Except maps aren't usually based on user feedback,
This would be like if one mapmaker deliberately included a fictional town, THEN had its employees send information to the competitor about this nonexistent town. Would you consider it "copying" if, based on this information, the competitor added the town to its own map?
But their algorithm makes no reference whatsoever to the location of the result on Google's list, it ONLY references whether the user found it relevant enough to click on. It could be the first result or the fiftieth, Microsoft neither knows nor cares.
I also agree with your "demonstrably." It's more like, we're standing on a hilltop. We think we can see - barely - higher hilltops through the mist. But we can't be sure it's not just a cloud.
- The heat shield tiles were originally developed for ICBM warheads (using composites technology developed in other fields) - Velcro was a commerical invention having nothing to do with the space program - Hydrogen fuel cells were invented in 1838. The ones used by NASA were invented by a commercial company, G.E., in 1959.
So it really is more of a case that increasing technological development enabled the space program, not the other way around.
Strange, then, that he didn't present these in his argument, don't you think? I just disagree that this is about "fortitude." It is about being sensible. The way to develop emerging technologies is *incrementally,* by exploring possibilities and slowly increasing the funding of the ones that show promise, as long as they continue to show promise. We have in fact been doing this, but none of the competing technologies have *in reality* shown much promise yet. Many of them are still at early stages of basic feasibility, because ancillary technologies (like materials) have only recently become sufficiently developed.
How so? As Neal himself points out in the article, liquid-fuel rocket technology had already been under development for decades, and the principles and mechanics involved pretty well-understood by the 1960's.
The thing is he's saying that without presenting any reasons for believing it to be true. It's certainly *possible* that money spent on a space elevator would be more productive than money spent on rockets. It's also possible that it could turn out to be *less* productive. His argument only makes sense if he has actual reasons for believing the former more likely than the latter, but he doesn't present any.
His argument is about on the same level as someone arguing that you should dump all your money into lottery tickets. It's a no-brainer - so long as we are assuming that you win, of course.
Suppose you accept his premises that our current state of rocket technology evolved in part due to key improbable events. As a result, we've continued that technology, to "climb to the top of that hill" as he puts it. That doesn't, by itself, automatically mean there must be higher hills to climb. We may have purposefully or accidentally climbed the highest hill we are currently capable of climbing. Perhaps we would have been further along with some other technology if we hadn't climbed this hill, but it might not have been better overall. Right? I mean, it could have turned out like our quest for magnetically confined fusion.
Blind people develop superior hearing to sighted people. I'd still rather have my vision, and I don't think that's entirely due to path dependency.
Same mistake with the combustion engine. Yes, we are getting close to maxing out the technology. But it's not clear that, if we had not developed it in the first place, we would have come up with something more effective in its place. It's not even clear we would have come up with something *as* effective. It's not even clear we even have anything plausible *yet* that would be as effective.
The fundamental mistake in this article seems to be an assumption that the grass is greener in the counterfactual, but he presents no evidence to persuade us that this is actually true.
I think he meant "bugging" in the sense of "annoying," not "wiretapping." His point, I think was that he doesn't really care if the FBI is wiretapping him because they almost certainly will never bother him or waste his time, but advertisers almost certainly will.
The precise recipe for Coca-Cola is implemented millions of times a day, but it still controlled by Coca-Cola - and it ISN'T patented. If, someday, someone discovers the recipe independently, then the idea belongs to that person as well and they can do with it as they please.
You can't properly draw conclusions on what would be "socially optimal" without considering costs AND benefits. I.e., without software patents, would h.264 have been created in the first place? Would WebM have been? What about future replacements? What about other unintended consequences, such as encouraging commercial developments to use trade secrets instead of patent protection? (One of the goals of patents was to *open up* research and development, allowing commercial exploitation without keeping everything safely locked up behind closed doors.)
No, actually, it is the other way around: there is no inherent right to demand payment for your ideas.
Absurd! Of COURSE there is a right to demand payment for your ideas. The alternative is that someone can force you to provide ideas against your will, should you decide to demand payment, i.e., slavery. I think what you meant to say is that there is no inherent right to control how your ideas are used, which is something different.
