Which IM does your company use? I worked at a place that used Lotus (now IBM) Sametime and what's worse, it *would* steal focus everytime, never mind that Windows' "prevent focus stealing" option was on.
However, have you tried using some virtual desktop tools? There's one called Dexpot that allows custom rule definitions that route windows with specific titles to specific desktops. Maybe it'd help route your IM windows somewhere else?
I agree with you. Even most musical 'geniuses' get to that point by monomaniacally focussing on polishing their craft in their toddler/childhood years, at a time when other kids are doing other things.
That said, innate talent does exist. Google for the video of the guy who learned Icelandic in a week (he got to be that smart after an epileptic attack, apparently). However, innate talent is rare and unpredictable and although it rises to the top on occasion (military geniuses throughout history, both good and evil; modern-day wonders like Steve Jobs) for the purposes of strategic planning they can be discounted.
Which is why your opinion counts for zilch. Innovation is about bringing new things (physical objects, business models, whatever) to market and turning them into market-accepted ideas, however new-ness isn't measured by a narrow reductionist view, it's measured in its totality.
The Playstation Eye Toy and Motion Club was an afterthought, in product planning terms. The reason the Wii is innovative is that it took a low-cost console design and a motion control input system and turned it into the centrepiece of the console.
> defining incremental feedback loops as innovation?
It might surprise you but it takes a LOT of work to sift through the tonnes of feedback any successful (or even unsuccessful) product receives, identify the doable ones and actually work out the kinks and then bring it to market. Just the idea alone is worth pretty much nothing (except in hindsight) when you've got lots of other ideas you can work on. In short, innovation shows itself in the processes you create that allow successful ideas to be accepted and then executed well. Innovation is NOT about the idea itself.
> How many standalone copies of Vista have been sold since the official release date?
Microsoft never breaks down that figure for any OS it sells (or Office, either). It does break down Windows' OEM and Volume+Retail sales, and those were 23% and 6% (yes, 6%) of total company revenue in fiscal year 2005. No reason to believe Vista figures would be very different, at best there'll be a slight skew due to a small number of early adopters.
Interestingly the biggest revenue streams at MS are: Office Volume+Retail (24%), Windows OEM (23%) and Windows Server, including Windows Server OSes, Exchange, etc -- all sold mostly through Volume (19%).
... but you do have to remember MS gave away Vista upgrade vouchers to folk buying XP through Q4 last year. I wonder how many of these 40M licenses are really XP purchasers claiming their Vista disks?
Anyway, if the claim is true MS must be breathing a sigh of relief, given all the "no one wants to upgrade to Vista" talk on the internet. (Of course, we heard the same during the 9x/2k->XP and NT->2k transition as well). Still, if you're a user with existing hardware and files, hold off upgrading! It's the sensible thing to do.
Licencing is done with commercial organisations (unless you want to get into a futile battle with open source i.e., individual hackers/projects, which is silly and MS won't do it). Sun can license the patents for the versions of OO it sells/supports, like Novell did IF in fact patents are being infringed and cannot be worked around.
Also, licensing is not always per unit sold. Flat one-time payments are also used, and often patents are licensed for free, i.e., as part of a patent portfolio swap, no-sue agreements, etc.
Why would legal departments ready themselves for a counter-strike if Microsoft wants to license its patents (and the commercial terms are reasonable)?
Despite what you may think, companies cross-licence patents all the time. It's especially useful to do so for patents, which are basically worth zilch after 20 years anyway.
Microsoft has no history of patent litigation (lots of history of patent litigation directed against it, though), and I was interested to see if this would mark a change in its legal strategy. This news seems to indicate that nothing has changed, and all the "patent infringement" talk is probably because MS wants to get another Novell-style cross-licensing deal.
That'll work so well when you're in the study and your wife is in the kitchen (or the other way around). Until mobile phones figure out an easy way to mesh together (without relying on ridiculous network-specific 3 way calling) extensions continue to rock.
Since when? I don't see anyone creaming their panties over the latest release of Pro*C or Siebel point release. Ditto IBM, except when it collaborates with Open Source. Even the Google fanboys have taken on a decidedly muted look ever since their shenanigans w.r.t privacy and data mining have come to light.
