Freedom of speech: That's right, baby. The right to open my mouth, as long as I am not shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Complaints fall under it. You might not like it, but, hey, too bad.
Don't be so sure. Remember that CDA passed the Senate with the support of 99 Republicans and Democrats. Had it held up in court, it would have outlawed "indecent" communication on the internet. And keep in mind that legally, "indecency" is not synonymous with obscenity. While obscenity is somewhat defined, legally, indecency is not. So if CDA had been upheld--and it was supported by 99 Republicans and Democrats--all it would have taken was one piddly little county court finding that your complaint was "indecent" to have you thrown in jail.
Don't take your freedom of speech for granted. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Even if you are worried about electing Bush, the tired old "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" slogan is simply untrue. A vote for Nader is half a vote for Bush. It takes two people switching from Gore to Nader to do the same damage to the Gore campaign as one person switching from Gore to Bush does.
Suppose you have a state where 1005 people plan on voting for Gore, and 1000 plan on voting for Bush. Now, it would take six Gore supporters to switch their vote to Nader to give the state to Bush (1000-999-6), but it would only take three Gore supporters switching their vote to Bush (1003-1002).
To vote any other way allows the worst person to get in.
Then you have to balance the risk of allowing the worse major candidate to win with just how much worse that candidate is, and the possibility of improving the publicity of your third party four years down the road.
This year, a vote for a 3rd party is a wasted vote.
Do I even need to mention that this is exactly what the Republicrats want you to believe? Go away, Republicrat shill.
When you vote, please remember that voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. And if you vote for evil, do not be surprised when you have an evil government.
If you vote for the lesser of two evils now, there won't be a real alternative next time. Suppose no one voted for any second (oh, excuse me, "third" if you believe there are really two separate major parties in the US) party candidate this time around. Do you really think any "third" party candidate would bother to run in 2004? If Ralph Nader didn't get a single vote this year, why should the Green Party even bother fielding a candidate in 2004?
Part of the problem is that reading just the stories without comments does not give you just the facts. What you often see in a/. story is: a) link to news source; b) submitter's summary of news article (and an inaccurate summary, as often as not, it seems); c) submitter's editorial comments; and d) editor's editorial comments.
I wholeheartedly agree with your general point. However, I take issue with your mentioning of Nader and Buchanan only. By what criteria? I agree that debates should be opened to more candidates, but I also believe some objective criteria is necessary for inclusion, so that you don't have a debate with literally hundreds of candidates. You offer no objective criteria.
My recommendation would be to include any candidate who is on enough state ballots to theoretically win the election. For this election, that would be seven candidates: Browne, Buchanan, Bush, Gore, Hagelin, Nader, and Philips. Seven people is not too many for a debate; the republican primary debates included six people and were quite effective.
The Democrats and Republicans effectively comprise a single party. They act in monopolistic fashion to keep other parties out of the political system with overly restrictive ballot access laws and debate requirements.
Our one ruling party keeps up the illusion of being two parties, because they know that the people would not tolerate what was blatantly a single party, and a legitimate second party would increase in power.
There is little difference between Republicans and Democrats; moderate Republicans are closer, politically, to moderate Democrats than to libertarian Republicans. They're not exactly the same; Brin is correct to note that. However, the differences are small, and the existence of those differences does not make them separate parties. Any two politicians from the same party will not agree 100% of the time.
How many times, during the debates, did Bush and Gore agree with each other? And how many issues were not raised at all, because there is no difference between the two major candidates on those issues?
The one ruling party tries to scare us into not voting for second (oh, excuse me, "third") parties with the thought that, if we don't vote for the candidate we find less distasteful, the worse one will win. "Don't waste your vote!" they scream. I won't buy it. While Bush and Gore aren't completely alike, and there is one of the two I would have a slight preference for if those were my only two choices, the difference is small enough that I'm willing to risk that fate by voting for a legitimate alternative.
(Even if you are worried about that scenario, keep in mind that, despite the slogan, a vote for Nader is *not* a vote for Bush. It's half a vote for Bush. It takes two people switching from Gore to Nader to do as much damage to Gore as one person switching from Gore to Bush does. Think about it. Feel free to substitute any of the other "third" party candidates for Nader in this argument, of course.)
The tired old scare tactic of the one ruling party is becoming less effective, and they know it. So they try to beef it up with arguments that the next president will appoint Supreme Court justices. "If you don't vote for X, Y will win and get to appoint SC members!" But this argument doesn't hold water, either. Yes, the next president will have the opportunity to appoint some justices. The flaw in the logic here is failing to take into account that *which* justices resign will depend on who is the president. None of the justices are so infirm that they will have to resign in the next four years. A conservative justice is not going to resign during a Gore administration and let Gore shift the court to the left. Vice versa for liberal justices under Bush. So while the next president will have the opportunity to appoint some justices, the ideological makeup of the court will not change.
