes the most popular are the ones that can be interfaced with freely. Look at an HTTP server, the web exploded because the protocol was out there for anyone to interface with any server implementing it. Let's move down further, you have a program that generates a data set your program will be more highly desireable if more programs can read and use the data you generate. Or reverse the situation, say your program interprets and analyzes data, if you can only analyze and use your own data then your program isn't as useful as one that can analyze and interpret data from many different sources.
It's not a question of being "useful" (in that i disagree with GP. software can be useful without interfacing with other software) it's a question of how useful it is. Something that can interface with many different data sets (a video player that can play many different formats) is much more useful than something that can only interface with a single type of data. Not only that, but when software is able to interface with many different sources, innovation happens quite frequently because it creates competition.
In the world of software, compatibility with other software is what generates innovation, progress, and is great for both consumers and developers. If your software is very compatible, it will be in high demand. It will be in even higher demand as people take advantage of it's compatibility to create more software to interface with yours.
And, what if someone wants to keep their software from being compatible with someone else's software for security or profit reasons.
Security reasons are pointless, if you have a security problem then it's not from being compatible with someone else's software it's from your software being insecure to begin with. As far as profit reasons, unless you're creating a vendor lock-in type situation where you're creating an entire ecosystem of products all relying on each other as the sole way to interface with each other, then you'll make much more profit by being compatible. If you are going for that vendor-lock-in then you still want to be compatible with everyone else's software (just not let them be compatible with yours) so you can subsume and replace the software that people are using to get them into the ecosystem. In both situations you can see that there is only a benefit when make your software compatible with another piece of software.
You cannot trust an application you have never seen before to load code of its choosing to be executed on a driver supplied to you by third-party which may or may not have a stellar security record themselves.
I fail to see the difference between this and using some client-side application, other than the fact that WebGL is a cross-platform spec.
BitCoin is completely anonymous until the point at which you want to convert it to something like USD. At that point, the only reason why it's no longer Anonymous is because the payment of USD is able to be tracked. The only information attached to any bitcoin is a cryptographically secure hash, there is nothing that links any individual person to any individual hash.
It's amusing when you realize that both addresses could be lulzsec donation addresses unless you can say with certainty that the first address belongs to someone else....
You can't exchange them directly for goods and services, but must exchange them for conventional money first
Actually, you can exchange them directly for some goods and services as there are more and more organizations and companies online beginning to accept them. Thus, since you can exchange them directly for goods and services, according to your definition, bitcoins are just another currency to be exchanged to and from. No different than exchanging USD for EUR.
the meaures required to avoid the taxes are almost as expensive as paying the taxes themselves
Wait...so, they manipulate loop holes to avoid paying taxes while not saving much money to do it. When if they actually paid the taxes and could look at the taxes and go "Hey, look at these ridiculous taxes" people wouldn't be responding with "What ridiculous taxes, You don't PAY any of them!" and might actually have some firepower to reduce the taxes! I'm sorry, but I doubt that so many huge business could miss that kind of opportunity. Therefore I'd like a citation on that statement.
The group that supports the Fair Tax has studied the question, and noted the research of a Dr. Jorgenson, a dept. of economics head of I believe it is Harvard, that says that 22% of the price of goods produced in the USA are composed of tax costs encurred by the corporations manufacturing here
Link please, I'd like to see how he came to this decision. Obviously, if they are avoiding the taxes, but still charging us for the taxes, then what would change if we lower the taxes? Oh yea, the corporations would keep the prices the same and their profits would soar even higher
I'm sorry, but the excuse that they spend tons of money to avoid paying US Corporate Taxes is ridiculous. They are making billion and trillion dollar profits. There is no excuse, if we close the loopholes that allow them to avoid the taxes we can see how much they would ACTUALLY pay and if it's still so much, we can reduce it then. But when a corporation's effective tax rate is NEGATIVE because they got a benefit and paid no taxes, there is no argument that justifies lowering the tax rate even more.
No offense, but when corporations are getting tax benefits and frequently not paying any taxes at all, I find it hard to believe the corporate tax rate is the culprit.
