Oh, I don't doubt that it's a fine electric automobile, based on a Lotus Elise,
The Model S is not based on the Elise. The Tesla Roadster was but that no longer is in production. Try going to Tesla's web site before posting next time.
Personal prejudices and preferences aside, my biggest issue with electric cars is that you're really just shuffling the emissions around.
You're forgetting several important details. First is that you can power an electric vehicle with power from non-fossil fuel sources. Hydro, wind, solar, nuclear etc. You can actually reduce the emissions to a good approximation of zero. Second is that it is MUCH easier to control emission at the generating station than it is to try to do it on every tailpipe out there. Would you rather have one big filter or millions of small ones? Third is that the power efficiency of electric motors is significantly higher than for internal combustion engines. ICEs waste a huge amount of power in the form of heat. Fourth is that you have the option of powering an electric vehicle with fossil fuels that are potentially less polluting. Instead of coal you can power it with natural gas or even oil.
Until we get a point of 100% clean renewable energy, I'm not sure the trade-off is worth it.
So nothing is worth doing until it is perfect? That's a pretty tragically stupid argument.
Tesla demoed battery swapping technology recently. Takes 90 seconds, no need to get out of the car. Faster than filling up with liquid fuel.
I don't really see that taking off because it's too much of an infrastructure investment and requires too much cooperation between rival companies. Electric wires are already strung all over the place and it is fairly straightforward to upgrade them to accommodate the extra juice. For battery swapping to work at a large scale, electric car vendors have to agree upon a standard battery design and I just don't see that happening anytime soon. It's a nifty idea but I have my doubts.
No you don't. Just like the asshats who ride harley davidson motorcycles don't "need" to hear their motorcycles violating local noise ordinances. You might like it (no idea why) but you certainly don't need it. Speaking for myself I don't really want to hear your car go vroom either.
I'm somewhat mystified why people would a car that is any louder than it absolutely has to be. It's noise pollution, nothing more. Noise from a car is a by-product. People expect it because it has always been there but it does not make the vehicle perform any better. Personally I want a car that is absolutely silent and goes like stink. (and no there are no blind people crossing the road anywhere I drive)
I'm sorry, I just don't care for battery cars, just like I don't care for iDevices -- perhaps the (dumb) analogy is more accurate than the author intended.
I've actually sat in a Tesla Model S at a electric vehicle show. I defy anyone to actually test drive one and claim that they "don't like battery cars". The Model S is obviously too pricey for most folks but it is an awesome car almost any way you care to measure it. It's fast, handles great, has range comparable to gas cars, looks nice, doesn't need gasoline, has a terrific interior and can even be recharged relatively quickly given the state of the art in recharge technology. Given it's range the recharge time problem is significantly mitigated. I'd buy one in a heartbeat if I had the money.
If the technology can be developed to get recharge times down to 5-10 minutes you had better start learning to like "battery cars" because that is really the only serious problem holding them back. Until we get to that point I think we're going to see a slow but steady migration through plug in hybrids. I've driven the Volt and the Ford Fusion Energi and I'm seriously considering buying one or the other. They're both genuinely good cars for reasonable prices (not cheap but competitive) and I can do much of my daily driving without needing to use gas.
Looking back on history, I never got the dislike towards him.
It's mostly scapegoating from the right. Presidents who serve during tough economic times usually get a disproportionate amount of blame for problems that they weren't responsible for creating and often can't do much to fix. Since he wasn't exactly beloved by his own party, Carter is a fairly easy target by the conservatives. Their criticisms of him are rarely fair or accurate but the tactic has worked in the past.
Only by people who think Reagan was the second coming of George Washington. If you were dumb enough to vote for Bush the Lesser you might actually believe that Carter was a bad president. Carter was a mediocre president who served during a period of rather bad economic problems that were not his fault. His record is mixed but isn't especially bad overall. I'm old enough to actually remember when he was in office and there hasn't been a president since who I feel was substantially better and one who was considerably worse.
The instant they broke the law, I became an injured party. Ignoring the 4th is breaking the law, no matter how 'legal' you make it.
While I agree with you, that argument is not sufficient. The government's defense is quite simple. They will ask you to show what specific (to you), quantifiable and irreparable harm you suffered. For better or worse that is not easy to do when all the evidence of harm to you is classified.
The fourth amendment's applicability is only certain in the minds of privacy advocates.
The fourth amendment's applicability hinges on the word "unreasonable" in the first sentence. The question is whether the NSA's activities constitute a reasonable search. This can be debated but I have heard no argument yet that convinces me that the NSA has not crossed the line into conducting an unreasonable search. And since they have managed to keep everything a secret I can't even prove I have standing in a court of law to sue for a violation of my rights.
The NSA's sniffing is legally comparable to a police dragnet checking door-to-door for a suspect - it infringes privacy, but the impact on any particular person's life isn't unreasonable.
When the police are looking for a suspect they are looking for a specific person and they do not continue to infringe upon your person or property indefinitely and in secret. The NSA's program would be like the police showing up daily and rooting through your mailbox and phone bills looking for information that might incriminate you without any warrant or even probable cause.
At one point there were no humans and then at some later date, a modern human appeared.
