I think that's pretty much human nature. People are the same way about cars or whatnot, and music too, even if you yourself are above it.
I suppose they are, but there is actually a reason for it with technology: Network effects. People always talk about growing the pie and all that, but the simple fact is that if people are using Apple products instead of (rather than in addition to) Linux-based products then it very much impacts people other than the ones who buy the Apple kit, because of the network effects. People make content and drivers and so forth for the platforms that people use. So if geeks want content and drivers and so forth for the platforms they like, they have to get everyday people to use those platforms. And the effectiveness of Apple's reality distortion field is very much one of the impediments to that.
But, if there were worthy prior art you would think that Google could have found it and submitted it. There must not have been.
You are blatantly (and one would have to assume intentionally) ignoring the alternative that a jury of laymen just didn't understand it.
And it's not like they write patent claims in any kind of understandable language. How is some real estate agent from Beaumont supposed to know that "list traversal with garbage collection" is the same thing as "record search means including a means for identifying and removing at least some of the expired ones of the records from the linked list when the linked list is accessed"?
A big part of the problem is that there was a huge ton of actual prior art all through the 1970s, 80s and 90s which no one was thinking about for patent purposes at the time and which isn't easily searchable. You have people who can perfectly well remember doing X thing 25 years ago, but almost all the equipment and software from that era is sitting in junk yards or on floppy disks that have long been unreadable due to age, and hardly anybody used to file patents or disclosures for that stuff so the patent office doesn't have any record of it.
So then you get a bunch of people who filed for patents between 1995 and 2000 on things that computer scientists have been doing since 1962 (or which consist of "X thing everybody perfectly well knows about, but on the internet") and which everybody now infringes because they were "infringing" in 1999 when the patent was filed and in 1973 when the attorney who filed the patent was born.
The "problem" (for Microsoft) is that as soon as the troll crawls out from under the bridge, everybody has the solution -- creating a work around is not that hard once you actually have something concrete to avoid. And that doesn't even solve the customer's problem, which is that they're being sued for a zillion dollars for what they already did, and which Microsoft can't reasonably promise them Windows will avoid because offering indemnification for software patents is economic suicide.
Yeah, I don't really get it either. As I understand it the problem is that the math says the ultimate speed limit is the speed of light, so the only way for something to be faster than light is for the amount of time it takes to get there to be negative. So then you have the communication getting their before it left, basically -- Alice gets the message five years ago instead of today, or something like that.
If an a cause triggers an effect somewhere else in a faster-than-light fashion, sure, an outside observer in some frame of reference might be able to observe it occurring before the cause. This happens any time that the outside observer is closer to the effect than to the cause. However, at no point does that observer observe the effect before the cause occurs. If that observer is, for example, five light years away from the effect and ten light years away from the cause, then the observer still observes the effect five years after the cause occurred.
I'm not a physicist either, but let me see if I can explain this.
Suppose you have three points arranged along a line, say A, B and C, so that A is e.g. 10 light years away from C and B is half way between them, and at the starting time they're all stationary with respect to one another.
Now suppose Alice at point A sets off at the speed of light for point C. An observer at point C will observe that A leaves and arrives at the same time (or almost the same time, if Alice is traveling slightly slower than the speed of light), because the light conveying to point C that Alice has left point A arrives at point C at the same time as Alice arrives at point C. So from the frame of reference of point C, Alice will be at point A until she is at point C. Moreover, at point B, Alice similarly appears to arrive instantly at point B as soon as she is seen to depart from point A, but once she passes point B, point B perceives her to take several more years to reach point C.
Now suppose all three points have instantaneous FTL communications. Now when Bob at point B observes Alice to have passed point B, he call ups Carol at point C and tells her that Alice is headed her way. Well, in the frame of reference of Carol at point C, Alice is still at point A, because it will be several years before Alice sets off from point A and instantaneously arrives at point C. So Carol calls up Alice -- while Alice is still at point A -- and convinces her not to come. Which is obviously a causality violation, because if Alice remains at point A then Bob can't observe her passing point B (and so Bob can't tell Carol and Carol won't know to tell Alice not to come).
