Patents are reverse socialism. The government takes something of value from the people, and grants it to an individual. They are very much capitalism, because every kind of capital you can own has this same property: it exists because the government says it exist, and your ownership of it exists because the government says it does. People talk about capitalism as if it were the natural state of things, but that's no more true than that socialism is: both are decisions that the group, in the form of the government, makes about how to allocate assets.
So what? That's how technology goes: good design costs, so you start with good enough, and iterate to good. It's worth noting that the OpenMoko phone, ab open source phone, also very similar to the iPhone, was under development and probably would have come out before the iPhone if they'd had more money. Trade secret protection is not a defense against independent development, and rumors don't change that.
The fact is that the market was primed for devices like the iPhone and iPad when they came out. The parts had gotten cheap enough. The iPhone is a great product, and the iPad is a great product, but neither product was a surprise, and neither product gives Apple the rights to a monopoly on that form factor.
Trolls are parasites in the same sense that people who eat fruit are parasites. You don't eat half the fruit and leave the rest. You eat the whole thing, and then chuck the pits in the trash, where they never germinate. Why would you leave any money on the table?
Another analogy would be mosquitoes. Sure, no individual mosquito is going to take a substantial amount of your blood, but living in a cloud of mosquitoes is not a happy life.
Right. They wait until you're making money, and then they come take it. Half a million? No. The damage can be your entire company. What would RIM look like right now if they hadn't suffered a half a billion dollar patent tax on push email?
The right to bear arms is not a right to fire them indiscriminately. Making it illegal to discharge firearms in circumstances where doing so is not in the public interest is very much allowed. For instance, you're not allowed to discharge firearms in the city limits of the town I live in, despite strong support for the right to carry them.
Yup. Even the policies intended to protect BLP articles are broken, in the sense that, as you imply, mainstream media actually does really poor reporting these days, and personal blogs by knowledgeable practitioners in the field are forbidden for use in BLP articles for any reason. It doesn't even take a corporation or country with deep pockets: all it takes is a few interested amateurs with nothing better to do, and nobody who's actually working for a living can possibly compete.
Yes and no. I've been involved in a POV dispute on an article because a friend of mine died under titillating circumstances, and another friend of mine is being coatracked over it. (Yes, these are real Wikipedia terms.) The death has been all over the news, mostly in very gossipy articles that quote a lot of third parties but don't do any fact-checking. And so of course a lot of people who want to pee on a famous person's wikipedia biography immediately dogpiled on it and started making gossipy edits.
This isn't the first time it's happened, and the person in question has had people cancel speaking invitations on him after he and his assistants have been out of pocket on airplane tickets. So there's a really serious side to this edit warring—even though it's celebrity gossips doing it, real people get hurt in the process.
You can't stop paying. You can't default on student loans. If you stop paying, the loan just keeps growing as penalties and interest on principal and penalties adds up. You can't declare bankruptcy. Your Social Security income will be garnished to pay for the loans. If you got the loans, and you can't pay them, you are meat.
This is a scandalously bad deal, particularly considering all the "vocational tech" schools that sprang up to get the loan money without teaching any useful skills. But the trouble is that when you're 18, and you're thinking about college, you don't have any experience with indebtedness yet, and so you don't realize how massively you are screwing yourself when you take those loans.
You should read the rest of the wikipedia article, not just the first paragraph of the toxicity section. Also, it turns out that the excessive use of roundup-ready GMO crops has, shockingly, caused evolution to occur in the midwest, where it was thought to be impossible. Consequently, the next generation of pesticide-ready GMO crops will be much more exciting. Another point I neglected to mention earlier is that if you are a farmer who does not use roundup-ready seeds, but does save seeds for planting next year, then when your neighbor's GMO crops contaminate your seeds, Monsanto will sue you for violating their patents.
The frustrating thing about this controversy is that the reason there's such a strong backlash against GMO plants is the widespread use of a *particular sort* of GMO plant: roundup-ready plants. Here, genetic manipulation has been used to make the plant resistant to Roundup, which is a fairly scary pesticide. And then there are the plants that have had insect toxins engineered into them. These toxins have in some cases been found to be toxic to humans as well.
OTOH, GMO products that have high yields, or are more resistant to fungus and mold, are not such a bad idea. But we treat all GMO products as the same, and so we wind up seeing stories like this one.
(Someone will probably point out that insect resistance and roundup resistance can improve yields, and this is true, but it's the side effects that people worry about.)
They're going to claim that it's because of people like him, and he's effectively part of their propaganda engine when he spews on about how great he is for illegally bypassing the release embargo on Hollywood content.