Apple and Open Source have a loud, whiny fanboy community that's impervious to logic. They're welcome to it. Most of the rest of us just use the right tool for the job and move on.
I tried playing Gears of War at a friend's place using the controller. I moved around like a drunken sailor. True, the first time I played with a mouse (mouse-look in Quake, I think it was) I wasn't very good, but not as bad at this.
I'm sure I'll improve given enough practice. Until then it's kinda hard to justify dropping cash on a product that you can't even use well. Note that I'm a pretty casual player (the sort who struggles with midrange-skill bots), so the motivation to spend a lot of time learning a new system doesn't exist. But I do like the premise of games like Gears of War, Halo 3 and Mass Effect, and would play them if I could.
I'm probably not in Microsoft's target market for the XBox 360. But I wonder why they're so against offering customers more choice and increasing their market share in the process. Are they scared that a keyboard/mouse enabled XBox will cause a gamers' migration from their bread-and-butter Windows platform?
I could be wrong, but if I'd guess what keeps free speech going in England and Australia (and Canada) is Anglo-Saxon culture. Historically Britain always had the local wit and court jesters saying the most inconvenient things, and that I believe made it into judicial attitudes in a bottom-up sort of way, as judges became increasingly reluctant to ban any sort of expression on moral grounds (e.g. the case of the band on Lady Chatterley's Lover).
It's interesting to look at countries like Germany or India, which ban hot-button speech (Nazis, religious hate speech). The interesting thing is that these countries actually do have a tradition of free speech, it's just that a nanny state government was so traumatized by some events (WW2, Pre-Partition religious violence) that they had this knee-jerk response of banning certain kinds of speech.
What makes this really interesting is it's sort of hard to predict how a combination of PC culture and Muslim immigrants (who have different sensitivities than the natives) will pan out for the countries that don't protect speech the way the US does (although given Aussie culture Australia will probably do all right).
And you'll be surprised how this ISN'T the case throughout much of the world. Most Americans take it for granted, but it's pretty much an American innovation. Even liberal European democracies reserve very broad powers to curb speech in the name of a vaguely defined "public order". And you should hear Germans on how Nazi speech should be curbed (I wonder if they're really that afraid of neo-Nazis, or are they trying to suppress a rather painful national nightmare).
And even though some people claim that there are ways to subvert this in the US, it's actually pretty hard (and you have rights even within Guantanamo, see Hamdan v. Rumsfeld). One/. poster has a sig that goes "the root password to the US constitution is child porn". Well, child porn is illegal because it harms those who society judges cannot protect themselves. The legal theory is very well worked out, for example, the Supremes have clarified multiple times that 'simulated' child porn, though repugnant, cannot be illegal.
Free speech laws have meaning only if they protect speech that genuinely makes you mad. I find it astonishing that so many nations fail this test.
My bad. The guy who created Kazaa and Skype was Estonian, but he doesn't have anything to do with Joost (and as someone else mentioned, Joost works out of the US, UK and Netherlands).
I know several people from Estonia. Estonia is also a very small country, and they'd be the first to admit that in a large general readership like Slashdot, saying "raise your right hand if you know where Estonia is", makes a lot of sense. Hell, one could say "raise your right hand if you can spot Chengdu on a map" and get mystified glances, and Chengdu (one of China's top 5 cities) has 10X more people than Estonia does!
Hell, I'll go out on a limb and say people in Europe wouldn't be able to place Estonia on a map, unless they paid attention in History class.
> It's not the American people I'm frustrated with, it's the Bush administration... It's no excuse for my stupidly generalizing outburst.
It's good you get that, but if your frustration with another country's politics causes you to vent randomly over Estonia's geographical smallness, you need professional help in managing your anger issues. Seriously.
Estonia's also home of the guys who created Kazaa (before it sold out and became adware). They then went on to create Skype (whose technicians still work out of Estonia IIRC), and now Joost.
Estonia's one of the more happening places in the European VC scene due in no small part to their activities.
