Superb intellecual reading? Not even close. This article is full of factual inaccuracies and pandering to popularized but inaccurate portrayals of the biotech industry.
While the establishment of public mechanisms for control of govenment owned resources is perfectly reasonable, the biotech patent examples show a great fundamental ignorance of patent law and how it applies in such situations, fed by media distortion of the facts. A good debunking of widely held distortions on this topic is presented at the following link:
Ditto the examples where the drug research is viewed as 'given away' without just compensation from pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies develop more than 90% of the medicines that are approved by the FDA. The fact is that NIH's own internal audits of the process clearly show that most cooperative programs with drug companies develop new scientific knowledge that is widely shared, not new proprietary drugs. Even when cases arise that involve identification of a new drug, the vast bulk of these drugs fail to result in commercially usable products due to effectiveness, toxicity, deliverability and other issues.
They view a website as a large monolithic application.
Applications haven't been "monolithic" for a long time. MVC had it's origins in application design, and anything decent these days is designed with the same 3-tier to n-tier approach that a web site would have.
It's all in the economics - you have to be able to update one part of the application without the changes propagating throughout the whole application.
What is the difference between a private company and a public company?
The public company sells stock on a public exchange. This makes it subject to certain financial disclosure requirements. A private company is generally owned by its principals who are also generally involved in the day to day management of the company. A private company does not have to make significant financial disclosures to the public or it's employees.
In both cases the goal of the company is to make money for its owners/investors.
In most cases the ultimate goal for a private company is to 'flip', or go public, cashing out the owners. The process of flipping is carefully engineered to present an appearence of great value where in fact there may be none.
NONE of this has anything to do with customer satisfaction other than that needed for commercial operations.
Now wait a minute! I thought ultrasound caused small fusion reactions to occur when sonic cavities collapsed! Rather than projecting a sound, isn't this thing going to cause people's heads to explode in a fusion reaction???
Well, maybe, as a soveriegn nation has a wide responsibility to it's citizens.
BUT this is only a reasonable choice if all other avenues are exhausted, i.e. use of free software, approaching vendors for licenses that fit the particular circumstances, etc.
If Malaysia acts totally irresponsibly in this matter, what software company is going to export to Malaysia?
I think that the H1-B visa program has a bad effect on the future of the US as a world technology leader.
While one can argue with that the effect of having qualified H1-B employees in the US is good for the economic strength of the nation, I feel that this is likely to be a short term effect. Other nations that currently export their best talent to the US are working hard to develop programs to keep this talent at home.
In the meantime the lack of economic incentive for homegrown US technical talent due to salaries being depressed by the availability of a large labor pool (supply/demand) is causing the best/brightest to pursue other opportuniites. This has an effect both on the current labor pool, and the future ability to develop homegrown technical talent because of the decay of the educational infrastructure that results when students are not interested in a field.
As talent exporting countries develop ways to provide opportunities at home, the H1-B pool will dry up, and the American educational system will NOT have the means to to provide the needed talent, while universities abroad that have been supplying the US with talent will now be fueling thier native economies, and the US will not have the trained talent to keep up.
Policy makers are doing the country a great disservice by bowing to business demands that are notoriously governed by quarterly profit statements, rather than considering the longer term need to educate its citizens to compete with the rest of the world.
Leave simulation and computers in physics where they belong.
Nonsense. Physics is done with nothing more sophisticated than a slide rule for calculations. If the problem can't be done with a slide rule, just make a few simplifying assumptions and try again. Even the great Enrico Fermi used nothing more than a slide rule.
Chemists, on the other hand have a much more difficult world. They can't simplify everything down to a trivial case because the atoms they deal with have their properties determined by their complex electonic structures, and the molecules are made up of assemblies of thousand and more atoms. To understand the behaviour of these structures you must have powerful computers.
Re:Your links say the opposite. - Your way off
on
.NET for Apache
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
When the same App was ported to.NET, it could perform better under a heavier load then any other database.
Well, I would say that porting applications to a different code base for benchmarking is an exercise in futility. The fact of the matter is that both architectures are amenable to considerable optimization that would not be done in this sort of study, and the 700 - 900 range in page load performance does not represent a difference that any experienced person would consider meaningful.
Spam is what economicists call an external diseconomy. Simply speaking, it's a resource that general society pays for, not the business. Since the business views the resource as being low or no cost, it will use the resource as much as possible, disregarding the fact that it is costing internet users everywhere.
