There's one distinction -- and it makes all the difference in the world -- Apple makes money from the hardware.
Apple COULD opt to give away OS X free with the hardware (but why bother when they can sell it?). In fact they make a great TCO case using the no-user limit with OS X on their Xserve slice machine, as compared to the per user pricing on the Windows Server software when used with a comparable Intel slice machine.
If Microsoft build XP atop a Linux infrastructure, they would still have to sell it to make money, and so Linux would continue to have the cost advantage.
Yup -- here's just the sort of thinking typified by such management types:
Let's see, we write software and we buy software from Microsoft... let's outsource our development staff to Microsoft for a cut in the pricing on the stuff we buy from them! We lose those expensive employees and get a break on our product costs! We're financial geniuses!!
So as they pollute and destroy whatever uniqueness HP products have, somebody else brings out a similar but better product for a lot less, and a third company brings out a significantly different, but more expensive product for a premium price. HP withers while the competition thrives.
Financial geniuses do not create world-beating products.
None of the solutions based on providing multiple user access to an address book by replicating aliases to it will work if the address book is subject to updating by multiple users.
That's what a database is for.
IF (and ONLY IF) you are going to limit your address book updates to a single user, then replication of aliases/links can work. Otherwise, you eventually run into the problem where two users are going to update it at the same time (or within a small enough window that both read the same data but write different data), and one clobbers the other's update, or worse, clobbers some critical data structure and nukes the address book. The LDAP solution is the best way to handle this.
I believe you're referring to 2D barcode, which instead of using the width of the bars, use the height as well, giving approximately the square of the amount of info that a 1D bar code occupying the same space would provide. See
http://www.aurorabarcode.com/PDF/2D%20Bar%20Codes. pdf for more info.
Just as television did not decimate the film industry, and VCRs did not decimate the film industry, and the film industry or any of its descendents did not decimate live theatre, use of CGI animation will not replace current fare so much as add to it.
The people whose lives will be (or have already been) altered by CGI will be those whose product (hand-drawn animation) is replaced by it with no alternative outlets for their work.
There are plenty of local repertory theatres where set designers, costumers, et al can find work -- assuming that CGI-generated TV actually replaces human-based programming -- but not many alternatives for non-computer animators.
In ANY company, employees are given the least consideration. They are viewed simply as a consumable resource, like fuel oil or coal (hopefully a bit more environmentally friendly). If Worldcom had a substantial fraction of its shares owned by employees (a horrible thought, on the face of it, to lose one's job and assets at the same time), they might have a say in the way things go, but as it is, you are merely a part of the machinery. If whoever buys the part you support does not already have people to perform that function, you may get to keep your job (albeit with different pay and benefits), but if a company in a similar business purchases the business unit you work for, unless their people already have more than they can handle, the plan will be for them to do the work you do now.
The other possibility would be if Worldcom was close enough to making a go of it that they did not need to sell off parts of the company, merely a reprieve from debt payments. Or if you work in whatever part remains, you may keep employed -- again, at different pay+benefits.
Hopefully, the retirement savings managed by the company were not used to prop up the collapsing stock price (so the pirates running the show could grab a bit more loot), as was the case at Enron.
The lesson to be learned here? Try not to work for crooks -- a pretty difficult proposition, nowadays.
I believe that AOL has a number of suppliers of bandwidth. They recently inked a deal to buy transatlantic bandwidth from Level 3, and used to (and may still) get a lot of local domestic bandwidth from Metromedia.
Personally, I think they're hollering Fire! FIRE!! when there's only a whiff of smoke in the air. After all, the internet was DESIGNED to withstand having large chunks of it taken out (it was originally a DARPA project to build a resilient computer network that would survive a nuclear war), and while there's not nearly so much unused capacity as a year ago, there's still excess capacity. If UUNET were to go dark, it would be similar to yet another bad Microsoft virus (CodeRed, SirCam, Klez) clogging the net -- a slowdown, and some systems offline, but in a few days most things would be fully functional again. Either someone else would buy UUNET and fill the need, or some other company (Level 3?) would eagerly pick up the load.
