It's really not that hard to create a a cell connection and send a text message to a device. Most phones will roam automatically to a site if the site will let them on. I've seen it done (albeit only with 2G) at a Seattle Wireless meeting with a software defined radio and a USRP. To do it legally, you'd (as the advertising agency) just make a deal with one of the carriers to use their licensed frequencies, then essentially MITM the phone and send it a text message when within range.
An asset is basically anything that is valuable that can be owned. If something can be traded for something else valuable, it's valuable, and if you can own it, it's an asset.
This is why the paper money in your pocket, despite it having little if any intrinsic value, is an asset. This is also why stocks, bonds, directives, and everything else is also considered an asset. And yes, notes and futures contracts and derivatives, even convoluted ones, are assets.
When you are accounting for a loan you've made, you don't list it as a liability, or a source of income, it is an asset, exactly the same as your checking account is an asset. (When a loan payment is made, the "principal" part of the payment is transferred from the "loan asset" and moved to your "checking account" or wallet or wherever. The interest part is, perhaps unsurprisingly, accounted as income that is transferred to your checking account, wallet, or whatever.)
Everything on wall street is owned by someone, and is of tangible value to someone else, and is therefore an asset. That fact that it may be misvalued by any other party or even the party that owns the asset does not change the fact that it's still an asset. If you can think of something that serves as a counter-example, I'd be interested to hear it, but the mere fact that you can't figure out what the underlying value of some contract is, possibly because you can't understand it, doesn't make it any less of an asset.
(I'm referring here to our economy, mind you, not the world of economic make-believe known as Wall Street).
Our government gives fake money to a private bank which is loaned back at interest, distributed and redistributed, and Wall Street, which deals entirely in assets (convoluted and abstracted as they may sometimes be), is the world of economic make-believe?
Presumably, in the same way that any other tax evasion will. Does the police force, military, court system, fire brigade etc. enslave people?
Yes. How many people here would willingly pay to hurt other people because they like to inhale the smoke of certain burning plants? Or willingly pay to hurt brown people overseas just because they are brown?
If you are unwilling to pay for these government "services," then I must ask, why are you paying for them, dummy?
You might say, "because I'm afraid the government will hurt me by seizing assests/arresting me/killing me or my family."
If you could travel back in time, and ask blacks why the stayed on the plantation, what do you think they might say?
1. America has a "free" market for health insurance/care
No, we don't. Half or more of the health care dollars are spent by the government through various programs, and the industry is heavily regulated.
2. America pays more than most Western countries for health insurance/care
Health insurance is not health care. The fact that the government has so horribly conflated the two through various perverse incentives is a big part of the problem.
4. Most States have one insurer that has >40% of the insurance market
Because competition is not presently allowed over state lines. The monopolistic behavior of the insurance market is a direct result of government regulation.
Government regulation is fucking healthcare, the answer to broken regulation fucking healthcare is more regulation on healthcare? Puh-lease.
I think even most capitalists can agree that for profit news only perpetuates those who have money to buy and pay people off and threaten peoples jobs so we never hear about all the corruption.
I think you have no idea what real capitalists think, or perhaps don't even have the slightest clue what real capitalism is.
We've seen more real news out of Wikileaks then all commercial news sites combined
Wikileaks, a privately owned and operated news source, as an example of what's wrong with privately owned and operated news sources? While simultaneously being lauded for being better than privately owned news sources? Where's the punchline to this ridiculous train of thought?
Wikileaks, for lack of a better term, is private charity. Private charity is part of capitalism! Wikileaks is a capitalist outgrowth! In fact, one of the things that makes Wikileaks so special is that it specifically makes it difficult for governments (as well as corporations) to silence reporters! If Wikileaks were run by the US*, do you think it would ever publish any US government leaks?
Why it is that people refuse to associate private charity with capitalism is beyond me. Private charity is capitalism's natural way of dealing with the little segments of the economy where the profit model hasn't been figured out or is presently for some reason broken, be it quality reporting or caring for the sick or disabled.
