You say so, but look at the first declarations from this rat brain experiment: -Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight? -The same thing we do every night, Pinky - try to take over the world!
"Every signal that we have sent out requires them to be visually oriented. Do you think the TV signals we beam into space will make any sense to beings that communicate ultrasonically?"
Just to see if I understood clearly your point: an hypothetical alien race can detect our TV signals through light years of interstellar vacuum but then they fail to see there's something encoded within because they "communicate ultrasonically"!?
Or they somehow evolutioned to be able to meake use the horribly faint gravity waves but still have problems with the much more common electromagnetic spectrum?
Anyway... just think about it the SETI way: yes, comunication, as much as life itself, can take ways and patterns we can't even imagine, but the task now is not to detect or communicate with each and every life form over there but to detect or communicate with just one. It make sense to try for the true and tested patterns, the only we know for sure that can be produced: ours.
"I have a cousin that has been a guest speaker for several national talks about how to properly setup your storage"
And the hope is that he knows better what he talks about than you.
"Your servers should be setup in a way that a single controller does not take down the array"
No. My servers need to be setup in a way that supports my business case. Sometimes that means going real time fully geographically redundant out of multi-tiered multi-rack-sized storage units (I also managed i.e. 3PAR arrays... you know you are starting to talk big when you count your storage real state by rack cabinets, not disks), some others, I can and should go with a single humble COTS SATA disk.
"Even better is you can setup a master-master/slave shared SAS plane, so if one file-server dies, the slave picks up. Yes, you can allow multiple computers to directly share the same physical harddrives, FreeBSD supports that."
"Actually, no. many states are "prima facie" states"
So what?
"Exceeding the posted "limit" is not unlawful per se, but it is prima facie evidence of violation of the actual statute"
So still excessive speeding is whatever the law of the land sets as such, right?
"another group of states deliberately set the posted limit lower than is reasonable for the road in normal conditions in order to trap drivers to generate revenue"
That's what you say. Do you have evidence of that case? And, even if you found such an evidence, how lower than the "real" road limit the legal limit is? Whatever you "feel" in the given moment you happen to drive that road? I said two things: *operational* limits and 'dura lex sed lex'. Think about them for a while.
"If policy is an attempted experiment and governments always fail to conduct properly controlled experiments, doesn't that end up meaning that it actually is difficult to run controlled experiments in economics?"
No, it isn't an attempted experiment, it *is* an experiment. It's only the ones conducting it don't want to clearly state their expectancies, neither note down the results nor publish them to public scrutiny. See, you may say it's very difficult for you to leave the chair in front of your computer and offer as proof the fact that you didn't went up. No: going up is easy, it's only you don't want to, not the same thing.
"Generally speaking, I can see where you might be able to run very simple controlled experiments, like taking a hot dog cart to different corners in a city and see how geography affects hot dog sales. But even then you have more variables"
No, that's not how it works: you produce an hypothesis "within this theoretical framework, given variables A, B, C I predict that the hot dog chart X will sell 30% more than hot dog chart Y", then you put those two hot dog charts and see what happens.
If hot dog chart X in fact sells 30% more than hot dog chart Y, then your hypothesis gets reinforced but as soon as SINGLE ONE of your predictions fail you shout out loud "MY HYPOTHESIS IS BULL SHIT" and you go back to your cave to think about what happened, what you never do is go saying "well, my hypothesis is still valid, after all it worked the other 99 times"
Contrast this with what politicians do: -Back in 1973 we run into a crisis we thought we understood and applied keynesian supply-side policies; now, in 2008 we'll also think to understand this crisis and we'll apply keynesian supply-side policies too. -Yeah, well, but the fact is that you didn't understand 1973 crisis and your policies ended up into a stagflation scenario, which means the keynesian underlying theory is bollocks, right? -Yeah, well, whatever.
"So, the fact that Western economies make life longer... Get your head out of your ass."
Exactly the kind of thing being talked about here: on these kind of topics people let them go by their gut feelings, even when hard data can be easily found.
