However, I suspect that it's impossible to write a set of laws that leeches can't find a way to exploit, for their own benefit at the detriment of the greater good.
Well, you can, it just requires putting more faith in juries and the judiciary than we are currently comfortable with. For example, a good legal code can be summed up in the four words "Do Not Harm Others" if you trust your police, judges, and juries to apply that code fairly (but we don't, and we shouldn't).
Think about it from a software testing perspective, where do you encounter the most errors when testing software? The edge cases right? But with law, every time you try to close a loopholes you create more edge cases. Only with a wholesale re-write can those edges be removed, and there are very, very few laws that have gone through such a re-write in recent history. I would argue that any complex law code is going to have loopholes that the unethical will take advantage of, the more complex the code the more loopholes there will be to abuse.
My point, which I thought was obvious, is that if you don't understand science there's no reason to believe those things aren't possible. Thus we get people railing about how the LHC is going to destroy the world. We get people wasting decades on research into alchemy. We get prayer circles for people with cancer when they could be out fundraising. We get people insisting that AIDS is caused by malnutrition.
If nothing else, the economist in the article should understand the concept of asymmetrical information. If I'm smart enough, and knowledgeable enough, I can rig up a 'perpetual motion' machine that will fool someone without that knowledge. And the less knowledge he has the easier it's going to be. These kinds of scams and quackery happen all the time. And yes, the same scams can be done with finance (just look at the mess that is wall street) and I have no absolutely no argument against teaching basic finance to teenagers either. Just the ideas of past, present, and future worth and sunk cost would go a long, long way in today's society.
I also feel it's essential for people to know the basics on how the world works.
This is the heart of the matter. If you don't believe in (and understand) science, anything could happen; the world could spontaneously collapse into a black hole, a hobo on the street could discover a way to turn lead into gold, every case of cancer in the world could suddenly disappear, or every healthy person could develop AIDS for no discernible reason. Without understanding the science behind why these things are impossible (or at least statistically unlikely over the lifespan of the universe) how do you hope to understand where your electricity comes from or how pharmaceuticals are researched? Not understanding science is like living your entire life based on Last Thursdayism (the idea that the entire universe, was created last Thursday, including all evidence to the contrary).
There's more than one way to infect a system, and yes, most of them require user stupidity but there is no end to the supply of stupid users. The most commonly described example is to drop a few USB thumb drives in the parking lot with your worm on them, then just wait for some well intentioned (or not) employee to pick it up and either plug it in to see who it might belong to or start using it for day to day activities, such as updating software on the 'secure', air-gapped systems.
Being a monopoly is not illegal, abusing that monopoly to prevent others entering the market or to spread your influence into other markets is. Google is completely safe on the first count, a small team could start up a search engine in a matter of weeks, but I can see how there are areas of concern in the second.
Google uses it's search page to serve a wide variety of content these days and there have been accusations that they unfairly increase the rankings of their own services in the past (though I'm not sure if those accusations are valid or not). In short, they probably should be investigated because there are areas of serious concern, that does not necessarily mean I feel they've done anything wrong or deserve to be punished.
Not their intention, but by the time they actually got this law written and implemented, it probably would be a gamer's exemption. And that right there is just one of the problems with trying to set limits this way, the pace of PC hardware is far faster than the pace of legislation.
A thought experiment: I propose a modified form of the Drake equation that, for lack of a better name, I will call MozeeToby's Equation:
First, add a term for the probability that a civilization will send out self replicating probes before it dies off. I refuse to believe this number is significantly low (that is, I refuse to believe that 1% of alien civilizations won't be curious enough to do so or die off before they are able). We are just nearing the technological ability to start this effort ourselves and I don't see any reason that the technology should be especially outlandish or unlikely for other civilizations to develop. I'm not saying I'll see the first probes launched in my lifetime, but I have difficulty believing that we won't have the ability in the next thousand years.
Second, get rid of the civilization lifespan variable from Drake's equation. All that matters is that they get the first batch of probes out the door before they die off. After that, the probes will be too numerous and too scattered to realistically be stopped by any natural phenomenon.
Third, add a variable for the probability that these probes make contact when they find an intelligent civilization. I'm prepared to concede that this number could be low, perhaps even in the range of fractions of a percent, but it only takes a single civilization choosing to make contact to blow the whole 'zoo hypothesis' out of the water. Space is simply too large to prevent a single player from making contact against the wishes of everyone else.
