"And what about junk phone calls? Aren't they the cheapest medium??"
Err...no. Spam can be sent out at a rate of 100,000 messages per hour by a rather weak machine ($500, call it $50 per month with electric). Assuming 1K per message, that's 800 million bits per hour. Call it 250,000 bits per second, within the capibilities of a $50/month internet connection. For a $100 per month, that's 65 million messages per month. That's 6500 messages per penny.
Mailings are pennies per *message*. Even $.05 is still 30,000 times the cost of spam, not to mention printing costs. Phone calls are going to have similar cost (about $.06 per connection). Phone soliciting is the most popular because of its high closing rate, not costs.
Both junkmail (disposal costs and time) and phone soliciting (just time) cost the recipient less than the sender. SPAM costs recipients much more than the sender. The sender stores the mailing list and one copy of the message (which can be amortized over the entire list). Each recipient has to store their own copy of the message. The sender pays one bandwidth; the recipient pays 3 (receiving the message, sending the message to the client, getting the message for the client).
Personal initiatives against spam will not have much impact in an industry where one can send 650,000 messages to get one purchase with a $1 margin. Since most spam is not sent by the actual producer, refusing to buy their products is not going to affect spam unless *everyone* does it. More organized efforts are needed (for example, closing off the seller's supply of the actual good or auctioning off their Porsche to pay their fines; shut down their merchant account; or simply preventing the intended recipient from seeing it with filters, etc.).
SPF ( http://spf.pobox.com ) does this at the domain level. At the username level, authentication would be guaranteed by the domain server.
The grandparent post's issues can be solved by always using the domain SMTP server (as opposed to using an ISP server or sending direct). Most people already do this. If the ability to send from a dynamic IP is really needed, I notice that DynDNS is listed as an SPF supporter at http://spf.pobox.com/faq.html.
A second conversation (to verify) is not needed. Just push all mail through the SMTP servers. Then the receiving server can verify the sender on receipt (the sender's IP is known as part of the TCP conversation).
There is also a proposal called IM2000 that would offer most of what you want as well. With IM2000 only a message notification is sent. Using that info, your email client then gets the actual message from the sending server. If you verify the sending server in DNS prior to retrieving the message, you can be guaranteed that it is sent by the correct server.
The biggest problem I have with projects like Gentoo or MythTV is that there is no list of hardware (particularly motherboard) that definitely works without tweaking. I would seriously consider buying from the Gentoo store (supporting Daniel directly or the Gentoo brand in general) if it offered a preinstalled system that was known to work, particularly a PVR system.
I tried installing Gentoo on my regular system back before the second hard drive died, but I never got the X settings right so no desktop. Kind of took the fun out of it. On the bright side, it only took my machine about a day to compile. I suspect that the three to five day estimates are with older hardware.
Is this an internal or an external site? I ask because IE 5 is still widely (20+%) used. If your externally available site doesn't work on IE 5, then it is correct to say that you wasted a lot of money on a site that doesn't work properly in all browsers.
It is usually separate farms. I.e. one farm will be paid ten years in a row not to produce while another produces consistently. My great-grandfather retired that way (he got paid not to produce for the last ten years or so of his life).
Not producing the same crop from the same field is something that is done internal to the operation of the farm. I don't think that the current programs intentionally pay for this. It is something that farmers usually do on their own (because the crops otherwise get bad quickly).
The point behind paying not to produce or buying surplus production and throwing it away is to maintain a consistent surplus capacity. They want to avoid the problem of running out of food in a drought year. Without these programs, it's not that it would be a surplus; instead, we would have a situation where people only produced what they thought they could sell: some years they would under produce. Also, these programs maintain arable land in an arable state (not turned into a housing development).
"In our current scenario we will see the rate of extraction continue at current levels until there is no more and then the market will crash."
It is much easier to extract oil from a field that is full than from one that has been drilled previously. This is part of the reason why so much oil comes from the middle east. The older oil fields in the US, etc. are more expensive to operate and thus not profitable Extraction levels will slow as the fields are depleted (and thus become more expensive to operate). No sharp crash.. Further, not all fields are of the same size; some will run low before others.
Since it has been known for a while that their products are crap, it doesn't make much difference if someone says it. However, if Baystar sticks to the money back demand, it bankrupts SCO, making the stock worthless.
