modeler
@modeler@lemmy.world
- Comment on xkcd #3078: Anchor Bolts 6 days ago:
the crust … starts crumbling somewhere else creating new mountains or islands
Exactly. The oceanic crust will (in geologic time) crack in front of the bolts and be dragged down parallel to the bit that was bolted, stacking the oceanic crust with the newer bit under the older one.
The cracking and stacking happens naturally and this creates stacks of many oceanic crust sections moving to the left of the picture.
- Comment on Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch 1 week ago:
It seems you misunderstand the goal of goverment.
This is your opinion of what you want governments to be, not what they actually are.
What is the point of not researching and having bigger budget, if it can’t buy thing that did not get created?
What a lot of negatives and hypotheticals. All solved by getting a return on investment and having that money to do more things with, including research.
And then on goverment level there is no such thing as copyright or patent.
I’d like to introduce you to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which is an intergovernmental organisation that does precisely what you say doesn’t exist.
They STILL need to put in money to create their own product.
Sure, but the cost to duplicate the product is tiny compared to researching, developing then creating a production run for it. And this fake normally severely impacts the profits for the inventor.
But now we’re just repeating the same arguments.
- Comment on Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch 1 week ago:
You appear to want to completely burn down a system you don’t understand because of some examples of misuse. For example, as there are slumlords, should we make all property free? Or should we solve the underlying problem (of massive capital flows to the rich?)
You also have no idea how to read and understand a patent. The way they are written is horrendously verbose and highly confusing, but so are medical research papers or legal case summaries, and for the similar reasons: these are highly technical documents that have to follow common law (i.e. a long history of legal decisions taken in IP disputes).
The real problem in the US IMHO has been the constant defunding of the patent office that has allowed a large number of very poor patents to be filed. The problems you are screaming about largely go to that root cause.
But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water - you have no idea how bad that would be for everybody but the mega corporations.
- Comment on Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch 1 week ago:
Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products,
And cheaply, because the research and productisation has been done by somebody else - this is an argument for patents
plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product,
Not true. One major issue is that many competitors literally copy the product exactly. Fake products wreck the original company
even if it’s a copy they still need to make it work,
That is 100x easier when you have a working product to clone
They’ll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share… This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there’s no patents…
The point is exactly that the fake product undercuts the original by a huge amount (they had no investment to pay off).
If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,…), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.
I agree that the government model makes sense for a lot of areas and products. But note that a government won’t invest millions or billions in developing a product if another country immediately fakes the product and prevents the government from collecting back the taxes it spent on the research.
As I discuss above there are lots of criticisms to the current IP laws - adjustment is 1000x better than abolishing a system that has driven research and development for several hundred years
- Comment on Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch 1 week ago:
All evidence points to the opposite of your conclusion.
In places where IP laws are weak or non-existent, very little fundamental or expensive research is done by companies - because the result is immediately cloned by 100 competitors. In medicine, companies will not research and develop new drugs to market unless they can get a return on the investment. Even in places with strong IP laws, development of drugs that can’t produce a return in the limited monopoly window is simply not done (eg with a small number of patients or when 1 course of a drug will permanently cure the patient), so many diseases do not have treatments.
In countries where there is strong IP laws, innovation jumps because innovating creates new things that people/companies can sell for profit. A personal area of interest is development of small-arms - every single advance from muskets to modern weapons is documented in patents in the US and Europe; the rate of innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries was incredible - and that is via patents and profit in the free market.
Now, we can have a productive argument about state sponsored research - but unless the state undertakes all research in an economy (which would be staggering overreach), we need IP laws.
We can also discuss patents on software (which IMHO are not needed because companies do fundamental research without patent laws like in the UK).
We can also discuss what is the appropriate time that copyright should remain - the Disney law in the US is a ridiculous overreach. It was 25 years or until the death of the author/artist - that worked very well for centuries.
You do
n’tneed government promises of monopoly rights to create innovation in the marketplace, competition drives innovation. - Comment on When you live in the UK and don't work for the BBC 2 months ago:
A ‘nonce’ is something used when encrypting data - it adds randomness into the data, so that identical messages will be encrypted differently. This stops hackers executing attacks where they can guess the first bit of the message, and work backwards to the encryption key (among different attacks).
- Comment on White House Faith Office 2 months ago:
I’m interested! I thought both words derive from Latin prosequi/persequi and had essentially the same meaning as modern English. Which language do you speak?
- Comment on White House Faith Office 2 months ago:
Is that prosecuted or persecuted? Hmmm, actually both fit perfectly in your sentence
- Comment on Why would a UTF-8 MySQL backup contain invalid UTF-8 characters? 3 months ago:
This is the right answer. I had the job of planning a schema update to fix this shitty design.
Saying that, unicode and character formats are incredibly complex things that are not easily implemented. For example two strings in utf-8 can contain the same number of characters but be hugely different in size (up to 3-4x different!). It’s well worth reading through some articles to get a feel of the important points.
- Comment on CENSORED!!!!!!!!!!1 4 months ago:
That made my head spin. Sorry about the pun - guilty as charged.