Fact is, Wikileaks simply wouldn't exist is a society where all wealth was publicly/governmentally owned, because those in charge would eventually recognize the danger it poses to their power and "repurpose it for something more productive for the good of society."
To say that capitalism isn't solving the news problem is intellectually dishonest, at best. Wikileaks is, in and of itself, great evidence to the contrary.
FFS! How stupid can politicians be? Don't they realize that if national light rail were a viable option, some company would already be doing it? Don't they realize that this will be a bigger failure than Amtrak, which we already pay for at the barrel of a gun?
Pro-selfownership does not necessarily mean pro-IP. Don't know where you got that from, but a lot of non-libertarians misunderstand self-ownership, so I'll give you a pass.
Wikipedia sums it up nicely:
Many libertarians consider copyright and patent to be forms of enclosure â" illegitimate government creation of exclusive privilege by prohibiting most individuals from accessing commons. Copyright and patents are government-granted monopolies on production, and no better than a government-granted monopoly on producing food or oil.
Trademark, unlike copyright and patent, can be construed as a protection against fraud and misrepresentation: it ensures that others cannot abuse a successful product name to promote an inferior knockoff. Since most libertarians believe that fraud should be criminal, they agree, in this regard, with trademark law.
However, in many jurisdictions the concept of trademark dilution has developed to protect trademarks as a property right, securing the investment the trademark owner has made in establishing and promoting a strong mark without regard to likelihood for confusion. This has even been used to limit free speech about a product, something few libertarians would be likely to defend.
A "science" degree in creationism certainly isn't a degree in science. There is no way I would ever hire anyone with such a degree. If anything, I would see them as potentially being very disruptive in the workplace.
Woah there, bud. Be careful. That might be religious discrimination.
Yay law of unintended consequences!
Why the fucking fuck is the government dictating what PHDs a University and issue, anyway? Does this draconian, freedom-hating measure only apply publicly funded universities, or is it anyone?
Well technically you are not giving it. It's your children or grandchildren who will ultimately pay the bill for the debt incurred by this generation. (Thanks mom and dad, or grandma and grandpa.)
Technically, most of them will have it taken at gunpoint; only a few will willingly give it.
Hindsight? I've been saying the housing bubble is going to burst for the last 5 years ('03 to about '08, when the mantra became, "See, I fucking told you so!"), arguing with my Realtor friend, and I don't know shit about economics. It was just so unbelievably obvious to me that it's hard for me to believe our "officials" didn't see it coming. Doubly so when they then proceeded to take actions that in fact made it worse, rather than heading it off at the pass. And got rich in the process. The government version of Enron, anyone? Literally. s/stocks/housing/gi and you have the biggest fucking pump and dump scheme ever concocted by man. First at the expense of speculators, then big corporations, and now the American Taxpayer. And us fucking morons are voting for more anal raping at the expense of these losers, which is why we elected Obama over McCain instead of throwing them both to the dogs and getting Ron Paul or (shudder) Bob Barr in there. Kenneth Lay is probably snickering at the genius of it all and kicking himself in the ass for not thinking of it himself.
No, far from surprising, this seems downright intentional to me.
I'm not alone, either. In fact, other silly Austrian-school economists were predicting the housing collapse for way longer than myself. It was never a question of if for them, but rather of when.
Now, I'll admit I never saw the investment banks or AIG getting tanked, but that has less to do with the predictability of the situation and more to do with me not knowing shit about economics and not having thought it all the way through. Although in some sense, it's impossible to think through what all the unintended consequences of government action might be. Just today I was thinking about how the government has poured trillions into the banks trying to get them to lend, and they still aren't, and I was theorizing about why that was, and realized that there was a potential scenario where the more money you injected, the less incentive there would be to lend it out. On the surface, it seems retarded that making more money available would make lending harder, but when you really think it through, there's a good reason why it might. And if I do say so myself, that's a pretty big fucking unintended consequence.
In closing, a random related tangent: it's only the big government Keynes that have been blindsided by this, which should tell you something about that economic model/theory...
