mmm... but I thought this sub-thread was discussing who would pay for final mile fiber, suggested as a possible solution to the bandwidth problem. Did I get my threads crossed?
In the case of any final mile solution, the analogy works very well, I think.
Now, if you could somehow choose which state's roads you were going to use, and could choose to pay their taxes instead, that'd be sweet. That's nonsensical and impossible for roads, but entirely possible with the tubes. We need more choice, not less.
If you could choose which internet backbone you were going to use it would be sweet. But you can't. Choose your ISP all you like, the big carriers can hold us all to ransom. And even if you manage to route around them, the resource you want may not have that option.
At the end of the day, I don't think the free market works very well for large scale infrastructure, purely because it tends toward the monopolistic. There's only one road network; one railway system; one Internet. And allowing one cmorporation, or small group of companies to upgrade such a resource (as some in this debate seem to be suggesting) seems to be giving them a the right to impose their own taxes.
If a private company does it, you can choose not to pay them. Maybe I won't use the internet.
Meh. If a private company chooses to upgrade the road outside my house, I may not have to walk on it. But if I ever have a need to leave my place of residence, I'm going to have to pay their rates, which at that time need not be driven by market forces.
The free market isn't a useful model for everything, simply because there are some resources where it's difficult, if not impossible, to provide a choice.
Gartner people understand things are on the way but really the tone is hostile.
Ah, look on the bright side; at least they've stopped claiming that Linux causes cancer in puppies and demands that you sacrifice your first born to Satan.
The way I see it, the world is moving slowing but inexorably towards Free Software. Analyst groups like gartner are basically hanging onto the coat-tails of Corporate America and pulling as hard as they can trying to slow the process.
The interesting thing,however about Gartner and their ilk is that they can't get too far from the consensus viewpoint
of the corporate decision makers that they're trying to manipulate, or else they start to lose credibility. So we see
them being dragged long in the wake of the big migration, kicking and screaming as they go, all in the hopes that they might yet be able to exert some influence.
They appear to have been dragged as far as admitting "Yes, it's going to happen, but you enjoy it much, so there!". I think that speaks volumes about how corporate attitudes are changing.
D)Hurting Linux would hurt Novell eventually. They may have been stupid to sign that agreement with Microsoft, but they do know VERY well what happened to SCO. Since the patents would only gain them anything in countries that recognize them, and as they have a potential to lose their business everywhere that does not, it would be an extremely high risk move.
Actually, I tend to view Darl McBride's "set the controls for the heart of the sun" strategy as increasing the plausibility of the conspiracy theories. I mean prior to SCO I'd have tended to assume that CEOs as a class were A) looking out for the best interests of their company and B) not clinically insane. In retrospect, Darl's actions suggest that these may not be entirely safe assumptions.
It seems to me that there are parallels here with a disease. Think about the first doctor to encounter the black death. I imagine he might have thought that those buboe things would clear up themselves, given time. But I bet the second time he saw those symptoms he took them a lot more seriously.
We've seen one staunch Linux company implode by adopting an obviously foolhardy course that benefited no one by Microsoft. Now we find Novell displaying apparently similar symptoms.
We'd be foolish ourselves not to consider the possibility that they may have contracted the
same malady.
Linus and the kernel hackers are free to reject any and all code that comes from Novell.
Right. And therefore, presumably, the GP's concerns are without foundation, since it will be a simple matter to grep for the string SEKRIT MS PATENTED CODE: DO NOT USE in the comments.
If the mindset in the article were to be believed, the large companies would be blindly signing literally everybody who made music so it could control them.
If course, that's only true if signing a band or musician has zero overhead. If there's a cost to the label for each signing, then they have finite capacity, and will want to pick and choose.
There's also scarcity economics at work at this level as well. If every high school wannabe rock band had a contract with EMI or Sony BMG, then the perceived value of that contract would plummet. Similarly, if every museo you met had a contract, and was nevertheless practically penniless, then no one at all would sign up, since they'd be taking on obligations with no expectation of recompense.
You can model any human activity in terms of money, certainly. But that doesn't make that model the predictor for all classes of activity. I mean you can model every human activity in terms of
garbage if you want to: every human activity produces some waste materials, if only from from the excrement of those so engaged and the waste heat of the work performed. You can say every human endeavour is about anything with a little ingenuity.
