Also who wants only a 1/100 chance of NOT getting your SO pregnant? For most Americans that would be on the order of once year (assuming the women is only fertile for a few days a month).
It's not 1% chance per time, it's 1% per couple per 2.5 years (the length of the study). So once every 250 years for you and your SO, assuming you have sex about as frequently as the people in the study.
Unless of course the "almost a third" quit the study because it killed them, or made it impossible to get it up, or something.
hmm... I certainly think that it can result in waste, but on the whole, proper patent laws are a benefit.
Remember, letting an inventor earn a profit off of their invention isn't a bad thing.
Patents do this by permitting the patent holder to forbid other people from doing certain things or using certain knowledge. It seems that the negative effects of this tend to outweigh any positive effects of making it easier for inventors to turn a profit.
There's only one reason you engage in anti-competitive behavior. That reason would be, you know what you're doing is easy enough that others could do it too, and most likely better than you're doing it, and for less cost.
In this particular case, the reason is that others (AMD) are doing it too, which means that Intel currently has to charge semi-reasonable prices.
Explain to me why I am wrong. If you can.
You seem to be saying that anti-competitive behavior is only used by companies who already have an absolute monopoly and are afraid of losing it. This is incorrect; it's actually used by companies which do have a few competitors, to attempt to kill those competitors and obtain an absolute monopoly. (This is also why a company can be declared a monopoly and be subject to antitrust regulations while having less than 100% market share.)
The most compelling case for copyright, for me, comes from Joseph Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction. In essence, he argues that copyright creates more innovation because it does not allow people to use the status quo of ideas.
Am i missing something here, or is the world falling apart?
Bob and Jim can both make chips for $10. Bob has $1000 in the bank, while Jim only has $300.
Bob sells chips for $8, losing $2 on each sale. Because of this, Jim can't sell chips for more than $8, so he also has to lose $2 on each sale.
Jim can only sell 150 chips at this price before going broke, while Bob can sell 500. So Jim goes broke first, and Bob raises his price to $20 per chip.
Then some time later Jane wants to start selling chips. She can make chips for $8, but only has $50 in the bank because she's just starting out. Bob cuts his price to $6 per chip for a couple weeks until Jane goes broke, then raises his price back to $20.
For example, the RepRap project, while far from having a tool that can manufacture chips, could in theory be advanced until it is capable of doing so.
RepRap is a toy and a joke, and works in a way that cannot be used to produce chips even if it could be shrunk sufficiently.
It's not like computer chips require expensive materials to manufacture. They're made of the cheapest stuff on earth.
The expense comes from the amount of work needed to prepare the materials and make the manufacturing equipment.
Hell, if a government that isn't motivated by profit and leverage were to seize one of those fabs, they could use them to make hundreds of chips for every man, woman and child on earth.
Given that companies will often have more than one fab and can still be limited by manufacturing capacity, I think you're overestimating how much could be produced.
The scarcity only exists because we allow them to shut the things off and hold them over our heads like carrots to make us jump.
Or, you know, because they're bloody expensive to build and operate. Or can you make plasma etchers, ion implantation machines, photolithography machines, etc, in your basement?
How are most of these practices problematic? Why should there be anything wrong with them selling chips for servers at below cost? Yes, it keeps them dominant but the result is cheaper servers for the rest of us. If the point of anti-trust regulations is to benefit the consumer then it isn't clear to me what the problem is with that aspect.
Prices below cost are unsustainable; they have to go back up eventually, and cost the seller money until then. This means that they only make sense if the intent is to bankrupt the competition so you can charge monopoly prices later. The consumers may seem to better off at the moment, but the problem is that they'll end up significantly worse off after not too long.
abusing its dominant position in chips by giving large rebates to computer makers,... and by offering chips for server computers at prices below actual cost
In what alternate dimension does the EU exist where the above are illegal?
I think the "rebates" one depends on what the rebates are for. If it's something like a volume discount, it's probably ok. If it's something like "discount for not using AMD chips", it's probably not. I think something like the latter was one of the complaints in the US antitrust case against Microsoft.
Selling your main product below cost as standard practice (ie, not just for getting rid of outdated inventory) only makes sense to try to starve out a competitor who doesn't have enough cash reserves, and so I understand is generally considered predatory pricing which tends to be illegal.
Think of the movie War of the Worlds. Dropping yourself into another inhabited planet would probably be a death sentence as your body would have no resistance to the kinds of viruses and bacteria that live there.
