Yes, patents are like chemo-therapy in the sense that they cause a lot of damage but we still have them because there is also a benefit. As with chemo-therapy the damage IS the benefit, making it very hard to balance the whole thing to come out ahead. You would still have to defend patents in court if you could grant them on your own - in fact even more so. The problem is any patent on something that would have been developed anyway in the absence of the patent system. In those cases the patent system is not buying us anything but the damage of litigation and a monopoly is the same.
The OP was wondering about passive safety. Passive safety is when the laws of physics make the reactor disable itself before it overheats e.g. due to the shape of the reactor where the nuclear material expands with heat and then spills out of the reactor into a separate container so that there is not enough nuclear material to sustain a reaction. In such a design the heat that would ordinarily be the problem is what shuts the reaction down with no intervention or electricity required. Cooling by a diesel generator is an active safety system - the diesel generator is actively fighting the physics of the situation to prevent an accident. A passively safe reactor fails by shutting down, an actively safe reactor fails by e.g. spewing radioactive waste. The kind of reactor you want is the passively safe kind, so the OP is wondering what kind of idiot built a reactor that isn't passively safe. Probably the reactors were built before such ideas were developed or perhaps the whole thing is actually fine and the news stories are exaggerating.
The main problem of patents is not the difficulty of getting them, it is the damage they cause for everyone other than the person holding the patent. There is no reason to think the process before would be more lengthy and the uncertainty is the same. On the contrary the process before could be shorter by making procedures at the patent office that make that possible, while re-arranging the courts is more difficult. Consider taking your thinking to the extreme of letting everyone grant themselves patents on anything and then having to duke it out in court to defend these self-signed patents. Patents wouldn't be worth anything until they were defended, except as a means to threaten people. It is the same problem with patents today, just less so. We need less patents not more patents. It is a tiny step in the right direction to make patents harder to get within the existing laws. We don't need more 1-click patents.
I fail to see how a lengthy process after granting a patent is better than a lengthy process before the patent is granted. The uncertainty is the same but the granted patent can be used for harassment even if it should not have been granted.
That's because you shifted the discussion to the kind of violence that the police get involved in. If we do that, then yes - more man-on-woman violent crime gets reported. In the same way, if we shift the discussion to giving birth, then I'm sure you'd agree women are more guilty of it than men, but that's not much of an argument. I'm surprised it took this long for the misogynist label to be brought out. It's usually the first card played in any questioning of mens' problems involving women as aggressors. Obviously everything I say must be wrong if I can be accused of saying something about women that can be seen as bad.
I agree that men on average do more physical damage to women when they do attack women. This is one of the main reasons that there is the idea that the attacks are almost exclusively man-on-woman: a woman slapping a man around just simply isn't counted as violence. I think that's because women have less upper body strength than men and they are also more savvy about how to use violence without losing social standing (but I don't really know if that is the reason from data) - they know that if they refrain from causing physical injury, they are exceedingly unlikely to ever have trouble over it. "He must have had it coming." The maximum penalty that there is any probability of them facing is the man cutting off the connection. This is not true for men. Because the stakes are so much lower for women, that means that a larger group of women are prepared to engage in it casually. So if we think that purely physical discomfort and injury are the only things that matter in violence, then yes, woman-on-man spouse violence is a lesser concern.
I doubt you really disagree: imagine a man hitting a woman in a public park, and imagine a woman hitting a man in a public park. Now imagine the typical reaction from men and women who pass by and see it. The difference in reaction is not apparent from a crime statistic and it plays a part in warping what gets reported and what is seen as rising to the level of a crime.
I'm guessing you got 1 in 6 from Wikipedia which references http://www.ccasa.org/statistics.cfm. That page also says 1/7 women have been raped by their husbands. In that case husbands rape 98% of all women who have been raped (1/6-1/7). Do you believe that?
I'm prepared to grant that certain smaller groups of women may be much more at risk than other groups, and for women in those groups the risk of rape is a very real problem.
