do you have someone on staff who is paid $25,000 or more per year for lobbying/propaganda activities (or whose job duties include enough lobbying stuff that the proportion of their pay that goes towards lobbying is >=$25K)?
> If you support the regulation of political statements, you are against freedom of speech. Period. End of story. > You are against freedom of speech! Period. End of story!
bullshit.
"regulation" is a different word from "prohibition", and different again from "limitation" and "restriction".
i'm 100% pro-freedom of speech, against censorship of ANY kind but i'm also very much in favour of regulation of political statements - i.e. having regulations that require identification of who has authorised and who has paid for the political statements. that's NOT the same thing as limiting what kind of speech is allowed or punishing people for saying unpopular/inconvenient things, it's just informing the public who is behind the message, so they can make their own conclusions about bias or ulterior motive.
blogging has long been defined in my personal dictionary as "blog: an astro-turfer's wet-dream".
I fully support stem cell research. I think it is a sin not to. The only problem people like me have with embryonic stem cell research is not the research at all, but the production of the stem cells to begin with. In order to harvest embryonic stem cells (as my feeble mind understands it), an embryo must be coaxed to divide and start to grow. At a certain point, it has to be destroyed to harvest the stem cells. It's that destruction of a growing embryo that is the problem. People like me equate that to an abortion, but it's no longer about women's choice, but experimentation and profit.
then why do nutcases with beliefs like yours have a problem with somatic cell nuclear transfer (AKA "therapeutic cloning") - which has nothing at all to do with conception, abortion, babies or even embryos...it's about taking an egg cell (human or animal), removing ALL genetic material from it, and inserting DNA from an adult patient's cells. then triggering it to start dividing and growing to produce stem cells. the stem cells are harvested long before the mass of cells could even remotely be called "embryo-like".
it's a tissue culture made for a specific patient using that specific patient's own DNA. yet loony fundamentalists are as opposed to it as they are opposed to abortion - presumably because they have no understanding of the science involved, they're just reacting against the word "cloning" in the journalistic term "therapeutic cloning".
and they don't know that stem cells can come from other sources.
pure bullshit. nobody who's in favour of embryonic stem cell research thinks it should be done INSTEAD of adult stem cell research. it should be done AS WELL AS adult stem cell research, and both of them used where it makes most sense to use them. they're well aware of the existence of adult stem cells, and of the differences between adult and embryonic stem cells (the major one being that adult stem cells are not pluri-potent - i.e. unlike embryonic stem cells they are very limited in what other kinds of cells they can become. many cell types can ONLY be grown from embryonic stem cells.)
it's not the pro-research people who are ignorant, it's the anti-research people (the loony fundies). they're ignorant, they like it that way, and they intend to stay that way.
A small percentage of the miles I drive take place during a day in which I travel more than 200 miles. If the tesla were cheaper, I could have two cars: a cheap internal combustion car to make long trips, and a tesla to do most of my driving. We don't need one car to serve all purposes for all people.
alternatively, buy a small electric car for day-to-day driving and hire a bigger car when you need it for long trips.
that would work out many thousands of dollars/year cheaper than the repayments on a vehicle that sits idle in the driveway most of the year.
and if you planned ahead and put aside (in a separate savings account) the same amount that you *would* have paid on the loan repayments for the second car, you'd have thousands in the bank at the end of the year - more than enough to pay for the hire-car AND the holiday itself, especially if you get a train/bus/plane instead of a long drive and hired the car locally when you get to your destination (depends - the long road trip through scenic countryside may be part of the point of the holiday).
Congratulations for being made of money and/or running a business from your home.
i'm not made of money, nor do i run a business at home, but i run raid-1 on all my computers (linux software raid, of course). actually, there's one exception - the crappy old laptop in the back room, which only has a 10GB drive anyway.
i would run raid-5 but i can't quite justify spending the money on a hardware raid controller with non-volatile cache - without which, raid-5 is too slow to bother with.
having lost nearly all my data once due to a disk crash (and inadequate backups), i'm quite happy to spend twice as much for my disk storage for raid-1. a 320GB drive costs $AU128 today, so i have to spend $256 to get two of them. it's worth it. it's still significantly less than $1 per GB.
compared to the approx $2000 i paid for my first 20MB hard disk (a 65ms microscience clunker) back in about 1982 or 83, it's an amazing bargain.
akamai can't be used as justification for tossing out net-neutrality because the service it provides doesn't in any way depend on special priviledges such as TOS or bandwidth prioritisation/limitation.
akamai is just another service on the internet (albeit one with MANY more servers than most, and geographically distributed far more than most), it is available to anyone on the same terms.
