emotional pain is no different or less real than "real" physical pain to the brain.
Key words there: "to the brain". Your body is intact.
You could claim it's like torture, except you don't have to listen to it. And once you've heard it, you don't have to continue to stand there listening to it.
That assumes your premise is correct. You've got essentially one study that leans in that direction, but it's not proof.
You may not be from America, so this may not apply in your jurisdiction, but there's no requirement for a working prototype here.
Right. We were talking about my proposal, which was about a 2-year patent term, starting with the first working product, thus eliminating patent trolls.
But that means that it stays secret for a decade or more, preventing innovation.
Yes, that is the tradeoff. I haven't been able to reconcile that, yet -- although I do believe that this makes more sense for successful drugs.
That is, I'd rather have the formula secret for a decade and then ready for generic use in 12 years, rather than ready for generic use in 15-30 years.
Plus, how do you keep a drug secret when you're doing human tests?
No need to keep the drug secret, only the formula.
That, plus you'd have to define "good return".
True, but certainly, it wouldn't be hard to find an arbitrary benchmark -- for example, doubling your money (after expenses).
What about reinvesting profits in R&D? Do those count as "returns" or no?
Yes -- though perhaps there'd be some split. But the idea is, you reinvest in R&D because you expect it to be successful, and you want more profit.
Also, keep in mind that you're not forced to stop selling the drug once you get to that point. You just have to start competing.
Personally, I think the best way to end the whole Bilski issue is to have Congress - not the Court - amend title 35 to explicitly make software and business methods patentable, but make them be examined much faster, and for a shorter term, as you propose... if an industry needs shorter terms, then we can add that industry once we know about it. Much better than placing an arbitrary limit on all fields.
Problem is, we now have to define fields explicitly, and as software patents have already shown, new fields emerge faster than Congress can keep up.
Also, it makes the legal code more complicated and more "hardcoded". That's a good thing to avoid, if we can do it and keep the same benefits. (If not, I like your idea.)
That's why I was trying to define what it was about drugs, specifically, that requires a longer patent term, and not just put an arbitrary limit on all drugs. Overly-simplistic example: See all that spam for Acai? Suppose that use was somehow patentable -- FDA approval isn't an issue (so long as they're clearly marked "not intended to treat any disease"), nor is the R&D particularly hard.
With the system I outlined, they get a patent term based on the amount of time they are actually selling it, not based on the years it might take a "real" drug to be reviewed, sent through animal and clinical trials, and finally approved.
The problem with Watt is that the inventors involved were all being greedy jerks.
Well, Watt specifically.
That's a human problem, not a patent problem.
It is, however, a problem that's solved by removing patents. Even if Watt kept his design secret, all Hornblower would have to do is take Watt's engine apart.
Or, for that matter, build his own from scratch. That's the other issue of patents vs copyright -- I can copyright some code, and you can write other code that does the same thing without infringing on me. However, if I patent it, you can't write other code that does the same thing, even if you were unaware of my patent.
Oh, Firefox has this built in anyway, mostly -- right-click, "undo close tab". My point was that this, and the crash recovery, are two things that Chrome has anyway, in some form.
So, Firefox gives you crash recovery. Chrome gives you crash recovery and less chance of a whole-browser crash. (Seriously, is there any other browser that you'd comfortably use the latest svn as a default browser?)
the product in question is a new version of an existing product with high consumer awareness
The iPhone was initially released in 2007. It certainly took less than two years to get popular enough that simply releasing a new version pays for years of R&D in three days.
I'm guessing the iPod saw similar results.
Most inventions take years to pay off, if they ever do.
And some never do.
So, given some small headstart, you do have an incentive to invent something, certainly if you've got an established product line, because you'll have the feature two years ahead of the competition.
But if it never takes off, or if it takes off very slowly, there's the chance that someone else will take the idea, improve on it, perhaps market it better, tweak the design, and use a more efficient manufacturing process -- which is a win for everyone but you.
The only difference is, what's the window of time you can hold onto that invention while you try to get your shit together?
I haven't had as good luck with that. One obvious example: If some other tab crashes while I'm typing this, I won't lose what I typed. Firefox might well open a tab pointing back to your comment here, but it wouldn't contain this text.
Arguably, this is something that could be fixed at the level of the website -- if Slashdot had a plain HTML form (and not ajaxy), Firefox might be able to recover it (though probably not). Or, Slashdot could take a Gmail-like approach, and periodically save it to a draft on the server.
But I don't have to deal with either of these. The other tab crashes, even an extension can crash and not cause problems for what I'm typing right here.
That, and Chrome remembers open tabs, too, in the form of the "recently closed" history in a new tab.
1) You invent a drug, at the expense of $10 million dollars of research. 2) You file for a patent that currently takes a minimum of 2 years to be examined 3) You lose.
