Back when they were first discovered (1990s), these symptomless carriers seemed like they could have been the genesis of a separate species. Children that they had with other symptomless carriers would have HIV and only be able to have survivable offspring with other symptomless carriers. Given time we'd have separate gene pools.
Around 2000 or so, they figured out how HIV- children could be born to HIV+ mothers. So there won't be any separation of the gene pool. Due to sexual recombination, if there are no disadvantages to this adaptation (like sickle cell anemia), then the gene may quickly spread throughout the species. Quickly meaning hundreds of thousands of years rather than hundreds of millions.
As he's pointed out himself: when he wrote Neuromancer, he was privately proud that you could not tell "from textual evidence" that the United States existed in the world of Neuromancer. It did not occur to him that the USSR might not exist.
The dude is brilliant, but not for accurate predictions of the future. His books are brilliant assessments of the present day. The insight in Neuromancer is about 1984 as much as the insight in Pattern Recognition is about 2002. If you see what I mean.
The free market would quickly move to serve shareholders that cannot research all the activities of their portfolio. Our coupon clipping grandmothers would buy portfolio insurance that would insulate them from damages but would pay for harm done by a company, like homeowner's insurance. Also like homeowner's insurance, it would be more or less expensive based on the risk inherent in the particular company, and this added cost to shareholders would make companies more responsive to their risk.
I'll point out that punitive damages can also serve a valid purpose, and it may be very reasonable to penalize a company further than the specific damage that was done in this particular instance. For example, it may be very expensive and difficult to litigate certain damages, so Toxico could count on further victims failing to sue. This is not make their enterprise acceptable, so it is fine to charge them punitive damages to discourage them from harmful activity in the future.
Still, no, it's not right for the court to look at Toxico's net worth just to make sure they don't have any money left. Unless they've declared bankruptcy, in which case that's exactly the court's job:)
Come to think about it, I would argue that in your example Toxico should only be penalized for the amount of damage they did and what it costs to repair. This sum may be as much or more than Toxico has assets in the bank, but I don't think it's right for the court to look at Toxico's worth just to make sure they don't have any money left.
Absolutely. I just used that example because it seemed clear that Toxico would have done a large enough amount of damage that the number would definitely exceed their net worth. Otherwise, feeding people radioactive waste would be a great business model.
Wow. I didn't realize you were the original poster. You were way further off base than I originally understood.
Consider the fictional company Toxico. Toxico disposes of radioactive and inconvenient waste at a discount. They do so by packaging and selling it as Toxico Treats in your local grocery store. They make huge profits and thousands of people die.
Toxico should obviously not exist. The shareholders should never see a penny. I hope we both agree on this point.
So, certainly we should arrest and charge all of the human criminals that work for Toxico. What about all the people harmed by their products? Shouldn't they get every penny that Toxico ever earned? That's the system: They sue Toxico, Toxico settles, Toxico declares bankruptcy, and the people that were harmed get all of the money that they can out of the bankruptcy.
The *problem* with our system, in the eyes of many free market capitalists, is that the shareholders are immune from those damages. If my house falls over and kills 4000 people, I am liable. If my company (Toxico) falls over and kills 4000 people, I am not liable, due to, IMHO, government fiction. This is wrong. If a bad company is bankrupted by civil action, the shareholders should be liable for damages.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Criminal courts prosecute humans. Corporations can only ever be in civil court. Please consider the last time that a corporation was convicted of theft or murder. (Hint: this cannot happen.)
When companies do harm, the person or company that was harmed sues them for damages. They get sued for wrongful death, or whatever. This is our system, and it is an essential part of the "free market". This is not "completely different than a company being bankrupted by a civil ruling." It is, in fact, exactly a company being bankrupted by a civil ruling. Liability is the primary way in which corporations are prevented from doing harm to others in a free market.
Actually, I don't want to see anyone bankrupted by the court system.
Sure you do. There are companies that do more harm than good and are profitable only because they do not compensate those that they harm. Those companies should be "bankrupted by the court system". Right?
None of your respondents are making the right point.
Saying what you just said may be considered illegal in England, based on the law they were debating and this dude's (idiotic) religious status as a Jedi.
So he may have called himself a Jedi solely in order to highlight the bill's idiocy. Or maybe not. I can't tell. I'm only an American.
Porn producers have always had to document this. Now anyone who distributes porn (or has more than like 400 videos or something) will also need documentation.
That's a lot of people and businesses that are going to have to get rid of a ton of their stock because they don't have a way to get proper documentation for it. It's a sizeable taking from the porn industry.
