It is? A promise is a positive move? A promise from a compulsive liar is a positive move?
I'll believe that it's a positive move AFTER it has achieved results that *I* consider positive. And which legal authorities that I trust concur are irreversible. There's too much history here for me the trust MS on any other basis.
1) I didn't know Volvo was Ford 2) I didn't find anything even interesting about the ad, much less offensive. 3) It's certainly not anything that would inspire me to buy their car, but I also don't see why it would give cause to a boycott.
OTOH, this thing about suing people who wanted to publish pictures of their cars... Now *that's* reason for a boycott.
Believe as you chose. It wasn't exactly a secret at the company...if you could read it properly it was in the job descriptions. Up to a certain point they talked about technical competence, beyond that it was people skills. I.e., politics. It wasn't technical people skills, they had terms for that, and that was in technical skills.
P.S.: Politics is not a dirty word. It a particular skill set. It gets a bad name only because of a subset of those most gifted in that field who lack both morals and ethics. (The skill can be used to get a large proportion of people to not notice your lack of morals and ethics...or even to approve of it. This tends to give the entire set of people with those skills a bad name, because they can clearly be dangerous.)
I pretty much agree with you. I'll probably generally avoid them anyway, as I don't like being tracked, but my objection to DRM was that it stands a great chance of destroying our cultural heritage. Copyrights last a totally insane length of time, and by the time a copyright expires there's likely to be no feasible way to reconstruct the contents of the original disk. Watermarks don't have this problem. I may find them distasteful, and avoid watermarked merchandise, but I don't feel that they are inherently evil. (There may well be evil implementations of watermarking...such as using slightly encrypted credit card numbers as the watermark, but that's both separate, and of much diminished degree.)
So stop being a spoiled brat and go do the grunt work. You aren't yet up to the task of the higher profile stuff. You
It must be nice to believe that such actions will be rewarded. From my experience the rewards will go to those who develop their skills in politicking rather than their technical skills. The only reward for developing one's technical skills is the self induced pleasure of mastering something difficult. If one has that, then it provides it's own motivation. If one doesn't... it seems more rational to concentrate on the mastery of politics.
Well, I can afford to be sanguine about this. I got in at the early stage, parlayed technical skills into a durable job, and was able to take an early retirement when I got disgusted with the MS EULA. But seriously, my choices were irrational. I knew bloody well that technical skills might keep me in my job, but they wouldn't earn a promotion. And I got enough pleasure out of technical mastery that I was willing to accept the costs. But don't lie to people. Technical skills are only enough to keep your job, not enough to earn much in the way of promotions. (I would have been a lousy manager, though. Managing people isn't something that grabs my attention.)
Perhaps other places of employment are different. But I doubt it. (OTOH, I'll admit that I took the first job that I came to out of college and stuck to it like a burr. So all I know about other places is what I had learned in summer jobs. I think I lucked out...but if I'd been ambitious, or less technically introverted, I'd have left quickly.)
It was never only the gifted that went to college. I *was* once mainly the wealthy and a few of the gifted. Strangely, the wealthy easily found good jobs waiting for them once they graduated, and the gifted became academics (which was also a good job, but one you needed to work at).
Sorry, to me Sony is, has been, and will be primarily a rootkit vendor. That is nearly unforgivable, and they haven't even admitted they did anything wrong. I'm not going to trust ANYTHING with the name Sony on it. It may not have DRM, but how do I know it doesn't have something worse.
OK, a bit paranoid there at the end. I admit it. I'm still not going to buy anything from them. I class buying from Sony with giving money to SCOx.
Except that this is an exceptionally stupid approach whose only justification is to allow bureaucrats to exert power. It doesn't make anyone, anywhere in the world, any safer. It does confiscate some people's laptops...and possibly the guards take possession of some of them. Or maybe not. (Evidence lockers have been known to lose valuable evidence which isn't of any use for a trial.)
