That's an interesting and unusual spin, but I think you're assuming far, far more infrastructure capability and availability of raw capital than India is likely to have available anywhere in the foreseeable future.
In fact, part of the problem with the claims that the offshoring trend will somehow uplift a downtrodden India is precisely that in India, it only benefits a tiny sliver of the population. The great majority of India still suffers from nearly pre-industrial conditions, poor education, and so on. From what I've read, important progress has been made recently, but Hyderabad is hardly poised to become the next New York City.
In a move most considered inconceivable, McDonalds announced today that it would begin development of an offshore alternative for its employee base. "The move was really a 'no-brainer'," exclaimed Terence Haynes, head of offshoring development for the multibillion dollar corporation. "We simply had to consider offshoring in order to generate the returns our stockholders demand."
Haynes went on to describe the how offshoring would be used to save the company it's estimated millions per year. "A customer would simply walk up to a kiosk and where there was once an employee there to take your order you will now have a phone. Customers can simply pick up the phone, call the 1-800 number and place their order through one of our specially trained offshored employees." The order will then be processed through our new computer ordering system where it will be forwarded to one of several McDonald's franchises in the area for processing. Customers will then be notified where to go to pick up their order. "The process may inconvenience customers at first", admits Haynes, "but once they realize how wonderful the new technology is, they'll begin to come around."
The offshoring initiative for McDonalds is not without its critics. One customer, using the new system had this complaint. "I wanted a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke. That's it. Nothing else. But it turns out that these Indian folks have this thing about beef so they don't accept orders for any burgers. The person explained that if I wanted a burger I had to call a completely different number in China or some such place. I said to heck with it and just ordered the Nuggets."
Which is precisely why the government will never be able to do anything more cheaply over the long term. There is no incentive to streamline. Costs are passed directly on to the consumer/taxpayer, who no longer has a choice in the matter.
Speaking as someone who wrote electronic insurance filing software for a number of years, I can tell you the US government is already a vast, inefficient bureaucracy when it comes to the relatively small involvement in healthcare it has today (the key word is "relatively"...)
I don't know where you work, but IT isn't exactly a blue-collar field. Of the few hundred people I work with, the lowest-paid among them probably makes at least $50K (in an area where the average income is about $35K) and the top guys are making more like $120K.
Companies are trying very hard to keep this offshoring thing quiet. Outside of the industries directly affected by it, most people never give it much thought, and few of them realize the impact.
Heck, think about it this way -- I just told you that in my area, the average income is about $35K. What would be the impact on the local economy if a few hundred people making 2X or 3X that much were suddenly no longer able to pay their bills, or had to move away to find a new job?
This is the main reason IT offshoring is different from the 70's when a lot of blue collar work went to other countries. There is a lot more income at stake. For that reason, I expected IT offshoring to have the impact you describe -- people would notice and "something" would be done about (I freely admit I don't know what can or should be done to "fix" the problem). I think there are a lot fewer "offshorable" jobs in biotech, so I doubt it'll have the same impact.
Except that (1) the prices aren't going down, and (2) the REASON they're taking American jobs is that they make less money, so (3) they CAN'T afford to buy the products they're making.
If they COULD afford those products, their labor wouldn't be cheap enough to compete. There have already been several stories about Indians who are concerned with their gradually increasing compensation. By their own estimate, in only a few years they'll be expensive enough that they're no longer appealing and Big Business will shift it's gaze to the next low-rent country on the list. Their bubble will be smaller and shorter-lived than ours ever was.
Get it? It's a system that drags everybody down, not lifts anybody up.
Well, at least you're consistently full of shit, I'll give you that.
Anything that is non-American is a target for complaint by Americans, for Americans.
And the Europeans NEVER complain about non-European things. The Indians NEVER complain about Americans. The Chinese never complain about anybody. Jesus, at least we're complaining about some discrete event. All the Europeans seem to do is complain about Americans blindly and automatically.
All those Americans complaining about losing jobs to India can get Indian work visa's, easily enough... think it works the other way around, though?
