Posts by bobbles31 332 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2007
I guess it's because the patent covers an artefact that you actually have to produce yourself, whereas copyright covers the artefact itself.
A counter analogy would be, why should property copyright have limited duration when my home ownership is never ending.
The home I leave to my children doesn't revert to public ownership after 70 years so why should that photo, that I spent a lifetime training and perfecting my craft such that I was able to capture it?
I thought that the whole point of raid was that the expectation that a drive would fail and the system could carry on.
Surely the question becomes one of performance improvement over maintenance cost. Given that you are going to be replacing drives more frequently, is the increased maintenance cost less than the increased revenue from having faster drives? If so, use SSDs if not don't. I would hazard to guess that across the industry their are relatively few applications that would provide a net benefit.
Actually, by not paying a dividend when they patently could they are directly affecting the share price and as a result not acting in the best interests of the share holder. Einhorn isn't a philanthropist he is a capitalist, he has provided capital for Apple to operate and now he wants his return.
It's this small idea called capitalism.
The reason cars don't have 8 tracks or tape players is because it is no longer commercially viable for the manufacturer to include support for those features. The same applies to software. At some point the company has to make a call as to whether or not a given feature is economically viable to include in future versions.
Or would you rather that the new versions included a legacy feature tax in the price to pay some engineers, analysts, qa, localisation, managers etc to maintain that feature in all future releases?
Down vote away, but the OP did ask for an explanation.
It's a wonderful example of the prisoners dilema, if all the companies cooperated then they would all suffer minimal costs and could freely innovate. If one of them sets out to gain the patents then all would suffer substantial costs and innovation would be stifled.
I've always thought that the duration of a patent should be based on returns. Once a patent has returned the research and development costs and given the inventor a healthy return then patent protection no longer applies. This should apply particularly where a patent is considered a component of a bigger system.
To be fair to the original poster, I have heard the term big four used a lot when talking about companies but in tech circles or at least dev circles Gang of Four refers to a specific group of individuals and more commonly a specific book.
I guess the corporate GOF would rather appear more like wise gurus than the corporate pirates that they really are.
I wonder if by "average citizen" he means, the subset of all Athenians that are not slaves and not the sum of all people that live and work in Athens. I believe this to be an important distinction because it is essentially like saying the average person at Cambridge University is genetically disposed to high intelligence (not counting all those people who clean the floors, cook food etc etc)
I was a rabid GTA fan boy but IV put pay to that. It's not that the game was bad but it wasn't true to the GTA lineage of bigger badder and more ridiculous. Bailing a jeep out of the back of a cargo jet however, is pure GTA! Soon as I have confirmation that the annoying, friends phoning you up to whine mechanic is gone, I will put in my preorder.
Of course, I might be willing to put up with incessant friend nagging if the combine harvester mission gets included again.
Your argument is only slightly flawed, Starbucks themselves are the very antithesis of your argument. They charge a premium for a product that is exactly the same as everyone else's. and yet, people pay the higher Starbucks price, why?
How high would a tax have to be before Starbucks stopped seeing a profit big enough to warrant having outlets in the UK? This is the point at which Starbucks would leave. Whilst there is a profit, there will be a company there to exploit it.
I'll take a stab at it,
Hmrc introduced IR35 which is supposed to apply the test of "on the balance of probabilities is the contractor actually a disguised employee". (The sheep in wolves clothing test)
They could by the same definition introduce a "on the balance of probabilities is the company just making that foreign payment in order to avoid tax". What I like to call the bunch of robbing bastards test. If they pass the test then the payment be treated as profit and not an expense.
Mines the one with the PCG membership in the pocket.
You my friend make a very salient point. An import on ip is exactly what is needed. Corps have found a way to put a value on something that is tax free. IP is exactly what this is, for a company to take money out if the system (country) it has to be assigned as an expense of the company. Normally this would be assigned to something that had been imported but as you quite rightly point out all that has been imported is the IP. If import duty was assigned to the value of the IP that was extracted then everything would balance. The company can show as big a loss as it likes because it will have paid some form of tax on all of its expenditure.
Up voted by me, I used to be an avid cinema goer, but have given this up nowadays in favour of on demand services. The biggest turn off to the cinema is not the people who love the sound of their own voice so much that they can't shut up for 2 hours, not the overpriced "refreshments", not the mortgage sized face value of tickets. It is the simple fact that on the balance of probabilities any film that a cinema is showing is nothing more than an overhyped over dramatic pile of special effect sequences shown in no particular order and generally for no particular reason.
Here's an idea, when the producers sit around deciding what film to make and how to go about it, rather than getting the worlds best marketing people and advertising executives in a room with a group of special effects technicians, maybe (and I know I am out on a limb here) you should start with a writer, and a plot, and maybe a script. The cinema "experience" is still one of the best forms of entertainment available it is just a shame that the actual content has sunk to a level akin to watching a porn film starring Jo Brand.