Probably not, actually, since there's no reason to think that you'd be a similar enough environment to whatever they usually lived in. Smallpox was bad for the native americans not just because they weren't adapted to it, but mostly because it was adapted to humans.
Of course, you could still end up dying when you find out that the atmosphere there has cyanide or hydrogen chloride or something instead of oxygen.
Mind telling me what possible public interest is served by prohibiting me from rolling out my own cable service if I've got the capital and the wherewithal to do so?
Supposedly fewer people tearing up roads and the like to lay new wires (and never mind that shared, govt-owned wires would solve this better, similar to the "local loop unbundling" we had for a while but without the conflict of interest).
Comcast says it costs them $6.85 per home to double the internet capacity of a neighborhood.
Comcast also says that their users like their service and don't leave it the instant Verizon installs FiOS in the neighborhood. You shouldn't put much faith in what Comcast says.
The actual line in the article is "Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, has told investors that doubling the Internet capacity of a neighborhood costs an average of $6.85 a home.". We should believe them in this case, since AIUI they can get in actual real trouble with the SEC if they lie to their investors.
If all Time Warner customers decided one day not to check their e-mail or download a single movie, the company's costs would be no different than on a day when every customer was glued to the screen watching one YouTube video after another.
Does this just mean that Time Warner is big enough to only have settlement-free peering instead of paying anyone else for connectivity, or does it mean that their connectivity is priced by pipe size rather than data transfer?
Those would be examples of proprietary software and hardware, not formats as the GP was arguing.
It's actually proprietary interfaces, where they make sure that nobody except itunes can talk to the ipod. Which might be file formats on the ipod, or communication protocols, depending on how exactly it works.
Good luck with that, with today's portable media players being 1~160GB+ capacity it would be practically insane to manage files by hand. Let go of this useless obsession and learn to use metadata on your files. You'll probably even like smart playlists once you start using them.
he doesn't need to be a geek so long as he has the right geeks working for him
Is that really true? I'm a lawyer. No way on God's green earth would I work under the supervision of a non-lawyer.
Supervision as in "we should handle this case in this way", of course. But what about things like "case X will have a huge impact, so focus on getting it right and let the newer people handle A, B, and C."? Ie, setting general policy rather than direct supervision.
If this guy can prioritize between "nobody's databases can talk to eachother" and "we can't get bugfixes for Important Software X because the vendor went bankrupt" and "new employees are stting on their thumbs for 8 weeks while their computer accounts get set up", then as long as he doesn't meddle beyond saying "how much will it cost to fix this" and "fix this next, because it gets us the most bang for our buck" it doesn't really matter if he personally doesn't know anything about how to fix it.
Or, we could call it what everyone else is calling it. Grid computing or sometimes cloud computing.
I think the idea with those is that you have lots of "normal" computers on a "normal" network, whereas here you have one big computer. There should be different ratios of disk space to compute power, and CPU power to interconnect speeds and probably available RAM.
As they used to say, "The first 90% takes 90% of the effort, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the effort". Crunch time is just the expression of doing that last 90% effort in the last 10% of the schedule.
Or figure out what kind of things make that last "10%" take so much longer than it should, and learn to estimate it properly. Including estimated time for expected requirements changes and/or making it clear that estimates will change along with requirements.
an internet advocacy group has asked the FCC to investigate whether the WiFi-only restriction on the Skype for iPhone app is in violation of federal law.
If it is in violation (or rather, if AT&T's requirement that led to the software being restricted is in violation), wouldn't they already be having problems with their no-tethering rules for some data/internet plans?
Apparently. And things like C&D letters, and... Whatever happened to the purpose of copyright being promotion of science and the useful arts?
These things are created for a specific purpose, which does not require them to be sold, and they would exist regardless of being copyrightable. So WTF is the point of them being copyrightable?
Slashdot Mirror
Also who wants only a 1/100 chance of NOT getting your SO pregnant? For most Americans that would be on the order of once year (assuming the women is only fertile for a few days a month).
It's not 1% chance per time, it's 1% per couple per 2.5 years (the length of the study). So once every 250 years for you and your SO, assuming you have sex about as frequently as the people in the study.
Unless of course the "almost a third" quit the study because it killed them, or made it impossible to get it up, or something.
hmm... I certainly think that it can result in waste, but on the whole, proper patent laws are a benefit.
Remember, letting an inventor earn a profit off of their invention isn't a bad thing.