Chromium and Chrome were not in use to refer to an OS until the products were developed, it is not an accurate analogy to the Appstore/App store issue.
They didn't get *book trademarked, they successfully (ugh) won a case that *book infringed their trademark in the market of social networking websites.
You can't have a free market in a Natural Monopoly (roads, water, power), although you can get pretty close via regulation. Such as electricity choice, local phone choice, multiple car manufacturers, et cetera.
FTFY
Look at the airline industry, deregulation shot prices up through the roofs.
The actual hardware/infrastructure service is not the only service that counts. Customer service, technical assistance, troubleshooting, are all things that are taken into account. Verizon could still offer a better deal at it's higher price, but being forced to share it's infrastructure at cost means that there will be incentive for the cost of services to go down. Either way, I fail to see the issue.
There are many edge cases and situations that are not obvious from the code alone, even good code. In addition, there are always tradeoffs between speed, accuracy, memory usage, etc, which differ based on the situation. A comment that says "we used a sparse array here instead of a map because we decided it was more important to have faster lookups than memory usage" is important when you look a piece of code that may initially seem to not be the best way to do something.
If the code doesn't work, you have to find a better way to do it.
It's not always obvious that the code "doesn't work" perhaps the code is working exactly as intended, you just don't know why that was the intention. A comment explaining 'why' that intention was used may be the difference between refactoring the code or realizing that the code is correct and the case that you think is wrong, is actually not a valid case and the output is completely correct.
Slashdot Mirror
the inability to patent and protect your invention greatly reduces the incentive to continue your work, bringing your invention to market and likely employing others.
Unless your idea is very truly novel (very rare among patents) your invention is something that people other than you can and will come up with. You just happened to come up with it first. Inventions were invented, brought to market, and sold for profit long before patents existed. They will continue whether patents exist or not. Is there a way for patents to be implemented without the ridiculousness that exists today? I'm sure there is. But right now, patents hurt creativity and hinder invention much more greatly than they might help it. Particularly in the case of software.
I don't personally advocate the abolishment of patents altogether. However, I'd prefer the removal of patents to the current state of things.
They also don't listen to anyone who doesn't agree with their point of view, well...if they're a bad manager which is most likely the case.
The point of a defensive-only use of patents is that if someone sues you, you use your patents to say "Hey, if you sue us...we'll sue you for these patents of ours that you infringe so you might not wanna do that." Essentially its the mutually assured destruction route, acquiring patents because you need them to defend yourself if sued, but acknowledging that you only have patents because the system requires you get them to survive.
It's simply not possible for a company the size of Apple to not engage in patents, even if they do suck.
However, it's entirely possible for a company the size of Apple to not offensively use its patents, yet Apple does.
Solitaire. That's a game that's not competitive. RPGs are games that are not competitive.
Though one could argue that the competitiveness is in one's success at the game and the ability to point and say "look at what I accomplished"
Do not punish people who have taken advantage of an unjust situation - blame the people who created the unjust situation: the local government politicians
How about we blame both? Though, according to most conservatives, it is perfectly fine for the local governments to create the monopolies just not for the federal government to do it. What should happen is that the monopolies given to local companies should be eliminated so that some competition can start to form. In addition, Net Neutrality needs to be enforced to protect consumers and innovation. Maybe when there's enough competition we won't need to enforce Net Neutrality and a "free market" may actually work, but right now there is no "free market" with ISPs. Telecommunications companies should be divested from content producing companies. ISPs should be a utility selling a dumb pipe.
Public property should not exist
So, public parks, nature reserves, etc. should all be privately owned? Gimme a break. The only reason why parks and such still exist is because governments use public property to prevent corporations from bulldozing it and building on it.
It's amusing, because many opponents actually agree that the problems that Net Neutrality seeks to prevent are valid problems that should be dealt with, they just don't believe those problems will actually occur and thus government regulation to prevent them is unnecessary.
Except for the fact that those problems are occurring? Have you been living in a hole for some time now?