Possible solution: Patent can be examined and approved without a working prototype. Start the 2-year clock from first working prototype or from date of filing, whichever comes first. Note that until this clock starts, you have no patent protection -- rely on trade secrets. (However, others may well not want to compete, as chances are, your patent will be approved first, and they will then be infringing.)
1) You invent a drug, at the expense of $10 million dollars of research. 2) You file for a patent and it gets examined within 1 month 3) By some miracle, it gets allowed and issued within 6 months, hooray!
Still a pretty inefficient system.
4) You start clinical trials in rabbits, as required by the FDA - minimum length of the trial is three years.
Obvious exception, then: Start the 2-year clock from when the drug is first actually available. "In usable form" would seem to imply that -- I can't really use the drug if it still needs approval.
Go back to the drawing board.
Alright, since everyone is so concerned with making a profit, how about: 7 years, or when you make a good return on your investment, whichever comes first. Thus, your drug examples would have a much longer term than the iPhone. Only problem is, it's much more difficult to track, and may well be subject to Hollywood accounting in some way.
Actually, do you have any ideas here?
Keep in mind, the goal of the patent system is to promote innovation, not to make inventors/corporations obscenely rich. From its very inception, most patents seem to do the opposite -- they are for inventions that would've happened anyway, and they restrict future improvements unnecessarily. It goes all the way back to Watt and Hornblower -- both would very likely have invented steam engines, and made quite a profit, but they would also have been able to build on each other's inventions, creating a more efficient engine.
This happened anyway, it just had to wait until the patents expired -- that's why I suggested shortening the term of a patent by so much.
The main point of a patent is to give the inventor a chance to recover the development costs and make a profit from their hard work before anybody else is allowed to copy them. If you think that this can be done in such a short time, you have a very simplistic idea of the costs of research and development.
The 16GB iPhone 3GS only costs the company three percent more to make than last year's model, with a bill of materials totalling $172.46 plus $6.50 in manufacturing costs, says the company.
Apple's US carrier, AT&T, sells the 16GB iPhone 3GS at a subsidized $199, but industry watchers reckon that AT&T and other carriers cough up around $600 per phone. In the UK, Apple's carrier of choice, O2, sells a pay as you go 16GB iPhone 3GS for a whopping $719.85.
Apple claims it sold a million iPhone 3GS phones in the three days following its launch, which would equate to a cool $420 million profit if iSuppli's numbers are accurate.
In absolute terms, Appleâ(TM)s R&D investment is up $59 million in Q4 2005 over Q4 2004. For all we know this might be a good, sustainable R&D investment rate for them.
Assuming that's per quarter, that means that exactly one model of iPhone, in exactly three days, paid for Apple's entire R&D budget for over a year and a half -- "entire" meaning "not limited to iPhones".
Now, not everything's an iPhone, but you see the point -- from the first public release of a product to a profit doesn't have to take a long time. In cases where it does, chances are the inventor's doing something wrong, and deserve to lose their protection.
In either case, notice again that competition doesn't necessarily kill the device in question, nor do cheap imitators actually prevent innovation.
We wouldn't have Vorbis if it weren't for the MP3 patents.
No, but we'd have AAC, which is arguably just as good, maybe even better.
And from what everyone is saying, Theora is far inferior to h.264. If patents weren't an issue, we'd all just declare mp4/m4v with h.264 and AAC as the new standard for the video tag, and there'd actually be cross-browser support.
At the moment, because of real patents, Opera and Firefox won't support h.264 (and thus, youtube.com/html5), and because of imagined patents, Safari won't support vorbis. Thus, it's not just open source projects, but open standards, which are neutered by software patents.
You may have a point with libpng, but then again, gif wasn't that bad. Indeed, gif supports things png doesn't -- animations, for one (there are two competing implementations, one of which has growing browser support (but nowhere near png), and one of which has practically no browser support.) I do prefer png, even with the gif patent expired, but at the end of the day, how big of an improvement was it?
Patents force people to work around patents. It's economically inefficient (just as hurricanes fuel the construction industry) and therefore probably not desirable, but it really does happen.
Firefox crashes for me occasionally, randomly, and not particularly reproduceably. For one thing, plugins can crash it.
Firefox also lags for me quite a bit, particularly when a webpage is being unresponsive -- or a plugin is being unresponsive -- or some part of Firefox itself is being unresponsive.
Chrome seems to use slightly more CPU and RAM -- I'm not sure. But it never lags, and the whole browser never crashes. Tabs crash often enough, but then, I'm running a nightly -- and it's much faster to just click refresh (don't blink or you'll miss it) than to reload an entire running Firefox and all its tabs and windows.
I agree. UI candy is fine, but that is not the feature I'd have chosen from Chrome.
Supposedly, they're planning on it. No comment as to when that will be ready, though.
If Google, as announced, implements a plug-in API and those two plug-ins I mentioned are ported, I'll stay.
Just to be clear: You don't mean plug-in. Chrome already supports plugins. It would be very embarrassing if it didn't -- YouTube wouldn't work, for example, without the Flash plugin.
