IP laws pre-date the modern music industry, and IP is conceptually a much larger problem space than record sales and 1-hit wonders.
The canonical IP problem is medicine. If a company spends 5 years and 10B USD developing a drug, each pill can be produced for 5c or so, but the medicine must sell for a much higher cost in order for its developer to be reasonably compensated.
How do you solve this problem?
1) Nationalize all medicine development [i.e. move the cost from per-pill to per-taxpayer] 2) Provide distribution monopoly protection to drug developer under certain rules and for a certain time (the current approach) 3) Depend on charitable giving to fund medicine development 4) Rely on a staff of drug researchers who work part-time in their parents basement, collaborating over the internet.
Any others?
Note that these are of course the strategic choices -- there are tactical things that could be done to reduce the costs involved -- relaxing FDA regulations could go a long way in reducing TTM (and thus overall cost and investment recouperation requirements) -- but the fundamental issue of how to compensate the IP creators must be addresed.
In exactly the same way it did before the fiction of "intellectual property" was foisted on the world!
You mean in the dark ages? When there were no books available to the common person? No recordings of music for them to enjoy? No engineered medicines to improve quality of life?
The idea that content matters over physical goods came about when it was first possible to produce a physical copy tremendously faster than the original content. And this radically transformed society forever, generally for the better.
I'm merely asking how one reconciles too seemingly opposing points:
1) copying things is easier than ever before. Information apparently wants to be free 2) information is the only instrument of value or progress in Western society. It, more than anything else (besides perhaps the British Rule of Law) is the difference between man of today and man of 1400 AD.
I'm not willing to throw intellectual property under the bus until you can explain to me how people with ideas can distribute their life work and be fairly compensated.
I'm afraid you might be right. I'm afraid because in our society, intellectual property is the only thing of true value. Not labor. Not Capital. Intellect.
IP has worked, more or less, until now to give society a way to reward the judicious and novel application of intellect to move the world forward, even if it is in uneven bursts.
A society who derives the majority of its benefits and progress from mere ideas would do well to see that the idea developers are fairly rewarded and can afford to comfortably develop ideas.
In the IP-free world you describe, how might this happen?
i want them to always, only be function keys. I will never in my life think "oh, i should reach up to hit F3 to mean "redo" (isn't F3 search on notepad and certain other MS products?). I want F3 to be F3, nothing more, nothing less.
The 4000 "remembers" the f-lock state across boots. It is the first F-lock "enabled" keyboard that i wouldn't absolutely smash into little bits if i got stuck with one. I can turn it to "f-lock" and forget about it.
FLock and function-key overloading was something that didn't need to happen. Just like going away from inverted-T.
Re:There is only one true keyboard...
on
Review of Das Keyboard
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· Score: 2, Interesting
When the MS natural keyboard first came out i completely scoffed at it, as it was both goofy looking and from Microsoft.
Additionally, at the time I was only using Sun and SGI machines so I had no need to try learning to use one.
Fast forward a few years, and as luck would have it, I found myself working at Microsoft in Redmond. I quickly learned to love the original natural keyboard, especially because of its backward tilt / massive wrist rest. None of the subsequent kb designs had this feature, and IMO, it was the #1 most useful ergo keyboard feature. I asked around a bit and IIRC, the unconventional tilt was patented by someone else and we opted to not continue paying royalties on it.
I too regret that our company started dicking with home/end and arrow key layouts. Not to mention the completely unforgivable "FLock" fiasco. I started collecting Natural keyboards out of other peoples "PC recyle" piles (years ago, hardware people didn't want would get piled up in the major hallways of buildings, and it was "officially" meant for our PC recycling partner, but if you nabbed this hardware and put it to good use nobody much complained).
I built up a supply of original Natural keyboards thinking that our company would forever have its head in the dirt and never make an unmolested arrow-key / no fLock unit, much less one that had the proper direction of tilt / wrist rest.
Well, as another poster pointed out, the "Natural ergonomic keyboard 4000" is excellent and satisfies on all points. the Natural is still a bit more substantial and has better wrist support and hand angle, but the 4000 is a modern replacement that is natively USB and I find it satisfactory enough that I am finally retiring my 10+ year old natural KBs in favor of 4000s.
Internally, one of our hardware guys (who had a long list of employees that were pissed off at our KB offerings) beamed with pride when he first unveiled the 4000 to us because it really is the first credible successor to the original Natural KB.
As an aside, almost all of the key letters have rubbed off of all my natural KBs:) The thumb-strike regions on the space bar are completely de-textured. I showed a few to my wife and she couldn't fathom how someone could wear a keyboard so much:)
you know who i hate more than telcos that have monopoly control because of the government?
the government that gave them that monopoly control.
Imagine that you're telco X. $important_guy in the executive branch (who owns the FCC, mind you) comes along and says "i'd like you to do blah for us. You'll agree, if you know what's good for you. By the way, we're the feds, and we can do anything we like, as demonstrated by the fact that we're asking you to do this, which you and we both know is illegal."
Basically, I can't get too upset with some company for going along with what the feds, who weild ultimate power over their existance, have asked them to do.
Suing these companies for not having the courage to stand up to the law is kind of hypocritical unless you are willing to stand up to the feds when they ask you to do something distasteful. Remember, they'll have guns when they ask you.
Yeah -- these telco's did the wrong thing, but I'd argue that when the NSA asks you to do something, that's considered "duress".
I think the dems and the republicans are just too addicted to getting their kicks off of spiting each other for anyone to just be reasonable now and then. It's hard for me to see this as little more than dems picking on two of their favorite targets: large companies, and anyone that cooperates with the Bush adminsitration _at all_.
Sure. I wasn't being specific about what is or is not intellectual property in the theoretical or practical sense, only that it is probably a valid concept for the law to tackle, because the sorts of things we think of as intellectual property (a process for making steel stronger, the design of a jet engine, the process for manufacturing a life-saving drug, etc) need to be described and governed by the rule of law, in a manner not entirely different than physical property (this car belongs to me, my land usage rights are blah, etc etc)
If ownership implies control (car owners control who can access their car), then a mechanism similar to copyrights or patents make sense for the ownership of intellectual property. And like our real property (land, cars, etc), the government (unfortuneately, in the opinion of many strong property rights advocates) has a say in exactly how extensive that mechanism can be. The government has curtailed what owning a car means in such a way that by virtue of being a car owner, I cannot drive as fast as I like (technically, this is licensure to use publicly owned roads, and not a restriction of car ownership per-se). Having similar caveats about how intellectual property may be used by the owner would not be new ground for any governoring body.
