I think that if you appeal in a corporate case such as this and you lose the damages should be increased.
Often, an appealing party has to pay costs if they lose. In the U.S. in federal court, a lawyer can be forced to pay his opponent's legal fees if he submits any frivolous articles to the court. Relax a bit on the whole condemnation of the legal system thing;-). Lawyers do a very good job of policing themselves, but the nuances of the system are often lost on those without a legal education. The fact that the media rarely gets the facts or reasoning right on decisions and rarely covers procedural rulings only makes things worse.
You're fallacy lies here. If you invest in developing something easily copyable, it may be true that it costs you a lot of money, but it is false that it gives you no benefit. It does provide you benefit; the benefit of whatever you were developing. (In your example, it was a better wing).
What I think you meant to say was that someone else could gain the same benefit without it costing them the same amount of money, since they could just copy the development you have done.
So, at least on the surface, you appear to be complaining about the fact that freeloaders don't have to pay as much as you did. It affects your ability to benefit beyond your development, that is, to benefit at the expense of others. And it allows others to benefit without compensating you. But in the final analysis, it's all about selfishness.
It might be a rightful selfishness, but it's selfishness none the less.
You're an idiot. If it costs me (say) $30M to develop a new wing, in terms of lab time, employee time, and resources, and I can only sell 1 at the monopolist price before it becomes a free market, I will not recover my $30M investment much less profit from it. As a businessman, I will never invest any money in research. The time and money necessary to develop the new wing would be more efficiently spent on some other facet of business, either a development protectable as a trade secret or another endeavor completely unrelated to technological advancement.
As a result, society suffers because it never gets a better wing. Without the financial incentive to innovate, not true innovation will take place. Garage inventors may have good ideas and develop them into useful devices, but relegating innovation into a device-by-device process would fundamentally defeat the goals of our commercial system. You're advocating (I'm assuming, because there can be no other conclusion from your argument) a return to the days of blacksmiths and cobblers where there is no mass production. Modern medicine -- who needs it? Cars -- no, just walk. Watch out for the piles of horse dung in the street, though. Buildings more than 4 stories high? Nope -- no elevators. Air travel? no way.
New and useful ideas are expensive to develop and bring to market, but often are very cheap to duplicate. Removing the incentive to be the first to bring a technology to market will remove the incentive to invest in new technology. If no one invests in new technology, there will be very little... More importantly, perhaps, it is only the gauranty of a patent monopoly that allows many new products, once developed, to be produced. A factory is very expensive to build or retool, and a company would not undertake that expense in many cases if they could not count on the monopolist price. Subsequent competitors currently have the benefit of ~20 years of technological advance and an established market before they have to retool to compete -- they can retool more cheaply with lower risk.
More importantly, especially for the "don't export our jobs" crowd that is prevalent here, eliminating the patent system would cause a flight of manufacturing jobs from the U.S. and a total collapse of the technology development market. If the only relevant factor in delivering a device to market is how cheaply it can be produced, then everything will be made in China. In the U.S., you'd be talking at least an overnight doubling in real unemployment, maybe more, and an economic depression that would dwarf that triffling little thing in the 30's as trillions and trillions of dollars in propety value would evaporate instantaneously.
So, in conclusion, your preference for an abolishment of the patent system would 1) not work in theory, 2) not work in practice, and 3) cause a massive global economic collapse. From the above, it is apparent that you failed to adequately consider your position. Please desist from further idiocy.
Re:Unknown Error In The Submission
on
Nuclear Batteries
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you assume that the thumb rule holds for nickel-63, everything in 25 micrometers would receive a dose rate of 1.6 million rem/hr. Obviously the thumb rule has to break down (because at 0 meters the dose is infinite), but a significant dose will still be received at the penetration distance nonetheless.
Nickel by itself is a pretty bad substance for people, at least in its pure form. Some ridiculous portion of the population would have a severe allergic reaction to pure nickel (I forget the exact number, I think it's around 5% of the population). A "terrorist" or polluter or evil-doer or whatever would likely do more damage with Nickel powder than would occur from the availability of Ni63 through this battery.
Nope, I just assumed that it was obvious that if your government didn't spend about 400 billion dollars a year on the military, then that money could be spent on something else. Assuming that they ploughed even some of that budget into education rather than explosives, then we can conclude the american public would be better off. That's logic. The only justification is if you really think the US needs to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more than everyone else on its armed forces to ensure it's citizen's safety. I think it is equally clear that it doesn't.
You still failed to make a cogent argument. You need to state a claim and back it up with evidence. While it may seem obvious to you that spending $400B/y or so on an industry that wouldn't otherwise exist and employs Americans almost exclusively has no positive effects on the American economy, society, or culture, it is in no way obvious to most rational people. There is SOME benefit merely from spending money that wouldn't otherwise be spent. Government spending is one of the few controls the government can exercise over the economy, and it's a very strong stimulus (especially if it is deficit spending).
As for education, because there are competing state and federal funding sources for public schooling, it is far more likely that additional money supplied by the federal government would meet with a withdrawal of state, local, and private funding for public schools. In other words, no more would actually be spent on education in many cities and states as other priorities would arise that the state would value more highly per marginal dollar. States have a ton of money too and find a way to spend more than they take in... If states and localities thought that education needed more money and were willing to cut back in other areas, they would do so. Because they haven't cut back in other areas more, it's a sound assumption that additional money put into the system would result in negligible changes in school funding.
Many state lotteries were passed using the justification that the lottery money would go to education... well, when the lottery money rolled in the states kept the funding the same and spent the extra money elsewhere. The actual money from the lottery did go to education, but that was really just on the accountant's spreadsheet.
