They're not forbidding all fishing, just large foreign commercial operations. Their own citizens can still fish.
Short term, that should result in a beautiful place for tourism. Will probably be a wonderful place for diving, and if they can exploit that properly, they'll get some nice cash out of that.
Long term, at this rate, pretty much everybody else around will overfish in their waters and panic. Then Kiribati could sell some of their now very plentiful fish for big $$$.
In my experience, disk space isn't nearly as limiting as it used to be. Back in '93, a 500MB drive was pretty large, but could be easily filled. I remember that deciding what to keep on one's hard disk, and how to free up a bit more space used to take a considerable amount of time. After all, a single CD was bigger. Today, a 500GB drive won't be filled by most people.
Also, there are 1TB SSDs in existence already, one reported to be postage stamp sized. That's a very useful size, considering that much smaller ones can be comfortably used.
And if it goes get cramped, there are always regular hard disks to fall back to, which do storage of mass amounts of data that doesn't need high performance better anyway.
Here you have one. I don't own a single HDCP compliant monitor, and that's entirely intentional. I also pass on any laptops with BluRay drives or a TPM.
I don't download stuff I didn't pay for. However, I also think it's very rude to sneak crap like this into my hardware, movies, game and music.
As a result, I don't have an HDCP compliant monitor or Blu-Ray drive. I haven't bought any DRMed games or music in the last 5 years or so. I don't have any Apple products or a Steam account. I intentionally avoided laptops with BluRay drives and TPM. The few videos I bought were DVD, which is utterly broken, and as soon as I find a source of DRM-free downloads, I'm switching to that.
I won't pirate it, but it disgusts me so much, I won't touch the legal stuff with a 10 foot pole. My money now goes instead to the EFF, FSF, pirate party, and initiatives like Musopen and the Humble Bundle.
The RIAA has brought it to themselves. They have effectively placed themselves in the position of "the enemy" for many people.
It's got to the point that you can't ignore their existence even if you don't touch music in any shape or form (piracy included). They'll still oppose net neutrality, push draconian legislation, and in some countries collect a tax attached to storage media (they want internet connections too). For this reason, I want them dead and gone, yesterday.
And yes, this trumps the culture you're talking about, because it's my culture (related to technology and the internet) they're screwing with, and at this point of time I think if the entire music industry died in exchange for them stopping trying to screw with my hardware and internet connection, it would be a fair price to pay.
So I'll gladly contribute to this, and hope it makes them a bit poorer, even though I never had any interest in listening to classical music.
One of the nice things about knowing things like that is that you can derive other things from them. For instance, from knowing the motions of the planets a sufficiently clever person would be able to figure out moon phases, eclipses, seasons, the position of the sun in the sky on a given day and the times of sunrise and sunset. I don't think it's very hard to imagine those being used in a Sherlock Holmes story.
A bit of knowledge can go a long way. If you have a good starting point you don't necessarily need to keep volumes of related things in your head. All you need to know is enough to know where to look for the rest.
You can find light bulbs that use 1/5th as much power as incandescents. You can't save that much power by using your incandescents 1/5th as much. Seriously, just try how long can you sit in the darkness only in the glow of your monitor. I'm sure you won't keep it up for long.
Most people won't run 5X CFLs 24/7, just because that'd be painfully bright, and it makes sleeping hard. Even if you turned your room's lights off, going for a midnight snack would be painful.
I would be surprised if any savings you can do through usage patterns amounted to more than 20% or so.
Well, I can tell you that if I go buy a RAID card, or set up a machine for the long term, I check if it's in the vanilla kernel.
It's not so much about OSS as about long term reliability. I had systems on 2.2 in 2008. Thousands of devices spread all around the country, hard to replace. It's been a pain so now I make sure I don't depend on the vendor.
What you see as religion is for me just long term planning. It does me no good to have hardware decide what software I can run. Been there, dealt with it, explained it to the boss, didn't like it. So since then it's either in the kernel or I don't care about it. Even if I probably never will look at the code.
