SETI doesn't have a whole lot to do with science, other than the fact that they do use nice big radio telescopes. These are people with wishes and dreams and faith to test instead of hypothesies and observations. We've observed nothing, as yet, to suggest there is anybody else "out there", and yet these people are scanning for radio signals they may have sent to us. That's great, and more power to them, but I wouldn't call it serious science by any reasonable definition.
The problem isn't so much that they suggest there's someone out there. There probably is. The problem is that even if there is, all our powerful telescopes wouldn't be able to detect their radio signals anyway. Because of the inverse quare law, we wouldn't be able to detect our own planet at a distance of over half a light year.
SETI doesn't merely assume there are civilisations out there, they assume those civilisations are sending signals directly to us through powerful narrow beams. That's quite a bit less likely.
If my tax dollars went into it, I'd be kinda pissed (mainly because I'd prefer donating cycles to Folding@Home, but that's another story).
In TFA, an administrator even said it'd have been a different matter if it'd been for cancer research. I guess the guy chose the wrong @home project to join.
Look, I know there are counter arguments to everything. I am simply stating what the most accepted arguments are.
Could be the most accepted arguments (by whom?) are wrong, or at least missing some point, though.
Sure, however, if the invention is easily copied, there is less of an incentive to bring it to market because a competitor can simply copy it without having to expend the initial resources to invent it.
Sure, but then the inventor will have a much harder time making money from his invention. Simply being able to sell products based on your invention is often more than enough of an incentive. Especially in software.
But that's only necessary for patents that can be kept secret.
5)How many users actually buy android apps? Free apps are the vast vast majority of downloads.
No doubt, but some quality apps are a bit too much work to give away for free. The ability to pay for apps provides an extra incentive for developers to make cool apps. Extra value for everybody.
6)Why can't those users just turn off the non-marketplace firewall and install via download from the producer?
They could download it directly as download from a website if the developer were to distribute his app that way, but that makes it very easy to copy and give all your friends a free copy. The entire point of having an app store is to make it much easier to get access to lots of apps, including making it easier to pay for them than to install an illegal version. By driving people away from the app store, Optus is driving them to other methods of getting apps.
Nothing I said goes against what you said. My only point here is that patent protection is good for inventions that are easily reversed engineered. It creates the incentive for inventors to bring those types of inventions to market, which benefits society.
If those inventions do anything useful at all, there is already plenty of incentive to bring them to market: making money from them. Only for inventions that can be kept secret, is it necessary to give inventors an incentive to share them anyway.
I assume the original poster said that patent protection isn't required for inventions "that can easily be examined and cloned" because the disclosure required by a patent would not be necessary. My point is that those types of inventions would never be revealed to the public because the inventor will not waste resources on them.
Why would those resources be wasted? Inventions don't just make money through licensing deals, they can make money by being an actual product that makes money. Look at all those crappy software patents. Many patents have been acquired long after the actual invention has been done and used in the market. The invention wasn't done to get a patent out of it, but because there was a direct need for it, or a direct opportunity to make money from it. Lack of patents would not stop those inventions, but the existence of patents for those inventions does hinder their application, and even normal business operation.
Patents give the inventor a reason to reveal those inventions to the public, which in turn, allows other inventors to build on them and obtain new patents.
But that's only necessary for patents that can be kept secret. For inventions that can only be used by revealing them, no extra incentive to reveal the invention is needed. The inventor has to reveal it anyway.
But as I understand, if you simply insert a sim card from a different provider, you can access paid apps normally. How is that possible if it's a firmware issue?
What Google could do, however, is indirectly fund a class action suit against Optus. Just pay a lawyer to volunteer to handle that lawsuit, and pay for some national media attention to reach more disgruntled customers.
I don't know what kind of contract the Optus victims customers have, but if I got an Android phone through Optus and they're intentionally blocking Android services, then I'd definitely consider that breach of contract. In form them of that, get a new sim-only contract elsewhere, and stop paying the old contract.
Or sue them. This sounds deserving of a class action suit.
Read what he wrote. He claims that patents aren't intended for the benefit of the inventors, but for the benefit of society. They offer inventors a limited monopoly in exchange for sharing their inventions, rather than keeping them secret.
For inventions that are easily reverse-engineered or duplicated in a slightly different fashion (like software), society doesn't need to entice inventors to share their inventions, because that sharing happens automatically. Only for inventions that can be kept secret is it necessary to offer a monopoly in exchange for sharing the invention.
