While the specific examples will vary, I can certainly vouch for having had similar problems.
Getting printing working on my linux system was a pain. Then every few years it tends to break. Right now I can't print, due to some update to the foomatic libraries, or maybe it was cups. I suspect that most of the popular print drivers were updated, but my printer is probably going on 5-6 years old and was never super-popular.
That said, Windows is not free from these sorts of problems either. I upgraded a PC to Windows 7 and it is having plug-and-play issues with the network card. From what I can tell it is some issue somewhere between the BIOS and the network card and the drivers for each. All of the above are about 5-6 years old, and are using the built-in drivers in Windows 7. The network card is the venerable DFE-530TX (Rev D - which apparently is a bit of a collector's item), and google says that the consensus is to buy new hardware.
Some distros make this sort of thing more seamless than others, but really they all fall short to some extent or another.
If you think a stock is undervalued you buy some of it. If you think it is overvalued you sell some of it.
In your example there are people selling at $6, and buying at $4. If I think the intrinsic value is $5 then I can put out buys at 4.50 and sells at 5.50 and be the first person anybody goes to to make a trade, and make a profit on every one (assuming the real value really is $5).
So, what you're saying is that if I start out a new business in the EU, I should break any law that makes it harder to compete. Then once I've been told to obey it, do so consistently (for that law only).
Violation of laws should be responded to punitively, in general. I'm also not a big fan of resolving them via civil suits - regulators should be proactively going after them.
The other side of the demand curve is competition with other products.
In the US a product with a 2 year warranty has to compete against products with a 1 year warranty (or less). The glut of products like this probably diminishes the perceived value of the luxury product because of a flood of lower price points.
In Europe that lower-warranty pool of products does not exist. So, it will be harder for cheaper products to undercut Apple on costs. On the other hand, unless Apple really cranks up their warranty it also makes it hard for Apple to distinguish itself on quality. If a phone you intend to replace in two years has a two year warranty that almost makes build quality irrelevant.
Sure, but all it takes is some code getting run anywhere on a corporate LAN to run through it like wildfire. Firewalls are an obvious layer of protection, but you can't have big security holes on the other side, otherwise you're talking worm city.
The whole reason that Iran and North Korea even began pursuing nuclear weapons is because of that incredibly stupid "Axis of Evil" speech that George Bush made in 2003.
While I agree with much of what you say, I can't say that the speech was stupid. He did get re-elected, and the job of any public official who can seek another term is to get elected for another term. Anything they really do while in office really should just be viewed as part of their campaign.
Talking tough on something might harm the country, but as long as it riles up the voters and gets them to pull the right lever, you'll see it time and time again.
Any time people scratch their heads at the behavior of CEOs or elected officials they usually make the mistake of assuming that they're honestly working for the betterment of whoever is paying them. If you simply assume they're out for themselves it all falls into place.
Interesting - issues like this come up between states in the US as well. I think the big difference is that state law doesn't have the level of variation that EU law has, and limited state sovereignty has been around for 200 years which of course is why there isn't as much variation.
The EU nations are slowly becoming like US states - a step bigger than zoning boards, but not the sovereign entities that can do everything from mint money to wage war. With a structure like either the US or EU governments in many cases the only thing that local government can do is shoot itself in the foot, as with the driving regulations example. You see stuff like this right now with the internet sales tax controversy in the US, and states granting exemptions to taxes to businesses in general in exchange for building facilities.
The big issue in the EU is that this is all new, and that leads to the fear you describe.
Well, I can remember all the ruckus it created in lawmaking bodies (quick - ban it fast!). And there was a period of time where you couldn't go three days about hearing about some congressional hearing about "push."
Not sure it is likely to happen though, unless Righthaven speculatively purchased those rights for a considerable fee (not unlike what happens with debt collectors - they buy your $1k loan for $300, and then they make a profit if they can get more than that).
Yeah, I'll be the first to agree that patent durations probably aren't optimal. They're far better than copyright, but across the board they probably need adjustment. They probably should be set by industry to reflect the pace of innovation. Within the drug industry it probably would make sense to adjust them to some degree based on need/volume. You might offer a really long patent for a drug that treats some really rare disease to give somebody more incentive to go after it (orphan drugs as they're often called). You might offer a short one if it sells $5B/yr - after the first $25B I'm sure they've made back their investment. And so on...
To a degree this is already done with a few laws that give patent extensions of six months or so for doing certain things, like testing your drug on children.
All that said, if you want to solve the way costs are borne you either need universal insurance or government-funded R&D. Otherwise you'll always have issues where poor people can't afford medications.