You mean Extensions.
And, they're working on that, too. There seem to be some vague goals to eventually natively support Firefox extensions. At the moment, it's stupidly easy to make an extension (I built an adblocker in two days), but the API isn't stable yet (or fully implemented), and it's only available on the nightly builds, and then only if you pass a commandline flag to enable it.
All those warnings aside, though, it works quite well.
yes, I could kludge them on, no thanks
Define "kludge".
For example, while privoxy is harder to implement, it's anything but a "kludge" -- block the ads once, they stay blocked, no matter which browser you use.
The other one you mention:
I can't right click on pictures and find their properties
Less convenient, but right-click, open image in new tab. You don't even have to switch to that tab -- the image dimensions will be right there.
As for an extension, there doesn't seem to be a good way to modify the context menu. (Again: Unstable API. Maybe they'll add it before extensions are released.) On the other hand, it would be trivial to add as a keystroke or a toolstrip button -- could change the alt text, could make an overlay, or could make it so the default left-click action pops it up.
The most obvious difference is, this would show the actual visible dimensions of the image. So, if you have a 1x1 image scaled up to 20x20, this would report 20x20.
This would probably take me less than an hour to build. I've never tried writing a Firefox extension before, but I kind of doubt it was ever that easy. Think Greasemonkey on steroids.
Also, clearing my tracks (delete everything) takes forever and a day.
Depends what you mean by that. It could be as simple as blowing away ~/.config/chrome (on Linux; there's similar things on Windows). There's also exactly one button to purge history -- or are you saying it's the wait time? And there's "Incognito Mode", which is probably what you're looking for, if you routinely purge your entire browser history.
As for myself, Chrome just feels lighter and faster than Firefox. I use both -- Firebug still has a few things I like, and there are still a few pages that don't work with Chrome (or at least, my Chromium nightly, and I'd expect that). But the fact that I went from knowing nothing about the Chrome extension API to having a working adblocker (using couchdb, which I'd never used) in two days is just awesome.
No more than 7 years on a patent. No extensions. No exceptions.
Overly generous.
The tradeoff I'd suggest is: You are not allowed to file a patent until your invention is actually in a usable state. Once it is in a usable state, your patent lasts at most 1-2 years.
The advantage to this is, you can do whatever you want as long as you keep it secret (NDAs, etc). However, this does not prevent a competitor from independently coming up with the same idea, so you have an incentive to actually get it to market. And once it hits the market, you have 2 years to turn a profit -- at least in high tech, if you didn't do that in two years, you're Doing It Wrong.
Obvious example: iPhone. Google disabled multitouch on Android because of patent concerns. The iPhone was crazily successful in its first two years, so I think we can safely say Apple's got a return on their investment. Even in the incredibly unlikely event that a multitouch Android today could completely wipe out the iPhone, I doubt very much that Apple would be any less likely to build their next killer gadget. As it is, that particular feature, now blindingly obvious in hindsight (and it wouldn't make the Android an iPhone-killer, either), is unlikely to be anywhere but the iPhone for the next twelve years.
The above is simplified and likely somewhat wrong (it's doubtful Apple has patents that completely kill multitouch, just restrict it somewhat), but you see the point. Even seven years is far too long. Seven years ago this month, the Phoenix browser, a "browser-only" fork of Mozilla, was released. In other words, seven years encompasses the entire lifetime of Firefox, from back before it was called Firefox, right up to before it was forked from Mozilla.
Think about it. Suppose Opera held a patent on tabbed browsing back then. That would mean Firefox 3.0 would only just be introducing that "new" feature -- assuming there were enough people still maintaining it, rather than simply using Opera.
No patenting of algorithms
Pretty much eliminates software patents. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's an interesting problem -- can we then patent software, but not hardware? Could we patent, for instance, a Verilog program? (Is that software or hardware?)
It might have some interesting implications, too -- for instance, if a patent only applied to a hardware implementation, that might push more codec implementations in hardware, which might actually help open source software -- you'd then have a choice of interfacing with the hardware (you bought it, you should have a license to use it), or reimplementing the codec in software (not vulnerable to patents since it's an algorithm).
Patents to be awarded to individuals only, not companies
I'm not entirely sure what this accomplishes.
Consider one scenario: I invent something. I have nowhere near the resources to actually develop this idea. So I patent it and sell it to a company, and they build it.
Now, suppose I can't sign over the patent. Would any company touch it? Certainly, they'd be much more cautious -- even if they hire me, the second I leave the company, I take the patent with me, and their product dies.
But those are just arguments against -- I really have no idea what your argument for this rule is.
the Church itself does not believe in hell or its punishments. It only wants us to believe.
Irrelevant. For all we know, hell exists, and every member of the church will go there.
For all we know, everyone goes to hell, or only those who refused to eat broccoli go to heaven, or perhaps heaven is worse than hell.
