Shoplifting is a misdemeanor because public order is not achieved through civil torts alone. Infringement via filesharing has become the petty offense of the 21st century. Sooner or later it will need the same treatment.
The trouble is that shoplifting is still primarily enforced by the shop owner. The state does not pay a police officer to stand in every shop and watch for shoplifters, because it isn't cost-effective. And so it is with copyright infringement -- the cost to detect and prosecute an infringement far exceeds the harm it causes.
That is really why copyright for entertainment is failing. People blame the internet, but it isn't the internet. It's the availability of storage devices that cost $0.20/GB. You can pay $100 for a portable hard drive that will hold every song released by all the major labels in the last decade and be left with a fair chunk of free space.
Right now infringement is detected because people share with strangers, so the industry becomes one of the strangers and gets the IP address of the other side of the connection. Never mind that though. Remember six degrees of separation? Even if they somehow stop all infringement on the internet -- which is obviously impossible, but let's make the assumption -- in person sharing is still just as bad. Soon enough you'll be able to get a hard drive that can hold every song ever recorded. Then someone will buy one and put every song ever recorded on it. That person's friends will want a copy, and six degrees of separation later everybody has got it. New releases follow the same path and as time goes on the process becomes more efficient as the people involved improve it. Nobody will care about "filling up their hard drive" and someone will create a piece of software that allows you to mark files as "send to friends" and people you designate as friends will automatically get them the next time your any of your devices is in wireless range of theirs. Then their friends will get them, etc.
Notice that it doesn't matter whatsoever that the copies are made over the internet rather than in person. It doesn't matter whether the number of copies made by each person is small or large, because making each recipient a distributor results in exponential growth that makes the number of generations before everyone has it small regardless of the number of distributions made by each person. And there is no good opportunity for detection because no one is distributing to anyone who they don't trust.
That is the future we have to design copyright around. A future in which zero-cost redistribution is widespread and undetectable. That doesn't mean we should give up the idea of creating a government incentive for authorship, but it does mean that we probably have to give up trying to prohibit the thing we can't effectively prohibit.
Multi-nationals can be required to report profits made IN THIS COUNTRY, and to pay the same tax rates that our small businesses pay.
No you can't. Profits are defined as revenues minus costs. What multinational companies do is to pay a sister company in another jurisdiction for products or services. The sister company makes a big profit on the transaction, the US company offsets almost all of their US revenues with it, but it's a legitimate product or service that they actually need. They just arrange to buy it from a sister company.
So you want to stop it, how do you do it? The first attempt would be to say that costs paid to non-US companies should not be able to offset US revenues. The effect of that is very similar to an import tariff. It probably violates a list of treaties as long as your arm and it would have all the countries that sell to us screaming bloody murder. On top of that, you would quickly get scams where a nonprofit conducts a "fund raiser" where they buy foreign goods and then resell them in the US at low margins to 'raise money' but really to import the goods without paying the tax and then sell them to a US company that in effect donates the nonprofit's 2% margin to charity instead of paying 35% in tax. To fix that you would have to make it even more like an import tariff, and good luck with that.
So let's make it more targeted at the problem then. Make it so only costs paid to foreign companies that are in the same corporate family tree can't be deducted against US revenues. But now if Volkswagen manufactures a car in Germany and sells it in the US, they pay income tax on the whole cost of the car because the cost is paid to their own German subsidiary, whereas if Toyota manufactures in Alabama from US parts they only pay income tax on the profit instead of the whole cost of the car. That still seems like a problem, international relations wise.
So we need to not discriminate against foreign products. The way you do that would be to impose a tax on just revenues and not allow anyone to deduct any costs. That wouldn't discriminate against foreign products, but "tax on revenue" is a synonym for "sales tax." I don't think that's what we were going for.
NAFTA China "free trade" CAFTA outsourcing exporting jobs... tax cuts for companies that export jobs
All you've done is list "outsourcing" over and over. And that isn't even the cause, it's the symptom. The problem is that we need to adopt policies that make hiring Americans more competitive, but most of those policies aren't as egalitarian or redistributive as people might like.
Let me give you some examples:
We take the principle that everyone deserves a quality education, so we take the resources (tax revenue) that we have for education and try to divide it equally between all students. But some jobs require a better education than others. Complete fairness is not a competitive advantage. You can create a basic level of education in everyone without striving for perfect equality: It would be far better to have schools for smart kids that we spend substantially more per student on, and schools for less smart kids that we spend less money on. It doesn't really matter that the future retail workers don't have a strong grip on calculus. It does really matter that the future doctors and engineers don't because we reduced everything to the lowest common denominator.
