The whole concept of seperating content from the hardware has just turned the content people into utter savages. Watching TV at home? You have to pay twice to see the ballgame. That's ridiculous.
IT's silly, why pay $66 bucks for a copy of watered down Dista when you can steal Ultimate? I mean, if you are in a country that has no IP enforcment, why not just steal the best one?
Despite the imperialistic wishes of the EU, the USA does not have to abide by EU laws. People are competing against Microsoft, they just lose. Let's spell this out, after a few releases, Netscape was not as good a brower as IE 4.0, Borland C++ was not as good as Visual C++, and dBase III was certainly no match for FoxPro. On the other hand, where people make the right decisions, they gain on MS. Zune is no iPod, msnbc is no CNN or Fox, IE is no Firefox and Windows is no Linux.
The point is, you didn't have to look at all a few decades ago. Good music was pervasive. Now the music that is pervasive is Britney Crapola, and the good stuff is underground or Indy. If the likes of Phil Lesh and other good bands were actually what the music industry pushed - then, I doubt people would feel so negatively about a recording industry that really was once held in much higher esteem. Back in the day, you could feel like a record producer was a part of the revolution, and now he or she is just another suit of "the Man".
So basically, RIAA really ticks people off because they've come to represent music that honestly isn't worth paying for anyway. I mean, give Britney Spears money? Heck, I could bore you for a longer time with my lousy game. Give me $15 instead. Or you could just wait a month until I port it to Linux and open source the thing anyway.
Executive orders are nice, but it takes the legislature in American politics to actually allocate funds. Gov Ted has issued marching orders but has no bucks to pay for it. So really, it's a nice sound bite thing for a re-election campaign. He can say "I'm working to give broadband to everyone", when he's really not. He just signed a piece of paper demanding people to do something that can't be done unless the Ohio legislature actually authorizes money for it.
I mean, the biggest act of GenX - Nirvana, was an overrated distortion band built around the central premise that Daddy was too mean in my posh suburb and so I had to go and shoot myself. What a bunch of drivel.
And then, Pearl Jam is even worse... It's like, they have that song "Better Man", singing some sympathetic song that's supposed to make me feel sorry for her. But for me, I like to sing that song saracastically... "Ahhhhh pity party..... she lies and still loves him, can't find a better man", like, I'm supposed to feel sorry for her because she's a liar.
Stupid broad, go find a better man, that's what I say.
No amount of distorted sound can correct the whiny nature of today's male music. John Lennon rolls over in his grave at the sound of these p----ies.
Today's music sucks compared to the best of the mid 1960s through the mid 1970s. It's just true. Artists in that era incorporated a wide range of sounds and styles into their work to create a discography that is often remarkable and most likely impossible to duplicate today. The other thing, too, is that major artists of that era were expected to produce an album at least once a year, and, more often than not, every six months. That's an impressive amount of material. Nowadays, you'll hear new albums from major acts more like every two to three years.
Elton confuses digital music and the internet. Digital technology puts the recording technology that only the Beatles could afford to use onto everyone's PC, and could theoretically be used to make some genuinely great albums. However, the Internet and today's musical delivery methods place such an emphasis on individual songs, that it often makes little sense for an artist to even bother with the concept of an album.
The problem is, ironically, that back in those days, an album was considered a work of art by itself and so it was appropriate to use the latest in studio technology to create sounds and songs that are impossible to play live. When I was a kid, radio stations wouldn't just play songs, they would play entire albums, start to stop. That just doesn't happen but rarely anymore - and then only on college radio.
Nowadays, a major act by a major company doesn't have the artistic freedom to do a good album as a whole - as there's so much emphasis on forcing a band to retain the same "sound" to keep loyal listeners, and, since tours are now big money makers too, the pressure to make an album that is playable live is even more immense.
Tiny Dancer Levon Madman across the Water Goodbye Yellow Brick Road Crocodile Rock Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me Someone Saved My Life Tonight and I'll take Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters up against any song the Who ever did, period.