I'm in awe of your ability to wrap so many wrong and irrelevant things into such a short sentence.
The "Americans can get Indian work visas" thing has been run into the ground in every offshoring article on slashdot. There are always a small handful of people insisting it's possible, by EVERY piece of evidence I've seen anyone present (beyond anecdotal musing) has been to the contrary.
By contrast, assuming you work in IT, how many Indians do you run into on a daily basis? If you're in any company of any size, or even if you've just called for tech support on something recently -- or hell, even to just order something -- chances are good you're dealing with somebody from India. And don't think you're "safe" being in Canadan or Europe or whatever... at least once a week now, The Register runs some story or another about the creeping encroachment in Europe.
Which brings us to the irrelevancy -- this isn't about getting a work visa. Many, many, many of us welcome the opportunity to compete with an Indian (or anyone else) when they're competing on-shore. Many of us hold NOTHING against "Indians". The problem is Americans -- upper management sacrificing quality to shave a few bucks so they can boost their bonus before they cut and run.
This isn't about race, and it isn't about competition, it's about the gutting of the American economy by a small handful of Americans who are already so flush with cash there is virtually nothing they can't do. I'm all for grabbing as much as you can -- but not at the expense of your countrymen. And if you have a problem with patriotism and national pride, well, sorry, but that's how I feel, and so far I haven't seen any rational explanation of why I should feel otherwise.
The only thing that is going to save America from itself, is Americans leaving America and living abroard for a while, so as to get their heads out of the sand and see what the world is really like, not what MTV/CNN/Disney tells you it is like... Americans have a view of their relation to the rest of the world that is not only wrong, but downright rude.
Been there, done that. Traveled the world. It was fun. The people were nice. I still go to Europe every couple of years, time permitting. I even considered moving to Paris back in 2000, except that the cost of living relative to the income wasn't where I wanted it to be. And in spite of all that, my viewpoint hasn't changed. I still think America is the best place to live. I like it here. Your blanket characteriziation of "Americans" is just as rude and stupid as anything you're accusing us of.
Rather unexpectedly, I went online to search for a particularly hard to find Torx socket set, and ran across this prime example. This is precisely the sort of thing you're claiming doesn't exist.
Your invention may be produced and sold by Lisle Corporation under an attractive Award or Royalty Agreement that will bring you income for years to come. Even with a very good tool invention you need someone who can manufacture and sell the tool. The Lisle Corporation has been working with inventors of new tools on an award or royalty basis for many years.
You seem to be letting your pessimism cloud your judgement.
Ok, first the examples. Quite a lot of people make good money licensing patented ideas. You don't have to come up with The Next Big Thing to make good money.
I have a friend who makes a nice bit of side-income (maybe $25K/year) off royalties from some obscure bit of electronics he patented (I don't really know what it is, I've just heard him talk about it).
I actually KNOW this guy, I used to work for him in the early 90's. Last time I saw him he was pulling down a few hundred thou a year off these CoughPop things.
You want three? I recently saw on TV (some awful show called "Inventors", I think) a guy who invented the automatic pet-food dispenser and some other weird pet-related product -- some kind of automatic cat door, or some equally bizarre thing. He was worth something like $3 million. In fact, that show was on once a week or so, on TLC I believe, and at least one of the people featured on each epsiode was an example of someone who became successful as a direct result of something they invented.
For that matter, *I* am in the process of patenting something related to kitchen countertops, of all things, and I have some good leads on getting it licensed. Making back my investment for the patent process should be no problem at all (it'll end up being only about $6K), and more to the point, I have every reason to believe I should make some nice side money from it.
There are no guarantees. You might lose the money you invest. But that's just how business works. (I'm actually taking a safer route and using a provisional patent to protect my idea, then getting the first licensees to pay the actual utility patent fees.)
If patents on ideas from individuals were predictably profitable, then there would be companies looking to *pay* for such ideas
That's just it -- there ARE companies that will license ideas patented by individuals. Think about it from their perspective -- if some guy shows up pitching an idea related to their line of business, and they conclude that their competitor might snatch it up, you can bet they're going to consider getting their hands on it first.