So no, "western economies" doesn't make life longer and, in fact, USA has always done merely so-so in this regard: look at the OECD tables and you'll see it belongs to the awkward squad, and the OECD doesn't even publish data about USA's infant mortality rates, probably because they are outright embarrasing for a first world country*3.
"It would be *extremely* difficult to run controlled experiments in economics."
No, it is extremely simple. In fact, it is so simple that every new government tries theirs as soon as it gets in charge: they call them policy. What you can't count on is controlled *repeatable* experiments. But, you see, theories doesn't need them either.
The problem is one of willness. Problem is those governments don't really want to conduct in proper way those experiments nor learn from the outputs and, much less, that citizenship can learn if their experiments tend to go as planned or not and, even less, if they are wanting to learn from their past experiences.
"...opposed to non-excessive speeding, which in no way directly causes an unsafe condition by itself."
Of course non-excessive speeding doesn't cause an unsafe condition. Excessive speeding on the other hand...
Now: with regards of excessive speeding, what's its operational definition? Yes: whatever the law of the land sets as such -'dura lex sed lex' and all that stuff.
"RAID5 increases the chance of needing to go to backup"
"Increases" implies a comparation. RAID5 increases chance of needing to go to backup compared to what? JBOD?
Of course RAID6 increases MTBF versus RAID5, that's its purpose. Now, you say from "rarely going" to "never in your life time". Surprise: cost also increases in more or less the same amount. Oh! and, by the way, I already told you that I managed quite a lot of systems. I *also* lost (in my lifetime, no less) RAID6 systems: once because of a malfunctioning controller and another one, believe or not, because of three disks dying in quick sucesion (from an array of seven).
"You're assuming that the only way to get things done in open source is to beg at the feet of the gate keepers"
Not at all. Where do I say you can't be one of the gatekeepers?
"If the gate keepers of these projects are truly detestable to work with, you really ought to take responsibility to fork the project and maintain your fork yourself."
This doesn't make what I said any less right. It's only that now you are one of the peer programers in control positions: now it is *you* then one that needs to be convinced to accept a patch.
"Don't use RAID5. When one drive dies, there is a very good chance another drive will die, even if the that drive is a different model or brand."
True, but "very good chance" is still less than 100%.
I had a lot of systems with RAID5 and so, I lost filesystems due to a second drive (and even a third) dying before recovering from the previous one but also a majority that didn't so, all in all, RAID5 showed its value.
Maybe you are one of those that think RAID means "backup" instead of "higher MTBF".
It's only that, well, yes it is. The vast majority of open source software projects, either successful or not, are the creation of just one single person. See? "person", as in "I don't give a damn if they are man, woman or aliens from XK-578".
Anyone can, say, open an account at github and publish their code to their leisure, accept patches from whoever they want and publish about their code and the community of users and developers they want to build around it as much as they want. It's difficult to think of any other human activity more agnostic to personal identity than producing software. And still, there's a gender bias: maybe it comes from somewhere different.
Wrong. We are talking here about open source. It is not users the ones that have access to a repo or apply the patch. Merit is judged by peers in control positions.
"How do they judge it? By using, or not using, code."
Wrong again. Peer programers in control positions judge the code they recieve by two main criteria: 1) They understand the code solves interesting problems 2) Code provided doesn't put those peer programers in control positions into undesired troubles.
"Is it a fair judgement? It is the only judgement that matters, whether it is "fair" or not."
I concur.
What about all the biases that everyone has?
"No one gives a crap about the gender of the person that wrote the code."
The peers in control positions shouldn't give a crap about gender and usually they really believe they don't give a crap. Not clear if that's always the case.
You see? the parent poster was begging the question about answers not being so easy as seem at first glance. Your answer (and mine) show him right.
"Finally, will your opinion on the above if uber drivers are ruled to be employees?"
Will... change, I suppose you mean. My opinion wouldn't change but, since the situation changes it would also change the output required from my opinion: there wouldn't be a private contractor, therefore the only entity that have to be looked after would be Uber.
