The only lost sales are those people who want one immediately and will not for whatever reason eventually buy one when it becomes finally available for them.
Which can be a large number given the time period. Once the Christmas season was over, the money for the Wii was likely spent on other gifts and the immediate demand to satisfy the kids is over.
Everything else is not lost revenue, just deferred.
Deferred revenue has a cost, the same amount of money you get later is not worth as much as money you get now
I would be so bold to say that the buzz which I (incorrectly or otherwise) attribute in large part to perceived "exclusivity" of the device easily offsets those actually lost sales by generating revenue in new markets previously untouched by console gaming.
From my limited experience word of mouth is a huge driver for sales of the Wii. For many non tech-savy people it's just another new video game console, until they try it themselves. So limiting the supply and chances would in fact negatively impact sales.
The trouble with socialized healthcare, is that Freedom is forfeit in the name of cost savings. Those ends don't justify those means.
Those freedoms are already forfeit. The huge government bureaucracy and regulation involved with the medical field eliminates most choice. In the hybrid industry the government is artificailly limiting competition, without in turn limiting price increases caused by such artificial restrictions, the worst of both worlds.
In Europe we have government agencies looking out for us, and dishing out huge fines. In the USA, I gather, you couldn't trust the government as far as you could throw them, and the whole system is geared towards a more personal "lawyers at ten paces at high noon" approach.
The US government does indeed dish out substantial fines when a company violates the public trust. The difference is that in a civil suit no crime necessarily needs to have been commited, for the government to dish out fines the law must be broken. For example, the famed McDonald's coffee case. There was no real crime committed so no government fines, however, it was determined that the company knew about the risk of having the coffee served at higher temperature so it could be kept out longer (less waste = more profit); so as punishment they were forced to pay punitive damages to discourage such behavior.
Just like my ADD was "just lazy and undisciplined"?
TFA didn't seem to mention the particular condition that Jackson has, but I know autistic kids that have some socially unwelcome reactions to seemingly minor things. I think it has to do with their perceptual differences, what seems important to them seems unimportant to us and vice versa.
So what if there is a genetic "excuse." Most people have problems, and but are able to overcome them to integrate better into society.
These people have never been to a Fry's. If you've never been to one, picture this: they sell porn and energy drinks within 20 feet of each other.
Probably they should have said "Apple has designed the ideal techie retail store for the average consumer." Fry's is great if you are a real techie and know exactly what you want. However, it's horrible if you are an average consumer who only has a general idea of what they want.
Except patents cover methods, (ie. how you make "hello world" be printed to the screen) not the end result (ie. "hello world" is printed to the screen").
Next time read the patent before trolling. The patent title just mentions display, but in the claims section it mentions:
1) Display of "Hello World" as a method for testing the functionality of a device 2) Display of "Hello World" as a means to demonstrate the ability to create a program on a digital device 3) Use of a computer program with the output "Hello World" as a means to introduce programming .... and many more claims
That, and TFA speaks of Copyright infringement, copyright covering the conception of an idea put in tangible form (and is granted to the creator automatically upon creation of said idea in tangible form, contrary to misconception, copyright does not cover ideas). Copyright covers the right (right) to reproduce (copy) and distribute a creative work
And the post I was responding to was discussing IP in general.
Disdain for the *AA is really no excuse to not bother understanding IP.
Not laughing a joke is no excuse to insult somebody's knowledge.
Shocking! Hope the patient has some money 'cause the doc is gonna get his.
After 8 years of school, a few more years of slaver... err residency, and the cost of malpractice insurance... of course the doc is going to want to be paid.
Not that the government is any better, but a "For Profit" company trying to please both shareholders AND help people just is beyond my realm of belief.
You mean help out the people who gave the capital to make something happen in the first place? The problem isn't profit, it's the profit + massive regulation + massive litigation risk. The reason the govt should handle health care is because the latter two items can't be dealt with adequately in the private sector
In a population of billions it may well be that without the chilling effect of patents much more will be created as huge numbers of people build on freely reusable ideas to keep ahead in business. e.g. In the early days of the software industry.
The early days of the software industry had problems with investment because there was no certainty programs were covered by copyright. Yes there was still development, but there wasn't diversity in development projects, because there was supplier rather than customer driven development. Open source development for example tends to focus on popular things for the hobbyists, and not necessarily those things with real business value.
So that would be why patents are routinely made as unintelligible as possible and engineers are routinely told to avoid doing patent searches when developing products to avoid "willful infringement" penalties.
Patents are legal documents so must be worded carefully to stand up in court. As for the "willful infringement" that's just the lawyers covering their ass. Many companies have people (or hire other companies) do patent searches as part of industry intelligence, but also have in place systems to reduce the legal risk of possibly tainting their own development programs.
The patent entrenched interests love to handwave about how people won't create without patents; it just shows how out of touch with reality they are.
People will create, but the rate will decrease without investment.
The bigger problem is that the world has become more about legal system than the actual law or even common sense. The rich can bully/abuse the patent system by using the legal system at every single stage of the process until they get their way.