Which do you fear more? The hell where you cannot be pricked with needles or the hell where you are forced to bow, forced to beg, isolated, forced to physical pain all by someone you can see and know.
"Cannot be pricked with needles" meaning the afterlife, I assume.
You're making a claim that you have no evidence for.
An unknown offers the same hope that America offered to Christopher Columbus.
That doesn't make it a smart decision. Suppose the Americas hadn't been there -- Columbus would've died at sea. What's more, he never knew he discovered another continent -- he went to his grave thinking he'd discovered India.
Will your God
My god?
I'm an atheist. But thanks for assuming.
The question is, if you are facing the end of your life, if you're right, it's the beginning of your life in heaven. If I'm right, it's the end of your existence -- and frankly, I think pain and a loss of dignity is far better than no existence at all.
And if neither of us are right, it could be worse than anything we know.
I think if they saw how people with terminal diseases have their lives dragged on by medical treatments wouldn't have wrote that you go to hell for suicide.
That's beside the point.
The point wasn't whether or not you go to hell for suicide.
The point was, you have absolutely no idea what happens after death. For all you know, maybe you do go to hell for suicide. Or maybe you go to hell for masturbating. Or maybe everyone just goes to hell.
Or maybe heaven is really a horrible place, after all.
Starting to make sense?
Now, I would guess that there is no afterlife. That you simply go to sleep and don't wake up -- that you cease to exist. But we don't really know, and if there is, we don't know what it's like.
I agree, and you'll notice, that is what I've been saying this whole thread.
Look at my original post. It was replying to someone who claimed this was "courage". I spun it as cowardice. Then I clarified -- I don't think I can say it's either one, and I don't think less of him, but I don't like glorifying it.
If you want to develop for the iPhone, you will use Objective C. Your only other option is a web app, but providing that offline may or may not be allowed, and either way, it's not likely to expose the same APIs.
Contrast this to Windows Mobile which, being an actually open platform (or at least as open as any other proprietary OS), will support any language people care to port to it. That goes double for Android.
Me, I prefer Ruby. "Aha," you say, "That has iPhone support!" As many owners of jailbroken phones will tell you, it's not that you can't do this on the iPhone, it's that Apple might arbitrarily reject you for doing so.
If I wanted viruses on my phone I would have gotten Windows Mobile. (Yeah WinMO doesn't really have a virus problem...
Nor does OS X, for that matter.
If apple wants to provide a channel which is only screened for actual malware, that might make sense, though it'd still be an absurd bottleneck trying to get anything approved.
Well, let's be fair -- the iPod does, indeed, use USB Mass Storage. It also exposes its library through a ton of files in a bizarre proprietary format, so it's not like you can actually transfer music that way, but it's certainly a step above this.
Saying "I don't blame them" doesn't make it an act of courage, though.
Ultimately, it's neither. Both options are terrifying, and at least pulling the trigger means you had the courage to act and make a choice, rather than simply letting it happen. And I do have some of the same sentiment -- I'd probably rather spend my last breaths on my terms, diving headfirst into the maw, than spend my last breaths on a respirator, unconscious from the pain.
The difference is, I have no faith that there's anything at all after this. So unless I have a damned good reason not to -- like, draining the estate when it's truly terminal, or jumping on a grenade -- I absolutely will fight for every second I can. I love life, and I want more of it.
This thread is full of stories with defeatist morals -- and I will not say that anyone is wrong for making that choice. But at the same time, I also won't revere them for making "the right choice" -- they made the choice they made, and it isn't black and white.
My own story: My step-grandfather had cancer, undiscovered for a long time. When you get that old, you don't go to the doctor over every lump and ache. So when it was finally discovered, it was pretty much too late.
I was in a serious crunch at work, so I didn't go visit him as long as there was a chance... but my father called me, with two words: "Jerry's dying." He'd talked to my grandmother, and together, they decided there was no point dragging it out -- he was asleep so much, and when he was awake, he was in pain... he was barely there, and every day was costing money. So they had his life support pulled.
My father and I dropped everything and flew out there. He was in a coma by the time we arrived.
He never woke up. We like to say he waited for everyone to arrive (we weren't the last). He just... slipped away quietly in the night.
I don't know what choice I would have made, in that position -- I've never been in that position. I don't blame anyone for making that choice -- but I don't think that it's somehow more "right" than the alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
emotional pain is no different or less real than "real" physical pain to the brain.
Key words there: "to the brain". Your body is intact.
You could claim it's like torture, except you don't have to listen to it. And once you've heard it, you don't have to continue to stand there listening to it.
That assumes your premise is correct. You've got essentially one study that leans in that direction, but it's not proof.
You may not be from America, so this may not apply in your jurisdiction, but there's no requirement for a working prototype here.
Right. We were talking about my proposal, which was about a 2-year patent term, starting with the first working product, thus eliminating patent trolls.
But that means that it stays secret for a decade or more, preventing innovation.