It's so wrong-headed that I can't think of any intelligible purpose that it serves, other than to keep people subservient by letting them see that they could be inconvenienced far more than they are. (I.e., psychological warfare of the government against it's citizenry.)
Even if that's true "this time", there's no guarantee that it will be true next time. When they aren't following the legal procedures and guidelines there's no reason to trust them to be honest. And they're not, whatever the courts say. If they courts say that they are, that just means that the courts are corrupt.
Pencil is a bad choice. My preference is bingo markers, but any indelible ink is reasonable. Sharpies are good, but expensive. Bingo markers were specifically designed for the job, and make nice round dots.
Theoretically possible, however, doesn't have much to do with any implementation that I've heard of. More of them seem designed to specifically allow election results to be faked than to produce honest results.
Fundamentally, the problem is that if the mechanism for counting votes is hidden, then the results can't be trusted. It could, potentially, pass every test but when a crucial date rolled around, or a switch was set, it could act in a very different way.
And it's not just the program. Every step of the procedure needs to be verifiable. It *should* be publicly verifiable, but at a bare minimum it's got to be verifiable by hired observers who aren't beholden to the participating parties.
Well, when the system is running you need to be root not to run lilo, but to save the changes. When the system is booting, it doesn't yet know the difference between root and other users. That has to wait until late in the process, and the boot manager takes place as the first step in the process. (It's analogous to the "LOAD" button that some 1401 card readers had...a hard wired piece of code to read in aome cards and do what the program on them said to do. (The cards had to be punched in 1401 binary, of course. And there *was* not operating system.)
If you were to execute a boot loader while the system was running it would be equivalent to crashing and restarting. If you were to do it with a restart address at a particular address, it would be equivalent to crashing and restarting from that address. (Notice that I said "crashing", not shutting down.)
As far as I know, neither Grub nor LILO allow you to execute the boot loader while the system is running. The named programs are for configuration and installation. Because crashing is a bad idea. Sufficiently so that only a hardware switch is allowed to do it intentionally. (And that's because bad idea or not, sometimes it's the best one available.)
"Always"? You've got a short time horizon. Admittedly I haven't used MSWind in a long time, but MSWind95 stored time as a time (i.e., localtime). Linux installs had to step carefully around how the clock was set, because if they were sharing a computer with an MSWind machine they shouldn't use UTC.
I don't know what it is these days, so I can't claim that MS still does things that way. But they DID.
You know, I don't really care *how* Intel justifies what it did, unless it argues against the facts as presented. They are despicable and untrustworthy. This is a clear warning to not enter into a contractual agreement with them.
It's also mean, heartless, and evil.
If you justify their motives, you are arguing in favor of their actions. What this does to me is cast doubt on any argument that can be used to justify their motives. *If* it's what corporations do, then it's a good argument for changing the qualifications for being allowed to be a corporation. It's not a good argument for accepting the behavior.
...OLPC doesn't care about selling PC's. ALL they care about is who gets them....
Wrong. OLPC is trying to sell an educational system. The system happens to be embedded in a computer so that it can function without the presence of a highly trained teacher, and so that lab work can be done in real time.
If you just think of it as a computer, you get the wrong idea about what's being sold.
Sorry, but that's a misstatement. It's true that companies, and people, act differently if they are, in essence, absolute powers. They tend to stop paying attention to outside criticism, etc. But they don't act the same. E.g.:
My hypothesis is that if Apple were the uber-dominant player in the computer industry, that computers would be expensive and well designed. They would also have very definite ideas about how they should be used, and it would be very difficult to use them in any other way. And all of the boxes would probably sealed so that only service techs could get at them. They would be fantastic multi-media machines, and adequate for programming. But you would need to use Apple tools.
Do you think this is wild speculation? But Apple *DID* own the personal computer market before the Mac came out. It took IBM to shake them out of dominance. That's essentially how they acted then. (Except that the Mac was designed for the office environment, so they left out the multi-media and discouraged games. That lost them the personal computer market when IBM made it's move.)
