Interesting case in point - the makers of Claritin resisted FDA's movement to take it off prescription-only status and allow over-the-counter sales, because OTC drugs are cheaper, and the patent was about to (or already had) run out. They were going to lose both legs of their protection against commoditization. But they finally went along with it, and found what seems to be a successful strategy.
OTOH, taking an idea that was not at all available to most people for several reasons, and making the effort to bring it to the masses - should that not have a reward?
"You think? Surely the rate of truly groundbreaking invention and discovery was faster and more impressive a hundred years ago."
Not so. See Kurzweil's hypothesis about the coming technological singularity (there are probably better links, but that will do for now). Not only is technological advance increasing in speed, the rate of change is increasing. More new tech has been developed in the last 20 years than in the entire previous history of humans, and the next 10 years will do the same again - if we don't blow ourselves up or all die of a horrible epidemic.
Of course, I'm not saying this has anything to do with patents, it's just a factoid to toss into the argument.:)
It means that Bitcoin will nearly always be a deflationary system.
Which is the problem with all monetary standards based on a fixed (or nearly so) quantity of any physical asset such as gold.
I wasn't the first to do so, but about 20 years I wrote an unpublished essay proposing that energy would make a pretty good standard - call it the erg standard. (IIRC an economist in the 1960s proposed this in several papers.) The idea is that as an economy grows the amount of energy that is produced also tends to grow at a rate that is more-or-less proportional, which would tend to keep the relationship between the asset and the economic activity reasonably constant. Also energy is something that isn't naturally easy to hoard directly. Of course, an important point is that _anything_ real or imagined can be used as a standard - it's just one commodity in dynamic balance with all others, which happens to be used to 'keep score'. Energy just has the advantage of a built-in growth factor where gold is a physically limited quantity. Also, imagine what would happen to the world economic system if someone found a solid gold asteroid and started shipping vast quantities of gold back down to Earth (not that this would be practical, it's just an example) - the gold standard would suddenly fall apart. But it is unlikely that any energy production method would be extremely much cheaper than existing methods, and if such a method were to be discovered then a political/economic mechanism to deal with this could be instituted.
For popular usage the standard could denominated in terms such as a kilowatt-hour or BOE. So, for example, instead of oil being priced at $100 per barrel, dollars would be denominated as 0.01 BOE. Note that an actual barrel of oil would cost something more than one BOE, as the cost of production, shipping delivery and business operations would be a component of the delivered cost.
Similarly, a BOE is 6.12x10^9 Joules, while a KWH is 3.6x10^6 J, which converted at the above rate would be about 5.88 cents (US) per KWH - fairly close to the base cost of electricity in many parts of the US. Of course as delivered it costs more in most locations because of the cost of the electrical grid etc. So my electric bill which is presently about $20 per month might be denominated as 340 KWH instead, while actual usage might be (just making this up as I don't recall actual usage) 200 KWH - equivalent to about 10c per KWH. (Note that I have non-electric heat and hot water, the major energy users in my house - all I have is an electric stove, used once every other day or so, and lights that I keep turned off when I'm not using.)
Good point. As I recall, the fundamental advantages that Seymour Cray introduced with the Cray supercomputers were primarily about infrastructure - cooling the boards and chips, and using interconnect wiring that was all the 'exact' right length for the high speed signals. Since the wires were the same length, the propagation delay between boards could be accommodated in the logic on each board, so the individual processors could act in parallel increasing the overall clock speed. (I know this could be stated more clearly - sorry.)
The machines had different cooling methods. In the Cray-1) two circuit boards were layered back-to-back against a copper sheet that was attached to a freon plumbing system. In the Cray-2 the entire module was immersed in a bath of Fluorinert (I remember seeing a picture of the first prototype of a new Cray processor, inside a fish tank filled with Fluorinert - the fluorinert evidently had color patterns that resulted from stimulation by the high frequency signals.)
For him and his situation, I think the distinguishing between hookers and gold-diggers was a very thin one (if there was one at all). He knew it wasn't about the relationship - it was a transaction. He got eye-candy, probably got laid, she got fun and 'gifts'.