Many modern vehicles (actually, pretty much everything with EFI and electronic ignition, ie. just about everything after '99 or so) turn off the fuel injection if there is no throttle and the engine is above a certain RPM.
If you're coasting on a long downhill stretch, and using the brakes to slow you when you'd maintain in 5th or 4th, you're actually not doing yourself any favors by idling the engine (idling uses gas, engine braking doesn't until the engine is turning too slowly).
My car is rather amusing going down Mt. Hood. If I put it in second around 20mph or so, there is just enough engine braking to slightly slow the car going down hill, but when it hits ~1,100 rpm, it surges as the fuel injection comes back on, up to about ~2,000 rpm, where it shuts off again.
The disadvantage is that, on the way home, it's almost 40 miles straight down hill. I can literally go almost 55 miles without the engine warming up if I engine brake. This, obviously, is quite bad for the engine. Of course, I idle down the first leg in neutral (or just put it in 3rd/4th), using the brakes to maintain speed, the car warms up in a couple of miles...
Firefox 2.0.0.16 on Windows XP SP2. Confirmed. Closing the tab makes it stop. Using TrayClip to monitor the clipboard, I can see it updates every 3-4 seconds.
Assuming all the features were easy to copy, generation three cars from all 9 (lets say 1 died) manufacturers are going to be awesome: Good mileage, low pollution, creature comforts, power everything...
One big problem. If one company did not innovate at all, it would have an inferior product for a very short while. But before long, they would copy all of the other innovations and could sell a car with all of the improvements for a lower sticker price than all of the competitors because they don't have to recoup R&
They still have to recoup a form of R&D: Reverse Engineering. Granted it's a cheaper form of R&D, but it also returns less of a product: It doesn't create anything new, it only recreates something that somebody else already does.
and they could eliminate all of their competition.
You act like I didn't even think of this in your reply.
I believe I pretty specifically said that the companies that originally developed the technology would have a huge pressure to innovate again, because if they didn't they would die.
So by the time the leech company has copied A/C, the original companies have either a) figured out something great and new, above and beyond AC, the continues to justify their price, or b) dies. The pressure to innovate (caused by the prospect of death) keeps them going, or somebody better can step in and replace them. It's simple competition, which patents stifle.
If two cars have identical A/C systems, the public won't care who came up with the idea or who had it first. If the quality's the same, they'll want the one that's cheaper (the one that doesn't have to recoup costs).
I submit to you: the iPhone. Lots of knockoffs that are cheaper, technically superior, and higher quality. And yet, the iPhone outsells them by leaps and bounds. Why? Here's a hint: they serve different markets.
Also, your "crappy cars because of patents" scenario assumes no licensing. If two car companies both find some cool improvements, there's nothing stopping them from saying "You can put A/C in your cars if you'll pay us $25 per car with A/C and let us use that neat new suspension technique you figured out." That's a win-win (for both car companies and the consumer) and it happens all the time.
A mandatory licensing system might make for a more efficient market. Maybe. But I'm highly skeptical of government interference in the markets because, in almost every case, they make them way less efficient for minimal gain.
Can companies hoard their patents and refuse to play with others until they expire? Sure. That happens a lot too, but I'm not convinced that American technological ingenuity is suffocating because of it.
Then why does our iPhone totally suck compared to the cheap, Chinese knock-off?
Like I said, patents are often badly abused and the system has flaws, but I do believe that patents (at least in the case of hardware innovations) are essential for this country's business model. I'd like to see the system improved, but I certainly don't consider elimination an improvement.
Also, I think that your comparison to open source is a little flawed. As the Patent Office has finally figured out, software is a very different creature than hardware. Unfortunately, community designed hardware is something of a rarity.
Yes they will - If they decide that the value of that superior suspension system exceeds whatever the patent holder is charging to license its use.
And if a patent holder decides not to license it, but be the sole, exclusive manufacturer?
Ah, yes. Then we're right back where the parent poster started. His vehicle will not benefit until the patent expires.
Patents are being badly abused, but they're not all bad. If car manufacturers knew that pouring $$ into R&D would aid their competitors evenly with themselves
Why do you believe it would aid them evenly?