Likewise, you look at the nominal corporate income tax rate. It's one of the highest in the world. Then you look at the effective corporate tax rate. For multinational corporations it's extremely low (because the nature of a multinational corporation allows them to report profits in lower-tax countries), but for smaller corporations it's much higher. It puts US small business -- who employ the largest number of Americans -- at a disadvantage compared to multinationals. Eliminating the corporate income tax would create no benefit to large corporations (which already don't pay it), but would help the job-creating small businesses that do. But the national feeling is that large corporations should pay more taxes, and we can't actually do that in a way that doesn't have ruinous side effects (e.g. tax on gross rather than net income), so keeping up appearances forces us into the charade that causes actual harm to small business. (The problem is that the only kind of tax you can force a high-mobility corporation to pay is a consumption tax on their products -- you can tax them on their customers that are in your jurisdiction. But that burden is then shared in part by customers, and that tends to raise the price of goods in a regressive way.)
The general problem is that we try to make everything fair on paper, but what is fair is not always what is competitive. There is sometimes a trade off between more jobs and more equality, and we have to be willing to admit that before we can make a rational decision about which is more important and when.
Compression can actually speed up disk access in some cases. The CPU and memory are faster than the disk, so the time it takes to read one block from the disk and decompress it can be less than the time it takes to read two uncompressed blocks.
So they require every Windows PC, the majority of which have fast unlimited internet, to keep many GB of redundant files just in case. Instead of making it an option that the rare user with a slow connection can turn on if he likes.
their patches aren't very good quality, and might need to be uninstalled regularly enough that 4-5 old versions of the same file are required to be kept around
You forgot to add that they think it's better to fill up your disk with this crap than to just download it from the internet again if it's needed.
A 3D printer is a different kind of animal. The output isn't information on a page or a screen, it's a physical object the utility of which is not derived from its use as a medium of expression.
But Hardware Firmware and Software are all methods of storing Rules and Logic. The creative process in making all three is about the same so legally they should be treated equally.
You can make a distinction between hardware in the sense of "cotton gin" and hardware in the sense of "combination of prior art logic gates." And all you've done is explain why the latter should not be patentable.
This is an implementation of RSA encryption and decryption, in a language where ^ is exponentiation and % is remainder after division: BigInt rsa(BigInt message, BigInt key, BigInt modulus) {
return (message ^ key) % modulus; }
Can you see why people might describe that as nothing but pure math?
You're one of those people who doesn't understand what patents are for, aren't you? If you think the only thing they're good for is to license them then you're thinking like a patent troll.
You get a patent, you make the product and you stop your competitors from copying it for five years. In five years you have a new product covered by new patents.
Of course, that has nothing to do with whether software should be patentable at all. Which it shouldn't. Because it's still all math and abstract ideas.
Yes, and even if it wasn't, then I just read the summary as basically saying some circuit boards probably shouldn't be patentable either, not that because they are, software should be too, which was his argument.
This.
It seems like this is a stock pro-software patent argument: Hardware is patentable, and you can implement a software algorithm in hardware, so therefore the same software should be patentable. You already see the obvious flaw; not all hardware is patentable. You can't make press plates for a printing press that contain a work of literature, call it a machine and patent the storyline. And if you consider what hardware ought not to be patentable, it's the hardware that acts like software. There is a reason that mask rights had to be enacted as a separate piece of legislation.
That is somewhat irrelevant because of the cost and time required to challenge a patent. If you want to use the so-called "invention" without getting sued then you have to pay twelve quadrillion dollars to a lawyer, then wait a thousand years while the process moves through the courts. In the meantime you have to come up with some other work around to avoid letting the patent holder get an injunction against your product, and once you waste the effort to find the work around, you don't need the patent anymore, so why bother wasting even more time and effort invalidating it?
And here's the rub: The patent holder knows all of that. So they offer to license you their invalid patent for a little less than the cost of the next least expensive alternative. Then you pay them money that they use to file more invalid patents and "you never get rid of the Dane."
Software RAID isn't even that slow. I mean think about it, which is faster? Your 3GHz Core i7 or whatever five dollar coprocessor they put on your RAID card?