The summary is that governments define and enforce property rights for physical property. Intellectual property IS an important and valid concept, because what we usually think of as IP is where the majority of the real value in society is and what differentiates us from our mideival ancestors. Banishing intellectual property as a concept is no more feasible than banishing physical property as a concept.
(As an aside, some people think physical property should also be abolished. Any of them who are serious are necessarily willing to kill you to get you to hand over your property, so you should be wary of them. Consult history if you disagree.)
the problem with axing the notion of IP is that in a western style society, ideas are the only entities with real value, that actualy move society forward.
The difference between today and (today - 4000 years) is not that people are stronger (although they may be), live longer (although many do). It's not even that people, on the whole, are smarter than they used to be (although this is difficult to really measure).
Rather, the person of today has the benefit of thousands of years of human ingenuity. When the socio-economic conditions are ripe for someone to act upon their own ideas, humanity leaps forward. The real value in the world is not labor and is not stock, but is actually intellect.
The key then, is how to reward intellect appropriatley. As you no doubt agree, today's patent and copyright system does not appear to reward intellectual output appropriately, as it is more commonly used to stifle development than to promote it. Do not, however, get confused about what the real value in society is -- ideas are valuable over all else, and it is worthwhile to construct the framework such that valuable ideas are lucrative enough that they are pursued, and that the most able in our world are able to sustain themselves based on the value of their intellectual contributions alone (as opposed to the value of their perspiration).
The answer is that both China and us the US need to become more self reliant. The US is too reliant on cheap imports, the Chinese are too reliant on capitolizing on their 3rd world demographic to create cheap exports.
The interactions between China and the US both work to our mutual advantage. It represents a more optimal allocation of work vs resources. Consider the story of the Lawyer and the Typist. Suppose that a Lawyer can type 150wpm and a Typist can only type 100 wpm. The Lawyer can also do Lawyery type things. The Typist cannot.
It's better for the Typist _and_ the Lawyer if the Lawyer pays the Typist to type, even if he's not as good as the lawyer is, and the lawyer can then focus on doing whatever it is they're left doing.
This is comparative advantage, this is specialization, this is distribution of labor.
In the short term, some jobs in the US are lost, and for some individuals, this can be a real problem of displacement. For the US people in General, and for the US economy in general, it's a net win, as the lower cost structure now associated with the same work frees up more capital in the US.
People who bemoan the "rich getting richer" have a sort of naive view aobut where that money goes. By and large it goes back into the American economy, whether is is being made available as credit for lower and middle class families to buy houses or cars, or whether it is to pay for all of the blue collar guys to build frivolous McMansions. I assure you that no billionaires are storing their fortunes under a mattress.
Our government should be working to promote local manufacturing and job creation for local consumption, and their government should be utilizing their indigenous workforce to create a better living environment for themselves.
There isn't enough local demand in China for chinese goods of the sort they've been making for us. As we continue infusing money into the Chinese economy, that will change. There are now special models of BMW made only for the Chinese market. As the chinese middle class develops, more and more Chinese production will be sold in the local market. More and more, it will make less sense to have labor and production in China for import into the US market.
Essentially the world market is reacting tot he fact that there is a cost disparity between doing anything in the US and doing it in China. That disparity will correct itself over time, and as the comparative differences in our economies resolve, the sorts of working condition disparities you talk about will resolve along with them. This is natural result of the movement of money, and will NEVER be acheived with the kind of government meddling you suggest.
The story headline and my headline are essentially equivalent. They're both ridiculous, inflammatory, mischaracterizations of what happened.
I'm sure we all love the election season political advertising that says foolish crap like "Bob Jackass voted NO to making our schools better!"
Well of course he did, because the particular bill in question said something like "50% tax on milk to improve school funding", and Bob thought there were some drawbacks to that approach.
It's not that Google shareholders are against human rights in China. At every public company, a few activist shareholders come up with proposals they want to be voted on that say things like "improve human rights in China" and invariably the board suggests voting against them. I don't think there's some widespread malign for human rights in China. I think there is a real concern that the particulars of the proposal damage or have the potential to damage the business in a way that doesn't offset the hypothetical progress made towards acheiving the aim.
The real story here is that todays proposal of the month got prioritized below some other shareholder objective. Not that Google hates the idea of chinese freedom.
Look at this from Google's perspective. It is in their best interest to make Chinese citizens info-addicts. Google wants to be in the business of making the CHinese people completely dependant on Google for finding out as much as possible. Giving them more possible choices and better filtering/searching technology to whittle the results down to what the PEOPLE want is what will endear google with more customers and a more lucrative eyeballs base to their advertising clients.
The special tricks and procedures Google has to put in place to operate in the Chinese market are a cost of doing business in China, one I'm sure they'd rather dispense with if they thought they could. Some blowhard activist popping up and saying "just don't play ball with the Chinese government" is unrealistic for a variety of reasons.
Everytime we buy a product from China we infuse money into that economy. We give someone the choice (and it IS their choice) to put down their shovel and give up the agrarian lifestyle that their ancestors have had for the last _6000 years_ (it's China, remember), and do something different.
For every poverty stricken child that ends up working in a factory making shoes, we can say two things about that child - they are more likely to be able to eat than if they had no other source of income - they are less likely to be forced into child prostitution, which is a serious concern in many developing economies in Asia
It is understandable to think "we enjoy certain labor and lifestyle conditions in the west; everyone should have them". But it's irrational and erroneous. Sectors of the Chinese economy and populace have gone from agrarian to industrial to information based in a fraction of the time it took Europe and the US to do so.
Look at South Korea, which essentially got its start in 1950. For a long time there was a command economy and a suppression of democracy and personal wealth. Yet in fewer than 50 years South Koreas standard of living and material wealth has grown such that in many ways it outpaces the US. Democracy has arrived.
It makes no sense to talk about "working conditions in china" as some sort of single faceted problem. China is a country where rural poor still die from flooding every year on one end, and Hong Kong on the other, which has the worlds highest-per-capita Rolls Royce ownership (despite draconian anti-car rules).