While you may be meaning well with this argument to spend more on education by harnessing the federal budget, in the end all you're really advocating is replacing a porkbarrel stimulus project that, in addition to stimulating the economy, provides a social benefit with an assortment of state-level porkbarrel projects which won't necessarily provide stimulus or a social benefit. While it may be good for a state senator's cousin that he gets a massive tax break to build a strip mall, for example, it's not clear that this provides the same stimulus or social benefit as military expenditure.
This, of course, doesn't even address the implicit flaw in your argument that additional spending on education would provide a benefit. I don't know if you've ever actually been to school (your "argument" is certainly not compelling enough to make that a foregone conclusion) but learning is largely the duty of the student. There's no "learning device" that teachers can hook up to a students head to force knowledge in. Students have to take the time to read and do their work, and if they don't do that there's no amount of money that will improve them as students. The state has a duty to provide a clean, air conditioned/heated (if necessary), orderly learning environment and teachers capable of guiding students in their quest to gain knowledge. The state does not have an obligation (nor should it) to see that every kid learns X. Currently, the state does a very good job of providing a legitimate opportunity for every kid to learn X, but in some districts it fails. In the majority of districts where a child does not have the benefit of a c
It's an H-bomb, right? The tritium (halflife of 12 years, IIRC) would be the hardest part to source. It's very very very hard to obtain because so few reactors can make it and it degrades so rapidly.
There's actually been a lot of work done studying the replacement rate for criminals. In areas like this (petty theft of unsecure items on the street) or drug dealing, a criminal who is arrested is often replaced on the street by another criminal before he's fingerprinted... You can't stop crime by locking up criminals because many crimes are created by some combination of poverty, opportunity, and moral flexibility. In the case of drug dealers (the class of criminal for whom this is most true), there's not even the moral flexibility requirement. (It's plainly not immoral to sell drugs -- merely illegal.)
When doing "Documentaries," you are carrying a responsibility of presenting truth to the audience.
Truth has little if anything to do with nonfiction. If you believe you have access to some font of truth, please introduce me to whomever sold it to you. I think I can find him a job selling bridges and whatnot...
So we are left with a nation, that is composed of accountants and lawyers. And these will soon be outsourced as well.
There are only about a million lawyers, the vast majority of whom would not be recognizeable by you as attorneys. They write laws, negotiate contracts, manage estates, and interpret statutes for regulatory agencies. The majority of law school graduates never practice and of those who do practice, the vast majority never see the inside of a courtroom for any reason other than jury duty.
As for accountants, the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy has their number at around 525k, with the great majority working for small firms or solo practices. It is awefully hard to get outsourced from a business where you are the only employee.
Once again, someone on slashdot is being ignorant and foolish when it comes to non-computer fields... should I be surprised? Apparently a nation is composed of something so long as that group makes up one half of one percent of its population. I had better write that down somewhere to make sure I remember. I wouldn't want to come off like an idiot in some future conversation...
This is totally untrue for any number of social and economic reasons.
The only thing that would happen if IP laws went away is that business models would change. People would make their money in a different manner.
Period.
There is absolutely NO economic evidence that IP laws have ANY positive effect on the production of art or inventions.
From the beginning, it has merely been some people's THEORY that this is true - most of these people in government or business with other agendas than the free dissemination of ideas.
Well, people who really love to write, compose music, etc AND are already insanely wealthy -- wealthy enough to write for the benefit of others for free while at the same time supporting their families without any additional income. So, how many people do you think fall into that category? We could just go down the list of great american authors and see how many we would have had if there was no financial incentive to produce books... can you name one? I mean I know for a fact that Hawthorne, Twain, Melville, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Salinger would not have written as prolifically if at all if there had been no prospect for financial incentive. The prospect of future returns paying either for previously incurred expenses or to sustain their overly extravagant lifestyle was a major part of the reason they chose to write.
More importantly, though, I think you completely misunderstand the nature of our economic system. Right now, for example, lawyers are rewarded handsomely when they successfully represent their clients. That makes law a profitable field, and because people like to have money it makes law a competitive field. More people try to become lawyers and, as a result, we have much better lawyers now, on average, than we did say 50 years ago. (read some case law and it will be quite obvious to you that the quality of representation has improved). Awarding copyright to artists does the same thing -- it makes the creation of art a competitive field. I don't want to read a book some idiot with family money put together, published, and distributed because I have very little interest in reading anything that a substantial portion of the population isn't willing to pay to read. (Substantial portion here doesn't imply mainstream, simply large enough to support a boutique publisher's overhead).
But this brings about another problem... if there is to be no copyright then who will pay to publish and distribute the books? Who will pay for the endless rounds of editing that go into every book you buy? Maybe you distribute electronically, though that has been wildly unsuccessful so far because people (and that is who we care about here, remember) don't like to read off of computer screens. They do that enough at work, and so maybe they print it out themselves for 4 cents a page... and so this 1200 page book in my hand would cost me $48 to print up. That is cheaper than the $60 that I paid for it, but that does not include the editing or the compensation for the writer...
For some reason, though, you were stupid enough to repeatedly make the point that copyright is without merit, and that it serves no constructive purpose in our society. How exactly would this society-without-copyright exist in your fairytale world? How would the creators of intellectual property profit from their massive investments of time, energy, and money? Maybe Steinbeck would write and publish his own books, you know, in that free time between 18 hour shifts as a bricklayer. Maybe Hemingway would have been able to write "The Sun Also Rises" imbetween digging ditches. I doubt it, though.