There's a huge difference between saying "Hollywood has too much power in the distribution of content," a statement with which I agree, and "and therefore we should just take the content and not pay for it." The problem statement is correct. The proposed solution is destructive. If you don't like how much power Hollywood has, work to take some of it away. The death of SOPA/PIPA should tell you that this isn't an impossible task. We are not powerless. So let's stop acting like we are.
Yeah yeah yeah. You're so brave. We all admire you. And you are completely missing the point. The point is that Hollywood is going to keep trying to censor the internet, because of people like you, until we stop them. The way we stop them is to sway public opinion away from Hollywood. What you just said here will not achieve that end. Nobody gives a shit how noble you feel when you pirate content. If you care about changing the debate, come up with something more constructive to say—something that regular folks will actually sympathize with. If you just want to brag about what a rebel you are, give it a rest, will you? We've all heard this line a million times, and it doesn't get any easier to swallow on the million-and-first.
Amp-hours? That's not a measure of energy consumed. You must have meant watt-hours. So suppose you have a solar panel, which costs 200KWH to place, and pays for that energy consumed in four years. Then after 20 years, it has generated five times as much energy as it consumed on installation. So if you amortize its cost over 20 years, without any tax deductions, at, say, 5% interest, then you have to pay 2.4KWH per month. And for the life of the solar panel, you get back 4KHW/month. Your net profit is 1.6KWH/month for the entire 20 years. And if you can deduct depreciation and interest, it's effectively more.
This is so true. We really have nothing to fear. All compounds are safe, as long as the manufacturer says they are. I don't understand why people have so little faith in our corporate overlords.
Anything that pays for itself in 20 years can be paid for on time. There are companies forming around this very idea today. You buy the panels, install them at someone's home, and they pay you monthly for the panels. You deduct interest and depreciation, and suddenly the panels cost a lot less than they did. The only sad thing is that this can only be done by businesses—private individuals can't write the panels' depreciation off as a business expense.
You've apparently never heard of grid-tie solar. The idea is to have solar panels on roofs everywhere, feeding excess power into the grid during the day, when demand is high. So if you plug your car into the wall at work, the power might well be coming from solar panels, and certainly *can* come from solar panels.
While you're thinking about selling real estate, consider the resale value of any property within the fallout zone of Fukushima. People will continue to live there, whatever the risks, because they will not be able to leave. Even if this report is correct, which seems unlikely, the long-term fallout from Fukushima will be incredibly costly. These costs need to be insured against; if they were, unsafe reactors would no longer be competitive with renewable sources of energy.
In my experience, it's the pro-nuke people who say "nuke-you-lur." Witness George Bush, for instance. Anti-nuclear activists generally know how to pronounce the word.
I think that word does not mean what you think it means. Vermont has suffered from being raped by extractive industries in the past. We have a healthy fear of having it happen again. Our trees have mostly grown back, but rocks take a lot longer to grow back. Yes, we need to figure out how to get the gasoline monkey off our backs. But fracking is just a way to stay addicted longer. It's not a realistic way out of our energy problems.
Generally speaking, what Vermonters tend to want is for things to be done right, not stupidly. We would rather be frugal than cheap. IOW, we would rather insulate our houses properly and heat them with wood if they aren't insulated properly, than import fossil fuels. And that is what we do. Our plan for the future is to be more efficient in our use of energy, rather than to come up with new ways to extract more fossil fuel. To generate energy using local resources like hydro, wind and methane digestion rather than using coal and nuclear.
It's always sad to see people from out of state talking about us as if we were reactionary and backwards—in my experience, Vermonters are some of the most realistically and practically forward-thinking people in the nation.
I keep hearing that from Entergy proponents, but the fact is that IBM has been working to move its employment offshore in general, so it's hard to take anything they say about closing plants in Burlington very seriously.
The article you referenced talks about people leaving Long Island for cheaper places with better jobs. One example of such a place that is given there is Vermont. Nowhere in the article you cite is any statement made to the effect that young Vermonters are leaving the state for greener pastures. Perhaps that's because there are no greener pastures.
It's true that very rural locations in Vermont don't have DSL yet, because they are too far from the CO. The location where we are building our house has cable, but not DSL. This is too bad—I'd much rather get my internet service from Sovernet than Comcast. C'est la vie.
One of the big wins about Vermont's strict environmental laws is that the environment here is really, really nice. Development isn't subsidized—it has to pay for itself, without piggybacking on existing ratepayers, and without dumping into town sewer systems that don't have the capacity to take the additional load. If you want to build somewhere that doesn't have electrical service, you have to pay to put it in yourself. As a consequence, we have strong village centers and minimal sprawl—there are urban centers, and there are rural areas, but very little in between.
Frankly, I think you're crazy to live here only five months out of the year.