If you're the sort of person who's more responsive to slogans than to long, point-by-point arguments, here's a few for you:
Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.
If you vote for the lesser of two evils, don't be surprised when your government turns out to be evil.
My guess--and this is only a guess, since I don't work in this field--is that new questions are being raised. However, the new questions are more complex than the old ones, so they either cannot be phrased in a way that most non-mathematicians can understand, or if they can, they are certainly cannot be expressed as elegantly as the old questions, and thus fail to capture the popular imagination the way the old questions did, and thus are not as widely reported on as the old questions.
Although most slashdotters won't agree with me on this point, I'd be totally happy if I found out one of my competitors was stealing my design. Because I have a butt-load of patents protecting it, and if my competitor wants to sell his product in any major market, I'm going to sue his ass into the ground.
As for adding protection against reverse-engineering it simply commits too much cash to the design to make it worth-while.
If your invention is patented, there's no need for anyone to reverse engineer it. Part of the requirement of a patent is that you describe in detail how to make your invention.
How about those who are studying Sartre's existentialism? I'm sure the copyright on existentialism has not expired yet.
There's no copyright on existentialism. You can't copyright an idea.
You can copyright a particular expression of an idea. The copyright on Sartre's works, for example, may still be in effect. But the copyright applies only to the particular words Sartre used to express existentialism, not to existentialism itself.
So, it's "the majority may do any damn thing they please?" That attitude is referred to as "the tyranny of the majority," and it's not the model we've chosen to follow in the United States. The Bill of Rights specifies a number of areas where the majority may not impose its will on a minority.
All in all, poorly presented--especially since this is a technical forum, you damned idiot, not a pulpit for you to expound your personal political views..
--
I'm voting for Nader because I'd rather be right than win.
Now, excuse me if I just don't "get" this, but isn't the Constitution the Supreme Law of the Land?
Yes, but a law is presumed constitutional unless and until a court declares it unconstitutional. "I think this law is unconstitutional" is not good enough, unless you're a judge.
"Well gee, your honor, I thought the law prohibiting first-degree murder was unconstitutional" as a defense will not get you very far.
The URL for the Medline entry for the incompetence article, with abstract, is below. I was trying to post it as a link, but apparently it's too long, as/. keeps trying to insert a space into the URL, which screws it up. Remove any spaces which may appear; they've been inserted by/. and don't belong there.
Both disagreed with the idea, but neither had heard of the bill.
Certainly, one can't expect the candidates to have heard of every bill, particularly considering that neither of them are currently in congress.
However, I'd expect them to know that "602P" is not a bill simply because it does not have the correct format for a bill number. Bills are either H.R. nnn (for those originating in the House) or S. nnn (for those originating in the Senate). Bill numbers never have a letter at the end.
Case-in-point: as a response to this article, I could spend an hour writing out a point-by-point refutation of Katz, and pointing out those instances where's he's not wrong, but just spouting obvious facts which enlighten no one.
Or I could take thirty seconds on a flame, e.g., "The KatzBot must be out-of-whack; it didn't include the term 'post-Columbine.'"
Okay, besides checking if the patent is legal, shouldn't they also check if it infringes on sombody else's patent?
No. To understand this, it's important to understand exactly what a patent grants you. If you have a patent, that means you can prevent anyone else from making or selling your invention. It does not give you the right to make or sell it yourself. (If you could have made/sold it before the patent, you still can, but that right doesn't come from the patent. Conversely, if you couldn't have legally made/sold your invention before, you still can't.)
To be precise, your action in making or selling an invention which someone else has patented is an infringement upon that patent. Getting a patent itself never infringes another patent, because just getting a patent isn't making or selling anything.
A common example from the pharmaceutical industry: Company A patents drug X. Company B can still patent the combination of drugs X and Y (in a single pill, for example). Just getting the patent isn't making or selling X, so that's fine.
Now, company B cannot sell their X-Y combination without the permission of company A, since that would infringe on A's patent on X. Likewise, company A cannot sell X-Y without the permission of company B. (Of course, A can still sell X alone.) If company C wants to sell X-Y, it must have the permission of both A and B.
Now, if B had tried to patent X alone (not the X-Y combination), with A already having a patent on X, the application will (at least in theory) be rejected by the patent office.
Who cares? We need more cases like this for patent office reform
Probably won't help. One will sue the other (or both will sue each other), but it will never make it to trial. They'll settle out of court with a cross-licensing agreement.
(Aside:...which does not strengthen the patents against other challenges, legally. A patent becomes neither more nor less valid simply because it's been licensed, one time or several.)
Besides, smashing up a Starbucks is "radical chic". It's for losers who actually think "Fight Club" is a good movie and for whiners who think Ikea is the scourge of the earth.
It's possible to think Fight Club was a good movie without agreeing with the values of the main characters.
