As soon as a company moves away from the "extreme profit margins", their stocks drop. When they stay there, they plummet. Shareholders start bitching. CEOs start getting sacked until one of them revs the engine up on a short term, burn-the-company extreme-profit plan, then bails as the company self-immolates. That's the fate of a company that tries to retract away from those sort of profit margin.
Also note that it has no reflection on the long-term feasibility or survivability of the company - just on the public perception of it's short-term results as reflected in its stock.
but culture can't survive in the long term if its creators don't get rewarded for their work
Yes, it can. The first iteration of culture is frequently free - people will compose and play music for their own pleasure, and that of their friends, ditto for writers and visual artists. Even if we were to accept your proposition though, copyright isn't required for artists to be compensated. We've had three and a half thousand year history of human culture before copyright appeared on the scene.
Fortunately for me, I'm already outside the Land of the Dubiously Free (how's Gitmo going? Enjoying your free speech zones?). And while there are obvious differences between police and military communications, the one glaring similarity is that it's bloody stupid to tell the people you are trying to catch (and who may be willing to kill you) where you are, and what you are doing.
Ok, I'm usually all for governmental transparency, but really? You expect police tactical communications to be public? Do you expect military comms to be in the clear as well, for the sake of transparency?
Record them, and publish them a week or so after the fact for transparency, but real-time police comms need to be secured so they can actually do their job.
6. Even if climate change is anthropogenic, they do not believe humanity has the unified political will to decrease emissions sufficiently. Even if the Western hemisphere miraculously agrees to, Asia and the developing nations in Africa and the Middle East will (somewhat justifiably) continue to use fossil fuels to continue their industrialization. And even if we somehow miraculously get the entirety of humanity weaned off fossil fuels, and this current uptick is anthropogenic, we're still coming out of an ice age, with the planet is still well below it's historic temperatures, so we'll have to deal with a warm earth eventually.
In short, we should be looking at ways to adapt, rather than commanding the tide to retreat.
Um, yes, a high false-positive rate or a false-negative rate are both instances of a technology not working. If it weren't, you could just make a device that pings 100% of passengers, and get a 0% false-negative rate.
People have been murdered over a post on social networks by goverments. People have been held in custody (hi USA) over posting a qoute from family guy
And this is distinct and different from any other service that lets you post information (slashdot, blogs, etc)? And it's the fault of social networks, and not, say, government?
Firstly, no, if the typewriter were invented now, it should not be patentable, as pretty much everything about it is trivial.
However, assuming all you had access to was 1850s tech, and without looking at the mechanism (that was sorta the point of "without looking at their code".) would you make the same claim? All you'd have to work with is "I push buttons and words come out on the paper". Plenty of inventors worked on the same problem before a commercially successful typewriter came about.
How the hell do we know that Apple isn't trollling patent filings for good ideas? We should just assume they are infallible corporate citizens?
You don't. But I, and the grandparent, were speaking in generalities. When you get down to specific cases then you start needing evidence - one way or another.
How do we know these guys didn't use Motorolla cell phones, see the feature (therefore learning that it was viable, and gaining some knowledge of how it was implemented by it's behavior) and copy it
Patents don't protect "knowledge that it's viable". They protect the implementation. If you're able to reverse engineer a feature from looking at its interface, then it is, almost by definition, obvious. Remember, what they do isn't protected. What's protected is how they do it. If you look at a UI, and come up with the same method of accomplishing it without looking at their code, or a description of the algorithm or some such, then how they do it is fairly obviously obvious.
With something like the Wright Brother's patents, conclusively knowing that something CAN be done may be the most valuable part.
Just because it's valuable doesn't mean it's patentable. The Wright brothers demonstrated that artificial heavier-than-air flight was possible. And yet they didn't get a patent on artificial heavier-than-air flight, they got a patent on their specific implementation.
Now, if you can prove that Apple's entire staff grew up in a vacuum, had never seen nor heard of anything Motorolla did, and yet came up with the same ideas, and implemented it in the same way that ran afoul of the patent, THEN I would accept your premise that the patent MUST be too obvious
Fortunately, I don't care what you accept. I could demand that you prove each patent was entirely original, with the inventor deriving a complete modern understanding of mathematics and computational systems from first principles before acceding that his patent was novel, but then I'd just be being as ridiculous as you, and just as relevant.
It depends on the area, but those who do have a mortgage and kids have probably had to choose between the $1M+ house (Australia is far more expensive than that!? I doubt it) in a neighborhood with good public schools, or a $600-800k house/condo in one where they will be paying $20-30k+ a year per child for private schools if they want their kids to have any hope of a decent education.
