No offense, but if I'm an ET, and the race I just dropped into visit hasn't gotten around to figuring out how to stop the #1 genetic suicide mechanism built into their own bodies, I'm NOT helping them. Then again, that's the human in me talking.
Paintballs. Neon Pink Hellfire paintballs. Preferably on your neighbors dogs who've been chewing up your rabbits. Or on your neighbors. I'm not picky.:-)
Or just create up a text file with false headers, and pump it to a telnet session connected to your local mail server on port 25.:-)
SMTP is such a wonderfully delicious hacking tool. And the lack of any sort of digital signatures on 99% of business related email that goes out surely can't hurt either.:-)
Not that I've actually had to resort to this....... much.
Right. Instead of having the employees making dozens of personal calls on their desk phones at the unbelievable markup that businesses are charged per minute.:-/
I used arch paging up in the northeast U.S. for years, and let me tell you, that signal would penetrate a BUNKER. Places I couldn't see the sun would still get pager reception. good luck getting a cellphone to find a cell, even when the tower was 200 yards away.
If by innovation you mean: I slave over a hot soldering iron building the "next-big-thing", and then go and sell it on the market, and finally IBM comes along and builds a duplicate of said item for 1/10th the price I can (due to economies of scale, say)
Then you are right. No patent system invented in the history of the world will prevent human innovation. The question is, do *I* deserve a certain period of time with which to earn money on my invention?
I'm torn. I'm a direct beneficiary of the patent system, but I'm also disturbed by the inept patent examination process...
As to the industrial revolution: during the 19th century, more than a few patents were granted to inventors. Our infrastructure today may be a perverted vision of what the "Framers" set forth, but it has existed and functioned for the history of our country.
There's a few questions that need to be asked: 1. Do we care about innovation for us all, costs
be damned
Result: individual inventors will get discouraged everytime some big corp steals their idea and undercuts them.
We (the royal we) win, inventor loses 2. Do we care that the inventor receive his just reward? Some of which includes building a company, hiring people, providing jobs, etc. This provides both society and inventor reward, and is the lynchpin of the American Dream.
We win, inventor wins.
I'm for option 2, myself, as much as I wish option 1 could work.
I think you are a bit naive, here. Hundreds of thousands of dollars barely pays for the costs of a patent, let alone any kind of significant R&D project.
I can tell you affirmatively that it takes less than $1000 and a good idea for a patent. If what you say is true, you are only buttressing his argument. A company can still be nimble, yet have to spend significant amounts of money on R&D.
That's a completely naive analysis of cost structure. Even if the other company were completely copying your product, in addition to production, they would have to spend a lot of money on development and marketing, and reverse engineering is often more costly than just doing the research themselves.
Not necessarily true. They can steal employees away, litigate, and *STILL* dominate your market. Figuring out how to make silicon-on-insulator work was a lot harder than building the equipment to make it work. Look at drug research. Figuring out that enzyme X does such and such when combined with chemical Z is a lot harder than simply synthesizing said concoction.
See, here you contradict yourself. On the one hand, you claim that your competitors can crank out copies of your products with no more than production costs, and on the other hand, you say that even small changes require you to "retool your fab".
Silicon on insulator isn't a cheap thing to implement. Going from UV to xray photolithography isn't cheap. Going from galium arsenide to copper substrate isn't either. Just because a change is "simple" doesn't mean that it doesn't require massive infrastructure alterations. Such as assumption is at best naive.
(only large companies with big legal staffs can enter that lottery, however).
This shows how ignorant you really are, and how little time you spend in the real world. I know more than one inventor who's made his livelihood for less than $1000 in patent attorney and appliation fees and a little blood sweat and tears. That, and that reason alone, is the entire reason the patent system is WORTH the crap we have to put up with, so that nimble young (old) minds with an itch to scratch and a solution can create and innovate, without fear some faceless corporation is going to stomp them before they can even get their feet under them.
You are just looking for the government to give your company a nice, guaranteed handout for the next 20 years
No, he's not. He's asking the government to grant his device protections against competition for 20 years so that he can attempt to let market forces give him money. He might get that money by selling(licensing) that invention to other "Evil Mega Corps", he might not. At no time is the government giving him a handout or free money.
What if this guy works in a 4 person electronics shop? Are you going to tell him that he should just close up shop and go work for Texas Instruments or Intel and just give up? Great, destroy the American Dream while you're at it.