Guess what else: I like The X-Files, despite the fact that I don't believe in paranormal phenomena.
What a familiar pattern in this world-- some people work to increase the total wealth for everybody, while other people work to grab as much of it for themselves as they can.
Of course it's a familiar pattern. You just described the essential difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Well, at least Republicans claim that want to increase the total wealth for everybody. I bought that line for a good 20 years or so of my life. I now see through that lie.
Did you see the debate Tuesday? As far as social security, Bush wants to allow me to invest some of my own moneyunder certain guidelines!!! Gee, he's so fscking generous, to allow me to use some of my own money, with restrictions.
If I had any qualms before the debate that I might "throw the election" to Gore by voting for Browne, I no longer do.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be so sure. Remember that CDA passed the Senate with the support of 99 Republicans and Democrats. Had it held up in court, it would have outlawed "indecent" communication on the internet. And keep in mind that legally, "indecency" is not synonymous with obscenity. While obscenity is somewhat defined, legally, indecency is not. So if CDA had been upheld--and it was supported by 99 Republicans and Democrats--all it would have taken was one piddly little county court finding that your complaint was "indecent" to have you thrown in jail.
Don't take your freedom of speech for granted. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Even if you are worried about electing Bush, the tired old "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" slogan is simply untrue. A vote for Nader is half a vote for Bush. It takes two people switching from Gore to Nader to do the same damage to the Gore campaign as one person switching from Gore to Bush does.
Suppose you have a state where 1005 people plan on voting for Gore, and 1000 plan on voting for Bush. Now, it would take six Gore supporters to switch their vote to Nader to give the state to Bush (1000-999-6), but it would only take three Gore supporters switching their vote to Bush (1003-1002).
A vote for Nader is half a vote for Bush.
Then you have to balance the risk of allowing the worse major candidate to win with just how much worse that candidate is, and the possibility of improving the publicity of your third party four years down the road.
This year, a vote for a 3rd party is a wasted vote.
Do I even need to mention that this is exactly what the Republicrats want you to believe? Go away, Republicrat shill.
When you vote, please remember that voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. And if you vote for evil, do not be surprised when you have an evil government.
If you vote for the lesser of two evils now, there won't be a real alternative next time. Suppose no one voted for any second (oh, excuse me, "third" if you believe there are really two separate major parties in the US) party candidate this time around. Do you really think any "third" party candidate would bother to run in 2004? If Ralph Nader didn't get a single vote this year, why should the Green Party even bother fielding a candidate in 2004?
Part of the problem is that reading just the stories without comments does not give you just the facts. What you often see in a /. story is: a) link to news source; b) submitter's summary of news article (and an inaccurate summary, as often as not, it seems); c) submitter's editorial comments; and d) editor's editorial comments.
My recommendation would be to include any candidate who is on enough state ballots to theoretically win the election. For this election, that would be seven candidates: Browne, Buchanan, Bush, Gore, Hagelin, Nader, and Philips. Seven people is not too many for a debate; the republican primary debates included six people and were quite effective.
Our one ruling party keeps up the illusion of being two parties, because they know that the people would not tolerate what was blatantly a single party, and a legitimate second party would increase in power.
There is little difference between Republicans and Democrats; moderate Republicans are closer, politically, to moderate Democrats than to libertarian Republicans. They're not exactly the same; Brin is correct to note that. However, the differences are small, and the existence of those differences does not make them separate parties. Any two politicians from the same party will not agree 100% of the time.
How many times, during the debates, did Bush and Gore agree with each other? And how many issues were not raised at all, because there is no difference between the two major candidates on those issues?
The one ruling party tries to scare us into not voting for second (oh, excuse me, "third") parties with the thought that, if we don't vote for the candidate we find less distasteful, the worse one will win. "Don't waste your vote!" they scream. I won't buy it. While Bush and Gore aren't completely alike, and there is one of the two I would have a slight preference for if those were my only two choices, the difference is small enough that I'm willing to risk that fate by voting for a legitimate alternative.
(Even if you are worried about that scenario, keep in mind that, despite the slogan, a vote for Nader is *not* a vote for Bush. It's half a vote for Bush. It takes two people switching from Gore to Nader to do as much damage to Gore as one person switching from Gore to Bush does. Think about it. Feel free to substitute any of the other "third" party candidates for Nader in this argument, of course.)
The tired old scare tactic of the one ruling party is becoming less effective, and they know it. So they try to beef it up with arguments that the next president will appoint Supreme Court justices. "If you don't vote for X, Y will win and get to appoint SC members!" But this argument doesn't hold water, either. Yes, the next president will have the opportunity to appoint some justices. The flaw in the logic here is failing to take into account that *which* justices resign will depend on who is the president. None of the justices are so infirm that they will have to resign in the next four years. A conservative justice is not going to resign during a Gore administration and let Gore shift the court to the left. Vice versa for liberal justices under Bush. So while the next president will have the opportunity to appoint some justices, the ideological makeup of the court will not change.