You appear to be hung up on either getting something for nothing, or getting a guarantee of some kind. TANSTAAFL. Patents cost money because there is labor involved, and probably it serves as a deterrent against a certain amount of frivolous filing. We can debate about whether the cost is reasonable, but suggesting they should be free is just silly. I wish a lot of things in life were free -- but they aren't.
The rest of your post sounds a lot like a typical sour-grapes routine: "This might be hard, or might fail, so nobody should try." Indeed, you seem to take it a step further and conclude that nobody should be allowed to try, which is just crazy.
And, no I'm not going to backup those gigabytes and gigabytes of losslessly compressed music (assuming about 50% compression ratio), as there is no convient and inexpensive way for home user to do that
A DVD burner is great for that. We've ripped about 30GB from our CDs, so I can burn those on about six DVDs (three bucks total -- we needed the burner itself for my wife's business anyway) and I avoid having to rip everything over again in the event of a HDD crash on the music server.
Seriously, wouldn't that be sweet? The religious types would be beside themselves with confusion. Not that Mel would ever give them the rights, of course.
"High profile" implies media coverage, and that implies public interest. I doubt many people are going to get worked up over a patent infringement case that doesn't involve their TV, the remote control to their TV, or their car.
How many high profile patent litigations can you cite AT ALL, not just recently? Only a few high-tech geek-specific things come to mind for me personally, and none of those would have generated the slightest glimmer of interest from the general public.
Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean they haven't happened. (Not being a patent attorney myself, I also can't say they HAVE happened, I'm just arguging against your assumption that they haven't.)
I don't know what you consider "getting rich", but you might be surprised at how many people out there make a few million off one dumb idea or another. For instance, the guy who thought up those automatic pet-food dispensers is worth something like $3M purely from licensing that silly little idea.
In fact, it probably says a lot that a multi-millionaire simply flys below the radar of "rich folks" these days. Granted, there are lots of people who are vastly more wealthy for other reasons, and certainly there is more money being made off patents by medium and big companies -- but that doesn't mean individual examples are particularly rare.
My cousin's wife has an idea that she would like see implemented. In the current system, she keeps quiet in the hope that someday she'll be able to patent it. Without patents, she would have no incentive to keep it quiet and would talk it over or send an email to the appropriate manufacturer in the hope of getting a few free samples (it's a disposable product, so individual items are very cheap).
And you see nothing wrong with that? Today, your cousin's wife has a chance to make a little money. Get by. Pay the bills. Receive tangible benefit from the product of her insight. In your world, the best she could do would be to hope for the charity of [hand waving] some random company. And y'know, companies aren't all that charitable.
In fact, if there was no patent system and your cousin's wife was smart, she would have greater incentive to keep her mouth shut until she could afford to start a business to manufacture this product herself -- probably a considerably less likely proposition.
I agree the patent system has problems, and certainly examples are easy to find (such as the 1-click patent), but "no patent system at all" doesn't really improve anything for the individual.
In order for a patent, your application has to "enable one skilled in the art at the time the invention was made" to build and operate the invention. You can't patent ideas. You can't say "i want to patent an antigravity device."
Awhile back on slashdot, there were links to all sorts of bizarre things which people have patented. The specific one which comes to mind was a radio which communicated faster than light through "hyperspace".
So it would seem that not all patent examiners necessarily agree with you.
On the other hand, it seems likely that guy's patent will expire long before somebody figures out how to build the wormhole-producing black box required to operate the rest of his "invention"...
A utility patent is the full-blown patent. Right now, getting one can be as cheap as about $4000, but it can run up into the $15K range. It depends on a whole bunch of factors.
What most regular folks do (e.g. individuals who aren't a patent factory like IBM, 3M, GE, etc) is file for a provisional patent. This is a relatively cheap process (in the neighborhood of $1500) which protects the basic idea for one year, with the intent of allowing you to file changes (improvements) to the basic claim. That's the INTENT -- because changing a "real" utility patent is very time consuming and expensive.