It depends. There are definitely many, many $1M+ houses to choose from. I bought a relatively-new (7 years old), 4-bedroom house 50km from the city centre. My wife used to rent a 50-year old 2-bedroom flat in one of the closer suburb that was valued at half a mil. If you were looking for a 3/4-bedroom house close in to the city? A million easy. I tried doing a quick search on one of our property websites, but most were for auction or "contact agent for price". There was a car space for $155,000 though.
in a neighborhood with good public schools, or a $600-800k house/condo in one where they will be paying $20-30k+ a year per child for private schools if they want their kids to have any hope of a decent education.
I don't know how the Aussie public education system compares to the US one, but ours is fairly uniform quality-wise, with a couple of exceptions on both ends of the spectrum.
Oh, and are you referring to social security? That's really a joke as far as supporting anyone in retirement, at best it would cover about 1/3 of the monthly cost of living in the Bay Area (assuming that mortgage and student loans have been paid, which is not likely).
No. In Australia, whenever you work, your employee has to pay 9% of your salary into a superannuation fund you nominate. If you voluntarily contribute to your own super fund above that, you get tax benefits and the government will co-contribute up to a certain limit. It's basically enforced saving for retirement, with incentives to save more. I don't know how social security works in the US, but I'm pretty sure it's not like that, given the talk I hear of the government "raiding" the social security kitty. If the government were emptying out peoples' private investment funds, I'm sure there'd be more of a stink.
And until people hit Medicare (which is also inadequate) at 65, health insurance costs continue to rise rapidly (if you are not on a corporate plan) once you get into the 40s+, sometimes $1000+ per MONTH.
Insurance costs here are locked in from the time you've had continuous coverage. Assuming I never leave my insurance fund, I'll pay the same rate as I did as a 25 year-old for the rest of my life. I'm probably over-paying for my benefits now, but I'm sure the pendulum will swing the other way. Of course, plenty of people decide not to get private health insurance, rely on our medicare, and then bitch when their non-critical operations aren't done as fast as they want. Also, I don't know of any company here that includes health insurance as a perk. Probably why our health care stayed reasonable.
It seems its a question of lifestyle choice. For people who choose to live in the Bay Area, it's expensive. I don't know how far out it takes for the prices to get reasonable, but I chose a 1 hour+ commute as a trade-off for not having that sort of onerous debt hanging over me all my life.
Carly Fiorina was given the boot from HP after what she did there. It remains to be seen what happens with Elop; he hasn't been there long, and it's not long enough to say if his strategy will work. Personally, I doubt it, but I'll wait till the results are in before I lynch him. Yes, CEOs often get inordinately large pay-packets, but at least they lose their job (albeit, often with a pretty penny) when they screw up. Political parties can't even lose their job except for every 4 years (depending on the electoral cycle where you are), and even then, there's usually only one other candidate. Chances are they'll keep it.
The main difference with government, is that there is no correlation between the work they perform, and the money they receive. Most of the people who suggest doing away with government are frustrated by this. For instance, my state government recently spent 10 million dollars on a failed infrastructure project. If companies were mismanaged as badly as my state government, they would have been sued out of existence by their share-holders, and failed to generated any profit. But because it's government, it can just keep taking its tithe and doing diddly, as long as it's prepared to split it's pay-out with the other party in the running whenever people get sick of it.
I didn't say it wasn't fair the movies competed. In fact, I didn't mention the quality of the products, or fair at all. I just said that it's no surprise that a method that relies on government intervention and tax-funded enforcement can do better than a method that doesn't. If copyright were abolished, kickstarter-style funding would be more common, as the funding methodology promulgated by copyright laws just wouldn't work anymore. Just the same way as it's no surprise that a privately-funded venture fails when it tries to compete against a government-sponsored monopoly.
No, not really. At ~30, most people will have a mortgage, and young children either here or on the way, if they are going to have them. That's the most expensive time of life. By 50 - 60, most people will have paid off their mortgage (unless they're continually trading up), and their kids will be independent, or very nearly so.
For reference, I'm currently 30, and have a mortgage, and looking at children in the near future. Most of my friends my age have mortgages and young children. My parents (a bit under 60) are going on overseas holidays every 3 months, because all their expenses have dropped off, their pay has increased, and they've accrued enough leave to let them.
I'm also in Australia, so things are a little different from the US. Housing is far more expensive here, tertiary education much cheaper. Your wages include contribution to a base-line investment scheme that should see you on a decent annuity once you retire.