Yup, I hear that worked really well for sulfanilamide.
The problem with this approach is that it is very difficult for consumers to determine if a pill is safe to take. A bad pill can look exactly the same as a good one. That stems both from quality issues during manufacture, and also from whether the drug itself is safe.
Figuring out if a drug is effective will cost hundreds of millions of dollars with or without regulation. All getting rid of regulation will do is let you sell it without bothering to figure that out, as with herbal supplements. How will a $5 pill compete with a 10 cent supplement when neither has any evidence to support it. And, if the $5 pill has evidence, how do you know it isn't just cooked up if nobody is auditing the books?
Yeah, but the next time they sue somebody their target will be more likely to roll over without a fight.
Sure, if they fight they're likely to win, but they're also likely not to recover anything. So, as long as the troll asks for less money than the cost of litigation, the defendent may roll over.
That is the problem with the legal system - you lose even if you win.
Something I wouldn't mind having a record of: Video footage around my home, video footage of the area around me, gps coordinates of my location, audio from all of the video, and index of faces and text against timecode for all of the video footage.
Why? Lots of reasons. For one, I can submit video evidence regarding anything that happens that might concern a court (well, assuming you get rid of backwards laws, or maybe I wear a T-shirt and post signs informing all of what is going on). I also can spot any unusual activity - like unusual people around my house/etc. If somebody robs me, chances are that I not only have video of it, but video of the same person driving their car by my house two years prior and their license plate, or maybe their face in my kid's yearbook when I happened to thumb through it 10 years before that. When somebody walks by I don't have to guess where I know them from. If I'm shopping for cereal at one store, I can look up what the price was on the cereal when I happened to be in another store a week before. And so on...
There's a reason DHS is paying a lot of money to collect this kind of data on everybody. If you just retain data long enough, you can get quite a bit just from everything you happen to incidentally encounter.
The next step is to pool information with others. Do that with enough people and suddenly you know as much as anybody about everything going on.
So draft the contract such that the government (or some agent of the government... another bidder?) gets to report bugs and the service is not complete until the bugs are gone.
Yeah, but would the guy writing the contract want to do that to the nice guy who takes 12 senators per month out to a really nice lunch, and makes sure they're always stocked with the latest gadgets/etc?
I'm surprised this stuff hasn't taken off more. From what I read after 9/11 there was a big push to get cops to do more enforcement of minor offenses. If you pull somebody over with an expired sticker on their car, then you get to ask for their license and run it. You never know what watch list they might be on.
Well, tracking a reported-stolen device with a GPS is just probable cause to enter a private residence, and who knows what you'll find there. Even if it turns out the device wasn't even stolen anything the cop sees is probably fair game. Walk into enough houses, and eventually you'll find something big.
Sounds like a suggestion I read (probably on/.) about avoiding TSA luggage tampering. Place a component of a gun in your luggage and declare it at the counter - the luggage has to be secure and locked, and they'll search it in your presence and you keep the only key. A component creates less gun law hassles at your destination, though obviously you'd be an idiot not to be VERY familiar with the laws.
Yep. And things like expiring patents that are round-about taxation. Good argument for estate (death) taxes.
What do you mean by "expiring patents?" Do you mean revoking them before the planned expiration date? If so, that is basically like trying to fix the homeless problem by taxing anybody who feeds homeless people.
The idea is that you tax the people not working on drug R&D, and give the money to people who will do it. Or, more typically you just tax everybody in proportion to their income, since that is easier to administrate.
Basically if you want less of something, tax it. If you want more of something, subsidize it (either with cash or with some kind of artificial market manipulation like patents - though the latter may not distribute costs in a desirable manner). If you want more drugs that DON'T cost lots of money, the last thing you want to do is tax the people making drugs. If anything you offer to pay them for drugs, on the condition that they become royalty free.
Often local police don't pursue small crimes like theft. They don't fingerprint cars that have stolen radios, or follow-up when you report your cell phone stolen (despite the fact that it probably broadcasts a GUID and is GPS trackable with a warrant).
However, going after small crimes can be a way to go after big crimes. Somebody who has stolen an iPad could very well be into some other crime, and when you walk into their house anything in plain sight is fair game. Plus there is the whole bit about nipping problems in the bud - the teenager stealing radios today could be trading in guns in a few years.
Sure, fingerprinting the car with a stolen radio costs more than replacing the radio, but the goal isn't to replace the radio - it is to deter real crime, and send the message that stealing is going to get you in trouble.