P.S.: I think I've got the timing a bit screwy here, but I believe that that's because there's a long lag time between planing what a new model of computer should be like and actually building and selling it.
1) We won't all be killed by global warming...at least not directly. It might precipitate WWIII.
2) We'll likely be worrying about something new. That's because we have short attention spans, not because we will have found global warming not to be a problem.
3) We won't have run out of fossil fuels...but we may have run out of the relatively clean ones. We *may* have run out of helium.
4) Green energy sources are possible, but that probably won't be sufficient to more than ameliorate the problem. We need to BOTH keep the CO2 level from rising more and adapt to inevitable global warming. Parts of the process have momentum, and they can't be stopped easily. What we can do is stop pushing them...and try to push the other direction. But at this point pushing the other direction is rather difficult. The easiest way that I can see is some form of sun-shade at the appropriate LaGrange point. L1, I think, but I don't really remember which point is numbered which. The one between the sun and the earth on a line connecting their centers. Making that large enough would be a real challenge, and we need to be able to fold it up.
Commercial fusion is speculative at best. We'll get there "some day". Any particular time estimate is unwarranted. Solar cells are practical now, but not economic. Ditto for other approaches to solar power. (Well, they aren't all practical now, but a number of them are.) But these won't yield liquid fuel, only electricity, which is difficult to store. I.e., most proposals for storing electricity have high costs or high losses, sometimes both. This is a proposal for directly generating a chemical fuel from sunlight. I notice that they don't talk about costs or efficiency...which is appropriate for a general press article about a prototype technical development. But ferrite is a lot cheaper and more common than platinum. If you have doubts about this reaction, consider the "hot smokers" oceanic volcano vents. It's not precisely the same, but some of the reactions involved are quite similar, and light photons are more energetic than volcanic heat that's been emitted and absorbed several times.
N.B.: I'm not sure the "hot smokers" are relevant. I know it's a chemical reaction that involves iron pyrite...and that one of the reaction products are the life forms that circle the vent...and that's about all that I know. But it *feels* relevant.
I don't think that a virus writer is likely to sue you for violating his copyrights, so all you need to do is claim that you didn't accept his license.
P.S.: If he did sue, things would get very funny very quickly.
I believe that you're confusing dark matter with dark energy. (I'm certain that one of your respondents is.) You seem in a mixed state, and I think you don't understand what you're disbelieving in, if you really mean you don't believe in dark matter.
We live on a ball of cold dark matter. (I.e., the speed of it's particles is slow, and it's not emitting significant electromagnetic radiation.) It happens to be composed largely of protons and neutrons, and the "missing mass" isn't. You might be referring to non-bosonic dark matter. I don't know what it's current status is, but last time I checked it seemed conservative to presume that it existed, but any particular proposition for what it was composed of was controversial. (I'm not sure how much of it ended up being the mass carried by neutrinos...which had previously been believed to have a mass of zero.)
Dark Energy is a separate "matter". There is, indeed, a reasonable chance that some changing of the theories will wipe it away.
It's more difficult than that. 1) The current patent system is broken in ALL industries, but some sort of patent system is probably desirable. 2) For inventions that require a lot of up-front investment, a longer patent is more justifiable. 3) For industries that don't require the patent to reveal sufficient information to allow others to reproduce the invention easily, patents should be invalid. 4) When the system requires a patent lawyer to understand what the patent means, individuals who are not patent lawyers should not be affected. 5) There are a lot of undefined terms in the area of patents. These should be removed. Examples are "obvious", "skilled in the art". These need to either be made more precise, or removed from patent law...and if they are only well-defined to lawyers or patent-lawyers, then the laws containing those terms should only apply to lawyers or patent-lawyers.
A lot of these problems stem from the problem that nobody can define what a patentable invention is. As long as this is true, you're going to have either bad patent law or none... but it doesn't need to be as bad as the current law.
