"...it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13,
1813
Ummm, let's see, 187 years ago... Have there been many inventions since then? Yes.
Have the most innovative countries been those with a patent system like England? Yes.
I'm not the AC poster, but the part that seemed naive to me was "Scientists are already and have been for a long time working together, standing hand in hand. Maybe it seems Utopian from a selfish viewpoint but it's very natural to scientists."
Scientists are sometimes co-operative, sometimes bitterly competitive. Sometimes they share their data, sometimes they guard it jealously. Sometimes they go to great lengths to sneak a look at each other's data.
For an exampe, see The Double Helix by James Watson, where Watson and Crick win a Nobel prize, partly by gaining access to Rosalind Franklin's X-ray pictures of DNA.
For those who don't know, he's been involved in writing commercial DBMS systems and publishing research papers for decades; very important in the field
While I agree that companies shouldn't be granted patents on just the discovered gene without any intended use, it will take a lot of time and money to develop genes into treatments. Who will invest that money if anybody can copy their results for free?
Scientific research is not driven primarily by commercial institutions. It's driven by academics.
That's not clear to me. Drug companies and other biomedical firms do a lot of research as well as development. IBM, Texas Instruments, Bell Labs and others do lots of basic research.
Gene liscences, patents, and other concepts of intellectual property stifle the academic process.
That's not clear to me. Universities hold patents and make money off licensing them. Do you have any evidence of this?
In general I wish people on Slashdot would realize that for all their rhetoric, there is more research and more innovation produced here in the U.S. than in countries with less developed IP systems.
Just claimingthat the system stifles innovation doesn't make it so.
Excellent point. They, or the AMA or FDA or whoever I choose to trust, could also create an "approved" branding scheme with a trademarked graphic and have a page of links to approved sites. Having a single, largely unaccountable bureaucracy have control over a domain is unnecessary.
It seems that the only presidential candidate in the US who really cares about people (and not whoever will help them the most) is Ralph Nader, and he doesn't have many vote.
So, the more ways I find to take money from Billy and give it to Bob, the more I care about people? Have you really thought this through?
We'll increase federal money for health care and add home care and help with prescription drugs to Medicare.
Why yes, they care so much. It's not like people on Medicare vote, or anything.
We'll implement a national plan with solid targets to make jobs our first economic priority.
Someday Canada might have as many jobs as the "corporate-controlled" United States.
We'll double the Child Tax Benefit and create a National Early Years Fund for early childhood education and child care.
Take money from people without children and give to people with children. Wow, why didn't I think of that? I guess I just don't care enough. Hmmm. Maybe we can get it from those people on Medicare. They don't have any young children!
We'll roll back tuition fees and create interest-free loans for college and university students
Yeah, take money from people who don't go to college and give it to people who go to college, because college-educated people are so much poorer than those people who never went to college. Oh, you mean we should just take it from people in other stages of life...like those with young children or retired people on Medicare. I guess I just didn't care enough to understand.
We'll fight for fair trade deals that put the needs of Canadians ahead of global corporations
Oh, fair trade, who could be against that? I guess if I cared enough I could see how it's better to take from consumers and exporters and give to those who compete against imports
(Economists know that free trade helps far more people than it hurts. Try reading about it sometime.)
Instead of having each mail user have their own key, which is a lot of trouble, have the mail servers communicate with each other, and with mail clients, using TLS (i.e. SSL).
There is already some support for this from a few mail clients (mostly incomplete), and from a few mail servers.
In some ways it is not as secure as the end-to-end encryption of a complete PKI solution. You have to trust the mail servers to not be compromised. But it is a lot less expensive.
Also, companies generally would like to be able to read their employees official communications even if they don't want any random person to intercept plaintext.
Sorry, history (as well as economic theory) has proved you wrong.
Over time, wages and working conditions improve, they do not get worse. Japan was once (only 40 years ago) a low wage country. Now it is on a par with the U. S. The same is happening with Taiwan, China, Singapore, Thailand, etc.
Come to think of it, the U.S. was a low wage country 100 years ago.
Corporatism? That's fascism. Lack of regulations was not the problem with Nazi Germany. The corporations were encouraged, even required to do bad things.
Take from the rich, give to the poor. It's clear he has no idea how wealth is actually created.
See, if you need proof, http://www.votenader.org/is sues/agriculture_letter.html He thinks falling prices for commodities is a bad thing! Hello? Who does he think buys these things? This is a trend that's been going on for hundreds of years. Does he know that around 1900, a family typically spent over half its income on food?
I agree with your post, except for this part - the War on Drugs didn't start because hippies liked to smoke it - it started because of racism - Chinese immigrants smoked opium, and because of this they could work ungodly hours and would work for cheaper than American workers
Holy crap! This is so wrong! The first efforts at drug control were by the Chinese who were trying to stop the British from importing opium into China. Have you ever heard of the Opium Wars?
I think the drug laws cause more problems than they solve but bringing in this racism canard is wrong.
Yes, it helps the employees who choose to work there. They generally make more money than other people in the country.
Look at income statistics, health statistics, and other quality of life statistics and you'll find that countries that have invited in multinationals have done better for their citizens than those who have tried to keep them out.
As their productivity improves, so do their wages. This is what has happened in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and so on.
I went to college to be a pharmacist.
I had envisioned to get my degree. Eventually move into my own business, with my own little pharmacy on the corner.
When in school, other people in the program did make me see the light.
"How can you do that, with CVS, Genovese and Rite Aids starting to pop-up all over the place? They'll run you out of business."
