> good stories seem much harder to come by these days.
Good stories are relatively easy to come by, it just takes some work. There are thousands and thousands of new manuscripts a year, and more books now than there have been at any other time in recorded history. Most of them are bad, but it's still easy to find a good one if you have an ear for it.
But that's where the problems *Begin*, not where they end. You still need to get people with money to agree that it's good, and you need to show it has marketing potential, and you need to find someone with tens of millions of dollars that it has potential. You need big names to agree to it, you need to find excellent cinematographers, and you need some screenwriters to buff it up who can write and who can write for your target audience. (Certainly there are excellent screenwriters, but despite the higher barriers to entry, there are also a LOT of horrible screenwriters.)
Basically, you need people with a sense of cadence, you need people with good technical skills, and you need people who are cute and really good at playing pretend. You also need someone to manage those people. And a few tens of millions of dollars.
Actually, ideas aren't patentable, though methods or processes can be.
"Existing" inventions may still be patentable if they only exist in secret, for example; and the question of *when* the invention exists is relevant, too. For example, the summary suggests the relevant date here is 1999. So the question would be whether it existed, or was obvious, in 1999. (It gets more complicated, but that's the basic idea.) Merely because other people have developed the same invention since the patent application was filed doesn't mean the patent is invalid or pre-existing.
A computer will be much better at facts. So it's mostly a question of grammar. And the hardest problem is likely figuring out wordplay, which occasionally comes up in jeopardy.
> You see, when people get busted for smuggling drugs across the country, they generally get hit not because the cop said, he might have drugs, lets search him, but because they are speeding or sampling the merchandise and weaving or driving erratic or something.
I especially loved the guy who drove a semi full of pot on the cars-only level of the George Washington Bridge.
Rollover risk varies by vehicle. I think it is higher among SUV's because they have higher centers of gravity and the wider wheelbase doesn't make up for it. It's still not that high, and a good SUV helps in other situations. My grandparents survived being hit by a tractor trailer at 55 because they were in a suburban. SUV's also give you an advantage in that you are a little higher up and are slightly more likely to be able to see what is happening on the road. The downside is that you're more dangerous to other people (because you're bigger).
They make sense if you have a lot of snow, if you have certain hip problems, if you have to deal with special needs individuals, or if you need a lot of cargo capacity.
> Actually, it's very simple: Blowing up innocent people, just because you can, is terrorism.
No--terrorism requires some component of "terror." Blowing up innocent people often qualifies, but not always. For example, blowing up innocent people may be genocide, with an intention of eliminating--rather than terrifying--a population. Or it may be an untempered reaction to being a twenty-year old who's just seen his friends killed--a twenty year old with automatic weapons, who lashes out too easily at a race he dehumanizes because the enemy largely consists of people of that race.
Also, by your definition, terrorism in asymmetric warfare would not count as terrorism--because there, people aren't blowing up innocent people just because they can. They're doing it because they can *And* because it gives them something--a way to fight back against an overwhelming force, or a way to maintain control over their own people, or satisfaction of a perverted concept of honor.
It's very simple and true that blowing up innocent people is wrong--we leave aside the moral dillemna involved in blowing up an innocent person to kill Hitler or Stalin. But that doesn't mean that all blowing up of innocent people is terrorism, nor that all terrorists blow up innocent people.
> The only thing you know in the stock market is this: If a stock is going up, it can continue to go up. Or it might stay the same or go down.
Not really. There are a few things you can say. For example, increases in volume almost always come before significant increases in movement, and forecast them--they just don't tell you whether the stock will go rapidly up or rapidly down. You can also say "Look, I can buy a share of company X for Y dollars, when the company as a whole, based on its balance sheet and historical income, is worth Z dollars."
>...by making it easier for them to end their enemies' lives. You haven't saved any net lives, just switched which side lost the lives.
The goal is not to save net lives.