No patents mean anyone can copy the invention without paying the inventor, so I win that argument.
That doesn't mean he's not getting paid at all, though. If his invention is any good, he's already making money from it by the time his competitors find out about it.
That monopoly has been earned
No, it has been granted.
It's earned based on the fact the inventor has full rights to profit from the invention and others don't, at least not without permission.
Which is only the case because the government says it is.
It doesn't have to be a monopoly, though. If anyone pays licensing fees to the company owning the invention, it can use the invention.
That's exactly what the monopoly is.
Lol, the walling off is to protect the weak (inventors) from abuse (copycat jackals, greedy companies and consumers).
By the way, you realize patents are government-enforced monopolies, right? Walling off sections of the free market through legal force? If you think opposing patents is "socialist", you don't know what the word means.
You sound like you think government interference in the free market is automatically socialist. If that's true, then you don't know what the word means. Socialism is not about government protecting business monopolies. It's (supposed to be) about government by and for the people.
I'm not sure what kind of -ism would go with government protecting the interests of big business. Some kind of state-capitalism, I guess. Some people consider this part of fascism.
It's a cool universe (though their fantasy setting was better back in the late '80s) with some really amazingly cool games set in it, which makes it all the more frustrating that the people in charge of it are complete morons.
I wouldn't call "Busted" a newspaper, but its certainly a niche publication that can survive on printed media,
There are a lot of publications that survive very well on printed media. Magazines aren't going anywhere. The don't all publish their stories online for free, and there's no reason why the demand for their stories would suddenly disappear. Besides, paper is nicer to read, easier to take with you as you hang on the couch, ride on the train, soak in the tub, etc.
The big problem with newspapers is that long ago they used to be the bringers of breaking news. Radio and TV are already faster than newspapers for bringing breaking news, and with the ascent of internet, breaking news is just not a viable market for newspapers anymore.
So while your "newspaper targetting 25-35 year old males" might be thriving, it is probably not thriving on the news. News delivery is much better served by other sources.
Breaking news, yes. But there's a lot more to news than that. There's background and analysis, and the quick, short AP/Reuter stories online aren't so good at that. They require thought and research.
My newspaper doesn't tell me what happened yesterday, because I already know that. They tell me why it happened, what the different aspects to the story are, and what details the online sources missed. And quite a bit of background info, nicely summarised, in case I missed the events of the past couple of years that led to this.
While a newspaper is no longer relevant for time-sensitive stories, the ability to disseminate information instantaneously over the Internet has greatly reduced the quality of information.
Exactly. And that quality is what my newspaper tries to add. It doesn't try to compete with online news, it tries to complement it.
CNN, Fox, Yahoo, MSNBC, local newspaper websites, etc, all post the same AP, Reuters, and celebrity publicist news feeds verbatim as soon as they hit the wire.
Note that my newspaper does that too. But it doesn't put those stories on the front page. The bottom half of page 3 can fit 8 tiny headlines with a paragraph of content each. Starting page 4, you get big, double-page stories of background info and analysis, which is where the real strength of the paper lies.
the iphone will be the runt of the litter for another 7 months. Do you think that will affect sales?
The runt of the litter? There are still a lot of phones that are worse than an iPhone, and I bet it's still a very nice device for a lot of people. The resolution is good enough for a lot of things. Not everybody needs a real high end device.
The only problem is, the iPhone does have a high-end price.
One of the fastest growing Dutch news papers is directly aimed at 25-35 year old men who get most of their news online. I love it. It's a format that works well.
Slashdot Mirror
SETI doesn't have a whole lot to do with science, other than the fact that they do use nice big radio telescopes. These are people with wishes and dreams and faith to test instead of hypothesies and observations. We've observed nothing, as yet, to suggest there is anybody else "out there", and yet these people are scanning for radio signals they may have sent to us. That's great, and more power to them, but I wouldn't call it serious science by any reasonable definition.
The problem isn't so much that they suggest there's someone out there. There probably is. The problem is that even if there is, all our powerful telescopes wouldn't be able to detect their radio signals anyway. Because of the inverse quare law, we wouldn't be able to detect our own planet at a distance of over half a light year.
SETI doesn't merely assume there are civilisations out there, they assume those civilisations are sending signals directly to us through powerful narrow beams. That's quite a bit less likely.
If my tax dollars went into it, I'd be kinda pissed (mainly because I'd prefer donating cycles to Folding@Home, but that's another story).
