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Except there were more medicinal compounds patented BEFORE patents were introduced.
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004.pdf

And in Italy there was a measurable slowdown in development JUST AFTER INTRODUCTION of patents for medicines. Profits went up, new drugs went down. They simply didn't have to try so hard to compete.

Also, a large part of the medications used today originated at publicly funded universities. The pharmaceutical companies' contribution is often to change a tiny bit, like the delivery mechanism, and then fight and bribe tooth and nail to get their own patented variety approved by the governments and the competitors' versions stalled.
There wouldn't be over 1200 registered pharmaceutical lobbyists in Washington if they didn't get even more return for that investment.

I used to use a cough decongestant made by a handful of pharmacists, who had made it for about two generations. Then came a big company and demanded a ban - it ate part of their market share in certain areas. It got banned because the combination of two ingredients in a specific ratio was "untested" - despite having been sold for well near 40 years with no documented ill effects, and sold in almost, but not quite, the same ratio by the big pharma company. It wasn't a consumer concern, it wasn't an FDA concern - it got pushed by a single company who wanted to sell their product.
Yes, sure, they're contributing... To my hatred of them and everything they stand for. I refuse to buy stock in any pharmaceutical company, no matter whether it's more profitable. Cause unlike them, I have scruples.

UCLA's Cyclops is a great tool to monitor your own IP space and make sure you know immediately when this sort of this occurs.

they want tame nerds who agree with the USA's current luddite anti-technology crusade and will uphold things like plainly idiotic copyright monopoly law and endless censorship. They ain't gonna get the best and brightest until there's some regime change at the top.

It's not about computer support here, I know. But the following quote (by Phil Agre, I'm sure the name will ring some bells here) just hits the attitude of arrogance of nerds and what's wrong with it just too well. For a while I had this actually printed and pinned to the wall.

Here it goes (from http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/how-to-help.html):

How to help someone use a computer.

Phil Agre
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/

Computer people are fine human beings, but they do a lot of harm in the ways they "help" other people with their computer problems. Now that we're trying to get everyone online, I thought it might be helpful to write down everything I've been taught about helping people use computers.
First you have to tell yourself some things:

Nobody is born knowing this stuff.

You've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.

If it's not obvious to them, it's not obvious.

A computer is a means to an end. The person you're helping probably cares mostly about the end. This is reasonable.

Their knowledge of the computer is grounded in what they can do and see -- "when I do this, it does that". They need to develop a deeper understanding, but this can only happen slowly -- and not through abstract theory but through the real, concrete situations they encounter in their work.

Beginners face a language problem: they can't ask questions because they don't know what the words mean, they can't know what the words mean until they can successfully use the system, and they can't successfully use the system because they can't ask questions.

You are the voice of authority. Your words can wound.

Computers often present their users with textual messages, but the users often don't read them.

By the time they ask you for help, they've probably tried several things. As a result, their computer might be in a strange state. This is natural.

They might be afraid that you're going to blame them for the problem.

The best way to learn is through apprenticeship -- that is, by doing some real task together with someone who has a different set of skills.

Your primary goal is not to solve their problem. Your primary goal is to help them become one notch more capable of solving their problem on their own. So it's okay if they take notes.

Most user interfaces are terrible. When people make mistakes it's usually the fault of the interface. You've forgotten how many ways you've learned to adapt to bad interfaces.

Knowledge lives in communities, not individuals. A computer user who's part of a community of computer users will have an easier time than one who isn't.

Having convinced yourself of these things, you are more likely to follow some important rules:
Don't take the keyboard. Let them do all the typing, even if it's slower that way, and even if you have to point them to every key they need to type. That's the only way they're going to learn from the interaction.

Find out what they're really trying to do. Is there another way to go about it?

Maybe they can't tell you what they've done or what happened. In this case you can ask them what they are trying to do and say, "Show me how you do that".

Attend to the symbolism of the interaction. Try to squat down so your eyes are just below the level of theirs. When they're looking at the computer, look at the computer. When they're looking at you, look back at them.

When they do something wrong, don't say "no" or "that's wrong". They'll often respond by doing something else that's wrong. Instead, just tell them what to do and why.

Try not to ask yes-or-no questions. Nobody wants to look foolish, so their answer is likely to be a guess. "Did you attach to the file server?" will get you less information than "What did you do after you turned the computer on?".

Explain your thinking. Don't make it myste

It's not about computer support here, I know. But the following quote (by Phil Agre, I'm sure the name will ring some bells here) just hits the attitude of arrogance of nerds and what's wrong with it just too well. For a while I had this actually printed and pinned to the wall.

Here it goes (from http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/how-to-help.html):

How to help someone use a computer.