What patents do, and this is a bit forgotten in this day and age of patent corruption, is protect the "small guy". The guy who's got a great invention, but no capital to finance it's sale/construction en mass. As a child of an inventor who had zero money to dominate a market quickly, I saw first hand how the patent system allowed said inventor to generate earning potential.
To all of you complaining that we need to do away with patents, I don't see how that'd work, unless you want a world RULED by Evil-Mega-Corps. Reform, yes. Abolition, no!
Sure, as soon as I get a refund for Iraq, the Crusader artillery vehicle, and the GHWB Bush aircraft carrier currently under construction, and the SS bodyguard contingent protecting my President from rogue assassins. I don't feel it's worth my money protecting that stooge.
The CAIB made some recommendations, particularly wrt to the tile repair kit that are incompatible with a Hubble launch. O'Keefe knows this, and in the spirit of being a "willing conspirator" is obeying the CAIB recommendations. This has the (un)fortunate side-effect of putting the onus of a Hubble launch, and most of the blame should something go wrong, on a bipartisan Congress that wants to see the Hubble mission go.
He's playing politics with the best of 'em. I figure in the end, the mission will get the green-light, but it will be because Congress made NASA do it.
but that would presuppose a universe expanding at or faster than the speed of light, would it not? Because sooner or later, the galaxies that formed on the other side of that 13billion years ago are going to start shining through. We may be dead and forgotten, but it *SHOULD* happen sooner or later, right?
So what you are saying, is if the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and these objects are 800 million years old, and this isn't the "end of the universe itself", we can expect to see more structured galaxies popping into view no more than 1.6 billion years from now?
Cuz that's what my 3 dimensional brain tells me will happen...
Just let me try and wrap my head around something here. Is it at all conceivable that one of the galaxies we are looking at at the far "end" of time could be our very own milky way? Or that any number of galaxies we've imaged over the past 100 years are our own galaxy in various stages of evolution?
Because even though I concede, yeah, it's possible, it would require an expansion rate of the universe (far?) greater than the speed of light.
Please help a 3 dimensional brain understand a 4 dimensional universe (where objects 13 billion years old might be sitting right next door (metaphyically speaking) to us right now.
And what the hell does that mean? If I keep looking 30billion light years out, do I suddenly see myself looking back at me? Cuz I tell ya, that would just FREAK ME OUT.:-)
Which doesn't do anything to help it see the light and frequencies that the earth's atmosphere blocks. I find it despicable that we are going to let a manageable resource fall into disrepair simply because we feel a shuttle is too "risky". Fine, use Soyuz and Progress vessels to fix the Hubble.
All this "The hubble will die" crap is the new director pissing all over Congress, saying "You gave me the new rules to obey, it's up to you to break them", and then get to run roughshod all over congress when they finally change their minds. It's a good plan, BTW. Wish I had thought of it.
I do sell intellectual property, and in many cases, don't particular care if it gets used by unlicensed people. Those who need exposure, will do anything to get it (starving artist syndrome).
What keeps me using purchased microsoft product, however attractive those eastern european CD knockoffs are, is the assurance I'm getting virus/trojan free software. For me, that's worth the $200-300 price tag.
Says who? Linux has been running just fine on 4ways for a long time now... There may be special simulation packages unavailable to me (if I did work in that realm, which I don't) but 4way machines are still very useful to me, since I *DO* serious database work and development, and have chosen the virtualization route. Since one $5000 computer is more valuable to me than 10 $500 computers.
Not calculus, per se, but statistics. I've had need of higher math at least 6 times the past year, and it all stems from my brain not knowing how to create an equation able to solve my problem (silly things like how many gumballs in a car going 60mph, they hit a wall, how long does it take the gumballs at the back of the car to stop decellerating type of things)... which probably don't need calculus, but all my math skillz are lost to the depths of time and having used my math book as a pillow...
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No offense, but if I'm an ET, and the race I just dropped into visit hasn't gotten around to figuring out how to stop the #1 genetic suicide mechanism built into their own bodies, I'm NOT helping them.
Then again, that's the human in me talking.
Explain that in ingrish for us poor schleps who didn't get that the first time around?