What irks me the most, though, is that a small-minded cretin like you infers from the fact that you can see no usefulness to one of the most important development in property rights in the last 3000 years that no one else has thought about the issue. You completely ignore the very real fac
Doesn't matter. Deciding if something is wrong or right should not depend on how it effects the economy
Whether an action actually has a deleterious economic impact on another party should determine whether we change the laws or their enforcement. I think this is stupid -- the government didn't change the law when people were selling seats in their apartments to watch Cubs games from across the street, and this is little different... The question of whether movie companies are being harmed is one that they haven't answered (and one that the RIAA failed to answer as well). All they've been able to show is that, if everyone who downloaded a song had bought their albums the record company would have made a lot of money. I don't understand why they don't see TV and Radio the same way -- once a song or movie is broadcast once, I'd think that anyone should be allowed to have a copy because they could have easily taped the broadcast. That alone tells me that this isn't about royalties or DVD or CD sales -- record execs aren't stupid enough to think that some pimply 12 year-old is going to buy 100,000 worth of CD's. This is about controling the content that reaches consumers, because the consumers who can afford to purchase music still choose to do so... they just choose much more wisely now because they have more information, and the RIAA is suffering relative to less mainstream and or independent labels...
The distribution of low-quality copies of DVD's is an externality, though not necessarily a negative one, and is a necessary effect of the widespread digitization of information. In order to put the genie back in the bottle, the government would have to harm everyone, even the most scrupulous of consumers, a great deal relative to the minor gains that record or movie companies might make as a result...
FYI, I have not downloaded a song in 5 years, and I've never downloaded a movie.
At the end, the total amount of recall I have of specific aspects of the book will be about equivalent to the recall I'd have after seeing a movie, only the movie gives me the information passively and in a fifth the time. Do you really remember significantly more detail about a story from reading a book than from seeing a movie?
You need to work on your reading skills... You should retain more info from the book that is not in the movie than info actually in the movie... Even the most pathetic contemporary authors like Clancy, who are writing in order to sell screenplay rights, include far more detail than you could hope to include in a movie...
If you think that a movie can replace a book, you don't know how to read fiction. Seeing an elephant's shadow is not the same as seeing an elephant...
Same thing is at work here. If the US attacks our enemies, we strengthen the terrorists. If we don't attack our enemies, we strengthen the terrorists. If we support Israel, we strengthen the terrorists. If we withdraw support from Israel, we strengthen the terrorists. If we have corned beef on rye for lunch, we strengthen the terrorists.
At some point you just have to stop for a minute and think that maybe the problem here isn't US foreign policy, but rather terrorism itself.
I know it's a bad idea to feed the trolls, but I don't think you understand the situation at all. There are many thousands, if not millions, of sane, normal people who believe themselves justified in either sacrificing their lives to kill Americans, or in contributing to such actions. Sane, normal people don't normally do such things. Stark raving mad people don't normally do these things. Maybe if we figure out why these people are so angry and change the root cause behind that anger, we can put an end to this terrorist mennace? Merely attacking the terrorists after they've become terrorists (and committed acts allowing some "justification" in applying the US's violent antiterror methods)is not a tennable solution. Swatting the mosquito that just gave you malaria might make you feel better, and might prevent someone else from getting malaria from THAT mosquito, but it does little for you and doesn't prevent future mosquitos from giving you malaria again, once you've recovered...
Anyway, terrorism is, above all, speech. Some view it as a weapon intended to inflict psychological damage which should be shunned along with weapons meant to inflict biological or radiological damage beyond the scope of conventional weapons, but I feel this is the wrong approach. Terrorists generally fall into two groups:
1) The Voiceless. These terrorists have no voice at all in their governance. They are ruled by a government that is not compelled, constitutionally or otherwise, to listen to them, and responds to any dissent with great speed and force. Most of the Middle East falls into this group, including the Saudis, Iraqis, and the subjugated palestinians. Because they have no voice in their own government and any attempt to gain one would result in a sudden (and in many cases, US-backed) demise, they lash out at their oppressor's guardian. These "terrorists" are freedom fighters who happen to be fighting for freedom from us. Calling them terrorists is a political word game, much the same as when the British refered to American efforts at independence as terrorist acts. In most cases, all peaceful efforts have been exhausted or rebuffed, leaving these "terrorists" to ask for either liberty or death.
2) The Extremists. Extremists have a voice, but feel that they are right and that they should get their way even though the political system of which they are a part disagrees with them. The OKC bombers fall into this category, as do many of the green terrorist organizations and the American "civil rights terrorist" organizations spawned in the late 60's and early 70's. Abortion clinic bombers/snipers/etc also fall into this category, along with church bombers and others of that ilk. This is the more normal view of terrorism -- a group who loses an election but feels justified in taking violent actions to subvert the fair and just results.
The 9/11 terrorists, and most of the victims of our war on terror, are terrorists falling within the first class. While they may be extremists in the literal sense, they never had a voice, and they didn't have that voice because of the United States (and, historically, Europe). Because the U.S. props up despotic, dictatorial regimes in the middle east, supplying them with weapons, training, and aide, it is the target of these terrorists. These terrorists are fighting to have a hand in their own government, something that the U.S. theoretically views as an inalienable r
Having all this data sounds potentially useful for the airlines and airports themselves, for marketing and whatever other purposes.
The Airlines and Airports already have access to your entire flight history. How would a fingerprint or iris scan help them in marketing to you? This is basically a more secure driver's license that allows the authorities to identify low risk passengers and not waste security resources on them...
and it was clear that the guy was bullshitting why bother with negotiations, just because they're fun?
It is cheaper, for the government, the suspect, and the potential jurors to settle a case before it gets to court. So long as the finding is considered equitable by both sides, why spend a ton of money on this guy?
You'd be surprised about a criminal mastermind coming out of Australia too wouldn't you.
Rupert Murdoch?
Re:Wait... so you're telling me...
on
A New Ice Age?
