What is most useful for the consumer is for other people to know how you did what you did. Before patents that kind of stuff was kept secret and lots of technologies were lost either completely or for a significant period of time(Damascus steel being a specific example). That's been part of patent law since the 14th century. In exchange for a period of protection you had to explain how you did it.
Sure, theoretically having every idea free and open from day one would be even better, but it has never worked that way. Inventions are only valuable if no one can copy them more cheaply and the kinds of companies which can copy them most cheaply tend not to be particularly innovative unless pushed.
People really have no idea how simple it would be to create perfect knockoffs at a lower price, particularly if the inventor is an individual.
Except that before patents, we had mostly trade and guild secrets enforced by beating the living daylights out of each other, frequent loss of critical knowledge and intermittent dark ages and after patents are put into place we have the greatest period of innovation in human history. I know correlation is not causation, but when you're arguing that there is a causal relationship between patents and the opposite of what happened, correlation is enough to disprove you.
Sure, developing nations steal the ideas, as they always have, including the US when it was a developing nation, but that's really beside the point as it's never really been a problem and still isn't. When developing nations become sufficiently developed that they want to interact more fully with the rest of the world (ie sell some of the stuff they ignored the patents for) they start following the rules, as even China is starting to do, and before that point, they aren't really a trade influencing factor.
There are a lot of issues with the current patent landscape, but we've seen far more innovation since patents were introduced than we ever did before and a lot less knowledge has been lost.
I think you're just using too narrow a definition of "patent troll". Patents are designed to foster innovation. They give an idea value so that people will take the risk of investing in that idea whatever the scale of the inventor. If all ideas are trivially copied once their details are known then either the ideas have no value so no one invests in them or the ideas get kept secret and we don't get to know about them and build on them. Good patents provide this functionality, they temporarily stifle competition in order to foster innovation.
Bad patents on the other hand merely stifle innovation. Patents can be bad for any number of reasons(the patent holder has no intention of seeking investment for them, the idea itself is trivial(a hard one since the whole idea of patents is that once someone shows you an idea it usually seems trivial), or the patent should not belong to the holder. Essentially these are patents with no upside for the community.
If you wield a bad patent you're a patent troll be you some little company with no assets or the latest do no wrong tech firm, if you use a good patent you're not.
This still leaves us with working out how the hell to determine things like triviality and prior art, but at least we don't have to try and determine intent. Patents, like copyrights and all sorts of other intellectual property, are a necessary evil, they always have downsides, but they're supposed to have upsides.When they don't, the holder is a troll.
They can sue you for the violation of any term of the contract you signed that wasn't either deliberately misleading, invalid, illegal or contradicted by something you can prove the salesman said. It's called a contract freely entered into by you.
Prior to today, the library of Congress made you can't unlock provisions illegal, buy they are not any longer, so you are stuck with what you signed. Don't want a contract that forbids unmoving the phone for the duration of the contract, don't sign one.
The theory is the usual "Free Market Fallacy" wherein the cost of entry to every industry is effectively zero so if you don't drop your price to $15 someone will enter the market who will. The issue of course is that the cost of entry into most industries is far from zero and so the $15 guy never enters the market and the price remains at $20. Potentially existing competitors could drive the price down, but race to the bottom doesn't really work for existing players unless they believe they can pick up and maintain a substantial enough increase in market share to make up for the loss in profits over time.
The problem which reality is showing us(though no good economist, especially right wing economists ever let pesky things like reality get in the way) is that the automatic relocation of even new workers doesn't work the way that economic theory says it should. People who work in what would be traditionally called Blue Collar roles are not always in those roles because of any lack of education or opportunity. In many cases people who do manual jobs do so because they enjoy them and/or have an affinity for them which they would not have if they were doing some sort of indoor office role, plenty of people seem to feel the same way about the non assembly line areas of food service.
In short, labor is not fungible. Not only is someone who has trained as a machinist for twenty years going to magically transform into someone working in HR overnight, but it appears that a person who if a machinist job was available would have taken that job for twenty years won't successfully become an HR drone simply because that is the job that is available. Everyone has different skills and different personalities, and just because you or I are comfortable working in an office in front of a computer doesn't mean that everyone is, and that's not even taking into account whether someone who would be comfortable doing that kind of job is able to access the education and training necessary to excel in it.