Note I'm not against Uber drivers being contractors -as long as they are not hidden hires, or employees. In any case, proper legislation applies.
"Is there a single reason why soda companies would WANT people to keep on drinking soda?"
Well, in fact, there is: soda allows for stronger market recognition. It is obvious for the customer which one is Coca-Cola and which one is 7-Up therefore allowing marketing departments to deploy their fidelity thingies. But then, it's much more difficult to set apart Coca-Cola bottled water from Nestle bottled water and the entry barrier for new competitors becomes also lower. These are things you don't like when you are already a behemoth in that market.
"Not to mention it's bottled by the same companies like Pepsico and Coke that make soda."
Exactly that: the article's title "The Decline of 'Big Soda'" makes it sound as if 'Big Soda' companies were somehow endangered.
They go on saying "sales of full-calorie soda in the United States have plummeted". Well, what about non-full-calorie soda? Is Coca-Cola Light sold by a different company than the "normal" Coca-Cola now?
"So if people keep drinking water these companies have nothing to worry about."
Worried? They are delighted! They are basically selling tap water at the same price than soda, obviously making bigger profits.
There might be something on this news, but certainly nothing that timothy editor has highlighted.
"I'm not defending Uber, but what, as a passenger, do I gain by having the wetware in the taxi driver's head do the path-finding instead of the software on his computer?"
It's been said that "two people should be able to enter into their own contract" as a defense for Uber in a same free-market environment.
But it is also a well stated fact that in such free-market environment, contracts need to be perfected by the two parties being in full knowledge of the transaction. Taxis, by its own nature, make very difficult to set this level on knowledge: you reach a city and take a taxi which, at least for you, is no different than a thousand others, and after your trip, chances to ever see that taxi again are slim: the end result is that the customer is at a huge disadvantage on this relationship so, in order for the service to even operate, it gets regulated to return a fair balance on customer's expectations.
Uber tries to blow off this balance for their own profit in a race to the bottom, and naively thinking that the invisible hand will straight things out is just that: naive.
"At this point, it's known that uber will do anything for a buck, illegal or otherwise. If you use uber especially somewhere like London, you're part of the problem."
Well, said. Look at the comments: doesn't it look suspicious that the percentage of anonymous cowards here seems to be well over average?
The point is: yes, probably taxi regulations are suboptimal and, yes, Uber wants to throw all them off, disregarding if motivated or not, for their own profit, which shouldn't be tolerated.
There's, though, a point that I don't see usually highligthed and it is that, in the end, as Uber says once and again, it is not Uber the once driving the cars. But, still, governments are going against Uber and only against Uber, which shows it's not only Uber the one being greedy here, also governments.
In a sane scencario, governments would be after Uber on their contract relationship with drivers: are they following their due process? i.e.: drivers should be licensed (both to drive a car and operate a public transportation device), are they paying their taxes acording to local tax regulations? etc. *BUT* on the other hand, the onus of in fact being a private contractor and a taxi driver should be on the driver itself, which doesn't happen because government much prefers going after a single company than a thousand drivers and *that* part is unjust against Uber, no matter how is going everything else.
"Microsoft has tons of patents. Excel would not have existed if Microsoft had not cloned it from Lotus 1-2-3."
Was Microsoft a big company back when it "cloned" Lotus 1-2-3? (even if it had cloned it, which it didn't). No, it wasn't: therefore it is not an example of a big company eating the lunch of a little one because of patents.
Did Microsoft relied on patents for the success of Excel back then? Also no, and despite of that, IBM (the big fish in the pond, back then) didn't eat its lunch either, therefore an example of the world not working the way you think it should.
In fact, IBM, being "the big fish" is a very nice example of the world working in exactly the opposite way you stated: IBM wanted the PC market for themselves, after all, they invented it, and thought they could control it by means of patents. It ended up in the ISA wars utterly lost by IBM against the compatible alliance led by Compaq.