But the fact that we can analyse Wikimedia purely in terms of money is not an argument for them
using ads to finance their operation, any more than being able to conduct the analysis based on refuse constitutes an argument for them buying a fleet of garbage trucks.
Isn't it interesting just how far out of touch from reality he is? I mean, even after you allow for the self-serving corporate shill factor, he's still way, way off anything that sane people are going to want. That can be dangerous for a senior corporate officer, even in marketing. It may be his job to lie, but I suspect that the shareholders would like to think he knew roughly where the bounds of reality lay.
You know what I think he's doing? I think he's extrapolating from the ridiculous margin the carriers make on SMS messages, and using that to calculate bandwidth charges. He thinks "they pay these rates for SMS, so they pay for connectivity".
Of course, if too many people make that particular connection, it could end up having the opposite effect to the one he wants.
No, he saying where there needs to be some sort of aurhority, it should be a community of experts not some random government wonks.
... or corporate sock puppet, for that matter, unless I misread TFA.
But question remains - experts according to whom? And appointed by whom? If a government wonk appoints the community members then they are effectively government wonks. A non governmental on the other hand foundation is vulnerable to corporate capture, since it will likely get most of its income from corporate funding. And I can't for the life of me see how having Microsoft, Disney and Sony BMG decide the future of the 'net is any better, as a system, than your random government wonks.
The other option, and the one I think Zittrain probably has in mind, is for a self selecting community, similar to the membership of an online forum. This still brings us back to who decides who may and may not be admitted to the group. If the group votes on membership internally then we create a self selecting clique. If there are no controls then we wind up with USENET. If we have an external party make appointments then we revert back to government wonks and corporate sock puppets.
It's hard to draw inferences, since TFA is woefully short on details, but from what we have, I suspect Zittrain has some sort of warm fuzzy wisdom-of-crowds meme rattling around in his head, and thinks that the net would be so much nicer a place if it was run by Wikipedia, or by what ever mailing lists Prof. Zittrain happens to participate in himself. He might even be right, but I don't think it would work like that in the real world.
So he's saying that the only way to stop the 'net from being placed under centralised control would be to place the 'net under central control?
All right. I'm being flip, and I'm sure there has to be more to it than that. All the same, how do you prevent the two cases from becoming functionally equivalent? If you hand net governance into the hands of a small clique, the obvious moves for those who want to unfairly exploit the net is to gain control of the clique.
All this would do is open a second avenue of attack for the forces he seems to be so worried about. That's if we accept the initial premise that the 'net is doomed as things stand... and I'm not sure that I do.
Perhaps he's not a corporate drone that values the "good of the company" above truth.
A "Pauline conversion on the road to Redmond"? Let me guess: There was a great light in the sky and RMS spoke to him saying "Miguel, Miguel, why persecutest thou me?" And the scales dropped from Miguel's eyes and he repented.
No doubt he'll be changing his name to "Linus" the next time he visits Seattle./p
I mean, if you did 10 or 18 years of R&D to create a new invention, it might easily take you 20 or 30 years to make back the money you invested in that
Yeah, but then again, so what?
I mean, my family has been working on antigravity [1] since the early 1800's. Does that mean that if I get it working I'm entitled to a two hundred year patent? I mean this development has taken generations and consumed the entire lives of hard working people who died in poverty. How can you put a price on that? Should I demand a government monopoly that will allow the next seven generations to live in idle luxury?
I don't mean to sound callous here, but invention is a risky business. If you want to get rich, become a merchant banker. If you want to invent, then invent, but don't do it solely on the expectation that the world will then owe you a living.
And frankly, I'm tired of the "I have to work, so you should have to work too!" argument. It smacks of Marxist "everybody is equal, and if they're not, we'll damn well cripple those who excel in order to make everybody equal!" bullshit.
I don't think anyone objects to you not working. What people object to is your having a government enforced monopoly that lets you finance your leisure by raising prices for the rest of us.