We on Slashdot tend to have a somewhat biased view of the world, we are, for the most part, information workers in a world where information work is expanding and our opportunities are a darned site rosier than many, but imagine for a moment if you were forced to do construction or work in a restaurant(or if you do those things imagine being an IT worker). It's not just about skills it's about what people are good at and can live with doing.
We bring it up because it's the argument you're already making. The existing government has issues so the solution is apparently to eliminate it and replace it with some form of magical private enterprise which is somehow angelic despite all evidence. Government has issues, but it also does a lot of good and tends as far as I can see to be slightly less evil than most alternatives. Libertarians could work with the rest of us to try and fix the broken bits, or offer some form of viable alternative, but instead it's " government bad".
I think that our justice system should be about trying to convert criminals into productive citizens, but most people seem to want blood. I think our current trial system leads to a stupid con job on both sides which leaves the outcome a crap shoot and encourages this kind of press bargaining malarkey as opposed to legit charges (and in this instance, punishments aside and with all respect to the dead, legit charges did exist).
Problem is, replacing government with private enterprise isn't going to fix any of that, because it's what people want and if they don't get to vote for it, they'll pay for it instead, only the mega rich will be even more unaccountable.
We've all done stuff in the past the difference between you and Aaron is two fold. One the times, which is sad but true, but more importantly you were in all likelihood a minor, Aaron was in his twenties. The guards even back then probably would have treated an adult differently.
The foreign exchange market is a market just like the stock market. This means it's full of wildly irrational people and ultra fast trades done by computers. There are underlying factors which affect the value of a currency(most importantly a combination of the interest rates you can get for buying bonds in said currency and the overall strength of that economy), but the actual fluctuations in price are just as irrational and insane as any other market. People buy currency X with currency Y at price Z and this determines the value of said currency. It doesn't matter how many of currency X or Y there are or how Z relates to the actual buying power of either currency.
This means that yes, the current state of the dollar is both irrational and based on sound economic principles and is fundamentally a contradiction in terms. Welcome to the modern markets my friend.
I do so love the people who insist that there's been some ridiculous amount of inflation when it's patently obvious and provable that there hasn't. The value of any given currency is at it's core, about what you can buy with it, and in a country like the US it's what you can buy locally(exchange rates impact countries that buy goods from overseas as opposed to the US which manufactures them overseas but sells them in US dollars). How many dollars there might or might not be really has no impact beyond the degree to which it affects the previously mentioned ability.
In addition to this, you have to separate out places where the cost of something has increased or decreased as compared to how your buying power has been affected. As a specific example which I'm sure, as a fiat currency is evil nutter, is near and dear to your heart, the cost of gold has skyrocketed over the last decade or so. This is not an issue of the dollar being worth less gold, but an issue of gold being worth more dollars. Whenever the economy gets a bit shaky nutters like you purchase large amounts of shiny gold metal to make themselves feel safer, and the Chinese government, for a lot of the same largely insane reasons, is doing the same thing. Demand for gold goes up against a relatively fixed supply and so prices increase. When the economy gets back on track of course, as always, gold will start to lose significant value and all the paranoid nutters will end up broke, but they won't notice because the economy will have picked back up and they'll decide it was inflation all along.
The value of the dollar is what you can buy with said dollar in the united states which barring a bit of inflation here and there(some inflation is a good thing) is about the same as it was last year or the year before.
If you're talking about the currency exchange rate, that value is set by the currency exchange market and is therefor bound by no sense of reality or sanity whatsoever in much the same way as stocks. The Australian dollar was trading at about 93 cents to the US dollar right before Lehman brothers and two months after it was sitting at 58 cents. Our economy barely had a hiccup and the US one was in the toilet, but the value of the US dollar rose dramatically. The most important factor causing the US dollar to drop has dick all to do with quantitative easing or the trillion dollar coin(which actually won't affect inflation at all since the effect on the money supply is essentially zero), mostly it has to do with the fact that the US economy is in the toilet and US interest rates are near zero, with interest rates being the bigger factor.
Microsoft are big on dogfooding, as they should be. If the people who make a product aren't using it then they aren't doing their job. I don't mean that using the product is part of their job, but if you make Windows Phones and you don't want to use that phone then you've not made the phone you should have. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't explore your competitors products, but the reason that most of the very best software written tends to be things like compilers and IDEs is because the people who write them use them for a living. When they suck, they fix them.