If the goal were to save net lives, it probably makes sense to betray a country in symmetric wars. (The enemy knows better where to strike and the war doesn't drag out as long.) But we trust foreign governments less than we trust our own, and foreign cultures less than we trust our own. Also, the last time we were in a symmetric war was really WW2; and there are sometimes normative concerns that make sheer logic and net saved lives irrelevant. In this case, I have a normative preference not to betray the rather-free world to the Nazis. Because Nazis suck.
> Weapons aren't evil when used to defend oneself.
Weapons are not evil. To be evil requires the capacity for good, Some "evil" people are not evil because they lack this trait; they are insane.
Even the ICJ has admitted that nuclear weapons might be legitimately used in some circumstances, for example.
And enough rifles will kill as many people as died at Hiroshima, or Dresden. Or under Stalin.
A weapon is a tool, to be used or abused or destroyed or thrown away. Your point--"when used to defend oneself"--shows that It is what we do with the weapon that establishes moral worth.
> Don't ask a cop. Then again, don't ask a lawyer either. Both will give you overly conservative anwers.
They will, but then, I was thinking more in the "if you're going to purchase one" sense. Most of us, if we want to get a gun, want to do it in a way that the local cops are fine with and that is definitely legal--we want to be conservative. We aren't doing it as a theoretical 2nd amendment exercise, and don't want to have to pay thousands in attorney fees and risk jail or big fines in a fight over whether something was legal.
The second amendment guarantees the right to bear arms. Recently, SCOTUS decided that that means the right to bear arms of the type commonly used for personal defense. (They had to decide something, because two hundred years ago people could buy muskets, and now they can buy howitzers. So they had to decide what kind of arms it referred to.)
So basically, we can have handguns. (Though they can still be regulated in some ways. Ask a lawyer. Or a cop.)
But we don't usually use houses full of explosives for self-defense.
>We can't have 'copied' drugs for much cheaper, thus some people who might have been able to afford said drugs are no longer able to... just to secure the profits of some corporation?
Well, not quite.
We tend to think of the patent system as absurd, and it does have a lot of shortcomings. But the Constitution allows Congress to create the patent system "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" ("useful arts" means technology, more-or-less). The idea is to make it worthwhile for a person or organization to invent something of value.
For the vast majority of artists and inventors, it is not worthwhile. You do it because you have an idea, and even if you get patent or copyright protection, you never make a penny.
But that doesn't mean we don't need some intellectual property protection for society. A film like Spider-Man could never be made without it, because it just costs too much money, and you need to convince people with a hundred million dollars that it's worth spending on Spider-Man. The only expensive films that would be made would be propaganda pieces put together by Rupert Murdoch and Bloomberg and a few others, and even these would probably be worth a third or less of big-budget films today.
In drugs, it's even worse. It costs a fortune to develop a new drug. So long as we use private drug development, there has to be an incentive that lets people make back their money on drugs, or else they'll never invent the drug in the first place. It would slow the pace of drug development by half or more if we simply discontinued the patent system. Probably more.
So there's a good reason drugs are expensive, and a good reason for patent and copyright. It's just that the way they're designed, they have a lot of victims.
> Method for dissipation of influenza symptoms through prolong dietary restriction versus current methods of hypercaloric intake treatment of cold virus carriers.
You keep using that abstract. I do not think it means what you think it means.
> That wasn't the case for the Pentagon Papers. This is spin & damage control, nothing less.
Interesting, but weren't the Pentagon... ah, yes, here we are: 4,100 pages of the Pentagon papers were published in the Congressional Record by Mike Gravel shortly after there release, to ensure the possibility of public debate. Wikileaks doesn't have a Mike Gravel.
If I understand your argument correctly, you're saying that a law enforcement officer can, with NO search warrant, and with no intervention whatsoever by a court:
- Track every credit card purchase that I've ever made up to the present moment - Search through the history of transactions I've made at my local library - See records of all of my telephone calls - view my accountant's copy of all of my tax records - review any and all personal correspondences that I've sent to friends - see my complete transaction history at my bank - review all of the stock/bond transactions that I've made with my broker....
I certainly hope that no court would subscribe to your bizarre interpretation of the Fourth Amendement.