Taking your own numbers at face value my view on that particular matter is 7% inaccurate, yet you wish to conclude that that is "seriously detached from real life". More like my views are seriously detached from how you like to view the world. Violence in general is more a problem for men than women, yet we are more concerned about violence against women. It's true whether or not you wish to accept it.
You didn't understand the OKCupid link at all and you dismissed the other link because you don't like it, so you aren't very interesting to have a discussion with. I'm hoping for you that you did understand it but you just refuse to process it because it challenges what you believe - then there is hope for you. Your conception of security as being specifically about protecting women, not men, only means you are making my point while attempting to disagree with me - always embarrassing but then what you wrote about the OKCupid link shows you don't really mind that. I can recognize that starving eventually leads to dying without me having hangups about food - it doesn't make me mad at food or mean I have bad experiences with food. It does mean I make sure to have food available. In the same way recognizing facts don't make me mad at women. It just makes me aware that there are crazy women out there and that I don't want them - you can have them if you don't have any standards, it's OK. It's sad that you think that recognizing facts requires having bad experiences or forgoing sex, but I'm not really here to help you with your issues. I really liked the tone of your post, so I wrote one for you too. This certainly isn't a waste of time.
You have to not infringe on other people's right to be not punched in the face. Does this infringe your freedom? I suppose it does in the spin you are putting on this.
Have you ever seen a man attack a women physically even once? I lose count of the number of times I've seen it the other way around and I doubt your experience is different. It's just that we don't classify women-on-man violence as violence. A slap is the typical example - it's violence when a man does it and not violence when a woman does it. Violence from both genders is directed at men far more than at women. The reason you are confused on this issue is that violence against women is considered to be a more serious matter than violence against men, so the discussion is always about violence against women even though it's much rarer. Here's a great example of that: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-13906762.html
This story makes it out to be a travesty that women are now more than half as likely to be assaulted as a man is. It carefully avoids the fact that men are still more at risk than women. I can't be bothered to find the real data on this as I forgot the url, but here's something for you to read: (the numbers in there are too low because men don't report when they are abused)
http://www.oregoncounseling.org/Handouts/DomesticViolenceMen.htm
It's free as in freedom not free as in beer. You don't have to tell anyone. You do have to allow other people to use your code in the same way that you did with the code that you used. Or at least you do if you distribute binaries.
It's stupid simple. The point of the GPL is to make source code freely available. You can only get in trouble with the GPL if you don't want that, in which case of course the GPL is not for you. All the GPL does is list ways of you being an asshole and telling you not to do that, given that you accepted the premise that the GPL is about making source code available.
Rape is not a common thing and is a non-issue for normal, balanced people of both sexes. Men are much, much more at risk in the nightlife than women are - from other men. Physical risk of being coerced has just got nothing to do with why women have different wishes on sex. If you are honest you'll realize that woman-on-man violence is much more common than the other way around. One main effect that is actually real is that almost all men desire young women physically while women want same-age partners. This means that young women experience tremendous demand from men so they can afford to be very picky. This gives them excellent training for playing games on men without investing any real effort so that they are skilled at forcing situations of them being in control even when they get older and are not as much in demand.
That translates to "the only people more annoying than those who take my viewpoint to an extreme is the people who disagree with me" I think that's a common sentiment, too.
This is great IF it does not in any way count as evidence against the identified person - this system should only serve as a way for the police to get someone to investigate that might then later be found to be guilty on other grounds. The reason for this is that eye witnesses are not reliable, so if you make them go through a million photos, they ARE going to get it wrong. The best they can do is to identify a few pictures that kind of look like the person they saw, but we humans are more likely to arbitrarily choose one picture out of the likely candidates to be the RIGHT one, instead of admitting that we can't say for sure. Making the computer eliminate most of the less likely matches only increases the unreliability of the system because eye witnesses can then in effect look through even more pictures in less time leading to an even higher false positive rate.