It doesn't work that way. There was no single point where *poof* a "modern human" appeared. To assume that at some point humans stopped evolving and that we are all descended from that one mating pair. That is demonstrably not true. You can trace the DNA back and prove it. It wasn't a single person's gene that mutated into some final form. It is a population that accumulated a series of mutations that were passed around over generations that eventually resulted in a breeding population similar to our current form.
Improbable? Yes. Difficult? Yes. But not impossible. Assuming the initial four were sufficiently procreative -- say, 10-12 children each -- you have enough genetic diversity for a viable start.
ALL those children will have the exact same DNA, one set from each parent. There is no genetic diversity. You get a complete set from both parents and different genes will be expressed but there is no new DNA. You can mix and match it all you want but the population is too small to avoid accumulated genetic problems. Read up on minimum viable population. Genetic defects will accumulate over generations (remember no new DNA available) eventually resulting in serious problems. There are examples of small populations on humans successfully producing viable populations (starting sizes of 10-15) with some inbreeding problems but there are no examples of a single male/female pair resulting in a successful population. The statistical odds make it simply improbable to the point of absurdity.
So, we went from a point of having 0 people, to having 1000 people, with no intermediate stage? Please explain the science of that.
You're presuming that humans came into their current form all at once. Could not possibly have happened that way. There were a series of incremental mutations within the breeding population that over time became what we presently think of as homo sapiens. Think of it this way. If you took 4 people and dropped them on an island, they would die out from inbreeding even if nothing else killed them. Adam and Eve is a cute story but from a biology standpoint it is quite impossible.
Shooting someone doesn't always mean you kill. You could shoot them in the foot for example. If it stops that person knifing an innocent in the heart, then that's a life saved.
If you draw a gun on someone you had best be prepared to kill them. You might wound them as per your example but that should not be your expectation. If you draw a lethal weapon on someone, your expectation should be that you are going to kill them and you should be prepared to possibly go to jail for your actions. You are NOT going to shoot the gun out of the guys hand. The real world isn't like a 1950s western. There is nothing wrong with drawing a weapon in self defense but be realistic about the consequences and likely outcomes of doing so.
Even when there was only 4 people on the planet there was still murder.
I'm pretty sure you were joking but there never has been only 4 people on the planet. That's not a viable breeding population and evolution doesn't work that way.
We are fortunate that we are allowed to protect ourselves and not have to totally rely on the government to be safe.
There are many ways to protect yourself and carrying a firearm isn't the best among them. Frankly if it gets to the point where you truly need a firearm, you probably screwed up somewhere along the way. (Not saying you shouldn't have the right to carry, just that it should be a very last resort)
I reside in Georgia, and I have in fact carried my sidearm in plain view on MARTA and in the public areas of Hartsfield-Jackson.
I'm somewhat dubious that you carried openly in an airport unless you were wearing a uniform at the time or this was a LONG time ago. However even if you did I have to ask, WHY? Nobody is going to attack you in an airport that you are going to be able to defend against and it's about as secure a location as you are likely to be in. Your sidearm at best is NO help at all and at worst could cause a huge problem. I don't have any problem at all with people transporting their unloaded firearms though airports but if you brought a loaded firearm into an airport in the current security environment we should have heard your arrest report on the evening news. I say this even if what you did was perfectly legal. Actions like that are what gives thugs like the TSA the excuse they need to behave badly.
A disarmed populace is just a crop of victims waiting to be harvested.
Really? India seemed to do pretty well with passive resistance against the UK. The Soviet Union collapsed and it wasn't because of personal firearms. Your little personal firearms don't stand a chance against the military or even the police really. The notion that your personal firearms are what preserves your liberty is a cute little sound bite that doesn't really stand up to serious scrutiny. I have no illusions whatsoever that my own guns (yes I have some) are what is keeping our government at bay. What keeps them at bay is our collective behavior and our willingness to speak up courageously in the face of power. The government can overwhelm some of us for a time but it can't handle all of us forever. As the saying goes, "vox populi, vox Dei".
Contrary to popular belief, most folks who legally carry a firearm are not cowboys out looking for a reason to go shoot somebody up.
I think you are mistaken on what constitutes popular belief. I very much agree that most firearms owners are quite responsible and most Americans understand this. That's never really been the issue. The problem is how do you identify the people who are crazy? How do you identify the irresponsible ones? How do you identify the criminals? It only takes a small number of people with guns to cause a big problem.
In all likelihood you are not the one I'm really worried about. (Although if you actually brought a loaded gun to the airport maybe you are...) I'm a supporter of gun rights but the the gun lobby (aka the NRA) has really gotten out of hand. There ARE crazy people out there looking to shoot up schools and movie theaters and public gatherings. They exist but as a society we seem unwilling to have an adult conversation about what to do about them. I'm not for a moment proposing that we take away everyone's guns but I don't think it is unreasonable to register firearms, *require* safety and competency training, and to conduct background checks. I don't think it is unreasonable to require precautions when handing someone a weapon whose primary purpose is to kill.
It is only AFTER a product is shown to be profitable does it attract imitators. This allows for a natural limited duration monopoly in which to recoup R&D costs.
