It doesn't matter to America whether a factory in China uses automation or cheap labor to produce goods. What matters is that you can build an automated factory in the US and produce goods at competitive prices, because the automation mitigates the labor cost advantages of foreign factories and the US factory then has the advantage of significantly lower transportation costs when selling to the US market.
Moreover, it is for the same reason that anyone who offshores an automated factory is generally an idiot -- offshoring and automation are largely incompatible strategies to reduce labor costs. If you spend the money to automate, the advantage of then having cheap labor is substantially reduced because you require far fewer employees, and that small remaining advantage is swallowed by the cost of transporting the finished goods back to the US from the other side of the world.
If you can afford to live by working 20 hours/week then you can work for 40 hours/week at the same hourly wage, spend only 20 hours/week worth of wages and before the end of 20 years have saved enough money that at 5% interest will yield the equivalent of 20 hours/week in wages.
Compare that to working 20 hours/week for 40 years and not being able to save a single dime because you spend as much as you make, so that by the end of the 40 years you've worked the same number of total hours but have zero savings whereas someone who worked twice as many hours for half as many years will still have the entire amount of their savings at the end of the 40 years and be able to live off the interest indefinitely.
The original suggestion was to reduce the length of the work week. Obviously if you can't afford to live on 20 hours/week worth of wages then neither plan works, but if you can afford to reduce the length of the work week then you can instead reduce the age of retirement with better results.
People will ALWAYS cost more than machines. It simply takes more to maintain a human than a computer.
That is obviously not true in all cases. If you need to buy 100 expensive machines to replace one human because it's something that machines can do but are bad at, the human will cost less. Just think about it: If machines always cost less, why do any humans have jobs?
More importantly, you can reduce the cost of a human by reducing the cost of living. People get all caught up in money and inflation/deflation etc., but the fact is that the less labor is required to produce the same products and services, the more products and services that each person can consume for each hour they labor. Or equivalently, the fewer hours of labor you need to put in to make enough money to have the same amount of goods and services.
Where the problem comes in is if you start with a world where everyone is working e.g. 40 hours a week and producing all that everyone needs, and you transition to a world in which half the people are working 40 hours a week to produce everything everyone needs and the other half are unemployed. That is not a trivial problem, but there are a number of solutions to it that are obviously superior to intentionally creating inefficiencies just so that more people can have something to do. Even if all you do is just print money and give everyone enough to buy food and shelter, it's better than forcing people to do redundant work in exchange for the same money, because in the former case they can at least have the possibility of doing something which is actually constructive with their time, instead of forcing them to do something menial and time consuming that a machine could do faster and cheaper.
The solution is to reduce the working week. Especially since ploughing women into the workplace has hugely increased the proportion of the population in the workforce.
The problem is that that is inefficient for skilled jobs. If you train one person how to do a job and they work 60 hours a week doing it, you have 1/3rd the training costs as if you have to train three people who each work 20 hours a week.
Additionally, employees generally prefer to work e.g. 40 hours/week rather than 20 if they can get paid twice as much for doing so, because the increase in discretionary income is so disproportionate. If it takes e.g. 18 hours of labor to cover necessities spending (food and shelter) then working 20 hours leaves only 2 hours wages in discretionary income, whereas working 40 hours gives you 22 hours wages in discretionary income. And if it takes 35 hours of labor to cover necessities spending then working only 20 hours is just not feasible.
What would work a lot better is early retirement. If people would work 40-80 hours/week for 10 or 20 years while saving for retirement and then leave the workforce, that would solve a lot of the problem. The trouble is that some people are idiots who refuse to save anything, and so we set up systems like social security and unemployment to save those people from starvation if they lose their jobs, but the existence of those systems encourages everyone else not to save anything (and taxes them by the amount of money they might have saved), so then no one can retire until they're eligible for social security and everyone has incentive to work as many hours as they can until then.
Housekeepers? Landfill workers? Do you have any idea how much those jobs actually pay?
I'm going to guess that it's less than the person hiring the housekeeper makes and more than you get paid having no job once your unemployment insurance runs out.
And as robotics comes down to the consumer level, those same housekeepers would be fired anyways because a machine cost less than a person to maintain.
Not if the person costs less because the person's cost of living is reduced by automation.
The only people holding all the wealth are the ones who own the computers and robotics, not the ones who are making them.
