Well with all the outsourcing it's not like programmers will have many paid jobs left anyway but that's another point.
And you still do not understand economics or software, first of all there is a lot of very expensive software (thousands of dollars) which will never be OSS unless one of the makers gets generous. Then it will still cost thousands for support and nothing will change. Actually the code is probably so horrid it will never be OSS (some is coded by outsourced programmers in India who make sure there are enough bugs to keep them in business, and that the code is unreadable enough that nobody can replace them). Then there are large companies which pay people to write custom software for their needs, or commercial software aimed at very specific markets.
If OSS writers cannot support themselves then they won't have time to code OSS, then paid programs will appear again and people will pay due to their superiority to OSS. It's a natural economic system of checks and balances and I don't see what you're complaining about. It won't ever hit the bottom because long before then paid software would make a return.
I went to a good public school (magnet, it had more money than the average) and we still had jack shit for network security. This isn't the IT staff's fault, hard to blame it when they have basically one guy (three if you count the part time help he got from CS teachers) for a school of over 3000.
The thing is that with such limits any security you can put in (keep in mind most of their work involves support not security, time is limited and all) will be cracked very quickly. Freshman year a kid was cracking the linux passwords on the school server, another kid got the master student database (with pictures, addresses, schedules, etc.), proxies were bypassed my freshman year, and by my sophomore year even the hardware security devices (Centurion boards) were bypassed. That isn't even including all the vandalism that their restrictions probably caused, kids will lash out against such restrictions and damaging a computer isn't all that hard given 10 minutes, a pair of pliers and access to the pci slots. Then again my school did have a lot of very intelligent but also rebellious students.
In the end, minimal security is probably more cost effective than trying anything fancy.
You said it yourself: "the teachers have computers" not the students. The former will use them for work, the later to play games unless given a specific use. It's all nice until you have kids how can't do calculus without a computer or know nothing about economics except how to plug in equations. Doing something "faster" doesn't mean it's better since the more time you spend on something the more you will learn from it.
So how do they eat, pay their internet bills, house themselves? Magic? Not necessarily from OSS but they somehow make money.
Have you ever used Windows 98? That was pre-OSS (at least before it became that big of a thing) and you're telling me that was a polished piece of software not made under the "good enough" philosophy?
The great things about economics is that in the end things usually even out. If free software isn't good enough then pay software will come back as people will pay for a "better product". There will be people who customize software and those who render support. In addition, the average user doesn't care about free if they can't get the damn thing to work.
Have you seen how many Linux distros there are? Do you have any idea how often OSS seems to fork because of some thing or other? That is why OSS is great: if it doesn't work that well then someone can make a new version using the previous source code as a base. No need to write an OS from scratch to compete. And yes, there is always going to be competition weather it's due to money or users or number of people who post in your forum.
You're trying to simplify a complex interaction and that generally doesn't work out.
Also, many IT people are not paid to write commercial software but to either support it or to write custom software for companies. The guy who writes OSS at home may be a network admin during the day, and hopefully those two parts will overlap.
Your point, it's like saying we should not have used light bulbs because the candle makers go out of business. It's like someone else said a very narrow-minded and down right stupid way of thinking.
This is not 1984 or Brave New World, things in the real world change and shift. Change is not bad, unless you are an old school conservative but that's another point. If OSS makes better and cheaper software than good for them. However, OSS developers also make money somehow so in the need the total economic effect is none and society gets a better product.
Also, you assume things wont level out however they must somehow since unless OSS developers make money somehow they can't have a computer without which they can't make OSS software. It's a natural check in the system, so some form of steady state will emerge although traditional paid programmers may not be part of it. Too bad for them however things change.
afaik a study was done about how many launches per year would be needed for the shuttles to be cost-efficient (due to their design the more you fly them the less the average cost). It came out to around 52, one a week.
Space planes will be efficient once we have a use for such a large launch capacity, which right now we simply don't.
And how many of those kids will be voting when they grow up? I doubt many of those who answered wrong to the questions, they don't care now and they probably won't care later.