A while back (1980s) my company used to do business with a very rich guy who was short, fat, ugly, with an obnoxious personality and a comb-over. Unlike many like him, he was aware of all of the above. He also had a Ferrari Testarossa, primarily because money + Ferrari was an effective antidote to the rest of his 'features'. It worked. Of course, a typical date cost him $1000s.
Funny thing - in practice, today this is the opposite of how things are going. More people have been transitioned from dirt-eating poverty to what most of the world considers middle class in the last 30 years than at any time in history. There are two reasons. Globalization has created hundreds of millions of jobs in places where there were formerly no means of acquiring money, bringing hundreds of millions of families into the global middle class. And technology has been improving every aspect of life for those who are worst off much faster than it has improved life for the first world.
The technology being deployed in the traditionally-defined third world is leapfrogging the first world - cell phones are just one ubiquitous example, as it is an order of magnitude cheaper to deploy cell systems than wired systems. Go to villages in the middle of nowhere and low-cost solar panels, sold for approximately the cost of a month's worth of kerosene, are providing electric lights to mud huts and releasing the money formerly used for kerosene to be used for other ways to improve lives. A 5 dollar per month change in the cost of living means almost nothing to a first worlder; it may double the standard of living for a third worlder.
And I would not be surprised at all if locally-generated all-electric power technology will be rolled out first in places where there is no hydrocarbon infrastructure first. So those villagers may have their home solar and electric scooters a generation before you and I!:)
It depends on the industry. Power utilities, for example, are essentially long term finance vehicles. They use the construction of power plants as the means to qcquire long term financing (bonds) at low rates, which they can leverage in the financial markets to increase profits. For them, it's important to maintain long term stable investment, so they tend to provide dividends rather than growth. Growth is pretty much fixed according to their monopoly situation. They also look at their stock as a kind of floating bond, and the dividends as interest on that 'debt'.
There have been some exceptions - Idaho Power was a particularly egregious example, where the new managers of a very stable mutual utility had dreams of glory and sold off their assets (dams, power lines, etc.) in order to get into the network game. They changed the name and built a bunch of fiber in the late 1990s just in time for the glut of fiber. So they ended up with thousands of miles of dark fiber, a huge debt, and power rates to their customers going through the roof. It all ended up fairly well - I forget the details but IIRC some german company bought their network/comms business and it became T-Mobile.
IMHO your professor is one of those asshats who went to B-school during the 1970s, when the 'greed is good' mantra got into the schools. He's just spouting the nonsense that he learned. Unfortunately one or two entire generations of executives were taught this, and it's been one of the factors that has really screwed things up world wide. It works great when times are good, but as we have seen it makes the company and the economy vulnerable to every shifting wind.
redistributing wealth or centralized control of econimics are the cure for AGW
*cough*Carbon Tax*/cough* *cough*Cap and Trade*/cough* *cough*auto fuel mileage regulations*/cough* *cough*banning oil from shale*/cough* Not to say which (if any) of these are right or wrong (much less whether they might actually achieve any useful environmental improvement), but they are all examples of using regulation to achieve centralized control of the economy. Along with many others. Regulation of economic activity has replaced actual takeover by the state as the primary method of achieving central planning and control.
There are literally thousands of oil seeps across the bottom of the Gulf. Those seeps release (as a conservative estimate) "Two Exxon-Valdez of oil every year". That would be as much as 1.5 million barrels, then.
Using a technique they developed in the early 1990s to help explore for oil in the deep ocean, Earth Satellite Corporation scientists found that there are over 600 different areas where oil oozes from rocks underlying the Gulf of Mexico. The oil bubbles up from a cracks in ocean bottom sediments and spreads out with the wind to an to an area covering about 4 square miles. "On water, oil has this wonderful property of spreading out really thin," said Mitchell. "A gallon of oil can spread over a square mile very quickly."...
It's quote possible that there is an oil seep within a small distance of the BP well, that happens to be seeping the same oil. Not saying there is, but it hasn't been ruled out.
In summary: It was around 9PM, and dark on Clear Lake in California. Bismarck Dinius and some friends were sitting on a sailboat, drifting with its running lights on. An off-duty deputy sheriff, Russell Perdock, admits to driving his 24 foot Baja 24 at 40 MPH in the dark (others say it was faster), and ran over the sailboat killing one of the people on board the sailboat.