But the question is, what's the efficiency? Smelting requires "epic amounts of power" but if you can get more than half of it back out on the other end then you've got a commercially viable high energy battery. Whereas if you lose 95%+ then it's just a curious toy.
I wouldn't even be worried about them selling reactors to other countries. The real problem is that they'll take the design, build 100 of them in China and then have a reliable source of cheap electricity for half a century while the luddites in the US would rather continue to burn radioactive coal than build a single new reactor -- and if they screw it up with incompetence it will only cost US companies added bureaucracy as the scaremongers take the opportunity to do everything they can to intentionally bury everyone in the US with red tape.
Not only that, the "turn it into a picture" method has the disadvantage of making the non-redacted portions of it cease to be text formatted, which is totally annoying. Not to mention turning efficient, easily-compressible text into an image 100 times as big after compression.
What I've seen people do in meatspace is to get out the black marker, black out the parts they want redacted, then photocopy it and distribute the copy but keep/destroy the one that actually has the marker on it.
Your analogy doesn't make any sense. It isn't that their product is being used in a bad way once they've sold it, it's that the government is asking them to do something wrong and they're doing it. It would be as if, in order to have the right to sell bananas in the US, the government required you (an employee of the banana company) to kill an innocent person. Which is literally the end result of giving over this information to oppressive regime.
Microsoft never tried to hide that their offering wasn't certified yet, they're just a vendor calling out their competitor for lying to the client (the government).
Except that it is and was certified, according to the GSA (which issues the certifications).
You're kind of missing the point. The idea is, with zero marginal cost (i.e. internet distribution), you can make a more money selling a certain number of units for a lower price than selling 10% as many units for a 500% higher unit price. The idea that you might not be able to make back your production costs at the low price doesn't enter into it -- you're making more money at a lower price than a higher price, so if you can't make a profit charging $1 then you'll lose even more by charging $5.
Especially because volume has its own benefits: Even if lowering prices doesn't strictly increase total revenue, increasing your volume will increase your name recognition. That way you can sell more concert tickets or software support services or ad impressions or whatever, or have an easier time finding customers for your next release, etc.
I hate the RIAA and their methods as much as anyone, but I don't think it is spurious to look at what's happened to the music industry in the last 15 years or so and say that the internet has not had a negative effect.
The effect the internet has had has been to somewhat level the playing field between smaller acts and big labels, with the result that instead of getting a small handful of acts who each sell millions of recordings, you get a far larger number of smaller acts that can each make a living without becoming millionaires. The idea that getting more self-sustaining bands and more music but less of a chance for record companies to be king makers is, on balance, "a negative effect" seems highly disingenuous to me.
I'm an amateur musician, but among the semi-professionals I know no one has any delusions about breaking into the music industry anymore. It's really changed the landscape because the industry itself has shrunk dramatically.
I think you'll find that the "music industry" is bigger than it ever wars. It's just that everything is going to live performances -- which have been up year over year for some time now -- at the expense of "recorded music" which is on the decline profit-wise because there is now more competition since any aspiring musician can make a recording and distribute it on the internet.
Those who charge for bandwidth love piracy - since if the cost of the content goes to zero, all the profit in home-viewing of movies will go to the telcom companies & ISPs.
I don't think you're thinking this through. ISPs generally don't like P2P because they don't get to charge both ends -- they get money from the "consumers" but they don't get to charge the "producers". Why do you think Comcast wanted to throttle BitTorrent, instead of just letting customers hit their caps and whacking them with ridiculous fees? It's because they'd much rather you use Netflix, so that they can charge Netflix for bandwidth and let customers hit their caps and whack them with ridiculous fees.
The value of Java is that the designers know how to say "no". Adding more features to a language dramatically increases the chances that code will do something unknown or unexpected.
No it doesn't. Having the extra features in the language does not require you to use them.
