You seem to be concentrating mostly on works subject to copyright now, so let's stick with that. Any fool with a bit of programming skill can create a basic game engine. Anyone with a basic command of their language and the slightest imagination can write a story, and anyone with a basic command of their language and some knowledge of a useful subject can write a textbook. Millions of people can play a bit of piano or guitar and make up a song.
But creating a good game or writing a good book or producing a good musical performance take more than that. They take time and hard work, and a lot of it isn't glamorous, and a lot of it isn't particularly enjoyable but needs to be done anyway, and a lot of it isn't necessarily done by the author or musician or game designer who takes most of the credit at the end of the day.
IMHO, the biggest advantage of economic incentives is that it creates a motivation for the editors and the sound technicians and the fact checkers and the typesetters and the hair and make-up people and the guy who drives all the props to today's set. Writers will always write and people who love music will always play, and plenty of them would do it even if they never got paid at all, and the good ones wouldn't need to worry because they'd get paid somehow anyway being the recognisable face of their work. However, there wouldn't be nearly as many good works without everyone else who works behind the scenes, and those are the people who would really lose out if copyright disappeared before some other economic model evolved to replace it.
To me, Open Source represents the perfect example of what happens when you take away the major commercial incentives. Lots of geeks still write software for fun and/or the satisfaction of solving some problem. Some of that software is technically very good, because it's written by geeks who care about that sort of thing. On the other hand, poor to non-existent documentation is almost universal, user interfaces are often unpolished, many of the most successful OSS projects are merely imitations of successful commercial products rather than truly innovative alternatives, and ultimately the software is more driven by the needs or wishes of its creators than anyone else who might use it. There's nothing wrong with that, of course -- the world doesn't owe anyone their perfect software -- but the wider market isn't generally as well served by this model as by traditional commercial development where there is a direct financial incentive to give the market what it wants.
And now, here's the kicker. The exceptions, the big success story OSS projects that are run more professionally and do produce more polished results on par with other commercial offerings, are mostly developed by people whose funding comes from other sources (often backed by commercial IP) and then shared with GPL-style licences that prevent others from taking advantage in certain ways (also protected by IP).
I've recently been involved with the patenting process, at it applies in the US and Europe.
In some respects, I was pleasantly surprised. The patent lawyer genuinely seemed to want to use the system as it was intended, do a good job of writing everything up, and secure some real protection for the inventors of something genuinely new and useful.
In other respects, I was disappointed. I think the biggest downer for me was when we were formally advised that reading other patents in the field was potentially dangerous. Clearly the reality is that a patent lawsuit in the US is a very uncertain proposition for all concerned, particularly if the patent itself is of the broad-but-possible-not-enforceable variety and/or if the parties involved have substantially different resources to spend on the case. We were warned that having read anyone else's patents would mean if we were ever found to have infringed them in one of those uncertain lawsuits, that infringement would incur greater penalties as it would then be considered wilful.
That seemingly minor detail did more to damage my belief that at least the principle of various kinds of IP is worth having than any arguments about awarding trivial patents for nonsense inventions with vague descriptions ever have. Perversely, the very people who would most benefit from being aware of inventions -- those working in the same industry, who might want to license them or otherwise collaborate with other inventors -- appear to have a substantial incentive not to actually explore the disclosed knowledge the system is designed to share.
As I recall, the US workforce is about 155 million people, so 40 million is about a quarter of that. That means 75% of jobs don't rely on IP, according to the USPTO.
That doesn't follow at all. Just because 75% of jobs don't make their money from creating IP, that doesn't mean those 75% of jobs would be done as well, or even possible at all, without the creations of the other 25%.
This is why the whole framework for this discussion is silly, really. Political considerations aside, as economic tools the various kinds of IP aren't there just as a boon to creative industries, they are there because having those creative industries be creative is valuable for others as well and so giving them incentives to to create is in the general interest of society.
It doesn't surprise me that businesses that consume rather than create these works don't report that IP is important. If IP went away, their costs might go down, at least in the short term. That doesn't mean a small business of tradesmen who build houses for a living won't benefit from the R&D that leads to a more efficient building method, and thus benefit indirectly from any IP-based incentives that made that R&D economically viable.