In TFA, an administrator even said it'd have been a different matter if it'd been for cancer research. I guess the guy chose the wrong @home project to join.
more complete article on the story
That's a really nice wiring photo there.
If you ever thought about learning Morse,
Why would you do that? The Droid/Milestone has an app for that.
Look, I know there are counter arguments to everything. I am simply stating what the most accepted arguments are.
Could be the most accepted arguments (by whom?) are wrong, or at least missing some point, though.
Sure, however, if the invention is easily copied, there is less of an incentive to bring it to market because a competitor can simply copy it without having to expend the initial resources to invent it.
Sure, but then the inventor will have a much harder time making money from his invention. Simply being able to sell products based on your invention is often more than enough of an incentive. Especially in software.
But that's only necessary for patents that can be kept secret.
You can't keep a patent secret.
Yeah, I meant "invention" there.
Isn't the whole point of Android is that it is "Open"?
How could your mobile operator prevent you from accessing any sites?
Exactly because it's open. Optus can modify Android to not give access to the paid market, and put that modified version on the phones they sell.
Of course you can simply respond by installing Cyanogen, but not everybody is tech savvy enough to do that.
Are you saying it is easier to jail-break a closed iPhone than it is to work around simple blocks on the open Android?
No, jailbreaking is harder. But that's also not something that the average user is going to do.
5)How many users actually buy android apps? Free apps are the vast vast majority of downloads.
No doubt, but some quality apps are a bit too much work to give away for free. The ability to pay for apps provides an extra incentive for developers to make cool apps. Extra value for everybody.
6)Why can't those users just turn off the non-marketplace firewall and install via download from the producer?
They could download it directly as download from a website if the developer were to distribute his app that way, but that makes it very easy to copy and give all your friends a free copy. The entire point of having an app store is to make it much easier to get access to lots of apps, including making it easier to pay for them than to install an illegal version. By driving people away from the app store, Optus is driving them to other methods of getting apps.
Probably, but it's still a workaround that wouldn't be necessary if Optus did what their customers paid them for.
Nothing I said goes against what you said. My only point here is that patent protection is good for inventions that are easily reversed engineered. It creates the incentive for inventors to bring those types of inventions to market, which benefits society.
If those inventions do anything useful at all, there is already plenty of incentive to bring them to market: making money from them. Only for inventions that can be kept secret, is it necessary to give inventors an incentive to share them anyway.
I assume the original poster said that patent protection isn't required for inventions "that can easily be examined and cloned" because the disclosure required by a patent would not be necessary. My point is that those types of inventions would never be revealed to the public because the inventor will not waste resources on them.
Why would those resources be wasted? Inventions don't just make money through licensing deals, they can make money by being an actual product that makes money. Look at all those crappy software patents. Many patents have been acquired long after the actual invention has been done and used in the market. The invention wasn't done to get a patent out of it, but because there was a direct need for it, or a direct opportunity to make money from it. Lack of patents would not stop those inventions, but the existence of patents for those inventions does hinder their application, and even normal business operation.
Patents give the inventor a reason to reveal those inventions to the public, which in turn, allows other inventors to build on them and obtain new patents.
But that's only necessary for patents that can be kept secret. For inventions that can only be used by revealing them, no extra incentive to reveal the invention is needed. The inventor has to reveal it anyway.
But as I understand, if you simply insert a sim card from a different provider, you can access paid apps normally. How is that possible if it's a firmware issue?
What Google could do, however, is indirectly fund a class action suit against Optus. Just pay a lawyer to volunteer to handle that lawsuit, and pay for some national media attention to reach more disgruntled customers.
I don't know what kind of contract the Optus victims customers have, but if I got an Android phone through Optus and they're intentionally blocking Android services, then I'd definitely consider that breach of contract. In form them of that, get a new sim-only contract elsewhere, and stop paying the old contract.
Or sue them. This sounds deserving of a class action suit.
Read what he wrote. He claims that patents aren't intended for the benefit of the inventors, but for the benefit of society. They offer inventors a limited monopoly in exchange for sharing their inventions, rather than keeping them secret.
For inventions that are easily reverse-engineered or duplicated in a slightly different fashion (like software), society doesn't need to entice inventors to share their inventions, because that sharing happens automatically. Only for inventions that can be kept secret is it necessary to offer a monopoly in exchange for sharing the invention.
Sorry, it's definitely been earned. The inventor only gets less than 20 years of profit.
False again. He gets as much profit as he can get out of it. Profit from an invention is not limited to the duration of the patent.
