This raises a serious question, doesn't it? Is it worth destroying the existing recording industry, just to have all the new industries this would create?... Hold on. What could I have been thinking?
Really? Does business really suffer from slow broadband speeds? Occasionally, I have to wait an extra 30 seconds for a file download but it's hardly impacting my productivity. What kind of business needs a really fat pipe to prosper?
Well, for one thing businesses with a lot of employees working on computers.
For another, how about... businesses with imagination?
Aside from the obvious examples of content businesses, there are businesses that could use content to sell more products and services. Here in the states, soda bottles had unique IDs that could be used online to redeem song downloads.
How about businesses which need to provide technical support. Service manuals could be augmented by videos, so that you could watch a video on how to unjam the copy machine (and maybe get exposed to a bit of subtle marketing). Maybe you'd even get a human being to talk to -- expensive to be sure, but in some cases worth it. Maybe the local auto mechanic who's stumped could video conference to the regional service boffin.
I could probably come up with ten pages of examples of ways businesses could use high bandwidth link, especially provided that everyone has them. Now chances are, very few of those would come to fruition, but that's OK because, shocking though it might seem, I'm not as smart as everybody else in the world, put together.
Well, it doesn't have to be Microsoft's fault to be embarrassing to them. The script goes like this:
1. Microsoft cuts a sweetheart deal with the LSE to use their products.
2. Microsoft engages is massive media blitzkrieg claiming that LSE's selection is proof that organizations that need reliability prefer Windows to Linux.
3. Shortly thereafter, LSE systems crash in a spectacular and very public way.
4. Mayhem ensues.
As others have pointed out, Microsoft products are not the first choice of organizations that place reliability first in their mission critical systems. The reasons can be as simple as "stick with what you know works", so getting a major player to try something new is a big deal. Having your poster child fail in a public and spectacular way is not a happy event.
If LSE crashed once a week for the next year, but none of the fifty two crashes were blamed on Microsoft platforms, you might argue that this says nothing negative about those platforms. You'd be right. It just undercuts the warm fuzzy feelings they're trying to foster about the safety of following the herd.
if we could take a young child, possessor of the greatest marvel known to biological or computational science, namely a brain, and manage to educate that child so he had a statistically reasonable chance of not growing up to think like a moron?
The specific moronity I have in mind is all or nothing thinking.
There is not a safe in the world that cannot be opened without its combination or keys. That's why you don't rely on a safe to be perfect. You have burglar alarms, surveillance cameras, and frequent physical checking. A good safe turn out to be highly useful, if you understand its limitations. But even a very good safe can be worse than useless if you believe it to be impenetrable.
Any artifact which is subjected to the scrutiny of hostile ingenuity will fall to that ingenuity. So you don't buy anything with the idea that it is magical unbreakable pixie dust you can sprinkle on a problem. Anybody selling magical unbreakable pixie dust is selling to people they think are morons. So caveat emptor.
Now, if somebody said they are selling clone resistant RFID tags, that's interesting. How resistant? Even just a little resistant may in some cases have a great deal of value, for example where the value of what is protected by the technology exceeds the cost of effort to duplicate it.
Yes, but the bond holders (mainly China) are being taken care of.
Of course, the losses are getting "socialized" one way or the other, if you count "socialized" as meaning "borne by nearly everybody (say 95%) in society". If you count "socialized" as "borne by everybody (say 99.9%) in society" then that's still up for grabs.
What has become increasingly clear over the last few years is that the major structural impact of globalization on the US economy amounts to this: manufacturing has been moved to China; US consumption of goods whose production has moved to China is propped up by home equity; home equity is propped up by Chinese investment; and Chinese investment is funded by imports to the US of goods we used to make for ourselves.
The good news is that nobody can escape this interdependency without a great deal of pain. Getting off the merry go round may be more painful for us than it is for China, but it'll be plenty painful for China. The bad news is that our role in this picture is to accumulate debt. I think the ancestor post has it right: say goodbye to long term projects with distant economic benefits. Say hello to running like hell to stay in the same place.
Years ago, left leaning politicians called this a vision of the economy in which "everybody took out everybody else's trash." This was, of course, a gross exaggeration. Services have real value. The problem is that we've been using debt to exaggerate the productivity of our economy, and if we lived within the means of our true productivity, we'd feel a lot poorer in the short term.
