> Regulation isn't the problem. Some degree of regulation is necessary, and it provides some very real benefits.
Some regulation *is* necessary. I don't think we need the FDA issuing 10-page edicts on what constitutes Swiss cheese. Or government-granted monopolies on wireless spectrum, or internet access etc.. Not to mention how broken the patent system is. Or licensing requirements that have nothing to do with safety or hygiene (licensing for interior decorating?)
> This is the only reason that China and Mexico, for instance, can produce goods far more cheaply than in the US
You're conflating innovation with labor. We still create lots of stuff in the US, we just don't build it all here. The US is also, still, one of the largest manufacturing nations in the world. We export *tons* of stuff, we just import a lot more.
The problem is that there are a lot of workers in the US who think they should get $30 an hour for operating a torque wrench. Those days are long gone. There are still plenty of decent-paying manufacturing jobs available, but you need some skills beyond turning a wrench until it stops.
It's not "Free Trade" that killed innovation in the US. It's regulation. You can't start a company out of your garage anymore. There are health codes, environmental regulations, tax and accounting standards to be met. Plus, quite a lot of regulation is designed to protect incumbent interests, squeezing out any potential competitors before they even get to market.
The Henry Ford museum is a steam junkies nirvana. Giant, two-story Edison power plant engines the size of a large ranch home. Original beam engines. An *enormous* Allegheny locomotive engine inside, used to haul mile-long coal trains up mountains. Compressed-air operating engines inside. Operating steam trains (burning coal) outside, along with various steam powered engines and tractors. There's an intact Edison substation, an operating workshop run on an overhead belt system, a working roundhouse where you can watch them work on the engines....
> It's not as though this is something that could be done by ordinary people in their homes.
Yeah, that's what I meant. In the US there are dozens of brands of aspirin. Nearly every major drug store has it's own generic brand. A lot of those are are made on spec, I'm sure, but that doesn't change the fact that there is plenty of competition for aspirin - a drug any pharmaceutical company can make.
> the drug companies probably aren't making much of a profit.
In the UK, maybe not. Most certainly in the US. Bayer and Excedrin spend a lot of money advertising their aspirin brands. Generic brand aspirin is comparable in price to the UK, though, if not a little cheaper, so I'm not sure why there would be so much competition if there was no profit in it.
> Then again, this is Slashdot. People enjoy spreading FUD about pharmacy when they know nothing about it.
Now what the hell are you talking about? I'm saying you can make money off of drugs without patent protection. I'd say that's pretty self evident. The case might be different in the UK, but, seeing as how this is a thread about a US court ruling, what happens in the UK doesn't really matter, does it?
I don't think there is a single elected member of congress with an economics degree. I think something like 95% of them are lawyers, the rest are doctors and a handful of other professions (doctors, comedians, etc...)
You don't need a degree in economics. This first year macro stuff. Create money out of thin air - with no added economic activity to counterbalance the dilution in value, and the value of the currency decreases.
If I develop a new type of super-light but super-strong steel, should I be allowed to patent the chemical formula that makes up compound? Is my new type of steel an invention or a discovery? This compound is a mixture of pre-existing things, carbon, iron, etc., but in a way never before done.
That's pretty much the definition of an invention. You're putting things that already exist in a novel way. The key here is "novel." IE non-obvious. You can't make cantaloupe-flavored gum and patent it - you're just making a new flavor of something that's already flavored. Now, if you make gum that can be used to reliably patch a flat tire - that's novel, nobody has made gum that can do that.
The problem with gene patents is that you are patenting the observation of how something already works. It would be like Niels Bohr patenting chemical interactions, so anyone who mixed substances together to create new compounds would have been infringing on his patent, even though he just figured out exactly how it worked.
Good point on aspirin. Aspirin *was* patented a long time ago. The patent has long expired, but companies still seem to make a lot of money off of selling it, even though anyone can buy dirt cheap acetylsalicylic acid from Dow and infuse it into their own tablets for next to nothing.
So now there's another hole in my house. Make that two holes, one for air coming in and one for hot air blowing out. Now the air coming in needs to be cleaned and de-humidified. And, if it's a particularly hot day, cooled down, unless you have a gigantic fan blowing tons of air through the racks to get the thermal load down.
I.E. it needs to be air conditioned.