And to all those who think that not everyone voting is bad or that we need everyone to vote on specific issues: look at this study and ask yourselves "do I want these people voting for laws that will apply to me?"
But if that same Indian engineer was building say better housing it would help more people. Or maybe some new farming equipment, etc.
However, that same engineer would probably then just go to the US since while space work is interesting designing some farming equipment isn't (nor does it help India's morale) so he might as well get paid better.
If I'm not mistaken once we start going down this line we get a static communist state where everyone is mostly happy however little goes forward.
Everyone who bitches about the space program need to look at themselves and what "useless" things the government does and they enjoy. If you want to cut away useless funding that doesn't help people then I'd start by killing all government contribution to the arts (doesn't help anyone), then sports (same; I mean at all levels), etc.
Right now a robot will fail miserably at walking the path however unlike dogs robots are constantly improving so with time they will be able to do both.
GPS is: 1) not that accurate (I heard 10 feet or so for affordable gps units which isn't bad but also not great) 2) not always available expecially in a city, or in any closed/covered building
This is not caching but a specific method or something along those lines. And you do know that a patent does not say "you can't use this invention for yourself" but rather "ask us, and potentially pay us, if you want to use this invention yourself".
Trivial and obvious things should not be patentable.
There studies, if you want them then google it (Park and Ginarte; Arora, Ceccagnoli, and Cohen ; Bessen & Maskin; Lanjouw & Cockburn; Cohen et al/Levin et al; Hall & Ziedonis; Baldwin et al; Branstetter & Sakakibara). No one knows what removing patents would do and the effects of strengthening them are also unknown (although for static industries this seems to be bad). Also, no studies seem to indicate that strengthening patents decreases innovation significantly. Oddly enough countries with the highest R&D/GDP ratios also have the tightest IP laws however the later is caused by the former and not vice-versa.
If you have studies to show that removing patents or severely weakening them helps R&D then please post them. Interestingly enough, there is a quote that goes "If national patent laws did not exist, it would be difficult to make a conclusive case for introducing them; but the fact that they do exist shifts the burden of proof and it is equally difficult to make a really conclusive case for abolishing them." [Edith Penrose (1951)]
It seems that they weren't enforcing them because they didn't care until 2 years ago, when some said: "hey guys, we got all these patents maybe someone is infringing on them."
It was more like: "okay we spent all that money on research back in the late 80's and never got a product out however if we sue we can recoup some of our loses."
Research costs money, in some cases lot's of money. Patents guarantee that this money can be regained over time as part of the product cost. This prevents a competitor from directly copying your idea and selling it for less (they didn't have R&D costs).
In other words, without patents companies have a lot less incentive to do any sort of expensive specific research since they have little chance of making money on it.
Individual inventors would also be screwed since they also have little chance of making money of their inventions: a larger company with more money will simply copy it and sell it for less. Or maybe one of the inventor's investors or prospective investors will do it before the product is even in production.
Without patents there would be LESS innovation. Why would a company spend $20 billion to research something just to have someone else copy it within 2 years or less? A major part of what you pay for something is due to the R&D costs, so prices would go up to compensate for the smaller revenue. Companies may also make their products very obscured so that others can't copy them as easily (which is bad for customers).
Even worse, what if you make an invention and need money to make a factory however while showing your invention (or diagram, etc.) to investors one of them copies your invention (and releases it to market before you)? Sure seems fair to me... not.
Patents are in many ways a good thing, however imho the current system simply cannot cope with modern day problems/
Also your reasoning is flawed for this example, here you have a smaller company suing bigger companies. The patent is being used against companies that could become monopolies and not by them.
Doubt it, cost is too high with few benefits unless they go for a moon base. And by benefits I don't just mean scientific and economic but also political/social. I doubt China wants to mimic the US space program since that doesn't boost morale, however expanding on it would. However, a moon base is a very costly endeavor and China may simply not be willing to spend that much for the potentially limited gains.