To illustrate: suppose I have an idea for a new kind of light bulb, but would like to require payment for my idea. According to your statement, I do not have the right and presumably can therefore be compelled to give this idea away against my will, an obvious violation of human rights. On the other hand, if I only do not have the right to control how my idea is used (which is all patents do), I could still choose to keep it a secret, lock it down as much as possible, and guard it carefully.
Diamonds are harder than steel, not stronger. Spider silk is stronger than steel, but not nearly as hard. (And incredibly thin.) This implies that a cable made of spider silk should be able to withstand more strain than a steel cable of the same size. On the other hand, a bridge supported by spider silk trusses will be far less sturdy than one made from steel trusses.
If you accuse him of being Stalin you must apply that to other areas where eminent domain has been implied.
No you don't. Arguing that something is good sometimes is logically different than arguing that it is good all the time. It's the difference between "SOME P ARE Q" and "ALL P ARE Q."
In other words, it's perfectly reasonable to argue that eminent domain is a good thing so long as it's used wisely, but that the suggested use is not wise, and therefore not a good use of eminent domain.
Actually, to reply to myself, I thought about who *else* it would benefit: huge corporations manufacturing hardware and software, who instead of having to pay the license fees themselves, now get to do it for free thanks to the taxes of Joe Sixpack. Trickle-up corporate welfare at its finest. Yes, this is a fantastic plan~
So, instead of all of us paying through license fees, the U.S. taxpayers should pay through taxes? How does this actually benefit anyone other than non-U.S. entities who get to then free-ride? And is it worth potentially killing off future commercial codec development?
Second of all, I'm not convinced that in your example, omitting the "required" identifier, Google's behavior is better. I would be willing to wager that "credit" is mis-typed as "cedit" significantly more often than users are actually looking for information on the MFC CEdit control.
Slashdot Mirror
Except maps aren't usually based on user feedback,
This would be like if one mapmaker deliberately included a fictional town, THEN had its employees send information to the competitor about this nonexistent town. Would you consider it "copying" if, based on this information, the competitor added the town to its own map?
But their algorithm makes no reference whatsoever to the location of the result on Google's list, it ONLY references whether the user found it relevant enough to click on. It could be the first result or the fiftieth, Microsoft neither knows nor cares.
Because they do take us where we need to be, today. If the money for Y comes at the expense of X, then *not having X* is a cost of Y too.
I also agree with your "demonstrably." It's more like, we're standing on a hilltop. We think we can see - barely - higher hilltops through the mist. But we can't be sure it's not just a cloud.
Ironically none of your examples are correct.
- The heat shield tiles were originally developed for ICBM warheads (using composites technology developed in other fields)
- Velcro was a commerical invention having nothing to do with the space program
- Hydrogen fuel cells were invented in 1838. The ones used by NASA were invented by a commercial company, G.E., in 1959.
So it really is more of a case that increasing technological development enabled the space program, not the other way around.
Strange, then, that he didn't present these in his argument, don't you think? I just disagree that this is about "fortitude." It is about being sensible. The way to develop emerging technologies is *incrementally,* by exploring possibilities and slowly increasing the funding of the ones that show promise, as long as they continue to show promise. We have in fact been doing this, but none of the competing technologies have *in reality* shown much promise yet. Many of them are still at early stages of basic feasibility, because ancillary technologies (like materials) have only recently become sufficiently developed.
How so? As Neal himself points out in the article, liquid-fuel rocket technology had already been under development for decades, and the principles and mechanics involved pretty well-understood by the 1960's.
The thing is he's saying that without presenting any reasons for believing it to be true. It's certainly *possible* that money spent on a space elevator would be more productive than money spent on rockets. It's also possible that it could turn out to be *less* productive. His argument only makes sense if he has actual reasons for believing the former more likely than the latter, but he doesn't present any.
His argument is about on the same level as someone arguing that you should dump all your money into lottery tickets. It's a no-brainer - so long as we are assuming that you win, of course.
Suppose you accept his premises that our current state of rocket technology evolved in part due to key improbable events. As a result, we've continued that technology, to "climb to the top of that hill" as he puts it. That doesn't, by itself, automatically mean there must be higher hills to climb. We may have purposefully or accidentally climbed the highest hill we are currently capable of climbing. Perhaps we would have been further along with some other technology if we hadn't climbed this hill, but it might not have been better overall. Right? I mean, it could have turned out like our quest for magnetically confined fusion.
