According to that legal argument it would also be illegal to access websites, send mail to someone, ping an IP address, or basically interact over any internet connection without prior explicit permission.
So as a matter of practical application of law, I'd have to disagree. If it's open, it's open and you can reasonably assume you are invited to utilize resources offered in reasonable ways.
The ole keyword overload is probably something they filter against; they probably run some linguistic structure scan for valid sentances.
In order of increasing annoyance level I'd suggest you follow these procedures: a) Use a Slavic or Arab sounding email address. Then use GPG to encrypt the content (suggested content: How much did it cost the taxpayers to let you read this?). b) Run a TOR node to encourage encrypted comms passing their way. c) Start an ABF (workers education union) class on how regular users can encrypt their communications with their friends and family. d) Write a roleplaying game where the players are rebels fighting against a fascistic system, but they can only communicate with eachother online. Enjoy the lawsuits when the judicial system contorts in agony trying to deal with obviously made up, obviously completely innocent and private activities... except the spooks wanted to make it not private and it's almost indistinguishable from crap that they get in their too widely trawling nets. And imagine the fun and excitement. Will the guys in suits knocking on the door be the other roleplayers? Will they be the FBI?
There are simply so many ways to make the whole effort completely worthless. Which is just yet another reason why it's an very unconstructive law.
Same here. I've bought most SimCity games (as far as they've worked under cedega), and was going to buy Spore once it got there, but this is simply a total dealbreaker. This is product is defective by design.
"Further, since 1662 the media has had an agenda, and has become a close bed fellow with legislators."
There ya go, moved it back to the Licensing Act. Since the inception of copyright, the legislators protect the owners of the printers and the owners of the printers protect the legislators in return...
It's always struck me as funny that record companies get pissed about free music being available online
Because they need someone to pay for all the free copies they send to the stores. It's not that strange really, it gets put in the 'marketing' budget, probably costs more money than they give to the actual artists (if it isnt just outright deducted from the artists part of the revenue), and then they can whine about how expensive it is to produce and distribute music.
Of course, this kind of waste only makes sense when you have monopoly rights; if there was actual competition they'd get undersold in a heartbeat and the practice would disappear or at the very least get minimized. But when you dont have significant pricing pressure then spending like this is useful. And with music it also has several further effects; if cd's get sent to dj's and stores will be reluctant to pay for music to play. If dj's, radios and stores expect to get their music for free then unsigned artists cant afford to compete.
So you get the consumers to pay for the limiting of their choices. Way to go for the promotion of the arts, eh.
The Freerunner looks good enough for geek use, so I'm certainly going to order one. It's the first phone I've actually wanted.
I doubt opensource developers need any 'education' from Nokia; most understand those 'business rules'. And reject them. Nokia on the other hand, have been fairly consistently in favour of proprietary approaches, from support for software patents to DRM, etc.
The phone industry and its 'business rules' has brought us things like short text messages with profit margins in the range of thousands of percent of the cost, 'ringtones', drm'ed throwaway music, etc. I understand exactly how it works, as does anyone who hasn't had a rectal anesthetic for the last decade.
Over the longer term, open handsets stand to revolutionize portable computing. Unless the company changes philosophy at some fundamental level, I doubt Nokia will be part of that.
Re:Can one migrate a guest from Parallels or QEMU?
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Easiest way I've seen to do it is to install a -xen kernel in the machine you're about to move, then dd a copy into a file or block device you're planning to use. That works fairly well on fedora/centos paravirtualized hosts on fedora/centos at least.
Another way is to define an external xen-aware vmlinuz and initrd in the vm config file, in which case you should be able to boot pretty much any linux filesystem (provided the initrd does the appropriate things, of course).
Cant say how easy it is with fully virtualized non-linux systems tho, but as Xen HVM assisted vm's use QEMU for most device emulation I suspect you may get similar problems there.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
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paravirtualizes all the hardware and gives you almost all the benefit.
Have you tested it/what performance levels does it have? It's been a bit too immature to push in the corporate setting yet, but it would be interesting to see if it's getting comparable performance now.
Xen dropped the ball by not working closely with the Linux kernel developers
Oh, I agree, duplicating kernel work in the hypervisor is idiotic and a long term dead end, wether it's vmware or xensource doing it.
so the future for Linux & Xen is looking even less rosy.
Yes, well, it's still GPL. But sure, if it hadn't had Redhat and several other companies working on it, I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole after the Citrix purchase.
My personal opinion is that none of them will win outright, at least not for many many years
I agree; as technologies they'll all stay around for a long time or the features and advantages will get merged into something user-configurable. Wether the companies built around them will stay around is another matter; commoditization tends to wreck havoc on some business plans.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
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On the management front, nothing touches Virtual Center, not even close...