Read the very next sentence after that
This is proven false by the multitude of situations where ISPs have violated Net Neutrality principles and by the number of ISPs who've publicly stated they'd be willing to make specific services faster if they paid for it.
I know it's already happening and specifically said so.
Except majority of that "property" that is being spoken of here (the cables, pipes, etc.) was paid for by the government subsidizing the ISPs in order to promote the building of infrastructure. Instead of continuing to build the infrastructure that they were given money for, they kept it. Instead of increasing capacity by building infrastructure they are overselling and shaping.
Let's give it by a different example, look at phone lines. Net neutrality is analogous to the common carrier law in respect to telephony. According to that article and your argument, you must believe that the common carrier designation in the telephone industry should never have happened. That it is wrong for the government to have regulated and told a private entity how to use "its property". The argument is absurd on the face of it, the Internet should be considered a utility, a public resource. ISPs provide access to this intangible thing over which data is sent not only over their "property" but over the "property" of others. The innovation of tools, technologies, utilities, and services has flourished for years due to Net Neutrality.
It's amusing, because many opponents actually agree that the problems that Net Neutrality seeks to prevent are valid problems that should be dealt with, they just don't believe those problems will actually occur and thus government regulation to prevent them is unnecessary. This is proven false by the multitude of situations where ISPs have violated Net Neutrality principles and by the number of ISPs who've publicly stated they'd be willing to make specific services faster if they paid for it.
The question is not about property, and if that's the only argument that is made then you have no argument. An electricity company can't charge you more for your electricity if you're running a pool or if you have a big screen tv. Your water company can't change the rate of water flowing to your house if you're using hot water vs cold water, using a tub vs a faucet. So why should your ISP be able to slow your web browser down vs streaming video? Why should your ISP be able to give preference to Hulu over Netflix just because Hulu paid them money?
You want a solution to the problem of bandwidth supplying? Build infrastructure, throttle a PERSON who is using too much bandwidth, not the protocol.
Every language has retarded idiosyncrasies, the skill and talent in programming is to learn a language and know how to properly use that tool to solve a particular problem. Well written C++ can be very elegant and not look at all like a train wreck. Poorly written code in any language is still poorly written code and will look like a train wreck.
There is nothing legally improper about claiming an invention that is based on something old.
As long as you aren't trying to claim that the something old is part of your patent, you're right.
The software with the most usage and that becomes the most popular are the ones that can be interfaced with freely. Look at an HTTP server, the web exploded because the protocol was out there for anyone to interface with any server implementing it. Let's move down further, you have a program that generates a data set your program will be more highly desireable if more programs can read and use the data you generate. Or reverse the situation, say your program interprets and analyzes data, if you can only analyze and use your own data then your program isn't as useful as one that can analyze and interpret data from many different sources.
It's not a question of being "useful" (in that i disagree with GP. software can be useful without interfacing with other software) it's a question of how useful it is. Something that can interface with many different data sets (a video player that can play many different formats) is much more useful than something that can only interface with a single type of data. Not only that, but when software is able to interface with many different sources, innovation happens quite frequently because it creates competition.
In the world of software, compatibility with other software is what generates innovation, progress, and is great for both consumers and developers. If your software is very compatible, it will be in high demand. It will be in even higher demand as people take advantage of it's compatibility to create more software to interface with yours.
And, what if someone wants to keep their software from being compatible with someone else's software for security or profit reasons.
Security reasons are pointless, if you have a security problem then it's not from being compatible with someone else's software it's from your software being insecure to begin with. As far as profit reasons, unless you're creating a vendor lock-in type situation where you're creating an entire ecosystem of products all relying on each other as the sole way to interface with each other, then you'll make much more profit by being compatible. If you are going for that vendor-lock-in then you still want to be compatible with everyone else's software (just not let them be compatible with yours) so you can subsume and replace the software that people are using to get them into the ecosystem. In both situations you can see that there is only a benefit when make your software compatible with another piece of software.
You cannot trust an application you have never seen before to load code of its choosing to be executed on a driver supplied to you by third-party which may or may not have a stellar security record themselves.