Yes, that is the tradeoff. I haven't been able to reconcile that, yet -- although I do believe that this makes more sense for successful drugs.
That is, I'd rather have the formula secret for a decade and then ready for generic use in 12 years, rather than ready for generic use in 15-30 years.
Plus, how do you keep a drug secret when you're doing human tests?
No need to keep the drug secret, only the formula.
That, plus you'd have to define "good return".
True, but certainly, it wouldn't be hard to find an arbitrary benchmark -- for example, doubling your money (after expenses).
What about reinvesting profits in R&D? Do those count as "returns" or no?
Yes -- though perhaps there'd be some split. But the idea is, you reinvest in R&D because you expect it to be successful, and you want more profit.
Also, keep in mind that you're not forced to stop selling the drug once you get to that point. You just have to start competing.
Personally, I think the best way to end the whole Bilski issue is to have Congress - not the Court - amend title 35 to explicitly make software and business methods patentable, but make them be examined much faster, and for a shorter term, as you propose... if an industry needs shorter terms, then we can add that industry once we know about it. Much better than placing an arbitrary limit on all fields.
Problem is, we now have to define fields explicitly, and as software patents have already shown, new fields emerge faster than Congress can keep up.
Also, it makes the legal code more complicated and more "hardcoded". That's a good thing to avoid, if we can do it and keep the same benefits. (If not, I like your idea.)
That's why I was trying to define what it was about drugs, specifically, that requires a longer patent term, and not just put an arbitrary limit on all drugs. Overly-simplistic example: See all that spam for Acai? Suppose that use was somehow patentable -- FDA approval isn't an issue (so long as they're clearly marked "not intended to treat any disease"), nor is the R&D particularly hard.
With the system I outlined, they get a patent term based on the amount of time they are actually selling it, not based on the years it might take a "real" drug to be reviewed, sent through animal and clinical trials, and finally approved.
The problem with Watt is that the inventors involved were all being greedy jerks.
Well, Watt specifically.
That's a human problem, not a patent problem.
It is, however, a problem that's solved by removing patents. Even if Watt kept his design secret, all Hornblower would have to do is take Watt's engine apart.
Or, for that matter, build his own from scratch. That's the other issue of patents vs copyright -- I can copyright some code, and you can write other code that does the same thing without infringing on me. However, if I patent it, you can't write other code that does the same thing, even if you were unaware of my patent.
Interesting. ...I'll have to add this for Chrome. Looks like it wouldn't be too difficult.
More for navigating away from the form than anything, I suspect.
Oh, Firefox has this built in anyway, mostly -- right-click, "undo close tab". My point was that this, and the crash recovery, are two things that Chrome has anyway, in some form.
So, Firefox gives you crash recovery. Chrome gives you crash recovery and less chance of a whole-browser crash. (Seriously, is there any other browser that you'd comfortably use the latest svn as a default browser?)
the product in question is a new version of an existing product with high consumer awareness
The iPhone was initially released in 2007. It certainly took less than two years to get popular enough that simply releasing a new version pays for years of R&D in three days.
I'm guessing the iPod saw similar results.
Most inventions take years to pay off, if they ever do.
And some never do.
So, given some small headstart, you do have an incentive to invent something, certainly if you've got an established product line, because you'll have the feature two years ahead of the competition.
But if it never takes off, or if it takes off very slowly, there's the chance that someone else will take the idea, improve on it, perhaps market it better, tweak the design, and use a more efficient manufacturing process -- which is a win for everyone but you.
The only difference is, what's the window of time you can hold onto that invention while you try to get your shit together?
I haven't had as good luck with that. One obvious example: If some other tab crashes while I'm typing this, I won't lose what I typed. Firefox might well open a tab pointing back to your comment here, but it wouldn't contain this text.
Arguably, this is something that could be fixed at the level of the website -- if Slashdot had a plain HTML form (and not ajaxy), Firefox might be able to recover it (though probably not). Or, Slashdot could take a Gmail-like approach, and periodically save it to a draft on the server.
But I don't have to deal with either of these. The other tab crashes, even an extension can crash and not cause problems for what I'm typing right here.
That, and Chrome remembers open tabs, too, in the form of the "recently closed" history in a new tab.
1) You invent a drug, at the expense of $10 million dollars of research.
2) You file for a patent that currently takes a minimum of 2 years to be examined
3) You lose.
Possible solution: Patent can be examined and approved without a working prototype. Start the 2-year clock from first working prototype or from date of filing, whichever comes first. Note that until this clock starts, you have no patent protection -- rely on trade secrets. (However, others may well not want to compete, as chances are, your patent will be approved first, and they will then be infringing.)
1) You invent a drug, at the expense of $10 million dollars of research.
2) You file for a patent and it gets examined within 1 month
3) By some miracle, it gets allowed and issued within 6 months, hooray!
Still a pretty inefficient system.
4) You start clinical trials in rabbits, as required by the FDA - minimum length of the trial is three years.
