They make very little profit on anything they sell, all the profit comes from membership fees.
Even if true, that seems orthogonal to the question of whether they fit the profile of a "small competitor." Costco reported northward of $2 billion in net income last year.
The cost of a patent battle are large, they could probably afford it but the patent holder is betting they won't want to spend the money.
If true, that was a bad bet -- Costco is the one that filed the lawsuit.
If you read TFA you will see that "why we can't have nice things for cheap" refers to the tactic employed by large companies of threatening legal action against small competitors that those competitors can't afford to defend against
Yeah, that's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Costco -- an itty-bitty company that can't afford to defend itself.
Or, you could just as glibly say: those who could, did, and those who couldn't, copied.
I have no idea if that's actually how it went down, just as I presume you have no particular evidence this is a nuisance suit. But if Costco did indeed copy Acushnet's patented features, I take it you wouldn't deny the actual inventor legal recourse.
Somewhat like the paper wraps a large number of words around a really basic (and laughably ridiculous) premise, you've wrapped a large number of words around a really basic troll technique: isolating one thing I said, plugging in your own set of silly assumptions (e.g., that a couple of tokers in their parents' basement have already saved enough money that a ~10x increase would leave them financially independent, and that they could stay in their parents' basement for the 33 years it would take to reach that point), ignoring the larger context of my analogy, and having your way with the resultant straw man. Thus endeth the benefit of the doubt.
The big-picture point you're ducking is that the authors' math requires worldwide reductions of a degree and over a sustained of a period of time that will not happen. Once more, and all together now: Will. Not. Happen.
Though they of course can't suffer the loss of face that would result from saying this in plain English, the authors themselves pretty much admit their entire premise is a pipe dream: "We cannot predict where civilization will be mid-century, but a decadal staircase based on a carbon law, if adopted broadly, may provide essential economic boundary conditions to make a zero-emissions future an inevitability rather than wishful thinking." So if every country of any size across the globe commits to a framework that would force them to implement every single condition the authors say is required for such sustained reductions at such an aggressive rate (including, according to the authors, little no to oil use worldwide less than 23 years from now -- there are many other hilarious examples, but I think that one most succinctly captures the wide-eyed naivete of it all), ipso facto those reductions will happen. Really sage stuff.
Thus, my original point fully stands: a supposed peer-reviewed science journal is simultaneously wasting space and flushing what remaining credibility it might have by publishing what the authors themselves basically admit is really just a pie-in-the-sky fairy tale -- one which, when you strip away the sciency-sounding veneer and cloud of two-dollar words, is qualitatively indistinguishable from my example.
You strike me as a last-word sort of guy, so have at it. I've spent more than enough time putting the rattle back up on the high chair on this one.
Ok, Matt. Though I've already spelled it out elsewhere for another coy poster, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt -- once -- that you're not just trolling and you really can't see why the burden should be on people like you to explain why there's a cogent thought in this paper worth discussing, not the other way around.
The thesis of this "scientific paper" is basically like a couple of tokers sitting around in their parents' basement saying "DUUUUDE... what if the money in our savings account DOUBLED EVERY YEAR?!??? By the time our parents kick us out, we'll never have to work again. We could just, like, go to the bank and tell them they need to do this and stuff, 'cause we'd be totally poor if they didn't. DUUUUDE."
I sure do hope you can see (1) why a thought process like that -- which is indisputably mathematically correct, and yet utterly decoupled from reality -- shouldn't ever leave that basement, much less be published in what professes to be a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and (2) that most professedly sentient beings would not haughtily demand a blow-by-blow explanation as to why.
It's hilarious (in a sad sort of way) to see the "consensus" attack dogs come out to defend the kind of mindless drivel that is this paper, published in what alleges to be a scientific journal.
It's doubly hilarious that, rather than even attempting to justify why the mindless drivel is anything but, you simply fall back on the reflexive ad hominem "denialists" -- this, in the midst of a high-horse post about supposed "empty rhetoric."
Unless the summary is fundamentally inaccurate (which I don't see you suggesting), the paper is just a science-veneered, prolix riff on the ages-old saying, "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride."