Some people still believe that there is a possibility that the lawsuits may bring in money. A bankruptcy precludes that (even if the lawsuits continue under a new owner, the money won't go to the stockholders). Thus, Baystar not forcing them into bankruptcy is good for SCO stock.
Which should we find more convincing: where Baystar put their money (if they remove the money back demand, they are indicating that they think they will get more money if they wait, i.e. that SCO will be more valuable after the lawsuits); or what they say (that SCO has crappy products).
Yes, we have now gotten to the point where the comment, "your products are crap, just stick to suing people," actually is a rosy view of SCO's future. No one believes in their products. At least some people still believe in their lawsuits. SCO is no longer a tech company. They are just a bundle of lawsuits hoping that one will carry through to a big reward from the deep pockets of IBM, Daimler Chrysler, or AutoZone.
"What isn't claimed goes to the kids (or 2/3 of it). If I took the 100 bucks I'd just buy more stuff. I think the schools could do a lot more with that portion"
No money for schools, just Microsoft software. Microsoft keeps *all* the unclaimed money. They just have to give software that *retails* at prices totalling 2/3 of the amount. Note that MS Windows retails at $200 but is available for about $50 to Dell, etc. Further, since computers come with an OS, this means that they will have to buy other Microsoft software that they don't really need and might never use (like my high school's Fortran compiler; I think that the two of us in the Fortran/COBOL class did manage to compile Hello World eventually but that was the end of it).
If the judge hadn't thrown out the Lindows.com offer, then other distros (and Apple, charities, etc.) could have followed suit. Microsoft might have had to pay in something that would have actually mattered.
Local electricians make $27/hour (about $54K a year without overtime) and get time and a half for anything over forty hours. Sixty-five hours a week would easily give $100,000 per year. High Voltage test techs make about the same per hour and get time and a half over 8 hours in a day (or Saturdays) and double time over 10 hours in a day (or Sundays). There was an article about an employee of one of the big three US car companies that made a $100,000 in a year with overtime.
I would agree that this is rare in an office environment, but there are any number of blue collar jobs that are hourly and pay better than $40K per year. For that matter, I have had several salary style jobs that paid considerably less.
Forwarding: it's not so much that it's not supported, as that it has to work differently.
For most domains, you should run all your email through an SMTP server. You would just set SPF for that mail server. If the same mail server is used for both sending and receiving mail, you can just set it to the MX record.
Running ads is fine. Just don't expect the ads (with quizzes!) to pay for your parking. Parking meter ads make at least as much sense as ads on trains or buses or at a gas station (a BP near my parents does essentially what you want).
"2. Turn them into potential advertising machines. The LCD screens can run mini commercials on a small screen and generate more money for the city. I can also see this as a perk, you get free parking for watching the ads and responding to the questions just to ensure you're really watching the ads."
This is one of those ideas that is great in theory but does not work in practice. One problem is that people who would rather spend time watching ads than pay for parking (or whatever) are not good targets for advertising. They tend to be light on money and heavy with time; advertisers want to reach people who are heavy with money and light on time.
This is why advertisers love things like ESPN and the Super Bowl and hate commercial skip.
"The number of spams your system has sent in response to forged "From" addresses?"
I have posted this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating: this is what SPF ( http://spf.pobox.com ) is meant to address. Forged From addresses from SPF enabled domains do not need to generate challenges.
Joe job reflected spam is not limited to challenge/response systems. It also arises when some of the recipient addresses generate bounces. This requires a fix to joe jobs, not an abandonment of automated responses and bounces (both of which serve valid purposes when used as intended).
"since virtually all From and Reply-to lines in spam are faked, for every 100 spams you receive, you send 90 or so emails to innocent bystanders that don't want your bounce message."
SPF ( http://spf.pobox.com ) addresses this. If the "innocent bystanders" have SPF rules set up for their domain and don't allow unauthenticated relaying from authorized servers, then you don't need to generate a challenge for joe jobs (stealing someone else's email address).
"As to your second point, software is a service industry..."
Yes, and overall in services, we are still a net exporter. We may even still be a net exporter of software. Making it harder for US companies to participate in *export* industries will not bring jobs back to the US, it will just shift work to foreign *companies* hiring foreign workers.