That is why Java is such an annoying language. Take multiple inheritance. You should almost never use it. It's complicated and hard to get right. The thing is, there are a small number of instances where having it will save you from having to write 10,000 lines of redundant code. So instead of doing something sensible like having a policy of not using it unless you get approval from the project lead but still having it when you need it, Java tells you to go screw yourself and just write the 10,000 lines of redundant code.
To add to this, there is no reason that we must have sales taxes. There are better ways for governments to collect revenue. Like income tax. Or net asset tax with a deduction for the value of the average house in the county you live in.
Net asset tax is really kind of brilliant because there is no legal way to hide from it -- if you own something, the value gets taxed. No tax shelters. Doesn't matter if it's stocks, cash, a patent, paintings, etc. And at the same time, it doesn't screw up the economy because the only behavior it promotes is spending by rich people with assets in excess of the deduction, and then only up to the point that they actually exceed it, and the only behavior it really punishes is hoarding things without using them.
Just like how the US Auto industry got used to being able to charge obscene prices for equal (or lower) quality products, brick and mortar stores got used to having very little competition. Now that they actually have to compete and can no longer ass rape customers, they're screaming like children over the fact that someone is giving consumers a better deal and as a result, consumers are flocking to the better prices.
To be fair, that's not quite it.
The problem is that brick and mortar stores inherently have higher costs. Which means they have to have higher prices to recover their costs. But with somewhat higher prices, they lose all the price-sensitive customers to Amazon. Then they have lower volume but the same fixed costs, which requires them to charge even higher prices. Vicious cycle until at some point they just go out of business.
And it's actually worse than that (if you can imagine), because the more of them go out of business the more business there is for Amazon et al. At some point the scale of distribution will become such that same-day delivery, or even "30 minutes or less" delivery becomes cost effective for Amazon, which eliminates even the convenience advantage of brick and mortar stores.
I can see how it could be a testing artifact: In testing, people compare the relatively smaller savings to the relatively higher price and decide more often that it isn't worth it. In actual reality, people generally only bother to compare prices on things that cost more than a certain threshold amount, and then once they do they buy whatever is the cheapest.
A long time ago, I used to work in sales, selling printers that cost $450 that people would shop around on, and drive 90 miles to the next big city to save $5 ($445).
From a game theory perspective that is totally rational. Customers would prefer that the local store not charge a convenience premium, so if they buy solely on price (even when the price difference is smaller than the inconvenience of driving to the city), it will cause the local store to have to price competitively with the big city store and let the consumers have the convenience of a local store without paying extra.
Of course, if the local store is less efficient than the big city store then it might also just go out of business. And these days when the "big city store" is Amazon, basically all brick and mortar stores are less efficient, so they're folding up. But that's the free market -- if your costs are higher than your competitor's and you can't offer enough "something else" to make up the difference then you had better find another line of work.
Fair is fair. If it's fair to no play sales tax online, then it's only fair to not pay it in a brick and mortar store.
OK, so get rid of it for the brick and mortar stores then. Just don't add it to the internet.
Sales tax is regressive and economically stupid anyway: Think about what happens to someone who would otherwise have a job taking inputs that cost $X and selling them for $X + 5% when you tack on a 6% sales tax: If customers are not willing to pay more than 5% over the cost of the inputs, the sales tax eats every cent of profit and then some and the industry that would otherwise exist, doesn't. In essence the problem is that the amount of the tax exceeds the amount of the profit, making the endeavor unsustainable.
Compare that to e.g. an income tax where you take deductions for business expenses so that the tax can never exceed the profit and bankrupt the business.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's pretty much human nature. People are the same way about cars or whatnot, and music too, even if you yourself are above it.
I suppose they are, but there is actually a reason for it with technology: Network effects. People always talk about growing the pie and all that, but the simple fact is that if people are using Apple products instead of (rather than in addition to) Linux-based products then it very much impacts people other than the ones who buy the Apple kit, because of the network effects. People make content and drivers and so forth for the platforms that people use. So if geeks want content and drivers and so forth for the platforms they like, they have to get everyday people to use those platforms. And the effectiveness of Apple's reality distortion field is very much one of the impediments to that.