Phil Agre
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/

Computer people are fine human beings, but they do a lot of harm in the ways they "help" other people with their computer problems. Now that we're trying to get everyone online, I thought it might be helpful to write down everything I've been taught about helping people use computers.
First you have to tell yourself some things:

Nobody is born knowing this stuff.

You've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.

If it's not obvious to them, it's not obvious.

A computer is a means to an end. The person you're helping probably cares mostly about the end. This is reasonable.

Their knowledge of the computer is grounded in what they can do and see -- "when I do this, it does that". They need to develop a deeper understanding, but this can only happen slowly -- and not through abstract theory but through the real, concrete situations they encounter in their work.

Beginners face a language problem: they can't ask questions because they don't know what the words mean, they can't know what the words mean until they can successfully use the system, and they can't successfully use the system because they can't ask questions.

You are the voice of authority. Your words can wound.

Computers often present their users with textual messages, but the users often don't read them.

By the time they ask you for help, they've probably tried several things. As a result, their computer might be in a strange state. This is natural.

They might be afraid that you're going to blame them for the problem.

The best way to learn is through apprenticeship -- that is, by doing some real task together with someone who has a different set of skills.

Your primary goal is not to solve their problem. Your primary goal is to help them become one notch more capable of solving their problem on their own. So it's okay if they take notes.

Most user interfaces are terrible. When people make mistakes it's usually the fault of the interface. You've forgotten how many ways you've learned to adapt to bad interfaces.

Knowledge lives in communities, not individuals. A computer user who's part of a community of computer users will have an easier time than one who isn't.

Having convinced yourself of these things, you are more likely to follow some important rules:
Don't take the keyboard. Let them do all the typing, even if it's slower that way, and even if you have to point them to every key they need to type. That's the only way they're going to learn from the interaction.

Find out what they're really trying to do. Is there another way to go about it?

Maybe they can't tell you what they've done or what happened. In this case you can ask them what they are trying to do and say, "Show me how you do that".

Attend to the symbolism of the interaction. Try to squat down so your eyes are just below the level of theirs. When they're looking at the computer, look at the computer. When they're looking at you, look back at them.

When they do something wrong, don't say "no" or "that's wrong". They'll often respond by doing something else that's wrong. Instead, just tell them what to do and why.

Try not to ask yes-or-no questions. Nobody wants to look foolish, so their answer is likely to be a guess. "Did you attach to the file server?" will get you less information than "What did you do after you turned the computer on?".

Explain your thinking. Don't make it myste

I will add a tidbit that I picked up last night shortly after I wrote the above. You mentioned that since the ground state (not your exact words) of the vacuum is "defined" to be 0, then the energy must be negative. I understand that logic. The problem is that the premise is incorrect. Planck's equations, as refined by Einstein et al. in 1913, show that in fact the vacuum energy of a quantum system must always be above its "potential well", or the theoretical zero state. Thus, "zero-point" energy is NOT "defined" to be zero, but in fact is always positive, and the Casimir effect then, even using your own framework, is not "negative energy". [Jane Q. Public]

If you really did "understand that logic" then you wouldn't have written all that nonsense about vectors. Instead, you'd have skipped immediately to this point, which now implicitly acknowledges that the Casimir vacuum has lower energy than the standard vacuum.

Remember that spacetime is curved near large masses, but ~flat far away from masses where only vacuum energy is present. This implies that vacuum energy exerts ~zero gravitational force, so its stress-energy tensor must be ~zero, so the standard vacuum has ~zero energy.

If you're interested in the details, John Baez summarizes several vacuum energy density calculations. A naive quantum field theory calculation yields a vacuum energy with a mass density of +10^96 kg/m^3, which would've ripped the universe apart [1] before galaxies could form. On the other hand, general relativity and observations of our nearly-flat universe place a more rigorous upper bound at +10^(-26) kg/m^3. It seems like [2] gravity renormalizes vacuum energy to zero, within about one part in 10^122. Even though renormalization was harshly criticized at first, it's necessary to explain why galaxies (and thus humans!) exist.

Here's another, purely quantum-based, argument [3] for renormalization:

"As there is no lower energy state than the ground state, there is no energy level transition available to release the ZPE. Therefore, it can be argued that hf/2 should be dropped before integration of the quantum expression. This procedure is an example of renormalization, which basically redefines the zero of energy." [Abbott et al. 1996]

Footnotes

[1] One might assume that a large positive vacuum energy would collapse the universe just like a large amount of positive mass-energy would. This doesn't happen because in general relativity gravity depends on energy and pressure. In natural units, vacuum energy has pressure equal and opposite to its energy density. Because the stress-energy tensor has three pressure terms (for x,y,z) and only one energy density term, the negative pressure of positive vacuum energy dominates, causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. back

[2] It's also vaguely possible that zero point energy doesn't gravitate at all

well, patenting it is a good way to ensure it won't happen for 20 years. Patents retard innovation, as is well understood by now.