It's interesting and I'll look at the article, but, one thing I can think of is that the extraction of a resource is not free rent as you describe, and arguably never has been. These days, extracting any of the major resources, iron, coal, oil, uranium, copper, aluminum and more, all require a considerable capital investment. This implies groups of people, and therefor, organization, control, and thus either corporations or governments.
So has your father ever been hit by a car while changing lanes?
Hmmm...... sounds to me like he's still alive, and its you that has a flawed line of reasoning by estimating risk based on the assumption of immediate total loss.
Face it, predicting another dotBoom over the internet these days is about as silly as predicting another dotBoom over the CD-ROM. It's so ubiquitious that the growth isn't there in the sense that excites Wall Street.
There's not even Web 2.0 spike to begin with.... people building web apps are going to maybe use Web 2.0 or maybe not. The previous web boom was more about putting money into internet companies that were building out for the first time. This is a much more evolutionary technology.
For that matter, there's not even an all out browser war any more, just a gradual increase in the use of FireFox that only engages Microsoft's attention to throw tabs onto IE6 and call it IE7. Back in the Netscape day, Gates and Co were so po'd they made a really groundbreaking browser from a DOM scripting standpoint in IE4... and they spent a few good shillings to do so. Now, what do we get, tabs? Microsoft is too busy building x-boxes and table computers to care about PCs any more and even Vista is anti-climatic.
Well, I think that's all a load of sunny sounding crap.... There's a reason that we do not hear about this other culture that you talk about, and that's because these other cultures live at the fringe of world affairs and are often pretty poor.
Having everyone cooperate is fine and well and waiving a magic wand to identify "freeloaders" is all fine and well, but the question always becomes, what do people cooperate towards, and who gets the job of identifying freeloaders and enforcing some work upon them? Bottom line is, both require a person to be in a position of power relative to the rest, and therein lies the downfall of any utopian society. Sure, if your leader is good, it is great, but, eventually, the leadership gets rewarded to those who would be the most ambitious but are able to publicly deny it the best. Because your culture doesn't allow for competition and only really has one cooperative enforcement mechanism, the end result is usually civil war. Indeed, civil wars go hand in hand with changes in power in any monarchy or monopolized power culture.
The best thing to do, really, is to view humanity as a brute force heuristic to self happiness, and let each go their own way, without much of a central authority at all. If people want to compete, they can, and if they don't, they don't. That's pretty much what America does and it works pretty well. You can, if you want, live without participating in competitive society - the Amish do it pretty well, actually.
But, you also have the option of forming your own group and your own culture to your heart's content, and inviting others to join you - that's what a corporation is for. This way, power is disbursed, and, as a matter of rule, there doesn't need to be a controlling authority that invites civil disruption over who gets to control it, so long as people recognize, as always, that central government is the enemy, and not the savior, in most cases.
Even if you have sex with an infected person, completely unprotected, your risk of catching HIV is something like 0.1%. So yeah, you roll the dice, but, most of the time, you'd actually be fine.
Oh, I was picked on because I was a dick! I still am. Oh well.
The emotional feeling you describe comes -after- doing the violent act that you did. You feel sick at what you've done, after the adrenaline comes down, but, the immediate glow, what your body tells you, is that it was good. It's only when your brain comes in do you get the bad feelings. But even still, at some level, you did enjoy it, because, otherwise, you wouldn't have done it, which was my point all along.
I've got my black colored glasses on, but to me it seems like almost every headline lately is either bad news for some group, or at least provokes a political brawl. But finally, after what seems like a brutal decade, there's been a bit of good news for Team USA. GM and Ford are both making money, and now someone has made a real advance in solar cell efficiency. As someone who lives in Delaware, and has seen banks slash their staff and Chrysler announce the closure of a key auto plant, the prospect of any industrial expansion is a welcome bonus.