Money is freedom, because freedom in its most abstract sense is choice, and nothing facilitates the execution of personal choice better than having money. The more money we infuse into the Chinese economy, not via government action, but into the leaf nodes -- the people making shoes or any of the other things westerners are calling "slave labor", the more freedom we inject into the most critical portions of the Chinese populace.
I'm no happier about kids working in factories than Americans were at the time of the US industrial revolution. But what I am happy about is that everywhere the American system (which is really the British system) has taken root, the total length of time taken to transition from "agrarian poverty" to "modern economy with full human rights, individual liberty, and high standard of living for the majority" become shorter and shorter, every time.
Now to be fair, "we" are infusing all of this money into China because we think it is in our best interest, not because of some altrusitic paternalism. However -- and this is the "invisible hand" theory showing up -- the Chinese are working for us because _they_ beleive it is in _their_ best interest. The result of our profit-driven desire is that a ton of money is infused into the Chinese economy, which DOES have real benefits to real humans in China.
Suggesting that we cut off that money is somehow altruistic or responsible or any other number of things is simply assinine in the face of a real analysis. You're essentially telling a 10 year old girl who works in a factory "for your own good, we're not going to let you work at all. Good luck finding food or taking care of your sick parents".
But based on my reading of the paper, it isn't 100% there. You don't get "sploit.exe" dumped onto your disk when the thing is all done. Their stuff only works backwards to a certain point.
For instance, when they come up with the exploit for WMF reader vulnerability, they're not making you a new WMF file (as I understand, anyway).
One thing that interested me is the model they invented. The binary differencing was off-the-shelf stuff from eEye. But their model of the x86 machine (cpu, instruction side effects, registers, and memory) is new, and that seems like something that could have been written previously.. I'm surprised they needed to do this. They also define a space of functions that examine the model to determine if badness has happened, for each specific kindof badness they're interested in, i.e. return address changes during execution of call.
They also appear to require execution traces of P (or P') to run under a machine monitor; I don't think from the instructions in P they work backwards from P/P' difference lines and construct initial conditions of the machine state. Even if that _is_ what they were doing, they only model the salient portions of the binary, not the outside system.
Even so, what they're doing here is fantastic. The things they're not doing (automatically creating files that trigger the exploit) are all possible offshoots from this paper, if one were to have sufficient computing power and time to create models of the salient portions of the system. For each different data flow into the instruction/memory space, the model would need to describe the line of demarcation. In the case of the WMF/PNG vulnerabilities, that line is on the other side of readfile or mmap or whatever. (i.e. the bytes that trigger the exploit come from the disk). Building a file on disk in a certain way to cause a sequence of x86 instructions to produce the desired memory is a hard problem in and of itself, although I perhaps possible with the tools and techniques they've already got.
The same would be true of the ASP.NET vulnerability. I beleive they can work backwards from exploit to the in-memory representation of a URL request. At that point, knowing that URLs come from the outside hostile internet, through IIS, etc etc etc, is vuln-specific domain expertise. However, a library of injection points (file on dist, URL request from network, packet from network, etc) could be built around the analysis model. The analysis engine works backwards until it says "here is the memory precondition that leads to an exploit, now i rely on an injection plugin to acheive that memory state."
Admit it: the modern American is so uncomfortable around people who are different from him that makes him perfectly willing to pass up a net benefit to his society because of something as stupid as a foreign accent.
Well, I for one wish you luck in resolving your beef with my country's stupid government.
I'm a Microsoft employee living in the midwest (the so called land of racism, apparently). Last week I phone screened a guy in India about a job here in Fargo. Next week I'm phone screeing a chinese woman who already lives here.
There is certainly opposition to foreigners in the US, but very little of it comes from the midwest and very little of it is racist in nature. In my opinion, the overwhelming majority of immigration controls are about gringo-job protectionism. Low-wage-earner job protectionism is more of a blue-state thing than something we do here in the Dakotas. Especially a far north as we are, everyone kind of understands the need for cheap foreign labor that is seasonal in nature. So while there's certainly some latent racist tendencies in some midwesterners, I think that gets lost in the noise when setting immigration policy.
I think the second big factor in anti-immigrant rhetoric comes from mexican border states, and I think that is an entirely disjoint problem from H1B / skilled labor.
I'm frankly not worried about people that come here with engineering or other advanced job skills. Infact, I want as many of them as I can get. It makes America stronger and it makes American companies stronger (which makes American institutional owners stronger, and so on, blah blah).
Good luck. Sorry my Government sucks. Ron Paul and I are trying to get most of it fired, but that's not going so well for us. I hope you and your fiance work it out and can some day participate in the American government process to try and prevent other people from having to go through this crap. I'd wager that it will be easier for you to do that in America than it will be for me in say, Germany or Japan (to pick two places off-hand that I'd be interested in living were it not for socio-political ceilings for foreigners)
beyond.ca == canada, where all of this took place.
It's reasonably easy to import cars into canada once they are 15 years old. That's why this was an R32 and not the newer R34 which has been the star of a few famous western movies:)
just like a Porsche is faster than a Toyota, but who makes more money
Porsche, actually, if you're referring to profit
Porsche is done of the most profitable automakers. If you've ever looked at a Porsche options sheet, it will become clear why this is the case. They also have brilliant/lucky financial people.
Exactly how am I posing an increased risk to the network here?
By thinking.
You're probably not getting paid to think, you're probably getting paid to be a cog... a cog whos gear-teeth mesh well with the neighboring gear-teeth so that the whole machine spins reliably and predictably, if not ineffeciently.
What's good for one cog isn't always good for the machine. Machines are what make money, and what makes them make more money are cheaper cogs.
Such is life in corporate America. You might consider testing the waters by seeing how your "superiors" respond to the idea of a cog that thinks for itself and has some ideas about making the machine better. Failing that, you might try jumping into some other machine.
I'm a QA guy at MS and beleive me, I understand your frustration. People like me have no say in how things get licensed. I've got friends that ask me licensing questions for their particular business problem and I've honestly got no idea. All i can do is forward the questions into people internally and hope somebody has a lucid response.
Every time I do this, i remind "whoever" is listening: every time a customer has to think about this, they move some deltaE closer to saying "fuck you guys" and jumping to F/OSS, where if nothing else, licensing is certainly _perceptually_ less confusing.
