Sorry that would be the logical assumption when it is phrased that way. Most people would not make the War on drugs the issue they were opposed to above all else. The justiposition of the two in the sentence leads to that logical conclusion.
You actually think people made marijuana and the war on drugs their #1 issue, or was that from a concerted campaign by to skew the vote. I have not seen nor heard that that was a major concern of anyone ever. Posibly the war on addictive, destructive drugs like crack cocaine and heroine but marijuana is neither addicting nor destructive in any meaningful way. My points were that the savings from persuing and prosecurting victimless crimes associated with marijuana were not only cost effective, humane, but a source of revenue and job growth.
I agree whole hardedly that hard drugs should be illegal and dealers prosecuted, I don't think anyone has an issue with that and I think that is what people were refering to in change.gov. They are two different things.
I dont think your reasoning for Obama's motives is correct. For sure he does not profit from that pork barrel, and there are the other massive benefits.
1. Drug Company/tabacco/Famers having a whole new market with huge growth potential. 2. The taxing revenues from sale. 3. The reduction of costs for holding people in jail for smoking (really, it was a stupid idea from the start, didn't we learn anything from prohibition!) 3a. The cost of the law enforcement and legal cost prosecuting smokers. 4. Cutting the financial legs out from the organized crime organizations. 5. Re-energizing of the Lava Lamp market.
So an the is a jobs bill as well as a budget reduction bill.
There is also the Peter Principal , where you rise to the level of you incompetency. Seems to always work, except one company that had a salary and promotion path for technical people and paid them what they were worth to the organization. That is a different and successful model. More should adopt that. So you don't have to become a manager to make more money, if your good at what you do, keep doing it and getting paid properly. Radical. Very Radical. Cuts the legs out of the Peter Principal, you end up with a well run, loyal , competent staff, that can do more with less. Radical.
I have to agree. The union is not the issue. Without unions we would not have weekends or paid vacation. Why? because the robber barons wanted to work people to death and pocket all the money. Seems like the robber barons are making a comeback. Only organized labor can combat that perniscious direction. Just look back to the industrial revolution, for god's sake we actually had to pass laws to make it illegal to use child labor, and those got on the books because we had laws protecting horses better than our own children. So I think the union issue (competent/incompetent) is a red herring and maybe a local phenomona for that one person and certainly his agenda. But don't we all sterotype, sometimes its hard to break out of that mold and get down to underlying principals, facts and reasons for.
Yes, the government has already required banks to report any cash transactions using a lot of 100 bills or transactions over I think it was $3000 that are unusual for a client to the government. I think the penalty was $250k for each unreported incident and they nailed one East Coast back as an example. I was working for a bank and had to write the reporting code when that first happened. That was about 8 or so years ago if I remember. So they have not outlawed the $100 bill but recognized its important role in drug traffic and other illegal activities and have the bank locked down for automatic snitching for them. So it appears that part of the world has started to adapt, but I suspect that regular currency is still by far the most used.
But then make weed legal and tax it. That would clear the cost of the people arrested and held in prisons which we pay for, not to mention the cost of the prosecutions and the profit of private prison companies. It would also cut out a lot of the financing for organized crime and help reduce the government defiicit an get more jobs for people, esp famers, and the byproduct of hemp are there as well. We went through this with alcohol and have been flirting with it with tobacco. With tabacco they have taken a mid road, allowing the sale, with warnings, and limiting the effect on other people.
Talk about a chilling effect on scientific research.. The next thing you will be doing is suing Doctors if they get a diagnosis wrong, oh wait we are doing that.
" (Of course, even if the page admins hadn't done this, inappropriate comments should be the basis for penalizing the user who posted them, not the Facebook page that they were posted on, but it was a moot point in this case.) "
The speaker seems to think that opinions should be punished and someone is the arbitor of appropriate.
"Anybody who seriously reviewed the page's contents for more than twenty seconds would have understood the page's real purpose and seen that it was not actually distributing pornography or otherwise violating the Facebook TOS"
Assumes that the people that were complaining were thinking that this was a porn site and not complaining that the anti-porn material was the offensive part. There is a body (small it may be ) that upholds the idea that God created the world in 7 days and that Global warming does not exist or its not our problem. I suspect the site has an agenda and does not publish research that shows that there is no harm (I suspect such research exists).
