[LINK] Einstein's fridge an example for NICTA?

[Jan Whitaker]

At 11:15 AM 12/12/2006, Karl Auer wrote:
>I'm not being obtuse, and I'm not trying to be mean to you, but could
>you please READ your original question again AND the new paragraph
>above?
>
>Neither of them makes any sense at all on a grammatical, syntactical
>level. Or if they do, the parse is too complex for my little brain.

OK, let me try in a simpler way, an analogy using pie.

Once upon a time before 1995, in a land called Oz, there was one big 
pie. The people who worked in Canberra would give pieces of the pie 
to those who needed to eat and therefore do really interesting things 
in places called Universities. {this is fun!}

Then there was an election and the new people who came to work in 
Canberra decided to give that pie to different people who were their 
friends called companies instead of the Universities. The company 
people who received the government pie to create and sell their 
product and services had money left over from their saved expenses, 
and could now use that money to do their own secret research. Sadly, 
the people who worked in Universities lost their jobs and stopped 
doing their work. It didn't cost the government and the people who 
sent them the taxes in the first place any more. But once again, 
sadly, the secret things that were discovered by the companies were 
sold back to the people whose money they used to offset their 
expenses in the first place.

This is getting ridiculous! I don't know why it wasn't making sense 
in the first place. Of course, I understood it because I was thinking 
it, and it's my responsibility to communicate it effectively.

bottom line: isn't the new approach 'corporate welfare'?

I don't argue with the position that commercialisation is a good 
thing. But would open access to that research increase competition to 
develop those new products instead of creating IP monopolies?

Jan


Jan Whitaker
JLWhitaker Associates, Melbourne Victoria
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
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'Seed planting is often the most important step. Without the seed, 
there is no plant.' - JW, April 2005
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