The problem is in the number of possible combinations. Even if you take a small number of possible elements, and a smaller subset of chosen elements from that original set, you start generating serious numbers of patents. Say you were going to make a new bar code reader. You have 20 possible things you can put in that bar code reader. Rotating 8 sided mirror. Rotating 6 sided mirror. Oscillating mirror. Shape memory alloy actuators. DC motor drive. Stepper motor. Fixed mirror set. Red diode laser. Infrared diode laser. LED lighting. CMOS imager. Light sensitive diode. CCD imager. Fresnel lens. Cylindrical lens. Holographic lens. Etc. It would be very easy to find many more than twenty elements for "things to make a bar code reader". Just, for ha-has, stick with 20. Now, say your novel invention comprises a six element combination not found in other bar code readers. How many possible combinations? You ARE relying on a computer to brute force this, aren't you? Well, that's 20 x 19 x 18 x 17 x 16 x 15 possible combinations for six elements chosen from a possible field of 20. That's 27,907,200 combinations. (Please don't quibble over my mathematical simplifications). That would be more patent applications than have ever been filed in the U.S. All your patent applications would say so far is that you have six elements, not how they are configured or how they function. There are a ton of ways you could configure an 8 sided rotating mirror, especially if it is interacting with a fixed mirror set, or an oscillating mirror set.
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So if you wanted to patent all the combinations, you quickly run out of money. The USPTO charges thousands of dollars to process each application. If you wanted to patent the algorithm, the USPTO has a special kind of rejection for you. It is called "undue experimentation". In other words, you would have to perform a ridiculous amount of experimenting with unworkable and wrong combinations before you found one that works. In yet other words, no one is teaching you anything new by saying, "try a bunch of different combinations; one of them will work". Duh. Edison knew that, but he did the hard work of actually trying all the combinations, and finding the very few that worked. So, if the computer program isn't actually intelligent, it will waste a whole lot of resources attempting to patent useless crap.
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TFA says that one company is copyrighting all possible 400 word combinations in the English language. That is 400 elements chosen from a set of around maybe 100,000 - 250,000 elements (English words). Since the words are allowed to repeat, taking the 100,000 figure, we have 100,000 raised to the 400th power, or 10^2400 possible combinations. Say the company had a very fast computer and was able to express and thereby claim 100 billion 400 word combinations per second. It would need just 10^2389 seconds to claim each combination. In very round numbers, a year is about 10^8 seconds, so the comany would need about 10^2381 years to complete it's task. In very round numbers, the lifetime of the universe is about 10^10 years, so the company would need about 10^2371 lifetimes of the universe to complete it's task. Or a faster computer. Or a new law that says that a person doesn't actually have to express something in order to copyright it.
It's a judge's job to put bad guys in jail for a very long time. Usually the bad guys don't like it at all. The only thing keeping the bad guys from getting some revenge on the federal judges is the certainty that very extra super bad things will happen when they make even the slightest malicious gesture towards a federal judge. In short, we wouldn't have judges or a rule of law if we didn't protect the people working as judges. Seriously, would you want to tell a mob boss that he needs to rot in jail for 10 years, thereby disappointing many of his mob friends who had hoped maybe he could get probation? And then have some joker on the Internet who thinks it is an awesome prank to post your home address and other details of your private life? Nope, the joker is going to be exhibit A in the case of Federal Judge Smith v. Internet Joker, with Federal Judge Hammer presiding.
There could be things other than error rate that the manufacturer could point to. Perhaps noise bleeding into other audio components. If someone is using a tube amplifier nearby, there may be some noise pickup. But, the manufacturer would make these kind of claims to BS their way through, creating uncertainty by upping the technical issues. Can you imagine being an engineer tasked by the manufacturer to design these things? I mean, you would HAVE TO KNOW that all of the marketing would be utter BS, even more ripe, pungent and flagrant BS than is typically purveyed by the marketing department.
OK, I dislike Verizon's business practices probably more than your typical person, but let me give you Verizon's perspective. Verizon is really trying to get a monthly minimum somehow or another. They have costs, whether or not you use your phone. Just walking around with your phone turned on, there is all kinds of signalling between your handset and various towers, using up some bandwidth. So, if you carried around your powered on phone all month, and sent just one text, how does Verizon make money charging you just 20 cents? However you paid for your bill, e.g. with your visa card, would probably end up taking more than 20 cents away from Verizon. You wouldn't be a profitable customer for them. So, why should they agree to make a deal with you that is unprofitable for them? I don't think you will find too many companies that will give you a flat rate per gigabyte (say $30), and then say, "Well, good afternoon, Mr. Gun, you sent just 30 texts and only used 50 kilobytes or.00005 gigabytes this month, so that will be $30.00 X.00005 = $0.0015. Are you putting that on Visa, or sending a personal check?"
Ignorance seems to spring from an eternal well. I believe there must be some force operating that removes knowledgeable people, and replaces them with ignorant ones!
I love what you have done with your homepage. Did you tile that whole backround yourself? Very shrub-like. It must have been a lot of work. You can't even see any grout lines!
It is a rather difficult problem for mobile carriers. Because their bandwidth is so limited, they are constantly looking for little games to play with packets, to make sure that people get the maximum use of the available carrier signals. Mobile carriers prioritize and throttle packets all the time. Most of it is to just reduce wasted bandwidth. The easiest example for anyone who hasn't worked in the industry to understand is voice packets vs. static data packets. The mobile carrier wants to make sure that your voice packets are not dropped, and delivered quickly enough to keep up with the sound wave data rate. If keeping your voice signal clear means making some other customer's web page load a tiny bit slower, then oh well. Video is smilar. You don't want your youtube playback interrupted, because it will ruin the experience, but if an excel spreadsheet takes.3 seconds longer to load, it won't much matter. But there are tens of thousands of these optimizations. There has probably already been substantial optimization to give advantages to packets from the mobile carriers. In the long run, it is better to cut this stuff off now, rather than wait until it grows into an intolerable monopoly situation. Mobile broadband is becoming increasingly relevant, and a direct competitor to cable broadband. There really are people who don't need their home computer anymore, and just use their phone. When 5G-LTE arrives, it may make the cable companies less relevant. So, Wheeler is right to address the problem now.
You are just wrong about this. It is about making all broadband carriers "common carriers" under Title II so that they must open their networks to competitors, and not favor their own services. So, Comcast can't throttle down packets from vonage, while passing their own voip signals just fine, or throttling down Netflix while providing their own video on demand service at a blazing speed. It pertains to mobile broadband, but it is not about wireless only. Where did you get that idea? If you read the article, you would see that the government is involved in your life anyway, like it or not. You should study game theory. It might clue you in why sometimes broadly applicable rules (aka laws) are necessary. Or do you think everyone would function perfectly fine without these crazy things called "laws"?
Tom Wheeler is actually a human being, not a faceless bureaucratic mouthpiece for the cable industry. Who would have thought it? I like his story about almost being the huge success that made AOL an also-ran in internet history, but for a rule that made the telephone network open, and the cable network closed. That is why so many people experienced the early internet at 1200 baud or 2400 baud, rather than 1.5 megabaud. Wheeler's early failure due to an FCC reg made a lasting impression on him. Now he has a chance to fix the problem that tripped him up. While the devil is always in the details, I like the direction he says he is going in. Kudos.
"perfectly well". That literally made me laugh out loud. So perfect!!! Yes, if you zoom out far enough, and look at the world as a whole, the world society lacks a single centralized authority. And world society, historically speaking, functions "perfectly well" with instability, wars, famine, injustice, rape, murder, apathy, ignorance, environmental destruction, and all the rest. That is just what people do, on a macro scale, and a micro scale. They need these things to evolve! The error in *your* thinking is that there is or ever has been any central authority anywhere. There have always been competing authorities, and competing rules, and competing systems, with borders and limitations. And evolution. And evolutionary blind alleys. Mutation, cancer, and disease (because there is no central progressive, socialist, communist, facist authority for DNA reproduction, and life functions perfectly well without it). Beheadings. Warlords. Conquest. Palaces and dungeons. Yes, as you say, "Most societies historically have functioned perfectly well without it." The earth continues to spin, and life continues to evolve into ever greater forms. Nice to see someone else thinking perfectly well for a change. Throw away your labels and ideals, and let us stand on the bones of our ancestors and have a perfectly good laugh! Or should we try to kill each other to decide who is right and who's children will laugh over our bones?
I agree completely. It is just the way things are. If you remove government, you get highway bandits. Eventually, the highway bandits compete with each other, until one wins. The dominant winner doesn't hide. He and his group conspicuously controls the highways, to keep all the other highway bandits out. They wear uniforms. They streamline their collection. They create euphamisms, like "tolls", and "North Texas Transportation Authority" for their operations. We ultimately accept them, because they are us... I could personalize it like this: The people got rid of the government. Then, when I was bringing my butternut squash that I grew on my land to market, someone set up a roadblock and took most of it, claiming they were collecting tolls (for whatever). I need to take my squash back, or steal someone else's food to survive. I find it is not so easy acting alone, so I get a posse together. We take all of our stuff back. But then some other groups try to take back the stuff we reposessed. You can see where this is going. As long as I fail to kill all the toll takers who cross my path, I am literally paying people to be highway bandits. I am the highway bandit. I am the government. Or alternatively, I am a true libertarian, killing all the toll takers (and police who come after me) who crazily believe they are doing their job and earning a living. Really, those dead people were just immoral highway bandits, trying to steal my goods at gunpoint. I am not the troll. They are (or were).
You haven't thought things through well enough. You imagine that you can pay for "protection from highway bandits" and that this is somehow different from government. Wake up. That is what government is. Protection from highway bandits. If you somehow managed to convince everyone to eliminate the U.S. government, then the question of roads would immediately pop up. Without roads you can't get to work or deliver products to markets. You can't have markets, because thieves and bandits would raid them. So, you would pay for your own private guards. Pretty soon, you would find that there are businesses providing protection. You would hire them, and so would other companies. But they would fight each other. Somehow, the fighting would ultimately get resolved. Either some warlord would emerge from the fighting as victorious leader who would impose order, or people would get together and vote on rules so that private protection companies would not fight. Rules, and a rulemaking process would evolve from your garden of eden of liberty. You can't avoid it. There are other people living on the planet. You have to get along with them. It isn't easy. You can't just say, "hey, this is my stuff, everyone keep their hands off of it" and expect everything to be fine. Again, wake up. Where did you get the stuff? Were you born with it? Did God pre-ordain that you own it? You don't think far enough ahead, and think about what will happen if you get rid of government. It will evolve again. And again. Everywhere. You can either react to it like it is some alien creature, or you can plan ahead, and try to optimize the rules that eventually evolve. Because rules will evolve, by force. It can either be a democratic force, or a dictatorial force. Or some mixture. But try not to be so simplistic in your thinking. It is frustrating to read.
Do you even know what foreign earnings are? Do you get that U.S. companies are setting up foreign shell corporations to hold all their patents, so that they can make royalty payments to those foreign companies, thereby avoiding profits that were, in reality, made on inventions conceived and developed here in the U.S.? Patents are just one part of the puzzle, but they illustrate a great point.
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Inventors, both native and foreign born, live in the U.S., after being educated in U.S. universities, using U.S. infrastructure and support networks. They land jobs with U.S. companies to invent, develop and sell products to U.S. citizens. The U.S. patent rights on those products are sold to a foreign company which then charges the U.S. corporation a high royalty. The patents are only valuable because of the extensive U.S. patent system which protects the intellectual property of inventors and their corporate assignees, foreign or domestic. The foreign shell company makes all of the profits in a small country with tiny or non-existent taxes. The U.S. company claims all the royalty payments as expenses, wiping out U.S. profits. Here is one example of many. http://www.usatoday.com/story/... Then, tax attorneys educated by U.S. law schools prepare U.S. corporate tax returns that legalize all of this under laws written by corporate lobbyists for the benefit of U.S. corporations. Then the U.S. corporations control their media subsidiaries (ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS), to try to justify all of this. It isn't a perfect plutocracy, so they must pay P.R. firms, pundits, and think tanks to convince people like you that Barack Obama is a socialist trying to steal their money, and that his 14% tax proposal to pay for U.S. highways is wildly unfair double taxation.
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But by all means. Go ahead and keep watching Fox "News". It is your right. Rupert Murdock's interests are undoubtedly aligned with the long term interests of U.S. citizens. I'm sure the republic will limp along just fine if all its citizenry are too busy to discover anything resembling the truth. And don't worry your little head. Obama's proposal has zero chance of being passed by either the corporate-controlled House or Senate. Even if I changed your mind (which I am certain I have not), there are millions upon millions out there who will listen to corporate sponsored political commercials and vote to keep either the corporate-backed republicans or corporate-backed democrats in power. I can't convince them all. They won't see this post, or visit my website. It is simply TLDR. You have won the argument. Congratulations.
Yes, the most natural thing for a direct democracy is to vote to become a republic. Nobody wants to vote on every banking regulation, fishing quota, and patent term adjustment procedure. But there are greater opportunities for direct democracy now, especially where the issues are of popular concern. Legislators, for example, are too beholden to entrenched interests to legalize marijuana; it is typically citizen initiatives that force their hands. So I don't think the idea of direct democracy is dead. It can live side by side with representative democracy.
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And I agree that a republic can be a subset of a democracy, but it is not exclusively a subset of democracy, which is what Tablizer pointed out. Leaders in a republic can be chosen by an aristocracy, for example. A republic can be a plutocracy, where only the rich people or landed class get to choose the law makers. A plutocracy is not what most people would consider a democracy. Ordinary folks don't get to vote on laws or leaders in a plutocracy. Many well informed people have suggested we are effectively a plutocracy in the US, including Tablizer. So ShanghaiBill should not have suggested that making the distinction between a democracy and a republic made Tablizer look "stupid". The distinction is not an "idiotic meme". They are not mutually exclusive, as you point out, but they are not the same, either.
It would seem our governments are at minimum committing the crime of conspiracy to break into US (and UK, Aussie, etc) citizens computers, if they are helping out foreign governments. They may have made themeselves immune for their own actions, but I highly doubt that immunity extends to helping foreign governments break into your own citizens computers. I have not researched this though. Just thought some people with more knowledge might chime in. If it is not illegal, it really needs to be illegal.
Brother, remove the log that is in your own eye so that you may see clearly to remove the speck that is in your brother's eye. In a democracy, the people vote on laws, budgets, wars and everything else. In a republic, the people elect representatives who vote on laws, budgets, wars, and everything else. That's what people generally understand, and how they use the terms. You can quibble over more precise terms like "direct democracy" vs. "democratic republic" etc. Of course, you don't have to take my word for it. But I can't think of any way you could independently verify what I said. I wish there was some independent reference materials you could consult. Can someone help me out here?
Those are very good questions, and I don't have the answers. Probably because I don't have a very good definition of what pure logic is, or even if it exists. I struggle with those questions. Obviously, it is better to have eyes to see and ears to hear in addition to a CPU to compute, in order to run physical experiments. I don't know whether, logically, eyes and ears are necessary. Unfortunately, my tiny brain has not reached the limits of pure logic. So I just don't know.
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On the other hand, I believe I have used pure logic to understand some things about space and time. I believed for many years that there was no possibility of a final theory in physics, on the basis of logic. But in 2007, I had a change in my logical thinking, and found a logical error I was making. It was in understanding the limits of my own personal logical abilities that finally convinced me that a final theory was possible. Strangely enough. And, understanding these limits led to conclusions about the nature of space and time. So that's why I said what I said. I still need to publish my findings. I have not found the time and motivation to fully explain them in a manner worthy of publication. OMG, why am I saying these things to an annoymous coward? You will never circle back and read my reply.
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And I must point out that every calculation must obey the laws of physics, even if the interpretation of the way it obeys the laws of physics is not transparent. If there is a complete set of laws, there is only one complete set of laws. Otherwise, it is not the complete set of laws I am talking about. Everything must obey the one complete set of laws. Everything. Every calculation, every thought, every expression, every version of this sentence. All. must. obey. You may not understand how it obeys, or interpret the way it obeys correctly. But everything obeys.
Obviously paradoxes are not real so examine the paradoxes...
If paradoxes are not real, how do we examine them? How do we even know about them, if they are not real? If they are not real, they must not really exist. So, are you saying the only true paradoxes are the ones we don't know about and which don't exist? Wow. I think I get it now. It has been 42 all along, but 42 is just a number. 42 isn't a real thing, and that is the true paradox. I don't know the answer, because paradoxes are not real, which means I do know the answer, which is 42.
unless the natural philosophers were right that the universe can be deduced from pure logic without observation.
Now that is an interesting notion. Unless you believe in the soul, or a "ghost in the machine" theory of consiousness, then pure logic, as a resident of the physical human brain, should obey the laws of physics just as any other physical thing obeys the laws of physics. In a sense, pure logic can be both an experiment and an observation.
If an unknown paradox fell on top of a tree falling in the woods, but no philosophers could debate the paradox since it was unknown, would it affect whether the tree makes a sound?
I think it is because vacuum energy is calculated on the basis of the field theory, which in turn depends on constants like the charge of the electron. I am pretty certain that calculations of the vacuum energy do not depend on the size of the universe. Puzzles like these are really important so that people can think of new questions to ask based on problems they didn't previously realize existed. These puzzles challenge our notions of space and time, which to me, are pretty tenuous notions.
Slashdot Mirror
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So if you wanted to patent all the combinations, you quickly run out of money. The USPTO charges thousands of dollars to process each application. If you wanted to patent the algorithm, the USPTO has a special kind of rejection for you. It is called "undue experimentation". In other words, you would have to perform a ridiculous amount of experimenting with unworkable and wrong combinations before you found one that works. In yet other words, no one is teaching you anything new by saying, "try a bunch of different combinations; one of them will work". Duh. Edison knew that, but he did the hard work of actually trying all the combinations, and finding the very few that worked. So, if the computer program isn't actually intelligent, it will waste a whole lot of resources attempting to patent useless crap.
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TFA says that one company is copyrighting all possible 400 word combinations in the English language. That is 400 elements chosen from a set of around maybe 100,000 - 250,000 elements (English words). Since the words are allowed to repeat, taking the 100,000 figure, we have 100,000 raised to the 400th power, or 10^2400 possible combinations. Say the company had a very fast computer and was able to express and thereby claim 100 billion 400 word combinations per second. It would need just 10^2389 seconds to claim each combination. In very round numbers, a year is about 10^8 seconds, so the comany would need about 10^2381 years to complete it's task. In very round numbers, the lifetime of the universe is about 10^10 years, so the company would need about 10^2371 lifetimes of the universe to complete it's task. Or a faster computer. Or a new law that says that a person doesn't actually have to express something in order to copyright it.
It's a judge's job to put bad guys in jail for a very long time. Usually the bad guys don't like it at all. The only thing keeping the bad guys from getting some revenge on the federal judges is the certainty that very extra super bad things will happen when they make even the slightest malicious gesture towards a federal judge. In short, we wouldn't have judges or a rule of law if we didn't protect the people working as judges. Seriously, would you want to tell a mob boss that he needs to rot in jail for 10 years, thereby disappointing many of his mob friends who had hoped maybe he could get probation? And then have some joker on the Internet who thinks it is an awesome prank to post your home address and other details of your private life? Nope, the joker is going to be exhibit A in the case of Federal Judge Smith v. Internet Joker, with Federal Judge Hammer presiding.
There could be things other than error rate that the manufacturer could point to. Perhaps noise bleeding into other audio components. If someone is using a tube amplifier nearby, there may be some noise pickup. But, the manufacturer would make these kind of claims to BS their way through, creating uncertainty by upping the technical issues. Can you imagine being an engineer tasked by the manufacturer to design these things? I mean, you would HAVE TO KNOW that all of the marketing would be utter BS, even more ripe, pungent and flagrant BS than is typically purveyed by the marketing department.
Because the medical researchers who developed the AIDS testing smart phone attachment didn't think of that, and you did.
OK, I dislike Verizon's business practices probably more than your typical person, but let me give you Verizon's perspective. Verizon is really trying to get a monthly minimum somehow or another. They have costs, whether or not you use your phone. Just walking around with your phone turned on, there is all kinds of signalling between your handset and various towers, using up some bandwidth. So, if you carried around your powered on phone all month, and sent just one text, how does Verizon make money charging you just 20 cents? However you paid for your bill, e.g. with your visa card, would probably end up taking more than 20 cents away from Verizon. You wouldn't be a profitable customer for them. So, why should they agree to make a deal with you that is unprofitable for them? I don't think you will find too many companies that will give you a flat rate per gigabyte (say $30), and then say, "Well, good afternoon, Mr. Gun, you sent just 30 texts and only used 50 kilobytes or .00005 gigabytes this month, so that will be $30.00 X .00005 = $0.0015. Are you putting that on Visa, or sending a personal check?"
Ignorance seems to spring from an eternal well. I believe there must be some force operating that removes knowledgeable people, and replaces them with ignorant ones!
I love what you have done with your homepage. Did you tile that whole backround yourself? Very shrub-like. It must have been a lot of work. You can't even see any grout lines!
It is a rather difficult problem for mobile carriers. Because their bandwidth is so limited, they are constantly looking for little games to play with packets, to make sure that people get the maximum use of the available carrier signals. Mobile carriers prioritize and throttle packets all the time. Most of it is to just reduce wasted bandwidth. The easiest example for anyone who hasn't worked in the industry to understand is voice packets vs. static data packets. The mobile carrier wants to make sure that your voice packets are not dropped, and delivered quickly enough to keep up with the sound wave data rate. If keeping your voice signal clear means making some other customer's web page load a tiny bit slower, then oh well. Video is smilar. You don't want your youtube playback interrupted, because it will ruin the experience, but if an excel spreadsheet takes .3 seconds longer to load, it won't much matter. But there are tens of thousands of these optimizations. There has probably already been substantial optimization to give advantages to packets from the mobile carriers. In the long run, it is better to cut this stuff off now, rather than wait until it grows into an intolerable monopoly situation. Mobile broadband is becoming increasingly relevant, and a direct competitor to cable broadband. There really are people who don't need their home computer anymore, and just use their phone. When 5G-LTE arrives, it may make the cable companies less relevant. So, Wheeler is right to address the problem now.
You are just wrong about this. It is about making all broadband carriers "common carriers" under Title II so that they must open their networks to competitors, and not favor their own services. So, Comcast can't throttle down packets from vonage, while passing their own voip signals just fine, or throttling down Netflix while providing their own video on demand service at a blazing speed. It pertains to mobile broadband, but it is not about wireless only. Where did you get that idea? If you read the article, you would see that the government is involved in your life anyway, like it or not. You should study game theory. It might clue you in why sometimes broadly applicable rules (aka laws) are necessary. Or do you think everyone would function perfectly fine without these crazy things called "laws"?
Tom Wheeler is actually a human being, not a faceless bureaucratic mouthpiece for the cable industry. Who would have thought it? I like his story about almost being the huge success that made AOL an also-ran in internet history, but for a rule that made the telephone network open, and the cable network closed. That is why so many people experienced the early internet at 1200 baud or 2400 baud, rather than 1.5 megabaud. Wheeler's early failure due to an FCC reg made a lasting impression on him. Now he has a chance to fix the problem that tripped him up. While the devil is always in the details, I like the direction he says he is going in. Kudos.
"perfectly well". That literally made me laugh out loud. So perfect!!! Yes, if you zoom out far enough, and look at the world as a whole, the world society lacks a single centralized authority. And world society, historically speaking, functions "perfectly well" with instability, wars, famine, injustice, rape, murder, apathy, ignorance, environmental destruction, and all the rest. That is just what people do, on a macro scale, and a micro scale. They need these things to evolve! The error in *your* thinking is that there is or ever has been any central authority anywhere. There have always been competing authorities, and competing rules, and competing systems, with borders and limitations. And evolution. And evolutionary blind alleys. Mutation, cancer, and disease (because there is no central progressive, socialist, communist, facist authority for DNA reproduction, and life functions perfectly well without it). Beheadings. Warlords. Conquest. Palaces and dungeons. Yes, as you say, "Most societies historically have functioned perfectly well without it." The earth continues to spin, and life continues to evolve into ever greater forms. Nice to see someone else thinking perfectly well for a change. Throw away your labels and ideals, and let us stand on the bones of our ancestors and have a perfectly good laugh! Or should we try to kill each other to decide who is right and who's children will laugh over our bones?
I agree completely. It is just the way things are. If you remove government, you get highway bandits. Eventually, the highway bandits compete with each other, until one wins. The dominant winner doesn't hide. He and his group conspicuously controls the highways, to keep all the other highway bandits out. They wear uniforms. They streamline their collection. They create euphamisms, like "tolls", and "North Texas Transportation Authority" for their operations. We ultimately accept them, because they are us... I could personalize it like this: The people got rid of the government. Then, when I was bringing my butternut squash that I grew on my land to market, someone set up a roadblock and took most of it, claiming they were collecting tolls (for whatever). I need to take my squash back, or steal someone else's food to survive. I find it is not so easy acting alone, so I get a posse together. We take all of our stuff back. But then some other groups try to take back the stuff we reposessed. You can see where this is going. As long as I fail to kill all the toll takers who cross my path, I am literally paying people to be highway bandits. I am the highway bandit. I am the government. Or alternatively, I am a true libertarian, killing all the toll takers (and police who come after me) who crazily believe they are doing their job and earning a living. Really, those dead people were just immoral highway bandits, trying to steal my goods at gunpoint. I am not the troll. They are (or were).
You haven't thought things through well enough. You imagine that you can pay for "protection from highway bandits" and that this is somehow different from government. Wake up. That is what government is. Protection from highway bandits. If you somehow managed to convince everyone to eliminate the U.S. government, then the question of roads would immediately pop up. Without roads you can't get to work or deliver products to markets. You can't have markets, because thieves and bandits would raid them. So, you would pay for your own private guards. Pretty soon, you would find that there are businesses providing protection. You would hire them, and so would other companies. But they would fight each other. Somehow, the fighting would ultimately get resolved. Either some warlord would emerge from the fighting as victorious leader who would impose order, or people would get together and vote on rules so that private protection companies would not fight. Rules, and a rulemaking process would evolve from your garden of eden of liberty. You can't avoid it. There are other people living on the planet. You have to get along with them. It isn't easy. You can't just say, "hey, this is my stuff, everyone keep their hands off of it" and expect everything to be fine. Again, wake up. Where did you get the stuff? Were you born with it? Did God pre-ordain that you own it? You don't think far enough ahead, and think about what will happen if you get rid of government. It will evolve again. And again. Everywhere. You can either react to it like it is some alien creature, or you can plan ahead, and try to optimize the rules that eventually evolve. Because rules will evolve, by force. It can either be a democratic force, or a dictatorial force. Or some mixture. But try not to be so simplistic in your thinking. It is frustrating to read.
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Inventors, both native and foreign born, live in the U.S., after being educated in U.S. universities, using U.S. infrastructure and support networks. They land jobs with U.S. companies to invent, develop and sell products to U.S. citizens. The U.S. patent rights on those products are sold to a foreign company which then charges the U.S. corporation a high royalty. The patents are only valuable because of the extensive U.S. patent system which protects the intellectual property of inventors and their corporate assignees, foreign or domestic. The foreign shell company makes all of the profits in a small country with tiny or non-existent taxes. The U.S. company claims all the royalty payments as expenses, wiping out U.S. profits. Here is one example of many. http://www.usatoday.com/story/... Then, tax attorneys educated by U.S. law schools prepare U.S. corporate tax returns that legalize all of this under laws written by corporate lobbyists for the benefit of U.S. corporations. Then the U.S. corporations control their media subsidiaries (ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS), to try to justify all of this. It isn't a perfect plutocracy, so they must pay P.R. firms, pundits, and think tanks to convince people like you that Barack Obama is a socialist trying to steal their money, and that his 14% tax proposal to pay for U.S. highways is wildly unfair double taxation.
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But by all means. Go ahead and keep watching Fox "News". It is your right. Rupert Murdock's interests are undoubtedly aligned with the long term interests of U.S. citizens. I'm sure the republic will limp along just fine if all its citizenry are too busy to discover anything resembling the truth. And don't worry your little head. Obama's proposal has zero chance of being passed by either the corporate-controlled House or Senate. Even if I changed your mind (which I am certain I have not), there are millions upon millions out there who will listen to corporate sponsored political commercials and vote to keep either the corporate-backed republicans or corporate-backed democrats in power. I can't convince them all. They won't see this post, or visit my website. It is simply TLDR. You have won the argument. Congratulations.
Or, if they have heard of them, their main source of information about their operations comes from fictional TV series.
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And I agree that a republic can be a subset of a democracy, but it is not exclusively a subset of democracy, which is what Tablizer pointed out. Leaders in a republic can be chosen by an aristocracy, for example. A republic can be a plutocracy, where only the rich people or landed class get to choose the law makers. A plutocracy is not what most people would consider a democracy. Ordinary folks don't get to vote on laws or leaders in a plutocracy. Many well informed people have suggested we are effectively a plutocracy in the US, including Tablizer. So ShanghaiBill should not have suggested that making the distinction between a democracy and a republic made Tablizer look "stupid". The distinction is not an "idiotic meme". They are not mutually exclusive, as you point out, but they are not the same, either.
It would seem our governments are at minimum committing the crime of conspiracy to break into US (and UK, Aussie, etc) citizens computers, if they are helping out foreign governments. They may have made themeselves immune for their own actions, but I highly doubt that immunity extends to helping foreign governments break into your own citizens computers. I have not researched this though. Just thought some people with more knowledge might chime in. If it is not illegal, it really needs to be illegal.
I am waiting for someone to notice. www.i-party.us
Brother, remove the log that is in your own eye so that you may see clearly to remove the speck that is in your brother's eye. In a democracy, the people vote on laws, budgets, wars and everything else. In a republic, the people elect representatives who vote on laws, budgets, wars, and everything else. That's what people generally understand, and how they use the terms. You can quibble over more precise terms like "direct democracy" vs. "democratic republic" etc. Of course, you don't have to take my word for it. But I can't think of any way you could independently verify what I said. I wish there was some independent reference materials you could consult. Can someone help me out here?
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On the other hand, I believe I have used pure logic to understand some things about space and time. I believed for many years that there was no possibility of a final theory in physics, on the basis of logic. But in 2007, I had a change in my logical thinking, and found a logical error I was making. It was in understanding the limits of my own personal logical abilities that finally convinced me that a final theory was possible. Strangely enough. And, understanding these limits led to conclusions about the nature of space and time. So that's why I said what I said. I still need to publish my findings. I have not found the time and motivation to fully explain them in a manner worthy of publication. OMG, why am I saying these things to an annoymous coward? You will never circle back and read my reply.
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And I must point out that every calculation must obey the laws of physics, even if the interpretation of the way it obeys the laws of physics is not transparent. If there is a complete set of laws, there is only one complete set of laws. Otherwise, it is not the complete set of laws I am talking about. Everything must obey the one complete set of laws. Everything. Every calculation, every thought, every expression, every version of this sentence. All. must. obey. You may not understand how it obeys, or interpret the way it obeys correctly. But everything obeys.
If paradoxes are not real, how do we examine them? How do we even know about them, if they are not real? If they are not real, they must not really exist. So, are you saying the only true paradoxes are the ones we don't know about and which don't exist? Wow. I think I get it now. It has been 42 all along, but 42 is just a number. 42 isn't a real thing, and that is the true paradox. I don't know the answer, because paradoxes are not real, which means I do know the answer, which is 42.
Now that is an interesting notion. Unless you believe in the soul, or a "ghost in the machine" theory of consiousness, then pure logic, as a resident of the physical human brain, should obey the laws of physics just as any other physical thing obeys the laws of physics. In a sense, pure logic can be both an experiment and an observation.
If an unknown paradox fell on top of a tree falling in the woods, but no philosophers could debate the paradox since it was unknown, would it affect whether the tree makes a sound?
I think it is because vacuum energy is calculated on the basis of the field theory, which in turn depends on constants like the charge of the electron. I am pretty certain that calculations of the vacuum energy do not depend on the size of the universe. Puzzles like these are really important so that people can think of new questions to ask based on problems they didn't previously realize existed. These puzzles challenge our notions of space and time, which to me, are pretty tenuous notions.
Oh, Anonymous Coward, you are funny! I wish I had mod points today.