Re:Being a sysadmin is a career grave. Don't do it
on
30 Years a Sysadmin
·
· Score: 2
"Imagine you tried having sysadmins work Agile ten years ago: you would have been seen as mental."
You don't know what you are talking about. Sysadmin has always been agile: it has always been about pipelining and automation. True: tools and mindset had a boom very recently among the masses (virtualization on x86 in the early 200x was key for this) but you can go to http://www.infrastructures.org... (back to 1994), or have a look at cfengine (back to 1993) to understand that agilism has been always the case.
Maybe your confusion comes from Windows *operators* that bastardized the term "system administration" so it looked like the kind of things they were doing back then (and even today, for the most part).
"Yes, terrible! 1) The large, non-innovative company simply steals the work of another company expending neither effort, nor time, nor money, nor creativity. 2) Other startups refuse wasting time and money building new products. 3) Customer lives with the same crap product for decades."
Sensible rationale. It makes sense.
But real world seems to probe it doesn't work that way: software development, for instance, has flourished without the need of a strong patent chest. Neither Microsoft, nor Oracle, nor Google, nor Facebook, nor Twitter, nor SAP, nor Red Hat, etc. made their way into big companies thanks to strong patent protection for their innovations, but by being innovative, fast to implement and with good business acumen. It's arguable, though, that they acquired a strong patent portfolio once they were big as a war chest against other big companies also with large patent portfolios and to increase the entry barrier for new competitors.
Slashdot Mirror
You say so, but look at the first declarations from this rat brain experiment:
-Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?
-The same thing we do every night, Pinky - try to take over the world!
"Where the hell else can I carry it? I've got jeans and a t-shirt."
That's exactly why I use a fisher-style vest in summer.
"Every signal that we have sent out requires them to be visually oriented. Do you think the TV signals we beam into space will make any sense to beings that communicate ultrasonically?"
Just to see if I understood clearly your point: an hypothetical alien race can detect our TV signals through light years of interstellar vacuum but then they fail to see there's something encoded within because they "communicate ultrasonically"!?
Or they somehow evolutioned to be able to meake use the horribly faint gravity waves but still have problems with the much more common electromagnetic spectrum?
Anyway... just think about it the SETI way: yes, comunication, as much as life itself, can take ways and patterns we can't even imagine, but the task now is not to detect or communicate with each and every life form over there but to detect or communicate with just one. It make sense to try for the true and tested patterns, the only we know for sure that can be produced: ours.
"I have a cousin that has been a guest speaker for several national talks about how to properly setup your storage"
And the hope is that he knows better what he talks about than you.
"Your servers should be setup in a way that a single controller does not take down the array"
No. My servers need to be setup in a way that supports my business case. Sometimes that means going real time fully geographically redundant out of multi-tiered multi-rack-sized storage units (I also managed i.e. 3PAR arrays... you know you are starting to talk big when you count your storage real state by rack cabinets, not disks), some others, I can and should go with a single humble COTS SATA disk.
"Even better is you can setup a master-master/slave shared SAS plane, so if one file-server dies, the slave picks up. Yes, you can allow multiple computers to directly share the same physical harddrives, FreeBSD supports that."
And here you show for what you are, my cute PFY..
"Actually, no. many states are "prima facie" states"
So what?
"Exceeding the posted "limit" is not unlawful per se, but it is prima facie evidence of violation of the actual statute"
So still excessive speeding is whatever the law of the land sets as such, right?
"another group of states deliberately set the posted limit lower than is reasonable for the road in normal conditions in order to trap drivers to generate revenue"
That's what you say. Do you have evidence of that case? And, even if you found such an evidence, how lower than the "real" road limit the legal limit is? Whatever you "feel" in the given moment you happen to drive that road? I said two things: *operational* limits and 'dura lex sed lex'. Think about them for a while.
"If policy is an attempted experiment and governments always fail to conduct properly controlled experiments, doesn't that end up meaning that it actually is difficult to run controlled experiments in economics?"