Patents do this by permitting the patent holder to forbid other people from doing certain things or using certain knowledge. It seems that the negative effects of this tend to outweigh any positive effects of making it easier for inventors to turn a profit.
There's only one reason you engage in anti-competitive behavior. That reason would be, you know what you're doing is easy enough that others could do it too, and most likely better than you're doing it, and for less cost.
In this particular case, the reason is that others (AMD) are doing it too, which means that Intel currently has to charge semi-reasonable prices.
Explain to me why I am wrong. If you can.
You seem to be saying that anti-competitive behavior is only used by companies who already have an absolute monopoly and are afraid of losing it. This is incorrect; it's actually used by companies which do have a few competitors, to attempt to kill those competitors and obtain an absolute monopoly. (This is also why a company can be declared a monopoly and be subject to antitrust regulations while having less than 100% market share.)
The most compelling case for copyright, for me, comes from Joseph Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction. In essence, he argues that copyright creates more innovation because it does not allow people to use the status quo of ideas.
Is this anything like how breaking people's windows will stimulate the economy?
Am i missing something here, or is the world falling apart?
Bob and Jim can both make chips for $10. Bob has $1000 in the bank, while Jim only has $300.
Bob sells chips for $8, losing $2 on each sale. Because of this, Jim can't sell chips for more than $8, so he also has to lose $2 on each sale.
Jim can only sell 150 chips at this price before going broke, while Bob can sell 500. So Jim goes broke first, and Bob raises his price to $20 per chip.
Then some time later Jane wants to start selling chips. She can make chips for $8, but only has $50 in the bank because she's just starting out. Bob cuts his price to $6 per chip for a couple weeks until Jane goes broke, then raises his price back to $20.
For example, the RepRap project, while far from having a tool that can manufacture chips, could in theory be advanced until it is capable of doing so.
RepRap is a toy and a joke, and works in a way that cannot be used to produce chips even if it could be shrunk sufficiently.
It's not like computer chips require expensive materials to manufacture. They're made of the cheapest stuff on earth.
The expense comes from the amount of work needed to prepare the materials and make the manufacturing equipment.
Hell, if a government that isn't motivated by profit and leverage were to seize one of those fabs, they could use them to make hundreds of chips for every man, woman and child on earth.
Given that companies will often have more than one fab and can still be limited by manufacturing capacity, I think you're overestimating how much could be produced.
The scarcity only exists because we allow them to shut the things off and hold them over our heads like carrots to make us jump.
Or, you know, because they're bloody expensive to build and operate. Or can you make plasma etchers, ion implantation machines, photolithography machines, etc, in your basement?
How are most of these practices problematic? Why should there be anything wrong with them selling chips for servers at below cost? Yes, it keeps them dominant but the result is cheaper servers for the rest of us. If the point of anti-trust regulations is to benefit the consumer then it isn't clear to me what the problem is with that aspect.
Prices below cost are unsustainable; they have to go back up eventually, and cost the seller money until then. This means that they only make sense if the intent is to bankrupt the competition so you can charge monopoly prices later. The consumers may seem to better off at the moment, but the problem is that they'll end up significantly worse off after not too long.
In what alternate dimension does the EU exist where the above are illegal?
I think the "rebates" one depends on what the rebates are for. If it's something like a volume discount, it's probably ok. If it's something like "discount for not using AMD chips", it's probably not. I think something like the latter was one of the complaints in the US antitrust case against Microsoft.
Selling your main product below cost as standard practice (ie, not just for getting rid of outdated inventory) only makes sense to try to starve out a competitor who doesn't have enough cash reserves, and so I understand is generally considered predatory pricing which tends to be illegal.
There have already been incidents where offshore foreign workers were bribed to provide account information on bank customers.
You seem to be implying that there haven't been cases of American workers doing the same. Is there any reason to think this implication is accurate?
OTOH, if life was designed by a creator, then one would expect that creator to have some preference for one handedness over the other.
Why would you expect that?
Compatibility?
Think of the movie War of the Worlds. Dropping yourself into another inhabited planet would probably be a death sentence as your body would have no resistance to the kinds of viruses and bacteria that live there.
Probably not, actually, since there's no reason to think that you'd be a similar enough environment to whatever they usually lived in. Smallpox was bad for the native americans not just because they weren't adapted to it, but mostly because it was adapted to humans.
Of course, you could still end up dying when you find out that the atmosphere there has cyanide or hydrogen chloride or something instead of oxygen.
