Come on, Slashdot, you're a bunch of engineers, right?
Wrong.
If by engineer you mean a licensed professional who stands by his work, and can be called to account for his failures.
It's the height of hubris for outsiders (especially lawyers in the state legislature) to come in and dictate low-level engineering details.
It also the height of hubris for the geek to allow Google to be the sole judge of its own work.
Would you feel the same way if a financial advisor intentionally stole all the money your parents had for retirement?
The financial advisor isn't a geek ---
and the geek should never have to serve hard time.
That is the argument as it usually plays out on Slashdot.
Prison sends the message that the white guy with a six or seven figure income will be treated the same as the poor and the black.
It sends the message that intangible property is still property.
Something that the geek --- who spends his entire working life inside a digital universe defined by the value given to endless streams of ones and zeroes --- ought to be applauding,
My intuition is that I'd be just fine with the only content available being content that did not seek a revenue stream. I thought the internet was better back then anyway.
The geek always thinks that way
Because way back then the Internet was his personal playground. He was the both content provider and consumer. I haven't forgiven him yet for the multitude of user-unfriendly clients he devised for communication over the snail slow connections of the dial-up modem days.
The Government did not invent roads. Roads existed long before the Government made them, in fact most towns and cities had roads without a Government mandating and taxing people for using and building them.
Surveying a road, grading and maintaining it always comes with a pretty stiff price tag.
Local roads and bridges were traditionally paid for by taxes, tolls and contributions of labor and materials.
Long distance travel by car was damn near impossible before the US federal government became directly and deeply involved. [untitled photograph] [
Lots and lots of people cycle to where they need to go in the winter, and -28 is a pretty common winter temperature
I would like to see a real breakdown by age, sex, martial status, income, injuries and deaths in traffic, and reports of medical emergencies like hypothermia, heart attacks and so on,
You pick any laptop with Windows pre-installed and buy another and let me install and configure Linux and put it in a box. You will then see how a Windows system when compared to a Linux system is inferior "out of the box."
How much say will I get in how you will configure the system?
You are a geek but I am not and we have a very different set of interests, values and expectations.
My desktop computer at home is running Linux for more than a decade now.
"Winning the desktop" has never been about winning over the geek.
It's always about winning over the full time office worker, the temp and the senior volunteer. The billion or so clerical workers in this world who keep things running behind the scenes.
Finland has about 3 million passenger cars in use by a population of 5.46 million.
Finland, Vehicle stock grew in 2012
Helsinki has some 390 cars per 1000 inhabitants. This is less than in cities of similar density, such as Brussels' 483 per 1000, Stockholm's 401, and Oslo's 413.
Today, Helsinki is the only city in Finland to have trams and metro trains. There used to be two other cities in Finland with trams: Turku and Viipuri (Vyborg, now in Russia), but both have since abandoned trams. The Helsinki Metro, opened in 1982, is the only rapid transit system in Finland.
You don't automatically deserve for your business to succeed regardless of other commercial factors, and you certainly don't deserve money just for having an idea. Ideas are cheap, it's R&D that costs money.
I never said that I deserve automatic business success. "Reward" and "getting paid" are two different things. I do agree, however, that I expressed myself poorly. Of course the mere idea is not enough to get a patent: At the very least I should supply enough information to make my valve. Still, I shouldn't need to actually produce valves in order to deserve patent protection; after all there are dedicated research entities like CSIRO who do expend significant effort to develop technologies even though they don't develop physical products based on those technologies.
And that is how the patent system is broken, because it directly rewards ideas and not development effort. The positive outcome of the system is just a side-effect of how the system works. The whole system needs refactoring so that it directly achieves the goals above within an ethical framework that acknowledges the value of straightforward hard work over simple ideas. This would mean that a patent troll with nothing more than an idea can't walk all over a company that had the same idea and then spend $10m developing it into a commercial product.
If the non-company actually came up with a working prototype and wrote a patent that explains in detail how to copy it and demonstrably came up with the whole thing first then yes, the non-company deserves the patent. Of course this scenario is utterly unlikely. Still, patents shouldn't be about how much it cost to come up with something; they should be about whether this something advances the state of the art and is described in a precise manner that allows an average worker in the field to reproduce it. If your company spends $10m and mine spends $100k and we independently arrive at the same method of solving a particular problem then your company's claim isn't automatically more valid than mine.
If we could ensure that all granted patents are for things that advance the state of the art in a reproducible manner we'd be much closer to a reasonable system (although there'd still be work left to be done).
It is within Google's capability to dynamically map every speed trap and even moving police cars.
If a police car can be tracked so can you.
If a speed trap is fullt automated, how does Google detect it before you have been ticketed?
When it comes to breaking the speed limit or being run over by a semi, I'll break the speed limit every time.
To what advantage if the semi is also being driven far above the speed limit?
Realistically, what are your chances of actually keeping pace with the thing or out-running it without losing control of your own vehicle?
Slashdot is a haven for rational thought
Stop it, please. You're killing me.
I don't get why people want to lock themselve in an echo chamber. That seems silly to me.
--- and a bizarre question to be asking here.
You can see the posters here circling the wagons when topics like gender equality come up on Slashdot.
Yep. And then all that money that would be used to pay salaries that would be used on expenses locally, making the local economy work, will be redirected to Bill Gate's pockets.
The Munich economy is working just fine.
Munich is considered a global city and holds the headquarters of Siemens AG (electronics), BMW (car), MAN AG (truck manufacturer, engineering), Linde (gases), Allianz (insurance), Munich Re (re-insurance), and Rohde & Schwarz (electronics). Among German cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants purchasing power is highest in Munich (26,648 euro per inhabitant) as of 2007. In 2006, Munich blue-collar workers enjoyed an average hourly wage of 18.62 euro (ca. $23).
The breakdown by cities proper (not metropolitan areas) of Global 500 cities listed Munich in 8th position in 2009. Munich is a centre for biotechnology, software and other service industries. Munich is the home of the headquarters of many other large companies such as the aircraft engine manufacturer MTU Aero Engines, the injection molding machine manufacturer Krauss-Maffei, the camera and lighting manufacturer Arri, the semiconductor firm Infineon Technologies (headquartered in the suburban town of Neubiberg), lighting giant Osram, as well as the German or European headquarters of many foreign companies such as McDonald's and Microsoft.
as to that new corporate headquarters in Munich that makes the geek so suspicious:
Microsoft Deutschland decided to relocate its [30 year old] headquarters [from a suburb about 17km north of the city] and establish new, modern headquarters in Parkstadt Schwabing. Commencement of the construction works is planned for 2014. As of summer 2016, approximately 1,800 employees will find a new working environment in the new headquarters in Munich-Schwabing.
http://www.eversheds.com/globa..." a>Microsoft Deutschland GmbH relocates its headquarters[Nov 2013]
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
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