The only time hardware RAID makes sense anymore is if your workload was already CPU bound. And then the purpose isn't to make disk access faster, it's to offload the parity calculations to free up the CPU for other things.
Is the only reason you're looking at a clustered filesystem that you don't want to lose data? Because if it is, it's probably not what you want. The purpose of a clustered filesystem is to minimize downtime in the face of a hardware failure. You still need a backup in the case of a software failure or in case you fat finger something, because a mass deletion can replicate to all copies.
Granted, roads are often designed for higher speeds than where the speed limits are set, but if the speed limits were set at that maximum design value, then any speeding whatsoever would result in no factor-of-safety at all, which is unacceptable from an engineering standpoint (for example, a road designed for (sorry, US units here) 85 mi/hr may receive a speed limit of 75 mi/hr).
That is an argument for setting the recommended speed for the road if you were writing a user's manual. But you're making a law. More than that, it's a prophylactic law -- we punish people who haven't actually caused a collision. You ought to set it somewhat higher than where you think it ought to be, so that there is some margin of error to prevent the wrongful punishment of someone who wasn't actually doing anything dangerous.
I'm surprised that fuel consumption, being a big national issue, hasn't gained traction with the speed limit people. The state next to mine even recently increased their speed limits on a major road from 65 to 70, so all those SUVs can go even faster and burn even more fuel (no engine technology in the world will save you from speed-squared drag).
Lowering the speed limit is an extremely inexact way to reduce fuel consumption. Plenty of people will simply ignore it as they do already, and to the extent that they don't, you create a disincentive for people to buy vehicles that consume less fuel because their gas-guzzling monster truck won't hit them as hard in the pocket book at a lower speed. If you want to reduce fuel consumption then you raise the gas tax. Then if I still want to drive fast, I can buy a car that gets 30MPG at 80MPH and everybody's happy.
I also think that all those people who speed on their commutes must have failed math, because going 75 instead of 70 only saves you a theoretical 100 seconds (not even 2 minutes!) over 30 miles, which is generally erased by slowdowns at an interchange or a traffic light. Going 75 versus 65 only saves you 220 seconds - less than four minutes - over 30 miles. About the only time speeding makes sense is on very long trips or if every second counts.
And driving 85 instead of 55 will save you more than 10 minutes. Each way. If you're commuting five days a week that's a hundred hours a year. I don't know anybody who couldn't use an extra hundred hours a year.
Case in point, the expressways in the major metropolitan city in the U.S. called Chicago where the speed limit on the expressways is 55 MPH. From my estimation, the number of drivers at or below the speed limit is approximately 5%. I also estimate that the average speed of all drivers is approximately 70-75 MPH.
You should see New York. Same 55MPH speed limit, but about half the traffic is at 75-85MPH and the other half is still around 70.
Which is really the problem with this sort of multiple-car tracking thing. The point of enforcing speed limits in most places is to collect a tax on motorists. That only works if you have extremely sporadic enforcement. If you have regular enforcement then sufficiently large numbers of people start objecting to how low the speed limit is that they get it raised to where it should have been in the first place, and then the revenue stream dries up.
If it costs that much, maybe we don't need it that badly?
Maybe. But what if you do need it that badly? If the going rate for a programmer with a security clearance who can do a transition away from some esoteric thing involving COBOL and Windows NT Terminal Server Edition is $300K/year, you can either pay $300K/year or you can not do the transition right now and wait until the going rate goes up to $500K/year five years from now.
A lot of those contracts were to deliver X thing that costs $15 at any hardware store. But the delivery was to the middle of Afghanistan on a specific time table while people are shooting. It turns out it costs more to deliver a thing to Kandahar than it does to Baltimore.
The only addiction going on is Big Pharma's addiction to obscene monopoly profits they get to keep by excluding natural remedies by way of FDA regulations made by commissioners in their own pockets.
The argument that drugs are illegal at the behest of drug companies is ridiculous. They only have a monopoly when they have a patent, and patents expire after 20 years. If THC was better than today's pharmaceuticals at anything in particular, someone would analyze the method by which it operates, produce a synthetic product with the same behavior, patent it and put it through FDA trials.
Drugs are illegal at the behest of law enforcement agencies and private prison companies. They are the cause of the "harm" of the drug war. If all we wanted was to prohibit drugs without significant negative consequences, there is an easy way to do it: You make the penalty for distribution a huge fine, like $50,000, and you stay in jail until you pay the fine (or for a maximum period like three years). Then the government can spend all that money to pay farmers in South America not to grow drug crops in the same way that we pay farmers in Iowa not to grow corn.
