Isn't a big leap, but it also isn't a very exegetically informed one.
As an aside, "Jewish traditions" don't mean much more than Christian traditions, given that we're talking about text that is thousands of years old, and talking about traditions as they have been formed and reformed over all those thousands of years. There is a common myth that Jewish interpretation is closer to the original than Christian interpretation, because Jews wrote the (Hebrew) Bible. Problem is that it wasn't the same Jews, it was others who lived a long, long time ago, starting a tradition of scriptural interpretation and theology that carried on for some time, then split into multiple lines, which wound up in the modern day. There isn't any particular reason to favor one of those branches over the other just based on ethnicity. In fact, Jewish thought had already split into multiple pieces (even just in Palestine) by the time Christianity got started, and only one branch (the one stemming from the Pharisees) has survived in any dominant form to the present day.
As for Genesis, "all knowledge" is an unlikely interpretation, especially when you are thinking of intellectual knowledge. "To know" in the Hebrew scriptures often or even usually has a sense of experiential knowledge, not just thought knowledge. (Recall how the patriarchs "knew" their wives and thus begot their offspring.) To know good and evil in this sense is to in some sense adopt or take them on, absorb them, live them, or perhaps to simply experience both.
Your summary about God punishing them for not knowing right from wrong-- interpreting "knowledge of good and evil" as having moral knowledge-- is contradicted by the story itself. When Eve is tempted, she clearly knows she should not succumb. She is aware of a "should" that applies to her. And so is Adam. Their ability to succumb to temptation is simply their ability to choose anything at all. If you think making free-thinking beings capable of making their own moral choices is being a huge prick, I'm sorry, but I disagree.
No. Profiling goes in the wrong direction, and for reasons having nothing to do with race, color, or political correctness. The more we rely on profiling-- which is guaranteed to miss some people, and therefore have to be ratcheted up again and again in its level of intrusiveness, the more we need to root around in the private lives of every person who ever would like to fly. Do you want to get on an airplane? Okay, we will search your credit records, your recent purchases, and why not your email while we're at it? And then what we arrive at in the end is citizens being denied the right to long-distance travel because they fit a prediction model, regardless of whether they are guilty of anything or have any malicious intent at all. That is not equal rights and protections for every citizen, and probably runs afoul of the Constitutional right to petition your government for a redress of grievances, if you live in Hawaii or somewhere else remote.
What we really should be doing is moving completely the opposite direction. We should have the right to fly completely anonymously-- why should the government be allowed to track the movements of citizens without cause? It matters not a whit who is on board, if they have no means of doing anything bad when they get there. I would rather submit to an extra thorough screening, body scanners, luggage searches, whatever, than submit to my personal, private life being scrutinized by a federal agency when I have done nothing to legitimately instigate the initiation of government tracking of my activities. If I have no weapons capable of damaging the flightworthiness of an airplane or taking control of it, then I am not a real threat no matter what crazy religious tenets I may adhere to. (Sure, I could stab someone with my pen or overpower and strangle someone, but what will that accomplish? I could do as much standing in line at the ticket counter, and it would not be qualitatively different.)
Airlines, by the way, don't back passengers being positively identified because it improves security. They back it because it disallows resale of tickets, thereby allowing them to sell more tickets than there are seats on the plane.
It sounds from your description like it is somewhere in the broader area including treason and sedition. Which one probably depends on the details, and on exactly whom he is affiliating himself to and what they are doing.
I tend to agree, that Internet access nowadays has grown into a true form of infrastructure, like roads, which are clearly a government responsibility. The main thing I worry about here, however, is that unlike roads, networking technologies are changing rapidly, and given the way government planning, standards, and contracts work, it is highly likely that we'd always have Internet access that was a fraction of the speed and reliability we could have. We'd constantly be rolling out public access networks that were about 10 years behind the current, latest technology.
That is true, but unfortunately doesn't go very far. Gas and electricity are the pretend free markets that I was thinking of. One thing to notice about it is that one aspect of it (delivery) is still a complete monopoly, and this tends to get hidden in all the talk of how we by introducing this practice, are allowing competition, and therefore can deregulate. There is a reason naturally monopolistic markets are regulated, and delivery is still unavoidably monopolistic.
Another issue is that there are a lot of important decisions in provider choice other than price. Access, and what sorts of uses are allowed, all the net neutrality questions are at the level of the delivery provider, not the bulk seller. That is, the (first) guy who decides whether to drop your file-sharing or video streaming packets, to make room for other network traffic or to satisfy political concerns, works for the company who actually has wires going to your house, the company still in a monopolistic position. That's why net neutrality can't easily be achieved through competition-- there is no room for true competition in the primary space where the net neutrality concerns arise.