First, many password schemes (especially older ones) are limited to some number of characters. I've seen older unix systems that truncated passwords at 8 chars, so somebody typing in applesauceisaverypastydish295 was hashed based on "applesau" which is a trivial dictionary hit.
Next, you only have 3 words, and they're fairly short. The capitalization of ME will add entropy, but if you start with short and common words you could easily hit that combination much faster than "giraffe pamphlet paint silhouette."
The problem here is the tragedy of the commons. Let's say that 95% of the population decides to invest in "ethical companies" that have little growth but do lots of wonderful things.
I decide to be a greedy bastard and invest in "evil company" which only invests in stuff that makes a buck.
We all retire. I get all the free benefits to the world that 95% of the population funded, plus I get a big fat bank account since I invested in a company focused completely on increasing shareholder value. Everybody else gets to watch me mooch while I sit on my yacht, and they all worry about social security payment reductions because their investments haven't grown over time.
Pretty quickly 95% of the population is buying stock in "evil company" and "ethical companies" collapse.
If everybody kept investing in charity work then sure, we'd all be a lot better off. However, all it takes is for every single person to be a little bit selfish and the whole thing collapses. Unfortunately, human nature is that we're all a little bit selfish.
It would be wonderful if charity alone could address the drug discovery problem. However, for whatever reason it hasn't happened yet, and I'm skeptical as a result that it will ever happen, any more that charity will be able to fund road maintenance. The only really effective solution to the tragedy of the commons is government taxation.
No, the bloggers just get the right to sue over the articles, which a court has already ruled is without value, and which they wouldn't use anyway because they're not .
If anything the business model is validated to an extent. They still wreaked havoc on the defendant, and the defendant can't recover their costs since there is nothing to recover.
That is the problem with IP trolls - they require little capital to operate, and the companies they go after have quite a bit of capital (in most cases). So, they have little downside and considerable upside. In theory a single lawyer could work for a half-dozen of them, so that if one hits the jackpot it can pay out to its shareholders and divest itself of assets to prepare for the next suit, and if one loses it just folds.
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While the specific examples will vary, I can certainly vouch for having had similar problems.
Getting printing working on my linux system was a pain. Then every few years it tends to break. Right now I can't print, due to some update to the foomatic libraries, or maybe it was cups. I suspect that most of the popular print drivers were updated, but my printer is probably going on 5-6 years old and was never super-popular.
That said, Windows is not free from these sorts of problems either. I upgraded a PC to Windows 7 and it is having plug-and-play issues with the network card. From what I can tell it is some issue somewhere between the BIOS and the network card and the drivers for each. All of the above are about 5-6 years old, and are using the built-in drivers in Windows 7. The network card is the venerable DFE-530TX (Rev D - which apparently is a bit of a collector's item), and google says that the consensus is to buy new hardware.
Some distros make this sort of thing more seamless than others, but really they all fall short to some extent or another.
You don't need HFT to have market markers.
If you think a stock is undervalued you buy some of it. If you think it is overvalued you sell some of it.
In your example there are people selling at $6, and buying at $4. If I think the intrinsic value is $5 then I can put out buys at 4.50 and sells at 5.50 and be the first person anybody goes to to make a trade, and make a profit on every one (assuming the real value really is $5).
So, what you're saying is that if I start out a new business in the EU, I should break any law that makes it harder to compete. Then once I've been told to obey it, do so consistently (for that law only).
Violation of laws should be responded to punitively, in general. I'm also not a big fan of resolving them via civil suits - regulators should be proactively going after them.
Ok, so I get to borrow $200M for 3 years, and pay $200k in interest at the end (assuming you lose and the other guy doesn't have to pay it).
The other side of the demand curve is competition with other products.
In the US a product with a 2 year warranty has to compete against products with a 1 year warranty (or less). The glut of products like this probably diminishes the perceived value of the luxury product because of a flood of lower price points.
In Europe that lower-warranty pool of products does not exist. So, it will be harder for cheaper products to undercut Apple on costs. On the other hand, unless Apple really cranks up their warranty it also makes it hard for Apple to distinguish itself on quality. If a phone you intend to replace in two years has a two year warranty that almost makes build quality irrelevant.
Sure, but all it takes is some code getting run anywhere on a corporate LAN to run through it like wildfire. Firewalls are an obvious layer of protection, but you can't have big security holes on the other side, otherwise you're talking worm city.
The whole reason that Iran and North Korea even began pursuing nuclear weapons is because of that incredibly stupid "Axis of Evil" speech that George Bush made in 2003.