These are exactly the forces that cause industrial pollution. It costs businesses little or nothing to dump their waste products in local lakes; society as a whole pays for the degradation of the environment.
When you have an external diseconomy, the only way to restrain businesses from taking advantage is to change the cost structure - make businesses pay the true cost of spam through internet rate changes, or enact legislation to make it illegal (the later is the strategy used to control pollution).
Hmmm. If I was the RIAA I would be looking to see if I could find evidence that the Slahdot offices/employees are actively pirating music. It seems like every other day Slashdot's editors are posting some article which in effect says "Those stinking Nazi RIAA creeps are harrassing us because they are attempting to enforce their legal rights against copyright infringement AND are lobbying Congress to further restrict copying" I mean, could the bias be any more obvious? What is Slashdot hiding?
Clearly the RIAA is doing what any other industry organization - protecting its members legal position, and lobbying for legislation that would be more favorable to its members. This after all is why these sorts of organizations exist. It's no different from other organizations say, like 'The Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry', etc. except that Slashdot thinks what this organization does gores the precious right to swap files despite the existance of long standing laws that clearly state such activities are illegal.
You people can't expect the patent examiners to have degrees in micro biology, genetic engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, etc...
The actual fact of the matter is that patent examiners usually do have a technical background complete with the degrees you mention.
The reason we are seeing too many bad patents is because the US patent system has some real flaws, including not-strict-enough criterea for unobviousness and utility. Other fixes that would help include publication of applications and allowance for commentary by other parties as part of the application process.
Are the taxes genuinely higher for a given income level than in the USA?
Yes. Not only do they have steep income taxes, but a 25% sales (aka VAT) tax as well.
The USA has a very low tax burden for a western industrialized country. The main reason for this is lack of nationalized health care system, which adds considerably to the level of taxes.
They actually admit that it's a specific case of a generic idea!
ALL patents are limited by the claims for God's sake! This is just boilerplate inserted by the lawyer. In fact it is quite often that a patent attorney who is writing a fair number of patents may insert a bit of boilerplate that he uses as a sort of signature, becuase patent's do not contain an author designation anywhere on the document. This bit of non-informational text may in fact just be the author's encoded signature.
It only took three years for the general PC market to catch up with the power of the X-box.
The early Halo demos were shown on a ATI Rage 128 based Mac G4 three years ago. Halo was origianlly designed to be a Mac/PC game that would run on commonly available hardware.
What is important in games is not the glitz, but the quality of the game paly, which is what has always put Bungie games at the top of the heap.
Thankfully, "denial of income" is not a bona fide crime.
Denial of income is the end result of the action here. Our society makes many actions that result in denial of income illegal. Some of them are:
Copyright, Trademark and Patent Infringement. Failure to adhere to fair wage laws. Investment Fraud. Filing false tax returns. Embezlement.
Are you saying that all of these actions are ok because all they do is deny income?
It is not theft, as it does not deny use of the item in question to the legitimate holder of copyright.
THAT depends on what you define as 'use'. I am sure that New Line Cinema defines their 'use' of a movie they hold a copyright to as something other than viewing it in the privacy of their studio! The fact is that their use is in the sense of a product that they use to generate revenue and profits! By pirating people are IN FACT denying this copyright holder USE of the product in exactly the manner they intended when they invested the many millions of dollars required for its production.
but the crime is different since the victim still has their original.
Suppose I don't use your credit card number, but I sell the number to somebody else. Still happy?
Oh, you still have your original credit card number.
The crime is NOT different. By copying the movie rather than buying it, you are depriving the copyright owner of income. This is exactly the same as hacking his bank account or stealing his credit card number.
No, it certainly is true of the 16.1" (GRX) series models I was writing about.You have a different, earlier model that was sold before this policy went into effect.
Not only that, it is impossible to get upgrades to the bundled software should you want such.
Here are some links from Google groups that describe user experiences with Sony's policies in this area.
I recently went shopping for a laptop, and seriously considered a Sony 16.1" screen model. I decided against purchasing a Sony product because Sony has an extremely bad policy in regard to OS support.
Sony encodes the BIOS with a designation describing the OS that it was sold with. This designation is checked by the drivers supplied by Sony. If the driver OS doesn't match the BIOS designation, the drivers do not load. This is to prevent buyers from installing an OS that the laptop was not sold with. Sony also does not make driver packages available for download online.
