Spring ROO uses aspectJ to hide generated code. No getters/setters, no persistence code, pretty simple. It could be done in the IDE, using only AspectJ, but I like ROO.
How many users out there are actually in a position to actually look at the the code in open source software out there and really "fix" it? 99% of the population hasn't a clue how to "fix" "broken" software.
Duh. But they might have money to hire some of the remaining 1% to do it, starting with the money saved from MS licenses.
everyone knows it's easy to slip backdoors into hardware, but hiding it is the hard part. every fabless chip maker does spot checks of their products and will find these backdoors. at the very least they will find that the shipping products aren't like the ones they designed with extra circuits.
anyone with data that's worth keeping secret will have it behind firewalls and all kinds of security appliances that will start flashing alerts if there is traffic to a high risk geographic area
That's funny. You mean that I shouldn't mind if my servers phones home to a low risk geographic area, but they should raise an alter if they ever get hits from Nigeria or some other foreign country? (Disclaimer: I live in foreignland, too)
You are allowed to modify hardware if you want, just don't go crying if you get busted for installing a mod to get around copyright, or if the manufacturer refuses to serve you further.
Fair enough, in some cases. The problem here is the blurring of the lines between what the seller wants, and the law. It's their right to void warranties for some aftermarket modifications. It's OK to get in trouble with the law for selling modifications that affect safety regulations, esp. if others lives are put in jeopardy. It's not reasonable to put someone in jail for selling jailbreaks, no matter how you put it. It could even be a little more reasonable if there were any public property involved, like airwaves or something like this. But jailing someone because he sells something that _could_ potentially be used in order to not buy stuff from one company, even though it might be used for other purposes, is not a good spending of taxpayer dollars. I only use the financial argument because we are talking about the US. Of course it's also ridiculous from a human rights perspective.
Right, but you don't have the right to charge money to install chips into someone else's device. There's all sorts of legal precedent for that from cars to guns to any number of other items you're prohibited from doing. That's why he went to jail.
It's not the same. We are not talking about safety regulations here. A chipped console is not a risk to other people, or yourself, no matter how you put it. The guy went to jail, because some people are _that_ powerful.
Our legal system takes intent in to account, and takes other circumstances. So there is nothing contradictory about saying "An individual can jailbreak their phone for the purpose of adding functionality and that is perfectly legal," and also saying "A person cannot sell Xbox 360 breaks for the purpose of enabling the illicit copying of games."
There's also the question of what a jailbreak does and doesn't do. In the case of the iPhone, it allows for fairly significant functionality, like installing Flash. Legally this is called a "substantial non-infringing use" and hence is a DMCA exemption. The 360 hack? Does it do anything other than let you play copied games? If not or if the uses are only superficial, then it probably isn't legal.
It doesn't make sense. I have a Wii since it came out. It has a WiiKey chip or something like that. I have the homebrew channel, and tried just a little bit of hacking. It came with Wii Sports, and I bought Wii Fit afterwards. I only play Wii Sports and Wii Fit. My original Wii Sports disc broke in half. I downloaded a Wii Sports ISO, and burned a disc. I don't see how playing my Wii sports copy is not a "substantial non-infringing use". I don't care that much, because I live in South America, and that kind of nonsense hasn't arrived here yet, but me and my Wii have visited the US, and it doesn't make sense that I had to worry about my Wii sports replacement disc, or being prosecuted as a criminal because of doing whatever I want with the stuff I buy, or getting someone to do it for me.
I believe that the whole "intellectual property" thing is getting worse every day. Not only are governments pretending that intellectual stuff can be stolen, but they are limiting rights on actual property. Last century, you would probably get laughed at saying that a _company_ gets to decide what you can and can't do with stuff you bought from them. It has nothing to do with safety regulations and stuff, but in this case, the seller is limiting your property rights, trying to protect their "intellectual property" rights. Doesn't make any sense at all.