But remember, some things are cheap to copy, but expensive to invent. It's for the protection of these that patent law is reasonable. And it's unfair to second-guess how expensive it *should* have been to invent after the fact.
Sometimes I think a patent should be not a license to manufacture, but a prize, rather like the X-prise. Each year in January congress should appropriate a certain amount of money, during the next January the "Patent Prize Commission" should allot that money among those filing for inventions during that year. It would be necessary to reveal sufficient information to allow others to copy the invention cheaply (i.e., without going through either the process of invention or of reverse engineering). If you don't win, your process remains your secret. You can file as often as you desire until you have won, but there's a fee for each filing that is estimated to cover twice the cost of handling and evaluation. If two or more entries in the same year are essentially identical (in the judgment of the judges), and it is still deemed a worthy invention, then the prize is split. All winning entries become public domain.
I'm not really sure that the prize would be better than the current system, but it's hard to see how it could be worse.
Korea may or may not have been reasonable. I wasn't there, I don't know.
Viet Nam has never been satisfactorily justified. I don't know why we went in, I don't know why we broke the Geneva Agreement. True, Hanoi would have been the capitol city, and the country would have had a communist leadership. But they wouldn't have trusted China, and they would have trusted the US. (Ditto for Cuba. Castro's nearly first act was to try to establish normal relations with the US. We neatly drove him to seek for other support.)
Iran is just stupid and evil. I can find no justification for it.
And you left out cases where the other side was weak, and there still was no moral justification for the US actions. ("Saying we can win easily" and being right is *not* a moral justification.)
Every one of those incidents has been a blot on our record as a nation. I happen to think that most other countries would have accumulated more blots more quickly, but that doesn't excuse us for our actions.
Slashdot Mirror
It is? A promise is a positive move? A promise from a compulsive liar is a positive move?
I'll believe that it's a positive move AFTER it has achieved results that *I* consider positive. And which legal authorities that I trust concur are irreversible. There's too much history here for me the trust MS on any other basis.
1) I didn't know Volvo was Ford
2) I didn't find anything even interesting about the ad, much less offensive.
3) It's certainly not anything that would inspire me to buy their car, but I also don't see why it would give cause to a boycott.
OTOH, this thing about suing people who wanted to publish pictures of their cars... Now *that's* reason for a boycott.
Believe as you chose. It wasn't exactly a secret at the company...if you could read it properly it was in the job descriptions. Up to a certain point they talked about technical competence, beyond that it was people skills. I.e., politics. It wasn't technical people skills, they had terms for that, and that was in technical skills.
P.S.: Politics is not a dirty word. It a particular skill set. It gets a bad name only because of a subset of those most gifted in that field who lack both morals and ethics. (The skill can be used to get a large proportion of people to not notice your lack of morals and ethics...or even to approve of it. This tends to give the entire set of people with those skills a bad name, because they can clearly be dangerous.)
I pretty much agree with you. I'll probably generally avoid them anyway, as I don't like being tracked, but my objection to DRM was that it stands a great chance of destroying our cultural heritage. Copyrights last a totally insane length of time, and by the time a copyright expires there's likely to be no feasible way to reconstruct the contents of the original disk. Watermarks don't have this problem. I may find them distasteful, and avoid watermarked merchandise, but I don't feel that they are inherently evil. (There may well be evil implementations of watermarking...such as using slightly encrypted credit card numbers as the watermark, but that's both separate, and of much diminished degree.)
Not a garbage truck, but a recycling truck. Wad it together and boot it into a slightly higher orbit, so it can be used later for manufacturing.
Sorry. Typo.
So stop being a spoiled brat and go do the grunt work. You aren't yet up to the task of the higher profile stuff. You
... it seems more rational to concentrate on the mastery of politics.