What most people actually use the provisional patent for is to protect their idea while they shop it around to investors and licensees. Then you make it a condition of the licensing that the first licensee pays for the full-blown patent expenses (or something along those same lines).
But it should actually be pretty rare for the expenses to run as high as $10K. (I happen to be in the process of patenting something, and luckily a friend of mine is a patent attorney.)
Bizarre, I've never heard this angle. Most references I find are related to claims in Galison's book "Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time ". Everyone else seems to regard this as a bit apocryphal. Still interesting, though.
From the linked book review:
The young Einstein was not, of course, employed in the academic world but in the Swiss Patent Office. And Switzerland, as we know, was a centre of invention and innovation in clock technologies. The patent office at Bern was a clearing-house for new timing technologies, and Einstein's job afforded him a veritable grandstand seat from which to become acquainted with new electro-technological advances.
At $300K each, there was no way the US government was going to buy a few just to crash test them.
The government doesn't buy them, the manufacturer has to donate them. The problem wasn't the cost (after all, the Porsche GT1 will be US legal), the problem was the very small number produced (public-sale production was the minimum required to satisfy Group B rally homologation requirements).
Years later, they convinced the NHTSA to accept Porche's crash test data.
Actually, they enacted the supercar law, which reduces the restrictions providing only a certain number are imported and each vehicle is driven no more than 2500 miles each year on public roads.
Finally, these Porches were modified enough to pass emissions. The cars in question doesn't have as much horsepower as the original but still are powerful machines.
Actually, the Porsche emissions were fine under the rules of the new supercar law. Canepa, a Califorina Porsche importer and "tuner" did make engine, exhaust, and other modifications, but these were intended to increase the power of the car. When the 959 came out in 1988 it's 450HP was impressive. But in 2000 or so, when this all took place, 450HP was fairly run-of-the-mill. As I recall, he notched them up to about 600HP.
There are plenty of better ways this country could spend 1/4 billion dollars.
Except "this country" isn't spending the money. People who already have giant wads of cash are giving these guys tiny slices of their personal warchests in $10K increments, and things of that nature. In fact, the country is GETTING that money. The candidates aren't collecting it so they can roll around in it naked at home (sorry, I hope you weren't eating when you read this) -- they're collecting it to SPEND. Hotels, food, electricians, travel, print shops, ten billion "Vote For Me You Bitches" lapel pins, etc.
And frankly, $250M isn't crap in the big picture. Christ, my own company, which is medium-sized at best, just announced QUARTERLY earnings of about $6B.
The presidency isn't supposed to be about bling-bling.
Only that in this case, the Porsche wasn't at all street-legal prior to the efforts of Gates and... either Canepa or Holbert. The DOT, EPA, and NHTSA suck.
From IBM's perspective, if you have a goose that lays golden eggs, it's probably not a good idea to scrimp on chicken feed.
Except that this goose will continue shooting out eggs by the dozen regardless of how IBM or anybody else uses the product of its work.
Christ, how many operating systems has IBM cranked out *completely on it's own* in the past 30 years? Not getting support from that schitzoid agglomerate called "the Linux community" probably ranks pretty low on their list of priorities. If it was "religion" and not "marketing", truly important IBM software like DB2 and MQ Series would suddenly be all OSS/GPL-friendly, and available to relative nobodies like the Mandrake people. Don't hold your breath.
Linux developers are basically unpaid IBM employees.
This reminds me of the late 80's and early 90's when one magazine after another loudly proclaimed THIS was finally "The Year of the LAN"... year after year after year.
It had ceased to be interesting by the time it finally actually happened.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an interesting and unusual spin, but I think you're assuming far, far more infrastructure capability and availability of raw capital than India is likely to have available anywhere in the foreseeable future.
In fact, part of the problem with the claims that the offshoring trend will somehow uplift a downtrodden India is precisely that in India, it only benefits a tiny sliver of the population. The great majority of India still suffers from nearly pre-industrial conditions, poor education, and so on. From what I've read, important progress has been made recently, but Hyderabad is hardly poised to become the next New York City.
