People constantly bemoan the fact that their one vote can't possibly compete with the millions of dollars available to a PAC.
What I see, though, is a whole bunch of new wealthy, under 35, disaffected geeks with serious stock options. Typically, they don't vote, because they believe its a waste of time.
So hell, why don't we all kick in a couple grand of our millions to our own private slush/bribe fund? Screw voting.. can't we just pay off our representatives directly? How much could a "NO" vote possibly cost?
Admit it, who here would pass up a chance to bribe their local politician on the side of good?
But take, for example, medicines. A good medication can take millions of dollars to research and create, and millions more to test so that we're sure that it's safe and effective. But often the manufacture is fairly inexpensive.
My dream is to amass a huge fortune, spend several trillion on a unique cure for cancer, then hold the world hostage with my patent for 20 years. Can't afford my $1,000,000,000 per treatment licencing fee? Tough shit. Die like the rest. Came up with an identical drug, but selling it cheaper? Tough shit; that drug is MINE.
You seem to be confused/that drug belongs to me/the drug is MINE.
This is a capitalist society. I have a god-given right to make as much goddamn money as I want. My ideas are my property. I will litigate you into the ground for making a better, cheaper product, because that is not what capitalism is all about; that is communism, or socialism, or something pinko, and just plain anti-American.
Wait a sec, something is wrong with my line of thought..
Religion, like quake, is a mirror of our society. In this case, beliefs in supernatural beings is simply an indication of the "average" persons thinking abilities.
X = Bandwidth now Y = Bandwidth once they block dialpad
X - Y = Bandwidth due to dialpad
Yes, but when Y is much less than X then clearly the profit incentive for protecting their long distance service is a much more probable motive. WORST case low quality voice over IP is maximally 4kbps (thats BITS).
However, he acknowledged that the bandwidth usage would probably be negligable [sic]
Its amazing i dont see more posts about this particular statement, only naive rants about constitutional law.
First off, you are completely incorrect about the historical background of patents. They were, in fact, established to promote innovation by insuring the patent entered the public domain after 17 years so that progress could continue. Without patents, it was claimed, inventors would hoard their discoveries and they would never see the light of day.
Back then, 17 years was a relatively short amount of time, technologically speaking - it encompassed a single development cycle from product design to product market. I ask you this: what is the development cycle for a car today? For a piece of software? For a website?
The only people who are miffed by the patent system are a) people who didn't think of it first and b) people who want everything to be freely available. As for the rest of us who live in a capitalist world and rather like it, patents serve only to reinforce that system and give people rights within it
The people who are miffed by the patent system are those of us who find it hard to do any useful R&D work at all without "stealing" somebody's stupid patent. You find a solution to a problem (it may be clever, it may be obvious) that is one hurdle in hundreds to your project, only to find that your solution has been patented. Now pray that your company has a patent it can use for leverage against the 1st patent holder to negotiate a deal. Rinse. Repeat for each hurdle. This is how R&D works in the real world, not your fantasy "capitalist world".
People like YOU who live in the capitalist world seem to depend on people who actually have to come up with solutions to engineering problems. When was the last time you worked in a large R&D dept. and didn't have to deal with negotiating patent portfolios?
Finally, patents do NOT give people rights, they remove rights. They are a government endorsed monopoly. I'm not sure how you get from free market to capitalism to patents, but in my book, it doesn't get much more socialist than patents.
Over the centuries, several tests have been proposed, leading to the one we have at the moment. Perhaps the author will now suggest how we can define his distinction more perspicaciously, so that it can be practically applied, and so we can take this to the next step?
Ok. Fine. You are trying to get people here to compromise. No need to be patronizing. How about we reduce the length of a patent to 3 years, or have a way of documenting the proceeds from a patent, and after its reached a certain amount, say, 400% of investment, whichever comes first, it expires and goes into the PD.
I understand people's blind reluctance to simply get rid of Patents entirely, even given reams of evidence that as of late, they are doing far more harm than good. Many of these people are patent lawyers, who eat, sleep, and breath (not to mention make a living off of) this stuff. Most everybody else are mindless sheep who can't divine the inner workings of a lightbulb, let alone an IDCT, and to them, just about every possible idea on the planet is "non-obvious" to them. Yes, now its my turn to be patronizing; hush.