Unless you're using Linux desktops. I've seen rumors about the VIC client coming to linux, but after, what, three, four years of customers asking for it? From the point of view of virtualizing linux, the lack of interest in supporting Linux has pretty much negated the advantages of virtual center.
In the long run, a lot of what virtual center does isn't that hard to replicate with standard linux infrastructure (HA, resource management, provisioning, migration, etc), and the ability to leverage host OS capabilities will only make it easier over time.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
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Running Xen
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Are you testing paravirtualization or hardware assisted full virtualization? (I'm talking about paravirtualized, the full virtualization would match your experience)
Examples; iterative shell scripts (ie, anything with lots of forks and execs) had a huge difference. IO performance varied, but xen tended to be significantly faster on anything read-related. Kernel compilations on multiple virtual machines, fair amount of difference. CPU bound, slight but measurable difference.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
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Running Xen
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As far as I can tell, Redhat is pushing libvirt, which is vm agnostic (you're supposed to be able to use it to manage whatever virtualization tech you want to use).
KVM is nice and shows promise, but performance wise the paravirtualized approach of xen is still significantly faster (as in very-near-bare-metal, even significantly faster than vmware ESX on most loads).
The weak dollar benefits shareholders, not employees.
Not really, measured in other currencies, US stocks have been going downwards since 2001.
The main beneficiaries of a falling currency are those who needed to borrow large amounts of the currency. So if you wanted to, for example, finance a war, it might be a good idea to look at the 'ole tax-through-inflation method. Much easier to accomplish a stealth appropriation of assets through inflation than trying to ram through significantly higher taxes.
There is no correlation between a weak dollar and the strength or status of the U.S. in the world economy.
That rather depends on what you measure. For the most common measure, GDP, it certainly matters; the Eurozone passed the US as the worlds largest economy sometime during the spring. To a large part due to changes in exchange rates between the dollar and the euro.
The relative strength of a currency is, as you say, neither good or bad in itself. It does however change many things; a falling currency reduces wages and assets denominated in that currency. Good for jobs in some sectors, but did you ask for a paycut recently?
Ultimately, allowing excessive currency fluctuations tends to damage the economy by creating large uncertainties, but sometimes, for some central banks, political concerns take precedence and it becomes preferable to socialize economic misadventures by letting the holders of assets and takers of wages pay for someone elses losses.
They actually smooth out the peaks and valleys of supply and demand.
While I agree with you in theory, if you add in leverage and valuation bubble driven lending I'm not so sure it works out that way. The game changes when lending creates money.
If the price decreases, they've lost out!
If the price decreases they go bust and the lender loses out, which apparently translates into the Fed and taxpayers bailing them out. Structured correctly over several deals, most of the speculative profit is retained anyway, and the losses get almost completely socialized.
Supporting the freedom of the market is one thing (and a good thing, IMO), but you also have to realize that certain segments of what we have today is nothing like a free market. The banking industry in combination with fractional reserve lending distorts the effects of what _should_ be rational (and market smoothing) speculation.
I mean you can't just throw out the thing all together.
Yes you can.
Having no patenting system would make the whole market far too volatile.
According to...? As demonstrated by...? Which would be bad because...?
The whole software industry has shown over the last 30 years that patents aren't at all necessary for development; in fact they've rather indicated patents slow down progress. The free software movement is in the middle of demonstrating you don't even need copyright to encourage development.
It's becoming fairly obvious that technological and innovative development is driven by need, necessity, competition and information accessibility. As a thought experiment; lock a smart innovator in a basement for ten years. What do you think he'll have invented when he comes out? Personally I'll bet most of the time it'll be something 9 years and six month out of date, independently invented five times in the first year and completely irrelevant to the world ten years later.
A single innovative mind, or a single development group simply has no chance to beat a million monkeys banging away on their keyboards, as long as the monkey build on each others advances.
If you could start over and rebuild the whole thing, what would you do?
Rebuild it from scratch with the actual purpose in mind. The single most usable feature about the patent system is disclosure. The single most damaging feature is the monopoly nature. So at the very least have those two in mind as fundamental aspects that cannot be compromised.
So to describe one possible example the same way you did:
* Inventor A comes up with an idea and registers it. Now anyone can read about it. * Company B reads about the idea which solves a problem they're having. They start using it. They register their usage of the active patent and indicate the approximate savings/revenue/units sold derived from the patent. * Patent office pays Inventor A appropriate remuneration * Company C reads about the same idea, expands the idea, registers the expansion, and starts using it, again registering the approximate savings and revenue derived from the A part. * Patent office pays Inventor A appropriate remuneration * Company B reads about the expansion, incorporates the expansion, register their further use. * Patent office pays Inventor A and Company C appropriate remuneration * Etc.