The end result is that you will be stuck with whatever OS the machine was sold with. Want to run Win2K Server on a machine sold with Win XP? Too Bad.
Want to dual boot Win2K and XP. Nah. Want to upgrade when the next Windows comes out? Nope.
The only exception to this is that it is possible with some fiddling to install Win XP Pro on a machine that came with XP Home. But don't count on Sony to tell you how! They won't.
In my opinion the result is that Sony laptops are completely unsuitable for technically inclined users.
BTW, my search ended up with a Compaq 2800T with WinXP and the same Radeon card as the Sony. It's got a 15.1" screen, USB 2.0 and is FAR more portable. It also runs RedHat 7.3 and Windows 2000 just fine.It's also expandable to 1gig of RAM and has USB 2.0. The configurability from the Compaq store is also far better than with the Sony.
Sony? Not until they adopt a less hostile OS policy.
An electric car is not an alternative fuel unless all of the power from your grid is via solar or wind (I don't count hydro, as this usually comes from a dam that disrupted local flora/fauna).
Wind/solar farms are just as disruptive as hydro power. To get the generating capacity of something like Hoover Dam you need many large wind/solar installations, plus the eco impact of manufacturing tremendous amounts of related equipment. People often forget that wind/solar are pretty 'low density' energy sources.
Take tissue from a hundred fat people, and a hundred naturally skinney people, combine them, run them thru a centrifuge, and find out what the *difference* is by looking at or studying the bands. Then inject (or intake) the difference as a diet solution.
Yes, and this injection results in people changing what they eat and their exercise pattern how?
Slashdot Mirror
Superb intellecual reading? Not even close. This article is full of factual inaccuracies and pandering to popularized but inaccurate portrayals of the biotech industry.
e em .html
While the establishment of public mechanisms for control of govenment owned resources is perfectly reasonable, the biotech patent examples show a great fundamental ignorance of patent law and how it applies in such situations, fed by media distortion of the facts. A good debunking of widely held distortions on this topic is presented at the following link:
http://csf.colorado.edu/sristi/papers/patentonn
Ditto the examples where the drug research is viewed as 'given away' without just compensation from pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies develop more than 90% of the medicines that are approved by the FDA. The fact is that NIH's own internal audits of the process clearly show that most cooperative programs with drug companies develop new scientific knowledge that is widely shared, not new proprietary drugs. Even when cases arise that involve identification of a new drug, the vast bulk of these drugs fail to result in commercially usable products due to effectiveness, toxicity, deliverability and other issues.
They view a website as a large monolithic application.
Applications haven't been "monolithic" for a long time. MVC had it's origins in application design, and anything decent these days is designed with the same 3-tier to n-tier approach that a web site would have.
It's all in the economics - you have to be able to update one part of the application without the changes propagating throughout the whole application.
I'm worried about Y3K already!
I think it's Y10K that's going to be the REAL ball-buster. How many systems out there are using 5 digits to store the year???
I'm laying in my emergency supplies right now!
What is the difference between a private company and a public company?
The public company sells stock on a public exchange. This makes it subject to certain financial disclosure requirements. A private company is generally owned by its principals who are also generally involved in the day to day management of the company. A private company does not have to make significant financial disclosures to the public or it's employees.
In both cases the goal of the company is to make money for its owners/investors.
In most cases the ultimate goal for a private company is to 'flip', or go public, cashing out the owners. The process of flipping is carefully engineered to present an appearence of great value where in fact there may be none.
NONE of this has anything to do with customer satisfaction other than that needed for commercial operations.
Now wait a minute! I thought ultrasound caused small fusion reactions to occur when sonic cavities collapsed! Rather than projecting a sound, isn't this thing going to cause people's heads to explode in a fusion reaction???
Well, maybe, as a soveriegn nation has a wide responsibility to it's citizens.
BUT this is only a reasonable choice if all other avenues are exhausted, i.e. use of free software, approaching vendors for licenses that fit the particular circumstances, etc.
If Malaysia acts totally irresponsibly in this matter, what software company is going to export to Malaysia?
Hey, now
I think that the H1-B visa program has a bad effect on the future of the US as a world technology leader.
While one can argue with that the effect of having qualified H1-B employees in the US is good for the economic strength of the nation, I feel that this is likely to be a short term effect. Other nations that currently export their best talent to the US are working hard to develop programs to keep this talent at home.