In a move most considered inconceivable, McDonalds announced today that it would begin development of an offshore alternative for its employee base. "The move was really a 'no-brainer'," exclaimed Terence Haynes, head of offshoring development for the multibillion dollar corporation. "We simply had to consider offshoring in order to generate the returns our stockholders demand."
Haynes went on to describe the how offshoring would be used to save the company it's estimated millions per year. "A customer would simply walk up to a kiosk and where there was once an employee there to take your order you will now have a phone. Customers can simply pick up the phone, call the 1-800 number and place their order through one of our specially trained offshored employees." The order will then be processed through our new computer ordering system where it will be forwarded to one of several McDonald's franchises in the area for processing. Customers will then be notified where to go to pick up their order. "The process may inconvenience customers at first", admits Haynes, "but once they realize how wonderful the new technology is, they'll begin to come around."
The offshoring initiative for McDonalds is not without its critics. One customer, using the new system had this complaint. "I wanted a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke. That's it. Nothing else. But it turns out that these Indian folks have this thing about beef so they don't accept orders for any burgers. The person explained that if I wanted a burger I had to call a completely different number in China or some such place. I said to heck with it and just ordered the Nuggets."
Your arguments did seem indefensible, but I figured you'd at least TRY.
the government wouldn't need to make a profit
Which is precisely why the government will never be able to do anything more cheaply over the long term. There is no incentive to streamline. Costs are passed directly on to the consumer/taxpayer, who no longer has a choice in the matter.
Speaking as someone who wrote electronic insurance filing software for a number of years, I can tell you the US government is already a vast, inefficient bureaucracy when it comes to the relatively small involvement in healthcare it has today (the key word is "relatively"...)
I don't know where you work, but IT isn't exactly a blue-collar field. Of the few hundred people I work with, the lowest-paid among them probably makes at least $50K (in an area where the average income is about $35K) and the top guys are making more like $120K.
Companies are trying very hard to keep this offshoring thing quiet. Outside of the industries directly affected by it, most people never give it much thought, and few of them realize the impact.
Heck, think about it this way -- I just told you that in my area, the average income is about $35K. What would be the impact on the local economy if a few hundred people making 2X or 3X that much were suddenly no longer able to pay their bills, or had to move away to find a new job?
This is the main reason IT offshoring is different from the 70's when a lot of blue collar work went to other countries. There is a lot more income at stake. For that reason, I expected IT offshoring to have the impact you describe -- people would notice and "something" would be done about (I freely admit I don't know what can or should be done to "fix" the problem). I think there are a lot fewer "offshorable" jobs in biotech, so I doubt it'll have the same impact.
Except that (1) the prices aren't going down, and (2) the REASON they're taking American jobs is that they make less money, so (3) they CAN'T afford to buy the products they're making.
If they COULD afford those products, their labor wouldn't be cheap enough to compete. There have already been several stories about Indians who are concerned with their gradually increasing compensation. By their own estimate, in only a few years they'll be expensive enough that they're no longer appealing and Big Business will shift it's gaze to the next low-rent country on the list. Their bubble will be smaller and shorter-lived than ours ever was.
Get it? It's a system that drags everybody down, not lifts anybody up.
Well, at least you're consistently full of shit, I'll give you that.
... think it works the other way around, though?
... Americans have a view of their relation to the rest of the world that is not only wrong, but downright rude.
Anything that is non-American is a target for complaint by Americans, for Americans.
And the Europeans NEVER complain about non-European things. The Indians NEVER complain about Americans. The Chinese never complain about anybody. Jesus, at least we're complaining about some discrete event. All the Europeans seem to do is complain about Americans blindly and automatically.
All those Americans complaining about losing jobs to India can get Indian work visa's, easily enough
I'm in awe of your ability to wrap so many wrong and irrelevant things into such a short sentence.
