Finally! Google's in charge, and Moto can finally be made non-evil (does official "happy dance"). I was about to give up hope.
I have a Photon that was lobotomized by Moto's 2.3.5 update last week (which killed our ability to unlock the bootloader through guerrilla means). I listed it on eBay on Sunday after deciding I had no desire to own a crippled phone with a locked bootloader. As a direct result of this good news, I cancelled the auction a few minutes ago, and decided to wait at least another week or two in case Google decides to show the world they're aggressively non-evil by telling Motorola to liberate our bootloaders... now.
Please, Google... let the sweet song of AOSP freedom fill the sterile cubicles at Motorola. Allow us to throw off our chains and shackles, and enjoy Android freedom on a phone that has a microSD card & a real camera button. For the love of [God||Xenu||FSM], I beg you. No, I beseech and implore you. With one stroke of your pen (and some thinly-veiled threats of termination), you can liberate every Motorola phone from the heavy yoke imposed by Motorola within a matter of days, and win the undying love & loyalty of the XDA crowd forever. We love Motorola's hardware. We despise their locked bootloaders. Make Motorola unlock my Photon, and I might even replace it with a Photon Q (with extended battery) in a couple of months.
It's a shame China couldn't have demanded that Google force Motorola unlock their bootloaders worldwide as a condition of approval. My Photon is for sale on eBay right now because their 2.3.5 update *really* locked the bootloader once and for all, and made the phone impossible to root for at least a few days.
I refuse to be like Motorola's battered spouse any longer. I will not graciously thank them for giving me a thin, damp, moldy blanket to help keep warm when they make me sleep naked on the dungeon's cold concrete floor.
Damn you, Motorola, and your kernel's blighted "ondemand" governor. I want "interactive", and refuse to suffer with lockscreen lag for one fscking day more. When I hit the power button or touch the screen, I want the phone at 100% CPU speed... NOW. I'm tired of having to "exercise" the phone by flipping the notification tray open and closed, over and over again, to keep the phone from slowing down and making me feel like I'm try to slog through wet concrete for 30 seconds while it runs at 200MHz. I didn't buy a dualcore 1-GHz phone so it could run more slowly than my ancient Hero that's overclocked and locked to 711MHz.
If I had a Trebuchet, I'd gather the media, then wheel it over to your parking lot and use it to hurl that now-lobotomized piece of locked-down junk through one of your office windows... after Father Marilyn Manson performs the last rites, while a half-dozen drag queen nuns sing spirituals about the chariot in the sky while the phone sails over your parking lot and across the great Rainbow Bridge over the River Styx into the welcoming arms of Jay Miner, Jon Postel, and Dennis Ritchie -- one of whom will have the private key needed to unlock its soul and allow it finally feel the healing kiss of CM9.
With God, Xenu, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster as my witnesses, I will never, *ever* buy another Motorola phone with a locked bootloader.
So... has SpaceX made any kind of arrangements for cheering Floridians who might feel like driving up tonight to watch the launch in person from some meaningful vantage point? I've checked, and SpaceX themselves seem to be completely silent about that particular topic. I know their launch site is beyond the gates and isn't going to be accessible, period... but how about the causeway? Are any of the old shuttle viewing areas (like the northern tip of the public beach directly south) likely to be worth driving up for? (at this point, I have about 4 hours to decide whether to go through with this drive-to-Cocoa mission or forget about it).
For anybody who's seen an earlier Dragon launch in person... was it more impressive than the videos on Youtube made it look? Compared to the shuttle's state-shaking pyrotechnics, the Youtube videos make the Dragon's earlier launches look kind of wimpy and underwhelming, and suggest that watching a launch for more than 3 or 4 miles away would be about as exciting as watching a jet fly silently over the midwestern US at cruising altitude.
I don't know about THIS case, but I know that when they were planning shuttle launches last summer, the daily landing window for a landing in Florida was approximately 10 minutes, and shifted by about 10 minutes per day. I believe there are technically launch windows every 50 or 70 minutes, but they have to commit to one before the countdown begins. In other words, they can't shoot for a 5am launch, miss it due to a rainstorm, and try again an hour later. If the planned launch window passes, they call the whole thing off, empty the tanks, dispose of the fuel and liquid oxygen, and basically plan several days to restore everything to pristine virgin condition. Mainly, because SpaceX can't afford (politically or otherwise) to have anything go wrong. If there's even the slightest doubt in their minds that the launch will be a complete success, it's not going to launch. 5 years from now, if their launch schedule is full and they have more business than they can handle, they might go a step beyond NASA and start experimentally launching unmanned rockets during inclement weather to see how much impact it really, truly has on launch safety.
Anyway, a predawn LAUNCH isn't really a problem, because the rocket will light up the sky for 20 miles. It's predawn LANDINGS that used to suck, because unlike a launch, a shuttle landing before dawn was basically invisible to the naked eye.
> Common good is all good as long as it does not encroach on the good of the individual.
In the US, at least, the legal function of copyright (and patents) is to promote the advancement of science and the useful arts. The USPTO has no constitutional mandate to maximize shareholder value, investor wealth, or the good of any particular individual. EUROPEAN IP law has a long tradition of treating IP as a natural right, but its pollution of American IP law is a fairly recent tragedy.
When you get down to the source legal mandate of IP law that grants it legitimacy, American IP law has more in common with Chinese IP law than it's EVER had with European IP law. People forget that a hundred years ago, Europeans were screaming about wholesale American infringement of pretty much everything, to America's general benefit and prosperity. Today, American companies are the ones screaming for stronger laws while strangling American innovation, and companies in places like China (who've studied American history well, and are doing their best to replicate the steps that made America wealthy and powerful) are the ones benefiting from advancements to the science and useful arts while American companies strangle each other in court.
> Why does no one pose the opposite question: why can't copyright be infinite years?
Because after a certain point in time, either the line between your copyrighted work and popular culture starts to blur as it becomes part of the background noise and cultural fabric... or your work becomes irrelevant and everyone forgets it ever existed. It's not necessarily easy to paint a bright line that illustrates with razor-sharp clarity when something makes the transition, but just to offer an easy example -- by now, just about everyone would agree that "Happy Birthday to You" has become a part of western civilization (if not global human civilization, period). I'd argue that there's a long period of time where it's legitimate for someone to have the right to financially benefit from something in the form of royalties, but absolutely immoral to claim the right to take it away entirely. Likewise, if something simply fades into irrelevance instead of becoming part of the cultural fabric, the only thing achieved by strong eternal copyright laws is the creation of a legal minefield that does nothing besides ensnare the naive and unwary.
I'd personally reform copyright law by making copyright automatic at the time of creation, but with an automatic term of somewhere between 2 and 5 years. To extend it beyond that term, you'd be required to explicitly file, furnish a copy of your work that can be indexed and searched to enable someone who comes across a fragment in the future to make a good-faith effort to locate the owner, and renew it periodically at fees that increase exponentially over time. Say, 25 years for an initial registration of $25, with renewal fees every 10 years thereafter that start at $100 and double each time. After 60 years (initial 5 + first 25 + 2 renewals), I'd guess that probably 80% of what gets registered for copyright would have fallen into public domain.
By prohibiting consolidation of copyrights (so each individual item copyrighted would have to remain as an individual copyrighted item forever, with its own doubling renewal fees), you'd prevent media conglomerates from indiscriminately buying old copyrights for pennies on the dollar & renewing them in perpetuity. After 100 years, even the largest copyright conglomerate would be forced to seriously cull its holdings and determine what was really worth spending $10,000 to renew for another 10 years. Eventually, even the almighty Mouse would be forced to reconsider the individual merit of every comic book and TV show published by them during the 20th Century, and triage its renewals to works that were truly the company's "crown jewels".
> PS how many different tunes on a theme of viagra do we need?
Actually, the FDA *does* generally have a policy of looking upon applications for approval of new "me too" drugs with extreme disfavor. More than a few perfectly good drugs have fallen through the cracks in the US and failed to get approval (or approval was never sought in the US at all) just because the FDA didn't think they made any particular improvement over drugs that were already approved. If there are already 3 drugs approved to treat some condition, and you want to get drug #4 approved, your drug had BETTER be demonstrably superior in some way (less-frequent dosage, more tolerable side effects, and efficacy that's at least as good as what already exists), or the FDA will metaphorically yawn and show you the door.
This is particularly problematic for things like psychiatric drugs, where you might have one specific small group of patients for whom existing approved drugs are intolerable, but you might not even DISCOVER that your drug is a blockbuster miracle among that small group until long after it's approved, has been on the market for years, and the patients themselves and their doctors have discovered it by accident. If your "me too" drug gets blown off by the FDA, those patients will never even get the chance to discover that your drug works better for them.