There are several possible objections to this; paperwork and difficulty to assess revenue derived from a specific part. Compare with todays system; today you can either get a) a license from the patent holder which may very well be the same paperwork plus the cost or b) get sued. Which is a whole lot more cost and paperwork. And which may end up with you not being able to use the invention at all. Compared to the usual tax reports this would be a minor reporting issue.
Another objection would be the financing; first, the financing today may seem 'free', but the fact is it's exacted from the economy as a whole as a form of taxation on 'new' products, with licensing costs baked into the end price (in the best case. In the worst case we're paying by products not getting to the market at all). So we're paying in everything from high medical insurance costs to expensive environmentally improved technology.
Financing of a innovation incentive system could be done in any of a number of ways; personally I'd prefer one that didn't penalize things we might actually want rapidly adopted like more efficient medicines or more energy efficient technology. A flat sales tax on the appropriate industry segment might be appropriate. Initially it could even be tuned to approximate current expenditure on patent licenses in the field to ease transition.
Third would be the remuneration process; once you have an actual budget and an actual goal it becomes much easier to maximize the benefit of the funds available. Today nobody is responsible for the budget so we get the patent office granting p
we'll see a corresponding increases in research and development
I'm not sure there's much of an increase in actual R&D, most of what we're seeing in the biometric security field looks more like slick salesmen conning gullible people out of their money.
If it becomes possible to replace every lock and key with some sort of recognition software
Some sort of secure recognition software? Well, pretty much the only biometric factor that cannot currently be copied, surreptiosly picked up or faked is the contents of your brain. So that would be some device that could detect knowledge, for example, by the pressing of numbers on a keypad.
The difficulty of changing a PIN to your ID card may to seem preferable after changing your face for the third time. Or easier than spending your life in a latex catsuit as the insurance companies wont pay out if you've been spreading your biometric data around everywhere you go.
Using biometrics for security is a fundamentally flawed approach. They have a places as an _added_ factor, but for most purposes they're too easily compromised to replace a password, to hard to change to replace a token and add little extra security above a token and password combination.
Really, how many people need to dink with the kernel, be it Windows, OS X or Linux?
Well, it's a fair number, but it's not necessarily the number of people, but the _right_ people we need to be dinking around with the kernel. Unfortunately, with proprietary operating systems, it seems the right people are not necessarily doing that.
I don't personally dink around that much in the kernel (altho I've bypassed a bug or two in drivers), but I certainly want the genius with too much free time and the same hardware that I have who can fix the bugs to have access to the source. I dont want to hack my own paravirtualising hypervisor, but I'm very pleased to use xen technology, which would have been very difficult to implement without open source.
As a user of programs and operating systems I usually dont need the source. But I do need many improvements made by people with similar interests to me; interests that may overlap very much less with the strategic thinking of a single monolithic corporation.
Sharing code is useful at the application level.
Free software is useful at any level you want to have improved. Which is pretty much all of them. Personally I dont have the patience for proprietary products anymore; I find most tend to have issues that would never survive a few iterations in an opensource product. With free software products I know that if it annoys me enough it'll annoy someone else enough to fix it.
Of course, the monopoly pricing example is much simplified and valid only as a model for demonstrating why selling more copies cheaper isn't interesting when you have monopoly rights; more but cheaper still means less total revenue. In the real world you have many other aspects, for example, if you're making a 500% recordable profit you're not spending enough. Most organizations tend to accumulate waste until they make the minimum acceptable profit; see the music industry as a typical example, they can fail to make a profit selling hundreds of thousands of units of something where the costs of producing and distributing it should be less than a nicer used car. Spending money is rarely a problem; only competition enforces productive spending.
Now, if we're talking physical goods you certainly have a case.
Well, the application of monopoly pricing models is valid in either case; all goods contain amortized costs, it's mainly a question of how much of the total it is. It's interesting to compare the financials of, for example, the pharmaceutical industry with the auto industry. The more actual competition there is in a segment, the more the costs tend to be producing the actual product. The less competition, the more costs tend to go into marketing and administration.
With music and video there is ONLY the one-time production costs.
So the trick becomes letting the production costs be recouped, while still maintaining competitive pressure. Monopoly rights obviously don't work, as they inevitably result in an ever increasing level of waste, to the point where the one-time production cost is fairly minor in the expenditure of the revenue. Full competition may be a bit harsh, altho open source and creative commons et. al, have demonstrated that production costs can be cut to miniscule levels with appropriate measures. Perhaps it would be good enough.
Personally I tend to advocate freeing up the whole copying thing and simply putting a 'sales tax' on revenue derived of copying (ad's on download sites, on the price of CD-writing kiosks at your supermarket or book printing at your bookstore, etc). Then hand that money to the creators of the copied materials to offset the production cost plus some, perhaps with a ceiling on payouts, handing them forwards down the long tail, to maximize the amount of material financed. Easier to manage, less incentive for piracy, less incentive for draconian legislation and it opens up for a huge host of services that simply cannot be produced due to monopoly rights today (oh, and it would make it vastly simpler for the creators; simply publish your stuff and as people start downloading it, you'll get paid depending on revenue generated by your work. It could even work for open source or other free things). It would also put the actual budget for 'IP' on the public books instead of hiding the costs and pretending that what amounts to privately held taxation rights aren't a cost to the economy.