It seems to me (and I'm not a lawyer, let alone a patent lawyer, so excuse my tiny, insignificant, ignorant personal thoughts) that patents are increasingly being used for weapons in the field of corporate battle, NOT for reimbursing or even protecting the "inventor". Most large corporations my company does businesses with have legions of engineers and lawyers dedicated to the sole purpose of churning out patents. Why? Because they come up with innovative solutions to your day to day problems? NO. Because they do alot of internal development, and they need to make sure that when they "steal" somebody elses idea (rest assured it is impossible not to when in an R&D environment - you may come up with the most basic solution to a problem and not realize you've "stolen" it) they can defend themselves with other patents. These other patents rarely have anything to do with the first case, but odds are, if the 2nd corporation is doing R&D they, too, have to traverse the incredibly dense (and slowly solidifying) mine field of patents as well. Odds are they have stepped on one, or many, of corporation #1's patents. So they agree to ignore them both and share the parts of their portfolio that overlap their interests. And this is protecting our common good, and the small inventor with NO patent portfolio, right?
Again, I'm not a lawyer, so this complaint must be miniscule compared to the GREAT stuff that patents are improving and helping to innovate. Not sure where, but I'm sure that if I watched more infomercials I'd have an idea of what a great common good patents are.
I'm just reporting what I, a totally incompetent, stupid, engineer, see day to day in the irrelevant, niche market, doesn't-apply-to-joe-shmoe, "high tech" business arena, and its NOT small time inventors being protected by patents. YMMV.
AP, Massachussets -- In a landmark study, researchers at MIT have concluded that pornography magazines fail to attract a significant amount of Puritans as subcribers. "The average straight laced Quaker simply will not buy porno, no matter how sexy and hard core the material" claims Dr. Tohtal Klulehs. "We have yet to explain the phenomenon. Hopefully further study will help pornography publishers to penetrate markets traditionally denied them."
"Clearly it is about appealing to a broader range of sexual tastes" said Larry Flynt, publisher of Penthouse and Hustler magazines, "Maybe more pictures of donkeys and ducks, naked and petrified will help spur sales."
The study concludes that pornographers just have not done enough to appeal to people who find public nudity and sex appalling. Critics claim that pornography seems to be primarily, and unfairly, targeted towards horny, sex-starved men. Change, they said, is needed, before the pornography industry collapses completely due to lack of demand.
The seamless integration of the Office Suite, Linking and embedding, the concept of COM everywhere, getting the entire product line Internet-ready in an amazingly short time, VBA across the product line, etc. Forget the silly flames: Gates has a very good knack of identifying the needs of the public and providing software for those needs.
Wow I don't know where to start.
1) Office Suite integration This is innovation? Sounds like an obvious step to me.
2) Linking and embedding. I know several MS programmers who worked on the object embedding stuff. None of that concept came from anywhere but the project managers.
3) COM OOP has been around a LONG time. Network + OOP was done at Xerox even way back when. Again, I know a few COM developers at MS, and believe me when I tell you, none of this came from B.G. either.
4) Internet Ready This is where I start to suspect your post. MS was dragged tooth and nail into the Internet arena. For about 15 years TCP/IP was totally foreign to MS. Remember Trumpet Winsock?
MS insisted that the Internet was doomed because it was developed by "kids and academics" and tried to position the MSN as an Internet replacement (like AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve, all of which have now given up on most of their proprietary stuff and are one big ISP)
5) VBA I keep forgetting, a lot of people think this is a good thing. But I'll humor you. How is making a graphical scripting language revolutionary? Especially one based on a language as bletcherous as Basic?
That Bill G. is an even marginally talented programmer is a common misperception, even among geeks.
Paul Allen (a very GOOD hacker at the time) did most of the Altair work.