As long as the corporations are not monopolies/oligopolies, you still get the benefits because automation reduces costs and competition requires the cost savings to be passed onto consumers. Obviously if they are monopolies/oligopolies then you're screwed, but only as a result of the lack of competition rather than the existence of automation.
As for the manufacturing, the big threat to Americans isn't Outsourcing, it's computers & robotics. I know keep bringing this up in my posts, but there is a sleeping bag factory making 2 MILLION bags a year with a total workforce (including salesmen, marketing, accounting and all other non-manufacturing jobs) of JUST 120 people. Fact is, it's not just that we're outsourcing, we just don't need all these people.
The computers and robotics are the solution. That factory is only employing 120 people, but it's employing 120 Americans. Those people can get paid an average of $40,000/year and the labor cost per sleeping bag will only be $2.40. Now put the factory in the vicinity of an Amazon.com warehouse instead of on the other side of the world and you can get a sleeping bag of the same quality, shipped to your door, for $15 instead of $50.
The idea that there will be no work to be done is totally ridiculous. We have massive landfills going back a hundred years or more that could be sorted through for recyclable materials. Most members of the middle class would be happy to have a housekeeper. No one would complain if there was a shorter line at the DMV. The reason that those jobs are not created is that the value of that labor is lower than its costs, and the reason for that is that the cost of living in this country is too high -- because we ship everything in from the other side of the world.
If you build a fully-automated factory in the vicinity of where the goods are consumed, the goods cost less. That reduces the minimum amount of money someone has to make to have a living wage, which allows unskilled laborers to accept those lower paying jobs without experiencing the ravages of poverty. Which allows landfills to hire employees to sort through the junk for profitably recyclable materials, allows middle class people to hire more housekeepers, allows the government to hire enough DMV employees to have shorter lines, etc.
On top of all that, "traditional" non-automated factories in America just aren't competitive anymore. The decision isn't between losing 880 out of 1000 American factory jobs to automation, the decision is between keeping the remaining 120 jobs in America by automating or just sending the whole factory to China. It seems abundantly obvious which alternative is better for American factory workers.
You aren't guaranteed to get the same return path for the same set of packets - the dynamic nature of the net means that there are variations and the route tends to change over time.
In theory more than in practice. Routes change primarily when equipment goes down. It happens, but not that often.
of course you've now hacked a piece of maintain machinery, far more than the usual home machine so it's more of a risk that you'll be caught...
On balance it makes you less likely to be caught, because whoever is trying to catch you has to trace you back through this router in addition to any other measures you're taking (like other compromised routers, or using an internet cafe etc.) rather than only tracing you through the other measures.
As for cable segments? Depends on the topology, the technology and it ups the risk if you have a physical constraint to your location.
You don't actually have to be there, you only have to have a compromised machine there. Get some unsuspecting cable modem user to install a trojan, then spoof the user's neighbor's IP address to keep the compromised user from getting busted and thereby prompting them to remove the trojan.
As far as I'm aware, when it comes to things like downloading kiddie porn or whatever they're trying to prosecute you for I don't think they can just throw you in prison because of a IP address log.
Maybe not, but if there is one fewer plausible explanation (like having open wifi) for why your IP address showed up in their logs, they're going to spend more time harassing you and your friends and family until they give up and go away.
All I'm saying is that leaving your wireless open makes your chance of getting raided go from "almost zero" to "almost zero" while providing you with a plausible explanation for any traffic that might be seen as coming from your IP address in the unlikely even that it actually does happen.
About the only way they can do that is to either get your IP when you don't have it (ie the ISP cycles around the IP addresses you have so someone else has yours), or they manage to hack all the routers coming from the kiddie porn site so that all packets route to somewhere else - not exactly your common garden script kiddie hack.
They don't need all the routers, they only need to be able to see the traffic on the return path. You can do that by being on the same cable segment as the target, or by compromising any single router anywhere on the internet and then just picking a random IP address to spoof for which that router is on the return path, etc.
Your hypothetical only proves why you should leave your connection open -- the justice system has nothing to do with the truth. You want to argue that some asshat is going to use your open connection to break the law and that you will get nicked for it. But it's just as likely (which, incidentally, is not all that likely in either case) that some asshat will spoof your IP address with the same result. And in either case it behooves you to have an open wireless, because in either case you get jackboots pressed against your neck, but if your network is set up so that it isn't accessible to the general public then the prosecutor is going to have a much easier time wrongly putting you in prison because you've deprived yourself of the argument that someone used your open wireless.