It's not quite accurate to say that literally EVERYONE reacts differently to drugs (the bulk of patients are, in fact, quite predictable), but it's not much of an exaggeration to say that most drugs work well for most people, but among almost any group of patients, you're going to have a persistent group of 5-20 percent outliers who end up being problematic for reasons that aren't necessarily obvious. Something that's a "me too" drug for 80% of patients could be the one drug that's tolerable and works for an atypical outlier.
Of course, the FDA's reluctance to approve "me too" drugs does nothing to help lower prices for consumers. A patented drug that's forced to compete with a half-dozen equally-patented "me too" drugs will probably end up with de-facto near-generic pricing unless it's literally the "best of breed" that sets the gold standard for patient success.
In my opinion, "the more, the merrier." If somebody comes up with a new non-infringing drug that's objectively no worse than some other, why should the FDA be allowed to give the first company a license to print money for 18 years without real competition? If Company #1 patents a drug, why should it be allowed to just sit on its hands and wait 15 years before patenting obvious chemical cousin #2 as the new, improved "extended-release" version (which, in fact, is the main consequence of the FDA's general refusal to even consider applications for "me too" drugs... it gives the original manufacturer lots of slack to take its time and dole out improved versions one patented variant at a time, instead of having to play all of its cards at once and patent everything up front to avoid having their main competitor beat them to patenting the improved, extended-release variant of their own drug.
One major problem with the way patents work now is that the terms are "one size fits all", and the long lead time (and failure trail) of pharmaceutical development ends up getting patent terms extended into absurdity for things like software. Patent terms SHOULD take into account the relative difficulty & expense of getting something to the point where it's patentable.
Take software patents. Suppose software were patentable, but with specific limits... like:
* USPTO.gov runs a free digital notary service that allows you to fingerprint and timestamp your software repository daily. If somebody is granted a software patent, any otherwise-infringing use that was timestamped prior to its granting and publication is automatically eligible for statutory license without charge. Additional provisions would have to be worked out to deal with cases where somebody demonstrates prior use of the patented technique, but improves upon it AFTER the patent is granted in a way that calls into question whether those improvements were influenced by the patent's publication. Just to keep software vendors honest, in order to qualify for a software patent or automatic license for unpatented prior art, the source used to document the patent (or license) would have to be made public.
* for the first 3 years after publication, the grantee has unfettered rights to the patent, with the specific exception of anyone who can prove (via digitally-notarized source timestamped prior to the patent's publication) prior unpatented use (who'd have automatic rights to use it within the scope of whatever they had as of the patent's publication date).
* for the next 5 years, anybody who wanted to use the patented technique could purchase a compulsory license at statutory rates based entirely upon the sales/licensing cost of their software. The rates might be something like "10% per patent, subject to a maximum of 50% to be shared among all patent holders". In other words, if your app uses one patented technique and sells for $10, you'd send a check for $1 per license sold every 3 months to the US Treasury for distribution to the patent holder. Use 2 patents, and the check is $2 per license sold. Use 5, and the check is $5. Use 6 or more, and the check is STILL $5, except now everyone who believes they have a stake in your royalty payments has to either accept 1/Nth of it by filing a claim form identifying their patent's number as one being infringed, or go to court at their own expense (and without involving you, except perhaps as a paid expert witness to testify in their defense to justify a larger share going to them). Give your app away for free, and the licensing costs would be 10% through 50% of zero.
* After the 5 years, the patent term ends, and the technique is officially public domain.
With a scheme like this, truly innovative & groundbreaking techniques would be protected... but the terms would be short enough to literally FORCE the patent owner to try and monetize it as quickly as he can. Submarine patents would be literally impossible, because anybody who was already doing something similar (and demonstrably documenting it by getting the repo notarized daily) would have automatic free use in perpetuity anyway, and the term would be so short, making money from the patent would literally require that its new owner aggressively market it to potential users, and license it as widely and deeply as possible. If somebody like Apple decided to take its ball and go home (refusing to license it to anyone), HTC & Samsung would have compulsory licensing rights by the time most consumers even realized the technique existed. And source-publication rquirements to qualify for patent protection (or compulsory licensing) would ensure that the relevant source was readily available to guerrilla Android developers working on AOSP and Cyanogen.
Likewise, with pharmaceuticals, I'd treat "use" patents separately from "manufacturing technique" patents. Say, 5 years of unfettered licensing rights for "use" patents, foll
The point is, people don't want to spend their year doing perpetual floor maintenance -- especially not maintenance that leaves them unable to walk on the floor for days at a time. Laminate & engineered hardwood can be replaced in an afternoon, then ignored by everything besides your Roomba for the next 5-10 years. If you buy premium commercial-grade laminate or engineered hardwood, you won't have to BOTHER with a runner to protect high-traffic areas, because the transparent aluminum coating is extra-thick.
Properly-maintained hardwood looks beautiful. The problem is, keeping it that way is too much work and inconvenience. I have three friends with classic art deco condos in South Beach who did the whole, "omigod, how could they cover up this beautiful hardwood" thing, spent weeks restoring it, enjoyed it for about a month, then went through weeks of despair after their dogs/cats/kids/visitors/they_themselves progressively destroyed all their hard work and scratched/scuffed it up from daily life. They all eventually ended up covering it with laminate or engineered hardwood, and rationalized it as "protecting the original floor for future generations, when better coatings that dry faster" exist. And keep in mind... the coatings we have today dry in a FRACTION of the time the varnishes they had a hundred years ago did. Imagine a floor that literally couldn't be walked on for weeks, in a house with kids, circa 1920, and it's no wonder that people covered them up with linoleum, sheet vinyl, and carpet at the first opportunity.
> Your weight is a result of calories in vs. calories out.
Actually, it's not. There are plenty of studies demonstrating that chronic sleep-deprivation makes you MUCH more likely to gain weight from a given number of calories. Your body goes into 'crisis' mode, and becomes more aggressive and efficient about converting calories into fat. The fact that you're likely to end up ravenously hungry and fatigued multiples the effect, but even if you kept exercise and calorie count constant, you'd be more likely to gain weight after extended chronic sleep deprivation.
The same phenomenon has been observed with some psychiatric drugs. In particular, one class of drugs used for treating schizophrenia. I don't remember the exact details, but I remember reading that there were a couple of them that *observably* slowed down the patient's metabolism for reasons that aren't entirely understood (and researchers are certainly trying, because if they can figure out what makes them slow somebody's metabolism down, they might be able to come up with a blockbuster drug that speeds it up and enables effortless weight loss. Assuming, of course, the drug doesn't end up having drug-induced mania or psychosis as a side effect).
> There's also the concern of the post-ROHS lead-free solder in newer gear
Ah, yes... the environmental wisdom of prematurely sending 10 years' worth of electronic gear to a landfill somewhere by mandating that every solder connection be what used to be called a "cold joint". Mitigated only by the knowledge that the Chinese electrolytic capacitors with substandard electrolyte probably burst a year before that point, anyway.
In a state like Florida, where just about all grass is basically some variety of cultivated crabgrass (northern-type grass is almost impossible to grow year-round because some part of the year is inevitably too hot, wet, or both), you'd be hating life completely if you had to cut any meaningful lawn with a push-type reel motor. Or even a rotary-blade mower without power-assisted wheels.
Power motors with reel blades exist, but without major protection, they're a HUGE safety hazard. And they break a lot, because there's more blade for things like stray bark chunks from mulch to get jammed in. A rotary blade has fewer places where an object can wedge into place. A manual reel-blade mower might be perfect for cutting the grass of a British (or American) townhouse with a small yard, but commercial landscaping companies that depend upon speed to give hundreds of lawns their weekly trims could never depend upon them. They're too much labor, and require too much maintenance.
As for electric cars being cheaper to operate & maintain, that's true up to the point where you have to replace the battery. Then the economics go out the window. That's why at least one new hybrid (Leaf?) was designed so that if the battery poops out when the car is old and within months of getting junked anyway, you can just flip a switch and tell it to forget the electric subsystem even exists instead of having to cough up more money than you could actually sell the car for (WITH a new battery). The economics of electric cars also depend upon governments not finding ways to tax electricity used for vehicle power the way gasoline is taxed. And if you need more than a hundred miles of range, you have two choices: wait a long time to recharge, or run from a gas generator whose efficiency is less than half of what you'd get if the engine were driving the wheels directly instead of generating electricity.
Real stone is a terrible flooring material. It stains, it cracks, and it requires expensive skilled craftsmen to install (vs some homeless guy the contractor pulled off the street and pays $7/hour to throw down). Ditto, for genuine hardwood. You see people on HGTV who proudly show off the beautiful vintage hardwood floor they spent a month restoring. You don't see them covering it up a year later with laminate in disgust because their dogs destroyed it with their nails, and their chairs & shoes scraped it up within days. It's just too much ongoing work to keep a real hardwood floor looking good.