From what I've seen (my experience with the phone is limited to 7.5, but I've been to a bunch of Microsoft presentations about Win8 in general). It's likely to be managed C++ with a WinRT library. All the "making C++ a first class citizen" was a bit misleading as yes you could write code in C++, just as you always could, but if you wanted any of the "first class citizen" stuff you needed to use Microsoft's managed variant.
IE 10 has Do Not Track enabled by default, Google don't want do not track, but simultaneously don't want to look like they're violating it, so they blocked IE 10 on phones, not a shocker.
Microsoft have denied access to anyone, period, writing native code for Windows Phone. It's perfectly possible for any of the major vendors to release a browser(even a pretty decent one) in managed code, but it would involve all of them creating and maintaining a parallel code base which none of them want to do. If you want to port webkit to a managed language supported by windows phone and build a browser around it, nothing I've seen in Microsoft's Terms of Use will stop you(unlike Apple which allowed native code but forbid browsers).
Depends where you live. Here in Oz, the price of an average paperback is about $AU20, you'll only pay that for an ebook from amazon if it's a new release(which in hardcover would be well over $AU30 here). Can I find cheaper books if I get them shipped or find them used, sure, but the price is better than local and I will have the new book in about a minute, no matter where I am which isn't half bad.
I can't get into an e-book on a back lit screen, but on e-ink, I can and have read till the wee hours of the morning just as I did when I was a child and as a bonus my library fits in my pocket.
Getting rid of your citizenship is piss easy, you need to have somewhere else to go and if you've got more than two million in assets they'll take capital gains as if you sold all of them today and if course you have to be square with the IRS, but once you've got that sorted it's a formal declaration at an embassy or consulate. Heck if you take an office requiring an oath you lose it automatically. Of course if what you want is to renounce your citizenship to avoid taxes or start in the us without the obligations of a citizen, you're but otherwise it's really easy. You cab never get it back of course, but you want out, just get citizenship somewhere else and expatriate.
Just to put this out there yet again,.NET WORKS PERFECTLY FINE ON WINDOWS 8. Microsoft allowed managed C++ to access the new Windows RT runtimes, and the RT framework only allows a subset of the.NET framework, but all your old apps run just fine outside the metro stack regardless of your development methodology.
Yes, if you want to run your local apps locally on a surface RT some redevelopment will be required, but given your local app is probably shockingly bad under a touch interface it probably needs redevelopment for surface anyway, and converting it will be no worse than putting it on an iPad or android tablet, and in the best case might actually be fairly simple. For that matter your app is probably a web application and requires nothing at all unless you're upgrading your server and using an appallingly old version of NET.
I'm aware, though I suppose that a child hood in the home of a gun nut who was convinced the apocalypse was coming and had a readily accessible arsenal could be described as slightly deranged. Funny how all these mass murderers grew up in houses full of guns and had all the safety and target training that the pro gun folks always say will stop the problem.
Your insurance company should pay out any time you meet the requirements if your policy, however stupid they've made the terms. Insurance is a bit like a casino, sometimes three house pays out sometimes it doesn't and they set the games up so the house always wins, buy they still write the check when you win. Having your insurance company act like a company that the world wouldn't be better off without costs bigger premiums if course and it involves idiots not getting all huffy because they never use their insurance, but it can be done.
The fact that he was high functioning autistic really has nothing to do with anything, with the possible exception of the death if his mother (control and rage issues could result in killing someone who is actually there). The press is just using the usual tactic of ascribing reason to unreason. It's not their fault we pathologically need to understand why bad things happen so we can say it won't happen to us or in the case of gun owners that guns are safe. The fact is that we have no idea why some people go out and murder large numbers of people and the vast majority do not.
Result. say it was mostly not done because for the most part it didn't matter at the time. Rendering efficiency want a huge deal till we started rendering things in real time. If you asked pretty much any subject matter expert at the time "how do we make this more efficient, this kind of thing would be the likely result. Novelty can be a problem no one thought to solve, but it probably shouldn't include things that are fairly obvious if you ask the right question.