John Q. Public never even hears from the cops. That's the thing most people don't seem to get getting about the whole SWAT team thing -- it happens to like six people out of a hundred million. You might as well argue that people shouldn't share their connections because they could be electrocuted while configuring their routers, it's about the same probability.
I'm going to go ahead and ask people what good they think logging is going to do them. You end up with a log that records a computer name (which anyone can make up or change trivially) and a MAC address (which anyone can make up or change trivially). How is that good for anything?
If anything it could make it worse, because the cops would be idiots to trust a log that the suspect had motive and opportunity to preemptively alter as exonerating evidence. If anything it just gives them an excuse to accuse you of not turning over a computer that appears in the logs. Whereas if the log so happens to contain something incriminating-sounding (like your name is Mike and some third party did something illegal using a computer called "Mike's laptop" either because it's a common name or because they wanted to pin it on you), you're just digging your own grave. Where's the upside?
What I would do is just create an open public network and a WPA2 private network, and then set a rate limiter on the public network so that people can check their email or look for directions or whatever but can't suck up all your bandwidth.
2) How much of that stuff was made in the last, I don't know, 15 years?
3) How much of that stuff would actually end up on a streaming service, instead of in the "Disney Vault" while the streaming service gets The Pacifier, Air Bud and reruns of Hannah Montana?
I don't think that's it. It isn't the middle managers who decide whether middle managers get outsourced, it's upper management. It isn't upper management who decides whether upper management gets outsourced, it's the board of directors.
The real problem is that as much as people say that CEOs get paid a zillion times more than factory workers or whatever, the fact is that your typical large company has far more factory workers on the payroll than they have C-level executives. A company can save a lot more money by outsourcing 20,000 factory workers and paying them $15,000 instead of $65,000 than you can save by cutting the salaries of a dozen top executives by a million dollars each.
It's effectively impossible to "win" in the market when your competitors simply copy your designs verbatim
Are you kidding? Of course you can. Make a significant release every year so that by the time anyone can copy last year's model, you're ready with something better. Use economies of scale to undercut them on price. Require carriers to commit to buy 50 million (or however many it takes to make back the R&D costs) before you deliver the first one so that you can lock in your orders before your competitors have anything to offer. Produce high quality software and services for your devices to create a competitive advantage.
Of course, if your plan is to do R&D once and milk it for high margins for a decade without doing any more, you lose. But you're supposed to lose. The point of competition is to make people keep improving their products while driving down margins.
my major assumption is that suing will frequently yield a net benefit
And I guess that is what I would dispute. I think people confuse "having a legal claim" and "filing a lawsuit" too much. If you have an obviously meritorious legal claim, you show it to the adversary's lawyers and you usually get a settlement -- who wants to go to court when they're obviously going to lose? So the cases that make it into a courtroom are the ambiguous ones. But the ambiguous ones are the ones that it's worth spending millions in legal fees over -- if you can increase your chance of winning (or not paying) $10 million by 10%, that's worth a million dollars in legal fees. Or more, if you can set a precedent you like. But that means both sides will just pile on more lawyers to cancel each other out until going to court will tend to a near-zero expected value: You can easily spend e.g. $5 million on lawyers to have a 50% chance of winning a case over $10 million.
And that sort of double or nothing gambit makes a lot more sense to the company that is slowly dying and will likely fail anyway if they do nothing than it does to the company on the upswing that doesn't need to gamble to make profits.
But Samsung ought to have (if nothing else) enough pride to come up with something that wasn't as direct a copy.
They have. They sell plenty of other phones that are substantially different than that one. What you're saying is that once Apple makes something, no one else should be able to make anything like it. That's just silly.
Obviously it's a heuristic and not a determinant, and sometimes it will be wrong. But consider the edge cases: If a company is expecting to totally dominate their competitors on the merits, they have basically no motive to litigate, because it's expensive and bad PR and they can get everything they want without it. Conversely, if a company knows their competitor's product is superior and they're about to enter a death spiral, they have every incentive to litigate because they have nothing left to lose.
So now consider your hypothetical where the product is only slightly better and competition on the merits would yield a slight majority whereas litigation might significantly damage the competitor and yield a large majority of the market. Obviously it could play out the way you suppose, but consider the incentives again: The company with the inferior product has the greater incentive to strike first because they have a prospective 60% of the market to gain rather than only 40%. Moreover, they suffer the greater risk in keeping the status quo, because they risk the competitor with the superior product deciding to launch an ad campaign informing people about the inferior competitor's product's flaws or taking various other measures to use their superior product to expand their market share at the cost of the inferior competitor.