If the patented subjects were simple enough to have been implemented many times independently by engineers versed in the art, solving the same problem, then they were obvious, and shouldn't have qualified for patent protection in the first place.
And you can be pretty sure they weren't developed from the patent filings, as most companies prohibit engineers from looking at patents, as you get more leniency if you accidentally violate a patent than if you do it knowingly, which is another telling fact against patents (it shouldn't be possible to violate them accidentally).
But the point is that the BIG ACTS got BIG because record companies were in a position to market them. If you don't have these vast promotional machines I think you won't see any more U2s or Bon Jovis.
Nonsense. Look at the drek that gets splashed around by the internet meme-factories. Stuff like Rebecca Black gets exposure because it's novel (and bad). Now imagine their was no competition by million-dollar marketing machines, and something novel and GOOD came on the scene.
Selective enforcement for the win. Unless you also contributed millions to their political masters' warchest, the FBI's not going to enforce the law on your behalf.
At least part of that is because those alternate means of funding need to compete against government-sponsored limited monopolies (AKA copyright). Of course copyright is going to beat them - that's why all those powerful lobbyists are pulling for it. When you've got the US government enforcing your business model with tax payers money, that's a huge competitive advantage.
No, no it's not. Academic journals are doing it because a paper's worth is measured by how many times it's cited by other academic papers. Nobody cares about wikipedia citations.
If that was how Star Wars handled things, were The Force basically was sort of like a remote hand/light telekinese not crazy off the charts level I'd be willing to accept it.
If you're willing to accept light telekinesis, then it's just a question of scale - in which case, I assume your problem is mostly to do with energy storage/transmission. There's no reason to believe that a sufficiently advanced genetically engineered organism couldn't be, say, receiving transmitted power from some outside source that it allows its symbiote to utilise in telekinetic effects. Or it could be some sort of miniaturized nuclear reaction. There's a helluva lot of mass in the human body - enough, if total energy conversion is possible, to perform such feats.
My point being, there's plenty of pseudo-science hand-waving you can do to make it just as "realistic" as Asimov's telempathy. It's really just a case of Clarke's Third Law.
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as a company moves away from the "extreme profit margins", their stocks drop. When they stay there, they plummet. Shareholders start bitching. CEOs start getting sacked until one of them revs the engine up on a short term, burn-the-company extreme-profit plan, then bails as the company self-immolates. That's the fate of a company that tries to retract away from those sort of profit margin.
Also note that it has no reflection on the long-term feasibility or survivability of the company - just on the public perception of it's short-term results as reflected in its stock.
but culture can't survive in the long term if its creators don't get rewarded for their work
Yes, it can. The first iteration of culture is frequently free - people will compose and play music for their own pleasure, and that of their friends, ditto for writers and visual artists. Even if we were to accept your proposition though, copyright isn't required for artists to be compensated. We've had three and a half thousand year history of human culture before copyright appeared on the scene.
Fortunately for me, I'm already outside the Land of the Dubiously Free (how's Gitmo going? Enjoying your free speech zones?). And while there are obvious differences between police and military communications, the one glaring similarity is that it's bloody stupid to tell the people you are trying to catch (and who may be willing to kill you) where you are, and what you are doing.
Ok, I'm usually all for governmental transparency, but really? You expect police tactical communications to be public? Do you expect military comms to be in the clear as well, for the sake of transparency?
Record them, and publish them a week or so after the fact for transparency, but real-time police comms need to be secured so they can actually do their job.
Is it more than it buys in the US?
6. Even if climate change is anthropogenic, they do not believe humanity has the unified political will to decrease emissions sufficiently. Even if the Western hemisphere miraculously agrees to, Asia and the developing nations in Africa and the Middle East will (somewhat justifiably) continue to use fossil fuels to continue their industrialization. And even if we somehow miraculously get the entirety of humanity weaned off fossil fuels, and this current uptick is anthropogenic, we're still coming out of an ice age, with the planet is still well below it's historic temperatures, so we'll have to deal with a warm earth eventually.
In short, we should be looking at ways to adapt, rather than commanding the tide to retreat.
Um, yes, a high false-positive rate or a false-negative rate are both instances of a technology not working. If it weren't, you could just make a device that pings 100% of passengers, and get a 0% false-negative rate.
People have been murdered over a post on social networks by goverments. People have been held in custody (hi USA) over posting a qoute from family guy
And this is distinct and different from any other service that lets you post information (slashdot, blogs, etc)? And it's the fault of social networks, and not, say, government?