It must be nice to believe that such actions will be rewarded. From my experience the rewards will go to those who develop their skills in politicking rather than their technical skills. The only reward for developing one's technical skills is the self induced pleasure of mastering something difficult. If one has that, then it provides it's own motivation. If one doesn't
Well, I can afford to be sanguine about this. I got in at the early stage, parlayed technical skills into a durable job, and was able to take an early retirement when I got disgusted with the MS EULA. But seriously, my choices were irrational. I knew bloody well that technical skills might keep me in my job, but they wouldn't earn a promotion. And I got enough pleasure out of technical mastery that I was willing to accept the costs. But don't lie to people. Technical skills are only enough to keep your job, not enough to earn much in the way of promotions. (I would have been a lousy manager, though. Managing people isn't something that grabs my attention.)
Perhaps other places of employment are different. But I doubt it. (OTOH, I'll admit that I took the first job that I came to out of college and stuck to it like a burr. So all I know about other places is what I had learned in summer jobs. I think I lucked out...but if I'd been ambitious, or less technically introverted, I'd have left quickly.)
It was never only the gifted that went to college. I *was* once mainly the wealthy and a few of the gifted. Strangely, the wealthy easily found good jobs waiting for them once they graduated, and the gifted became academics (which was also a good job, but one you needed to work at).
Sorry, to me Sony is, has been, and will be primarily a rootkit vendor. That is nearly unforgivable, and they haven't even admitted they did anything wrong. I'm not going to trust ANYTHING with the name Sony on it. It may not have DRM, but how do I know it doesn't have something worse.
OK, a bit paranoid there at the end. I admit it. I'm still not going to buy anything from them. I class buying from Sony with giving money to SCOx.
Except that this is an exceptionally stupid approach whose only justification is to allow bureaucrats to exert power. It doesn't make anyone, anywhere in the world, any safer. It does confiscate some people's laptops...and possibly the guards take possession of some of them. Or maybe not. (Evidence lockers have been known to lose valuable evidence which isn't of any use for a trial.)
It's so wrong-headed that I can't think of any intelligible purpose that it serves, other than to keep people subservient by letting them see that they could be inconvenienced far more than they are. (I.e., psychological warfare of the government against it's citizenry.)
Even if that's true "this time", there's no guarantee that it will be true next time. When they aren't following the legal procedures and guidelines there's no reason to trust them to be honest. And they're not, whatever the courts say. If they courts say that they are, that just means that the courts are corrupt.
Pencil is a bad choice. My preference is bingo markers, but any indelible ink is reasonable. Sharpies are good, but expensive. Bingo markers were specifically designed for the job, and make nice round dots.
Theoretically possible, however, doesn't have much to do with any implementation that I've heard of. More of them seem designed to specifically allow election results to be faked than to produce honest results.
Fundamentally, the problem is that if the mechanism for counting votes is hidden, then the results can't be trusted. It could, potentially, pass every test but when a crucial date rolled around, or a switch was set, it could act in a very different way.
And it's not just the program. Every step of the procedure needs to be verifiable. It *should* be publicly verifiable, but at a bare minimum it's got to be verifiable by hired observers who aren't beholden to the participating parties.
Well, when the system is running you need to be root not to run lilo, but to save the changes.
When the system is booting, it doesn't yet know the difference between root and other users. That has to wait until late in the process, and the boot manager takes place as the first step in the process. (It's analogous to the "LOAD" button that some 1401 card readers had...a hard wired piece of code to read in aome cards and do what the program on them said to do. (The cards had to be punched in 1401 binary, of course. And there *was* not operating system.)
If you were to execute a boot loader while the system was running it would be equivalent to crashing and restarting. If you were to do it with a restart address at a particular address, it would be equivalent to crashing and restarting from that address. (Notice that I said "crashing", not shutting down.)
As far as I know, neither Grub nor LILO allow you to execute the boot loader while the system is running. The named programs are for configuration and installation. Because crashing is a bad idea. Sufficiently so that only a hardware switch is allowed to do it intentionally. (And that's because bad idea or not, sometimes it's the best one available.)
