First off, evolution isn't magic. The scenario you're describing assumes that some mosquitos could survive this weapon today. If we get away from the "one breeding season" assumption and allow a longer timeframe, it still assumes that a solution is within the range of biological adaptation, which is not a sure thing.
So the odds are we're not moving toward "laser-proof" mosquitos any moreso than we have bullet-proof deer running around. You might get mosquitos that evade the targeting system -- females that beat their wings like males, or individuals that present a profile that looks more like a butterfly to the computer. And if so... then you're back where you started, having played out a temporary repreive from the mosquito problem.
In other words, it's only better to pass if the adaptation in the mosquitos actually makes the problem worse.
"Can't be wiped out by lasers" isn't worse in the context that your alternative is to not wipe them out with lasers anyway.
Soemtimes "does not necessarily mean" is a concise and exact expression of what you have to say. "Someone implied A means B. We cannot infer B from A." Actually that's one of the few things that isn't wrong with the quoted sentence; a lof of writers would over-reach and just claim "B is not true" -- whic also is not necessarily the case.
OTOH, I don't know what the courts are saying if they're not making the endorsement in question. "We consider this service valid even though it was done with a medium that doesn't meet the basic standards for serving papers"?
Either way, I suppose you could argue that in an ideal world he'd have found out whether the courts intend their actions to imply what Facebook says; but I'm not sure it's that easy to get s straight yes-or-no answer from courts in two countries...
The only fact they list that I find all that troubling, is the "humans and dinosaurs" one. The reason I find it more disturbing, is that it could well reflect rejection of observed data regarding the history and development of our planet (i.e. rejection of science) rather than mere ignorance of a dicrete fact.
Runner up is the "time it takes the Earth to circle the sun"... that's a little mind-boggling.
While I would expect most adults to know that 70% of Earth is covered in water, it's really more trivia than science. (It's also silly IMO to distinguish 70% as "the exact number" while calling, say, 71% an approximation... but I digress.) You could understand and practice scientific thinking, maybe even in an advanced scientific field, and for some reason happen to not know that bit of information. It's not something a scientific mind will automatically reason to -- it's just soemthing we expect everyone will have been told. I guess since we figure the person who told them will have been teaching a science class at the time, that makes it a measure of scientific literacy?
Perhaps. And yet, the person who takes your rifles is still breaking the law. The drive-by is another, separate instance of that person breaking the law; but even if he just takes them to a shooting range to teach marksmanship to orphans, taking the rifles is still illegal.
Plus, your analogy is flawed. Whether there should be or not, there are no laws requiring that an individual secure his/her PC; but there are laws about safe storage of firearms.
And just to tone down the hyperbole a bit, botnets don't kill people.
Well, if everyone were playing nice, wouldn't the Windows Indexing Service (and other services that can be used in this attack) count as ( / have registered themselves as) "users" of the DLL? So then leaving behind the DLL would be the "correct" behavior anyway?
Well, granted the bombs used in WWII are nothing like what we have today, but it still seems worth noting that the only actual use of nuclear weapons was war-ending / winning.
You're talking about MAD strategy, which is one nuclear strategy but not the only one. An arms race does tend to lead to MAD, which made it synonymous with nuclear strategy (at least in the public eye) in the cold war. The thing is, MAD doesn't apply to every conceivable nuclear conflict today.
MAD assumes that there are two (or more) powers, each with enough weapons to destroy the other, who would be on opposite sides of any conceivable nuclear conflict. If these assumptions are not met, then one side can (and might) use nuclear weapons to win. If one power believes these assumptions are not met ("with enough of a head start, we can reduce their offensive capability enough that some of us will survive"), then they might try to use nuclear weapons to win.
Laches applies to a specific infraction, not a type of infraction. If MS could have brought action against TomTom much earlier, but MS delayed in bringing that specific action, and TomTom is now in a worse position as a defendant than they would've been were the action brought in a timely manner, then laches might apply.
In short, if I notice you're letting other people get by with stealing your donuts, that doesn't mean I can steal your donuts with impunity. (Trademark, but not patent, is a notable exception.)
You're wrong about him stealing from his band-mates, though. If multiple people hold a copyright, they each have the rights enumerated under copyright -- including the right to make copies.
Several people have said this, but it is incorrect.