Firstly, no, if the typewriter were invented now, it should not be patentable, as pretty much everything about it is trivial.
However, assuming all you had access to was 1850s tech, and without looking at the mechanism (that was sorta the point of "without looking at their code".) would you make the same claim? All you'd have to work with is "I push buttons and words come out on the paper". Plenty of inventors worked on the same problem before a commercially successful typewriter came about.
How the hell do we know that Apple isn't trollling patent filings for good ideas? We should just assume they are infallible corporate citizens?
You don't. But I, and the grandparent, were speaking in generalities. When you get down to specific cases then you start needing evidence - one way or another.
How do we know these guys didn't use Motorolla cell phones, see the feature (therefore learning that it was viable, and gaining some knowledge of how it was implemented by it's behavior) and copy it
Patents don't protect "knowledge that it's viable". They protect the implementation. If you're able to reverse engineer a feature from looking at its interface, then it is, almost by definition, obvious. Remember, what they do isn't protected. What's protected is how they do it. If you look at a UI, and come up with the same method of accomplishing it without looking at their code, or a description of the algorithm or some such, then how they do it is fairly obviously obvious.
With something like the Wright Brother's patents, conclusively knowing that something CAN be done may be the most valuable part.
Just because it's valuable doesn't mean it's patentable. The Wright brothers demonstrated that artificial heavier-than-air flight was possible. And yet they didn't get a patent on artificial heavier-than-air flight, they got a patent on their specific implementation.
Now, if you can prove that Apple's entire staff grew up in a vacuum, had never seen nor heard of anything Motorolla did, and yet came up with the same ideas, and implemented it in the same way that ran afoul of the patent, THEN I would accept your premise that the patent MUST be too obvious
Fortunately, I don't care what you accept. I could demand that you prove each patent was entirely original, with the inventor deriving a complete modern understanding of mathematics and computational systems from first principles before acceding that his patent was novel, but then I'd just be being as ridiculous as you, and just as relevant.
These ones look pretty close to San Fran, and are much cheaper than $1M.
It depends on the area, but those who do have a mortgage and kids have probably had to choose between the $1M+ house (Australia is far more expensive than that!? I doubt it) in a neighborhood with good public schools, or a $600-800k house/condo in one where they will be paying $20-30k+ a year per child for private schools if they want their kids to have any hope of a decent education.
It depends. There are definitely many, many $1M+ houses to choose from. I bought a relatively-new (7 years old), 4-bedroom house 50km from the city centre. My wife used to rent a 50-year old 2-bedroom flat in one of the closer suburb that was valued at half a mil. If you were looking for a 3/4-bedroom house close in to the city? A million easy. I tried doing a quick search on one of our property websites, but most were for auction or "contact agent for price". There was a car space for $155,000 though.
in a neighborhood with good public schools, or a $600-800k house/condo in one where they will be paying $20-30k+ a year per child for private schools if they want their kids to have any hope of a decent education.
I don't know how the Aussie public education system compares to the US one, but ours is fairly uniform quality-wise, with a couple of exceptions on both ends of the spectrum.
Oh, and are you referring to social security? That's really a joke as far as supporting anyone in retirement, at best it would cover about 1/3 of the monthly cost of living in the Bay Area (assuming that mortgage and student loans have been paid, which is not likely).
No. In Australia, whenever you work, your employee has to pay 9% of your salary into a superannuation fund you nominate. If you voluntarily contribute to your own super fund above that, you get tax benefits and the government will co-contribute up to a certain limit. It's basically enforced saving for retirement, with incentives to save more. I don't know how social security works in the US, but I'm pretty sure it's not like that, given the talk I hear of the government "raiding" the social security kitty. If the government were emptying out peoples' private investment funds, I'm sure there'd be more of a stink.
And until people hit Medicare (which is also inadequate) at 65, health insurance costs continue to rise rapidly (if you are not on a corporate plan) once you get into the 40s+, sometimes $1000+ per MONTH.
Insurance costs here are locked in from the time you've had continuous coverage. Assuming I never leave my insurance fund, I'll pay the same rate as I did as a 25 year-old for the rest of my life. I'm probably over-paying for my benefits now, but I'm sure the pendulum will swing the other way. Of course, plenty of people decide not to get private health insurance, rely on our medicare, and then bitch when their non-critical operations aren't done as fast as they want. Also, I don't know of any company here that includes health insurance as a perk. Probably why our health care stayed reasonable.
It seems its a question of lifestyle choice. For people who choose to live in the Bay Area, it's expensive. I don't know how far out it takes for the prices to get reasonable, but I chose a 1 hour+ commute as a trade-off for not having that sort of onerous debt hanging over me all my life.