Nothing particularly Marxist about that; it's basic free market economics. You're asserting that one single day worked by yourself is equivalent to a lifetime's work from everyone else. but the only way the market can be made to agree is by imposing restrictions on the market. I'd say junking patents was pretty sound capitalism, myself.
That's one hell of a burden of proof to put on yourself. I don't believe you can POSSIBLY prove that to be the case in any objective way
That's a little disingenuous, in so much as it's impossible to prove anything outside the realm of pure mathematics.
That said, there are a number of widely accepted ways to support an argument. One of them to a respected authority in the area who supports the proposition. In that connection, I'd like to call Mr. Bill Gates to the stand:
PATENTS: If people had understood how patents would be granted when most
of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry
would be at a complete standstill today.
That's Bill in a Microsoft strategy memo, circulated 1991. Full text in here. I believe most objective reviewers would accept that as rather better than anecdotal evidence.
And so we find that the man who created the most successful software company on the planet would seem to support the proposition that patents are bad for the industry. His solution to the problem is revealing as well.
The solution to this is patent exchanges
with large companies and patenting as much as we can.
So MS aren't patenting things on a massive scale because they think it'll be good for the industry. They're doing it because, if the software industry is going to be stifled, they want to be the ones doing the stifling.
The question is, does it really make sense to have a patent system that penalises everyone apart from a handful companies? I can't see that it does.
I'm sure there'd be an argument for why programming innovations of the last 10 years aren't really interesting or aren't as important as his Golden Age, just as there are people who think you can mathematically prove that rock was perfected in 1968
But the difference is that EMI and its pals in the RIAA aren't busy flooding the patent office with thousands of patents a month, all of them with titles like "Method and Aparatus for producing the G-Chord".
If they did, then we'd see new bands being cease-and-desisted any time they started to get popular. The indie scene would vanish overnight. I can't see that being good for the music industry.
But the software business hasn't been around for so long, and so patents are being granted on notes and chords and beats, and all sorts of fundamental stuff that hasn't really changed since the seventies. And I can't how it can be a good thing to let MS and IBM decide what sort of software may be written and who is allowed to write it, any more than I'd like to see Sony-BMG decide who was allowed to start a band, and what sort of music they could play.
"developing a new theorem" does not require "millions of dollars"
Right. And neither does it require the significant prior investment in research equipment. A new drug may need cryogenic storage, the electron microscopes, and probably a whole load of esoteric and expensive equipment I've never heard of. Most mathematical discoveries can be worked out with nothing more than a pencil and paper.
Similarly, if a mathematician gets his theorem wrong, it rarely if ever proves fatal. There are no complex expensive government mandated acceptance procedures for new math. This is not the case for drugs.
And while I will grant that the occasional mathematical development can be expensive in computer time or brain power, these same overheads apply to the pharmaceutical industry, as well as overheads in infrastructure.
So I can't see the two cases as being equivalent. Personally, if I was going to accuse people of making assess of themselves, I wouldn't be so keen to conflate the two on such flimsy support. But maybe that's just me.
As for "passive aggressive", do you remember writing this?
How do you think the world would have been if the Wright brothers had patented the airplane?
Oh, that's right, they did...
So.... what? it's different when it's you doing it? Help me out here.
The cost of development of both drugs and mathematical concepts (software) can be extremely high.
Right. Because developing a new theorem requires millions of dollars worth of industrial equipment as well as years and years of double blind testing before the regulators will let anyone use it.
You can bitch and moan all you want about software patents
Thank you. I can see where that is going to come in useful
The patent should be negotiable to any other third party who requires it, and it should be available at a reasonable price for reasonable terms.
mmmm... Reasonable according to whom? Reasonable by what criteria?
Suppose you have a patent I want to licence and we decide a dollar a year is reasonable. Suppose you have a million? Is a million dollars a year still reasonable? And let's not forget that even a seedcorn licence would be enough to freeze out most of the free software projects going. A lot of people would see that as a Bad Thing.
Suppose I'm selling a product and my margins are just on break even. Then any extra overhead could be enough top break the company. Suppose you just drop ten thousand junk patents and a cease and desist order into the mix. To get back to making a profit, I still have to break those patents in court, which I probably won't have the money to do.
I think the problems of software patents run a lot deeper than the occasional lock-out strategy, and I don't think they'll be solved by creating price controls on patent licences.