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What is most useful for the consumer is for other people to know how you did what you did. Before patents that kind of stuff was kept secret and lots of technologies were lost either completely or for a significant period of time(Damascus steel being a specific example). That's been part of patent law since the 14th century. In exchange for a period of protection you had to explain how you did it.
Sure, theoretically having every idea free and open from day one would be even better, but it has never worked that way. Inventions are only valuable if no one can copy them more cheaply and the kinds of companies which can copy them most cheaply tend not to be particularly innovative unless pushed.
People really have no idea how simple it would be to create perfect knockoffs at a lower price, particularly if the inventor is an individual.
Except that before patents, we had mostly trade and guild secrets enforced by beating the living daylights out of each other, frequent loss of critical knowledge and intermittent dark ages and after patents are put into place we have the greatest period of innovation in human history. I know correlation is not causation, but when you're arguing that there is a causal relationship between patents and the opposite of what happened, correlation is enough to disprove you.
Sure, developing nations steal the ideas, as they always have, including the US when it was a developing nation, but that's really beside the point as it's never really been a problem and still isn't. When developing nations become sufficiently developed that they want to interact more fully with the rest of the world (ie sell some of the stuff they ignored the patents for) they start following the rules, as even China is starting to do, and before that point, they aren't really a trade influencing factor.
There are a lot of issues with the current patent landscape, but we've seen far more innovation since patents were introduced than we ever did before and a lot less knowledge has been lost.
I think you're just using too narrow a definition of "patent troll". Patents are designed to foster innovation. They give an idea value so that people will take the risk of investing in that idea whatever the scale of the inventor. If all ideas are trivially copied once their details are known then either the ideas have no value so no one invests in them or the ideas get kept secret and we don't get to know about them and build on them. Good patents provide this functionality, they temporarily stifle competition in order to foster innovation.
Bad patents on the other hand merely stifle innovation. Patents can be bad for any number of reasons(the patent holder has no intention of seeking investment for them, the idea itself is trivial(a hard one since the whole idea of patents is that once someone shows you an idea it usually seems trivial), or the patent should not belong to the holder. Essentially these are patents with no upside for the community.
If you wield a bad patent you're a patent troll be you some little company with no assets or the latest do no wrong tech firm, if you use a good patent you're not.
This still leaves us with working out how the hell to determine things like triviality and prior art, but at least we don't have to try and determine intent. Patents, like copyrights and all sorts of other intellectual property, are a necessary evil, they always have downsides, but they're supposed to have upsides.When they don't, the holder is a troll.
They can sue you for the violation of any term of the contract you signed that wasn't either deliberately misleading, invalid, illegal or contradicted by something you can prove the salesman said. It's called a contract freely entered into by you.
Prior to today, the library of Congress made you can't unlock provisions illegal, buy they are not any longer, so you are stuck with what you signed. Don't want a contract that forbids unmoving the phone for the duration of the contract, don't sign one.
The theory is the usual "Free Market Fallacy" wherein the cost of entry to every industry is effectively zero so if you don't drop your price to $15 someone will enter the market who will. The issue of course is that the cost of entry into most industries is far from zero and so the $15 guy never enters the market and the price remains at $20. Potentially existing competitors could drive the price down, but race to the bottom doesn't really work for existing players unless they believe they can pick up and maintain a substantial enough increase in market share to make up for the loss in profits over time.
The problem which reality is showing us(though no good economist, especially right wing economists ever let pesky things like reality get in the way) is that the automatic relocation of even new workers doesn't work the way that economic theory says it should. People who work in what would be traditionally called Blue Collar roles are not always in those roles because of any lack of education or opportunity. In many cases people who do manual jobs do so because they enjoy them and/or have an affinity for them which they would not have if they were doing some sort of indoor office role, plenty of people seem to feel the same way about the non assembly line areas of food service.
In short, labor is not fungible. Not only is someone who has trained as a machinist for twenty years going to magically transform into someone working in HR overnight, but it appears that a person who if a machinist job was available would have taken that job for twenty years won't successfully become an HR drone simply because that is the job that is available. Everyone has different skills and different personalities, and just because you or I are comfortable working in an office in front of a computer doesn't mean that everyone is, and that's not even taking into account whether someone who would be comfortable doing that kind of job is able to access the education and training necessary to excel in it.