Blind people develop superior hearing to sighted people. I'd still rather have my vision, and I don't think that's entirely due to path dependency.
Same mistake with the combustion engine. Yes, we are getting close to maxing out the technology. But it's not clear that, if we had not developed it in the first place, we would have come up with something more effective in its place. It's not even clear we would have come up with something *as* effective. It's not even clear we even have anything plausible *yet* that would be as effective.
The fundamental mistake in this article seems to be an assumption that the grass is greener in the counterfactual, but he presents no evidence to persuade us that this is actually true.
Also, this is a test comment.
Through the interactions of gravitons and graviolis.
I think he meant "bugging" in the sense of "annoying," not "wiretapping." His point, I think was that he doesn't really care if the FBI is wiretapping him because they almost certainly will never bother him or waste his time, but advertisers almost certainly will.
For Google, it's a different game, they don't currently compete for hardware or software share
They don't? Isn't Android software? Isn't Chrome? What would you call the ChromeOS netbook, if not "hardware?"
It depends on the idea, naturally.
The precise recipe for Coca-Cola is implemented millions of times a day, but it still controlled by Coca-Cola - and it ISN'T patented. If, someday, someone discovers the recipe independently, then the idea belongs to that person as well and they can do with it as they please.
You can't properly draw conclusions on what would be "socially optimal" without considering costs AND benefits. I.e., without software patents, would h.264 have been created in the first place? Would WebM have been? What about future replacements? What about other unintended consequences, such as encouraging commercial developments to use trade secrets instead of patent protection? (One of the goals of patents was to *open up* research and development, allowing commercial exploitation without keeping everything safely locked up behind closed doors.)
No, actually, it is the other way around: there is no inherent right to demand payment for your ideas.
Absurd! Of COURSE there is a right to demand payment for your ideas. The alternative is that someone can force you to provide ideas against your will, should you decide to demand payment, i.e., slavery. I think what you meant to say is that there is no inherent right to control how your ideas are used, which is something different.
To illustrate: suppose I have an idea for a new kind of light bulb, but would like to require payment for my idea. According to your statement, I do not have the right and presumably can therefore be compelled to give this idea away against my will, an obvious violation of human rights. On the other hand, if I only do not have the right to control how my idea is used (which is all patents do), I could still choose to keep it a secret, lock it down as much as possible, and guard it carefully.
Diamonds are harder than steel, not stronger. Spider silk is stronger than steel, but not nearly as hard. (And incredibly thin.) This implies that a cable made of spider silk should be able to withstand more strain than a steel cable of the same size. On the other hand, a bridge supported by spider silk trusses will be far less sturdy than one made from steel trusses.
If you accuse him of being Stalin you must apply that to other areas where eminent domain has been implied.
No you don't. Arguing that something is good sometimes is logically different than arguing that it is good all the time. It's the difference between "SOME P ARE Q" and "ALL P ARE Q."
In other words, it's perfectly reasonable to argue that eminent domain is a good thing so long as it's used wisely, but that the suggested use is not wise, and therefore not a good use of eminent domain.
Actually, to reply to myself, I thought about who *else* it would benefit: huge corporations manufacturing hardware and software, who instead of having to pay the license fees themselves, now get to do it for free thanks to the taxes of Joe Sixpack. Trickle-up corporate welfare at its finest. Yes, this is a fantastic plan~
So, instead of all of us paying through license fees, the U.S. taxpayers should pay through taxes? How does this actually benefit anyone other than non-U.S. entities who get to then free-ride? And is it worth potentially killing off future commercial codec development?
Internet Explorer was free.
What does it give you? A formalized and participatory process for advancement and further development of the specification.
I watched an Uwe Boll film and died on the inside.
EAST St. Louis, Illinois.
First of all, you're doing it wrong.
http://www.letmebingthatforyou.com/?q=%2BCedit
Second of all, I'm not convinced that in your example, omitting the "required" identifier, Google's behavior is better. I would be willing to wager that "credit" is mis-typed as "cedit" significantly more often than users are actually looking for information on the MFC CEdit control.