"I don't believe that printing money creates wealth." No, it doesn't. However, if the problem is that some people aren't able to find work because of insufficient *demand*, then printing money generates more demand. This will lead to more people working -> more production -> more disposable income.
Yes, the devaluation reduces people's wealth. Thus the threat of devaluation pushes people to transfer their wealth from devaluing currency to goods, which increases production (increasing disposable income).
Note: this *reduces* wealth in the short term. However, it increases demand and disposable income. It will not work if demand is topped out in some areas of the economy; it is a response to the grandparent's claim that the entire middle class was going to be out of work and unable to buy things. Personally, I think that the current situation is one in which there are industry specific weak spots (e.g. IT), but in which other industries are at the limit (thus the inflationary pressures).
From where is your increase in disposable income to come? Not an increase in money, you already ruled that out.
It's easy to explain why requiring companies to pay American wages to non-Americans is a bad idea: it promotes companies that buy the product from foreign companies rather than those that hire people to produce it in house. I.e. along with shifting from American to foreign workers, it shifts from American companies to foreign companies.
This ignores the fact that garment production doesn't have minimum wage jobs. Garment workers were roughly $10/hour jobs in the US. They're hard jobs why do them for less than that...a much easier job is available at Wal-Mart at $7/hour.
Sure we do. If there is a demand shortage, there is a simple fix: print more money. Demand shortages are an artifact of money shortages.
Otoh, IT anti-outsourcing people don't explain how starting a trade war in an area where we are a net *exporter* will help us. The fact remains that while the US imports more goods than it exports, we export more services than we import.
Japan is roughly the size of California and has four times the population. Trains work great in areas where everyone has access to them. The problem in the US is that people are much more distributed. There are six cities in the US where trains are cheaper than buses (off the top of my head, I think that they are New York, LA, Chicago, Baltimore, Miami, and Philadelphia). This is ignoring subsidies, just cost per passenger/mile.
In Japan, trains make sense. They run in areas that can support them. In the US, they mostly do not. Most of us do not live in areas that can support them.
Trains are subsidized too. The government often pays for the track (particularly for commuter trains).
What if I only want to listen to one song. I can think of several albums that I own from which I would only listen to one song. This is the beauty of MP3s, etc. I can include *only* the song that I want to hear.
If "artists" only want people to listen to the songs from their albums in order, they should make them just one track. E.g. Rush's 2112. About 6 songs IIRC, but they appear as one track on the CD (also called 2112). They were originally one side of the LP. Oh, and stop releasing crummy songs. Then we wouldn't have to buy the singles instead of the albums.
"[radio stations] algorithm is to pick a song from a short list of 10-15 that have already been played to death, and maybe once every couple of hours, pick a song they played into the ground last month."
I would add that they start with crap now, so even before they overplay it, it sucks. That's why I listen to shuffle play lists. They aren't a replacement for albums (I would actually like to be able to select albums as tracks in some cases); they are a replacement for decent radio.
The true glory of a shuffled playlist is listening to a hundred quality songs in a row. No commercials. No DJ talking over the music. No crummy songs (also a problem with albums; I have several albums off which I only like one song). No songs that might be good but I don't like. No thinking about to what I might want to listen next. Some of the songs might be a half hour long (e.g. Rush's 2112).
"Today, your cousin's wife has a chance to make a little money. Get by. Pay the bills. Receive tangible benefit from the product of her insight. In your world, the best she could do would be to hope for the charity of [hand waving] some random company. And y'know, companies aren't all that charitable."
I find it very unlikely that she will ever have enough money to patent it. If she tried, she might find that there was prior art (it is common sense obvious from existing products). Even if not, she would still have to find someone to manufacture and market it. In the end, the chances of her idea making any money for her in *any* system are very low (but she is far more likely to get caught in one of those $6000 invention submission scams in *this* system).
If patents on ideas from individuals were predictably profitable, then there would be companies looking to *pay* for such ideas (rather than make you pay them). Since there aren't, I'm betting that most patents are just paper. Seventeen years and they are forgotten. All they accomplished was to waste the inventor's money.
"keep her mouth shut until she could afford to start a business to manufacture this product herself"
I think that she is realistic enough to realize that she is never going to have enough money to manufacture the product. I don't think that she is realistic enough to admit that she is never going to patent this product.