Again, it isn't that every time a company sues another company it's because the litigating company's product is crap. It's just that it happens that way (significantly) more often than not, because of how the incentives line up.
I'm not saying it's right to deal with this in the courts, but it's clearly not right for Google and Samsung to just rip off designs like this. It takes years of research and development to do a design right (over five in this case), and only months to do a shallow copy.
You seem to be assuming that that is what happened. The problem is that the design features are dictated by the form factor. It has to fit in your pocket, you want it to be as small and light as possible while having a big screen, etc. These aren't design features, they're customer preferences. The idea that you can exclude competitors from making what customers want is ridiculous. I mean it would be one thing if they had done something bizarre like made a triangular phone in pink with green stripes and they wanted to claim that, but they've made a black rectangle with icons arranged on a grid. It's not original, it's classic. Which is fine -- people like classic -- but it's totally unreasonable to expect to be able to exclude others from that.
Ah yes, but the "if" is very important. A company involved in litigation is a much riskier investment. It shows the same thing that it shows to discerning customers: That the company thinks its market share is at risk and that it requires the extreme step of going to court. On top of that, there is the risk that the company will spend seven or eight figures worth of investors' money in legal fees and not have anything to show for it. Worse, by launching a strike you invite a response, and there is every possibility that your attack will fail and your competitor's will succeed.
So while it is true that in theory investors may not care after the fact whether a company makes its profits by making products people want to buy or by making similar profits trying to sue everyone, in the meantime before the case comes to a conclusion you create a great deal of uncertainty. And if there is one thing investors hate, it's uncertainty.
I don't think I said that most people care about any of that stuff. Discerning customers should care about that stuff, obviously, because it's a pretty good proxy for which products to choose -- the company itself is tacitly admitting that their competitors are offering more value for money, because if the converse were true then the litigant would be happy to just defeat their competitors in the marketplace instead of wasting their own time and money bringing things to court. The fact that some nontrivial fraction of prospective customers don't care about that sort of thing says nothing about whether you, as an individual, are well-advised to consider such things when making a purchase.
Also, would you rather I said "investors" rather than "customers"? Because investors definitely care about that stuff.
Anyway, your point about the machines is taken, but all they need is more RAM.
Sure, assuming you're the Slashdot reader willing to install it yourself rather than Joe Sixpack who has to pay Best Buy $200 to add $40 worth of memory to a $150 computer. And assuming it's even upgradeable -- some of the cheaper laptops actually have the memory chips soldered to the motherboard. Or they just don't support anything more: A 1.4GHz Pentium III-S will still thoroughly embarrass almost anything Atom-based, but a lot of those motherboards max out at either 512MB or 1GB.
1. They have to be aggressive because if they don't, someone else will be aggressive to them. It's how it works now.
Is it? You can accumulate a patent arsenal without being the first one to sue. It seems to me that all filing the lawsuit does is serve as an admission to your prospective customers that you can't win on the merits. Winners win, losers litigate.
I am going to quote what I wrote so that you can read it again:
There are actually entire lines of computers that came with Vista but were too slow to actually run either it or Windows 7 properly
Windows 7 may be faster on low memory machines than Vista, but that's like saying that a turtle is faster than a slab of concrete. The problem is that there are zero versions of Windows that run properly on low resource machines with no XP drivers.
Even the ones with XP drivers are often hopeless. I've seen XP run on a Pentium M from that era -- which it does admirably for exactly as long as you don't install antivirus on it, after which point the entire machine grinds to a halt because on a machine with 512MB of RAM, having the virus definitions in memory make the difference between having just enough memory to run a web browser and a productivity suite to having constant disk thrashing.
vista came on this laptop. there are NO xp drivers.
There are actually entire lines of computers that came with Vista but were too slow to actually run either it or Windows 7 properly, and at the same time are too new for anyone to have made XP drivers. Like half the computers sold with Vista before 2009 or so.
Never had any problems running Ubuntu on them though.
Yeah, Windows XP. That's why half the time I install it on a machine made after 2002, it doesn't have (among other things) the NIC driver, which means no Windows Update. Solution? Boot Ubuntu LiveCD and download it from the internet -- works every time.