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· Score: 1, Informative
This is something that could possibly devastate society as we know it, perhaps not for us, but for our children or our children's children, but there's a great many people who either dismiss it as never going to happen or something that can be easily controlled without any major shifts in lifestyle or attitude.
Someone once said "This is a fragile ball we're living on. It's a miracle and we're destroying it." That's a hell of a lot closer to the truth than any politician, especially any politician who's made a killing from exploiting fossil fuels, will ever admit to.
You have evidence that says that global warming has been caused by human activity? I haven't seen any. *The Earth is warming up -- this is well established by the preponderance of available data. *Is human activity increasing CO2 levels by maybe 5% in some areas, but little if any globally, causing this difference? It would take a massive development to make this anything other than junk science. *What could we do in the U.S. to minimize the greenhouse effect? Well, The U.S. already consumes more CO2 than it produces. I don't know about other greenhouse gasses, but if there is a manmade greenhouse effect, the U.S. is not contributing any CO2 to it...
The most damning thing to MS is that they released beta code for Win95 more than 2 years before filing the first of the patents. Patent law clearly states that you have no more than 364 days after first publicly demonstrating a device or idea to patent it.
Not neccessarily. MSFT would have its patent rights intact if, for example, anyone seeing that code (I assume you mean sourcecode and not binaries) had a click-through or better confidentiality agreement. More importantly, though, as long as MSFT just took the input and showed the output (a public demonstration) without going into detail about how the transformation worked, they'd likewise be protected. If I give you a magic black box that you can put a fish in and the fish will turn into a chicken, and there's no way for you to take apart the box, then even though I'm demonstrating the effectiveness of the box in turning fish into chickens I'm not forfeiting any patent rights...
So if he killed the man at 5mph, he should have got a lesser sentence? How does this make sense? If he'd killed him with a cuddly toy, should he just have been let off?
Well, in this case he was acting with gross negligence and disregard for human life... If he killed someone at 5mph, though, the question of whether it was an accident would have to be addressed, as it would if he killed someone with a cuddly toy. People aren't put in jail for killing other people, but rather for the situation surrounding that homicide.
It would be no impediment NOW, but we'd also be way behind the curve if a patent had been granted on the transistor or the integrated circuit. We'd still be using 8086 era technology being provided by a single hardware vendor who had the lock on the basic technological patents.
I hate to break it to you, but the transistor was patented, as was just about every incrimental improvement in technology since then... It would seem that you've got some holes in your reasoning, as we have, in fact, advanced beyond 8086 era technology and a great many hardware manufacturers offer us a wide variety of options. Maybe patents aren't the boogeyman you think they are?
http://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/events/p atbat.html
Google is your friend. This was the first return in my search for "transistor patent".
Large economy does not mean good economy. Having a lot of low paying jobs does not mean you have a lot of high paying tech jobs. Most people in Texas are somewhat poor and this is a fact you cannot dispute. Cali on the other hand, the res plenty of rich people there.
"Adolph_Hitler"... hehe... That's a funny troll name, but I'm not sure why you're trolling Texas. Texas only has New York beat by about 2 million people but still has a larger economy. If Texas just had a bunch of low-paying jobs then you figure New York with its ridiculously inflated NYC salaries would almost certainly overtake Texas... Though it's hard to know how that "2nd largest economy" stat was compiled, as it was provided without a link. Many of the higher paid NYC employees live in CT or Jersey, and while a sound accounting process would credit NY with that income, it's hard to know what the uncited study used...
Every state has plenty of poor people -- in Texas many live in the stereotypical trailer parks, and perhaps that's what you're referencing, but NY has plenty of poor folks, with many of them stacked on top of each other in the city. Texas may have a bit of a distribution of wealth issue, though I doubt it. Rather, my folks (in Dallas) live in a house valued between $2M and $3M (based on recent sales of similar houses in the area) in a neighborhood of ~10k houses, most of similar value with some worth far more. There are a dozen or so similar neighborhoods, some with much more valuable houses and fewer people, others with many more houses of slightly lesser value... for a metro area of 5.7 million, that's a pretty good upper middle class... The schools in these neighborhoods are top notch as well, and for parents unsatisfied with the public offerings there are a number of fine private schools, and they always have the option of sending their kids to a boarding school in the northeast for H.S.
As for whoever said Houston was bigger than MA, I don't know what they were smoking. According to wikipedia Houston is smaller than Boston, much less MA... I wouldn't be surprised if more people in Houston were gainfully employed, though... I swear Boston is full of freeloaders (I live in the area right now)... Between people getting their check from the govt and drawing their income in some way from organized crime or civil corruption, I'd guess a third of MA residents drawing income draw at least some of it in this manner... Though I guess I'm including forms of civil graft, such as Cambridge's sweeping/towing racket that would show up as "legitimate" jobs...
Re:Spaceflight as a religious endeavour
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Do you really think that a few hundred colonists on the Moon or on Mars would be able to perpetuate humanity? How about a few thousand?
While as little as a few dozen would contain the requisite genetic diversity to repopulate the earth, you aren't thinking right... It's relatively expensive to sustain life on earth because of the high gravity. The necessary maintenance diet is in the thousands of calories, but on the Moon, for example, it would be far smaller. At the same time, the moon isn't hampered by an atmosphere to block the sun's energy allowing for higher power conversion rates per unit area, and the abundance of metal oxides combined with the abundance of vacuum should allow a population on the moon to generate plenty of steel, titanium, and oxygen once their industrial base reached adequate size. If enough carbon and nitrogen is imported, along with "starter soil," a self-sustaining agricultural base could be created to feed the inhabitants and maintain the atmosphere.