The local DA charged Dinius with manslaughter, as he happened to be holding the tiller of the non-moving sailboat. The DA pushed this through to a trial, at which Dinius was finally acquitted. Defending himself cost Dinius all his savings, his job and (IIRC) his marriage - four years of no income and legal nightmares will do that.
Finally, last year (after four years!), Perdock was thrown off the force and the DA was voted out. Perdock, the deputy sheriff was never charged. But his insurance company did man up and contribute to the settlement to the estate of the person who was killed.
It used to be that the major part of the American system was based on a moral code. However ever since Dewey and some others, 'pragmatism' (which, as a philosophy, has been distorted and pruned to now merely mean "the end justifies the means") has become the accepted value system for public decisions. Unfortunately the direct outcome of that value system is that there are no moral absolutes. If you can get away with something and not get caught, then it's all good.
(Note - I am not saying that pragmatism as the philosophy of William James says that - only that the common usage of the term has come to mean that. However pragmatism as a philosophy appears to me to deny the possibility of any moral absolute. But that's a different discussion.)
Except that if they catch you, they won't bother with a trial. They'll torture you, then shoot you and your entire family. Like other organized crime groups in the good old days.
Much of the success of Apple, object-oriented systems in general, and later NeXT and the World Wide Web (which was inspired by the NeXT on Berners-Lee's desk), was due to the ability to support 'rich' documents. Back in 1989 being able to send an audio or video file to an associate as part of an email, or incorporate as a natural part of a shared document, was pretty much the 'killer app' for the NeXT. So this raises the question, "How do we define 'executable' in this context?"
For example, a video might have bogus image data that happens to tickle a buffer overflow in the video display program, that causes it to perform a jump into the memory space where the video data resides, which happens to have been specially constructed to execute a hack. There's no 'executable' capability in the video, but in fact it does cause execution of malware.
That's pretty much how many of the simple hacks of the 1990s and later worked. Most of those holes have been closed (I hope), but more sophisticated equivalents will always continue to arise, as systems (including the humans in the loop) continue to change, expand and advance. The best analogy is the disease process in biology, where immune systems can be modeled for use in anti-malware systems. IBM and others have investigated as a model for computer malware protection
By analogy, this is part of the reason why high security buildings around Washington DC have no windows. Too easy to 'peek' through (using some arbitrary 'peaking' technology), or break in through.
Most normal buildings are only *apparently* secure, since a simple lock pick or broken window gets you in. I think this phishing attack is analogous to the classic Hollywood entry using a glass cutter and shorting across the alarm wiring. This gets you in the building so you can do your dirty work.
Those high security buildings also sometimes have Faraday cages and other systems built into the structure, but that's another story.
Hmm. Since immortal means 'infinite lifespan' or 'living an infinite number of years', then only one person has to do that to make the average also infinite. Everyone else could die tomorrow.
Want proof? Read this. [wikipedia.org] We are the only country in the world that still rewards the inventor with the patent, instead of the company with the fastest lawyers. It is blindingly obviously the right way to reward innovation instead of litigation. It is so obvious that for Congress to accept First-to-File would be indefensible as supporting innovation or entrepreneurs to anyone who has even a remote knowledge of the patent process. And for inventors who have lots of patents, like my Father, the idea of First-to-File is enough to send him into a half hour apoplectic tirade that makes me fear for his heart. Yet the movement to make the switch is alive and kicking, and probably going to happen within the next few years. Why? Mostly because with every check Microsoft writes to damned near every person in Congress, they say, "Oh, and pass first-to-file -- we're tired of only getting patents when one of our employees invents something."
I read somewhere that the biggest impetus toward this is unification of the global patent system - some countries that use first-to-file are making noises about going to WHO about artificial trade barriers. But I agree that first-to-file sucks. It's hard to argue that first-to-file encourages inventors more than first-to-invent.
Actually cost of sales is about 50%, operations is probably in the range of 20% to 25%, liability insurance is on the order of 10% to 15%, so profit is only about 15% to 20%. Oddly enough, that's about what the companies report as a rule.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting case in point - the makers of Claritin resisted FDA's movement to take it off prescription-only status and allow over-the-counter sales, because OTC drugs are cheaper, and the patent was about to (or already had) run out. They were going to lose both legs of their protection against commoditization. But they finally went along with it, and found what seems to be a successful strategy.