Let's say something political, now. Let's hope that the Government can come together with the kind of tax incentives they are waiving around for Ethanol and Oil production to help building owners migrate to solar cells. I think we've beaten the crap out of each other enough debating energy independence and its just time to get rolling.
Well, I'm basically happy and you're just a dick, but that's ok because I still enjoy conversing with you. I was never beaten as a child, and I don't lay a hand on mine either. I'm one of those people that cringe when I see the person in a supermarket grabbing their child's arm too much. In such a case, were it not for the threat of jail, I'd probably deck that person and enjoy it immensely, largely because, I have such a strong empathy for the child. But, by and large, you are talking to someone who kept an ugly choke cherry tree alive in his back yard until it ultimately died by lightening, largely because I felt bad for it being an ugly tree. If someone would have knocked my tree, I'd probably would have been tempted to shoot them!
There is a huge difference between organized violence of war and the kind of violence that I am talking about. War is violent, for sure, but it isn't the kind of violence that is automatically built into people, and I believe that people get into wars assuming that it is. Fundamentally, that which makes you want to catch a pass thrown to you is the same emotion that the army plays on when it hands you a rifle and makes you want to shoot someone. That's got nothing to do with it the instinctive enjoyment of small, animal violence, although, victory does play a part in reaffirming one's commitment to the war.
Even today, Barrey McCaffrey said that the Army is basically, at its best, designed to attract varsity high school atheletes, and then they present the war as a sort of a sport, with the same team chemistry, but with much higher stakes. You don't want to have older people on the battlefield because as you get older you tend to become more secure and become less suspectible to the need to impress other people. And its also for this reason that the Army is very conservative when it comes to changing unit chemistry or culture. Tradition is a powerful motivator.
I used to drink with B-17 pilots that had no problem dropping the bombs on civilians, but, they still drink because of all the flak coming back. As I said, the reason we avoid wars is that people do like to inflict violence, but, they don't like it coming back to them. At its best, society should try to replace the spectacal of destruction with the spectacal of creation, so that, we get our visual stimuli from building newer and bigger things. It's only natural that a society that builds less tends to become more violent.
You are the one that is dangerous, because you suffer from the twin evil of approaching human morality on absolutist terms, and to make that work, you have to oppress humanity to make it conform to your stilted world view.
My argument is that violence is fun. The common sense evidence is that people wouldn't do violent things if they didn't enjoy it. The fact is, violence is as much as a part of the human enjoyment as it is for any other higher animals... really, most animals.. dogs, cats, bears, tigers, all along the line. Guess what they do? As children, they all fight! What are people but animals? What do people like to do, but fight! They fight as children to learn to survive and to strengthen themselves, and they fight as adults to win favor in whatever social unit they are in, and to win the right to mate with the most.
Our society, of course, puts our violence into bottles, and rightfully so, so we can have a lawful civilization. Right now, that's sports, and a bit of fisticuffs between boys until they reach college age. That's what society approves of. It approves of it because people instinctively know that you have to be ready for conflict - if anything, women instinctively like men who win versus men who lose. Just like animal females will mate with the alpha first, so too do human women.
Beyond that, there's the military, or a physical line of work where one's conflict is against nature itself. In either case, a society has trained its children through conflict and sport, born out by evolution, to either expand against a harsh natural world, or against other national rivals.
In your world, no violence is acceptable. And that's simply not human. It's like arguing that sex isn't acceptable, but for procreation. Sure, you may not like the morality, but at the end of the day, you have to either deal with reality or ignore it. Like a deluded scientologist or other brainwashed whack job, you repeat your unrealities over and over and over again, calling everyone who disagrees with you stupid. But all I have to do to prove mine is to invite you to actually look at the world instead of trying to impose your own analytical framework on top of it. You keep bashing this square peg into a round hole and really have no clue.