You're joking right... please tell me you're joking. I mean any semi-intelligent person could easily find the dozens of sites rebutting that "evidence"... so you must be joking, right?
The US is a free-market... wow The Apollo missions were privately funded right? The government hasn't given any money for research unit recently, right? Scientific research does not work unless
Also, read to learn. He said that basic Scientific Research doesn't work if done by the private sector, if you look the government has been funding it for quite a while. He didn't say that scientific research does not work if there is a free economy for things other than said research.
You can test your applications and guidelines in environments close to their work environment, a probe doesn't have that luxury. In addition, there is no such thing as a "fail safe" because you don't want the probe overriding your commands which are different because something changes. And by the time you hear from the probe it's too late to do anything so there is no point in having it run some internal checklist. Also, this involved probably hundreds of people working on it and a single chance to send the commands (and everyone is busy because it's so critical). In such environments shit does happen. You're a pilot so I'm going to ask you: did your only experience before flying a plane alone involve a simulator? Well that is about the experience these people had before sending those commands.
...wtf are you talking about, the company was selling their product in the US. This has absolutely nothing to do with their sales in Canada and they only have to potentially pay royalties on US sales. If you'd like to explain to me why a company can infringe on someone's patents simply because they sell the products from another country then please do.
What is at stake is the whole patent system since if a company in country B can sell products in country A and promote them in country A while infringing on patents in in country A then the patent system will collapse (I'll just go to Canada or China or Venezuela and copy your product then sell it into the US).
That is called "picking loud parts" and "not reading up on things before hand" and "bad design". Go find a Dell and listen to it, nothing is keeping you from having a computer which is just as quite or quieter. Granted you can't sue the.50c "extra powerful" fans you find on sale or any random power supply. Instead you need to use big and slow fans and a large heatsink designed for such fans (which do add a bit of cost). You also have to use quite hard drives and a power supply with a similar large and slow fan.
Don't blame the components for your own bad decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
Well with all the outsourcing it's not like programmers will have many paid jobs left anyway but that's another point.
And you still do not understand economics or software, first of all there is a lot of very expensive software (thousands of dollars) which will never be OSS unless one of the makers gets generous. Then it will still cost thousands for support and nothing will change. Actually the code is probably so horrid it will never be OSS (some is coded by outsourced programmers in India who make sure there are enough bugs to keep them in business, and that the code is unreadable enough that nobody can replace them). Then there are large companies which pay people to write custom software for their needs, or commercial software aimed at very specific markets.
If OSS writers cannot support themselves then they won't have time to code OSS, then paid programs will appear again and people will pay due to their superiority to OSS. It's a natural economic system of checks and balances and I don't see what you're complaining about. It won't ever hit the bottom because long before then paid software would make a return.
I went to a good public school (magnet, it had more money than the average) and we still had jack shit for network security. This isn't the IT staff's fault, hard to blame it when they have basically one guy (three if you count the part time help he got from CS teachers) for a school of over 3000.
The thing is that with such limits any security you can put in (keep in mind most of their work involves support not security, time is limited and all) will be cracked very quickly. Freshman year a kid was cracking the linux passwords on the school server, another kid got the master student database (with pictures, addresses, schedules, etc.), proxies were bypassed my freshman year, and by my sophomore year even the hardware security devices (Centurion boards) were bypassed. That isn't even including all the vandalism that their restrictions probably caused, kids will lash out against such restrictions and damaging a computer isn't all that hard given 10 minutes, a pair of pliers and access to the pci slots. Then again my school did have a lot of very intelligent but also rebellious students.
In the end, minimal security is probably more cost effective than trying anything fancy.
You said it yourself: "the teachers have computers" not the students. The former will use them for work, the later to play games unless given a specific use. It's all nice until you have kids how can't do calculus without a computer or know nothing about economics except how to plug in equations. Doing something "faster" doesn't mean it's better since the more time you spend on something the more you will learn from it.
So how do they eat, pay their internet bills, house themselves? Magic? Not necessarily from OSS but they somehow make money.