We on Slashdot tend to have a somewhat biased view of the world, we are, for the most part, information workers in a world where information work is expanding and our opportunities are a darned site rosier than many, but imagine for a moment if you were forced to do construction or work in a restaurant(or if you do those things imagine being an IT worker). It's not just about skills it's about what people are good at and can live with doing.
Who needs to insert a backdoor into Java? Isn't Java just one gigantic back door these days straight from Oracle?
We bring it up because it's the argument you're already making. The existing government has issues so the solution is apparently to eliminate it and replace it with some form of magical private enterprise which is somehow angelic despite all evidence. Government has issues, but it also does a lot of good and tends as far as I can see to be slightly less evil than most alternatives. Libertarians could work with the rest of us to try and fix the broken bits, or offer some form of viable alternative, but instead it's " government bad".
I think that our justice system should be about trying to convert criminals into productive citizens, but most people seem to want blood. I think our current trial system leads to a stupid con job on both sides which leaves the outcome a crap shoot and encourages this kind of press bargaining malarkey as opposed to legit charges (and in this instance, punishments aside and with all respect to the dead, legit charges did exist).
Problem is, replacing government with private enterprise isn't going to fix any of that, because it's what people want and if they don't get to vote for it, they'll pay for it instead, only the mega rich will be even more unaccountable.
We've all done stuff in the past the difference between you and Aaron is two fold. One the times, which is sad but true, but more importantly you were in all likelihood a minor, Aaron was in his twenties. The guards even back then probably would have treated an adult differently.
The foreign exchange market is a market just like the stock market. This means it's full of wildly irrational people and ultra fast trades done by computers. There are underlying factors which affect the value of a currency(most importantly a combination of the interest rates you can get for buying bonds in said currency and the overall strength of that economy), but the actual fluctuations in price are just as irrational and insane as any other market. People buy currency X with currency Y at price Z and this determines the value of said currency. It doesn't matter how many of currency X or Y there are or how Z relates to the actual buying power of either currency.
This means that yes, the current state of the dollar is both irrational and based on sound economic principles and is fundamentally a contradiction in terms. Welcome to the modern markets my friend.
I do so love the people who insist that there's been some ridiculous amount of inflation when it's patently obvious and provable that there hasn't. The value of any given currency is at it's core, about what you can buy with it, and in a country like the US it's what you can buy locally(exchange rates impact countries that buy goods from overseas as opposed to the US which manufactures them overseas but sells them in US dollars). How many dollars there might or might not be really has no impact beyond the degree to which it affects the previously mentioned ability.
In addition to this, you have to separate out places where the cost of something has increased or decreased as compared to how your buying power has been affected. As a specific example which I'm sure, as a fiat currency is evil nutter, is near and dear to your heart, the cost of gold has skyrocketed over the last decade or so. This is not an issue of the dollar being worth less gold, but an issue of gold being worth more dollars. Whenever the economy gets a bit shaky nutters like you purchase large amounts of shiny gold metal to make themselves feel safer, and the Chinese government, for a lot of the same largely insane reasons, is doing the same thing. Demand for gold goes up against a relatively fixed supply and so prices increase. When the economy gets back on track of course, as always, gold will start to lose significant value and all the paranoid nutters will end up broke, but they won't notice because the economy will have picked back up and they'll decide it was inflation all along.
The value of the dollar is what you can buy with said dollar in the united states which barring a bit of inflation here and there(some inflation is a good thing) is about the same as it was last year or the year before.
If you're talking about the currency exchange rate, that value is set by the currency exchange market and is therefor bound by no sense of reality or sanity whatsoever in much the same way as stocks. The Australian dollar was trading at about 93 cents to the US dollar right before Lehman brothers and two months after it was sitting at 58 cents. Our economy barely had a hiccup and the US one was in the toilet, but the value of the US dollar rose dramatically. The most important factor causing the US dollar to drop has dick all to do with quantitative easing or the trillion dollar coin(which actually won't affect inflation at all since the effect on the money supply is essentially zero), mostly it has to do with the fact that the US economy is in the toilet and US interest rates are near zero, with interest rates being the bigger factor.
Microsoft are big on dogfooding, as they should be. If the people who make a product aren't using it then they aren't doing their job. I don't mean that using the product is part of their job, but if you make Windows Phones and you don't want to use that phone then you've not made the phone you should have. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't explore your competitors products, but the reason that most of the very best software written tends to be things like compilers and IDEs is because the people who write them use them for a living. When they suck, they fix them.