But, if there were worthy prior art you would think that Google could have found it and submitted it. There must not have been.
You are blatantly (and one would have to assume intentionally) ignoring the alternative that a jury of laymen just didn't understand it.
And it's not like they write patent claims in any kind of understandable language. How is some real estate agent from Beaumont supposed to know that "list traversal with garbage collection" is the same thing as "record search means including a means for identifying and removing at least some of the expired ones of the records from the linked list when the linked list is accessed"?
A big part of the problem is that there was a huge ton of actual prior art all through the 1970s, 80s and 90s which no one was thinking about for patent purposes at the time and which isn't easily searchable. You have people who can perfectly well remember doing X thing 25 years ago, but almost all the equipment and software from that era is sitting in junk yards or on floppy disks that have long been unreadable due to age, and hardly anybody used to file patents or disclosures for that stuff so the patent office doesn't have any record of it.
So then you get a bunch of people who filed for patents between 1995 and 2000 on things that computer scientists have been doing since 1962 (or which consist of "X thing everybody perfectly well knows about, but on the internet") and which everybody now infringes because they were "infringing" in 1999 when the patent was filed and in 1973 when the attorney who filed the patent was born.
The "problem" (for Microsoft) is that as soon as the troll crawls out from under the bridge, everybody has the solution -- creating a work around is not that hard once you actually have something concrete to avoid. And that doesn't even solve the customer's problem, which is that they're being sued for a zillion dollars for what they already did, and which Microsoft can't reasonably promise them Windows will avoid because offering indemnification for software patents is economic suicide.
Yeah, I don't really get it either. As I understand it the problem is that the math says the ultimate speed limit is the speed of light, so the only way for something to be faster than light is for the amount of time it takes to get there to be negative. So then you have the communication getting their before it left, basically -- Alice gets the message five years ago instead of today, or something like that.
If an a cause triggers an effect somewhere else in a faster-than-light fashion, sure, an outside observer in some frame of reference might be able to observe it occurring before the cause. This happens any time that the outside observer is closer to the effect than to the cause. However, at no point does that observer observe the effect before the cause occurs. If that observer is, for example, five light years away from the effect and ten light years away from the cause, then the observer still observes the effect five years after the cause occurred.
I'm not a physicist either, but let me see if I can explain this.
Suppose you have three points arranged along a line, say A, B and C, so that A is e.g. 10 light years away from C and B is half way between them, and at the starting time they're all stationary with respect to one another.
Now suppose Alice at point A sets off at the speed of light for point C. An observer at point C will observe that A leaves and arrives at the same time (or almost the same time, if Alice is traveling slightly slower than the speed of light), because the light conveying to point C that Alice has left point A arrives at point C at the same time as Alice arrives at point C. So from the frame of reference of point C, Alice will be at point A until she is at point C. Moreover, at point B, Alice similarly appears to arrive instantly at point B as soon as she is seen to depart from point A, but once she passes point B, point B perceives her to take several more years to reach point C.
Now suppose all three points have instantaneous FTL communications. Now when Bob at point B observes Alice to have passed point B, he call ups Carol at point C and tells her that Alice is headed her way. Well, in the frame of reference of Carol at point C, Alice is still at point A, because it will be several years before Alice sets off from point A and instantaneously arrives at point C. So Carol calls up Alice -- while Alice is still at point A -- and convinces her not to come. Which is obviously a causality violation, because if Alice remains at point A then Bob can't observe her passing point B (and so Bob can't tell Carol and Carol won't know to tell Alice not to come).
But the question is, what's the efficiency? Smelting requires "epic amounts of power" but if you can get more than half of it back out on the other end then you've got a commercially viable high energy battery. Whereas if you lose 95%+ then it's just a curious toy.