Anytime a business makes it hard for customers to give it money, they're doing something wrong.
Expecting customers to keep track of licenses (with paper and a filing cabinet, in some cases!) and all kinds of other stuff is completely ridiculous. A big part of the problem is that internally, we're for the most part completely insulated from it. We do ok at responding to pain that we know about and have exposure to, and pretty badly at pain we don't understand or know about.
I'm sorry for how lame your licensing experience has been and wish I could offer some help. I'm also interested in knowing more about your virtual test lab.. one of my last projects in Redmond was working on the automation system that ran all of Visual Studio's tens of thousands of automated tests across thousands of PCs. The feedback I get is that very few companies are doing automated software testing, so I'm interested in what you're working on.
I was checking out anime OP/ED videos a while back for a series I had started watching and came across someone that has somehow tricked youtube into letting ultra-high resolution videos on the site.
Notice that the "clock" on the player says its 9:59 long. Note that the streaming hiccups and stutters because the actual video is only 1:30 long -- just like any other anime OP. The time-code computation appears to be totally off for this video, but the quality is fantastic. Listen with good headphones -- the audio and video quality are both fantastic in this video.
This person's other movies are all other anime OP/ED sections that all say they are around 10 minutes long, but in reality are all 1:30 or so.
So it seems this person has figured out how to exploit something in youtubes video analysis/recoder to get ultra-high quality audio/video, at the expense of breaking the media-length calculations.
Do they throw a hissy fit, and constantly complain about how the shortcomings of the windows environment could be improved by moving to linux? This attitude, which seems to be fostered and even encouraged here at slashdot, would be devastating in the work environment.
Actually, I did that a lot when I first got hired at my current company. I flunked a round of interviews partially because of my hot-headed attitude and MS bashing.
I did a 2nd round with a different group and kept the rhetoric to a minimum. But once I was in, I turned on the flame-thrower again. "I can't beleive you put up with this crap -- pine and sendmail will service 25,000 mailboxes on a 1 proc machine", etc. I would constantly compare the lame MS experience to some F/OSS experience. This was back in the 2000-2001 time frame. Was it annoying? yes. Did people listen to me? Yes. Did we switch to f/oss software? No. Did a lot of the software we used to do our jobs get better? Yes.
The company I did this at?
Microsoft.
I'm a Microsoft Employee, and I'm a QA engineer (tools & automation developer). You had better beleive that when one of us says "F/OSS kicks our ass at this", people here eventually notice and try to remedy the problem. (Clearly, there's great job security here:))
I agree with the generalities of your point. You need to pick and choose your battles. But one thing I'll say is -- if you're frustrated that MS products are so (in your opinion) inferior to some F/OSS (or any competing offering) product, MS is a great place to work. We take competition very seriously, and we need more people that are used to not rebooting, apps not taking down more than they need to, user separation, simple tools that are efficient and single-purposed, etc, to help us make better software. When I joined, there wasn't a linux compete team, a compatibility lab, etc etc. Now we have all of those things and there are people who actually study where we don't measure up.
Right now, on my Vista machine, I have the EN, DK, DE, and JP keyboard layers installed. I use alt-shift to switch input key systems.
As you may know, English, German, and Danish keyboards all have slightly different layouts. I primarily use the english layout, but on occasion need to switch to a different layout.
I use the Microsoft Japanese IME, whereby you use the english layout to type in romanized japanese syllables. The IME is smart enough to build up a kana or kanji completion list based on what you've typed.
However, there are infact native japanese keyboard layouts as well, and as shown in the video, you can directly type the hirigana which is roughly 50% more stroke efficient (most hirigana are 2 roman characters, some are 3, and just a handful are a single char).
So, from the perspective of wanting to change keyboard layouts, a keyboard like this would be awesome. Important to you? No. Important to me? Well, not $2500 important. $50 important? Yes.
Next application: application software keybindings
Remember when applications like Autocad or even flight simulators had these huge keyboard overlays that fit over your keyboard? These would tell you what functions mapped to what keys. I remember when Lotus 123 was still a product and all the lotus junkies had the 123 overlay as well.
This keyboard does away with all of that. And you'll never lose the mapping, and it can task switch along with the app itself.
Next Application: Modal / Contextual input applications
suppose i'm in vi. Not all key strokes are legal, depending on what mode i'm in. A keyboard where invalid characters go dark provides a tremendous amount of context information.. even if i only notice it in my peripheral vision.
Or what about input validation? Field alpha-numeric only? Set the keyboard up to black out non alpha-numeric chars. Numbers only? Dim most of the keyboard.
Yes/No/Cancel dialogs? Black out everything except Y,N,C, arrow keys, space bar, escape, and enter.
There's a tremendous amount of context and HCI informational cueing that you can give the user with a keyboard like this. If i could get this thing at an affordable price, i'd have one, and i'd start thinking of things to do with it.
Someone else mentioned changing the key-caps when you have modifiers pressed (shift, alt, ctrl, etc). That idea alone could be a system seller, especially in environments with tremendous key tables (try doing APL programming sometime). Or remember the good-ole-days of "ALT+nnn" input on DOS machines?
I don't think the capabilities and possibilities of the keyboard are stupid at all. I've been an extremely fast and accurate touch typist for almost 20 years and i think this would be tremendously helpful. It would change where my brain and eyes look for visual cues when using the computer.
Random thought: suppose you're using a system where security is not NSA grade, but you still want some. Someone appears to hve forgotten their password. Why not highlight the keys that make up the password? Finger memory is subconcious yet strong with a lot of people; if giving someone a password reminder like this keeps them from being locked out of their system, but doens't let the casual attacker brute-force the logon, why not try it?
The more I think bout this thing, the more interesting ideas I want to try with it.
the suggestion that the justicies would need to reach the same conclusion in private is foolish.
The reason you go for 9 redundant judges is not to have broad unanimity. It's to get diversity of opinion to the input of the legal function.
Suppose that one of the justices really _nails_ the interpretation of the law, or his copy of the paperwork was the only one where a "comma" was printed clearly enough to see.
In isolation, he might come to the correct, but minority opinion.
Once all the justices confer, they may reverse their earlier opinions and agree with the lone justicices interpretation. This happens all the time in any congregation of experts. Someone notices one thing, someone else notices something else, and so on, and a dialogue that attempts to emcompass the value that all of those invovled bring the table ensues.