Umm, no. That's NOT what that says:

We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.

Where's the "retard innovation" there?

Even if you accept the authors' claims, they're not claiming patents retard innovation. So how the hell can you claim that's "well understood" when your documentation doesn't even say that?

well, patenting it is a good way to ensure it won't happen for 20 years. Patents retard innovation, as is well understood by now.

Here's the paper: http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~chunyip/publications/mobicom12-peng-accounting.pdf

There are multiple distance measures in cosmology - they are all in principle exact (at least, if you know all your cosmological parameters), but they differ significantly once you start getting above about 1 billion light years. Much above that, and they can differ incredibly much. Some of these measures are based on idealized measurements, others on the physics directly.

Some measures used in cosmological work are,

- proper motion distance (the distance a parallax measurement would give you)
- luminosity distance (the distance you would infer from the apparent brightness of a standard candle)
- angular diameter distance (the distance you would infer from the apparent angular size of a standard sized object). The angular diameter distance is notorious for getting smaller if you get far enough away in many cosmologies (including, apparently, the one we live in).
- look back distance (if you imagine that everyone has a clock synchronized at the big band, the difference between your time and the time you would read on the remote clock, if you could read it). This is also called the light travel time.
- proper distance (what some long yardstick would read).
- comoving distance (the proper distance divided by the scale factor - 1 plus the redshift, z - for the remote observer, to get a distance that doesn't change with cosmological time).

And, finally, each cosmological model will have a coordinate distance (the difference between the coordinates of two different places), which need not have a simple relation to any of the above.

It is fair to say that one of the easiest ways to make a fool of yourself in cosmology is to mix up distance scales. (As an additional cause of mixups, only proper distances can be subtracted - for the rest, the distance between A and B is NOT the difference of the distance to A and the distance to B, even if A and B are on a straight line as seen from the Earth.)

In this case, the Gamma Ray Burst 090510A was at a red shift of 0.897. Go to the Cosmology Calculator and you find that that

For Ho = 71, OmegaM = 0.270, Omegavac = 0.730, z = 0.897

It is now 13.666 Gyr since the Big Bang.
The age at redshift z was 6.376 Gyr.
The light travel time was 7.290 Gyr.
The comoving radial distance, which goes into Hubble's law, is 3053.8 Mpc or 9.960 Gly.
The angular size distance DA is 1609.8 Mpc or 5.2505 Gly.
The luminosity distance DL is 5793.1 Mpc or 18.895 Gly.

The proper distance is (1+z) times the comoving distance, or 18.89 Gly.

The evidence is outlined in the freely available "Against Intellectual Monopoly".

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

Your basic premise is faulted, and circular.

The premise is hardly faulted, nor circular: Art is a form of expression, all humans have some intrinsic desire to express and innovate upon those expressions (rare exceptions, of course). This will never end, despite the current structure of law. Creating formal art, on the other hand, is a different story. The expression must conform to some standards of the medium, and when current law standards offer protection for a formal art piece there is more incentive to flood the market on that medium.

It essentially comes down to "If it isn't one of my %x motives, then it isn't a real motivation." It's a form of a no true scottsman. It rejects nearly the entire spectrum of reasons in favor of just 3, and does so without justification or evidence. While you may hold such an opinion, this does not in fact make said opinion true.

The glory of the English language is its ability to be specific and vague at the same time. I did not claim those were the only three groups of artists, just that those three groups are clearly identifiable, with the exact wording "Three large groups of artists exist". It is difficult to argue there isn't a group of people more pre-disposed (via nature or nurture) to creative output than others; it is difficult to argue that many humans don't creatively express themselves on occasion for personal consumption or for the enjoyment of those around them; and it is even more difficult to argue that there isn't a group of humans that create formal art for monetary purposes. This does not exclude whatever other motivations you might believe you have, but given your descriptions on this thread you seem to fall within these parameters (your fire burning analogies especially with the second one). This does not suggest these are the only form of artists, or true artists. There are plenty of sources about the types of personalities and make-ups that are more prone to involvement in specific expressive domains, here is one random one from a UCAL Davis Dean.

Being the one who is making the assets, and donating them, I should think that nobody other than myself has any claim to state what *MY* motives and reasons for those motives *are.*

I believe that since you created the asset, you should have a right to decide where and how that piece enters the market. The 'right of first sale' is an important component to a stable pragmatic approach away from copyright and the limits of the Creative Commons group. For more on the right of first sale in the absence of copyright, consult Boldrine and Levine. However, if copies of that asset are easily made and you have chosen to give/sell that property to someone else, I do not believe you should maintain a downstream distribution monopoly. It is likely that society can more efficiently distribute your work than you can, and society will be better off as a result.

As for asserting that I am an interchangable part; take a look at the sisteen chapel's fresco. Then ask yourself, could this lady?