Unlike the Drake equation, we know the result of MozeeToby's equation; it's zero. There have been no probes sighted or heard or landing on the White house lawn. If you grant that the two new terms are not infinitesimally small, which I would argue could not be the case based on what we know of evolution and what drives the development of intelligence, one of the other terms, original to the Drake equation must be the problem.
Well, either that or there is a disaster waiting for us somewhere between now and when we develop the technology to build a self replicating probe. Nanotech catastrophe? Antimatter warfare? Something we can't even imagine yet? I have difficulty thinking of serious threats between our current tech level and the levels required.
ABS does not help you stop faster, simply pumping the breaks does just as well. All it does is lets you steer while stopping at the maximum rate, and with a half hour's training in an empty, ice covered parking lot, you can learn to do that without ABS too.
And besides, if you are regularly having your ABS activate, you are arguably driving too fast for the conditions or you don't have the right tires (though I am well aware that ice and snow can often mean that every single person on the road is driving too fast for the conditions). Think about it this way, if your ABS kicks in when stopping on an icy road, that is functionally equivalent to approaching a stop sign on dry pavement so fast you need to lock up the tires, and I see people in the winter doing this at every single intersection.
And shooting that little girl in the head probably did more damage to Taliban's influence in Pakistan than all the actions by the US and Pakistani governments over the past 11 years combined. There are tens of thousands of people openly protesting against the Taliban as a result of that assassination attempt; it will be a long, long time before someone can openly declare support for the Taliban in Pakistan.
There's a difference between "You're infringing and will be punished" and "You're infringing and cannot sell the phone until we get this worked out". Blocking sales should be the nuclear option, only used in the most blatant violations of the most key features, which is what this judge is saying. Violating this patent to marginally improve the user experience on a device is not sufficient to run a company into the ground.
No, they are bound by case law to work towards fulfilling the goals that were laid out to their shareholders. Those goals are very, very rarely "make as much money as possible". They range from "maximize shareholder value" (which isn't the same thing as maximizing short term profit) to "uphold traditional christian values". No one ever said that selling stock of your company meant you had to run said company like a sociopath.
Mao didn't need a religious excuse to kill millions, neither did Stalin. North Korea manages to oppress their people to a degree the middle eastern nations can only dream about. Christianity was used as a rallying cry for countless atrocities throughout the middle ages. Evil flows from evil people. If the evil people couldn't use Islam to be evil they'd use something else.
Personal information is the currency used to buy a lot of products these days. I've never paid Google a dime, but I've gotten many hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of value out of their products and services; in exchange I give them an amount of personal data that they use to present me with ads.
You don't take out every other bond once every 521 years, you take out 50% of the bonds randomly. A lot of your DNA is going to be totally destroyed, but DNA is very long, and you've got an awfully large number of copies in any significant sample. Out of trillions of base pairs and hundreds of thousands of copies, you're going to have sections of DNA tens of thousands of base pairs long that are still intact after a single half life. All you need to do is start stitching them together where they overlap and you can recover thew hole thing.
About 6% of the links would still be present, not 5% of the DNA. That means the vast majority of the available sequences are very very short, but statistically there's going to be longer sequences mixed in. And you'll have a massive number of copies of the total DNA strand. So long as they are long enough to be unique, you can start merging them together to expand what you have.
For instance, if you have one sequence that goes 123412321*242213422332* and another that goes *242213422332*1323451234, based on the overlapping sections (between the *), you can construct one longer sequence: 123412321*242213422332*1323451234.
Which can then be combined with other sequences in turn. A few hundred thousand iterations later you can do you genealogical research on your 2000 (or 10000) year old mummy.
Are people really not aware that a huge number of areas are depleting their water tables? We're taking water out faster than nature is putting it back in, eventually those aquifers are going to run dry.
Actually the Baby Einstein movies were pulled from the shelves voluntarily by Disney after research showed they did more harm than good. They even offered a refund for any videos bought in 3 years before they were pulled. Maybe you can argue that they knew about it before then based on the preliminary research, but in the end they did the right thing.