A mature settlement on the Moon would have a self-sustaining population of 5 billion, not 5 thousand. It would be the ideal base of operations for expansion into the rest of the solar system and beyond, as well as the ideal place to do space propulsion research. Living below the surface of Mercury, in the clouds on Venus, on Mars and its moons, as well as on/in the more significant asteroids, while at the same time exploiting the unexploited areas of the Earth, we could eventually support 100 billion people in the solar system.
Manned spaceflight as it has been is meaningless, because it has been undertaken under the guise of meaningful scientific research done in space. This research is largely pointless because even if new phenomena are discovered, they have no practical application because we have no industrial base in space. The ultimate goal of manned spaceflight is the propagation of our species, and NASA should focus on making a self-sustaining Moon base over satisfying intellectual curiosity with extravagant probe missions. Why? Because with a self-sustaining Moon base we could send 1000 probes for every 1 we can send from earth. More importantly, though, with a mature presence in space we'd have several times as many minds working on the universe's problems... Rather, if the ultimate goal of all human endeavor is scientific discovery, then increasing the number of humans will greatly increase the amount of science undertaken.
As for settling the bottom of the oceans (raised elsewhere), that's more of a stupid counter argument than a justifiable alternative. The bottom of the oceans are energy poor, even compared to mars, and the structures would be much harder to build because they must keep out enormous pressures while withstanding the stresses of an active plate tectonics system. Without energy to grow food and/or drive chemical/industrial processes, the bottom of the ocean is more of a campsite/vacation destination than a viable alternative to permanent settlement of space. The bottom of the ocean would provide us with more real estate to build apartment buildings and whatnot, but we have a very long way to go in terms of increasing the carrying capacity of the earth and reducing sprawl before such a development would be necessary.
You failed to grasp the argument in the article. His argument is not that people will stop playing games, but that people will stop shelling out huge amounts of money to play new games. The fact that someone was entertaining themselves by playing burgertime supports his point that the entertainment people gain by playing games is not directly related to the technology being used to display the game. He is making the argument that the video game (or, rather, console game) industry will collapse because subsequent console generations will offer only slight, barely perceptible improvements in graphics rather than breakthroughs allowing radically different game types.
He certainly did not say that people will stop playing games -- he's saying people will stop buying new consoles because the coming generation of consoles has so little to offer over the current generation. Sure, a few mindless boobs will continue to shell out $500/year to play the latest, greatest console games, but that number will shrink rapidly as the core market that has sustained the industry for 20 years ages and the budget-limited portion of the market catches in. As a result, their margins will thin and as a result their research budget will thin, leading to an even smaller advance for the next generation console, creating a downward spiral of ROI.
If you don't believe that this is at the very least a worry of the 3 current contestants in the battle for the living room, then explain why all three outsourced both their core processor and their graphics processor to the same two companies (IBM and ATI). Once IBM and ATI got the first console contracts, they could offer better deals to the remaining two. If either of the remaining two thought there was a lot of growth left, they would have invested heavily in R&D to come out ahead with a superior product to win market share. They both went with the cheaper alternative, though, which would lead a logical person to the conclusion that the console manufacturers, or at least the second two, already see their industry as one of diminishing returns rather than growth.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't know.
Often, an appealing party has to pay costs if they lose. In the U.S. in federal court, a lawyer can be forced to pay his opponent's legal fees if he submits any frivolous articles to the court. Relax a bit on the whole condemnation of the legal system thing
You're an idiot. If it costs me (say) $30M to develop a new wing, in terms of lab time, employee time, and resources, and I can only sell 1 at the monopolist price before it becomes a free market, I will not recover my $30M investment much less profit from it. As a businessman, I will never invest any money in research. The time and money necessary to develop the new wing would be more efficiently spent on some other facet of business, either a development protectable as a trade secret or another endeavor completely unrelated to technological advancement.
As a result, society suffers because it never gets a better wing. Without the financial incentive to innovate, not true innovation will take place. Garage inventors may have good ideas and develop them into useful devices, but relegating innovation into a device-by-device process would fundamentally defeat the goals of our commercial system. You're advocating (I'm assuming, because there can be no other conclusion from your argument) a return to the days of blacksmiths and cobblers where there is no mass production. Modern medicine -- who needs it? Cars -- no, just walk. Watch out for the piles of horse dung in the street, though. Buildings more than 4 stories high? Nope -- no elevators. Air travel? no way.
New and useful ideas are expensive to develop and bring to market, but often are very cheap to duplicate. Removing the incentive to be the first to bring a technology to market will remove the incentive to invest in new technology. If no one invests in new technology, there will be very little... More importantly, perhaps, it is only the gauranty of a patent monopoly that allows many new products, once developed, to be produced. A factory is very expensive to build or retool, and a company would not undertake that expense in many cases if they could not count on the monopolist price. Subsequent competitors currently have the benefit of ~20 years of technological advance and an established market before they have to retool to compete -- they can retool more cheaply with lower risk.
More importantly, especially for the "don't export our jobs" crowd that is prevalent here, eliminating the patent system would cause a flight of manufacturing jobs from the U.S. and a total collapse of the technology development market. If the only relevant factor in delivering a device to market is how cheaply it can be produced, then everything will be made in China. In the U.S., you'd be talking at least an overnight doubling in real unemployment, maybe more, and an economic depression that would dwarf that triffling little thing in the 30's as trillions and trillions of dollars in propety value would evaporate instantaneously.
So, in conclusion, your preference for an abolishment of the patent system would 1) not work in theory, 2) not work in practice, and 3) cause a massive global economic collapse. From the above, it is apparent that you failed to adequately consider your position. Please desist from further idiocy.