"From the student's perspective:" From the Instructors perspective (taught for 27 years undergrad CS) for learning to be effective I think you need in class presentation and explaination, especially answering and clarifying specific questions coupled with outside study. True you could pick up a text book, read it and learn, but the learning is often stiffled by questions that are not answered, sometimes just the use of a particular sub dialect within the disciple. Or yes you could probably learn from just going to class. But repitition and explaination seem to be most efficient and allow deeper understanding of material. Also the class room can present a much different way of looking at a subject than is presented in a text book which can be a formal and complete treatment. The classroon can present an informal more, this is important to me because, look at the material.
"but my professor requires the 10 odd problems assigned out of the book" there are several cunundrums here. Should you grade? what should that mean? Assuming that you need to score someones success in mastering the material, how do you do that? A common set of problems to work gives some consistant basis for comparison. It also give the student the opportunity to work in the other direction, not soaking it in, but bringing it out and coupling the new information with other general problem solving skills. You learn deepest by doing, and maybe even deeper by teaching.
So you are paying the instructor to provide you with subject material laid out in a fashion where one concept leads and builds in another, insight and explaination and a proscribed path of outside work to help (notice help) you internalize the material so you walk away with an education and not just a grade.
"Seriously, did you try to sound like a throwback from colonial times, or did you just live up to your username?"
I can't comment on the nature vs nurture roots of cultural expectation, but there are clearly different cultural expectations, as in honor killings in the Middle East, or the idea of face in the orient, or the role of Intellegent Design in our schools (in some parts of the South).
Well that is the trouble with those people that argue with success, or do not look at anthropology or sociology but only work with ideology. There are different models in the world that are successful, each with a different version of what is right and what is wrong and what is allowed and what is not.
Even in your freedom model, you have no true freedom (we call tha anarchy, but if you were making the anarchist argument I missed the point.)
If your argument was not for anarchy, then you must have a set of rules that limit freedom and govern activities between individuals with penalties or remedies for actions not conforming with those rules. These are limits on freedom. So I assume you are talking about a certain set of limited freedoms. In that you are labelling "Freedom" as your vision of freedom and assuming you are correct and everyone else in the world in different systems is wrong. And you do not allow them the freedom to practice their version. That is the great conundrum the democractists face. Lets do some nation building, take over a country, give them democracy and a constitution and let them vote for what they want. Often they come up with a different set of laws and rules, like Sharea law that we find offensive, but then that was their choice. Doesn't freedom require the excersize of choice? Or do you feel that everyone must choose what you feel is the correct version. Sort of Democratic/Freedom PC?
You would probably agree that we need traffic laws right. Stopping at traffic lights so as not to kill or be killed in a side on collision. So a culturally agreed upon limit to freedom eh? What about marriages of people younger than 18 years of age. In some countries that is normal and expected and appropriate. Here there are large barriers to that. A limit on freedom of those under the age of 18 and 21. but then you are for unlimited freedom right.
No I think my point was that there are different models and different expectations and culturally appropriate ways of people living good lives. To deny that is to deny history and current events. Now I might agree with you that there are certain principles that I and many of those living around me think is the best way, but that is not the same as the right way. For example, I have never forgiven the Missionaries for clothing the Tahians. A limit to freedom certainly, for what, for someone else's view of what is proper and what is expected and that is not culturally approriate and downright authoritarian and heavy handed. I have family in China and they are quite happy generally with their life even though their freedoms (like to all internet sites) are curbed. They are too busy going to Starbucks and shopping in high end shopping centers to bother with that. And we have a few people in our jails, and prisons that might complain about their limits on freedom.
" it was so well established so long ago that freedom is superior to the alternative" unsupported. Certainly a way for Judeo Christains from a European background to live and work together and prosper. There are other successful models as shown in China for instance, which had many , many more people than live in democracies, living , working and propering, and it is not a Democracy and only has limited freedoms.
