I could be wrong here, but those rates appear to be just for the US. I think I read somewhere that only about half of what Apple has is sitting in the US ($66 billion comes to mind).
It seems that footnotes would often be "dicta" - judicial comments not directly relating to the case at issue, and therefore not form binding precedent.
One of the most famous is US v. Carolene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Carolene_Produ...), but there are hundreds, maybe thousands of examples. Even when they don't contain actual law, footnotes often give insights into why a court decided an issue or interpreted a fact the way it did. These little hints can be invaluable in distinguishing later cases, or giving a later court a foothold to create some new law.
Setting a precedent is, in fact, the creation of new law. This is the basis of the Common Law system that the United States and other former English colonies use. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
:). Thanks for the link, it was very educational. However, it actually doesn't seem to apply in this case: "United States federal courts only act as interpreters of statutes and the constitution by elaborating and precisely defining the broad language (connotation 1(b) above), but, unlike state courts, do not act as an independent source of common law (connotation 1(a) above)." [1]
In theory, you're right: courts don't make laws. In practice, courts make law every day. This is intuitively obvious (e.g. If law says you can't do A or C but says nothing about B, and the court says "B is really just like A and C, so B is also prohibited under the law", the court has just made law)[edit: perhaps not so obvious if you don't practice law, but courts do this every day], but also goes deeper: The very idea of judicial review itself was invented by the courts (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison).
While not a footnote, the headnote of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad "indicated that corporations enjoyed the same rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, as did natural persons" and has been very influential.
The actual holding in Taylor v. Taintor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_v._Taintor) is not nearly as famous as the paragraph in the majority opinion that gives legal standing to bounty hunters: "Whenever they choose to do so, they may seize him and deliver him up in their discharge; and if that cannot be done at once, they may imprison him until it can be done. They may exercise their rights in person or by agent. They may pursue him into another State; may arrest him on the Sabbath; and if necessary, may break and enter his house for that purpose"
Because this is the internet, I feel obliged to point out the inaccuracies of some of his other statements:
>>Film was and is to some degree still capable of more resolution, more dynamic range, better color fidelity and less prone to weird errors in the way that a Bayer sensor does<<
First of all, film and digital sensors of comparable sizes have nowhere near the same amount of resolution, dynamic range, or color fidelity. Digital sensors simply murder film in every category. (You can make the argument that B&W film still has some an edge in terms of dynamic range, but considering you're matching it against RGB sensors, I'm not sure that's fair.) Even 8x10 film is now out-resolved by medium format backs.
In terms of color fidelity, there is no film emulsion that will get you more accurate results than properly color-managed digital equipment. Which is exactly why museums and people who care about accurate color reproduction use digital capture.
Finally, the anti-aliasing filters aren't exactly a big deal. Yes, they degrade image quality. Yet, even with them on most consumer sensors, those sensors still massively out-resolve, and produce sharper images, than comparable film. Also note that most medium format backs don't have AA filters.
So, while somebody might like using film (or may need to in certain circumstances) the arguments presented aren't exactly the best justifications for doing so.
Just 'cuz I can't let this pass without comment, same as you can: let's take a nice color film and compare this. Say, Ektar 100; in the past I might have used Ektar 25 for this but 100 is a nice speed good for outdoors shooting or controlled lighting conditions. I'm using a Kodak film here both because we're talking about Kodak and because they offer superb information on their products. I'm using a color film because technical B&W films exist and are superb for their application but are not really suitable for general photography, plus are more directly comparable to digital.
Film is an analog medium, so we need some way of measuring resolution. The accepted way is line pairs per mm, or cycles per mm; a dark line next to a light line. A Bayer sensor because of the way the color filter works requires four linear pixels to resolve this same object.
Now Kodak's papers on the subject indicate that Ektar's color response desynchronizes around 20 lp/mm and reach 20% contrast at around 65 lp/mm for the red channel and 80+ for the blue and green channels. Since we're dealing with black and white lines here, we use the blue and green filters as they will still be visually distinguishable. We can argue whether further than 20% contrast is relevant but it seems like a decent enough stopping place. Fine. So the film can resolve 80 lp/mm.
Actual gate size varies a little but generally it is considered to be 36mm x 24mm. So that translates to 11520 x 7680 or an 84 megapixel camera, under perfect conditions.
In realistic use because of diffraction you are unlikely to get 80 lp/mm on the film, the film is not likely to be flat, you probably can't hold the camera perfectly rigidly, etc. It is generally accepted by archivists that 4000 DPI scanning is good enough for archival, which translates to about a 5700 x 3800 image or about 20 MP. In 8x10 that translates to about 1.2 gigapixels, although when you get to that point 4K DPI is probably overkill due to the diffraction limit reached at typical 8x10 working apetures.