In general I would agree with you, but on subjects like law or finance or medicine, there are good reasons that formal advice is restricted to people with sufficient qualifications, and those reasons make just as much sense on-line. I'm not objecting to offering an opinion or sharing personal understanding with good intentions, I'm just objecting to presenting these as if they were statements of fact.
We seem to be having different conversations. I didn't express any opinion about what you just asked. I just said that your statement that "only the owner of a copyright can enforce it" was wrong.
I advise you to not post your "legal advice recommendations" in an online forum meant for people to hold discussions about relevant topics.
This whole discussion is basically about copyright law. How is challenging objectively wrong information about copyright law not relevant to the topic?
You understand the exact same applies to what you just said yourself?
No, it doesn't. Firstly, you are objectively wrong on this. Secondly, my comments here are based on formal legal advice as it applies in my jurisdiction (the UK).
What is not objective legal knowledge but merely my personal opinion is that posting bad legal advice, and in particular posting incorrect information about copyrights to a forum with a tendency to be less than respectful of copyright, could actually get someone who believed you in trouble. And if you don't think anyone reading Slashdot would believe you, please consider that your objectively wrong post is currently at +5, while my warning citing a specific and verifiable counterexample is currently at 0.
Please don't post legal advice without appropriate qualifications. The above isn't the whole story in many jurisdictions, as there are other factors such as exclusive licensing to consider.
There's nothing wrong with hearing the news later, but people with mobile devices will hear it earlier and clearly a lot of people value that ability to stay up to date and use their time for something interesting when they're just in a coffee shop for a few minutes or on the train home. If you don't value that, then of course you personally don't need those devices.
Perhaps not for you. I know plenty of people who go out a lot for business meetings and don't need to take a full laptop any more, because they can get any urgent messages via their phone or other mobile devices. In our household we often use a phone or tablet to get directions and travel news if one of us is driving but has a passenger with mobile Internet. Sometimes it's just nice to get news that your friends got engaged or someone's baby arrived safely when you're out, and mobile social networking apps can tell you. Sure, you could also do all of these things with a laptop, but only if you left it turned on all the time, and it still wouldn't fit in your pocket.
I'm sorry, my bad. For 99.9% of serious content creation, they are just not the right tool for the job. For the last 0.1%, they are a good enough tool to get the job done by a sufficiently skilled practitioner if efficiency is not a consideration.
I simply cannot accept the proposition that people are -- willingly -- going to accept a future of either creation or consuption on these restricted devices.
If you mean exclusively on small factor touchscreens, sure, I agree. An iPad isn't going to replace a dedicated home cinema room any time soon, or a hardcore gamer's custom rig, or a CAD workstation at the office.
But for routine use, that ship already sailed. Smartphones are ubiquitous when people are out. Tablets are becoming ubiquitous around the house, for the kind of household that used to have multiple PCs or laptops instead. Bazillions of people are quite happy sending e-mails, checking Facebook, or catching up on a missed TV show on these devices, and for many of those people that already meets the majority of their needs.
Not everyone cares about playing AAA games on a PC (they have consoles for that) or running business applications (they go to work for that) or writing software. And to a first approximation, no-one cares about command lines. Real PCs aren't going anywhere for those who do want to do these things, but there's no point pretending that a water-cooled 4th generation i7 is necessary for reading e-mail.
nope, modern laptops are just as good as desktops now. Apart from the small screen (which can be good as a secondary thing to run your email or whatnot on), the laptop has as much power as your desktop.
An average laptop might have as much processing power and RAM and disk space as an average desktop, but the upper bound on a desktop is still far, far higher. To pick an example someone mentioned earlier, you can't get a lot of laptops with dual fast processors and 64+GB of RAM, which is a good but realistic specification for a professional CAD workstation. If you're rendering video or working with high quality audio, you might be thankful for a local RAID array with a few TB of capacity (as well as the large SSD for OS/applications and probably networked storage for larger capacity, obviously).
Also, in terms of peripherals, laptops are stuck in the dark ages. I'll take my two large monitors (try driving 8+ megapixels from any laptop's built-in graphics), my ergonomic keyboard and mouse, my real graphics tablet for sketching and precision work, and my real surround sound speakers over whatever feeble imitation the best laptop you can find has to offer, thanks. Sure, you can plug all of these into a modern laptop (until you run out of USB ports, at least), but if you're going to do that and shove the laptop out of the way, you've just bought an expensive and less reliable/upgradeable desktop anyway.