Among other things, they'd be first to market with the new design. And they'd have it for as long as the competitors took to figure out how to replicate it. And the design might not even matter: A luxury car company probably wouldn't have much use for an improvement that was only applicable to sport suspension. Different companies would still exist to support different markets
and provide them with no market advantage, they would all eliminate R&D, wait for their competitors to innovate, and then start using the new design (should it ever emerge).
This statement seems to be predicated on the belief that people wouldn't innovate if there weren't a patent motive. I submit that there only needs to be a monetary motive to drive people to innovate (and if open source software is any proof, sometimes, not even a monetary motive).
Do a little thought experiment with me:
Imagine there are 10 auto manufactures in the world, and they all make exactly the same car. It lasts 10,000 miles (if you are lucky) before it breaks down, has no luxury feature whatsoever (no power steering, heat, A/C, power windows, locks, mirrors, sunroof, hell, maybe it doesn't even have windshield wipers), gets 3 gallons to the mile, dumps a thick smog everywhere around it (including the passenger compartment), and tops out at 5mph.
Are you seriously going to tell me the first person who figures out how to put AC or a heater in a car isn't going to have an advantage over the others? What if the other guys are working on making their cars faster or more efficient, aren't they going to have an advantage?
So all ten companies work on ten different advantages to their automobiles, and produce their "second generation." Each vehicle has all the problems of the first generation, but with one improvement (one has wipers, one has AC, one has a nice stereo, one gets good mileage, etc.).
Now, consumers are going to pick which features are most important to them. Some companies will survive, others won't. 'tis the nature of the market.
Assuming all the features were easy to copy, generation three cars from all 9 (lets say 1 died) manufacturers are going to be awesome: Good mileage, low pollution, creature comforts, power everything... Now what? Are you saying, without patents, development stops here?
Each company now has a huge incentive to:
Find ways to make vehicles less expensively
Come up with new features that customers are going to want.
Make their vehicles chaper
Etc. etc.
If they don't, they die.
Now imagine generation 3 with patents. Every car on the road is going to suck, with minor improvements to whatever system each company specializes in. The companies that thrive are going to be the ones that figure out how to accomplish the same goals (such as AC, power windows, and wipers) at the same time, in the same car, without violating any patents. In many cases, they will have to use inferior technology to do this. In some cases, they will improve upon the existing technologies. Companies will still die if the patented technology isn't important enough to consumers (say, wipers are more important than AC), and then that technology disappears and becomes unavailable to 3g cars (so now nobody can make AC until the patent expires), thereby making all cars on the road
Slashdot Mirror
Objectionable is different from illegal.
Gallons per dekimile!!
Erg, my comment was directed at you, but apparently I'm incompetent or something.
It's really not that hard to create a a cell connection and send a text message to a device. Most phones will roam automatically to a site if the site will let them on. I've seen it done (albeit only with 2G) at a Seattle Wireless meeting with a software defined radio and a USRP. To do it legally, you'd (as the advertising agency) just make a deal with one of the carriers to use their licensed frequencies, then essentially MITM the phone and send it a text message when within range.
I thought I was only kidding when I said the security on Blackboard was so bad a 9 year old could hack it.
I'm still amazed that people have failed to realize that digital cameras do a great job of capturing a diagram in a hurry.
You could look into Maemo...
An asset is basically anything that is valuable that can be owned. If something can be traded for something else valuable, it's valuable, and if you can own it, it's an asset.
This is why the paper money in your pocket, despite it having little if any intrinsic value, is an asset. This is also why stocks, bonds, directives, and everything else is also considered an asset. And yes, notes and futures contracts and derivatives, even convoluted ones, are assets.
When you are accounting for a loan you've made, you don't list it as a liability, or a source of income, it is an asset, exactly the same as your checking account is an asset. (When a loan payment is made, the "principal" part of the payment is transferred from the "loan asset" and moved to your "checking account" or wallet or wherever. The interest part is, perhaps unsurprisingly, accounted as income that is transferred to your checking account, wallet, or whatever.)