Mind telling me what possible public interest is served by prohibiting me from rolling out my own cable service if I've got the capital and the wherewithal to do so?
Supposedly fewer people tearing up roads and the like to lay new wires (and never mind that shared, govt-owned wires would solve this better, similar to the "local loop unbundling" we had for a while but without the conflict of interest).
Comcast says it costs them $6.85 per home to double the internet capacity of a neighborhood.
Comcast also says that their users like their service and don't leave it the instant Verizon installs FiOS in the neighborhood. You shouldn't put much faith in what Comcast says.
The actual line in the article is "Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, has told investors that doubling the Internet capacity of a neighborhood costs an average of $6.85 a home.". We should believe them in this case, since AIUI they can get in actual real trouble with the SEC if they lie to their investors.
If all Time Warner customers decided one day not to check their e-mail or download a single movie, the company's costs would be no different than on a day when every customer was glued to the screen watching one YouTube video after another.
Does this just mean that Time Warner is big enough to only have settlement-free peering instead of paying anyone else for connectivity, or does it mean that their connectivity is priced by pipe size rather than data transfer?
Those would be examples of proprietary software and hardware, not formats as the GP was arguing.
It's actually proprietary interfaces, where they make sure that nobody except itunes can talk to the ipod. Which might be file formats on the ipod, or communication protocols, depending on how exactly it works.
Apple does NOT use "proprietary formats" for its iPod, that's just FUD spread around by people who never even tried one.
New iPods reengineered to block synching with Linux (2007), although I think this has been mostly (ipod touch / iphone require jailbreaking?) fixed.
Good luck with that, with today's portable media players being 1~160GB+ capacity it would be practically insane to manage files by hand. Let go of this useless obsession and learn to use metadata on your files. You'll probably even like smart playlists once you start using them.
What about how itunes won't run on linux?
he doesn't need to be a geek so long as he has the right geeks working for him
Is that really true? I'm a lawyer. No way on God's green earth would I work under the supervision of a non-lawyer.
Supervision as in "we should handle this case in this way", of course. But what about things like "case X will have a huge impact, so focus on getting it right and let the newer people handle A, B, and C."? Ie, setting general policy rather than direct supervision.
If this guy can prioritize between "nobody's databases can talk to eachother" and "we can't get bugfixes for Important Software X because the vendor went bankrupt" and "new employees are stting on their thumbs for 8 weeks while their computer accounts get set up", then as long as he doesn't meddle beyond saying "how much will it cost to fix this" and "fix this next, because it gets us the most bang for our buck" it doesn't really matter if he personally doesn't know anything about how to fix it.
Or, we could call it what everyone else is calling it. Grid computing or sometimes cloud computing.
I think the idea with those is that you have lots of "normal" computers on a "normal" network, whereas here you have one big computer. There should be different ratios of disk space to compute power, and CPU power to interconnect speeds and probably available RAM.
As they used to say, "The first 90% takes 90% of the effort, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the effort". Crunch time is just the expression of doing that last 90% effort in the last 10% of the schedule.
Or figure out what kind of things make that last "10%" take so much longer than it should, and learn to estimate it properly. Including estimated time for expected requirements changes and/or making it clear that estimates will change along with requirements.
.xxx
That'll probably be one of the first few to go, right after .con, .c0m, .0rg, .etc .
There is one exception to this: .cheezburger has been reserved for ICANN's exclusive use.
How about a slashdot policy of not linking to articles behind paywalls?
Seriously, it's even worse than the "free registration required" links that we used to have problems with.
Original PDF at http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/76522/tr-2008-169.pdf.
Posting on blogs, weather it be something bad about your company or just blogs in general, also are usually a violation.
Hmm, isn't slashdot technically a blog?
...
Hey, where'd everyone go?
an internet advocacy group has asked the FCC to investigate whether the WiFi-only restriction on the Skype for iPhone app is in violation of federal law.
If it is in violation (or rather, if AT&T's requirement that led to the software being restricted is in violation), wouldn't they already be having problems with their no-tethering rules for some data/internet plans?
140 Characters? You can copyright 140 characters?
Apparently. And things like C&D letters, and ... Whatever happened to the purpose of copyright being promotion of science and the useful arts?
These things are created for a specific purpose, which does not require them to be sold, and they would exist regardless of being copyrightable. So WTF is the point of them being copyrightable?
How do you outlaw hatred? How do you prosecute people for hating?
Isn't that what the Thought Police are for?