Because all that is available on Wikipedia, except it doesn't take a whole shelf, and is more convenient to access.
Proper commentary could be incredibly interesting. A book on how the news about the war affected the changes people made to the article, the different editing factions, etc could be very worth reading.
No, it means "comes included in the vanilla kernel".
If you don't have it there, I'm not interested unless the hardware you have is something very, very specific that I really need. Which normal network and wifi cards aren't.
Question 1: Unless it's a SSD, I think they're full of it, and go with your. In any case it's not the manufacturer's claims I'll look at, but Tom Hardware's benchmarks or any such site's. I'll pay special attention to dirty tricks like pretending to flush the cache.
Question 2: If printing speed is important, I look for benchmarks/testing the unit myself. If it's not, then I don't care what it is.
It's very simple. When somebody pushes an overbearing amount of rules on you, it can be a very effective tactic to simply follow each and every one to the letter.
It doesn't matter it's silly. It doesn't matter nobody loses any money because of it. Make sure it's applied strictly in all cases, until even the people who push for it start screaming from the frustration, and then they might finally get the hint.
None of that matters. The law is the law, and it doesn't contain exceptions for the police or shoe photography. There are statuory damages that can be collected even if not a single photo gets sold.
Personally, I'm against the current obsessive enforcement of copyright. This is why I think that if it's going to be interpreted in a strict and unflexible way, it should be done that way for everybody. The police mustn't get an exception to it. If the law is too overbearing, then the law should be changed for everybody.
It's an old realtime chat system. Screen is split in two, half for your text, half for the other side's, and anything you type gets sent and displayed at the destination immediately.
So they get to see your typing speed, typos, how you type half a sentence and then change your mind, etc.
In my experience, some interesting things arise from it. For instance you see how and where people have to think while writing a reply, replies that start rather tactless and get corrected, etc. Some people will also start doing things like going "Hmm..." and periodically adding a "." to show that they're still there. Conversations also go more like RL ones, in that since you see typing in real time, sometimes you see somebody typing the reply to a question you were about to ask, and erase the question, or start replying as soon as you have enough to reply to.
In Slashdot comments, Alsee has posited a scenario in which all home ISPs start requiring Trusted Network Connect. So you need to be using an approved and unmodified operating system, or you don't get a routable IP address. And even if your ISP does allow customers to run Linux, it's effectively Tivoized because you can only run (say) Ubuntu with the official kernel.
I think such scenarios are still pretty far away, and in any case the internet isn't the only way of networking that exists.
Carriers can refuse service to any device that they want. GSM, for example, has the EIR which allows for a "blacklist" of unapproved IMEIs. Ostensibly, EIR allows disabling stolen handsets, but it can also be used to give zero bars to any device that doesn't implement whatever digital imprimatur scheme the IFPI-beholden carriers choose.
There's an open source GSM implementation now. Presumably it could identify itself under any arbitrary IMEI. Of course if things get to that point it's going to be messy. Also I don't see that happening just yet. People are getting sick of the restrictions already.
Let me know when the Pirate Party has gained even one seat in the United States Senate.
I'm not in the US, but I'm sure it'll get a few seats if anything like the above happens. A large amount of people just don't have enough things to be concerned about yet.
Anyway, my stance is simple: I will push back in whatever ways are available to me, and do everything possible to make such things unprofitable.
I suppose I'll start giving more support to devices like Openmoko (doubt that's going to become illegal), or worst case, give money to the Pirate Party or whoever tries to reverse it.
You mention that Wilson had to sell his patents. Without patents, would he have received any compensation at all?
The litigation he was involved in was infringement of somebody else's sewing patents, and since he had no money, he sold the patents to those same people that were suing him. In such a situation I doubt he got a whole lot of money on that deal, in fact with a leverage like that they probably got him to sell for pennies on the dollar.
Without patents, no, he wouldn't get royalties or sell the patents, but he wouldn't have got sued either, which would have allowed him to manufacture his design.