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It doesn't matter to America whether a factory in China uses automation or cheap labor to produce goods. What matters is that you can build an automated factory in the US and produce goods at competitive prices, because the automation mitigates the labor cost advantages of foreign factories and the US factory then has the advantage of significantly lower transportation costs when selling to the US market.
Moreover, it is for the same reason that anyone who offshores an automated factory is generally an idiot -- offshoring and automation are largely incompatible strategies to reduce labor costs. If you spend the money to automate, the advantage of then having cheap labor is substantially reduced because you require far fewer employees, and that small remaining advantage is swallowed by the cost of transporting the finished goods back to the US from the other side of the world.
If you can afford to live by working 20 hours/week then you can work for 40 hours/week at the same hourly wage, spend only 20 hours/week worth of wages and before the end of 20 years have saved enough money that at 5% interest will yield the equivalent of 20 hours/week in wages.
Compare that to working 20 hours/week for 40 years and not being able to save a single dime because you spend as much as you make, so that by the end of the 40 years you've worked the same number of total hours but have zero savings whereas someone who worked twice as many hours for half as many years will still have the entire amount of their savings at the end of the 40 years and be able to live off the interest indefinitely.
The original suggestion was to reduce the length of the work week. Obviously if you can't afford to live on 20 hours/week worth of wages then neither plan works, but if you can afford to reduce the length of the work week then you can instead reduce the age of retirement with better results.
People will ALWAYS cost more than machines. It simply takes more to maintain a human than a computer.
That is obviously not true in all cases. If you need to buy 100 expensive machines to replace one human because it's something that machines can do but are bad at, the human will cost less. Just think about it: If machines always cost less, why do any humans have jobs?
More importantly, you can reduce the cost of a human by reducing the cost of living. People get all caught up in money and inflation/deflation etc., but the fact is that the less labor is required to produce the same products and services, the more products and services that each person can consume for each hour they labor. Or equivalently, the fewer hours of labor you need to put in to make enough money to have the same amount of goods and services.
Where the problem comes in is if you start with a world where everyone is working e.g. 40 hours a week and producing all that everyone needs, and you transition to a world in which half the people are working 40 hours a week to produce everything everyone needs and the other half are unemployed. That is not a trivial problem, but there are a number of solutions to it that are obviously superior to intentionally creating inefficiencies just so that more people can have something to do. Even if all you do is just print money and give everyone enough to buy food and shelter, it's better than forcing people to do redundant work in exchange for the same money, because in the former case they can at least have the possibility of doing something which is actually constructive with their time, instead of forcing them to do something menial and time consuming that a machine could do faster and cheaper.
The solution is to reduce the working week. Especially since ploughing women into the workplace has hugely increased the proportion of the population in the workforce.
The problem is that that is inefficient for skilled jobs. If you train one person how to do a job and they work 60 hours a week doing it, you have 1/3rd the training costs as if you have to train three people who each work 20 hours a week.
Additionally, employees generally prefer to work e.g. 40 hours/week rather than 20 if they can get paid twice as much for doing so, because the increase in discretionary income is so disproportionate. If it takes e.g. 18 hours of labor to cover necessities spending (food and shelter) then working 20 hours leaves only 2 hours wages in discretionary income, whereas working 40 hours gives you 22 hours wages in discretionary income. And if it takes 35 hours of labor to cover necessities spending then working only 20 hours is just not feasible.
What would work a lot better is early retirement. If people would work 40-80 hours/week for 10 or 20 years while saving for retirement and then leave the workforce, that would solve a lot of the problem. The trouble is that some people are idiots who refuse to save anything, and so we set up systems like social security and unemployment to save those people from starvation if they lose their jobs, but the existence of those systems encourages everyone else not to save anything (and taxes them by the amount of money they might have saved), so then no one can retire until they're eligible for social security and everyone has incentive to work as many hours as they can until then.
Housekeepers? Landfill workers? Do you have any idea how much those jobs actually pay?
I'm going to guess that it's less than the person hiring the housekeeper makes and more than you get paid having no job once your unemployment insurance runs out.
And as robotics comes down to the consumer level, those same housekeepers would be fired anyways because a machine cost less than a person to maintain.
Not if the person costs less because the person's cost of living is reduced by automation.
The only people holding all the wealth are the ones who own the computers and robotics, not the ones who are making them.