"Always"? You've got a short time horizon. Admittedly I haven't used MSWind in a long time, but MSWind95 stored time as a time (i.e., localtime). Linux installs had to step carefully around how the clock was set, because if they were sharing a computer with an MSWind machine they shouldn't use UTC.
I don't know what it is these days, so I can't claim that MS still does things that way. But they DID.
You know, I don't really care *how* Intel justifies what it did, unless it argues against the facts as presented. They are despicable and untrustworthy. This is a clear warning to not enter into a contractual agreement with them.
It's also mean, heartless, and evil.
If you justify their motives, you are arguing in favor of their actions. What this does to me is cast doubt on any argument that can be used to justify their motives. *If* it's what corporations do, then it's a good argument for changing the qualifications for being allowed to be a corporation. It's not a good argument for accepting the behavior.
...OLPC doesn't care about selling PC's. ALL they care about is who gets them. ...
Wrong. OLPC is trying to sell an educational system. The system happens to be embedded in a computer so that it can function without the presence of a highly trained teacher, and so that lab work can be done in real time.
If you just think of it as a computer, you get the wrong idea about what's being sold.
Sorry, but that's a misstatement. It's true that companies, and people, act differently if they are, in essence, absolute powers. They tend to stop paying attention to outside criticism, etc. But they don't act the same. E.g.:
My hypothesis is that if Apple were the uber-dominant player in the computer industry, that computers would be expensive and well designed. They would also have very definite ideas about how they should be used, and it would be very difficult to use them in any other way. And all of the boxes would probably sealed so that only service techs could get at them. They would be fantastic multi-media machines, and adequate for programming. But you would need to use Apple tools.
Do you think this is wild speculation? But Apple *DID* own the personal computer market before the Mac came out. It took IBM to shake them out of dominance. That's essentially how they acted then. (Except that the Mac was designed for the office environment, so they left out the multi-media and discouraged games. That lost them the personal computer market when IBM made it's move.)
P.S.: I think I've got the timing a bit screwy here, but I believe that that's because there's a long lag time between planing what a new model of computer should be like and actually building and selling it.
1) We won't all be killed by global warming...at least not directly. It might precipitate WWIII.
2) We'll likely be worrying about something new. That's because we have short attention spans, not because we will have found global warming not to be a problem.
3) We won't have run out of fossil fuels...but we may have run out of the relatively clean ones. We *may* have run out of helium.
4) Green energy sources are possible, but that probably won't be sufficient to more than ameliorate the problem. We need to BOTH keep the CO2 level from rising more and adapt to inevitable global warming. Parts of the process have momentum, and they can't be stopped easily. What we can do is stop pushing them...and try to push the other direction. But at this point pushing the other direction is rather difficult. The easiest way that I can see is some form of sun-shade at the appropriate LaGrange point. L1, I think, but I don't really remember which point is numbered which. The one between the sun and the earth on a line connecting their centers. Making that large enough would be a real challenge, and we need to be able to fold it up.
Commercial fusion is speculative at best. We'll get there "some day". Any particular time estimate is unwarranted. Solar cells are practical now, but not economic. Ditto for other approaches to solar power. (Well, they aren't all practical now, but a number of them are.) But these won't yield liquid fuel, only electricity, which is difficult to store. I.e., most proposals for storing electricity have high costs or high losses, sometimes both. This is a proposal for directly generating a chemical fuel from sunlight. I notice that they don't talk about costs or efficiency...which is appropriate for a general press article about a prototype technical development. But ferrite is a lot cheaper and more common than platinum. If you have doubts about this reaction, consider the "hot smokers" oceanic volcano vents. It's not precisely the same, but some of the reactions involved are quite similar, and light photons are more energetic than volcanic heat that's been emitted and absorbed several times.
