How do any of the current string of property protection laws help the people with the least amount of property?
The current string of laws seemed to be aimed protecting intellectual property in the new digital environment. New authors, composers or publishers have as much to gain, if not more, from these new protections as established companies.
As for consumers, they may find that new laws interfere with their long standing desire to get something for nothing but in practice, they can well afford to rent DVDs. If not, there's always network television.
In case you havn't figured it out yet, people arn't payed based on how hard they work - they are payed based on how much money they make for their employers!
In case you haven't figured it out yet, employers pay people as little as they can get away with. What's more, they'll pay some classes of employees, women and blacks for example, less money than white males unless prevented by legislation.
Anyone who's ever worked in an IT department knows that productivity varies enormously between employees and salary only incidentally reflects productivity.
If you work in technology long enough, you'll figure it out eventually.
if you're making millions of dollars a year, then you should not be crying to Congress...
You raise 2 interesting questions:
1. At what point do you make so much money that you cannot reasonably expect the law to protect your property?
2. At what point do you make so little money that the laws that protect property no longer apply to you?
It is people with the least amount of property that have the most the gain from the rigourous enforcement of laws protecting property. If those laws mean they can't pirate movies, that's the price they pay so that people can't steal stuff from them.
ElcomSoft and other Internet-based companies don't exist in some otherworldly realm...
Exactly. A business case that's based on finding loopholes in U.S. laws resembles offshore banks whose sole purpose is evading U.S. tax laws instead of supplying normal banking services. If foreign companies who do business in the U.S. are not bound by the same laws as U.S. companies, U.S. companies are put at a substantial disadvantage for obeying the law.
ElmcomSoft already has a plausible argument: It "did nothing wrong and merely created a program that lets people who purchase eBooks to use them in reasonable and legal ways for personal use." When lawyers start bring forward novel and dubious arguments to bolster their case, it makes you wonder if their fundamental case is sound.
Steve Newman is a fucking moron, a shill for a corrupt corporation...
Possibly but Whatley's statement is still wrong, defamatory, and made with wreckless disregard for the truth. I don't see how you can defend Whatley by attacking Newman.
Besides, Whatley's accusation implicitely insults and defames food service workers as well. Food service workers have enough problems without being used as a metaphore for incompetence. That kind of smug, casual snobbery is particulary disreputable.
There is no libel but not because what you say is an opinion. It's because your target is a public figure. The Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment to allow "vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials".
As I read the law, if you were to say that a public official had committed a criminal act and you knew the accusation was false and you did it with "actual malice", you could be sued for libel.
Private individuals have a different status. Whatley did more than call Newman a fool but the story doesn't say why the court found for the plaintiffs. Wrecklessly, maliciously and repeatedly calling into question a private individual's competence is plausible grounds.
In any case, I don't see how you could define "opinion" as permitting a lower standard of truth that some other kinds of public statements. Conceivably vagueness would be a defense.
Defendant Whatley said: If Steve Newman was not a relative his job would consist of... 'Would you like fries with that?'"
According to the company's Web site: Dr. Newman is the former President and CEO of Fed American Inc., President and CEO of SANDCO American Corporation, and President and CEO of SAN Medical Corporation. A graduate of the University of Rochester School of Medicine, he also has degrees from UCLA and Brooklyn College. Dr. Newman's articles and presentations on the future of technology have been distributed worldwide.
On the face of it, Whatley's statement is wrong, defamatory, and made with wreckless disregard for the truth. The only question is whether $450,000 is an appropriate penalty for what he said, that is, did Newman or the company suffer that much in damages or did Whatley's conduct need a substantial judgment to deter him in the future.
The main line of Whatley's defenders appears to be that nobody should take what he says seriously, a curious position for people who claim the moral high ground over corporations.
With so much true stuff that needs to be said, why would anyone waste their time on malicious nonsense?
These differences do not strike me as statistically different.
The U.S. is the highest in these categories of all western countries. The difference is usually attributed to the availability in Canada and western Europe of free pre-natal care and free regular checkups that result in early detection of problems. It's an example of how the simple availability of care is more effective than sophisticated procedures to deal with illness well after it appears.
Not for six months anyway.
It varies by province. In Ontario, the residency requirement is 3 months. But the point is that health insurance is guaranteed regardless of medical condition. In the U.S. laid off employees who apply for personal insurance will be denied if they have a pre-existing health condition. This problem is a particular concern for older employees who would naturally have a higher incidence of health problems.