As for dynamic range, Kodak doesn't show when Ektar 100 shoulders off but it has minimum 11 stops of dynamic range. I've used Ilford's XP2 when shooting a wedding before, and that has a bizarre shoulder with something like 13-15 stops of dynamic range. Digital cameras are typically more like 7 without using HDR, and HDR is not well suited to anything that isn't completely static.
Finally we get to color fidelity. Kodak worked very, very hard to be as precise as possible with their films and largely succeeded; you can find in the Ektar 100 tech document precise filter recommendations to cancel out the oddity of florescents if you know what sort of florescent you're working with. If you are fortunate enough to use flash, all flashes are designed to emit a precise blackbox radiative spectrum that corresponds to daylight, where the films are balanced. EPP, which is a long obsolete reversal film that I have worked with, was used a lot in catalog photography where it was vitally important that the color used in the catalog must match precisely the color that was photographed, and it was very good for that. Digitals are theoretically more flexible and thus have the potential for better color fidelity, but to do that you basically need to know precisely which lights you are using and at that point you're in the same boat as film users.
Now, is all this really compelling reasons to go to film? Not really. But I spend all day every day working in front of a computer and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my hobby time calibrating my monitors and messing with scanners and printers (each in a dead heat for most miserable fucking peripherial ever), so I do traditional darkroom stuff, occasionally including some color work.
1. I didn't check your numbers, but I'll assume you're correct. However, in my experience, film does not even come close to approaching those theoretical lp/mm numbers. This test, done with Ektachrome instead of Ektar, reflects my own findings: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/iq180_vs_8...
2. Ok, you're right. Some films will certainly outperform some digital. But, the new MF backs will shoot 13-15 stops as well, so who wins? I'd argue that, on average, digital trumps film. I've shot mostly velvia (the most popular landscape/wildlife film for 30 years?) and provia, and those can't compete with even my 3 year old dslr. (see http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/dynamicrange2/ for tests done with an 8 year old dslr)
3. Get a color checker (http://xritephoto.com/ph_product_overview.aspx?ID=1192). No filters necessary, and precise color no matter what lighting conditions. And, you'd be able to eliminate one of those miserable fucking peripherals.
FWIW, going digital has tremendously simplified my workflow and allowed me more shooting time with less dicking around with equipment time, and much better quality prints (and I make really big prints). Cheers.
Oh, no question that you have a better MTF from an Alpa than you would from an 8x10 at f32 (a perfectly reasonable working aperture for 8x10). I think the 8x10 can still out resolve the Alpa but you're getting into that ugly 20% part of the MTF curves. The rule of thumb I've had for a while is that digital has fewer, better pixels; the digital back hits a wall beyond which you cannot proceed any further, but at and up until that wall the results are superb. I think the current sweet spot is speculated to be 6 cm x 9 cm cameras, mostly because of diffraction and film flatness issues. And reversal film has notoriously poor dynamic range, and mediocre color correction; that's one of the things that pushed me to doing all negatives in my photography.
A professional is probably only going to use film these days if they want a specific effect; say, infrared, or sometimes people fart around with Holgas and call it art. For an amateur, the $20,000 digital back that can compare with a 4x5 with some decent lenses costing a tenth that much is a much harder sell. And that's pretty much where I sit; I'm not going to spend $50,000 on a top of the line MF outfit. I might spend the $1.2K for an X-100, though, still mulling that over. A couple thousand buys a lot of film and developer.
While he seems well meaning, his point is a bit silly and shows a lack of understanding as to how capitalism works.
>>Instead of measuring ourselves by the size of our Series A or our average profit per employee, let’s measure in lives changed.<<
In an article that talks about the power of software to scale and effect entire populations of people, just how does he propose to "measure lives changed"? He doesn't, really. And how could he?
For example, if you rescue me from a burning building, you've certainly changed my life. But by how much? Do you now get credit for every accomplishment (or bad act) I do from that day forward? Or, if you're polite and let me get the cab we both hail, which allows me to get to my meeting on time, which allows me to close the sale and get the promotion... you've actually changed my life quite a bit, and you'll almost certainly never know about it.
The problem is, many more lives are changed by actions that are seemingly trivial, and often even unseen, than by those that are visibly heroic. Measurement then becomes impossible. Except we've figured out how to measure it. We use money.
If you're getting paid a princely some to design some system that end users will never see, you can be sure it's because the middleman thinks its valuable. He thinks he will be able to change people's lives. And, his belief will be confirmed when the end users pay him. In exchange for money, the end users get something that makes them better off. And that's the entire basis of capitalism.