I fail to see the difference between this and using some client-side application, other than the fact that WebGL is a cross-platform spec.
Actually, lack of games on Linux is one of the driving forces for keeping a large swath of people from switching.
BitCoin is completely anonymous until the point at which you want to convert it to something like USD. At that point, the only reason why it's no longer Anonymous is because the payment of USD is able to be tracked. The only information attached to any bitcoin is a cryptographically secure hash, there is nothing that links any individual person to any individual hash.
It's amusing when you realize that both addresses could be lulzsec donation addresses unless you can say with certainty that the first address belongs to someone else....
Which means that it's current worth is $60,000 if you can get someone to pay that much for it, not the $30,000 that you paid for it.
You can't exchange them directly for goods and services, but must exchange them for conventional money first
Actually, you can exchange them directly for some goods and services as there are more and more organizations and companies online beginning to accept them. Thus, since you can exchange them directly for goods and services, according to your definition, bitcoins are just another currency to be exchanged to and from. No different than exchanging USD for EUR.
I don't see how "early adopter making money off his early investment" equates to ill gotten gains.
the meaures required to avoid the taxes are almost as expensive as paying the taxes themselves
Wait...so, they manipulate loop holes to avoid paying taxes while not saving much money to do it. When if they actually paid the taxes and could look at the taxes and go "Hey, look at these ridiculous taxes" people wouldn't be responding with "What ridiculous taxes, You don't PAY any of them!" and might actually have some firepower to reduce the taxes! I'm sorry, but I doubt that so many huge business could miss that kind of opportunity. Therefore I'd like a citation on that statement.
The group that supports the Fair Tax has studied the question, and noted the research of a Dr. Jorgenson, a dept. of economics head of I believe it is Harvard, that says that 22% of the price of goods produced in the USA are composed of tax costs encurred by the corporations manufacturing here
Link please, I'd like to see how he came to this decision. Obviously, if they are avoiding the taxes, but still charging us for the taxes, then what would change if we lower the taxes? Oh yea, the corporations would keep the prices the same and their profits would soar even higher
I'm sorry, but the excuse that they spend tons of money to avoid paying US Corporate Taxes is ridiculous. They are making billion and trillion dollar profits. There is no excuse, if we close the loopholes that allow them to avoid the taxes we can see how much they would ACTUALLY pay and if it's still so much, we can reduce it then. But when a corporation's effective tax rate is NEGATIVE because they got a benefit and paid no taxes, there is no argument that justifies lowering the tax rate even more.
No offense, but when corporations are getting tax benefits and frequently not paying any taxes at all, I find it hard to believe the corporate tax rate is the culprit.
Chromium and Chrome were not in use to refer to an OS until the products were developed, it is not an accurate analogy to the Appstore/App store issue.
They didn't get *book trademarked, they successfully (ugh) won a case that *book infringed their trademark in the market of social networking websites.
You can't have a free market in a Natural Monopoly (roads, water, power), although you can get pretty close via regulation. Such as electricity choice, local phone choice, multiple car manufacturers, et cetera.
FTFY
Look at the airline industry, deregulation shot prices up through the roofs.
The actual hardware/infrastructure service is not the only service that counts. Customer service, technical assistance, troubleshooting, are all things that are taken into account. Verizon could still offer a better deal at it's higher price, but being forced to share it's infrastructure at cost means that there will be incentive for the cost of services to go down. Either way, I fail to see the issue.
There are many edge cases and situations that are not obvious from the code alone, even good code. In addition, there are always tradeoffs between speed, accuracy, memory usage, etc, which differ based on the situation. A comment that says "we used a sparse array here instead of a map because we decided it was more important to have faster lookups than memory usage" is important when you look a piece of code that may initially seem to not be the best way to do something.
If the code doesn't work, you have to find a better way to do it.
It's not always obvious that the code "doesn't work" perhaps the code is working exactly as intended, you just don't know why that was the intention. A comment explaining 'why' that intention was used may be the difference between refactoring the code or realizing that the code is correct and the case that you think is wrong, is actually not a valid case and the output is completely correct.