There's no way the best scientists have to make do on a mere salary unless that salary is in the millions.
yes, there's every way. it's the usual state of affairs for the vast majority of scientists, as it is for the vast majority of workers in every field.
that especially includes the best scientists as well as the average scientists - the better they are, the more likely there are to be FAR more motivated by interest in what they're doing rather than profit....because it takes a huge amount of personal interest to BE the best.
and managers know that, they know that most scientists will take a job based on how interesting it is...with income a secondary consideration at best (other factors like convenience, quality of colleagues, reputation of the lab/institution, etc usually come way before income). Scientists, while they are usually happy with what they get, are as exploited financially as any other tech worker. As a tech worker, they generally get paid significantly more than unskilled workers - but they don't get anywhere near as much as the management or owner classes.
A lot of scientists absolutely are motivated by profit.
some are. most are motivated a lot more by their intrinsic interest in what they are working on.
And profit happens to be the best way to allocate talent by encouraging the best to step up and try.
amazing how you can come to that conclusion when every single piece of research into the motivating effects of reward finds the exact opposite, that it actually de-motivates.
i guess that shows you're no scientist since you prefer ideology to evidence.
Those who can't hack it in corporate labs SETTLE for government labs.
pure bullshit. some of the best (as in most interesting) research is done in government labs and other publicly funded labs, and some of it is done ONLY there because there is no prospect of short-term profit (of course, as soon as publicly funded labs discover something that has short-term profit potential, then the private labs jump on the bandwagon, getting a jump-start from all the publicly funded research).
Socialism just doesn't work. Quit trying to apply it to the medical industry.
how droll. i'm arguing AGAINST a form of socialism in the medical industry....or didn't you realise that government-mandated monopolies are a form of socialism?
or maybe you're just the usual kind of blinkered corporatism-uber-alles philistine who *JUST KNOWS* that socialism and welfare are bad when people benefit from them, but natural and proper when business benefits?
it's bullshit, anyway. most scientists aren't motivated by profit, they're motivated by the research itself (and research grants, of course), and most of them work in publicly funded institutions, anyway. of those that work in the private sector, very few of them actually share in the profit - they're just paid a salary like anyone else. so there's little evidence that patent monopolies are a motivating factor for any scientists, and no evidence (plus much counter-evidence) that they motivate a majority of scientists.
scientists are also motivated by status and the tenure that often comes with status - and the way to increase status as a scientist is to publish.
all the chicken-little style doom and gloom about how terrible life would be without patents is just self-serving propaganda from those making grotesquely unreasonable profits from the current system, and from the dim-witted drones who like to fantasise that one day they too will be able to make grotesque profits.
Because it's almost impossible to tell the difference between coming up with it independently and copying the earlier one.
no it's not. researchers keep notes and journals and diaries. anything developed in too short a time to be reflected in a journal is likely to be too trivial/obvious to even deserve a patent.
I have an idea that would revolutionize the world, but I tell it to nobody. It's my idea. While non-obvious, it's easily reverse engineerable so everybody would be able to make it and I'd make no money. Why bother? Now introduce patent laws. Hey, I can tell the world, market my idea and make loads of money for twenty years.
without patent monopolies, you'd have a choice between not doing anything with your idea and going ahead and producing/selling it anyway. if it was a really complicated idea, you'd have at least a few years lead while the competition ramped up (and afterwards you'd still have the first-to-market advantage). if it only took weeks for the competition to ramp up then your idea was too trivial/obvious to deserve a 20 year monopoly anyway. either way, there's no particular incentive to hoard the idea - you wont gain from it at all that way.
in any case, why should the rest of the world care whether you make loads of money for twenty years? if your idea is so useful, then it will be reinvented (and probably in a lot less than 20 years).
btw, you're obviously in favour of (at least the idea of) entrepreneurship and business, and presumably the idea of the "Free Market" too. how do you reconcile that with the obviously socialist nature of government-granted monopolies? is it just the usual unstated hypocritical assumption that "socialism and welfare is good if it's for business, but bad if it's for actual people", or have you actually thought out some way of reconciling the conflict?