You're assuming that satisfaction within the Euro within the countries that use (hint: not all of Europe does) is high. It's not. In fact, the Italians complain bitterly about their inability to inflate regularly (their traditional style of staying competitive), thanks to Euro fiscal rules. On the other hand, in Germany, where the Bundesmark was very strictly managed, they're appalled at what they see as the lax management of the Euro. And in France, the introduction of the Euro is equated with high prices. Ireland is about the only country the Euro has helped.
Of course, this doesn't mean that the Euro is going be booted off any European country anytime soon. But it's a long way away from the dominance of the dollar, especially as long as India and China have significant dollar holdings.
And about footing that defence bill, I think it's unlikely that Europe will amassing a US (or even Chinese) style army anytime soon. But it has several security challenges: e.g. Russia (assuming Russia isn't a liberal democracy in the next 50 years, as is likely). There's also the booming demographics in the middle-east and North Africa and its continued refusal to admit Turkey into the EU (something that sort of paints it as a "Christian" Club). In contrast you have stagnant or declining populations in Europe, complete with stagnant growth in Europe's main drivers, France and Germany. Over time you'll see European leaders divert increasing amounts of their resources to protecting their strategic interests, especially when their "carrot" of trade becomes less juicy in the face of similar Chinese and Indian "carrots".
> Capitalism is an economic theory which claims that the best economic results are achieved under a specific set of conditions.
With a definition that vague you can argue almost anything is capitalism. The specific set of conditions are private ownership (of property and - for a limited time - inventions, which is where the rationale for patents comes from) and freedom of entry (to enable competitive markets, note that this doesn't give you the right to exploit others' inventions for a limited time).
> It's not another word for "economy", nor does it mean "business".
Good point. My own shorthand definition is "private ownership" and "free markets" -- two conditions which enable capitalism. However, free != freeloader; and a market where you spend billions to develop something -- and provide all the details in the form of a patent application -- only to see it being manufactured by someone else, is a *freeloader* market.
> You can argue that patents are good... you are then automatically arguing that capitalism is flawed as an economic theory
The epistemological basis for temporary grants of monopoly (which is what patents are) comes from the notion of "private property". For most of history physical objects (gold, land) were the only thing with value, which was the basis of feudalism (position being predicated on your holdings). Inventors and writers changed this, so that Shakespeare got rich with his plays and JK Rowling is richer than the Queen of England thanks to Harry Potter.
Btw, most of these squabbles over the right or wrong of patenting ended in the late 1700s, thus proving that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. Those who argue that intellectual output ought to have no value** today are little more IP anarchists who allow their hatred for corporations to blind them to the fact that the end of IP implies the resurgence of feudalism.
** This does not imply, of course, that those who hold IP rights cannot give them away freely. That is legal and indeed permissible because "private property" allows you to do what you like with it.
> The copyright extension is more blatant, but patents get extended in scope (business methods, software,...), if not in duration... This is not a "pure" market, but rather something that has already been created by meddling politicians.
They've not increased in duration (Except in the US, where they're trying to increase their 17-year limit to 20 years to sync with standard international practice). Now that that's out of the way--
Scope creep for patents occurs in courts, not in the legislature. Jefferson wrote in 1793 that patents ought to protect "any new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new or useful improvement" (italics mine). The Congress in 1952 clarified that patents protected "anything under the sun that is made by man." A few 'pure business method' patents (Wikipedia has examples) were granted as far back as 1799, but it was not until *1998* that a court decision cleared the way for routine filings of business-method patents. As such, it's difficult to blame politicians for this.
Finally, none of your points addresses the basic issue: drugs (very expensive to research and develop, cheap to produce) are EXACTLY the kind of thing patents were designed for. Drug companies invest billions in R&D for a 20 year window on sales. Success is not guaranteed and "hit" drugs like Viagra don't come by everyday. So all of your talk of how the market is somehow not 'free' is actually very academic and doesn't change the fact that Brazil's decision sends a lousy message to innovators in Brazil. And as I have mentioned before, countries that actually care about their R&D industries, like India, do find ways to work with drug companies. It's a pity political convenience stopped Brazil from doing the same.