It's rather educational. Definitely don't read it to your kids without preparing yourself and checking the whole story beforehand.
For example, one of Cinderella's stepsisters was doing fine with Prince Charming, until the fields whispered to him "Dude, check out her foot! Check out her foot!" and he looked and saw that she had severed her heel in order to fit into the glass slipper and she was bleeding everywhere.
Also for example, there is a story that's only one page long about Rose Red: This little boy disobeys his mother and goes out into the forest and meets Rose Red. Then, exactly one year later, the boy dies in his bed and his mother finds a red rose on the doorstep. No, it's not too upsetting, but that's the whole story.
Most of the stories are gory and weird. Yes, German people are twisted, but IMHO there is something to be said for telling your children about twisted shit. This is expounded upon in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, and he cites The Raven (By Coleridge, not Poe) as an excellent example.
Right. That doesn't matter, because you have not described a system that would be covered by this patent. Do you know of any Apple II or Macintosh software that could control which (MIDI or otherwise) songs were played with a few listboxes for categories like Genre or Artist or Album, and a grid displaying information about the songs?
I don't. I'm not saying that this *should* be patentable. But it is different from the other devices you describe, and thus may be covered by a new patent.
Are you trying to argue that our current system for software patents makes sense?
I'm not a patent lawyer, but this seems to be a rediculous patent.
I'm not a patent lawyer either, but I'd like to point out that "rediculous" is not a disqualifying characteristic for a patent.
Plenty of prior art exists. For example, MIDI and CD players throughout the 90's were capable of "controlling the playback of music" and "displaying two or more data fields about the song".
But not on a computer. Those MIDI and CD players throughout the 90s would have also been patentable (and I'm sure they're patented) but whenever you make an improvement to the use of a patented technology, you can usually get a... wait for it... brand new patent.
There are a quadrillion patents for existing technology, now slightly tweaked or modernized. I'm sure someone got a new patent for the steam engine just as soon as they connected it to a computer. It's now a computer controlled steam engine. Then when they connect that computer to the internet, it's an internet enable steam engine. Then when they created a web interface for it, they got more patents.
None of your listed "problems" have anything to do with patent law. That's the problem. Yes, yes, obviousness is *supposed* to come into play, but that has obviously been defined out of existence. Your prior art would not be covered by this patent.
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Why couldn't you have said that two hours ago?!
Back when they were first discovered (1990s), these symptomless carriers seemed like they could have been the genesis of a separate species. Children that they had with other symptomless carriers would have HIV and only be able to have survivable offspring with other symptomless carriers. Given time we'd have separate gene pools.
Around 2000 or so, they figured out how HIV- children could be born to HIV+ mothers. So there won't be any separation of the gene pool. Due to sexual recombination, if there are no disadvantages to this adaptation (like sickle cell anemia), then the gene may quickly spread throughout the species. Quickly meaning hundreds of thousands of years rather than hundreds of millions.
I think he's over it.
As he's pointed out himself: when he wrote Neuromancer, he was privately proud that you could not tell "from textual evidence" that the United States existed in the world of Neuromancer. It did not occur to him that the USSR might not exist.
The dude is brilliant, but not for accurate predictions of the future. His books are brilliant assessments of the present day. The insight in Neuromancer is about 1984 as much as the insight in Pattern Recognition is about 2002. If you see what I mean.
I think we're all mortified by thinking about what you've got on your audio player that you're so worried about.
The free market would quickly move to serve shareholders that cannot research all the activities of their portfolio. Our coupon clipping grandmothers would buy portfolio insurance that would insulate them from damages but would pay for harm done by a company, like homeowner's insurance. Also like homeowner's insurance, it would be more or less expensive based on the risk inherent in the particular company, and this added cost to shareholders would make companies more responsive to their risk.
Er... I'm going to double respond again.
:)
I'll point out that punitive damages can also serve a valid purpose, and it may be very reasonable to penalize a company further than the specific damage that was done in this particular instance. For example, it may be very expensive and difficult to litigate certain damages, so Toxico could count on further victims failing to sue. This is not make their enterprise acceptable, so it is fine to charge them punitive damages to discourage them from harmful activity in the future.
Still, no, it's not right for the court to look at Toxico's net worth just to make sure they don't have any money left. Unless they've declared bankruptcy, in which case that's exactly the court's job
Wow. I didn't realize you were the original poster. You were way further off base than I originally understood.