He did have somewhat better luck later:
In 1851, Wilson partnered with Nathaniel Wheeler, and the two formed the firm, Wheeler, Wilson & Company, which began manufacturing sewing machines on the basis of Wilsons three subsequent patents. It also soon entered the fray in the Sewing Machine War, and would become one of the members of the Combination in 1856.
So here we see that: patents don't really do much if you don't have the money to back them up, so forget about the whole "independent inventor" deal. And when he formed his partnership, it got into the whole patent mess, and ended up joining the Combination, which nullified the effects of the patents. So I doubt he'd have ended up much worse if there weren't any in the first place.
Without patents, those that posses the capital would benefit and not necessarily the inventor (assuming he isn't in the employ of those with capital)
No, as you can see, without the capital, Wilson's patent didn't do him a whole lot of good. It's only when he partnered that he got somewhere, and then still reached the effectively patent-less situation.
In the case of Savary pumping machine, would he have made a dime if the property owners (those with the mines) could just use his invention?
I don't see why not. He invented it after all, he was the person best qualified to know how to make one of those, what the pitfalls are, and how to fix it when it breaks. If somebody copied it, he would still have a headstart in coming up with an improvement.
Also, Wikipedia says: "Savery's patent covered all engines that raised water by fire and Newcomen was forced to go into partnership with Savery". Really I don't have much sympathy for such things, and IMO that outright says that his patent delayed improvements, as it had a ridiculously large scope.
I'd also look at Papin, who had key ideas in the area of steam power, but without patronage spent his life trying to scrape by instead of enjoy the fruits of his mental labor:
Papin did his research at about the same time the people you mentioned, so why didn't he patent his inventions and get some money from them? IMO because of the above: simply having a patent isn't enough, you still need money. Even if nobody sues you, building prototypes has to be expensive.
This, of course, assumes that the information from the inventors would still be readily available (that is a key aspect of patents) instead of locked up in their file cabinets hoping for someday having the capital to build whatever it is. In some cases, the invention is inevitable and might ultimately be found by multiple people. However I look at Newcomen as a contrary example; he spent ten years of his life experimenting to find ways to stable motion of a machine.
You need the capital anyway. If you have a patent but not the means to get some business done, then any potential partner can offer you a bad deal. After that a bad deal is still better than no deal at all, and without capital you'll have to get by with what you're offered.
Also, IMO, there's no 100% perfect situation, but I think that the ocassional loss due to plans in the file cabinets is much less damaging than having an ent
If the DMCA provision passes, I promise that from that point I won't spend a single cent on anything made by anybody who supports or takes advantage of it, and that I will make every effort discourage other people and companies from purchasing those things.
All my money will instead go on software, hardware and music without DRM and under liberal licenses, as well as organizations that oppose this kind of legislation. I will especially contribute to any attempts to eliminate patents and heavily restrict copyright.
So far two pieces of evidence have been presented in this thread, the article on steam engines from the grandparent, and the one on sewing machines, on which I just finished giving my opinion.
Please summarize, what is wrong with those two articles? In my view, both of them contain evidence on how patents delayed the industrial revolution, and how things actually worked much better once the patents could be ignored.
On the subject of rewarding inventors, I believe the profit from a successful invention is reward enough.
Now I'm even more convinced that patents are harmful and unnecessary. Even more, I think the paper proves so.
Let's see the timeline:
In 1846, Howe patents his sewing machine. However it doesn't work very well, so nobody wants it. Later that year he sets off to England to try to sell it, and fails miserably. Meanwhile, other inventors keep banging on the problem and gradually fix the problems.
In 1850, Wilson, who had invented and patented some useful stuff has to sell his patents, because he can't afford the litigation, proving that just owning a patent does little good unless you have money for the lawyers. In that year, Singer perfects his machine. Around that time, Howe returns and starts suing everybody in the business. There's much fighting in the courts, and by 1854 Howe wins big against Singer.