No, it isn't an attempted experiment, it *is* an experiment. It's only the ones conducting it don't want to clearly state their expectancies, neither note down the results nor publish them to public scrutiny. See, you may say it's very difficult for you to leave the chair in front of your computer and offer as proof the fact that you didn't went up. No: going up is easy, it's only you don't want to, not the same thing.
"Generally speaking, I can see where you might be able to run very simple controlled experiments, like taking a hot dog cart to different corners in a city and see how geography affects hot dog sales. But even then you have more variables"
No, that's not how it works: you produce an hypothesis "within this theoretical framework, given variables A, B, C I predict that the hot dog chart X will sell 30% more than hot dog chart Y", then you put those two hot dog charts and see what happens.
If hot dog chart X in fact sells 30% more than hot dog chart Y, then your hypothesis gets reinforced but as soon as SINGLE ONE of your predictions fail you shout out loud "MY HYPOTHESIS IS BULL SHIT" and you go back to your cave to think about what happened, what you never do is go saying "well, my hypothesis is still valid, after all it worked the other 99 times"
Contrast this with what politicians do:
-Back in 1973 we run into a crisis we thought we understood and applied keynesian supply-side policies; now, in 2008 we'll also think to understand this crisis and we'll apply keynesian supply-side policies too.
-Yeah, well, but the fact is that you didn't understand 1973 crisis and your policies ended up into a stagflation scenario, which means the keynesian underlying theory is bollocks, right?
-Yeah, well, whatever.
"So, the fact that Western economies make life longer...
Get your head out of your ass."
Exactly the kind of thing being talked about here: on these kind of topics people let them go by their gut feelings, even when hard data can be easily found.
Life expectancy at birth, years 1985-1995*1:
USA | Cuba
1985 74.56 | 76.34
1986 74.61 | 76.43
1987 74.77 | 76.34
1988 74.77 | 76.49
1989 75.02 | 76.53
1990 75.21 | 76.53
1991 75.37 | 76.59
1992 75.64 | 76.65
1993 75.42 | 76.65
1994 75.57 | 76.65
1995 75.62 | 76.65
So no, "western economies" doesn't make life longer and, in fact, USA has always done merely so-so in this regard: look at the OECD tables and you'll see it belongs to the awkward squad, and the OECD doesn't even publish data about USA's infant mortality rates, probably because they are outright embarrasing for a first world country*3.
*1http://www.indexmundi.com/
*2 https://data.oecd.org/healthst...
*3 https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...
"It would be *extremely* difficult to run controlled experiments in economics."
No, it is extremely simple. In fact, it is so simple that every new government tries theirs as soon as it gets in charge: they call them policy. What you can't count on is controlled *repeatable* experiments. But, you see, theories doesn't need them either.
The problem is one of willness. Problem is those governments don't really want to conduct in proper way those experiments nor learn from the outputs and, much less, that citizenship can learn if their experiments tend to go as planned or not and, even less, if they are wanting to learn from their past experiences.
"...opposed to non-excessive speeding, which in no way directly causes an unsafe condition by itself."
Of course non-excessive speeding doesn't cause an unsafe condition. Excessive speeding on the other hand...
Now: with regards of excessive speeding, what's its operational definition? Yes: whatever the law of the land sets as such -'dura lex sed lex' and all that stuff.
"RAID5 increases the chance of needing to go to backup"
"Increases" implies a comparation. RAID5 increases chance of needing to go to backup compared to what? JBOD?
Of course RAID6 increases MTBF versus RAID5, that's its purpose. Now, you say from "rarely going" to "never in your life time". Surprise: cost also increases in more or less the same amount. Oh! and, by the way, I already told you that I managed quite a lot of systems. I *also* lost (in my lifetime, no less) RAID6 systems: once because of a malfunctioning controller and another one, believe or not, because of three disks dying in quick sucesion (from an array of seven).
"You're assuming that the only way to get things done in open source is to beg at the feet of the gate keepers"
Not at all. Where do I say you can't be one of the gatekeepers?