Asking people to reach _exactly_ the same conclusion before hand with unanimity is ridiculous, as it would only work if people had identical observational and reasoning capabilities.
Slashdot Mirror
IP laws pre-date the modern music industry, and IP is conceptually a much larger problem space than record sales and 1-hit wonders.
The canonical IP problem is medicine. If a company spends 5 years and 10B USD developing a drug, each pill can be produced for 5c or so, but the medicine must sell for a much higher cost in order for its developer to be reasonably compensated.
How do you solve this problem?
1) Nationalize all medicine development [i.e. move the cost from per-pill to per-taxpayer]
2) Provide distribution monopoly protection to drug developer under certain rules and for a certain time (the current approach)
3) Depend on charitable giving to fund medicine development
4) Rely on a staff of drug researchers who work part-time in their parents basement, collaborating over the internet.
Any others?
Note that these are of course the strategic choices -- there are tactical things that could be done to reduce the costs involved -- relaxing FDA regulations could go a long way in reducing TTM (and thus overall cost and investment recouperation requirements) -- but the fundamental issue of how to compensate the IP creators must be addresed.
You mean in the dark ages? When there were no books available to the common person? No recordings of music for them to enjoy? No engineered medicines to improve quality of life?
The idea that content matters over physical goods came about when it was first possible to produce a physical copy tremendously faster than the original content. And this radically transformed society forever, generally for the better.
I'm merely asking how one reconciles too seemingly opposing points:
1) copying things is easier than ever before. Information apparently wants to be free
2) information is the only instrument of value or progress in Western society. It, more than anything else (besides perhaps the British Rule of Law) is the difference between man of today and man of 1400 AD.
I'm not willing to throw intellectual property under the bus until you can explain to me how people with ideas can distribute their life work and be fairly compensated.
I'm afraid you might be right. I'm afraid because in our society, intellectual property is the only thing of true value. Not labor. Not Capital. Intellect.
IP has worked, more or less, until now to give society a way to reward the judicious and novel application of intellect to move the world forward, even if it is in uneven bursts.
A society who derives the majority of its benefits and progress from mere ideas would do well to see that the idea developers are fairly rewarded and can afford to comfortably develop ideas.
In the IP-free world you describe, how might this happen?
i want them to always, only be function keys. I will never in my life think "oh, i should reach up to hit F3 to mean "redo" (isn't F3 search on notepad and certain other MS products?). I want F3 to be F3, nothing more, nothing less.
The 4000 "remembers" the f-lock state across boots. It is the first F-lock "enabled" keyboard that i wouldn't absolutely smash into little bits if i got stuck with one. I can turn it to "f-lock" and forget about it.
FLock and function-key overloading was something that didn't need to happen. Just like going away from inverted-T.
When the MS natural keyboard first came out i completely scoffed at it, as it was both goofy looking and from Microsoft.
Additionally, at the time I was only using Sun and SGI machines so I had no need to try learning to use one.
Fast forward a few years, and as luck would have it, I found myself working at Microsoft in Redmond. I quickly learned to love the original natural keyboard, especially because of its backward tilt / massive wrist rest. None of the subsequent kb designs had this feature, and IMO, it was the #1 most useful ergo keyboard feature. I asked around a bit and IIRC, the unconventional tilt was patented by someone else and we opted to not continue paying royalties on it.
I too regret that our company started dicking with home/end and arrow key layouts. Not to mention the completely unforgivable "FLock" fiasco. I started collecting Natural keyboards out of other peoples "PC recyle" piles (years ago, hardware people didn't want would get piled up in the major hallways of buildings, and it was "officially" meant for our PC recycling partner, but if you nabbed this hardware and put it to good use nobody much complained).
I built up a supply of original Natural keyboards thinking that our company would forever have its head in the dirt and never make an unmolested arrow-key / no fLock unit, much less one that had the proper direction of tilt / wrist rest.
Well, as another poster pointed out, the "Natural ergonomic keyboard 4000" is excellent and satisfies on all points. the Natural is still a bit more substantial and has better wrist support and hand angle, but the 4000 is a modern replacement that is natively USB and I find it satisfactory enough that I am finally retiring my 10+ year old natural KBs in favor of 4000s.
Internally, one of our hardware guys (who had a long list of employees that were pissed off at our KB offerings) beamed with pride when he first unveiled the 4000 to us because it really is the first credible successor to the original Natural KB.
As an aside, almost all of the key letters have rubbed off of all my natural KBs :) The thumb-strike regions on the space bar are completely de-textured. I showed a few to my wife and she couldn't fathom how someone could wear a keyboard so much :)
i dont think it is ethical to hang a company out to dry to try and investigate the government if the latter is your real target.
you know who i hate more than telcos that have monopoly control because of the government?
the government that gave them that monopoly control.
Imagine that you're telco X. $important_guy in the executive branch (who owns the FCC, mind you) comes along and says "i'd like you to do blah for us. You'll agree, if you know what's good for you. By the way, we're the feds, and we can do anything we like, as demonstrated by the fact that we're asking you to do this, which you and we both know is illegal."
Basically, I can't get too upset with some company for going along with what the feds, who weild ultimate power over their existance, have asked them to do.
Suing these companies for not having the courage to stand up to the law is kind of hypocritical unless you are willing to stand up to the feds when they ask you to do something distasteful. Remember, they'll have guns when they ask you.
Yeah -- these telco's did the wrong thing, but I'd argue that when the NSA asks you to do something, that's considered "duress".
I think the dems and the republicans are just too addicted to getting their kicks off of spiting each other for anyone to just be reasonable now and then. It's hard for me to see this as little more than dems picking on two of their favorite targets: large companies, and anyone that cooperates with the Bush adminsitration _at all_.
You could use Outlook, which lets you set the default composition type. Additionally, it lets you change it easily from the Ribbon bar :)
Sure. I wasn't being specific about what is or is not intellectual property in the theoretical or practical sense, only that it is probably a valid concept for the law to tackle, because the sorts of things we think of as intellectual property (a process for making steel stronger, the design of a jet engine, the process for manufacturing a life-saving drug, etc) need to be described and governed by the rule of law, in a manner not entirely different than physical property (this car belongs to me, my land usage rights are blah, etc etc)
If ownership implies control (car owners control who can access their car), then a mechanism similar to copyrights or patents make sense for the ownership of intellectual property. And like our real property (land, cars, etc), the government (unfortuneately, in the opinion of many strong property rights advocates) has a say in exactly how extensive that mechanism can be. The government has curtailed what owning a car means in such a way that by virtue of being a car owner, I cannot drive as fast as I like (technically, this is licensure to use publicly owned roads, and not a restriction of car ownership per-se). Having similar caveats about how intellectual property may be used by the owner would not be new ground for any governoring body.