So, while it's sexy to say that we have a responsibility to better the world at large because of our privilege, don't overlook the fact that by performing some service for pay, you are already bettering the world at large. By definition.
Significantly higher relative to life expectancy of someone who makes it to 10 years old, but still incredibly low in the Western world. It's likely close enough to 0 that it just isn't visible on the graph.
But, how long you live might affect how many children you have.
Think of it this way: if you knew you had a high probability of living to 80, you might decide to have fewer offspring so that you could dedicate your earnings to supporting yourself in your later years (children are very expensive after all).
Regardless of whether this hypothesis is true, clearly the number of years you live likely has some bearing on how many children you might choose to have.
He has a habit of deleting almost all of the posts on his tumblr. When he started the account, he actually said he was only going to have one or two posts up at any one time. It's kind of surprising the number he's got up now (although they're almost all photos). The Jobs tribute post could have been deleted out of spite, but he's deleted some other really cool stuff too, so I kinda doubt it.
“Five hundred people will have job security for the next decade, but how much value does it create for the entire economy ? It may not be enough to dramatically improve living standards in the U.S. over the next decade or two decades.”
It's strange that someone as successful as Peter Thiel has been in the startup world, a world built on providing value, would make such a statement. What does the number of permanent or semi-permanent jobs have to do with the amount of value being created by something like twitter? If it took 100,000 employees to run twitter as it exists today, would that make it more valuable to the economy? Of course not.
If it only took one guy to design, build, ship, and sell the iPhone, Apple would be far more valuable to the economy, not less. You'd free up all those talented people to go out and create even more value on their own.
Also, he seems to equate increased $$ with increased living standards. By and large that's been historically true, but it's a bit misleading. Even if twitter made 0 money and created 0 jobs, it would still improve living standards. Certainly not in the way indoor plumbing or electricity raised living standards, but it still makes people's lives easier, which, by definition, improves living standards.
> If it took 100,000 employees to run twitter as it exists today, would that make it more valuable to the economy? Of course not.
> If it only took one guy to design, build, ship, and sell the iPhone, Apple would be far more valuable to the economy, not less. You'd free up all those talented people to go out and create even more value on their own.
I think it depends, really. Historically, talented people have created new industries/companies that employed a lot of less talented people and allowed them to live a comfortable life. I suspect the focus of his worry is that these less talented people are nowadays less often reaping the benefits of the innovations talented people create.
Historically, those industries required less talented people in order to stay in business. Somebody has to sell the product, answer the phones, sweep the floors, etc. If you created a company that could operate with out all of those less talented people, this would be a boon.
Even if you presume all those less talented employees are mindless drones, if you can provide the same service with fewer employees, you now have all the value created by that service, plus you have all those extra mindless drones to go produce value someplace else.
As to your second point, I can't imagine that's what he's really thinking. The few talented people who create the twitters, iphones, etcs, are far outnumbered by the millions of less-talented people who actually use those products.
> Historically, those industries required less talented people in order to stay in business. Somebody has to sell the product, answer the phones, sweep the floors, etc. If you created a company that could operate with out all of those less talented people, this would be a boon.
> Even if you presume all those less talented employees are mindless drones, if you can provide the same service with fewer employees, you now have all the value created by that service, plus you have all those extra mindless drones to go produce value someplace else.
Right, but what about the time when there's nothing sufficiently valuable for those people to do? Historically, we've been very able to replace old jobs with new ones - technology simultaneously freed people up and created new job growth segments. The question is whether technology is still capable of creating enough new jobs.
Providing value is nothing more than fulfilling someone else's desire, whether that desire is for a shiny new car that accelerates very quickly, or a new way to communicate, or something pretty to look at, or something delicious to eat, or etc., etc.
Luckily, human beings have essentially unlimited desires. For this reason, there will always be sufficiently valuable things for people to do.
If there is truly nothing valuable for an entire population to do, ie if machines can fulfill every desire we can dream up, it means humanity has finally created utopia.
Unlimited desires is probably a stretch. Substantial, certainly.
The problem is not utopia, it's the situation where there's nothing useful for, say, 20% of the population to do. I think there's plenty for the highly intelligent and well educated to get on with, but for those without (and perhaps unable to achieve) that level of education, it's a tougher situation.
> If it only took one guy to design, build, ship, and sell the iPhone, Apple would be far more valuable to the economy, not less. You'd free up all those talented people to go out and create even more value on their own.
I wonder what your plan is to gainfully employ 7 billion talented people that are freed up. Do you envision a world where 7 billion people come up each with a revolutionary change that improves some aspect of shelter/feed/transport/communicate/socialize/entertain/learn fundamental needs that people have?
