Communities could start asking members or FOSS users to donate CPU cycles for a buildbot, a BOINC [boinc.berkely.edu] computation project or just to mine some donations. Just a thought.
I actually wonder why it was secret to begin with.
And I wonder why is there a need to start these treaties like that.
It's has become a democratic tradition to empower the citizens you represent with the ability to deal with the results of your negotiations, as public opinion wouldn't react correctly to a well intended and morally sound proposal.
Brazil doesn't even export mafia gangster like Russia.
That last sentence ruined an excellent comment. I bet you can't name half of the European countries, but on the stereotypical side you got us all figured out. If many of you can stop thinking that civilization outside US and Western Europe froze 10 years ago and stop gulping everything media/multimedia feeds you wouldn't the world be a great place?
What happened? You don't treat anyone in your country as a (true) minority anymore and go for the closest type of alien? I wonder why Brazilians would be pissed?
It's actually improper. He/She didn't mean to say laws. There aren't international laws, there are treaties. And signing and then breaking a treaty makes you look evil.
I googled twice to be sure. It really makes you look bad.
And after that I start a long chain of messages concerning your upbringing, mental sanity, political or sexual orientation, detailed expositions about specific relatives you have in order to fully reinforce the full meaning of a rebuttal:).
But even if I would actually attack your argument with a good counter-argument, even bringing conclusive evidence how would that stop someone to blindly defend or attack a wrong, unfounded, biased opinion? And after witnessing repeated examples of such conversations turning the worse why would you try?
I like your answer... and I agree.
I would also add my opinion: patents, yes, basically for breakthroughs, without exclusivity. Anyone should be able to use the research behind the patent, base further innovation on it, and in exchange, for a limited period of time, it pays to the innovator a small slice from profit. By this criteria, non-gov organizations and universities would be able to freely use this kind of research in any community or endeavor.
Copyrights: yes, free registration and free fair usage. Also a work can be freely used for any purpose it wasn't designed for. Any distributor should be allowed to sell and provide a work as long as during a limited interval after registration they pay the creator a small slice from profit, non-gov organizations and universities are only required to specify the creators.
And it goes like this: you invest money in research or creation, you deserve a reward. Anyone who makes a profit from your work must thank you, literally. And once registered an innovation or copyrighted work, you can't decide it's application, so that anyone further contributing can apply ideas you never thought of.
Yeah I hate their voodoo, too.
It supposedly makes the world go round, though.
On another note, starting from the hypothesis that there is a correlation between innovation(research output), patent regulation effectiveness(as a coefficient) and research accessibility after patented, and the correlation happens to have a maximum somewhere. This hypothesis is really vague, but plausible. Where would you put us today in relation to that maximum? I actually never thought of putting stuff like that into numbers until this guy came out. Going from this people should give him the middle finger, start crunching some data and follow to the optimum. After that, as a naive and unthinkably optimist person that I am, I think someone will come with a better proposal to define and regulate patents.
The purpose of patent law is to foster innovation and encourage discloser of inventions.
There is no evidence that patent law actually is fostering innovation and at least with software patents there is no discloser, because software patents are so broad or they cover mathematics.
Point valid, but it specifies means of protection, describing the patent as a good, a property, otherwise there wouldn't be a basis for patent lawsuits.
> Would they research just to look good?
Companies invest in R&D because of market pressure. If one company fails to innovate it will be out-innovated by a competing company. It's funny how some people want free market but at the same time apologize for patents.
That is the itch-scratching I was referring to. But big companies invest in R&D to gain assets, not in the market as the consumer see it, but as a means to gain market share by blocking the competitors. Small fries know best, and this is what outrages people against the law.
But patent law does something good here: it encourage disclosure of innovations. In my opinion by no means we should abolish all patents. But you need to base patent law on evidence, like everything else. And you need to articulate the goals of patent law for the market.
And I agree with you, to the point of deciding what is proper evidence.
There is no 1:1 relationship between taxes and government budget as TFA have implied. There are many factors and in my opinion, taxes are the least significant.
There isn't an exclusive relationship, lots of stuff goes in and out of the budget. But there is a correlation for one of its components, and a significant one, in my opinion. That interesting curve (not Tabarrok's) actually means something to some economists, and I will not dare anger them, for they will curse me to hell. It was interesting to see the guy's theory about patents, without checking his numbers. Just the insight gives something.