Monopolies are generally bad for the consumer.
The usual economic formulas don't apply to health care, nor should they. Health care is heavily regulated because consumers cannot be expected to know enough to make an informed choice everytime they choose a physician, a medical procedure or go to an emergency room. Hospitals and physicians in no sense compete for customers.
It's significant that the only reason laid-off workers have any medical coverage is because of federal regulation. Under the free market model, insurance companies simply raised premiums or denied coverage to people for the sole reason that they lost their job. The fact that this process makes some kind of economic sense in no way justifies it.
It is the same with health insurance. The objective is delivery of health care to sick people, not the efficient running of a business. A profitable insurance company at the expense of a high infant mortality rate is skewed set of values for sure. I believe you used the term "barbaric".
this sounds like complaining about getting a day off of school...
Exactly. Why shouldn't telecom outages be treated like a sick day? People take sick days and life goes on. People get stuck in traffic on the way to work or the commuter train breaks down. My crummy home ADSL service is plenty more reliable than the expressway at rush hour.
It's a case of expectations always exceeding the improvements in the technology. The theory behind telecommuting is that people who work at home are more productive than people who commute. That extra productivity should more than make up for occasional downtime.
The bottom line is that people die in Canada because there isn't enough quality health care to go around, and ultimately the state choses who lives or dies.
The two most basic indicators of health care are the infant mortality rate and life expectancy. In both these stats, Canada is ahead of the United States. Infant mortality in Canada is 5.0/1000 live births vs. 6.7/1000 in the U.S. Life expectancy in Canada is 79.5 years vs 77.3 in the U.S. If the Canadian government is deciding anything, it is that more children should live and live longer.
Should the healthy bear the costs of the sick to that degree?
That's the way insurance works, even in the U.S.
That's why this Canadian legally works in the U.S.A.
Let us hope then that you don't have a catastrophic illness and have your insurance cancelled or get laid off and have no insurance at all. You can, of course, always come back to Canada and receive treatment as soon as you cross the border.
My father died (in Canada), of a ruptured aortic anurysm.
Medical malpractice occurs in every health care system. Condemning a whole system based on one possible example is unreasonable.
I think it better that people die for lack of money to save themselves than lack of technology to save them...
These alternatives in no way describe the difference between Canadian and American health care. Every western country except the U.S. has adopted some system of public health insurance to allow universal access to health care.
...Canadian health care was barbaric by comparison.
Canadian health care is not barbaric by any standard. What's absurd, if not barbaric, is the fact that half of the one million Americans who file for bankruptcy each year do so because of medical bills and other problems arising from serious illness or injury.
It's a problem that does not occur in Canada.
This guy was supposed to have been head of business development at a dot com but you'd never know it from looking at his Web site. His sad sack sense of humour may have gotten him some sympathy and attention but I doubt if an employer would hand him responsibility based on what they see at his site.
If he's in business development you'd expect him at least to use the success of the site to promote his skills to a potential employer. There's not even a resumé. He actually has some ads at the bottom of the home page and buried behind a link called Odd Todd Officials, but even when you find them they're so poorly done you're not sure what you're looking at.
From the point of view of getting a job, his site is worse than useless. Let's see how his goofy outlook holds up after another few months of eating potatochips.
The problem behind the problem
on
Biohackathon
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative, for the National Institutes of Health, says: Today the disciplines of computer science and biology are often too far apart to help one another. A computer-science student often stops studying other sciences after freshman biology or chemistry; a biology student, even one knowledgeable about computers, may not ever have had formal computer-science classes. Biomedical computing needs a better -- and more attractive -- meld of those disciplines. Today computer-science students have little incentive to learn about biomedicine. The barrier is not just the rigorous demands of computer science, it is also the relative rewards: The $50,000 to $80,000 a year that professional programmers earn makes the compensation associated with many research positions in biology laughable. This situation is even more risible when one includes the reality that staff positions on NIH research grants are guaranteed for no longer than the grant award.
This is a problem in every field of scientific computing but it is particularly acute in biology because of the bizarre and heterogeneous data set. Ultimately, the question is whether it is more efficient to teach a computer science student biology or teach programming to a biology student.
People who go into computer science typically do so because of fascination with the tools and techniques, not because they are interested so much in the data. The scientific mindset of the biologist might transfer to computer science much easier than the mindset of the programmer transfer to biology.