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Patents are reverse socialism. The government takes something of value from the people, and grants it to an individual. They are very much capitalism, because every kind of capital you can own has this same property: it exists because the government says it exist, and your ownership of it exists because the government says it does. People talk about capitalism as if it were the natural state of things, but that's no more true than that socialism is: both are decisions that the group, in the form of the government, makes about how to allocate assets.
So what? That's how technology goes: good design costs, so you start with good enough, and iterate to good. It's worth noting that the OpenMoko phone, ab open source phone, also very similar to the iPhone, was under development and probably would have come out before the iPhone if they'd had more money. Trade secret protection is not a defense against independent development, and rumors don't change that.
The fact is that the market was primed for devices like the iPhone and iPad when they came out. The parts had gotten cheap enough. The iPhone is a great product, and the iPad is a great product, but neither product was a surprise, and neither product gives Apple the rights to a monopoly on that form factor.
And who knows, maybe the debate with Bruce Schneier convinced him that he just couldn't keep going with the cognitive dissonance.
Trolls are parasites in the same sense that people who eat fruit are parasites. You don't eat half the fruit and leave the rest. You eat the whole thing, and then chuck the pits in the trash, where they never germinate. Why would you leave any money on the table?
Another analogy would be mosquitoes. Sure, no individual mosquito is going to take a substantial amount of your blood, but living in a cloud of mosquitoes is not a happy life.
Right. They wait until you're making money, and then they come take it. Half a million? No. The damage can be your entire company. What would RIM look like right now if they hadn't suffered a half a billion dollar patent tax on push email?
...because the potential entrepreneur expects that if they become successful, a patent troll will take all their money?
The right to bear arms is not a right to fire them indiscriminately. Making it illegal to discharge firearms in circumstances where doing so is not in the public interest is very much allowed. For instance, you're not allowed to discharge firearms in the city limits of the town I live in, despite strong support for the right to carry them.
Yup. Even the policies intended to protect BLP articles are broken, in the sense that, as you imply, mainstream media actually does really poor reporting these days, and personal blogs by knowledgeable practitioners in the field are forbidden for use in BLP articles for any reason. It doesn't even take a corporation or country with deep pockets: all it takes is a few interested amateurs with nothing better to do, and nobody who's actually working for a living can possibly compete.
Yes and no. I've been involved in a POV dispute on an article because a friend of mine died under titillating circumstances, and another friend of mine is being coatracked over it. (Yes, these are real Wikipedia terms.) The death has been all over the news, mostly in very gossipy articles that quote a lot of third parties but don't do any fact-checking. And so of course a lot of people who want to pee on a famous person's wikipedia biography immediately dogpiled on it and started making gossipy edits.
This isn't the first time it's happened, and the person in question has had people cancel speaking invitations on him after he and his assistants have been out of pocket on airplane tickets. So there's a really serious side to this edit warring—even though it's celebrity gossips doing it, real people get hurt in the process.
You can't stop paying. You can't default on student loans. If you stop paying, the loan just keeps growing as penalties and interest on principal and penalties adds up. You can't declare bankruptcy. Your Social Security income will be garnished to pay for the loans. If you got the loans, and you can't pay them, you are meat.
This is a scandalously bad deal, particularly considering all the "vocational tech" schools that sprang up to get the loan money without teaching any useful skills. But the trouble is that when you're 18, and you're thinking about college, you don't have any experience with indebtedness yet, and so you don't realize how massively you are screwing yourself when you take those loans.
It's a lot easier for the passengers or copilot to overpower a crazy pilot who _doesn't_ have a gun... Did you forget about the copilot?
You should read the rest of the wikipedia article, not just the first paragraph of the toxicity section. Also, it turns out that the excessive use of roundup-ready GMO crops has, shockingly, caused evolution to occur in the midwest, where it was thought to be impossible. Consequently, the next generation of pesticide-ready GMO crops will be much more exciting. Another point I neglected to mention earlier is that if you are a farmer who does not use roundup-ready seeds, but does save seeds for planting next year, then when your neighbor's GMO crops contaminate your seeds, Monsanto will sue you for violating their patents.
The frustrating thing about this controversy is that the reason there's such a strong backlash against GMO plants is the widespread use of a *particular sort* of GMO plant: roundup-ready plants. Here, genetic manipulation has been used to make the plant resistant to Roundup, which is a fairly scary pesticide. And then there are the plants that have had insect toxins engineered into them. These toxins have in some cases been found to be toxic to humans as well.
OTOH, GMO products that have high yields, or are more resistant to fungus and mold, are not such a bad idea. But we treat all GMO products as the same, and so we wind up seeing stories like this one.
(Someone will probably point out that insect resistance and roundup resistance can improve yields, and this is true, but it's the side effects that people worry about.)
They're going to claim that it's because of people like him, and he's effectively part of their propaganda engine when he spews on about how great he is for illegally bypassing the release embargo on Hollywood content.