Artists are not interchangeable.

While its good and fun to continue to make fun of this woman and it has likely spawned many useful memes, her painting is her form of expression. I'll agree that her restoration doesn't fit with the standards of the restoration industry, but her re-envisioned piece really isn't that far off many expressionist genre works and there is certainly no formal definition for what is "good art". The best consensus is "being unique" and to be honest, this woman's restoration is really quite unique -

What makes you think that removing the money will stop the weapons and the violence? This isn't organized crime. Money is not the motive. The motive is crazy.

Then how do you explain that economic studies on developing countries frequently show the following pattern when comparing natural resources and the number of armed conflicts:

poor: few armed conflicts
medium: lots of armed conflicts
very rich: few armed conflicts

For some discussion on possible causal relations and a literature review see Ross

Earliest calculatable time is the Planck second 10E-43 seconds. This is smallest resolvable time unit in physical constants. This says 10^32 degrees K. At this temperature gravitation may unify with the other three universal forces.

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

Intellectual property: Patents against prosperity | The Economist

Why abolish software patents - software patents wiki (en.swpat.org)

When Patents Attack! | This American Life

Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture | Video on TED.com

Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? Times Labs Blog

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation - Boing Boing

US patent trolling costs $29b: study - Strategy - Business - News - iTnews.com.au

Patents | Electronic Frontier Foundation

http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/

Zynga might be too close, but the vast majority of games actually copy each other so much that they create a GENDRE for god's sake. And that has been alwways a good thing for gaming in particular. The truth is that yes, there are indeed assholes, there will always be, but they seem to be on both sides and the question remains to where do they cause the less damage.

As far as being non-creative, I'm not sure who you mean. Personally, I develop new software for a living and I was curiously enough working on my novel when I got your reply.

There's a fallacy where you just make an assertion and hope people believe you, you know that?

If you want evidence on the matter, I suggest you read Against Intellectual Monopoly. It's written by two economists, and thoroughly debunks the idea of copyright and patents as being beneficial to society.

Thank you. I've put in critical thought now, and I realize that 'art' is not useful. Literature is a waste of time and I have implemented a policy by which school teachers who purport to have students read in class will be executed, and we'll start rounding up and burning all these worthless tomes so as not to corrupt future generations.

Congratulations on demonstrating your lack of reading comprehension. I was saying that your misuse of a term suggests that you are not deeply familiar with the subject. 'Useful arts' in the context of the constitution means arts that have a direct practical usage. 'Arts' is used here in the sense of a skill or trade. For example, 'martial arts' refers to the skills of combat, with 'Martial' being a reference to Mars, the Roman god of war. You also misunderstood the difference between something being 'not useful' and 'worthless.' In fact, if you knew much about copyright law, you'd understand that something that has utility is not eligible for copyright, although it may be patentable sometimes. That's why the fashion and automotive industry have a lot of free culture going on in their designs. The functional elements often cannot be separated from the non-functional elements.

Now, please pay attention. The critical thought is not in understanding the meaning of the words in the copyright clause. You need to actually look at historical and modern evidence, and read about various theories and analysis of those theories. Your misunderstanding of the specific words in the copyright clause have no real effect on the scope of copyright law since 'science' covers what you think is actually 'useful arts', but your misuse is a red flag that you are a novice in serious discussion of this matter. It would be akin to someone debating about philosophy pronouncing 'Socrates' as 'So-crates' in the same manner as Bill and Ted. Such a mistake is very hard to not write off as an idiot who has no idea what they are talking about.

One innocent person spied on, arrested or charged with the help of Google to advance this "don't be evil" agenda is one too many.
You can't be evil to fight evil. You're passing ones and zeroes back and forth for crying out loud...

This is absurd. Obviously every human system for making decisions is going to make errors; those errors will be both type I (false positive) and type II (false negative). While it's up for debate what the acceptable ratio of those errors is when making laws or punishing lawbreakers, it's pretty clearly false that even one false positive is more evil than any number of false negatives. For a tongue-in-cheek historical overview of the arguments over *what* the ratio is, see N Guilty Men.

None of this is to impute that we are giving criminal defendants a fair shake or that the system as a whole could do better (which I think, by the way, there are reforms that would reduce both type I and type II errors simultaneously, thus convicting more of the guilty and acquitting more of the innocent). Nor do I dispute that we should err very strongly on the side of acquitting the guilty rather than punishing the innocent -- the magnitude of the error is not nearly the same. But to get any useful traction on the problem, you can't start with "it's evil to have a system that convicts even a single innocent suspect" because that ignores that such a system would have to acquit so many guilty suspects to get the 0% error rate (if not all of them). Instead, you have to do the hard work of looking at each particular policy and judge whether, taken as a whole and including the effect of wrongful conviction, unpunished crime, criminals that go on after one offense to violate the rights of more victims and so forth, the policy is a net positive or a net negative.