Have you ever used Windows 98? That was pre-OSS (at least before it became that big of a thing) and you're telling me that was a polished piece of software not made under the "good enough" philosophy?
The great things about economics is that in the end things usually even out. If free software isn't good enough then pay software will come back as people will pay for a "better product". There will be people who customize software and those who render support. In addition, the average user doesn't care about free if they can't get the damn thing to work.
Have you seen how many Linux distros there are? Do you have any idea how often OSS seems to fork because of some thing or other? That is why OSS is great: if it doesn't work that well then someone can make a new version using the previous source code as a base. No need to write an OS from scratch to compete. And yes, there is always going to be competition weather it's due to money or users or number of people who post in your forum.
You're trying to simplify a complex interaction and that generally doesn't work out.
Also, many IT people are not paid to write commercial software but to either support it or to write custom software for companies. The guy who writes OSS at home may be a network admin during the day, and hopefully those two parts will overlap.
Your point, it's like saying we should not have used light bulbs because the candle makers go out of business. It's like someone else said a very narrow-minded and down right stupid way of thinking.
This is not 1984 or Brave New World, things in the real world change and shift. Change is not bad, unless you are an old school conservative but that's another point. If OSS makes better and cheaper software than good for them. However, OSS developers also make money somehow so in the need the total economic effect is none and society gets a better product.
Also, you assume things wont level out however they must somehow since unless OSS developers make money somehow they can't have a computer without which they can't make OSS software. It's a natural check in the system, so some form of steady state will emerge although traditional paid programmers may not be part of it. Too bad for them however things change.
afaik a study was done about how many launches per year would be needed for the shuttles to be cost-efficient (due to their design the more you fly them the less the average cost). It came out to around 52, one a week.
Space planes will be efficient once we have a use for such a large launch capacity, which right now we simply don't.
Which is why you compile at night or when you're not using the darn thing.
And how many of those kids will be voting when they grow up? I doubt many of those who answered wrong to the questions, they don't care now and they probably won't care later. And to all those who think that not everyone voting is bad or that we need everyone to vote on specific issues: look at this study and ask yourselves "do I want these people voting for laws that will apply to me?"
But if that same Indian engineer was building say better housing it would help more people. Or maybe some new farming equipment, etc.
However, that same engineer would probably then just go to the US since while space work is interesting designing some farming equipment isn't (nor does it help India's morale) so he might as well get paid better.
If I'm not mistaken once we start going down this line we get a static communist state where everyone is mostly happy however little goes forward.
Everyone who bitches about the space program need to look at themselves and what "useless" things the government does and they enjoy. If you want to cut away useless funding that doesn't help people then I'd start by killing all government contribution to the arts (doesn't help anyone), then sports (same; I mean at all levels), etc.
Right now a robot will fail miserably at walking the path however unlike dogs robots are constantly improving so with time they will be able to do both.
GPS is:
1) not that accurate (I heard 10 feet or so for affordable gps units which isn't bad but also not great)
2) not always available expecially in a city, or in any closed/covered building
This is not caching but a specific method or something along those lines. And you do know that a patent does not say "you can't use this invention for yourself" but rather "ask us, and potentially pay us, if you want to use this invention yourself".
Trivial and obvious things should not be patentable.
There studies, if you want them then google it (Park and Ginarte; Arora, Ceccagnoli, and Cohen ; Bessen & Maskin; Lanjouw & Cockburn; Cohen et al/Levin et al; Hall & Ziedonis; Baldwin et al; Branstetter & Sakakibara). No one knows what removing patents would do and the effects of strengthening them are also unknown (although for static industries this seems to be bad). Also, no studies seem to indicate that strengthening patents decreases innovation significantly. Oddly enough countries with the highest R&D/GDP ratios also have the tightest IP laws however the later is caused by the former and not vice-versa. If you have studies to show that removing patents or severely weakening them helps R&D then please post them. Interestingly enough, there is a quote that goes "If national patent laws did not exist, it would be difficult to make a conclusive case for introducing them; but the fact that they do exist shifts the burden of proof and it is equally difficult to make a really conclusive case for abolishing them." [Edith Penrose (1951)] It seems that they weren't enforcing them because they didn't care until 2 years ago, when some said: "hey guys, we got all these patents maybe someone is infringing on them." It was more like: "okay we spent all that money on research back in the late 80's and never got a product out however if we sue we can recoup some of our loses."
