Posts by Tom 13 7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
No patents were created so the inventor of something new would be able to profit from it either by being the sole supplier or selling licenses to use his technology. The assumption was that since this gives him the means to make money and making money is something people desire more people would invent more things. But it was always about a private profit.
No, it's exactly on point. IP is granted a monopoly protection by governments. By definition that means they are preventing certain kinds of competition. The claim made by the governments granting the monopolies is that if they don't grant them, IP development and technological growth will be stymied. I happen to largely share that viewpoint, but it doesn't mean I should deny the mechanism by which that end is achieved.
Google makes a hell of a lot more than any news scraper out there. If you're going after companies on the basis of them taking money from you Google would be THE target to go after.
They are currently escaping because of their "automated" system for delivery. Allegedly human hands never touch the data only machine algorithms. To me that just says they can just process it faster than humans could.
No I wouldn't. I would assume it was probably another Dem on Dem incident. Because the truth is, they're the ones who do most of it. Only lamestreamers cover it up when they can for Dems and make it headlines for Republicans, even when it turns out the perp isn't a Republican. And when they can't, they make snide remarks to at least perpetuate the myth that both sides engage in it.
I expect that would be highly dependent on the nature of the explosion. If it's the kind of explosion Elmer Fudd usually gets from his shotgun, not so much. If it's the kind of explosion Rutger Hauer got when he pulled the pin in Wanted Dead or Alive I expect it would rapidly impact the number of smokers.
because having recognized that you are beyond reason, for the most part, we see no need to waste further efforts. Key bit is here:
"everyone has their own perspective and to think there is only one and they all match"
I'll refer you to C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength and the crabby experimental scientist who gets whacked early in the book. His point was dead on, which is of course, why he got whacked.
Needs a bit more than a peer review these days. I'd say it also has to have the cleansed and aggregated data published as well. As far down the scale as you can get without disclosing PII.
If you are sensitive it is genuine. If you aren't sensitive what makes it even more confusing is that it isn't necessarily consistent for those of us who are. I'd say 9 times out of 10 I'm the first person to notice the smell of insulation burning off an electrical wire, but other things I can' smell because of my allergies. Perfume is another thing that can set me off (and oddly enough it is more often men who cause the problem) depending on the scent. I'd imagine the sulfur dioxide would be the issue with the volcano and that's on the list of things I notice. And until LCDs took over the market, I was usually the first guy to hear the monitor hum on the soon to be failing CRT.
I work in the US and have never paid that much for my insurance, including my employer contribution (which they've all been pretty up front about). If you're paying that much it's because somebody else in the chain is featherbedding. If we had passed Reagan's solution way back in the 80s I know I'd be sitting pretty for health coverage when I retire 25 years from now. Instead we keep getting socialist plans and the costs keep going up.
Okay, test case:
What would Microsoft sales of Windows 7 Professional be if they set the cost of the software at 10,000 Euros per copy?
Yeah, that's right, they can't really set any price they want to for their product. They do have some control, but their objective is to maximize economic profit, not price.
More right than wrong, but some of the nits matter.
In a free market the price and demand curves meet at the clearing price which maximizes production and consumption. In monopolistic markets that point is manipulated to create what is usually called an "economic profit." Price is normally set to maximize that profit. In a free market, new competition enters to undercut the current producer because of the economic profit. The only practical monopolies are government created ones like Ma Bell was in the US.
Microsoft and Adobe do have somewhat monopolistic markets because the critical point is the interchange format. Most businesses buy Word because Word is the format in which they receive documents from other businesses. Likewise a business is likely to save on training costs if they use the same software everybody else is using. It's worth noting that before about 1990 there were changes in market leaders as we went from Wordstar to WordPerfect to Word. Until then nobody ever really captured more than 60% of the market. At the time it happened MS used their monopoly position in the OS industry to undercut the pricing of WordPerfect. They were never taken to court for it. But because they now control more than 80% of the market, it is nearly impossible to dislodge them. While it is true they could set prices too high, it is also true that they have a fair amount of price setting leeway and leverage. Probably not as much as the politicos and writer of the article assume, but not as little as they claim.
No market's are not about what it will bear, that's the claim made by the market droids. Markets a clearing function. They clear the most produced goods at the price at which consumers will pay it, assuming there are no government created or natural monopolies that affect the market. And so far all of those 'natural monopolies' which have been claimed in the past have turned out to be government created.
The way the law is written now, yes. But as soon as the lawmakers say that First Sale applies to IP that is no longer the case. Which is what he's advocating.