There's a huge difference between saying "Hollywood has too much power in the distribution of content," a statement with which I agree, and "and therefore we should just take the content and not pay for it." The problem statement is correct. The proposed solution is destructive. If you don't like how much power Hollywood has, work to take some of it away. The death of SOPA/PIPA should tell you that this isn't an impossible task. We are not powerless. So let's stop acting like we are.
Yeah yeah yeah. You're so brave. We all admire you. And you are completely missing the point. The point is that Hollywood is going to keep trying to censor the internet, because of people like you, until we stop them. The way we stop them is to sway public opinion away from Hollywood. What you just said here will not achieve that end. Nobody gives a shit how noble you feel when you pirate content. If you care about changing the debate, come up with something more constructive to say—something that regular folks will actually sympathize with. If you just want to brag about what a rebel you are, give it a rest, will you? We've all heard this line a million times, and it doesn't get any easier to swallow on the million-and-first.
Amp-hours? That's not a measure of energy consumed. You must have meant watt-hours. So suppose you have a solar panel, which costs 200KWH to place, and pays for that energy consumed in four years. Then after 20 years, it has generated five times as much energy as it consumed on installation. So if you amortize its cost over 20 years, without any tax deductions, at, say, 5% interest, then you have to pay 2.4KWH per month. And for the life of the solar panel, you get back 4KHW/month. Your net profit is 1.6KWH/month for the entire 20 years. And if you can deduct depreciation and interest, it's effectively more.
This is so true. We really have nothing to fear. All compounds are safe, as long as the manufacturer says they are. I don't understand why people have so little faith in our corporate overlords.
Anything that pays for itself in 20 years can be paid for on time. There are companies forming around this very idea today. You buy the panels, install them at someone's home, and they pay you monthly for the panels. You deduct interest and depreciation, and suddenly the panels cost a lot less than they did. The only sad thing is that this can only be done by businesses—private individuals can't write the panels' depreciation off as a business expense.
You've apparently never heard of grid-tie solar. The idea is to have solar panels on roofs everywhere, feeding excess power into the grid during the day, when demand is high. So if you plug your car into the wall at work, the power might well be coming from solar panels, and certainly *can* come from solar panels.
While you're thinking about selling real estate, consider the resale value of any property within the fallout zone of Fukushima. People will continue to live there, whatever the risks, because they will not be able to leave. Even if this report is correct, which seems unlikely, the long-term fallout from Fukushima will be incredibly costly. These costs need to be insured against; if they were, unsafe reactors would no longer be competitive with renewable sources of energy.
In my experience, it's the pro-nuke people who say "nuke-you-lur." Witness George Bush, for instance. Anti-nuclear activists generally know how to pronounce the word.
I think that word does not mean what you think it means. Vermont has suffered from being raped by extractive industries in the past. We have a healthy fear of having it happen again. Our trees have mostly grown back, but rocks take a lot longer to grow back. Yes, we need to figure out how to get the gasoline monkey off our backs. But fracking is just a way to stay addicted longer. It's not a realistic way out of our energy problems.
Generally speaking, what Vermonters tend to want is for things to be done right, not stupidly. We would rather be frugal than cheap. IOW, we would rather insulate our houses properly and heat them with wood if they aren't insulated properly, than import fossil fuels. And that is what we do. Our plan for the future is to be more efficient in our use of energy, rather than to come up with new ways to extract more fossil fuel. To generate energy using local resources like hydro, wind and methane digestion rather than using coal and nuclear.
It's always sad to see people from out of state talking about us as if we were reactionary and backwards—in my experience, Vermonters are some of the most realistically and practically forward-thinking people in the nation.
I keep hearing that from Entergy proponents, but the fact is that IBM has been working to move its employment offshore in general, so it's hard to take anything they say about closing plants in Burlington very seriously.
The article you referenced talks about people leaving Long Island for cheaper places with better jobs. One example of such a place that is given there is Vermont. Nowhere in the article you cite is any statement made to the effect that young Vermonters are leaving the state for greener pastures. Perhaps that's because there are no greener pastures.
It's true that very rural locations in Vermont don't have DSL yet, because they are too far from the CO. The location where we are building our house has cable, but not DSL. This is too bad—I'd much rather get my internet service from Sovernet than Comcast. C'est la vie.
One of the big wins about Vermont's strict environmental laws is that the environment here is really, really nice. Development isn't subsidized—it has to pay for itself, without piggybacking on existing ratepayers, and without dumping into town sewer systems that don't have the capacity to take the additional load. If you want to build somewhere that doesn't have electrical service, you have to pay to put it in yourself. As a consequence, we have strong village centers and minimal sprawl—there are urban centers, and there are rural areas, but very little in between.
Frankly, I think you're crazy to live here only five months out of the year.