Finally, in the case of Internet access, the distinction between delivery and provision is a dubious one altogether. Arguably, it doesn't even make sense at all. At least with gas there is a real product that someone has to inject into the pipes somewhere, and presumably there is some means by which all the providers sort out the rate at which they have to pump gas into the pipes. An ISP, more or less by definition, is one of those "wires-based" delivery agents.
I haven't watched these videos, but there is practically no such thing as "treasonous speech." At least not of the sort I suspect you're thinking. Speech that conveys military secrets, yes, that is treason. Speech that says "America is evil and worthy of death" is not, and you are probably sooner going to wander from that kind of stuff over the line into crimes of inciting violence than into crimes of treason. You basically have to actually help someone conduct war or gain military advantage against the United States to be guilty of treason. "Aid and Comfort" are regularly misunderstood to mean something like "words that inspire courage," when they mean nothing of the sort. It is particularly hopelessly off the mark when people think it applies to people who criticize U.S. policy, saying it causes enemies to take heart and therefore indirectly gives them comfort and therefore is treason. This is not what this phrase means at all. Treason requires material support or the equivalent. If you give food and shelter to the enemy, that is aid and comfort. If you go visit their training schools and give lectures on military tactics, that is aid and comfort. This piece of the Constitution was written to purposely limit treason to a very small category, because the writers knew that an abusable definition of treason is one of the most dangerous and hard-to-stop powers a government can have.
Or because providing a service that requires laying wires to your house or beaming things to your house over a limited, licensed part of the radio frequency spectrum is a naturally monopolistic market. You can't really have a true free market with Internet access providers much more than you can have a true free market with electricity providers, natural gas providers, water providers, or road providers. Some states have played with pretend free markets in those areas, but there is no getting around the fact that there are not going to be multiple parallel sets of natural gas pipes running through the entire grid.
It's all about the cartel, whether active or passive collusion is going on. A thousand people making and selling something makes it a consumer's market. 5 people making and selling something means one of them breaking with a few onerous things they all benefit from imposing on the consumer is unlikely.This is how airlines operate, this is how ISP's operate, how cell phone companies operate, how the major software makers operate. Whom, exactly, are you going to buy from in order to "not go along with it," if they all have almost identical restrictions on you? I've sometimes wondered if the real danger to free exchange of free speech in the near future isn't government censorship, but the several remaining large Internet service providers all gradually taking up a stronger and stronger interpretation of their terms of use which all ban "offensive content".
1. In order for democracy to be stable and people to maintain trust in their government, they must be able to see that their votes do count. Electronic voting unavoidably violates this very important principle, because it makes the mechanism of voting completely opaque to almost everybody. A person can see a piece of paper, and people can watch all the pieces go into a box, and verify the box was empty beforehand, and confirm the number of ballots equals the number of voters, and count every piece of paper in front of all interested citizens. A person cannot see electronic impulses or magnetic encodings, nor observe counting or validation algorithms in action (much less raw disk drivers, magnetic heads, error-correction algorithms, and so on). This means the machinery of democracy is enclosed in a black box.
This is opposite the principles of democracy, and it has nothing to do with procedure, nor with particular algorithms, it has to do with the entire idea of sticking the mechanisms of voting inside an unobservable space. Even with the best possible such system, the whole thing relies on the faith of the people that what is going on is in fact what they have been told. It takes voting disputes out of the realm of opening up locked boxes on camera in front of people from different parties, something all can watch and understand, and puts it in the realm of whether you believe the claims of a few reputed experts against the word of others who claim to also be experts. And even if you think you are one of those elite, stop and think about whether A) you have the means to prove whether there were forged microprocessors in the voting computer, or even that the software actually running was the software whose source code you might have examined; and B) the public trust in democracy being based on faith in the word of a few elite is ever a good idea.
2. A voting system which can be tampered with is bad for democracy. But a voting system where tampering across all districts can be centralized is horrible. To alter the outcome of a paper ballot election over a whole state, people would have to physically visit potentially hundreds or thousands of voting locations. That is a very risky action, and the greater the geographical extent of tampering, the greater the chances of detection. An electronic election, on the other hand, has multiple centralized attack points. Changing the source code, the processor supply, the central vote database (depending on how the system works), building in hidden back doors, all of these are actions that could be done by a single person in a single place. It is much better to risk more small-scale fraud, none of which can get very widespread without being likely to be detected, than to design things in such a way as to allow the entire system to be compromised all at once in a single incident that may or may not be detected.