I also think they need to return to the 'working sample' requirement for a patent, and get rid of 'method' patents which cover the idea of a process, not the process itself.
that would be a good start, but it's the exact opposite of what is happening. with pharmaceutical patents, for example, India allows patents ONLY for the process of creating the drug, not for the drug itself or the various uses of it. IMO, that's a not un-reasonable position. unfortunately, they're being forced to "harmonize" their patent laws with the U.S., so they'll be subject to the same evergreening patent abuses that most of the rest of the world is.
i'm not at all against a better, reformed patent system....but given a choice between no patents at all and the current patent system, i'd choose no patents.
Sure, we have a pretty good public research program, but private industry still comes up with most of the new stuff.
it doesn't, actually. it does in some fields (like computers and electronics) but it certainly doesn't in the pharmaceutical field. most new drugs are discovered and developed in government funded labs, at universities and public research orgs, etc. it's only when they have something useful that it's sold (for a pittance, almost given away) to one of the big pharma companies to market and distribute.
about the only USEFUL contribution big pharma makes is to run the trials for approval of the drug - and yes, the trials ARE expensive and time-consuming....but there's no reason why they couldn't be publicly funded as well as the research and the resulting drug then sold for cost + a reasonable percentage rather than cost times an enormous profit factor.
the public is paying the bills and taking the risks for the research, so the public should be the ones to benefit/profit from it - both from economical access to the drugs that THEIR taxes helped to develop and from the small reasonable profit (which should be plowed back in to the public research labs)
Inventor's don't have to share anything with the outside world. Patents are simply recognizing the inventor's right to say, "I'll show you how to do X if you promise to do Y."
patents do a lot more than that - they also say "and nobody else is allowed to independently invent it either".
in most countries, it's not even the first to come up with an idea, it's the first to FILE for the patent that gets the monopoly.
Why shouldn't the inventor have the right do do that? It's his invention after all.
a) why shouldn't someone who independently comes up with the same or similar idea be able to do whatever they want with it?
b) ideas don't and can't belong to anyone. any monopoly of them is an artificial government-mandated one, a socialist intervention in the marketplace.
c) the justification for patents is that they encourage innovation and the eventual sharing of ideas. that may have been true a few hundred years ago now, but it's certainly not true today. if anything, patents STIFLE innovation, not encourage it. there's also a sufficient body of public knowledge and a sufficiently widespread ethos of both sharing and research for the common good that there is more than enough "incentive" to research anything that we actually need.
The automotive manufacturers are arguably helping reduce the accident counts by making the various contributory technologies less distractive, such as by building in hands-free calling.
it's not the use of hands that makes talking on the phone dangerous while driving, it's the distraction of the conversation itself.
numerous studies have shown that there is little or no difference between using a hands-free and a non-hands-free phone. diverting your attention from the road and the drivers & pedestrians around you is dangerous.
the last thing the world needs is yet more distraction opportunities for drivers - and what is it with people, anyway, can't they go 5 minutes without immersing themselves in consuming AV product?
How moronic do they make Greens these days? Yea that pond scum will absorb a lot of CO2... and release it right back when you burn it for fuel. So it is carbon neutral unless you plan to compact the algae into bricks and bury it.
No. Algal biodiesel is carbon neutral if you burn it, because burning it emits the same amount of carbon as was removed from the atmosphere by growing the algae. Algol biodisel would be carbon negative if you buried it, because that would be taking carbon out of the atmosphere.
actually, it's better than that. even burning biodiesel effectively reduces the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere because it *replaces* the burning of fossil fuel. that's a net win.
btw, burning it doesn't emit the same amount of carbon as was removed by growing it. there's waste product (containing carbon) left over after processing, not all of it is converted to oil and burnt. so it's more accurate to say "burning it emits most of the same amount of carbon...."
The lesson is, don't try to set up a totalitarian regime in Sydney.
at least, not without scaring the hell out of the population with bullshit about queue-jumping terrorist refugees, bogus anthrax in the mail, and rising interest rates.
i was arguing based on fact, not making yet another comment on what a bunch of self-serving arseholes arrange for themselves via legislation and supreme court interpretations: spending money is not speech.
while you can argue that donating money can qualify as "freedom of association", it certainly does not qualify as "speech".
as for your comments on the mafia and hamas: speech is speech, whether it's in support of a popular or mainstream organisation or in support of unpopular organisations. in fact, it's easy to argue that popular speech doesn't actually need protection, but that unpopular speech very much does need protection. if donating money to the democrats or the republicans or any other party qualifies as protected free speech, then so does donating money to hamas, or the mafia, or any other organisation (regardless of their objectives or methods).