Windows is losing simply because of scaling. All companies are scaling back and if they reduce the number of servers at satellite locations, those are expensive licenses they will not have to pay.
You are right, and that's one extra hurdle of using proprietary software. Accounting gets to tell you to lose your BDCs. That makes the software solution inferior, within your budget, to a platform that does not charge you per server.
The "cuba libre" drink is said to be the result of US intervention in Cuban independence from Spain. It might have something to do with revolutionaries, but not communist at all. It also makes you think of Coca Cola, that's a capitalist icon if there is one.
That's one of the reasons their FTA iniciatives don't work with countries that have a choice. Here in Uruguay, the president was negotiating an FTA with the US 4 years ago. It also conflicted with other treaties, like Mercosur, but unfair subsidies, patents and copyrights were the main reasons it got rejected. They sell an FTA, but without the "Free" part.
The GP is fair paraphrasing Schmidt. In Schmidt's view, If you don't do stuff that you want hidden, you have nothing to be afraid of.
_Your_ interpretation comes out of nowhere.
One thing is to say, like you say, that published stuff can't be unpublished, so we need to be zealous protecting our privacy. Another thing is to say, like Schmidt says, and the GP paraphrases, that you should stop doing stuff you don't want others to know about.
What you said is that you can't expect your facebook pics to remain in your circle of friends. What Schmidt said was that if you don't want others to know you are taking pole dancing classes/affiliated to the non-ruling political party/a Harry Potter fan, maybe you should stop doing it.
I believe there's a world of distance between both concepts, and I'm not comfortable giving my data away to a guy who thinks like that. But I do, anyway.
No. They are not trying to defend freedom. They are trying to defend a lifestyle. Without strong intervention in the middle east, US economy would face even more challenges than it does.
Lets see, in the decades after the US became a democracy, it had no votes for women. Had legal slavery based on color of the skin. Denied citizenship to asians and the natives. Slaughtered millions of the natives and deported the survivors to concentration camps where they were expected to slowly die with no natural or mineral resources.
The former USSR nations are not doing great, but most have NOT yet slipped as low as the past of the US of A.
Why do you compare the US after 2 centuries of freedom with newly freed states?
Those nations have been free from kings for a century also. The only big change they had recently was from a communist dictatorship to mostly capitalistic oligarchies. That's hardly a big improvement in freedom.
A fair comparison would be against themselves, when they were under the soviet rule. The GP does that comparison in some cases.
Anyhow, I don't see where he names the united states.
Though I think there are probably a grand total of 3 people on Earth who have used MS Access in any serious capacity and don't loathe it.
I am one of those. I used Access as a frontend to a huge Oracle database (social security data for a small country) back in 1997. I loved it. I could make reports for management after-hours, when there were no IT people around, before I knew enough SQL to write the queries myself. The query specification language was great, programming forms was really easy, professional reports were pretty easy, and looked great. I believe MS had the opportunity to compete as with Oracle Forms at the time for rich clients, had they wanted to.
Of course, 13 years later, it's not as impressive, but there is a certain type of user that benefits a lot from it.
I have only recently learned of a reason why someone in their right mind would migrate to Oracle from Postgres. SLAs.
The only thing that is easier with Oracle than with Postgres is getting a good support contract that also covers your ass.
If covering your ass is not needed, or is not worth the additional cost in money and time involved in using Oracle, the list should stop at PostgreSQL.
It's easier to set-up, easier to learn, easier to administer, easier clustering/HA (no need to worry about getting someone to approve the purchase of additional licenses) . It's easier to debug yourself, because it's easier to understand how it's supposed to work (hint: it's thoroughly documented).
Maybe it's that his detractors are trying too hard. Even this story is misleading against him. We are discussing that "Wikileaks Calls For Assange To Step Down" I RTFA, and it doesn't say that. There is some guy who wants Assange to step down. and some other people do also. The original article already has some spin in the title, says "wikileaks organizers" meaning "some wikileaks organizers", but implying that either "some" or "all" organizers are against him.