I think that you (and she) are focusing too much on the possibility of making money from an invention. That possibility is next to nothing. Forget about the potential revenue from the patent, what about the thousands she saves by not patenting? Not to mention that she would actually have a chance to *buy* the product if she gave away the idea to someone who would use it.
If patent filings were free (and unreviewed), then the system might work. However, they aren't. Patent filings are expensive.
Outside of pharmaceuticals, can you name three modern patents where an individual actually made enough money to cover patent fees and marketing time (forget about invention time) from a manufacturer who got the idea from them (if the manufacturer got the idea independently and is just licensing as patent rent, it doesn't count)? I certainly can't.
"You need to explain that because of the nature of the way Linux is developed it needs insurance like this for the good of all Linux users."
You are proving the parent post's point. This insurance is *NOT* necessary. There is no reason to believe that your company would lose a lawsuit of the type against which they are indemnifying. Further, it's not like proprietary software vendors offer insurance of this sort (even though the same problem exists with them).
The point of this insurance is that it allows smaller distros to offer what the HPs and IBMs can: indemnification against the legal expenses of frivolous lawsuits. This insurance is just an answer to the anti-Linux argument: "If something goes wrong, we are responsible because it is provided without warranty." This product is designed for PHBs (Pointy Headed Boss: see Dilbert) who do not understand the issues. It allows them to quantify the risk so that they can put it in their cost/benefit analysis.
This insurance is a response to FUD about Linux. There is no evidence that there is a real problem that is being solved. This is what the grandparent's post was discussing. It now sounds like Linux users are vulnerable to being sued. Do the anti-FUD benefits outweigh the FUD damage from this? I don't know, but spreading the FUD is not going to help.
If anything, this insurance should be touted as something that open source has that proprietary software vendors do not (I don't think that they will indemnify closed source projects, since they do not have access to the source). Describing it as something that Linux *needs* is just FUD. Describe it as something that closed source *lacks*.
Why not? If you aren't going to implement it, why not share it? Right now, it costs thousands of dollars to put through a patent application. If you think you might get a patent, you have a strong incentive not to tell anyone (hard to prove that they didn't have the idea first if they file first). Thus, the current system provides a strong incentive for people who do not have the resources to get a patent to keep quiet.
How many patents are actually sold that way? How many individuals pay thousands to get a patent, find a manufacturer, get the item made, and sell enough to recoup their investment? Don't forget to include the opportunity cost (you could have been flipping burgers at McDonalds) of all the man hours of finding a manufacturer and distribution channel.
If this was a valid path to riches, then all those invention submission companies would pay to get the patents for you and split the proceeds. Instead, they want you to pay $6000 to them to patent the idea and "try" to find a buyer. Instead of making money off licensing, they plan on making money off gullible "inventors." Even with the ability to cherry pick the good ideas, apparently patents can't even provide a reasonable return with any consistency.
Note how IBM and other big companies use patents. To protect their research? No, to keep other companies from patenting things and holding them up for ransom. They invent things to use them and patent to keep others from keeping them from using their invention. The guy who ran IBM's patent licensing division was considered innovative for coming up with the idea of licensing some of these defensive patents for some extra cash. Even so, IBM still does not make enough from licensing to cover the research costs.
The point of invention is not to license the patent. The point is to improve your own product. Most inventions will occur in engineering on existing products.
Look at the 1-Click Shopping patent. Would Amazon have implemented 1-Click Shopping without the patent? Of course they would have. It enhances their business by improving their customers' experience. Even if they knew for certain that it would lead to all their competitors adopting it, they still would have (i.e. no competitive advantage).
The only area in which patents are a requirement for distribution is pharmaceuticals. The expensive trials required to get FDA certification cannot be funded without patent protection (or equivalent).
My cousin's wife has an idea that she would like see implemented. In the current system, she keeps quiet in the hope that someday she'll be able to patent it. Without patents, she would have no incentive to keep it quiet and would talk it over or send an email to the appropriate manufacturer in the hope of getting a few free samples (it's a disposable product, so individual items are very cheap).
Slashdot Mirror
"And what about junk phone calls? Aren't they the cheapest medium??"