The same extends to Google's program here -- maybe it's evil, maybe it's not, but it certainly doesn't merit such a judgment based on the existence of even a single false positive.

UCLA's original press release can be read at http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/world-s-fastest-camera-used-to-235979.aspx, which also indicates that the research team was led by Bahram Jalali and Dino Di Carlo. However, the team consisted of Keisuke Goda, Ali Ayazi, Daniel R. Gossett, Jagannath Sadasivam, Cejo K. Lonappan, Elodie Sollier, Ali M. Fard, Soojung Claire Hur, Jost Adam, Coleman Murray, Chao Wang, Nora Brackbill, Dino Di Carlo, and Bahram Jalali, who contributed the following to the work: K.G. designed research; K.G., A.A., D.R.G., J.S., C.K.L., E.S., C.W., and N.B. performed research; K.G., D.R.G., J.S., C.K.L., E.S., A.M.F., S.C.H., and C.M. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; K.G., A.A., J.S., C.K.L., A.M.F., J.A., and C.W. analyzed data; and K.G., A.A., D.R.G., D.D.C., and B.J. wrote the paper.

It appears that neither Prof. Jalali nor Prof. Di Carlo did very much at all other than attaching their names to the paper - Dr. Goda is the one who primarily responsible for this work.

Thanks for bringing up a point that is often missed: Patents are an optional power grant that Congress may choose to exercise. I think that innovation would run like a the flaming chicken on a Firebird Trans Am without patents.

Here is one of my favorite references on the subject: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm

Hogwash. Destroying them would not do incalculable harm to many industries. Patent defenders such as yourself are the ones harming innovation.

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm

This is a wrong way to frame the question, IMHO. The value of the artistic output is entirely subjective. One could objectively measure the volume and the rate of production, but any comparison in value between a larger volume of crappy work and a smaller volume of superb work is also subjective. There are somewhat more objective metrics, like how many professional artists are out there and how much money they make. But again, measuring the value of having a ton of poor artists versus fewer better-paid artists is subjective. It all comes down to a realization that art to economy is what peacock feathers are to reproduction: it looks fucking awesome, but no one is sure how useful it is. Because of that, I don't believe it would do much good (or bad) to abolish copyright on woks of art for entertainment. Just as long as terms are reasonable and non-commercial sharing is a human right, copyright sits well with me.

There are places, though, where copyright does damage we can quantify. This is off-topic, but anyway. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that commodity software, for example, is up to 10 times cheaper when it's libre (as it necessarily would be if copyrights and patents were abolished). And economic research shows that in every area where art has utility, copyrights and patents at best do absolutely nothing, and at worst set back the technological innovation by decades. Rent-seekers are the only ones who benefit from it, and everyone else ends up with a bill. Here too, copyrights would not do any harm if they were reasonably framed. A patent law, on the other hand, is just a racket waiting to happen.

I have to agree. A song is not someone's property, and no amount of wishful thinking or even congressional lawmaking can magically make it so. The same argument holds for intellectual property in all its forms. Granting a monopoly to individuals for their ideas is bad for society and leads to less innovation and creativity. A good book about this for those who are inclined to explore this idea further:

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm

For a song it is much more important, HOW it is performed, not WHAT is performed.

Not to a judge in a copyright suit. Judges strip away the performance and look at the sheet music.

And? People listening music are generally not judges of a copyright suit. People like songs, which touch them emotionally and that emotion in music is not defined by the chord progressions, that comes from the artistic performance.

For a song it is much more important, HOW it is performed, not WHAT is performed.

Not to a judge in a copyright suit. Judges strip away the performance and look at the sheet music.

I don't think there'd be enough matter in the universe for [copyrighting everything]. [...] Even for very short songs that's a lot of possibilities.

A judge isn't looking for the whole songs to be identical; he's just looking for the songs to be "substantially similar". This cuts down to comparing the melodic hooks, as shown by the cases listed here. A nine-note hook was deemed an infringement in Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, so let's go with that.

Model a "note" as a duration plus a pitch interval to the next note. There are seven distinct intervals in a diatonic (major or minor or modal) scale. Notes can be short or long; the performer's exact timing does not change the fundamental character of a melody. This gives fourteen possibilities for each note. But the last note does not really have a duration, nor does it have an interval to the next pitch because there is none. With eight duration/interval combinations, you end up with 14^8 possibilities, or about 1.48 billion distinct hooks. That's fewer than one for each person on the planet.

I recommend that you read this book. It's chock full of examples of how patents and copyright have consistently resulted in worse results than free competition, and the examples include both industries and individuals within them in both the past and modern times, and it goes into great detail on the theory end too.