At my employer's firm, we have perfected the art of repelling those out to gain information by a 2-pronged approach. We run the callers through a maze of automated phone forwarding recordings to (eventually) a person who has no clue about anything.
It always surprises me that people treat Marc Andreessen as a "visionary". As I see it, he's a programmer of some talent who happened to be in the right place at the right time to be tapped by Jim Clark (the REAL visionary) to take his browser (which he did not invent, but merely polished the creation of Tim Berners-Lee) and try and make a new industry with it. Without Jim Clark (not just his money, but his business sense and entrepreneurial spirit), nobody would know Marc Andreessen today. So far as I can see, he's no more deserving of that kind of respect than any of a number of folks at Netscape. The ARE kudos that the folks at Netscape deserve, as the people at Netscape did an enormous amount to develop many of the technologies that have made the WWW what it is today -- but I don't see that Mr Andreessen deserves any more credit than anyone else.
Unfortunately,I have no knowledge of Netscape that anyone else couldn't get through the media, so these are merely the opinions of someone willing to question the popular perceptions.
I'm not trying to disparage the man, but IMHO, he's shown no particular managerial skills or any aspects of a true visionary. I expect Loudcloud to quietly burn through its VC financing, and slip beneath the waves, just another dot-com bomb.
The fact that he's so willing to accept that just because Microsoft owns the market today, they will always and forever do so, should discredit him as a man of imagination.
Just for a second, image the consequences of a hypothetical event like Homeland Security deciding to hold individual (and corporate) computer users responsible for the viruses their systems propagate, in an attempt to wake people up to responsible operation of their computers. In such a scenario, it wouldn't take more than a few highly-publicized cases of clueless PC users whose systems launch DOS attacks being prosecuted to change the dynamics of the marketplace significantly.
Change Happens -- All the Time. No visionary expects the future to be anything like the present.
I'd prefer LED-based lighting, with still-higher efficiencies and none of the troublesome RF pollution. I think LED-based lighting (using a mix of various colored LEDs and white LEDs to simulate a natural spectrum) is a lot closer to reality than Bob's bogeyman technology, with there already being LED-based lighting in specialty apps (such as theater spotlights that don't get hot and last a very long time (http://ledmuseum.home.att.net/digital.htm), in addition to burning a lot less electricity).
... who's going to make the tiny little punched card readers to read these things? And how will we clear the inevitable card jams?
Re:Moving production to Asia?
on
IBM Spins Down
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Welcome to Wal-Mart.
While maybe 24,000 jobs won't be missed (unless one of them is putting food on your table and a roof over your head), but this is only a drop in a river of jobs moving offshore.
I suggest you check out yesterday's WSJ Boomtown column for a little enlightenment, like the paragrapgh that reads:
"Career advice for the 21st century: Stay away from any job that can be done online, or you'll be competing with my buddy Odyssey -- and people eager to underbid him, too. I found a good programmer in five minutes. I'm still looking for a good carpenter."
Want to trade in your mouse for a hammer? Unless you can somehow compete with equally competent coders who charge 1/10th what you do, you're going to be in the same (sinking) boat as the rest of us.
Seems to me that Sun has run out of rope in these economic harsh times, and is backing away from competing by raising (effectively) prices in order to keep some cash flowing through its corporate veins. With the ability to buy an 80-processor Xserve (clustered, since OS X won't support 80 cpus in a single image) for a mere $160,000 (and that includes over 2TB of disk) and NO per-user licensing charges, Sun has seen that they cannot compete and survive.
I Look for Sun to increasingly merge Linux with Solaris, just as IBM is doing with MVS, and Apple is doing with BSD unix. The costs of developing a proprietary OS are simply too much to bear in these times of declining profits.
... why not start one hypothesizing a secret Apple Aquafication of Open Office? That would have a much greater impact that replacing IE with Chimera.
