Guns can be made once and last decades if not centuries. The stock of them increases over time.
Any thoughts on the above?
So limit ammunition instead. There's a Chris Rock skit about that, which is straight to the point and hilarious. But yeah, with proper care, guns last a long time. Ammo actually expires or gets old and useless.
Sounds like the flip-side of the other business model the current patent system generates: filing an idiotic general patent, let it lie dormant for years, exerting no effort at all into engineering and/or bringing an actual product to market, waking up from a zombie-like state whenever somebody makes a product that might possibly infringe, identifying profitable products, and then filing suit when there is money to be made.
I'm not defending the current system - it is really and obviously broken - but the most clear side effect I can see from the way it works is that ALL corporations HAVE to file these bs patents, in order to build up a massive portfolio just so they can defend themselves when they inevitably get sued. Then in negotiations the two sides can cross-license and whatever mumbo-jumbo it takes to make most of the various threats in the lawsuit go away and pad the rest with cash.
If you tried to approach this in a principled manner, and only patented what was truly non-obvious and innovative, you'd have nothing to bargain with when you are inevitably sued.
The whole system of software patents is totally busted.
Passed by Both Houses of Congress based on what was thought to be good information at the time.
Yeah, passed by both houses... why don't you look at how the actual voting split down? To imply it was fully supported by both parties is intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.
But in case you do lie to yourself like that - how about holding Republicans to this same standard as far as the Affordable Health Care Act? You know, legit legislation passed by both houses, etc?
Businesses are not able to act confidently when they are worried that the rules are going to keep changing.
More BS courtesy conservatives/republican/folks with their head shoved up their ass. Business aren't worried about "rules" that "change"... they are sitting around because of low demand (due to other massive problems with the economy and how the middle class is doing). Business WANT rules changes all the damn time - check out the lobbying budget for various industries. They just want all changes in their favor, everything to benefit them, without any longer term outlook.
The best thing a government can do for an economy is get out of the way.
That's what conservatives did: weaken financial regulations, lower taxes, etc. The result was the disaster of the Bush presidency culminating in the financial crisis of 2008, which we are still feeling the effects of.
Sorry, but this mantra conservatives keep preaching is demonstrably false.
I just got an email from corporate HR stating that my cost for health insurance is going up over the next two years because of this ruling.
Because corporations are always 100% truthful, and they would never ever seize upon a convenient excuse for jacking up rates. Please, they were probably going to raise rates anyway.
In the case of the whole OEM software preload business, I think Microsoft has largely been the victim.
Microsoft is hardly the innocent victim in this. By offloading hardware to OEMs, they avoid a expensive, brutal, fast-moving and LOW profit margin side of the business. They also shove a ton of support costs of their crown jewels on to the same OEMs (and be honest, a lot of support issues are really Windows issues and not hardware-specific ones). They've benefited for 2+ decades of living in the high-margin very profitable software side of the equation; that's the trade off they made and complaining "oh but the OEMs don't properly showcase our baby" is total bullshit.
We have worked very hard to provide you with the tools to provide customers with a great Windows experience. If you do not choose to execute on that, we will.
I think MS is going to discover a brand new effort-to-profit-ratio on the hardware side of the business, and ultimately will backfire. Their front-line OEMs, battling it out over pennies, may decide to take their ball and play on a more level playing field. MS is making the OS and this tablet HW? They are going to naturally have better info on what new capabilities the OS will have, have a better say as to what HW changes are coming, undoubtedly have a pricing advantage, etc.
What I am saying is that you benefit from these things every day of your life. I don't understand how people can look down their nose at these methods while at the same time voluntarily benefiting from the consequences.
These kinds of people call themselves "Libertarians".
Want to create jobs, let businesses hire people without regulatory red tape and high costs (taxes)
And then what, have the public sue when your non-regulated drug company sells a product that kills people? Or sue when your non-regulated food company puts rotting meat up for sale? Sue when planes fall out of the sky due to shoddy construction? Etc.
Are you an attorney? Your "gov't get out of the way" society would turn into a giant "wealth transfer to attorneys" society, while regular people would be harmed non-stop.
Government cannot create private sector jobs. Period. They only thing government can do is take from the productive and give it to those that are not productive.
So explain to me how the following would come about if entirely funded by profit motivated corporations:
non-toll national highway system space program GPS (satellite constellation, see "space program") nuclear technology, weapons/energy the internet
Great comment... too often the zealots fails to see that the vast majority of people don't actually think of "farting around with computers" as their most important and enjoyable hobby.