Actually, disturbingly, this is close to a more or less accurate interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. Other laws may prevent police from doing the things you list, and the police can't break laws while doing those things--but the Fourth Amendment does not usually protect information you have communicated to other people. Maryland v. Smith, IIRC, allows them to use telephone numbers you call against you in court without a warrant because you have to communicate those numbers to the telephone company, so you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in them. California v. Greenwood is another big case in this area.
"Unreasonable search" doesn't mean "unreasonable search," it means what judges and justices, over decades of argument (most of the important stuff since 1969's Mapp v. Ohio), have reasoned out that "unreasonable search" means. Constitutional Law works like that--there's a debate over what something means, and the appointed and confirmed judge listens to both sides and then has a clerk write an opinion that becomes law. Then someone appeals, and it happens again, only this time with references to the prior opinions. Each opinion usually changes or refines the meaning at least slightly.
Also, "unreasonable search" means something different today than it did 200 years ago.
I just heard the same story from someone who works in government; they've been warned not to discuss anything leaked by wikileaks, even to each other, because nonauthorized disclosure of classified or secret information doesn't make the information unclassified. (OR so they've been told--I don't have time to check the law at the moment. It would be an interesting court case.)
> Business records aren't "papers"? Are you clinically retarded or just a Big Brother Lover? Business records is exactly the kind of thing the Founding Fathers were thinking about...
It is possible he just happens to know something about the law. Also, ad hominem attacks aren't very useful--because they are more likely to reinforce groupthink than to help anyone learn.
What the founding fathers were thinking about rarely helps directly--it only helps if the law isn't well-settled, and even then it is the original understanding--i.e. how the Constitution would have been interpreted when it was originally passed, rather than what the founding fathers thought, that would matter. It is really freaking hard to figure out how a bunch of gentlemen two hundred years dead thought about a problem that arises two hundred years later, especially when you only have one perspective-tinted set of notes.
Also, they would only have protected you against the federal government, since it took the 14th amendment and a century of jurisprudence to make the bill of rights applicable to the states. The Fourth Amendment, in particular, wasn't applicable against them until Mapp v. Ohio in 1969, as I recall.
> Honestly the data isn't private protected data, it belongs to the companies we did business with and they can do what they want with it.
Close. The Government can steal it, legally (so as to be not stealing at all) because there is no fourth amendment protection. Absent other privacy laws protecting us, at least.
There is no Fourth Amendment protection because we have to communicate our purchases to the credit card company; thus we cannot expect the information to remain private. That is how the law reasons. Because we can't expect it to remain private, we have no reasonable expectation of privacy, and the Fourth Amendment only protects us against unreasonable searches.
That being said, I don't know that the issue has ever been analyzed at an appellate level when the company in question had a privacy policy--the old rulings predate those by some years. There is a slight chance one could expand the Fourth Amendment by pointing to privacy policies.
Although privacy policies often have the doublespeak "will not share your information unless required or permitted by law..."
The business model has changed in a way which makes 5-year-console-cycles less important. It used to be turning out a new console would give you new capabilities AND would get people to buy lots of new games. Now you may get a little more power and may be able to upgrade the way a few things are done, but more of your revenue stream comes from subscriptions than from new game or new console sales. (New console sales are actually a net negative, at least for some of the major providers, because they keep the lost low to encourage sales of the games and recoup the loss on games + subscriptions.)
Also, the technology of game platforms isn't advancing quickly enough any more to make a five-year-lag a competition killer.
Slashdot Mirror
> good stories seem much harder to come by these days.
Good stories are relatively easy to come by, it just takes some work. There are thousands and thousands of new manuscripts a year, and more books now than there have been at any other time in recorded history. Most of them are bad, but it's still easy to find a good one if you have an ear for it.
But that's where the problems *Begin*, not where they end. You still need to get people with money to agree that it's good, and you need to show it has marketing potential, and you need to find someone with tens of millions of dollars that it has potential. You need big names to agree to it, you need to find excellent cinematographers, and you need some screenwriters to buff it up who can write and who can write for your target audience. (Certainly there are excellent screenwriters, but despite the higher barriers to entry, there are also a LOT of horrible screenwriters.)