Now, you can argue about whether or not that would be a good thing for the production of new IP, but certainly would fix the pricing issue.
Except that when it comes to search Microsoft is the Apple of the business desktop PC market and therefore not in a position to be ABLE to stifle competition. Besides which, there's a well known Google blog post where they determined Bing uses Google searches to confirm their results, and if Bing doesn't have one, substitutes Google's.
Louis Sullivan observed that "form follows function." This is as true with an OS as it is with a building.
I expect a different form for the OS on a phone than I do on a dual monitor desktop which is different yet again (albeit only slightly) from a presentation computer connected to a Jumbotron.
Why should I HAVE to "easily replace/avoid" the interface on a new OS? Isn't the point of the new OS to add value? If the first thing I had to do with a new car was get a new paint job because the old one reeked, I wouldn't buy the car.
Yep, and the last time I was involved in a largish purchase of systems from a major vendor, Dell put that image on the boxes before they left the factory so we wouldn't have to.
And even if they are rolling their own, they watch the cost of the machine including the "pre-installed" license as wells as the terms of the Enterprise license. Buy the wrong starter boxes and you'll owe them lots of money come audit time.
Try again.
And when your average person couldn't crank out 10,000 copies of a song, that made sense. The problem is that now the average person can, and peer-to-peer networks do that, so the average person now runs afoul of those laws. Because while it might not have been you intention to inflict commercial damages on the copyright owner when you put that song on the file share, that's exactly what you did. From the commercial standpoint, tape didn't have that impact. Each generation degraded it so it had a limit. CDs upped the ante because they didn't degrade, but you still had person to person and time constraints. Peer-to-peer does away with that - perfect copies and unlimited distribution, so you're right up there with the old style pirates who had pressing plants making thousands of vinyl copies of records.
Which isn't to say the actual creators of the copyrights aren't being screwed by the copyright holders who are pressing the court cases.
but it would seem to me that it would be the quick and simple aggregation of information by a service without needless intrusion from things in which the user is uninterested. If it made it available offline that would be even better. I like checking things on my train ride where internet connectivity is spotty at best.
How about a cursory reading of the US Constitution?
The US Congress does in fact posses the ability to create new courts and funnel certain types of cases to those courts. That's essentially what they did with this law.
Furthermore, the claim of damages is specious at best. Given the way the law is written, the letters in question are going to third parties, not the targets of the investigations. As third parties who are essentially being asked to testify against the target, they are unlikely to have protections against self-incrimination. On the other hand, revealing even the existence of such a letter can clearly undermine the work of collecting information to apprehend and prosecute the subject.
Whether or not such policies are wise for a democratic republic is certainly a good question. And I would feel better if there were a more rigorous court reviewing the requests. However, they are quite constitutional.
Close but not quite.
It would be an illegal condition of the contract and as such that condition would be struck but usually not the entire contract. In order for the whole contract to be struck the court would have to determine that the removing the condition would make the rest of the terms of the contract unenforceable.
A more interesting problem is that in order for a contract (and therefore a contract to issue a license) to be issued, some of value must be exchanged between parties. Now while I assume that in the case of updates to MS software the "free" downloads could be considered modifications to the original, but it is an interesting conundrum for other free downloads like Reader, Flash, and Java.
Actually, there were some old OSes that did that very well. OS space cleanly segmented from data space so while the data space still needed to be protected, it was nearly impossible to compromise the OS space.
It's just our current OS matrix that jumbles them together.
The elephant in the room on this one is that very little if any nuclear waste is buried in a sealed site. Most of it is still sitting on the reactor site where it was created and put into "temporary" storage. Particularly here in the US where we've been waiting since the 1950s for that salt site in Nevada to open only to discover it now won't happen.
Trademark law wasn't written at a time to take the internet into account. There can only be one tld so if you've got competing trademarks, only one of them is going to get the domain.
BTW: In this instance the more obvious example would seem to be an Apple tld. Should it belong to the chips & fondleslabs? The record company? Or an association for the growers of real fruity goodness?
Let me fix that for you:
1. Large corporations don't pay (much) tax
1. Large corporations don't pay any taxes, although they will collect them for politicians after an appropriate mark up.
2. Politicians like to implement new taxes, they just don't want to be responsible for collecting them from you.
Granted the maps probably aren't any more accurate than the ones Western militaries probably already have, but they might provide useful confirmation. Think of it as being similar to taking a camera on a military base. We can probably get high quality pictures from space, but confirmation from a guy on the ground improves your confidence in the data. In short, I could see Western militaries having similar concerns if it was a Chinese company delivering beverages to one of their bases.
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