otherwise, all a govt has to do is declare any dissent organisation to be "criminal" or "terrorist" and suddenly, they have no legitimate voice any more - leaving them a choice between silence and illegitimate expression (like bombing).
and, finally, supporting Hamas definitely can be 'citizen participation in the domestic political process' - it's a statement that the citizen does not support the government's foreign policy, that they would prefer the govt to stop blindly supporting israel (and veto-ing every single UN sanction against them) no matter what war crimes and other atrocities they commit, that they want real peace in the middle east, not a program of slow genocide of the palestinians.
if financial transactions are "speech" and thus protected in the U.S. by the first amendment to the constitution, then how is it legal to prohibit donating money to Hamas or other palestinian charity organisations? (the militant wing is only a small part of Hamas' activities - they're very popular over there because they build hospitals and schools and feed people)
isn't that speech too - even if unpopular? (in fact, unpopular speech is precisely the kind of speech that NEEDS protection).
It'll never happen because it's a blatant violation of the First Amendment.
huh?
exactly how is placing limits on *campaign financing* in any way a violation of free speech?
money isn't speech. spending isn't speech. bribery isn't speech. corruption of representatives or parties isn't speech. drowning out everyone else's voices with a million dollars worth of monotone isn't speech.
you'd still be perfectly free to make your arguments to other people, including to candidates or elected representatives - just without the corrupting influence of large amounts of money to back up your words.
oh trivial things, really. proposing bills for and voting for things like funding public health and public education services, anti-pollution laws, protection of individual rights, even down to legislating a livable minimum wage.
in other words, pretty much the exact opposite of what most of them vote for now.
government exists to do collectively the things that it makes sense to do collectively, so that everyone benefits from living in a society, not just a few.
Holding them to the notion of "improving life for all people" smacks of communism. It's not the government's responsibility to improve the lives of people- at least directly. This is a responsibility that each person assumes as a member of a free society.
no, it smacks of democracy. you know, that weird and unfashionable idea that elected members should actually represent the people who live in the region that elected them and act in their interests.
an elected representative is supposed to be the agent of the people in their electorate, and that includes acting to improve their lives.
ps: please take the following advice: if you're an american, then take the time to look up the words "communism" and "capitalism" so that you actually have some chance of knowing what the hell you're talking about before mentioning them - or, worse, basing your argument on your misunderstandings of the words.
I also take issue with Durbin saying this indicates a problem with the patent system. If a new drug comes out that offers no additional benefit, but has patent protection, WHY DOESN'T THE CONSUMER BUY THE GENERIC?
because the new, patentable drug is released only after at least 6 months of propaganda designed to make the old, out-of-patent drug seem dangerous or ineffective.
the classic example is the switch from aspirin to paracetamol (acetaminophen to you americans) as a general-purpose analgesic, the public were bombarded with stories about aspirin causing ulcers etc - but no mention at all of the fact that paracetamol has a lethal dose that can be only 2 or 3 times the effective dose (with overdoses causing a very nasty, painful death from liver failure). see the Toxic Dose heading in the wikipedia article for details.
Capitalism fundamentally depends on informed consumers.
no, capitalism doesn't depend on any such thing. you must be an american, because you appear to be using the word as a fuzzy, non-specific propaganda term that implies mass-market consumption, freedom, democracy, mom, and apple pie - i.e. all the things that have actually NOTHING to do with capitalism.
mass-market consumption, which is what you were really talking about, depends on ill-informed or, at best, ignorant consumers, all trained to buy and consume as a pavlovian reflex.
The tip about not using cat is stupid. If you use cat, it is easier to reedit the command line to repipe the file output to some other command instead. e.g. cat file | head, then up arrow replace head with grep or strings | head, or whatever.
yes, this is really useful.
i do it all the time when i have a very large file, and i'm e.g. iteratively developing the exact regular expression i need.
e.g.
start off with
head filename | grep "reallycomplexbutnotperfectpattern"
and keep editing the regexp until it gives me exactly what i want, nothing more and nothing less.
then, when i've got the pattern right, just hit up arrow and change "head" to "cat". or a sequence of cat, grep, sed, awk, whatever in the pipeline if you need to transform the input before the final grep.
similarly, you can insert "| head |" into a pipeline to run a quick test before you do the real thing.
for i in *.png; do convert "$i" "${i%.*}.jpg"; done
that's neat. i've always used sed or basename for this, but your way is better. i knew bash could do useful stuff with ${...} like having default values for vars, but for some reason it never really sunk in that it could do primitive sed-like stuff.
e.g. my old way of doing it (to be replaced by the ${VAR%pattern} way from now on):
for i in *.png ; do convert "$i" "$(basename $i.png).jpg" ; done
1. first impressions: the article is mostly simple, obvious stuff, i'm surprised to see it on IBM's developerworks site.