We _are_ being lied to about this guy. He might be guilty of lots of things, but for example, in this article, he is being a victim of a discredit campaign. That doesn't make him innocent of anything, though.
Use restraint for recommending it unless you've done exactly what's being discussed.
This is about some guy who put a lot of work into an improved DLL for Wing Commander. Even if Wine didn't support his software out of the box, it could have been a better starting point, and the patches he shares would be more useful.
A stupid trait it shares with an actual keyboard. Ooops, hadn't noticed that, eh?
That's deep. When your finger is on the "F" key you don't need to know which key you are on. You need to know whether you are hitting the center the edge of the key, or the edge of the next key. With keyboards it's easy because you touch the keys when you are covering them, and your fingers self-calibrate. With a touch interface you need to constantly see where your fingers are. Audible, or synthetic haptic feedback could help a little, but it's no match to actual physical keys with currently available technology.
The point is that actions or ideas are only stupid in a context and from a point of view.
I was just showing an example of an idea that did seem stupid before, and can still be honestly evaluated as stupid if you think about it.
A touch screen is stupid always. The lack of feedback, the obscuring of the keys, it is plain stupid. Everybody thought about it first, and discarded it as stupid.
You can come up with a new idea out of luck or work. Being successful using an idea everyone discards is what takes talent. Not lack of stupidity.
Of course, I am not saying that a touch screen is objectively stupid. People make money out of it. It's not stupid to make money. I mean that it's a good example of an idea that would seem stupid to a regular designer, but would work nevertheless.
About being objectively stupid, I think getting fired from your own company is as close as one can get.
I don't know if the AC meant what I understood, but he has a point. Steve Jobs does not succeed by lack of stupidity. Some of the stuff he pulled seemed pretty stupid before he did it, and some of it was. A phone without keys seems pretty stupid to me. I think it's stupid, still. That doesn't stop him from making money from a phone without keys. Seeing how stupid others are is easy, it doesn't take talent. Making money in spite of intelligent people thinking you are stupid, it does take talent.
Wealth is not necessarily measured in dollars, it can measured in oil and other tangible stuff. China could afford not to get all that cash in green paper, they could cash it in US natural resources.
No, I don't need to familiarise myself with the costs of R&D, thank you very much. I understand that, I am trying to explain that patents are a reason why D is so expensive to begin with.
You use GPS to make the case for patents, and patents didn't help with its development. If anything, they added to its cost of development.
I am OK with the way GPS was funded, it's just another way innovation can happen, funded by the government. That proves that if patents ceased to exist, innovation would still happen.
About communism and capitalism and stuff, I don't understand why getting rid of patents would imply communism. Patents are government regulated monopolies. Making government smaller and eliminating monopolies seems to me a step away from any form of socialism. I don't follow your reasoning.
I listed three ways to fund innovation that exist today and are not based on patents (necessity, competition, industry needs) . You named another one (governments). I didn't say "Everyone should just share," or "Oh well people will invent out of the love of it!" . What can you say about what I _did_ say?
Even if greed and laziness were the only motivation possible, patents would not be needed. I said that companies would have to invent new stuff in order to have it before others do. Those lazy people you talk about will also invent stuff in order to work less and make more money. There are lots of examples, within the limits of the economic system you know and love.
I understand your example. I just don't agree with your reasoning.
Right now, the free market does not give us advancement in mathematics and physics. Not all innovation is made as a bet on future patent rewards.
I don't quite understand why some people who believe in the benefits of free markets defend patents, which are essentially a monopoly.
I can give you some examples of non patent funded innovation.
- Innovation out of necessity. If you need to carry energy, building a superconductor has a direct advantage, no matter if your competitor gets it too.
- Innovation to get a head start. If you innovate, you get there first. You start selling sooner, and can start building your next product.