Plus he can still sue e-bay according to the article "Quote" A patent can be infringed when someone sells or "offers to sell" a patented invention "End Quote"
No, he can't.
The court extensively analyzed the "offer to sell" precedent and concluded that a listing on eBay is not an offer to sell by eBay. And the patent owner admitted eBay didn't "sell" the products at issue. This is all on pages 4-9 of the opinion linked in the summary (and is also explained in the rest of the Ars Technica article below the soundbite you clipped out).
Libertarians believe that companies that oppress users will fail in the marketplace.
A few thoughts:
1. They generally do fail -- just not in the time frame you would prefer. 2. I think you may have really meant "companies that oppress users to a far greater degree than they benefit them." I can quite comfortably predict that for any company of any size you might care to name there's a disproportionately vocal minority that has come up with something to whine about. 3. The specific situation we're talking about here is not simply a company oppressing users in a vacuum, but doing so using the cudgels of overbearing legislation (DMCA) and court precedent (EULAs). That's about as anti-libertarian as you can get.
BTW, College tuition is only really going wacko because the government stepped in and made student loans so easy to get.
538 [fivethirtyeight.com] says you're wrong.
Did you even read the article you cited? Here's a fun excerpt (emphasis mine):
"Among for-profit institutions, it is much more difficult to pin down a reason for tuition increases, though recent research suggests that one big cause is the generosity of federal student aid: Some institutions may be raising tuition in order to capture as much government-backed money as possible."
THE ASSIGNMENT OF A PATENT BY A PUBLIC SENIOR HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION TO A PATENT ASSERTION ENTITY SHALL BE CONSIDERED VOID AND UNENFORCEABLE.
So a middleman buys the patents, then turns around and assigns them to an assertion entity. This is often how the larger players do it anyway (so the original patent owner doesn't understand who it really is and thus jack up the price).
Look, it's an easy mistake to make, only thinking of efficiency in one dimension, but it's not that hard of a concept, especially for a/.er.
Maybe you're so fixated on the specific point you're trying to make that (1) you don't comprehend that your point is fully orthogonal to my original point that you jumped on; and (2) ironically enough, you don't comprehend that you're the one who is only thinking of efficiency in one dimension.
I'm looking at efficiency in terms of the number of person-minutes required to complete the end-to-end transaction: walking into the restaurant to holding my food in my hand. That takes all externalities into account, which is sorta what you need to do if you're going to have an intellectually honest conversation about whether a given piece of technology increases efficiency.
You, on the other hand, are focused on the single (and largely irrelevant) measure of how long the first part of the transaction (sending the order to the kitchen) takes. A kitchen during peak times quickly reaches its peak throughput limit, at which point it simply doesn't matter how quickly you're able to push orders back to them: the food will not come out any faster. This isn't particularly complicated.
I have retail software development experience, and line busting is a way of dealing with long lines
And there you have it: as the saying goes, when you're carrying around a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Problem is, here we're not talking about waiting in line for a kiosk that, e.g., dispenses tickets, and thus ends the transaction at the kiosk. We're talking about waiting in line for a kiosk that then dumps you in another line to wait for your food. Context matters.
It's only a loss of efficiency if the patron considers ordering to be less preferable to waiting
Given your recent request for "compelling evidence," I'll wait for you to provide that for the above proposition. A dash of common sense would suggest it's quite the opposite: that the average person would rather spend the time they're waiting to get their food doing other things (talking, reading, thinking, etc.) rather than bumbling around on an ordering kiosk and thus lengthening their end-to-end time in the restaurant.
Or think of it in terms of normal checkout in a retail store.
Utterly apples and oranges -- in a retail store, your work with the kiosk doesn't kick off another capacity-limited workflow by others. Instead, the retailer outsources bagging to you as well, decreasing net efficiency even further.
and it's a different side of the equation, potentially subject to a different line of automation
Of course you can always jump to another lilypad when the current one starts to sink, but kitchen automation wasn't the subject of this thread.