It's been just "Humble Bundle" for a while now, they dropped the 'Indie' part... somewhere around bundle number 4 I think? Personally, I buy them to support the charities first, the developers second, and the business plan third. For some reason, Child's Play has captured my attention in a way no other charity has, perhaps because playing video games was such a huge part of how I dealt with difficulties in my own childhood. Give the kids some games to play, help them be happy for a few hours that might otherwise be spent being miserable.
Nice rant, really very impressive! However, I think it's worth pointing out that this (top speed of Mach 3 or Mach 4, service ceiling above 100,000 ft, range 1000 miles) is a bit different from the Avrocar (top speed less than 100 mph, service ceiling under 10,000 ft). Your rant is like complaining that the B2 wasn't really secret for decades because everyone knew the Germans were working on a flying wing design in WWII.
Which brings me to my own rant: I don't see very many flying wings flying through the air either, but obviously the flying wing research did in fact bear fruit. It's entirely possible that the saucer design did work but has been kept secret since for one reason or another. The shape certainly seems to lend itself toward stealth just looking at it, if they ever did make a design that could do Mach 3 while still being stealthy I could see that being kept under wraps for a very long time.
I've been re-reading the Revelation Space series lately and it struck me suddenly just how many principal characters are female. In the first book there are 3 principal characters - two of which are female, probably ~10 peripheral characters - about half of which are female and the trend continues into the other books as well though less so as the number of characters increases. Even the principal villains (I personally see the Inhibitors as more of a force of nature that must be dealt with than as villains) are female and most of the strong, active characters are female. Its really quite unusual for a science fiction series.
Sure, we can make heavy things go fast, but they still haven't solved basic problems like how keep plasma from electrical arcing from melting the rails.
Do the rails cost less than a cruise missile? I've heard the more recent versions can fire several shots before they need to be replaced; if you can fire your railgun 5 times for 10 hours of maintanence and $50000 worth of steel that easily replaces 5 cruise missiles (at a cost of $500,000 each).
Slashdot Mirror
How about this... what are the alternatives for eBay? Oh wait...
However, I suspect that it's impossible to write a set of laws that leeches can't find a way to exploit, for their own benefit at the detriment of the greater good.
Well, you can, it just requires putting more faith in juries and the judiciary than we are currently comfortable with. For example, a good legal code can be summed up in the four words "Do Not Harm Others" if you trust your police, judges, and juries to apply that code fairly (but we don't, and we shouldn't).
Think about it from a software testing perspective, where do you encounter the most errors when testing software? The edge cases right? But with law, every time you try to close a loopholes you create more edge cases. Only with a wholesale re-write can those edges be removed, and there are very, very few laws that have gone through such a re-write in recent history. I would argue that any complex law code is going to have loopholes that the unethical will take advantage of, the more complex the code the more loopholes there will be to abuse.
My point, which I thought was obvious, is that if you don't understand science there's no reason to believe those things aren't possible. Thus we get people railing about how the LHC is going to destroy the world. We get people wasting decades on research into alchemy. We get prayer circles for people with cancer when they could be out fundraising. We get people insisting that AIDS is caused by malnutrition.
If nothing else, the economist in the article should understand the concept of asymmetrical information. If I'm smart enough, and knowledgeable enough, I can rig up a 'perpetual motion' machine that will fool someone without that knowledge. And the less knowledge he has the easier it's going to be. These kinds of scams and quackery happen all the time. And yes, the same scams can be done with finance (just look at the mess that is wall street) and I have no absolutely no argument against teaching basic finance to teenagers either. Just the ideas of past, present, and future worth and sunk cost would go a long, long way in today's society.
I also feel it's essential for people to know the basics on how the world works.
This is the heart of the matter. If you don't believe in (and understand) science, anything could happen; the world could spontaneously collapse into a black hole, a hobo on the street could discover a way to turn lead into gold, every case of cancer in the world could suddenly disappear, or every healthy person could develop AIDS for no discernible reason. Without understanding the science behind why these things are impossible (or at least statistically unlikely over the lifespan of the universe) how do you hope to understand where your electricity comes from or how pharmaceuticals are researched? Not understanding science is like living your entire life based on Last Thursdayism (the idea that the entire universe, was created last Thursday, including all evidence to the contrary).