Computers are wonderful tools. And we computer people use them like hammers, which is to say that we make everything look like a nail. But the beauty of some imaginably potential unbreakable, verifiable, cryptographically strong, instantly tallied system blinds us to the fact that the whole notion of hiding democracy inside computers is a bad idea in the first place. Computerizing voting is like using a microwave oven to warm up your baby. It is simply a tool that is incompatible with the task, regardless of whatever efficiency it may gain and effort it may save.
The problem is that instant runoff voting actually has no advantages, it only appears to have them. We are better off with any of several other alternative voting systems. Right now I'm leaning toward range voting, for several reasons including the fact that it is extremely simple and can be tallied by hand easily.
It isn't fanaticism at all. You overlook the fact that some data can be tampered with easily, and other data can be tampered with only through some difficulty. Consider a paper ballot, examined and deposited by the voter, locked in a box, and watched by various representatives of different interests. Compare that to an electronic ballot which may never even have been written to disk properly, or may have been erased and rewritten arbitrarily. The big key here is that one happens inside a black box where tampering is invisible to observers, the other happens in a way that is much more readily observable.
Arguably, in the same way that the information that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn unconstitutional laws prevents Congress from testing its bills thoroughly for Constitutionality.
Yes, once you see spelling errors of that sort enough times, you start to loose the ability to differentiate between the right and wrong version of the word.
Okay, cool, just let me know how it goes the next time a prospective employer looks you up on the interwebs and finds all the Ku Klux Klan rally pictures I just posted to your facebook page.
Yes, but the same thing works for other sites as well, like Yahoo, which is a mail provider, and if you can hijack someone's email account, you can then visit other sites' "forgot my password" links and get passwords or password reset links sent to the mail account, and thereby gain access to everything else, too. So it is a bigger breach than just the existing session on the existing site.
Huh? The bank is on the hook for fraudulent charges to your credit card, not you. That's part of how they successfully market credit cards. If people stop being able to use credit cards safely, that definitely does damage to the banking industry.
re: "doesn't look as nice". Actually, that isn't something you can say across the board. Filming physical models can often produce superior results. In fact, it takes a whole lot of work on a computer to produce something that looks half as good as simply taking a picture of a real-life object. I actually think a lot of the spaceship action in the original Star Wars movies looked better (where, of course, "better" is definitely a subjective, artistic judgment based on sense of "realism", sense of how much its look fits with the feel of the overall film and so on) than the newer ones which relied more on computer graphics. The difference isn't solely that CGI looks better (though it does in some cases-- think, say, a Godzilla monster, that would rely on a very difficult model or a person in a suit), but that you can do things with it that you can't do with a camera and a real scene, and that you can much, much more easily re-film a scene with slight adjustments.
Reading the article, this seems to stem from the strange notion that, always and everywhere, >90 = A, >80 = B, >70 = C, etc. I've seen good teachers whose assignments come close to fitting that mold, but I've also seen good teachers where the A students get 70% of the test right. A good teacher doesn't go by raw numbers, because those numbers don't consistently correspond in precisely the same way to the amount of excellence displayed by a student. That would require some kind of absolute, perfect assignment and test-writing skills on the part of the teacher, so all tests and work are precisely calibrated to the same measurement scheme. I remember seeing teachers go to all kinds of trouble to try to make their grading fit into that arbitrary 90/80/70/60 scheme, adding points to everyone's test (which bumps everyone up equally but not proportionally-- it is a failed attempt at normalization), or striking certain questions, and so on. It always seemed a bit hocus-pocus to me as an "everything should be objective" high school student, until I realized in college that _all_ grading is ultimately subjective, which is why it is important to have good teachers who can wisely assess their students' performance, their own teaching, and their own measurements of the students' performance.
Fixed that for you. Surprising how quickly we assume truthfulness on the part of people who try to slip an untruth past us once. Just because their explanation is plausible doesn't mean it is legitimate. I mean, I'm not proposing the opposite is necessarily true, either, but it seems silly to assume trustworthiness of someone who has just demonstrated otherwise.
But it isn't an "idea", in the sense that you're talking about, that gets patented. It is a specific design of something-- an idea in practice. And I'd dispute your contention, as well, that all such things are free. Ideas don't usually happen out of nowhere. Sometimes they take serious, applied thought in an attempt to solve a particular problem.