As long as the corporations are not monopolies/oligopolies, you still get the benefits because automation reduces costs and competition requires the cost savings to be passed onto consumers. Obviously if they are monopolies/oligopolies then you're screwed, but only as a result of the lack of competition rather than the existence of automation.
As for the manufacturing, the big threat to Americans isn't Outsourcing, it's computers & robotics. I know keep bringing this up in my posts, but there is a sleeping bag factory making 2 MILLION bags a year with a total workforce (including salesmen, marketing, accounting and all other non-manufacturing jobs) of JUST 120 people. Fact is, it's not just that we're outsourcing, we just don't need all these people.
The computers and robotics are the solution. That factory is only employing 120 people, but it's employing 120 Americans. Those people can get paid an average of $40,000/year and the labor cost per sleeping bag will only be $2.40. Now put the factory in the vicinity of an Amazon.com warehouse instead of on the other side of the world and you can get a sleeping bag of the same quality, shipped to your door, for $15 instead of $50.
The idea that there will be no work to be done is totally ridiculous. We have massive landfills going back a hundred years or more that could be sorted through for recyclable materials. Most members of the middle class would be happy to have a housekeeper. No one would complain if there was a shorter line at the DMV. The reason that those jobs are not created is that the value of that labor is lower than its costs, and the reason for that is that the cost of living in this country is too high -- because we ship everything in from the other side of the world.
If you build a fully-automated factory in the vicinity of where the goods are consumed, the goods cost less. That reduces the minimum amount of money someone has to make to have a living wage, which allows unskilled laborers to accept those lower paying jobs without experiencing the ravages of poverty. Which allows landfills to hire employees to sort through the junk for profitably recyclable materials, allows middle class people to hire more housekeepers, allows the government to hire enough DMV employees to have shorter lines, etc.
On top of all that, "traditional" non-automated factories in America just aren't competitive anymore. The decision isn't between losing 880 out of 1000 American factory jobs to automation, the decision is between keeping the remaining 120 jobs in America by automating or just sending the whole factory to China. It seems abundantly obvious which alternative is better for American factory workers.
You aren't guaranteed to get the same return path for the same set of packets - the dynamic nature of the net means that there are variations and the route tends to change over time.
In theory more than in practice. Routes change primarily when equipment goes down. It happens, but not that often.
of course you've now hacked a piece of maintain machinery, far more than the usual home machine so it's more of a risk that you'll be caught...
On balance it makes you less likely to be caught, because whoever is trying to catch you has to trace you back through this router in addition to any other measures you're taking (like other compromised routers, or using an internet cafe etc.) rather than only tracing you through the other measures.
As for cable segments? Depends on the topology, the technology and it ups the risk if you have a physical constraint to your location.
You don't actually have to be there, you only have to have a compromised machine there. Get some unsuspecting cable modem user to install a trojan, then spoof the user's neighbor's IP address to keep the compromised user from getting busted and thereby prompting them to remove the trojan.
As far as I'm aware, when it comes to things like downloading kiddie porn or whatever they're trying to prosecute you for I don't think they can just throw you in prison because of a IP address log.
Maybe not, but if there is one fewer plausible explanation (like having open wifi) for why your IP address showed up in their logs, they're going to spend more time harassing you and your friends and family until they give up and go away.
All I'm saying is that leaving your wireless open makes your chance of getting raided go from "almost zero" to "almost zero" while providing you with a plausible explanation for any traffic that might be seen as coming from your IP address in the unlikely even that it actually does happen.
About the only way they can do that is to either get your IP when you don't have it (ie the ISP cycles around the IP addresses you have so someone else has yours), or they manage to hack all the routers coming from the kiddie porn site so that all packets route to somewhere else - not exactly your common garden script kiddie hack.
They don't need all the routers, they only need to be able to see the traffic on the return path. You can do that by being on the same cable segment as the target, or by compromising any single router anywhere on the internet and then just picking a random IP address to spoof for which that router is on the return path, etc.
Your hypothetical only proves why you should leave your connection open -- the justice system has nothing to do with the truth. You want to argue that some asshat is going to use your open connection to break the law and that you will get nicked for it. But it's just as likely (which, incidentally, is not all that likely in either case) that some asshat will spoof your IP address with the same result. And in either case it behooves you to have an open wireless, because in either case you get jackboots pressed against your neck, but if your network is set up so that it isn't accessible to the general public then the prosecutor is going to have a much easier time wrongly putting you in prison because you've deprived yourself of the argument that someone used your open wireless.