After that, for some reason everybody starts suing everybody else, and the mess escalates with huge amounts of resources being devoted to litigation, to the point it has a very negative effect on the whole industry. Howe is the only one who is happy, because everybody owes him royalties, but he's the one not making anything.
In 1856, a lawyer comes up with the solution: let's do a patent pool (the Combination). Howe's cooperation is mandatory, so he's given a guaranteed cash supply for just sitting on his butt. The patent pool includes everything that goes into an useful sewing machine, so anybody wanting to make their own must reach an agreement with the patent pool.
Now, that's wrong with this? Several things:
First, the solution to a patent war was effectively to let go the patents. Everybody in the Combination licenses from everybody else, so the overall situation for them is as if there were no patents. They only need to contend with other people, which gives them a privileged position. My conclusion: patents == bad, since the solution to all the trouble was to agree to ignore the patents.
Second, the members of the pool still can compete with each other, and Singer has the most market share. How does he manage to do that? Not with patents! He pretty much invents marketing, then goes further with selling on an installment plan to compensate for the expense of his product, and giving discounts for competitors' old machines which prevents a second hand market of competitors' hardware. My conclusion: patents == unnecessary, since Singer gets an advantage just fine without them.
Third, Howe sits on his butt and collects royalties from people actually making a product, without manufacturing anything himself. My conclusion: patents == bad, since they're rewarding the wrong person.
Now, where in this do you see that the patents did any good? In this story, the mess with the patents escalates until it reaches the point where nobody but Howe can get anything done. They solve the problem by basically doing as if there weren't patents in the first place. And then Singer gets the most market share, not through proprietary technology, but through his superior business sense. During all of this the happiest one is Howe, who after his initial failed attempt just manages to collect money from everybody else, without doing anything himself.
Overall, without patents this probably would have worked out a lot smoother. People wouldn't have had to waste tons of money and time on lawsuits, the end result would have been about the same, Singer would still win through his good business sense. One difference is that Howe would still be poor, but IMO that's entirely how it should be.
I do not believe in things that have no proof of their existence.
Take the example of Russel's Teapot. Somebody could propose that there's a teapot in orbit around the Sun, though telescopes can't detect it, and there's no evidence of its existence.
Well, my take on things like that if that if we can't see it on a telescope, it doesn't affect anything else's orbit, it's not crashing into any satellites, and has no observable effect on anything, its existence or inexistence effectively doesn't matter.
Same with gods. If it doesn't show itself, affect anything, or do anything, then its existence or lack of it is entirely unimportant. When it announces itself, only then there will be some point in believing in it. Meanwhile, I say it doesn't exist by default.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's more of a long term investment.
They're not forbidding all fishing, just large foreign commercial operations. Their own citizens can still fish.
Short term, that should result in a beautiful place for tourism. Will probably be a wonderful place for diving, and if they can exploit that properly, they'll get some nice cash out of that.
Long term, at this rate, pretty much everybody else around will overfish in their waters and panic. Then Kiribati could sell some of their now very plentiful fish for big $$$.
Probably not much.
In my experience, disk space isn't nearly as limiting as it used to be. Back in '93, a 500MB drive was pretty large, but could be easily filled. I remember that deciding what to keep on one's hard disk, and how to free up a bit more space used to take a considerable amount of time. After all, a single CD was bigger. Today, a 500GB drive won't be filled by most people.
Also, there are 1TB SSDs in existence already, one reported to be postage stamp sized. That's a very useful size, considering that much smaller ones can be comfortably used.
And if it goes get cramped, there are always regular hard disks to fall back to, which do storage of mass amounts of data that doesn't need high performance better anyway.
That's a trademark issue, not a copyright one. You can copy the design all you want, you just can't write "Prada" on it.
It didn't take very long after their recent proclamation
Here you have one. I don't own a single HDCP compliant monitor, and that's entirely intentional. I also pass on any laptops with BluRay drives or a TPM.
