Posted on 07/13/2011 5:49:57 AM PDT by 1010RD
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Well they've been keeping the Internet free. I suppose somebody has to pay for all this innovation.
Now we just have to hope Microsoft doesn’t see this as a misuse of their “intellectual property,” lock it down, and sue everybody who unlocks it in order to innovate.
Sony did this with their little robotic dogs, and more recently with the PlayStation 3.
iRobot did the opposite with the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner and encouraged innovation by publishing open interfaces and even producing the iRobot Create.
Result: The smart innovators hate Sony and love iRobot. Guess where the talent’s going to go?
I suspect that one of two things happened at Microsoft. They saw the writing on the wall, saw what happened with Roomba and set this up or this happened so quickly that they couldn’t stuff the genie back into the bottle and let it play out.
Either way the market just shifted massively across the US. What has happened to the US Patent Office is a mess and the Invisible Hand just fixed it. I believe we’ll see hybrids like this going forward. It means incredible wealth for our country and an opportunity for the un/under-employed to get in on the ground floor...if they still know how to think and work.
I love America.
A lot of innovation came out of the space program, either from inside or developed by contractors. They just weren’t very money-efficient at their primary space mission.
I'm hopeful for the former. IIRC, Microsoft hasn't gone after XBox modders any more than to exclude modded XBoxes from Live since mods could allow cheating. Meanwhile, Sony has been legally steamrolling anyone who dares hack the PS3 for their personal use (technically fixing what Sony broke in removing the Other OS feature).
It it seems more like serendipity than intent. The hardware comes from Israel and the software was done by a company in England that Microsoft bought in 2003. It's a testament to human ingenuity and private enterprise.
I’d be curious to read your sources or know your definition of innovation. My understanding is that the space program pulled off the shelf items and reconfigured them for the mission, but that no true innovation came out of it. All the break-throughs came from the private sector and then were applied to the program.
Just, wow. I’m so behind the curve... a video game controller that can be used for guidance like that?
I think Microsoft and the rest of the industry have been shaken by what happened to Sony. The upcoming generation has a very different idea about stealing than do the generations before them. Having grown up copying, pasting, saving, etc. they just don’t see technology - soft or hard - as something that you can own.
I do laugh when they whine about losing out on their own inventions, though. I think this is the future and that it will be very hard to keep information proprietary. I was reading about a Quant house that would slowly bleed traders/programmers/brains that would set up competition against them. Once you know the ‘system’ you game it.
This really isn’t unusual in America. Smuggling was an honorable profession against the British. Apprentices usually broke their contracts, as did indentured servants, and set up shop a town or two over or sometimes in direct competition with their master. Americans have always been aggressive innovators. That is until FDR saddled us with an alphabet soup government and to be fair Nixon gave us the EPA.
To me it’s like listening to radio or maybe the telegraph for the first time. Imagine a time when you couldn’t. That’s what the future for our kids will be like. All this stuff that seems so amazing is just going to be old hat.
I laugh to watch Star Trek when the cell phone I have beats a Communicator and a Tri-Corder combined. Sci-Fi gets old fast nowadays.
You're right on this - the 'good' is potentially more exciting that the computer. Wish Isaac Asimov had lived to see this...
You’ve been added. Welcome Aboard!
A lot of invention is reconfiguration. A lot of it was working with companies to get their basic products to be usable by NASA, and then the improved product hit the shelves. But some things were developed right at NASA.
There's another aspect. The older generation might see this magic and think old rules don't apply. The new generation thinks the rules should still apply.
Imagine grandpa bought a tractor with lots of attachments, and a front shovel that's the main reason he bought it. One day the tractor company comes by and tells him we have an update for your tractor, and you don't take it then no more attachments will work on your tractor. But when he takes it he find out his shovel doesn't work anymore. The company says too bad, we don't want you to use the shovel anymore so we killed it with the update. They don't care they just lowered the value of his property.
So grandpa fiddles with the tractor to make the shovel work again, and shares this fix with other angered customers. The tractor company's lawyers come down on him like a ton of bricks. Somehow it's illegal for him to fiddle with his own property.
There is no way our society would have accepted such things 50 years ago, but for some reason we accept it when it is applied to computers. This generation realizes computers are not a special exception when it comes to freedoms, and they're willing to piss off some big companies to prove it.
Thanks.
Fascinating list of inventions, but I still am not convinced that NASA was ever cost effective. Some of those inventions would have been invented otherwise and for less money.
I’m all for space flight, but not government subsidies of same.
Great analogy and apt. I agree with grandpa. I was referring to the stealing/copying of software, movies, music, etc.
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