Yes, and? The cost of a PARTICULAR wedding will of course rise if there are more guests, but that is not what they are talking about when they are talking about the cost of a wedding. You can have a wedding with 200 people and only spend $10K, or you can have a wedding with 20 people and spend $100K.

Way to completely miss the point. Some people choose the venue NOT because of the size, but because they simply MUST 'have the best'. Or maybe they choose the venue to fulfill a fantasy. For instance, you can get married in Disney World. You can choose all kinds of options, such as having the wedding party arrive in horse-drawn carriages, etc. You can spend many 10's of thousands of dollars before even ONE guest is invited. And when you do invite your first guest, the price does not double.

Apart from the venue there are also things like the wedding dress - do you have any idea on the price range for wedding dresses? Same for things like flowers, photographers, etc.

THAT is what they are talking about, not stupid crap like '20 people cost more that 10 people'.

Anybody who thinks that wedding costs only scale with the number of people is a fool.

No, it is not. You can have your reception in the church hall (maybe catered, maybe potluck, etc), or you can have it at the fanciest country club in town.

If you have a lot of people at a wedding where you are not spending a lot of money, those people are there because they care about you. That is a good thing.

If you spend a lot of money on a wedding that does not have a lot of guests, it indicates that appearances are very important to you. That is not a good thing.

Where do you get that stupid idea? Go price a wedding venue for 200 people, then see if you can have the same venue for 10% of the cost if you only invite 20 people. Food and drink may 'scale', the price of the venue, entertainment, etc does not.

Sure, if you ignore the whole Radcliffe College (started in 1879) thing.

Wait, you're claiming that sticking something that already exists (a digital camera) in the same case as something else that already existed is MORE innovative than the camera sensors, memory, and all that other stuff you can't see is? That has got to be one of the STUPIDEST things I have ever heard.

Exactly what patent is it that covers ALL speech recognition on a computer? Or has there been some mathematical proof done that shows there is no other way to do it?

You can't get a patent on a 'new version'. You can get a patent on improvements, but ANYONE can do that.

What do you mean speech recognition isn't an invention? Did it just fall out of the sky or something?

If this technology existed 20 years ago, then the patent is expired anyway.

You're not making any sense.

Wow. You do know that Moore's law is not a real thing, right? You can't 'take advantage of it'.

And you may want to look at what one of those 'other companies' that are making these ever smaller components is called. Hint, it begins with an S and ends with a G.

"The point" is that no system is, or will ever be, perfect. You are the one making the claim that they are too cheap to patch systems, etc. They aren't.

Even with their precautions someone breached them. That does not mean the money was not well spent, it just means that their system (including all the users of their system) is not perfect. I suppose YOU could make a 'perfect system' for them?

Of course they COULD have kept that valuable customer name/email information off the internet. That would kind of make it impossible to offer on-line banking (something probably 99% of their customers want), wouldn't it.

There will ALWAYS be tradeoffs between usability and security. A perfectly secure system would be virtually useless. The trick, of course, is finding the right balance. A breech like this does not show that balance is not currently right.

How is that 'not really innovation'? What enabled all those improvements, magic? Or maybe you think Moore's law is an actual law of physics, and things are just going to keep getting denser with no innovation from dedicated human beings?

If 'incremental improvements' are not innovation, then there has been no innovation between ENIAC and today's smartphones. Every one of the steps between there and here has been 'just an incremental improvement'.

What is your point? Yes, I am sure Dragon has patents on certain ways of doing speech recognition, and if you want to use those methods you must pay Dragon. So what?

The purpose of patents is to spur innovation. Doing what someone else is already doing, the same way they are doing it, is not innovation.

If you are unable to copy (whether or not you 'designed it from scratch') what Dragon is doing, maybe you should do something ELSE. Maybe there is a better way to do speech recognition. Maybe you should focus your attention on something other than speech recognition. Those efforts could lead to real innovation, efforts that would otherwise be wasted doing what already has been done.

Read up on something like the history of the steam engine. Watt was motivated by financial gain. He patented his engine and rigorously defended it. Other people saw a lucrative market for steam powered engines, and set about making their own engines that were different than what Watt did. That drove innovation. And the same pattern is repeated throughout history.

Really? 10 years ago you had a phone with 32GB of memory, that could connect to an LTE4 network, stream usable HD video (and display it on it's own HD screen), do voice recognition, weighed less the 150 grams, had a 16MP camera, etc? Exactly which phone was that?

Now, maybe YOU do not want or appreciate those features, and that is fine, but don't pretend they don't exist.

Most innovation (not just now, but always) does NOT show up suddenly as some earth-shattering new thing. Most innovation is incremental improvements to existing stuff.

Exactly. This is nothing more than a case of nostalgia for 'the good old days' that never actually existed.

Watt and his competitors were having patent fights hundreds of years ago. Bell and his competitors. Edison. The list goes on.

Yep, you can't innovate. Which is why the phone in your pocket is exactly the same as, does the same thing as, and performs the same as the phone that was there 10 years ago.