Consider the fictional company Toxico. Toxico disposes of radioactive and inconvenient waste at a discount. They do so by packaging and selling it as Toxico Treats in your local grocery store. They make huge profits and thousands of people die.
Toxico should obviously not exist. The shareholders should never see a penny. I hope we both agree on this point.
So, certainly we should arrest and charge all of the human criminals that work for Toxico. What about all the people harmed by their products? Shouldn't they get every penny that Toxico ever earned? That's the system: They sue Toxico, Toxico settles, Toxico declares bankruptcy, and the people that were harmed get all of the money that they can out of the bankruptcy.
The *problem* with our system, in the eyes of many free market capitalists, is that the shareholders are immune from those damages. If my house falls over and kills 4000 people, I am liable. If my company (Toxico) falls over and kills 4000 people, I am not liable, due to, IMHO, government fiction. This is wrong. If a bad company is bankrupted by civil action, the shareholders should be liable for damages.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Criminal courts prosecute humans. Corporations can only ever be in civil court. Please consider the last time that a corporation was convicted of theft or murder. (Hint: this cannot happen.)
When companies do harm, the person or company that was harmed sues them for damages. They get sued for wrongful death, or whatever. This is our system, and it is an essential part of the "free market". This is not "completely different than a company being bankrupted by a civil ruling." It is, in fact, exactly a company being bankrupted by a civil ruling. Liability is the primary way in which corporations are prevented from doing harm to others in a free market.
That is fucking hilarious.
someone trying to save $50 on a floppy drive
Have they started making floppy drives out of babies?
None of your respondents are making the right point.
Saying what you just said may be considered illegal in England, based on the law they were debating and this dude's (idiotic) religious status as a Jedi.
So he may have called himself a Jedi solely in order to highlight the bill's idiocy. Or maybe not. I can't tell. I'm only an American.
Or he could just install curl or wget.
No, not free including international. But good enough for most people concerned about phone minutes that live in MetroPCS's extremely limited coverage area.
MetroPCS is not designed with globetrotters in mind.
Porn producers have always had to document this. Now anyone who distributes porn (or has more than like 400 videos or something) will also need documentation.
That's a lot of people and businesses that are going to have to get rid of a ton of their stock because they don't have a way to get proper documentation for it. It's a sizeable taking from the porn industry.
It's rather educational. Definitely don't read it to your kids without preparing yourself and checking the whole story beforehand.
For example, one of Cinderella's stepsisters was doing fine with Prince Charming, until the fields whispered to him "Dude, check out her foot! Check out her foot!" and he looked and saw that she had severed her heel in order to fit into the glass slipper and she was bleeding everywhere.
Also for example, there is a story that's only one page long about Rose Red: This little boy disobeys his mother and goes out into the forest and meets Rose Red. Then, exactly one year later, the boy dies in his bed and his mother finds a red rose on the doorstep. No, it's not too upsetting, but that's the whole story.
Most of the stories are gory and weird. Yes, German people are twisted, but IMHO there is something to be said for telling your children about twisted shit. This is expounded upon in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, and he cites The Raven (By Coleridge, not Poe) as an excellent example.
"The target of 10 million units gives tremendous momentum to a platform"
"Also, being provided as free gifts in happy meals gives tremendous momentum to a platform."
"Buy an XBox360 or we kill this dog."
Ever read the Brothers Grimm?
Right. That doesn't matter, because you have not described a system that would be covered by this patent. Do you know of any Apple II or Macintosh software that could control which (MIDI or otherwise) songs were played with a few listboxes for categories like Genre or Artist or Album, and a grid displaying information about the songs?
I don't. I'm not saying that this *should* be patentable. But it is different from the other devices you describe, and thus may be covered by a new patent.
Are you trying to argue that our current system for software patents makes sense?
There are a quadrillion patents for existing technology, now slightly tweaked or modernized. I'm sure someone got a new patent for the steam engine just as soon as they connected it to a computer. It's now a computer controlled steam engine. Then when they connect that computer to the internet, it's an internet enable steam engine. Then when they created a web interface for it, they got more patents.
None of your listed "problems" have anything to do with patent law. That's the problem. Yes, yes, obviousness is *supposed* to come into play, but that has obviously been defined out of existence. Your prior art would not be covered by this patent.
Yes, it's idiotic. That's the problem.
I'm sorry. I completely misunderstood your comment. I totally assumed you were being sarcastic.
Way to go, me. Apparently it *is* Mayan food. I'll shut up.
That would explain why we don't call it Mayan food, you idiot.
Glad we're all on the same page :)