I don't download stuff I didn't pay for. However, I also think it's very rude to sneak crap like this into my hardware, movies, game and music.
As a result, I don't have an HDCP compliant monitor or Blu-Ray drive. I haven't bought any DRMed games or music in the last 5 years or so. I don't have any Apple products or a Steam account. I intentionally avoided laptops with BluRay drives and TPM. The few videos I bought were DVD, which is utterly broken, and as soon as I find a source of DRM-free downloads, I'm switching to that.
I won't pirate it, but it disgusts me so much, I won't touch the legal stuff with a 10 foot pole. My money now goes instead to the EFF, FSF, pirate party, and initiatives like Musopen and the Humble Bundle.
The RIAA has brought it to themselves. They have effectively placed themselves in the position of "the enemy" for many people.
It's got to the point that you can't ignore their existence even if you don't touch music in any shape or form (piracy included). They'll still oppose net neutrality, push draconian legislation, and in some countries collect a tax attached to storage media (they want internet connections too). For this reason, I want them dead and gone, yesterday.
And yes, this trumps the culture you're talking about, because it's my culture (related to technology and the internet) they're screwing with, and at this point of time I think if the entire music industry died in exchange for them stopping trying to screw with my hardware and internet connection, it would be a fair price to pay.
So I'll gladly contribute to this, and hope it makes them a bit poorer, even though I never had any interest in listening to classical music.
That seems a bit short-sighted.
One of the nice things about knowing things like that is that you can derive other things from them. For instance, from knowing the motions of the planets a sufficiently clever person would be able to figure out moon phases, eclipses, seasons, the position of the sun in the sky on a given day and the times of sunrise and sunset. I don't think it's very hard to imagine those being used in a Sherlock Holmes story.
A bit of knowledge can go a long way. If you have a good starting point you don't necessarily need to keep volumes of related things in your head. All you need to know is enough to know where to look for the rest.
Actually false.
You can find light bulbs that use 1/5th as much power as incandescents. You can't save that much power by using your incandescents 1/5th as much. Seriously, just try how long can you sit in the darkness only in the glow of your monitor. I'm sure you won't keep it up for long.
Most people won't run 5X CFLs 24/7, just because that'd be painfully bright, and it makes sleeping hard. Even if you turned your room's lights off, going for a midnight snack would be painful.
I would be surprised if any savings you can do through usage patterns amounted to more than 20% or so.
Well, I can tell you that if I go buy a RAID card, or set up a machine for the long term, I check if it's in the vanilla kernel.
It's not so much about OSS as about long term reliability. I had systems on 2.2 in 2008. Thousands of devices spread all around the country, hard to replace. It's been a pain so now I make sure I don't depend on the vendor.
What you see as religion is for me just long term planning. It does me no good to have hardware decide what software I can run. Been there, dealt with it, explained it to the boss, didn't like it. So since then it's either in the kernel or I don't care about it. Even if I probably never will look at the code.
Because all that is available on Wikipedia, except it doesn't take a whole shelf, and is more convenient to access.
Proper commentary could be incredibly interesting. A book on how the news about the war affected the changes people made to the article, the different editing factions, etc could be very worth reading.
Is this an actual useful work containing for instance some sort of commentary?
Or is this one of those artistic statements where somebody just took the entire history of the page and printed it as a book with minimal formatting?
No, it means "comes included in the vanilla kernel".
If you don't have it there, I'm not interested unless the hardware you have is something very, very specific that I really need. Which normal network and wifi cards aren't.
Question 1:
Unless it's a SSD, I think they're full of it, and go with your. In any case it's not the manufacturer's claims I'll look at, but Tom Hardware's benchmarks or any such site's. I'll pay special attention to dirty tricks like pretending to flush the cache.
Question 2:
If printing speed is important, I look for benchmarks/testing the unit myself. If it's not, then I don't care what it is.
It's very simple. When somebody pushes an overbearing amount of rules on you, it can be a very effective tactic to simply follow each and every one to the letter.