Carpet didn't become popular until the invention of vapor barriers and vacuum cleaners. Even in ancient times, wealthy people had rugs in places like their bedroom. The invention of vacuum cleaners and mass production is what enabled poor people to have it, too. In more recent times, the fusion of inkjet printing with porcelain tile has enabled the production of floorcovering that's ideal -- the appearance of natural stone (or wood), with the indestructible nature of porcelain. The only thing they haven't *quite* figured out yet is how to make tile whose CUT edges can maintain the chiseled look of the best porcelain tile. In a middle-class bathroom, that's what inevitably gives away the fact that it's not real travertine (unless the builder went the extra step and used crown molding and wood edging to cover and hide the cut edges of the tile).
Timber frame and mud brick homes aren't coming back in style... homes with fake timbers and veneer brick glued to the outside that LOOK like timber frame & mud brick homes are coming back in style (at least, in the UK). The same phenomenon is visible in the US, where houses have brick street-facing facades, but anything you can't see from the street is covered with cheap vinyl siding or blow-on knockdown-textured fake stucco. Nobody is going to build a genuine brick structure today, because it would be cost-prohibitive. In scenarios where masonry construction is desired or required, they'll use concrete blocks & affix veneer brick to the outside. Classic all-brick construction re
> Of course when the federal reserve corporation is printing money at 0% interest hyperinflation will eventually surface somewhere at some point.
Unless a large portion of America ends up as smoldering nuclear craters, classic hyperinflation is structurally impossible in America. Weimar Germany had staggering war reparations that had to be repaid in foreign currency. Zimbabwe had no economy to speak of courtesy of its government, and currency that was essentially worthless for purchasing imported goods. Israel was basically at war with all of its neighbors, and one or two nuclear bombs could have wiped it off the map & made its currency & resources worthless forever. Argentina had staggering foreign debt that had to be repaid in US dollars. Brazil's hyperinflation was fueled by consumer expectations of ongoing inflation, and all businesses there could do was go along with it for the ride.
Unlike Weimar Germany and Argentina, America's debt is Dollar-denominated. Political sabotage (like what almost happened last summer) is LITERALLY the only way America could default on its outstanding debt. Of course, you could argue that someday, America might have to borrow Euros or Yuan... but that's unlikely to happen, because every other country on earth with resources comparable to the US spends money the same way the US does. And those countries are going to keep doing it, because if they decided to be austere and quit spending, their economies would implode & they'd be engulfed in domestic civil war long before their spendthrift neighbors even noticed.
Brazilian-style inflation is impossible in the US at this point, too... partly, thanks to Amazon. If prices began to surge in retail stores, there's always going to be negative price pressure from online vendors to pull back on it. Twenty years ago, people in Argentina had to go to the bank daily to withdraw cash and buy things, and deposit extra cash to use the interest as a hedge against inflation. There were physical limits to the number of people whom a bank could serve in one day, and physical limits to the amount of cash that could be shoveled around, so Argentines were in a perpetual state of panic that they'd either be unable to get cash the literal day they needed it (line too long, employees go home at 4pm) or be stuck holding onto cash that lost value daily & had to be spent immediately on *anything* with durable value. Thanks to online banking, that constraint is gone.
Ditto, for time spent shopping. 20 years ago, consumers had to run from store to store to find available goods to buy. Comparison shopping was hard, because it took time to go from store to store, and prices could conceivably rise at store #1 before you saw the prices at stores #2 and #3 and decided to buy it from store #1 after all. With online vendors, that constraint is gone, too.
Fuel prices might go up, but companies like FedEx and UPS have such staggering fixed costs due to their jet and truck fleets, at a certain point they'd be forced to operate at a small loss just to keep enough cash flowing to make the debt payments on their jets and truck fleets. As a result, regional shortages are less of a problem as well. If the product you want to buy exists anywhere in America, you can probably find it through the internet within an hour and buy it anyway. I've already witnessed this firsthand. In the past, every time a hurricane hit, the prices of things like generators would go through the roof for weeks. Stores avoided getting cited for "gouging" by keeping generator prices jacked up all year, and perpetually running them on sale until a hurricane hit (at which point they went back to their allegedly-normal prices). Amazon Prime blew *that* business model away, too. I know people who LITERALLY ordered generators from Amazon (with overnight prime shipping) as Irene was making landfall by their house (before the cell towers went offline), and had them delivered the next evening. It *really* had an impact on local generator prices. They were still fly
> College tuition and fee rates have gone up much faster than the rate of inflation. Why do you think that is?
Let's start with the Boomers. Boomers had record college attendance compared to earlier generations, but (compared to later generations) were practically *warehoused* in college, with 100 students being considered a SMALL class. Colleges built new buildings to accommodate them, and those buildings didn't go away when the last of the boomers graduated, and the X'ers began to trickle in.
I literally mean, "trickle in". By any account, GenX was a baby bust generation that was a FRACTION of the boomers' size. And when we (I'm an X'er) got to college, they took advantage of the opportunity to give us breathing room, smaller classes, and allowed us to occupy the same space once occupied by 2-4 times as many students. Life was good. Colleges were even happier when lots of us stuck around for 5+ years, because they had plenty of surplus capacity to sell.
Then, starting in the late 90s, the GenY tsunami rolled ashore as the Boomers' kids reached college age... and expected the same college experience that their X'er cousins had a few years earlier. Almost overnight, the number of students doubled (or more), and every university in America (especially in places like Florida, where the population of the state ITSELF had increased by 300% since 1970) had to embark on a massive building campaign to maintain the same level of amenities the X'ers enjoyed for a much, much larger student population. Those new buildings weren't cheap, and most of them had to be built almost *overnight*.
Of course, the great wheel of life keeps turning. The tail end of GenY is starting school now, and the number of students is going to start drying up in another 5-10 years when the next (much, much smaller) generation of kids will be welcomed with eager, open arms (just like their GenX parents were). Schools will get about 10-15 years of breathing room to get ready for the NEXT gigantic surge of kids to arrive (when GenY's kids start college).
Anyway, that's the long and short of it. Tuition doubled for GenY because GenX raised expectations to levels that were economically-unsustainable with Boomer/GenY student bodies without doubling tuition. I don't think tuition is necessarily going to go down, but I think the massive wave of tuition-inflation has peaked, and tuitions are likely to be pretty stable again for the next 15 years or so.
Yes... and no. ASCAP (and Harry Fox) are efficient clearinghouses for businesses that use music, but they're also kind of like a protection racket if you're an independent musician who likes to perform in public for free. Still, they're probably a net improvement over the status quo compared to the legal minefield that exists today.
Of course, in an ideal world, the patent system would work as constitutionally intended, and uspto.gov would be like a catalog and clearinghouse for useful things to license & make your products better, instead of a trap where inventors are warned to never, EVER look lest it be introduced in court as evidence against them someday.
It sounds like a great idea, but here's the problem: if there were one or more bona-fide legal issues that required a jury trial to decide, and losers had to pay the defendant's legal fees if they lost, the doctor's lawyers would move for summary judgment to dismiss without prejudice for lack of demonstrating the means to pay the doctor's legal fees if you were to lose. ("Without prejudice" means you could come back and file a new lawsuit someday if you manage to scrape up the money to post a bond sufficient to cover the doctor's potential legal expenses before the statute of limitations runs out).
If you were lucky, you might be able to obtain the services of someone whose newly-invented role fell somewhere between bail bondsman and investor, who'd agree to underwrite your liability for the doctor's legal expenses in return for $10,000 up front and 70% of anything you were awarded.
Patent-wise, it's even worse. Let's suppose you're sued for infringement by EvilMegacorp. The first thing they do is seek an injunction to make you stop allegedly infringing. The next thing they do is move for summary judgment to make the injunction permanent until you can demonstrate that you have the means to pay their legal fees if they win. Or, let's suppose you're an inventor who patents something, and EvilMegacorp blatantly infringes upon it. You file a lawsuit against them, and they pull the same stunt -- they certify to the judge that they've put $20 million in escrow to cover your legal fees if you win, and move for summary judgment to dismiss unless you can do the same.
Put another way, lobbying for a change to make the loser pay is a dangerous strategy, because it ultimately gives large corporations with deep pockets yet another weapon to use against everyone else.
A far better strategy would be to reform the way licensing itself works and come up with a fair framework for low-ceremony compulsory licensing at statutory rates that are high enough to encourage both the patent's owner and potential licensor to negotiate directly, but are ALSO aggregate among the holders of all patents. In other words, if you invent something and someone says you're infringing their patent, you could pay something like 70% of your gross revenue into escrow, then walk away and let everyone who thinks they have a patent stake in it fight over the funds among themselves at their own expense without involving YOU... and any funds that are unclaimed after 18 years would automatically revert to you. If your product allegedly makes use of 490 patents, the owners of those 490 patents can duke it out against each other to claim their share.