The secondary mortgage market is not in isolation the death of our space ambitions. Globalization per se is not isolation the death of our space ambitions. Dependency on foreign energy is not in isolation the death of our space ambitions. It's just tying them all together in a way that makes us feel richer and more productive than we really are that leaves us little margin for investing in our future.
OK, to boil down what you are saying, there are three ways the statement "I am authorized to act on behalf of XYZ, which is an owner of an exclusive right to material X that is infringed by Y" can be false:
(1) The agent may not in fact by authorized by XYZ. (2) The material "Y" might not be infringing on XYZ's exclusive rights to "X". (3) XYZ might not have exclusive rights to "X".
Naturally, the person making the representation must know that the statement he is making is false. Whether "Y" infringes on "X" is usually a matter of judgment, but in some cases if it falls within well established rules of fair use any lawyer making such a claim should, in my opinion, be disbarred.
While this notion sounds a bit quaint to modern ears, in times past it was understood that the word "invention" referred to something that, heretofore, had not yet existed.
It is only within the last generation or so that the word "invention" has come to mean the first formal description of something that already exists or that is in the process of entering the market. Back in the day, the "patent office" was not the equivalent of a frontier "land office".
Funny thing. Last night I was at a restaurant and being one of those people who can't spend more than one minute of idleness without something to read, I read the bottle of ketchup.
On the bottle was a picture of company founder Henry John Heinz, and a quote:
To do a common thing uncommonly well, brings success.
There's the "over the transom" kind of anonymity, in which the credibility of the evidence has to be judged by external sources.
There's the "anonymity" of confidential sources, in which a trusted (or not) third party attests to authority of the source.
And there's the pseudonymity of the web, which is all over the place from pseudonyms like "CmdrTaco" whose real identity is know, and other pseudonyms like "riverbend" whose actual identity is unknown, but whose pseudonym nonetheless has its own reputation which must be considered. Does knowing that the "kos" of "DailyKos" is Markos Moulitsas, born on September 11, 1971 in Chicago Illinois, add or detract anything from his credibility when writing as "kos"? The reputation of the pseudonym "kos" is arguably more important to Mr. Moulitsas in his political writing than the reputation of his legal name.
Uhhhh. OK. "Mother Nature" doesn't do anything to "take care of us". The most that can be reasonably argued is that "she" maintains a set of equilibria something vaguely analogous to homeostasis.
I think this is a bad idea because it changes too many parameters in too complex a way. Why do this for a global pollutant like CO2 when carbon sequestration reduces the rate at which a parameter diverges from its known status quo ante values?
True, we'll never really be able to set the clock back, and true, some people will make out better and other worse under an serious sequestration effort. But that's true of any thing we attempt. Of all the things we might attempt, carbon sequestration would be by far the safest. Even global warming deniers would have to admit that if human contributions to CO2 aren't significant, then offsetting those contributions won't be significant either.
However, anybody who knew me would be appalled by the idea of my being one 72 year old heartbeat away from having my finger on the button.
Give me somebody who understands habeas corpus, or the idea of separation of church and state, and who nows how to hire people who can keep up with developments in technology for them while they watch over the enduring and fundamental principles of our democracy.
Different markets, different companies, different efficiencies.
As competent laptops near the two figure mark in dollars, manufacturing is increasingly turning out commodity items. That means margins get small. That's what killed the PDA industry: it wasn't convergence per se. Convergence makes sense for some users and not others, but it makes sense for all producers. Rather than adapting to selling $49 PDAs, they escaped into the highly controlled and artificial world of mobile phone sales.
The problem, I think, is that the field of computing is as or more volatile than ever, but on razor thin margins. It's not something you can master by the TQM process of repeatable processes and analyzable results. So being able to say sayonara to a couple of thousand workers without any fuss is desirable. Companies, I'm guessing, see their future security in being highly flexible marketing entities.
Frankly, I find this distressing, but I'm not sure it's the wrong approach.
Apple, if I understand this correctly, contracts nearly all its manufacturing out. It has just one facility in Ireland. Perhaps this is enough to keep their ideas grounded in the realities of manufacturing.
Just because you can't read and understand it doesn't mean it doesn't have value to someone.
Ah, grasshopper, you have not mastered the Tao of the Value Proposition.
Knowledge of the Tao cannot be obtained rationally, but there are stories which point the way. On such story concerns Sozan, a Zen master from China. One day, the story goes, a student came to Sozan asked: "Master, what is the most valuable thing in the world?"
The master replied: "The head of a dead cat."