I totally agree with your notion that you can make money supporting free software. I was refuting the parent specifically for stating that Microsoft doesn't create wealth when in fact they do create quite a bit.
Well... the software does. I'm not entire sure about the company. I mean if Bill and Steve had ever though that their products were generating more money for the customer than they were for Microsoft, I have a feeling they'd have put prices up until this was no longer the case. But I'll concede I may be prejudiced here.
Still, tracking back up the argument stack a little, would you also agree that you couldn't then take the wealth generated by Microsoft products and use that as an argument against the GPL, or the free software movement? I mean given free software packages are just as capable of generating the same wealth?
I make a good salary supporting Microsoft installations, along with Oracle software, Sonicwall, and the thousands of other programs are out there. Furthermore, our business couldn't make as much money as it does if we went the all paper route. The automation that the software tools give us save us a ton of both time and money
That makes a good argument for the notion that software generates wealth. I don't think you've established that we need Microsoft, or proprietary software from any vendor in order to have these benefits. You could make just as much money supporting free software. Granted, the ubiquity of Microsoft products means that your customer base is larger for MS kit, but that still doesn't make proprietary software a necessary part of the business model. And the office automation you describe can be done as well using free software solutions.
If someone has real severe clinical depression, drugs are the only scientifically proven way to get back to leading a normal life.
Yes, this is not under dispute
The research does in fact say that for the most serious cases of clinical depression,
the drugs do have a benefit. They don't work any better in such cases you understand;
it's just that the placebo effect drops away sharply at the extreme end of the severity curve,
so that drugs become more effective by comparison.
The point here is that for the vast majority of cases where the four anti-depressants in question are usually prescribed,
they have roughly the same effect as a couple of grams of chalk wrapped up in a sugar coating.
Which rather brings into question their value in all but the most extreme cases.
[ Info based on an interview on Radio 4's Today Program, this morning. They had an interview with one of the researchers, and another with a rep from the drugs industry. ]
"Did X action related to this policy block one or more bits of data? Yes or No."
mmm... but I don't think it works like that.
This is where I wish I had a deeper understanding of networking protocols, but as I understand it, what happens is that that the receiving computer gets so many packets and then signals back to say "my buffer is full - don't send any more until I say so". Under normal use the receiver would then process the buffer contents, and then signal the sender saying, "next packet, please"
Thing is, you can throttle a protocol just by increasing the time between clearing the buffer and then telling the sender "Hit me!" If the time you add is greater than protocol's timeout period, you can effectively block it without a single byte being consigned to the bit bucket. Even if the protocol has a very long timeout, you can still slow it down to the point where it's becomes basically unusable.
And if it ever goes to court, there's not a single byte you can point at and say "this datum was blocked, your honour", for the simple reason that it was never sent, so how could they block it?
This is why any net neutrality proposal that allows traffic shaping is utterly worthless. Because an ISP can then take any protocol they like and throttle it back to one byte every ten centuries, and then say "...but we're allowed to do traffic shaping, your honour"
It turns out that the other point the anti-peak-oil lobby keep hammering is also correct: There is indeed plenty of oil out there. It's just that the remaining untapped reserves are rather harder to get at than the ones we've already tapped...
Slashdot Mirror
What if your socks were to burst into flames, just because I wrote these words?
I think that close examination will reveal that the EU is not in fact in the process of killing anyone at Microsoft.
For that matter, I'll be very surprised if it turns out that your feet are on fire.
mmm... but I thought this sub-thread was discussing who would pay for final mile fiber, suggested as a possible solution to the bandwidth problem. Did I get my threads crossed?
In the case of any final mile solution, the analogy works very well, I think.
If you could choose which internet backbone you were going to use it would be sweet. But you can't. Choose your ISP all you like, the big carriers can hold us all to ransom. And even if you manage to route around them, the resource you want may not have that option.
At the end of the day, I don't think the free market works very well for large scale infrastructure, purely because it tends toward the monopolistic. There's only one road network; one railway system; one Internet. And allowing one cmorporation, or small group of companies to upgrade such a resource (as some in this debate seem to be suggesting) seems to be giving them a the right to impose their own taxes.