With a little luck, somebody will eventually come up with a way to interface one of Sony's old control sticks to an Android phone & configure it for both Android & App control. They rocked, because once you learned how it worked, you could literally control almost everything with one hand by feel alone.
That's the #1 Ultimate Universal Suck of touchscreens - you have to actively look at them and focus most of your attention on using them. There's a lot to be said for controls that you can grab & manipulate 'blind':-)
From what I've been told, there are two variants of Mexican "Diet Coke" -- the original formula from the 80s/90s that's 50% sugar and 50% aspartame, and the newer formula that's 100% aspartame, but has 2-3 times as much as the American formula and was introduced once the aspartame patent expired in Mexico.
Apparently, "New Coke" actually started out as 1980s Diet Coke, then somebody at Coca-Cola's labs replaced the NutraSweet with HFCS, then added even more, and realized it tasted really good & pitched it to management as a new product to replace the original Coke. Or something to that effect. Either way, if you add sugar (or more aspartame) to regular Diet Coke, you can re-create the taste of 1980s New Coke on your own. Ever since I discovered that, restaurant Diet Coke has tasted a lot better (with the addition of 2 or 3 packs of aspartame, and lots of weird looks from other diners & the waiter/waitress). Personally, I wish Coke would have stepped up to the plate and introduced their OWN high-aspartame "new" Diet Coke, too. Unfortunately, they decided to go with Coke Zero, which I find to be completely disgusting and *worse* than normal (100% Nutrasweet) Diet Coke (but better than the blended aspartame+saccharin, and WAY better than the 100% saccharin fountain variants found at most restaurants (only BK and McDonalds use the 100% aspartame formula Diet Coke; most restaurants use the blended formula, and most gas stations & bars use the 100% saccharin formula). To me, Coke Zero tastes like I remember Tab tasting (yuck!).
I remember being told by a teacher (late 80s) who used to work for Pepsi that they'd made Diet Pepsi in their labs that was almost double-blind indistinguishable from regular Pepsi... the problem was, it cost a lot more to make (NutraSweet was still under patent), and they would have either had to sell 1-liter bottles for the price of 2-liter bottles, or charge more for 2-liter bottles of Diet Pepsi than they did for regular Pepsi. Moreover, the "indistinguishable" formula had ~12 calories per can, so they would have had Coke running commercials showing people drinking Diet Pepsi and getting fat. The drink that eventually became the original-formula Pepsi One (in the US, circa 1999 or 2000) was basically Diet Pepsi with double the aspartame. Then, they decided to unify the American and European formulas (the European formula had Ginseng) and jacked up the caffeine to energy-drink levels, rebranding it under the European name (Pepsi Max).
There are still some bottlers who sell Pepsi One (at least, in Florida, in cans, at Publix), but they changed the formula again (it's now a blend of aspartame and sucralose), and it doesn't taste nearly as good as it used to. Apparently, sucralose is still expensive, so the new Pepsi One falls somewhere between original Diet Pepsi and original Pepsi One taste-wise... better than regular Diet Pepsi, and slightly less likely to give you heart palpitations & flushed skin than Pepsi Max, but not as good as the original Pepsi One used to be.
Don't forget the PowerPC version of NT... or more precisely, Microsoft's decision to quietly pull it right at the moment when 90% of the world's Mac owners would have happily jumped ship, installed it over MacOS, and never looked back.
> The telco's on the other hand, have always had Microsoft by the gentlemans parts, and call the shots.
Not really. It's fun and fashionable to bash Microsoft, but let's not forget that ~7 years ago, while Palm was merrily selling phones with Verizon-mandated lack of bluetooth (among other things), Microsoft winked and hid the key to Verizon's handcuffs in the registry where anyone smart enough to use regedit could unlock all the naughty features Big Red didn't want people to play with.
Microsoft knew fully well that Verizon would find out about it, but they did it anyway. No, they didn't proclaim that they were going to withhold their phones from Verizon, because they knew that in America, such an announcement would have just screwed the 40% or so of consumers who are stuck with them because it's the only carrier who worked above the 60th floor of their building, or had 3G service out in the middle of BFE, and wouldn't have made the slightest difference to Verizon's practices. They just quietly gave Vzw the finger, made the phone trivially-unlockable, and let them ship.
The biggest problem with Windows Phone *today* is the fact that you can technically buy your freedom, but writing software that only runs on liberated Windows Phones is basically masturbation, because most people won't be able to run it. It's like giving somebody a Lamborghini with a gallon of gas and a small oval track surrounded by a concrete wall. The worst part is, Microsoft is locking down Windows Phone without even having any clear rationale of its own for doing it, besides "Well, Apple does it, so I guess we should probably do it, too. After all, Gartner Group said it makes users more productive."
The phone's network stack was probably written by the same fine folks responsible for several million angry, frustrated, and miserable users with laptops and new installations of Vista who found themselves unable to connect to most wi-fi access points courtesy of the "feature" that ultimately led to KB928233 ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233/en-us ) -- usually, when they were someplace where they couldn't easily get online to look up the solution.
> No kidding... If Cocacola can keep its soda formula a secret, why can't/wouldn't a pharm company?
Actually, the formula for Coca-Cola ceased to be a true secret a long time ago, and you can find it online pretty easily with some help from Google. What protects Coca-Cola *today* is trademark law. You can make a beverage that tastes EXACTLY like Coca-Cola, with the exact same recipe down to the nanogram and picoliter of raw ingredients, and sell it with complete legality... but if Coca-Cola, Inc. can find even the slightest shred of evidence that your company (or its representatives) have, in any way, shape, or form, implied that it actually tastes like "Coca-Cola", they can sue you into oblivion.
The real reason why nobody (in the US, at least) makes a beverage that tastes EXACTLY like Coca-Cola is simple: classic Coca-Cola doesn't really taste very good compared to just about any other "cola" drink. If your goal is to get consumers to buy your drink & you can't associate it with Coca-Cola's branding in any way, shape, or form (so you have to sell it based ENTIRELY upon consumer taste preferences), you'd sell more by copying the formula for Pepsi. In blind taste tests, Pepsi wins over coke 999 times out of a thousand. In supermarkets where people look at the brand on the label, Coke wins most of the time out of consumer habit. Coke's value IS their brand.
Go ahead, prove it to yourself. Buy a 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, then buy a bunch of bottles/cans of premium "cola" drinks (especially those made with cane sugar). Throw in a bottle of Pepsi while you're at it. Then do a blind taste test, and see which one you think tastes the best. I can almost *guarantee* that the winner WON'T be "Coca-Cola".
The sad thing is, "New Coke" really *did* taste better than classic Coke. Where Coca-Cola screwed up was underestimating the value of their own brand and history by eliminating the original one. Had they rolled out "new Coke", and announced they'd be selling "classic Coca-Cola" in perpetuity, classic Coke would today be a niche beverage you'd have to go to a liquor store to buy. Or, at best, a large grocery store might have a few six-packs and one-liter bottles of "Classic Coke" available, sitting dusty & unsold amidst an ocean of "Coke".
> When the insurance mandate in Obamacare is ruled unconstitutional, that section of Obamacare (at least) will be invalidated.
Until Congress passes a law making receipt of federal highway funds contingent upon the state's legislature passing a law that requires substantially the same thing. Or until ONLY the "must purchase" provision gets struck down, and premiums get increased for everyone because there are so many people waiting until they come down with an expensive medical problem before purchasing insurance.
And in the real world, you put in the prohibition against patent-infringing uses, and release it anyway. Regardless of how blatantly it might violate the GPL2, remember -- the GPL2 isn't self-executing. Somebody with standing to sue (ie, a contributor who holds part of the copyright along with others) would have to sue you, and demonstrate in court that your infringement caused real damages that can be quantified and made whole by payment of some specific amount of money to you. No, before you ask, your likelihood of getting an injunction on the grounds that "violating the principle of the GPL2" constitutes irreparable harm that can not be remedied would be somewhere between "slim" and "none". The judge would tell you to go home, and come back when you can cite specific losses you've suffered personally and assign a dollar value to them.
Put another way, in America, you can't sue somebody because they violated your moral principles and offended you. Or at least, you aren't going to be able to use the court system to make them change their wicked ways. If you're lucky & personally have standing to sue, and can show that the anger you feel from those wanton violations gave you autistic meltdowns that runined 117 days of your productivity, you might be able to convince a judge to grant you a hundred thousand or so in damages to compensate you for your medical bills and lost wages, but that's pretty much it. Courts don't address abstract harms, or right moral wrongs. They shuffle around cash when somebody harms someone, and call it a day.
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Finally! Google's in charge, and Moto can finally be made non-evil (does official "happy dance"). I was about to give up hope.
