You are wrong. Your premise is correct, but your conclusion is wrong. You're advocating what's effectively a position of anarchy, and if you know history, you'll know that anarchy is not a course that will lead to progress.
See, there's something called economies of scale. A new product is expensive because it costs a lot to manufacture. It costs a lot to manufacture because the company manufacturing it does not know exactly how well it will sell, and hence will only allocate a certain amount of resources into making it. I.e., it will not make very many units.
This is true of all industries that deal with material goods.
Once a company has sales data, it can then begin to ramp up its production. Prices will then fall. How well a company does this, how quickly it responds to the rise or fall of demand, is a significant competitive advantage. This is why a lot of companies are focusing on point-of-sale tracking, and why you're seeing all these advertisements from IBM about "analytics".
A large company with much more resources (material property and capital) can ramp up much more quickly than a small business. This is a fact. Companies with lots of resources that cannot do this die very quickly and sometimes violently. It's a matter of survival of the fittest, and the fitness, like natural processes, is determined by how quickly and efficiently the organism can adapt.
Without patents, your small inventor is going to be ultimately completely screwed. While the new product is still in a niche market, the small inventor's small company will thrive. At this time, large companies will take notice. They will begin to copy the product. But they probably won't sell the copied product immediately. Instead, they'll sit on it and wait until the market leaves its niche status. If this never happens, the copy is shelved and the large company focuses on a different product. But once the product has sufficient market, the large company will jump in. It will out-manufacture the small company (who by now, isn't very small, but is still tiny when compared to the large company), and be able to sell at much lower prices.
Now, if the small company can ramp up production quickly enough, and with enough marketing dollars, the small company can regain much of this lost market within a short amount of time. However, the large company has a lot of revenue streams. And it can still thrive even if one product is losing money. The small company, with far fewer revenue streams, cannot afford to take a loss on their best-selling product. So the large company will go into a price war with the small company. And the large company will win.
But say that multiple large companies jump in at the same time, and that they will all be fighting to gain control of the market of this product. That still doesn't help the small company, because all that will do is drive the price down to its bare minimum, and again, based on economies of scale, the small company will not be able to sell as low as the large company.
The only way out for the small company is to out-innovate the large companies. The inventor who owns the small company needs to be one step ahead of the mass of resources the large company can bring to the table. Sometimes, this is possible. Most of the time, it is not.
Now, this is purely an economic viewpoint of what would happen if patents are removed. From a social viewpoint, it will discourage innovation. Why? Because people will realize that if they want to bring to market a new invention, they're facing a significant uphill battle, one that will not end until they become a large company themselves, or their company dies. So what they will do is work for an existing large company instead. It is a much easier way out, and people with starving kids waiting at the dining table for them to come home with the bacon will take that way.
So all of the potential inventors and innovators will go work for large companies. Large companies are risk adverse. Car companies spent millions to bury n
Even if Apple seriously screws up the next generation, I think Microsoft is still far from being in a position to take over. Their Windows Phone software is not terribly popular, and their partners are all very, very wary of their antics, i.e. nobody would willingly partner with them. They have no good will left among the industry, and besides manufacturers, there are no developers interested in making their platform successful. Nokia doesn't count because it's rather clear Nokia is running around the smartphone market with neither direction nor purpose.
Android is, however, in a good position to take over. And not necessarily Samsung Android, but a lot of the smaller phone makers like HTC or Motorola would gobble up chunks of Apple's lost market share. In fact, they may already be taking over, albeit slowly.
This is assuming Apple's next generation phone really bombs. That in and of itself is highly unlikely. Even when the iPhone had trouble making and receiving phone calls (a death sentence for most other phones, if there ever was one), the only impact was Apple and 3rd party case makers selling more cases.
Social media, by definition, is an invasion of privacy. Except it's usually not some faceless corporation invading your privacy, but yourself, and the people with whom you socialize.
You can't socialize without giving up some privacy, plain and simple. And you're not going to be able to do socialize online, where all data is stored digitally and can be copied on a whim, without exposing your socializing to the entire world. Whether the rest of the world cares is another matter altogether.