This proposal just doesn't make any sense. Servers need cold, clean, relatively dry air. There's tons of it outside in the winter. The only way to get it in the summer is AC. Seeing as how heating a house is much, much cheaper than cooling it, I don't see how this could work.
I don't. I know quite a few people who don't. I have an android tablet and a cheap pay as you go phone. When I'm not in my car I'm near open Wifi about 75% of the time - I'm not paying $50 a month for the privilege of updating my Facebook page while I drive.
What was wrong with MacOS 7, 8 or 9? 7.6 and 8.5 were pretty lousy releases, but what problems did you have with them? System 6 was pretty dodgy, but compared with it's contemporary version of Windows, 2.1, it was fantastic. At the very least you could use 4MB of RAM without farting around with your config.sys (and autoexec, and win.ini...)
Overall I was happy with that line of OSes. I ended up running MacOS 8.1 comfortably on my PowerMac 6100/60. Ever try running Windows 98 on a P60? Ugh.
You're kind of proving my point. The market didn't move from ps/2 as soon as Apple dumped the ports in the iMac. It only moved once USB became common on PCs.
What? People weren't moving to USB *at all* until the iMacs were released. USB was already fairly common on mid and high end PCs, but they were little more than curiosities until peripherals were available. And, until at least late 1999, the vast majority of those were made for Macs.
It's well and nice that Windows 98SE had native USB support, but for the first year or so manufacturers weren't falling over themselves to support USB on the PC. There just wasn't the same demand as on the Mac side.
My boss at the time wanted a USB keyboard so he could have one wire running up from his Dell - just like a Mac. We searched for a week - the *ONLY* keyboards available were made with Macs in mind (translucent with the power and command/option keys, most came from MacAlly and Kensington). I didn't see a Windows-layout keyboard until, at least, mid-1999.
At the time, USB on PC's was an afterthought. If you were a company making peripherals, why would you spend the money to design a USB interface when PCs had all the old commodity ports available? Mac companies *had* to go USB if they wanted to keep selling to Mac users. And, as popular as the iMacs were, it made economic sense to do so.
Also: Polka and Fugue by Weinberger The Pines of Rome, last movement - by Resphighi (blew a circuit breaker playing this LOUD)
Also check out some of the old 90's Telarc samplers. Telarc is known for some fantastically clean, high dynamic range recordings. I have the Great Fantasy Adventure Album, with songs from various films along with sound effects, including the famous Jurassic Lunch track that will destroy your speakers if you're not careful - I'm not exaggerating.
I don't know what commercials sound like. My MythTV box skips them automatically. One of the algorithms looks at the volume of the audio to help find and eliminate them:)
ReplayGain fixes average differences in volume between different tracks. It doesn't help when a single track was compressed/normalized so that is has no dynamic range. There's really no post-processing that can fix that.
They might not have killed anything, but they sure as hell popularized it. How many USB peripherials did you see before the iMac came out? USB was around at the time - I have a Gateway P100 with USB ports on it from the late 90's. Couldn't find anything to plug into them until the iMac came out - then nearly all the available peripherals were in some garish color, or translucent, to match the iMac.
Of course, you're talking three strip technicolor there. The first two decades of color film used the two strip process, resulting in bizarre, unnatural color palettes. It was a gimmick. Some filmmakers used it successfully, most did not.
In 20 years I'm sure most 3D films will look fantastic. Double-4K res, double-60FPS, using super-bright laser projectors on high-gain synthetic diamond screens, it'll look more real than real.
Until then, like two-strip color, it'll be a quality-sacrificing gimmick.
That's too bad, because it's awesome. I haven't found anything else that comes close to how flexible and easy to use it is.
As far as trust goes - I trust the developer of NoScript over the entirety of the javascript code injected by advertising and tracking agencies out there.
By the way - did you read the NoScript developer's mea culpa?
This phone may still be able to make calls but would anybody in his/her right mind say the phone "survived" the fall?
If it works, it "survived." If a person fell out of a plane with no chute, hit the ground sustaining massive injuries but wound up living - that person survived the fall.
Slashdot Mirror
> Regulation isn't the problem. Some degree of regulation is necessary, and it provides some very real benefits.
Some regulation *is* necessary. I don't think we need the FDA issuing 10-page edicts on what constitutes Swiss cheese. Or government-granted monopolies on wireless spectrum, or internet access etc.. Not to mention how broken the patent system is. Or licensing requirements that have nothing to do with safety or hygiene (licensing for interior decorating?)