"Well, that means of synthesizing this protein didn't work...what if we tried this way? Okay, another failed attempt that we spent a week and built specialty equipment for, let's try a third option." Eventually you come up with something that is worth patenting, which not every idea is. (I could give you plenty of methods for failing to turn iron into gold, for instance.) And that process definitely costs time and money and serious effort. Even in software, it takes work and experimentation, and often a lot of time spent in analysis and thought, if you are solving a complex problem.
Sure, an idea has nothing to do with research if you only count the actual split-second moment that the final, working solution occurs to you as "having an idea". But that's not really all that's involved in having an idea, and it certainly isn't all that is involved in testing the idea or developing something real out of it. I can't just say, "I have an idea-- let's get stuff into outer space using a 25,000-mile elevator. Okay, hand me a patent, please."
Furthermore, you still say nothing that really shows software inventions to be qualitatively different than other inventions.
Finally, I certainly wouldn't claim building a factory and mass producing something is part of the invention process. The point about building the factory is that the law secures to an inventor the exclusive right to do that mass producing for a period of time, because otherwise the inventor would have little or no chance of profiting from his or her own invention.
The point isn't whether they can make it work properly as a product, but whether they can, with a working product, have an opportunity to actually profit from their own inventions. Without patents, inventors have a better chance of losing money than making money from putting the effort-- often a whole lot of money and time-- into inventing. The market-wide incentive would be to sit back and let other people invest all the money in R&D, and then scoop up their ideas. And small businesses and individuals would be altogether out of luck-- they'd have nearly no chance to get something out to a wide market before large businesses with large amounts of capital copied their product and put it on every shelf in the country.
As for being "cheap, quick and serendipitous," maybe, but implementation is also far cheaper than for mechanical inventions. Especially implementation on a mass, distributable scale-- you can make a new, better lawn mower engine prototype in your garage if you own machining tools, but you need to set up a whole factory somehow if you want to sell them, and retool every time you make a design change. With software, scaling up from one copy to one million copies is practically nothing in comparison.
I'd think that the lower implementation and to-market barriers in software, combined with the fact that the cycle of development, design, and market advancement is faster, possibly argues for a shorter protected period under patent law, maybe 5 years instead of 14 (though, I may be thinking of things like packaged software; maybe something like, say, a compression algorithm could be a different story), but I don't see a qualitative difference between software and any other invention with regard to the things that we're discussing here.
Sure, that may be, but that doesn't apply uniquely to software, that applies to inventions in general. Ideas are the building blocks of progress in all patentable arenas, not just software. The notion of the idea is the whole point of the patent. If you patent a new mousetrap design, I may come up with a better but derivative design, and then I have to license it from you if I want to sell it within the patent period.
Note also that the patent period is relatively short (and maybe it should be even shorter for software), as compared to copyright which has gotten out of hand (death plus 70 years). Both are originally intended to secure some benefit to creators for their creation by allowing them to exclusively profit from it for some initial period of time after it is introduced.
And by doing so, don't forget that, while indeed keeping society from getting to have cheaper knock-offs or patent-infringing improved designs, patents also do confer benefits on society at the same time, by encouraging innovation on the part of people who can patent their ideas. Remember that if software can't be patented, then the individual or start-up business has no protection against the giant industry leading corporation that can, without penalty, just duplicate the invention and reap all its benefits thanks to their huge existing marketing and distribution channels and budgets. Today a Microsoft would have to either buy my company from me or license the use of my idea. Without a patent, they could just duplicate it themselves and put out of business the person who came up with the idea. Society needs to balance the public good of getting to use new ideas freely with the public good of fostering those ideas, and a short but real patent period of time is probably a good way of doing so.
I think actually the problem is that software patents seem to be allowed on things they would never be allowed on if it weren't software. You can patent a technique or a machine, but you can't patent "a method for conveying people from one place to another via machine". You have to have a particular machine you've invented, or a non-obvious particular method. It seems, at least to this interested but semi-casual observer, that patents are being granted on software for impossibly broad things-- like patenting the extraction of iron from ore, rather than patenting a specific method of extracting iron from ore. Can you patent a "one-keytwist" method of unlocking a door? Of course not, though you certainly could patent a particular lock mechanism. Yet somehow you can patent the entire idea of clicking on just one button to order something. Unfortunately, the patent office is not apparently immune to the common problem of the computer being looked at as an inexplicable magical box and therefore having no idea what precedents or analogues might apply to something when that something is on a computer.
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Isn't a big leap, but it also isn't a very exegetically informed one.
As an aside, "Jewish traditions" don't mean much more than Christian traditions, given that we're talking about text that is thousands of years old, and talking about traditions as they have been formed and reformed over all those thousands of years. There is a common myth that Jewish interpretation is closer to the original than Christian interpretation, because Jews wrote the (Hebrew) Bible. Problem is that it wasn't the same Jews, it was others who lived a long, long time ago, starting a tradition of scriptural interpretation and theology that carried on for some time, then split into multiple lines, which wound up in the modern day. There isn't any particular reason to favor one of those branches over the other just based on ethnicity. In fact, Jewish thought had already split into multiple pieces (even just in Palestine) by the time Christianity got started, and only one branch (the one stemming from the Pharisees) has survived in any dominant form to the present day.
As for Genesis, "all knowledge" is an unlikely interpretation, especially when you are thinking of intellectual knowledge. "To know" in the Hebrew scriptures often or even usually has a sense of experiential knowledge, not just thought knowledge. (Recall how the patriarchs "knew" their wives and thus begot their offspring.) To know good and evil in this sense is to in some sense adopt or take them on, absorb them, live them, or perhaps to simply experience both.
Your summary about God punishing them for not knowing right from wrong-- interpreting "knowledge of good and evil" as having moral knowledge-- is contradicted by the story itself. When Eve is tempted, she clearly knows she should not succumb. She is aware of a "should" that applies to her. And so is Adam. Their ability to succumb to temptation is simply their ability to choose anything at all. If you think making free-thinking beings capable of making their own moral choices is being a huge prick, I'm sorry, but I disagree.
No. Profiling goes in the wrong direction, and for reasons having nothing to do with race, color, or political correctness. The more we rely on profiling-- which is guaranteed to miss some people, and therefore have to be ratcheted up again and again in its level of intrusiveness, the more we need to root around in the private lives of every person who ever would like to fly. Do you want to get on an airplane? Okay, we will search your credit records, your recent purchases, and why not your email while we're at it? And then what we arrive at in the end is citizens being denied the right to long-distance travel because they fit a prediction model, regardless of whether they are guilty of anything or have any malicious intent at all. That is not equal rights and protections for every citizen, and probably runs afoul of the Constitutional right to petition your government for a redress of grievances, if you live in Hawaii or somewhere else remote.
What we really should be doing is moving completely the opposite direction. We should have the right to fly completely anonymously-- why should the government be allowed to track the movements of citizens without cause? It matters not a whit who is on board, if they have no means of doing anything bad when they get there. I would rather submit to an extra thorough screening, body scanners, luggage searches, whatever, than submit to my personal, private life being scrutinized by a federal agency when I have done nothing to legitimately instigate the initiation of government tracking of my activities. If I have no weapons capable of damaging the flightworthiness of an airplane or taking control of it, then I am not a real threat no matter what crazy religious tenets I may adhere to. (Sure, I could stab someone with my pen or overpower and strangle someone, but what will that accomplish? I could do as much standing in line at the ticket counter, and it would not be qualitatively different.)
Airlines, by the way, don't back passengers being positively identified because it improves security. They back it because it disallows resale of tickets, thereby allowing them to sell more tickets than there are seats on the plane.
It sounds from your description like it is somewhere in the broader area including treason and sedition. Which one probably depends on the details, and on exactly whom he is affiliating himself to and what they are doing.
Point taken.
I tend to agree, that Internet access nowadays has grown into a true form of infrastructure, like roads, which are clearly a government responsibility. The main thing I worry about here, however, is that unlike roads, networking technologies are changing rapidly, and given the way government planning, standards, and contracts work, it is highly likely that we'd always have Internet access that was a fraction of the speed and reliability we could have. We'd constantly be rolling out public access networks that were about 10 years behind the current, latest technology.
That is true, but unfortunately doesn't go very far. Gas and electricity are the pretend free markets that I was thinking of. One thing to notice about it is that one aspect of it (delivery) is still a complete monopoly, and this tends to get hidden in all the talk of how we by introducing this practice, are allowing competition, and therefore can deregulate. There is a reason naturally monopolistic markets are regulated, and delivery is still unavoidably monopolistic.
Another issue is that there are a lot of important decisions in provider choice other than price. Access, and what sorts of uses are allowed, all the net neutrality questions are at the level of the delivery provider, not the bulk seller. That is, the (first) guy who decides whether to drop your file-sharing or video streaming packets, to make room for other network traffic or to satisfy political concerns, works for the company who actually has wires going to your house, the company still in a monopolistic position. That's why net neutrality can't easily be achieved through competition-- there is no room for true competition in the primary space where the net neutrality concerns arise.