John Q. Public never even hears from the cops. That's the thing most people don't seem to get getting about the whole SWAT team thing -- it happens to like six people out of a hundred million. You might as well argue that people shouldn't share their connections because they could be electrocuted while configuring their routers, it's about the same probability.
I'm going to go ahead and ask people what good they think logging is going to do them. You end up with a log that records a computer name (which anyone can make up or change trivially) and a MAC address (which anyone can make up or change trivially). How is that good for anything?
If anything it could make it worse, because the cops would be idiots to trust a log that the suspect had motive and opportunity to preemptively alter as exonerating evidence. If anything it just gives them an excuse to accuse you of not turning over a computer that appears in the logs. Whereas if the log so happens to contain something incriminating-sounding (like your name is Mike and some third party did something illegal using a computer called "Mike's laptop" either because it's a common name or because they wanted to pin it on you), you're just digging your own grave. Where's the upside?
What I would do is just create an open public network and a WPA2 private network, and then set a rate limiter on the public network so that people can check their email or look for directions or whatever but can't suck up all your bandwidth.
1) It was a joke.
2) How much of that stuff was made in the last, I don't know, 15 years?
3) How much of that stuff would actually end up on a streaming service, instead of in the "Disney Vault" while the streaming service gets The Pacifier, Air Bud and reruns of Hannah Montana?
I don't think that's it. It isn't the middle managers who decide whether middle managers get outsourced, it's upper management. It isn't upper management who decides whether upper management gets outsourced, it's the board of directors.
The real problem is that as much as people say that CEOs get paid a zillion times more than factory workers or whatever, the fact is that your typical large company has far more factory workers on the payroll than they have C-level executives. A company can save a lot more money by outsourcing 20,000 factory workers and paying them $15,000 instead of $65,000 than you can save by cutting the salaries of a dozen top executives by a million dollars each.
It's effectively impossible to "win" in the market when your competitors simply copy your designs verbatim
Are you kidding? Of course you can. Make a significant release every year so that by the time anyone can copy last year's model, you're ready with something better. Use economies of scale to undercut them on price. Require carriers to commit to buy 50 million (or however many it takes to make back the R&D costs) before you deliver the first one so that you can lock in your orders before your competitors have anything to offer. Produce high quality software and services for your devices to create a competitive advantage.
Of course, if your plan is to do R&D once and milk it for high margins for a decade without doing any more, you lose. But you're supposed to lose. The point of competition is to make people keep improving their products while driving down margins.
my major assumption is that suing will frequently yield a net benefit
And I guess that is what I would dispute. I think people confuse "having a legal claim" and "filing a lawsuit" too much. If you have an obviously meritorious legal claim, you show it to the adversary's lawyers and you usually get a settlement -- who wants to go to court when they're obviously going to lose? So the cases that make it into a courtroom are the ambiguous ones. But the ambiguous ones are the ones that it's worth spending millions in legal fees over -- if you can increase your chance of winning (or not paying) $10 million by 10%, that's worth a million dollars in legal fees. Or more, if you can set a precedent you like. But that means both sides will just pile on more lawyers to cancel each other out until going to court will tend to a near-zero expected value: You can easily spend e.g. $5 million on lawyers to have a 50% chance of winning a case over $10 million.
And that sort of double or nothing gambit makes a lot more sense to the company that is slowly dying and will likely fail anyway if they do nothing than it does to the company on the upswing that doesn't need to gamble to make profits.
But Samsung ought to have (if nothing else) enough pride to come up with something that wasn't as direct a copy.
They have. They sell plenty of other phones that are substantially different than that one. What you're saying is that once Apple makes something, no one else should be able to make anything like it. That's just silly.
Obviously it's a heuristic and not a determinant, and sometimes it will be wrong. But consider the edge cases: If a company is expecting to totally dominate their competitors on the merits, they have basically no motive to litigate, because it's expensive and bad PR and they can get everything they want without it. Conversely, if a company knows their competitor's product is superior and they're about to enter a death spiral, they have every incentive to litigate because they have nothing left to lose.
So now consider your hypothetical where the product is only slightly better and competition on the merits would yield a slight majority whereas litigation might significantly damage the competitor and yield a large majority of the market. Obviously it could play out the way you suppose, but consider the incentives again: The company with the inferior product has the greater incentive to strike first because they have a prospective 60% of the market to gain rather than only 40%. Moreover, they suffer the greater risk in keeping the status quo, because they risk the competitor with the superior product deciding to launch an ad campaign informing people about the inferior competitor's product's flaws or taking various other measures to use their superior product to expand their market share at the cost of the inferior competitor.