But I digress.
"Liberty is the right to question and challenge the government, which absolutely necessary to prevent corruption and tyranny. Privacy allows dissenters to build a movement without the knowledge of those who would suppress it."
I am confused, Privacy as opposed to Liberty?? I would think the Privacy is one of the cornerstones of the U.S. democracy. Well until yesterday when the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that it was OK for police to enter a home without a warrant, tesor the man living there that was trying to advise them that they did not have a warrant and to stay out. This overtures an 800 year law that a homeowner can defend his property from illegal search and seizure from even the police. A matter of privacy and liberty here.
But privacy is key to allowing people to live their own lives and to form and talk about their own ideas. The point is you should have a system who's ideas stand on their own, have merit and overwhelming support of the people. Lets add, redition, torture, removal of habeas corpus and the above mentioned abonination, and you have a formula where you start to loose support around the world and eventially at home when people wake up to the fact that we are allowing the Facists to take over. The rest of the world can see the pustules on our face way before we do.
What I learned from years of teaching, "The lesson taught is never the lesson learned". Good case in point, that will become a new rule of the game of playing the game. I have heard that commodity brokers when nothing is going on will bet with each other which elevator will come next. Gamers will game play,or the law of unintended consequences will reign supreme.
But this will create a new underclass, I'm not sure that is the intention, just to make more money, but underclass here we come, Like a credit score, will if follow you? will it affect other parts of your life?
Sorry, its not a case of managing windows, its a case of what you can see at the same time and that is a function of screen realestate. Now if you can dome up with the equivalent to what I used to have with a 22 in analog (square) screen with enough definition to put two screens worth of text on one screen then yes. But with the current LCD HD formatted screens, one screen is inadequate for the work.
Or it may be that you job is so straight forward that you are not interplaying a lot of disparate elements into what you do. That being the case then under those circumstances you might be right.
For a developer that has to use a development environment matched with a db environment matched with a file envirionment matched with documentation and matched with lookups online for issues problems, solutions. Two monitors is the very least.
We have one web developer that is working on forms all the time and she has 4 monitors.
Right now I have 3 browsers, 1 email client, 2 windows explores, 2 command prompt windows, 2 db studios, 3 word documents , 12 notepad instances, and one development environment open on my desktop, usually I have more. But the big thing is the correlation between different things, like comparing two bits of code or cutting and pasting between the DB schema and the code or a text file.
Screen realestate is precious and the more you have the more things you can correlate and refer to with just the movment of the eyes and not the mouse or hiding your work to see other documents the better.
Actually I don't think inventors should be allowed to sell patents. The rights of a patent should be attached for the specified period of time to the inventor (or shared by an inventing team). It was originally designed as a protection for the inventor (and possibly his family). There is great evil in turning it into a commodity. First of all companies pre-empt an inventors right to a patent in many employment agreements (which is a deal with the devil , recording artists have seen this with the copyrights on their work as well). And the patent trolls which fullfil about the same place in society as the deriviatives market. IP should not be seperated from the intellegence that created it. That leads to exploitation and really stupid things like patenting an idea that you push a button and you can update, so pay me, no pay the guy that bought my idea.
The companies article in defense of selling very obvious ideas, are that they published the information in the patent so obviously someone else could not have thought of the idea (because it was so blooming obious). Does anybody remember the old game where if you said the same thing as someone else "jinx, you owe me a coke".
And now they are talking about removing the invalidation of a patent due to prior art. I think this is a copy of the laws in Europe. So get your stupid idea's in now, or see an existing good idea, check that there is not currently a patent or patent pending and slip their idea in as your own.. Bonanza!
They are not excersizing private property rights. They don't own the internet, they dont own the site they are blocking, They are excersizing censorship of information from a service that they should just be connecting through to.
I agree, the software will probably have a built in ability to install an automatic update, so at any point the authorities will be able to move a key logger into place without you knowing. I think it is The same with what someone else reported, the decibal sensor on all phones, an minor update and you have location and conversation when you need. I think Australia is having some heavy "we want to know what your doing, and we are going to tell you what to do, politics". A bit scary, they used to be so freedom loving and independent.