> However, the inkjets (which, by the way, are very far from perfect) are quite uncorrelated from the matter at hand.
Heh. Actually they're very relevant to the matter at hand. I've tried to explain why briefly below.
> It isn't as if they just sat around a few decades and researched
Except that *is* what happened. (link, link) IBM did a lot of the early work in the early 1960s but never came up with something that'd appeal to mid- and small-business and consumers. Siemens made an early breakthrough here, and a thermal inkjet prototype was developed by HP in (IIRC) 1979. It was too primitive to bring to market, so HP continued to polish it until they introduced their first commercial inkjet in (again, IIRC) 1984. This wasn't a perfect printer, in fact according to Canon (which actually had more patents than HP on inkjet tech at this time) their engineers would "lose face" (warning:.doc) if they shipped such a lousy printer. The first inkjets didn't sell very well but HP continued to invest in them until they had 300 dpi resolution in about 1988, at which point they first tasted commercial success.
> No, it came in iterations, every few months or years a new model.
Iterative improvements came only around 1989-90, when sales started booming. Until then, imagine yourself an HP R&D manager and wonder if you would have greenlighted research that took almost a decade to get significant sales (on top of almost 15 years of prior research).
I've often said that/.-ers have a very warped view of innovation, coming no doubt from a world where all you need to build something new is a freely-available library here and some sample code there, and hey presto! new app! Innovation outside software (in hardware, in pharmaceuticals) is a good deal more complicated than that.
> Patents and capitalism don't belong in the same category. Patents explicitly prevent the market from being free
Patents prevent the market being "free" in a very narrow, semantic sense of "free". By arguing that, you sound like a chess player with a 1-step lookahead. If real entrepreneurs and businessmen did that capitalism would be very uninteresting.
Patents, by encouraging innovation, do in fact encourage capitalism by allowing businessmen to invest in high upfront R&D, low-reproduction costs like pharmaceuticals.
> but preserving the pristine sanctity of IP would have been more desireable.
Public policy is never a zero sum game of lives OR progress. No, a better course of action would have been something that saved lives *without* sending a chilling message to R&D-intensive industry in Brazil.
> If research doesn't offer profit in this quarter, it will not be done
Away from the/. stereotypes, practically no organization does that. Otherwise you wouldn't have a host of things, from inkjets (which took 10-30 years to perfect, depending on how you count) to bagless vacuum cleaners, to things like jet airplanes or CT scanners.
What organizations (and increasingly governments) do demand is oversight. Given the accountability demands these days (Sarbannes Oxley comes to mind) that is hardly surprising.
I didn't. My very next words were "The only silver lining in all of this is that poor Brazilian patients will benefit", if you actually bothered to read my post instead of posting vacuous replies to score cheap mod-points (God given right? where did that even come from?) But as I also said, in doing so the Brazilian government has sent a very clear message about what it thinks of R&D-intensive industry. Not good for Brazil in the long run, IMHO. (See also my discussion in the same post of what India, a comparable country, is doing.)
Yes, the WTO gives Brazil the right to claim public health precedent. If that right is abused, you can bet your britches the country will have to pay in some way, most directly at the cost of driving down innovation within its borders. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
> Actually, the reason why they didn't get rid of slaves and human labor was because slaves were cheaper
Uh, no (typical/. economic illiteracy, I might add). Slaves might be cheaper than developing new tech, but the TCO of new tech is cheaper than using slaves, especially when you consider even breakdown-prone machines do more work than even the strongest slave. And then there's the fact that machine labor scales so much better than slave labor. And machines don't eat (useful in famine years). The reason why they didn't get rid of slaves was because the intellectual classes didn't a) deal with those who did the slave-running to see the wrongness AND the inefficiency of the situation.
In the middle ages when people working on the land (either directly or landowners managing the actual workers) began to get a smidgen of education the use of machines in agriculture skyrocketed.
Slashdot Mirror
Which IM does your company use? I worked at a place that used Lotus (now IBM) Sametime and what's worse, it *would* steal focus everytime, never mind that Windows' "prevent focus stealing" option was on.