Almost everyone would find some way to come up with the money for the fine, because it's better than prison. But that would take all the profit out of selling drugs: If you sell them, you lose $50,000, and that money goes to increase the cost of producing the drugs. It devours their margins from both ends.
It would also take all the growth out of the prison industry, and remove most of the incentive to have large law enforcement budgets. Which is why it hasn't happened.
I'm sorry, but "slightly addictive" is still addictive. That doesn't make it a valid reason to make it illegal though, nicotine is easily more addictive, and it's still legal, so "marijuana is addictive" shouldn't be a valid argument that you even allow. You actually give them credence by arguing against it.
The problem is that there is the inconsistency and then there is the politics. There isn't really any good argument for why cigarettes should be legal and marijuana shouldn't. But you're claiming to have a good argument for legalizing marijuana, and it could be that all you really have is a good argument for prohibiting cigarettes.
Pretty much everyone with a brain is saying the economy will get much worse before it gets better as not only have we hit bottom yet on the two previous bubbles, but we have two MORE bubbles that could burst any time, the student loan bubble and the retirement bubble. Now what do you think is gonna happen to RH if the economy continues to tank and more and more potential and former customers take the same route?
Let's see. First more people will switch to open source to save on licensing costs. Then some of those people will need support services, and some of those people will buy them from RedHat, and RedHat will take their money to the bank.
if you aren't careful Red hat is another Novell. don't forget once upon a time both Novell and Sun were powerhouses in the industry too.
Don't forget that Novell failed as a proprietary software company before they failed as an open source company. And Sun much the same. Sun in particular demonstrates that the community model works a lot better than the CDDL-style "this is our code but if you want you can toil for many hours without compensation to improve it and then have your changes rejected" model.
And I still don't get how this supposed for-pay but free as in freedom model is supposed to work. If you can get a copy of the Linux kernel by paying $10 to RedHat, and then twenty thousand different people each make some improvements, do you now have to pay $200,000 for a copy of the Linux kernel so that they can each get $10? Or does it still only cost $10 but you split it twenty thousand different ways so that they each get a twentieth of a cent? Neither one of those seems productive. The first is blatantly useless, the latter is inferior to the current model because it creates high transaction costs and yet each person is only going to make an extremely modest amount of money. Plus, it makes no consideration for the value of each contribution, but attempting to value contributions would require a great deal of overhead and result in copious flame wars, pissing contests and (since money is involved) litigation. It doesn't seem worth it.
Not only this, but the more effort Red Hat puts in to make their software better, the less support people need and so the less money they get (From people not buying their support).
This is wrong twice: First, lowering support costs lowers the operating costs of their support business. Then for cost conscious customers, they can pass part of that savings onto the customer to make it so that the value of the support services still exceed their price, while still making similar profits. And if they can price discriminate then for less price-sensitive customers it means the same revenues at a lower cost, so more profit.
Second, lowering support costs makes their platform more attractive to customers. If more people switch to it because of relatively lower support costs, the customer base of prospective support customers is larger and they can sell more support contracts.
The failure mode would theoretically be that they improved the product so much that it no longer requires any support at all, but that seems highly unlikely. And to the extent that it did happen, why is that a bad outcome? Are we so focused on profits and growth that it should be seen as undesirable that a company set out to fix a problem, and actually fix it once and for all? Or is rent-seeking the only way to do business now?
I responded to a post claiming that it doesn't matter that Apple's products are more expensive because there are "free" options. My argument is that "free" only means that it costs less than the threshold amount at which a carrier will subsidize the device entirely, and that consequently as between two devices that have the same price to the customer, carriers will want to promote the one that has a lower wholesale cost and thereby leaves them more profit.
You seem to be arguing that Apple's products are not more expensive, which is what everyone else has been taking for granted because it is consistent with their business model throughout the history of their company and across all of their hardware lines. Yet you provide no evidence that they have or reasoning why they would have diverged from their normal business model, you only make indignant accusations that my hypothetical numbers are not backed by citations.
Then you try to make technical points like this:
iPhone 5? There's no such thing.
The device that became the iPhone 4S was referred to as the iPhone 5 during its development by most people until Apple announced the former as the official name. Would you be happier if I had said "iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S" instead? Would it have changed anything?