2. re: xargs end-of-file warning. as of version 4.2.9, GNU xargs defaults to not having an end-of-file string - worth knowing about, but not really a problem.
3. a far more common "gotcha" with xargs is dealing with space characters (and other characters with special meaning to the shell) in file names. this is especially common if you are working on directories containing HTML (and other) files uploaded by Mac & Windows users. to deal with it, use find's "-print0" arg and xargs' "-0" arg, for null-terminated input.
e.g. to set permissions to 644 on all the html files in a user's public_html directory:
most of the GNU utils support null-termination for input & output - so if you need to run grep or whatever on the output of find before passing it to xargs, you can. e.g. to find all copies of Matt Wright's scripts such as FormMail.pl in all users' web sites and disable them:
make your users use secure alternatives instead - such as the NMS versions of the same scripts. even Matt's Script Archive recommends the use of the NMS versions instead of his own, these days.
Slashdot Mirror
no, it wouldn't have. RTFB.
do you have someone on staff who is paid $25,000 or more per year for lobbying/propaganda activities (or whose job duties include enough lobbying stuff that the proportion of their pay that goes towards lobbying is >=$25K)?
no?
then you wouldn't have had to register.
> If you support the regulation of political statements, you are against freedom of speech. Period. End of story.
> You are against freedom of speech! Period. End of story!
bullshit.
"regulation" is a different word from "prohibition", and different again from "limitation" and "restriction".
i'm 100% pro-freedom of speech, against censorship of ANY kind but i'm also very much in favour of regulation of political statements - i.e. having regulations that require identification of who has authorised and who has paid for the political statements. that's NOT the same thing as limiting what kind of speech is allowed or punishing people for saying unpopular/inconvenient things, it's just informing the public who is behind the message, so they can make their own conclusions about bias or ulterior motive.
blogging has long been defined in my personal dictionary as "blog: an astro-turfer's wet-dream".
if you willingly downloaded a britney spears album (fake or real) then you deserve whatever happens to you.
then why do nutcases with beliefs like yours have a problem with somatic cell nuclear transfer (AKA "therapeutic cloning") - which has nothing at all to do with conception, abortion, babies or even embryos...it's about taking an egg cell (human or animal), removing ALL genetic material from it, and inserting DNA from an adult patient's cells. then triggering it to start dividing and growing to produce stem cells. the stem cells are harvested long before the mass of cells could even remotely be called "embryo-like".
it's a tissue culture made for a specific patient using that specific patient's own DNA. yet loony fundamentalists are as opposed to it as they are opposed to abortion - presumably because they have no understanding of the science involved, they're just reacting against the word "cloning" in the journalistic term "therapeutic cloning".
pure bullshit. nobody who's in favour of embryonic stem cell research thinks it should be done INSTEAD of adult stem cell research. it should be done AS WELL AS adult stem cell research, and both of them used where it makes most sense to use them. they're well aware of the existence of adult stem cells, and of the differences between adult and embryonic stem cells (the major one being that adult stem cells are not pluri-potent - i.e. unlike embryonic stem cells they are very limited in what other kinds of cells they can become. many cell types can ONLY be grown from embryonic stem cells.)
it's not the pro-research people who are ignorant, it's the anti-research people (the loony fundies). they're ignorant, they like it that way, and they intend to stay that way.
alternatively, buy a small electric car for day-to-day driving and hire a bigger car when you need it for long trips.
that would work out many thousands of dollars/year cheaper than the repayments on a vehicle that sits idle in the driveway most of the year.
and if you planned ahead and put aside (in a separate savings account) the same amount that you *would* have paid on the loan repayments for the second car, you'd have thousands in the bank at the end of the year - more than enough to pay for the hire-car AND the holiday itself, especially if you get a train/bus/plane instead of a long drive and hired the car locally when you get to your destination (depends - the long road trip through scenic countryside may be part of the point of the holiday).
i'm not made of money, nor do i run a business at home, but i run raid-1 on all my computers (linux software raid, of course). actually, there's one exception - the crappy old laptop in the back room, which only has a 10GB drive anyway.