IF there is anything at all to an Apple push to replace IE, it's probably only a means to get Microsoft to lighten up on its push to replace Quicktime with WiMP.
But I like the idea of an Aqua front end on Open Office, something that looks as good as Microsoft Office X, has full document support, and is free. Now THAT's a rumor.
I guess I get kinda weary with the all-too-common notion that things are always going to be the way they are today.
If market-dominating products persisted in this state due to inertia, or herd behavior, or whatever, then we would still be using Apple IIs, or TRS-80s, or IBM PCs, or CP/M, or Lotus 1-2-3, or WordStar.
Times changes, things change, fashions change.
Bill Gates is acutely aware that Microsoft does not have any lock on the future, it's why he fights so fiercely to hang onto nearly all of the marbles.
If we learn anything from history, its that he won't succeed. Either the crumbs of the marketplace that he does not own will grow into something unimaginable, or some totally unrelated technology will replace the existing computing segment of the economy.
No rational person believes that 10 years from now we will be using systems and software that are just like the ones today, only fatter and faster.
Change happens. Watch for it. Making informed choices is the best way to surf the waves of change.
Just because we're stuck today with IE owning nearly all the browser usage amongst the computing illiterati, is no reason to expect it will be that way forever.
I suppose you also expect.NET to be a raging success (just like the XBox), with millions of (l)users willingly ponying up annual subscription fees to use their PCs. Myself, I figure that before that happens, millions will abandon PC-based email for cellphone-based email -- all we need to dethrone IE is a viable alternative that is sufficiently attractive to the masses.
So long as things like Mozilla/Netscape7, Opera, Konqueror, etc, continue to be developed, there is the possibility that they may catch the public fancy and pose a serious threat to IE.
All you need is to send the requirements and have the whole effort managed and performed on the other side of the globe.
If $30/hr US coders can be replaced by $3/hr foreign coders, cannot $40/hr US managers be replaced by $4/hr foreign managers?
This has been ongoing in the blue-collar segment of the economy for two or three decades, it's pretty much inevitable that the same thing will occur here.
At least until US unemployment levels rise to a point where consumption of those foreign-produced goods collapses. Hopefully, by that point, foreign economies will have expanded to the point where they can generate a fair amount of spending themselves, and wage inflation will have brought a reasonable global marketplace into being.
Until then, the only way to survive is by becoming a fat-cat CEO and ride the wave of profits.
That's about as significant as all those insects trying to stop my windshield on a hot summer evening...
Let's take your notion to an extreme, and say that EVERYONE who is opposed to being limited to Microsoft Windoze make a stand and switch to the Mac OS on Macintosh hardware. If I have any sort of understanding as to the relative sizes of the users involved, not only would Microsoft not notice the absence of the "Linux Community", Apple would only perceive a 4%-5% increase in sales.
Given this, one has to wonder why Microsoft bothers to struggle for the last 5% of market share (they'd like to snuff Apple as well as Linux)... and it has to come down to a desire on their part to obliterate any possible alternatives to running Windoze, so they can make their immense income seem small against the potential of making environmentally-friendly versions of Windoze that bio-degrade over the span of a year requiring a new purchase at ever-increasing prices (.NET by any other name).
Alternatives to Microsoft products do not pose a threat to Microsoft's current operations, but do limit the amount of pain they can force upon the consumer in the future. Elected officials pose no threat to them, so long as we continue to have the best government money can buy.
Why should the folks who are interested in the things NASA works on be taxed heavier than the rest of us?
Personally, I'd prefer yet another form to fill out at tax time â" one that would direct (in broad-brush terms) how my taxes were spent. It seems that our elected officials cannot be entrusted to spend our money wisely â" they not only end up blowing it on themselves (have you looked into congressional pensions lately?), but even then it's not enough and they wind up as the puppets of the lobbyists with the biggest checkbooks.
Any legislation involving the compensation of elected officials so DEFINITELY be required to be approved directly by the taxpayers. I realize that this would result in a permanent wage freeze for our greedy stalwarts in DC, but it would take a very long time until it became a problem, especially with the continually increasing flow of soft money from every interest wanting to own its very own elected official.