> This is the only reason that China and Mexico, for instance, can produce goods far more cheaply than in the US
You're conflating innovation with labor. We still create lots of stuff in the US, we just don't build it all here. The US is also, still, one of the largest manufacturing nations in the world. We export *tons* of stuff, we just import a lot more.
The problem is that there are a lot of workers in the US who think they should get $30 an hour for operating a torque wrench. Those days are long gone. There are still plenty of decent-paying manufacturing jobs available, but you need some skills beyond turning a wrench until it stops.
It's not "Free Trade" that killed innovation in the US. It's regulation. You can't start a company out of your garage anymore. There are health codes, environmental regulations, tax and accounting standards to be met. Plus, quite a lot of regulation is designed to protect incumbent interests, squeezing out any potential competitors before they even get to market.
The Henry Ford museum is a steam junkies nirvana. Giant, two-story Edison power plant engines the size of a large ranch home. Original beam engines. An *enormous* Allegheny locomotive engine inside, used to haul mile-long coal trains up mountains. Compressed-air operating engines inside. Operating steam trains (burning coal) outside, along with various steam powered engines and tractors. There's an intact Edison substation, an operating workshop run on an overhead belt system, a working roundhouse where you can watch them work on the engines....
> It's not as though this is something that could be done by ordinary people in their homes.
Yeah, that's what I meant. In the US there are dozens of brands of aspirin. Nearly every major drug store has it's own generic brand. A lot of those are are made on spec, I'm sure, but that doesn't change the fact that there is plenty of competition for aspirin - a drug any pharmaceutical company can make.
> the drug companies probably aren't making much of a profit.
In the UK, maybe not. Most certainly in the US. Bayer and Excedrin spend a lot of money advertising their aspirin brands. Generic brand aspirin is comparable in price to the UK, though, if not a little cheaper, so I'm not sure why there would be so much competition if there was no profit in it.
> Then again, this is Slashdot. People enjoy spreading FUD about pharmacy when they know nothing about it.
Now what the hell are you talking about? I'm saying you can make money off of drugs without patent protection. I'd say that's pretty self evident. The case might be different in the UK, but, seeing as how this is a thread about a US court ruling, what happens in the UK doesn't really matter, does it?
I don't think there is a single elected member of congress with an economics degree. I think something like 95% of them are lawyers, the rest are doctors and a handful of other professions (doctors, comedians, etc...)
You don't need a degree in economics. This first year macro stuff. Create money out of thin air - with no added economic activity to counterbalance the dilution in value, and the value of the currency decreases.
If I develop a new type of super-light but super-strong steel, should I be allowed to patent the chemical formula that makes up compound? Is my new type of steel an invention or a discovery? This compound is a mixture of pre-existing things, carbon, iron, etc., but in a way never before done.
That's pretty much the definition of an invention. You're putting things that already exist in a novel way. The key here is "novel." IE non-obvious. You can't make cantaloupe-flavored gum and patent it - you're just making a new flavor of something that's already flavored. Now, if you make gum that can be used to reliably patch a flat tire - that's novel, nobody has made gum that can do that.
The problem with gene patents is that you are patenting the observation of how something already works. It would be like Niels Bohr patenting chemical interactions, so anyone who mixed substances together to create new compounds would have been infringing on his patent, even though he just figured out exactly how it worked.
I thought only inventions could be patented, not discoveries? Does the judge need a dictionary?
Good point on aspirin. Aspirin *was* patented a long time ago. The patent has long expired, but companies still seem to make a lot of money off of selling it, even though anyone can buy dirt cheap acetylsalicylic acid from Dow and infuse it into their own tablets for next to nothing.
So now there's another hole in my house. Make that two holes, one for air coming in and one for hot air blowing out. Now the air coming in needs to be cleaned and de-humidified. And, if it's a particularly hot day, cooled down, unless you have a gigantic fan blowing tons of air through the racks to get the thermal load down.
I.E. it needs to be air conditioned.
This proposal just doesn't make any sense. Servers need cold, clean, relatively dry air. There's tons of it outside in the winter. The only way to get it in the summer is AC. Seeing as how heating a house is much, much cheaper than cooling it, I don't see how this could work.
> You mean besides the constant freeze-ups, having to reboot between switching applications, unhappy mac faces at start up
I only had app freezes when using dodgy programs. I had the same number of problems on my Windows machines (and OS/2, for that matter.)