The summary is that governments define and enforce property rights for physical property. Intellectual property IS an important and valid concept, because what we usually think of as IP is where the majority of the real value in society is and what differentiates us from our mideival ancestors. Banishing intellectual property as a concept is no more feasible than banishing physical property as a concept.
(As an aside, some people think physical property should also be abolished. Any of them who are serious are necessarily willing to kill you to get you to hand over your property, so you should be wary of them. Consult history if you disagree.)
the problem with axing the notion of IP is that in a western style society, ideas are the only entities with real value, that actualy move society forward.
The difference between today and (today - 4000 years) is not that people are stronger (although they may be), live longer (although many do). It's not even that people, on the whole, are smarter than they used to be (although this is difficult to really measure).
Rather, the person of today has the benefit of thousands of years of human ingenuity. When the socio-economic conditions are ripe for someone to act upon their own ideas, humanity leaps forward. The real value in the world is not labor and is not stock, but is actually intellect.
The key then, is how to reward intellect appropriatley. As you no doubt agree, today's patent and copyright system does not appear to reward intellectual output appropriately, as it is more commonly used to stifle development than to promote it. Do not, however, get confused about what the real value in society is -- ideas are valuable over all else, and it is worthwhile to construct the framework such that valuable ideas are lucrative enough that they are pursued, and that the most able in our world are able to sustain themselves based on the value of their intellectual contributions alone (as opposed to the value of their perspiration).
The interactions between China and the US both work to our mutual advantage. It represents a more optimal allocation of work vs resources. Consider the story of the Lawyer and the Typist. Suppose that a Lawyer can type 150wpm and a Typist can only type 100 wpm. The Lawyer can also do Lawyery type things. The Typist cannot.
It's better for the Typist _and_ the Lawyer if the Lawyer pays the Typist to type, even if he's not as good as the lawyer is, and the lawyer can then focus on doing whatever it is they're left doing.
This is comparative advantage, this is specialization, this is distribution of labor.
In the short term, some jobs in the US are lost, and for some individuals, this can be a real problem of displacement. For the US people in General, and for the US economy in general, it's a net win, as the lower cost structure now associated with the same work frees up more capital in the US.
People who bemoan the "rich getting richer" have a sort of naive view aobut where that money goes. By and large it goes back into the American economy, whether is is being made available as credit for lower and middle class families to buy houses or cars, or whether it is to pay for all of the blue collar guys to build frivolous McMansions. I assure you that no billionaires are storing their fortunes under a mattress.
There isn't enough local demand in China for chinese goods of the sort they've been making for us. As we continue infusing money into the Chinese economy, that will change. There are now special models of BMW made only for the Chinese market. As the chinese middle class develops, more and more Chinese production will be sold in the local market. More and more, it will make less sense to have labor and production in China for import into the US market.
Essentially the world market is reacting tot he fact that there is a cost disparity between doing anything in the US and doing it in China. That disparity will correct itself over time, and as the comparative differences in our economies resolve, the sorts of working condition disparities you talk about will resolve along with them. This is natural result of the movement of money, and will NEVER be acheived with the kind of government meddling you suggest.
The story headline and my headline are essentially equivalent. They're both ridiculous, inflammatory, mischaracterizations of what happened.
I'm sure we all love the election season political advertising that says foolish crap like "Bob Jackass voted NO to making our schools better!"
Well of course he did, because the particular bill in question said something like "50% tax on milk to improve school funding", and Bob thought there were some drawbacks to that approach.
It's not that Google shareholders are against human rights in China. At every public company, a few activist shareholders come up with proposals they want to be voted on that say things like "improve human rights in China" and invariably the board suggests voting against them. I don't think there's some widespread malign for human rights in China. I think there is a real concern that the particulars of the proposal damage or have the potential to damage the business in a way that doesn't offset the hypothetical progress made towards acheiving the aim.
The real story here is that todays proposal of the month got prioritized below some other shareholder objective. Not that Google hates the idea of chinese freedom.
Look at this from Google's perspective. It is in their best interest to make Chinese citizens info-addicts. Google wants to be in the business of making the CHinese people completely dependant on Google for finding out as much as possible. Giving them more possible choices and better filtering/searching technology to whittle the results down to what the PEOPLE want is what will endear google with more customers and a more lucrative eyeballs base to their advertising clients.
The special tricks and procedures Google has to put in place to operate in the Chinese market are a cost of doing business in China, one I'm sure they'd rather dispense with if they thought they could. Some blowhard activist popping up and saying "just don't play ball with the Chinese government" is unrealistic for a variety of reasons.
Nonsense.
Everytime we buy a product from China we infuse money into that economy. We give someone the choice (and it IS their choice) to put down their shovel and give up the agrarian lifestyle that their ancestors have had for the last _6000 years_ (it's China, remember), and do something different.
For every poverty stricken child that ends up working in a factory making shoes, we can say two things about that child
- they are more likely to be able to eat than if they had no other source of income
- they are less likely to be forced into child prostitution, which is a serious concern in many developing economies in Asia
It is understandable to think "we enjoy certain labor and lifestyle conditions in the west; everyone should have them". But it's irrational and erroneous. Sectors of the Chinese economy and populace have gone from agrarian to industrial to information based in a fraction of the time it took Europe and the US to do so.
Look at South Korea, which essentially got its start in 1950. For a long time there was a command economy and a suppression of democracy and personal wealth. Yet in fewer than 50 years South Koreas standard of living and material wealth has grown such that in many ways it outpaces the US. Democracy has arrived.
It makes no sense to talk about "working conditions in china" as some sort of single faceted problem. China is a country where rural poor still die from flooding every year on one end, and Hong Kong on the other, which has the worlds highest-per-capita Rolls Royce ownership (despite draconian anti-car rules).