"If the gate keepers of these projects are truly detestable to work with, you really ought to take responsibility to fork the project and maintain your fork yourself."
This doesn't make what I said any less right. It's only that now you are one of the peer programers in control positions: now it is *you* then one that needs to be convinced to accept a patch.
"Don't use RAID5. When one drive dies, there is a very good chance another drive will die, even if the that drive is a different model or brand."
True, but "very good chance" is still less than 100%.
I had a lot of systems with RAID5 and so, I lost filesystems due to a second drive (and even a third) dying before recovering from the previous one but also a majority that didn't so, all in all, RAID5 showed its value.
Maybe you are one of those that think RAID means "backup" instead of "higher MTBF".
"But that's not how it works in real life."
It's only that, well, yes it is. The vast majority of open source software projects, either successful or not, are the creation of just one single person. See? "person", as in "I don't give a damn if they are man, woman or aliens from XK-578".
Anyone can, say, open an account at github and publish their code to their leisure, accept patches from whoever they want and publish about their code and the community of users and developers they want to build around it as much as they want. It's difficult to think of any other human activity more agnostic to personal identity than producing software. And still, there's a gender bias: maybe it comes from somewhere different.
"Who judges merit?
The users."
Wrong. We are talking here about open source. It is not users the ones that have access to a repo or apply the patch. Merit is judged by peers in control positions.
"How do they judge it?
By using, or not using, code."
Wrong again. Peer programers in control positions judge the code they recieve by two main criteria:
1) They understand the code solves interesting problems
2) Code provided doesn't put those peer programers in control positions into undesired troubles.
"Is it a fair judgement?
It is the only judgement that matters, whether it is "fair" or not."
I concur.
What about all the biases that everyone has?
"No one gives a crap about the gender of the person that wrote the code."
The peers in control positions shouldn't give a crap about gender and usually they really believe they don't give a crap. Not clear if that's always the case.
You see? the parent poster was begging the question about answers not being so easy as seem at first glance. Your answer (and mine) show him right.
"To see Uber as anti-regulation is to miss the point."
It dismisses regulations for their own profit no matter how intelligent your argument seems to you.
"They are merely a much better regulator that uses 21st century tools."
and naively thinking that the invisible hand will straight things out is just that: naive.
"Finally, will your opinion on the above if uber drivers are ruled to be employees?"
Will... change, I suppose you mean. My opinion wouldn't change but, since the situation changes it would also change the output required from my opinion: there wouldn't be a private contractor, therefore the only entity that have to be looked after would be Uber.
Note I'm not against Uber drivers being contractors -as long as they are not hidden hires, or employees. In any case, proper legislation applies.
"Is there a single reason why soda companies would WANT people to keep on drinking soda?"
Well, in fact, there is: soda allows for stronger market recognition. It is obvious for the customer which one is Coca-Cola and which one is 7-Up therefore allowing marketing departments to deploy their fidelity thingies. But then, it's much more difficult to set apart Coca-Cola bottled water from Nestle bottled water and the entry barrier for new competitors becomes also lower. These are things you don't like when you are already a behemoth in that market.
"Not to mention it's bottled by the same companies like Pepsico and Coke that make soda."
Exactly that: the article's title "The Decline of 'Big Soda'" makes it sound as if 'Big Soda' companies were somehow endangered.
They go on saying "sales of full-calorie soda in the United States have plummeted". Well, what about non-full-calorie soda? Is Coca-Cola Light sold by a different company than the "normal" Coca-Cola now?
"So if people keep drinking water these companies have nothing to worry about."
Worried? They are delighted! They are basically selling tap water at the same price than soda, obviously making bigger profits.
There might be something on this news, but certainly nothing that timothy editor has highlighted.
"I'm not defending Uber, but what, as a passenger, do I gain by having the wetware in the taxi driver's head do the path-finding instead of the software on his computer?"
It's been said that "two people should be able to enter into their own contract" as a defense for Uber in a same free-market environment.