At most Bill acted as Allen's "agent". He was the one angling to make sure he (and Allen) made money off of Allen's skills. Witness his now infamous "big foot" letter to Altair hobbiests, regarded now as the start of retail software sales. That is Bill Gates' primary legacy to computing, not any real programming.
Seeing as this will undoubtedly degenerate into a flame war anyway, here are my two cents why I always install Solaris on our Suns (and yes, Linux just about everywhere else).
1) NFS 2) automount (linux automount still doesn't have a NFS "host" mount)
So, please fix those two, and I'll dump Solaris entirely (oh, and make Cadence release a Linux port of verilog)
So you agree that seventeen years is a bit extreme?
Things move just a few orders of magnitude faster in the age of information than back then when it took weeks for a letter to get from one coast to another.
Patents may have helped innovation in the 19th century, but it is doing nothing now but providing a cash cow for patent lawyers arbitrating patent porfolio agreements between large corporations.
So why do corporations typically spend billions gererating patents?
The typical patent is not registered by John Q. Inventor from his little garage labratory. The typical pattent is applied for by the DOZENS by large corporations who wish to have a large portfolio of patents to use as leverage in case they get sued by another large corporation over one of ITS several hundred patents.
Seems to me we are helpless to cause change by writing our congressmen, seeing as the population at large still thinks of patents in terms of lightbulbs and the little inventor in his lab. They only way to make a REAL difference is to hit corporations where it counts: their bottom line. At the same time, this may somehow help educate a hopelessly ignorant public, most of which truly believe patents foster innovation.
You are so amazingly ignorant it frightens me. Many IS depts use Linux internally. More than you can POSSIBLY imagine. IS is not high profile. IS does not market a product to the consumer. IS has no need for advertising. IS has no need for market share. IS has no need for focus groups. IS has no need for people like you.
The original poster is correct. IS needs solutions that work, NOW, that can be debugged NOW. Not by a deadline. Not when tech support calls you back 3 weeks later with a reference to a completely useless "Knowledge Base" entry for a bug fix they have renamed "supplement". Not to meet an RFP. Not to meet some PHBs retarded marketing requirements. Get a real IS job before you even start to comment.
I don't think they overcharged for windows, save for the OS bundling games they played with computer manufacturers.
If anything, they dumped it on the market for LESS than they should have to gain market share, but seeing as its a software product, dumping is hard to prove: per copy costs being $0.
Yet another example of why per-unit cost accounting for software is a waste of time.
I wish I knew the answer to this. If I did, I'm sure I would be a very rich man in the coming years. This I do know: the system as it is, while imperfect, has worked fairly well for the past century or so. However, it is clear that it cannot sustain itself given the progress of information technologies. A different approach must (and will) be taken, because our current one simply isn't effiecient any more.
Even if it was, I expect technology to give rise to a much more competitive method. This alone is cause to expect the current system to collapse, with or without the help of those "anti-patent" crackpots.
What will it look like? I have no idea. The only shift im seeing currently is one to a service based information economy, where people are paid to write specific code to accomplish a specific task for a (sold-per-unit) material good.
Is this, combined with the non-profit GPL enough? Probably not. It doesn't cover big budget movies, or music. But I'm positive other models will prevail.
Personally, while I enjoyed The Matrix, Star Wars, and other big budget attractions immensely, I would not shed a tear if they were the last of their kind. Especially if it meant total freedom from information exchange restrictions.
I realize others disagree, but I'm sure a useful solution will arise from the muck.
Do yourself a favor. Spend your every moment doing something productive. You will discover what real achievement is. Your leisure time will be that much sweeter. When you stop wasting time in front of the console and give yourself a mission in RL, you discover what real fun is.
What leisure time? Supposedly I am supposed to spend all time time doing something productive. I have alot of things I do in my spare time. Some are productive. Some are not. The ones that are not waste huge amounts of energy and time, no matter how you look at it. Some are outside. Some are inside. Some involve computers.
You frighten me. You have the most closed mind I have ever seen, even on/.
People who play games on their computers are wasting time + resources (storage & cpu cycles) = money
Is tweaking my window manager productive? Recompiling a kernel? It helps nobody. It gives me pleasure. How is that different from playing a computer game?