Anyways, there are many ways to solve the problem of one-time costs of infinitely reproducible goods. Monopoly rights may, for economic reasons, be the one of the worst and most wasteful ways.
business execs) rarely understand is that piracy usually indicates an unfulfilled market.
Monopoly pricing always creates an unfulfilled market; revenue is maximized at a pricing point far above the fulfillable market.
A classic economic example would be this: You have ten customers who would pay 1, 2, 3.. up to 10 dollars, and a per unit production cost of 2 dollars.
Set the price at 10 dollars and you get 1 customer paying ten dollars; $10 in revenue. Lower the price, $8 gets you 3 customers, $24 total revenue. $7 gets you $28. Subtract 4 times $2 for unit costs and you get $20 profit. Try $6 price, that gets you $30 income minus 5 times $2, the same $20 profit.
Turns out $7, with 4 customers would maximize your profit. That leaves the 5 people between $2 (minimum production cost) and $7 unfulfilled. In a free market, competition would force prices down towards $2, maximizing the total wealth in the market. In the monopoly market, the wealth created by fulfilling the market is lost (well, unless the potential customers pirate the material).
But now look at the trend - steady decline ever since
Microsoft barely looks any better tho.
Microsoft was their best shot at creating shareholder value.
In the same way as selling in Nov 07 or during the actual offer would have created value for the selling shareholders? You don't necessarily get redo's in stock trading.
There's a reason Microsofts stock dropped on the offer. There's a reason Ballmer was, I suspect, forced by the board to drop the bid. Much as I'd find it amusing to see Microsoft lose an investment of that size, a whole lot of shareholders in both companies obviously thought it would have been a very bad deal for both of them, most likely ending up with both customers and employees moving away from the joined company. Apart from temporarily getting to pretend to be more of a serious contender in googles field, there is little long term shareholder value in this deal.
Placating Ballmers ego, while perhaps safest around furnished rooms, may not necessarily be the best business decision.
People who wanted to sell at, or near, Microsoft's offer had the chance to do so until the offer was dropped (heck, they still can; iirc, the offer was 50% cash 50% stock, and with the way Microsoft's stock is moving, by the time the deal had been approved they'd have been glad to get $20-$25 actual money for their stock; I'd imagine the sales pressure from a significant fraction of yhoo owners with no interest in being msft owners would depress the stock even more, something which Icahn and other's who'll dump the stock as soon as they can aren't likely to change).
A lawsuit against a GPL3 violator WILL be perceived as a lawsuit against ALL companies that use GPL'd software
Mmm, no. It will be perceived as a lawsuit against all GPL _violators_.
Users of GPL software are better protected against lawsuits by the GPLv3.
And in at corporate management levels, the perception is what counts.
If some group of corporate management bases their approval of merging random code off the net into their products on perception I doubt they'd last long in the software industry.
Nothing is entirely safe; in the case of patents, you're even safer off using GPLv3 code than you are using public domain code (as the publisher of the code can't sue you for infringing any patents they may have).
Some intellectual property lawyers tend to be overly concerned with protecting the 'intellectual property' of their clients, rather than protecting their clients from the threat of 'intellectual property' held by others. Those lawyers constantly focus on the pile they're protecting, ignoring the huge mountainsides surrounding their pile, and the avalanche about to crush them.
How the hell do you build a business advantage over a competitor when you are forced to divulge your developments to everybody?
What, competition without state protection? Build a business advantage by being better, cheaper, faster, leaner? That sounds almost like a free market; cant have that, eh?
will GPL3 ruin open source development in the business world
No. It will create problems for free riders and make it easier for good corporate citizens to abide by the GPL because they wont have to worry about their less ethical brethren using it against them.
One corporations proprietary advantage is everyone elses disadvantage; some companies actually realize this and figure that having an advantage for 6 months in one area while their competitors have an advantage in another area for 6 months means they get a clean slate with _both_ advantages at the beginning of the next cycle. Plus their new advantage for that cycle... Moving technology forward much faster and not subject to anyone elses whims.
Linux would not be where it is today without business support
Businesses who have, to a large extent, been part of formulating the GPLv3. The corporate objectors to GPLv3 tend to be more in the non-contributing camp.
Slashdot Mirror
According to that legal argument it would also be illegal to access websites, send mail to someone, ping an IP address, or basically interact over any internet connection without prior explicit permission.
So as a matter of practical application of law, I'd have to disagree. If it's open, it's open and you can reasonably assume you are invited to utilize resources offered in reasonable ways.