i would run raid-5 but i can't quite justify spending the money on a hardware raid controller with non-volatile cache - without which, raid-5 is too slow to bother with.
having lost nearly all my data once due to a disk crash (and inadequate backups), i'm quite happy to spend twice as much for my disk storage for raid-1. a 320GB drive costs $AU128 today, so i have to spend $256 to get two of them. it's worth it. it's still significantly less than $1 per GB.
compared to the approx $2000 i paid for my first 20MB hard disk (a 65ms microscience clunker) back in about 1982 or 83, it's an amazing bargain.
akamai can't be used as justification for tossing out net-neutrality because the service it provides doesn't in any way depend on special priviledges such as TOS or bandwidth prioritisation/limitation.
akamai is just another service on the internet (albeit one with MANY more servers than most, and geographically distributed far more than most), it is available to anyone on the same terms.
most are. the vast majority.
some do. not many.
yes, there's every way. it's the usual state of affairs for the vast majority of scientists, as it is for the vast majority of workers in every field.
that especially includes the best scientists as well as the average scientists - the better they are, the more likely there are to be FAR more motivated by interest in what they're doing rather than profit....because it takes a huge amount of personal interest to BE the best.
and managers know that, they know that most scientists will take a job based on how interesting it is...with income a secondary consideration at best (other factors like convenience, quality of colleagues, reputation of the lab/institution, etc usually come way before income). Scientists, while they are usually happy with what they get, are as exploited financially as any other tech worker. As a tech worker, they generally get paid significantly more than unskilled workers - but they don't get anywhere near as much as the management or owner classes.
some are. most are motivated a lot more by their intrinsic interest in what they are working on.
amazing how you can come to that conclusion when every single piece of research into the motivating effects of reward finds the exact opposite, that it actually de-motivates.
i guess that shows you're no scientist since you prefer ideology to evidence.
pure bullshit. some of the best (as in most interesting) research is done in government labs and other publicly funded labs, and some of it is done ONLY there because there is no prospect of short-term profit (of course, as soon as publicly funded labs discover something that has short-term profit potential, then the private labs jump on the bandwagon, getting a jump-start from all the publicly funded research).
how droll. i'm arguing AGAINST a form of socialism in the medical industry....or didn't you realise that government-mandated monopolies are a form of socialism?
or maybe you're just the usual kind of blinkered corporatism-uber-alles philistine who *JUST KNOWS* that socialism and welfare are bad when people benefit from them, but natural and proper when business benefits?
it's bullshit, anyway. most scientists aren't motivated by profit, they're motivated by the research itself (and research grants, of course), and most of them work in publicly funded institutions, anyway. of those that work in the private sector, very few of them actually share in the profit - they're just paid a salary like anyone else. so there's little evidence that patent monopolies are a motivating factor for any scientists, and no evidence (plus much counter-evidence) that they motivate a majority of scientists.
scientists are also motivated by status and the tenure that often comes with status - and the way to increase status as a scientist is to publish.
all the chicken-little style doom and gloom about how terrible life would be without patents is just self-serving propaganda from those making grotesquely unreasonable profits from the current system, and from the dim-witted drones who like to fantasise that one day they too will be able to make grotesque profits.
no it's not. researchers keep notes and journals and diaries. anything developed in too short a time to be reflected in a journal is likely to be too trivial/obvious to even deserve a patent.
without patent monopolies, you'd have a choice between not doing anything with your idea and going ahead and producing/selling it anyway. if it was a really complicated idea, you'd have at least a few years lead while the competition ramped up (and afterwards you'd still have the first-to-market advantage). if it only took weeks for the competition to ramp up then your idea was too trivial/obvious to deserve a 20 year monopoly anyway. either way, there's no particular incentive to hoard the idea - you wont gain from it at all that way.
in any case, why should the rest of the world care whether you make loads of money for twenty years? if your idea is so useful, then it will be reinvented (and probably in a lot less than 20 years).
btw, you're obviously in favour of (at least the idea of) entrepreneurship and business, and presumably the idea of the "Free Market" too. how do you reconcile that with the obviously socialist nature of government-granted monopolies? is it just the usual unstated hypocritical assumption that "socialism and welfare is good if it's for business, but bad if it's for actual people", or have you actually thought out some way of reconciling the conflict?