Mines the one with the frog pills in the pocket.
You can waste a courts time with rounded corners patent cases, you can bitch about the verdict to the press, he'll you can even call the judge names outside his own court if you like. But Judges get real funny when they issue an order and it doesn't get followed. People that don't do as they are told by a judge generally go to prison.
I do regularly clear out old kit so my collection these days only runs to a couple of boxes.
Although in my defence I do seem to cling to exotic items:
1 x Fujitsu Siemens stylistic st5031 tablet pc
1 x mpeg4 daughter board for long obsolete graphics cards.
1 x Commodore 64 with 1541 disk drive and 1501 printer
And my personal favourite
1 x Action Replay Cartridge mkiv for said Commodore 64
IMHO we are reaching a sort of saturation point with tech. Most people get by with a tablet these days, whilst they certainly aren't a 640k 8bit machine they are also much much lower spec than a top of the range PC. My point is that the difference between what you could get and what you would actually use is getting wider and wider, I had virgins 40meg product about 4 years ago it was extortionate but I felt that As a heavy user I needed that bandwidth. Then I realised that in actuality I would rarely go over 10 meg in terms of what I actually used so I dropped my service down to that, no noticeable difference in service I merely stopped flattering myself that I needed that much bandwidth and accepted the fact that at 10 meg I could probably receive a file quicker than the source can pump it out.
I wonder if a sizeable drop in SSDs will hurt new machine sales. I used to buy a laptop every other year but last time I was due for a replacement instead of shelling out over a grand on a new laptop I spent about £500 on replacing my current laptops drives with an SSD and a hybrid. As a result I now have a 3 year old machine that is as (if not not more) responsive than a lot of modern laptops.
Disclosure: I primarily use VS 2010 for work which is very heavy on disk usage.
Am I the only layman that thinks that the LHC sounds like nothing more than a powerful brownian motion generator?
Expect someone to find hundreds of Higgs Bosons by plugging Atlas into a really hot cup of tea and subsequently being murdered for being a smart arse.
Mines the one with the book in the pocket that has the words Don't Panic written on it in large friendly letters.
That could be the case, or.........just maybe it is a correlation with the increasing popularity of laptops over desktops and even tablets over laptops that is leading to a market where an ever larger proportion of machines are sold with no media drive at all.
I mean what percentage of a target market needs to have no need of something before that feature is removed. Especially in the case where that feature costs real money in terms of a license?
It may well be the Hotels fault, but the woman was insured. So it is her insurance companies job to recover damages from the hotel or it's insurer.
I guess dropping something on your foot is potentially not as pyschologically damaging as having something fall on you unexpectedly whilst your mind is presumably in a busy and happy place.
That program confused the living poop out of me. I had been in Australia for 3 months, and was watching it about 6 months after I got back. I started watching it about 15 minutes in with no idea what it was about and was genuinely confused until I noticed that some of the dates for serving politicians were in the future.
Good though
I think that the case is not based on the dispute that Java is free or not. It is based on the principle that Google have forked the Java source with no intention of returning their changes as a contribution to the ongoing Java effort. Effectively creating two Javas, Sun's and Googles.
Iirc the license allows for the forking of the code for personal use but not for ongoing commercial distribution as competing platform.
Effectively, oracles Own IP is being used as the basis for a competing product which oracle are saying is against the terms of the license under which the source code is made available.
1) So far as I can tell, the only person guilty in the Wikileaks saga was the person that leaked the information. IIRC, Wikileaks didn't pay for the information so technically have no charges to answer.
2) Yes - though if I were on the Jury there I vote not guilty.
3) Yes
4) Not as such, but the leak should be.
5) Depends on how they come about them.
In almost all these cases there is a possible public interest defence, I guess that when you are faced with the moral dilemma of whether to break the law or not you should ask yourself very carefully, is this really an act that is being taken in the public interest. Or is it just something sensational that the public's insatiable appetite for the salacious would be interested in.
I fear that the Murdoch's empire for tat is more weighted towards the latter.
Considering some of the things that haven't been reported in the Tabloids that really are in the public interest I find myself not giving them the benefit of the doubt.
IMHO the only way that the public interest defence could possibly work is to treat it as exactly that. When the journo brings the evidence obtained illegally, bring the prosecution and test the evidence, the story, the outcome and present your arguments for a public interest defence. If the public (as represented by a jury) disagrees then justice will be seen to be done.
Of course, journalists would probably be a bit more cautious when using this form of defence and that is right and proper.
MPs should make this clear and from this point on that is the process.
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