Sad, You seem to think that lack of regulation will equal growth. (read the article on Chinese suicides in the iPhone iPad plant) and certainly the over regulation of derivatives did make the financial markets safe for everyone. That is one of the primary, and necesarry roles of government, to set down the ground rule so things don't go boom in the night, like the markets or oil wells or rockets in space.
On a related side note. I remember flying over Kansas one time in the past and the flight service had to stop serving alcholic beverages because Kansas (I'm sure it was Kansas) had passed a law that said no drinking (or maybe just hard liquor that was not sold in a state licensed store). So maybe the FAA will not have juristiction but for sanity there should be some international agreements standards and regulations. Just like you as a land owner has mineral right below, the FAA has juristiction above, certainly above 14k feet where the IFR flight are controlled. Why would you suppose that flights that were just a little higher up should not have regulations to keep them from bumping into each other, ala the air traffic control system, which requires transponders with position information etc so collisions can be avoided. Certainly a plane or a rocket is travelling too fast to visually keep track of other traffic, and at those speeds, the strength of the planes radar would have to be high to see that far ahead, behind, to the side. All that additional radiation would probably fry all the passengers, and wilt the flowers being shipped here from China.
"Sacom said the company initially responded to the spate of suicides by bringing in monks to exorcise evil spirits"
Obviously since it is the iPhone and iPad they probably are using the wrong kind of exorcists. Maybe we can share some of our Hell and Damnation Bible thumpers to strainghten out those pesky spirits. Or maybe they should have sent the monks to the executive offices instead of the factory?
Slashdot Mirror
You may be right, He may be smoking money, (but not inhaling)
Sorry that would be the logical assumption when it is phrased that way. Most people would not make the War on drugs the issue they were opposed to above all else. The justiposition of the two in the sentence leads to that logical conclusion.
http://www.radioshack.com/search/index.jsp?kwCatId=&kw=pen%20conductive%20ink&origkw=pen+conductive+ink&sr=1
You actually think people made marijuana and the war on drugs their #1 issue, or was that from a concerted campaign by to skew the vote. I have not seen nor heard that that was a major concern of anyone ever. Posibly the war on addictive, destructive drugs like crack cocaine and heroine but marijuana is neither addicting nor destructive in any meaningful way. My points were that the savings from persuing and prosecurting victimless crimes associated with marijuana were not only cost effective, humane, but a source of revenue and job growth.
I agree whole hardedly that hard drugs should be illegal and dealers prosecuted, I don't think anyone has an issue with that and I think that is what people were refering to in change.gov. They are two different things.
Well I think I'll submit a patent for a solar powered Lava Lamp. Free energy for both purposes. Just think of the jobs that will create!
I dont think your reasoning for Obama's motives is correct. For sure he does not profit from that pork barrel, and there are the other massive benefits.
1. Drug Company/tabacco/Famers having a whole new market with huge growth potential.
2. The taxing revenues from sale.
3. The reduction of costs for holding people in jail for smoking (really, it was a stupid idea from the start, didn't we learn anything from prohibition!)
3a. The cost of the law enforcement and legal cost prosecuting smokers.
4. Cutting the financial legs out from the organized crime organizations.
5. Re-energizing of the Lava Lamp market.
So an the is a jobs bill as well as a budget reduction bill.
There is also the Peter Principal , where you rise to the level of you incompetency. Seems to always work, except one company that had a salary and promotion path for technical people and paid them what they were worth to the organization. That is a different and successful model. More should adopt that. So you don't have to become a manager to make more money, if your good at what you do, keep doing it and getting paid properly. Radical. Very Radical. Cuts the legs out of the Peter Principal, you end up with a well run, loyal , competent staff, that can do more with less. Radical.