- Consortium based R&D. Get together with the rest of the industry, and develop the next generation. Extra points if the engineers involved in the invention are under your control.
And add to that all the work that could be done by standing on the shoulders of others, which you can't really do right now without great legal and licensing costs. You could take a lots of money out of the courts, and into the lab.
I don't think the economic result of eliminating patents could be negative. Anyhow, it would be a lot fairer. Right now, only large companies can really build new stuff. Small ones do build stuff, but it's a lot riskier than it has to be.
I first heard all of this from a law-school professor who explained it from a laissez faire point of view. It's not my favourite economic theory, but I think it makes a point with patents.
I own a small business. I invent ("creation" is a bit large for me) a remarkable widget. I sell it, making a big profit. The paper talks about me. Big companies want to buy mine, so they can have my know-how about widgets. Customers buy my widgets, I make money. Eventually, someone reverse-engineers my widgets and starts selling them. They make money. I can't keep selling widgets for a profit. Now I have several ways to make money. I can invent a new widget, and repeat the whole process. I can adapt the widget to the needs of new or current customers. I can sell widget maintenance. I can sell widget consultancy to the new widget market leader.
In the real world: I invent a new widget. I sell it for a profit, and become successful. I get sued for infringing some patents I knew nothing about. I am a small business, can't afford the legal cost, the only thing I can hope for is getting bought, or it's game over for me.
If I don't get sued, any large companies could also implement my widgets. They don't need to reverse-engineer anything, the patent is intended to explain the building of a widget. I _could_ sue them, but it would take a lot of money and time. Patents would not help me a lot.
I really think the solution is to eliminate patents. Of course they are not such a bad idea in theory, but in practice they are bad for business, bad for people, and bad for innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
Spring ROO uses aspectJ to hide generated code.
No getters/setters, no persistence code, pretty simple.
It could be done in the IDE, using only AspectJ, but I like ROO.
How many users out there are actually in a position to actually look at the the code in open source software out there and really "fix" it? 99% of the population hasn't a clue how to "fix" "broken" software.
Duh. But they might have money to hire some of the remaining 1% to do it, starting with the money saved from MS licenses.
everyone knows it's easy to slip backdoors into hardware, but hiding it is the hard part. every fabless chip maker does spot checks of their products and will find these backdoors. at the very least they will find that the shipping products aren't like the ones they designed with extra circuits.
anyone with data that's worth keeping secret will have it behind firewalls and all kinds of security appliances that will start flashing alerts if there is traffic to a high risk geographic area
That's funny.
You mean that I shouldn't mind if my servers phones home to a low risk geographic area, but they should raise an alter if they ever get hits from Nigeria or some other foreign country? (Disclaimer: I live in foreignland, too)
You are allowed to modify hardware if you want, just don't go crying if you get busted for installing a mod to get around copyright, or if the manufacturer refuses to serve you further.
Fair enough, in some cases.
The problem here is the blurring of the lines between what the seller wants, and the law.
It's their right to void warranties for some aftermarket modifications. It's OK to get in trouble with the law for selling modifications that affect safety regulations, esp. if others lives are put in jeopardy.
It's not reasonable to put someone in jail for selling jailbreaks, no matter how you put it. It could even be a little more reasonable if there were any public property involved, like airwaves or something like this. But jailing someone because he sells something that _could_ potentially be used in order to not buy stuff from one company, even though it might be used for other purposes, is not a good spending of taxpayer dollars.
I only use the financial argument because we are talking about the US. Of course it's also ridiculous from a human rights perspective.
Right, but you don't have the right to charge money to install chips into someone else's device. There's all sorts of legal precedent for that from cars to guns to any number of other items you're prohibited from doing. That's why he went to jail.
It's not the same. We are not talking about safety regulations here.
A chipped console is not a risk to other people, or yourself, no matter how you put it. The guy went to jail, because some people are _that_ powerful.