If violence isn't fun, then why do people watch ultimate fighting? Why do people play Unreal Tournament - and so many play the sniper role, even though it is the hardest, just to get that special satisfaction of hearing it say "head shot", when you blow someone's head off? Why does EVERY modern culture have a metaphore for every collective action as a form of violence? We have our war on drugs, war on terror, war on poverty, war on crowded superhighways on tuesday, crusade to save the earth, and and so on. It doesn't even matter which political party. Across the ocean, our islamic rivals have jihad, which really, in their culture, means a jihad on drugs, a jihad on poverty, a jihad on superhighways on tuesday.
Look, if people are only a few million years evolved from other animals, then scientifically speaking, we really can't be THAT much better. We're just not. Anyone whose never enjoyed pinning someone in a wrestling match, knocking someone on their ass in a football game, socking a guy in the mouth for saying something to your wife, really, isn't human. It's you that's f--- up, not me. I can at least acknowledge what's in myself and thus develop a moral framework to guard against its excess, or adopt a religion designed to do the same, you, on the other hand, just sweep the problem under the rug.... fly into the murky storm of human emotion with a hand on one of your eyes.
Haven't you ever been in a fistfight or stolen something? Haven't you ever broken something? Come on? Getting drunk and rowdy and raising hell on some level is fun. I mean seriously, if getting into a brawl in a video game is fun, why not the real thing? It only ceases to be fun when the kind of hell you would inflict on someone else is inevitably inflicted back on you.
To me, all of those scientific disciplines that you mention always try to look through things your way because academic types are precisely the sort of people that eschew the sport of violence because deep down inside they know they suck at it. I was never good at sports. I was never good at fighting, so I hid out in the library and learned computers in h.s. But, wow, when I did win a few fights every now and then, I really did enjoy it. Then, when I went to college, our frat was basically a high tech gang, and, well, getting into giant frat to frat brawls was pretty cool. Don't know a barroom brawl until you tried it. So, I see people that pretend to believe otherwise are living a lie.
Really, today's crime among young men is because we have a society that gives them too much freedom, so they do the free thing, which is to get violent and rowdy. What you really need is a lot of structure, and a lot of powerful authority figures intervening early on. Fathers matter, but so do strong teachers, and strong police. Young women may not need the brutal headmasters of old, but young men surely do.
Men are powerful things, and so, are capable of sustaining some amount of discipline in youth that honestly would be damaging to women. And men need to be tempered, like a piece of metal must be beaten into steel. IT's just the way it is. You may have some self denying academics on your side, but I've got thousands of years of successful societies on mine.
The thing of it is, the capital required to do certain kinds of R&D is so heavy, that startups could just as likely leverage the thousands of patents the likes of Intel, IBM and Microsoft have behind them. What can't happen today is, somebody at MS does something kind cool, but someone else outside sees the potential of it, fixes it, and makes a go of it. Today, that lands you in patent trouble, and really, its unfair because that sort of free for was exactly how MS and Intel got started themselves.
Anything law that protects the "little guy" protects the big guy that much more.
Rehabilitation ultimately depends on people unlearning something. In the case of violent criminals, for them, they have learned that robbing and shooting and raping and killing are all fun. Indeed, it must be that these sins are fun, otherwise, companies wouldn't make billions of dollars selling this stuff in music, movies and video games. For someone that actually did those terrible things, you are sort of asking them to learn to believe what they will always see is a lie, and no amount of psychiatry can cover that up, I think. The best you can get is a promise to not do it again, and I don't know how much that is worth.
SIMD / MIMD are about powerful vector processing, and I thought Cray was building this stuff a long time before anyone else was. I chalk this up as, yet another reason to get rid of patents altogether.
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The nice thing about software though is that you can charge whatever you want for it and still make a profit
To a point - you have to recoup your development costs, and those tend to climb exponentially with the complexity of the product.
The whole concept of seperating content from the hardware has just turned the content people into utter savages. Watching TV at home? You have to pay twice to see the ballgame. That's ridiculous.