It doesn't matter it's silly. It doesn't matter nobody loses any money because of it. Make sure it's applied strictly in all cases, until even the people who push for it start screaming from the frustration, and then they might finally get the hint.
None of that matters. The law is the law, and it doesn't contain exceptions for the police or shoe photography. There are statuory damages that can be collected even if not a single photo gets sold.
Personally, I'm against the current obsessive enforcement of copyright. This is why I think that if it's going to be interpreted in a strict and unflexible way, it should be done that way for everybody. The police mustn't get an exception to it. If the law is too overbearing, then the law should be changed for everybody.
It's an old realtime chat system. Screen is split in two, half for your text, half for the other side's, and anything you type gets sent and displayed at the destination immediately.
So they get to see your typing speed, typos, how you type half a sentence and then change your mind, etc.
In my experience, some interesting things arise from it. For instance you see how and where people have to think while writing a reply, replies that start rather tactless and get corrected, etc. Some people will also start doing things like going "Hmm..." and periodically adding a "." to show that they're still there. Conversations also go more like RL ones, in that since you see typing in real time, sometimes you see somebody typing the reply to a question you were about to ask, and erase the question, or start replying as soon as you have enough to reply to.
I think such scenarios are still pretty far away, and in any case the internet isn't the only way of networking that exists.
There's an open source GSM implementation now. Presumably it could identify itself under any arbitrary IMEI. Of course if things get to that point it's going to be messy. Also I don't see that happening just yet. People are getting sick of the restrictions already.
I'm not in the US, but I'm sure it'll get a few seats if anything like the above happens. A large amount of people just don't have enough things to be concerned about yet.
Anyway, my stance is simple: I will push back in whatever ways are available to me, and do everything possible to make such things unprofitable.
I suppose I'll start giving more support to devices like Openmoko (doubt that's going to become illegal), or worst case, give money to the Pirate Party or whoever tries to reverse it.
The litigation he was involved in was infringement of somebody else's sewing patents, and since he had no money, he sold the patents to those same people that were suing him. In such a situation I doubt he got a whole lot of money on that deal, in fact with a leverage like that they probably got him to sell for pennies on the dollar.
Without patents, no, he wouldn't get royalties or sell the patents, but he wouldn't have got sued either, which would have allowed him to manufacture his design.
He did have somewhat better luck later:
So here we see that: patents don't really do much if you don't have the money to back them up, so forget about the whole "independent inventor" deal. And when he formed his partnership, it got into the whole patent mess, and ended up joining the Combination, which nullified the effects of the patents. So I doubt he'd have ended up much worse if there weren't any in the first place.
No, as you can see, without the capital, Wilson's patent didn't do him a whole lot of good. It's only when he partnered that he got somewhere, and then still reached the effectively patent-less situation.
I don't see why not. He invented it after all, he was the person best qualified to know how to make one of those, what the pitfalls are, and how to fix it when it breaks. If somebody copied it, he would still have a headstart in coming up with an improvement.
Also, Wikipedia says: "Savery's patent covered all engines that raised water by fire and Newcomen was forced to go into partnership with Savery". Really I don't have much sympathy for such things, and IMO that outright says that his patent delayed improvements, as it had a ridiculously large scope.
Papin did his research at about the same time the people you mentioned, so why didn't he patent his inventions and get some money from them? IMO because of the above: simply having a patent isn't enough, you still need money. Even if nobody sues you, building prototypes has to be expensive.
You need the capital anyway. If you have a patent but not the means to get some business done, then any potential partner can offer you a bad deal. After that a bad deal is still better than no deal at all, and without capital you'll have to get by with what you're offered.
Also, IMO, there's no 100% perfect situation, but I think that the ocassional loss due to plans in the file cabinets is much less damaging than having an ent
If the DMCA provision passes, I promise that from that point I won't spend a single cent on anything made by anybody who supports or takes advantage of it, and that I will make every effort discourage other people and companies from purchasing those things.
