Have to admit this made me chuckle! +1

Any and every job can feel like you describe when you're only in it for the money or simply don't have the right skills.

I've routinely hired new engineers in their late teens/early 20s straight out of college for $70K+. There's not many, if any, career paths that can boast entry level jobs with that starting point that don't require graduate level education or specialized training.

After reading through the first couple paragraphs, the tone of his whole article feels sensationalist and stereotyped to the point I really didn't care what he had to say. While it's fun to spout of hyperbole like "my computer illiterate producer who's only game play experience is Bejeweled" as if it represents what one thinks a whole industry is like regardless of reality, it's not very useful or constructive except for generating page hits.

I've spent 18 years in the game development industry (LoL, UO, TR, SWG, LOTRO, DDO) and while there are those occasional low points, it's not the norm.

One piece of advice he has which all budding indie game developers need to take to heart is do it for love and passion and don't expect to make any money out of it. If you do it for love and passion, players will notice and provide the greatest possible path to financial gain if your product is worth it. Regardless of financial world, you will have something that you created with that's genuinely yours and can leverage to land you bigger and better paying game gigs down the road. The key is to create something you love.

The current patent ecosystem, at least in regards to computer technology in general, has incentivized an environment of innovative litigation schemes rather than incentivizing true product innovation. Too many businesses and lawyers making money from schemes that do not produce (and never intended to produce) tangible results other than to sue for money on white paper ideas that never saw (and never expected to see) the light of day until some other entity actually (often unknowingly) puts in the effort of true innovation while tripping over hidden patent traps.

Thanks for the reply and +1 for giving me inspiring my personal education today as I looked up "bike shedding". Pretty informative and usable for future reference!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law_of_Triviality

Regulators don't have the same skin in the game that company executives have with their own company. Oversight committees and regulators will never have the same level of motivation to ferret out every little detail because frankly there's no financial incentive to do so. It's not like regulators will make any more money working harder and longer by discovering fraud than if they just put in their 9-5. C-level execs, on the other hand, stand to make huge windfalls with these kinds of large deals and will know every little detail, risk and reward of the deal and leverage every resource to discover every little detail before making a decision. HP management either was grossly incompetent at evaluating this multi-billion dollar purchase or willfully negligent for who knows what reason.

I find it hard to believe that the management of HP failed to uncover fraud of this magnitude during their evaluation in the purchase of Autonomy. What this really means is management failed to do their due diligence in evaluating Autonomy and now need to to distract from poor financial performance due to a lack of competence at the executive level.

In those cases, the inventor can profit without the need of legal protection and patents. They've created something novel which can easily be kept secret unless they give the source code away at which point they are knowingly and willingly sharing with the rest of the world their invention. If it's that useful to society, companies will pay for it since they can't simply copy it since there's nothing to "see" to copy except assembly code in a binary blob. Copyright will also still be in full effect.

In those cases, the inventor can profit without legal protection. They've created something novel which can easily be kept secret unless they give the source code away at which point they are knowingly and willingly sharing with the rest of the world their invention. If it's that useful to society, companies will pay for it since they can't simply copy it since there's nothing to "see" to copy except assembly code in a binary blob.

All great points! Yes, laws are hard to do especially in a way that produces the result you intend without a bunch of unintended side effects. And discussion of those details is how we arrive at details. I've thought a lot today about this just from this thread alone. Compounding the problem with coming up with generic laws are the reality that people's motives aren't always for the good of the whole but simply the good of themselves but they misrepresent or conceal their real intentions or distract from the real issues with strawman arguments.

You've given more to think about which I hope we all continue to do.

Drugs aren't the output of a single device or process. Drugs are the output of multiple devices and processes working to create a novel output and therefore patentable. Software is not the resultant output of multiple devices or processes.

I like your example and it shows the need to support certain activities.

In this case, GM can reverse engineer your product since the physical manifestation of that product exists and can be inspected and its workings discovered.

Software, for the most part, does not exist in a meaningful, tangible manifestation unless you choose to give away the source code. Yes, you get the assembly codes and can decompile the binary into some crippled form of source code, but, you can't really discover the actually mechanism the same way you can take apart a physical device.

Furthermore, a 200 MPG engine would not have been created as the output of a single machine or process. You're not going to build that engine using just a drill press or just a milling machine or even just a 3D printer. If it theoretically COULD be the output of one single device, then, it shouldn't be patentable.

The 200MPG engine is going to be the resultant output of many processes and devices and therefore deserves legal defense.

Software is the output of a single device/process and doesn't deserve to be a patentable output. Furthermore, it can be monetized in the public without others easily "figuring it out" unless it was trivial to begin with at which point we're back to the point where it doesn't deserve to be patented because it's simply not that novel.

See my previous response. In a word, yes, the output of a single mechanical device shouldn't be patentable. Combining outputs from multiple unique devices, however, should be something we encourage and reward with legal defense.

I like how you're thinking and appreciate your response.

In fact, I don't believe you should be able to patent the output of a drilling press or a milling machine. In general, as I think out loud, it seems the root problem is allowing the output from a single device or process to be patented. Once a machine or process exists that can produce an output then nobody should be able to hold license to any one particular output of that device or process.

Now, combine multiple outputs from multiple different devices or processes and create a new device or process that can produce a new kind of output that can't be done with any existing single device or process... that feels like what we want to encourage and give legal defense.

That's a fair point and observation. Development takes time. The reward should be focused on those who actually take the time to develop and market their product for meaningful use in society (or team up with others who can bring a product to market) and not reward those who simply come up with the idea for it and wait to sue someone else who actually spends the time to make it a reality.