There's more than one way to infect a system, and yes, most of them require user stupidity but there is no end to the supply of stupid users. The most commonly described example is to drop a few USB thumb drives in the parking lot with your worm on them, then just wait for some well intentioned (or not) employee to pick it up and either plug it in to see who it might belong to or start using it for day to day activities, such as updating software on the 'secure', air-gapped systems.
As a man married for 5 years now I'd have to say no, no I haven't thought about murdering my wife.
Being a monopoly is not illegal, abusing that monopoly to prevent others entering the market or to spread your influence into other markets is. Google is completely safe on the first count, a small team could start up a search engine in a matter of weeks, but I can see how there are areas of concern in the second.
Google uses it's search page to serve a wide variety of content these days and there have been accusations that they unfairly increase the rankings of their own services in the past (though I'm not sure if those accusations are valid or not). In short, they probably should be investigated because there are areas of serious concern, that does not necessarily mean I feel they've done anything wrong or deserve to be punished.
This isn't a gamer's exemption.
Not their intention, but by the time they actually got this law written and implemented, it probably would be a gamer's exemption. And that right there is just one of the problems with trying to set limits this way, the pace of PC hardware is far faster than the pace of legislation.
A thought experiment: I propose a modified form of the Drake equation that, for lack of a better name, I will call MozeeToby's Equation:
First, add a term for the probability that a civilization will send out self replicating probes before it dies off. I refuse to believe this number is significantly low (that is, I refuse to believe that 1% of alien civilizations won't be curious enough to do so or die off before they are able). We are just nearing the technological ability to start this effort ourselves and I don't see any reason that the technology should be especially outlandish or unlikely for other civilizations to develop. I'm not saying I'll see the first probes launched in my lifetime, but I have difficulty believing that we won't have the ability in the next thousand years.
Second, get rid of the civilization lifespan variable from Drake's equation. All that matters is that they get the first batch of probes out the door before they die off. After that, the probes will be too numerous and too scattered to realistically be stopped by any natural phenomenon.
Third, add a variable for the probability that these probes make contact when they find an intelligent civilization. I'm prepared to concede that this number could be low, perhaps even in the range of fractions of a percent, but it only takes a single civilization choosing to make contact to blow the whole 'zoo hypothesis' out of the water. Space is simply too large to prevent a single player from making contact against the wishes of everyone else.
Unlike the Drake equation, we know the result of MozeeToby's equation; it's zero. There have been no probes sighted or heard or landing on the White house lawn. If you grant that the two new terms are not infinitesimally small, which I would argue could not be the case based on what we know of evolution and what drives the development of intelligence, one of the other terms, original to the Drake equation must be the problem.
Well, either that or there is a disaster waiting for us somewhere between now and when we develop the technology to build a self replicating probe. Nanotech catastrophe? Antimatter warfare? Something we can't even imagine yet? I have difficulty thinking of serious threats between our current tech level and the levels required.
ABS does not help you stop faster, simply pumping the breaks does just as well. All it does is lets you steer while stopping at the maximum rate, and with a half hour's training in an empty, ice covered parking lot, you can learn to do that without ABS too.
And besides, if you are regularly having your ABS activate, you are arguably driving too fast for the conditions or you don't have the right tires (though I am well aware that ice and snow can often mean that every single person on the road is driving too fast for the conditions). Think about it this way, if your ABS kicks in when stopping on an icy road, that is functionally equivalent to approaching a stop sign on dry pavement so fast you need to lock up the tires, and I see people in the winter doing this at every single intersection.
And shooting that little girl in the head probably did more damage to Taliban's influence in Pakistan than all the actions by the US and Pakistani governments over the past 11 years combined. There are tens of thousands of people openly protesting against the Taliban as a result of that assassination attempt; it will be a long, long time before someone can openly declare support for the Taliban in Pakistan.
There's a difference between "You're infringing and will be punished" and "You're infringing and cannot sell the phone until we get this worked out". Blocking sales should be the nuclear option, only used in the most blatant violations of the most key features, which is what this judge is saying. Violating this patent to marginally improve the user experience on a device is not sufficient to run a company into the ground.