It's also OK to put someone the police suspects on other grounds in a lineup and have the witness pick that person out. What's bad is combining the two things by having the computer select a likely match and put that person in the lineup based solely on matching the witness description - that has all the same problems as having the witness go through the database themselves. The problem is that a computer system with millions of entries is always going to produce a person who looks a lot like the right guy, even if the actual right guy isn't in the database at all, and that is going to make many witnesses identify the wrong guy based on striking similarity.
The even bigger problem is that this problem is not obvious and many juries and even some defense lawyers aren't going to understand the problem correctly - "he says this guy attacked him, what more is there to say in this matter? Guilty!"
The problem with this is that some jobs that need to be done are not enjoyable and therefore they won't get done. This is things like picking fruit all day, cleaning public toilets and picking up trash. I guess those examples could eventually be done by robots, but there are always going to be less desirable jobs that it will be hard to fill in a world where no one is too motivated by money. Your idea might be the right one even with that problem, but only if the amount of undesirable things that need to be done becomes truly tiny.
If the laws there support such charges then those laws are in urgent need of repair. More importantly, there needs to be heavy penalties for police officers who attempt to harass citizens in these kinds of ways up to and including jail time. Police can make mistakes like the rest of us and that's acceptable to a certain degree. Arresting someone for recording them while on the job is not an acceptable kind of mistake because it involves the officer abusing his extensive privileges for his own gain and it potentially allows him to hide other abuses of power. I would put it at the same level of seriousness as if an accused person goes to the judge's private home and attempts to physically intimidate him into dropping his case. Or rather it's more serious than that, because the police officer is in a position of trust while the accused is not.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, patents are like chemo-therapy in the sense that they cause a lot of damage but we still have them because there is also a benefit. As with chemo-therapy the damage IS the benefit, making it very hard to balance the whole thing to come out ahead. You would still have to defend patents in court if you could grant them on your own - in fact even more so. The problem is any patent on something that would have been developed anyway in the absence of the patent system. In those cases the patent system is not buying us anything but the damage of litigation and a monopoly is the same.
I want a MANLY power plant that can create a 30-100 km dead zone of mutants and a death plume that has a global reach.
OK, but why do you think coal is so manly?
The OP was wondering about passive safety. Passive safety is when the laws of physics make the reactor disable itself before it overheats e.g. due to the shape of the reactor where the nuclear material expands with heat and then spills out of the reactor into a separate container so that there is not enough nuclear material to sustain a reaction. In such a design the heat that would ordinarily be the problem is what shuts the reaction down with no intervention or electricity required. Cooling by a diesel generator is an active safety system - the diesel generator is actively fighting the physics of the situation to prevent an accident. A passively safe reactor fails by shutting down, an actively safe reactor fails by e.g. spewing radioactive waste. The kind of reactor you want is the passively safe kind, so the OP is wondering what kind of idiot built a reactor that isn't passively safe. Probably the reactors were built before such ideas were developed or perhaps the whole thing is actually fine and the news stories are exaggerating.
The main problem of patents is not the difficulty of getting them, it is the damage they cause for everyone other than the person holding the patent. There is no reason to think the process before would be more lengthy and the uncertainty is the same. On the contrary the process before could be shorter by making procedures at the patent office that make that possible, while re-arranging the courts is more difficult. Consider taking your thinking to the extreme of letting everyone grant themselves patents on anything and then having to duke it out in court to defend these self-signed patents. Patents wouldn't be worth anything until they were defended, except as a means to threaten people. It is the same problem with patents today, just less so. We need less patents not more patents. It is a tiny step in the right direction to make patents harder to get within the existing laws. We don't need more 1-click patents.
I fail to see how a lengthy process after granting a patent is better than a lengthy process before the patent is granted. The uncertainty is the same but the granted patent can be used for harassment even if it should not have been granted.