The "Americans can get Indian work visas" thing has been run into the ground in every offshoring article on slashdot. There are always a small handful of people insisting it's possible, by EVERY piece of evidence I've seen anyone present (beyond anecdotal musing) has been to the contrary.
By contrast, assuming you work in IT, how many Indians do you run into on a daily basis? If you're in any company of any size, or even if you've just called for tech support on something recently -- or hell, even to just order something -- chances are good you're dealing with somebody from India. And don't think you're "safe" being in Canadan or Europe or whatever... at least once a week now, The Register runs some story or another about the creeping encroachment in Europe.
Which brings us to the irrelevancy -- this isn't about getting a work visa. Many, many, many of us welcome the opportunity to compete with an Indian (or anyone else) when they're competing on-shore. Many of us hold NOTHING against "Indians". The problem is Americans -- upper management sacrificing quality to shave a few bucks so they can boost their bonus before they cut and run.
This isn't about race, and it isn't about competition, it's about the gutting of the American economy by a small handful of Americans who are already so flush with cash there is virtually nothing they can't do. I'm all for grabbing as much as you can -- but not at the expense of your countrymen. And if you have a problem with patriotism and national pride, well, sorry, but that's how I feel, and so far I haven't seen any rational explanation of why I should feel otherwise.
The only thing that is going to save America from itself, is Americans leaving America and living abroard for a while, so as to get their heads out of the sand and see what the world is really like, not what MTV/CNN/Disney tells you it is like
Been there, done that. Traveled the world. It was fun. The people were nice. I still go to Europe every couple of years, time permitting. I even considered moving to Paris back in 2000, except that the cost of living relative to the income wasn't where I wanted it to be. And in spite of all that, my viewpoint hasn't changed. I still think America is the best place to live. I like it here. Your blanket characteriziation of "Americans" is just as rude and stupid as anything you're accusing us of.
Of course. I wasn't suggesting the FTL radio or other such patents were at all legitimate.
Rather unexpectedly, I went online to search for a particularly hard to find Torx socket set, and ran across this prime example. This is precisely the sort of thing you're claiming doesn't exist.
Lisle Tool Corp's Inventor's Program
Your invention may be produced and sold by Lisle Corporation under an attractive Award or Royalty Agreement that will bring you income for years to come. Even with a very good tool invention you need someone who can manufacture and sell the tool. The Lisle Corporation has been working with inventors of new tools on an award or royalty basis for many years.
You seem to be letting your pessimism cloud your judgement.
Ok, first the examples. Quite a lot of people make good money licensing patented ideas. You don't have to come up with The Next Big Thing to make good money.
I have a friend who makes a nice bit of side-income (maybe $25K/year) off royalties from some obscure bit of electronics he patented (I don't really know what it is, I've just heard him talk about it).
I actually KNOW this guy, I used to work for him in the early 90's. Last time I saw him he was pulling down a few hundred thou a year off these CoughPop things.
You want three? I recently saw on TV (some awful show called "Inventors", I think) a guy who invented the automatic pet-food dispenser and some other weird pet-related product -- some kind of automatic cat door, or some equally bizarre thing. He was worth something like $3 million. In fact, that show was on once a week or so, on TLC I believe, and at least one of the people featured on each epsiode was an example of someone who became successful as a direct result of something they invented.
For that matter, *I* am in the process of patenting something related to kitchen countertops, of all things, and I have some good leads on getting it licensed. Making back my investment for the patent process should be no problem at all (it'll end up being only about $6K), and more to the point, I have every reason to believe I should make some nice side money from it.
There are no guarantees. You might lose the money you invest. But that's just how business works. (I'm actually taking a safer route and using a provisional patent to protect my idea, then getting the first licensees to pay the actual utility patent fees.)
If patents on ideas from individuals were predictably profitable, then there would be companies looking to *pay* for such ideas
That's just it -- there ARE companies that will license ideas patented by individuals. Think about it from their perspective -- if some guy shows up pitching an idea related to their line of business, and they conclude that their competitor might snatch it up, you can bet they're going to consider getting their hands on it first.