The OS wasn't killing Apple, their idiotic product stratification was, along with relying on too much proprietary technology driving costs up.
I don't. I know quite a few people who don't. I have an android tablet and a cheap pay as you go phone. When I'm not in my car I'm near open Wifi about 75% of the time - I'm not paying $50 a month for the privilege of updating my Facebook page while I drive.
What was wrong with MacOS 7, 8 or 9? 7.6 and 8.5 were pretty lousy releases, but what problems did you have with them? System 6 was pretty dodgy, but compared with it's contemporary version of Windows, 2.1, it was fantastic. At the very least you could use 4MB of RAM without farting around with your config.sys (and autoexec, and win.ini...)
Overall I was happy with that line of OSes. I ended up running MacOS 8.1 comfortably on my PowerMac 6100/60. Ever try running Windows 98 on a P60? Ugh.
A rack generates heat all day long. I use hot water for, maybe, twenty minutes a day. What are you going to do with the rest of that heat?
You're kind of proving my point. The market didn't move from ps/2 as soon as Apple dumped the ports in the iMac. It only moved once USB became common on PCs.
What? People weren't moving to USB *at all* until the iMacs were released. USB was already fairly common on mid and high end PCs, but they were little more than curiosities until peripherals were available. And, until at least late 1999, the vast majority of those were made for Macs.
It's well and nice that Windows 98SE had native USB support, but for the first year or so manufacturers weren't falling over themselves to support USB on the PC. There just wasn't the same demand as on the Mac side.
Yeah - I know. I remember it vividly.
My boss at the time wanted a USB keyboard so he could have one wire running up from his Dell - just like a Mac. We searched for a week - the *ONLY* keyboards available were made with Macs in mind (translucent with the power and command/option keys, most came from MacAlly and Kensington). I didn't see a Windows-layout keyboard until, at least, mid-1999.
At the time, USB on PC's was an afterthought. If you were a company making peripherals, why would you spend the money to design a USB interface when PCs had all the old commodity ports available? Mac companies *had* to go USB if they wanted to keep selling to Mac users. And, as popular as the iMacs were, it made economic sense to do so.
Also:
Polka and Fugue by Weinberger
The Pines of Rome, last movement - by Resphighi (blew a circuit breaker playing this LOUD)
Also check out some of the old 90's Telarc samplers. Telarc is known for some fantastically clean, high dynamic range recordings. I have the Great Fantasy Adventure Album, with songs from various films along with sound effects, including the famous Jurassic Lunch track that will destroy your speakers if you're not careful - I'm not exaggerating.
I don't know what commercials sound like. My MythTV box skips them automatically. One of the algorithms looks at the volume of the audio to help find and eliminate them :)
Winamp gain goes to +1.
ReplayGain fixes average differences in volume between different tracks. It doesn't help when a single track was compressed/normalized so that is has no dynamic range. There's really no post-processing that can fix that.
They might not have killed anything, but they sure as hell popularized it. How many USB peripherials did you see before the iMac came out? USB was around at the time - I have a Gateway P100 with USB ports on it from the late 90's. Couldn't find anything to plug into them until the iMac came out - then nearly all the available peripherals were in some garish color, or translucent, to match the iMac.
Remember when Apple made high-end tools for artists instead of crippled plastic toys to lock in sheep consumers? Oh, Wozniak, how we miss you...
By high end tools for artists you mean the Apple II? Woz had little to do with the Mac.
Of course, you're talking three strip technicolor there. The first two decades of color film used the two strip process, resulting in bizarre, unnatural color palettes. It was a gimmick. Some filmmakers used it successfully, most did not.
In 20 years I'm sure most 3D films will look fantastic. Double-4K res, double-60FPS, using super-bright laser projectors on high-gain synthetic diamond screens, it'll look more real than real.
Until then, like two-strip color, it'll be a quality-sacrificing gimmick.
That's too bad, because it's awesome. I haven't found anything else that comes close to how flexible and easy to use it is.
As far as trust goes - I trust the developer of NoScript over the entirety of the javascript code injected by advertising and tracking agencies out there.
By the way - did you read the NoScript developer's mea culpa?
This phone may still be able to make calls but would anybody in his/her right mind say the phone "survived" the fall?
If it works, it "survived." If a person fell out of a plane with no chute, hit the ground sustaining massive injuries but wound up living - that person survived the fall.