I recently switched a notebook computer to Windows from Linux. Not because I don't like linux - now I've got 2 distros in VMs on that system - but because I needed/wanted that notebook to serve also serve as an actual notebook (i.e. working wireless networking) and as a secondary game system. I got tired of fiddling with building drivers, and wanted more gaming choices.
However, I personally am more interested in the ability of organise my desktop in such a way that maximises my ease of use, and productivity, without some idiot OS telling me that I can't use a mouse click that way. Most Windows users are quite astonished at the way I can stack up and organise active views on various projects.
And in turn, others might be interested in doing something besides stacking windows, perhaps they want to run certain applications. Myself, I got rid of one Linux box in favor of Windows, because I was tired of diddling with wireless drivers. Now I run Linux in VMs, which is the tradeoff I made to maximize my ease of use.
I think the answer to this, why that doesn't exist, is a misunderstanding.
The free-market isn't a magic factory that produces stuff tailored to your specific desires. It responds to aggregate demand. If this item isn't made then either 1) no corporation perceives demand, or 2) no corporation thinks they can make it AND sell it for more profit than some other product that is already out there.
I think #2 applies here. The people willing to buy a nicer laptop (screen, keyboard) at a higher price aren't a large enough market for a corporation to really care about. From their eyes, the delta in customers they would gain buying the fancier laptop, isn't worth it.
Security and best practices are an academic concepts that are not taught in school. Most people don't really care about security until it affects them.
And in turn, corporations don't care about security until is costs them money. Look at Microsoft, they didn't give a flip about security until sometime after Windows XP when that OS was getting owned left and right by malware. Which started to cost them, albeit indirectly.
How exactly will this cost LinkedIn? If it is being ridiculed in the press, they'll just ride it out and not care. If people leave in droves and their service becomes less valuable, or advertisers/customers jump ship, then they'll give a crap.
So, all of sudden, the entire tech world has decided that tablets are the future and desktop & mobile UIs will converge, even though historically it is the fact that they ended up being fundamentally different what made them succeed..
I must be stupid, but I truly and honestly still don't see why this wll happen, so I'd very much appreciate someone more tech-literate than me to explain the future.
Tablets are getting the attention since they are the "new" thing, with a larger potential market than regular PCs.
I'm kinda surprised people here don't get that. Just like in the old days of computing, when mainframes rules and PCs were solutions looking for problems (for home users, not for businesses), tablets and mobile will go on to penetrate the market (where market is "all people on the earth") further than PCs did ever did.
The PC was successful, is successful, and will continue to be successful, but a larger segment of humanity will find a use for tablets/mobile than PCs, just like more people have use for PCs than a mainframe. For every person who needs a PC to create something, there will be 10 people who can use a tablet to consume it.
Yes, because unless you plan to allow ALL religious references in public spaces, there will be problems. Or were you some anonymous coward that thinks EVERYONE would be happy with $YOUR_RELIGION on display, funded by public money?
It's tough to give a blanket recommendation given I (nobody) can really know what you'll like, but my thinking on this is these games are available at such a low cost, it is worth getting them just to play for an hour each. And support the concept of multi-platform DRM-free gaming. With this bundle, you even get the soundtracks in 2 formats! If it turns out you like one, that's like icing on the cake.
I've thrown in $15 - $25 for each Humble Indie Bundle so far, and have found a few real gems in there. My favorite so far as in HIB 2 (I think): Space Chem, which is basically an organic chemistry puzzle game.
Anyway, I played Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP on my iPhone, partway, and look forward to having it around on all my systems. It's got simple graphics, but a quirky sense of humor (written dialog) and some great background music. I'd say check it out. YMMV as far as Metacritic scores, but I'll also note that all games in this bundle score well, above 80/100.
When a libertarian wants to do something, he does it without bothering anyone When a liberal wants to do something, they make everyone do it
When a libertarian doesn't want to do something, he quietly doesn't do it When a liberal doesn't want to do something, they make it so no-one may do it
Think about that next time you post some anti-libertarian trash on Slashdot. We just want to let you do what you want to do (unless you want to ban people from doing things, I guess that we won't let you do).
Bloomberg as a liberal, lol.
Anyway, libertarians should move to their own island - you know, just quietly do it without preaching their bullshittified utopian unrealistic views - and make everybody happy! Themselves, and everyone else since we wouldn't have to listen to them anymore! And in your little vaccum world, you could be as discriminatory as you want to be.
And who exactly guarantees YOUR property rights? As opposed to the next bigger or better armed group that decides to steal it from you? Who exactly is the police that protects you, the courts that prosecutes criminals, etc? Sorry, but most Libertarian rants come off as clueless fucktards who don't admit the extent of their DEPENDENCY on the gov't they call evil at every turn.