Paintballs. Neon Pink Hellfire paintballs. Preferably on your neighbors dogs who've been chewing up your rabbits. Or on your neighbors. I'm not picky. :-)
Hmmm.. seems I remember reading this very scenario in Sum of All Fears. Thank you for the great idea Tom Clancy...
(realizing of course that tom clancy stands on the shoulders of giants, and this idea was not his own...)
Or just create up a text file with false headers, and pump it to a telnet session connected to your local mail server on port 25. :-)
:-)
... much.
SMTP is such a wonderfully delicious hacking tool. And the lack of any sort of digital signatures on 99% of business related email that goes out surely can't hurt either.
Not that I've actually had to resort to this....
Or sleeping 25 miles away.
Right. Instead of having the employees making dozens of personal calls on their desk phones at the unbelievable markup that businesses are charged per minute. :-/
I used arch paging up in the northeast U.S. for years, and let me tell you, that signal would penetrate a BUNKER. Places I couldn't see the sun would still get pager reception. good luck getting a cellphone to find a cell, even when the tower was 200 yards away.
If by innovation you mean: I slave over a hot soldering iron building the "next-big-thing", and then go and sell it on the market, and finally IBM comes along and builds a duplicate of said item for 1/10th the price I can (due to economies of scale, say)
Then you are right. No patent system invented in the history of the world will prevent human innovation. The question is, do *I* deserve a certain period of time with which to earn money on my invention?
I'm torn. I'm a direct beneficiary of the patent system, but I'm also disturbed by the inept patent examination process...
As to the industrial revolution: during the 19th century, more than a few patents were granted to inventors. Our infrastructure today may be a perverted vision of what the "Framers" set forth, but it has existed and functioned for the history of our country.
There's a few questions that need to be asked:
1. Do we care about innovation for us all, costs
be damned
Result: individual inventors will get discouraged everytime some big corp steals their idea and undercuts them.
We (the royal we) win, inventor loses
2. Do we care that the inventor receive his just reward? Some of which includes building a company, hiring people, providing jobs, etc. This provides both society and inventor reward, and is the lynchpin of the American Dream.
We win, inventor wins.
I'm for option 2, myself, as much as I wish option 1 could work.
-Chris
I think you are a bit naive, here. Hundreds of thousands of dollars barely pays for the costs of a patent, let alone any kind of significant R&D project.
I can tell you affirmatively that it takes less than $1000 and a good idea for a patent. If what you say is true, you are only buttressing his argument. A company can still be nimble, yet have to spend significant amounts of money on R&D.
That's a completely naive analysis of cost structure. Even if the other company were completely copying your product, in addition to production, they would have to spend a lot of money on development and marketing, and reverse engineering is often more costly than just doing the research themselves.
Not necessarily true. They can steal employees away, litigate, and *STILL* dominate your market. Figuring out how to make silicon-on-insulator work was a lot harder than building the equipment to make it work. Look at drug research. Figuring out that enzyme X does such and such when combined with chemical Z is a lot harder than simply synthesizing said concoction.
See, here you contradict yourself. On the one hand, you claim that your competitors can crank out copies of your products with no more than production costs, and on the other hand, you say that even small changes require you to "retool your fab".
Silicon on insulator isn't a cheap thing to implement. Going from UV to xray photolithography isn't cheap. Going from galium arsenide to copper substrate isn't either. Just because a change is "simple" doesn't mean that it doesn't require massive infrastructure alterations. Such as assumption is at best naive.
(only large companies with big legal staffs can enter that lottery, however).
This shows how ignorant you really are, and how little time you spend in the real world. I know more than one inventor who's made his livelihood for less than $1000 in patent attorney and appliation fees and a little blood sweat and tears. That, and that reason alone, is the entire reason the patent system is WORTH the crap we have to put up with, so that nimble young (old) minds with an itch to scratch and a solution can create and innovate, without fear some faceless corporation is going to stomp them before they can even get their feet under them.
You are just looking for the government to give your company a nice, guaranteed handout for the next 20 years
No, he's not. He's asking the government to grant his device protections against competition for 20 years so that he can attempt to let market forces give him money. He might get that money by selling(licensing) that invention to other "Evil Mega Corps", he might not. At no time is the government giving him a handout or free money.
What if this guy works in a 4 person electronics shop? Are you going to tell him that he should just close up shop and go work for Texas Instruments or Intel and just give up? Great, destroy the American Dream while you're at it.
HAND.