You appear to be hung up on either getting something for nothing, or getting a guarantee of some kind. TANSTAAFL. Patents cost money because there is labor involved, and probably it serves as a deterrent against a certain amount of frivolous filing. We can debate about whether the cost is reasonable, but suggesting they should be free is just silly. I wish a lot of things in life were free -- but they aren't.
The rest of your post sounds a lot like a typical sour-grapes routine: "This might be hard, or might fail, so nobody should try." Indeed, you seem to take it a step further and conclude that nobody should be allowed to try, which is just crazy.
And, no I'm not going to backup those gigabytes and gigabytes of losslessly compressed music (assuming about 50% compression ratio), as there is no convient and inexpensive way for home user to do that
A DVD burner is great for that. We've ripped about 30GB from our CDs, so I can burn those on about six DVDs (three bucks total -- we needed the burner itself for my wife's business anyway) and I avoid having to rip everything over again in the event of a HDD crash on the music server.
Seriously, wouldn't that be sweet? The religious types would be beside themselves with confusion. Not that Mel would ever give them the rights, of course.
"High profile" implies media coverage, and that implies public interest. I doubt many people are going to get worked up over a patent infringement case that doesn't involve their TV, the remote control to their TV, or their car.
How many high profile patent litigations can you cite AT ALL, not just recently? Only a few high-tech geek-specific things come to mind for me personally, and none of those would have generated the slightest glimmer of interest from the general public.
Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean they haven't happened. (Not being a patent attorney myself, I also can't say they HAVE happened, I'm just arguging against your assumption that they haven't.)
I don't know what you consider "getting rich", but you might be surprised at how many people out there make a few million off one dumb idea or another. For instance, the guy who thought up those automatic pet-food dispensers is worth something like $3M purely from licensing that silly little idea.
In fact, it probably says a lot that a multi-millionaire simply flys below the radar of "rich folks" these days. Granted, there are lots of people who are vastly more wealthy for other reasons, and certainly there is more money being made off patents by medium and big companies -- but that doesn't mean individual examples are particularly rare.
My cousin's wife has an idea that she would like see implemented. In the current system, she keeps quiet in the hope that someday she'll be able to patent it. Without patents, she would have no incentive to keep it quiet and would talk it over or send an email to the appropriate manufacturer in the hope of getting a few free samples (it's a disposable product, so individual items are very cheap).
And you see nothing wrong with that? Today, your cousin's wife has a chance to make a little money. Get by. Pay the bills. Receive tangible benefit from the product of her insight. In your world, the best she could do would be to hope for the charity of [hand waving] some random company. And y'know, companies aren't all that charitable.
In fact, if there was no patent system and your cousin's wife was smart, she would have greater incentive to keep her mouth shut until she could afford to start a business to manufacture this product herself -- probably a considerably less likely proposition.
I agree the patent system has problems, and certainly examples are easy to find (such as the 1-click patent), but "no patent system at all" doesn't really improve anything for the individual.
When I went to a police academy, we were taught never to assume anything.
Isn't "probable cause" essentially a form of assumption?
The only thing you'll get if you put lawyers there is junk that's correctly phrased and formatted,
Correctly phrased and formatted... if you're also a lawyer.
Legalese is an unnecessarily (and intentionally) convoluted mess.
At least right now, you can READ most of the patents without formal training in LawSpeak.
In order for a patent, your application has to "enable one skilled in the art at the time the invention was made" to build and operate the invention. You can't patent ideas. You can't say "i want to patent an antigravity device."
Awhile back on slashdot, there were links to all sorts of bizarre things which people have patented. The specific one which comes to mind was a radio which communicated faster than light through "hyperspace".
So it would seem that not all patent examiners necessarily agree with you.
On the other hand, it seems likely that guy's patent will expire long before somebody figures out how to build the wormhole-producing black box required to operate the rest of his "invention"...
A utility patent is the full-blown patent. Right now, getting one can be as cheap as about $4000, but it can run up into the $15K range. It depends on a whole bunch of factors.