Yeah, if the fail-safe is working as intended. I'm not saying every mine suffers this problem, just that if enough are deployed, there's bound to be a few.
You can think of the WTO as a mediator on trade disputes.
They have no power to stop the trade disputes. But they can determine what's "fair" and limit the effect of the dispute to just the relevant parties.
Without the WTO, the U.S. could say, convince the Great Britian with lies to do something to Antigua. They still can strong-arm other countries, but they have less of a standing to do so, since the dispute and mediation process is out in the open.
A lot free software is written collaboratively. That means that the copyright is held not by one individual, but by multiple ones. And the thing about free software is that the individuals holding the copyright may not be in the U.S. Hence a violation of free software copyrights would be a potential violation of that other country's copyright laws.
Yes, they can pull the pieces of code written by U.S. contributors only and redistribute that. But to be honest, I don't think that's worth the effort. There are bigger, easier, and more worthwhile fish in the sea.
I was more excited about the A380 myself, but I realize that there's a very small market for such large planes.
The 787 is using a lot of unproven tech. "Revolutionary" is good when it's built on sound fundamentals. I'm not sure the 787 was built this way. Rather, I suspect it was built on barely-good-enough and laboratory-tested, which are not encouraging signs.
There's a reason why a lot of civilian technology comes out of military research. Using it in the military will test the technology in the real world to hell and back again (literally, even). And the military can compensate for greater risk of partial or full failure, both by the operators' prior training and greater built in redundancy as a result of a higher price tag that only the military would pay.
I don't think the technology used in the 787 came out of this system.
It was a local phenomenon, I believe. The volume of particulates being put out didn't change, it just concentrated in one location and sat there. Once it dissipated, everything was back to normal again.
Though, I wonder if the current cold snap can be partially if not fully attributed to this event.
Sorry, NK is not the enemy of the U.S. They may be an enemy of U.S. interests, but you should read "U.S. interests" as "things the very wealthy and very powerful want but cannot get without government intervention" so for laymen like ourselves, NK is a non-issue.
The enemy of the U.S. people are the corporations and special interests that control the government. Until people start realizing this, they'll just continue to get hit with the fallout from the U.S. government protecting its "interests."
Meanwhile, the U.S. is run by career politicians and lawyers.
I'm not sure which is worse, quite frankly. While I'm partial to engineers myself, most of them are not very good when it comes to dealing with unpredictable systems like people.
That depends on if you're talking about cloud storage or cloud computing.
Encrypting your data is pointless for cloud computing. You're better off asking whether your data is stored in an encrypted file system of some sort. Encrypting your data for putting onto cloud storage is more practical. Yes, the "client" you install may have the ability to root your computer on command, but you might as well unplug the cable going out to the WAN from your home network if you're that afraid of people getting access to your data.
Propoganda always works against an intellectually lazy, shallow, disinterested, and ignorant population. Why do you think there's been such a concerted attack from the government on our primary education system over the past 10-15 years?
I think your scope is a bit too narrow. All "intellectual property" has this effect. All of it needs reform (sans trademark, which is more for consumer protection than a piece of "property").
Sinofsky? You mean the guy who came up with the clusterfuck that's Windows RT/8? Really?
I'd much rather have J Allard at the helm, the guy responsible for the XBox and the guy who came up with the Courier. Give me the visionary. I couldn't care less for the Jobs wannabe.
I know RIM will give the government its encryption keys at the drop of a hat, but I figure Apple'd do the same too. Unless Apple was actually refusing to not give it to the U.S. government at the drop of a hat.
It's a huge plus for making the switch to T-Mobile. Sure, their service sucks in many places, but I'd like to support this idea that if I buy an unlocked phone at full price, I can get service for cheaper, even with a contract.
Slashdot Mirror
You are wrong. Your premise is correct, but your conclusion is wrong. You're advocating what's effectively a position of anarchy, and if you know history, you'll know that anarchy is not a course that will lead to progress.
See, there's something called economies of scale. A new product is expensive because it costs a lot to manufacture. It costs a lot to manufacture because the company manufacturing it does not know exactly how well it will sell, and hence will only allocate a certain amount of resources into making it. I.e., it will not make very many units.