If he holds copyright, then it doesn't matter who else also holds copyright on the same work. Copyright doesn't mean "entitled to a profit from every copy made"; it means (among other things) "entitled to make copies without anyone else's permission".
"If the prosecution fails to provide enough evidence to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the defendant is guilty, the jury is obligated to render "not guilty". That means the jurors have to be convinced, 100%, that the defendant was guilty"
Wrong. The pharse is 'a reasonable doubt' (not 'a shadow of a duobt'), and '100% convinced' doesn't enter into it. The prosecution specifically does not have to disprove every conceivable fantasy scenario, which is what your standard would require. (And in civil cases the standard of proof is even lower.)
As to the claim that nullification can't be proved -- well, jury verdicts have been set aside before, so don't count on it.
And yes, it's a contraversial subject with some prominant names speaking both for it and against it. I'm not too impressed with an array of 3 quotes -- two from the same person, dating back to the first supreme court.
Legal systems are complex. It's foolish to look for a blanket statement as to whether nullification would be right or wrong in every conceivable situation. But considering that the American system puts millions of voices into making the law, in general I believe it is socially irresponsible for 12 people to be too quick to disregard the law. Nullification is an extreme measure, and not something that the defense should even bother to hope for.
That's true; it's called nullification. However, before you try basing your defense on the hope of that happening, consider two thigns:
1) Though it is rare, if a judge feels that a jury is completely out of line he can set aside the verdict.
2) The public perception of copyright (what's likely to show up in the jury) isn't like the/. perception of copyright law. I wouldn't bet on jury nullification in a copyright case. Keep in mind the jury's actions in the one RIAA copyright case that went that far. (Yes, the judge later said he'd given incorrect instructions; and yes, AFAIK that resulted in the judge setting aside the ruling; but the point is, the jury sympathies were not something a copyright offender could rely on.)
Well, I can give a definite answer to one of those, and can only speak generally to the other.
A generic isn't so much a "new drug" as it is another manufacturer's vesrion of an existing drug. When the existing drug's patent expires, it's already through FDA approval, so generic manufcaturers can more or less pick it up and run with it as long as they follow certain rules about generic equivalence. (There are a couple different classes of generic, but the short form is "same active ingredients in the same dose; not necessarily the same inactive ingredients".)
By the time a drug can go generic, not only has the active formulation been approved, it's also been tried "in the wild" for some number of years. So even though they aren't run through their own full approval process, generics are historically safer from a statistical point of view. (Nobody's going to make generic Vioxx; that sort of thing.)
Now to your other question... I've never seen the books on a drug as it moves through the development pipeline, so I don't know the exact breakdown of costs. Pharma companies cite "R&D" as the cost driver of drugs in America; but (1) this project will only cover the R, not the D; and (2) the R&D explanation is probably only part of the story. When their spokespeople say R&D, it's a better-sounding explanation than "you're subsidizing drugs in other countries that regulate drug prices, and you're paying for our insurance and legal fees, and our ad budget".
Having a published repository of the data, presumably with dates and citations to show authorship, is actually one of the best defenses against a patent troll scenario.
The drug industry runs on patents today. You seem to be assuming that software today is more tightly patent-controlled than drugs today; you would have that backwards. (Not every piece of new software is covered by a patent.)
I don't see that anything these guys do WRT building an information platform is going to change the regulatory environment or layers of process (and expense) involved in actually bringing a product to market. So I'm not concerned about public perception of safety... but it does raise a different issue.
So this platform provides the basis for a new drug, and "nobody owns the IP" (sort of); ok, that means nobody gets the lock-in of being the one and only brand manufacturer of the drug for a few years after it gets approved. Then who's going to commit the time, money, and effort to getting the drug through the layers of testing and trials to become FDA approved? Who's going to take on the legal liability associated with marketing a new drug, when they can only command generic-level pricing?
If this platform discovers all of the otherwise-patentable innovations to create a new drug, I'm not sure how the drug will be brought to market. One possibility (assuming the model is less like GPL and more like BSD) is that the final innovation for a drug will come about in the traditional way, creating a faster pipeline of drugs that are still marketed as expensive brand drugs for the first years of their life. Another is that companies will specialilze in taking on the risk and expense of bringing an unpatentable drug to market, and the market will determine a premium above "normal" generic pricing (but hopefully below normal brand pricing) that they'll command for their effort. That latter approach could be sensitive to anti-competitive behavior, though.
Those who would say a thing is not possible, should refrain from interrupting those who are doing that very thing.