Finally, in the case of Internet access, the distinction between delivery and provision is a dubious one altogether. Arguably, it doesn't even make sense at all. At least with gas there is a real product that someone has to inject into the pipes somewhere, and presumably there is some means by which all the providers sort out the rate at which they have to pump gas into the pipes. An ISP, more or less by definition, is one of those "wires-based" delivery agents.
I haven't watched these videos, but there is practically no such thing as "treasonous speech." At least not of the sort I suspect you're thinking. Speech that conveys military secrets, yes, that is treason. Speech that says "America is evil and worthy of death" is not, and you are probably sooner going to wander from that kind of stuff over the line into crimes of inciting violence than into crimes of treason. You basically have to actually help someone conduct war or gain military advantage against the United States to be guilty of treason. "Aid and Comfort" are regularly misunderstood to mean something like "words that inspire courage," when they mean nothing of the sort. It is particularly hopelessly off the mark when people think it applies to people who criticize U.S. policy, saying it causes enemies to take heart and therefore indirectly gives them comfort and therefore is treason. This is not what this phrase means at all. Treason requires material support or the equivalent. If you give food and shelter to the enemy, that is aid and comfort. If you go visit their training schools and give lectures on military tactics, that is aid and comfort. This piece of the Constitution was written to purposely limit treason to a very small category, because the writers knew that an abusable definition of treason is one of the most dangerous and hard-to-stop powers a government can have.
Or because providing a service that requires laying wires to your house or beaming things to your house over a limited, licensed part of the radio frequency spectrum is a naturally monopolistic market. You can't really have a true free market with Internet access providers much more than you can have a true free market with electricity providers, natural gas providers, water providers, or road providers. Some states have played with pretend free markets in those areas, but there is no getting around the fact that there are not going to be multiple parallel sets of natural gas pipes running through the entire grid.
It's all about the cartel, whether active or passive collusion is going on. A thousand people making and selling something makes it a consumer's market. 5 people making and selling something means one of them breaking with a few onerous things they all benefit from imposing on the consumer is unlikely.This is how airlines operate, this is how ISP's operate, how cell phone companies operate, how the major software makers operate. Whom, exactly, are you going to buy from in order to "not go along with it," if they all have almost identical restrictions on you? I've sometimes wondered if the real danger to free exchange of free speech in the near future isn't government censorship, but the several remaining large Internet service providers all gradually taking up a stronger and stronger interpretation of their terms of use which all ban "offensive content".
1. In order for democracy to be stable and people to maintain trust in their government, they must be able to see that their votes do count. Electronic voting unavoidably violates this very important principle, because it makes the mechanism of voting completely opaque to almost everybody. A person can see a piece of paper, and people can watch all the pieces go into a box, and verify the box was empty beforehand, and confirm the number of ballots equals the number of voters, and count every piece of paper in front of all interested citizens. A person cannot see electronic impulses or magnetic encodings, nor observe counting or validation algorithms in action (much less raw disk drivers, magnetic heads, error-correction algorithms, and so on). This means the machinery of democracy is enclosed in a black box.
This is opposite the principles of democracy, and it has nothing to do with procedure, nor with particular algorithms, it has to do with the entire idea of sticking the mechanisms of voting inside an unobservable space. Even with the best possible such system, the whole thing relies on the faith of the people that what is going on is in fact what they have been told. It takes voting disputes out of the realm of opening up locked boxes on camera in front of people from different parties, something all can watch and understand, and puts it in the realm of whether you believe the claims of a few reputed experts against the word of others who claim to also be experts. And even if you think you are one of those elite, stop and think about whether A) you have the means to prove whether there were forged microprocessors in the voting computer, or even that the software actually running was the software whose source code you might have examined; and B) the public trust in democracy being based on faith in the word of a few elite is ever a good idea.
2. A voting system which can be tampered with is bad for democracy. But a voting system where tampering across all districts can be centralized is horrible. To alter the outcome of a paper ballot election over a whole state, people would have to physically visit potentially hundreds or thousands of voting locations. That is a very risky action, and the greater the geographical extent of tampering, the greater the chances of detection. An electronic election, on the other hand, has multiple centralized attack points. Changing the source code, the processor supply, the central vote database (depending on how the system works), building in hidden back doors, all of these are actions that could be done by a single person in a single place. It is much better to risk more small-scale fraud, none of which can get very widespread without being likely to be detected, than to design things in such a way as to allow the entire system to be compromised all at once in a single incident that may or may not be detected.