Have nothing to do with patents.
Patent law does now specify how you monetize or how you are compensated for your research.
So patents were made just for bragging. I was referring to their purpose, and yes their purpose is mostly to prevent unfair copying, rather than to assure monetizing your research.
For example a university is funded by public money and by tuitions. A private company have capital, whereas a public company sells shares.
Well universities doesn't have to worry about ROI but what about a company? Would they research just to look good? Shouldn't just all companies research brainwashing to make customers buy whatever they produce?
What curve? There is no curve. There is no evidence for a curve.
There could be that patents have actually no relationship with innovations.
I don't know, man, it could actually be a polygonal path there, or an apple. It surely doesn't look at all similar to the relation between taxes and government budget as TFA implied. I was just impressed with Tabarrok's ass.
But if a "scratching my nose" group of families fund such research and find a cure and then they give it away for free, the result is just like having no patents (because publishing research results without patent is equivalent to prior works). The problem is finding researchers to work for that sum of money (families don't have the money for a fancy laboratory, with cutting edge equipment AND to pay a generous salary), and on the other hand after they find a cure they don't have the incentive to fund research for similar types of the problem. In the medical field there is also the need to validate and certify the drugs, rigorous tests to see if it complies to all regulations and the problem is that "scratching an itch"-type of research often results in a drug applicable to a limited group or it results in complication to a broad group of people.
Also, a person diagnosed with cancer doesn't have a lot of time. Would you, as a researcher, work for a group that pressures you to find a fast cure and might at any time withdraw from funding you, after their relative is beyond recovery? Big pharmaceutical companies are indeed milking a cow dry with those patents but they provide thoroughly tested and generic results, as they have the resources and expertise to do a proper job. Considering the medical example I keep my opinion that exclusive use of a patent is not helpful. If you paid for a research, there must be a price for anyone to use it at any time.
Don't come to me with some mind experiments like "But without patent protection where is the incentive to innovate". People have innovate for freaking 50,000 years. Our patent system, or our capitalist system is just about 250 years old.
If you invest something into research and then give away its results for free, would you do more research?
I agree, if you want to scratch your itch you will more likely research anyway, and by making it free, you can use any contribution to your work to your benefit, as anyone researching further on your idea would most likely be useful to you. As an example, look at the wonderful open source communities. The downside is: scratching your itch doesn't give you expert insight in a general problem, but in a particular problem - yours. This is why many open source works tend to get messy, hackish and poorly supported. More than anything research requires quality, and investment in quality requires return of investment, cheap quality requires expertise, which requires dedicated people. So the curve Tabarrok took out his ass is his way of saying that given a chance to make some profit from research we would have dedicated people innovating.
My personal opinion is that exclusive rights are actually beyond the maximum innovation point and where the curve starts descending
Yeah but besides that, why did this piece of thread (didn't mean it, honestly) get to be about Apple anyway? Does this world have only three tech giants? And why do we perpetuate that illusion? Shouldn't it derail to something a little more interesting such as impact on small players on the market? Innovators? Anyone?
And besides the point: let's say you specify in your will that you want daisies on your grave and you leave a sum of money in order to do that, then afterwards your relatives get the money and use part of it to buy a marker to draw a daisy on your gravestone. Breaking a agreement, a license or a contract like that doesn't translate to revenue loss in most cases ("he doesn't mind, he's dead and the goose is in the bag now"), but it still feels like a d**k move.
Actually the answer is merit. In order to have profit with an open source project it needs to be reasonably good and damn useful. Also always expect poor donations until enough people get to know your product.
My projects (and I believe most open source projects) started by scratching an itch. In each case developer's itch... Commercial products usually start by attempting to scratch a known itch for the intended audience. The transition to open source from closed source is successful when the project in question successfully scratches an itch, by the aforementioned 'damn' amount, and it draws (and allows, by design) people with the itch scratched to contribute.
... but why don't they replace the keyboard+mouse with a touch-enabled device? It's like they never considered that possibility.
You get to keep the entire screen estate but you add complex input to it.