An automated McDonalds has six kiosks in the same place. Even if the customers took twice as long on average at two minutes, there would still be a 50% increase in OPH.
Again, you're looking at this strictly from the perspective of the efficiency of the restaurant. In your example, to get a 50% increase in throughput, you're expending three times as much labor -- except the restaurant doesn't care because to it, the labor is now free. To the population of McDonalds patrons, ordering now takes twice as long as it did. Overall efficiency has gone down.
This is assuming, however, that the bottleneck is in the ordering process. Kiosks aren't going to speed up anything if it's isn't the bottleneck.
Exactly -- it isn't, because your food doesn't just immediately fly into your hands the instant you're done ordering. See my last post.
It's less efficient for an individual purchase, but if you can get more lines in the same space, you can get more purchases with more machines and more lines.
If it's less efficient for an individual purchase and more purchases are occurring, net inefficiency can't do anything but go up. To the extent the restaurant is increasing its efficiency, it's doing so by externalizing work to the individual consumers -- work they generally can't do as efficiently as those they're replacing. How is so-called "automation" like this any good if it ends up costing society more time than without it?
Waiting in line is a waste of time.
I don't think this would save nearly as much time over the entire transaction (from ordering to eating) as you might think. During rush periods, the time for the kitchen to cook your food and the time for a server to assemble it would be the limiting factor. You'd just end up standing around longer waiting for your food after you order.
All these people whining about minimum wage increases causing more automation like it's a bad thing. You've all got it backwards. Human labor has been undervalued, so nobody bothered to put effort into being more efficient.
"Automation" is a bit of stretch here -- we're talking about self-service ordering kiosks. This is effectively just turning around the screen the employee would have used to enter my order and making me use it instead. In most cases that's going to result in a net decrease in efficiency, not an increase. This should be clear enough to anyone who has stood in line watching people endlessly screw around at self-checkout kiosks at a grocery store.
Iin places like Australia they pay $14+ per hour to fast food workers, and somehow the price of a value meal is the same there as it is here.
It's kinda sad, IMO, that this has to explained. Even once.
It's actually kinda sad that it has to be explained -- even once -- that there's no such thing as a free lunch. The reality behind your misleading statistic has been well understood for years now:
To start, some Australians actually make less than the adult minimum wage. The country allows lower pay for teenagers, and the labor deal McDonald's struck with its employees currently pays 16-year-olds roughly US$8 an hour, not altogether different from what they'd make in the states. In an email, Greg Bamber, a professor at Australia's Monash University who has studied labor relations in the country's fast food industry, told me that as a result, McDonald's relies heavily on young workers in Australia.
He might also be carrying it in locations/situations that should be secure.
I might also be Oprah's love child, and so might not have to work another day for the rest of my life. But the world might be about to end tomorrow anyway, so it might not matter.
Did Mike share top secret information over his personal email? No.
Actually, we do not know what was shared. They are explicitly witholding "sensitive" emails.
AC conspiracy-mongering aside, we do know for a fact that he didn't share top secret information over his personal email for the profoundly simple reason that he wouldn't have had a top secret clearance at the time.
So there's no way he could have had top secret information to share -- unless, of course, Hillary emailed it to him.
The Federal Circuit didn't "throw out" a penny of damages. They were already gone nearly two years ago. The summary even correctly reflects this when quoting the Reuters article -- the district court itself threw out the original damages verdict, and all the Federal Circuit was deciding was whether there could be any liability at all. If it hadn't ruled like this, the case would have gone back to the district court for a new trial on damages.
if that were true, how would they have gotten the patents in the first place?
At least in part because the goalposts have been moved since then. The Supreme Court's recent Alice decision that really opened the floodgates to patents like this being so readily invalidated happened after these patents issued.
Slashdot Mirror
They make very little profit on anything they sell, all the profit comes from membership fees.
Even if true, that seems orthogonal to the question of whether they fit the profile of a "small competitor." Costco reported northward of $2 billion in net income last year.
The cost of a patent battle are large, they could probably afford it but the patent holder is betting they won't want to spend the money.
