0wza's comments

Well, it's better than Google. Google just jumped right into the game, though they claimed to disagree with it.

Bezos has the cash to play the game. And he had acces to it early enough (remember the one-click patent) to gain a monumental advantage. Relative to the other big players, Amazon has stayed on the sidelines.

Not to say Amazon is an angel that sets the standard for fairplay, but they definitely (? prove me wrong!) do not pursue patents to the extent of Microsoft, Apple, Google and others.

You can either call them naive for not playing, or you can accept that they may have set a better example.

Hey, I absolutely agree evolution is slow to catch up. But the thing is, we gotta live with what we've got. (Kinda like an election with two lame candidates.) That is the challenge. We're better to work with what evolution has equipped us than to ignore it. We have to be realistic. Dare I say it? We occasionally need to be _reasonable_. (Hello Apple.)

If I understand you correctly this time, you're saying we would have gotten a better deal if Microsoft had not been able sue competitors. Even the Gates Foundation, with all its billions, can't manage to achieve world peace or universal equality.

I read Maskin's paper from 1999. His basic premise was that software didn't need patents to reach a high level of success as an industry. And when the rampant software patenting started, he says it did not boost the industry. But he seems to think that this example of one industry sums up the entire role of the patent system, for any industry. Still not sure I buy that. If he has done his homework on other industries, e.g. pharmaceuticals, he is not showing it in that paper. Maybe I need to read more of his papers.

Wow. Your thinking is downright scary.

"compromise [is] a logical fallacy"

If it's hard wired then maybe that's for a reason. And the reason is likely because it keeps you or your progeny alive longer.

Economics can often be inhuman. It's all theory. Contrast that with evolution and "hard wiring". Absence of logic aside, if everyone took your attitude seriously, little would get done and I'm sure economic activity would suffer. Welcome to the world of negotiation. It's how things get done.

This is type of comment represents exactly the kind of childish thinking to which I was refering.

When you are incapable of negotiation, patents and IP in general indeed become a royal PITA.

I'm not sure that lobbying from the pharma industry would have done much good for software companies before the State Street decision. As I said, software companies are newcomers to patents. Other industries have been using patents for far longer.

Even copyright protection for software is a relatively new thing. I'm sure the world's largest patent troll when he was a CTO at a major software company was at times amazed that software could be protected by copyright. It is a gift that spawned an industry and was used to build one of the world's greatest monopolies. What would have happened without that ability to sue for copyright infringement?

Are you sure that's what he's saying? Is he suggested all patents are impediments?

I just skimmed that paper and I see references to semiconductors and software. The word "pharmaceutical" only appears in the title of a one of the references. He never discusses pharmaceuticals.

Maybe the IT industry has enough cash to make us all forget about other industries that use the patent system such as the pharmaceutical industry. Maybe we can stay focussed on software as a raison d'etre for everything. If patents hurt software, then they must be abolished. Never mind how this might impact other industries.

The only thing I "disagree" with is that the focus is solely on software. Where were these "abolish patents" arguments from Nobel Laureates in Economic years ago, before the smartphone era? Why weren't they arguing against patents that make it more difficult for smaller players to develop drug treatments and make the treatments that are developed by large players more expensive for everyone?^1 Or maybe they were and I just didn't notice.

I'm just not convinced that someone who focuses almost entirely on IT and particularly software truly understands _all_ the dynamics of the patent system. It makes me skeptical. Software is a recent entry into the patent game. The absurd behavior of a few IT companies and patent trolls emerging from IT (the term patent troll itself was coined by an Intel lawyer) is making us question the very notion of patents, for _any_ industry. Am I the only who find this a bit peculiar?

Let's take a step back and look at the big picture. Before these IT clowns got so seriously involved with patents (the increases in the number of patents they've filed for and been granted in a relatively short span of years is, at least to me, quite shocking), how many scholars were proposing bold ideas about "abolishing [all] patents"? There have been serious problems with patents for many years. But maybe they have just never been exploited with such insulting flagrancy until now, thanks to the greater participation of the software industry and one fashionable hardware company in particular.

Maybe the real pressing problem is not patent but IT executives and their child-like ideas about how to conduct business.

1. Years ago, there were people arguing for patent _reform_ (not abolishing an entire system) and warning of the frequency with which bogus software patents were being issued. And even just arguing for reforms, they seemed a bit crazy at the time. Needless to say they did not have "Nobel" attached to their names. My, how things have changed. I wonder what they think now?

Dubious lawsuits are a telltale sign of a company on its way down. When all else is lost, file lawsuits. What's to lose?

If we can't pay our bills with earned revenue, maybe we can get a few judgements for some quick cash.

Whether this applies to this case, I do not know. Draw your own conclusions.

A peculiar comparison to P2P. But I think I know what he's getting at. It's the idea of "enablement". As in, enabling easy infringement. But if my understanding is correct (it might not be), so long as there are alternative non-infringing uses that are significant, this hurdle, set by incumbent industries, can be overcome.

Perhaps good examples were analog cassette and video tapes. They enabled easy infringement. But they had so many beneficial uses, the courts were not persuaded by the incumbent industries. And Congress even created exceptions for personal use copying ("home taping") in the statute.