"Why is the head of a dead cat the most valuable thing in the world?" inquired the student.
Sozan replied: "Because no one can name its price."
That which has clear value also has finite value. There is no finite bound to the value of a benefit which cannot be defined. The highest values are like water: they seek the lowest level of thought, and flow into the shape of such expectations as they meet there.
Well, you'd also have to pay for it with an out of state billing address. Probably, you'd need to have an out of state friend do it for you.
This strategy is known as "tax fraud".
Alternatively, you could support a vendor you like and pay for local services. Generally, the closer your tax dollars are spent to home, the more they benefit you. I live in a state with a 5% sales tax but not to far from the border of a state with no sales tax. Some people drive over the border to make major purchases like large appliances, but I never do. I'm not saying every dollar is spent wisely, but there's a lot of things like the roads and education that need funding.
I've also been around the country and seen a number of state and local governments in action. I've come to the conclusion that states where there is a great deal of cynicism about government are places where that cynicism is warranted. They just have the cause wrong. They elect politicians who trade on the cynicism and anger of the voters, and the voters get regressive taxation, demoralized and vindictive state workers, managerial indifference and economic inefficiency as their reward.
9.8% is extraordinarily regressive for a sales tax. That's a bad sign.
Tennessee according to the data I'm looking at, taxes food at 5.5%. Could that possibly be right? Tennessee also has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Talk about taxing somebody when they're down.
I don't know much about Tennesee, but a state that has high sales taxes, high food taxes, and high unemployment has got to be royally screwed up. No wonder the poster wants to avoid sending them any tax money. Somebody 's doing well there, I bet. The top 5% of Tennessee families have an average income of 187,206. This is comparable, say, to Delaware, where the top 5% of families earn $188,435. The difference is that Tennessee families in the bottom 20% make $14,303 (putting it sixth from the bottom in the US), compared to an average income of $22,0225 for Delaware's bottom 20%.
It's not that I think income equalization is, in itself so important. It's just that Tennessee looks like a state where the well off are using taxes to kick the working man in the nuts.
Re:Not just the original person but all friends.
on
The Electronic Bastille
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Various social critics in the tradition of Focault (Michel, not Leon) have been predicting this kind of thing for years.
Starting more or less from first principles, they predicted that attempts to collect information on private individuals will tend to expand regardless of how useless or even counterproductive those efforts are. These kinds of things only stop growing when they get large enough to encounter some practical limitation. It might be budget, it might be technology, or it might even be people taking to the streets to protest.
I'm kind of surprised that entrepreneurs haven't come up with a device to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain yet. Granted, it would probably take a bit of surgery to install, but if you weren't convinced it was the coolest toy ever, you would be after a few pushes of the button.
Actually, new New Testament Greek, there are two words for "soul", one of which is invariably translated as "soul", the other of which is variously translated as "soul" and "spirit".
This, by the way, was probably one of Phillip Pullman's inspirations for the daemons in His Dark Materials series.
Different attributes were assigned to each of these concepts, and in fact in places they are used in contradistinction. Of course they are not scientific concepts, but this was the second century BCE or so. And everything doesn't have to be a scientific concept. While there have been some interesting social scientific speculations on this matter, "morality" is not yet a scientific concept, nor is it clear that it will ever be.
Well, we'll see about Li-ion batteries. The newer technologies should be somewhat intrinsically safer, which will probably make making a hugemongous Li-ion batteries a little less expensive. As soon as it looks like a better technology is on the horizon, Cobasys will be more motivated to license its technology.
If not, well, in WW1 there was a big patent fight between Wright Aeronautical and the Feds told them to patch it up in the interests of national security. Wright and Curtiss merged, which was good for Wright because they had stopped manufacturing because their airplanes were uncontrollable man-killers.
Cobasys's patents are granted by the public for the public good. If they're playing some kind of game where they're being unreasonable about licensing in order to help their oil company parents, well, they can be compelled to license on reasonable term. As we have been reminded over and over again, we are a nation at war.
Well, internal combustion engines deliver their maximum torque at over a thousand RPM. Since you have the greatest need for torque at 0 RPM, you'd have to have some kind of bulky gear train between the engine and the wheels.
Slashdot Mirror
The last name's right and that's all that matters.
This raises a serious question, doesn't it? Is it worth destroying the existing recording industry, just to have all the new industries this would create? ...
Hold on. What could I have been thinking?