But many lost the need to taste it. This is not a virtual loss, it's actually a lost potential probable income. Think of the taxes that would have gone to the Government from that income. So many statistical orphans skipping lunches, being denied the dream of making hard-earned money from music. It's murder, i tell you!
And I disagree with you. I've been using VirtualBox a lot in the last 3 years and it's come a long way but it has a lot of rough edges. I agree it's really useful for a beginner, especially when you're unsure about an investment, and a good path to specialized solutions, but you can't ignore the fact that it crashes more than VMware. Take my word for it.
I got really pissed when I found flash working better in a windows virtual machine than on a native Linux setup. I know the downsides of Windows so I use it only when I need it, as opposed to enjoying the bittersweet experience of my Linux machine. I didn't question your point, thank you for your concern, I just added to my arguments to get back to the initial point.
An how is this acceptable in comparison to the Windows experience?
TBH the (heavy) stuff I run on my Linux are my personal reason to prefer it as a platform. It isn't seamless, it isn't consistent, far from easy, but it lets me do my things better. I dislike having flash influenced by resource-hogging processes or even by ads, given that in similar circumstances the Windows version works better. It's not the same thing having a Linux version of a product as enjoying it's features in Linux terms and that is bugging people. And I'm hopeful that standards will occur in a seemingly natural form for Linux to replace the Flash experience.
Until then I can ignore the issues.
You could understand the usefulness of CCleaner when it cleans. A gaming rig means installing games, playing them, then uninstalling them to free space. Usually installs and uninstalls leave dangling classes in registry that point to nothing, file associations, temporary files and stuff.. After two or three of these cycles you may notice slowdown. This is why CCleaner is useful, it was created for that. Also, browser cache usually stores files for sites you aren't planning to visit anymore whis is sometimes the bigger part of the cache, or files for older version of a page. Periocicly cleaning that up saves space and allows the browser to restart caching instead of comparing file versions. This also reduces chances of resident malware in cache.
Slashdot Mirror
Communities could start asking members or FOSS users to donate CPU cycles for a buildbot, a BOINC [boinc.berkely.edu] computation project or just to mine some donations. Just a thought.
The Windows app store is a Steam competitor.
FTFY.
I actually wonder why it was secret to begin with. And I wonder why is there a need to start these treaties like that. It's has become a democratic tradition to empower the citizens you represent with the ability to deal with the results of your negotiations, as public opinion wouldn't react correctly to a well intended and morally sound proposal.
Brazil doesn't even export mafia gangster like Russia.
That last sentence ruined an excellent comment. I bet you can't name half of the European countries, but on the stereotypical side you got us all figured out. If many of you can stop thinking that civilization outside US and Western Europe froze 10 years ago and stop gulping everything media/multimedia feeds you wouldn't the world be a great place?
What happened? You don't treat anyone in your country as a (true) minority anymore and go for the closest type of alien? I wonder why Brazilians would be pissed?
It's actually improper. He/She didn't mean to say laws. There aren't international laws, there are treaties. And signing and then breaking a treaty makes you look evil.
I googled twice to be sure. It really makes you look bad.
Seriously? I give you seven to ten years. If you aren't feeling anything around the corner now, go on. Be superior.
Scale your application enough... The difference might bite you. But yeah, it's not as it's used to be.
And after that I start a long chain of messages concerning your upbringing, mental sanity, political or sexual orientation, detailed expositions about specific relatives you have in order to fully reinforce the full meaning of a rebuttal :).
But even if I would actually attack your argument with a good counter-argument, even bringing conclusive evidence how would that stop someone to blindly defend or attack a wrong, unfounded, biased opinion? And after witnessing repeated examples of such conversations turning the worse why would you try?
He even brought out the cheese for the pasta when he mentioned Windows 8, you need to give him at least 3 out of 5. I almost fed him myself...
I like your answer... and I agree.
I would also add my opinion: patents, yes, basically for breakthroughs, without exclusivity. Anyone should be able to use the research behind the patent, base further innovation on it, and in exchange, for a limited period of time, it pays to the innovator a small slice from profit. By this criteria, non-gov organizations and universities would be able to freely use this kind of research in any community or endeavor.
Copyrights: yes, free registration and free fair usage. Also a work can be freely used for any purpose it wasn't designed for. Any distributor should be allowed to sell and provide a work as long as during a limited interval after registration they pay the creator a small slice from profit, non-gov organizations and universities are only required to specify the creators.