Is there no limit to the greed these people have?
Can they even sleep with themselves?
IT's silly, why pay $66 bucks for a copy of watered down Dista when you can steal Ultimate? I mean, if you are in a country that has no IP enforcment, why not just steal the best one?
Despite the imperialistic wishes of the EU, the USA does not have to abide by EU laws. People are competing against Microsoft, they just lose. Let's spell this out, after a few releases, Netscape was not as good a brower as IE 4.0, Borland C++ was not as good as Visual C++, and dBase III was certainly no match for FoxPro. On the other hand, where people make the right decisions, they gain on MS. Zune is no iPod, msnbc is no CNN or Fox, IE is no Firefox and Windows is no Linux.
If the best they've got is David Hasselhoff, then no wonder they are so against having to pay for music. It's just not worth paying for over there!
The point is, you didn't have to look at all a few decades ago. Good music was pervasive. Now the music that is pervasive is Britney Crapola, and the good stuff is underground or Indy. If the likes of Phil Lesh and other good bands were actually what the music industry pushed - then, I doubt people would feel so negatively about a recording industry that really was once held in much higher esteem. Back in the day, you could feel like a record producer was a part of the revolution, and now he or she is just another suit of "the Man".
So basically, RIAA really ticks people off because they've come to represent music that honestly isn't worth paying for anyway. I mean, give Britney Spears money? Heck, I could bore you for a longer time with my lousy game. Give me $15 instead. Or you could just wait a month until I port it to Linux and open source the thing anyway.
So yeah, screw RIAA.
Hooray for Germany! Is it still bad to say this?
Executive orders are nice, but it takes the legislature in American politics to actually allocate funds. Gov Ted has issued marching orders but has no bucks to pay for it. So really, it's a nice sound bite thing for a re-election campaign. He can say "I'm working to give broadband to everyone", when he's really not. He just signed a piece of paper demanding people to do something that can't be done unless the Ohio legislature actually authorizes money for it.
Total fraud.
Managers are going to look at this and say, "why can't we just IPv6 for new stuff". So, I'd say this proposal is dead on arrival.
I mean, the biggest act of GenX - Nirvana, was an overrated distortion band built around the central premise that Daddy was too mean in my posh suburb and so I had to go and shoot myself. What a bunch of drivel.
And then, Pearl Jam is even worse... It's like, they have that song "Better Man", singing some sympathetic song that's supposed to make me feel sorry for her. But for me, I like to sing that song saracastically... "Ahhhhh pity party..... she lies and still loves him, can't find a better man", like, I'm supposed to feel sorry for her because she's a liar.
Stupid broad, go find a better man, that's what I say.
No amount of distorted sound can correct the whiny nature of today's male music. John Lennon rolls over in his grave at the sound of these p----ies.
Today's music sucks compared to the best of the mid 1960s through the mid 1970s. It's just true. Artists in that era incorporated a wide range of sounds and styles into their work to create a discography that is often remarkable and most likely impossible to duplicate today. The other thing, too, is that major artists of that era were expected to produce an album at least once a year, and, more often than not, every six months. That's an impressive amount of material. Nowadays, you'll hear new albums from major acts more like every two to three years.
Elton confuses digital music and the internet. Digital technology puts the recording technology that only the Beatles could afford to use onto everyone's PC, and could theoretically be used to make some genuinely great albums. However, the Internet and today's musical delivery methods place such an emphasis on individual songs, that it often makes little sense for an artist to even bother with the concept of an album.
The problem is, ironically, that back in those days, an album was considered a work of art by itself and so it was appropriate to use the latest in studio technology to create sounds and songs that are impossible to play live. When I was a kid, radio stations wouldn't just play songs, they would play entire albums, start to stop. That just doesn't happen but rarely anymore - and then only on college radio.