But, for any single problem, there's probably a dozen recipes that equally solve it. The reason why no one patents them is because they're so easily substitutable and they don't make $$$.
You're partially right, you don't patent when it a substitute can easily be developed. The problem is just because a substitute can easily be developed by somebody looking at the patent doesn't mean it's trivial to develop in the first place; and just because there is a substitute that's close doesn't mean it can exactly mimic the properties a customer wants. Hence you have a lot of trade secrets in the chemical industry. Many things like plating bath chemicals, polymer dopants, underfill compositions are all things that once published can easily be copied and changed enough to get around a patent. Yet those things are extremely difficult to reverse engineer, and can provide a significant technical advantage over the competition.
Hint: that's the most important part... if it doesn't make $$$, people don't patent it... and it's not really worth reverse engineering that particular recipe (unless you have to solve the problem, and then you can come up with just about any chemical that does the job
If you have product A, B, & C that work, but product A works a little better then the trade secrets around product A will net the maker more $$$. The question on whether or not to patent those trade secrets is how important it is, how easy it is to get around, and how easy it is to detect whether or not somebody is infringing. Another reason you won't patent is because unless you can show through reverse engineering that the suspect product is infringing, you can't bring a case against them. So sometimes the best way to protect your ideas is keep something a trade secret if it is difficult to prove somebody is infringing on your patent.
You take a sample of it and put it in a mass spectrometer. The molecule gets fragmented and the identity of each fragment is determined by a mass-to-charge ratio and other observations. Then, from a very very very (very!) large database of identities of fragments, the original molecule can be determined.
Great you identify all the fragments present, now figure out how to put them all together. Even more fun is when you have non-homogeneous compounds, or when you have a polymer with small amounts of dopants or mixture of isomers. Again even when you can reverse engineer, it's still expensive.
It's a legal barrier (ie. its patent). Once the 17 years are up, a company can produce a generic version in about 6 months (compared to the 5-10 years of development time).
Exactly. So most companies aren't going to spend 5-10 years of investment developing something that anybody else can produce in 6 months. Besides, there are many uses of chemicals outside of medicine. In fact, with all the regulation the drug industry isn't worried about reverse engineering as that information will come out in their legal documentation. There are lots of chemical "special recipes" used in a variety of industries, from adhesives to electronics that are kept trade secret, and are more trouble to reverse engineer than what it's worth.
Face it, in the world where One Click patent can even exits, you're _guaranteed_ to infringe on someone's intellectual property if your code is more complicated than "Hello world".
Infringements: 1. Hello World is a registered trademark of Servognome Corp. Any use or redistribution without the implied oral consent of Servognome is strictly prohibited 2. Patent #45239223 - Display of the words "Hello World" on a digital device
Trade secrets are very hard to keep in any case. There are a million ways that trade secrets leak out, most trivially by people taking a good look at the products in question.
There are many types of trade secrets. Knowing how to make something in a unique way won't necessarily come out by just looking at a product. Patents aren't just about revealing an idea, but how to actually realize it Further not everything is easy to identify just by inspection. For example chemcial compounds are difficult to reverse engineer, and reverse engineering in itself is very expensive. Patents allow anybody to have an understanding on making something, not just big corporations who can afford resources to reverse engineer.
While I feel the pharmas are the folks who would hold this information hostage to make more money regardless of the cost of human life, the above comment raises an interesting point.
Do the rich deserve better police or fire protection? Public services can be distributed equally, yet those who pay more can receive more benefit. A pharmecutical company will receive more benefit from research than Joe down the street in terms of supporting their business. So the fact that the research is done in the first place allows them to derive gains proportional to their donation even though the information is equally distributed.
Isn't the idea of being a nonprofit, you know, I mean, like, not getting rich?
Non-profit is just a nice way of saying wealth redistribution to serve your own interest. Non-profits seek to control more and more wealth, not to mention the personal gains of the controllers as they pay themselves through administrative fees.
Entrepreneurialism and risk-taking aren't going to simply cease being features of markets because you're a pessimist about the market for TV shows. While it's possible that your point may have been valid 15 years ago when "Seinfeld" first aired, things are as bad as you think at some networks already.
Entrepreneurism will still continue, but when you increase the risk on the distribution side, less risk will be taken on the content side. Right now with time slot based programming, networks need to fill the time with something. That means they are forced to take chances on shows they might not otherwise want to invest in, or keep struggling shows around until they can find something better.
At least in the on-demand model, there's room for entrepreneurs to compete with each other. There is room for promotion and banner ads in the online store, free previews, downloads of pilot and early episodes, mid-season bundle pricing, and limited promotion at the beginning or end of the video file. Pundits, online and off, can review, promote, and even shill for shows, studios, actors, and directors. There is room for someone, whether an individual or a large group of people, to fund the shows they want to see. And none of this requires third-party advertisement.