If you're the sort of person who's more responsive to slogans than to long, point-by-point arguments, here's a few for you:
Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.
If you vote for the lesser of two evils, don't be surprised when your government turns out to be evil.
My guess--and this is only a guess, since I don't work in this field--is that new questions are being raised. However, the new questions are more complex than the old ones, so they either cannot be phrased in a way that most non-mathematicians can understand, or if they can, they are certainly cannot be expressed as elegantly as the old questions, and thus fail to capture the popular imagination the way the old questions did, and thus are not as widely reported on as the old questions.
"At the moment, however, the new result appears to have no obvious applications."
"To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen."
--The Amtal Rule
As for adding protection against reverse-engineering it simply commits too much cash to the design to make it worth-while.
If your invention is patented, there's no need for anyone to reverse engineer it. Part of the requirement of a patent is that you describe in detail how to make your invention.
There's no copyright on existentialism. You can't copyright an idea.
You can copyright a particular expression of an idea. The copyright on Sartre's works, for example, may still be in effect. But the copyright applies only to the particular words Sartre used to express existentialism, not to existentialism itself.
I think you're confusing theory and practice.
So, it's "the majority may do any damn thing they please?" That attitude is referred to as "the tyranny of the majority," and it's not the model we've chosen to follow in the United States. The Bill of Rights specifies a number of areas where the majority may not impose its will on a minority.
All in all, poorly presented--especially since this is a technical forum, you damned idiot, not a pulpit for you to expound your personal political views..
--
I'm voting for Nader because I'd rather be right than win.
Yes, but a law is presumed constitutional unless and until a court declares it unconstitutional. "I think this law is unconstitutional" is not good enough, unless you're a judge.
"Well gee, your honor, I thought the law prohibiting first-degree murder was unconstitutional" as a defense will not get you very far.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10626367&do pt=Abstract
A better analogy would be to ask people what the title of RFC 3A9T was.
Certainly, one can't expect the candidates to have heard of every bill, particularly considering that neither of them are currently in congress.
However, I'd expect them to know that "602P" is not a bill simply because it does not have the correct format for a bill number. Bills are either H.R. nnn (for those originating in the House) or S. nnn (for those originating in the Senate). Bill numbers never have a letter at the end.
Case-in-point: as a response to this article, I could spend an hour writing out a point-by-point refutation of Katz, and pointing out those instances where's he's not wrong, but just spouting obvious facts which enlighten no one.
Or I could take thirty seconds on a flame, e.g., "The KatzBot must be out-of-whack; it didn't include the term 'post-Columbine.'"
No. To understand this, it's important to understand exactly what a patent grants you. If you have a patent, that means you can prevent anyone else from making or selling your invention. It does not give you the right to make or sell it yourself. (If you could have made/sold it before the patent, you still can, but that right doesn't come from the patent. Conversely, if you couldn't have legally made/sold your invention before, you still can't.)
To be precise, your action in making or selling an invention which someone else has patented is an infringement upon that patent. Getting a patent itself never infringes another patent, because just getting a patent isn't making or selling anything.
A common example from the pharmaceutical industry: Company A patents drug X. Company B can still patent the combination of drugs X and Y (in a single pill, for example). Just getting the patent isn't making or selling X, so that's fine.
Now, company B cannot sell their X-Y combination without the permission of company A, since that would infringe on A's patent on X. Likewise, company A cannot sell X-Y without the permission of company B. (Of course, A can still sell X alone.) If company C wants to sell X-Y, it must have the permission of both A and B.
Now, if B had tried to patent X alone (not the X-Y combination), with A already having a patent on X, the application will (at least in theory) be rejected by the patent office.
Very unlikely. It probably won't even get to trial. Much more likely that they'll just cross-license the patents to each other.
Probably won't help. One will sue the other (or both will sue each other), but it will never make it to trial. They'll settle out of court with a cross-licensing agreement.
(Aside: ...which does not strengthen the patents against other challenges, legally. A patent becomes neither more nor less valid simply because it's been licensed, one time or several.)
It's possible to think Fight Club was a good movie without agreeing with the values of the main characters.
Guess what else: I like The X-Files, despite the fact that I don't believe in paranormal phenomena.
Of course it's a familiar pattern. You just described the essential difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Well, at least Republicans claim that want to increase the total wealth for everybody. I bought that line for a good 20 years or so of my life. I now see through that lie.
Did you see the debate Tuesday? As far as social security, Bush wants to allow me to invest some of my own money under certain guidelines!!! Gee, he's so fscking generous, to allow me to use some of my own money, with restrictions.
If I had any qualms before the debate that I might "throw the election" to Gore by voting for Browne, I no longer do.