All my money will instead go on software, hardware and music without DRM and under liberal licenses, as well as organizations that oppose this kind of legislation. I will especially contribute to any attempts to eliminate patents and heavily restrict copyright.
Please provide some more specific arguments.
So far two pieces of evidence have been presented in this thread, the article on steam engines from the grandparent, and the one on sewing machines, on which I just finished giving my opinion.
Please summarize, what is wrong with those two articles? In my view, both of them contain evidence on how patents delayed the industrial revolution, and how things actually worked much better once the patents could be ignored.
On the subject of rewarding inventors, I believe the profit from a successful invention is reward enough.
Ok, now I've read the paper entirely.
Now I'm even more convinced that patents are harmful and unnecessary. Even more, I think the paper proves so.
Let's see the timeline:
In 1846, Howe patents his sewing machine. However it doesn't work very well, so nobody wants it. Later that year he sets off to England to try to sell it, and fails miserably. Meanwhile, other inventors keep banging on the problem and gradually fix the problems.
In 1850, Wilson, who had invented and patented some useful stuff has to sell his patents, because he can't afford the litigation, proving that just owning a patent does little good unless you have money for the lawyers. In that year, Singer perfects his machine. Around that time, Howe returns and starts suing everybody in the business. There's much fighting in the courts, and by 1854 Howe wins big against Singer.
After that, for some reason everybody starts suing everybody else, and the mess escalates with huge amounts of resources being devoted to litigation, to the point it has a very negative effect on the whole industry. Howe is the only one who is happy, because everybody owes him royalties, but he's the one not making anything.
In 1856, a lawyer comes up with the solution: let's do a patent pool (the Combination). Howe's cooperation is mandatory, so he's given a guaranteed cash supply for just sitting on his butt. The patent pool includes everything that goes into an useful sewing machine, so anybody wanting to make their own must reach an agreement with the patent pool.
Now, that's wrong with this? Several things:
First, the solution to a patent war was effectively to let go the patents. Everybody in the Combination licenses from everybody else, so the overall situation for them is as if there were no patents. They only need to contend with other people, which gives them a privileged position. My conclusion: patents == bad, since the solution to all the trouble was to agree to ignore the patents.
Second, the members of the pool still can compete with each other, and Singer has the most market share. How does he manage to do that? Not with patents! He pretty much invents marketing, then goes further with selling on an installment plan to compensate for the expense of his product, and giving discounts for competitors' old machines which prevents a second hand market of competitors' hardware. My conclusion: patents == unnecessary, since Singer gets an advantage just fine without them.
Third, Howe sits on his butt and collects royalties from people actually making a product, without manufacturing anything himself. My conclusion: patents == bad, since they're rewarding the wrong person.
Now, where in this do you see that the patents did any good? In this story, the mess with the patents escalates until it reaches the point where nobody but Howe can get anything done. They solve the problem by basically doing as if there weren't patents in the first place. And then Singer gets the most market share, not through proprietary technology, but through his superior business sense. During all of this the happiest one is Howe, who after his initial failed attempt just manages to collect money from everybody else, without doing anything himself.
Overall, without patents this probably would have worked out a lot smoother. People wouldn't have had to waste tons of money and time on lawsuits, the end result would have been about the same, Singer would still win through his good business sense. One difference is that Howe would still be poor, but IMO that's entirely how it should be.
I do not believe in things that have no proof of their existence.
Take the example of Russel's Teapot. Somebody could propose that there's a teapot in orbit around the Sun, though telescopes can't detect it, and there's no evidence of its existence.
Well, my take on things like that if that if we can't see it on a telescope, it doesn't affect anything else's orbit, it's not crashing into any satellites, and has no observable effect on anything, its existence or inexistence effectively doesn't matter.
Same with gods. If it doesn't show itself, affect anything, or do anything, then its existence or lack of it is entirely unimportant. When it announces itself, only then there will be some point in believing in it. Meanwhile, I say it doesn't exist by default.
On top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies