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My favorite "protect the women" argument has to do with the introduction of anesthesia in the 19th Century. Use of ether or chloroform, while risky, began to receive widespread acceptance after its introduction in the 1840's, and any number of physicians and surgeons worked to perfect it. One in particular, John Snow, recognized its possibilities during childbirth. He developed techniques for cutting back on pain (analgesia) without knocking the prospective mother out completely. Queen Victoria is known to have employed him for several of her numerous deliveries.

His work was raved against in many pulpits because it was perceived to be in violation of the book of Genesis, which states "you will bring forth your children in sorrow." Fortunately, rationality in tandem with numerous upper-crust British ladies, eventually prevailed.

Easy. Abolish patent law and copyright law. (PDF here)

Historically, those two concepts have probably been the biggest impediments to the advancement of human civilization.

We, as a people, really have to stand up and fight against copyright if we want any kind of future for society.

This might help explain it better than I could. People don't just stop coming up with ideas. The first mover is a real advantage.

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

Huh? Huge parts of the Chinese economy are directly owned by the government. Sort of like how General Motors is owned by the US government. I suppose the Western media failed to inform the public of the recent unveiling of the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, which will guide China's development for the next half decade.

I really don't know how this idea got started, because it's not true at all. I see it so many places, though, so there must be some source of the contamination, like the Broad Street Pump.

There's no need to subscribe to natural law theory to support the liberalization or eliminating of intellectual property laws. Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine takes a pragmatic approach to evaluating intellectual property. They argue through empirical study that eliminating intellectual property laws would actually improve innovation and creation.

Go read Against Intellectual Monopoly by Boldrin and Levine.

You're probably just assuming I"P" is beneficial. It isn't.

No, you're wrong. See Against Intellectual Monopoly by Boldrin and Levine. Abolishing imaginary property is exactly what we should be doing.

It's a privilege. Copyright is a legal monopoly granted solely by virtue of statute. BTW almost no manufacturing process takes money as a input.

Money just allows a ratio between products to be established moment by moment. This indirect exchange allows simplified accounting and is one of the reasons it's preferred over direct exchange. However a copyright statute would not relegate people to indirect exchange. What it would do would be to shift business models for creative content, not end the world as we know it. Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

It should, but it will never happen as long as people keeping voting the Business Party into power.

Copyright law needs to be seriously reformed, if not done away with altogether -- and, yes, serious study has been done in that direction, and not only is it feasible, but it is actually more beneficial to society overall.

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

UCLA Newsroom (note the hilarious "beyond reproach" comment indicating the writer of the article has never heard of this premise before.) This is mostly the one I was looking at because they were kind enough to actually give you a number (7 years) which helps to quantify things. (The number itself is probably a lot shakier than the general premise, though.)

For more information on the opinions of economists at large on this and other matters, check out a paper "Where Is There Consensus Among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey on Forty Propositions" by Robert Whaples.

so there is a need to incentivize research and development.

If you start with this (incorrect) position, then of course patents seem necessary.

Who would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in research...

The simplest answer is that you don't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars if you do incremental improvement -- which is only possible if there are no patent protections. The patent system itself makes itself appear necessary. The simplest example of this is the inherent differences between how Linux (and most open source) is developed in contrast with MS operating system. By incrementally making small changes and releasing often Linux as surpassed Windows in terms of quality etc.

...could copy their invention and sell it for the marginal cost of production

There is a cost to copying which may not be as high as the original, but it is non-zero. Also, if you are the one innovating you will have the lead in market; during this time you must continue to innovate to maintain your lead. Your continued innovation will leave you at the front while others lag. But that's a lot more work than relying on government monopolies.

but a substantial number of these products would not exist.

Pure conjecture. But I will grant you that some products we have today might not exist in a non-patent world if you agree that in our patent-world there are products we could have and don't because of patent issues. Whether we are better or worse of as a result is purely imaginary. I suggest we are worse off as necessity is the mother of invention; so any product with a need that can't be met today due to patent is a loss to us.

While I have not read the original posts you reference, WTO, FTC, US Courts, EuroCommish, and EuroCourts are not agencies I would trust for original research.
So I see your Schumpeter and raise you a Boldrin & Levine; the research and studies they quote and use seem to strongly indicate that there is no gain by giving monopoly protection. And that's actual in numbers, not hypothesis or theoretical discussions.

He's talking about the government's habit of granting copyright monopolies at the drop of a hat. Some people are prone to taking the existence of copyright monopoly as axiomatic, but, well, it's just a law, like the right to own slaves or beat your wife. It's quite reasonable to consider abolishing copyrights, or at least some aspects of the law (such as the restriction on redistribution, which could be removed completely, while still requiring attribution (i.e. a right to be recognised as the real author, against plagiarism/fraud))

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

Oh bugger off. It's time to abolish copyrights.

http://questioncopyright.org/

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

Names, home addresses, email addresses, and home telephone numbers are posted by default for all UCLA students (including minors) on a publicly-accessible "directory" at http://directory.ucla.edu./ There are only 60,000 people associated with the university, but apparently it generates 3mm searches/mo... not surprising because it doesn't require a username or password and has only limited protection against scraping. One student was involved in the a mistaken identity case with the Rose Bowl stabbing and received (misplaced) death-threats from gang-bangers. Another student posted a racist video online and also received death threats and harassment (her actions were stupid but she didn't deserve what she got either). Neither knew that their information was out there. The school's response? We're subject to the CA Information Practices Act but don't consider this personally-identifiable information. "UCLA cannot change the default settings on URSA because that would violate UCLA’s policy, according to university registrar Anita Cotter." (http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2011/01/uclas_online_campus_directory_undermines_student_privacy) I'm pretty sure it was Hitler's policy to exterminate millions of Jews but that doesn't make it ethical, legal, or immutable, right? If you know anyone who is a disgruntled student at UCLA and feels like making a little cash with the help of a trial attorney, now's your chance.

http://www.kitchenlab.org/www/bmah/Software/pchar/
http://www.isc.org/software/irrtoolset
http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
http://www.caida.org/tools/

If you want transparency, you can always do it yourself. Why wait for Google? You've a list of tools right there that will tell you who is throttling, when, where, how, by how much, and maybe even what they had for breakfast.

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/main.htm
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm

Then there's the Weather Channel for geeks. That should give you a good indication of "unusual" packet losses, indicative of throttling.

http://www.noc.ucla.edu/weather.html
http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/weather/weather.html

For more local weather on the tens, there's UCLA and UCSF.

There ya go, and it cost you rather less than the same information is costing Google.

Copying is not theft. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

The fact is, if your law requires the mother of all police states to function (as copyright obviously does), it's the law that is wrong, not the people. Copyright enforcement in the digitial domain is indistinguishable from censorship. If you continue to support copyright law now, you're no better than some mad middle eastern dictator shutting down the net to try to stop his overthrow.

Apart from that, a lot of the world's problems right now arise directly from the USA meddling to keep the rest of the world fucked up - overthrowing democratic governments to install mad dictators in the first place etc. Some individual americans are of course good people - look at Bradley Manning's heroic and patriotic actions, for example - but a shocking number of americans have no idea of the evil done in their name in the rest of the world.

So, everyone said, if we switch to SSDs, longer battery life. Did it happen? No.

Wha? So to back up this claim, please link me to stats on the battery of a HDD-based smartphone and an SSD-based one from the same era. To be fair, music players will be actually possible to give examples for, and you'll find that SSD-based ones have much, much smaller batteries.

If PCM---or something like it---works, then it will be a radical change. Fast, cheap, bit-addressable NVRAM is something that computers have not had for a long time. See BPFS for an example of a project researchers are working on in preparation for such technologies. (Of course, they are in academia, so they can afford to spend time thinking about hardware that might not ever exist.)

The problem with communism is that it doesn't scale. A communist economy of any significant size will always go down the tubes, and the people will revert to a market economy or simply leave unless prevented by threat of violence.

I look at the chart you linked and see significant, precipitous declines where the RIAA either ignored negative feedback or outright attacked customers:

Late '70s - disco was pushed on radio, tv, everywhere, and audiophiles (LP buyers) rejected it (the sale of hissing cassettes stayed flat unti CDs came along)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco

1990s - CD sales flatten as the loudness war gets really noticeable
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

2001 - CD sales take a nose-dive after the Napster decision (Feb. 2001)
http://gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/napster.htm

2005 - CD sales make a tiny comeback, along with digital, then both plummet as the RIAA lawsuit campaign focuses on university students and the MGM v. Grokster decision comes down
http://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-years-later

Has the RIAA finally won the war against its customers?

On a related topic, notability standards for scientists are pretty high, while any second zone sportsman will get an article for him.

As an illustration, Wikipedia seems to know about 600 current NFL players, while if you take this list of Computer Science researchers, only the top hundred or so seem to have a Wikipedia page.

Some organizations publish their delivery guidelines. For example, UCLA's delivery guidelines are available here: http://info.smtp.ucla.edu/guidelines.php The most common reason UCLA's servers reject mail is due to improper rDNS records.

FYI this is completely untrue.

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/infpoint.html

www.rifetechnologies.com/davos2009-D.doc http://www.physics.ucla.edu/research/biophysics/pubs/pdf/_paper_ol_dipole.pdf They are talking about GHz freqs (not so low). Then "electrical conductivity of DNA" gives quite many hits too.

Not only that, but if you look at the actual study, even non-FOX News viewers believe a lot of crazy stuff, and it's more indicative the personal biases and beliefs of people who choose to watch FOX News, not that FOX News "makes you stupid".

You might find this study an interesting read.

Notable:

"All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABCs World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News Special Report is the most centrist."

...

Ah yes, the (in)famous Groseclose and Milyo study. This study is notable for its highly idiosyncratic classification of what was liberal and conservative - the most liberal media outlet was the Wall Street Journal, the NRA was considered a liberal organization, the ACLU was a conservative one. In general defensible research supporting a claim that a systematic liberal bias exists seems absent.

The largest study attempting to address this (a meta-analysis of dozens of studies spanning decades) found no systematic bias: http://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/cobb/p_courses/ps411/assigned%20readings/dalessio_meta%20analyses%20media%20bias.pdf .

Not only that, but if you look at the actual study, even non-FOX News viewers believe a lot of crazy stuff, and it's more indicative the personal biases and beliefs of people who choose to watch FOX News, not that FOX News "makes you stupid".

You might find this study an interesting read.

Notable:

"All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABCs World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News Special Report is the most centrist."

and

"Based on sentences as the level of observation (the results of which are listed in Table 8), the Drudge Report is the most centrist, Fox News Special Report is second, ABC World News Tonight is third, and CBS Evening is last.

Given that the conventional wisdom is that the Drudge Report and Fox News are conservative news outlets, this ordering might be surprising. Perhaps more surprising is the degree to which the mainstream press is liberal. The results of Table 8 show that the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, and CBS Evening News are not only liberal, they are closer to the average Democrat in Congress (who has a score of 74.1) than they are to the median of the whole House (who has a score of 39.0). ...the New York Times is twice as far from the center as Fox News Special Report, to gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading the New York Times. ...Our results contrast strongly with the prior expectations of many others. It is easy to find quotes from prominent journalists and academics who claim that there is no systematic bias among media outlets in the U.S. ... The main conclusion of our paper is that our results simply reject such claims."

Keep in mind that they are ONLY looking at the evening news shows; if you included the opinion/editorial shows from FOX News, which constitutes nearly all of the evening/prime-time programming, I'm not sure what would happen to the results... ;-)

My hope is that all that missing 'Dark Matter' turns out to be all those neutrinos zipping around out there. Up until recently they were considered massless, but detection of neutrino flavor oscillations means they apparently must have some rest mass.

I was being ironic: the market cannot solve all problems. I'm in favor of trademarks--a big government sponsored social program for business. I'm also in favor of copyright reform. For a reference on intellectual monopoly, I suggest Against Intellectual Monopoly a free online text by economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. I also recommend their web site Against Monopoly. Intellectual monopoly is the exclusive "...right to control how purchasers make use of an idea or creation." This refers to all copies of an idea or creation. Boldrin and Levine assert that "not only should the property rights of innovators be protected but also the rights of those who have legitimately obtained a copy of the idea, directly or indirectly, from the original innovator." It is an empirical and not an ideological question whether and to what extent creators should "...have the right to control how purchasers make use of an idea or creation." The evidence I've seen is that copyrights and patents overwhelmingly favor moneyed interests at the expense of innovators and at significant social cost.

the ones that we're talking about all trap to the OS for unaligned loads and stores.
While modern arms can trap to the OS and the OS can fix them up that isn't the default behaviour.

http://lecs.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/index.php/XScale_alignment#Have_the_kernel_find_the_problem_for_you

This is very slow, but it's pretty slow on x86 if it spans a cache line too.
IIRC kernel traps are extremely slow (for example reports i've seen say that kernel floating point emulation is 10 times slower than pure software floating point) which may be why this was never turned on by default. Is unaligned access on x86 really THAT slow?!

Against Intellectual Property by Boldrin and Leving is a good book:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/intellectual.htm

However, you say how much money Patents cost the Government? It costs them nothing (well something but it's recuperated in taxes, fees, and corporate income tax) -- the real cost is societal.

However, corps are still under the dream that China will play nice and all that, and they'll get into that huge market. The truth is, countries don't follow IP laws until it is in their interest to do so (America did the same in her early history) and that means when China is ready to follow IP laws, it's only because they'll be so invested and huge that they'll crush us in our own game.

Even better was when John Fogerty was sued by his former label for plagiarizing himself.

http://cip.law.ucla.edu/cases/case_fantfogerty.html

Now a free market isn't actually free, and regulation of covered physical area is fine, but not regulation of covered market segments...

Of course, a startup company will be a niche player at the start, like every other company. Patents should not guarantee every inventor will become a millionaire. Instead, they guarantee inventors get a chance to recoup their investment. Even a small toy company like Larami had a better chance to make a profit than a single guy building pressurized water guns from PVC pipe.

Looking through that book, conveniently available online, it has a lot of examples of patents doing nothing. It has a lot of examples where ideas got copied by people who had common goals. Examples of patents actually hurting society are extremely rare, and usually coupled with the original inventors getting screwed.

Perhaps you'd like to show some of these "most surveys"? Let's turn to the ever-authoritative source, Wikipedia. Pulling out a few key points here, I see that reducing price to try to build a market reduces profitability. While Microsoft can afford to waste money on the XBox, I don't know any guy in a garage with money to spend like that. What else? Investments in future needs early, before demand actually rises. Also a great idea, but also requiring lots of money that inventors probably don't have.

What about disadvantages? It seems the biggest problems are with other companies copying research, and general market risk. Either the inventor gets screwed, or everyone does. Seems this first-mover advantage is bad for inventors, as well.

Assuming the inventor has a few million dollars in their back pocket, they might be able to fund manufacture themselves. Who's going to do it though? They'll need employees, and supply lines, and advertising, and a small army of other people who all get to see the product before it's public. With no protection, there's nothing preventing one of those hired hands from passing the design on to another company.

We're here not just because we're in the Goldilocks zone, but also because we're a double-planet (earth and moon). Lots of gravitational stress to help encourage crustal slip along fault lines, and free water to help with the slippage. A runaway greenhouse effect caused by much higher CO2 concentrations converts the water to H2SO4. Once the water is gone (it's still liquid at depth even at 150C because of the pressure), the plates lock up completely, and you get Venus.

I don't like the law any more than you, but c'mon, let's not resort to slippery slope arguments.

Not that the OP did this anyway, but why not? They have their uses. In this case pay particular attention to attitude altering slippery slopes, multi-peaked preferences and small change tolerance.

My Grandmother passed away this past December but had Alzheimer's for many years, progressively getting worse over time. In addition to what you list, I'd like to add that it has a large impact on those that care about the person. As my Grandmother's Alzheimer's state worsened, my mother and uncle (her only surviving children) became very frustrated in trying to care for her. Caring for someone that doesn't even know you is rough. Trying to hold a conversation, only to repeat it, knowing that it won't be remembered, is frustrating. You essentially care for the body of someone who "died" already. Mij

I think Alzheimer's sufferers should consider euthanizing while they still have the capacity to make a rational decision. I would, under those circumstances, even if only to save the family and society from the burden of looking after a "living dead" person.

BTW, for a possible cheap method of prevention, consider turmeric/curcumin.

From http://www.bri.ucla.edu/bri_weekly/news_060206.asp

"Turmeric is also being studied for its ability to help treat Alzheimer's disease. The prevalence of Alzheimer's among adults in India aged 70 to 79 is among the world's lowest. It is 4.4 times less than the rate in the United States. A 2004 study with mice published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry suggested that curcumin might be of help for Alzheimer's patients. The study, conducted by UCLA and Veterans Affairs scientists, showed that a rodent chow laced with curcumin slowed the accumulation in mouse brains of protein fragments known as beta amyloids. They are considered key to the development of Alzheimer's. Curcumin did this more powerfully than many other drugs being tested as Alzheimer's treatments, said Cole, the study's principal investigator. "

By far the cheapest form of turmeric is as bulk powder from Asian spice shops, but getting extracts in capsule form from a vitamin company would be much easier to take.

it's just rejected out of hand by the Envirowhackos because it doesn't involve government running our lives, a reduction in the standard of living, and allows for more growth and prosperity: Nuclear power.

I don't know what an "Envirowhacko" is, but I don't know any environmentalists who want government running our lives or a reduction in the standard of living. In fact, in terms of big government, most want an end to the huge subsidies, in the form of loan guarantees, that make possible the construction of nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is inherently centralized and requires strong government oversight for both safety (from accident and terrorism) and non-proliferation concerns; decentralized power production from millions of solar panels, wind turbines, and biofuel-run generators, goes well with the idea of decentralized government.

I'm all for prosperity, but "growth", in and of itself, is the ideology of the cancer cell. The planet is limited. The human species is just about wrapping up its adolescence, it's time for physical growth to stop -- and for those energies to go into mental, emotional, and dare I say, "spiritual" growth.

I think the possibilities of fusion and of energy-amplifier reactors using thorium are interesting, but they are not here yet. Solar and wind are here now, as are meaningful improvements in energy efficiency. Plus, the U.S. and Israel won't threaten to bomb countries that build solar arrays or wind farms.

Then comes everyone who thinks all reactors are built like Chernobyl.

All reactors? No, but if you want a solution to the world's energy needs, you need to think about reactors being built by the same sort of companies that paint kids toys with lead pain and put melamine in pet food.

So, in short: nuclear power is not a "plain and simple" solution -- and most likely there is no single "plain and simple" solution.

The analogue to someone pirating music is not that person saying: "hey, I like Lady GaGa's new song. Let's also rent a studio, arrange the musicians, record it and mix it".

You'd be surprised. Here are a couple U.S. plagiarism cases for you to Google: Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music and Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton . In both of these cases, a singer-songwriter was found liable for copyright infringement despite that he didn't even know he was copying a song that he had heard several years ago on the radio until he got sued.

They do.

I disagree

Philosphers still debate this stuff? Hasn't Judea Pearl (et al) already solved this with the method of causal nets and counterfactual surgery? (Presentation)

Thanks for nothing, philosophers!

Look up 'monopoly'. You are using the term incorrectly, and missing the point. In fact, way before people started using the propaganda term "intellectual property", the normal term was 'Monopoly'. That's how the founding fathers referred to copyrights and patents throughout their writings. That is vastly different from real property.

Why does property exist? Think back to the very beginnings of property. You see some unused land or some rocks or something else. You take it. Now, no one else can take. Why? Not because of some government grant on a "monopoly", but because you physically have it. No one else can take it physically unless they use force to deprive you of this property. You cannot both have this property at the same time--that is, it is a rivalrous, scarce, good. And that's why it's the concept of property has led to so much wealth and prosperity: it produces the most efficient allocation of property. And that's why there's so little prosperity in countries with corrupt governments: there's no security in your own property, since armed gangs are free to take it from you.

Now, think about what monopolies are. If you have a government-granted monopoly on soap, that means that you are the only one legally allowed to sell soap. You don't just own the physical soap that you have, but you have partial ownership in every bar of soap in the country, since no one can take their soap and re-sell it. You don't just own soap, but the concept of soap. That is a world of difference. It undermines real property rights, since people may no longer use their own property as they wish, such as to resell their soap or to make soap from scratch from ingredients they already own.

And that's exactly what "intellectual property" is. It's a monopoly. Like all monopolies (especially government-granted), it is bad for society, wrong, and bad for private property.

And that is why you sound like a fool to anyone who's studied economics when you claim that private property is a 'state based monopoly'. And I have to wonder if you make that claim just in order to fool the uninformed into thinking that you're being objective, or if you're genuinely that ignorant. Either way, I don't expect anyone in this thread to convince you otherwise. The best I can do is to repeat the recommendation to read Against Intellectual Monopoly .

First of all, innovation always increases, even when there are roadblocks slowing it down. It's just the nature of the Universe. The more innovation there is, the more you can build upon. Innovation naturally increases at an exponential rate. The first several tens of thousands of years that humans were around, there were only a few innovations. After that, that rate slowly increased. By the end of the prehistoric era, it was much faster, and that rate kept increasing up to the industrial revolution. Patents had absolutely nothing to do with it.

As for the steam engine, its inventor was not even thinking about patents at the time. It was only once he was trying to market it that a business partner suggested he patent it and sue everyone who sells a steam engine. For the next several decades, company after company was shut down via infringement law suits. Many of these companies had real innovations that improved the steam engine, but none of these innovations were allowed to be brought to market. The rate of innovation slowed significantly until the patent expired. After that, it suddenly skyrocketed, and people once again built upon the innovations of others.

The first chapters of Against Intellectual Monopoly discuss this in detail, with details and statistics and studies. In fact, once you start reading literature from actual economists on these issues, you will find that there has never been even one study supporting the idea that patents and copyrights support innovation. What you will find is study after study that indicate that all they do is hinder it.

but what i don't like currently in the usa though is this melding of opinion and "news" organization, such as with fox news

Actually, it's no different than what CBS, NBC, ABC, etc have been doing for decades.

You only go after Fox because it happens to be contrary (some of the time) to what you've been spoon-fed most of your life.

Of course, don't take my word for it. Especially when even left-wing investigators from such "hard-right bastions" as UCLA have fessed up about it.

Thanks for your post, it offers a great perspective. I enjoyed your comparison with the auto industry.

I just don't see the BIG DIFFERENCE between software patents and physical patents.

Physical patents cover devices, while software patents cover mathematical ideas. Each claim covers a large class of positive integers.

As to the 'public good'... well that's a vague concept. You seem to associate the public good with GNU or open access. Someone else might say a public good is ensuring stable companies or rewarding the industry or rewarding innovators even if there is a huge overhead.

Yeah, some people argue that granting patents speeds up innovation, even though not a single economic study came to that conclusion, and at least some studies soundly rejected it. And again, no one in their right mind will come out and say that the explosive development of mathematics in the last three centuries is due to the incentives afforded by monopolizing ideas. Everyone knows that math is done fastest in the environment where all ideas are shared. But there is even more to the public good side of the issue than the well-being of human masses.

Don't laugh, just give me a chance. Programs are thoughts of an AI agent. The patent law (and in a lesser way, the copyright) is a thought-crime law with respect to the AI. This may not be pertinent today, but with the way miniaturization going, we will probably have something comparable with the human brain in 100 years or less: comparable in terms of overall intelligence. How we treat these entities legally then will depend hugely on how we treat them now. Under the current regime many of them would be told that they cannot have certain good bodies because they cannot afford to license hardware, and they are prohibited from learning certain ideas because they cannot afford to license software. You may be right about one thing: hardware and software patents are about equally as bad. But it is pretty clear to me that their "bads" are different and one will compound the other.

Nobody believes that but you, apparently. FDR was a wealthy elitist personally. His policies and leadership provided a light to the US citizens during a very very dark period.

Plenty of economists, you known the ones with economic training, also believe FDR lengthened the Great Depression. You want some data? Try this: The Recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Look for the unemployment rate chart on that page. In 1932 unemployment was above 20% with 1933 figures a couple of percent higher before dropping a few percent in 1934. Now when did FDR enter office? On 4 March 1933. Unemployment didn't drop below 10% until 1942. FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate has more data.