Exactly. For content consumption, small and mobile devices are very convenient. For quick interactions, they're OK. For serious content creation, they are just not the right tool for the job.
The trouble for the PC vendors is that for most serious content creation, desktops and laptops were already powerful enough a few years ago. Only those who really need local power, like creative media or CAD types in business or gamers at home, are interested in buying newer and more powerful machines often any more. For everyone else, the desktop isn't dead, it's just a mature platform and they already have it.
For what little it's worth, I agree with almost everything you said there. I don't think we're quite as stuck with "micromanaging" our kids here in the UK yet -- there are still enough of the older generations around to point out when parents are being overly protective and provide a degree of social/political acceptability -- but unfortunately the "fear everything" culture our governments and courts and schools seem determined to push on everyone is relentless.
Personally, I intend to ignore them anyway and teach my kids to be independent and responsible on their own, just as I'd stop to help a child who was hurt regardless of whether some jobsworth might look at a camera and think I was up to no good because of their rampant paranoia. It's the right thing to do, and I'll be damned if I'm going to raise kids who are afraid to go out of their own house or refuse to help someone else's kids who need it just because politics.
Of course, keeping personal information entirely secret is the best means of control, but in the modern world, complete secrecy is getting more and more impractical.
It's not just impractical; for most people, it's undesirable. You can't interact in many useful ways with people or organisations you'd like to collaborate with unless you inherently give up some degree of personal information. That "loss" of privacy isn't in itself a problem for most people, because it's done willingly and typically for mutual benefit.
The problems usually start when others get hold of the information, or when information that was willingly shared for one useful purpose then gets reused for something else. Technology makes both of these possibilities increasingly easy, but as always that technology is ethically neutral.
IMHO, what we need is to establish standards of respect for this kind of personal data, where it's not socially acceptable to share potentially sensitive information about someone without their knowledge and consent. Just because technology means we could do something, it doesn't mean we have to, any more than I have to drink five pints this afternoon and then drive home at 90mph past the park where your kids are playing just because I have money and a car. The common idea that you can't solve social problems with technological measures applies.
Where necessary, those social norms then need to be backed by force of law, so that organisations with contrary motivations such as businesses and governments are compelled to comply as well.
Not all change is for the better, and some things are worth fearing. Ironically, the best lessons about the future dangers of this kind of technology can be found in history.
Can anyone comment reliably on whether this strategy actually holds up in the US? Here in the UK, I would expect that knowingly and deliberately running a company into the dust like that would be grounds for piercing the corporate veil.
It's local organic produce and home-delivered, so it's not straightforward to do a fair like-for-like comparison with large supermarket prices.
I don't think that really affects my point, though. There is no reason those supermarkets, with their vast economies of scale and negotiating power, couldn't introduce a scheme where you could "rent a crate" or something. At least one (Sainsbury's) did experiment with a similar idea a few years ago, but again despite apparently being quite popular at our local store, they discontinued it after a fairly short time.
You joke, but we get a weekly delivery of fresh fruit and vegetables from a service that sources most of the produce locally. It all comes in a wooden or plastic crate, and when they deliver each week they take away the now-empty crate from the previous time. Total waste, washing, or other hassle involved on our side: 0.
Obviously this doesn't work for all produce you buy at the store, but part of the problem in this debate is the assumption that any kind of bag is a good starting point. Bags basically suck as a way of carrying your shopping home. We just haven't figured out how to shift to a better plan quick enough yet, so it can become established before consumers who hate change kill it by taking their business to stores that didn't make the jump and thus penalise those that did.
And if you look at the places that have introduced the charge, such as M&S, many have adopted a "small bag is free, full size bags are charged" policy as well, presumably in response to negative feedback from customers.
Some other curious data points on this issue, which isn't nearly as black-and-white as it might seem:
For one thing, it turns out that lots of people do "recycle" those "disposable" plastic bags. When Ireland introduced a tax on plastic bags, bin liner purchases increased by 400%.