Basically, you need people with a sense of cadence, you need people with good technical skills, and you need people who are cute and really good at playing pretend. You also need someone to manage those people. And a few tens of millions of dollars.
Actually, ideas aren't patentable, though methods or processes can be.
"Existing" inventions may still be patentable if they only exist in secret, for example; and the question of *when* the invention exists is relevant, too. For example, the summary suggests the relevant date here is 1999. So the question would be whether it existed, or was obvious, in 1999. (It gets more complicated, but that's the basic idea.) Merely because other people have developed the same invention since the patent application was filed doesn't mean the patent is invalid or pre-existing.
A computer will be much better at facts. So it's mostly a question of grammar. And the hardest problem is likely figuring out wordplay, which occasionally comes up in jeopardy.
> You see, when people get busted for smuggling drugs across the country, they generally get hit not because the cop said, he might have drugs, lets search him, but because they are speeding or sampling the merchandise and weaving or driving erratic or something.
I especially loved the guy who drove a semi full of pot on the cars-only level of the George Washington Bridge.
Rollover risk varies by vehicle. I think it is higher among SUV's because they have higher centers of gravity and the wider wheelbase doesn't make up for it. It's still not that high, and a good SUV helps in other situations. My grandparents survived being hit by a tractor trailer at 55 because they were in a suburban. SUV's also give you an advantage in that you are a little higher up and are slightly more likely to be able to see what is happening on the road. The downside is that you're more dangerous to other people (because you're bigger).
They make sense if you have a lot of snow, if you have certain hip problems, if you have to deal with special needs individuals, or if you need a lot of cargo capacity.
disclaimer: my evidence is mostly anecdotal.
> Actually, it's very simple: Blowing up innocent people, just because you can, is terrorism.
No--terrorism requires some component of "terror." Blowing up innocent people often qualifies, but not always. For example, blowing up innocent people may be genocide, with an intention of eliminating--rather than terrifying--a population. Or it may be an untempered reaction to being a twenty-year old who's just seen his friends killed--a twenty year old with automatic weapons, who lashes out too easily at a race he dehumanizes because the enemy largely consists of people of that race.
Also, by your definition, terrorism in asymmetric warfare would not count as terrorism--because there, people aren't blowing up innocent people just because they can. They're doing it because they can *And* because it gives them something--a way to fight back against an overwhelming force, or a way to maintain control over their own people, or satisfaction of a perverted concept of honor.
It's very simple and true that blowing up innocent people is wrong--we leave aside the moral dillemna involved in blowing up an innocent person to kill Hitler or Stalin. But that doesn't mean that all blowing up of innocent people is terrorism, nor that all terrorists blow up innocent people.
> The only thing you know in the stock market is this: If a stock is going up, it can continue to go up. Or it might stay the same or go down.
Not really. There are a few things you can say. For example, increases in volume almost always come before significant increases in movement, and forecast them--they just don't tell you whether the stock will go rapidly up or rapidly down. You can also say "Look, I can buy a share of company X for Y dollars, when the company as a whole, based on its balance sheet and historical income, is worth Z dollars."
> ...by making it easier for them to end their enemies' lives. You haven't saved any net lives, just switched which side lost the lives.
The goal is not to save net lives.
If the goal were to save net lives, it probably makes sense to betray a country in symmetric wars. (The enemy knows better where to strike and the war doesn't drag out as long.) But we trust foreign governments less than we trust our own, and foreign cultures less than we trust our own. Also, the last time we were in a symmetric war was really WW2; and there are sometimes normative concerns that make sheer logic and net saved lives irrelevant. In this case, I have a normative preference not to betray the rather-free world to the Nazis. Because Nazis suck.
So I'm okay with not saving net lives.
Is this place which was flooded where the Indo-European language roots come from?
And when Helen sank a thousand ships, was she really just sending them home?
Is Captain Jack Sparrow upside down in the Med?