OTOH, taking an idea that was not at all available to most people for several reasons, and making the effort to bring it to the masses - should that not have a reward?
"You think? Surely the rate of truly groundbreaking invention and discovery was faster and more impressive a hundred years ago."
Not so. See Kurzweil's hypothesis about the coming technological singularity (there are probably better links, but that will do for now). Not only is technological advance increasing in speed, the rate of change is increasing. More new tech has been developed in the last 20 years than in the entire previous history of humans, and the next 10 years will do the same again - if we don't blow ourselves up or all die of a horrible epidemic.
Of course, I'm not saying this has anything to do with patents, it's just a factoid to toss into the argument. :)
It means that Bitcoin will nearly always be a deflationary system.
Which is the problem with all monetary standards based on a fixed (or nearly so) quantity of any physical asset such as gold.
I wasn't the first to do so, but about 20 years I wrote an unpublished essay proposing that energy would make a pretty good standard - call it the erg standard. (IIRC an economist in the 1960s proposed this in several papers.) The idea is that as an economy grows the amount of energy that is produced also tends to grow at a rate that is more-or-less proportional, which would tend to keep the relationship between the asset and the economic activity reasonably constant. Also energy is something that isn't naturally easy to hoard directly. Of course, an important point is that _anything_ real or imagined can be used as a standard - it's just one commodity in dynamic balance with all others, which happens to be used to 'keep score'. Energy just has the advantage of a built-in growth factor where gold is a physically limited quantity. Also, imagine what would happen to the world economic system if someone found a solid gold asteroid and started shipping vast quantities of gold back down to Earth (not that this would be practical, it's just an example) - the gold standard would suddenly fall apart. But it is unlikely that any energy production method would be extremely much cheaper than existing methods, and if such a method were to be discovered then a political/economic mechanism to deal with this could be instituted.
For popular usage the standard could denominated in terms such as a kilowatt-hour or BOE. So, for example, instead of oil being priced at $100 per barrel, dollars would be denominated as 0.01 BOE. Note that an actual barrel of oil would cost something more than one BOE, as the cost of production, shipping delivery and business operations would be a component of the delivered cost.
Similarly, a BOE is 6.12x10^9 Joules, while a KWH is 3.6x10^6 J, which converted at the above rate would be about 5.88 cents (US) per KWH - fairly close to the base cost of electricity in many parts of the US. Of course as delivered it costs more in most locations because of the cost of the electrical grid etc. So my electric bill which is presently about $20 per month might be denominated as 340 KWH instead, while actual usage might be (just making this up as I don't recall actual usage) 200 KWH - equivalent to about 10c per KWH. (Note that I have non-electric heat and hot water, the major energy users in my house - all I have is an electric stove, used once every other day or so, and lights that I keep turned off when I'm not using.)
Good point. As I recall, the fundamental advantages that Seymour Cray introduced with the Cray supercomputers were primarily about infrastructure - cooling the boards and chips, and using interconnect wiring that was all the 'exact' right length for the high speed signals. Since the wires were the same length, the propagation delay between boards could be accommodated in the logic on each board, so the individual processors could act in parallel increasing the overall clock speed. (I know this could be stated more clearly - sorry.)
The machines had different cooling methods. In the Cray-1) two circuit boards were layered back-to-back against a copper sheet that was attached to a freon plumbing system. In the Cray-2 the entire module was immersed in a bath of Fluorinert (I remember seeing a picture of the first prototype of a new Cray processor, inside a fish tank filled with Fluorinert - the fluorinert evidently had color patterns that resulted from stimulation by the high frequency signals.)
For him and his situation, I think the distinguishing between hookers and gold-diggers was a very thin one (if there was one at all). He knew it wasn't about the relationship - it was a transaction. He got eye-candy, probably got laid, she got fun and 'gifts'.
A while back (1980s) my company used to do business with a very rich guy who was short, fat, ugly, with an obnoxious personality and a comb-over. Unlike many like him, he was aware of all of the above. He also had a Ferrari Testarossa, primarily because money + Ferrari was an effective antidote to the rest of his 'features'. It worked. Of course, a typical date cost him $1000s.