And it goes like this: you invest money in research or creation, you deserve a reward. Anyone who makes a profit from your work must thank you, literally. And once registered an innovation or copyrighted work, you can't decide it's application, so that anyone further contributing can apply ideas you never thought of.
Yeah I hate their voodoo, too.
It supposedly makes the world go round, though.
On another note, starting from the hypothesis that there is a correlation between innovation(research output), patent regulation effectiveness(as a coefficient) and research accessibility after patented, and the correlation happens to have a maximum somewhere. This hypothesis is really vague, but plausible. Where would you put us today in relation to that maximum?
I actually never thought of putting stuff like that into numbers until this guy came out. Going from this people should give him the middle finger, start crunching some data and follow to the optimum. After that, as a naive and unthinkably optimist person that I am, I think someone will come with a better proposal to define and regulate patents.
> I was referring to their purpose
The purpose of patent law is to foster innovation and encourage discloser of inventions. There is no evidence that patent law actually is fostering innovation and at least with software patents there is no discloser, because software patents are so broad or they cover mathematics.
Point valid, but it specifies means of protection, describing the patent as a good, a property, otherwise there wouldn't be a basis for patent lawsuits.
> Would they research just to look good?
Companies invest in R&D because of market pressure. If one company fails to innovate it will be out-innovated by a competing company. It's funny how some people want free market but at the same time apologize for patents.
That is the itch-scratching I was referring to. But big companies invest in R&D to gain assets, not in the market as the consumer see it, but as a means to gain market share by blocking the competitors. Small fries know best, and this is what outrages people against the law.
But patent law does something good here: it encourage disclosure of innovations. In my opinion by no means we should abolish all patents. But you need to base patent law on evidence, like everything else. And you need to articulate the goals of patent law for the market.
And I agree with you, to the point of deciding what is proper evidence.
There is no 1:1 relationship between taxes and government budget as TFA have implied. There are many factors and in my opinion, taxes are the least significant.
There isn't an exclusive relationship, lots of stuff goes in and out of the budget. But there is a correlation for one of its components, and a significant one, in my opinion. That interesting curve (not Tabarrok's) actually means something to some economists, and I will not dare anger them, for they will curse me to hell.
It was interesting to see the guy's theory about patents, without checking his numbers. Just the insight gives something.
Have nothing to do with patents. Patent law does now specify how you monetize or how you are compensated for your research.
So patents were made just for bragging. I was referring to their purpose, and yes their purpose is mostly to prevent unfair copying, rather than to assure monetizing your research.
For example a university is funded by public money and by tuitions. A private company have capital, whereas a public company sells shares.
Well universities doesn't have to worry about ROI but what about a company? Would they research just to look good? Shouldn't just all companies research brainwashing to make customers buy whatever they produce?
What curve? There is no curve. There is no evidence for a curve. There could be that patents have actually no relationship with innovations.
I don't know, man, it could actually be a polygonal path there, or an apple. It surely doesn't look at all similar to the relation between taxes and government budget as TFA implied. I was just impressed with Tabarrok's ass.
But if a "scratching my nose" group of families fund such research and find a cure and then they give it away for free, the result is just like having no patents (because publishing research results without patent is equivalent to prior works). The problem is finding researchers to work for that sum of money (families don't have the money for a fancy laboratory, with cutting edge equipment AND to pay a generous salary), and on the other hand after they find a cure they don't have the incentive to fund research for similar types of the problem. In the medical field there is also the need to validate and certify the drugs, rigorous tests to see if it complies to all regulations and the problem is that "scratching an itch"-type of research often results in a drug applicable to a limited group or it results in complication to a broad group of people.
Also, a person diagnosed with cancer doesn't have a lot of time. Would you, as a researcher, work for a group that pressures you to find a fast cure and might at any time withdraw from funding you, after their relative is beyond recovery? Big pharmaceutical companies are indeed milking a cow dry with those patents but they provide thoroughly tested and generic results, as they have the resources and expertise to do a proper job.
Considering the medical example I keep my opinion that exclusive use of a patent is not helpful. If you paid for a research, there must be a price for anyone to use it at any time.