Here I am in a career I like, computers.
Thus, consumers get cheaper prices at the drug store; usually, too, more convenient hours and a larger selection of products.
And you're helping to build a growing sector of the economy where there's a labor shortage.
If you have a supermarket discount card (like a Star Market Card), everytime you use it for purchases, retailers use it to track exactly what you've purchased, how much you spent and how often you shop. This information can then be shared (as with what website you visit) with product manufacturers who the feel you may be interested in their products.
Yeah, I really hate how they send me coupons for the products I use. I had sworn the clerks to secrecy about my Cap'n Crunch habit and used a blanket to cover my shopping cart, but, oh well.
A practice that is picking up speed in restaurants is the use of cameras spying on diners. The chefs then watch the diners so they can time when to serve the next course. I find this pretty scary that someone is watching my every bite.....
Here I'm wondering if you're even serious. Have you ever heard of waiters?
There are hundreds of ways that the private citizen is becoming less and less private, and it is sickening.
"Becoming less private"... compared to what? Less private than the small town most people lived in fifty years ago? Ha!
I remember this. The security flaw was not Unix-specific, but was not on most operating systems.
On Unix at that time, people's terminal/dev entries were generally writable (unless you did a "mesg n" command). You could send a command to a "smart" terminal that would get echoed back to the Unix system. It would appear that the targeted user had typed the command.
About this time, I found a bug in 4.1BSD that allowed you to bounce commands off a user's terminal without even knowing what kind of terminal they had.
By the way, I have a boring post in this archive. I posted as "unc!jqw", which was an account I had hacked into at that time.
Slashdot Mirror
Have the most innovative countries been those with a patent system like England? Yes.
Is Jefferson's point still valid? No.
And they're very difficult to reboot.
You can find this yourself by searching "silicon spheres integrated circuits" on Google.
Also, we could perhaps work on creating less error-prone interfaces, as advocated in the "Candy-Machine Interfaces" chapter of Writing Solid Code.
There's no reason why us trichromats couldn't do the same thing to see four colors.
Scientists are sometimes co-operative, sometimes bitterly competitive. Sometimes they share their data, sometimes they guard it jealously. Sometimes they go to great lengths to sneak a look at each other's data.
For an exampe, see The Double Helix by James Watson, where Watson and Crick win a Nobel prize, partly by gaining access to Rosalind Franklin's X-ray pictures of DNA.
His book with Andreas Reuter, Transaction Processing : Concepts and Techniques is terrific.
Watch me pull a definition out of my butt!
Hey moderators, it's not flamebait, it's a joke! (You do have to think about it.)
In general I wish people on Slashdot would realize that for all their rhetoric, there is more research and more innovation produced here in the U.S. than in countries with less developed IP systems.
Just claimingthat the system stifles innovation doesn't make it so.
Excellent point. They, or the AMA or FDA or whoever I choose to trust, could also create an "approved" branding scheme with a trademarked graphic and have a page of links to approved sites. Having a single, largely unaccountable bureaucracy have control over a domain is unnecessary.
(Economists know that free trade helps far more people than it hurts. Try reading about it sometime.)
There is already some support for this from a few mail clients (mostly incomplete), and from a few mail servers.
In some ways it is not as secure as the end-to-end encryption of a complete PKI solution. You have to trust the mail servers to not be compromised. But it is a lot less expensive.
Also, companies generally would like to be able to read their employees official communications even if they don't want any random person to intercept plaintext.
They're increasing quickly since they've gone to a free economy. They won't be low wage forever.
Over time, wages and working conditions improve, they do not get worse. Japan was once (only 40 years ago) a low wage country. Now it is on a par with the U. S. The same is happening with Taiwan, China, Singapore, Thailand, etc.
Come to think of it, the U.S. was a low wage country 100 years ago.
In 1997, total manufacture of goods in the U.S. was 8.1 Trillion dollars. Imported goods were only 870 Billion. (Tables 1231 and 1307 of the 1999 Statistical Abstract of the US http://www.census.go v/p rod/www/statistical-abstract-us.html.)
Opposition to free trade is based on ignorance.
Corporatism? That's fascism. Lack of regulations was not the problem with Nazi Germany. The corporations were encouraged, even required to do bad things.
See, if you need proof, http://www.votenader.org /is sues/agriculture_letter.html He thinks falling prices for commodities is a bad thing! Hello? Who does he think buys these things? This is a trend that's been going on for hundreds of years. Does he know that around 1900, a family typically spent over half its income on food?
I think the drug laws cause more problems than they solve but bringing in this racism canard is wrong.
Look at income statistics, health statistics, and other quality of life statistics and you'll find that countries that have invited in multinationals have done better for their citizens than those who have tried to keep them out.
As their productivity improves, so do their wages. This is what has happened in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and so on.
Thus, consumers get cheaper prices at the drug store; usually, too, more convenient hours and a larger selection of products.
And you're helping to build a growing sector of the economy where there's a labor shortage.
The horror, the horror.
So what? They could quit any time they wanted. It's not as if they were going to starve if they weren't given free AOL access.
On Unix at that time, people's terminal /dev entries were generally writable (unless you did a "mesg n" command). You could send a command to a "smart" terminal that would get echoed back to the Unix system. It would appear that the targeted user had typed the command.
About this time, I found a bug in 4.1BSD that allowed you to bounce commands off a user's terminal without even knowing what kind of terminal they had.
By the way, I have a boring post in this archive. I posted as "unc!jqw", which was an account I had hacked into at that time.