The ole keyword overload is probably something they filter against; they probably run some linguistic structure scan for valid sentances.
In order of increasing annoyance level I'd suggest you follow these procedures:
a) Use a Slavic or Arab sounding email address. Then use GPG to encrypt the content (suggested content: How much did it cost the taxpayers to let you read this?).
b) Run a TOR node to encourage encrypted comms passing their way.
c) Start an ABF (workers education union) class on how regular users can encrypt their communications with their friends and family.
d) Write a roleplaying game where the players are rebels fighting against a fascistic system, but they can only communicate with eachother online. Enjoy the lawsuits when the judicial system contorts in agony trying to deal with obviously made up, obviously completely innocent and private activities... except the spooks wanted to make it not private and it's almost indistinguishable from crap that they get in their too widely trawling nets. And imagine the fun and excitement. Will the guys in suits knocking on the door be the other roleplayers? Will they be the FBI?
There are simply so many ways to make the whole effort completely worthless. Which is just yet another reason why it's an very unconstructive law.
Same here. I've bought most SimCity games (as far as they've worked under cedega), and was going to buy Spore once it got there, but this is simply a total dealbreaker. This is product is defective by design.
"Further, since 1662 the media has had an agenda, and has become a close bed fellow with legislators."
There ya go, moved it back to the Licensing Act. Since the inception of copyright, the legislators protect the owners of the printers and the owners of the printers protect the legislators in return...
That way, they're out of circulation
Doubtful. Refurbishing drives is standard practice, and getting replacement drives with other peoples data isn't exactly rare.
It's always struck me as funny that record companies get pissed about free music being available online
Because they need someone to pay for all the free copies they send to the stores. It's not that strange really, it gets put in the 'marketing' budget, probably costs more money than they give to the actual artists (if it isnt just outright deducted from the artists part of the revenue), and then they can whine about how expensive it is to produce and distribute music.
Of course, this kind of waste only makes sense when you have monopoly rights; if there was actual competition they'd get undersold in a heartbeat and the practice would disappear or at the very least get minimized. But when you dont have significant pricing pressure then spending like this is useful. And with music it also has several further effects; if cd's get sent to dj's and stores will be reluctant to pay for music to play. If dj's, radios and stores expect to get their music for free then unsigned artists cant afford to compete.
So you get the consumers to pay for the limiting of their choices. Way to go for the promotion of the arts, eh.
The Freerunner looks good enough for geek use, so I'm certainly going to order one. It's the first phone I've actually wanted.
I doubt opensource developers need any 'education' from Nokia; most understand those 'business rules'. And reject them. Nokia on the other hand, have been fairly consistently in favour of proprietary approaches, from support for software patents to DRM, etc.
The phone industry and its 'business rules' has brought us things like short text messages with profit margins in the range of thousands of percent of the cost, 'ringtones', drm'ed throwaway music, etc. I understand exactly how it works, as does anyone who hasn't had a rectal anesthetic for the last decade.
Over the longer term, open handsets stand to revolutionize portable computing. Unless the company changes philosophy at some fundamental level, I doubt Nokia will be part of that.
Easiest way I've seen to do it is to install a -xen kernel in the machine you're about to move, then dd a copy into a file or block device you're planning to use. That works fairly well on fedora/centos paravirtualized hosts on fedora/centos at least.
Another way is to define an external xen-aware vmlinuz and initrd in the vm config file, in which case you should be able to boot pretty much any linux filesystem (provided the initrd does the appropriate things, of course).
Cant say how easy it is with fully virtualized non-linux systems tho, but as Xen HVM assisted vm's use QEMU for most device emulation I suspect you may get similar problems there.
paravirtualizes all the hardware and gives you almost all the benefit.
Have you tested it/what performance levels does it have? It's been a bit too immature to push in the corporate setting yet, but it would be interesting to see if it's getting comparable performance now.
Xen dropped the ball by not working closely with the Linux kernel developers
Oh, I agree, duplicating kernel work in the hypervisor is idiotic and a long term dead end, wether it's vmware or xensource doing it.
so the future for Linux & Xen is looking even less rosy.
Yes, well, it's still GPL. But sure, if it hadn't had Redhat and several other companies working on it, I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole after the Citrix purchase.
My personal opinion is that none of them will win outright, at least not for many many years
I agree; as technologies they'll all stay around for a long time or the features and advantages will get merged into something user-configurable. Wether the companies built around them will stay around is another matter; commoditization tends to wreck havoc on some business plans.
On the management front, nothing touches Virtual Center, not even close...
Unless you're using Linux desktops. I've seen rumors about the VIC client coming to linux, but after, what, three, four years of customers asking for it? From the point of view of virtualizing linux, the lack of interest in supporting Linux has pretty much negated the advantages of virtual center.