For another thing, while plastic bags are more environmentally unfriendly than paper bags when discarded, they are more efficient to transport in large numbers, and in practice that inefficiency translates rather directly into increased pollution, greater consumption of non-renewable fuel types for vehicles, and so on. The facts about resources used and pollution generated in manufacture aren't entirely one-sided either.
If the government really wanted to help the environment, they could politely encourage supermarkets to start selling the actually good reusable plastic bags that at least Sainsbury's and Tesco had a few years ago, which were much larger and tougher than the jokes they sell as reusable today (OK, you can reuse them, maybe two or three times before they fall apart). These actually seemed to be quite popular at the time, and we still use some of ours many years later, but the supermarkets that had them all switched to a different and much inferior type after a relatively short time; I don't know why.
In addition, far more environmental good would be done if the government slapped a significant tax on all packaging materials at the source, so that using excessive or unnecessary packaging carried a direct financial penalty. This step alone would almost certainly cut the volume of environmentally unfriendly waste -- meaning waste that can't be recycled or otherwise dealt with other than sending it to landfill -- more than even making all single-use bags of any type completely illegal.
So whenever you see a government official of whatever political affiliation making some claim about helping the environmental by taxing the supply of plastic bags, you should immediately ask what their real agenda is. If they're not also advocating more general restrictions on packaging, and they're not also advocating restricting other environmentally unfriendly practices such as supplying one-time paper bags when reusable bags could be used, then they're probably hiding some ulterior motive and/or capitalizing on some political talking point of the day.
Fair enough, calling it a crash was probably an overstatement. Still, after a series of bad news reports in recent months, from missed targets to laying off thousands of employees, along with guidance that wasn't exactly glowing in confidence on the last call, their share price has given up most of the gains in the first months of 2013.
Maybe you're right and they'll weather SDN as they've fought off other threats before, but I have a feeling this time really could be different. My simple reason is that a lot of these big networking companies are making large margins on their device sales, and a lot of the functionality in those boxes can increasingly be achieved using commodity hardware and freely available software. That creates market conditions open to disruption. Factor in effects like the NSA mess potentially hurting international sales and the general incompetence of the US government hurting domestic sales, and it's a tough market for Cisco right now.
It was interesting that in the first BI article I linked, they described an internal analysis by Cisco execs that said going into the SDN business would 'turn Cisco's "$43 billion business into a $22 billion business"'. Of course that was an anonymous source "close to the company" so we probably shouldn't read too much into it, but if the key point is true, it gives us some indication of how much of a change in the market Cisco's own people think is possible.
I'm not sure what Occam's razor suggests here, as either explanation seems both simple and plausible. It's only been a couple of weeks since Cisco announced the Insieme arrangement and ACI, too. Perhaps you're right and it's just coincidence, or maybe there is some truth in both theories.
This was my impression, too. OpenStack has a lot of potential, but look at the way a "competitor" like Apache's CloudStack is presented, and the documentation and UIs for configuring OpenStack do seem to be much less developed if there's much there at all. There's an interesting comparison here, though it is more than a year old now.
Still, I doubt the timing of these comments on the Gartner blog are coincidental, given the pressure the big networking hardware companies have been under and the threat to them that SDN represents.
For example, Cisco's stock price has been crashing for some time, and things like blowing a billion-dollar deal with Amazon aren't helping their prospects or, presumably, their share price. The same site (it's Business Insider, so apply your own level of confidence in anything they say) describes Cisco's response as 'a confusing array of products named "Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)"', but one thing we do know ACI is that much of it will be unavailable until next year.
I have no insider knowledge of who might have "encouraged" this particular set of comments from Gartner, but Big Networking is probably a fairly regular "customer", so I have at least one plausible theory.:-)
Perhaps we could avoid that unfortunate fate by having police officers patrolling the streets and pulling over people who are actually driving dangerously, instead of wasting them on fishing expeditions? It's not exactly difficult to spot someone who's had too much to drink when they can no longer properly control their vehicle or observe what's going on around them.
As a bonus, this would also help to prevent accidents involving people who are unable to drive properly for other reasons, such as driving while tired or spending too much time playing with the radio/phone/coffee and not enough time watching the road.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but I just don't buy this argument.