The computer has the same fundamental status in biology as the microscope. Computer science in the form of bioinformatics should perhaps be as basic to the study of biology as organic chemistry.
in cases where current law is unclear or ambiguous, the courts have looked back to pre-colonial laws and practices for prececent.
Supreme Court rulings cite common law all the time, sometime where existing law is ambiguous and sometime to reinforce existing interpretations.
See, for example, WASHINGTON et al. v. GLUCKSBERG et al.. In this case, which asserted a 14th Amendment right to assisted suicide, Judge Rehnquist wrote: "More specifically, for over 700 years, the Anglo American common law tradition has punished or otherwise disapproved of both suicide and assisting suicide." He cites a 13th century legal treatise and Blackstone Commentaries from the 18th century.
Justice Scalia, concurring, writes: "We now inquire whether this asserted right has any place in our Nation's traditions. Here... we are confronted with a consistent and almost universal tradition that has long rejected the asserted right, and continues explicitly to reject it today, even for terminally ill, mentally competent adults. To hold for respondents, we would have to reverse centuries of legal doctrine and practice..."
In effect, he makes an appeal to common law to justify a narrow interpretation of the 14th Amendment instead of broadening it.
Cats may not be restrained. To combat the rats that caused the Black Death in London in 1665, Charles II ordered that cats be allowed to roam free. This decree has the force of law in Canada and municipalities cannot issue cat licenses.
What about some 1780 BC? Hammurabi may well have been anticipating spam in his Code: If a shepherd, without the permission of the owner of the field, and without the knowledge of the owner of the sheep, lets the sheep into a field to graze, then the owner of the field shall harvest his crop, and the shepherd, who had pastured his flock there without permission of the owner of the field, shall pay to the owner twenty gur of corn for every ten gan.
And he was clearly thinking of sys admins who left open email relays when he decreed: If any one be too lazy to keep his dam in proper condition, and does not so keep it; if then the dam break and all the fields be flooded, then shall he in whose dam the break occurred be sold for money, and the money shall replace the corn which he has caused to be ruined.
"Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us." --Ecclesiastes, 2:9
In practice, political organizations of true believers, in Eric Hoffer's sense of "authoritarian faith", have proved to be emphemeral and unstable, although in the short-term they can be fairly disruptive. The reasons for their failure are that true believers are remarkably gullible and thus liable to exploitation and betrayal by their leaders. They are incapable of compromise and thus can't form alliances that give them broader influence. Even when they become large enough to pose a threat, they usually stir fair-minded centrists out of their torpor and find their opposition larger than ever.
Most important, true believers are prone to disillusionment when, over time, the world does not unfold as they expect it. True believers rarely moderate their views. Instead, they shift from irrational idealism to cynicism when their goals perpetually elude them. As cynics, they drop out of the political process and carp from the sidelines.
For some reason, cynicism is easier to sustain over a long period of time than irrational idealism. The result is that cynicism probably threatens public life and discourse more than hate groups and fanatics. True believers at least stir up debate and force the majority to think about and defend their values. Cynicism undermines the idea that things can ever get better.
The article says: The urgency in the field of patents is even greater. Here again, patents are not per se evil; they are evil only if they do no social good. They do no social good if they benefit certain companies at the expense of innovation generally. And as many have argued convincingly, that's just what many patents today do.
I'm not sure this statement of the problem corresponds with the reality.
Patents are crucial for innovation because they allow the inventor, usually a corporation, to recover his investment and make a profit. However, most inventions, typically over 80%, are not commercially successful. Therefore, patent holders must make enough money on successful inventions to pay for the total cost of a research and development and make a profit.
Because corporation cannot know in advance what innovations will by commercially successful, the only market-driven method of encouraging innovation is to increase the return on successful innovations.
The fact only a few patents are commercially successful leads to a lottery mentality in innovation. The larger the payoff in a lottery, the more people who will buy tickets even though the chance of winning becomes smaller. Similarly, in the process of innovation, the higher the return on a successful innovation, the more innovations will be devised in the hope of getting a commercially successful one.
One can imagine that in the high-risk, high reward environment, innovation would be greatest because the more innovative products one has, the greater the chance of a huge success.
The traditional criticism of how patents stifle innovation is that corporations will buy patents on new products that threaten their existing products and then suppress them. This problem suggests that patent laws should be changed so that patents should simply expire from lack use rather than have a fixed expiration date.
There's reason to think that in practice most products become obsolete before their patents expire. This behavior is what you would expect from a high rate of innovation, which a high return on patents encourages.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the "way" of our capitalistic society - middlemen, etc everywhere always scamming for a buck.