Meh. If a private company chooses to upgrade the road outside my house, I may not have to walk on it. But if I ever have a need to leave my place of residence, I'm going to have to pay their rates, which at that time need not be driven by market forces.
The free market isn't a useful model for everything, simply because there are some resources where it's difficult, if not impossible, to provide a choice.
Arguably, this is one of those cases.
Ah, look on the bright side; at least they've stopped claiming that Linux causes cancer in puppies and demands that you sacrifice your first born to Satan.
The way I see it, the world is moving slowing but inexorably towards Free Software. Analyst groups like gartner are basically hanging onto the coat-tails of Corporate America and pulling as hard as they can trying to slow the process. The interesting thing ,however about Gartner and their ilk is that they can't get too far from the consensus viewpoint
of the corporate decision makers that they're trying to manipulate, or else they start to lose credibility. So we see
them being dragged long in the wake of the big migration, kicking and screaming as they go, all in the hopes that they might yet be able to exert some influence.
They appear to have been dragged as far as admitting "Yes, it's going to happen, but you enjoy it much, so there!". I think that speaks volumes about how corporate attitudes are changing.
Actually, I tend to view Darl McBride's "set the controls for the heart of the sun" strategy as increasing the plausibility of the conspiracy theories. I mean prior to SCO I'd have tended to assume that CEOs as a class were A) looking out for the best interests of their company and B) not clinically insane. In retrospect, Darl's actions suggest that these may not be entirely safe assumptions.
It seems to me that there are parallels here with a disease. Think about the first doctor to encounter the black death. I imagine he might have thought that those buboe things would clear up themselves, given time. But I bet the second time he saw those symptoms he took them a lot more seriously.
We've seen one staunch Linux company implode by adopting an obviously foolhardy course that benefited no one by Microsoft. Now we find Novell displaying apparently similar symptoms. We'd be foolish ourselves not to consider the possibility that they may have contracted the same malady.
Right. And therefore, presumably, the GP's concerns are without foundation, since it will be a simple matter to grep for the string SEKRIT MS PATENTED CODE: DO NOT USE in the comments.
I'm surprised no one has seen it before, really.
If course, that's only true if signing a band or musician has zero overhead. If there's a cost to the label for each signing, then they have finite capacity, and will want to pick and choose.
There's also scarcity economics at work at this level as well. If every high school wannabe rock band had a contract with EMI or Sony BMG, then the perceived value of that contract would plummet. Similarly, if every museo you met had a contract, and was nevertheless practically penniless, then no one at all would sign up, since they'd be taking on obligations with no expectation of recompense.
You can model any human activity in terms of money, certainly. But that doesn't make that model the predictor for all classes of activity. I mean you can model every human activity in terms of garbage if you want to: every human activity produces some waste materials, if only from from the excrement of those so engaged and the waste heat of the work performed. You can say every human endeavour is about anything with a little ingenuity.
But the fact that we can analyse Wikimedia purely in terms of money is not an argument for them using ads to finance their operation, any more than being able to conduct the analysis based on refuse constitutes an argument for them buying a fleet of garbage trucks.
Don't confuse the map with the territory, dude.
Isn't it interesting just how far out of touch from reality he is? I mean, even after you allow for the self-serving corporate shill factor, he's still way, way off anything that sane people are going to want. That can be dangerous for a senior corporate officer, even in marketing. It may be his job to lie, but I suspect that the shareholders would like to think he knew roughly where the bounds of reality lay.
You know what I think he's doing? I think he's extrapolating from the ridiculous margin the carriers make on SMS messages, and using that to calculate bandwidth charges. He thinks "they pay these rates for SMS, so they pay for connectivity".
Of course, if too many people make that particular connection, it could end up having the opposite effect to the one he wants.
But question remains - experts according to whom? And appointed by whom? If a government wonk appoints the community members then they are effectively government wonks. A non governmental on the other hand foundation is vulnerable to corporate capture, since it will likely get most of its income from corporate funding. And I can't for the life of me see how having Microsoft, Disney and Sony BMG decide the future of the 'net is any better, as a system, than your random government wonks.