This is true of all industries that deal with material goods.
Once a company has sales data, it can then begin to ramp up its production. Prices will then fall. How well a company does this, how quickly it responds to the rise or fall of demand, is a significant competitive advantage. This is why a lot of companies are focusing on point-of-sale tracking, and why you're seeing all these advertisements from IBM about "analytics".
A large company with much more resources (material property and capital) can ramp up much more quickly than a small business. This is a fact. Companies with lots of resources that cannot do this die very quickly and sometimes violently. It's a matter of survival of the fittest, and the fitness, like natural processes, is determined by how quickly and efficiently the organism can adapt.
Without patents, your small inventor is going to be ultimately completely screwed. While the new product is still in a niche market, the small inventor's small company will thrive. At this time, large companies will take notice. They will begin to copy the product. But they probably won't sell the copied product immediately. Instead, they'll sit on it and wait until the market leaves its niche status. If this never happens, the copy is shelved and the large company focuses on a different product. But once the product has sufficient market, the large company will jump in. It will out-manufacture the small company (who by now, isn't very small, but is still tiny when compared to the large company), and be able to sell at much lower prices.
Now, if the small company can ramp up production quickly enough, and with enough marketing dollars, the small company can regain much of this lost market within a short amount of time. However, the large company has a lot of revenue streams. And it can still thrive even if one product is losing money. The small company, with far fewer revenue streams, cannot afford to take a loss on their best-selling product. So the large company will go into a price war with the small company. And the large company will win.
But say that multiple large companies jump in at the same time, and that they will all be fighting to gain control of the market of this product. That still doesn't help the small company, because all that will do is drive the price down to its bare minimum, and again, based on economies of scale, the small company will not be able to sell as low as the large company.
The only way out for the small company is to out-innovate the large companies. The inventor who owns the small company needs to be one step ahead of the mass of resources the large company can bring to the table. Sometimes, this is possible. Most of the time, it is not.
Now, this is purely an economic viewpoint of what would happen if patents are removed. From a social viewpoint, it will discourage innovation. Why? Because people will realize that if they want to bring to market a new invention, they're facing a significant uphill battle, one that will not end until they become a large company themselves, or their company dies. So what they will do is work for an existing large company instead. It is a much easier way out, and people with starving kids waiting at the dining table for them to come home with the bacon will take that way.
So all of the potential inventors and innovators will go work for large companies. Large companies are risk adverse. Car companies spent millions to bury n
Even if Apple seriously screws up the next generation, I think Microsoft is still far from being in a position to take over. Their Windows Phone software is not terribly popular, and their partners are all very, very wary of their antics, i.e. nobody would willingly partner with them. They have no good will left among the industry, and besides manufacturers, there are no developers interested in making their platform successful. Nokia doesn't count because it's rather clear Nokia is running around the smartphone market with neither direction nor purpose.
Android is, however, in a good position to take over. And not necessarily Samsung Android, but a lot of the smaller phone makers like HTC or Motorola would gobble up chunks of Apple's lost market share. In fact, they may already be taking over, albeit slowly.
This is assuming Apple's next generation phone really bombs. That in and of itself is highly unlikely. Even when the iPhone had trouble making and receiving phone calls (a death sentence for most other phones, if there ever was one), the only impact was Apple and 3rd party case makers selling more cases.
The world is a big enough place. The universe is substantially bigger.
Once a bank falls, its lobbying power kicks into high gear and the government will prop it back up again in the name of financial stability.
FTFY
Social media, by definition, is an invasion of privacy. Except it's usually not some faceless corporation invading your privacy, but yourself, and the people with whom you socialize.
You can't socialize without giving up some privacy, plain and simple. And you're not going to be able to do socialize online, where all data is stored digitally and can be copied on a whim, without exposing your socializing to the entire world. Whether the rest of the world cares is another matter altogether.
Yeah, if the fail-safe is working as intended. I'm not saying every mine suffers this problem, just that if enough are deployed, there's bound to be a few.