And again, you and I and every human on the planet 'blatantly rip off people who can actually invent things' all the time. Even that worthless asshole Isaac Newton blatantly admitted to such horrendous behavior, claiming that he was 'standing on the shoulders of giants.'

The simplified answer was actually the next two sentences in the essay:

'You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force."

You are debating a single sentence of an essay that is an amazing read to say the least. I highly recommend reading it: http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html

Human beings have made music since there were human beings.

Since before there were homo sapiens in fact.

Besides that Humans can feel horror and misery that a brain as simple as a cockroaches almost certainly cannot.

What makes you so certain? If you were in a cockroach body you would have limited senses and physical abilities, so even if you feel horror and misery how would you prove it to some human? Cockroaches may not pass IQ tests, but how can you be so sure they don't feel pain, horror and misery? And how much can you learn with a limited cockroach body? They certainly do have memory: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070927132543.htm

Maybe amoebas too: http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep01/feed.html
Some amoebas even build elaborate shells:
http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep01/shelled.html
Instinct maybe, but what's instinct then? And how sure are you that horror and misery don't come with instinct either? After all pain, horror and misery would be more useful concepts than passing IQ tests to most creatures on this planet and elsewhere even.

I think we're are still far from understanding thought and consciousness.

By the way there are single neurons that specialize in going "BINGO!" whenever someone thinks "Halle Berry".
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/Single-Cell-Recognition-Research-6260.aspx

Who knows, an individual amoeba might be potentially more intelligent than a single neuron. But there is currently no way for an amoeba to be hooked up to a suitable body to prove otherwise, no super exoskeleton or mecha robot equivalent that it can pilot and be provide supersenses. In contrast, multi-cellular animals allow a bunch of neurons to pilot a body and have their senses extended. But the neurons still have to specialize and cooperate with other neurons to fire the impulses to move limbs, receive impulses etc. A single cell wouldn't be able to do it plus there is no redundancy - if the entire body is controlled by a single cell and that cell dies without a replacement, the body is in trouble.

The less common way is the most common one on Windows: you go to a web site, download the installer and follow instructions (usually unzip and run a setup script). The last time I did it was for SamIam.

The more common way is similar to what other companies are calling "a store": you open your OS package manager, search for the application you need and click to install.. On my Ubuntu it is Applications menu, Ubuntu Software Center. There is also a command line version very handy to perform long installations on servers (easier to document and maybe you have only a CLI anyway.)

A variant of the latter method is going to the web site of a company, find the name of their own repository, and add it to the software sources in the package manager. I did it to install duplicity from this repository. Then it's included in the package manager.

Most programs are for free, some are for purchase.

Turns out that the penny doesn't actually fall that fast. On the other hand, A horse splashes

There is there is a statistically zero probability for any failed decryption to be as compressible as the true text.

This is quite incorrect for a system with perfect secrecy, such as the one time pad the GP was talking about, or a cryptogram shorter than the unicity distance of the cipher. There is no way to determine if a particular solution is correct because every possible solution is equally as likely as any other. Please see Shannon's Communications Theory of Secrecy Systems for more information.

Critique of tired light: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/tiredlit.htm

It's possible that the big bang theory has it wrong about galactic redshift, but that seems more like wishful thinking than observational data.

That book is rather old (published 1994), and you seem to have left out bisexuals and the transgendered. A more recent report has somewhat higher numbers (around 1 in 28 for LGB, 1 in 26 for LGBT):

An estimated 3.5% of adults in the United States identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual and an estimated 0.3% of adults are transgender. [...] Among adults who identify as LGB, bisexuals comprise a slight majority (1.8% compared to 1.7% who identify as lesbian or gay).

Note that the above measures how people identify themselves, which is an important distinction since...

Estimates of those who report any lifetime same-sex sexual behavior and any same-sex sexual attraction are substantially higher than estimates of those who identify as LGB. An estimated 19 million Americans (8.2%) report that they have engaged in same-sex sexual behavior and nearly 25.6 million Americans (11%) acknowledge at least some same-sex sexual attraction.

[...] By way of comparison, these analyses suggest that the size of the LGBT community is roughly equivalent to the population of New Jersey. The number of adults who have had same-sex sexual experiences is approximately equal to the population of Florida while those who have some same-sex attraction comprise more individuals than the population of Texas.

It should be noted that different surveys give remarkably different numbers. The link I gave discusses this in some detail. Also, I'm not sure if you're misquoting the survey you linked, but the numbers I've seen indicate that the "gayest" 5 large cities (San Francisco, Seattle, etc.) have around 10% LGBT people in the city itself, not the largest 5 cities (which are closer to 5%).