Everything on wall street is owned by someone, and is of tangible value to someone else, and is therefore an asset. That fact that it may be misvalued by any other party or even the party that owns the asset does not change the fact that it's still an asset. If you can think of something that serves as a counter-example, I'd be interested to hear it, but the mere fact that you can't figure out what the underlying value of some contract is, possibly because you can't understand it, doesn't make it any less of an asset.
Our government gives fake money to a private bank which is loaned back at interest, distributed and redistributed, and Wall Street, which deals entirely in assets (convoluted and abstracted as they may sometimes be), is the world of economic make-believe?
Sigh...
Or rsync'ing a maildir. Seriously, NASA? This was the best you could do?
Government programs for the win...
Yes. How many people here would willingly pay to hurt other people because they like to inhale the smoke of certain burning plants? Or willingly pay to hurt brown people overseas just because they are brown?
If you are unwilling to pay for these government "services," then I must ask, why are you paying for them, dummy?
You might say, "because I'm afraid the government will hurt me by seizing assests/arresting me/killing me or my family."
If you could travel back in time, and ask blacks why the stayed on the plantation, what do you think they might say?
No, we don't. Half or more of the health care dollars are spent by the government through various programs, and the industry is heavily regulated.
Health insurance is not health care. The fact that the government has so horribly conflated the two through various perverse incentives is a big part of the problem.
Because competition is not presently allowed over state lines. The monopolistic behavior of the insurance market is a direct result of government regulation.
Government regulation is fucking healthcare, the answer to broken regulation fucking healthcare is more regulation on healthcare? Puh-lease.
I think you have no idea what real capitalists think, or perhaps don't even have the slightest clue what real capitalism is.
Wikileaks, a privately owned and operated news source, as an example of what's wrong with privately owned and operated news sources? While simultaneously being lauded for being better than privately owned news sources? Where's the punchline to this ridiculous train of thought?
Wikileaks, for lack of a better term, is private charity. Private charity is part of capitalism! Wikileaks is a capitalist outgrowth! In fact, one of the things that makes Wikileaks so special is that it specifically makes it difficult for governments (as well as corporations) to silence reporters! If Wikileaks were run by the US*, do you think it would ever publish any US government leaks?
Why it is that people refuse to associate private charity with capitalism is beyond me. Private charity is capitalism's natural way of dealing with the little segments of the economy where the profit model hasn't been figured out or is presently for some reason broken, be it quality reporting or caring for the sick or disabled.
Fact is, Wikileaks simply wouldn't exist is a society where all wealth was publicly/governmentally owned, because those in charge would eventually recognize the danger it poses to their power and "repurpose it for something more productive for the good of society."
To say that capitalism isn't solving the news problem is intellectually dishonest, at best. Wikileaks is, in and of itself, great evidence to the contrary.
*Insert any government here.
FFS! How stupid can politicians be? Don't they realize that if national light rail were a viable option, some company would already be doing it? Don't they realize that this will be a bigger failure than Amtrak, which we already pay for at the barrel of a gun?
Pro-selfownership does not necessarily mean pro-IP. Don't know where you got that from, but a lot of non-libertarians misunderstand self-ownership, so I'll give you a pass.
Wikipedia sums it up nicely:
Woah there, bud. Be careful. That might be religious discrimination.
Yay law of unintended consequences!
Why the fucking fuck is the government dictating what PHDs a University and issue, anyway? Does this draconian, freedom-hating measure only apply publicly funded universities, or is it anyone?
Technically, most of them will have it taken at gunpoint; only a few will willingly give it.
Hindsight? I've been saying the housing bubble is going to burst for the last 5 years ('03 to about '08, when the mantra became, "See, I fucking told you so!"), arguing with my Realtor friend, and I don't know shit about economics. It was just so unbelievably obvious to me that it's hard for me to believe our "officials" didn't see it coming. Doubly so when they then proceeded to take actions that in fact made it worse, rather than heading it off at the pass. And got rich in the process. The government version of Enron, anyone? Literally. s/stocks/housing/gi and you have the biggest fucking pump and dump scheme ever concocted by man. First at the expense of speculators, then big corporations, and now the American Taxpayer. And us fucking morons are voting for more anal raping at the expense of these losers, which is why we elected Obama over McCain instead of throwing them both to the dogs and getting Ron Paul or (shudder) Bob Barr in there. Kenneth Lay is probably snickering at the genius of it all and kicking himself in the ass for not thinking of it himself.