There is nothing inherently infringing about P2P, or even inherently enabling. Nothing says you have to use it to share bits with thousands of people or more. Back in the analog days millions of people made recordings and shared them with each other (i.e. people they knew: friends, colleagues, etc.), without being sued. It's only when some people tried to started businesses selling mass produced copies to the public (i.e. people they didn't know: customers) without authorization that they were sued. These "bootleggers" were, as I remember it, a very small percentage of total number of people using the available recording technology.

Not quite enough to keep an enormously useful technology like audio and video recording out of reach from the public.

This what I thought too. Where is his comparison to patents in other areas?

I liked this title because it is restricted to software. A title like "Abolish patents, full stop" is, to be blunt, sheer idiocy and all too common.

I think there are some key differences between software "R&D" and chemical and biological R&D, and I can't see how any rational argument for reform could ignore those differences, but this "Noble Laureate" fails to mention any of them. Does he know something on the subject of patents that we don't?

"U.S. Consumers"

So does that imply if the consumers were not in the U.S. this would not be newsworthy? Or am I reading too far into the title?

Depends what your cake is. The internet was not always ad-supported. We know for fact it was valuable before commercial activity was permitted. Suggesting that any improvements since that time are attributable to web advertising is perhaps an easy argument to make, but a very difficult one to support with evidence. Showing correlation is easy. Any fool can do it. Causation OTOH requires work: a well designed experiment, using acceptable methods with controls, and data subjected to rigorous statistical analysis.

Web and mobile advertising does not need to become "impossible" in order for you to stop suggesting it's unavoidable.

Any fool can also make predictions of the future. Given Y, X will not exist. But given Z, X will exist. If we could be so certain about cause and effect and how to shape the future, mobile advertising would be quite easy, wouldn't it?

However we can all see that is not the case. Uncertainty favors those selling advertising services, not advertisers.

Allowing commercial activity does not necessarily mean the internet has to be an ad channel. I'd still buy things from Amazon even if I never saw a single web ad for the company. There are many other ad channels besides the web. They still work.

"For the last few months, iPhone users have enjoyed an unusual environment..."

Am I the only one who finds that humourous? An "unusual" environment? What exactly is "normal" about tracking people's movements in the name of convincing advertisers to pay you?

This briefly enjoyed environment should not be unusual. It is the one we've lived in for hundreds of years. It should be the norm. iAd should be _opt-in_ not opt-out. There are no valid arguments to the contrary that are not motivated out of just a tad bit too much greed, the unhealthy kind.

(Why do I say the greed is excessive and unhealthy? Because Apple has already sold a highly marked up device composed of cheap electronics and booked that revenue. But this is apparently not enough. The casualty of this greed is the consumer's basic notions of privacy. That price is arguably far too high for anyone to pay to any company in return for "helpful suggestions" of products and services they _might_ want, based on seller guesswork. Apple made a fortune selling iPods. They didn't need to track users' listening preferences to do it. There are limits to what is reasonable.)

Off topic a bit, but I just want to say I like the layout and the general approach of your blog. If it's a template I haven't seen it before.

The "pondering" section is intriguing. What if you could accept input as to what topics readers might prefer?

Well, what if I don't need the "cloud" to run virtual machines? What if I have many "machines" running on my computer, isolated kernels in userspsace? What if I have all the computing power I need at my fingertips, literally? Is that sort of control and transparency not useful? How many more security breaches do we need to see before we acknowledge that delegating our storage and computing needs may not be the wisest option in all cases?

The only thing I expect from the "cloud" is proper routing.

All the rest of the storage and computing can be done at the endpoints. This isn't some revolutionary idea. It's how the internet was originally imagined by Paul Baran.

Endpoints will vary. They will have different needs and capacities to meet them. Some may be even be "services" to which other subscribe. But there's no requirement for ubiquitous middlemen. Everything is not a service that requires a third party.

What's next, TaaS? Thinking as a Service?

The future of software is one of empowerment with less third party involvement.

The parent's term "passive-aggressive" is spot on.

StackExchange is even worse.

If you only knew their banning practices. They have extremely thin skin. The anti-thesis of "Postal's Law".

When they ban, it's not a warning, it's permanent. One mistake and you are banned for infinity.

"Trolls" (a very subjective term) will never learn to behave as you want them to if you don't steer them toward better behavior. Banning them in knee-jerk like fashion does not steer them toward being better netizens or being more agreeable to your views.

If the thinking is "my forum, my rules" then when the rules become silly (and they often do), we need more forums, run by more reasonable people. This is nothing new. "Postal's Law" is one of those insightful ideas that has greater applicability than was intended (e.g., more than just the structure of packets) and it will continue to seem ahead of it's time, as censorship keeps rearing its ugly head.

If people like luriel are consistently being hellbanned for speaking their mind on some non-programming topic, I still want to read what they're saying about programming.

Everyone has some controversial viewpoints on _some_ topic. But that's not the point. I really don't care what programmers think about politics, religion, sexism or topics not related to computing. This guy had a refined taste for programming. Aesthetics. Plan 9, cat -v, suckless, Go. Not perfection, but sooooo much better than so much else.

The idea of hellbanning people who can actually think outside the box is troubling. Send them to some isolated, limited audience forum ("hell"?) if you wish. Just tell us where it is if we want to read it. Because I certainly do.

In the comments of his that I saw in recent threads I read, I liked this guy's taste in code. For me, that's pretty rare on HN.

What the heck happened? Was he seriously ill? Judging from the commments I saw, his mind was apparently in good shape.

RIP luriel and condolences to his family.