The concept of paying for time-limited (or #-of-views-limited) access to information does work. Even when the medium is a stream of data over the Internet, we call it 'rental' by analogy with the traditional practice of renting a disc. In neither case -- the disc or the data stream -- was anyone ever "renting information".
If the thing being traded were the information, then nobody would ever watch a movie twice. The thing being traded is access to the inforamtion, which can follow a rental model just fine.
The point is, any external influence on the asteroid's path (such as a large gravitational pull) would have exactly the same impact on the probe's path, whether the asteroid is present or not. Gravity affects all matter equally.
I've never heard of a harpoon or grappling hook that could survive the use you want to put it to. The hook, and/or the tether, and/or the probe, and/or the asteroid itself would be destroyed during the tug-of-war between the asteroid and the probe.
There's also a very real concern that the attempt to accelerate the probe would drag the asteroid into a much less interesting orbit. Equal and opposite reactions, conservation of momentum, etc. My guess is, if you could make the probe survive the attempt to tether itself to the asteroid, it would subsequently be destroyed when the asteroid carried it into a crash with whatever it had previously been orbitting.
"Yes, we can propel to x speed as the asteroid, but every time we want to change direction fuel must be spent. If the asteroid changes direction ever, that's quite literally a free ride."
Since the asteroid has neither fuel to spend nor a means to spend it, it isn't going to change direction.
Note that "change direction" here means "deviate from a predetermined orbital path"; which is also the only sense in which it is true to say that "changing direction costs fuel".
"Depending on where it lands, we could get some pretty cool pictures. What if it heads towards some planet a few light years away and smacks into it?"
The asteroid has the same probability of going someplace interesting as the probe would have on its own.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, evolution isn't magic. The scenario you're describing assumes that some mosquitos could survive this weapon today. If we get away from the "one breeding season" assumption and allow a longer timeframe, it still assumes that a solution is within the range of biological adaptation, which is not a sure thing.
So the odds are we're not moving toward "laser-proof" mosquitos any moreso than we have bullet-proof deer running around. You might get mosquitos that evade the targeting system -- females that beat their wings like males, or individuals that present a profile that looks more like a butterfly to the computer. And if so... then you're back where you started, having played out a temporary repreive from the mosquito problem.
In other words, it's only better to pass if the adaptation in the mosquitos actually makes the problem worse.
"Can't be wiped out by lasers" isn't worse in the context that your alternative is to not wipe them out with lasers anyway.
Soemtimes "does not necessarily mean" is a concise and exact expression of what you have to say. "Someone implied A means B. We cannot infer B from A." Actually that's one of the few things that isn't wrong with the quoted sentence; a lof of writers would over-reach and just claim "B is not true" -- whic also is not necessarily the case.
OTOH, I don't know what the courts are saying if they're not making the endorsement in question. "We consider this service valid even though it was done with a medium that doesn't meet the basic standards for serving papers"?
Either way, I suppose you could argue that in an ideal world he'd have found out whether the courts intend their actions to imply what Facebook says; but I'm not sure it's that easy to get s straight yes-or-no answer from courts in two countries...
The only fact they list that I find all that troubling, is the "humans and dinosaurs" one. The reason I find it more disturbing, is that it could well reflect rejection of observed data regarding the history and development of our planet (i.e. rejection of science) rather than mere ignorance of a dicrete fact.
Runner up is the "time it takes the Earth to circle the sun"... that's a little mind-boggling.
While I would expect most adults to know that 70% of Earth is covered in water, it's really more trivia than science. (It's also silly IMO to distinguish 70% as "the exact number" while calling, say, 71% an approximation... but I digress.) You could understand and practice scientific thinking, maybe even in an advanced scientific field, and for some reason happen to not know that bit of information. It's not something a scientific mind will automatically reason to -- it's just soemthing we expect everyone will have been told. I guess since we figure the person who told them will have been teaching a science class at the time, that makes it a measure of scientific literacy?
You could.
But can you document an actual, non-hypothetical case where a botnet has cost a life?
I can document a case where a gun has cost a life.
"No, it's more like if your door is already busted wide open and burglars are coming in and out, and a reporter wanders in illegally."
Fixed.
Perhaps. And yet, the person who takes your rifles is still breaking the law. The drive-by is another, separate instance of that person breaking the law; but even if he just takes them to a shooting range to teach marksmanship to orphans, taking the rifles is still illegal.