Err...no. Spam can be sent out at a rate of 100,000 messages per hour by a rather weak machine ($500, call it $50 per month with electric). Assuming 1K per message, that's 800 million bits per hour. Call it 250,000 bits per second, within the capibilities of a $50/month internet connection. For a $100 per month, that's 65 million messages per month. That's 6500 messages per penny.
Mailings are pennies per *message*. Even $.05 is still 30,000 times the cost of spam, not to mention printing costs. Phone calls are going to have similar cost (about $.06 per connection). Phone soliciting is the most popular because of its high closing rate, not costs.
Both junkmail (disposal costs and time) and phone soliciting (just time) cost the recipient less than the sender. SPAM costs recipients much more than the sender. The sender stores the mailing list and one copy of the message (which can be amortized over the entire list). Each recipient has to store their own copy of the message. The sender pays one bandwidth; the recipient pays 3 (receiving the message, sending the message to the client, getting the message for the client).
Personal initiatives against spam will not have much impact in an industry where one can send 650,000 messages to get one purchase with a $1 margin. Since most spam is not sent by the actual producer, refusing to buy their products is not going to affect spam unless *everyone* does it. More organized efforts are needed (for example, closing off the seller's supply of the actual good or auctioning off their Porsche to pay their fines; shut down their merchant account; or simply preventing the intended recipient from seeing it with filters, etc.).
SPF ( http://spf.pobox.com ) does this at the domain level. At the username level, authentication would be guaranteed by the domain server.
.
The grandparent post's issues can be solved by always using the domain SMTP server (as opposed to using an ISP server or sending direct). Most people already do this. If the ability to send from a dynamic IP is really needed, I notice that DynDNS is listed as an SPF supporter at http://spf.pobox.com/faq.html
A second conversation (to verify) is not needed. Just push all mail through the SMTP servers. Then the receiving server can verify the sender on receipt (the sender's IP is known as part of the TCP conversation).
There is also a proposal called IM2000 that would offer most of what you want as well. With IM2000 only a message notification is sent. Using that info, your email client then gets the actual message from the sending server. If you verify the sending server in DNS prior to retrieving the message, you can be guaranteed that it is sent by the correct server.
The biggest problem I have with projects like Gentoo or MythTV is that there is no list of hardware (particularly motherboard) that definitely works without tweaking. I would seriously consider buying from the Gentoo store (supporting Daniel directly or the Gentoo brand in general) if it offered a preinstalled system that was known to work, particularly a PVR system.
I tried installing Gentoo on my regular system back before the second hard drive died, but I never got the X settings right so no desktop. Kind of took the fun out of it. On the bright side, it only took my machine about a day to compile. I suspect that the three to five day estimates are with older hardware.
Is this an internal or an external site? I ask because IE 5 is still widely (20+%) used. If your externally available site doesn't work on IE 5, then it is correct to say that you wasted a lot of money on a site that doesn't work properly in all browsers.
It is usually separate farms. I.e. one farm will be paid ten years in a row not to produce while another produces consistently. My great-grandfather retired that way (he got paid not to produce for the last ten years or so of his life).
Not producing the same crop from the same field is something that is done internal to the operation of the farm. I don't think that the current programs intentionally pay for this. It is something that farmers usually do on their own (because the crops otherwise get bad quickly).
The point behind paying not to produce or buying surplus production and throwing it away is to maintain a consistent surplus capacity. They want to avoid the problem of running out of food in a drought year. Without these programs, it's not that it would be a surplus; instead, we would have a situation where people only produced what they thought they could sell: some years they would under produce. Also, these programs maintain arable land in an arable state (not turned into a housing development).
Or we could just go back to older methods, e.g. paper ballots. These may be harder to count, but they are absolutely reliable.
We do not have time to make the current machines have valid paper trails without sacrificing either security or anonymity, since their printers suck.
"In our current scenario we will see the rate of extraction continue at current levels until there is no more and then the market will crash."
It is much easier to extract oil from a field that is full than from one that has been drilled previously. This is part of the reason why so much oil comes from the middle east. The older oil fields in the US, etc. are more expensive to operate and thus not profitable Extraction levels will slow as the fields are depleted (and thus become more expensive to operate). No sharp crash.. Further, not all fields are of the same size; some will run low before others.