If true, that was a bad bet -- Costco is the one that filed the lawsuit.
If you read TFA you will see that "why we can't have nice things for cheap" refers to the tactic employed by large companies of threatening legal action against small competitors that those competitors can't afford to defend against
Yeah, that's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Costco -- an itty-bitty company that can't afford to defend itself.
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, sue.
Or, you could just as glibly say: those who could, did, and those who couldn't, copied.
I have no idea if that's actually how it went down, just as I presume you have no particular evidence this is a nuisance suit. But if Costco did indeed copy Acushnet's patented features, I take it you wouldn't deny the actual inventor legal recourse.
Somewhat like the paper wraps a large number of words around a really basic (and laughably ridiculous) premise, you've wrapped a large number of words around a really basic troll technique: isolating one thing I said, plugging in your own set of silly assumptions (e.g., that a couple of tokers in their parents' basement have already saved enough money that a ~10x increase would leave them financially independent, and that they could stay in their parents' basement for the 33 years it would take to reach that point), ignoring the larger context of my analogy, and having your way with the resultant straw man. Thus endeth the benefit of the doubt.
The big-picture point you're ducking is that the authors' math requires worldwide reductions of a degree and over a sustained of a period of time that will not happen. Once more, and all together now: Will. Not. Happen.
Though they of course can't suffer the loss of face that would result from saying this in plain English, the authors themselves pretty much admit their entire premise is a pipe dream: "We cannot predict where civilization will be mid-century, but a decadal staircase based on a carbon law, if adopted broadly, may provide essential economic boundary conditions to make a zero-emissions future an inevitability rather than wishful thinking." So if every country of any size across the globe commits to a framework that would force them to implement every single condition the authors say is required for such sustained reductions at such an aggressive rate (including, according to the authors, little no to oil use worldwide less than 23 years from now -- there are many other hilarious examples, but I think that one most succinctly captures the wide-eyed naivete of it all), ipso facto those reductions will happen. Really sage stuff.
Thus, my original point fully stands: a supposed peer-reviewed science journal is simultaneously wasting space and flushing what remaining credibility it might have by publishing what the authors themselves basically admit is really just a pie-in-the-sky fairy tale -- one which, when you strip away the sciency-sounding veneer and cloud of two-dollar words, is qualitatively indistinguishable from my example.
You strike me as a last-word sort of guy, so have at it. I've spent more than enough time putting the rattle back up on the high chair on this one.
This is not an argument, it's posturing.
Ok, Matt. Though I've already spelled it out elsewhere for another coy poster, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt -- once -- that you're not just trolling and you really can't see why the burden should be on people like you to explain why there's a cogent thought in this paper worth discussing, not the other way around.
The thesis of this "scientific paper" is basically like a couple of tokers sitting around in their parents' basement saying "DUUUUDE... what if the money in our savings account DOUBLED EVERY YEAR?!??? By the time our parents kick us out, we'll never have to work again. We could just, like, go to the bank and tell them they need to do this and stuff, 'cause we'd be totally poor if they didn't. DUUUUDE."
I sure do hope you can see (1) why a thought process like that -- which is indisputably mathematically correct, and yet utterly decoupled from reality -- shouldn't ever leave that basement, much less be published in what professes to be a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and (2) that most professedly sentient beings would not haughtily demand a blow-by-blow explanation as to why.
It's hilarious (in a sad sort of way) to see the "consensus" attack dogs come out to defend the kind of mindless drivel that is this paper, published in what alleges to be a scientific journal.
It's doubly hilarious that, rather than even attempting to justify why the mindless drivel is anything but, you simply fall back on the reflexive ad hominem "denialists" -- this, in the midst of a high-horse post about supposed "empty rhetoric."
Post may contain irony
Indeed.
Unless the summary is fundamentally inaccurate (which I don't see you suggesting), the paper is just a science-veneered, prolix riff on the ages-old saying, "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride."
It really doesn't take much to get published in Science these days, does it?
Plus he can still sue e-bay according to the article "Quote" A patent can be infringed when someone sells or "offers to sell" a patented invention "End Quote"
No, he can't.