There's nothing to stop them from doing that now, you can create direct-to-dvd television shows. But such a model hasn't really taken off. The current model appeals to the "greed" of people. They are willing to watch a show if it's on, and passively consume, but most other than a small core rabid fanbase will ever actively donate to create more episodes.
Or maybe the fans could have picked up the tab for Firefly, or stopped funding Battlestar Galactica at the end of Season 2.
As I mentioned before such an active fanbase is small. How much did the "Enterprise" fans raise to continue? How much did "Serenity" make? Such grassroots campaigning may get you a show like Mystery Science theater, great writing with marginal production quality.
In a world when you can get any VG for free if you want to, why would you not get the things you want to have? Some kind of antiquated morality?
Such morality isn't necessarily antequated. With automation, most of what people create are ideas... things that can cheaply be mass reproduced.
I buy things when I think the creator deserves my support because the product is outstanding, but before I buy it I want to know if it's good or not, therefore I'll most likely pirate it beforehand,then buy it later if I believe it's worth my hard earned money.
Ultimately when you allow people to name their own price, most will choose free. Banking on goodwill is the quickest way to go out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
Deferred revenue has a cost, the same amount of money you get later is not worth as much as money you get now
From my limited experience word of mouth is a huge driver for sales of the Wii. For many non tech-savy people it's just another new video game console, until they try it themselves. So limiting the supply and chances would in fact negatively impact sales.
On behalf of my fellow gnomes that's Gnot even funny.
For example, the famed McDonald's coffee case. There was no real crime committed so no government fines, however, it was determined that the company knew about the risk of having the coffee served at higher temperature so it could be kept out longer (less waste = more profit); so as punishment they were forced to pay punitive damages to discourage such behavior.
Fry's is great if you are a real techie and know exactly what you want. However, it's horrible if you are an average consumer who only has a general idea of what they want.
1) Display of "Hello World" as a method for testing the functionality of a device
2) Display of "Hello World" as a means to demonstrate the ability to create a program on a digital device
3) Use of a computer program with the output "Hello World" as a means to introduce programming
.... and many more claims
And the post I was responding to was discussing IP in general.
Not laughing a joke is no excuse to insult somebody's knowledge.
People will create, but the rate will decrease without investment.
The bigger problem is that the world has become more about legal system than the actual law or even common sense. The rich can bully/abuse the patent system by using the legal system at every single stage of the process until they get their way.
Many things like plating bath chemicals, polymer dopants, underfill compositions are all things that once published can easily be copied and changed enough to get around a patent. Yet those things are extremely difficult to reverse engineer, and can provide a significant technical advantage over the competition.
If you have product A, B, & C that work, but product A works a little better then the trade secrets around product A will net the maker more $$$. The question on whether or not to patent those trade secrets is how important it is, how easy it is to get around, and how easy it is to detect whether or not somebody is infringing. Another reason you won't patent is because unless you can show through reverse engineering that the suspect product is infringing, you can't bring a case against them. So sometimes the best way to protect your ideas is keep something a trade secret if it is difficult to prove somebody is infringing on your patent.
Again even when you can reverse engineer, it's still expensive.
Exactly. So most companies aren't going to spend 5-10 years of investment developing something that anybody else can produce in 6 months.
Besides, there are many uses of chemicals outside of medicine. In fact, with all the regulation the drug industry isn't worried about reverse engineering as that information will come out in their legal documentation.
There are lots of chemical "special recipes" used in a variety of industries, from adhesives to electronics that are kept trade secret, and are more trouble to reverse engineer than what it's worth.
1. Hello World is a registered trademark of Servognome Corp. Any use or redistribution without the implied oral consent of Servognome is strictly prohibited
2. Patent #45239223 - Display of the words "Hello World" on a digital device
Further not everything is easy to identify just by inspection. For example chemcial compounds are difficult to reverse engineer, and reverse engineering in itself is very expensive. Patents allow anybody to have an understanding on making something, not just big corporations who can afford resources to reverse engineer.
You should read Shakespeare in the original Klingon
Public services can be distributed equally, yet those who pay more can receive more benefit. A pharmecutical company will receive more benefit from research than Joe down the street in terms of supporting their business. So the fact that the research is done in the first place allows them to derive gains proportional to their donation even though the information is equally distributed.
Non-profit is just a nice way of saying wealth redistribution to serve your own interest. Non-profits seek to control more and more wealth, not to mention the personal gains of the controllers as they pay themselves through administrative fees.
There's nothing to stop them from doing that now, you can create direct-to-dvd television shows. But such a model hasn't really taken off.
The current model appeals to the "greed" of people. They are willing to watch a show if it's on, and passively consume, but most other than a small core rabid fanbase will ever actively donate to create more episodes.
As I mentioned before such an active fanbase is small. How much did the "Enterprise" fans raise to continue? How much did "Serenity" make? Such grassroots campaigning may get you a show like Mystery Science theater, great writing with marginal production quality.
Ultimately when you allow people to name their own price, most will choose free. Banking on goodwill is the quickest way to go out of business.