That's because you shifted the discussion to the kind of violence that the police get involved in. If we do that, then yes - more man-on-woman violent crime gets reported. In the same way, if we shift the discussion to giving birth, then I'm sure you'd agree women are more guilty of it than men, but that's not much of an argument. I'm surprised it took this long for the misogynist label to be brought out. It's usually the first card played in any questioning of mens' problems involving women as aggressors. Obviously everything I say must be wrong if I can be accused of saying something about women that can be seen as bad.
I agree that men on average do more physical damage to women when they do attack women. This is one of the main reasons that there is the idea that the attacks are almost exclusively man-on-woman: a woman slapping a man around just simply isn't counted as violence. I think that's because women have less upper body strength than men and they are also more savvy about how to use violence without losing social standing (but I don't really know if that is the reason from data) - they know that if they refrain from causing physical injury, they are exceedingly unlikely to ever have trouble over it. "He must have had it coming." The maximum penalty that there is any probability of them facing is the man cutting off the connection. This is not true for men. Because the stakes are so much lower for women, that means that a larger group of women are prepared to engage in it casually. So if we think that purely physical discomfort and injury are the only things that matter in violence, then yes, woman-on-man spouse violence is a lesser concern.
I doubt you really disagree: imagine a man hitting a woman in a public park, and imagine a woman hitting a man in a public park. Now imagine the typical reaction from men and women who pass by and see it. The difference in reaction is not apparent from a crime statistic and it plays a part in warping what gets reported and what is seen as rising to the level of a crime.
I'm guessing you got 1 in 6 from Wikipedia which references http://www.ccasa.org/statistics.cfm. That page also says 1/7 women have been raped by their husbands. In that case husbands rape 98% of all women who have been raped (1/6-1/7). Do you believe that?
I'm prepared to grant that certain smaller groups of women may be much more at risk than other groups, and for women in those groups the risk of rape is a very real problem.
Which condition of the GPL are you referring to?
Taking your own numbers at face value my view on that particular matter is 7% inaccurate, yet you wish to conclude that that is "seriously detached from real life". More like my views are seriously detached from how you like to view the world. Violence in general is more a problem for men than women, yet we are more concerned about violence against women. It's true whether or not you wish to accept it.
You didn't understand the OKCupid link at all and you dismissed the other link because you don't like it, so you aren't very interesting to have a discussion with. I'm hoping for you that you did understand it but you just refuse to process it because it challenges what you believe - then there is hope for you. Your conception of security as being specifically about protecting women, not men, only means you are making my point while attempting to disagree with me - always embarrassing but then what you wrote about the OKCupid link shows you don't really mind that. I can recognize that starving eventually leads to dying without me having hangups about food - it doesn't make me mad at food or mean I have bad experiences with food. It does mean I make sure to have food available. In the same way recognizing facts don't make me mad at women. It just makes me aware that there are crazy women out there and that I don't want them - you can have them if you don't have any standards, it's OK. It's sad that you think that recognizing facts requires having bad experiences or forgoing sex, but I'm not really here to help you with your issues. I really liked the tone of your post, so I wrote one for you too. This certainly isn't a waste of time.
What single requirement of the GPL do you consider to be onerous and unrelated to source code?
You have to not infringe on other people's right to be not punched in the face. Does this infringe your freedom? I suppose it does in the spin you are putting on this.
Have you ever seen a man attack a women physically even once? I lose count of the number of times I've seen it the other way around and I doubt your experience is different. It's just that we don't classify women-on-man violence as violence. A slap is the typical example - it's violence when a man does it and not violence when a woman does it. Violence from both genders is directed at men far more than at women. The reason you are confused on this issue is that violence against women is considered to be a more serious matter than violence against men, so the discussion is always about violence against women even though it's much rarer. Here's a great example of that:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-13906762.html
This story makes it out to be a travesty that women are now more than half as likely to be assaulted as a man is. It carefully avoids the fact that men are still more at risk than women. I can't be bothered to find the real data on this as I forgot the url, but here's something for you to read: (the numbers in there are too low because men don't report when they are abused) http://www.oregoncounseling.org/Handouts/DomesticViolenceMen.htm
As for men wanting young women and women preferring same age partners, I don't know what rock you must have been living under to not know that, but here's some data:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman/
It's free as in freedom not free as in beer. You don't have to tell anyone. You do have to allow other people to use your code in the same way that you did with the code that you used. Or at least you do if you distribute binaries.