Funny thing - in practice, today this is the opposite of how things are going. More people have been transitioned from dirt-eating poverty to what most of the world considers middle class in the last 30 years than at any time in history. There are two reasons. Globalization has created hundreds of millions of jobs in places where there were formerly no means of acquiring money, bringing hundreds of millions of families into the global middle class. And technology has been improving every aspect of life for those who are worst off much faster than it has improved life for the first world.
The technology being deployed in the traditionally-defined third world is leapfrogging the first world - cell phones are just one ubiquitous example, as it is an order of magnitude cheaper to deploy cell systems than wired systems. Go to villages in the middle of nowhere and low-cost solar panels, sold for approximately the cost of a month's worth of kerosene, are providing electric lights to mud huts and releasing the money formerly used for kerosene to be used for other ways to improve lives. A 5 dollar per month change in the cost of living means almost nothing to a first worlder; it may double the standard of living for a third worlder.
And I would not be surprised at all if locally-generated all-electric power technology will be rolled out first in places where there is no hydrocarbon infrastructure first. So those villagers may have their home solar and electric scooters a generation before you and I! :)
Now we have an enraged rabbit with limited experience in the presidency.
It depends on the industry. Power utilities, for example, are essentially long term finance vehicles. They use the construction of power plants as the means to qcquire long term financing (bonds) at low rates, which they can leverage in the financial markets to increase profits. For them, it's important to maintain long term stable investment, so they tend to provide dividends rather than growth. Growth is pretty much fixed according to their monopoly situation. They also look at their stock as a kind of floating bond, and the dividends as interest on that 'debt'.
There have been some exceptions - Idaho Power was a particularly egregious example, where the new managers of a very stable mutual utility had dreams of glory and sold off their assets (dams, power lines, etc.) in order to get into the network game. They changed the name and built a bunch of fiber in the late 1990s just in time for the glut of fiber. So they ended up with thousands of miles of dark fiber, a huge debt, and power rates to their customers going through the roof. It all ended up fairly well - I forget the details but IIRC some german company bought their network/comms business and it became T-Mobile.
IMHO your professor is one of those asshats who went to B-school during the 1970s, when the 'greed is good' mantra got into the schools. He's just spouting the nonsense that he learned. Unfortunately one or two entire generations of executives were taught this, and it's been one of the factors that has really screwed things up world wide. It works great when times are good, but as we have seen it makes the company and the economy vulnerable to every shifting wind.
redistributing wealth or centralized control of econimics are the cure for AGW
*cough*Carbon Tax*/cough* *cough*Cap and Trade*/cough* *cough*auto fuel mileage regulations*/cough* *cough*banning oil from shale*/cough*
Not to say which (if any) of these are right or wrong (much less whether they might actually achieve any useful environmental improvement), but they are all examples of using regulation to achieve centralized control of the economy. Along with many others. Regulation of economic activity has replaced actual takeover by the state as the primary method of achieving central planning and control.
There are literally thousands of oil seeps across the bottom of the Gulf. Those seeps release (as a conservative estimate) "Two Exxon-Valdez of oil every year". That would be as much as 1.5 million barrels, then.
Using a technique they developed in the early 1990s to help explore for oil in the deep ocean, Earth Satellite Corporation scientists found that there are over 600 different areas where oil oozes from rocks underlying the Gulf of Mexico. The oil bubbles up from a cracks in ocean bottom sediments and spreads out with the wind to an to an area covering about 4 square miles. "On water, oil has this wonderful property of spreading out really thin," said Mitchell. "A gallon of oil can spread over a square mile very quickly." ...
It's quote possible that there is an oil seep within a small distance of the BP well, that happens to be seeping the same oil. Not saying there is, but it hasn't been ruled out.
Here's another: (really bad HTML layout, but hey). Here's The gist of the story.
In summary: It was around 9PM, and dark on Clear Lake in California. Bismarck Dinius and some friends were sitting on a sailboat, drifting with its running lights on. An off-duty deputy sheriff, Russell Perdock, admits to driving his 24 foot Baja 24 at 40 MPH in the dark (others say it was faster), and ran over the sailboat killing one of the people on board the sailboat.
The local DA charged Dinius with manslaughter, as he happened to be holding the tiller of the non-moving sailboat. The DA pushed this through to a trial, at which Dinius was finally acquitted. Defending himself cost Dinius all his savings, his job and (IIRC) his marriage - four years of no income and legal nightmares will do that.