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Shoplifting is a misdemeanor because public order is not achieved through civil torts alone. Infringement via filesharing has become the petty offense of the 21st century. Sooner or later it will need the same treatment.
The trouble is that shoplifting is still primarily enforced by the shop owner. The state does not pay a police officer to stand in every shop and watch for shoplifters, because it isn't cost-effective. And so it is with copyright infringement -- the cost to detect and prosecute an infringement far exceeds the harm it causes.
That is really why copyright for entertainment is failing. People blame the internet, but it isn't the internet. It's the availability of storage devices that cost $0.20/GB. You can pay $100 for a portable hard drive that will hold every song released by all the major labels in the last decade and be left with a fair chunk of free space.
Right now infringement is detected because people share with strangers, so the industry becomes one of the strangers and gets the IP address of the other side of the connection. Never mind that though. Remember six degrees of separation? Even if they somehow stop all infringement on the internet -- which is obviously impossible, but let's make the assumption -- in person sharing is still just as bad. Soon enough you'll be able to get a hard drive that can hold every song ever recorded. Then someone will buy one and put every song ever recorded on it. That person's friends will want a copy, and six degrees of separation later everybody has got it. New releases follow the same path and as time goes on the process becomes more efficient as the people involved improve it. Nobody will care about "filling up their hard drive" and someone will create a piece of software that allows you to mark files as "send to friends" and people you designate as friends will automatically get them the next time your any of your devices is in wireless range of theirs. Then their friends will get them, etc.
Notice that it doesn't matter whatsoever that the copies are made over the internet rather than in person. It doesn't matter whether the number of copies made by each person is small or large, because making each recipient a distributor results in exponential growth that makes the number of generations before everyone has it small regardless of the number of distributions made by each person. And there is no good opportunity for detection because no one is distributing to anyone who they don't trust.
That is the future we have to design copyright around. A future in which zero-cost redistribution is widespread and undetectable. That doesn't mean we should give up the idea of creating a government incentive for authorship, but it does mean that we probably have to give up trying to prohibit the thing we can't effectively prohibit.
Multi-nationals can be required to report profits made IN THIS COUNTRY, and to pay the same tax rates that our small businesses pay.
No you can't. Profits are defined as revenues minus costs. What multinational companies do is to pay a sister company in another jurisdiction for products or services. The sister company makes a big profit on the transaction, the US company offsets almost all of their US revenues with it, but it's a legitimate product or service that they actually need. They just arrange to buy it from a sister company.
So you want to stop it, how do you do it? The first attempt would be to say that costs paid to non-US companies should not be able to offset US revenues. The effect of that is very similar to an import tariff. It probably violates a list of treaties as long as your arm and it would have all the countries that sell to us screaming bloody murder. On top of that, you would quickly get scams where a nonprofit conducts a "fund raiser" where they buy foreign goods and then resell them in the US at low margins to 'raise money' but really to import the goods without paying the tax and then sell them to a US company that in effect donates the nonprofit's 2% margin to charity instead of paying 35% in tax. To fix that you would have to make it even more like an import tariff, and good luck with that.
So let's make it more targeted at the problem then. Make it so only costs paid to foreign companies that are in the same corporate family tree can't be deducted against US revenues. But now if Volkswagen manufactures a car in Germany and sells it in the US, they pay income tax on the whole cost of the car because the cost is paid to their own German subsidiary, whereas if Toyota manufactures in Alabama from US parts they only pay income tax on the profit instead of the whole cost of the car. That still seems like a problem, international relations wise.
So we need to not discriminate against foreign products. The way you do that would be to impose a tax on just revenues and not allow anyone to deduct any costs. That wouldn't discriminate against foreign products, but "tax on revenue" is a synonym for "sales tax." I don't think that's what we were going for.
NAFTA ...
China "free trade"
CAFTA
outsourcing
exporting jobs
tax cuts for companies that export jobs
All you've done is list "outsourcing" over and over. And that isn't even the cause, it's the symptom. The problem is that we need to adopt policies that make hiring Americans more competitive, but most of those policies aren't as egalitarian or redistributive as people might like.
Let me give you some examples:
We take the principle that everyone deserves a quality education, so we take the resources (tax revenue) that we have for education and try to divide it equally between all students. But some jobs require a better education than others. Complete fairness is not a competitive advantage. You can create a basic level of education in everyone without striving for perfect equality: It would be far better to have schools for smart kids that we spend substantially more per student on, and schools for less smart kids that we spend less money on. It doesn't really matter that the future retail workers don't have a strong grip on calculus. It does really matter that the future doctors and engineers don't because we reduced everything to the lowest common denominator.