While I agree with much of what you say, I can't say that the speech was stupid. He did get re-elected, and the job of any public official who can seek another term is to get elected for another term. Anything they really do while in office really should just be viewed as part of their campaign.
Talking tough on something might harm the country, but as long as it riles up the voters and gets them to pull the right lever, you'll see it time and time again.
Any time people scratch their heads at the behavior of CEOs or elected officials they usually make the mistake of assuming that they're honestly working for the betterment of whoever is paying them. If you simply assume they're out for themselves it all falls into place.
Interesting - issues like this come up between states in the US as well. I think the big difference is that state law doesn't have the level of variation that EU law has, and limited state sovereignty has been around for 200 years which of course is why there isn't as much variation.
The EU nations are slowly becoming like US states - a step bigger than zoning boards, but not the sovereign entities that can do everything from mint money to wage war. With a structure like either the US or EU governments in many cases the only thing that local government can do is shoot itself in the foot, as with the driving regulations example. You see stuff like this right now with the internet sales tax controversy in the US, and states granting exemptions to taxes to businesses in general in exchange for building facilities.
The big issue in the EU is that this is all new, and that leads to the fear you describe.
Transistor: no entry.
No surprise there. Wonder if they have an entry for Triode. :)
Well, I can remember all the ruckus it created in lawmaking bodies (quick - ban it fast!). And there was a period of time where you couldn't go three days about hearing about some congressional hearing about "push."
Nah - I just misread line 4. Whoops...
Not sure it is likely to happen though, unless Righthaven speculatively purchased those rights for a considerable fee (not unlike what happens with debt collectors - they buy your $1k loan for $300, and then they make a profit if they can get more than that).
Yeah, I'll be the first to agree that patent durations probably aren't optimal. They're far better than copyright, but across the board they probably need adjustment. They probably should be set by industry to reflect the pace of innovation. Within the drug industry it probably would make sense to adjust them to some degree based on need/volume. You might offer a really long patent for a drug that treats some really rare disease to give somebody more incentive to go after it (orphan drugs as they're often called). You might offer a short one if it sells $5B/yr - after the first $25B I'm sure they've made back their investment. And so on...
To a degree this is already done with a few laws that give patent extensions of six months or so for doing certain things, like testing your drug on children.
All that said, if you want to solve the way costs are borne you either need universal insurance or government-funded R&D. Otherwise you'll always have issues where poor people can't afford medications.
Yup, I hear that worked really well for sulfanilamide.
The problem with this approach is that it is very difficult for consumers to determine if a pill is safe to take. A bad pill can look exactly the same as a good one. That stems both from quality issues during manufacture, and also from whether the drug itself is safe.
Figuring out if a drug is effective will cost hundreds of millions of dollars with or without regulation. All getting rid of regulation will do is let you sell it without bothering to figure that out, as with herbal supplements. How will a $5 pill compete with a 10 cent supplement when neither has any evidence to support it. And, if the $5 pill has evidence, how do you know it isn't just cooked up if nobody is auditing the books?
Yeah, but the next time they sue somebody their target will be more likely to roll over without a fight.
Sure, if they fight they're likely to win, but they're also likely not to recover anything. So, as long as the troll asks for less money than the cost of litigation, the defendent may roll over.
That is the problem with the legal system - you lose even if you win.
Something I wouldn't mind having a record of: Video footage around my home, video footage of the area around me, gps coordinates of my location, audio from all of the video, and index of faces and text against timecode for all of the video footage.
Why? Lots of reasons. For one, I can submit video evidence regarding anything that happens that might concern a court (well, assuming you get rid of backwards laws, or maybe I wear a T-shirt and post signs informing all of what is going on). I also can spot any unusual activity - like unusual people around my house/etc. If somebody robs me, chances are that I not only have video of it, but video of the same person driving their car by my house two years prior and their license plate, or maybe their face in my kid's yearbook when I happened to thumb through it 10 years before that. When somebody walks by I don't have to guess where I know them from. If I'm shopping for cereal at one store, I can look up what the price was on the cereal when I happened to be in another store a week before. And so on...
There's a reason DHS is paying a lot of money to collect this kind of data on everybody. If you just retain data long enough, you can get quite a bit just from everything you happen to incidentally encounter.
The next step is to pool information with others. Do that with enough people and suddenly you know as much as anybody about everything going on.
So draft the contract such that the government (or some agent of the government... another bidder?) gets to report bugs and the service is not complete until the bugs are gone.
Yeah, but would the guy writing the contract want to do that to the nice guy who takes 12 senators per month out to a really nice lunch, and makes sure they're always stocked with the latest gadgets/etc?