People like you who post on slashdot are wasting time + resources + air that i could be breathing. Do yourself a favor. Save your sermon about what kind of entertainment I'm allowed to have for somebody who is as narrow minded as yourself.
I expect good books will still get written, great art will still get made, great software will still be engineered, with or without this IP crap.
If you are "lucky", the economy will generate something much more efficient than the "free market" defined by copyright law and patents. There will be gobs of cash available for those who know how to direct focus groups and shift paradigms: don't worry, you'll be able to watch more great, soul-searching films like "Titanic", "Jurassic Park", and "Lion King" and listen to great, ground-breaking music like N-Sync, BackStreet Boys, Menudo, and Brittany Spears.
Have no fear. There will be plenty of great ways to make your mind turn to tapioca and make millionaires and billionaires out of people willing to tell the public what they need, quality be damned.
Who has no credibility? Sooner or later they need to wake up and realize its all just bits. They are still living in denial if they think their business model has any future.
When cars replaced horses, its was good bet that changing tires was a more viable business than changing horseshoes.
Wake up and smell the coffee: if you rely on the law to restrict/control information transmission for an income, you may want to consider a different line of work.
20 years from now I have this feeling there won't much left of copyright/patent law.
Slashdot Mirror
People constantly bemoan the fact that their one vote can't possibly compete with the millions of dollars available to a PAC.
What I see, though, is a whole bunch of new wealthy, under 35, disaffected geeks with serious stock options. Typically, they don't vote, because they believe its a waste of time.
So hell, why don't we all kick in a couple grand of our millions to our own private slush/bribe fund? Screw voting.. can't we just pay off our representatives directly? How much could a "NO" vote possibly cost?
Admit it, who here would pass up a chance to bribe their local politician on the side of good?
But take, for example, medicines. A good medication can take millions of dollars to research and create, and millions more to test so that we're sure that it's safe and effective. But often the manufacture is fairly inexpensive.
My dream is to amass a huge fortune, spend several trillion on a unique cure for cancer, then hold the world hostage with my patent for 20 years. Can't afford my $1,000,000,000 per treatment licencing fee? Tough shit. Die like the rest. Came up with an identical drug, but selling it cheaper? Tough shit; that drug is MINE.
You seem to be confused/that drug belongs to me/the drug is MINE.
This is a capitalist society. I have a god-given right to make as much goddamn money as I want. My ideas are my property. I will litigate you into the ground for making a better, cheaper product, because that is not what capitalism is all about; that is communism, or socialism, or something pinko, and just plain anti-American.
Wait a sec, something is wrong with my line of thought..
Hrm....
I disagree.
Religion, like quake, is a mirror of our society. In this case, beliefs in supernatural beings is simply an indication of the "average" persons thinking abilities.
Fuck that shit, Pabst Blue Ribbon.
huh huh huh fooball rules pass the coors lite, now thats an american beer none of that import nasty commie shit.
urm in case its not obvious, i meant to say if Y is very close to X... the author made a very bizarre choice for variables :P
X = Bandwidth now
Y = Bandwidth once they block dialpad
X - Y = Bandwidth due to dialpad
Yes, but when Y is much less than X then clearly the profit incentive for protecting their long distance service is a much more probable motive. WORST case low quality voice over IP is maximally 4kbps (thats BITS).
However, he acknowledged that the bandwidth usage
would probably be negligable [sic]
Its amazing i dont see more posts about this particular statement, only naive rants about constitutional law.
I'll settle for a /bin/cp or a /bin/tar that doesn't suck. Have you ever honestly tried to use a Sun that doesn't have the GNU utils installed?
It makes command.com look like command line paradise.
Ok. I'm listening.
1) Educate me. Tell me what I'm missing.
2) Tell me what your colleagues have done to improve patent law.
3) Tell me what I can do to improve patent law.
4) Tell me what you think the worst/best aspects of current patent law are.
5) Tell me what you think would be the optimum way of handling patents, assuming you were dictator of the US.