You seem to be concentrating mostly on works subject to copyright now, so let's stick with that. Any fool with a bit of programming skill can create a basic game engine. Anyone with a basic command of their language and the slightest imagination can write a story, and anyone with a basic command of their language and some knowledge of a useful subject can write a textbook. Millions of people can play a bit of piano or guitar and make up a song.
But creating a good game or writing a good book or producing a good musical performance take more than that. They take time and hard work, and a lot of it isn't glamorous, and a lot of it isn't particularly enjoyable but needs to be done anyway, and a lot of it isn't necessarily done by the author or musician or game designer who takes most of the credit at the end of the day.
IMHO, the biggest advantage of economic incentives is that it creates a motivation for the editors and the sound technicians and the fact checkers and the typesetters and the hair and make-up people and the guy who drives all the props to today's set. Writers will always write and people who love music will always play, and plenty of them would do it even if they never got paid at all, and the good ones wouldn't need to worry because they'd get paid somehow anyway being the recognisable face of their work. However, there wouldn't be nearly as many good works without everyone else who works behind the scenes, and those are the people who would really lose out if copyright disappeared before some other economic model evolved to replace it.
To me, Open Source represents the perfect example of what happens when you take away the major commercial incentives. Lots of geeks still write software for fun and/or the satisfaction of solving some problem. Some of that software is technically very good, because it's written by geeks who care about that sort of thing. On the other hand, poor to non-existent documentation is almost universal, user interfaces are often unpolished, many of the most successful OSS projects are merely imitations of successful commercial products rather than truly innovative alternatives, and ultimately the software is more driven by the needs or wishes of its creators than anyone else who might use it. There's nothing wrong with that, of course -- the world doesn't owe anyone their perfect software -- but the wider market isn't generally as well served by this model as by traditional commercial development where there is a direct financial incentive to give the market what it wants.
And now, here's the kicker. The exceptions, the big success story OSS projects that are run more professionally and do produce more polished results on par with other commercial offerings, are mostly developed by people whose funding comes from other sources (often backed by commercial IP) and then shared with GPL-style licences that prevent others from taking advantage in certain ways (also protected by IP).
I've recently been involved with the patenting process, at it applies in the US and Europe.
In some respects, I was pleasantly surprised. The patent lawyer genuinely seemed to want to use the system as it was intended, do a good job of writing everything up, and secure some real protection for the inventors of something genuinely new and useful.
In other respects, I was disappointed. I think the biggest downer for me was when we were formally advised that reading other patents in the field was potentially dangerous. Clearly the reality is that a patent lawsuit in the US is a very uncertain proposition for all concerned, particularly if the patent itself is of the broad-but-possible-not-enforceable variety and/or if the parties involved have substantially different resources to spend on the case. We were warned that having read anyone else's patents would mean if we were ever found to have infringed them in one of those uncertain lawsuits, that infringement would incur greater penalties as it would then be considered wilful.
That seemingly minor detail did more to damage my belief that at least the principle of various kinds of IP is worth having than any arguments about awarding trivial patents for nonsense inventions with vague descriptions ever have. Perversely, the very people who would most benefit from being aware of inventions -- those working in the same industry, who might want to license them or otherwise collaborate with other inventors -- appear to have a substantial incentive not to actually explore the disclosed knowledge the system is designed to share.
As I recall, the US workforce is about 155 million people, so 40 million is about a quarter of that. That means 75% of jobs don't rely on IP, according to the USPTO.
That doesn't follow at all. Just because 75% of jobs don't make their money from creating IP, that doesn't mean those 75% of jobs would be done as well, or even possible at all, without the creations of the other 25%.
This is why the whole framework for this discussion is silly, really. Political considerations aside, as economic tools the various kinds of IP aren't there just as a boon to creative industries, they are there because having those creative industries be creative is valuable for others as well and so giving them incentives to to create is in the general interest of society.
It doesn't surprise me that businesses that consume rather than create these works don't report that IP is important. If IP went away, their costs might go down, at least in the short term. That doesn't mean a small business of tradesmen who build houses for a living won't benefit from the R&D that leads to a more efficient building method, and thus benefit indirectly from any IP-based incentives that made that R&D economically viable.