Research costs money, in some cases lot's of money. Patents guarantee that this money can be regained over time as part of the product cost. This prevents a competitor from directly copying your idea and selling it for less (they didn't have R&D costs).
In other words, without patents companies have a lot less incentive to do any sort of expensive specific research since they have little chance of making money on it.
Individual inventors would also be screwed since they also have little chance of making money of their inventions: a larger company with more money will simply copy it and sell it for less. Or maybe one of the inventor's investors or prospective investors will do it before the product is even in production.
It's not on caching but a specific and new way of speeding it up.
Without patents there would be LESS innovation. Why would a company spend $20 billion to research something just to have someone else copy it within 2 years or less? A major part of what you pay for something is due to the R&D costs, so prices would go up to compensate for the smaller revenue. Companies may also make their products very obscured so that others can't copy them as easily (which is bad for customers). Even worse, what if you make an invention and need money to make a factory however while showing your invention (or diagram, etc.) to investors one of them copies your invention (and releases it to market before you)? Sure seems fair to me... not. Patents are in many ways a good thing, however imho the current system simply cannot cope with modern day problems/ Also your reasoning is flawed for this example, here you have a smaller company suing bigger companies. The patent is being used against companies that could become monopolies and not by them.
Doubt it, cost is too high with few benefits unless they go for a moon base. And by benefits I don't just mean scientific and economic but also political/social. I doubt China wants to mimic the US space program since that doesn't boost morale, however expanding on it would. However, a moon base is a very costly endeavor and China may simply not be willing to spend that much for the potentially limited gains.
You're joking right... please tell me you're joking. I mean any semi-intelligent person could easily find the dozens of sites rebutting that "evidence" ... so you must be joking, right?
We weren't going to use the Shuttle in the first place.
Mbit is not MB
Just because you don't knoe how to enable the icon by slecting one check box, doesn't mean the rest of us don't.
The US is a free-market ... wow The Apollo missions were privately funded right? The government hasn't given any money for research unit recently, right? Scientific research does not work unless
Also, read to learn. He said that basic Scientific Research doesn't work if done by the private sector, if you look the government has been funding it for quite a while. He didn't say that scientific research does not work if there is a free economy for things other than said research.
You can test your applications and guidelines in environments close to their work environment, a probe doesn't have that luxury. In addition, there is no such thing as a "fail safe" because you don't want the probe overriding your commands which are different because something changes. And by the time you hear from the probe it's too late to do anything so there is no point in having it run some internal checklist.
Also, this involved probably hundreds of people working on it and a single chance to send the commands (and everyone is busy because it's so critical). In such environments shit does happen.
You're a pilot so I'm going to ask you: did your only experience before flying a plane alone involve a simulator? Well that is about the experience these people had before sending those commands.
...wtf are you talking about, the company was selling their product in the US. This has absolutely nothing to do with their sales in Canada and they only have to potentially pay royalties on US sales. If you'd like to explain to me why a company can infringe on someone's patents simply because they sell the products from another country then please do.
What is at stake is the whole patent system since if a company in country B can sell products in country A and promote them in country A while infringing on patents in in country A then the patent system will collapse (I'll just go to Canada or China or Venezuela and copy your product then sell it into the US).
That is called "picking loud parts" and "not reading up on things before hand" and "bad design". Go find a Dell and listen to it, nothing is keeping you from having a computer which is just as quite or quieter. Granted you can't sue the .50c "extra powerful" fans you find on sale or any random power supply. Instead you need to use big and slow fans and a large heatsink designed for such fans (which do add a bit of cost). You also have to use quite hard drives and a power supply with a similar large and slow fan.
Don't blame the components for your own bad decisions.