Well, for one thing businesses with a lot of employees working on computers.
For another, how about ... businesses with imagination?
Aside from the obvious examples of content businesses, there are businesses that could use content to sell more products and services. Here in the states, soda bottles had unique IDs that could be used online to redeem song downloads.
How about businesses which need to provide technical support. Service manuals could be augmented by videos, so that you could watch a video on how to unjam the copy machine (and maybe get exposed to a bit of subtle marketing). Maybe you'd even get a human being to talk to -- expensive to be sure, but in some cases worth it. Maybe the local auto mechanic who's stumped could video conference to the regional service boffin.
I could probably come up with ten pages of examples of ways businesses could use high bandwidth link, especially provided that everyone has them. Now chances are, very few of those would come to fruition, but that's OK because, shocking though it might seem, I'm not as smart as everybody else in the world, put together.
But PBS is educational television. That's how we know over here that Britain is populated by quirky but lovable eccentrics.
I'd vote for the Hon. John Hacker for President in a heartbeat as long as he had Sir Humphrey as his chief of staff.
Well, it doesn't have to be Microsoft's fault to be embarrassing to them. The script goes like this:
1. Microsoft cuts a sweetheart deal with the LSE to use their products.
2. Microsoft engages is massive media blitzkrieg claiming that LSE's selection is proof that organizations that need reliability prefer Windows to Linux.
3. Shortly thereafter, LSE systems crash in a spectacular and very public way.
4. Mayhem ensues.
As others have pointed out, Microsoft products are not the first choice of organizations that place reliability first in their mission critical systems. The reasons can be as simple as "stick with what you know works", so getting a major player to try something new is a big deal. Having your poster child fail in a public and spectacular way is not a happy event.
If LSE crashed once a week for the next year, but none of the fifty two crashes were blamed on Microsoft platforms, you might argue that this says nothing negative about those platforms. You'd be right. It just undercuts the warm fuzzy feelings they're trying to foster about the safety of following the herd.
if we could take a young child, possessor of the greatest marvel known to biological or computational science, namely a brain, and manage to educate that child so he had a statistically reasonable chance of not growing up to think like a moron?
The specific moronity I have in mind is all or nothing thinking.
There is not a safe in the world that cannot be opened without its combination or keys. That's why you don't rely on a safe to be perfect. You have burglar alarms, surveillance cameras, and frequent physical checking. A good safe turn out to be highly useful, if you understand its limitations. But even a very good safe can be worse than useless if you believe it to be impenetrable.
Any artifact which is subjected to the scrutiny of hostile ingenuity will fall to that ingenuity. So you don't buy anything with the idea that it is magical unbreakable pixie dust you can sprinkle on a problem. Anybody selling magical unbreakable pixie dust is selling to people they think are morons. So caveat emptor.
Now, if somebody said they are selling clone resistant RFID tags, that's interesting. How resistant? Even just a little resistant may in some cases have a great deal of value, for example where the value of what is protected by the technology exceeds the cost of effort to duplicate it.
Yes, but the bond holders (mainly China) are being taken care of.
Of course, the losses are getting "socialized" one way or the other, if you count "socialized" as meaning "borne by nearly everybody (say 95%) in society". If you count "socialized" as "borne by everybody (say 99.9%) in society" then that's still up for grabs.
What has become increasingly clear over the last few years is that the major structural impact of globalization on the US economy amounts to this: manufacturing has been moved to China; US consumption of goods whose production has moved to China is propped up by home equity; home equity is propped up by Chinese investment; and Chinese investment is funded by imports to the US of goods we used to make for ourselves.
The good news is that nobody can escape this interdependency without a great deal of pain. Getting off the merry go round may be more painful for us than it is for China, but it'll be plenty painful for China. The bad news is that our role in this picture is to accumulate debt. I think the ancestor post has it right: say goodbye to long term projects with distant economic benefits. Say hello to running like hell to stay in the same place.
Years ago, left leaning politicians called this a vision of the economy in which "everybody took out everybody else's trash." This was, of course, a gross exaggeration. Services have real value. The problem is that we've been using debt to exaggerate the productivity of our economy, and if we lived within the means of our true productivity, we'd feel a lot poorer in the short term.
The secondary mortgage market is not in isolation the death of our space ambitions. Globalization per se is not isolation the death of our space ambitions. Dependency on foreign energy is not in isolation the death of our space ambitions. It's just tying them all together in a way that makes us feel richer and more productive than we really are that leaves us little margin for investing in our future.