Obvious exception, then: Start the 2-year clock from when the drug is first actually available. "In usable form" would seem to imply that -- I can't really use the drug if it still needs approval.
Go back to the drawing board.
Alright, since everyone is so concerned with making a profit, how about: 7 years, or when you make a good return on your investment, whichever comes first. Thus, your drug examples would have a much longer term than the iPhone. Only problem is, it's much more difficult to track, and may well be subject to Hollywood accounting in some way.
Actually, do you have any ideas here?
Keep in mind, the goal of the patent system is to promote innovation, not to make inventors/corporations obscenely rich. From its very inception, most patents seem to do the opposite -- they are for inventions that would've happened anyway, and they restrict future improvements unnecessarily. It goes all the way back to Watt and Hornblower -- both would very likely have invented steam engines, and made quite a profit, but they would also have been able to build on each other's inventions, creating a more efficient engine.
This happened anyway, it just had to wait until the patents expired -- that's why I suggested shortening the term of a patent by so much.
The main point of a patent is to give the inventor a chance to recover the development costs and make a profit from their hard work before anybody else is allowed to copy them. If you think that this can be done in such a short time, you have a very simplistic idea of the costs of research and development.
Alright, let's do some calculations, shall we?
Source.
The 16GB iPhone 3GS only costs the company three percent more to make than last year's model, with a bill of materials totalling $172.46 plus $6.50 in manufacturing costs, says the company.
Apple's US carrier, AT&T, sells the 16GB iPhone 3GS at a subsidized $199, but industry watchers reckon that AT&T and other carriers cough up around $600 per phone. In the UK, Apple's carrier of choice, O2, sells a pay as you go 16GB iPhone 3GS for a whopping $719.85.
Apple claims it sold a million iPhone 3GS phones in the three days following its launch, which would equate to a cool $420 million profit if iSuppli's numbers are accurate.
And how about the cost of R&D?
In absolute terms, Appleâ(TM)s R&D investment is up $59 million in Q4 2005 over Q4 2004. For all we know this might be a good, sustainable R&D investment rate for them.
Assuming that's per quarter, that means that exactly one model of iPhone, in exactly three days, paid for Apple's entire R&D budget for over a year and a half -- "entire" meaning "not limited to iPhones".
Now, not everything's an iPhone, but you see the point -- from the first public release of a product to a profit doesn't have to take a long time. In cases where it does, chances are the inventor's doing something wrong, and deserve to lose their protection.
In either case, notice again that competition doesn't necessarily kill the device in question, nor do cheap imitators actually prevent innovation.
Sure sounds like you just did.
I thought "from a certain perspective" would've been enough to make my point clear.
GP claims it was bravery. I'm putting for the claim that it's cowardice, not because that's what I believe, but to show that it's not that simple.
We wouldn't have Vorbis if it weren't for the MP3 patents.
No, but we'd have AAC, which is arguably just as good, maybe even better.
And from what everyone is saying, Theora is far inferior to h.264. If patents weren't an issue, we'd all just declare mp4/m4v with h.264 and AAC as the new standard for the video tag, and there'd actually be cross-browser support.
At the moment, because of real patents, Opera and Firefox won't support h.264 (and thus, youtube.com/html5), and because of imagined patents, Safari won't support vorbis. Thus, it's not just open source projects, but open standards, which are neutered by software patents.
You may have a point with libpng, but then again, gif wasn't that bad. Indeed, gif supports things png doesn't -- animations, for one (there are two competing implementations, one of which has growing browser support (but nowhere near png), and one of which has practically no browser support.) I do prefer png, even with the gif patent expired, but at the end of the day, how big of an improvement was it?
Patents force people to work around patents. It's economically inefficient (just as hurricanes fuel the construction industry) and therefore probably not desirable, but it really does happen.
In other words, it's a broken window model.
Thanks for proving the point:
It almost never crashes.
Wouldn't it be better if, during one of those rare cases that it crashes for you, it didn't take down every single tab and window you have open?
Firefox crashes for me occasionally, randomly, and not particularly reproduceably. For one thing, plugins can crash it.
Firefox also lags for me quite a bit, particularly when a webpage is being unresponsive -- or a plugin is being unresponsive -- or some part of Firefox itself is being unresponsive.
Chrome seems to use slightly more CPU and RAM -- I'm not sure. But it never lags, and the whole browser never crashes. Tabs crash often enough, but then, I'm running a nightly -- and it's much faster to just click refresh (don't blink or you'll miss it) than to reload an entire running Firefox and all its tabs and windows.
I agree. UI candy is fine, but that is not the feature I'd have chosen from Chrome.
If Firefox does this, I'm going back.
Supposedly, they're planning on it. No comment as to when that will be ready, though.
If Google, as announced, implements a plug-in API and those two plug-ins I mentioned are ported, I'll stay.
Just to be clear: You don't mean plug-in. Chrome already supports plugins. It would be very embarrassing if it didn't -- YouTube wouldn't work, for example, without the Flash plugin.