Likewise, you look at the nominal corporate income tax rate. It's one of the highest in the world. Then you look at the effective corporate tax rate. For multinational corporations it's extremely low (because the nature of a multinational corporation allows them to report profits in lower-tax countries), but for smaller corporations it's much higher. It puts US small business -- who employ the largest number of Americans -- at a disadvantage compared to multinationals. Eliminating the corporate income tax would create no benefit to large corporations (which already don't pay it), but would help the job-creating small businesses that do. But the national feeling is that large corporations should pay more taxes, and we can't actually do that in a way that doesn't have ruinous side effects (e.g. tax on gross rather than net income), so keeping up appearances forces us into the charade that causes actual harm to small business. (The problem is that the only kind of tax you can force a high-mobility corporation to pay is a consumption tax on their products -- you can tax them on their customers that are in your jurisdiction. But that burden is then shared in part by customers, and that tends to raise the price of goods in a regressive way.)
The general problem is that we try to make everything fair on paper, but what is fair is not always what is competitive. There is sometimes a trade off between more jobs and more equality, and we have to be willing to admit that before we can make a rational decision about which is more important and when.
Compression can actually speed up disk access in some cases. The CPU and memory are faster than the disk, so the time it takes to read one block from the disk and decompress it can be less than the time it takes to read two uncompressed blocks.
So they require every Windows PC, the majority of which have fast unlimited internet, to keep many GB of redundant files just in case. Instead of making it an option that the rare user with a slow connection can turn on if he likes.
their patches aren't very good quality, and might need to be uninstalled regularly enough that 4-5 old versions of the same file are required to be kept around
You forgot to add that they think it's better to fill up your disk with this crap than to just download it from the internet again if it's needed.
A 3D printer is a different kind of animal. The output isn't information on a page or a screen, it's a physical object the utility of which is not derived from its use as a medium of expression.
But Hardware Firmware and Software are all methods of storing Rules and Logic. The creative process in making all three is about the same so legally they should be treated equally.
You can make a distinction between hardware in the sense of "cotton gin" and hardware in the sense of "combination of prior art logic gates." And all you've done is explain why the latter should not be patentable.
This is an implementation of RSA encryption and decryption, in a language where ^ is exponentiation and % is remainder after division:
BigInt rsa(BigInt message, BigInt key, BigInt modulus)
{
return (message ^ key) % modulus;
}
Can you see why people might describe that as nothing but pure math?
In addition to that, you can't copyright a drug.
You're one of those people who doesn't understand what patents are for, aren't you? If you think the only thing they're good for is to license them then you're thinking like a patent troll.
You get a patent, you make the product and you stop your competitors from copying it for five years. In five years you have a new product covered by new patents.
Of course, that has nothing to do with whether software should be patentable at all. Which it shouldn't. Because it's still all math and abstract ideas.
Yes, and even if it wasn't, then I just read the summary as basically saying some circuit boards probably shouldn't be patentable either, not that because they are, software should be too, which was his argument.
This.
It seems like this is a stock pro-software patent argument: Hardware is patentable, and you can implement a software algorithm in hardware, so therefore the same software should be patentable. You already see the obvious flaw; not all hardware is patentable. You can't make press plates for a printing press that contain a work of literature, call it a machine and patent the storyline. And if you consider what hardware ought not to be patentable, it's the hardware that acts like software. There is a reason that mask rights had to be enacted as a separate piece of legislation.
That is somewhat irrelevant because of the cost and time required to challenge a patent. If you want to use the so-called "invention" without getting sued then you have to pay twelve quadrillion dollars to a lawyer, then wait a thousand years while the process moves through the courts. In the meantime you have to come up with some other work around to avoid letting the patent holder get an injunction against your product, and once you waste the effort to find the work around, you don't need the patent anymore, so why bother wasting even more time and effort invalidating it?
And here's the rub: The patent holder knows all of that. So they offer to license you their invalid patent for a little less than the cost of the next least expensive alternative. Then you pay them money that they use to file more invalid patents and "you never get rid of the Dane."
slow-ass software RAID
Software RAID isn't even that slow. I mean think about it, which is faster? Your 3GHz Core i7 or whatever five dollar coprocessor they put on your RAID card?