> At some point, they have enough conventional weapons that they can guarantee each other's destruction even without the need of nukes.
They're already there. But at that point, there's a good chance they'll use the nukes anyway, even if they don't need them.
> Weapons aren't evil when used to defend oneself.
Weapons are not evil. To be evil requires the capacity for good, Some "evil" people are not evil because they lack this trait; they are insane.
Even the ICJ has admitted that nuclear weapons might be legitimately used in some circumstances, for example.
And enough rifles will kill as many people as died at Hiroshima, or Dresden. Or under Stalin.
A weapon is a tool, to be used or abused or destroyed or thrown away. Your point--"when used to defend oneself"--shows that It is what we do with the weapon that establishes moral worth.
> ... but the failure of such a major nation to agree to treaties banning mines has resulted in many less responsible nations refusing to do so either.
Don't confuse a rationalization, excuse, or purported claim to legality with an actual cause.
They refuse to agree to treaty banning landmines because they don't want to ban land mines.
> Don't ask a cop. Then again, don't ask a lawyer either. Both will give you overly conservative anwers.
They will, but then, I was thinking more in the "if you're going to purchase one" sense. Most of us, if we want to get a gun, want to do it in a way that the local cops are fine with and that is definitely legal--we want to be conservative. We aren't doing it as a theoretical 2nd amendment exercise, and don't want to have to pay thousands in attorney fees and risk jail or big fines in a fight over whether something was legal.
The second amendment guarantees the right to bear arms. Recently, SCOTUS decided that that means the right to bear arms of the type commonly used for personal defense. (They had to decide something, because two hundred years ago people could buy muskets, and now they can buy howitzers. So they had to decide what kind of arms it referred to.)
So basically, we can have handguns. (Though they can still be regulated in some ways. Ask a lawyer. Or a cop.)
But we don't usually use houses full of explosives for self-defense.
>We can't have 'copied' drugs for much cheaper, thus some people who might have been able to afford said drugs are no longer able to... just to secure the profits of some corporation?
Well, not quite.
We tend to think of the patent system as absurd, and it does have a lot of shortcomings. But the Constitution allows Congress to create the patent system "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" ("useful arts" means technology, more-or-less). The idea is to make it worthwhile for a person or organization to invent something of value.
For the vast majority of artists and inventors, it is not worthwhile. You do it because you have an idea, and even if you get patent or copyright protection, you never make a penny.
But that doesn't mean we don't need some intellectual property protection for society. A film like Spider-Man could never be made without it, because it just costs too much money, and you need to convince people with a hundred million dollars that it's worth spending on Spider-Man. The only expensive films that would be made would be propaganda pieces put together by Rupert Murdoch and Bloomberg and a few others, and even these would probably be worth a third or less of big-budget films today.
In drugs, it's even worse. It costs a fortune to develop a new drug. So long as we use private drug development, there has to be an incentive that lets people make back their money on drugs, or else they'll never invent the drug in the first place. It would slow the pace of drug development by half or more if we simply discontinued the patent system. Probably more.
So there's a good reason drugs are expensive, and a good reason for patent and copyright. It's just that the way they're designed, they have a lot of victims.
> Method for dissipation of influenza symptoms through prolong dietary restriction versus current methods of hypercaloric intake treatment of cold virus carriers.
You keep using that abstract. I do not think it means what you think it means.
> That wasn't the case for the Pentagon Papers. This is spin & damage control, nothing less.
Interesting, but weren't the Pentagon... ah, yes, here we are: 4,100 pages of the Pentagon papers were published in the Congressional Record by Mike Gravel shortly after there release, to ensure the possibility of public debate. Wikileaks doesn't have a Mike Gravel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers#Leak
If I understand your argument correctly, you're saying that a law enforcement officer can, with NO search warrant, and with no intervention whatsoever by a court:
- Track every credit card purchase that I've ever made up to the present moment ...
- Search through the history of transactions I've made at my local library
- See records of all of my telephone calls
- view my accountant's copy of all of my tax records
- review any and all personal correspondences that I've sent to friends
- see my complete transaction history at my bank
- review all of the stock/bond transactions that I've made with my broker.