Since it has been known for a while that their products are crap, it doesn't make much difference if someone says it. However, if Baystar sticks to the money back demand, it bankrupts SCO, making the stock worthless.
Some people still believe that there is a possibility that the lawsuits may bring in money. A bankruptcy precludes that (even if the lawsuits continue under a new owner, the money won't go to the stockholders). Thus, Baystar not forcing them into bankruptcy is good for SCO stock.
Which should we find more convincing: where Baystar put their money (if they remove the money back demand, they are indicating that they think they will get more money if they wait, i.e. that SCO will be more valuable after the lawsuits); or what they say (that SCO has crappy products).
Yes, we have now gotten to the point where the comment, "your products are crap, just stick to suing people," actually is a rosy view of SCO's future. No one believes in their products. At least some people still believe in their lawsuits. SCO is no longer a tech company. They are just a bundle of lawsuits hoping that one will carry through to a big reward from the deep pockets of IBM, Daimler Chrysler, or AutoZone.
"What isn't claimed goes to the kids (or 2/3 of it). If I took the 100 bucks I'd just buy more stuff. I think the schools could do a lot more with that portion"
No money for schools, just Microsoft software. Microsoft keeps *all* the unclaimed money. They just have to give software that *retails* at prices totalling 2/3 of the amount. Note that MS Windows retails at $200 but is available for about $50 to Dell, etc. Further, since computers come with an OS, this means that they will have to buy other Microsoft software that they don't really need and might never use (like my high school's Fortran compiler; I think that the two of us in the Fortran/COBOL class did manage to compile Hello World eventually but that was the end of it).
If the judge hadn't thrown out the Lindows.com offer, then other distros (and Apple, charities, etc.) could have followed suit. Microsoft might have had to pay in something that would have actually mattered.
Local electricians make $27/hour (about $54K a year without overtime) and get time and a half for anything over forty hours. Sixty-five hours a week would easily give $100,000 per year. High Voltage test techs make about the same per hour and get time and a half over 8 hours in a day (or Saturdays) and double time over 10 hours in a day (or Sundays). There was an article about an employee of one of the big three US car companies that made a $100,000 in a year with overtime.
I would agree that this is rare in an office environment, but there are any number of blue collar jobs that are hourly and pay better than $40K per year. For that matter, I have had several salary style jobs that paid considerably less.
Forwarding: it's not so much that it's not supported, as that it has to work differently.
For most domains, you should run all your email through an SMTP server. You would just set SPF for that mail server. If the same mail server is used for both sending and receiving mail, you can just set it to the MX record.
Running ads is fine. Just don't expect the ads (with quizzes!) to pay for your parking. Parking meter ads make at least as much sense as ads on trains or buses or at a gas station (a BP near my parents does essentially what you want).
"2. Turn them into potential advertising machines. The LCD screens can run mini commercials on a small screen and generate more money for the city. I can also see this as a perk, you get free parking for watching the ads and responding to the questions just to ensure you're really watching the ads."
This is one of those ideas that is great in theory but does not work in practice. One problem is that people who would rather spend time watching ads than pay for parking (or whatever) are not good targets for advertising. They tend to be light on money and heavy with time; advertisers want to reach people who are heavy with money and light on time.
This is why advertisers love things like ESPN and the Super Bowl and hate commercial skip.
"The number of spams your system has sent in response to forged "From" addresses?"
I have posted this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating: this is what SPF ( http://spf.pobox.com ) is meant to address. Forged From addresses from SPF enabled domains do not need to generate challenges.
Joe job reflected spam is not limited to challenge/response systems. It also arises when some of the recipient addresses generate bounces. This requires a fix to joe jobs, not an abandonment of automated responses and bounces (both of which serve valid purposes when used as intended).
"since virtually all From and Reply-to lines in spam are faked, for every 100 spams you receive, you send 90 or so emails to innocent bystanders that don't want your bounce message."
SPF ( http://spf.pobox.com ) addresses this. If the "innocent bystanders" have SPF rules set up for their domain and don't allow unauthenticated relaying from authorized servers, then you don't need to generate a challenge for joe jobs (stealing someone else's email address).
"As to your second point, software is a service industry..."
Yes, and overall in services, we are still a net exporter. We may even still be a net exporter of software. Making it harder for US companies to participate in *export* industries will not bring jobs back to the US, it will just shift work to foreign *companies* hiring foreign workers.