A bad policy is one which leaves you at some point in the future with no good options.
OK, to boil down what you are saying, there are three ways the statement "I am authorized to act on behalf of XYZ, which is an owner of an exclusive right to material X that is infringed by Y" can be false:
(1) The agent may not in fact by authorized by XYZ.
(2) The material "Y" might not be infringing on XYZ's exclusive rights to "X".
(3) XYZ might not have exclusive rights to "X".
Naturally, the person making the representation must know that the statement he is making is false. Whether "Y" infringes on "X" is usually a matter of judgment, but in some cases if it falls within well established rules of fair use any lawyer making such a claim should, in my opinion, be disbarred.
While this notion sounds a bit quaint to modern ears, in times past it was understood that the word "invention" referred to something that, heretofore, had not yet existed.
It is only within the last generation or so that the word "invention" has come to mean the first formal description of something that already exists or that is in the process of entering the market. Back in the day, the "patent office" was not the equivalent of a frontier "land office".
Funny thing. Last night I was at a restaurant and being one of those people who can't spend more than one minute of idleness without something to read, I read the bottle of ketchup.
On the bottle was a picture of company founder Henry John Heinz, and a quote:
There are different kinds of "anonymity".
There's the "over the transom" kind of anonymity, in which the credibility of the evidence has to be judged by external sources.
There's the "anonymity" of confidential sources, in which a trusted (or not) third party attests to authority of the source.
And there's the pseudonymity of the web, which is all over the place from pseudonyms like "CmdrTaco" whose real identity is know, and other pseudonyms like "riverbend" whose actual identity is unknown, but whose pseudonym nonetheless has its own reputation which must be considered. Does knowing that the "kos" of "DailyKos" is Markos Moulitsas, born on September 11, 1971 in Chicago Illinois, add or detract anything from his credibility when writing as "kos"? The reputation of the pseudonym "kos" is arguably more important to Mr. Moulitsas in his political writing than the reputation of his legal name.
Uhhhh. OK. "Mother Nature" doesn't do anything to "take care of us". The most that can be reasonably argued is that "she" maintains a set of equilibria something vaguely analogous to homeostasis.
I think this is a bad idea because it changes too many parameters in too complex a way. Why do this for a global pollutant like CO2 when carbon sequestration reduces the rate at which a parameter diverges from its known status quo ante values?
True, we'll never really be able to set the clock back, and true, some people will make out better and other worse under an serious sequestration effort. But that's true of any thing we attempt. Of all the things we might attempt, carbon sequestration would be by far the safest. Even global warming deniers would have to admit that if human contributions to CO2 aren't significant, then offsetting those contributions won't be significant either.
However, anybody who knew me would be appalled by the idea of my being one 72 year old heartbeat away from having my finger on the button.
Give me somebody who understands habeas corpus, or the idea of separation of church and state, and who nows how to hire people who can keep up with developments in technology for them while they watch over the enduring and fundamental principles of our democracy.
Different markets, different companies, different efficiencies.
As competent laptops near the two figure mark in dollars, manufacturing is increasingly turning out commodity items. That means margins get small. That's what killed the PDA industry: it wasn't convergence per se. Convergence makes sense for some users and not others, but it makes sense for all producers. Rather than adapting to selling $49 PDAs, they escaped into the highly controlled and artificial world of mobile phone sales.
The problem, I think, is that the field of computing is as or more volatile than ever, but on razor thin margins. It's not something you can master by the TQM process of repeatable processes and analyzable results. So being able to say sayonara to a couple of thousand workers without any fuss is desirable. Companies, I'm guessing, see their future security in being highly flexible marketing entities.
Frankly, I find this distressing, but I'm not sure it's the wrong approach.
Apple, if I understand this correctly, contracts nearly all its manufacturing out. It has just one facility in Ireland. Perhaps this is enough to keep their ideas grounded in the realities of manufacturing.
Ah, grasshopper, you have not mastered the Tao of the Value Proposition.
Knowledge of the Tao cannot be obtained rationally, but there are stories which point the way. On such story concerns Sozan, a Zen master from China. One day, the story goes, a student came to Sozan asked: "Master, what is the most valuable thing in the world?"
The master replied: "The head of a dead cat."
"Why is the head of a dead cat the most valuable thing in the world?" inquired the student.
Sozan replied: "Because no one can name its price."