It's stupid simple. The point of the GPL is to make source code freely available. You can only get in trouble with the GPL if you don't want that, in which case of course the GPL is not for you. All the GPL does is list ways of you being an asshole and telling you not to do that, given that you accepted the premise that the GPL is about making source code available.
You taught us well.
Rape is not a common thing and is a non-issue for normal, balanced people of both sexes. Men are much, much more at risk in the nightlife than women are - from other men. Physical risk of being coerced has just got nothing to do with why women have different wishes on sex. If you are honest you'll realize that woman-on-man violence is much more common than the other way around. One main effect that is actually real is that almost all men desire young women physically while women want same-age partners. This means that young women experience tremendous demand from men so they can afford to be very picky. This gives them excellent training for playing games on men without investing any real effort so that they are skilled at forcing situations of them being in control even when they get older and are not as much in demand.
Oh yeah, I liked the way the story too!
That translates to "the only people more annoying than those who take my viewpoint to an extreme is the people who disagree with me" I think that's a common sentiment, too.
This is great IF it does not in any way count as evidence against the identified person - this system should only serve as a way for the police to get someone to investigate that might then later be found to be guilty on other grounds. The reason for this is that eye witnesses are not reliable, so if you make them go through a million photos, they ARE going to get it wrong. The best they can do is to identify a few pictures that kind of look like the person they saw, but we humans are more likely to arbitrarily choose one picture out of the likely candidates to be the RIGHT one, instead of admitting that we can't say for sure. Making the computer eliminate most of the less likely matches only increases the unreliability of the system because eye witnesses can then in effect look through even more pictures in less time leading to an even higher false positive rate.
It's also OK to put someone the police suspects on other grounds in a lineup and have the witness pick that person out. What's bad is combining the two things by having the computer select a likely match and put that person in the lineup based solely on matching the witness description - that has all the same problems as having the witness go through the database themselves. The problem is that a computer system with millions of entries is always going to produce a person who looks a lot like the right guy, even if the actual right guy isn't in the database at all, and that is going to make many witnesses identify the wrong guy based on striking similarity.
The even bigger problem is that this problem is not obvious and many juries and even some defense lawyers aren't going to understand the problem correctly - "he says this guy attacked him, what more is there to say in this matter? Guilty!"
The problem with this is that some jobs that need to be done are not enjoyable and therefore they won't get done. This is things like picking fruit all day, cleaning public toilets and picking up trash. I guess those examples could eventually be done by robots, but there are always going to be less desirable jobs that it will be hard to fill in a world where no one is too motivated by money. Your idea might be the right one even with that problem, but only if the amount of undesirable things that need to be done becomes truly tiny.
This is what Slashdot gets for posting stories with a link to a troll how-to in the summary.
If the laws there support such charges then those laws are in urgent need of repair. More importantly, there needs to be heavy penalties for police officers who attempt to harass citizens in these kinds of ways up to and including jail time. Police can make mistakes like the rest of us and that's acceptable to a certain degree. Arresting someone for recording them while on the job is not an acceptable kind of mistake because it involves the officer abusing his extensive privileges for his own gain and it potentially allows him to hide other abuses of power. I would put it at the same level of seriousness as if an accused person goes to the judge's private home and attempts to physically intimidate him into dropping his case. Or rather it's more serious than that, because the police officer is in a position of trust while the accused is not.
There is no amount of time too small to matter if what matters is being faster than someone else.