N.B.: I'm not sure the "hot smokers" are relevant. I know it's a chemical reaction that involves iron pyrite...and that one of the reaction products are the life forms that circle the vent...and that's about all that I know. But it *feels* relevant.
I don't think that a virus writer is likely to sue you for violating his copyrights, so all you need to do is claim that you didn't accept his license.
P.S.: If he did sue, things would get very funny very quickly.
I believe that you're confusing dark matter with dark energy. (I'm certain that one of your respondents is.) You seem in a mixed state, and I think you don't understand what you're disbelieving in, if you really mean you don't believe in dark matter.
We live on a ball of cold dark matter. (I.e., the speed of it's particles is slow, and it's not emitting significant electromagnetic radiation.) It happens to be composed largely of protons and neutrons, and the "missing mass" isn't. You might be referring to non-bosonic dark matter. I don't know what it's current status is, but last time I checked it seemed conservative to presume that it existed, but any particular proposition for what it was composed of was controversial. (I'm not sure how much of it ended up being the mass carried by neutrinos...which had previously been believed to have a mass of zero.)
Dark Energy is a separate "matter". There is, indeed, a reasonable chance that some changing of the theories will wipe it away.
It's more difficult than that.
... but it doesn't need to be as bad as the current law.
1) The current patent system is broken in ALL industries, but some sort of patent system is probably desirable.
2) For inventions that require a lot of up-front investment, a longer patent is more justifiable.
3) For industries that don't require the patent to reveal sufficient information to allow others to reproduce the invention easily, patents should be invalid.
4) When the system requires a patent lawyer to understand what the patent means, individuals who are not patent lawyers should not be affected.
5) There are a lot of undefined terms in the area of patents. These should be removed. Examples are "obvious", "skilled in the art". These need to either be made more precise, or removed from patent law...and if they are only well-defined to lawyers or patent-lawyers, then the laws containing those terms should only apply to lawyers or patent-lawyers.
A lot of these problems stem from the problem that nobody can define what a patentable invention is. As long as this is true, you're going to have either bad patent law or none
But remember, some things are cheap to copy, but expensive to invent. It's for the protection of these that patent law is reasonable. And it's unfair to second-guess how expensive it *should* have been to invent after the fact.
Sometimes I think a patent should be not a license to manufacture, but a prize, rather like the X-prise. Each year in January congress should appropriate a certain amount of money, during the next January the "Patent Prize Commission" should allot that money among those filing for inventions during that year. It would be necessary to reveal sufficient information to allow others to copy the invention cheaply (i.e., without going through either the process of invention or of reverse engineering). If you don't win, your process remains your secret. You can file as often as you desire until you have won, but there's a fee for each filing that is estimated to cover twice the cost of handling and evaluation. If two or more entries in the same year are essentially identical (in the judgment of the judges), and it is still deemed a worthy invention, then the prize is split. All winning entries become public domain.
I'm not really sure that the prize would be better than the current system, but it's hard to see how it could be worse.
Intel didn't even show up until AFTER the product had been designed. At that point, adding Intel components would have required a redesign.
Looks like slime to me.
As I previously responded to this "There's a sucker born every minute".
Korea may or may not have been reasonable. I wasn't there, I don't know.
Viet Nam has never been satisfactorily justified. I don't know why we went in, I don't know why we broke the Geneva Agreement. True, Hanoi would have been the capitol city, and the country would have had a communist leadership. But they wouldn't have trusted China, and they would have trusted the US. (Ditto for Cuba. Castro's nearly first act was to try to establish normal relations with the US. We neatly drove him to seek for other support.)
Iran is just stupid and evil. I can find no justification for it.
And you left out cases where the other side was weak, and there still was no moral justification for the US actions. ("Saying we can win easily" and being right is *not* a moral justification.)
Every one of those incidents has been a blot on our record as a nation. I happen to think that most other countries would have accumulated more blots more quickly, but that doesn't excuse us for our actions.