In the long run, a lot of what virtual center does isn't that hard to replicate with standard linux infrastructure (HA, resource management, provisioning, migration, etc), and the ability to leverage host OS capabilities will only make it easier over time.
Are you testing paravirtualization or hardware assisted full virtualization? (I'm talking about paravirtualized, the full virtualization would match your experience)
Examples; iterative shell scripts (ie, anything with lots of forks and execs) had a huge difference. IO performance varied, but xen tended to be significantly faster on anything read-related. Kernel compilations on multiple virtual machines, fair amount of difference. CPU bound, slight but measurable difference.
As far as I can tell, Redhat is pushing libvirt, which is vm agnostic (you're supposed to be able to use it to manage whatever virtualization tech you want to use).
KVM is nice and shows promise, but performance wise the paravirtualized approach of xen is still significantly faster (as in very-near-bare-metal, even significantly faster than vmware ESX on most loads).
This law just proves that our political leaders are complete idiots
See, that's just the type of comments they want to ban. After all, don't politicians have feelings?
This is certainly one law I cant see GWB vetoing.
The weak dollar benefits shareholders, not employees.
Not really, measured in other currencies, US stocks have been going downwards since 2001.
The main beneficiaries of a falling currency are those who needed to borrow large amounts of the currency. So if you wanted to, for example, finance a war, it might be a good idea to look at the 'ole tax-through-inflation method. Much easier to accomplish a stealth appropriation of assets through inflation than trying to ram through significantly higher taxes.
There is no correlation between a weak dollar and the strength or status of the U.S. in the world economy.
That rather depends on what you measure. For the most common measure, GDP, it certainly matters; the Eurozone passed the US as the worlds largest economy sometime during the spring. To a large part due to changes in exchange rates between the dollar and the euro.
The relative strength of a currency is, as you say, neither good or bad in itself. It does however change many things; a falling currency reduces wages and assets denominated in that currency. Good for jobs in some sectors, but did you ask for a paycut recently?
Ultimately, allowing excessive currency fluctuations tends to damage the economy by creating large uncertainties, but sometimes, for some central banks, political concerns take precedence and it becomes preferable to socialize economic misadventures by letting the holders of assets and takers of wages pay for someone elses losses.
They actually smooth out the peaks and valleys of supply and demand.
While I agree with you in theory, if you add in leverage and valuation bubble driven lending I'm not so sure it works out that way. The game changes when lending creates money.
If the price decreases, they've lost out!
If the price decreases they go bust and the lender loses out, which apparently translates into the Fed and taxpayers bailing them out. Structured correctly over several deals, most of the speculative profit is retained anyway, and the losses get almost completely socialized.
Supporting the freedom of the market is one thing (and a good thing, IMO), but you also have to realize that certain segments of what we have today is nothing like a free market. The banking industry in combination with fractional reserve lending distorts the effects of what _should_ be rational (and market smoothing) speculation.
I mean you can't just throw out the thing all together.
Yes you can.
Having no patenting system would make the whole market far too volatile.
According to...? As demonstrated by...? Which would be bad because...?
The whole software industry has shown over the last 30 years that patents aren't at all necessary for development; in fact they've rather indicated patents slow down progress. The free software movement is in the middle of demonstrating you don't even need copyright to encourage development.
It's becoming fairly obvious that technological and innovative development is driven by need, necessity, competition and information accessibility. As a thought experiment; lock a smart innovator in a basement for ten years. What do you think he'll have invented when he comes out? Personally I'll bet most of the time it'll be something 9 years and six month out of date, independently invented five times in the first year and completely irrelevant to the world ten years later.
A single innovative mind, or a single development group simply has no chance to beat a million monkeys banging away on their keyboards, as long as the monkey build on each others advances.
If you could start over and rebuild the whole thing, what would you do?
Rebuild it from scratch with the actual purpose in mind. The single most usable feature about the patent system is disclosure. The single most damaging feature is the monopoly nature. So at the very least have those two in mind as fundamental aspects that cannot be compromised.
So to describe one possible example the same way you did:
* Inventor A comes up with an idea and registers it. Now anyone can read about it.
* Company B reads about the idea which solves a problem they're having. They start using it. They register their usage of the active patent and indicate the approximate savings/revenue/units sold derived from the patent.
* Patent office pays Inventor A appropriate remuneration
* Company C reads about the same idea, expands the idea, registers the expansion, and starts using it, again registering the approximate savings and revenue derived from the A part.
* Patent office pays Inventor A appropriate remuneration
* Company B reads about the expansion, incorporates the expansion, register their further use.
* Patent office pays Inventor A and Company C appropriate remuneration
* Etc.
There are several possible objections to this; paperwork and difficulty to assess revenue derived from a specific part. Compare with todays system; today you can either get a) a license from the patent holder which may very well be the same paperwork plus the cost or b) get sued. Which is a whole lot more cost and paperwork. And which may end up with you not being able to use the invention at all. Compared to the usual tax reports this would be a minor reporting issue.