I have a Photon that was lobotomized by Moto's 2.3.5 update last week (which killed our ability to unlock the bootloader through guerrilla means). I listed it on eBay on Sunday after deciding I had no desire to own a crippled phone with a locked bootloader. As a direct result of this good news, I cancelled the auction a few minutes ago, and decided to wait at least another week or two in case Google decides to show the world they're aggressively non-evil by telling Motorola to liberate our bootloaders... now.
Please, Google... let the sweet song of AOSP freedom fill the sterile cubicles at Motorola. Allow us to throw off our chains and shackles, and enjoy Android freedom on a phone that has a microSD card & a real camera button. For the love of [God||Xenu||FSM], I beg you. No, I beseech and implore you. With one stroke of your pen (and some thinly-veiled threats of termination), you can liberate every Motorola phone from the heavy yoke imposed by Motorola within a matter of days, and win the undying love & loyalty of the XDA crowd forever. We love Motorola's hardware. We despise their locked bootloaders. Make Motorola unlock my Photon, and I might even replace it with a Photon Q (with extended battery) in a couple of months.
It's a shame China couldn't have demanded that Google force Motorola unlock their bootloaders worldwide as a condition of approval. My Photon is for sale on eBay right now because their 2.3.5 update *really* locked the bootloader once and for all, and made the phone impossible to root for at least a few days.
I refuse to be like Motorola's battered spouse any longer. I will not graciously thank them for giving me a thin, damp, moldy blanket to help keep warm when they make me sleep naked on the dungeon's cold concrete floor.
Damn you, Motorola, and your kernel's blighted "ondemand" governor. I want "interactive", and refuse to suffer with lockscreen lag for one fscking day more. When I hit the power button or touch the screen, I want the phone at 100% CPU speed... NOW. I'm tired of having to "exercise" the phone by flipping the notification tray open and closed, over and over again, to keep the phone from slowing down and making me feel like I'm try to slog through wet concrete for 30 seconds while it runs at 200MHz. I didn't buy a dualcore 1-GHz phone so it could run more slowly than my ancient Hero that's overclocked and locked to 711MHz.
If I had a Trebuchet, I'd gather the media, then wheel it over to your parking lot and use it to hurl that now-lobotomized piece of locked-down junk through one of your office windows... after Father Marilyn Manson performs the last rites, while a half-dozen drag queen nuns sing spirituals about the chariot in the sky while the phone sails over your parking lot and across the great Rainbow Bridge over the River Styx into the welcoming arms of Jay Miner, Jon Postel, and Dennis Ritchie -- one of whom will have the private key needed to unlock its soul and allow it finally feel the healing kiss of CM9.
With God, Xenu, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster as my witnesses, I will never, *ever* buy another Motorola phone with a locked bootloader.
So... has SpaceX made any kind of arrangements for cheering Floridians who might feel like driving up tonight to watch the launch in person from some meaningful vantage point? I've checked, and SpaceX themselves seem to be completely silent about that particular topic. I know their launch site is beyond the gates and isn't going to be accessible, period... but how about the causeway? Are any of the old shuttle viewing areas (like the northern tip of the public beach directly south) likely to be worth driving up for? (at this point, I have about 4 hours to decide whether to go through with this drive-to-Cocoa mission or forget about it).
For anybody who's seen an earlier Dragon launch in person... was it more impressive than the videos on Youtube made it look? Compared to the shuttle's state-shaking pyrotechnics, the Youtube videos make the Dragon's earlier launches look kind of wimpy and underwhelming, and suggest that watching a launch for more than 3 or 4 miles away would be about as exciting as watching a jet fly silently over the midwestern US at cruising altitude.
I don't know about THIS case, but I know that when they were planning shuttle launches last summer, the daily landing window for a landing in Florida was approximately 10 minutes, and shifted by about 10 minutes per day. I believe there are technically launch windows every 50 or 70 minutes, but they have to commit to one before the countdown begins. In other words, they can't shoot for a 5am launch, miss it due to a rainstorm, and try again an hour later. If the planned launch window passes, they call the whole thing off, empty the tanks, dispose of the fuel and liquid oxygen, and basically plan several days to restore everything to pristine virgin condition. Mainly, because SpaceX can't afford (politically or otherwise) to have anything go wrong. If there's even the slightest doubt in their minds that the launch will be a complete success, it's not going to launch. 5 years from now, if their launch schedule is full and they have more business than they can handle, they might go a step beyond NASA and start experimentally launching unmanned rockets during inclement weather to see how much impact it really, truly has on launch safety.
Anyway, a predawn LAUNCH isn't really a problem, because the rocket will light up the sky for 20 miles. It's predawn LANDINGS that used to suck, because unlike a launch, a shuttle landing before dawn was basically invisible to the naked eye.
> Common good is all good as long as it does not encroach on the good of the individual.
In the US, at least, the legal function of copyright (and patents) is to promote the advancement of science and the useful arts. The USPTO has no constitutional mandate to maximize shareholder value, investor wealth, or the good of any particular individual. EUROPEAN IP law has a long tradition of treating IP as a natural right, but its pollution of American IP law is a fairly recent tragedy.
When you get down to the source legal mandate of IP law that grants it legitimacy, American IP law has more in common with Chinese IP law than it's EVER had with European IP law. People forget that a hundred years ago, Europeans were screaming about wholesale American infringement of pretty much everything, to America's general benefit and prosperity. Today, American companies are the ones screaming for stronger laws while strangling American innovation, and companies in places like China (who've studied American history well, and are doing their best to replicate the steps that made America wealthy and powerful) are the ones benefiting from advancements to the science and useful arts while American companies strangle each other in court.
> Why does no one pose the opposite question: why can't copyright be infinite years?
Because after a certain point in time, either the line between your copyrighted work and popular culture starts to blur as it becomes part of the background noise and cultural fabric... or your work becomes irrelevant and everyone forgets it ever existed. It's not necessarily easy to paint a bright line that illustrates with razor-sharp clarity when something makes the transition, but just to offer an easy example -- by now, just about everyone would agree that "Happy Birthday to You" has become a part of western civilization (if not global human civilization, period). I'd argue that there's a long period of time where it's legitimate for someone to have the right to financially benefit from something in the form of royalties, but absolutely immoral to claim the right to take it away entirely. Likewise, if something simply fades into irrelevance instead of becoming part of the cultural fabric, the only thing achieved by strong eternal copyright laws is the creation of a legal minefield that does nothing besides ensnare the naive and unwary.
I'd personally reform copyright law by making copyright automatic at the time of creation, but with an automatic term of somewhere between 2 and 5 years. To extend it beyond that term, you'd be required to explicitly file, furnish a copy of your work that can be indexed and searched to enable someone who comes across a fragment in the future to make a good-faith effort to locate the owner, and renew it periodically at fees that increase exponentially over time. Say, 25 years for an initial registration of $25, with renewal fees every 10 years thereafter that start at $100 and double each time. After 60 years (initial 5 + first 25 + 2 renewals), I'd guess that probably 80% of what gets registered for copyright would have fallen into public domain.
By prohibiting consolidation of copyrights (so each individual item copyrighted would have to remain as an individual copyrighted item forever, with its own doubling renewal fees), you'd prevent media conglomerates from indiscriminately buying old copyrights for pennies on the dollar & renewing them in perpetuity. After 100 years, even the largest copyright conglomerate would be forced to seriously cull its holdings and determine what was really worth spending $10,000 to renew for another 10 years. Eventually, even the almighty Mouse would be forced to reconsider the individual merit of every comic book and TV show published by them during the 20th Century, and triage its renewals to works that were truly the company's "crown jewels".
> PS how many different tunes on a theme of viagra do we need?
Actually, the FDA *does* generally have a policy of looking upon applications for approval of new "me too" drugs with extreme disfavor. More than a few perfectly good drugs have fallen through the cracks in the US and failed to get approval (or approval was never sought in the US at all) just because the FDA didn't think they made any particular improvement over drugs that were already approved. If there are already 3 drugs approved to treat some condition, and you want to get drug #4 approved, your drug had BETTER be demonstrably superior in some way (less-frequent dosage, more tolerable side effects, and efficacy that's at least as good as what already exists), or the FDA will metaphorically yawn and show you the door.
This is particularly problematic for things like psychiatric drugs, where you might have one specific small group of patients for whom existing approved drugs are intolerable, but you might not even DISCOVER that your drug is a blockbuster miracle among that small group until long after it's approved, has been on the market for years, and the patients themselves and their doctors have discovered it by accident. If your "me too" drug gets blown off by the FDA, those patients will never even get the chance to discover that your drug works better for them.
It's not quite accurate to say that literally EVERYONE reacts differently to drugs (the bulk of patients are, in fact, quite predictable), but it's not much of an exaggeration to say that most drugs work well for most people, but among almost any group of patients, you're going to have a persistent group of 5-20 percent outliers who end up being problematic for reasons that aren't necessarily obvious. Something that's a "me too" drug for 80% of patients could be the one drug that's tolerable and works for an atypical outlier.