I have to agree. The union is not the issue. Without unions we would not have weekends or paid vacation. Why? because the robber barons wanted to work people to death and pocket all the money. Seems like the robber barons are making a comeback. Only organized labor can combat that perniscious direction. Just look back to the industrial revolution, for god's sake we actually had to pass laws to make it illegal to use child labor, and those got on the books because we had laws protecting horses better than our own children. So I think the union issue (competent/incompetent) is a red herring and maybe a local phenomona for that one person and certainly his agenda. But don't we all sterotype, sometimes its hard to break out of that mold and get down to underlying principals, facts and reasons for.
I thought that the "First to File" law (if passed) would remove the whole idea of prior art invalidating a Patent. Am I wrong?
Yes, the government has already required banks to report any cash transactions using a lot of 100 bills or transactions over I think it was $3000 that are unusual for a client to the government. I think the penalty was $250k for each unreported incident and they nailed one East Coast back as an example. I was working for a bank and had to write the reporting code when that first happened. That was about 8 or so years ago if I remember. So they have not outlawed the $100 bill but recognized its important role in drug traffic and other illegal activities and have the bank locked down for automatic snitching for them. So it appears that part of the world has started to adapt, but I suspect that regular currency is still by far the most used.
But then make weed legal and tax it. That would clear the cost of the people arrested and held in prisons which we pay for, not to mention the cost of the prosecutions and the profit of private prison companies. It would also cut out a lot of the financing for organized crime and help reduce the government defiicit an get more jobs for people, esp famers, and the byproduct of hemp are there as well. We went through this with alcohol and have been flirting with it with tobacco. With tabacco they have taken a mid road, allowing the sale, with warnings, and limiting the effect on other people.
Talk about a chilling effect on scientific research.. The next thing you will be doing is suing Doctors if they get a diagnosis wrong, oh wait we are doing that.
" (Of course, even if the page admins hadn't done this, inappropriate comments should be the basis for penalizing the user who posted them, not the Facebook page that they were posted on, but it was a moot point in this case.) "
The speaker seems to think that opinions should be punished and someone is the arbitor of appropriate.
"Anybody who seriously reviewed the page's contents for more than twenty seconds would have understood the page's real purpose and seen that it was not actually distributing pornography or otherwise violating the Facebook TOS"
Assumes that the people that were complaining were thinking that this was a porn site and not complaining that the anti-porn material was the offensive part. There is a body (small it may be ) that upholds the idea that God created the world in 7 days and that Global warming does not exist or its not our problem. I suspect the site has an agenda and does not publish research that shows that there is no harm (I suspect such research exists).
"From the student's perspective:" From the Instructors perspective (taught for 27 years undergrad CS) for learning to be effective I think you need in class presentation and explaination, especially answering and clarifying specific questions coupled with outside study. True you could pick up a text book, read it and learn, but the learning is often stiffled by questions that are not answered, sometimes just the use of a particular sub dialect within the disciple. Or yes you could probably learn from just going to class. But repitition and explaination seem to be most efficient and allow deeper understanding of material. Also the class room can present a much different way of looking at a subject than is presented in a text book which can be a formal and complete treatment. The classroon can present an informal more, this is important to me because, look at the material.
"but my professor requires the 10 odd problems assigned out of the book" there are several cunundrums here. Should you grade? what should that mean? Assuming that you need to score someones success in mastering the material, how do you do that? A common set of problems to work gives some consistant basis for comparison. It also give the student the opportunity to work in the other direction, not soaking it in, but bringing it out and coupling the new information with other general problem solving skills. You learn deepest by doing, and maybe even deeper by teaching.
So you are paying the instructor to provide you with subject material laid out in a fashion where one concept leads and builds in another, insight and explaination and a proscribed path of outside work to help (notice help) you internalize the material so you walk away with an education and not just a grade.
"Seriously, did you try to sound like a throwback from colonial times, or did you just live up to your username?"
I can't comment on the nature vs nurture roots of cultural expectation, but there are clearly different cultural expectations, as in honor killings in the Middle East, or the idea of face in the orient, or the role of Intellegent Design in our schools (in some parts of the South).
Well that is the trouble with those people that argue with success, or do not look at anthropology or sociology but only work with ideology. There are different models in the world that are successful, each with a different version of what is right and what is wrong and what is allowed and what is not.