Nowadays, a major act by a major company doesn't have the artistic freedom to do a good album as a whole - as there's so much emphasis on forcing a band to retain the same "sound" to keep loyal listeners, and, since tours are now big money makers too, the pressure to make an album that is playable live is even more immense.
And by old, I mean, pre-1976
Tiny Dancer
Levon
Madman across the Water
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Crocodile Rock
Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me
Someone Saved My Life Tonight
and I'll take Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters up against any song the Who ever did, period.
It's interesting and I'll look at the article, but, one thing I can think of is that the extraction of a resource is not free rent as you describe, and arguably never has been. These days, extracting any of the major resources, iron, coal, oil, uranium, copper, aluminum and more, all require a considerable capital investment. This implies groups of people, and therefor, organization, control, and thus either corporations or governments.
So has your father ever been hit by a car while changing lanes?
Hmmm...... sounds to me like he's still alive, and its you that has a flawed line of reasoning by estimating risk based on the assumption of immediate total loss.
Face it, predicting another dotBoom over the internet these days is about as silly as predicting another dotBoom over the CD-ROM. It's so ubiquitious that the growth isn't there in the sense that excites Wall Street.
There's not even Web 2.0 spike to begin with.... people building web apps are going to maybe use Web 2.0 or maybe not. The previous web boom was more about putting money into internet companies that were building out for the first time. This is a much more evolutionary technology.
For that matter, there's not even an all out browser war any more, just a gradual increase in the use of FireFox that only engages Microsoft's attention to throw tabs onto IE6 and call it IE7. Back in the Netscape day, Gates and Co were so po'd they made a really groundbreaking browser from a DOM scripting standpoint in IE4... and they spent a few good shillings to do so. Now, what do we get, tabs? Microsoft is too busy building x-boxes and table computers to care about PCs any more and even Vista is anti-climatic.
Well, I think that's all a load of sunny sounding crap.... There's a reason that we do not hear about this other culture that you talk about, and that's because these other cultures live at the fringe of world affairs and are often pretty poor.
Having everyone cooperate is fine and well and waiving a magic wand to identify "freeloaders" is all fine and well, but the question always becomes, what do people cooperate towards, and who gets the job of identifying freeloaders and enforcing some work upon them? Bottom line is, both require a person to be in a position of power relative to the rest, and therein lies the downfall of any utopian society. Sure, if your leader is good, it is great, but, eventually, the leadership gets rewarded to those who would be the most ambitious but are able to publicly deny it the best. Because your culture doesn't allow for competition and only really has one cooperative enforcement mechanism, the end result is usually civil war. Indeed, civil wars go hand in hand with changes in power in any monarchy or monopolized power culture.
The best thing to do, really, is to view humanity as a brute force heuristic to self happiness, and let each go their own way, without much of a central authority at all. If people want to compete, they can, and if they don't, they don't. That's pretty much what America does and it works pretty well. You can, if you want, live without participating in competitive society - the Amish do it pretty well, actually.
But, you also have the option of forming your own group and your own culture to your heart's content, and inviting others to join you - that's what a corporation is for. This way, power is disbursed, and, as a matter of rule, there doesn't need to be a controlling authority that invites civil disruption over who gets to control it, so long as people recognize, as always, that central government is the enemy, and not the savior, in most cases.
Even if you have sex with an infected person, completely unprotected, your risk of catching HIV is something like 0.1%. So yeah, you roll the dice, but, most of the time, you'd actually be fine.
Oh, I was picked on because I was a dick! I still am. Oh well.
The emotional feeling you describe comes -after- doing the violent act that you did. You feel sick at what you've done, after the adrenaline comes down, but, the immediate glow, what your body tells you, is that it was good. It's only when your brain comes in do you get the bad feelings. But even still, at some level, you did enjoy it, because, otherwise, you wouldn't have done it, which was my point all along.