However, have you tried using some virtual desktop tools? There's one called Dexpot that allows custom rule definitions that route windows with specific titles to specific desktops. Maybe it'd help route your IM windows somewhere else?
I agree with you. Even most musical 'geniuses' get to that point by monomaniacally focussing on polishing their craft in their toddler/childhood years, at a time when other kids are doing other things.
That said, innate talent does exist. Google for the video of the guy who learned Icelandic in a week (he got to be that smart after an epileptic attack, apparently). However, innate talent is rare and unpredictable and although it rises to the top on occasion (military geniuses throughout history, both good and evil; modern-day wonders like Steve Jobs) for the purposes of strategic planning they can be discounted.
> I define innovation as new, novel, non obvious.
Which is why your opinion counts for zilch. Innovation is about bringing new things (physical objects, business models, whatever) to market and turning them into market-accepted ideas, however new-ness isn't measured by a narrow reductionist view, it's measured in its totality.
The Playstation Eye Toy and Motion Club was an afterthought, in product planning terms. The reason the Wii is innovative is that it took a low-cost console design and a motion control input system and turned it into the centrepiece of the console.
> defining incremental feedback loops as innovation?
It might surprise you but it takes a LOT of work to sift through the tonnes of feedback any successful (or even unsuccessful) product receives, identify the doable ones and actually work out the kinks and then bring it to market. Just the idea alone is worth pretty much nothing (except in hindsight) when you've got lots of other ideas you can work on. In short, innovation shows itself in the processes you create that allow successful ideas to be accepted and then executed well. Innovation is NOT about the idea itself.
> How many standalone copies of Vista have been sold since the official release date?
Microsoft never breaks down that figure for any OS it sells (or Office, either). It does break down Windows' OEM and Volume+Retail sales, and those were 23% and 6% (yes, 6%) of total company revenue in fiscal year 2005. No reason to believe Vista figures would be very different, at best there'll be a slight skew due to a small number of early adopters.
Interestingly the biggest revenue streams at MS are: Office Volume+Retail (24%), Windows OEM (23%) and Windows Server, including Windows Server OSes, Exchange, etc -- all sold mostly through Volume (19%).
... but you do have to remember MS gave away Vista upgrade vouchers to folk buying XP through Q4 last year. I wonder how many of these 40M licenses are really XP purchasers claiming their Vista disks?
Anyway, if the claim is true MS must be breathing a sigh of relief, given all the "no one wants to upgrade to Vista" talk on the internet. (Of course, we heard the same during the 9x/2k->XP and NT->2k transition as well). Still, if you're a user with existing hardware and files, hold off upgrading! It's the sensible thing to do.
Licencing is done with commercial organisations (unless you want to get into a futile battle with open source i.e., individual hackers/projects, which is silly and MS won't do it). Sun can license the patents for the versions of OO it sells/supports, like Novell did IF in fact patents are being infringed and cannot be worked around.
Also, licensing is not always per unit sold. Flat one-time payments are also used, and often patents are licensed for free, i.e., as part of a patent portfolio swap, no-sue agreements, etc.
Why would legal departments ready themselves for a counter-strike if Microsoft wants to license its patents (and the commercial terms are reasonable)?
Despite what you may think, companies cross-licence patents all the time. It's especially useful to do so for patents, which are basically worth zilch after 20 years anyway.
Microsoft has no history of patent litigation (lots of history of patent litigation directed against it, though), and I was interested to see if this would mark a change in its legal strategy. This news seems to indicate that nothing has changed, and all the "patent infringement" talk is probably because MS wants to get another Novell-style cross-licensing deal.
> Put the phone on speaker.
That'll work so well when you're in the study and your wife is in the kitchen (or the other way around). Until mobile phones figure out an easy way to mesh together (without relying on ridiculous network-specific 3 way calling) extensions continue to rock.
Since when? I don't see anyone creaming their panties over the latest release of Pro*C or Siebel point release. Ditto IBM, except when it collaborates with Open Source. Even the Google fanboys have taken on a decidedly muted look ever since their shenanigans w.r.t privacy and data mining have come to light.