The essential learning aspect of the hobbyist modality is captured pretty well by the LEGO Mindstorms robotics toys(?). While it's true that machine language is a lost art, as is the construction of simple electronic devices, there are new frontiers available today that were not practical in days gone by.
Maybe in another decade or two we'll have do-it-yourself genetic tinkering...
... after all, if there were laws against blatant displays of stupidity, we wouldn't have enough courtrooms to enforce them. If the billboard company wants to sue Sony over a work of fiction not accurately depicting a fictional representation of a billboard like theirs, I just treat it as welfare for lawyers on the part of the billboard company.
HOWEVER... if this nonsense should be successful in the courts -- whether or not Sony bothered to pay for a credible defense (after all, the judge has some responsibilities) -- then it would have my blood pressure and cynicism up a notch or three.
... although I realize that it's meant to sell film.
I think my son and his friends did a much better job with this kind of art (travelogue movie made from still images). Here's a sampling of what can be done with an ancient Quicktake 200 digital camera, a Powerbook, a Ford Explorer, and a little post-processing with Adobe Premiere:PassingTime195-1.mpg
The 195-1 refers to the ratio of time spent on the trip to time in the movie.
I suppose this explains why you don't see many young COBOL programmers.... like the Shakers, they've failed to reproduce and are slowly, verbosely, coding themselves into extinction.
If instructions to a pool of computing resources can be patented, why not instructions to a pool of cooking resources (i.e., kitchen+cook)? Isn't software just recipes for computing? Julia Child, contact your patent attorney immediately!
Or how about instructions to a vehicle+driver on how to get from one place to another? Can Mapquest patent AAA out of the trip-ticks business?
The whole idea of patenting software is ludicrous. Copyrights are something else entirely, and IMHO (IANAL), completely appropriate for software.
Slashdot Mirror
There's one distinction -- and it makes all the difference in the world -- Apple makes money from the hardware.
Apple COULD opt to give away OS X free with the hardware (but why bother when they can sell it?). In fact they make a great TCO case using the no-user limit with OS X on their Xserve slice machine, as compared to the per user pricing on the Windows Server software when used with a comparable Intel slice machine.
If Microsoft build XP atop a Linux infrastructure, they would still have to sell it to make money, and so Linux would continue to have the cost advantage.
There's no win here for Microsoft.
Yup -- here's just the sort of thinking typified by such management types:
Let's see, we write software and we buy software from Microsoft... let's outsource our development staff to Microsoft for a cut in the pricing on the stuff we buy from them! We lose those expensive employees and get a break on our product costs! We're financial geniuses!!
So as they pollute and destroy whatever uniqueness HP products have, somebody else brings out a similar but better product for a lot less, and a third company brings out a significantly different, but more expensive product for a premium price. HP withers while the competition thrives.
Financial geniuses do not create world-beating products.
None of the solutions based on providing multiple user access to an address book by replicating aliases to it will work if the address book is subject to updating by multiple users.
That's what a database is for.
IF (and ONLY IF) you are going to limit your address book updates to a single user, then replication of aliases/links can work. Otherwise, you eventually run into the problem where two users are going to update it at the same time (or within a small enough window that both read the same data but write different data), and one clobbers the other's update, or worse, clobbers some critical data structure and nukes the address book. The LDAP solution is the best way to handle this.
I believe you're referring to 2D barcode, which instead of using the width of the bars, use the height as well, giving approximately the square of the amount of info that a 1D bar code occupying the same space would provide.. pdf
See
http://www.aurorabarcode.com/PDF/2D%20Bar%20Codes
for more info.
Just as television did not decimate the film industry, and VCRs did not decimate the film industry, and the film industry or any of its descendents did not decimate live theatre, use of CGI animation will not replace current fare so much as add to it.
The people whose lives will be (or have already been) altered by CGI will be those whose product (hand-drawn animation) is replaced by it with no alternative outlets for their work.