The government, business people and consumers get to profit from the invention for infinity years after that.
That depends entirely on how long the invention remains profitable. It's unlikely to be truly infinite.
An invention that can easily be examined and cloned doesn't need patent protection.
Did you mean to say "that can't easily be cloned"?
No he didn't. Read the rest of his post. It makes sense.
No patents mean anyone can copy the invention without paying the inventor, so I win that argument.
That doesn't mean he's not getting paid at all, though. If his invention is any good, he's already making money from it by the time his competitors find out about it.
That monopoly has been earned
No, it has been granted .
It's earned based on the fact the inventor has full rights to profit from the invention and others don't, at least not without permission.
Which is only the case because the government says it is.
It doesn't have to be a monopoly, though. If anyone pays licensing fees to the company owning the invention, it can use the invention.
That's exactly what the monopoly is.
Lol, the walling off is to protect the weak (inventors) from abuse (copycat jackals, greedy companies and consumers).
So how''s that been working out for you lately?
By the way, you realize patents are government-enforced monopolies, right? Walling off sections of the free market through legal force? If you think opposing patents is "socialist", you don't know what the word means.
You sound like you think government interference in the free market is automatically socialist. If that's true, then you don't know what the word means. Socialism is not about government protecting business monopolies. It's (supposed to be) about government by and for the people.
I'm not sure what kind of -ism would go with government protecting the interests of big business. Some kind of state-capitalism, I guess. Some people consider this part of fascism.
It's a cool universe (though their fantasy setting was better back in the late '80s) with some really amazingly cool games set in it, which makes it all the more frustrating that the people in charge of it are complete morons.
Also keep in mind that converting all your Word files to a different format is quite a bit more cumbersome.
I wouldn't call "Busted" a newspaper, but its certainly a niche publication that can survive on printed media,
There are a lot of publications that survive very well on printed media. Magazines aren't going anywhere. The don't all publish their stories online for free, and there's no reason why the demand for their stories would suddenly disappear. Besides, paper is nicer to read, easier to take with you as you hang on the couch, ride on the train, soak in the tub, etc.
The big problem with newspapers is that long ago they used to be the bringers of breaking news. Radio and TV are already faster than newspapers for bringing breaking news, and with the ascent of internet, breaking news is just not a viable market for newspapers anymore.
So while your "newspaper targetting 25-35 year old males" might be thriving, it is probably not thriving on the news. News delivery is much better served by other sources.
Breaking news, yes. But there's a lot more to news than that. There's background and analysis, and the quick, short AP/Reuter stories online aren't so good at that. They require thought and research.
My newspaper doesn't tell me what happened yesterday, because I already know that. They tell me why it happened, what the different aspects to the story are, and what details the online sources missed. And quite a bit of background info, nicely summarised, in case I missed the events of the past couple of years that led to this.
While a newspaper is no longer relevant for time-sensitive stories, the ability to disseminate information instantaneously over the Internet has greatly reduced the quality of information.
Exactly. And that quality is what my newspaper tries to add. It doesn't try to compete with online news, it tries to complement it.
CNN, Fox, Yahoo, MSNBC, local newspaper websites, etc, all post the same AP, Reuters, and celebrity publicist news feeds verbatim as soon as they hit the wire.
Note that my newspaper does that too. But it doesn't put those stories on the front page. The bottom half of page 3 can fit 8 tiny headlines with a paragraph of content each. Starting page 4, you get big, double-page stories of background info and analysis, which is where the real strength of the paper lies.
Which one is that? Do they have an online version?
nrc.next (that's the official spelling, I believe). Their online edition is a blog.
the iphone will be the runt of the litter for another 7 months. Do you think that will affect sales?
The runt of the litter? There are still a lot of phones that are worse than an iPhone, and I bet it's still a very nice device for a lot of people. The resolution is good enough for a lot of things. Not everybody needs a real high end device.
The only problem is, the iPhone does have a high-end price.
I see. So. I think the general discussion is about newspapers. Not the thinly disguised escort service fliers that you pick up in most cities.
Maybe it's because I live in a city where escort service fliers don't need to disguise themselves thinly?
I must be one hell of a liberal, because I actually do get most of my news from NPR, BBC World Service, NYT, and slashdot.
You pinko liberal commie! Why do you hate freedom so much?
One of the fastest growing Dutch news papers is directly aimed at 25-35 year old men who get most of their news online. I love it. It's a format that works well.