Of course, the FDA's reluctance to approve "me too" drugs does nothing to help lower prices for consumers. A patented drug that's forced to compete with a half-dozen equally-patented "me too" drugs will probably end up with de-facto near-generic pricing unless it's literally the "best of breed" that sets the gold standard for patient success.
In my opinion, "the more, the merrier." If somebody comes up with a new non-infringing drug that's objectively no worse than some other, why should the FDA be allowed to give the first company a license to print money for 18 years without real competition? If Company #1 patents a drug, why should it be allowed to just sit on its hands and wait 15 years before patenting obvious chemical cousin #2 as the new, improved "extended-release" version (which, in fact, is the main consequence of the FDA's general refusal to even consider applications for "me too" drugs... it gives the original manufacturer lots of slack to take its time and dole out improved versions one patented variant at a time, instead of having to play all of its cards at once and patent everything up front to avoid having their main competitor beat them to patenting the improved, extended-release variant of their own drug.
One major problem with the way patents work now is that the terms are "one size fits all", and the long lead time (and failure trail) of pharmaceutical development ends up getting patent terms extended into absurdity for things like software. Patent terms SHOULD take into account the relative difficulty & expense of getting something to the point where it's patentable.
Take software patents. Suppose software were patentable, but with specific limits... like:
* USPTO.gov runs a free digital notary service that allows you to fingerprint and timestamp your software repository daily. If somebody is granted a software patent, any otherwise-infringing use that was timestamped prior to its granting and publication is automatically eligible for statutory license without charge. Additional provisions would have to be worked out to deal with cases where somebody demonstrates prior use of the patented technique, but improves upon it AFTER the patent is granted in a way that calls into question whether those improvements were influenced by the patent's publication. Just to keep software vendors honest, in order to qualify for a software patent or automatic license for unpatented prior art, the source used to document the patent (or license) would have to be made public.
* for the first 3 years after publication, the grantee has unfettered rights to the patent, with the specific exception of anyone who can prove (via digitally-notarized source timestamped prior to the patent's publication) prior unpatented use (who'd have automatic rights to use it within the scope of whatever they had as of the patent's publication date).
* for the next 5 years, anybody who wanted to use the patented technique could purchase a compulsory license at statutory rates based entirely upon the sales/licensing cost of their software. The rates might be something like "10% per patent, subject to a maximum of 50% to be shared among all patent holders". In other words, if your app uses one patented technique and sells for $10, you'd send a check for $1 per license sold every 3 months to the US Treasury for distribution to the patent holder. Use 2 patents, and the check is $2 per license sold. Use 5, and the check is $5. Use 6 or more, and the check is STILL $5, except now everyone who believes they have a stake in your royalty payments has to either accept 1/Nth of it by filing a claim form identifying their patent's number as one being infringed, or go to court at their own expense (and without involving you, except perhaps as a paid expert witness to testify in their defense to justify a larger share going to them). Give your app away for free, and the licensing costs would be 10% through 50% of zero.
* After the 5 years, the patent term ends, and the technique is officially public domain.
With a scheme like this, truly innovative & groundbreaking techniques would be protected... but the terms would be short enough to literally FORCE the patent owner to try and monetize it as quickly as he can. Submarine patents would be literally impossible, because anybody who was already doing something similar (and demonstrably documenting it by getting the repo notarized daily) would have automatic free use in perpetuity anyway, and the term would be so short, making money from the patent would literally require that its new owner aggressively market it to potential users, and license it as widely and deeply as possible. If somebody like Apple decided to take its ball and go home (refusing to license it to anyone), HTC & Samsung would have compulsory licensing rights by the time most consumers even realized the technique existed. And source-publication rquirements to qualify for patent protection (or compulsory licensing) would ensure that the relevant source was readily available to guerrilla Android developers working on AOSP and Cyanogen.
Likewise, with pharmaceuticals, I'd treat "use" patents separately from "manufacturing technique" patents. Say, 5 years of unfettered licensing rights for "use" patents, foll
The point is, people don't want to spend their year doing perpetual floor maintenance -- especially not maintenance that leaves them unable to walk on the floor for days at a time. Laminate & engineered hardwood can be replaced in an afternoon, then ignored by everything besides your Roomba for the next 5-10 years. If you buy premium commercial-grade laminate or engineered hardwood, you won't have to BOTHER with a runner to protect high-traffic areas, because the transparent aluminum coating is extra-thick.
Properly-maintained hardwood looks beautiful. The problem is, keeping it that way is too much work and inconvenience. I have three friends with classic art deco condos in South Beach who did the whole, "omigod, how could they cover up this beautiful hardwood" thing, spent weeks restoring it, enjoyed it for about a month, then went through weeks of despair after their dogs/cats/kids/visitors/they_themselves progressively destroyed all their hard work and scratched/scuffed it up from daily life. They all eventually ended up covering it with laminate or engineered hardwood, and rationalized it as "protecting the original floor for future generations, when better coatings that dry faster" exist. And keep in mind... the coatings we have today dry in a FRACTION of the time the varnishes they had a hundred years ago did. Imagine a floor that literally couldn't be walked on for weeks, in a house with kids, circa 1920, and it's no wonder that people covered them up with linoleum, sheet vinyl, and carpet at the first opportunity.
> Lead-free solder doesn't create a cold joint any more than leaded solder does when used properly.
"When used properly" is a key point. Quite a few things are built in ways that DON'T use it properly.
> Your weight is a result of calories in vs. calories out.
Actually, it's not. There are plenty of studies demonstrating that chronic sleep-deprivation makes you MUCH more likely to gain weight from a given number of calories. Your body goes into 'crisis' mode, and becomes more aggressive and efficient about converting calories into fat. The fact that you're likely to end up ravenously hungry and fatigued multiples the effect, but even if you kept exercise and calorie count constant, you'd be more likely to gain weight after extended chronic sleep deprivation.
The same phenomenon has been observed with some psychiatric drugs. In particular, one class of drugs used for treating schizophrenia. I don't remember the exact details, but I remember reading that there were a couple of them that *observably* slowed down the patient's metabolism for reasons that aren't entirely understood (and researchers are certainly trying, because if they can figure out what makes them slow somebody's metabolism down, they might be able to come up with a blockbuster drug that speeds it up and enables effortless weight loss. Assuming, of course, the drug doesn't end up having drug-induced mania or psychosis as a side effect).
> There's also the concern of the post-ROHS lead-free solder in newer gear
Ah, yes... the environmental wisdom of prematurely sending 10 years' worth of electronic gear to a landfill somewhere by mandating that every solder connection be what used to be called a "cold joint". Mitigated only by the knowledge that the Chinese electrolytic capacitors with substandard electrolyte probably burst a year before that point, anyway.
In a state like Florida, where just about all grass is basically some variety of cultivated crabgrass (northern-type grass is almost impossible to grow year-round because some part of the year is inevitably too hot, wet, or both), you'd be hating life completely if you had to cut any meaningful lawn with a push-type reel motor. Or even a rotary-blade mower without power-assisted wheels.
Power motors with reel blades exist, but without major protection, they're a HUGE safety hazard. And they break a lot, because there's more blade for things like stray bark chunks from mulch to get jammed in. A rotary blade has fewer places where an object can wedge into place. A manual reel-blade mower might be perfect for cutting the grass of a British (or American) townhouse with a small yard, but commercial landscaping companies that depend upon speed to give hundreds of lawns their weekly trims could never depend upon them. They're too much labor, and require too much maintenance.
As for electric cars being cheaper to operate & maintain, that's true up to the point where you have to replace the battery. Then the economics go out the window. That's why at least one new hybrid (Leaf?) was designed so that if the battery poops out when the car is old and within months of getting junked anyway, you can just flip a switch and tell it to forget the electric subsystem even exists instead of having to cough up more money than you could actually sell the car for (WITH a new battery). The economics of electric cars also depend upon governments not finding ways to tax electricity used for vehicle power the way gasoline is taxed. And if you need more than a hundred miles of range, you have two choices: wait a long time to recharge, or run from a gas generator whose efficiency is less than half of what you'd get if the engine were driving the wheels directly instead of generating electricity.
Real stone is a terrible flooring material. It stains, it cracks, and it requires expensive skilled craftsmen to install (vs some homeless guy the contractor pulled off the street and pays $7/hour to throw down). Ditto, for genuine hardwood. You see people on HGTV who proudly show off the beautiful vintage hardwood floor they spent a month restoring. You don't see them covering it up a year later with laminate in disgust because their dogs destroyed it with their nails, and their chairs & shoes scraped it up within days. It's just too much ongoing work to keep a real hardwood floor looking good.