Problem is that the time period you are talking about is FAR too short to recoup R&D costs. I've got 20 years experience in manufacturing and I assure you that the time period you propose is actually incredibly short. My company makes wire harnesses. We're a contract manufacturer. If you handed me almost any example of any wire harness, I could probably have a working prototype copy in your hands within a week. A month at the outside if it is really, really complicated. And we're a small shop with limited resources. One of the big companies could probably do it in a few days no matter how complex it is. Doesn't matter how innovative your product is, I can copy it cheaper than you can design it and I can probably have it in production inside of a month. Exactly how do you think you are going to recoup R&D costs on anything original in that short a time window?
Let's take drugs for example. Conducting the clinical trials to get a new drug approved takes many years and can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Setting up the manufacturing equipment to produce the drug typically is trivial by comparison and may only cost a few million. If I gave you the chemical formula for a drug, you could have someone manufacturing it within a month for a few cents a pill. There is no possible way any drug company could recoup their investment in the time it would take someone to knock off their product and they certainly can't "just innovate more" because that literally takes a decade for just a single drug.
Same situation with lots of other technology and manufactured products. It is MUCH cheaper to copy than to produce original work. This creates an economic disincentive to conduct original research. You will note that there is a very strong correlation between locations with strong patent and copyright protection and locations with strong research. That's not to say research cannot happen at all in places without such protection but it is almost invariably less.
Patents cause a market distortion by setting an artificial hurdle for innovation. If you jump this high you get a 17 year monopoly.
Yes they do. Because that twenty year monopoly is incentive for you to conduct the R&D necessary to make the product in the first place. Patents aren't supposed to be for incremental improvements to existing products. They are supposed to be for genuinely novel inventions - things that were hard (and probably expensive) to come up with. I'm very much of the opinion that our current patent regime is in bad need of reform but doing away with it altogether would be unbelievably stupid. I've spent a lot of time in places like China and Southeast Asia with rather lax enforcement of patent rights and there is a very good reason why we still don't see a lot of original technology come out of those places. Companies that have to do R&D are VERY reluctant to do it in China because of the free rider problem. They can easily be put out of business by knock offs no matter how innovative they are. They make stuff there but they are very careful with sharing design information. I don't think you have an adequate appreciation for the economics at work here. What you are saying sounds good from an ivory tower but doesn't really work in the Real World (tm).
A distinction without a difference. Patents promote progress by mitigating the effects of the free rider problem. Patents make many investments in research and development in useful arts and sciences possible that otherwise would not be economically viable. There is absolutely no way that Intel or Pfizer or IBM would exist without some means to mitigate the free rider problem.
You characterize copying first as "free riding", which is not true, and second as a "problem", which it definitely is not.
If you are smart enough to prove that your (bogus) assertion above is correct then there is a Nobel prize in economics waiting for you because NOBODY in the field of economics will agree with you. Let's be clear - I'm not talking about the mere transfer of information. I'm talking about producing knockoff products based on someone else's research and investment effort which is why someone would care about patent protection in the first place. Producing knockoff products most certainly is free riding and it most certainly is an economic problem. If you think otherwise you have never tried to run a business. Seriously, take a deep breath and go do some reading about the free rider problem and what it means. It's not just about people on buses.
Why is copying not free riding? Because free riding is about material goods and services. Ideas are neither.
An idea for a drug or a microchip which does not take tangible (and thus potentially saleable) form is useless. The ideas relevant to patent protection have to manifest themselves into products to be economically useful. Turning ideas into products costs significant money and if this money cannot be recouped then it will never be spent and society will not progress. It is trivial to demonstrate the economic effects to the free rider problem. You can (and should) share ideas all you want but when it comes to making the investments to turn those ideas into tangible form, there HAS to be a return on investment. Companies like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Pfizer, and the rest could not possibly justify spending billions each year on research if others could simply take their findings and produce knockoff products. There would be no point to most of these investments.
If scientists cannot share their ideas with each other and the public without first getting permission and securing payment, to make sure no one is getting a free ride, we will progress very slowly.
Scientists are not prohibited from sharing ideas. They are however prohibited (temporarily) from profiting from someone else's ideas or buying knockoff products of patented ideas. Yes, unfortunately this sometimes this slows progress in places. However without patent protection from free riders progress would stop altogether in many technologies. If you want to argue that patent terms are too long or that patents are being granted for ideas that don't deserve protection then I will agree with you 100% since that is manifestly true. But until you can articulate a solution to the free rider problem or can articulate why it has somehow ceased to be a problem (and you have not done either) then you have no meaningful argument to make regarding whether to do away with patents.
Myriad Genetics did *not* patent a gene, they patented a propensity for disease test, that featured a specific gene at the center of the test.
If what you say is true then why did the recent Supreme Court ruling invalidate Myriad's patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2? Myriad was apparently granted patents on naturally occurring genes they had managed to isolate and they used these patents to prevent anyone else from testing for the presence of these genes. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Myriad on this topic. This does not prevent Myriad from developing some novel test technology, it simply means they can't patent something that is just found in nature the same way they cannot dig up a pile of some mineral and get a patent for what they found.
How many other diseases will go unstudied, now that there is no reward for linking a gene to a disease?
There is plenty of reward for coming up with a therapy, coming up with novel testing equipment, etc. There is no public interest to be found in allowing patents for things simply found in nature.
Disclosure: I am a certified accountant with a specialty in cost accounting.
If your competitor steals your idea and then is able to copy your idea for cheaper...doesn't that mean you just lost and SHOULD go out of business?
What it means is that you need to study cost accounting. It's quite easy to demonstrate how a company that knocks off another company's product can gain a cost advantage. Research and development costs are often a very substantial portion of the cost of a good. Copying someone else's research is usually cheaper than doing it yourself. For two similar sized competent companies there is typically little difference in manufacturing or distribution costs. Holding all other things equal it is quite impossible for the company doing the R&D to sell it cheaper than a company which can simply copy someone elses work. This is called the free rider problem and it is the entire reason why patents exist in the first place.
They improved upon your idea, right or else how would they sell it for less?
They can sell it for less because they do not have to recoup R&D costs. Please go find a cost accountant and they will explain this to you in exquisite detail. You do not have to improve on a product at all to sell it for less if you do not have to do any engineering yourself.
Nice simple sound bite. Pity that like most sound bites it grossly oversimplifies the situation. Monopolies form for a variety of reasons, some of which are very much in the public interest. Monopolies are not something to be generally desired but it's not difficult to point out circumstances where they are the least worst option available.
Patents create a monopoly for a time in order to combat the free rider problem which is a FAR worse problem in most cases than a temporary monopoly. There are lots of inventions that are simply not economically viable without something resembling patent protection. If you want to do away with patents and the problems with their associated monopoly, all you have to do is explain how your alternative to patents will combat the free rider problem. So far no one has come up with a lesser evil but if you can do so I believe a Nobel prize awaits you. (and no, just doing away with patents without a replacement will NOT improve things - particularly for tangible manufactured goods) Please note that I'm in no way implying our current regime of patent law is well designed or without problems. I quite firmly believe our current set of patent regulations are quite broken. I'm merely saying that patents (with their associated monopoly) as a concept are in the public interest due to the existence of the free rider problem.
In many cases you have a natural monopoly whereby the lowest cost of production is only possible if carried out by a single firm. Public utilities tend to fall into this category. If the cost of production is not as low as possible then prices to consumers by definition cannot be as low as possible either and low prices are very much in the public interest. However because any monopoly creates potential opportunities for abuse and monopolistic pricing, such monopolies are often regulated. Again, it isn't perfect but it certainly serves a purpose beyond "feeding whatever company holds that monopoly".
Basically true but also irrelevant. For all practical purposes it may as well be linux given how compatible Windows RT is with Windows 8. There is no way to recompile desktop Windows 8 apps to work on Windows RT. iOS and OSX also share some technology but Apple was at least bright enough to brand them differently since they are not directly compatible at present. Frankly I think Microsoft marketing really screwed up the branding on this one.
Do you seriously think they are putting a touch interface on Windows because they aren't competing with iOS and Android? If that was true then there would have been no reason to create Windows RT. The Surface is very much meant to directly compete with the iPad. It ALSO is an attempt to steal a march on Apple and converge the tablet and laptop. In case you hadn't noticed Microsoft has been trying very hard to leverage their Windows operating system into the tablet market.
Surface comes with a keyboard and stand designed into the form factor, the iPad is a purely hand-held touch operated device.
The fact that they included a keyboard by default does not mean they don't compete. It is a trivial exercise to put a keyboard on an iPad. There is no technological reason you cannot put a word processor or spreadsheet on an iPad.
The point is that it should really be compared to netbooks or Chromebooks, in which case it was still massively overpriced but an interesting twist on the idea.
You've almost got it. What Microsoft (correctly) realized is that laptops and tablets are going to converge. Windows 8 is an attempt to jump into the lead on this convergence. Apple is doing the exact same thing (OSX is getting a LOT of features from IOS) albeit in a different way and so is Google. Tablets and laptops are going to get less and less distinct over time. Right now there just are some pretty severe hardware limitations forcing the somewhat artificial distinction.
It's important to keep the RT (WinCE warmed over) and the Pro separate. They're distinct products. Although, I wonder whether the RT is dragging the Pro down with it.
I'm pretty sure it is. Microsoft has (correctly) realized that tablets and PCs are going to converge at some level and the Surface Pro is an attempt to get ahead of the curve on this. It's a genuinely good idea on their part though one can easily argue that the execution on the idea has been quite lacking. But among the biggest screw ups they've made is in how they named their tablet products. Microsoft introduced a lot of needless confusion around their products
The problem is that the first device they released runs Windows RT. When people hear "Windows" they are going to assume they are going to be able to run all their Windows applications. This is not the case with Windows RT - it is much more limited than that. They later released the Surface Pro which can run regular Windows 8 but the damage was already done. There was and I think remains considerable confusion between the two. Quite frankly they should have called Windows RT something completely different. Apple figured this out - iOS and OSX share some underpinnings but they are different enough that calling them the same thing would have been confusing and probably misleading. If the operating systems cannot run the same applications and they cannot even be ported over, then call them something different. Microsoft has a strong brand in Windows but they've somewhat diluted it and caused needless confusion.
Speaking from my own experience I had 3 people at my work who were thinking of getting a Surface running Windows RT until I pointed out that those machines would not run their Windows applications. They genuinely did not realize this.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I don't doubt that it's a fine electric automobile, based on a Lotus Elise,
The Model S is not based on the Elise. The Tesla Roadster was but that no longer is in production. Try going to Tesla's web site before posting next time.
Personal prejudices and preferences aside, my biggest issue with electric cars is that you're really just shuffling the emissions around.
You're forgetting several important details. First is that you can power an electric vehicle with power from non-fossil fuel sources. Hydro, wind, solar, nuclear etc. You can actually reduce the emissions to a good approximation of zero. Second is that it is MUCH easier to control emission at the generating station than it is to try to do it on every tailpipe out there. Would you rather have one big filter or millions of small ones? Third is that the power efficiency of electric motors is significantly higher than for internal combustion engines. ICEs waste a huge amount of power in the form of heat. Fourth is that you have the option of powering an electric vehicle with fossil fuels that are potentially less polluting. Instead of coal you can power it with natural gas or even oil.
Until we get a point of 100% clean renewable energy, I'm not sure the trade-off is worth it.
So nothing is worth doing until it is perfect? That's a pretty tragically stupid argument.
Tesla demoed battery swapping technology recently. Takes 90 seconds, no need to get out of the car. Faster than filling up with liquid fuel.
I don't really see that taking off because it's too much of an infrastructure investment and requires too much cooperation between rival companies. Electric wires are already strung all over the place and it is fairly straightforward to upgrade them to accommodate the extra juice. For battery swapping to work at a large scale, electric car vendors have to agree upon a standard battery design and I just don't see that happening anytime soon. It's a nifty idea but I have my doubts.
Where do used batteries go?
They get recycled. 5 seconds on Google would have informed you of that fact.
No you don't. Just like the asshats who ride harley davidson motorcycles don't "need" to hear their motorcycles violating local noise ordinances. You might like it (no idea why) but you certainly don't need it. Speaking for myself I don't really want to hear your car go vroom either.
I'm somewhat mystified why people would a car that is any louder than it absolutely has to be. It's noise pollution, nothing more. Noise from a car is a by-product. People expect it because it has always been there but it does not make the vehicle perform any better. Personally I want a car that is absolutely silent and goes like stink. (and no there are no blind people crossing the road anywhere I drive)
I'm sorry, I just don't care for battery cars, just like I don't care for iDevices -- perhaps the (dumb) analogy is more accurate than the author intended.
I've actually sat in a Tesla Model S at a electric vehicle show. I defy anyone to actually test drive one and claim that they "don't like battery cars". The Model S is obviously too pricey for most folks but it is an awesome car almost any way you care to measure it. It's fast, handles great, has range comparable to gas cars, looks nice, doesn't need gasoline, has a terrific interior and can even be recharged relatively quickly given the state of the art in recharge technology. Given it's range the recharge time problem is significantly mitigated. I'd buy one in a heartbeat if I had the money.
If the technology can be developed to get recharge times down to 5-10 minutes you had better start learning to like "battery cars" because that is really the only serious problem holding them back. Until we get to that point I think we're going to see a slow but steady migration through plug in hybrids. I've driven the Volt and the Ford Fusion Energi and I'm seriously considering buying one or the other. They're both genuinely good cars for reasonable prices (not cheap but competitive) and I can do much of my daily driving without needing to use gas.
Looking back on history, I never got the dislike towards him.
It's mostly scapegoating from the right. Presidents who serve during tough economic times usually get a disproportionate amount of blame for problems that they weren't responsible for creating and often can't do much to fix. Since he wasn't exactly beloved by his own party, Carter is a fairly easy target by the conservatives. Their criticisms of him are rarely fair or accurate but the tactic has worked in the past.
Carter was a complete disaster for the US.
Only by people who think Reagan was the second coming of George Washington. If you were dumb enough to vote for Bush the Lesser you might actually believe that Carter was a bad president. Carter was a mediocre president who served during a period of rather bad economic problems that were not his fault. His record is mixed but isn't especially bad overall. I'm old enough to actually remember when he was in office and there hasn't been a president since who I feel was substantially better and one who was considerably worse.
My answer? It is secret. Government is allowed to keep them, so am I.
Good luck with that. Judges have always been so understanding of snide remarks.
The instant they broke the law, I became an injured party. Ignoring the 4th is breaking the law, no matter how 'legal' you make it.
While I agree with you, that argument is not sufficient. The government's defense is quite simple. They will ask you to show what specific (to you), quantifiable and irreparable harm you suffered. For better or worse that is not easy to do when all the evidence of harm to you is classified.
The fourth amendment's applicability is only certain in the minds of privacy advocates.
The fourth amendment's applicability hinges on the word "unreasonable" in the first sentence. The question is whether the NSA's activities constitute a reasonable search. This can be debated but I have heard no argument yet that convinces me that the NSA has not crossed the line into conducting an unreasonable search. And since they have managed to keep everything a secret I can't even prove I have standing in a court of law to sue for a violation of my rights.
The NSA's sniffing is legally comparable to a police dragnet checking door-to-door for a suspect - it infringes privacy, but the impact on any particular person's life isn't unreasonable.
When the police are looking for a suspect they are looking for a specific person and they do not continue to infringe upon your person or property indefinitely and in secret. The NSA's program would be like the police showing up daily and rooting through your mailbox and phone bills looking for information that might incriminate you without any warrant or even probable cause.
At one point there were no humans and then at some later date, a modern human appeared.