Our legal system takes intent in to account, and takes other circumstances. So there is nothing contradictory about saying "An individual can jailbreak their phone for the purpose of adding functionality and that is perfectly legal," and also saying "A person cannot sell Xbox 360 breaks for the purpose of enabling the illicit copying of games."
There's also the question of what a jailbreak does and doesn't do. In the case of the iPhone, it allows for fairly significant functionality, like installing Flash. Legally this is called a "substantial non-infringing use" and hence is a DMCA exemption. The 360 hack? Does it do anything other than let you play copied games? If not or if the uses are only superficial, then it probably isn't legal.
It doesn't make sense.
I have a Wii since it came out. It has a WiiKey chip or something like that. I have the homebrew channel, and tried just a little bit of hacking.
It came with Wii Sports, and I bought Wii Fit afterwards.
I only play Wii Sports and Wii Fit. My original Wii Sports disc broke in half. I downloaded a Wii Sports ISO, and burned a disc. I don't see how playing my Wii sports copy is not a "substantial non-infringing use". I don't care that much, because I live in South America, and that kind of nonsense hasn't arrived here yet, but me and my Wii have visited the US, and it doesn't make sense that I had to worry about my Wii sports replacement disc, or being prosecuted as a criminal because of doing whatever I want with the stuff I buy, or getting someone to do it for me.
I believe that the whole "intellectual property" thing is getting worse every day. Not only are governments pretending that intellectual stuff can be stolen, but they are limiting rights on actual property. Last century, you would probably get laughed at saying that a _company_ gets to decide what you can and can't do with stuff you bought from them. It has nothing to do with safety regulations and stuff, but in this case, the seller is limiting your property rights, trying to protect their "intellectual property" rights. Doesn't make any sense at all.
Windows is losing simply because of scaling. All companies are scaling back and if they reduce the number of servers at satellite locations, those are expensive licenses they will not have to pay.
You are right, and that's one extra hurdle of using proprietary software. Accounting gets to tell you to lose your BDCs. That makes the software solution inferior, within your budget, to a platform that does not charge you per server.
The "cuba libre" drink is said to be the result of US intervention in Cuban independence from Spain.
It might have something to do with revolutionaries, but not communist at all.
It also makes you think of Coca Cola, that's a capitalist icon if there is one.
That's one of the reasons their FTA iniciatives don't work with countries that have a choice.
Here in Uruguay, the president was negotiating an FTA with the US 4 years ago. It also conflicted with other treaties, like Mercosur, but unfair subsidies, patents and copyrights were the main reasons it got rejected. They sell an FTA, but without the "Free" part.
The GP is fair paraphrasing Schmidt.
In Schmidt's view, If you don't do stuff that you want hidden, you have nothing to be afraid of.
_Your_ interpretation comes out of nowhere.
One thing is to say, like you say, that published stuff can't be unpublished, so we need to be zealous protecting our privacy.
Another thing is to say, like Schmidt says, and the GP paraphrases, that you should stop doing stuff you don't want others to know about.
What you said is that you can't expect your facebook pics to remain in your circle of friends.
What Schmidt said was that if you don't want others to know you are taking pole dancing classes/affiliated to the non-ruling political party/a Harry Potter fan, maybe you should stop doing it.
I believe there's a world of distance between both concepts, and I'm not comfortable giving my data away to a guy who thinks like that. But I do, anyway.
No. They are not trying to defend freedom.
They are trying to defend a lifestyle. Without strong intervention in the middle east, US economy would face even more challenges than it does.
Lets see, in the decades after the US became a democracy, it had no votes for women. Had legal slavery based on color of the skin. Denied citizenship to asians and the natives. Slaughtered millions of the natives and deported the survivors to concentration camps where they were expected to slowly die with no natural or mineral resources.
The former USSR nations are not doing great, but most have NOT yet slipped as low as the past of the US of A.
Why do you compare the US after 2 centuries of freedom with newly freed states?