Carpet didn't become popular until the invention of vapor barriers and vacuum cleaners. Even in ancient times, wealthy people had rugs in places like their bedroom. The invention of vacuum cleaners and mass production is what enabled poor people to have it, too. In more recent times, the fusion of inkjet printing with porcelain tile has enabled the production of floorcovering that's ideal -- the appearance of natural stone (or wood), with the indestructible nature of porcelain. The only thing they haven't *quite* figured out yet is how to make tile whose CUT edges can maintain the chiseled look of the best porcelain tile. In a middle-class bathroom, that's what inevitably gives away the fact that it's not real travertine (unless the builder went the extra step and used crown molding and wood edging to cover and hide the cut edges of the tile).
Timber frame and mud brick homes aren't coming back in style... homes with fake timbers and veneer brick glued to the outside that LOOK like timber frame & mud brick homes are coming back in style (at least, in the UK). The same phenomenon is visible in the US, where houses have brick street-facing facades, but anything you can't see from the street is covered with cheap vinyl siding or blow-on knockdown-textured fake stucco. Nobody is going to build a genuine brick structure today, because it would be cost-prohibitive. In scenarios where masonry construction is desired or required, they'll use concrete blocks & affix veneer brick to the outside. Classic all-brick construction re
> Of course when the federal reserve corporation is printing money at 0% interest hyperinflation will eventually surface somewhere at some point.
Unless a large portion of America ends up as smoldering nuclear craters, classic hyperinflation is structurally impossible in America. Weimar Germany had staggering war reparations that had to be repaid in foreign currency. Zimbabwe had no economy to speak of courtesy of its government, and currency that was essentially worthless for purchasing imported goods. Israel was basically at war with all of its neighbors, and one or two nuclear bombs could have wiped it off the map & made its currency & resources worthless forever. Argentina had staggering foreign debt that had to be repaid in US dollars. Brazil's hyperinflation was fueled by consumer expectations of ongoing inflation, and all businesses there could do was go along with it for the ride.
Unlike Weimar Germany and Argentina, America's debt is Dollar-denominated. Political sabotage (like what almost happened last summer) is LITERALLY the only way America could default on its outstanding debt. Of course, you could argue that someday, America might have to borrow Euros or Yuan... but that's unlikely to happen, because every other country on earth with resources comparable to the US spends money the same way the US does. And those countries are going to keep doing it, because if they decided to be austere and quit spending, their economies would implode & they'd be engulfed in domestic civil war long before their spendthrift neighbors even noticed.
Brazilian-style inflation is impossible in the US at this point, too... partly, thanks to Amazon. If prices began to surge in retail stores, there's always going to be negative price pressure from online vendors to pull back on it. Twenty years ago, people in Argentina had to go to the bank daily to withdraw cash and buy things, and deposit extra cash to use the interest as a hedge against inflation. There were physical limits to the number of people whom a bank could serve in one day, and physical limits to the amount of cash that could be shoveled around, so Argentines were in a perpetual state of panic that they'd either be unable to get cash the literal day they needed it (line too long, employees go home at 4pm) or be stuck holding onto cash that lost value daily & had to be spent immediately on *anything* with durable value. Thanks to online banking, that constraint is gone.
Ditto, for time spent shopping. 20 years ago, consumers had to run from store to store to find available goods to buy. Comparison shopping was hard, because it took time to go from store to store, and prices could conceivably rise at store #1 before you saw the prices at stores #2 and #3 and decided to buy it from store #1 after all. With online vendors, that constraint is gone, too.
Fuel prices might go up, but companies like FedEx and UPS have such staggering fixed costs due to their jet and truck fleets, at a certain point they'd be forced to operate at a small loss just to keep enough cash flowing to make the debt payments on their jets and truck fleets. As a result, regional shortages are less of a problem as well. If the product you want to buy exists anywhere in America, you can probably find it through the internet within an hour and buy it anyway. I've already witnessed this firsthand. In the past, every time a hurricane hit, the prices of things like generators would go through the roof for weeks. Stores avoided getting cited for "gouging" by keeping generator prices jacked up all year, and perpetually running them on sale until a hurricane hit (at which point they went back to their allegedly-normal prices). Amazon Prime blew *that* business model away, too. I know people who LITERALLY ordered generators from Amazon (with overnight prime shipping) as Irene was making landfall by their house (before the cell towers went offline), and had them delivered the next evening. It *really* had an impact on local generator prices. They were still fly
> College tuition and fee rates have gone up much faster than the rate of inflation. Why do you think that is?
Let's start with the Boomers. Boomers had record college attendance compared to earlier generations, but (compared to later generations) were practically *warehoused* in college, with 100 students being considered a SMALL class. Colleges built new buildings to accommodate them, and those buildings didn't go away when the last of the boomers graduated, and the X'ers began to trickle in.
I literally mean, "trickle in". By any account, GenX was a baby bust generation that was a FRACTION of the boomers' size. And when we (I'm an X'er) got to college, they took advantage of the opportunity to give us breathing room, smaller classes, and allowed us to occupy the same space once occupied by 2-4 times as many students. Life was good. Colleges were even happier when lots of us stuck around for 5+ years, because they had plenty of surplus capacity to sell.
Then, starting in the late 90s, the GenY tsunami rolled ashore as the Boomers' kids reached college age... and expected the same college experience that their X'er cousins had a few years earlier. Almost overnight, the number of students doubled (or more), and every university in America (especially in places like Florida, where the population of the state ITSELF had increased by 300% since 1970) had to embark on a massive building campaign to maintain the same level of amenities the X'ers enjoyed for a much, much larger student population. Those new buildings weren't cheap, and most of them had to be built almost *overnight*.
Of course, the great wheel of life keeps turning. The tail end of GenY is starting school now, and the number of students is going to start drying up in another 5-10 years when the next (much, much smaller) generation of kids will be welcomed with eager, open arms (just like their GenX parents were). Schools will get about 10-15 years of breathing room to get ready for the NEXT gigantic surge of kids to arrive (when GenY's kids start college).
Anyway, that's the long and short of it. Tuition doubled for GenY because GenX raised expectations to levels that were economically-unsustainable with Boomer/GenY student bodies without doubling tuition. I don't think tuition is necessarily going to go down, but I think the massive wave of tuition-inflation has peaked, and tuitions are likely to be pretty stable again for the next 15 years or so.
Yes... and no. ASCAP (and Harry Fox) are efficient clearinghouses for businesses that use music, but they're also kind of like a protection racket if you're an independent musician who likes to perform in public for free. Still, they're probably a net improvement over the status quo compared to the legal minefield that exists today.
Of course, in an ideal world, the patent system would work as constitutionally intended, and uspto.gov would be like a catalog and clearinghouse for useful things to license & make your products better, instead of a trap where inventors are warned to never, EVER look lest it be introduced in court as evidence against them someday.
It sounds like a great idea, but here's the problem: if there were one or more bona-fide legal issues that required a jury trial to decide, and losers had to pay the defendant's legal fees if they lost, the doctor's lawyers would move for summary judgment to dismiss without prejudice for lack of demonstrating the means to pay the doctor's legal fees if you were to lose. ("Without prejudice" means you could come back and file a new lawsuit someday if you manage to scrape up the money to post a bond sufficient to cover the doctor's potential legal expenses before the statute of limitations runs out).
If you were lucky, you might be able to obtain the services of someone whose newly-invented role fell somewhere between bail bondsman and investor, who'd agree to underwrite your liability for the doctor's legal expenses in return for $10,000 up front and 70% of anything you were awarded.
Patent-wise, it's even worse. Let's suppose you're sued for infringement by EvilMegacorp. The first thing they do is seek an injunction to make you stop allegedly infringing. The next thing they do is move for summary judgment to make the injunction permanent until you can demonstrate that you have the means to pay their legal fees if they win. Or, let's suppose you're an inventor who patents something, and EvilMegacorp blatantly infringes upon it. You file a lawsuit against them, and they pull the same stunt -- they certify to the judge that they've put $20 million in escrow to cover your legal fees if you win, and move for summary judgment to dismiss unless you can do the same.
Put another way, lobbying for a change to make the loser pay is a dangerous strategy, because it ultimately gives large corporations with deep pockets yet another weapon to use against everyone else.
A far better strategy would be to reform the way licensing itself works and come up with a fair framework for low-ceremony compulsory licensing at statutory rates that are high enough to encourage both the patent's owner and potential licensor to negotiate directly, but are ALSO aggregate among the holders of all patents. In other words, if you invent something and someone says you're infringing their patent, you could pay something like 70% of your gross revenue into escrow, then walk away and let everyone who thinks they have a patent stake in it fight over the funds among themselves at their own expense without involving YOU... and any funds that are unclaimed after 18 years would automatically revert to you. If your product allegedly makes use of 490 patents, the owners of those 490 patents can duke it out against each other to claim their share.