Another objection would be the financing; first, the financing today may seem 'free', but the fact is it's exacted from the economy as a whole as a form of taxation on 'new' products, with licensing costs baked into the end price (in the best case. In the worst case we're paying by products not getting to the market at all). So we're paying in everything from high medical insurance costs to expensive environmentally improved technology.
Financing of a innovation incentive system could be done in any of a number of ways; personally I'd prefer one that didn't penalize things we might actually want rapidly adopted like more efficient medicines or more energy efficient technology. A flat sales tax on the appropriate industry segment might be appropriate. Initially it could even be tuned to approximate current expenditure on patent licenses in the field to ease transition.
Third would be the remuneration process; once you have an actual budget and an actual goal it becomes much easier to maximize the benefit of the funds available. Today nobody is responsible for the budget so we get the patent office granting p
In general, a criminal would not even need your actual fingers, but just your finger prints.
Which are usually available all over the nice glossy surface of laptop itself. Unless you're always wearing gloves.
This technology makes security more interesting
Like most buyometrics I'd say it mostly makes security more profitable. Nothing like high-tech snakeoil to part the gullible from their money.
we'll see a corresponding increases in research and development
I'm not sure there's much of an increase in actual R&D, most of what we're seeing in the biometric security field looks more like slick salesmen conning gullible people out of their money.
If it becomes possible to replace every lock and key with some sort of recognition software
Some sort of secure recognition software? Well, pretty much the only biometric factor that cannot currently be copied, surreptiosly picked up or faked is the contents of your brain. So that would be some device that could detect knowledge, for example, by the pressing of numbers on a keypad.
The difficulty of changing a PIN to your ID card may to seem preferable after changing your face for the third time. Or easier than spending your life in a latex catsuit as the insurance companies wont pay out if you've been spreading your biometric data around everywhere you go.
Using biometrics for security is a fundamentally flawed approach. They have a places as an _added_ factor, but for most purposes they're too easily compromised to replace a password, to hard to change to replace a token and add little extra security above a token and password combination.
Really, how many people need to dink with the kernel, be it Windows, OS X or Linux?
Well, it's a fair number, but it's not necessarily the number of people, but the _right_ people we need to be dinking around with the kernel. Unfortunately, with proprietary operating systems, it seems the right people are not necessarily doing that.
I don't personally dink around that much in the kernel (altho I've bypassed a bug or two in drivers), but I certainly want the genius with too much free time and the same hardware that I have who can fix the bugs to have access to the source. I dont want to hack my own paravirtualising hypervisor, but I'm very pleased to use xen technology, which would have been very difficult to implement without open source.
As a user of programs and operating systems I usually dont need the source. But I do need many improvements made by people with similar interests to me; interests that may overlap very much less with the strategic thinking of a single monolithic corporation.
Sharing code is useful at the application level.
Free software is useful at any level you want to have improved. Which is pretty much all of them. Personally I dont have the patience for proprietary products anymore; I find most tend to have issues that would never survive a few iterations in an opensource product. With free software products I know that if it annoys me enough it'll annoy someone else enough to fix it.
Now go away. I have a beard to tend to.
Of course, the monopoly pricing example is much simplified and valid only as a model for demonstrating why selling more copies cheaper isn't interesting when you have monopoly rights; more but cheaper still means less total revenue. In the real world you have many other aspects, for example, if you're making a 500% recordable profit you're not spending enough. Most organizations tend to accumulate waste until they make the minimum acceptable profit; see the music industry as a typical example, they can fail to make a profit selling hundreds of thousands of units of something where the costs of producing and distributing it should be less than a nicer used car. Spending money is rarely a problem; only competition enforces productive spending.
Now, if we're talking physical goods you certainly have a case.
Well, the application of monopoly pricing models is valid in either case; all goods contain amortized costs, it's mainly a question of how much of the total it is. It's interesting to compare the financials of, for example, the pharmaceutical industry with the auto industry. The more actual competition there is in a segment, the more the costs tend to be producing the actual product. The less competition, the more costs tend to go into marketing and administration.
With music and video there is ONLY the one-time production costs.
So the trick becomes letting the production costs be recouped, while still maintaining competitive pressure. Monopoly rights obviously don't work, as they inevitably result in an ever increasing level of waste, to the point where the one-time production cost is fairly minor in the expenditure of the revenue. Full competition may be a bit harsh, altho open source and creative commons et. al, have demonstrated that production costs can be cut to miniscule levels with appropriate measures. Perhaps it would be good enough.