What most regular folks do (e.g. individuals who aren't a patent factory like IBM, 3M, GE, etc) is file for a provisional patent. This is a relatively cheap process (in the neighborhood of $1500) which protects the basic idea for one year, with the intent of allowing you to file changes (improvements) to the basic claim. That's the INTENT -- because changing a "real" utility patent is very time consuming and expensive.
What most people actually use the provisional patent for is to protect their idea while they shop it around to investors and licensees. Then you make it a condition of the licensing that the first licensee pays for the full-blown patent expenses (or something along those same lines).
But it should actually be pretty rare for the expenses to run as high as $10K. (I happen to be in the process of patenting something, and luckily a friend of mine is a patent attorney.)
Bizarre, I've never heard this angle. Most references I find are related to claims in Galison's book "Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time ". Everyone else seems to regard this as a bit apocryphal. Still interesting, though.
From the linked book review:
The young Einstein was not, of course, employed in the academic world but in the Swiss Patent Office. And Switzerland, as we know, was a centre of invention and innovation in clock technologies. The patent office at Bern was a clearing-house for new timing technologies, and Einstein's job afforded him a veritable grandstand seat from which to become acquainted with new electro-technological advances.
At $300K each, there was no way the US government was going to buy a few just to crash test them.
The government doesn't buy them, the manufacturer has to donate them. The problem wasn't the cost (after all, the Porsche GT1 will be US legal), the problem was the very small number produced (public-sale production was the minimum required to satisfy Group B rally homologation requirements).
Years later, they convinced the NHTSA to accept Porche's crash test data.
Actually, they enacted the supercar law, which reduces the restrictions providing only a certain number are imported and each vehicle is driven no more than 2500 miles each year on public roads.
Finally, these Porches were modified enough to pass emissions. The cars in question doesn't have as much horsepower as the original but still are powerful machines.
Actually, the Porsche emissions were fine under the rules of the new supercar law. Canepa, a Califorina Porsche importer and "tuner" did make engine, exhaust, and other modifications, but these were intended to increase the power of the car. When the 959 came out in 1988 it's 450HP was impressive. But in 2000 or so, when this all took place, 450HP was fairly run-of-the-mill. As I recall, he notched them up to about 600HP.
There are plenty of better ways this country could spend 1/4 billion dollars.
:)
Except "this country" isn't spending the money. People who already have giant wads of cash are giving these guys tiny slices of their personal warchests in $10K increments, and things of that nature. In fact, the country is GETTING that money. The candidates aren't collecting it so they can roll around in it naked at home (sorry, I hope you weren't eating when you read this) -- they're collecting it to SPEND. Hotels, food, electricians, travel, print shops, ten billion "Vote For Me You Bitches" lapel pins, etc.
And frankly, $250M isn't crap in the big picture. Christ, my own company, which is medium-sized at best, just announced QUARTERLY earnings of about $6B.
The presidency isn't supposed to be about bling-bling.
New here?
Only that in this case, the Porsche wasn't at all street-legal prior to the efforts of Gates and... either Canepa or Holbert. The DOT, EPA, and NHTSA suck.
From IBM's perspective, if you have a goose that lays golden eggs, it's probably not a good idea to scrimp on chicken feed.
Except that this goose will continue shooting out eggs by the dozen regardless of how IBM or anybody else uses the product of its work.
Christ, how many operating systems has IBM cranked out *completely on it's own* in the past 30 years? Not getting support from that schitzoid agglomerate called "the Linux community" probably ranks pretty low on their list of priorities. If it was "religion" and not "marketing", truly important IBM software like DB2 and MQ Series would suddenly be all OSS/GPL-friendly, and available to relative nobodies like the Mandrake people. Don't hold your breath.
Linux developers are basically unpaid IBM employees.
This reminds me of the late 80's and early 90's when one magazine after another loudly proclaimed THIS was finally "The Year of the LAN"... year after year after year.
It had ceased to be interesting by the time it finally actually happened.