That which has clear value also has finite value. There is no finite bound to the value of a benefit which cannot be defined. The highest values are like water: they seek the lowest level of thought, and flow into the shape of such expectations as they meet there.
Well, you'd also have to pay for it with an out of state billing address. Probably, you'd need to have an out of state friend do it for you.
This strategy is known as "tax fraud".
Alternatively, you could support a vendor you like and pay for local services. Generally, the closer your tax dollars are spent to home, the more they benefit you. I live in a state with a 5% sales tax but not to far from the border of a state with no sales tax. Some people drive over the border to make major purchases like large appliances, but I never do. I'm not saying every dollar is spent wisely, but there's a lot of things like the roads and education that need funding.
I've also been around the country and seen a number of state and local governments in action. I've come to the conclusion that states where there is a great deal of cynicism about government are places where that cynicism is warranted. They just have the cause wrong. They elect politicians who trade on the cynicism and anger of the voters, and the voters get regressive taxation, demoralized and vindictive state workers, managerial indifference and economic inefficiency as their reward.
9.8% is extraordinarily regressive for a sales tax. That's a bad sign.
Tennessee according to the data I'm looking at, taxes food at 5.5%. Could that possibly be right? Tennessee also has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Talk about taxing somebody when they're down.
I don't know much about Tennesee, but a state that has high sales taxes, high food taxes, and high unemployment has got to be royally screwed up. No wonder the poster wants to avoid sending them any tax money. Somebody 's doing well there, I bet. The top 5% of Tennessee families have an average income of 187,206. This is comparable, say, to Delaware, where the top 5% of families earn $188,435. The difference is that Tennessee families in the bottom 20% make $14,303 (putting it sixth from the bottom in the US), compared to an average income of $22,0225 for Delaware's bottom 20%.
It's not that I think income equalization is, in itself so important. It's just that Tennessee looks like a state where the well off are using taxes to kick the working man in the nuts.
Various social critics in the tradition of Focault (Michel, not Leon) have been predicting this kind of thing for years.
Starting more or less from first principles, they predicted that attempts to collect information on private individuals will tend to expand regardless of how useless or even counterproductive those efforts are. These kinds of things only stop growing when they get large enough to encounter some practical limitation. It might be budget, it might be technology, or it might even be people taking to the streets to protest.
Beats raising the remote from a seated position on the couch, I'd say.
I'm kind of surprised that entrepreneurs haven't come up with a device to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain yet. Granted, it would probably take a bit of surgery to install, but if you weren't convinced it was the coolest toy ever, you would be after a few pushes of the button.
Actually, new New Testament Greek, there are two words for "soul", one of which is invariably translated as "soul", the other of which is variously translated as "soul" and "spirit".
This, by the way, was probably one of Phillip Pullman's inspirations for the daemons in His Dark Materials series.
Different attributes were assigned to each of these concepts, and in fact in places they are used in contradistinction. Of course they are not scientific concepts, but this was the second century BCE or so. And everything doesn't have to be a scientific concept. While there have been some interesting social scientific speculations on this matter, "morality" is not yet a scientific concept, nor is it clear that it will ever be.
I used to leave muscle cars in the dust at stoplights on my bike, however my 0-60 time was, roughly speaking, forever.
0-20 is probably a more important figure for around town driving. 0-60 is what you need for merging from full stop onto the highway.
Well, we'll see about Li-ion batteries. The newer technologies should be somewhat intrinsically safer, which will probably make making a hugemongous Li-ion batteries a little less expensive. As soon as it looks like a better technology is on the horizon, Cobasys will be more motivated to license its technology.
If not, well, in WW1 there was a big patent fight between Wright Aeronautical and the Feds told them to patch it up in the interests of national security. Wright and Curtiss merged, which was good for Wright because they had stopped manufacturing because their airplanes were uncontrollable man-killers.
Cobasys's patents are granted by the public for the public good. If they're playing some kind of game where they're being unreasonable about licensing in order to help their oil company parents, well, they can be compelled to license on reasonable term. As we have been reminded over and over again, we are a nation at war.
Well, internal combustion engines deliver their maximum torque at over a thousand RPM. Since you have the greatest need for torque at 0 RPM, you'd have to have some kind of bulky gear train between the engine and the wheels.
This may not be cost effective.
Well, I was referring to human history.
Strictly speaking, you're right. It shaping up to bet he worst ecological disruption in the history of the human species.
I suppose that's a relief.