I had a Blackberry Pearl that I used for ~2 years, and I liked it. Yes, even with the roller-ball and the "SureType" keyboard. It was fine as a phone and for text messages. Email was pretty decent too, even with the ever-blinking red light of "you've got mail". But the web browser and map apps (both included), weren't that great. I'd say terrible, but that is in comparison to what came afterwards. At the time it was OK, serviceable but not exactly easy/fun/compelling to use.
What exactly do you mean using it "as a smartphone (and not an App machine)"? If you aren't going to run apps, why get a smartphone? That was the conclusion I came to when I dropped the BB in favor of a Samsung Propel (a slider phone hiding a full keyboard) since at the time all I wanted was phone+text and the Propel was cheaper and didn't require a data plan.
While that is true to an extent, I don't think it fair to completely ignore how much money/effort/engineering went into developing the technology to even have a space program. Like how it was back in the 50's and 60's, entire fields of engineering, chemistry, lots of money needed to be invested without any clear expectation of profit.
Now, ~60 years later, a private company can come along and launch a rocket, but they also had 60+ more years of advancements to utilize.
Still, SpaceX's achivement is very impressive.
Now NASA funding should be for goals that are slightly beyond current tech. Robotics (for mining asteroids), putting satellites in orbit around planets for scientific purposes, better fuels, using robots to build bases on bodies in the solar system, etc.
I think the lesson of the "free-market" here is the regular people don't care what browser they use. The consumer choice made is what platform to buy/use, at the smartphone/tablet level, not at the tech details like which rendering engine is under the hood or whether or not they can swap between 5 different browsers on their device. They don't care about that stuff.
And I'm sure there are car geeks simply appalled with the car you own, food geeks who would vomit in horror at what you eat, beer/wine geeks who would rather die of thirst than drink whatever it is you like, music geeks who would pierce their eardrums rather than listen to your music collection, etc.
Basically, not everybody in this world actually cares about the same stuff you do, at the same level of intensity.
Slashdot Mirror
Guns can be made once and last decades if not centuries. The stock of them increases over time.
Any thoughts on the above?
So limit ammunition instead. There's a Chris Rock skit about that, which is straight to the point and hilarious. But yeah, with proper care, guns last a long time. Ammo actually expires or gets old and useless.
Sounds like the flip-side of the other business model the current patent system generates: filing an idiotic general patent, let it lie dormant for years, exerting no effort at all into engineering and/or bringing an actual product to market, waking up from a zombie-like state whenever somebody makes a product that might possibly infringe, identifying profitable products, and then filing suit when there is money to be made.
I'm not defending the current system - it is really and obviously broken - but the most clear side effect I can see from the way it works is that ALL corporations HAVE to file these bs patents, in order to build up a massive portfolio just so they can defend themselves when they inevitably get sued. Then in negotiations the two sides can cross-license and whatever mumbo-jumbo it takes to make most of the various threats in the lawsuit go away and pad the rest with cash.
If you tried to approach this in a principled manner, and only patented what was truly non-obvious and innovative, you'd have nothing to bargain with when you are inevitably sued.
The whole system of software patents is totally busted.
Passed by Both Houses of Congress based on what was thought to be good information at the time.
Yeah, passed by both houses... why don't you look at how the actual voting split down? To imply it was fully supported by both parties is intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.
But in case you do lie to yourself like that - how about holding Republicans to this same standard as far as the Affordable Health Care Act? You know, legit legislation passed by both houses, etc?
Businesses are not able to act confidently when they are worried that the rules are going to keep changing.
More BS courtesy conservatives/republican/folks with their head shoved up their ass.
Business aren't worried about "rules" that "change"... they are sitting around because of low demand (due to other massive problems with the economy and how the middle class is doing). Business WANT rules changes all the damn time - check out the lobbying budget for various industries. They just want all changes in their favor, everything to benefit them, without any longer term outlook.
The best thing a government can do for an economy is get out of the way.
That's what conservatives did: weaken financial regulations, lower taxes, etc. The result was the disaster of the Bush presidency culminating in the financial crisis of 2008, which we are still feeling the effects of.
Sorry, but this mantra conservatives keep preaching is demonstrably false.
I just got an email from corporate HR stating that my cost for health insurance is going up over the next two years because of this ruling.
Because corporations are always 100% truthful, and they would never ever seize upon a convenient excuse for jacking up rates.
Please, they were probably going to raise rates anyway.