Particles are trapped in the magnetosphere, although "trapped" doesn't mean they have to stay there forever. If you want to know how particles bounce off of a field gradient, look up how a magnetic mirror works as a result of conservation of magnetic moment which applies if the magnetic field isn't changing too fast. A single particle could be trapped for a very long time, until it has lost its kinetic energy to radiation. Groups of particles trapped by a magnetic mirror will result in them leaving quicker, as each collision between particles has a chance of knocking one in a direction close enough to parallel to the magnetic field, in which case it won't bounce off the mirror field. It is as much a perpetual motion machine as planetary orbits, where two bodies could orbit for a very long time until gravity waves radiate energy out of the system, or multiple body systems can eject a planet much quicker, but otherwise "trap" orbiting bodies on relevant time scales.

And there are emissions observed from Earth's and other magnetospheres, including maser like activity. There are entire books written on the topic at this point.

There is so much written on these topics, it is hard to link to anything in particular. Especially since it is such a big research area, searches return mostly narrow, esoteric papers and discussions of various minute details. An article here at least doesn't require math, and Wikipedia has an article on particle motion in a magnetosphere, although it isn't that great but at least links to other related topics.

I think you're on the right track here... maybe just need a little more energy...

=Smidge=

PhD's in Stanford are easy to get? I am surprised by that. His work looks fairly rigourous and he's had a few papers published. The methodology he employs in his PhD seems reasonable enough - which aspects of his thesis ("Learning and short-term retention of paired associates in relation to specific sequences of interpresentation intervals") do you have an issue with?

I also note he has a first degree in Maths, so I guess he's probably ok on this knowledge. Probably he could get by undergraduate level engineering.

You note "Let's see how long he'll last": reading his curriculum vitae I'd say probably a little while longer, seeing as he completed his PhD in 1966 and has been producing papers and been employed since then, that's about 45 years so far...

'ranking system for CME/EMP effects' ... 'all the way up to X5'?

Wow. Well, what you're talking about is the 'Flare Class' which only classifies the amount of x-ray energy given off by a flare. It's a log scale, so M is 10x as large as a C, and X is 10x as large as an M. Of course, there's no cap on it, and there have been X20 flares recorded. Of course, the sensors saturate, and as we're only really dealing with one significant figure and a magnitude, I don't know how much precision they have at those higher values.

To make things even more fun, there's also a flare 'importance' value, which is based on the energy and size of the flaring region in the optical (visible) spectrum.

But neither of these classifications have to do with CMEs, and particularly not their affects at earth. For that, you'd need to look at the solar wind folks, who are obsessed with things like 'Bz' (z-component of the magnetic field', ie, how is it oriented relative to the earth's magnetic field?) and radio bursts.

The closest thing that I can think of to what you describe would be a catalog of ICMEs (Interplanetary CMEs), but even those, if you look at the catalog, are just raw numbers, no sort of ranking to it. (the column with 'A' and 'B' in it are which of the two STEREO spacecraft saw the event, 'Ahead' or 'Behind')

Disclaimer : I'm not a solar physicist, but I work in a solar data archive, and have done work trying to normalize solar event catalogs.

Thanks for your post. I think it adds greatly to the conversation.

I'd like to ask an awkward question, and I ask only in the most informational of ways. If it were to help you lead a better life, would you have your right leg amputated and replaced with a prosthesis (simliar to the one in this image: http://rehab.ucla.edu/images/P/prosthetic-leg.jpg)?

Again, I don't think you're lazy, etc. Its clear your reduced mobility is caused by your accident. I'm just interested in your prospective.

Thanks for your time.
- Someone moving from IT into biomedical engineering.

In the US they don't get a lot of things you get "free" e.g. healthcare. They have sales taxes too. They have federal, and often have state and city taxes. http://www.calculator.net/take-home-pay-calculator.html
If you use California (since others have used it to compare it with Sweden): http://map.ais.ucla.edu/go/1002763 that's probably a state tax of about 10% and city tax of 0%.

Add expensive medical insurance (unless covered by employer). Add it all up and what's left might not be that much more compared to Sweden.

You'd be unlikely to get 100Mbps broadband for cheap. But cars and fuel are cheap. I suspect beer and food is cheaper too.

In my opinion the path Sweden has chosen seems better assuming technology improves and we get more automation - robots etc. After a while, you'd just have a growing percentage of people who are just not competitive compared to AIs and robots. What then do you do with them?

In Sweden you'd keep them fed, sheltered and entertained using some of the stuff (and profits) produced by the robots. It's easy enough to do given a socialist welfare state.

That doesn't work so well when you have a "winner takes all" society, there will be a lot of unhappy losers. They may have stupidly voted for that unhappy result, but that may not stop social unrest and other unpleasantness.

two forces have opposed wealth accumulation in the US as far as I can see, the growth made possible by the massive availability of natural resources outpacing wealth accumulation (unfortunately that stopped working in the 70s) and strong central government stepping in (Sherman, FDR, etc).