that would be a good start, but it's the exact opposite of what is happening. with pharmaceutical patents, for example, India allows patents ONLY for the process of creating the drug, not for the drug itself or the various uses of it. IMO, that's a not un-reasonable position. unfortunately, they're being forced to "harmonize" their patent laws with the U.S., so they'll be subject to the same evergreening patent abuses that most of the rest of the world is.
i'm not at all against a better, reformed patent system....but given a choice between no patents at all and the current patent system, i'd choose no patents.
it doesn't, actually. it does in some fields (like computers and electronics) but it certainly doesn't in the pharmaceutical field. most new drugs are discovered and developed in government funded labs, at universities and public research orgs, etc. it's only when they have something useful that it's sold (for a pittance, almost given away) to one of the big pharma companies to market and distribute.
about the only USEFUL contribution big pharma makes is to run the trials for approval of the drug - and yes, the trials ARE expensive and time-consuming....but there's no reason why they couldn't be publicly funded as well as the research and the resulting drug then sold for cost + a reasonable percentage rather than cost times an enormous profit factor.
the public is paying the bills and taking the risks for the research, so the public should be the ones to benefit/profit from it - both from economical access to the drugs that THEIR taxes helped to develop and from the small reasonable profit (which should be plowed back in to the public research labs)
patents do a lot more than that - they also say "and nobody else is allowed to independently invent it either".
in most countries, it's not even the first to come up with an idea, it's the first to FILE for the patent that gets the monopoly.
a) why shouldn't someone who independently comes up with the same or similar idea be able to do whatever they want with it?
b) ideas don't and can't belong to anyone. any monopoly of them is an artificial government-mandated one, a socialist intervention in the marketplace.
c) the justification for patents is that they encourage innovation and the eventual sharing of ideas. that may have been true a few hundred years ago now, but it's certainly not true today. if anything, patents STIFLE innovation, not encourage it. there's also a sufficient body of public knowledge and a sufficiently widespread ethos of both sharing and research for the common good that there is more than enough "incentive" to research anything that we actually need.
it's not the use of hands that makes talking on the phone dangerous while driving, it's the distraction of the conversation itself.
numerous studies have shown that there is little or no difference between using a hands-free and a non-hands-free phone. diverting your attention from the road and the drivers & pedestrians around you is dangerous.
the last thing the world needs is yet more distraction opportunities for drivers - and what is it with people, anyway, can't they go 5 minutes without immersing themselves in consuming AV product?
actually, it's better than that. even burning biodiesel effectively reduces the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere because it *replaces* the burning of fossil fuel. that's a net win.
btw, burning it doesn't emit the same amount of carbon as was removed by growing it. there's waste product (containing carbon) left over after processing, not all of it is converted to oil and burnt. so it's more accurate to say "burning it emits most of the same amount of carbon...."
at least, not without scaring the hell out of the population with bullshit about queue-jumping terrorist refugees, bogus anthrax in the mail, and rising interest rates.
i was arguing based on fact, not making yet another comment on what a bunch of self-serving arseholes arrange for themselves via legislation and supreme court interpretations: spending money is not speech.
while you can argue that donating money can qualify as "freedom of association", it certainly does not qualify as "speech".
as for your comments on the mafia and hamas: speech is speech, whether it's in support of a popular or mainstream organisation or in support of unpopular organisations. in fact, it's easy to argue that popular speech doesn't actually need protection, but that unpopular speech very much does need protection. if donating money to the democrats or the republicans or any other party qualifies as protected free speech, then so does donating money to hamas, or the mafia, or any other organisation (regardless of their objectives or methods).
otherwise, all a govt has to do is declare any dissent organisation to be "criminal" or "terrorist" and suddenly, they have no legitimate voice any more - leaving them a choice between silence and illegitimate expression (like bombing).
and, finally, supporting Hamas definitely can be 'citizen participation in the domestic political process' - it's a statement that the citizen does not support the government's foreign policy, that they would prefer the govt to stop blindly supporting israel (and veto-ing every single UN sanction against them) no matter what war crimes and other atrocities they commit, that they want real peace in the middle east, not a program of slow genocide of the palestinians.