I wouldn't even be worried about them selling reactors to other countries. The real problem is that they'll take the design, build 100 of them in China and then have a reliable source of cheap electricity for half a century while the luddites in the US would rather continue to burn radioactive coal than build a single new reactor -- and if they screw it up with incompetence it will only cost US companies added bureaucracy as the scaremongers take the opportunity to do everything they can to intentionally bury everyone in the US with red tape.
Not only that, the "turn it into a picture" method has the disadvantage of making the non-redacted portions of it cease to be text formatted, which is totally annoying. Not to mention turning efficient, easily-compressible text into an image 100 times as big after compression.
So maybe what they should introduce is a "photocopy" software for PDFs which removes any information which cannot be seen with the naked eye.
That isn't the problem. They already have things that effectively do that.
The problem is that not all programs do that automatically, and stupid people are stupid.
What I've seen people do in meatspace is to get out the black marker, black out the parts they want redacted, then photocopy it and distribute the copy but keep/destroy the one that actually has the marker on it.
Your analogy doesn't make any sense. It isn't that their product is being used in a bad way once they've sold it, it's that the government is asking them to do something wrong and they're doing it. It would be as if, in order to have the right to sell bananas in the US, the government required you (an employee of the banana company) to kill an innocent person. Which is literally the end result of giving over this information to oppressive regime.
That seems unwise. If they pay her then all we'll ever hear is how she's on their payroll, regardless of the quality of the work she does.
If the problem is money then if anything, we should pay her. Anyone feel like starting a "Save Groklaw" fund?
Microsoft never tried to hide that their offering wasn't certified yet, they're just a vendor calling out their competitor for lying to the client (the government).
Except that it is and was certified, according to the GSA (which issues the certifications).
Either way, it happens. A lot.
Is that somehow mutually exclusive with it being "serious BS"?
You're kind of missing the point. The idea is, with zero marginal cost (i.e. internet distribution), you can make a more money selling a certain number of units for a lower price than selling 10% as many units for a 500% higher unit price. The idea that you might not be able to make back your production costs at the low price doesn't enter into it -- you're making more money at a lower price than a higher price, so if you can't make a profit charging $1 then you'll lose even more by charging $5.
Especially because volume has its own benefits: Even if lowering prices doesn't strictly increase total revenue, increasing your volume will increase your name recognition. That way you can sell more concert tickets or software support services or ad impressions or whatever, or have an easier time finding customers for your next release, etc.
I hate the RIAA and their methods as much as anyone, but I don't think it is spurious to look at what's happened to the music industry in the last 15 years or so and say that the internet has not had a negative effect.
The effect the internet has had has been to somewhat level the playing field between smaller acts and big labels, with the result that instead of getting a small handful of acts who each sell millions of recordings, you get a far larger number of smaller acts that can each make a living without becoming millionaires. The idea that getting more self-sustaining bands and more music but less of a chance for record companies to be king makers is, on balance, "a negative effect" seems highly disingenuous to me.
I'm an amateur musician, but among the semi-professionals I know no one has any delusions about breaking into the music industry anymore. It's really changed the landscape because the industry itself has shrunk dramatically.
I think you'll find that the "music industry" is bigger than it ever wars. It's just that everything is going to live performances -- which have been up year over year for some time now -- at the expense of "recorded music" which is on the decline profit-wise because there is now more competition since any aspiring musician can make a recording and distribute it on the internet.
Those who charge for bandwidth love piracy - since if the cost of the content goes to zero, all the profit in home-viewing of movies will go to the telcom companies & ISPs.
I don't think you're thinking this through. ISPs generally don't like P2P because they don't get to charge both ends -- they get money from the "consumers" but they don't get to charge the "producers". Why do you think Comcast wanted to throttle BitTorrent, instead of just letting customers hit their caps and whacking them with ridiculous fees? It's because they'd much rather you use Netflix, so that they can charge Netflix for bandwidth and let customers hit their caps and whack them with ridiculous fees.
