Re: Java and avoiding software piracy?
I would like to start my rebuttal with this note:
Having had several hours to cool down, I have realized that to continue
this argument would be an exercise in futility. Both you and I differ in
the basic assumptions underlying our opinions. No amount of discussion
will ever allow us to reconcile these assumptions. However, in the
interest of not sounding like I'm giving up because I have nothing to
say, I will rebut your points. You may reply to my rebuttal in whatever
manner you want; I guarantee that I will not reply to it at all.
On Fri, 27 Jul 2007 12:39:55 +0000, Twisted wrote:
On Jul 26, 5:42 pm, Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeo...@verizon.net> wrote:
Why go through such trouble
to hide a source if it supports your claims?
Are you calling me a liar?!
No. I am neither calling you nor your source a liar. Instead, I am
pointing out that it damaged its credibility in doing so.
The patent was harmful. The problem is not that a specific patent got
misused. It is that patents get misused, easily and with the full
support of and assistance by the law. The patent system permitted and
indeed incentivized Watt's misuse of his patent. I don't honestly see a
way to properly fix it short of repealing patent law; requiring
compulsory licensing of patents with a single universal fixed price for
licensing any patent set by Congress is ALMOST good enough, however.
However, giving exclusive, noncompulsorily-licensed rights to Watt or
anyone else that lets them name their price or just say "no" altogether
automatically enables abuse, and incentivizes some forms of abuse that
will generally make the patent holder rich or at least let them rest on
their laurels doing no more innovating for years while progress is
retarded industrywide.
So automatically monopolizing a market and enforcing that monopoly is
abusive? Here's an example where that actually paid off very well: PNG
and GIF. Unisys decided in the 1990s that it was suddenly going to
enforce its patent on the LZW compression algorithm, the basis of the
popular GIF format. In response, the W3C convened and churned at PNG as a
full recommendation in under 1 year -- an impressive feat, given that
it's taken 7 years to get CSS2.1 to candidate recommendation and it will
take at least another year to get to full recommendation; HTML 5 is
expected to take another 15 years.
NO! Wealth is relevant. The entire point of patents is to ensure that
useful inventions /will have a positive ROI/.
NO! Preexisting wealth of Watt or that other guy or whoever else is NOT
relevant! The ROI is the same, $5, if I go from being poor with $1 to
having $6 and if I go from being rich with $1,000,000 to having
$1,000,005.
Given your assumptions, that is probably true. But I disagree with that,
and I furthermore recognize that it is an exercise in futility to try to
get you to see what I'm seeing.
[ More stuff there's no point in rebutting for similar reasons]
Proving that they knew of and wilfully infringed the patent is of course
simple -- see if they (or a shell or something) did a patent search and
saw the patent they allegedly infringed at all.
Not true. You and I would probably use different words to describe the
same thing; given that there are millions of patents to check for
potential infringement, searching is very difficult and expensive.
[Once again, our base assumptions differ.]
platinum is sometimes needed, and that is the most expensive metal
traded on commodity markets.
And an R&D lab need only ever get a fixed sized amount of platinum,
because its main use is as a catalyst rather than a reactant of any
sort. As such it is not consumed by doing however much R&D you want
using it over as long a time as you want. A small R&D firm might buy
land, a lab building built on it, some equipment, and some platinum and
never buy more of any of those again no matter how many new chemicals it
invents there. In practise, some stuff eventually needs fixing or
replacing for one reason or another but it will generally all last years
or even decades; the land should last indefinitely. And so should the
platinum.
You've taken chemistry, right? Then you should know that very few
chemical reactions go out to full completion, including the intermediary
ones reacting with catalysts. Catalysts, like any other component, wear
out over time; it is a recurring cost albeit not as recurring as the
reactants.
NMR machines for identifying
compounds are very expensive and require expensive maintenance (i.e.,
constant bathing in liquid nitrogen).
The machine is another one-time purchase, and liquid nitrogen is only
needed for some time before each use and during use.
Ummm... not true. The liquid nitrogen is needed /constantly/. The machine
sort of brickifies if you don't do so...
Why? Let's see...
First mover advantage
In an ideal market, that doesn't exist.
You have the expertise and the ideas in the heads of your employees;
your competitor even with your blueprints will take years to perfect it
themselves, unless they have employees that can read minds from vast
distances
But you don't have R&D employees, remember?
You have better experts than anyone else
Ditto.
You have a direct use for the
thing yourself, such as a process innovation that will increase your
efficiency and undercut the competition. Selling the gadget that makes
it possible can be an added revenue stream, or you can keep it secret
for as long as possible and rely on undercutting the competition without
operating at a loss and leaving them wondering "how?"
Ditto.
You think it will make the world a better place and are a wealthy
philanthropist
Wealthy philanthropists tend to be business moguls and not scientists
capable of deliviring medical breakthroughs.
* OK, where does the government get the extra money?
Stop giving welfare to people who can easily do so themselves? You'd be
surprised how much money can be freed up by letting go of the Agriculture
Department, or the Department of Health and Human Services... Or maybe ax
Social Security.
No taxes needed :-D.
Today cannot be compared with what was true a thousand years or even a
hundred years ago.
Evidence?
How far do you live from your workplace? Much farther then you would've
two hundred years ago. How long does it take to send a message to
Beijing? Much shorter than a hundred years ago. For how much of your
adult life do you plan to be working? Much less than a hundred years ago.
What percent of your life is spent in school? How much taxes do you pay?
I could go on for hours...
Today is exactly like a hundred or a thousand years ago in all of the
relevant ways. Innovation in some areas is more expensive but real
wealth available to entrepreneurs is also exponentially higher than in
those earlier times. Making a steam engine would have been impossible
for Cro-Magnon man and an Apollo-scale project for the Aztec empire, but
it was something a moderately well off engineering corporation
equivalent could have done in Roman times had there been such, and that
ONE MAN could do more or less out of his own pocket in James Watt's
time.
Evidence?
How the hell can I? It's behind a paywall and I don't have a credit
card, numbnutz.
Not any recent articles (i.e., last week or two). I would be willing to
bet that you did not even bother to check the website. In addition, you
have a local library, and local libraries also have something called
newspaper and magazine archives. If you were really pressed, you could
always take a trip to the Library of Congress and find it over there.
Besides, I was also trying to impress the point that it is often a good
idea to try to check information out before you start relying on its
content. After all, not doing so tends to make you look like an idiot.
Besides, I don't see how anything there can possibly counter the
paragraph of mine quoted immediately above. [Deleting utter incivility]
[accuses me of misunderstanding economics]
Oh no, I understand economics very well. Well enough to see through all
sorts of BS, including all of yours so far, and I expect even the
cleverest BS you are capable of producing is still utterly transparent
to me...
*Blinks off the shock of the breakdown of civility.* In all honesty, this
is as civil as I can make it:
My first impression of you before responding to your posts was that of a
rather whiny person who didn't understand economics. My current
impression of you is that of a whiny college student, incapable of
understanding that he could be wrong or even seeing that someone else
might have the guts to contradict himself, who has a friend who took an
economics class three years ago, and finally thinks that the French
economic model is the paragon of the world.
As I said before, we both rely on different assumptions. Therefore
everything I say must seem like utter BS to you whereas everything you
say seems like utter BS to me. Judging from the other replies in this
thread, I am going to hazard a guess that I am in the majority. Oh wait,
that's wrong. The majority of people have already given up talking with
you [rest of sentence deleted to maintain civility].