"I don't believe that printing money creates wealth." No, it doesn't. However, if the problem is that some people aren't able to find work because of insufficient *demand*, then printing money generates more demand. This will lead to more people working -> more production -> more disposable income.
Yes, the devaluation reduces people's wealth. Thus the threat of devaluation pushes people to transfer their wealth from devaluing currency to goods, which increases production (increasing disposable income).
Note: this *reduces* wealth in the short term. However, it increases demand and disposable income. It will not work if demand is topped out in some areas of the economy; it is a response to the grandparent's claim that the entire middle class was going to be out of work and unable to buy things. Personally, I think that the current situation is one in which there are industry specific weak spots (e.g. IT), but in which other industries are at the limit (thus the inflationary pressures).
From where is your increase in disposable income to come? Not an increase in money, you already ruled that out.
It's easy to explain why requiring companies to pay American wages to non-Americans is a bad idea: it promotes companies that buy the product from foreign companies rather than those that hire people to produce it in house. I.e. along with shifting from American to foreign workers, it shifts from American companies to foreign companies.
This ignores the fact that garment production doesn't have minimum wage jobs. Garment workers were roughly $10/hour jobs in the US. They're hard jobs why do them for less than that...a much easier job is available at Wal-Mart at $7/hour.
Sure we do. If there is a demand shortage, there is a simple fix: print more money. Demand shortages are an artifact of money shortages.
Otoh, IT anti-outsourcing people don't explain how starting a trade war in an area where we are a net *exporter* will help us. The fact remains that while the US imports more goods than it exports, we export more services than we import.
d) trains
3 of the other 4 options did not exist then. Private train companies went out of business when trucks and buses became available.
Japan is roughly the size of California and has four times the population. Trains work great in areas where everyone has access to them. The problem in the US is that people are much more distributed. There are six cities in the US where trains are cheaper than buses (off the top of my head, I think that they are New York, LA, Chicago, Baltimore, Miami, and Philadelphia). This is ignoring subsidies, just cost per passenger/mile.
In Japan, trains make sense. They run in areas that can support them. In the US, they mostly do not. Most of us do not live in areas that can support them.
Trains are subsidized too. The government often pays for the track (particularly for commuter trains).
What if I only want to listen to one song. I can think of several albums that I own from which I would only listen to one song. This is the beauty of MP3s, etc. I can include *only* the song that I want to hear.
If "artists" only want people to listen to the songs from their albums in order, they should make them just one track. E.g. Rush's 2112. About 6 songs IIRC, but they appear as one track on the CD (also called 2112). They were originally one side of the LP. Oh, and stop releasing crummy songs. Then we wouldn't have to buy the singles instead of the albums.
"[radio stations] algorithm is to pick a song from a short list of 10-15 that have already been played to death, and maybe once every couple of hours, pick a song they played into the ground last month."
I would add that they start with crap now, so even before they overplay it, it sucks. That's why I listen to shuffle play lists. They aren't a replacement for albums (I would actually like to be able to select albums as tracks in some cases); they are a replacement for decent radio.
The true glory of a shuffled playlist is listening to a hundred quality songs in a row. No commercials. No DJ talking over the music. No crummy songs (also a problem with albums; I have several albums off which I only like one song). No songs that might be good but I don't like. No thinking about to what I might want to listen next. Some of the songs might be a half hour long (e.g. Rush's 2112).
"Today, your cousin's wife has a chance to make a little money. Get by. Pay the bills. Receive tangible benefit from the product of her insight. In your world, the best she could do would be to hope for the charity of [hand waving] some random company. And y'know, companies aren't all that charitable."
I find it very unlikely that she will ever have enough money to patent it. If she tried, she might find that there was prior art (it is common sense obvious from existing products). Even if not, she would still have to find someone to manufacture and market it. In the end, the chances of her idea making any money for her in *any* system are very low (but she is far more likely to get caught in one of those $6000 invention submission scams in *this* system).
If patents on ideas from individuals were predictably profitable, then there would be companies looking to *pay* for such ideas (rather than make you pay them). Since there aren't, I'm betting that most patents are just paper. Seventeen years and they are forgotten. All they accomplished was to waste the inventor's money.