It doesn't work that way. There was no single point where *poof* a "modern human" appeared. To assume that at some point humans stopped evolving and that we are all descended from that one mating pair. That is demonstrably not true. You can trace the DNA back and prove it. It wasn't a single person's gene that mutated into some final form. It is a population that accumulated a series of mutations that were passed around over generations that eventually resulted in a breeding population similar to our current form.
Improbable? Yes. Difficult? Yes. But not impossible. Assuming the initial four were sufficiently procreative -- say, 10-12 children each -- you have enough genetic diversity for a viable start.
ALL those children will have the exact same DNA, one set from each parent. There is no genetic diversity. You get a complete set from both parents and different genes will be expressed but there is no new DNA. You can mix and match it all you want but the population is too small to avoid accumulated genetic problems. Read up on minimum viable population. Genetic defects will accumulate over generations (remember no new DNA available) eventually resulting in serious problems. There are examples of small populations on humans successfully producing viable populations (starting sizes of 10-15) with some inbreeding problems but there are no examples of a single male/female pair resulting in a successful population. The statistical odds make it simply improbable to the point of absurdity.
So, we went from a point of having 0 people, to having 1000 people, with no intermediate stage? Please explain the science of that.
You're presuming that humans came into their current form all at once. Could not possibly have happened that way. There were a series of incremental mutations within the breeding population that over time became what we presently think of as homo sapiens. Think of it this way. If you took 4 people and dropped them on an island, they would die out from inbreeding even if nothing else killed them. Adam and Eve is a cute story but from a biology standpoint it is quite impossible.
Shooting someone doesn't always mean you kill. You could shoot them in the foot for example. If it stops that person knifing an innocent in the heart, then that's a life saved.
If you draw a gun on someone you had best be prepared to kill them. You might wound them as per your example but that should not be your expectation. If you draw a lethal weapon on someone, your expectation should be that you are going to kill them and you should be prepared to possibly go to jail for your actions. You are NOT going to shoot the gun out of the guys hand. The real world isn't like a 1950s western. There is nothing wrong with drawing a weapon in self defense but be realistic about the consequences and likely outcomes of doing so.
Even when there was only 4 people on the planet there was still murder.
I'm pretty sure you were joking but there never has been only 4 people on the planet. That's not a viable breeding population and evolution doesn't work that way.
We are fortunate that we are allowed to protect ourselves and not have to totally rely on the government to be safe.
There are many ways to protect yourself and carrying a firearm isn't the best among them. Frankly if it gets to the point where you truly need a firearm, you probably screwed up somewhere along the way. (Not saying you shouldn't have the right to carry, just that it should be a very last resort)
I reside in Georgia, and I have in fact carried my sidearm in plain view on MARTA and in the public areas of Hartsfield-Jackson.
I'm somewhat dubious that you carried openly in an airport unless you were wearing a uniform at the time or this was a LONG time ago. However even if you did I have to ask, WHY? Nobody is going to attack you in an airport that you are going to be able to defend against and it's about as secure a location as you are likely to be in. Your sidearm at best is NO help at all and at worst could cause a huge problem. I don't have any problem at all with people transporting their unloaded firearms though airports but if you brought a loaded firearm into an airport in the current security environment we should have heard your arrest report on the evening news. I say this even if what you did was perfectly legal. Actions like that are what gives thugs like the TSA the excuse they need to behave badly.
A disarmed populace is just a crop of victims waiting to be harvested.
Really? India seemed to do pretty well with passive resistance against the UK. The Soviet Union collapsed and it wasn't because of personal firearms. Your little personal firearms don't stand a chance against the military or even the police really. The notion that your personal firearms are what preserves your liberty is a cute little sound bite that doesn't really stand up to serious scrutiny. I have no illusions whatsoever that my own guns (yes I have some) are what is keeping our government at bay. What keeps them at bay is our collective behavior and our willingness to speak up courageously in the face of power. The government can overwhelm some of us for a time but it can't handle all of us forever. As the saying goes, "vox populi, vox Dei".
Contrary to popular belief, most folks who legally carry a firearm are not cowboys out looking for a reason to go shoot somebody up.
I think you are mistaken on what constitutes popular belief. I very much agree that most firearms owners are quite responsible and most Americans understand this. That's never really been the issue. The problem is how do you identify the people who are crazy? How do you identify the irresponsible ones? How do you identify the criminals? It only takes a small number of people with guns to cause a big problem.
In all likelihood you are not the one I'm really worried about. (Although if you actually brought a loaded gun to the airport maybe you are...) I'm a supporter of gun rights but the the gun lobby (aka the NRA) has really gotten out of hand. There ARE crazy people out there looking to shoot up schools and movie theaters and public gatherings. They exist but as a society we seem unwilling to have an adult conversation about what to do about them. I'm not for a moment proposing that we take away everyone's guns but I don't think it is unreasonable to register firearms, *require* safety and competency training, and to conduct background checks. I don't think it is unreasonable to require precautions when handing someone a weapon whose primary purpose is to kill.
It is only AFTER a product is shown to be profitable does it attract imitators. This allows for a natural limited duration monopoly in which to recoup R&D costs.
Problem is that the time period you are talking about is FAR too short to recoup R&D costs. I've got 20 years experience in manufacturing and I assure you that the time period you propose is actually incredibly short. My company makes wire harnesses. We're a contract manufacturer. If you handed me almost any example of any wire harness, I could probably have a working prototype copy in your hands within a week. A month at the outside if it is really, really complicated. And we're a small shop with limited resources. One of the big companies could probably do it in a few days no matter how complex it is. Doesn't matter how innovative your product is, I can copy it cheaper than you can design it and I can probably have it in production inside of a month. Exactly how do you think you are going to recoup R&D costs on anything original in that short a time window?