You mean Extensions.
And, they're working on that, too. There seem to be some vague goals to eventually natively support Firefox extensions. At the moment, it's stupidly easy to make an extension (I built an adblocker in two days), but the API isn't stable yet (or fully implemented), and it's only available on the nightly builds, and then only if you pass a commandline flag to enable it.
All those warnings aside, though, it works quite well.
yes, I could kludge them on, no thanks
Define "kludge".
For example, while privoxy is harder to implement, it's anything but a "kludge" -- block the ads once, they stay blocked, no matter which browser you use.
The other one you mention:
I can't right click on pictures and find their properties
Less convenient, but right-click, open image in new tab. You don't even have to switch to that tab -- the image dimensions will be right there.
As for an extension, there doesn't seem to be a good way to modify the context menu. (Again: Unstable API. Maybe they'll add it before extensions are released.) On the other hand, it would be trivial to add as a keystroke or a toolstrip button -- could change the alt text, could make an overlay, or could make it so the default left-click action pops it up.
The most obvious difference is, this would show the actual visible dimensions of the image. So, if you have a 1x1 image scaled up to 20x20, this would report 20x20.
This would probably take me less than an hour to build. I've never tried writing a Firefox extension before, but I kind of doubt it was ever that easy. Think Greasemonkey on steroids.
Also, clearing my tracks (delete everything) takes forever and a day.
Depends what you mean by that. It could be as simple as blowing away ~/.config/chrome (on Linux; there's similar things on Windows). There's also exactly one button to purge history -- or are you saying it's the wait time? And there's "Incognito Mode", which is probably what you're looking for, if you routinely purge your entire browser history.
As for myself, Chrome just feels lighter and faster than Firefox. I use both -- Firebug still has a few things I like, and there are still a few pages that don't work with Chrome (or at least, my Chromium nightly, and I'd expect that). But the fact that I went from knowing nothing about the Chrome extension API to having a working adblocker (using couchdb, which I'd never used) in two days is just awesome.
Sorry, correction -- not Firefox 3.0, Firefox 3.6.
No more than 7 years on a patent. No extensions. No exceptions.
Overly generous.
The tradeoff I'd suggest is: You are not allowed to file a patent until your invention is actually in a usable state. Once it is in a usable state, your patent lasts at most 1-2 years.
The advantage to this is, you can do whatever you want as long as you keep it secret (NDAs, etc). However, this does not prevent a competitor from independently coming up with the same idea, so you have an incentive to actually get it to market. And once it hits the market, you have 2 years to turn a profit -- at least in high tech, if you didn't do that in two years, you're Doing It Wrong.
Obvious example: iPhone. Google disabled multitouch on Android because of patent concerns. The iPhone was crazily successful in its first two years, so I think we can safely say Apple's got a return on their investment. Even in the incredibly unlikely event that a multitouch Android today could completely wipe out the iPhone, I doubt very much that Apple would be any less likely to build their next killer gadget. As it is, that particular feature, now blindingly obvious in hindsight (and it wouldn't make the Android an iPhone-killer, either), is unlikely to be anywhere but the iPhone for the next twelve years.
The above is simplified and likely somewhat wrong (it's doubtful Apple has patents that completely kill multitouch, just restrict it somewhat), but you see the point. Even seven years is far too long. Seven years ago this month, the Phoenix browser, a "browser-only" fork of Mozilla, was released. In other words, seven years encompasses the entire lifetime of Firefox, from back before it was called Firefox, right up to before it was forked from Mozilla.
Think about it. Suppose Opera held a patent on tabbed browsing back then. That would mean Firefox 3.0 would only just be introducing that "new" feature -- assuming there were enough people still maintaining it, rather than simply using Opera.
No patenting of algorithms
Pretty much eliminates software patents. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's an interesting problem -- can we then patent software, but not hardware? Could we patent, for instance, a Verilog program? (Is that software or hardware?)
It might have some interesting implications, too -- for instance, if a patent only applied to a hardware implementation, that might push more codec implementations in hardware, which might actually help open source software -- you'd then have a choice of interfacing with the hardware (you bought it, you should have a license to use it), or reimplementing the codec in software (not vulnerable to patents since it's an algorithm).
Patents to be awarded to individuals only, not companies
I'm not entirely sure what this accomplishes.
Consider one scenario: I invent something. I have nowhere near the resources to actually develop this idea. So I patent it and sell it to a company, and they build it.
Now, suppose I can't sign over the patent. Would any company touch it? Certainly, they'd be much more cautious -- even if they hire me, the second I leave the company, I take the patent with me, and their product dies.
But those are just arguments against -- I really have no idea what your argument for this rule is.
Cue the "But being fair to the consumers wouldn't be maximizing profits for the shareholders!" apologists.
the Church itself does not believe in hell or its punishments. It only wants us to believe.