Apple and Open Source have a loud, whiny fanboy community that's impervious to logic. They're welcome to it. Most of the rest of us just use the right tool for the job and move on.
I tried playing Gears of War at a friend's place using the controller. I moved around like a drunken sailor. True, the first time I played with a mouse (mouse-look in Quake, I think it was) I wasn't very good, but not as bad at this.
I'm sure I'll improve given enough practice. Until then it's kinda hard to justify dropping cash on a product that you can't even use well. Note that I'm a pretty casual player (the sort who struggles with midrange-skill bots), so the motivation to spend a lot of time learning a new system doesn't exist. But I do like the premise of games like Gears of War, Halo 3 and Mass Effect, and would play them if I could.
I'm probably not in Microsoft's target market for the XBox 360. But I wonder why they're so against offering customers more choice and increasing their market share in the process. Are they scared that a keyboard/mouse enabled XBox will cause a gamers' migration from their bread-and-butter Windows platform?
I could be wrong, but if I'd guess what keeps free speech going in England and Australia (and Canada) is Anglo-Saxon culture. Historically Britain always had the local wit and court jesters saying the most inconvenient things, and that I believe made it into judicial attitudes in a bottom-up sort of way, as judges became increasingly reluctant to ban any sort of expression on moral grounds (e.g. the case of the band on Lady Chatterley's Lover).
It's interesting to look at countries like Germany or India, which ban hot-button speech (Nazis, religious hate speech). The interesting thing is that these countries actually do have a tradition of free speech, it's just that a nanny state government was so traumatized by some events (WW2, Pre-Partition religious violence) that they had this knee-jerk response of banning certain kinds of speech.
What makes this really interesting is it's sort of hard to predict how a combination of PC culture and Muslim immigrants (who have different sensitivities than the natives) will pan out for the countries that don't protect speech the way the US does (although given Aussie culture Australia will probably do all right).
And you'll be surprised how this ISN'T the case throughout much of the world. Most Americans take it for granted, but it's pretty much an American innovation. Even liberal European democracies reserve very broad powers to curb speech in the name of a vaguely defined "public order". And you should hear Germans on how Nazi speech should be curbed (I wonder if they're really that afraid of neo-Nazis, or are they trying to suppress a rather painful national nightmare).
/. poster has a sig that goes "the root password to the US constitution is child porn". Well, child porn is illegal because it harms those who society judges cannot protect themselves. The legal theory is very well worked out, for example, the Supremes have clarified multiple times that 'simulated' child porn, though repugnant, cannot be illegal.
And even though some people claim that there are ways to subvert this in the US, it's actually pretty hard (and you have rights even within Guantanamo, see Hamdan v. Rumsfeld). One
Free speech laws have meaning only if they protect speech that genuinely makes you mad. I find it astonishing that so many nations fail this test.
My bad. The guy who created Kazaa and Skype was Estonian, but he doesn't have anything to do with Joost (and as someone else mentioned, Joost works out of the US, UK and Netherlands).
Sorry about that.
I know several people from Estonia. Estonia is also a very small country, and they'd be the first to admit that in a large general readership like Slashdot, saying "raise your right hand if you know where Estonia is", makes a lot of sense. Hell, one could say "raise your right hand if you can spot Chengdu on a map" and get mystified glances, and Chengdu (one of China's top 5 cities) has 10X more people than Estonia does!
... It's no excuse for my stupidly generalizing outburst.
Hell, I'll go out on a limb and say people in Europe wouldn't be able to place Estonia on a map, unless they paid attention in History class.
> It's not the American people I'm frustrated with, it's the Bush administration
It's good you get that, but if your frustration with another country's politics causes you to vent randomly over Estonia's geographical smallness, you need professional help in managing your anger issues. Seriously.
Estonia's also home of the guys who created Kazaa (before it sold out and became adware). They then went on to create Skype (whose technicians still work out of Estonia IIRC), and now Joost.
Estonia's one of the more happening places in the European VC scene due in no small part to their activities.