Even in your freedom model, you have no true freedom (we call tha anarchy, but if you were making the anarchist argument I missed the point.)
If your argument was not for anarchy, then you must have a set of rules that limit freedom and govern activities between individuals with penalties or remedies for actions not conforming with those rules. These are limits on freedom. So I assume you are talking about a certain set of limited freedoms. In that you are labelling "Freedom" as your vision of freedom and assuming you are correct and everyone else in the world in different systems is wrong. And you do not allow them the freedom to practice their version. That is the great conundrum the democractists face. Lets do some nation building, take over a country, give them democracy and a constitution and let them vote for what they want. Often they come up with a different set of laws and rules, like Sharea law that we find offensive, but then that was their choice. Doesn't freedom require the excersize of choice? Or do you feel that everyone must choose what you feel is the correct version. Sort of Democratic/Freedom PC?
You would probably agree that we need traffic laws right. Stopping at traffic lights so as not to kill or be killed in a side on collision. So a culturally agreed upon limit to freedom eh? What about marriages of people younger than 18 years of age. In some countries that is normal and expected and appropriate. Here there are large barriers to that. A limit on freedom of those under the age of 18 and 21. but then you are for unlimited freedom right.
No I think my point was that there are different models and different expectations and culturally appropriate ways of people living good lives. To deny that is to deny history and current events. Now I might agree with you that there are certain principles that I and many of those living around me think is the best way, but that is not the same as the right way. For example, I have never forgiven the Missionaries for clothing the Tahians. A limit to freedom certainly, for what, for someone else's view of what is proper and what is expected and that is not culturally approriate and downright authoritarian and heavy handed. I have family in China and they are quite happy generally with their life even though their freedoms (like to all internet sites) are curbed. They are too busy going to Starbucks and shopping in high end shopping centers to bother with that. And we have a few people in our jails, and prisons that might complain about their limits on freedom.
and I still need more coffee, my choice
" it was so well established so long ago that freedom is superior to the alternative" unsupported. Certainly a way for Judeo Christains from a European background to live and work together and prosper. There are other successful models as shown in China for instance, which had many , many more people than live in democracies, living , working and propering, and it is not a Democracy and only has limited freedoms.
But I digress.
"Liberty is the right to question and challenge the government, which absolutely necessary to prevent corruption and tyranny. Privacy allows dissenters to build a movement without the knowledge of those who would suppress it."
I am confused, Privacy as opposed to Liberty?? I would think the Privacy is one of the cornerstones of the U.S. democracy. Well until yesterday when the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that it was OK for police to enter a home without a warrant, tesor the man living there that was trying to advise them that they did not have a warrant and to stay out. This overtures an 800 year law that a homeowner can defend his property from illegal search and seizure from even the police. A matter of privacy and liberty here.
But privacy is key to allowing people to live their own lives and to form and talk about their own ideas. The point is you should have a system who's ideas stand on their own, have merit and overwhelming support of the people. Lets add, redition, torture, removal of habeas corpus and the above mentioned abonination, and you have a formula where you start to loose support around the world and eventially at home when people wake up to the fact that we are allowing the Facists to take over. The rest of the world can see the pustules on our face way before we do.
What I learned from years of teaching, "The lesson taught is never the lesson learned". Good case in point, that will become a new rule of the game of playing the game. I have heard that commodity brokers when nothing is going on will bet with each other which elevator will come next. Gamers will game play,or the law of unintended consequences will reign supreme.
But this will create a new underclass, I'm not sure that is the intention, just to make more money, but underclass here we come, Like a credit score, will if follow you? will it affect other parts of your life?
but there are local currencies accepted today, all you have to have is someone to accept it as having value
cases in point
(thise people are not arrested)
http://www.dailypaul.com/139999/local-news-story-competing-currency-being-accepted-across-mid-michigan
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11749875
Sorry, its not a case of managing windows, its a case of what you can see at the same time and that is a function of screen realestate. Now if you can dome up with the equivalent to what I used to have with a 22 in analog (square) screen with enough definition to put two screens worth of text on one screen then yes. But with the current LCD HD formatted screens, one screen is inadequate for the work.