The other option, and the one I think Zittrain probably has in mind, is for a self selecting community, similar to the membership of an online forum. This still brings us back to who decides who may and may not be admitted to the group. If the group votes on membership internally then we create a self selecting clique. If there are no controls then we wind up with USENET. If we have an external party make appointments then we revert back to government wonks and corporate sock puppets.
It's hard to draw inferences, since TFA is woefully short on details, but from what we have, I suspect Zittrain has some sort of warm fuzzy wisdom-of-crowds meme rattling around in his head, and thinks that the net would be so much nicer a place if it was run by Wikipedia, or by what ever mailing lists Prof. Zittrain happens to participate in himself. He might even be right, but I don't think it would work like that in the real world.
So he's saying that the only way to stop the 'net from being placed under centralised control would be to place the 'net under central control?
All right. I'm being flip, and I'm sure there has to be more to it than that. All the same, how do you prevent the two cases from becoming functionally equivalent? If you hand net governance into the hands of a small clique, the obvious moves for those who want to unfairly exploit the net is to gain control of the clique.
All this would do is open a second avenue of attack for the forces he seems to be so worried about. That's if we accept the initial premise that the 'net is doomed as things stand... and I'm not sure that I do.
A "Pauline conversion on the road to Redmond"? Let me guess: There was a great light in the sky and RMS spoke to him saying "Miguel, Miguel, why persecutest thou me?" And the scales dropped from Miguel's eyes and he repented.
No doubt he'll be changing his name to "Linus" the next time he visits Seattle. /p
Yeah, but then again, so what?
I mean, my family has been working on antigravity [1] since the early 1800's. Does that mean that if I get it working I'm entitled to a two hundred year patent? I mean this development has taken generations and consumed the entire lives of hard working people who died in poverty. How can you put a price on that? Should I demand a government monopoly that will allow the next seven generations to live in idle luxury?
I don't mean to sound callous here, but invention is a risky business. If you want to get rich, become a merchant banker. If you want to invent, then invent, but don't do it solely on the expectation that the world will then owe you a living.
[1] Not really.
I don't think anyone objects to you not working. What people object to is your having a government enforced monopoly that lets you finance your leisure by raising prices for the rest of us.
Nothing particularly Marxist about that; it's basic free market economics. You're asserting that one single day worked by yourself is equivalent to a lifetime's work from everyone else. but the only way the market can be made to agree is by imposing restrictions on the market. I'd say junking patents was pretty sound capitalism, myself.
That's a little disingenuous, in so much as it's impossible to prove anything outside the realm of pure mathematics.
That said, there are a number of widely accepted ways to support an argument. One of them to a respected authority in the area who supports the proposition. In that connection, I'd like to call Mr. Bill Gates to the stand:
That's Bill in a Microsoft strategy memo, circulated 1991. Full text in here. I believe most objective reviewers would accept that as rather better than anecdotal evidence.
And so we find that the man who created the most successful software company on the planet would seem to support the proposition that patents are bad for the industry. His solution to the problem is revealing as well.
So MS aren't patenting things on a massive scale because they think it'll be good for the industry. They're doing it because, if the software industry is going to be stifled, they want to be the ones doing the stifling.
The question is, does it really make sense to have a patent system that penalises everyone apart from a handful companies? I can't see that it does.
But the difference is that EMI and its pals in the RIAA aren't busy flooding the patent office with thousands of patents a month, all of them with titles like "Method and Aparatus for producing the G-Chord".
If they did, then we'd see new bands being cease-and-desisted any time they started to get popular. The indie scene would vanish overnight. I can't see that being good for the music industry.
But the software business hasn't been around for so long, and so patents are being granted on notes and chords and beats, and all sorts of fundamental stuff that hasn't really changed since the seventies. And I can't how it can be a good thing to let MS and IBM decide what sort of software may be written and who is allowed to write it, any more than I'd like to see Sony-BMG decide who was allowed to start a band, and what sort of music they could play.
Right. And neither does it require the significant prior investment in research equipment. A new drug may need cryogenic storage, the electron microscopes, and probably a whole load of esoteric and expensive equipment I've never heard of. Most mathematical discoveries can be worked out with nothing more than a pencil and paper.