Irrelevant. For all we know, hell exists, and every member of the church will go there.
For all we know, everyone goes to hell, or only those who refused to eat broccoli go to heaven, or perhaps heaven is worse than hell.
Which do you fear more?
The hell where you cannot be pricked with needles or the hell where you are forced to bow, forced to beg, isolated, forced to physical pain all by someone you can see and know.
"Cannot be pricked with needles" meaning the afterlife, I assume.
You're making a claim that you have no evidence for.
An unknown offers the same hope that America offered to Christopher Columbus.
That doesn't make it a smart decision. Suppose the Americas hadn't been there -- Columbus would've died at sea. What's more, he never knew he discovered another continent -- he went to his grave thinking he'd discovered India.
Will your God
My god?
I'm an atheist. But thanks for assuming.
The question is, if you are facing the end of your life, if you're right, it's the beginning of your life in heaven. If I'm right, it's the end of your existence -- and frankly, I think pain and a loss of dignity is far better than no existence at all.
And if neither of us are right, it could be worse than anything we know.
Like, what's the point of going on? Do you have something to live for?
I would say, if you can't find something to live for, you lack imagination.
Just do whatever you feel like.
I agree.
My point wasn't to judge, it was to be a counterpoint to someone claiming it was "bravery".
I think if they saw how people with terminal diseases have their lives dragged on by medical treatments wouldn't have wrote that you go to hell for suicide.
That's beside the point.
The point wasn't whether or not you go to hell for suicide.
The point was, you have absolutely no idea what happens after death. For all you know, maybe you do go to hell for suicide. Or maybe you go to hell for masturbating. Or maybe everyone just goes to hell.
Or maybe heaven is really a horrible place, after all.
Starting to make sense?
Now, I would guess that there is no afterlife. That you simply go to sleep and don't wake up -- that you cease to exist. But we don't really know, and if there is, we don't know what it's like.
The "certain" perspectives you talk about are from somebody that is illogical and selfish.
No more so than the perspective of "That is bravery."
Please read my entire comment before replying.
that doesn't make them "lesser".
I agree, and you'll notice, that is what I've been saying this whole thread.
Look at my original post. It was replying to someone who claimed this was "courage". I spun it as cowardice. Then I clarified -- I don't think I can say it's either one, and I don't think less of him, but I don't like glorifying it.
If you want to develop for the iPhone, you will use Objective C. Your only other option is a web app, but providing that offline may or may not be allowed, and either way, it's not likely to expose the same APIs.
Contrast this to Windows Mobile which, being an actually open platform (or at least as open as any other proprietary OS), will support any language people care to port to it. That goes double for Android.
Me, I prefer Ruby. "Aha," you say, "That has iPhone support!" As many owners of jailbroken phones will tell you, it's not that you can't do this on the iPhone, it's that Apple might arbitrarily reject you for doing so.
If I wanted viruses on my phone I would have gotten Windows Mobile. (Yeah WinMO doesn't really have a virus problem...
Nor does OS X, for that matter.
If apple wants to provide a channel which is only screened for actual malware, that might make sense, though it'd still be an absurd bottleneck trying to get anything approved.
Well, let's be fair -- the iPod does, indeed, use USB Mass Storage. It also exposes its library through a ton of files in a bizarre proprietary format, so it's not like you can actually transfer music that way, but it's certainly a step above this.
Saying "I don't blame them" doesn't make it an act of courage, though.
Ultimately, it's neither. Both options are terrifying, and at least pulling the trigger means you had the courage to act and make a choice, rather than simply letting it happen. And I do have some of the same sentiment -- I'd probably rather spend my last breaths on my terms, diving headfirst into the maw, than spend my last breaths on a respirator, unconscious from the pain.
The difference is, I have no faith that there's anything at all after this. So unless I have a damned good reason not to -- like, draining the estate when it's truly terminal, or jumping on a grenade -- I absolutely will fight for every second I can. I love life, and I want more of it.
This thread is full of stories with defeatist morals -- and I will not say that anyone is wrong for making that choice. But at the same time, I also won't revere them for making "the right choice" -- they made the choice they made, and it isn't black and white.
My own story: My step-grandfather had cancer, undiscovered for a long time. When you get that old, you don't go to the doctor over every lump and ache. So when it was finally discovered, it was pretty much too late.
I was in a serious crunch at work, so I didn't go visit him as long as there was a chance... but my father called me, with two words: "Jerry's dying." He'd talked to my grandmother, and together, they decided there was no point dragging it out -- he was asleep so much, and when he was awake, he was in pain... he was barely there, and every day was costing money. So they had his life support pulled.
My father and I dropped everything and flew out there. He was in a coma by the time we arrived.
He never woke up. We like to say he waited for everyone to arrive (we weren't the last). He just... slipped away quietly in the night.
I don't know what choice I would have made, in that position -- I've never been in that position. I don't blame anyone for making that choice -- but I don't think that it's somehow more "right" than the alternative.