There are plenty of local repertory theatres where set designers, costumers, et al can find work -- assuming that CGI-generated TV actually replaces human-based programming -- but not many alternatives for non-computer animators.
In ANY company, employees are given the least consideration. They are viewed simply as a consumable resource, like fuel oil or coal (hopefully a bit more environmentally friendly). If Worldcom had a substantial fraction of its shares owned by employees (a horrible thought, on the face of it, to lose one's job and assets at the same time), they might have a say in the way things go, but as it is, you are merely a part of the machinery. If whoever buys the part you support does not already have people to perform that function, you may get to keep your job (albeit with different pay and benefits), but if a company in a similar business purchases the business unit you work for, unless their people already have more than they can handle, the plan will be for them to do the work you do now.
The other possibility would be if Worldcom was close enough to making a go of it that they did not need to sell off parts of the company, merely a reprieve from debt payments. Or if you work in whatever part remains, you may keep employed -- again, at different pay+benefits.
Hopefully, the retirement savings managed by the company were not used to prop up the collapsing stock price (so the pirates running the show could grab a bit more loot), as was the case at Enron.
The lesson to be learned here? Try not to work for crooks -- a pretty difficult proposition, nowadays.
I believe that AOL has a number of suppliers of bandwidth. They recently inked a deal to buy transatlantic bandwidth from Level 3, and used to (and may still) get a lot of local domestic bandwidth from Metromedia.
Personally, I think they're hollering Fire! FIRE!! when there's only a whiff of smoke in the air. After all, the internet was DESIGNED to withstand having large chunks of it taken out (it was originally a DARPA project to build a resilient computer network that would survive a nuclear war), and while there's not nearly so much unused capacity as a year ago, there's still excess capacity. If UUNET were to go dark, it would be similar to yet another bad Microsoft virus (CodeRed, SirCam, Klez) clogging the net -- a slowdown, and some systems offline, but in a few days most things would be fully functional again. Either someone else would buy UUNET and fill the need, or some other company (Level 3?) would eagerly pick up the load.
Truly a shame that Douglas Adams didn't live to see this.
At my employer's firm, we have perfected the art of repelling those out to gain information by a 2-pronged approach. We run the callers through a maze of automated phone forwarding recordings to (eventually) a person who has no clue about anything.
It always surprises me that people treat Marc Andreessen as a "visionary". As I see it, he's a programmer of some talent who happened to be in the right place at the right time to be tapped by Jim Clark (the REAL visionary) to take his browser (which he did not invent, but merely polished the creation of Tim Berners-Lee) and try and make a new industry with it. Without Jim Clark (not just his money, but his business sense and entrepreneurial spirit), nobody would know Marc Andreessen today. So far as I can see, he's no more deserving of that kind of respect than any of a number of folks at Netscape. The ARE kudos that the folks at Netscape deserve, as the people at Netscape did an enormous amount to develop many of the technologies that have made the WWW what it is today -- but I don't see that Mr Andreessen deserves any more credit than anyone else.
Unfortunately,I have no knowledge of Netscape that anyone else couldn't get through the media, so these are merely the opinions of someone willing to question the popular perceptions.
I'm not trying to disparage the man, but IMHO, he's shown no particular managerial skills or any aspects of a true visionary. I expect Loudcloud to quietly burn through its VC financing, and slip beneath the waves, just another dot-com bomb.
The fact that he's so willing to accept that just because Microsoft owns the market today, they will always and forever do so, should discredit him as a man of imagination.
Just for a second, image the consequences of a hypothetical event like Homeland Security deciding to hold individual (and corporate) computer users responsible for the viruses their systems propagate, in an attempt to wake people up to responsible operation of their computers. In such a scenario, it wouldn't take more than a few highly-publicized cases of clueless PC users whose systems launch DOS attacks being prosecuted to change the dynamics of the marketplace significantly.
Change Happens -- All the Time.
No visionary expects the future to be anything like the present.