Computers are wonderful tools. And we computer people use them like hammers, which is to say that we make everything look like a nail. But the beauty of some imaginably potential unbreakable, verifiable, cryptographically strong, instantly tallied system blinds us to the fact that the whole notion of hiding democracy inside computers is a bad idea in the first place. Computerizing voting is like using a microwave oven to warm up your baby. It is simply a tool that is incompatible with the task, regardless of whatever efficiency it may gain and effort it may save.
The problem is that instant runoff voting actually has no advantages, it only appears to have them. We are better off with any of several other alternative voting systems. Right now I'm leaning toward range voting, for several reasons including the fact that it is extremely simple and can be tallied by hand easily.
It isn't fanaticism at all. You overlook the fact that some data can be tampered with easily, and other data can be tampered with only through some difficulty. Consider a paper ballot, examined and deposited by the voter, locked in a box, and watched by various representatives of different interests. Compare that to an electronic ballot which may never even have been written to disk properly, or may have been erased and rewritten arbitrarily. The big key here is that one happens inside a black box where tampering is invisible to observers, the other happens in a way that is much more readily observable.
Arguably, in the same way that the information that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn unconstitutional laws prevents Congress from testing its bills thoroughly for Constitutionality.
Yes, once you see spelling errors of that sort enough times, you start to loose the ability to differentiate between the right and wrong version of the word.
Okay, cool, just let me know how it goes the next time a prospective employer looks you up on the interwebs and finds all the Ku Klux Klan rally pictures I just posted to your facebook page.
Yes, but the same thing works for other sites as well, like Yahoo, which is a mail provider, and if you can hijack someone's email account, you can then visit other sites' "forgot my password" links and get passwords or password reset links sent to the mail account, and thereby gain access to everything else, too. So it is a bigger breach than just the existing session on the existing site.
Huh? The bank is on the hook for fraudulent charges to your credit card, not you. That's part of how they successfully market credit cards. If people stop being able to use credit cards safely, that definitely does damage to the banking industry.
re: "doesn't look as nice". Actually, that isn't something you can say across the board. Filming physical models can often produce superior results. In fact, it takes a whole lot of work on a computer to produce something that looks half as good as simply taking a picture of a real-life object. I actually think a lot of the spaceship action in the original Star Wars movies looked better (where, of course, "better" is definitely a subjective, artistic judgment based on sense of "realism", sense of how much its look fits with the feel of the overall film and so on) than the newer ones which relied more on computer graphics. The difference isn't solely that CGI looks better (though it does in some cases-- think, say, a Godzilla monster, that would rely on a very difficult model or a person in a suit), but that you can do things with it that you can't do with a camera and a real scene, and that you can much, much more easily re-film a scene with slight adjustments.
Reading the article, this seems to stem from the strange notion that, always and everywhere, >90 = A, >80 = B, >70 = C, etc. I've seen good teachers whose assignments come close to fitting that mold, but I've also seen good teachers where the A students get 70% of the test right. A good teacher doesn't go by raw numbers, because those numbers don't consistently correspond in precisely the same way to the amount of excellence displayed by a student. That would require some kind of absolute, perfect assignment and test-writing skills on the part of the teacher, so all tests and work are precisely calibrated to the same measurement scheme. I remember seeing teachers go to all kinds of trouble to try to make their grading fit into that arbitrary 90/80/70/60 scheme, adding points to everyone's test (which bumps everyone up equally but not proportionally-- it is a failed attempt at normalization), or striking certain questions, and so on. It always seemed a bit hocus-pocus to me as an "everything should be objective" high school student, until I realized in college that _all_ grading is ultimately subjective, which is why it is important to have good teachers who can wisely assess their students' performance, their own teaching, and their own measurements of the students' performance.
BP posted what they said was the original.
Fixed that for you. Surprising how quickly we assume truthfulness on the part of people who try to slip an untruth past us once. Just because their explanation is plausible doesn't mean it is legitimate. I mean, I'm not proposing the opposite is necessarily true, either, but it seems silly to assume trustworthiness of someone who has just demonstrated otherwise.
I'm so glad we are putting essential processes of democracy inside of black boxes.
But it isn't an "idea", in the sense that you're talking about, that gets patented. It is a specific design of something-- an idea in practice. And I'd dispute your contention, as well, that all such things are free. Ideas don't usually happen out of nowhere. Sometimes they take serious, applied thought in an attempt to solve a particular problem.