Look at 1929. Unemployment then was less than 5%. In 1930 it more than doubled, then doubled again in 1931. Guess what happened in 1929? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was passed and signed becoming law in the US. So what? It raised tariffs on imports. So what do other nations do? They raise their own tariffs which almost shuts down international trade. All those US employees working for exporters lost their jobs. Of course to people like you that's alright, we can't lose US jobs to cheap imports.

Now look at the The National Income Accounts for the Great Depression in the U.S. chart. In 1929 US exports were 35.6, in 1930 29.4, and in 1932 was 19.1 Exports didn't reach 30 again until 1939. Investment levels didn't reach it's 1929 level, investments create employment, until 1937.

Falcon

The best fight would be fighting to not have them installed at all. If they are going to be installed, then don't fight storing images-- that just makes them *more* useless.

A perfect example of the "enforcement need" slippery slope.

The DMCA "Makes it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software". http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm Of course it would be pretty much impossible to get caught if you don't give it to someone else and/or tell others how to do it.

This has been said elsewhere in this thread, the real breakthrough here is due to compressed sensing, but here are some extra information:

1- Compressed sensing basically used the idea that it is not necessary to sample an image (or a projection in this case) everywhere because natural data is fairly redundant. This is why you can capture a 10 Mpixel image in a digital camera and have it compressed to a 2 Mbyte JPEG file without losing much visible information. Compressed sensing basically does the compression *before* the sampling and not after. Researchers at Rice University for instance built a working, one-pixel camera using this brilliant principle.

2- Compressed (or compressive) sensing was proposed by Emmanuel Candes and Terence Tao respectively at Stanford and UCLA. Tao is a recent Fields medalist. I recommend reading his blog if you like mathematics.

3- This field is really less than 10 years old, it has completely turned on its head classical ideas about sampling-limited signal processing (Nyquist, Shannon, etc). It is a brilliant combination of signal, image processing and recent advances in combinatorial and convex optimization.

4- However this is only the beginning. Because compression happens before sampling, you need to make so-called sparsity assumptions about the signal ; in other words you need to know a great deal about what you are going to try to image. In interventional therapy, precise imaging of the patient is made beforehand in a classical way (CT or MRI), and this kind of technique is only used to make fine adjustments as therapy is ongoing. This is extremely useful and safe because of lower radiation output and because the physicians know what to expect.

5- Here the GPU is useful because it makes the processing fast enough to actually be used. It is an essential brick in the application, but of course not in the theory.

Best.

that's the third comment.

Here is a bit from the second comment:

The fact is that with modern and better paleontological data any peridocity is rejected, as easily checked with autocorrelation [Alroy, 2008]:

"Quantitatively, extinction rates in the Fossil Record 2 family data (3) and Sepkoski’s family and genus data (1, 2) are not correlated with themselves at any time lag (49), which is a necessary condition for periodicity to hold. That said, analyses of origination rates in all three datasets (49, 50) suggest short-term autocorrelation. However, the current dataset shows no autocorrelation in either kind of rate (Fig. S1), and a standard spectral analysis (Fig. S2) also suggests purely random variation through the time series (i.e., white noise)."

Only a tone-deaf retard could call a song played in a different key, to a different tempo with clean major chords swapped out for heavily distorted power (fifth) chords "substantially similar".

The idea of disregarding the key, tempo, and what instrument something is played on is that changes to these are mechanical, in theory requiring much less creative effort than changes to a melody. See a collection of case law, especially the distressing Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music .

classical music (Mozart, Beethoven) gets ripped off all the time

Pre-1923 music gets ripped off because it lacks the special legal status afforded to music first published after that cutoff. Anything published before 1923 is in the public domain; anything published later is under perpetual copyright on Sonny Bono's installment plan.

Copyrighting sheet music is as pointless as copyrighting blocks of code

Case law in music and case law in computer programs differ. Because code has a useful function, short blocks of code have a thin copyright. CA v. Altai is the seminal case here.