So how do you explain the high tech industry? Lot of wealth created for a lot of people who didn't already have that sort of wealth. Second, FDR probably caused more wealth concentration since he created industry oligopolies. His legacy is less tainted by luck, because most of his efforts had to be undone in order to fight the Second World War.

The states have always been locked in by the race to the bottom enforced by internal free trade and no holds barred competition and were never able to make a real fist against the financiers and land owners.

Ah yes, the same sort of excessive competition that FDR fought. My view is that I rather have this "race to the bottom" than a single government which fritters and wastes the US's future.

More ignorance. And history revision. The protectionist law Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act was enacted on 17 June 1930. The State Department itself says "Such policies contributed to a drastic decline in international trade". The Great Depression though started on Black Tuesday, 29 October 1929.

You need to go to economics school. The Chicago school of economics, at the University of Chicago, with more Nobel Prize laureates than any other is a great one. Milton Friedman, one of those Nobel laureates, exposes the Great Depression Myth (almost 10 minute video). In "New Deal or raw deal?" 2 New Deal historians debate whether the New Deal helped during the Great Depression or made it worse. In "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" the political economist Amity Shlaes argues FDR's policies didn't end the depression, that WWII did. Massive government spending, which Obama is advocating, did. In finishing an economics study UCLA economists calculate "FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years".

I provided links to data to government and to economics resources, where are yours? Or do you only have voodoo economics yourself? Of course if you provide any I will research it and see what other economists say.

Falcon

Oh, and I dare you to point out anywhere where i mentioned Ayn Rand previously in regard to this thread. You can't because you're making things up that fits into your own world view and not in reality.

I think a lot of people are missing the point - nobody will remember steve jobs for Mac OSX.

They will remember him for the ipod, macbook air, mac mini, ipad series etc.

Whatever your views on their corporate behaviour, you have to admit it: mac laptops are shiny! ;)

None of this makes him a better or worse person, but all the talk about Apple's legal disputes and software derived from UNIX is missing the point. OSX is great to use, in a dull sort of way, but I much prefer debian. However, I have seen nothing as good for its size as a mac mini - even my 2008 model is better than non-apple models.

There is this http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/koolu/

Good points, especially on why pick one specific faith of hundreds of fairly mainstream ones?

Also, heart attacks can often cause brain damage.
http://www.bri.ucla.edu/bri_weekly/news_050822.asp

Coudl the three days of regular life be the true answer? Even if one believed in a higher power and related subdeities, could not then some devil be messing with him?

Also, vitamin D deficiency and vegetable deficiency disease cause most heart attacks, so it may indeed have been a coincidence related to poor diet, or even the wrath of the "sun god":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/news-archive/2008/vitamin-d-in-pediatrics/

Still, to be fair, and a truly skeptical skeptic, he might indeed be right. And even if his brain was altered, maybe it was improved? But personally, I don't buy it for the reasons you list.

My assertion is that proponents of CAGW will (and have) continually make ad hoc special pleadings when observations do not match their assertions.

While this is no doubt the case, it does not follow, therefore, that CAGW is unfalsifiable. There are specific predictions of required CO2 sensitivity, and measurable consequences, such as rising sea levels.

Forget the fact (for the moment), that there are people who ideologically hate lazzie-faire capitalism, or have other disabilities regarding entrenched world views. That is a /separate/ issue to whether CAGW is falsifiable or not. Agreed?

Look, read and understand this:

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

Patents do not and have never incentivised innovation. That's just a "lie to children" used as an excuse for their existence.

It's been tried dozens of times. It just fails, invariably, rapidly, and completely.

Apart from the obvious problem of simple human nature, there's a computationally intractable scaling problem involved. J. B. S. Haldane pointed this out in his famous paper, On Being the Right Size (primarily on biological scaling) back in 1928. And Haldane was himself a communist.

You may have heard of the hassle software patents cause in the USA. Mechanical engineering patents are actually in almost as bad a state (they directly impact fewer people is all), and it's pretty soul destroying to discover all those innovative things you could do to improve the automobile are illegal and will be for a long time., at least until the USA, its corporations and its USPTO crumble.

Don't make the mistake of thinking the patent system is okay when applied to some fields and software is "special" - it's plain broken in all fields, it's just programmers are in the enviable position of having something to compare to, because in the early history of computing patents weren't allowed and therefore innovation was explosively quick, and there are people alive today who remember that.

which they cannot come close to proving

Climate science was pretty much proven in 1979 by any reasonable objective scientific standard. You can learn learn about the history of the "debate" here. This is a short 10 minute clip on what we know about climate change.

It is easy to see anti-AGW arguments fall flat on their face when you look into the history of each claim, and read the sources of each claim and the responses. It is surprisingly little work.

We don't have man sized cockroaches because cockroaches are extremely well suited to their environment.

More a matter of the square-cube law, actually.