In general I would agree with you, but on subjects like law or finance or medicine, there are good reasons that formal advice is restricted to people with sufficient qualifications, and those reasons make just as much sense on-line. I'm not objecting to offering an opinion or sharing personal understanding with good intentions, I'm just objecting to presenting these as if they were statements of fact.
We seem to be having different conversations. I didn't express any opinion about what you just asked. I just said that your statement that "only the owner of a copyright can enforce it" was wrong.
I advise you to not post your "legal advice recommendations" in an online forum meant for people to hold discussions about relevant topics.
This whole discussion is basically about copyright law. How is challenging objectively wrong information about copyright law not relevant to the topic?
You understand the exact same applies to what you just said yourself?
No, it doesn't. Firstly, you are objectively wrong on this. Secondly, my comments here are based on formal legal advice as it applies in my jurisdiction (the UK).
What is not objective legal knowledge but merely my personal opinion is that posting bad legal advice, and in particular posting incorrect information about copyrights to a forum with a tendency to be less than respectful of copyright, could actually get someone who believed you in trouble. And if you don't think anyone reading Slashdot would believe you, please consider that your objectively wrong post is currently at +5, while my warning citing a specific and verifiable counterexample is currently at 0.
Only the owner of a copyright can enforce it.
Please don't post legal advice without appropriate qualifications. The above isn't the whole story in many jurisdictions, as there are other factors such as exclusive licensing to consider.
There's nothing wrong with hearing the news later, but people with mobile devices will hear it earlier and clearly a lot of people value that ability to stay up to date and use their time for something interesting when they're just in a coffee shop for a few minutes or on the train home. If you don't value that, then of course you personally don't need those devices.
The phone really brings nothing to the table.
Perhaps not for you. I know plenty of people who go out a lot for business meetings and don't need to take a full laptop any more, because they can get any urgent messages via their phone or other mobile devices. In our household we often use a phone or tablet to get directions and travel news if one of us is driving but has a passenger with mobile Internet. Sometimes it's just nice to get news that your friends got engaged or someone's baby arrived safely when you're out, and mobile social networking apps can tell you. Sure, you could also do all of these things with a laptop, but only if you left it turned on all the time, and it still wouldn't fit in your pocket.
I'm sorry, my bad. For 99.9% of serious content creation, they are just not the right tool for the job. For the last 0.1%, they are a good enough tool to get the job done by a sufficiently skilled practitioner if efficiency is not a consideration.
I simply cannot accept the proposition that people are -- willingly -- going to accept a future of either creation or consuption on these restricted devices.
If you mean exclusively on small factor touchscreens, sure, I agree. An iPad isn't going to replace a dedicated home cinema room any time soon, or a hardcore gamer's custom rig, or a CAD workstation at the office.
But for routine use, that ship already sailed. Smartphones are ubiquitous when people are out. Tablets are becoming ubiquitous around the house, for the kind of household that used to have multiple PCs or laptops instead. Bazillions of people are quite happy sending e-mails, checking Facebook, or catching up on a missed TV show on these devices, and for many of those people that already meets the majority of their needs.
Not everyone cares about playing AAA games on a PC (they have consoles for that) or running business applications (they go to work for that) or writing software. And to a first approximation, no-one cares about command lines. Real PCs aren't going anywhere for those who do want to do these things, but there's no point pretending that a water-cooled 4th generation i7 is necessary for reading e-mail.
nope, modern laptops are just as good as desktops now. Apart from the small screen (which can be good as a secondary thing to run your email or whatnot on), the laptop has as much power as your desktop.
An average laptop might have as much processing power and RAM and disk space as an average desktop, but the upper bound on a desktop is still far, far higher. To pick an example someone mentioned earlier, you can't get a lot of laptops with dual fast processors and 64+GB of RAM, which is a good but realistic specification for a professional CAD workstation. If you're rendering video or working with high quality audio, you might be thankful for a local RAID array with a few TB of capacity (as well as the large SSD for OS/applications and probably networked storage for larger capacity, obviously).
Also, in terms of peripherals, laptops are stuck in the dark ages. I'll take my two large monitors (try driving 8+ megapixels from any laptop's built-in graphics), my ergonomic keyboard and mouse, my real graphics tablet for sketching and precision work, and my real surround sound speakers over whatever feeble imitation the best laptop you can find has to offer, thanks. Sure, you can plug all of these into a modern laptop (until you run out of USB ports, at least), but if you're going to do that and shove the laptop out of the way, you've just bought an expensive and less reliable/upgradeable desktop anyway.