Personally I tend to advocate freeing up the whole copying thing and simply putting a 'sales tax' on revenue derived of copying (ad's on download sites, on the price of CD-writing kiosks at your supermarket or book printing at your bookstore, etc). Then hand that money to the creators of the copied materials to offset the production cost plus some, perhaps with a ceiling on payouts, handing them forwards down the long tail, to maximize the amount of material financed. Easier to manage, less incentive for piracy, less incentive for draconian legislation and it opens up for a huge host of services that simply cannot be produced due to monopoly rights today (oh, and it would make it vastly simpler for the creators; simply publish your stuff and as people start downloading it, you'll get paid depending on revenue generated by your work. It could even work for open source or other free things). It would also put the actual budget for 'IP' on the public books instead of hiding the costs and pretending that what amounts to privately held taxation rights aren't a cost to the economy.
Anyways, there are many ways to solve the problem of one-time costs of infinitely reproducible goods. Monopoly rights may, for economic reasons, be the one of the worst and most wasteful ways.
business execs) rarely understand is that piracy usually indicates an unfulfilled market.
.. up to 10 dollars, and a per unit production cost of 2 dollars.
Monopoly pricing always creates an unfulfilled market; revenue is maximized at a pricing point far above the fulfillable market.
A classic economic example would be this: You have ten customers who would pay 1, 2, 3
Set the price at 10 dollars and you get 1 customer paying ten dollars; $10 in revenue. Lower the price, $8 gets you 3 customers, $24 total revenue. $7 gets you $28. Subtract 4 times $2 for unit costs and you get $20 profit. Try $6 price, that gets you $30 income minus 5 times $2, the same $20 profit.
Turns out $7, with 4 customers would maximize your profit. That leaves the 5 people between $2 (minimum production cost) and $7 unfulfilled. In a free market, competition would force prices down towards $2, maximizing the total wealth in the market. In the monopoly market, the wealth created by fulfilling the market is lost (well, unless the potential customers pirate the material).
But now look at the trend - steady decline ever since
Microsoft barely looks any better tho.
Microsoft was their best shot at creating shareholder value.
In the same way as selling in Nov 07 or during the actual offer would have created value for the selling shareholders? You don't necessarily get redo's in stock trading.
There's a reason Microsofts stock dropped on the offer. There's a reason Ballmer was, I suspect, forced by the board to drop the bid. Much as I'd find it amusing to see Microsoft lose an investment of that size, a whole lot of shareholders in both companies obviously thought it would have been a very bad deal for both of them, most likely ending up with both customers and employees moving away from the joined company. Apart from temporarily getting to pretend to be more of a serious contender in googles field, there is little long term shareholder value in this deal.
Placating Ballmers ego, while perhaps safest around furnished rooms, may not necessarily be the best business decision.
People who wanted to sell at, or near, Microsoft's offer had the chance to do so until the offer was dropped (heck, they still can; iirc, the offer was 50% cash 50% stock, and with the way Microsoft's stock is moving, by the time the deal had been approved they'd have been glad to get $20-$25 actual money for their stock; I'd imagine the sales pressure from a significant fraction of yhoo owners with no interest in being msft owners would depress the stock even more, something which Icahn and other's who'll dump the stock as soon as they can aren't likely to change).
A lawsuit against a GPL3 violator WILL be perceived as a lawsuit against ALL companies that use GPL'd software
Mmm, no. It will be perceived as a lawsuit against all GPL _violators_.
Users of GPL software are better protected against lawsuits by the GPLv3.
And in at corporate management levels, the perception is what counts.
If some group of corporate management bases their approval of merging random code off the net into their products on perception I doubt they'd last long in the software industry.
Nothing is entirely safe; in the case of patents, you're even safer off using GPLv3 code than you are using public domain code (as the publisher of the code can't sue you for infringing any patents they may have).
Some intellectual property lawyers tend to be overly concerned with protecting the 'intellectual property' of their clients, rather than protecting their clients from the threat of 'intellectual property' held by others. Those lawyers constantly focus on the pile they're protecting, ignoring the huge mountainsides surrounding their pile, and the avalanche about to crush them.
How the hell do you build a business advantage over a competitor when you are forced to divulge your developments to everybody?
What, competition without state protection? Build a business advantage by being better, cheaper, faster, leaner? That sounds almost like a free market; cant have that, eh?
will GPL3 ruin open source development in the business world
No. It will create problems for free riders and make it easier for good corporate citizens to abide by the GPL because they wont have to worry about their less ethical brethren using it against them.
One corporations proprietary advantage is everyone elses disadvantage; some companies actually realize this and figure that having an advantage for 6 months in one area while their competitors have an advantage in another area for 6 months means they get a clean slate with _both_ advantages at the beginning of the next cycle. Plus their new advantage for that cycle... Moving technology forward much faster and not subject to anyone elses whims.
Linux would not be where it is today without business support
Businesses who have, to a large extent, been part of formulating the GPLv3. The corporate objectors to GPLv3 tend to be more in the non-contributing camp.