You still failed to make a cogent argument. You need to state a claim and back it up with evidence. While it may seem obvious to you that spending $400B/y or so on an industry that wouldn't otherwise exist and employs Americans almost exclusively has no positive effects on the American economy, society, or culture, it is in no way obvious to most rational people. There is SOME benefit merely from spending money that wouldn't otherwise be spent. Government spending is one of the few controls the government can exercise over the economy, and it's a very strong stimulus (especially if it is deficit spending).
As for education, because there are competing state and federal funding sources for public schooling, it is far more likely that additional money supplied by the federal government would meet with a withdrawal of state, local, and private funding for public schools. In other words, no more would actually be spent on education in many cities and states as other priorities would arise that the state would value more highly per marginal dollar. States have a ton of money too and find a way to spend more than they take in... If states and localities thought that education needed more money and were willing to cut back in other areas, they would do so. Because they haven't cut back in other areas more, it's a sound assumption that additional money put into the system would result in negligible changes in school funding.
Many state lotteries were passed using the justification that the lottery money would go to education... well, when the lottery money rolled in the states kept the funding the same and spent the extra money elsewhere. The actual money from the lottery did go to education, but that was really just on the accountant's spreadsheet.
While you may be meaning well with this argument to spend more on education by harnessing the federal budget, in the end all you're really advocating is replacing a porkbarrel stimulus project that, in addition to stimulating the economy, provides a social benefit with an assortment of state-level porkbarrel projects which won't necessarily provide stimulus or a social benefit. While it may be good for a state senator's cousin that he gets a massive tax break to build a strip mall, for example, it's not clear that this provides the same stimulus or social benefit as military expenditure.
This, of course, doesn't even address the implicit flaw in your argument that additional spending on education would provide a benefit. I don't know if you've ever actually been to school (your "argument" is certainly not compelling enough to make that a foregone conclusion) but learning is largely the duty of the student. There's no "learning device" that teachers can hook up to a students head to force knowledge in. Students have to take the time to read and do their work, and if they don't do that there's no amount of money that will improve them as students. The state has a duty to provide a clean, air conditioned/heated (if necessary), orderly learning environment and teachers capable of guiding students in their quest to gain knowledge. The state does not have an obligation (nor should it) to see that every kid learns X. Currently, the state does a very good job of providing a legitimate opportunity for every kid to learn X, but in some districts it fails. In the majority of districts where a child does not have the benefit of a c
It's an H-bomb, right? The tritium (halflife of 12 years, IIRC) would be the hardest part to source. It's very very very hard to obtain because so few reactors can make it and it degrades so rapidly.
There's actually been a lot of work done studying the replacement rate for criminals. In areas like this (petty theft of unsecure items on the street) or drug dealing, a criminal who is arrested is often replaced on the street by another criminal before he's fingerprinted... You can't stop crime by locking up criminals because many crimes are created by some combination of poverty, opportunity, and moral flexibility. In the case of drug dealers (the class of criminal for whom this is most true), there's not even the moral flexibility requirement. (It's plainly not immoral to sell drugs -- merely illegal.)
There are only about a million lawyers, the vast majority of whom would not be recognizeable by you as attorneys. They write laws, negotiate contracts, manage estates, and interpret statutes for regulatory agencies. The majority of law school graduates never practice and of those who do practice, the vast majority never see the inside of a courtroom for any reason other than jury duty.
As for accountants, the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy has their number at around 525k, with the great majority working for small firms or solo practices. It is awefully hard to get outsourced from a business where you are the only employee.
Once again, someone on slashdot is being ignorant and foolish when it comes to non-computer fields... should I be surprised? Apparently a nation is composed of something so long as that group makes up one half of one percent of its population. I had better write that down somewhere to make sure I remember. I wouldn't want to come off like an idiot in some future conversation...
Well, people who really love to write, compose music, etc AND are already insanely wealthy -- wealthy enough to write for the benefit of others for free while at the same time supporting their families without any additional income. So, how many people do you think fall into that category? We could just go down the list of great american authors and see how many we would have had if there was no financial incentive to produce books... can you name one? I mean I know for a fact that Hawthorne, Twain, Melville, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Salinger would not have written as prolifically if at all if there had been no prospect for financial incentive. The prospect of future returns paying either for previously incurred expenses or to sustain their overly extravagant lifestyle was a major part of the reason they chose to write.
More importantly, though, I think you completely misunderstand the nature of our economic system. Right now, for example, lawyers are rewarded handsomely when they successfully represent their clients. That makes law a profitable field, and because people like to have money it makes law a competitive field. More people try to become lawyers and, as a result, we have much better lawyers now, on average, than we did say 50 years ago. (read some case law and it will be quite obvious to you that the quality of representation has improved). Awarding copyright to artists does the same thing -- it makes the creation of art a competitive field. I don't want to read a book some idiot with family money put together, published, and distributed because I have very little interest in reading anything that a substantial portion of the population isn't willing to pay to read. (Substantial portion here doesn't imply mainstream, simply large enough to support a boutique publisher's overhead).
But this brings about another problem... if there is to be no copyright then who will pay to publish and distribute the books? Who will pay for the endless rounds of editing that go into every book you buy? Maybe you distribute electronically, though that has been wildly unsuccessful so far because people (and that is who we care about here, remember) don't like to read off of computer screens. They do that enough at work, and so maybe they print it out themselves for 4 cents a page... and so this 1200 page book in my hand would cost me $48 to print up. That is cheaper than the $60 that I paid for it, but that does not include the editing or the compensation for the writer...
For some reason, though, you were stupid enough to repeatedly make the point that copyright is without merit, and that it serves no constructive purpose in our society. How exactly would this society-without-copyright exist in your fairytale world? How would the creators of intellectual property profit from their massive investments of time, energy, and money? Maybe Steinbeck would write and publish his own books, you know, in that free time between 18 hour shifts as a bricklayer. Maybe Hemingway would have been able to write "The Sun Also Rises" imbetween digging ditches. I doubt it, though.