Those nations have been free from kings for a century also.
The only big change they had recently was from a communist dictatorship to mostly capitalistic oligarchies. That's hardly a big improvement in freedom.
A fair comparison would be against themselves, when they were under the soviet rule. The GP does that comparison in some cases.
Anyhow, I don't see where he names the united states.
Though I think there are probably a grand total of 3 people on Earth who have used MS Access in any serious capacity and don't loathe it.
I am one of those.
I used Access as a frontend to a huge Oracle database (social security data for a small country) back in 1997.
I loved it. I could make reports for management after-hours, when there were no IT people around, before I knew enough SQL to write the queries myself.
The query specification language was great, programming forms was really easy, professional reports were pretty easy, and looked great.
I believe MS had the opportunity to compete as with Oracle Forms at the time for rich clients, had they wanted to.
Of course, 13 years later, it's not as impressive, but there is a certain type of user that benefits a lot from it.
access -> sqlite -> mysql -> postgres -> oracle
I have only recently learned of a reason why someone in their right mind would migrate to Oracle from Postgres. SLAs.
The only thing that is easier with Oracle than with Postgres is getting a good support contract that also covers your ass.
If covering your ass is not needed, or is not worth the additional cost in money and time involved in using Oracle, the list should stop at PostgreSQL.
It's easier to set-up, easier to learn, easier to administer, easier clustering/HA (no need to worry about getting someone to approve the purchase of additional licenses) . It's easier to debug yourself, because it's easier to understand how it's supposed to work (hint: it's thoroughly documented).
ps. yeah, I went there and broke Godwin's Law, get over it.
You honoured Godwin's law. Congratulations.
Maybe it's that his detractors are trying too hard.
Even this story is misleading against him.
We are discussing that "Wikileaks Calls For Assange To Step Down"
I RTFA, and it doesn't say that.
There is some guy who wants Assange to step down. and some other people do also.
The original article already has some spin in the title, says "wikileaks organizers" meaning "some wikileaks organizers", but implying that either "some" or "all" organizers are against him.
We _are_ being lied to about this guy.
He might be guilty of lots of things, but for example, in this article, he is being a victim of a discredit campaign. That doesn't make him innocent of anything, though.
Use restraint for recommending it unless you've done exactly what's being discussed.
This is about some guy who put a lot of work into an improved DLL for Wing Commander.
Even if Wine didn't support his software out of the box, it could have been a better starting point, and the patches he shares would be more useful.
the obscuring of the keys, it is plain stupid.
A stupid trait it shares with an actual keyboard. Ooops, hadn't noticed that, eh?
That's deep.
When your finger is on the "F" key you don't need to know which key you are on. You need to know whether you are hitting the center the edge of the key, or the edge of the next key. With keyboards it's easy because you touch the keys when you are covering them, and your fingers self-calibrate. With a touch interface you need to constantly see where your fingers are.
Audible, or synthetic haptic feedback could help a little, but it's no match to actual physical keys with currently available technology.
Sorry, I lack the talent.
I thought I was being clear enough.
The point is that actions or ideas are only stupid in a context and from a point of view.
I was just showing an example of an idea that did seem stupid before, and can still be honestly evaluated as stupid if you think about it.
A touch screen is stupid always. The lack of feedback, the obscuring of the keys, it is plain stupid. Everybody thought about it first, and discarded it as stupid.
You can come up with a new idea out of luck or work. Being successful using an idea everyone discards is what takes talent. Not lack of stupidity.
Of course, I am not saying that a touch screen is objectively stupid. People make money out of it. It's not stupid to make money. I mean that it's a good example of an idea that would seem stupid to a regular designer, but would work nevertheless.
About being objectively stupid, I think getting fired from your own company is as close as one can get.
I don't know if the AC meant what I understood, but he has a point.
Steve Jobs does not succeed by lack of stupidity. Some of the stuff he pulled seemed pretty stupid before he did it, and some of it was.