Your friends flirted with your girlfriend on ICQ too? What's her number again? :-)
You're assuming that satisfaction within the Euro within the countries that use (hint: not all of Europe does) is high. It's not. In fact, the Italians complain bitterly about their inability to inflate regularly (their traditional style of staying competitive), thanks to Euro fiscal rules. On the other hand, in Germany, where the Bundesmark was very strictly managed, they're appalled at what they see as the lax management of the Euro. And in France, the introduction of the Euro is equated with high prices. Ireland is about the only country the Euro has helped.
Of course, this doesn't mean that the Euro is going be booted off any European country anytime soon. But it's a long way away from the dominance of the dollar, especially as long as India and China have significant dollar holdings.
And about footing that defence bill, I think it's unlikely that Europe will amassing a US (or even Chinese) style army anytime soon. But it has several security challenges: e.g. Russia (assuming Russia isn't a liberal democracy in the next 50 years, as is likely). There's also the booming demographics in the middle-east and North Africa and its continued refusal to admit Turkey into the EU (something that sort of paints it as a "Christian" Club). In contrast you have stagnant or declining populations in Europe, complete with stagnant growth in Europe's main drivers, France and Germany. Over time you'll see European leaders divert increasing amounts of their resources to protecting their strategic interests, especially when their "carrot" of trade becomes less juicy in the face of similar Chinese and Indian "carrots".
> Capitalism is an economic theory which claims that the best economic results are achieved under a specific set of conditions.
... you are then automatically arguing that capitalism is flawed as an economic theory
With a definition that vague you can argue almost anything is capitalism. The specific set of conditions are private ownership (of property and - for a limited time - inventions, which is where the rationale for patents comes from) and freedom of entry (to enable competitive markets, note that this doesn't give you the right to exploit others' inventions for a limited time).
> It's not another word for "economy", nor does it mean "business".
Good point. My own shorthand definition is "private ownership" and "free markets" -- two conditions which enable capitalism. However, free != freeloader; and a market where you spend billions to develop something -- and provide all the details in the form of a patent application -- only to see it being manufactured by someone else, is a *freeloader* market.
> You can argue that patents are good
The epistemological basis for temporary grants of monopoly (which is what patents are) comes from the notion of "private property". For most of history physical objects (gold, land) were the only thing with value, which was the basis of feudalism (position being predicated on your holdings). Inventors and writers changed this, so that Shakespeare got rich with his plays and JK Rowling is richer than the Queen of England thanks to Harry Potter.
Btw, most of these squabbles over the right or wrong of patenting ended in the late 1700s, thus proving that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. Those who argue that intellectual output ought to have no value** today are little more IP anarchists who allow their hatred for corporations to blind them to the fact that the end of IP implies the resurgence of feudalism.
** This does not imply, of course, that those who hold IP rights cannot give them away freely. That is legal and indeed permissible because "private property" allows you to do what you like with it.
> The copyright extension is more blatant, but patents get extended in scope (business methods, software,...), if not in duration ... This is not a "pure" market, but rather something that has already been created by meddling politicians.
They've not increased in duration (Except in the US, where they're trying to increase their 17-year limit to 20 years to sync with standard international practice). Now that that's out of the way--
Scope creep for patents occurs in courts, not in the legislature. Jefferson wrote in 1793 that patents ought to protect "any new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new or useful improvement" (italics mine). The Congress in 1952 clarified that patents protected "anything under the sun that is made by man." A few 'pure business method' patents (Wikipedia has examples) were granted as far back as 1799, but it was not until *1998* that a court decision cleared the way for routine filings of business-method patents. As such, it's difficult to blame politicians for this.
Finally, none of your points addresses the basic issue: drugs (very expensive to research and develop, cheap to produce) are EXACTLY the kind of thing patents were designed for. Drug companies invest billions in R&D for a 20 year window on sales. Success is not guaranteed and "hit" drugs like Viagra don't come by everyday. So all of your talk of how the market is somehow not 'free' is actually very academic and doesn't change the fact that Brazil's decision sends a lousy message to innovators in Brazil. And as I have mentioned before, countries that actually care about their R&D industries, like India, do find ways to work with drug companies. It's a pity political convenience stopped Brazil from doing the same.