Exactly. For content consumption, small and mobile devices are very convenient. For quick interactions, they're OK. For serious content creation, they are just not the right tool for the job.
The trouble for the PC vendors is that for most serious content creation, desktops and laptops were already powerful enough a few years ago. Only those who really need local power, like creative media or CAD types in business or gamers at home, are interested in buying newer and more powerful machines often any more. For everyone else, the desktop isn't dead, it's just a mature platform and they already have it.
For what little it's worth, I agree with almost everything you said there. I don't think we're quite as stuck with "micromanaging" our kids here in the UK yet -- there are still enough of the older generations around to point out when parents are being overly protective and provide a degree of social/political acceptability -- but unfortunately the "fear everything" culture our governments and courts and schools seem determined to push on everyone is relentless.
Personally, I intend to ignore them anyway and teach my kids to be independent and responsible on their own, just as I'd stop to help a child who was hurt regardless of whether some jobsworth might look at a camera and think I was up to no good because of their rampant paranoia. It's the right thing to do, and I'll be damned if I'm going to raise kids who are afraid to go out of their own house or refuse to help someone else's kids who need it just because politics.
Of course, keeping personal information entirely secret is the best means of control, but in the modern world, complete secrecy is getting more and more impractical.
It's not just impractical; for most people, it's undesirable. You can't interact in many useful ways with people or organisations you'd like to collaborate with unless you inherently give up some degree of personal information. That "loss" of privacy isn't in itself a problem for most people, because it's done willingly and typically for mutual benefit.
The problems usually start when others get hold of the information, or when information that was willingly shared for one useful purpose then gets reused for something else. Technology makes both of these possibilities increasingly easy, but as always that technology is ethically neutral.
IMHO, what we need is to establish standards of respect for this kind of personal data, where it's not socially acceptable to share potentially sensitive information about someone without their knowledge and consent. Just because technology means we could do something, it doesn't mean we have to, any more than I have to drink five pints this afternoon and then drive home at 90mph past the park where your kids are playing just because I have money and a car. The common idea that you can't solve social problems with technological measures applies.
Where necessary, those social norms then need to be backed by force of law, so that organisations with contrary motivations such as businesses and governments are compelled to comply as well.
Fundamentally it's a fear of change.
Not all change is for the better, and some things are worth fearing. Ironically, the best lessons about the future dangers of this kind of technology can be found in history.
Can anyone comment reliably on whether this strategy actually holds up in the US? Here in the UK, I would expect that knowingly and deliberately running a company into the dust like that would be grounds for piercing the corporate veil.
It's local organic produce and home-delivered, so it's not straightforward to do a fair like-for-like comparison with large supermarket prices.
I don't think that really affects my point, though. There is no reason those supermarkets, with their vast economies of scale and negotiating power, couldn't introduce a scheme where you could "rent a crate" or something. At least one (Sainsbury's) did experiment with a similar idea a few years ago, but again despite apparently being quite popular at our local store, they discontinued it after a fairly short time.
We should invent e-bags!
You joke, but we get a weekly delivery of fresh fruit and vegetables from a service that sources most of the produce locally. It all comes in a wooden or plastic crate, and when they deliver each week they take away the now-empty crate from the previous time. Total waste, washing, or other hassle involved on our side: 0.
Obviously this doesn't work for all produce you buy at the store, but part of the problem in this debate is the assumption that any kind of bag is a good starting point. Bags basically suck as a way of carrying your shopping home. We just haven't figured out how to shift to a better plan quick enough yet, so it can become established before consumers who hate change kill it by taking their business to stores that didn't make the jump and thus penalise those that did.
Some do, mostly "low cost" stores
And if you look at the places that have introduced the charge, such as M&S, many have adopted a "small bag is free, full size bags are charged" policy as well, presumably in response to negative feedback from customers.
Some other curious data points on this issue, which isn't nearly as black-and-white as it might seem:
For one thing, it turns out that lots of people do "recycle" those "disposable" plastic bags. When Ireland introduced a tax on plastic bags, bin liner purchases increased by 400%.