Finally, last year (after four years!), Perdock was thrown off the force and the DA was voted out. Perdock, the deputy sheriff was never charged. But his insurance company did man up and contribute to the settlement to the estate of the person who was killed.
Great name for a band: "Sociopathic homicidal frat boys" :D
It used to be that the major part of the American system was based on a moral code. However ever since Dewey and some others, 'pragmatism' (which, as a philosophy, has been distorted and pruned to now merely mean "the end justifies the means") has become the accepted value system for public decisions. Unfortunately the direct outcome of that value system is that there are no moral absolutes. If you can get away with something and not get caught, then it's all good.
(Note - I am not saying that pragmatism as the philosophy of William James says that - only that the common usage of the term has come to mean that. However pragmatism as a philosophy appears to me to deny the possibility of any moral absolute. But that's a different discussion.)
Except that if they catch you, they won't bother with a trial. They'll torture you, then shoot you and your entire family. Like other organized crime groups in the good old days.
Well, no worries there. The PIN is perfectly safe there, no doubt. |>_|
Much of the success of Apple, object-oriented systems in general, and later NeXT and the World Wide Web (which was inspired by the NeXT on Berners-Lee's desk), was due to the ability to support 'rich' documents. Back in 1989 being able to send an audio or video file to an associate as part of an email, or incorporate as a natural part of a shared document, was pretty much the 'killer app' for the NeXT. So this raises the question, "How do we define 'executable' in this context?"
For example, a video might have bogus image data that happens to tickle a buffer overflow in the video display program, that causes it to perform a jump into the memory space where the video data resides, which happens to have been specially constructed to execute a hack. There's no 'executable' capability in the video, but in fact it does cause execution of malware.
That's pretty much how many of the simple hacks of the 1990s and later worked. Most of those holes have been closed (I hope), but more sophisticated equivalents will always continue to arise, as systems (including the humans in the loop) continue to change, expand and advance. The best analogy is the disease process in biology, where immune systems can be modeled for use in anti-malware systems. IBM and others have investigated as a model for computer malware protection
By analogy, this is part of the reason why high security buildings around Washington DC have no windows. Too easy to 'peek' through (using some arbitrary 'peaking' technology), or break in through.
Most normal buildings are only *apparently* secure, since a simple lock pick or broken window gets you in. I think this phishing attack is analogous to the classic Hollywood entry using a glass cutter and shorting across the alarm wiring. This gets you in the building so you can do your dirty work.
Those high security buildings also sometimes have Faraday cages and other systems built into the structure, but that's another story.
They're including overtime. :D
So when you die, you know it wasn't you. :)
Just remember:
You don't extend the life of a car by driving it.
Hm. I think we need to invent a bio-mechanical car that responds to casual wear and tear by rebuilding itself more robustly, and then revisit this.
Like this.
Hmm. Since immortal means 'infinite lifespan' or 'living an infinite number of years', then only one person has to do that to make the average also infinite. Everyone else could die tomorrow.
Want proof? Read this. [wikipedia.org] We are the only country in the world that still rewards the inventor with the patent, instead of the company with the fastest lawyers. It is blindingly obviously the right way to reward innovation instead of litigation. It is so obvious that for Congress to accept First-to-File would be indefensible as supporting innovation or entrepreneurs to anyone who has even a remote knowledge of the patent process. And for inventors who have lots of patents, like my Father, the idea of First-to-File is enough to send him into a half hour apoplectic tirade that makes me fear for his heart. Yet the movement to make the switch is alive and kicking, and probably going to happen within the next few years. Why? Mostly because with every check Microsoft writes to damned near every person in Congress, they say, "Oh, and pass first-to-file -- we're tired of only getting patents when one of our employees invents something."
I read somewhere that the biggest impetus toward this is unification of the global patent system - some countries that use first-to-file are making noises about going to WHO about artificial trade barriers. But I agree that first-to-file sucks. It's hard to argue that first-to-file encourages inventors more than first-to-invent.
Actually cost of sales is about 50%, operations is probably in the range of 20% to 25%, liability insurance is on the order of 10% to 15%, so profit is only about 15% to 20%. Oddly enough, that's about what the companies report as a rule.