In the case of the whole OEM software preload business, I think Microsoft has largely been the victim.
Microsoft is hardly the innocent victim in this. By offloading hardware to OEMs, they avoid a expensive, brutal, fast-moving and LOW profit margin side of the business. They also shove a ton of support costs of their crown jewels on to the same OEMs (and be honest, a lot of support issues are really Windows issues and not hardware-specific ones). They've benefited for 2+ decades of living in the high-margin very profitable software side of the equation; that's the trade off they made and complaining "oh but the OEMs don't properly showcase our baby" is total bullshit.
We have worked very hard to provide you with the tools to provide customers with a great Windows experience. If you do not choose to execute on that, we will.
I think MS is going to discover a brand new effort-to-profit-ratio on the hardware side of the business, and ultimately will backfire. Their front-line OEMs, battling it out over pennies, may decide to take their ball and play on a more level playing field. MS is making the OS and this tablet HW? They are going to naturally have better info on what new capabilities the OS will have, have a better say as to what HW changes are coming, undoubtedly have a pricing advantage, etc.
Diablo 3 is inherently set to fail. This is coming from someone with 180+ hours into the game.
The game has been out 4 weeks so you're averaging 45 hours a week playing?! Holy crap!
Great post!
What I am saying is that you benefit from these things every day of your life. I don't understand how people can look down their nose at these methods while at the same time voluntarily benefiting from the consequences.
These kinds of people call themselves "Libertarians".
Want to create jobs, let businesses hire people without regulatory red tape and high costs (taxes)
And then what, have the public sue when your non-regulated drug company sells a product that kills people? Or sue when your non-regulated food company puts rotting meat up for sale? Sue when planes fall out of the sky due to shoddy construction? Etc.
Are you an attorney? Your "gov't get out of the way" society would turn into a giant "wealth transfer to attorneys" society, while regular people would be harmed non-stop.
Government cannot create private sector jobs. Period. They only thing government can do is take from the productive and give it to those that are not productive.
So explain to me how the following would come about if entirely funded by profit motivated corporations:
non-toll national highway system
space program
GPS (satellite constellation, see "space program")
nuclear technology, weapons/energy
the internet
Great comment... too often the zealots fails to see that the vast majority of people don't actually think of "farting around with computers" as their most important and enjoyable hobby.
I recently switched a notebook computer to Windows from Linux. Not because I don't like linux - now I've got 2 distros in VMs on that system - but because I needed/wanted that notebook to serve also serve as an actual notebook (i.e. working wireless networking) and as a secondary game system. I got tired of fiddling with building drivers, and wanted more gaming choices.
However, I personally am more interested in the ability of organise my desktop in such a way that maximises my ease of use, and productivity, without some idiot OS telling me that I can't use a mouse click that way. Most Windows users are quite astonished at the way I can stack up and organise active views on various projects.
And in turn, others might be interested in doing something besides stacking windows, perhaps they want to run certain applications. Myself, I got rid of one Linux box in favor of Windows, because I was tired of diddling with wireless drivers. Now I run Linux in VMs, which is the tradeoff I made to maximize my ease of use.
I think the answer to this, why that doesn't exist, is a misunderstanding.
The free-market isn't a magic factory that produces stuff tailored to your specific desires. It responds to aggregate demand. If this item isn't made then either 1) no corporation perceives demand, or 2) no corporation thinks they can make it AND sell it for more profit than some other product that is already out there.
I think #2 applies here. The people willing to buy a nicer laptop (screen, keyboard) at a higher price aren't a large enough market for a corporation to really care about. From their eyes, the delta in customers they would gain buying the fancier laptop, isn't worth it.
Security and best practices are an academic concepts that are not taught in school. Most people don't really care about security until it affects them.
And in turn, corporations don't care about security until is costs them money. Look at Microsoft, they didn't give a flip about security until sometime after Windows XP when that OS was getting owned left and right by malware. Which started to cost them, albeit indirectly.
How exactly will this cost LinkedIn? If it is being ridiculed in the press, they'll just ride it out and not care. If people leave in droves and their service becomes less valuable, or advertisers/customers jump ship, then they'll give a crap.
So, all of sudden, the entire tech world has decided that tablets are the future and desktop & mobile UIs will converge, even though historically it is the fact that they ended up being fundamentally different what made them succeed..
I must be stupid, but I truly and honestly still don't see why this wll happen, so I'd very much appreciate someone more tech-literate than me to explain the future.
Tablets are getting the attention since they are the "new" thing, with a larger potential market than regular PCs.