Uh-huh. Good luck with the credit crunch you'll get after outlawing charging interest.
Carly Fiorina was given the boot from HP after what she did there. It remains to be seen what happens with Elop; he hasn't been there long, and it's not long enough to say if his strategy will work. Personally, I doubt it, but I'll wait till the results are in before I lynch him. Yes, CEOs often get inordinately large pay-packets, but at least they lose their job (albeit, often with a pretty penny) when they screw up. Political parties can't even lose their job except for every 4 years (depending on the electoral cycle where you are), and even then, there's usually only one other candidate. Chances are they'll keep it.
The main difference with government, is that there is no correlation between the work they perform, and the money they receive. Most of the people who suggest doing away with government are frustrated by this. For instance, my state government recently spent 10 million dollars on a failed infrastructure project. If companies were mismanaged as badly as my state government, they would have been sued out of existence by their share-holders, and failed to generated any profit. But because it's government, it can just keep taking its tithe and doing diddly, as long as it's prepared to split it's pay-out with the other party in the running whenever people get sick of it.
I didn't say it wasn't fair the movies competed. In fact, I didn't mention the quality of the products, or fair at all. I just said that it's no surprise that a method that relies on government intervention and tax-funded enforcement can do better than a method that doesn't. If copyright were abolished, kickstarter-style funding would be more common, as the funding methodology promulgated by copyright laws just wouldn't work anymore. Just the same way as it's no surprise that a privately-funded venture fails when it tries to compete against a government-sponsored monopoly.
Life gets more expensive as you egt older.
Kids, college, etc.
No, not really. At ~30, most people will have a mortgage, and young children either here or on the way, if they are going to have them. That's the most expensive time of life. By 50 - 60, most people will have paid off their mortgage (unless they're continually trading up), and their kids will be independent, or very nearly so.
For reference, I'm currently 30, and have a mortgage, and looking at children in the near future. Most of my friends my age have mortgages and young children. My parents (a bit under 60) are going on overseas holidays every 3 months, because all their expenses have dropped off, their pay has increased, and they've accrued enough leave to let them.
I'm also in Australia, so things are a little different from the US. Housing is far more expensive here, tertiary education much cheaper. Your wages include contribution to a base-line investment scheme that should see you on a decent annuity once you retire.
If the patented subjects were simple enough to have been implemented many times independently by engineers versed in the art, solving the same problem, then they were obvious, and shouldn't have qualified for patent protection in the first place.
And you can be pretty sure they weren't developed from the patent filings, as most companies prohibit engineers from looking at patents, as you get more leniency if you accidentally violate a patent than if you do it knowingly, which is another telling fact against patents (it shouldn't be possible to violate them accidentally).
But the point is that the BIG ACTS got BIG because record companies were in a position to market them. If you don't have these vast promotional machines I think you won't see any more U2s or Bon Jovis.
Nonsense. Look at the drek that gets splashed around by the internet meme-factories. Stuff like Rebecca Black gets exposure because it's novel (and bad). Now imagine their was no competition by million-dollar marketing machines, and something novel and GOOD came on the scene.
Selective enforcement for the win. Unless you also contributed millions to their political masters' warchest, the FBI's not going to enforce the law on your behalf.
At least part of that is because those alternate means of funding need to compete against government-sponsored limited monopolies (AKA copyright). Of course copyright is going to beat them - that's why all those powerful lobbyists are pulling for it. When you've got the US government enforcing your business model with tax payers money, that's a huge competitive advantage.
No, no it's not. Academic journals are doing it because a paper's worth is measured by how many times it's cited by other academic papers. Nobody cares about wikipedia citations.
If that was how Star Wars handled things, were The Force basically was sort of like a remote hand/light telekinese not crazy off the charts level I'd be willing to accept it.
If you're willing to accept light telekinesis, then it's just a question of scale - in which case, I assume your problem is mostly to do with energy storage/transmission. There's no reason to believe that a sufficiently advanced genetically engineered organism couldn't be, say, receiving transmitted power from some outside source that it allows its symbiote to utilise in telekinetic effects. Or it could be some sort of miniaturized nuclear reaction. There's a helluva lot of mass in the human body - enough, if total energy conversion is possible, to perform such feats.
My point being, there's plenty of pseudo-science hand-waving you can do to make it just as "realistic" as Asimov's telempathy. It's really just a case of Clarke's Third Law.
Nobody's selling that flavour
we can now identify "earth like" planets
For sufficiently small values of "like"