I've got my black colored glasses on, but to me it seems like almost every headline lately is either bad news for some group, or at least provokes a political brawl. But finally, after what seems like a brutal decade, there's been a bit of good news for Team USA. GM and Ford are both making money, and now someone has made a real advance in solar cell efficiency. As someone who lives in Delaware, and has seen banks slash their staff and Chrysler announce the closure of a key auto plant, the prospect of any industrial expansion is a welcome bonus.
Let's say something political, now. Let's hope that the Government can come together with the kind of tax incentives they are waiving around for Ethanol and Oil production to help building owners migrate to solar cells. I think we've beaten the crap out of each other enough debating energy independence and its just time to get rolling.
Well, I'm basically happy and you're just a dick, but that's ok because I still enjoy conversing with you. I was never beaten as a child, and I don't lay a hand on mine either. I'm one of those people that cringe when I see the person in a supermarket grabbing their child's arm too much. In such a case, were it not for the threat of jail, I'd probably deck that person and enjoy it immensely, largely because, I have such a strong empathy for the child. But, by and large, you are talking to someone who kept an ugly choke cherry tree alive in his back yard until it ultimately died by lightening, largely because I felt bad for it being an ugly tree. If someone would have knocked my tree, I'd probably would have been tempted to shoot them!
There is a huge difference between organized violence of war and the kind of violence that I am talking about. War is violent, for sure, but it isn't the kind of violence that is automatically built into people, and I believe that people get into wars assuming that it is. Fundamentally, that which makes you want to catch a pass thrown to you is the same emotion that the army plays on when it hands you a rifle and makes you want to shoot someone. That's got nothing to do with it the instinctive enjoyment of small, animal violence, although, victory does play a part in reaffirming one's commitment to the war.
Even today, Barrey McCaffrey said that the Army is basically, at its best, designed to attract varsity high school atheletes, and then they present the war as a sort of a sport, with the same team chemistry, but with much higher stakes. You don't want to have older people on the battlefield because as you get older you tend to become more secure and become less suspectible to the need to impress other people. And its also for this reason that the Army is very conservative when it comes to changing unit chemistry or culture. Tradition is a powerful motivator.
I used to drink with B-17 pilots that had no problem dropping the bombs on civilians, but, they still drink because of all the flak coming back. As I said, the reason we avoid wars is that people do like to inflict violence, but, they don't like it coming back to them. At its best, society should try to replace the spectacal of destruction with the spectacal of creation, so that, we get our visual stimuli from building newer and bigger things. It's only natural that a society that builds less tends to become more violent.
You are the one that is dangerous, because you suffer from the twin evil of approaching human morality on absolutist terms, and to make that work, you have to oppress humanity to make it conform to your stilted world view.
My argument is that violence is fun. The common sense evidence is that people wouldn't do violent things if they didn't enjoy it. The fact is, violence is as much as a part of the human enjoyment as it is for any other higher animals... really, most animals.. dogs, cats, bears, tigers, all along the line. Guess what they do? As children, they all fight! What are people but animals? What do people like to do, but fight! They fight as children to learn to survive and to strengthen themselves, and they fight as adults to win favor in whatever social unit they are in, and to win the right to mate with the most.
Our society, of course, puts our violence into bottles, and rightfully so, so we can have a lawful civilization. Right now, that's sports, and a bit of fisticuffs between boys until they reach college age. That's what society approves of. It approves of it because people instinctively know that you have to be ready for conflict - if anything, women instinctively like men who win versus men who lose. Just like animal females will mate with the alpha first, so too do human women.
Beyond that, there's the military, or a physical line of work where one's conflict is against nature itself. In either case, a society has trained its children through conflict and sport, born out by evolution, to either expand against a harsh natural world, or against other national rivals.
In your world, no violence is acceptable. And that's simply not human. It's like arguing that sex isn't acceptable, but for procreation. Sure, you may not like the morality, but at the end of the day, you have to either deal with reality or ignore it. Like a deluded scientologist or other brainwashed whack job, you repeat your unrealities over and over and over again, calling everyone who disagrees with you stupid. But all I have to do to prove mine is to invite you to actually look at the world instead of trying to impose your own analytical framework on top of it. You keep bashing this square peg into a round hole and really have no clue.