"keep her mouth shut until she could afford to start a business to manufacture this product herself"
I think that she is realistic enough to realize that she is never going to have enough money to manufacture the product. I don't think that she is realistic enough to admit that she is never going to patent this product.
I think that you (and she) are focusing too much on the possibility of making money from an invention. That possibility is next to nothing. Forget about the potential revenue from the patent, what about the thousands she saves by not patenting? Not to mention that she would actually have a chance to *buy* the product if she gave away the idea to someone who would use it.
If patent filings were free (and unreviewed), then the system might work. However, they aren't. Patent filings are expensive.
Outside of pharmaceuticals, can you name three modern patents where an individual actually made enough money to cover patent fees and marketing time (forget about invention time) from a manufacturer who got the idea from them (if the manufacturer got the idea independently and is just licensing as patent rent, it doesn't count)? I certainly can't.
"You need to explain that because of the nature of the way Linux is developed it needs insurance like this for the good of all Linux users."
You are proving the parent post's point. This insurance is *NOT* necessary. There is no reason to believe that your company would lose a lawsuit of the type against which they are indemnifying. Further, it's not like proprietary software vendors offer insurance of this sort (even though the same problem exists with them).
The point of this insurance is that it allows smaller distros to offer what the HPs and IBMs can: indemnification against the legal expenses of frivolous lawsuits. This insurance is just an answer to the anti-Linux argument: "If something goes wrong, we are responsible because it is provided without warranty." This product is designed for PHBs (Pointy Headed Boss: see Dilbert) who do not understand the issues. It allows them to quantify the risk so that they can put it in their cost/benefit analysis.
This insurance is a response to FUD about Linux. There is no evidence that there is a real problem that is being solved. This is what the grandparent's post was discussing. It now sounds like Linux users are vulnerable to being sued. Do the anti-FUD benefits outweigh the FUD damage from this? I don't know, but spreading the FUD is not going to help.
If anything, this insurance should be touted as something that open source has that proprietary software vendors do not (I don't think that they will indemnify closed source projects, since they do not have access to the source). Describing it as something that Linux *needs* is just FUD. Describe it as something that closed source *lacks*.
"why should I share my idea?"
Why not? If you aren't going to implement it, why not share it? Right now, it costs thousands of dollars to put through a patent application. If you think you might get a patent, you have a strong incentive not to tell anyone (hard to prove that they didn't have the idea first if they file first). Thus, the current system provides a strong incentive for people who do not have the resources to get a patent to keep quiet.
How many patents are actually sold that way? How many individuals pay thousands to get a patent, find a manufacturer, get the item made, and sell enough to recoup their investment? Don't forget to include the opportunity cost (you could have been flipping burgers at McDonalds) of all the man hours of finding a manufacturer and distribution channel.
If this was a valid path to riches, then all those invention submission companies would pay to get the patents for you and split the proceeds. Instead, they want you to pay $6000 to them to patent the idea and "try" to find a buyer. Instead of making money off licensing, they plan on making money off gullible "inventors." Even with the ability to cherry pick the good ideas, apparently patents can't even provide a reasonable return with any consistency.
Note how IBM and other big companies use patents. To protect their research? No, to keep other companies from patenting things and holding them up for ransom. They invent things to use them and patent to keep others from keeping them from using their invention. The guy who ran IBM's patent licensing division was considered innovative for coming up with the idea of licensing some of these defensive patents for some extra cash. Even so, IBM still does not make enough from licensing to cover the research costs.
The point of invention is not to license the patent. The point is to improve your own product. Most inventions will occur in engineering on existing products.
Look at the 1-Click Shopping patent. Would Amazon have implemented 1-Click Shopping without the patent? Of course they would have. It enhances their business by improving their customers' experience. Even if they knew for certain that it would lead to all their competitors adopting it, they still would have (i.e. no competitive advantage).
The only area in which patents are a requirement for distribution is pharmaceuticals. The expensive trials required to get FDA certification cannot be funded without patent protection (or equivalent).
My cousin's wife has an idea that she would like see implemented. In the current system, she keeps quiet in the hope that someday she'll be able to patent it. Without patents, she would have no incentive to keep it quiet and would talk it over or send an email to the appropriate manufacturer in the hope of getting a few free samples (it's a disposable product, so individual items are very cheap).