"Well, that means of synthesizing this protein didn't work...what if we tried this way? Okay, another failed attempt that we spent a week and built specialty equipment for, let's try a third option." Eventually you come up with something that is worth patenting, which not every idea is. (I could give you plenty of methods for failing to turn iron into gold, for instance.) And that process definitely costs time and money and serious effort. Even in software, it takes work and experimentation, and often a lot of time spent in analysis and thought, if you are solving a complex problem.
Sure, an idea has nothing to do with research if you only count the actual split-second moment that the final, working solution occurs to you as "having an idea". But that's not really all that's involved in having an idea, and it certainly isn't all that is involved in testing the idea or developing something real out of it. I can't just say, "I have an idea-- let's get stuff into outer space using a 25,000-mile elevator. Okay, hand me a patent, please."
Furthermore, you still say nothing that really shows software inventions to be qualitatively different than other inventions.
Finally, I certainly wouldn't claim building a factory and mass producing something is part of the invention process. The point about building the factory is that the law secures to an inventor the exclusive right to do that mass producing for a period of time, because otherwise the inventor would have little or no chance of profiting from his or her own invention.
The point isn't whether they can make it work properly as a product, but whether they can, with a working product, have an opportunity to actually profit from their own inventions. Without patents, inventors have a better chance of losing money than making money from putting the effort-- often a whole lot of money and time-- into inventing. The market-wide incentive would be to sit back and let other people invest all the money in R&D, and then scoop up their ideas. And small businesses and individuals would be altogether out of luck-- they'd have nearly no chance to get something out to a wide market before large businesses with large amounts of capital copied their product and put it on every shelf in the country.
As for being "cheap, quick and serendipitous," maybe, but implementation is also far cheaper than for mechanical inventions. Especially implementation on a mass, distributable scale-- you can make a new, better lawn mower engine prototype in your garage if you own machining tools, but you need to set up a whole factory somehow if you want to sell them, and retool every time you make a design change. With software, scaling up from one copy to one million copies is practically nothing in comparison.
I'd think that the lower implementation and to-market barriers in software, combined with the fact that the cycle of development, design, and market advancement is faster, possibly argues for a shorter protected period under patent law, maybe 5 years instead of 14 (though, I may be thinking of things like packaged software; maybe something like, say, a compression algorithm could be a different story), but I don't see a qualitative difference between software and any other invention with regard to the things that we're discussing here.
Sure, that may be, but that doesn't apply uniquely to software, that applies to inventions in general. Ideas are the building blocks of progress in all patentable arenas, not just software. The notion of the idea is the whole point of the patent. If you patent a new mousetrap design, I may come up with a better but derivative design, and then I have to license it from you if I want to sell it within the patent period.
Note also that the patent period is relatively short (and maybe it should be even shorter for software), as compared to copyright which has gotten out of hand (death plus 70 years). Both are originally intended to secure some benefit to creators for their creation by allowing them to exclusively profit from it for some initial period of time after it is introduced.
And by doing so, don't forget that, while indeed keeping society from getting to have cheaper knock-offs or patent-infringing improved designs, patents also do confer benefits on society at the same time, by encouraging innovation on the part of people who can patent their ideas. Remember that if software can't be patented, then the individual or start-up business has no protection against the giant industry leading corporation that can, without penalty, just duplicate the invention and reap all its benefits thanks to their huge existing marketing and distribution channels and budgets. Today a Microsoft would have to either buy my company from me or license the use of my idea. Without a patent, they could just duplicate it themselves and put out of business the person who came up with the idea. Society needs to balance the public good of getting to use new ideas freely with the public good of fostering those ideas, and a short but real patent period of time is probably a good way of doing so.
I think actually the problem is that software patents seem to be allowed on things they would never be allowed on if it weren't software. You can patent a technique or a machine, but you can't patent "a method for conveying people from one place to another via machine". You have to have a particular machine you've invented, or a non-obvious particular method. It seems, at least to this interested but semi-casual observer, that patents are being granted on software for impossibly broad things-- like patenting the extraction of iron from ore, rather than patenting a specific method of extracting iron from ore. Can you patent a "one-keytwist" method of unlocking a door? Of course not, though you certainly could patent a particular lock mechanism. Yet somehow you can patent the entire idea of clicking on just one button to order something. Unfortunately, the patent office is not apparently immune to the common problem of the computer being looked at as an inexplicable magical box and therefore having no idea what precedents or analogues might apply to something when that something is on a computer.