I'd prefer LED-based lighting, with still-higher efficiencies and none of the troublesome RF pollution. I think LED-based lighting (using a mix of various colored LEDs and white LEDs to simulate a natural spectrum) is a lot closer to reality than Bob's bogeyman technology, with there already being LED-based lighting in specialty apps (such as theater spotlights that don't get hot and last a very long time (http://ledmuseum.home.att.net/digital.htm), in addition to burning a lot less electricity).
... who's going to make the tiny little punched card readers to read these things? And how will we clear the inevitable card jams?
Welcome to Wal-Mart.
While maybe 24,000 jobs won't be missed (unless one of them is putting food on your table and a roof over your head), but this is only a drop in a river of jobs moving offshore.
I suggest you check out yesterday's WSJ Boomtown column for a little enlightenment, like the paragrapgh that reads:
"Career advice for the 21st century: Stay away from any job that can be done online, or you'll be competing with my buddy Odyssey -- and people eager to underbid him, too. I found a good programmer in five minutes. I'm still looking for a good carpenter."
Want to trade in your mouse for a hammer? Unless you can somehow compete with equally competent coders who charge 1/10th what you do, you're going to be in the same (sinking) boat as the rest of us.
Globalization is rather painful.
Seems to me that Sun has run out of rope in these economic harsh times, and is backing away from competing by raising (effectively) prices in order to keep some cash flowing through its corporate veins. With the ability to buy an 80-processor Xserve (clustered, since OS X won't support 80 cpus in a single image) for a mere $160,000 (and that includes over 2TB of disk) and NO per-user licensing charges, Sun has seen that they cannot compete and survive.
I Look for Sun to increasingly merge Linux with Solaris, just as IBM is doing with MVS, and Apple is doing with BSD unix. The costs of developing a proprietary OS are simply too much to bear in these times of declining profits.
... why not start one hypothesizing a secret Apple Aquafication of Open Office? That would have a much greater impact that replacing IE with Chimera.
IF there is anything at all to an Apple push to replace IE, it's probably only a means to get Microsoft to lighten up on its push to replace Quicktime with WiMP.
But I like the idea of an Aqua front end on Open Office, something that looks as good as Microsoft Office X, has full document support, and is free. Now THAT's a rumor.
There! Consider it done.
I guess I get kinda weary with the all-too-common notion that things are always going to be the way they are today.
.NET to be a raging success (just like the XBox), with millions of (l)users willingly ponying up annual subscription fees to use their PCs. Myself, I figure that before that happens, millions will abandon PC-based email for cellphone-based email -- all we need to dethrone IE is a viable alternative that is sufficiently attractive to the masses.
If market-dominating products persisted in this state due to inertia, or herd behavior, or whatever, then we would still be using Apple IIs, or TRS-80s, or IBM PCs, or CP/M, or Lotus 1-2-3, or WordStar.
Times changes, things change, fashions change.
Bill Gates is acutely aware that Microsoft does not have any lock on the future, it's why he fights so fiercely to hang onto nearly all of the marbles.
If we learn anything from history, its that he won't succeed. Either the crumbs of the marketplace that he does not own will grow into something unimaginable, or some totally unrelated technology will replace the existing computing segment of the economy.
No rational person believes that 10 years from now we will be using systems and software that are just like the ones today, only fatter and faster.
Change happens. Watch for it. Making informed choices is the best way to surf the waves of change.
Just because we're stuck today with IE owning nearly all the browser usage amongst the computing illiterati, is no reason to expect it will be that way forever.
I suppose you also expect
So long as things like Mozilla/Netscape7, Opera, Konqueror, etc, continue to be developed, there is the possibility that they may catch the public fancy and pose a serious threat to IE.
... that the management needs to be domestic?
All you need is to send the requirements and have the whole effort managed and performed on the other side of the globe.
If $30/hr US coders can be replaced by $3/hr foreign coders, cannot $40/hr US managers be replaced by $4/hr foreign managers?