Let's take drugs for example. Conducting the clinical trials to get a new drug approved takes many years and can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Setting up the manufacturing equipment to produce the drug typically is trivial by comparison and may only cost a few million. If I gave you the chemical formula for a drug, you could have someone manufacturing it within a month for a few cents a pill. There is no possible way any drug company could recoup their investment in the time it would take someone to knock off their product and they certainly can't "just innovate more" because that literally takes a decade for just a single drug.
Same situation with lots of other technology and manufactured products. It is MUCH cheaper to copy than to produce original work. This creates an economic disincentive to conduct original research. You will note that there is a very strong correlation between locations with strong patent and copyright protection and locations with strong research. That's not to say research cannot happen at all in places without such protection but it is almost invariably less.
Patents cause a market distortion by setting an artificial hurdle for innovation. If you jump this high you get a 17 year monopoly.
Yes they do. Because that twenty year monopoly is incentive for you to conduct the R&D necessary to make the product in the first place. Patents aren't supposed to be for incremental improvements to existing products. They are supposed to be for genuinely novel inventions - things that were hard (and probably expensive) to come up with. I'm very much of the opinion that our current patent regime is in bad need of reform but doing away with it altogether would be unbelievably stupid. I've spent a lot of time in places like China and Southeast Asia with rather lax enforcement of patent rights and there is a very good reason why we still don't see a lot of original technology come out of those places. Companies that have to do R&D are VERY reluctant to do it in China because of the free rider problem. They can easily be put out of business by knock offs no matter how innovative they are. They make stuff there but they are very careful with sharing design information. I don't think you have an adequate appreciation for the economics at work here. What you are saying sounds good from an ivory tower but doesn't really work in the Real World (tm).
No. Patents exist to promote progress.
A distinction without a difference. Patents promote progress by mitigating the effects of the free rider problem. Patents make many investments in research and development in useful arts and sciences possible that otherwise would not be economically viable. There is absolutely no way that Intel or Pfizer or IBM would exist without some means to mitigate the free rider problem.
You characterize copying first as "free riding", which is not true, and second as a "problem", which it definitely is not.
If you are smart enough to prove that your (bogus) assertion above is correct then there is a Nobel prize in economics waiting for you because NOBODY in the field of economics will agree with you. Let's be clear - I'm not talking about the mere transfer of information. I'm talking about producing knockoff products based on someone else's research and investment effort which is why someone would care about patent protection in the first place. Producing knockoff products most certainly is free riding and it most certainly is an economic problem. If you think otherwise you have never tried to run a business. Seriously, take a deep breath and go do some reading about the free rider problem and what it means. It's not just about people on buses.
Why is copying not free riding? Because free riding is about material goods and services. Ideas are neither.
An idea for a drug or a microchip which does not take tangible (and thus potentially saleable) form is useless. The ideas relevant to patent protection have to manifest themselves into products to be economically useful. Turning ideas into products costs significant money and if this money cannot be recouped then it will never be spent and society will not progress. It is trivial to demonstrate the economic effects to the free rider problem. You can (and should) share ideas all you want but when it comes to making the investments to turn those ideas into tangible form, there HAS to be a return on investment. Companies like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Pfizer, and the rest could not possibly justify spending billions each year on research if others could simply take their findings and produce knockoff products. There would be no point to most of these investments.
If scientists cannot share their ideas with each other and the public without first getting permission and securing payment, to make sure no one is getting a free ride, we will progress very slowly.
Scientists are not prohibited from sharing ideas. They are however prohibited (temporarily) from profiting from someone else's ideas or buying knockoff products of patented ideas. Yes, unfortunately this sometimes this slows progress in places. However without patent protection from free riders progress would stop altogether in many technologies. If you want to argue that patent terms are too long or that patents are being granted for ideas that don't deserve protection then I will agree with you 100% since that is manifestly true. But until you can articulate a solution to the free rider problem or can articulate why it has somehow ceased to be a problem (and you have not done either) then you have no meaningful argument to make regarding whether to do away with patents.
Myriad Genetics did *not* patent a gene, they patented a propensity for disease test, that featured a specific gene at the center of the test.
If what you say is true then why did the recent Supreme Court ruling invalidate Myriad's patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2? Myriad was apparently granted patents on naturally occurring genes they had managed to isolate and they used these patents to prevent anyone else from testing for the presence of these genes. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Myriad on this topic. This does not prevent Myriad from developing some novel test technology, it simply means they can't patent something that is just found in nature the same way they cannot dig up a pile of some mineral and get a patent for what they found.
How many other diseases will go unstudied, now that there is no reward for linking a gene to a disease?
There is plenty of reward for coming up with a therapy, coming up with novel testing equipment, etc. There is no public interest to be found in allowing patents for things simply found in nature.
Disclosure: I am a certified accountant with a specialty in cost accounting.
If your competitor steals your idea and then is able to copy your idea for cheaper...doesn't that mean you just lost and SHOULD go out of business?