No, far from surprising, this seems downright intentional to me.
I'm not alone, either. In fact, other silly Austrian-school economists were predicting the housing collapse for way longer than myself. It was never a question of if for them, but rather of when.
Now, I'll admit I never saw the investment banks or AIG getting tanked, but that has less to do with the predictability of the situation and more to do with me not knowing shit about economics and not having thought it all the way through. Although in some sense, it's impossible to think through what all the unintended consequences of government action might be. Just today I was thinking about how the government has poured trillions into the banks trying to get them to lend, and they still aren't, and I was theorizing about why that was, and realized that there was a potential scenario where the more money you injected, the less incentive there would be to lend it out. On the surface, it seems retarded that making more money available would make lending harder, but when you really think it through, there's a good reason why it might. And if I do say so myself, that's a pretty big fucking unintended consequence.
In closing, a random related tangent: it's only the big government Keynes that have been blindsided by this, which should tell you something about that economic model/theory...
Depends on where you're coasting.
Many modern vehicles (actually, pretty much everything with EFI and electronic ignition, ie. just about everything after '99 or so) turn off the fuel injection if there is no throttle and the engine is above a certain RPM.
If you're coasting on a long downhill stretch, and using the brakes to slow you when you'd maintain in 5th or 4th, you're actually not doing yourself any favors by idling the engine (idling uses gas, engine braking doesn't until the engine is turning too slowly).
My car is rather amusing going down Mt. Hood. If I put it in second around 20mph or so, there is just enough engine braking to slightly slow the car going down hill, but when it hits ~1,100 rpm, it surges as the fuel injection comes back on, up to about ~2,000 rpm, where it shuts off again.
The disadvantage is that, on the way home, it's almost 40 miles straight down hill. I can literally go almost 55 miles without the engine warming up if I engine brake. This, obviously, is quite bad for the engine. Of course, I idle down the first leg in neutral (or just put it in 3rd/4th), using the brakes to maintain speed, the car warms up in a couple of miles...
Firefox 2.0.0.16 on Windows XP SP2. Confirmed. Closing the tab makes it stop. Using TrayClip to monitor the clipboard, I can see it updates every 3-4 seconds.
What twisted logic leads you to believe that the AWB was a good thing?
He has been pounded... that's why he started recording!
Assuming all the features were easy to copy, generation three cars from all 9 (lets say 1 died) manufacturers are going to be awesome: Good mileage, low pollution, creature comforts, power everything...
One big problem. If one company did not innovate at all, it would have an inferior product for a very short while. But before long, they would copy all of the other innovations and could sell a car with all of the improvements for a lower sticker price than all of the competitors because they don't have to recoup R&
They still have to recoup a form of R&D: Reverse Engineering. Granted it's a cheaper form of R&D, but it also returns less of a product: It doesn't create anything new, it only recreates something that somebody else already does.
and they could eliminate all of their competition.
You act like I didn't even think of this in your reply.
I believe I pretty specifically said that the companies that originally developed the technology would have a huge pressure to innovate again, because if they didn't they would die.
So by the time the leech company has copied A/C, the original companies have either a) figured out something great and new, above and beyond AC, the continues to justify their price, or b) dies. The pressure to innovate (caused by the prospect of death) keeps them going, or somebody better can step in and replace them. It's simple competition, which patents stifle.
If two cars have identical A/C systems, the public won't care who came up with the idea or who had it first. If the quality's the same, they'll want the one that's cheaper (the one that doesn't have to recoup costs).
I submit to you: the iPhone. Lots of knockoffs that are cheaper, technically superior, and higher quality. And yet, the iPhone outsells them by leaps and bounds. Why? Here's a hint: they serve different markets.