What irks me the most, though, is that a small-minded cretin like you infers from the fact that you can see no usefulness to one of the most important development in property rights in the last 3000 years that no one else has thought about the issue. You completely ignore the very real fac
Whether an action actually has a deleterious economic impact on another party should determine whether we change the laws or their enforcement. I think this is stupid -- the government didn't change the law when people were selling seats in their apartments to watch Cubs games from across the street, and this is little different... The question of whether movie companies are being harmed is one that they haven't answered (and one that the RIAA failed to answer as well). All they've been able to show is that, if everyone who downloaded a song had bought their albums the record company would have made a lot of money. I don't understand why they don't see TV and Radio the same way -- once a song or movie is broadcast once, I'd think that anyone should be allowed to have a copy because they could have easily taped the broadcast. That alone tells me that this isn't about royalties or DVD or CD sales -- record execs aren't stupid enough to think that some pimply 12 year-old is going to buy 100,000 worth of CD's. This is about controling the content that reaches consumers, because the consumers who can afford to purchase music still choose to do so... they just choose much more wisely now because they have more information, and the RIAA is suffering relative to less mainstream and or independent labels...
The distribution of low-quality copies of DVD's is an externality, though not necessarily a negative one, and is a necessary effect of the widespread digitization of information. In order to put the genie back in the bottle, the government would have to harm everyone, even the most scrupulous of consumers, a great deal relative to the minor gains that record or movie companies might make as a result...
FYI, I have not downloaded a song in 5 years, and I've never downloaded a movie.
You need to work on your reading skills... You should retain more info from the book that is not in the movie than info actually in the movie... Even the most pathetic contemporary authors like Clancy, who are writing in order to sell screenplay rights, include far more detail than you could hope to include in a movie...
If you think that a movie can replace a book, you don't know how to read fiction. Seeing an elephant's shadow is not the same as seeing an elephant...
I know it's a bad idea to feed the trolls, but I don't think you understand the situation at all. There are many thousands, if not millions, of sane, normal people who believe themselves justified in either sacrificing their lives to kill Americans, or in contributing to such actions. Sane, normal people don't normally do such things. Stark raving mad people don't normally do these things. Maybe if we figure out why these people are so angry and change the root cause behind that anger, we can put an end to this terrorist mennace? Merely attacking the terrorists after they've become terrorists (and committed acts allowing some "justification" in applying the US's violent antiterror methods)is not a tennable solution. Swatting the mosquito that just gave you malaria might make you feel better, and might prevent someone else from getting malaria from THAT mosquito, but it does little for you and doesn't prevent future mosquitos from giving you malaria again, once you've recovered...
Anyway, terrorism is, above all, speech. Some view it as a weapon intended to inflict psychological damage which should be shunned along with weapons meant to inflict biological or radiological damage beyond the scope of conventional weapons, but I feel this is the wrong approach. Terrorists generally fall into two groups:
The 9/11 terrorists, and most of the victims of our war on terror, are terrorists falling within the first class. While they may be extremists in the literal sense, they never had a voice, and they didn't have that voice because of the United States (and, historically, Europe). Because the U.S. props up despotic, dictatorial regimes in the middle east, supplying them with weapons, training, and aide, it is the target of these terrorists. These terrorists are fighting to have a hand in their own government, something that the U.S. theoretically views as an inalienable r
The Airlines and Airports already have access to your entire flight history. How would a fingerprint or iris scan help them in marketing to you? This is basically a more secure driver's license that allows the authorities to identify low risk passengers and not waste security resources on them...
It is cheaper, for the government, the suspect, and the potential jurors to settle a case before it gets to court. So long as the finding is considered equitable by both sides, why spend a ton of money on this guy?
Rupert Murdoch?
You have evidence that says that global warming has been caused by human activity? I haven't seen any.
*The Earth is warming up -- this is well established by the preponderance of available data.
*Is human activity increasing CO2 levels by maybe 5% in some areas, but little if any globally, causing this difference? It would take a massive development to make this anything other than junk science.
*What could we do in the U.S. to minimize the greenhouse effect? Well, The U.S. already consumes more CO2 than it produces. I don't know about other greenhouse gasses, but if there is a manmade greenhouse effect, the U.S. is not contributing any CO2 to it...
Not neccessarily. MSFT would have its patent rights intact if, for example, anyone seeing that code (I assume you mean sourcecode and not binaries) had a click-through or better confidentiality agreement. More importantly, though, as long as MSFT just took the input and showed the output (a public demonstration) without going into detail about how the transformation worked, they'd likewise be protected. If I give you a magic black box that you can put a fish in and the fish will turn into a chicken, and there's no way for you to take apart the box, then even though I'm demonstrating the effectiveness of the box in turning fish into chickens I'm not forfeiting any patent rights...
Well, in this case he was acting with gross negligence and disregard for human life... If he killed someone at 5mph, though, the question of whether it was an accident would have to be addressed, as it would if he killed someone with a cuddly toy. People aren't put in jail for killing other people, but rather for the situation surrounding that homicide.
It would be no impediment NOW, but we'd also be way behind the curve if a patent had been granted on the transistor or the integrated circuit. We'd still be using 8086 era technology being provided by a single hardware vendor who had the lock on the basic technological patents.
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I hate to break it to you, but the transistor was patented, as was just about every incrimental improvement in technology since then... It would seem that you've got some holes in your reasoning, as we have, in fact, advanced beyond 8086 era technology and a great many hardware manufacturers offer us a wide variety of options. Maybe patents aren't the boogeyman you think they are?
http://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/events/
Google is your friend. This was the first return in my search for "transistor patent".