First off, you are completely incorrect about the historical background of patents. They were, in fact, established to promote innovation by insuring the patent entered the public domain after 17 years so that progress could continue. Without patents, it was claimed, inventors would hoard their discoveries and they would never see the light of day.
Back then, 17 years was a relatively short amount of time, technologically speaking - it encompassed a single development cycle from product design to product market. I ask you this: what is the development cycle for a car today? For a piece of software? For a website?
The only people who are miffed by the patent system are a) people who didn't think of it first and b) people who want everything to be freely available. As for the rest of us who live in a capitalist world and rather like it, patents serve only to reinforce that system and give people rights within it
The people who are miffed by the patent system are those of us who find it hard to do any useful R&D work at all without "stealing" somebody's stupid patent. You find a solution to a problem (it may be clever, it may be obvious) that is one hurdle in hundreds to your project, only to find that your solution has been patented. Now pray that your company has a patent it can use for leverage against the 1st patent holder to negotiate a deal. Rinse. Repeat for each hurdle. This is how R&D works in the real world, not your fantasy "capitalist world".
People like YOU who live in the capitalist world seem to depend on people who actually have to come up with solutions to engineering problems. When was the last time you worked in a large R&D dept. and didn't have to deal with negotiating patent portfolios?
Finally, patents do NOT give people rights, they remove rights. They are a government endorsed monopoly. I'm not sure how you get from free market to capitalism to patents, but in my book, it doesn't get much more socialist than patents.
Over the centuries, several tests have been proposed, leading to the one we have at the moment. Perhaps the author will now suggest how we can define his distinction more perspicaciously, so that it can be practically applied, and so we can take this to the next step?
Ok. Fine. You are trying to get people here to compromise. No need to be patronizing. How about we reduce the length of a patent to 3 years, or have a way of documenting the proceeds from a patent, and after its reached a certain amount, say, 400% of investment, whichever comes first, it expires and goes into the PD.
I understand people's blind reluctance to simply get rid of Patents entirely, even given reams of evidence that as of late, they are doing far more harm than good. Many of these people are patent lawyers, who eat, sleep, and breath (not to mention make a living off of) this stuff. Most everybody else are mindless sheep who can't divine the inner workings of a lightbulb, let alone an IDCT, and to them, just about every possible idea on the planet is "non-obvious" to them. Yes, now its my turn to be patronizing; hush.
It seems to me (and I'm not a lawyer, let alone a patent lawyer, so excuse my tiny, insignificant, ignorant personal thoughts) that patents are increasingly being used for weapons in the field of corporate battle, NOT for reimbursing or even protecting the "inventor". Most large corporations my company does businesses with have legions of engineers and lawyers dedicated to the sole purpose of churning out patents. Why? Because they come up with innovative solutions to your day to day problems? NO. Because they do alot of internal development, and they need to make sure that when they "steal" somebody elses idea (rest assured it is impossible not to when in an R&D environment - you may come up with the most basic solution to a problem and not realize you've "stolen" it) they can defend themselves with other patents. These other patents rarely have anything to do with the first case, but odds are, if the 2nd corporation is doing R&D they, too, have to traverse the incredibly dense (and slowly solidifying) mine field of patents as well. Odds are they have stepped on one, or many, of corporation #1's patents. So they agree to ignore them both and share the parts of their portfolio that overlap their interests. And this is protecting our common good, and the small inventor with NO patent portfolio, right?
Again, I'm not a lawyer, so this complaint must be miniscule compared to the GREAT stuff that patents are improving and helping to innovate. Not sure where, but I'm sure that if I watched more infomercials I'd have an idea of what a great common good patents are.
I'm just reporting what I, a totally incompetent, stupid, engineer, see day to day in the irrelevant, niche market, doesn't-apply-to-joe-shmoe, "high tech" business arena, and its NOT small time inventors being protected by patents. YMMV.
AP, Massachussets -- In a landmark study, researchers at MIT have concluded that pornography magazines fail to attract a significant amount of Puritans as subcribers. "The average straight laced Quaker simply will not buy porno, no matter how sexy and hard core the material" claims Dr. Tohtal Klulehs. "We have yet to explain the phenomenon. Hopefully further study will help pornography publishers to penetrate markets traditionally denied them."