I'm surprised this stuff hasn't taken off more. From what I read after 9/11 there was a big push to get cops to do more enforcement of minor offenses. If you pull somebody over with an expired sticker on their car, then you get to ask for their license and run it. You never know what watch list they might be on.
Well, tracking a reported-stolen device with a GPS is just probable cause to enter a private residence, and who knows what you'll find there. Even if it turns out the device wasn't even stolen anything the cop sees is probably fair game. Walk into enough houses, and eventually you'll find something big.
Sounds like a suggestion I read (probably on /.) about avoiding TSA luggage tampering. Place a component of a gun in your luggage and declare it at the counter - the luggage has to be secure and locked, and they'll search it in your presence and you keep the only key. A component creates less gun law hassles at your destination, though obviously you'd be an idiot not to be VERY familiar with the laws.
Yep. And things like expiring patents that are round-about taxation. Good argument for estate (death) taxes.
What do you mean by "expiring patents?" Do you mean revoking them before the planned expiration date? If so, that is basically like trying to fix the homeless problem by taxing anybody who feeds homeless people.
The idea is that you tax the people not working on drug R&D, and give the money to people who will do it. Or, more typically you just tax everybody in proportion to their income, since that is easier to administrate.
Basically if you want less of something, tax it. If you want more of something, subsidize it (either with cash or with some kind of artificial market manipulation like patents - though the latter may not distribute costs in a desirable manner). If you want more drugs that DON'T cost lots of money, the last thing you want to do is tax the people making drugs. If anything you offer to pay them for drugs, on the condition that they become royalty free.
Often local police don't pursue small crimes like theft. They don't fingerprint cars that have stolen radios, or follow-up when you report your cell phone stolen (despite the fact that it probably broadcasts a GUID and is GPS trackable with a warrant).
However, going after small crimes can be a way to go after big crimes. Somebody who has stolen an iPad could very well be into some other crime, and when you walk into their house anything in plain sight is fair game. Plus there is the whole bit about nipping problems in the bud - the teenager stealing radios today could be trading in guns in a few years.
Sure, fingerprinting the car with a stolen radio costs more than replacing the radio, but the goal isn't to replace the radio - it is to deter real crime, and send the message that stealing is going to get you in trouble.
Yup - I see nothing here to suggest consoles are dying - only that other things right now are growing faster.
If you want a killer business model try the hula hoop. Whoever came up with that made a bundle - for about six months.
A few potential issues there:
First, many password schemes (especially older ones) are limited to some number of characters. I've seen older unix systems that truncated passwords at 8 chars, so somebody typing in applesauceisaverypastydish295 was hashed based on "applesau" which is a trivial dictionary hit.
Next, you only have 3 words, and they're fairly short. The capitalization of ME will add entropy, but if you start with short and common words you could easily hit that combination much faster than "giraffe pamphlet paint silhouette."
The problem here is the tragedy of the commons. Let's say that 95% of the population decides to invest in "ethical companies" that have little growth but do lots of wonderful things.
I decide to be a greedy bastard and invest in "evil company" which only invests in stuff that makes a buck.
We all retire. I get all the free benefits to the world that 95% of the population funded, plus I get a big fat bank account since I invested in a company focused completely on increasing shareholder value. Everybody else gets to watch me mooch while I sit on my yacht, and they all worry about social security payment reductions because their investments haven't grown over time.
Pretty quickly 95% of the population is buying stock in "evil company" and "ethical companies" collapse.
If everybody kept investing in charity work then sure, we'd all be a lot better off. However, all it takes is for every single person to be a little bit selfish and the whole thing collapses. Unfortunately, human nature is that we're all a little bit selfish.
It would be wonderful if charity alone could address the drug discovery problem. However, for whatever reason it hasn't happened yet, and I'm skeptical as a result that it will ever happen, any more that charity will be able to fund road maintenance. The only really effective solution to the tragedy of the commons is government taxation.
No, the bloggers just get the right to sue over the articles, which a court has already ruled is without value, and which they wouldn't use anyway because they're not .
If anything the business model is validated to an extent. They still wreaked havoc on the defendant, and the defendant can't recover their costs since there is nothing to recover.
That is the problem with IP trolls - they require little capital to operate, and the companies they go after have quite a bit of capital (in most cases). So, they have little downside and considerable upside. In theory a single lawyer could work for a half-dozen of them, so that if one hits the jackpot it can pay out to its shareholders and divest itself of assets to prepare for the next suit, and if one loses it just folds.