Also, your "crappy cars because of patents" scenario assumes no licensing. If two car companies both find some cool improvements, there's nothing stopping them from saying "You can put A/C in your cars if you'll pay us $25 per car with A/C and let us use that neat new suspension technique you figured out." That's a win-win (for both car companies and the consumer) and it happens all the time.
A mandatory licensing system might make for a more efficient market. Maybe. But I'm highly skeptical of government interference in the markets because, in almost every case, they make them way less efficient for minimal gain.
Can companies hoard their patents and refuse to play with others until they expire? Sure. That happens a lot too, but I'm not convinced that American technological ingenuity is suffocating because of it.
Then why does our iPhone totally suck compared to the cheap, Chinese knock-off?
Like I said, patents are often badly abused and the system has flaws, but I do believe that patents (at least in the case of hardware innovations) are essential for this country's business model. I'd like to see the system improved, but I certainly don't consider elimination an improvement.
Also, I think that your comparison to open source is a little flawed. As the Patent Office has finally figured out, software is a very different creature than hardware. Unfortunately, community designed hardware is something of a rarity.
Yes they will - If they decide that the value of that superior suspension system exceeds whatever the patent holder is charging to license its use.
And if a patent holder decides not to license it, but be the sole, exclusive manufacturer?
Ah, yes. Then we're right back where the parent poster started. His vehicle will not benefit until the patent expires.
Patents are being badly abused, but they're not all bad. If car manufacturers knew that pouring $$ into R&D would aid their competitors evenly with themselves
Why do you believe it would aid them evenly?
Among other things, they'd be first to market with the new design. And they'd have it for as long as the competitors took to figure out how to replicate it. And the design might not even matter: A luxury car company probably wouldn't have much use for an improvement that was only applicable to sport suspension. Different companies would still exist to support different markets
and provide them with no market advantage, they would all eliminate R&D, wait for their competitors to innovate, and then start using the new design (should it ever emerge).
This statement seems to be predicated on the belief that people wouldn't innovate if there weren't a patent motive. I submit that there only needs to be a monetary motive to drive people to innovate (and if open source software is any proof, sometimes, not even a monetary motive).
Do a little thought experiment with me:
Imagine there are 10 auto manufactures in the world, and they all make exactly the same car. It lasts 10,000 miles (if you are lucky) before it breaks down, has no luxury feature whatsoever (no power steering, heat, A/C, power windows, locks, mirrors, sunroof, hell, maybe it doesn't even have windshield wipers), gets 3 gallons to the mile, dumps a thick smog everywhere around it (including the passenger compartment), and tops out at 5mph.
Are you seriously going to tell me the first person who figures out how to put AC or a heater in a car isn't going to have an advantage over the others? What if the other guys are working on making their cars faster or more efficient, aren't they going to have an advantage?
So all ten companies work on ten different advantages to their automobiles, and produce their "second generation." Each vehicle has all the problems of the first generation, but with one improvement (one has wipers, one has AC, one has a nice stereo, one gets good mileage, etc.).
Now, consumers are going to pick which features are most important to them. Some companies will survive, others won't. 'tis the nature of the market.
Assuming all the features were easy to copy, generation three cars from all 9 (lets say 1 died) manufacturers are going to be awesome: Good mileage, low pollution, creature comforts, power everything... Now what? Are you saying, without patents, development stops here?
Each company now has a huge incentive to:
If they don't, they die.
Now imagine generation 3 with patents. Every car on the road is going to suck, with minor improvements to whatever system each company specializes in. The companies that thrive are going to be the ones that figure out how to accomplish the same goals (such as AC, power windows, and wipers) at the same time, in the same car, without violating any patents. In many cases, they will have to use inferior technology to do this. In some cases, they will improve upon the existing technologies. Companies will still die if the patented technology isn't important enough to consumers (say, wipers are more important than AC), and then that technology disappears and becomes unavailable to 3g cars (so now nobody can make AC until the patent expires), thereby making all cars on the road
Is it actually a standard torrent? How is this different from something like Peercast?