From what I've seen (my experience with the phone is limited to 7.5, but I've been to a bunch of Microsoft presentations about Win8 in general). It's likely to be managed C++ with a WinRT library. All the "making C++ a first class citizen" was a bit misleading as yes you could write code in C++, just as you always could, but if you wanted any of the "first class citizen" stuff you needed to use Microsoft's managed variant.
IE 10 has Do Not Track enabled by default, Google don't want do not track, but simultaneously don't want to look like they're violating it, so they blocked IE 10 on phones, not a shocker.
Microsoft have denied access to anyone, period, writing native code for Windows Phone. It's perfectly possible for any of the major vendors to release a browser(even a pretty decent one) in managed code, but it would involve all of them creating and maintaining a parallel code base which none of them want to do. If you want to port webkit to a managed language supported by windows phone and build a browser around it, nothing I've seen in Microsoft's Terms of Use will stop you(unlike Apple which allowed native code but forbid browsers).
Depends where you live. Here in Oz, the price of an average paperback is about $AU20, you'll only pay that for an ebook from amazon if it's a new release(which in hardcover would be well over $AU30 here). Can I find cheaper books if I get them shipped or find them used, sure, but the price is better than local and I will have the new book in about a minute, no matter where I am which isn't half bad.
I can't get into an e-book on a back lit screen, but on e-ink, I can and have read till the wee hours of the morning just as I did when I was a child and as a bonus my library fits in my pocket.
Getting rid of your citizenship is piss easy, you need to have somewhere else to go and if you've got more than two million in assets they'll take capital gains as if you sold all of them today and if course you have to be square with the IRS, but once you've got that sorted it's a formal declaration at an embassy or consulate. Heck if you take an office requiring an oath you lose it automatically.
Of course if what you want is to renounce your citizenship to avoid taxes or start in the us without the obligations of a citizen, you're but otherwise it's really easy. You cab never get it back of course, but you want out, just get citizenship somewhere else and expatriate.
Just to put this out there yet again, .NET WORKS PERFECTLY FINE ON WINDOWS 8. Microsoft allowed managed C++ to access the new Windows RT runtimes, and the RT framework only allows a subset of the .NET framework, but all your old apps run just fine outside the metro stack regardless of your development methodology.
Yes, if you want to run your local apps locally on a surface RT some redevelopment will be required, but given your local app is probably shockingly bad under a touch interface it probably needs redevelopment for surface anyway, and converting it will be no worse than putting it on an iPad or android tablet, and in the best case might actually be fairly simple. For that matter your app is probably a web application and requires nothing at all unless you're upgrading your server and using an appallingly old version of NET.
I'm aware, though I suppose that a child hood in the home of a gun nut who was convinced the apocalypse was coming and had a readily accessible arsenal could be described as slightly deranged. Funny how all these mass murderers grew up in houses full of guns and had all the safety and target training that the pro gun folks always say will stop the problem.
Your insurance company should pay out any time you meet the requirements if your policy, however stupid they've made the terms. Insurance is a bit like a casino, sometimes three house pays out sometimes it doesn't and they set the games up so the house always wins, buy they still write the check when you win. Having your insurance company act like a company that the world wouldn't be better off without costs bigger premiums if course and it involves idiots not getting all huffy because they never use their insurance, but it can be done.
The fact that he was high functioning autistic really has nothing to do with anything, with the possible exception of the death if his mother (control and rage issues could result in killing someone who is actually there). The press is just using the usual tactic of ascribing reason to unreason. It's not their fault we pathologically need to understand why bad things happen so we can say it won't happen to us or in the case of gun owners that guns are safe. The fact is that we have no idea why some people go out and murder large numbers of people and the vast majority do not.
These weren't naked "girls" they were naked girls, as massively underage.
Result. say it was mostly not done because for the most part it didn't matter at the time. Rendering efficiency want a huge deal till we started rendering things in real time. If you asked pretty much any subject matter expert at the time "how do we make this more efficient, this kind of thing would be the likely result. Novelty can be a problem no one thought to solve, but it probably shouldn't include things that are fairly obvious if you ask the right question.