While patents may provide a "stumbling block to innovation and progress", it's wrong to say they inhibit "the free exchange of ideas, and restrict[] our knowledge of how things work." Patents do just the opposite: to obtain one, you must describe in detail how a process works. This means that when you're granted a patent, you disclose to the whole world how your novel invention or process works. (The argument that the USPTO is granting frivolous patents on non-novel things is a separate argument.)
The alternative (though not really applicable to software or mechanical processes that get shipped in a product) is to keep everything secret. Had Coca Cola patented their formula, everyone would have known how to make the drink 20 years later.
Do you know anybody who acquires new knowledge by reading patents?
1. Because of the legalese language in which patents are written it's pretty damn hard to even understand what is patented.
2. Even if you understand what the patent is about, it's probably of little help in implementing the thing by yourself, as the patent just describes the general idea.
3. If you indeed understand the idea, you might then come up with an improvement, but there's no benefit for you in publishing it, as the underlying idea is patented, the only one to gain from it is the patent holder.
4. You are encouraged by the system to not read patents, because if you happen to infringe one, your knowledge of the existence of patent can be used against you.
There is so much wrong here that I appreciate you numbering them.
-1. Yes, people read patents all the time. For one example many might be familiar with here, see any of the Mac or Canon or Nikon rumors sites, which comb through filings to learn what their favorite companies are up to. Second, the benefit comes not just from reading the actual patents. Since the info is already out there and protected, there's no real harm for those who developed the innovation in discussing it openly in journals/conferences/trade shows/popular magazines/newspapers/etc. We see this all the time, probably much more than if patents didn't exist.
1. Patents are generally written in pretty simple language. When they're hard to read, it's because the language used is technical, not legal.
2. This is just factually wrong. If you don't describe something, it's very difficult to try to prevent or collect from someone using the idea you haven't described.
3. Sure, for a limited time. This doesn't mean there aren't periphery benefits from seeing how someone did something novel. In the medical field, advances that utilize some novel technique often provoke other people to look at similar though unrelated techniques.
I spent ten years in a corporate research lab, and my experience was quite different from yours. Specifically,
1. Our process went like this: first the researcher wrote up a description of the invention for review by a panel of his peers. If the panel decided that a patent should be filed, then the file was handed off to a patent attorney, who transformed the clearly-written technical description into an incomprehensible mess of legal jargon. The inventor was supposed to review it and confirm that it accurately reflected his invention, but if asked in confidence, I suspect most of the inventors would admit that they didn't understand a word of it and just signed the application to get it off their desks. To reiterate: these things were so bad that the inventor himself didn't understand them.
4. There were conflicting opinions withing the company, but it is true that some people advise against doing a search of existing patents. I'm not an expert in the law, but as I understand it, if it can be shown that you had knowledge of the patent you were infringing, treble damages can be imposed. And in software, if you search hard enough you're sure to find something you're infringing.
I agree with your point -1. Once we had filed a patent, we were free to publish our work in journals and conferences, and these papers were written by the inventor with the intent of communicating, in contrast to the patents, which were written by a lawyer whose intent seemed, as far as I could tell, to be to obfuscate and confuse.
You give no basis for your rejection of item 4, and while IANAL, I think you are wrong. I have definitely worked for companies whose corporate counsel advised us software engineers not to read patents related to the work we were doing. There is little to be gained by doing so, I was told, and it would expose the company to the possibility of triple damages if it somehow became known that we had infringed a patent we had read.
Yes, there are people who read patents, but AFAIK, at least in the area of software, they are not usually practitioners.
All that said, I actually agree with you that discarding the patent system entirely, even just for software, would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater -- but I also have to agree with those who argue that in the case of software, the baby/bathwater ratio is just awfully small.
RE your first point, you're sort of correct. Courts can award treble damages for willful and wanton infringement of a patent. Courts don't award treble damages willy nilly; they seem to award them when you intentionally rip off somebody's patent. Even if you know of another's patent rights, if you have a good faith claim as to why/how your patent doesn't infringe, and if you have a solid opinion letter from counsel, you generally won't get hit with increased damages, even if you lose the underlying suit.
RE software, I'd tend to agree with you. The original post makes the case that all patents are bad though, and that they specifically prevent that transmittal of knowledge. That's really what I was responding to.
3. For a limited time? 20 years is pretty much forever in the software industry. So sure you might start to look at alternative ways, but it can be quite hard when the obvious solution is patented. But often the patent attempts to cover the most general idea possible, so your entirely different implementation of the idea might still be infringing the patent.
But the main problem with software patents in particular is that you can never be sure if you're infringing something. You can only hope that you don't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_dividend