Money is freedom, because freedom in its most abstract sense is choice, and nothing facilitates the execution of personal choice better than having money. The more money we infuse into the Chinese economy, not via government action, but into the leaf nodes -- the people making shoes or any of the other things westerners are calling "slave labor", the more freedom we inject into the most critical portions of the Chinese populace.
I'm no happier about kids working in factories than Americans were at the time of the US industrial revolution. But what I am happy about is that everywhere the American system (which is really the British system) has taken root, the total length of time taken to transition from "agrarian poverty" to "modern economy with full human rights, individual liberty, and high standard of living for the majority" become shorter and shorter, every time.
Now to be fair, "we" are infusing all of this money into China because we think it is in our best interest, not because of some altrusitic paternalism. However -- and this is the "invisible hand" theory showing up -- the Chinese are working for us because _they_ beleive it is in _their_ best interest. The result of our profit-driven desire is that a ton of money is infused into the Chinese economy, which DOES have real benefits to real humans in China.
Suggesting that we cut off that money is somehow altruistic or responsible or any other number of things is simply assinine in the face of a real analysis. You're essentially telling a 10 year old girl who works in a factory "for your own good, we're not going to let you work at all. Good luck finding food or taking care of your sick parents".
You win the internet.
But based on my reading of the paper, it isn't 100% there. You don't get "sploit.exe" dumped onto your disk when the thing is all done. Their stuff only works backwards to a certain point.
For instance, when they come up with the exploit for WMF reader vulnerability, they're not making you a new WMF file (as I understand, anyway).
One thing that interested me is the model they invented. The binary differencing was off-the-shelf stuff from eEye. But their model of the x86 machine (cpu, instruction side effects, registers, and memory) is new, and that seems like something that could have been written previously.. I'm surprised they needed to do this. They also define a space of functions that examine the model to determine if badness has happened, for each specific kindof badness they're interested in, i.e. return address changes during execution of call.
They also appear to require execution traces of P (or P') to run under a machine monitor; I don't think from the instructions in P they work backwards from P/P' difference lines and construct initial conditions of the machine state. Even if that _is_ what they were doing, they only model the salient portions of the binary, not the outside system.
Even so, what they're doing here is fantastic. The things they're not doing (automatically creating files that trigger the exploit) are all possible offshoots from this paper, if one were to have sufficient computing power and time to create models of the salient portions of the system. For each different data flow into the instruction/memory space, the model would need to describe the line of demarcation. In the case of the WMF/PNG vulnerabilities, that line is on the other side of readfile or mmap or whatever. (i.e. the bytes that trigger the exploit come from the disk). Building a file on disk in a certain way to cause a sequence of x86 instructions to produce the desired memory is a hard problem in and of itself, although I perhaps possible with the tools and techniques they've already got.
The same would be true of the ASP.NET vulnerability. I beleive they can work backwards from exploit to the in-memory representation of a URL request. At that point, knowing that URLs come from the outside hostile internet, through IIS, etc etc etc, is vuln-specific domain expertise. However, a library of injection points (file on dist, URL request from network, packet from network, etc) could be built around the analysis model. The analysis engine works backwards until it says "here is the memory precondition that leads to an exploit, now i rely on an injection plugin to acheive that memory state."
Well, I for one wish you luck in resolving your beef with my country's stupid government.
I'm a Microsoft employee living in the midwest (the so called land of racism, apparently). Last week I phone screened a guy in India about a job here in Fargo. Next week I'm phone screeing a chinese woman who already lives here.
There is certainly opposition to foreigners in the US, but very little of it comes from the midwest and very little of it is racist in nature. In my opinion, the overwhelming majority of immigration controls are about gringo-job protectionism. Low-wage-earner job protectionism is more of a blue-state thing than something we do here in the Dakotas. Especially a far north as we are, everyone kind of understands the need for cheap foreign labor that is seasonal in nature. So while there's certainly some latent racist tendencies in some midwesterners, I think that gets lost in the noise when setting immigration policy.
I think the second big factor in anti-immigrant rhetoric comes from mexican border states, and I think that is an entirely disjoint problem from H1B / skilled labor.
I'm frankly not worried about people that come here with engineering or other advanced job skills. Infact, I want as many of them as I can get. It makes America stronger and it makes American companies stronger (which makes American institutional owners stronger, and so on, blah blah).
Good luck. Sorry my Government sucks. Ron Paul and I are trying to get most of it fired, but that's not going so well for us. I hope you and your fiance work it out and can some day participate in the American government process to try and prevent other people from having to go through this crap. I'd wager that it will be easier for you to do that in America than it will be for me in say, Germany or Japan (to pick two places off-hand that I'd be interested in living were it not for socio-political ceilings for foreigners)
beyond.ca == canada, where all of this took place.
:)
It's reasonably easy to import cars into canada once they are 15 years old. That's why this was an R32 and not the newer R34 which has been the star of a few famous western movies
In the US the rule is 25 years.
The kid brought forged ID documents.
Porsche, actually, if you're referring to profit
Porsche is done of the most profitable automakers. If you've ever looked at a Porsche options sheet, it will become clear why this is the case. They also have brilliant/lucky financial people.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aYvaIoPRz4Vg&refer=home
By thinking.
You're probably not getting paid to think, you're probably getting paid to be a cog... a cog whos gear-teeth mesh well with the neighboring gear-teeth so that the whole machine spins reliably and predictably, if not ineffeciently.
What's good for one cog isn't always good for the machine. Machines are what make money, and what makes them make more money are cheaper cogs.
Such is life in corporate America. You might consider testing the waters by seeing how your "superiors" respond to the idea of a cog that thinks for itself and has some ideas about making the machine better. Failing that, you might try jumping into some other machine.
I'm a QA guy at MS and beleive me, I understand your frustration. People like me have no say in how things get licensed. I've got friends that ask me licensing questions for their particular business problem and I've honestly got no idea. All i can do is forward the questions into people internally and hope somebody has a lucid response.
Every time I do this, i remind "whoever" is listening: every time a customer has to think about this, they move some deltaE closer to saying "fuck you guys" and jumping to F/OSS, where if nothing else, licensing is certainly _perceptually_ less confusing.
Anytime a business makes it hard for customers to give it money, they're doing something wrong.