With a little luck, somebody will eventually come up with a way to interface one of Sony's old control sticks to an Android phone & configure it for both Android & App control. They rocked, because once you learned how it worked, you could literally control almost everything with one hand by feel alone.
That's the #1 Ultimate Universal Suck of touchscreens - you have to actively look at them and focus most of your attention on using them. There's a lot to be said for controls that you can grab & manipulate 'blind' :-)
For those who've never seen the control I'm talking about: http://www.amazon.com/RM-X5S-Mobile-ROTARY-COMMANDER-Control/dp/B000WWNIDM/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336265895&sr=8-1-fkmr0
From what I've been told, there are two variants of Mexican "Diet Coke" -- the original formula from the 80s/90s that's 50% sugar and 50% aspartame, and the newer formula that's 100% aspartame, but has 2-3 times as much as the American formula and was introduced once the aspartame patent expired in Mexico.
Apparently, "New Coke" actually started out as 1980s Diet Coke, then somebody at Coca-Cola's labs replaced the NutraSweet with HFCS, then added even more, and realized it tasted really good & pitched it to management as a new product to replace the original Coke. Or something to that effect. Either way, if you add sugar (or more aspartame) to regular Diet Coke, you can re-create the taste of 1980s New Coke on your own. Ever since I discovered that, restaurant Diet Coke has tasted a lot better (with the addition of 2 or 3 packs of aspartame, and lots of weird looks from other diners & the waiter/waitress). Personally, I wish Coke would have stepped up to the plate and introduced their OWN high-aspartame "new" Diet Coke, too. Unfortunately, they decided to go with Coke Zero, which I find to be completely disgusting and *worse* than normal (100% Nutrasweet) Diet Coke (but better than the blended aspartame+saccharin, and WAY better than the 100% saccharin fountain variants found at most restaurants (only BK and McDonalds use the 100% aspartame formula Diet Coke; most restaurants use the blended formula, and most gas stations & bars use the 100% saccharin formula). To me, Coke Zero tastes like I remember Tab tasting (yuck!).
I remember being told by a teacher (late 80s) who used to work for Pepsi that they'd made Diet Pepsi in their labs that was almost double-blind indistinguishable from regular Pepsi... the problem was, it cost a lot more to make (NutraSweet was still under patent), and they would have either had to sell 1-liter bottles for the price of 2-liter bottles, or charge more for 2-liter bottles of Diet Pepsi than they did for regular Pepsi. Moreover, the "indistinguishable" formula had ~12 calories per can, so they would have had Coke running commercials showing people drinking Diet Pepsi and getting fat. The drink that eventually became the original-formula Pepsi One (in the US, circa 1999 or 2000) was basically Diet Pepsi with double the aspartame. Then, they decided to unify the American and European formulas (the European formula had Ginseng) and jacked up the caffeine to energy-drink levels, rebranding it under the European name (Pepsi Max).
There are still some bottlers who sell Pepsi One (at least, in Florida, in cans, at Publix), but they changed the formula again (it's now a blend of aspartame and sucralose), and it doesn't taste nearly as good as it used to. Apparently, sucralose is still expensive, so the new Pepsi One falls somewhere between original Diet Pepsi and original Pepsi One taste-wise... better than regular Diet Pepsi, and slightly less likely to give you heart palpitations & flushed skin than Pepsi Max, but not as good as the original Pepsi One used to be.
Don't forget the PowerPC version of NT... or more precisely, Microsoft's decision to quietly pull it right at the moment when 90% of the world's Mac owners would have happily jumped ship, installed it over MacOS, and never looked back.
> The telco's on the other hand, have always had Microsoft by the gentlemans parts, and call the shots.
Not really. It's fun and fashionable to bash Microsoft, but let's not forget that ~7 years ago, while Palm was merrily selling phones with Verizon-mandated lack of bluetooth (among other things), Microsoft winked and hid the key to Verizon's handcuffs in the registry where anyone smart enough to use regedit could unlock all the naughty features Big Red didn't want people to play with.
Microsoft knew fully well that Verizon would find out about it, but they did it anyway. No, they didn't proclaim that they were going to withhold their phones from Verizon, because they knew that in America, such an announcement would have just screwed the 40% or so of consumers who are stuck with them because it's the only carrier who worked above the 60th floor of their building, or had 3G service out in the middle of BFE, and wouldn't have made the slightest difference to Verizon's practices. They just quietly gave Vzw the finger, made the phone trivially-unlockable, and let them ship.
The biggest problem with Windows Phone *today* is the fact that you can technically buy your freedom, but writing software that only runs on liberated Windows Phones is basically masturbation, because most people won't be able to run it. It's like giving somebody a Lamborghini with a gallon of gas and a small oval track surrounded by a concrete wall. The worst part is, Microsoft is locking down Windows Phone without even having any clear rationale of its own for doing it, besides "Well, Apple does it, so I guess we should probably do it, too. After all, Gartner Group said it makes users more productive."
The phone's network stack was probably written by the same fine folks responsible for several million angry, frustrated, and miserable users with laptops and new installations of Vista who found themselves unable to connect to most wi-fi access points courtesy of the "feature" that ultimately led to KB928233 ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233/en-us ) -- usually, when they were someplace where they couldn't easily get online to look up the solution.
> No kidding... If Cocacola can keep its soda formula a secret, why can't/wouldn't a pharm company?
Actually, the formula for Coca-Cola ceased to be a true secret a long time ago, and you can find it online pretty easily with some help from Google. What protects Coca-Cola *today* is trademark law. You can make a beverage that tastes EXACTLY like Coca-Cola, with the exact same recipe down to the nanogram and picoliter of raw ingredients, and sell it with complete legality... but if Coca-Cola, Inc. can find even the slightest shred of evidence that your company (or its representatives) have, in any way, shape, or form, implied that it actually tastes like "Coca-Cola", they can sue you into oblivion.
The real reason why nobody (in the US, at least) makes a beverage that tastes EXACTLY like Coca-Cola is simple: classic Coca-Cola doesn't really taste very good compared to just about any other "cola" drink. If your goal is to get consumers to buy your drink & you can't associate it with Coca-Cola's branding in any way, shape, or form (so you have to sell it based ENTIRELY upon consumer taste preferences), you'd sell more by copying the formula for Pepsi. In blind taste tests, Pepsi wins over coke 999 times out of a thousand. In supermarkets where people look at the brand on the label, Coke wins most of the time out of consumer habit. Coke's value IS their brand.
Go ahead, prove it to yourself. Buy a 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, then buy a bunch of bottles/cans of premium "cola" drinks (especially those made with cane sugar). Throw in a bottle of Pepsi while you're at it. Then do a blind taste test, and see which one you think tastes the best. I can almost *guarantee* that the winner WON'T be "Coca-Cola".
The sad thing is, "New Coke" really *did* taste better than classic Coke. Where Coca-Cola screwed up was underestimating the value of their own brand and history by eliminating the original one. Had they rolled out "new Coke", and announced they'd be selling "classic Coca-Cola" in perpetuity, classic Coke would today be a niche beverage you'd have to go to a liquor store to buy. Or, at best, a large grocery store might have a few six-packs and one-liter bottles of "Classic Coke" available, sitting dusty & unsold amidst an ocean of "Coke".
> When the insurance mandate in Obamacare is ruled unconstitutional, that section of Obamacare (at least) will be invalidated.
Until Congress passes a law making receipt of federal highway funds contingent upon the state's legislature passing a law that requires substantially the same thing. Or until ONLY the "must purchase" provision gets struck down, and premiums get increased for everyone because there are so many people waiting until they come down with an expensive medical problem before purchasing insurance.
And in the real world, you put in the prohibition against patent-infringing uses, and release it anyway. Regardless of how blatantly it might violate the GPL2, remember -- the GPL2 isn't self-executing. Somebody with standing to sue (ie, a contributor who holds part of the copyright along with others) would have to sue you, and demonstrate in court that your infringement caused real damages that can be quantified and made whole by payment of some specific amount of money to you. No, before you ask, your likelihood of getting an injunction on the grounds that "violating the principle of the GPL2" constitutes irreparable harm that can not be remedied would be somewhere between "slim" and "none". The judge would tell you to go home, and come back when you can cite specific losses you've suffered personally and assign a dollar value to them.
Put another way, in America, you can't sue somebody because they violated your moral principles and offended you. Or at least, you aren't going to be able to use the court system to make them change their wicked ways. If you're lucky & personally have standing to sue, and can show that the anger you feel from those wanton violations gave you autistic meltdowns that runined 117 days of your productivity, you might be able to convince a judge to grant you a hundred thousand or so in damages to compensate you for your medical bills and lost wages, but that's pretty much it. Courts don't address abstract harms, or right moral wrongs. They shuffle around cash when somebody harms someone, and call it a day.