In the meantime the lack of economic incentive for homegrown US technical talent due to salaries being depressed by the availability of a large labor pool (supply/demand) is causing the best/brightest to pursue other opportuniites. This has an effect both on the current labor pool, and the future ability to develop homegrown technical talent because of the decay of the educational infrastructure that results when students are not interested in a field.
As talent exporting countries develop ways to provide opportunities at home, the H1-B pool will dry up, and the American educational system will NOT have the means to to provide the needed talent, while universities abroad that have been supplying the US with talent will now be fueling thier native economies, and the US will not have the trained talent to keep up.
Policy makers are doing the country a great disservice by bowing to business demands that are notoriously governed by quarterly profit statements, rather than considering the longer term need to educate its citizens to compete with the rest of the world.
Leave simulation and computers in physics where they belong.
Nonsense. Physics is done with nothing more sophisticated than a slide rule for calculations. If the problem can't be done with a slide rule, just make a few simplifying assumptions and try again. Even the great Enrico Fermi used nothing more than a slide rule.
Chemists, on the other hand have a much more difficult world. They can't simplify everything down to a trivial case because the atoms they deal with have their properties determined by their complex electonic structures, and the molecules are made up of assemblies of thousand and more atoms. To understand the behaviour of these structures you must have powerful computers.
When the same App was ported to .NET, it could perform better under a heavier load then any other database.
Well, I would say that porting applications to a different code base for benchmarking is an exercise in futility. The fact of the matter is that both architectures are amenable to considerable optimization that would not be done in this sort of study, and the 700 - 900 range in page load performance does not represent a difference that any experienced person would consider meaningful.
i guess this would be the "embrace" part of "embrace and extend."
It's "embrace, extend, extinguiish".
My mother used to say that if you are going to sup with the devil, you had better bring a long spoon. Never has that advice been more appropriate.
Spam is what economicists call an external diseconomy. Simply speaking, it's a resource that general society pays for, not the business. Since the business views the resource as being low or no cost, it will use the resource as much as possible, disregarding the fact that it is costing internet users everywhere.
These are exactly the forces that cause industrial pollution. It costs businesses little or nothing to dump their waste products in local lakes; society as a whole pays for the degradation of the environment.
When you have an external diseconomy, the only way to restrain businesses from taking advantage is to change the cost structure - make businesses pay the true cost of spam through internet rate changes, or enact legislation to make it illegal (the later is the strategy used to control pollution).
Hmmm. If I was the RIAA I would be looking to see if I could find evidence that the Slahdot offices/employees are actively pirating music. It seems like every other day Slashdot's editors are posting some article which in effect says "Those stinking Nazi RIAA creeps are harrassing us because they are attempting to enforce their legal rights against copyright infringement AND are lobbying Congress to further restrict copying" I mean, could the bias be any more obvious? What is Slashdot hiding?
Clearly the RIAA is doing what any other industry organization - protecting its members legal position, and lobbying for legislation that would be more favorable to its members. This after all is why these sorts of organizations exist. It's no different from other organizations say, like 'The Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry', etc. except that Slashdot thinks what this organization does gores the precious right to swap files despite the existance of long standing laws that clearly state such activities are illegal.
You people can't expect the patent examiners to have degrees in micro biology, genetic engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, etc...
The actual fact of the matter is that patent examiners usually do have a technical background complete with the degrees you mention.
The reason we are seeing too many bad patents is because the US patent system has some real flaws, including not-strict-enough criterea for unobviousness and utility. Other fixes that would help include publication of applications and allowance for commentary by other parties as part of the application process.
Are the taxes genuinely higher for a given income level than in the USA?
Yes. Not only do they have steep income taxes, but a 25% sales (aka VAT) tax as well.
The USA has a very low tax burden for a western industrialized country. The main reason for this is lack of nationalized health care system, which adds considerably to the level of taxes.
They actually admit that it's a specific case of a generic idea!
ALL patents are limited by the claims for God's sake! This is just boilerplate inserted by the lawyer. In fact it is quite often that a patent attorney who is writing a fair number of patents may insert a bit of boilerplate that he uses as a sort of signature, becuase patent's do not contain an author designation anywhere on the document. This bit of non-informational text may in fact just be the author's encoded signature.
It only took three years for the general PC market to catch up with the power of the X-box.