What it means is that you need to study cost accounting. It's quite easy to demonstrate how a company that knocks off another company's product can gain a cost advantage. Research and development costs are often a very substantial portion of the cost of a good. Copying someone else's research is usually cheaper than doing it yourself. For two similar sized competent companies there is typically little difference in manufacturing or distribution costs. Holding all other things equal it is quite impossible for the company doing the R&D to sell it cheaper than a company which can simply copy someone elses work. This is called the free rider problem and it is the entire reason why patents exist in the first place.
They improved upon your idea, right or else how would they sell it for less?
They can sell it for less because they do not have to recoup R&D costs. Please go find a cost accountant and they will explain this to you in exquisite detail. You do not have to improve on a product at all to sell it for less if you do not have to do any engineering yourself.
Nice simple sound bite. Pity that like most sound bites it grossly oversimplifies the situation. Monopolies form for a variety of reasons, some of which are very much in the public interest. Monopolies are not something to be generally desired but it's not difficult to point out circumstances where they are the least worst option available.
Patents create a monopoly for a time in order to combat the free rider problem which is a FAR worse problem in most cases than a temporary monopoly. There are lots of inventions that are simply not economically viable without something resembling patent protection. If you want to do away with patents and the problems with their associated monopoly, all you have to do is explain how your alternative to patents will combat the free rider problem. So far no one has come up with a lesser evil but if you can do so I believe a Nobel prize awaits you. (and no, just doing away with patents without a replacement will NOT improve things - particularly for tangible manufactured goods) Please note that I'm in no way implying our current regime of patent law is well designed or without problems. I quite firmly believe our current set of patent regulations are quite broken. I'm merely saying that patents (with their associated monopoly) as a concept are in the public interest due to the existence of the free rider problem.
In many cases you have a natural monopoly whereby the lowest cost of production is only possible if carried out by a single firm. Public utilities tend to fall into this category. If the cost of production is not as low as possible then prices to consumers by definition cannot be as low as possible either and low prices are very much in the public interest. However because any monopoly creates potential opportunities for abuse and monopolistic pricing, such monopolies are often regulated. Again, it isn't perfect but it certainly serves a purpose beyond "feeding whatever company holds that monopoly".
WRONG It's actually windows 8 compiled for arm.
Basically true but also irrelevant. For all practical purposes it may as well be linux given how compatible Windows RT is with Windows 8. There is no way to recompile desktop Windows 8 apps to work on Windows RT. iOS and OSX also share some technology but Apple was at least bright enough to brand them differently since they are not directly compatible at present. Frankly I think Microsoft marketing really screwed up the branding on this one.
Do you seriously think they are putting a touch interface on Windows because they aren't competing with iOS and Android? If that was true then there would have been no reason to create Windows RT. The Surface is very much meant to directly compete with the iPad. It ALSO is an attempt to steal a march on Apple and converge the tablet and laptop. In case you hadn't noticed Microsoft has been trying very hard to leverage their Windows operating system into the tablet market.
Surface comes with a keyboard and stand designed into the form factor, the iPad is a purely hand-held touch operated device.
The fact that they included a keyboard by default does not mean they don't compete. It is a trivial exercise to put a keyboard on an iPad. There is no technological reason you cannot put a word processor or spreadsheet on an iPad.
The point is that it should really be compared to netbooks or Chromebooks, in which case it was still massively overpriced but an interesting twist on the idea.
You've almost got it. What Microsoft (correctly) realized is that laptops and tablets are going to converge. Windows 8 is an attempt to jump into the lead on this convergence. Apple is doing the exact same thing (OSX is getting a LOT of features from IOS) albeit in a different way and so is Google. Tablets and laptops are going to get less and less distinct over time. Right now there just are some pretty severe hardware limitations forcing the somewhat artificial distinction.
It's important to keep the RT (WinCE warmed over) and the Pro separate. They're distinct products. Although, I wonder whether the RT is dragging the Pro down with it.
I'm pretty sure it is. Microsoft has (correctly) realized that tablets and PCs are going to converge at some level and the Surface Pro is an attempt to get ahead of the curve on this. It's a genuinely good idea on their part though one can easily argue that the execution on the idea has been quite lacking. But among the biggest screw ups they've made is in how they named their tablet products. Microsoft introduced a lot of needless confusion around their products
The problem is that the first device they released runs Windows RT. When people hear "Windows" they are going to assume they are going to be able to run all their Windows applications. This is not the case with Windows RT - it is much more limited than that. They later released the Surface Pro which can run regular Windows 8 but the damage was already done. There was and I think remains considerable confusion between the two. Quite frankly they should have called Windows RT something completely different. Apple figured this out - iOS and OSX share some underpinnings but they are different enough that calling them the same thing would have been confusing and probably misleading. If the operating systems cannot run the same applications and they cannot even be ported over, then call them something different. Microsoft has a strong brand in Windows but they've somewhat diluted it and caused needless confusion.
Speaking from my own experience I had 3 people at my work who were thinking of getting a Surface running Windows RT until I pointed out that those machines would not run their Windows applications. They genuinely did not realize this.
Well... my 6.1" screen is to a 4" screen what a 23" is to a 15" on the desktop. Would you go back to a 15" on your desk ?
Haven't figured out a way to get a 23" screen in my pocket yet.
Seriously, were you trying to come up with the least relevant analogy possible?