No, they are bound by case law to work towards fulfilling the goals that were laid out to their shareholders. Those goals are very, very rarely "make as much money as possible". They range from "maximize shareholder value" (which isn't the same thing as maximizing short term profit) to "uphold traditional christian values". No one ever said that selling stock of your company meant you had to run said company like a sociopath.
Mao didn't need a religious excuse to kill millions, neither did Stalin. North Korea manages to oppress their people to a degree the middle eastern nations can only dream about. Christianity was used as a rallying cry for countless atrocities throughout the middle ages. Evil flows from evil people. If the evil people couldn't use Islam to be evil they'd use something else.
Personal information is the currency used to buy a lot of products these days. I've never paid Google a dime, but I've gotten many hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of value out of their products and services; in exchange I give them an amount of personal data that they use to present me with ads.
You don't take out every other bond once every 521 years, you take out 50% of the bonds randomly. A lot of your DNA is going to be totally destroyed, but DNA is very long, and you've got an awfully large number of copies in any significant sample. Out of trillions of base pairs and hundreds of thousands of copies, you're going to have sections of DNA tens of thousands of base pairs long that are still intact after a single half life. All you need to do is start stitching them together where they overlap and you can recover thew hole thing.
About 6% of the links would still be present, not 5% of the DNA. That means the vast majority of the available sequences are very very short, but statistically there's going to be longer sequences mixed in. And you'll have a massive number of copies of the total DNA strand. So long as they are long enough to be unique, you can start merging them together to expand what you have.
For instance, if you have one sequence that goes 123412321*242213422332* and another that goes
*242213422332*1323451234, based on the overlapping sections (between the *), you can construct one longer sequence:
123412321*242213422332*1323451234.
Which can then be combined with other sequences in turn. A few hundred thousand iterations later you can do you genealogical research on your 2000 (or 10000) year old mummy.
Are people really not aware that a huge number of areas are depleting their water tables? We're taking water out faster than nature is putting it back in, eventually those aquifers are going to run dry.
cripple the nation
Fuck the nation, maybe the OP cars about the people instead?
Actually the Baby Einstein movies were pulled from the shelves voluntarily by Disney after research showed they did more harm than good. They even offered a refund for any videos bought in 3 years before they were pulled. Maybe you can argue that they knew about it before then based on the preliminary research, but in the end they did the right thing.
It's been just "Humble Bundle" for a while now, they dropped the 'Indie' part... somewhere around bundle number 4 I think? Personally, I buy them to support the charities first, the developers second, and the business plan third. For some reason, Child's Play has captured my attention in a way no other charity has, perhaps because playing video games was such a huge part of how I dealt with difficulties in my own childhood. Give the kids some games to play, help them be happy for a few hours that might otherwise be spent being miserable.
Nice rant, really very impressive! However, I think it's worth pointing out that this (top speed of Mach 3 or Mach 4, service ceiling above 100,000 ft, range 1000 miles) is a bit different from the Avrocar (top speed less than 100 mph, service ceiling under 10,000 ft). Your rant is like complaining that the B2 wasn't really secret for decades because everyone knew the Germans were working on a flying wing design in WWII.
Which brings me to my own rant: I don't see very many flying wings flying through the air either, but obviously the flying wing research did in fact bear fruit. It's entirely possible that the saucer design did work but has been kept secret since for one reason or another. The shape certainly seems to lend itself toward stealth just looking at it, if they ever did make a design that could do Mach 3 while still being stealthy I could see that being kept under wraps for a very long time.
I've been re-reading the Revelation Space series lately and it struck me suddenly just how many principal characters are female. In the first book there are 3 principal characters - two of which are female, probably ~10 peripheral characters - about half of which are female and the trend continues into the other books as well though less so as the number of characters increases. Even the principal villains (I personally see the Inhibitors as more of a force of nature that must be dealt with than as villains) are female and most of the strong, active characters are female. Its really quite unusual for a science fiction series.
A) Improved Safety
B) Tighter Emissions Controls
C) Increased Feature Sets
Sure, we can make heavy things go fast, but they still haven't solved basic problems like how keep plasma from electrical arcing from melting the rails.
Do the rails cost less than a cruise missile? I've heard the more recent versions can fire several shots before they need to be replaced; if you can fire your railgun 5 times for 10 hours of maintanence and $50000 worth of steel that easily replaces 5 cruise missiles (at a cost of $500,000 each).