Expecting customers to keep track of licenses (with paper and a filing cabinet, in some cases!) and all kinds of other stuff is completely ridiculous. A big part of the problem is that internally, we're for the most part completely insulated from it. We do ok at responding to pain that we know about and have exposure to, and pretty badly at pain we don't understand or know about.
I'm sorry for how lame your licensing experience has been and wish I could offer some help. I'm also interested in knowing more about your virtual test lab.. one of my last projects in Redmond was working on the automation system that ran all of Visual Studio's tens of thousands of automated tests across thousands of PCs. The feedback I get is that very few companies are doing automated software testing, so I'm interested in what you're working on.
I was checking out anime OP/ED videos a while back for a series I had started watching and came across someone that has somehow tricked youtube into letting ultra-high resolution videos on the site.
Here's an example: http://youtube.com/watch?v=2Vtrmpol390
Notice that the "clock" on the player says its 9:59 long. Note that the streaming hiccups and stutters because the actual video is only 1:30 long -- just like any other anime OP. The time-code computation appears to be totally off for this video, but the quality is fantastic. Listen with good headphones -- the audio and video quality are both fantastic in this video.
Now compare to a "normal" youtube version: http://youtube.com/watch?v=B5PoF34qM0o
This person's other movies are all other anime OP/ED sections that all say they are around 10 minutes long, but in reality are all 1:30 or so.
So it seems this person has figured out how to exploit something in youtubes video analysis/recoder to get ultra-high quality audio/video, at the expense of breaking the media-length calculations.
Actually, I did that a lot when I first got hired at my current company. I flunked a round of interviews partially because of my hot-headed attitude and MS bashing.
I did a 2nd round with a different group and kept the rhetoric to a minimum. But once I was in, I turned on the flame-thrower again. "I can't beleive you put up with this crap -- pine and sendmail will service 25,000 mailboxes on a 1 proc machine", etc. I would constantly compare the lame MS experience to some F/OSS experience. This was back in the 2000-2001 time frame. Was it annoying? yes. Did people listen to me? Yes. Did we switch to f/oss software? No. Did a lot of the software we used to do our jobs get better? Yes.
The company I did this at?
Microsoft.
I'm a Microsoft Employee, and I'm a QA engineer (tools & automation developer). You had better beleive that when one of us says "F/OSS kicks our ass at this", people here eventually notice and try to remedy the problem. (Clearly, there's great job security here
I agree with the generalities of your point. You need to pick and choose your battles. But one thing I'll say is -- if you're frustrated that MS products are so (in your opinion) inferior to some F/OSS (or any competing offering) product, MS is a great place to work. We take competition very seriously, and we need more people that are used to not rebooting, apps not taking down more than they need to, user separation, simple tools that are efficient and single-purposed, etc, to help us make better software. When I joined, there wasn't a linux compete team, a compatibility lab, etc etc. Now we have all of those things and there are people who actually study where we don't measure up.
I would find this keyboard extremely useful.
Right now, on my Vista machine, I have the EN, DK, DE, and JP keyboard layers installed. I use alt-shift to switch input key systems.
As you may know, English, German, and Danish keyboards all have slightly different layouts. I primarily use the english layout, but on occasion need to switch to a different layout.
I use the Microsoft Japanese IME, whereby you use the english layout to type in romanized japanese syllables. The IME is smart enough to build up a kana or kanji completion list based on what you've typed.
However, there are infact native japanese keyboard layouts as well, and as shown in the video, you can directly type the hirigana which is roughly 50% more stroke efficient (most hirigana are 2 roman characters, some are 3, and just a handful are a single char).
So, from the perspective of wanting to change keyboard layouts, a keyboard like this would be awesome. Important to you? No. Important to me? Well, not $2500 important. $50 important? Yes.
Next application: application software keybindings
Remember when applications like Autocad or even flight simulators had these huge keyboard overlays that fit over your keyboard? These would tell you what functions mapped to what keys. I remember when Lotus 123 was still a product and all the lotus junkies had the 123 overlay as well.
This keyboard does away with all of that. And you'll never lose the mapping, and it can task switch along with the app itself.
Next Application: Modal / Contextual input applications
suppose i'm in vi. Not all key strokes are legal, depending on what mode i'm in. A keyboard where invalid characters go dark provides a tremendous amount of context information.. even if i only notice it in my peripheral vision.
Or what about input validation? Field alpha-numeric only? Set the keyboard up to black out non alpha-numeric chars. Numbers only? Dim most of the keyboard.
Yes/No/Cancel dialogs? Black out everything except Y,N,C, arrow keys, space bar, escape, and enter.
There's a tremendous amount of context and HCI informational cueing that you can give the user with a keyboard like this. If i could get this thing at an affordable price, i'd have one, and i'd start thinking of things to do with it.
Someone else mentioned changing the key-caps when you have modifiers pressed (shift, alt, ctrl, etc). That idea alone could be a system seller, especially in environments with tremendous key tables (try doing APL programming sometime). Or remember the good-ole-days of "ALT+nnn" input on DOS machines?
I don't think the capabilities and possibilities of the keyboard are stupid at all. I've been an extremely fast and accurate touch typist for almost 20 years and i think this would be tremendously helpful. It would change where my brain and eyes look for visual cues when using the computer.
Random thought: suppose you're using a system where security is not NSA grade, but you still want some. Someone appears to hve forgotten their password. Why not highlight the keys that make up the password? Finger memory is subconcious yet strong with a lot of people; if giving someone a password reminder like this keeps them from being locked out of their system, but doens't let the casual attacker brute-force the logon, why not try it?
The more I think bout this thing, the more interesting ideas I want to try with it.
the suggestion that the justicies would need to reach the same conclusion in private is foolish.
The reason you go for 9 redundant judges is not to have broad unanimity. It's to get diversity of opinion to the input of the legal function.
Suppose that one of the justices really _nails_ the interpretation of the law, or his copy of the paperwork was the only one where a "comma" was printed clearly enough to see.
In isolation, he might come to the correct, but minority opinion.
Once all the justices confer, they may reverse their earlier opinions and agree with the lone justicices interpretation. This happens all the time in any congregation of experts. Someone notices one thing, someone else notices something else, and so on, and a dialogue that attempts to emcompass the value that all of those invovled bring the table ensues.
Asking people to reach _exactly_ the same conclusion before hand with unanimity is ridiculous, as it would only work if people had identical observational and reasoning capabilities.