"Clearly it is about appealing to a broader range of sexual tastes" said Larry Flynt, publisher of Penthouse and Hustler magazines, "Maybe more pictures of donkeys and ducks, naked and petrified will help spur sales."
The study concludes that pornographers just have not done enough to appeal to people who find public nudity and sex appalling. Critics claim that pornography seems to be primarily, and unfairly, targeted towards horny, sex-starved men. Change, they said, is needed, before the pornography industry collapses completely due to lack of demand.
That's Paul Allen and Davidoff, not Bill.
Bill was his "agent", and coded very little.
Bill contribution to the software industry is limited to this letter.
The seamless integration of the Office Suite, Linking and embedding, the concept of COM everywhere, getting the entire product line Internet-ready in an amazingly short time, VBA across the product line, etc. Forget the silly flames: Gates has a very good knack of identifying the needs of the public and providing software for those needs.
Wow I don't know where to start.
1) Office Suite integration
This is innovation? Sounds like an obvious step to me.
2) Linking and embedding.
I know several MS programmers who worked on the object embedding stuff. None of that concept came from anywhere but the project managers.
3) COM
OOP has been around a LONG time. Network + OOP was done at Xerox even way back when. Again, I know a few COM developers at MS, and believe me when I tell you, none of this came from B.G. either.
4) Internet Ready
This is where I start to suspect your post. MS was dragged tooth and nail into the Internet arena. For about 15 years TCP/IP was totally foreign to MS. Remember Trumpet Winsock?
MS insisted that the Internet was doomed because it was developed by "kids and academics" and tried to position the MSN as an Internet replacement (like AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve, all of which have now given up on most of their proprietary stuff and are one big ISP)
5) VBA
I keep forgetting, a lot of people think this is a good thing. But I'll humor you. How is making a graphical scripting language revolutionary? Especially one based on a language as bletcherous as Basic?
That Bill G. is an even marginally talented programmer is a common misperception, even among geeks.
Paul Allen (a very GOOD hacker at the time) did most of the Altair work.
At most Bill acted as Allen's "agent". He was the one angling to make sure he (and Allen) made money off of Allen's skills. Witness his now infamous "big foot" letter to Altair hobbiests, regarded now as the start of retail software sales. That is Bill Gates' primary legacy to computing, not any real programming.
Seeing as this will undoubtedly degenerate into a flame war anyway, here are my two cents why I always install Solaris on our Suns (and yes, Linux just about everywhere else).
1) NFS
2) automount (linux automount still doesn't have a NFS "host" mount)
So, please fix those two, and I'll dump Solaris entirely (oh, and make Cadence release a Linux port of verilog)
So you agree that seventeen years is a bit extreme?
Things move just a few orders of magnitude faster in the age of information than back then when it took weeks for a letter to get from one coast to another.
Patents may have helped innovation in the 19th century, but it is doing nothing now but providing a cash cow for patent lawyers arbitrating patent porfolio agreements between large corporations.
So why do corporations typically spend billions gererating patents?
The typical patent is not registered by John Q. Inventor from his little garage labratory. The typical pattent is applied for by the DOZENS by large corporations who wish to have a large portfolio of patents to use as leverage in case they get sued by another large corporation over one of ITS several hundred patents.
Seems to me we are helpless to cause change by writing our congressmen, seeing as the population at large still thinks of patents in terms of lightbulbs and the little inventor in his lab. They only way to make a REAL difference is to hit corporations where it counts: their bottom line. At the same time, this may somehow help educate a hopelessly ignorant public, most of which truly believe patents foster innovation.
heh
/proc/credits
cat
hrm ill code that up tonight and make a module
Non-obviousness? What a joke. To 99% of the world's population, the inner workings of a lightbulb are non-obvious.
What the hell? RPC has been around alot longer than any of those.
Shit, any OS with any multithread/tasking at all has (minimally) message passing. What's the difference if the other thread/task is local or not.
Either that, or I'm missing something.