For another thing, while plastic bags are more environmentally unfriendly than paper bags when discarded, they are more efficient to transport in large numbers, and in practice that inefficiency translates rather directly into increased pollution, greater consumption of non-renewable fuel types for vehicles, and so on. The facts about resources used and pollution generated in manufacture aren't entirely one-sided either.
If the government really wanted to help the environment, they could politely encourage supermarkets to start selling the actually good reusable plastic bags that at least Sainsbury's and Tesco had a few years ago, which were much larger and tougher than the jokes they sell as reusable today (OK, you can reuse them, maybe two or three times before they fall apart). These actually seemed to be quite popular at the time, and we still use some of ours many years later, but the supermarkets that had them all switched to a different and much inferior type after a relatively short time; I don't know why.
In addition, far more environmental good would be done if the government slapped a significant tax on all packaging materials at the source, so that using excessive or unnecessary packaging carried a direct financial penalty. This step alone would almost certainly cut the volume of environmentally unfriendly waste -- meaning waste that can't be recycled or otherwise dealt with other than sending it to landfill -- more than even making all single-use bags of any type completely illegal.
So whenever you see a government official of whatever political affiliation making some claim about helping the environmental by taxing the supply of plastic bags, you should immediately ask what their real agenda is. If they're not also advocating more general restrictions on packaging, and they're not also advocating restricting other environmentally unfriendly practices such as supplying one-time paper bags when reusable bags could be used, then they're probably hiding some ulterior motive and/or capitalizing on some political talking point of the day.
Fair enough, calling it a crash was probably an overstatement. Still, after a series of bad news reports in recent months, from missed targets to laying off thousands of employees, along with guidance that wasn't exactly glowing in confidence on the last call, their share price has given up most of the gains in the first months of 2013.
Maybe you're right and they'll weather SDN as they've fought off other threats before, but I have a feeling this time really could be different. My simple reason is that a lot of these big networking companies are making large margins on their device sales, and a lot of the functionality in those boxes can increasingly be achieved using commodity hardware and freely available software. That creates market conditions open to disruption. Factor in effects like the NSA mess potentially hurting international sales and the general incompetence of the US government hurting domestic sales, and it's a tough market for Cisco right now.
It was interesting that in the first BI article I linked, they described an internal analysis by Cisco execs that said going into the SDN business would 'turn Cisco's "$43 billion business into a $22 billion business"'. Of course that was an anonymous source "close to the company" so we probably shouldn't read too much into it, but if the key point is true, it gives us some indication of how much of a change in the market Cisco's own people think is possible.
I'm not sure what Occam's razor suggests here, as either explanation seems both simple and plausible. It's only been a couple of weeks since Cisco announced the Insieme arrangement and ACI, too. Perhaps you're right and it's just coincidence, or maybe there is some truth in both theories.
This was my impression, too. OpenStack has a lot of potential, but look at the way a "competitor" like Apache's CloudStack is presented, and the documentation and UIs for configuring OpenStack do seem to be much less developed if there's much there at all. There's an interesting comparison here, though it is more than a year old now.
Still, I doubt the timing of these comments on the Gartner blog are coincidental, given the pressure the big networking hardware companies have been under and the threat to them that SDN represents.
For example, Cisco's stock price has been crashing for some time, and things like blowing a billion-dollar deal with Amazon aren't helping their prospects or, presumably, their share price. The same site (it's Business Insider, so apply your own level of confidence in anything they say) describes Cisco's response as 'a confusing array of products named "Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)"', but one thing we do know ACI is that much of it will be unavailable until next year.
I have no insider knowledge of who might have "encouraged" this particular set of comments from Gartner, but Big Networking is probably a fairly regular "customer", so I have at least one plausible theory. :-)
Perhaps we could avoid that unfortunate fate by having police officers patrolling the streets and pulling over people who are actually driving dangerously, instead of wasting them on fishing expeditions? It's not exactly difficult to spot someone who's had too much to drink when they can no longer properly control their vehicle or observe what's going on around them.
As a bonus, this would also help to prevent accidents involving people who are unable to drive properly for other reasons, such as driving while tired or spending too much time playing with the radio/phone/coffee and not enough time watching the road.