Plus, your analogy is flawed. Whether there should be or not, there are no laws requiring that an individual secure his/her PC; but there are laws about safe storage of firearms.
And just to tone down the hyperbole a bit, botnets don't kill people.
Well, if everyone were playing nice, wouldn't the Windows Indexing Service (and other services that can be used in this attack) count as ( / have registered themselves as) "users" of the DLL? So then leaving behind the DLL would be the "correct" behavior anyway?
The tax revenue from the games will be used to stimulate the economy, taking care of the recession.
Until the complete lack of liquid water starved the plant-life, removing the foundation of the food chain.
Well, granted the bombs used in WWII are nothing like what we have today, but it still seems worth noting that the only actual use of nuclear weapons was war-ending / winning.
You're talking about MAD strategy, which is one nuclear strategy but not the only one. An arms race does tend to lead to MAD, which made it synonymous with nuclear strategy (at least in the public eye) in the cold war. The thing is, MAD doesn't apply to every conceivable nuclear conflict today.
MAD assumes that there are two (or more) powers, each with enough weapons to destroy the other, who would be on opposite sides of any conceivable nuclear conflict. If these assumptions are not met, then one side can (and might) use nuclear weapons to win. If one power believes these assumptions are not met ("with enough of a head start, we can reduce their offensive capability enough that some of us will survive"), then they might try to use nuclear weapons to win.
"See what I did there?"
Yes, I do. What you did there, was miss the point.
People enter into contracts to receive services all the time. What makes this any different?
Laches applies to a specific infraction, not a type of infraction. If MS could have brought action against TomTom much earlier, but MS delayed in bringing that specific action, and TomTom is now in a worse position as a defendant than they would've been were the action brought in a timely manner, then laches might apply.
In short, if I notice you're letting other people get by with stealing your donuts, that doesn't mean I can steal your donuts with impunity. (Trademark, but not patent, is a notable exception.)
You're probably right about the SR copyright.
You're wrong about him stealing from his band-mates, though. If multiple people hold a copyright, they each have the rights enumerated under copyright -- including the right to make copies.
Several people have said this, but it is incorrect.
If he holds copyright, then it doesn't matter who else also holds copyright on the same work. Copyright doesn't mean "entitled to a profit from every copy made"; it means (among other things) "entitled to make copies without anyone else's permission".
"If the prosecution fails to provide enough evidence to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the defendant is guilty, the jury is obligated to render "not guilty". That means the jurors have to be convinced, 100%, that the defendant was guilty"
Wrong. The pharse is 'a reasonable doubt' (not 'a shadow of a duobt'), and '100% convinced' doesn't enter into it. The prosecution specifically does not have to disprove every conceivable fantasy scenario, which is what your standard would require. (And in civil cases the standard of proof is even lower.)
As to the claim that nullification can't be proved -- well, jury verdicts have been set aside before, so don't count on it.
And yes, it's a contraversial subject with some prominant names speaking both for it and against it. I'm not too impressed with an array of 3 quotes -- two from the same person, dating back to the first supreme court.
Legal systems are complex. It's foolish to look for a blanket statement as to whether nullification would be right or wrong in every conceivable situation. But considering that the American system puts millions of voices into making the law, in general I believe it is socially irresponsible for 12 people to be too quick to disregard the law. Nullification is an extreme measure, and not something that the defense should even bother to hope for.
That's true; it's called nullification. However, before you try basing your defense on the hope of that happening, consider two thigns:
1) Though it is rare, if a judge feels that a jury is completely out of line he can set aside the verdict.
2) The public perception of copyright (what's likely to show up in the jury) isn't like the /. perception of copyright law. I wouldn't bet on jury nullification in a copyright case. Keep in mind the jury's actions in the one RIAA copyright case that went that far. (Yes, the judge later said he'd given incorrect instructions; and yes, AFAIK that resulted in the judge setting aside the ruling; but the point is, the jury sympathies were not something a copyright offender could rely on.)
Less than 5%?
So to find a failed mortgage, I'd have to poll all of 20 people or so? Is that supposed to sound ilke a positive?
Two questions a bit more on point:
What is the ratio of profit from a "good" mortgage vs. loss for a "failed" mortgage?
What percentage of the mortgages did the model predict would fail? (That is, after all, the sort of thing a risk assessment should indicate...)