The value of Java is that the designers know how to say "no". Adding more features to a language dramatically increases the chances that code will do something unknown or unexpected.
No it doesn't. Having the extra features in the language does not require you to use them.
That is why Java is such an annoying language. Take multiple inheritance. You should almost never use it. It's complicated and hard to get right. The thing is, there are a small number of instances where having it will save you from having to write 10,000 lines of redundant code. So instead of doing something sensible like having a policy of not using it unless you get approval from the project lead but still having it when you need it, Java tells you to go screw yourself and just write the 10,000 lines of redundant code.
It seems to me the problem is that Java has annoying treatment of references. I mean what's wrong with this?
void fn(foo &a, foo &b) // compare by value // compare by reference/address
{
if(a == b)
if(&a == &b)
}
To add to this, there is no reason that we must have sales taxes. There are better ways for governments to collect revenue. Like income tax. Or net asset tax with a deduction for the value of the average house in the county you live in.
Net asset tax is really kind of brilliant because there is no legal way to hide from it -- if you own something, the value gets taxed. No tax shelters. Doesn't matter if it's stocks, cash, a patent, paintings, etc. And at the same time, it doesn't screw up the economy because the only behavior it promotes is spending by rich people with assets in excess of the deduction, and then only up to the point that they actually exceed it, and the only behavior it really punishes is hoarding things without using them.
Just like how the US Auto industry got used to being able to charge obscene prices for equal (or lower) quality products, brick and mortar stores got used to having very little competition. Now that they actually have to compete and can no longer ass rape customers, they're screaming like children over the fact that someone is giving consumers a better deal and as a result, consumers are flocking to the better prices.
To be fair, that's not quite it.
The problem is that brick and mortar stores inherently have higher costs. Which means they have to have higher prices to recover their costs. But with somewhat higher prices, they lose all the price-sensitive customers to Amazon. Then they have lower volume but the same fixed costs, which requires them to charge even higher prices. Vicious cycle until at some point they just go out of business.
And it's actually worse than that (if you can imagine), because the more of them go out of business the more business there is for Amazon et al. At some point the scale of distribution will become such that same-day delivery, or even "30 minutes or less" delivery becomes cost effective for Amazon, which eliminates even the convenience advantage of brick and mortar stores.
I can see how it could be a testing artifact: In testing, people compare the relatively smaller savings to the relatively higher price and decide more often that it isn't worth it. In actual reality, people generally only bother to compare prices on things that cost more than a certain threshold amount, and then once they do they buy whatever is the cheapest.
A long time ago, I used to work in sales, selling printers that cost $450 that people would shop around on, and drive 90 miles to the next big city to save $5 ($445).
From a game theory perspective that is totally rational. Customers would prefer that the local store not charge a convenience premium, so if they buy solely on price (even when the price difference is smaller than the inconvenience of driving to the city), it will cause the local store to have to price competitively with the big city store and let the consumers have the convenience of a local store without paying extra.
Of course, if the local store is less efficient than the big city store then it might also just go out of business. And these days when the "big city store" is Amazon, basically all brick and mortar stores are less efficient, so they're folding up. But that's the free market -- if your costs are higher than your competitor's and you can't offer enough "something else" to make up the difference then you had better find another line of work.
Fair is fair. If it's fair to no play sales tax online, then it's only fair to not pay it in a brick and mortar store.
OK, so get rid of it for the brick and mortar stores then. Just don't add it to the internet.
Sales tax is regressive and economically stupid anyway: Think about what happens to someone who would otherwise have a job taking inputs that cost $X and selling them for $X + 5% when you tack on a 6% sales tax: If customers are not willing to pay more than 5% over the cost of the inputs, the sales tax eats every cent of profit and then some and the industry that would otherwise exist, doesn't. In essence the problem is that the amount of the tax exceeds the amount of the profit, making the endeavor unsustainable.
Compare that to e.g. an income tax where you take deductions for business expenses so that the tax can never exceed the profit and bankrupt the business.