The court extensively analyzed the "offer to sell" precedent and concluded that a listing on eBay is not an offer to sell by eBay. And the patent owner admitted eBay didn't "sell" the products at issue. This is all on pages 4-9 of the opinion linked in the summary (and is also explained in the rest of the Ars Technica article below the soundbite you clipped out).
In reality he probably just need to go to the court and get an injunction, probably the eBay sellers will just give up at that point
It's fairly ironic that the Supreme Court precedent that would prevent him from "just" getting an injunction is eBay v. MercExchange....
Libertarians believe that companies that oppress users will fail in the marketplace.
A few thoughts:
1. They generally do fail -- just not in the time frame you would prefer.
2. I think you may have really meant "companies that oppress users to a far greater degree than they benefit them." I can quite comfortably predict that for any company of any size you might care to name there's a disproportionately vocal minority that has come up with something to whine about.
3. The specific situation we're talking about here is not simply a company oppressing users in a vacuum, but doing so using the cudgels of overbearing legislation (DMCA) and court precedent (EULAs). That's about as anti-libertarian as you can get.
BTW, College tuition is only really going wacko because the government stepped in and made student loans so easy to get.
538 [fivethirtyeight.com] says you're wrong.
Did you even read the article you cited? Here's a fun excerpt (emphasis mine):
"Among for-profit institutions, it is much more difficult to pin down a reason for tuition increases, though recent research suggests that one big cause is the generosity of federal student aid : Some institutions may be raising tuition in order to capture as much government-backed money as possible."
From the bill:
THE ASSIGNMENT OF A PATENT BY A PUBLIC SENIOR HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION TO A PATENT ASSERTION ENTITY SHALL BE CONSIDERED VOID AND UNENFORCEABLE.
So a middleman buys the patents, then turns around and assigns them to an assertion entity. This is often how the larger players do it anyway (so the original patent owner doesn't understand who it really is and thus jack up the price).
Look, it's an easy mistake to make, only thinking of efficiency in one dimension, but it's not that hard of a concept, especially for a /.er.
Maybe you're so fixated on the specific point you're trying to make that (1) you don't comprehend that your point is fully orthogonal to my original point that you jumped on; and (2) ironically enough, you don't comprehend that you're the one who is only thinking of efficiency in one dimension.
I'm looking at efficiency in terms of the number of person-minutes required to complete the end-to-end transaction: walking into the restaurant to holding my food in my hand. That takes all externalities into account, which is sorta what you need to do if you're going to have an intellectually honest conversation about whether a given piece of technology increases efficiency.
You, on the other hand, are focused on the single (and largely irrelevant) measure of how long the first part of the transaction (sending the order to the kitchen) takes. A kitchen during peak times quickly reaches its peak throughput limit, at which point it simply doesn't matter how quickly you're able to push orders back to them: the food will not come out any faster. This isn't particularly complicated.
I have retail software development experience, and line busting is a way of dealing with long lines
And there you have it: as the saying goes, when you're carrying around a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Problem is, here we're not talking about waiting in line for a kiosk that, e.g., dispenses tickets, and thus ends the transaction at the kiosk. We're talking about waiting in line for a kiosk that then dumps you in another line to wait for your food. Context matters.
It's only a loss of efficiency if the patron considers ordering to be less preferable to waiting
Given your recent request for "compelling evidence," I'll wait for you to provide that for the above proposition. A dash of common sense would suggest it's quite the opposite: that the average person would rather spend the time they're waiting to get their food doing other things (talking, reading, thinking, etc.) rather than bumbling around on an ordering kiosk and thus lengthening their end-to-end time in the restaurant.
Or think of it in terms of normal checkout in a retail store.
Utterly apples and oranges -- in a retail store, your work with the kiosk doesn't kick off another capacity-limited workflow by others. Instead, the retailer outsources bagging to you as well, decreasing net efficiency even further.
and it's a different side of the equation, potentially subject to a different line of automation
Of course you can always jump to another lilypad when the current one starts to sink, but kitchen automation wasn't the subject of this thread.