> However, the inkjets (which, by the way, are very far from perfect) are quite uncorrelated from the matter at hand.
.doc) if they shipped such a lousy printer. The first inkjets didn't sell very well but HP continued to invest in them until they had 300 dpi resolution in about 1988, at which point they first tasted commercial success.
/.-ers have a very warped view of innovation, coming no doubt from a world where all you need to build something new is a freely-available library here and some sample code there, and hey presto! new app! Innovation outside software (in hardware, in pharmaceuticals) is a good deal more complicated than that.
Heh. Actually they're very relevant to the matter at hand. I've tried to explain why briefly below.
> It isn't as if they just sat around a few decades and researched
Except that *is* what happened. (link, link) IBM did a lot of the early work in the early 1960s but never came up with something that'd appeal to mid- and small-business and consumers. Siemens made an early breakthrough here, and a thermal inkjet prototype was developed by HP in (IIRC) 1979. It was too primitive to bring to market, so HP continued to polish it until they introduced their first commercial inkjet in (again, IIRC) 1984. This wasn't a perfect printer, in fact according to Canon (which actually had more patents than HP on inkjet tech at this time) their engineers would "lose face" (warning:
> No, it came in iterations, every few months or years a new model.
Iterative improvements came only around 1989-90, when sales started booming. Until then, imagine yourself an HP R&D manager and wonder if you would have greenlighted research that took almost a decade to get significant sales (on top of almost 15 years of prior research).
I've often said that
> Patents and capitalism don't belong in the same category. Patents explicitly prevent the market from being free
Patents prevent the market being "free" in a very narrow, semantic sense of "free". By arguing that, you sound like a chess player with a 1-step lookahead. If real entrepreneurs and businessmen did that capitalism would be very uninteresting.
Patents, by encouraging innovation, do in fact encourage capitalism by allowing businessmen to invest in high upfront R&D, low-reproduction costs like pharmaceuticals.
> but preserving the pristine sanctity of IP would have been more desireable.
Public policy is never a zero sum game of lives OR progress. No, a better course of action would have been something that saved lives *without* sending a chilling message to R&D-intensive industry in Brazil.
> If research doesn't offer profit in this quarter, it will not be done
/. stereotypes, practically no organization does that. Otherwise you wouldn't have a host of things, from inkjets (which took 10-30 years to perfect, depending on how you count) to bagless vacuum cleaners, to things like jet airplanes or CT scanners.
Away from the
What organizations (and increasingly governments) do demand is oversight. Given the accountability demands these days (Sarbannes Oxley comes to mind) that is hardly surprising.
> You say that as if "IP" were a God-given right.
I didn't. My very next words were "The only silver lining in all of this is that poor Brazilian patients will benefit", if you actually bothered to read my post instead of posting vacuous replies to score cheap mod-points (God given right? where did that even come from?) But as I also said, in doing so the Brazilian government has sent a very clear message about what it thinks of R&D-intensive industry. Not good for Brazil in the long run, IMHO. (See also my discussion in the same post of what India, a comparable country, is doing.)
Yes, the WTO gives Brazil the right to claim public health precedent. If that right is abused, you can bet your britches the country will have to pay in some way, most directly at the cost of driving down innovation within its borders. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
> Actually, the reason why they didn't get rid of slaves and human labor was because slaves were cheaper
/. economic illiteracy, I might add). Slaves might be cheaper than developing new tech, but the TCO of new tech is cheaper than using slaves, especially when you consider even breakdown-prone machines do more work than even the strongest slave. And then there's the fact that machine labor scales so much better than slave labor. And machines don't eat (useful in famine years). The reason why they didn't get rid of slaves was because the intellectual classes didn't a) deal with those who did the slave-running to see the wrongness AND the inefficiency of the situation.
Uh, no (typical
In the middle ages when people working on the land (either directly or landowners managing the actual workers) began to get a smidgen of education the use of machines in agriculture skyrocketed.