The only time hardware RAID makes sense anymore is if your workload was already CPU bound. And then the purpose isn't to make disk access faster, it's to offload the parity calculations to free up the CPU for other things.
Is the only reason you're looking at a clustered filesystem that you don't want to lose data? Because if it is, it's probably not what you want. The purpose of a clustered filesystem is to minimize downtime in the face of a hardware failure. You still need a backup in the case of a software failure or in case you fat finger something, because a mass deletion can replicate to all copies.
Granted, roads are often designed for higher speeds than where the speed limits are set, but if the speed limits were set at that maximum design value, then any speeding whatsoever would result in no factor-of-safety at all, which is unacceptable from an engineering standpoint (for example, a road designed for (sorry, US units here) 85 mi/hr may receive a speed limit of 75 mi/hr).
That is an argument for setting the recommended speed for the road if you were writing a user's manual. But you're making a law. More than that, it's a prophylactic law -- we punish people who haven't actually caused a collision. You ought to set it somewhat higher than where you think it ought to be, so that there is some margin of error to prevent the wrongful punishment of someone who wasn't actually doing anything dangerous.
I'm surprised that fuel consumption, being a big national issue, hasn't gained traction with the speed limit people. The state next to mine even recently increased their speed limits on a major road from 65 to 70, so all those SUVs can go even faster and burn even more fuel (no engine technology in the world will save you from speed-squared drag).
Lowering the speed limit is an extremely inexact way to reduce fuel consumption. Plenty of people will simply ignore it as they do already, and to the extent that they don't, you create a disincentive for people to buy vehicles that consume less fuel because their gas-guzzling monster truck won't hit them as hard in the pocket book at a lower speed. If you want to reduce fuel consumption then you raise the gas tax. Then if I still want to drive fast, I can buy a car that gets 30MPG at 80MPH and everybody's happy.
I also think that all those people who speed on their commutes must have failed math, because going 75 instead of 70 only saves you a theoretical 100 seconds (not even 2 minutes!) over 30 miles, which is generally erased by slowdowns at an interchange or a traffic light. Going 75 versus 65 only saves you 220 seconds - less than four minutes - over 30 miles. About the only time speeding makes sense is on very long trips or if every second counts.
And driving 85 instead of 55 will save you more than 10 minutes. Each way. If you're commuting five days a week that's a hundred hours a year. I don't know anybody who couldn't use an extra hundred hours a year.
Case in point, the expressways in the major metropolitan city in the U.S. called Chicago where the speed limit on the expressways is 55 MPH. From my estimation, the number of drivers at or below the speed limit is approximately 5%. I also estimate that the average speed of all drivers is approximately 70-75 MPH.
You should see New York. Same 55MPH speed limit, but about half the traffic is at 75-85MPH and the other half is still around 70.
Which is really the problem with this sort of multiple-car tracking thing. The point of enforcing speed limits in most places is to collect a tax on motorists. That only works if you have extremely sporadic enforcement. If you have regular enforcement then sufficiently large numbers of people start objecting to how low the speed limit is that they get it raised to where it should have been in the first place, and then the revenue stream dries up.
If it costs that much, maybe we don't need it that badly?
Maybe. But what if you do need it that badly? If the going rate for a programmer with a security clearance who can do a transition away from some esoteric thing involving COBOL and Windows NT Terminal Server Edition is $300K/year, you can either pay $300K/year or you can not do the transition right now and wait until the going rate goes up to $500K/year five years from now.
Exactly.
A lot of those contracts were to deliver X thing that costs $15 at any hardware store. But the delivery was to the middle of Afghanistan on a specific time table while people are shooting. It turns out it costs more to deliver a thing to Kandahar than it does to Baltimore.
The only addiction going on is Big Pharma's addiction to obscene monopoly profits they get to keep by excluding natural remedies by way of FDA regulations made by commissioners in their own pockets.
The argument that drugs are illegal at the behest of drug companies is ridiculous. They only have a monopoly when they have a patent, and patents expire after 20 years. If THC was better than today's pharmaceuticals at anything in particular, someone would analyze the method by which it operates, produce a synthetic product with the same behavior, patent it and put it through FDA trials.
Drugs are illegal at the behest of law enforcement agencies and private prison companies. They are the cause of the "harm" of the drug war. If all we wanted was to prohibit drugs without significant negative consequences, there is an easy way to do it: You make the penalty for distribution a huge fine, like $50,000, and you stay in jail until you pay the fine (or for a maximum period like three years). Then the government can spend all that money to pay farmers in South America not to grow drug crops in the same way that we pay farmers in Iowa not to grow corn.