A phone without keys seems pretty stupid to me. I think it's stupid, still. That doesn't stop him from making money from a phone without keys.
Seeing how stupid others are is easy, it doesn't take talent. Making money in spite of intelligent people thinking you are stupid, it does take talent.
Wealth is not necessarily measured in dollars, it can measured in oil and other tangible stuff.
China could afford not to get all that cash in green paper, they could cash it in US natural resources.
No, I don't need to familiarise myself with the costs of R&D, thank you very much.
I understand that, I am trying to explain that patents are a reason why D is so expensive to begin with.
You use GPS to make the case for patents, and patents didn't help with its development. If anything, they added to its cost of development.
I am OK with the way GPS was funded, it's just another way innovation can happen, funded by the government. That proves that if patents ceased to exist, innovation would still happen.
About communism and capitalism and stuff, I don't understand why getting rid of patents would imply communism. Patents are government regulated monopolies. Making government smaller and eliminating monopolies seems to me a step away from any form of socialism. I don't follow your reasoning.
I listed three ways to fund innovation that exist today and are not based on patents (necessity, competition, industry needs) . You named another one (governments). I didn't say "Everyone should just share," or "Oh well people will invent out of the love of it!" . What can you say about what I _did_ say?
Even if greed and laziness were the only motivation possible, patents would not be needed. I said that companies would have to invent new stuff in order to have it before others do. Those lazy people you talk about will also invent stuff in order to work less and make more money. There are lots of examples, within the limits of the economic system you know and love.
I understand your example. I just don't agree with your reasoning.
Right now, the free market does not give us advancement in mathematics and physics.
Not all innovation is made as a bet on future patent rewards.
I don't quite understand why some people who believe in the benefits of free markets defend patents, which are essentially a monopoly.
I can give you some examples of non patent funded innovation.
- Innovation out of necessity.
If you need to carry energy, building a superconductor has a direct advantage, no matter if your competitor gets it too.
- Innovation to get a head start.
If you innovate, you get there first. You start selling sooner, and can start building your next product.
- Consortium based R&D.
Get together with the rest of the industry, and develop the next generation. Extra points if the engineers involved in the invention are under your control.
And add to that all the work that could be done by standing on the shoulders of others, which you can't really do right now without great legal and licensing costs. You could take a lots of money out of the courts, and into the lab.
I don't think the economic result of eliminating patents could be negative. Anyhow, it would be a lot fairer. Right now, only large companies can really build new stuff. Small ones do build stuff, but it's a lot riskier than it has to be.
I first heard all of this from a law-school professor who explained it from a laissez faire point of view. It's not my favourite economic theory, but I think it makes a point with patents.
Well.
Let's make it a real example.
In my hypothetical world with no patents:
I own a small business.
I invent ("creation" is a bit large for me) a remarkable widget. I sell it, making a big profit. The paper talks about me.
Big companies want to buy mine, so they can have my know-how about widgets.
Customers buy my widgets, I make money.
Eventually, someone reverse-engineers my widgets and starts selling them. They make money. I can't keep selling widgets for a profit.
Now I have several ways to make money.
I can invent a new widget, and repeat the whole process. I can adapt the widget to the needs of new or current customers. I can sell widget maintenance. I can sell widget consultancy to the new widget market leader.
In the real world:
I invent a new widget. I sell it for a profit, and become successful. I get sued for infringing some patents I knew nothing about. I am a small business, can't afford the legal cost, the only thing I can hope for is getting bought, or it's game over for me.
If I don't get sued, any large companies could also implement my widgets. They don't need to reverse-engineer anything, the patent is intended to explain the building of a widget. I _could_ sue them, but it would take a lot of money and time. Patents would not help me a lot.
I really think the solution is to eliminate patents.
Of course they are not such a bad idea in theory, but in practice they are bad for business, bad for people, and bad for innovation.