Similarly, if a mathematician gets his theorem wrong, it rarely if ever proves fatal. There are no complex expensive government mandated acceptance procedures for new math. This is not the case for drugs.
And while I will grant that the occasional mathematical development can be expensive in computer time or brain power, these same overheads apply to the pharmaceutical industry, as well as overheads in infrastructure.
So I can't see the two cases as being equivalent. Personally, if I was going to accuse people of making assess of themselves, I wouldn't be so keen to conflate the two on such flimsy support. But maybe that's just me.
As for "passive aggressive", do you remember writing this?
So.... what? it's different when it's you doing it? Help me out here.
Right. Because developing a new theorem requires millions of dollars worth of industrial equipment as well as years and years of double blind testing before the regulators will let anyone use it.
Funny how people keep forgetting about that.
Thank you. I can see where that is going to come in useful
mmmm... Reasonable according to whom? Reasonable by what criteria?
Suppose you have a patent I want to licence and we decide a dollar a year is reasonable. Suppose you have a million? Is a million dollars a year still reasonable? And let's not forget that even a seedcorn licence would be enough to freeze out most of the free software projects going. A lot of people would see that as a Bad Thing.
Suppose I'm selling a product and my margins are just on break even. Then any extra overhead could be enough top break the company. Suppose you just drop ten thousand junk patents and a cease and desist order into the mix. To get back to making a profit, I still have to break those patents in court, which I probably won't have the money to do.
I think the problems of software patents run a lot deeper than the occasional lock-out strategy, and I don't think they'll be solved by creating price controls on patent licences.
Well... the software does. I'm not entire sure about the company. I mean if Bill and Steve had ever though that their products were generating more money for the customer than they were for Microsoft, I have a feeling they'd have put prices up until this was no longer the case. But I'll concede I may be prejudiced here.
Still, tracking back up the argument stack a little, would you also agree that you couldn't then take the wealth generated by Microsoft products and use that as an argument against the GPL, or the free software movement? I mean given free software packages are just as capable of generating the same wealth?
That makes a good argument for the notion that software generates wealth. I don't think you've established that we need Microsoft, or proprietary software from any vendor in order to have these benefits. You could make just as much money supporting free software. Granted, the ubiquity of Microsoft products means that your customer base is larger for MS kit, but that still doesn't make proprietary software a necessary part of the business model. And the office automation you describe can be done as well using free software solutions.
Yes, this is not under dispute
The research does in fact say that for the most serious cases of clinical depression, the drugs do have a benefit. They don't work any better in such cases you understand; it's just that the placebo effect drops away sharply at the extreme end of the severity curve, so that drugs become more effective by comparison.
The point here is that for the vast majority of cases where the four anti-depressants in question are usually prescribed, they have roughly the same effect as a couple of grams of chalk wrapped up in a sugar coating. Which rather brings into question their value in all but the most extreme cases.
[ Info based on an interview on Radio 4's Today Program, this morning. They had an interview with one of the researchers, and another with a rep from the drugs industry. ]
mmm... but I don't think it works like that.
This is where I wish I had a deeper understanding of networking protocols, but as I understand it, what happens is that that the receiving computer gets so many packets and then signals back to say "my buffer is full - don't send any more until I say so". Under normal use the receiver would then process the buffer contents, and then signal the sender saying, "next packet, please"
Thing is, you can throttle a protocol just by increasing the time between clearing the buffer and then telling the sender "Hit me!" If the time you add is greater than protocol's timeout period, you can effectively block it without a single byte being consigned to the bit bucket. Even if the protocol has a very long timeout, you can still slow it down to the point where it's becomes basically unusable.
And if it ever goes to court, there's not a single byte you can point at and say "this datum was blocked, your honour", for the simple reason that it was never sent, so how could they block it?
Exactly.
This is why any net neutrality proposal that allows traffic shaping is utterly worthless. Because an ISP can then take any protocol they like and throttle it back to one byte every ten centuries, and then say "...but we're allowed to do traffic shaping, your honour"
It turns out that the other point the anti-peak-oil lobby keep hammering is also correct: There is indeed plenty of oil out there. It's just that the remaining untapped reserves are rather harder to get at than the ones we've already tapped...