Don't come to me with some mind experiments like "But without patent protection where is the incentive to innovate". People have innovate for freaking 50,000 years. Our patent system, or our capitalist system is just about 250 years old.
If you invest something into research and then give away its results for free, would you do more research?
I agree, if you want to scratch your itch you will more likely research anyway, and by making it free, you can use any contribution to your work to your benefit, as anyone researching further on your idea would most likely be useful to you. As an example, look at the wonderful open source communities. The downside is: scratching your itch doesn't give you expert insight in a general problem, but in a particular problem - yours. This is why many open source works tend to get messy, hackish and poorly supported. More than anything research requires quality, and investment in quality requires return of investment, cheap quality requires expertise, which requires dedicated people. So the curve Tabarrok took out his ass is his way of saying that given a chance to make some profit from research we would have dedicated people innovating.
My personal opinion is that exclusive rights are actually beyond the maximum innovation point and where the curve starts descending
Yeah but besides that, why did this piece of thread (didn't mean it, honestly) get to be about Apple anyway? Does this world have only three tech giants? And why do we perpetuate that illusion? Shouldn't it derail to something a little more interesting such as impact on small players on the market? Innovators? Anyone?
And besides the point: let's say you specify in your will that you want daisies on your grave and you leave a sum of money in order to do that, then afterwards your relatives get the money and use part of it to buy a marker to draw a daisy on your gravestone. Breaking a agreement, a license or a contract like that doesn't translate to revenue loss in most cases ("he doesn't mind, he's dead and the goose is in the bag now"), but it still feels like a d**k move.
Actually the answer is merit. In order to have profit with an open source project it needs to be reasonably good and damn useful. Also always expect poor donations until enough people get to know your product.
My projects (and I believe most open source projects) started by scratching an itch. In each case developer's itch... Commercial products usually start by attempting to scratch a known itch for the intended audience. The transition to open source from closed source is successful when the project in question successfully scratches an itch, by the aforementioned 'damn' amount, and it draws (and allows, by design) people with the itch scratched to contribute.
... but why don't they replace the keyboard+mouse with a touch-enabled device? It's like they never considered that possibility. You get to keep the entire screen estate but you add complex input to it.
But many lost the need to taste it. This is not a virtual loss, it's actually a lost potential probable income. Think of the taxes that would have gone to the Government from that income. So many statistical orphans skipping lunches, being denied the dream of making hard-earned money from music. It's murder, i tell you!
google virtual appliances... both VirtualBox and VMware have awesome examples of VMs for specific software environments pre-packaged
And I disagree with you. I've been using VirtualBox a lot in the last 3 years and it's come a long way but it has a lot of rough edges. I agree it's really useful for a beginner, especially when you're unsure about an investment, and a good path to specialized solutions, but you can't ignore the fact that it crashes more than VMware. Take my word for it.
I got really pissed when I found flash working better in a windows virtual machine than on a native Linux setup. I know the downsides of Windows so I use it only when I need it, as opposed to enjoying the bittersweet experience of my Linux machine. I didn't question your point, thank you for your concern, I just added to my arguments to get back to the initial point.
An how is this acceptable in comparison to the Windows experience? TBH the (heavy) stuff I run on my Linux are my personal reason to prefer it as a platform. It isn't seamless, it isn't consistent, far from easy, but it lets me do my things better. I dislike having flash influenced by resource-hogging processes or even by ads, given that in similar circumstances the Windows version works better. It's not the same thing having a Linux version of a product as enjoying it's features in Linux terms and that is bugging people. And I'm hopeful that standards will occur in a seemingly natural form for Linux to replace the Flash experience. Until then I can ignore the issues.
You could understand the usefulness of CCleaner when it cleans. A gaming rig means installing games, playing them, then uninstalling them to free space. Usually installs and uninstalls leave dangling classes in registry that point to nothing, file associations, temporary files and stuff.. After two or three of these cycles you may notice slowdown. This is why CCleaner is useful, it was created for that. Also, browser cache usually stores files for sites you aren't planning to visit anymore whis is sometimes the bigger part of the cache, or files for older version of a page. Periocicly cleaning that up saves space and allows the browser to restart caching instead of comparing file versions. This also reduces chances of resident malware in cache.