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Comment by hourislate | Hacker News Reader

In Marc Goodman's book "Future Crimes" he discusses the largest transfer of Human wealth to ever occur.

Through China's hacking efforts they have stolen Trillions of Dollars of US Tax Payer money that has gone into research and development of anything the Government has done including the F 35 fighter development.

They have also attacked US Industry and stolen trade secrets and software. Recipes for Carbon Steel, Stainless Steel, etc. Decades of R&D and 100's of millions of dollars gone. Chinese State Owned Sinovel Wind Group stole AMSC's computer code that was developed to run power generating Wind Mills. It cost the company almost a 1 billion dollars a year in lost revenue and all the money it took to develop it.

Here is an article regarding the F 35 Program.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/o...

Is it really innovation when all you do is steal and copy from the west?

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It ain't innovation, it's cleverness.

I can sit here and try to re-discover the fundamentals of physics from the ground up, or I can go to a library and read a textbook.

Discovering from first principles is the honorable path, but it is a colossal waste of time. To get to the state of the art, you have to steal knowledge. Only then can you begin to understand and improve it.

This is a ridiculously biased and oversimplified view. If everyone operated on your espoused principles, nobody would be incentivized to innovate.

You seem to believe the Chinese have some God-given right to get to the state of the art. No, there's a reason things like intellectual property, copyright, patent, etc. exist. How people here are defending the Chinese theft of proprietary US secrets and technologies is beyond me.

There a case to be made that innovations which require a lot of research won't be made, but I don't agree that nobody would have incentive to innovate. When there's no intellectual property you can't afford not to innovate. The fashion and food business, which aren't covered by copyright, are fast to follow trends. If someone can put out something very similar to yourself you have to have and keep your edge.

The other things is that why we can have such long copyright terms, but not the same for patents, is because it didn't use to matter. There were real limits to making anything useful out of it. Patents on the other hand outright suppresses innovation in the short term to reveal the knowledge to everyone in the long term.

The third things is of course that something can't be secret and morally defended by intellectual property at the same time. At least not from a functional perspective.

This is why so many programmers now I work with are useless. Figure things out ???? Only an idiot would! You just go to StackOverflow and type in search terms until you find the answer you need! And then, when it's not in StackOverflow, they are utterly and completely lost.

Discovering from principles is not a "colossal waste of time". Ask any Physicist if they thought studying and understanding Classical Mechanics was a "colossal waste of time".

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