I certainly hope that no court would subscribe to your bizarre interpretation of the Fourth Amendement.
Actually, disturbingly, this is close to a more or less accurate interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. Other laws may prevent police from doing the things you list, and the police can't break laws while doing those things--but the Fourth Amendment does not usually protect information you have communicated to other people. Maryland v. Smith, IIRC, allows them to use telephone numbers you call against you in court without a warrant because you have to communicate those numbers to the telephone company, so you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in them. California v. Greenwood is another big case in this area.
"Unreasonable search" doesn't mean "unreasonable search," it means what judges and justices, over decades of argument (most of the important stuff since 1969's Mapp v. Ohio), have reasoned out that "unreasonable search" means. Constitutional Law works like that--there's a debate over what something means, and the appointed and confirmed judge listens to both sides and then has a clerk write an opinion that becomes law. Then someone appeals, and it happens again, only this time with references to the prior opinions. Each opinion usually changes or refines the meaning at least slightly.
Also, "unreasonable search" means something different today than it did 200 years ago.
I just heard the same story from someone who works in government; they've been warned not to discuss anything leaked by wikileaks, even to each other, because nonauthorized disclosure of classified or secret information doesn't make the information unclassified. (OR so they've been told--I don't have time to check the law at the moment. It would be an interesting court case.)
> Business records aren't "papers"? Are you clinically retarded or just a Big Brother Lover? Business records is exactly the kind of thing the Founding Fathers were thinking about...
It is possible he just happens to know something about the law. Also, ad hominem attacks aren't very useful--because they are more likely to reinforce groupthink than to help anyone learn.
What the founding fathers were thinking about rarely helps directly--it only helps if the law isn't well-settled, and even then it is the original understanding--i.e. how the Constitution would have been interpreted when it was originally passed, rather than what the founding fathers thought, that would matter. It is really freaking hard to figure out how a bunch of gentlemen two hundred years dead thought about a problem that arises two hundred years later, especially when you only have one perspective-tinted set of notes.
Also, they would only have protected you against the federal government, since it took the 14th amendment and a century of jurisprudence to make the bill of rights applicable to the states. The Fourth Amendment, in particular, wasn't applicable against them until Mapp v. Ohio in 1969, as I recall.
> Honestly the data isn't private protected data, it belongs to the companies we did business with and they can do what they want with it.
Close. The Government can steal it, legally (so as to be not stealing at all) because there is no fourth amendment protection. Absent other privacy laws protecting us, at least.
There is no Fourth Amendment protection because we have to communicate our purchases to the credit card company; thus we cannot expect the information to remain private. That is how the law reasons. Because we can't expect it to remain private, we have no reasonable expectation of privacy, and the Fourth Amendment only protects us against unreasonable searches.
That being said, I don't know that the issue has ever been analyzed at an appellate level when the company in question had a privacy policy--the old rulings predate those by some years. There is a slight chance one could expand the Fourth Amendment by pointing to privacy policies.
Although privacy policies often have the doublespeak "will not share your information unless required or permitted by law..."
Someone get a fire engine, some Selenium, and David Duchovney.
> They don't determine the mass of a galaxy by counting stars.
Nope, counting stars comes after a lively round of fisticuffs!
(I was going to go with good geek dating, but any good geek would know to use sampling techniques.)
> Being caught being a shithead isn't a valid justification for mass murder, despite your attempt to somehow say it is.
I said nothing of the kind. That is an unjustified insult of immense proportions.
The business model has changed in a way which makes 5-year-console-cycles less important. It used to be turning out a new console would give you new capabilities AND would get people to buy lots of new games. Now you may get a little more power and may be able to upgrade the way a few things are done, but more of your revenue stream comes from subscriptions than from new game or new console sales. (New console sales are actually a net negative, at least for some of the major providers, because they keep the lost low to encourage sales of the games and recoup the loss on games + subscriptions.)
Also, the technology of game platforms isn't advancing quickly enough any more to make a five-year-lag a competition killer.