Almost everyone would find some way to come up with the money for the fine, because it's better than prison. But that would take all the profit out of selling drugs: If you sell them, you lose $50,000, and that money goes to increase the cost of producing the drugs. It devours their margins from both ends.
It would also take all the growth out of the prison industry, and remove most of the incentive to have large law enforcement budgets. Which is why it hasn't happened.
I'm sorry, but "slightly addictive" is still addictive. That doesn't make it a valid reason to make it illegal though, nicotine is easily more addictive, and it's still legal, so "marijuana is addictive" shouldn't be a valid argument that you even allow. You actually give them credence by arguing against it.
The problem is that there is the inconsistency and then there is the politics. There isn't really any good argument for why cigarettes should be legal and marijuana shouldn't. But you're claiming to have a good argument for legalizing marijuana, and it could be that all you really have is a good argument for prohibiting cigarettes.
Pretty much everyone with a brain is saying the economy will get much worse before it gets better as not only have we hit bottom yet on the two previous bubbles, but we have two MORE bubbles that could burst any time, the student loan bubble and the retirement bubble. Now what do you think is gonna happen to RH if the economy continues to tank and more and more potential and former customers take the same route?
Let's see. First more people will switch to open source to save on licensing costs. Then some of those people will need support services, and some of those people will buy them from RedHat, and RedHat will take their money to the bank.
if you aren't careful Red hat is another Novell. don't forget once upon a time both Novell and Sun were powerhouses in the industry too.
Don't forget that Novell failed as a proprietary software company before they failed as an open source company. And Sun much the same. Sun in particular demonstrates that the community model works a lot better than the CDDL-style "this is our code but if you want you can toil for many hours without compensation to improve it and then have your changes rejected" model.
And I still don't get how this supposed for-pay but free as in freedom model is supposed to work. If you can get a copy of the Linux kernel by paying $10 to RedHat, and then twenty thousand different people each make some improvements, do you now have to pay $200,000 for a copy of the Linux kernel so that they can each get $10? Or does it still only cost $10 but you split it twenty thousand different ways so that they each get a twentieth of a cent? Neither one of those seems productive. The first is blatantly useless, the latter is inferior to the current model because it creates high transaction costs and yet each person is only going to make an extremely modest amount of money. Plus, it makes no consideration for the value of each contribution, but attempting to value contributions would require a great deal of overhead and result in copious flame wars, pissing contests and (since money is involved) litigation. It doesn't seem worth it.
Not only this, but the more effort Red Hat puts in to make their software better, the less support people need and so the less money they get (From people not buying their support).
This is wrong twice: First, lowering support costs lowers the operating costs of their support business. Then for cost conscious customers, they can pass part of that savings onto the customer to make it so that the value of the support services still exceed their price, while still making similar profits. And if they can price discriminate then for less price-sensitive customers it means the same revenues at a lower cost, so more profit.
Second, lowering support costs makes their platform more attractive to customers. If more people switch to it because of relatively lower support costs, the customer base of prospective support customers is larger and they can sell more support contracts.
The failure mode would theoretically be that they improved the product so much that it no longer requires any support at all, but that seems highly unlikely. And to the extent that it did happen, why is that a bad outcome? Are we so focused on profits and growth that it should be seen as undesirable that a company set out to fix a problem, and actually fix it once and for all? Or is rent-seeking the only way to do business now?
I responded to a post claiming that it doesn't matter that Apple's products are more expensive because there are "free" options. My argument is that "free" only means that it costs less than the threshold amount at which a carrier will subsidize the device entirely, and that consequently as between two devices that have the same price to the customer, carriers will want to promote the one that has a lower wholesale cost and thereby leaves them more profit.
You seem to be arguing that Apple's products are not more expensive, which is what everyone else has been taking for granted because it is consistent with their business model throughout the history of their company and across all of their hardware lines. Yet you provide no evidence that they have or reasoning why they would have diverged from their normal business model, you only make indignant accusations that my hypothetical numbers are not backed by citations.
Then you try to make technical points like this:
iPhone 5? There's no such thing.
The device that became the iPhone 4S was referred to as the iPhone 5 during its development by most people until Apple announced the former as the official name. Would you be happier if I had said "iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S" instead? Would it have changed anything?