I'm kinda surprised people here don't get that. Just like in the old days of computing, when mainframes rules and PCs were solutions looking for problems (for home users, not for businesses), tablets and mobile will go on to penetrate the market (where market is "all people on the earth") further than PCs did ever did.
The PC was successful, is successful, and will continue to be successful, but a larger segment of humanity will find a use for tablets/mobile than PCs, just like more people have use for PCs than a mainframe. For every person who needs a PC to create something, there will be 10 people who can use a tablet to consume it.
Yes, because unless you plan to allow ALL religious references in public spaces, there will be problems.
Or were you some anonymous coward that thinks EVERYONE would be happy with $YOUR_RELIGION on display, funded by public money?
It's tough to give a blanket recommendation given I (nobody) can really know what you'll like, but my thinking on this is these games are available at such a low cost, it is worth getting them just to play for an hour each. And support the concept of multi-platform DRM-free gaming. With this bundle, you even get the soundtracks in 2 formats! If it turns out you like one, that's like icing on the cake.
I've thrown in $15 - $25 for each Humble Indie Bundle so far, and have found a few real gems in there. My favorite so far as in HIB 2 (I think): Space Chem, which is basically an organic chemistry puzzle game.
Anyway, I played Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP on my iPhone, partway, and look forward to having it around on all my systems. It's got simple graphics, but a quirky sense of humor (written dialog) and some great background music. I'd say check it out. YMMV as far as Metacritic scores, but I'll also note that all games in this bundle score well, above 80/100.
When a libertarian wants to do something, he does it without bothering anyone
When a liberal wants to do something, they make everyone do it
When a libertarian doesn't want to do something, he quietly doesn't do it
When a liberal doesn't want to do something, they make it so no-one may do it
Think about that next time you post some anti-libertarian trash on Slashdot. We just want to let you do what you want to do (unless you want to ban people from doing things, I guess that we won't let you do).
Bloomberg as a liberal, lol.
Anyway, libertarians should move to their own island - you know, just quietly do it without preaching their bullshittified utopian unrealistic views - and make everybody happy! Themselves, and everyone else since we wouldn't have to listen to them anymore! And in your little vaccum world, you could be as discriminatory as you want to be.
So what's the take on polygamy in the Libertarian world? Isn't restricting marriage to "only" 2 people against Libertarian ideals?
my property
And who exactly guarantees YOUR property rights? As opposed to the next bigger or better armed group that decides to steal it from you?
Who exactly is the police that protects you, the courts that prosecutes criminals, etc?
Sorry, but most Libertarian rants come off as clueless fucktards who don't admit the extent of their DEPENDENCY on the gov't they call evil at every turn.
I had a Blackberry Pearl that I used for ~2 years, and I liked it. Yes, even with the roller-ball and the "SureType" keyboard. It was fine as a phone and for text messages. Email was pretty decent too, even with the ever-blinking red light of "you've got mail". But the web browser and map apps (both included), weren't that great. I'd say terrible, but that is in comparison to what came afterwards. At the time it was OK, serviceable but not exactly easy/fun/compelling to use.
What exactly do you mean using it "as a smartphone (and not an App machine)"? If you aren't going to run apps, why get a smartphone? That was the conclusion I came to when I dropped the BB in favor of a Samsung Propel (a slider phone hiding a full keyboard) since at the time all I wanted was phone+text and the Propel was cheaper and didn't require a data plan.
While that is true to an extent, I don't think it fair to completely ignore how much money/effort/engineering went into developing the technology to even have a space program. Like how it was back in the 50's and 60's, entire fields of engineering, chemistry, lots of money needed to be invested without any clear expectation of profit.
Now, ~60 years later, a private company can come along and launch a rocket, but they also had 60+ more years of advancements to utilize.
Still, SpaceX's achivement is very impressive.
Now NASA funding should be for goals that are slightly beyond current tech. Robotics (for mining asteroids), putting satellites in orbit around planets for scientific purposes, better fuels, using robots to build bases on bodies in the solar system, etc.
I think the lesson of the "free-market" here is the regular people don't care what browser they use. The consumer choice made is what platform to buy/use, at the smartphone/tablet level, not at the tech details like which rendering engine is under the hood or whether or not they can swap between 5 different browsers on their device. They don't care about that stuff.
And I'm sure there are car geeks simply appalled with the car you own, food geeks who would vomit in horror at what you eat, beer/wine geeks who would rather die of thirst than drink whatever it is you like, music geeks who would pierce their eardrums rather than listen to your music collection, etc.
Basically, not everybody in this world actually cares about the same stuff you do, at the same level of intensity.