Again, it isn't that every time a company sues another company it's because the litigating company's product is crap. It's just that it happens that way (significantly) more often than not, because of how the incentives line up.
I'm not saying it's right to deal with this in the courts, but it's clearly not right for Google and Samsung to just rip off designs like this. It takes years of research and development to do a design right (over five in this case), and only months to do a shallow copy.
You seem to be assuming that that is what happened. The problem is that the design features are dictated by the form factor. It has to fit in your pocket, you want it to be as small and light as possible while having a big screen, etc. These aren't design features, they're customer preferences. The idea that you can exclude competitors from making what customers want is ridiculous. I mean it would be one thing if they had done something bizarre like made a triangular phone in pink with green stripes and they wanted to claim that, but they've made a black rectangle with icons arranged on a grid. It's not original, it's classic. Which is fine -- people like classic -- but it's totally unreasonable to expect to be able to exclude others from that.
Ah yes, but the "if" is very important. A company involved in litigation is a much riskier investment. It shows the same thing that it shows to discerning customers: That the company thinks its market share is at risk and that it requires the extreme step of going to court. On top of that, there is the risk that the company will spend seven or eight figures worth of investors' money in legal fees and not have anything to show for it. Worse, by launching a strike you invite a response, and there is every possibility that your attack will fail and your competitor's will succeed.
So while it is true that in theory investors may not care after the fact whether a company makes its profits by making products people want to buy or by making similar profits trying to sue everyone, in the meantime before the case comes to a conclusion you create a great deal of uncertainty. And if there is one thing investors hate, it's uncertainty.
I don't think I said that most people care about any of that stuff. Discerning customers should care about that stuff, obviously, because it's a pretty good proxy for which products to choose -- the company itself is tacitly admitting that their competitors are offering more value for money, because if the converse were true then the litigant would be happy to just defeat their competitors in the marketplace instead of wasting their own time and money bringing things to court. The fact that some nontrivial fraction of prospective customers don't care about that sort of thing says nothing about whether you, as an individual, are well-advised to consider such things when making a purchase.
Also, would you rather I said "investors" rather than "customers"? Because investors definitely care about that stuff.
Anyway, your point about the machines is taken, but all they need is more RAM.
Sure, assuming you're the Slashdot reader willing to install it yourself rather than Joe Sixpack who has to pay Best Buy $200 to add $40 worth of memory to a $150 computer. And assuming it's even upgradeable -- some of the cheaper laptops actually have the memory chips soldered to the motherboard. Or they just don't support anything more: A 1.4GHz Pentium III-S will still thoroughly embarrass almost anything Atom-based, but a lot of those motherboards max out at either 512MB or 1GB.
1. They have to be aggressive because if they don't, someone else will be aggressive to them. It's how it works now.
Is it? You can accumulate a patent arsenal without being the first one to sue. It seems to me that all filing the lawsuit does is serve as an admission to your prospective customers that you can't win on the merits. Winners win, losers litigate.
I am going to quote what I wrote so that you can read it again:
There are actually entire lines of computers that came with Vista but were too slow to actually run either it or Windows 7 properly
Windows 7 may be faster on low memory machines than Vista, but that's like saying that a turtle is faster than a slab of concrete. The problem is that there are zero versions of Windows that run properly on low resource machines with no XP drivers.
Even the ones with XP drivers are often hopeless. I've seen XP run on a Pentium M from that era -- which it does admirably for exactly as long as you don't install antivirus on it, after which point the entire machine grinds to a halt because on a machine with 512MB of RAM, having the virus definitions in memory make the difference between having just enough memory to run a web browser and a productivity suite to having constant disk thrashing.
vista came on this laptop. there are NO xp drivers.
There are actually entire lines of computers that came with Vista but were too slow to actually run either it or Windows 7 properly, and at the same time are too new for anyone to have made XP drivers. Like half the computers sold with Vista before 2009 or so.
Never had any problems running Ubuntu on them though.
Yeah, Windows XP. That's why half the time I install it on a machine made after 2002, it doesn't have (among other things) the NIC driver, which means no Windows Update. Solution? Boot Ubuntu LiveCD and download it from the internet -- works every time.