The early Halo demos were shown on a ATI Rage 128 based Mac G4 three years ago. Halo was origianlly designed to be a Mac/PC game that would run on commonly available hardware.
What is important in games is not the glitz, but the quality of the game paly, which is what has always put Bungie games at the top of the heap.
Thankfully, "denial of income" is not a bona fide crime.
Denial of income is the end result of the action here. Our society makes many actions that result in denial of income illegal. Some of them are:
Copyright, Trademark and Patent Infringement.
Failure to adhere to fair wage laws.
Investment Fraud.
Filing false tax returns.
Embezlement.
Are you saying that all of these actions are ok because all they do is deny income?
It is not theft, as it does not deny use of the item in question to the legitimate holder of copyright.
THAT depends on what you define as 'use'. I am sure that New Line Cinema defines their 'use' of a movie they hold a copyright to as something other than viewing it in the privacy of their studio! The fact is that their use is in the sense of a product that they use to generate revenue and profits! By pirating people are IN FACT denying this copyright holder USE of the product in exactly the manner they intended when they invested the many millions of dollars required for its production.
but the crime is different since the victim still has their original.
Suppose I don't use your credit card number, but I sell the number to somebody else. Still happy?
Oh, you still have your original credit card number.
The crime is NOT different. By copying the movie rather than buying it, you are depriving the copyright owner of income. This is exactly the same as hacking his bank account or stealing his credit card number.
Poor analogy. No physical item is being stolen..therefore it is not comprable to shoplifting.
So if I hack your bank account or steal your credit card number it's ok with you?
I own a copy of the version Netflix has. It is really bad - a very poor quality, highly abridged master was used.
Wait for this restoration to come out on DVD. Even the Moroder version is better than the current DVD.
This is simply untrue.
S +p olicy&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=be7373cf.01 07141003.3de6883b%40posting.google.com&rnum=8
& lr =&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=bD5F8.23247%24gD6.36827%4 0sccrnsc01&rnum=3
No, it certainly is true of the 16.1" (GRX) series models I was writing about.You have a different, earlier model that was sold before this policy went into effect.
Not only that, it is impossible to get upgrades to the bundled software should you want such.
Here are some links from Google groups that describe user experiences with Sony's policies in this area.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=sony+laptop+O
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=GRX-500&hl=en
The fact is I would not touch one of these machines with a ten foot pole because of this policy.
I recently went shopping for a laptop, and seriously considered a Sony 16.1" screen model. I decided against purchasing a Sony product because
Sony has an extremely bad policy in regard to OS support.
Sony encodes the BIOS with a designation describing the OS that it was sold with. This designation is checked by the drivers supplied by Sony. If the driver OS doesn't match the BIOS designation, the drivers do not load. This is to prevent buyers from installing an OS that the laptop was not sold with. Sony also does not make driver packages available for download online.
The end result is that you will be stuck with whatever OS the machine was sold with. Want to run Win2K Server on a machine sold with Win XP? Too Bad.
Want to dual boot Win2K and XP. Nah. Want to upgrade when the next Windows comes out? Nope.
The only exception to this is that it is possible with some fiddling to install Win XP Pro on a machine that came with XP Home. But don't count on Sony to tell you how! They won't.
In my opinion the result is that Sony laptops are completely unsuitable for technically inclined users.
BTW, my search ended up with a Compaq 2800T with WinXP and the same Radeon card as the Sony. It's got a 15.1" screen, USB 2.0 and is FAR more portable. It also runs RedHat 7.3 and Windows 2000 just fine.It's also expandable to 1gig of RAM and has USB 2.0. The configurability from the Compaq store is also far better than with the Sony.
Sony? Not until they adopt a less hostile OS policy.
An electric car is not an alternative fuel unless all of the power from your grid is via solar or wind (I don't count hydro, as this usually comes from a dam that disrupted local flora/fauna).
Wind/solar farms are just as disruptive as hydro power. To get the generating capacity of something like Hoover Dam you need many large wind/solar installations, plus the eco impact of manufacturing tremendous amounts of related equipment. People often forget that wind/solar are pretty 'low density' energy sources.
Take tissue from a hundred fat people, and a hundred naturally skinney people, combine them, run them thru a centrifuge, and find out what the *difference* is by looking at or studying the bands. Then inject (or intake) the difference as a diet solution.
Yes, and this injection results in people changing what they eat and their exercise pattern how?