An automated McDonalds has six kiosks in the same place. Even if the customers took twice as long on average at two minutes, there would still be a 50% increase in OPH.
Again, you're looking at this strictly from the perspective of the efficiency of the restaurant. In your example, to get a 50% increase in throughput, you're expending three times as much labor -- except the restaurant doesn't care because to it, the labor is now free. To the population of McDonalds patrons, ordering now takes twice as long as it did. Overall efficiency has gone down.
This is assuming, however, that the bottleneck is in the ordering process. Kiosks aren't going to speed up anything if it's isn't the bottleneck.
Exactly -- it isn't, because your food doesn't just immediately fly into your hands the instant you're done ordering. See my last post.
It's less efficient for an individual purchase, but if you can get more lines in the same space, you can get more purchases with more machines and more lines.
If it's less efficient for an individual purchase and more purchases are occurring, net inefficiency can't do anything but go up. To the extent the restaurant is increasing its efficiency, it's doing so by externalizing work to the individual consumers -- work they generally can't do as efficiently as those they're replacing. How is so-called "automation" like this any good if it ends up costing society more time than without it?
Waiting in line is a waste of time.
I don't think this would save nearly as much time over the entire transaction (from ordering to eating) as you might think. During rush periods, the time for the kitchen to cook your food and the time for a server to assemble it would be the limiting factor. You'd just end up standing around longer waiting for your food after you order.
All these people whining about minimum wage increases causing more automation like it's a bad thing. You've all got it backwards. Human labor has been undervalued, so nobody bothered to put effort into being more efficient.
"Automation" is a bit of stretch here -- we're talking about self-service ordering kiosks. This is effectively just turning around the screen the employee would have used to enter my order and making me use it instead. In most cases that's going to result in a net decrease in efficiency, not an increase. This should be clear enough to anyone who has stood in line watching people endlessly screw around at self-checkout kiosks at a grocery store.
Iin places like Australia they pay $14+ per hour to fast food workers, and somehow the price of a value meal is the same there as it is here.
It's kinda sad, IMO, that this has to explained. Even once.
It's actually kinda sad that it has to be explained -- even once -- that there's no such thing as a free lunch. The reality behind your misleading statistic has been well understood for years now:
To start, some Australians actually make less than the adult minimum wage. The country allows lower pay for teenagers, and the labor deal McDonald's struck with its employees currently pays 16-year-olds roughly US$8 an hour, not altogether different from what they'd make in the states. In an email, Greg Bamber, a professor at Australia's Monash University who has studied labor relations in the country's fast food industry, told me that as a result, McDonald's relies heavily on young workers in Australia.
He might also be carrying it in locations/situations that should be secure.
I might also be Oprah's love child, and so might not have to work another day for the rest of my life. But the world might be about to end tomorrow anyway, so it might not matter.
Isn't this fun?
I just love the people who think they've found a massive smoking gun here -- you're far from the first.
Trump is using an unsecured phone to send... tweets. Messages broadcast to the universe.
Just imagine the harm that could befall the nation if one of those were to be intercepted.
You idiot.
Did Mike share top secret information over his personal email? No.
Actually, we do not know what was shared. They are explicitly witholding "sensitive" emails.
AC conspiracy-mongering aside, we do know for a fact that he didn't share top secret information over his personal email for the profoundly simple reason that he wouldn't have had a top secret clearance at the time.
So there's no way he could have had top secret information to share -- unless, of course, Hillary emailed it to him.
Sounds like a win-win to me.
The Federal Circuit didn't "throw out" a penny of damages. They were already gone nearly two years ago. The summary even correctly reflects this when quoting the Reuters article -- the district court itself threw out the original damages verdict, and all the Federal Circuit was deciding was whether there could be any liability at all. If it hadn't ruled like this, the case would have gone back to the district court for a new trial on damages.
if that were true, how would they have gotten the patents in the first place?
At least in part because the goalposts have been moved since then. The Supreme Court's recent Alice decision that really opened the floodgates to patents like this being so readily invalidated happened after these patents issued.