OBJ patent first post:
Oh, and by the way, I just patented semaphores, so, please, you all owe me money.
You are so amazingly ignorant it frightens me. Many IS depts use Linux internally. More than you can POSSIBLY imagine. IS is not high profile. IS does not market a product to the consumer. IS has no need for advertising. IS has no need for market share. IS has no need for focus groups. IS has no need for people like you.
The original poster is correct. IS needs solutions that work, NOW, that can be debugged NOW. Not by a deadline. Not when tech support calls you back 3 weeks later with a reference to a completely useless "Knowledge Base" entry for a bug fix they have renamed "supplement". Not to meet an RFP. Not to meet some PHBs retarded marketing requirements. Get a real IS job before you even start to comment.
I don't think they overcharged for windows, save for the OS bundling games they played with computer manufacturers.
If anything, they dumped it on the market for LESS than they should have to gain market share, but seeing as its a software product, dumping is hard to prove: per copy costs being $0.
Yet another example of why per-unit cost accounting for software is a waste of time.
But where will this gobs of cache come from?
I wish I knew the answer to this. If I did, I'm sure I would be a very rich man in the coming years. This I do know: the system as it is, while imperfect, has worked fairly well for the past century or so. However, it is clear that it cannot sustain itself given the progress of information technologies. A different approach must (and will) be taken, because our current one simply isn't effiecient any more.
Even if it was, I expect technology to give rise to a much more competitive method. This alone is cause to expect the current system to collapse, with or without the help of those "anti-patent" crackpots.
What will it look like? I have no idea. The only shift im seeing currently is one to a service based information economy, where people are paid to write specific code to accomplish a specific task for a (sold-per-unit) material good.
Is this, combined with the non-profit GPL enough? Probably not. It doesn't cover big budget movies, or music. But I'm positive other models will prevail.
Personally, while I enjoyed The Matrix, Star Wars, and other big budget attractions immensely, I would not shed a tear if they were the last of their kind. Especially if it meant total freedom from information exchange restrictions.
I realize others disagree, but I'm sure a useful solution will arise from the muck.
Do yourself a favor. Spend your every moment doing something productive. You will discover what real achievement is. Your leisure time will be that much sweeter. When you stop wasting time in front of the console and give yourself a mission in RL, you discover what real fun is.
/.
What leisure time? Supposedly I am supposed to spend all time time doing something productive. I have alot of things I do in my spare time. Some are productive. Some are not. The ones that are not waste huge amounts of energy and time, no matter how you look at it. Some are outside. Some are inside. Some involve computers.
You frighten me. You have the most closed mind I have ever seen, even on
People who play games on their computers are wasting time + resources (storage & cpu cycles) = money
Is tweaking my window manager productive? Recompiling a kernel? It helps nobody. It gives me pleasure. How is that different from playing a computer game?
People like you who post on slashdot are wasting time + resources + air that i could be breathing. Do yourself a favor. Save your sermon about what kind of entertainment I'm allowed to have for somebody who is as narrow minded as yourself.
I expect good books will still get written, great art will still get made, great software will still be engineered, with or without this IP crap.
If you are "lucky", the economy will generate something much more efficient than the "free market" defined by copyright law and patents. There will be gobs of cash available for those who know how to direct focus groups and shift paradigms: don't worry, you'll be able to watch more great, soul-searching films like "Titanic", "Jurassic Park", and "Lion King" and listen to great, ground-breaking music like N-Sync, BackStreet Boys, Menudo, and Brittany Spears.
Have no fear. There will be plenty of great ways to make your mind turn to tapioca and make millionaires and billionaires out of people willing to tell the public what they need, quality be damned.
Who has no credibility? Sooner or later they need to wake up and realize its all just bits. They are still living in denial if they think their business model has any future.
When cars replaced horses, its was good bet that changing tires was a more viable business than changing horseshoes.
Wake up and smell the coffee: if you rely on the law to restrict/control information transmission for an income, you may want to consider a different line of work.
20 years from now I have this feeling there won't much left of copyright/patent law.
Dinosaurs all of them, and good riddance.