If violence isn't fun, then why do people watch ultimate fighting? Why do people play Unreal Tournament - and so many play the sniper role, even though it is the hardest, just to get that special satisfaction of hearing it say "head shot", when you blow someone's head off? Why does EVERY modern culture have a metaphore for every collective action as a form of violence? We have our war on drugs, war on terror, war on poverty, war on crowded superhighways on tuesday, crusade to save the earth, and and so on. It doesn't even matter which political party. Across the ocean, our islamic rivals have jihad, which really, in their culture, means a jihad on drugs, a jihad on poverty, a jihad on superhighways on tuesday.
Look, if people are only a few million years evolved from other animals, then scientifically speaking, we really can't be THAT much better. We're just not. Anyone whose never enjoyed pinning someone in a wrestling match, knocking someone on their ass in a football game, socking a guy in the mouth for saying something to your wife, really, isn't human. It's you that's f--- up, not me. I can at least acknowledge what's in myself and thus develop a moral framework to guard against its excess, or adopt a religion designed to do the same, you, on the other hand, just sweep the problem under the rug.... fly into the murky storm of human emotion with a hand on one of your eyes.
Haven't you ever been in a fistfight or stolen something? Haven't you ever broken something? Come on? Getting drunk and rowdy and raising hell on some level is fun. I mean seriously, if getting into a brawl in a video game is fun, why not the real thing? It only ceases to be fun when the kind of hell you would inflict on someone else is inevitably inflicted back on you.
To me, all of those scientific disciplines that you mention always try to look through things your way because academic types are precisely the sort of people that eschew the sport of violence because deep down inside they know they suck at it. I was never good at sports. I was never good at fighting, so I hid out in the library and learned computers in h.s. But, wow, when I did win a few fights every now and then, I really did enjoy it. Then, when I went to college, our frat was basically a high tech gang, and, well, getting into giant frat to frat brawls was pretty cool. Don't know a barroom brawl until you tried it. So, I see people that pretend to believe otherwise are living a lie.
Really, today's crime among young men is because we have a society that gives them too much freedom, so they do the free thing, which is to get violent and rowdy. What you really need is a lot of structure, and a lot of powerful authority figures intervening early on. Fathers matter, but so do strong teachers, and strong police. Young women may not need the brutal headmasters of old, but young men surely do.
Men are powerful things, and so, are capable of sustaining some amount of discipline in youth that honestly would be damaging to women. And men need to be tempered, like a piece of metal must be beaten into steel. IT's just the way it is. You may have some self denying academics on your side, but I've got thousands of years of successful societies on mine.
The thing of it is, the capital required to do certain kinds of R&D is so heavy, that startups could just as likely leverage the thousands of patents the likes of Intel, IBM and Microsoft have behind them. What can't happen today is, somebody at MS does something kind cool, but someone else outside sees the potential of it, fixes it, and makes a go of it. Today, that lands you in patent trouble, and really, its unfair because that sort of free for was exactly how MS and Intel got started themselves.
Anything law that protects the "little guy" protects the big guy that much more.
Rehabilitation ultimately depends on people unlearning something. In the case of violent criminals, for them, they have learned that robbing and shooting and raping and killing are all fun. Indeed, it must be that these sins are fun, otherwise, companies wouldn't make billions of dollars selling this stuff in music, movies and video games. For someone that actually did those terrible things, you are sort of asking them to learn to believe what they will always see is a lie, and no amount of psychiatry can cover that up, I think. The best you can get is a promise to not do it again, and I don't know how much that is worth.
SIMD / MIMD are about powerful vector processing, and I thought Cray was building this stuff a long time before anyone else was. I chalk this up as, yet another reason to get rid of patents altogether.