-Chris
What patents do, and this is a bit forgotten in this day and age of patent corruption, is protect the "small guy". The guy who's got a great invention, but no capital to finance it's sale/construction en mass. As a child of an inventor who had zero money to dominate a market quickly, I saw first hand how the patent system allowed said inventor to generate earning potential.
To all of you complaining that we need to do away with patents, I don't see how that'd work, unless you want a world RULED by Evil-Mega-Corps. Reform, yes. Abolition, no!
Sure, as soon as I get a refund for Iraq, the Crusader artillery vehicle, and the GHWB Bush aircraft carrier currently under construction, and the SS bodyguard contingent protecting my President from rogue assassins. I don't feel it's worth my money protecting that stooge.
The CAIB made some recommendations, particularly wrt to the tile repair kit that are incompatible with a Hubble launch. O'Keefe knows this, and in the spirit of being a "willing conspirator" is obeying the CAIB recommendations. This has the (un)fortunate side-effect of putting the onus of a Hubble launch, and most of the blame should something go wrong, on a bipartisan Congress that wants to see the Hubble mission go.
He's playing politics with the best of 'em. I figure in the end, the mission will get the green-light, but it will be because Congress made NASA do it.
-Chris
If I have a ZERO % chance of coming back, I will volunteer to clean the toilets on whatever shuttle flight services Hubble.
NASA, you listening?
Actually, they do have a plan. Several in fact: DC-X, Venturestar, the "original shuttle design". Just don't have the money. :-)
but that would presuppose a universe expanding at or faster than the speed of light, would it not? Because sooner or later, the galaxies that formed on the other side of that 13billion years ago are going to start shining through. We may be dead and forgotten, but it *SHOULD* happen sooner or later, right?
So what you are saying, is if the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and these objects are 800 million
years old, and this isn't the "end of the universe itself", we can expect to see more structured galaxies popping into view no more than 1.6 billion years from now?
Cuz that's what my 3 dimensional brain tells me will happen...
Just let me try and wrap my head around something here. Is it at all conceivable that one of the galaxies we are looking at at the far "end" of time could be our very own milky way? Or that any number of galaxies we've imaged over the past 100 years are our own galaxy in various stages of evolution?
Because even though I concede, yeah, it's possible, it would require an expansion rate of the universe (far?) greater than the speed of light.
Please help a 3 dimensional brain understand a 4 dimensional universe (where objects 13 billion years old might be sitting right next door (metaphyically speaking) to us right now.
And what the hell does that mean? If I keep looking 30billion light years out, do I suddenly see myself looking back at me? Cuz I tell ya, that would just FREAK ME OUT. :-)
If they'd just put a parachute on the crew cabin, we wouldn't be HAVING this discussion... :-)
Which doesn't do anything to help it see the light and frequencies that the earth's atmosphere blocks. I find it despicable that we are going to let a manageable resource fall into disrepair simply because we feel a shuttle is too "risky". Fine, use Soyuz and Progress vessels to fix the Hubble.
All this "The hubble will die" crap is the new director pissing all over Congress, saying "You gave me the new rules to obey, it's up to you to break them", and then get to run roughshod all over congress when they finally change their minds. It's a good plan, BTW. Wish I had thought of it.
I do sell intellectual property, and in many cases, don't particular care if it gets used by unlicensed people. Those who need exposure, will do anything to get it (starving artist syndrome).
What keeps me using purchased microsoft product, however attractive those eastern european CD knockoffs are, is the assurance I'm getting virus/trojan free software. For me, that's worth the $200-300 price tag.
Says who? Linux has been running just fine on 4ways for a long time now... There may be special simulation packages unavailable to me (if I did work in that realm, which I don't) but 4way machines are still very useful to me, since I *DO* serious database work and development, and have chosen the virtualization route. Since one $5000 computer is more valuable to me than 10 $500 computers.
Ahhh... too late, Itanic did that about 3 years ago, and AMD did it not just 4 or 6 months ago... Sorry dude, quadwords are the future!
Not calculus, per se, but statistics. I've had need of higher math at least 6 times the past year, and it all stems from my brain not knowing how to create an equation able to solve my problem (silly things like how many gumballs in a car going 60mph, they hit a wall, how long does it take the gumballs at the back of the car to stop decellerating type of things)... which probably don't need calculus, but all my math skillz are lost to the depths of time and having used my math book as a pillow...