You misspelled "assmutilate"
"Adolph_Hitler"... hehe... That's a funny troll name, but I'm not sure why you're trolling Texas. Texas only has New York beat by about 2 million people but still has a larger economy. If Texas just had a bunch of low-paying jobs then you figure New York with its ridiculously inflated NYC salaries would almost certainly overtake Texas... Though it's hard to know how that "2nd largest economy" stat was compiled, as it was provided without a link. Many of the higher paid NYC employees live in CT or Jersey, and while a sound accounting process would credit NY with that income, it's hard to know what the uncited study used...
Every state has plenty of poor people -- in Texas many live in the stereotypical trailer parks, and perhaps that's what you're referencing, but NY has plenty of poor folks, with many of them stacked on top of each other in the city. Texas may have a bit of a distribution of wealth issue, though I doubt it. Rather, my folks (in Dallas) live in a house valued between $2M and $3M (based on recent sales of similar houses in the area) in a neighborhood of ~10k houses, most of similar value with some worth far more. There are a dozen or so similar neighborhoods, some with much more valuable houses and fewer people, others with many more houses of slightly lesser value... for a metro area of 5.7 million, that's a pretty good upper middle class... The schools in these neighborhoods are top notch as well, and for parents unsatisfied with the public offerings there are a number of fine private schools, and they always have the option of sending their kids to a boarding school in the northeast for H.S.
As for whoever said Houston was bigger than MA, I don't know what they were smoking. According to wikipedia Houston is smaller than Boston, much less MA... I wouldn't be surprised if more people in Houston were gainfully employed, though... I swear Boston is full of freeloaders (I live in the area right now)... Between people getting their check from the govt and drawing their income in some way from organized crime or civil corruption, I'd guess a third of MA residents drawing income draw at least some of it in this manner... Though I guess I'm including forms of civil graft, such as Cambridge's sweeping/towing racket that would show up as "legitimate" jobs...
While as little as a few dozen would contain the requisite genetic diversity to repopulate the earth, you aren't thinking right... It's relatively expensive to sustain life on earth because of the high gravity. The necessary maintenance diet is in the thousands of calories, but on the Moon, for example, it would be far smaller. At the same time, the moon isn't hampered by an atmosphere to block the sun's energy allowing for higher power conversion rates per unit area, and the abundance of metal oxides combined with the abundance of vacuum should allow a population on the moon to generate plenty of steel, titanium, and oxygen once their industrial base reached adequate size. If enough carbon and nitrogen is imported, along with "starter soil," a self-sustaining agricultural base could be created to feed the inhabitants and maintain the atmosphere.
A mature settlement on the Moon would have a self-sustaining population of 5 billion, not 5 thousand. It would be the ideal base of operations for expansion into the rest of the solar system and beyond, as well as the ideal place to do space propulsion research. Living below the surface of Mercury, in the clouds on Venus, on Mars and its moons, as well as on/in the more significant asteroids, while at the same time exploiting the unexploited areas of the Earth, we could eventually support 100 billion people in the solar system.
Manned spaceflight as it has been is meaningless, because it has been undertaken under the guise of meaningful scientific research done in space. This research is largely pointless because even if new phenomena are discovered, they have no practical application because we have no industrial base in space. The ultimate goal of manned spaceflight is the propagation of our species, and NASA should focus on making a self-sustaining Moon base over satisfying intellectual curiosity with extravagant probe missions. Why? Because with a self-sustaining Moon base we could send 1000 probes for every 1 we can send from earth. More importantly, though, with a mature presence in space we'd have several times as many minds working on the universe's problems... Rather, if the ultimate goal of all human endeavor is scientific discovery, then increasing the number of humans will greatly increase the amount of science undertaken.
As for settling the bottom of the oceans (raised elsewhere), that's more of a stupid counter argument than a justifiable alternative. The bottom of the oceans are energy poor, even compared to mars, and the structures would be much harder to build because they must keep out enormous pressures while withstanding the stresses of an active plate tectonics system. Without energy to grow food and/or drive chemical/industrial processes, the bottom of the ocean is more of a campsite/vacation destination than a viable alternative to permanent settlement of space. The bottom of the ocean would provide us with more real estate to build apartment buildings and whatnot, but we have a very long way to go in terms of increasing the carrying capacity of the earth and reducing sprawl before such a development would be necessary.
You failed to grasp the argument in the article. His argument is not that people will stop playing games, but that people will stop shelling out huge amounts of money to play new games. The fact that someone was entertaining themselves by playing burgertime supports his point that the entertainment people gain by playing games is not directly related to the technology being used to display the game. He is making the argument that the video game (or, rather, console game) industry will collapse because subsequent console generations will offer only slight, barely perceptible improvements in graphics rather than breakthroughs allowing radically different game types.
He certainly did not say that people will stop playing games -- he's saying people will stop buying new consoles because the coming generation of consoles has so little to offer over the current generation. Sure, a few mindless boobs will continue to shell out $500/year to play the latest, greatest console games, but that number will shrink rapidly as the core market that has sustained the industry for 20 years ages and the budget-limited portion of the market catches in. As a result, their margins will thin and as a result their research budget will thin, leading to an even smaller advance for the next generation console, creating a downward spiral of ROI.
If you don't believe that this is at the very least a worry of the 3 current contestants in the battle for the living room, then explain why all three outsourced both their core processor and their graphics processor to the same two companies (IBM and ATI). Once IBM and ATI got the first console contracts, they could offer better deals to the remaining two. If either of the remaining two thought there was a lot of growth left, they would have invested heavily in R&D to come out ahead with a superior product to win market share. They both went with the cheaper alternative, though, which would lead a logical person to the conclusion that the console manufacturers, or at least the second two, already see their industry as one of diminishing returns rather than growth.