Well, I can give a definite answer to one of those, and can only speak generally to the other.
A generic isn't so much a "new drug" as it is another manufacturer's vesrion of an existing drug. When the existing drug's patent expires, it's already through FDA approval, so generic manufcaturers can more or less pick it up and run with it as long as they follow certain rules about generic equivalence. (There are a couple different classes of generic, but the short form is "same active ingredients in the same dose; not necessarily the same inactive ingredients".)
By the time a drug can go generic, not only has the active formulation been approved, it's also been tried "in the wild" for some number of years. So even though they aren't run through their own full approval process, generics are historically safer from a statistical point of view. (Nobody's going to make generic Vioxx; that sort of thing.)
Now to your other question... I've never seen the books on a drug as it moves through the development pipeline, so I don't know the exact breakdown of costs. Pharma companies cite "R&D" as the cost driver of drugs in America; but (1) this project will only cover the R, not the D; and (2) the R&D explanation is probably only part of the story. When their spokespeople say R&D, it's a better-sounding explanation than "you're subsidizing drugs in other countries that regulate drug prices, and you're paying for our insurance and legal fees, and our ad budget".
Having a published repository of the data, presumably with dates and citations to show authorship, is actually one of the best defenses against a patent troll scenario.
???
The drug industry runs on patents today. You seem to be assuming that software today is more tightly patent-controlled than drugs today; you would have that backwards. (Not every piece of new software is covered by a patent.)
I don't see that anything these guys do WRT building an information platform is going to change the regulatory environment or layers of process (and expense) involved in actually bringing a product to market. So I'm not concerned about public perception of safety... but it does raise a different issue.
So this platform provides the basis for a new drug, and "nobody owns the IP" (sort of); ok, that means nobody gets the lock-in of being the one and only brand manufacturer of the drug for a few years after it gets approved. Then who's going to commit the time, money, and effort to getting the drug through the layers of testing and trials to become FDA approved? Who's going to take on the legal liability associated with marketing a new drug, when they can only command generic-level pricing?
If this platform discovers all of the otherwise-patentable innovations to create a new drug, I'm not sure how the drug will be brought to market. One possibility (assuming the model is less like GPL and more like BSD) is that the final innovation for a drug will come about in the traditional way, creating a faster pipeline of drugs that are still marketed as expensive brand drugs for the first years of their life. Another is that companies will specialilze in taking on the risk and expense of bringing an unpatentable drug to market, and the market will determine a premium above "normal" generic pricing (but hopefully below normal brand pricing) that they'll command for their effort. That latter approach could be sensitive to anti-competitive behavior, though.
Those who would say a thing is not possible, should refrain from interrupting those who are doing that very thing.
The concept of paying for time-limited (or #-of-views-limited) access to information does work. Even when the medium is a stream of data over the Internet, we call it 'rental' by analogy with the traditional practice of renting a disc. In neither case -- the disc or the data stream -- was anyone ever "renting information".
If the thing being traded were the information, then nobody would ever watch a movie twice. The thing being traded is access to the inforamtion, which can follow a rental model just fine.
The point is, any external influence on the asteroid's path (such as a large gravitational pull) would have exactly the same impact on the probe's path, whether the asteroid is present or not. Gravity affects all matter equally.
I've never heard of a harpoon or grappling hook that could survive the use you want to put it to. The hook, and/or the tether, and/or the probe, and/or the asteroid itself would be destroyed during the tug-of-war between the asteroid and the probe.
There's also a very real concern that the attempt to accelerate the probe would drag the asteroid into a much less interesting orbit. Equal and opposite reactions, conservation of momentum, etc. My guess is, if you could make the probe survive the attempt to tether itself to the asteroid, it would subsequently be destroyed when the asteroid carried it into a crash with whatever it had previously been orbitting.
"Yes, we can propel to x speed as the asteroid, but every time we want to change direction fuel must be spent. If the asteroid changes direction ever, that's quite literally a free ride."
Since the asteroid has neither fuel to spend nor a means to spend it, it isn't going to change direction.
Note that "change direction" here means "deviate from a predetermined orbital path"; which is also the only sense in which it is true to say that "changing direction costs fuel".
"Depending on where it lands, we could get some pretty cool pictures. What if it heads towards some planet a few light years away and smacks into it?"
The asteroid has the same probability of going someplace interesting as the probe would have on its own.