Or it may be that you job is so straight forward that you are not interplaying a lot of disparate elements into what you do. That being the case then under those circumstances you might be right.
For a developer that has to use a development environment matched with a db environment matched with a file envirionment matched with documentation and matched with lookups online for issues problems, solutions. Two monitors is the very least.
We have one web developer that is working on forms all the time and she has 4 monitors.
Right now I have 3 browsers, 1 email client, 2 windows explores, 2 command prompt windows, 2 db studios, 3 word documents , 12 notepad instances, and one development environment open on my desktop, usually I have more. But the big thing is the correlation between different things, like comparing two bits of code or cutting and pasting between the DB schema and the code or a text file.
Screen realestate is precious and the more you have the more things you can correlate and refer to with just the movment of the eyes and not the mouse or hiding your work to see other documents the better.
More screens, give me more screens!
Actually I don't think inventors should be allowed to sell patents. The rights of a patent should be attached for the specified period of time to the inventor (or shared by an inventing team). It was originally designed as a protection for the inventor (and possibly his family). There is great evil in turning it into a commodity. First of all companies pre-empt an inventors right to a patent in many employment agreements (which is a deal with the devil , recording artists have seen this with the copyrights on their work as well). And the patent trolls which fullfil about the same place in society as the deriviatives market. IP should not be seperated from the intellegence that created it. That leads to exploitation and really stupid things like patenting an idea that you push a button and you can update, so pay me, no pay the guy that bought my idea.
The companies article in defense of selling very obvious ideas, are that they published the information in the patent so obviously someone else could not have thought of the idea (because it was so blooming obious). Does anybody remember the old game where if you said the same thing as someone else "jinx, you owe me a coke".
And now they are talking about removing the invalidation of a patent due to prior art. I think this is a copy of the laws in Europe. So get your stupid idea's in now, or see an existing good idea, check that there is not currently a patent or patent pending and slip their idea in as your own.. Bonanza!
They are not excersizing private property rights. They don't own the internet, they dont own the site they are blocking, They are excersizing censorship of information from a service that they should just be connecting through to.
I agree, the software will probably have a built in ability to install an automatic update, so at any point the authorities will be able to move a key logger into place without you knowing. I think it is The same with what someone else reported, the decibal sensor on all phones, an minor update and you have location and conversation when you need. I think Australia is having some heavy "we want to know what your doing, and we are going to tell you what to do, politics". A bit scary, they used to be so freedom loving and independent.
Sad, You seem to think that lack of regulation will equal growth. (read the article on Chinese suicides in the iPhone iPad plant) and certainly the over regulation of derivatives did make the financial markets safe for everyone. That is one of the primary, and necesarry roles of government, to set down the ground rule so things don't go boom in the night, like the markets or oil wells or rockets in space.
On a related side note. I remember flying over Kansas one time in the past and the flight service had to stop serving alcholic beverages because Kansas (I'm sure it was Kansas) had passed a law that said no drinking (or maybe just hard liquor that was not sold in a state licensed store). So maybe the FAA will not have juristiction but for sanity there should be some international agreements standards and regulations. Just like you as a land owner has mineral right below, the FAA has juristiction above, certainly above 14k feet where the IFR flight are controlled. Why would you suppose that flights that were just a little higher up should not have regulations to keep them from bumping into each other, ala the air traffic control system, which requires transponders with position information etc so collisions can be avoided. Certainly a plane or a rocket is travelling too fast to visually keep track of other traffic, and at those speeds, the strength of the planes radar would have to be high to see that far ahead, behind, to the side. All that additional radiation would probably fry all the passengers, and wilt the flowers being shipped here from China.
"Sacom said the company initially responded to the spate of suicides by bringing in monks to exorcise evil spirits"
Obviously since it is the iPhone and iPad they probably are using the wrong kind of exorcists. Maybe we can share some of our Hell and Damnation Bible thumpers to strainghten out those pesky spirits. Or maybe they should have sent the monks to the executive offices instead of the factory?