This has been ongoing in the blue-collar segment of the economy for two or three decades, it's pretty much inevitable that the same thing will occur here.
At least until US unemployment levels rise to a point where consumption of those foreign-produced goods collapses. Hopefully, by that point, foreign economies will have expanded to the point where they can generate a fair amount of spending themselves, and wage inflation will have brought a reasonable global marketplace into being.
Until then, the only way to survive is by becoming a fat-cat CEO and ride the wave of profits.
That's about as significant as all those insects trying to stop my windshield on a hot summer evening...
Let's take your notion to an extreme, and say that EVERYONE who is opposed to being limited to Microsoft Windoze make a stand and switch to the Mac OS on Macintosh hardware. If I have any sort of understanding as to the relative sizes of the users involved, not only would Microsoft not notice the absence of the "Linux Community", Apple would only perceive a 4%-5% increase in sales.
Given this, one has to wonder why Microsoft bothers to struggle for the last 5% of market share (they'd like to snuff Apple as well as Linux)... and it has to come down to a desire on their part to obliterate any possible alternatives to running Windoze, so they can make their immense income seem small against the potential of making environmentally-friendly versions of Windoze that bio-degrade over the span of a year requiring a new purchase at ever-increasing prices (.NET by any other name).
Alternatives to Microsoft products do not pose a threat to Microsoft's current operations, but do limit the amount of pain they can force upon the consumer in the future. Elected officials pose no threat to them, so long as we continue to have the best government money can buy.
Why should the folks who are interested in the things NASA works on be taxed heavier than the rest of us?
Personally, I'd prefer yet another form to fill out at tax time â" one that would direct (in broad-brush terms) how my taxes were spent. It seems that our elected officials cannot be entrusted to spend our money wisely â" they not only end up blowing it on themselves (have you looked into congressional pensions lately?), but even then it's not enough and they wind up as the puppets of the lobbyists with the biggest checkbooks.
Any legislation involving the compensation of elected officials so DEFINITELY be required to be approved directly by the taxpayers. I realize that this would result in a permanent wage freeze for our greedy stalwarts in DC, but it would take a very long time until it became a problem, especially with the continually increasing flow of soft money from every interest wanting to own its very own elected official.
... just shifted to different areas.
The essential learning aspect of the hobbyist modality is captured pretty well by the LEGO Mindstorms robotics toys(?). While it's true that machine language is a lost art, as is the construction of simple electronic devices, there are new frontiers available today that were not practical in days gone by.
Maybe in another decade or two we'll have do-it-yourself genetic tinkering...
... after all, if there were laws against blatant displays of stupidity, we wouldn't have enough courtrooms to enforce them. If the billboard company wants to sue Sony over a work of fiction not accurately depicting a fictional representation of a billboard like theirs, I just treat it as welfare for lawyers on the part of the billboard company.
HOWEVER... if this nonsense should be successful in the courts -- whether or not Sony bothered to pay for a credible defense (after all, the judge has some responsibilities) -- then it would have my blood pressure and cynicism up a notch or three.
... although I realize that it's meant to sell film.
I think my son and his friends did a much better job with this kind of art (travelogue movie made from still images). Here's a sampling of what can be done with an ancient Quicktake 200 digital camera, a Powerbook, a Ford Explorer, and a little post-processing with Adobe Premiere:PassingTime195-1.mpg
The 195-1 refers to the ratio of time spent on the trip to time in the movie.
I suppose this explains why you don't see many young COBOL programmers.... like the Shakers, they've failed to reproduce and are slowly, verbosely, coding themselves into extinction.
If instructions to a pool of computing resources can be patented, why not instructions to a pool of cooking resources (i.e., kitchen+cook)? Isn't software just recipes for computing? Julia Child, contact your patent attorney immediately!
Or how about instructions to a vehicle+driver on how to get from one place to another? Can Mapquest patent AAA out of the trip-ticks business?
The whole idea of patenting software is ludicrous.
Copyrights are something else entirely, and IMHO (IANAL), completely appropriate for software.