But it is also a well stated fact that in such free-market environment, contracts need to be perfected by the two parties being in full knowledge of the transaction. Taxis, by its own nature, make very difficult to set this level on knowledge: you reach a city and take a taxi which, at least for you, is no different than a thousand others, and after your trip, chances to ever see that taxi again are slim: the end result is that the customer is at a huge disadvantage on this relationship so, in order for the service to even operate, it gets regulated to return a fair balance on customer's expectations.
Uber tries to blow off this balance for their own profit in a race to the bottom, and naively thinking that the invisible hand will straight things out is just that: naive.
"At this point, it's known that uber will do anything for a buck, illegal or otherwise. If you use uber especially somewhere like London, you're part of the problem."
Well, said. Look at the comments: doesn't it look suspicious that the percentage of anonymous cowards here seems to be well over average?
The point is: yes, probably taxi regulations are suboptimal and, yes, Uber wants to throw all them off, disregarding if motivated or not, for their own profit, which shouldn't be tolerated.
There's, though, a point that I don't see usually highligthed and it is that, in the end, as Uber says once and again, it is not Uber the once driving the cars. But, still, governments are going against Uber and only against Uber, which shows it's not only Uber the one being greedy here, also governments.
In a sane scencario, governments would be after Uber on their contract relationship with drivers: are they following their due process? i.e.: drivers should be licensed (both to drive a car and operate a public transportation device), are they paying their taxes acording to local tax regulations? etc. *BUT* on the other hand, the onus of in fact being a private contractor and a taxi driver should be on the driver itself, which doesn't happen because government much prefers going after a single company than a thousand drivers and *that* part is unjust against Uber, no matter how is going everything else.
"explain to me why a taxi license costs $1M"
I find very difficult to believe that a taxi license costs 1M US$... in London.
"Proposing a workaround to a shortcoming is implying a pilot's shortcoming in the first place"
Having a pilot *is* a shortcoming in any modern-age fighter plane, so I don't see your point.
"Microsoft has tons of patents. Excel would not have existed if Microsoft had not cloned it from Lotus 1-2-3."
Was Microsoft a big company back when it "cloned" Lotus 1-2-3? (even if it had cloned it, which it didn't). No, it wasn't: therefore it is not an example of a big company eating the lunch of a little one because of patents.
Did Microsoft relied on patents for the success of Excel back then? Also no, and despite of that, IBM (the big fish in the pond, back then) didn't eat its lunch either, therefore an example of the world not working the way you think it should.
In fact, IBM, being "the big fish" is a very nice example of the world working in exactly the opposite way you stated: IBM wanted the PC market for themselves, after all, they invented it, and thought they could control it by means of patents. It ended up in the ISA wars utterly lost by IBM against the compatible alliance led by Compaq.
"Imagine you tried having sysadmins work Agile ten years ago: you would have been seen as mental."
You don't know what you are talking about. Sysadmin has always been agile: it has always been about pipelining and automation. True: tools and mindset had a boom very recently among the masses (virtualization on x86 in the early 200x was key for this) but you can go to http://www.infrastructures.org... (back to 1994), or have a look at cfengine (back to 1993) to understand that agilism has been always the case.
Maybe your confusion comes from Windows *operators* that bastardized the term "system administration" so it looked like the kind of things they were doing back then (and even today, for the most part).
"Yes, terrible!
1) The large, non-innovative company simply steals the work of another company expending neither effort, nor time, nor money, nor creativity.
2) Other startups refuse wasting time and money building new products.
3) Customer lives with the same crap product for decades."
Sensible rationale. It makes sense.
But real world seems to probe it doesn't work that way: software development, for instance, has flourished without the need of a strong patent chest. Neither Microsoft, nor Oracle, nor Google, nor Facebook, nor Twitter, nor SAP, nor Red Hat, etc. made their way into big companies thanks to strong patent protection for their innovations, but by being innovative, fast to implement and with good business acumen. It's arguable, though, that they acquired a strong patent portfolio once they were big as a war chest against other big companies also with large patent portfolios and to increase the entry barrier for new competitors.