Actually, it's more like protesting On-Star by 3D printing a car exactly like the one you saw, but just without the On-Star integration.
Unfortunately, developers rarely get a say in how their game is packaged. DRM is implemented by the publisher's request.
You can think of the WTO as a mediator on trade disputes.
They have no power to stop the trade disputes. But they can determine what's "fair" and limit the effect of the dispute to just the relevant parties.
Without the WTO, the U.S. could say, convince the Great Britian with lies to do something to Antigua. They still can strong-arm other countries, but they have less of a standing to do so, since the dispute and mediation process is out in the open.
A lot free software is written collaboratively. That means that the copyright is held not by one individual, but by multiple ones. And the thing about free software is that the individuals holding the copyright may not be in the U.S. Hence a violation of free software copyrights would be a potential violation of that other country's copyright laws.
Yes, they can pull the pieces of code written by U.S. contributors only and redistribute that. But to be honest, I don't think that's worth the effort. There are bigger, easier, and more worthwhile fish in the sea.
At least it's real.
I was more excited about the A380 myself, but I realize that there's a very small market for such large planes.
The 787 is using a lot of unproven tech. "Revolutionary" is good when it's built on sound fundamentals. I'm not sure the 787 was built this way. Rather, I suspect it was built on barely-good-enough and laboratory-tested, which are not encouraging signs.
There's a reason why a lot of civilian technology comes out of military research. Using it in the military will test the technology in the real world to hell and back again (literally, even). And the military can compensate for greater risk of partial or full failure, both by the operators' prior training and greater built in redundancy as a result of a higher price tag that only the military would pay.
I don't think the technology used in the 787 came out of this system.
This also has more to do with meteorological prediction than climate prediction.
It was a local phenomenon, I believe. The volume of particulates being put out didn't change, it just concentrated in one location and sat there. Once it dissipated, everything was back to normal again.
Though, I wonder if the current cold snap can be partially if not fully attributed to this event.
Sorry, NK is not the enemy of the U.S. They may be an enemy of U.S. interests, but you should read "U.S. interests" as "things the very wealthy and very powerful want but cannot get without government intervention" so for laymen like ourselves, NK is a non-issue.
The enemy of the U.S. people are the corporations and special interests that control the government. Until people start realizing this, they'll just continue to get hit with the fallout from the U.S. government protecting its "interests."
Meanwhile, the U.S. is run by career politicians and lawyers.
I'm not sure which is worse, quite frankly. While I'm partial to engineers myself, most of them are not very good when it comes to dealing with unpredictable systems like people.
That depends on if you're talking about cloud storage or cloud computing.
Encrypting your data is pointless for cloud computing. You're better off asking whether your data is stored in an encrypted file system of some sort. Encrypting your data for putting onto cloud storage is more practical. Yes, the "client" you install may have the ability to root your computer on command, but you might as well unplug the cable going out to the WAN from your home network if you're that afraid of people getting access to your data.
Propoganda always works against an intellectually lazy, shallow, disinterested, and ignorant population. Why do you think there's been such a concerted attack from the government on our primary education system over the past 10-15 years?
Goodbye acceptable working conditions and decent pay, and say hello to sweatshops and brothels.
When you need to survive, you'll be willing to do anything.
I think your scope is a bit too narrow. All "intellectual property" has this effect. All of it needs reform (sans trademark, which is more for consumer protection than a piece of "property").
Sinofsky? You mean the guy who came up with the clusterfuck that's Windows RT/8? Really?
I'd much rather have J Allard at the helm, the guy responsible for the XBox and the guy who came up with the Courier. Give me the visionary. I couldn't care less for the Jobs wannabe.
I know RIM will give the government its encryption keys at the drop of a hat, but I figure Apple'd do the same too. Unless Apple was actually refusing to not give it to the U.S. government at the drop of a hat.
And I'll bet they will continue this longstanding tradition in Episode VII.
I believe Aasif Mandvi is muslim, but I could be wrong.
It's a huge plus for making the switch to T-Mobile. Sure, their service sucks in many places, but I'd like to support this idea that if I buy an unlocked phone at full price, I can get service for cheaper, even with a contract.