(oops. clicked submit rather than preview)
if financial transactions are "speech" and thus protected in the U.S. by the first amendment to the constitution, then how is it legal to prohibit donating money to Hamas or other palestinian charity organisations? (the militant wing is only a small part of Hamas' activities - they're very popular over there because they build hospitals and schools and feed people)
isn't that speech too - even if unpopular? (in fact, unpopular speech is precisely the kind of speech that NEEDS protection).
no, they're not expression, they're a transaction. transactions are not speech, they're transactions.
huh?
exactly how is placing limits on *campaign financing* in any way a violation of free speech?
money isn't speech. spending isn't speech. bribery isn't speech. corruption of representatives or parties isn't speech. drowning out everyone else's voices with a million dollars worth of monotone isn't speech.
you'd still be perfectly free to make your arguments to other people, including to candidates or elected representatives - just without the corrupting influence of large amounts of money to back up your words.
oh trivial things, really. proposing bills for and voting for things like funding public health and public education services, anti-pollution laws, protection of individual rights, even down to legislating a livable minimum wage.
in other words, pretty much the exact opposite of what most of them vote for now.
government exists to do collectively the things that it makes sense to do collectively, so that everyone benefits from living in a society, not just a few.
no, it smacks of democracy. you know, that weird and unfashionable idea that elected members should actually represent the people who live in the region that elected them and act in their interests.
an elected representative is supposed to be the agent of the people in their electorate, and that includes acting to improve their lives.
ps: please take the following advice: if you're an american, then take the time to look up the words "communism" and "capitalism" so that you actually have some chance of knowing what the hell you're talking about before mentioning them - or, worse, basing your argument on your misunderstandings of the words.
because the new, patentable drug is released only after at least 6 months of propaganda designed to make the old, out-of-patent drug seem dangerous or ineffective.
the classic example is the switch from aspirin to paracetamol (acetaminophen to you americans) as a general-purpose analgesic, the public were bombarded with stories about aspirin causing ulcers etc - but no mention at all of the fact that paracetamol has a lethal dose that can be only 2 or 3 times the effective dose (with overdoses causing a very nasty, painful death from liver failure). see the Toxic Dose heading in the wikipedia article for details.
no, capitalism doesn't depend on any such thing. you must be an american, because you appear to be using the word as a fuzzy, non-specific propaganda term that implies mass-market consumption, freedom, democracy, mom, and apple pie - i.e. all the things that have actually NOTHING to do with capitalism.
mass-market consumption, which is what you were really talking about, depends on ill-informed or, at best, ignorant consumers, all trained to buy and consume as a pavlovian reflex.
either that or you're just naive and unimaginative
the article attempts to be funny but only manages to be completely lame.
yes, this is really useful.
i do it all the time when i have a very large file, and i'm e.g. iteratively developing the exact regular expression i need.
e.g.
start off with
head filename | grep "reallycomplexbutnotperfectpattern"
and keep editing the regexp until it gives me exactly what i want, nothing more and nothing less.
then, when i've got the pattern right, just hit up arrow and change "head" to "cat". or a sequence of cat, grep, sed, awk, whatever in the pipeline if you need to transform the input before the final grep.
similarly, you can insert "| head |" into a pipeline to run a quick test before you do the real thing.
that's neat. i've always used sed or basename for this, but your way is better. i knew bash could do useful stuff with ${...} like having default values for vars, but for some reason it never really sunk in that it could do primitive sed-like stuff.
e.g. my old way of doing it (to be replaced by the ${VAR%pattern} way from now on):
for i in *.png ; do convert "$i" "$(basename $i
1. first impressions: the article is mostly simple, obvious stuff, i'm surprised to see it on IBM's developerworks site.
/home/USER/public_html -name "*.htm*" -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644
/home/*/public_html /home/*/cgi-bin -name "*.cgi" -o -name "*.pl" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -Zzli "matt.*wright" | xargs -0 chmod a-x
2. re: xargs end-of-file warning. as of version 4.2.9, GNU xargs defaults to not having an end-of-file string - worth knowing about, but not really a problem.
3. a far more common "gotcha" with xargs is dealing with space characters (and other characters with special meaning to the shell) in file names. this is especially common if you are working on directories containing HTML (and other) files uploaded by Mac & Windows users. to deal with it, use find's "-print0" arg and xargs' "-0" arg, for null-terminated input.
e.g. to set permissions to 644 on all the html files in a user's public_html directory:
find
most of the GNU utils support null-termination for input & output - so if you need to run grep or whatever on the output of find before passing it to xargs, you can.
e.g. to find all copies of Matt Wright's scripts such as FormMail.pl in all users' web sites and disable them:
find
make your users use secure alternatives instead - such as the NMS versions of the same scripts. even Matt's Script Archive recommends the use of the NMS versions instead of his own, these days.