People looking for the highest price to sell aren't that much different from people looking for the lowest price to buy.
Scamming for a buck isn't an inherent feature of capitalism but of human nature. Capitalism is often criticized for not imposing restraints on the excesses of human behavior. However, those restraints can and should come from elsewhere: government regulation, public education, trade association codes of behavior, warranties and guarantees, media exposure of abuses.
If scamming on eBay were a big problem, it would collapse instead of growing spectacularly. In its own way, eBay's success is an unexpected affirmation of the honesty of ordinary people engaging in commerce.
I guess that is one reason why I will never own a business - I am too honest for my own "good"...
When employees sell their time to their employer they generally do so based on their employer's willingness to pay, not on what they think is a reasonable price for their labour. Essentially, everyone is engaged in some kind of commerce when they make a living.
for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself.
But the polyphosphazene polymers you provide a link to could easily be chiral...
I'm following Prof. Robert D. Minard (Penn State Astrobiology Research Center) who says they aren't chiral.
But why do we need a mathematical definition of life, or indeed any definition of life at all?
I was playing here with the previous post's idea that life might be more fundamental than its chemistry. There's a hint of this idea in Stephen Wolfram's theories. Coming up with a precise definition of life would only be pointless if it's impossible. The point would be that a mathematical description of life might give it the same standing as a natural law like gravity or entropy: The Law of Life.
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents...
The environmental movement may be based on misinformation, unfounded fear or outright deception but it is not based on hatred.
The World Resources Institute's stated purposes is: WRI is an environmental think tank that goes beyond research to find practical ways to protect the earth and improve people's lives.
In so far as there is a "unifying agent" it is an appeal to people's concern for others, not their hatred.
Slashdot Mirror
People earn what they ask for. Period.
Trade unions would be surprised to hear this theory.
she left shortly thereafter
I presume they didn't offer her more money to stay.
How do any of the current string of property protection laws help the people with the least amount of property?
The current string of laws seemed to be aimed protecting intellectual property in the new digital environment. New authors, composers or publishers have as much to gain, if not more, from these new protections as established companies.
As for consumers, they may find that new laws interfere with their long standing desire to get something for nothing but in practice, they can well afford to rent DVDs. If not, there's always network television.
In case you havn't figured it out yet, people arn't payed based on how hard they work - they are payed based on how much money they make for their employers!
In case you haven't figured it out yet, employers pay people as little as they can get away with. What's more, they'll pay some classes of employees, women and blacks for example, less money than white males unless prevented by legislation.
Anyone who's ever worked in an IT department knows that productivity varies enormously between employees and salary only incidentally reflects productivity.
If you work in technology long enough, you'll figure it out eventually.
if you're making millions of dollars a year, then you should not be crying to Congress...
You raise 2 interesting questions:
1. At what point do you make so much money that you cannot reasonably expect the law to protect your property?
2. At what point do you make so little money that the laws that protect property no longer apply to you?
It is people with the least amount of property that have the most the gain from the rigourous enforcement of laws protecting property. If those laws mean they can't pirate movies, that's the price they pay so that people can't steal stuff from them.
ElcomSoft and other Internet-based companies don't exist in some otherworldly realm...
Exactly. A business case that's based on finding loopholes in U.S. laws resembles offshore banks whose sole purpose is evading U.S. tax laws instead of supplying normal banking services. If foreign companies who do business in the U.S. are not bound by the same laws as U.S. companies, U.S. companies are put at a substantial disadvantage for obeying the law.
ElmcomSoft already has a plausible argument: It "did nothing wrong and merely created a program that lets people who purchase eBooks to use them in reasonable and legal ways for personal use." When lawyers start bring forward novel and dubious arguments to bolster their case, it makes you wonder if their fundamental case is sound.
Steve Newman is a fucking moron, a shill for a corrupt corporation...
Possibly but Whatley's statement is still wrong, defamatory, and made with wreckless disregard for the truth. I don't see how you can defend Whatley by attacking Newman.
Besides, Whatley's accusation implicitely insults and defames food service workers as well. Food service workers have enough problems without being used as a metaphore for incompetence. That kind of smug, casual snobbery is particulary disreputable.
There is no libel here.
There is no libel but not because what you say is an opinion. It's because your target is a public figure. The Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment to allow "vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials".
As I read the law, if you were to say that a public official had committed a criminal act and you knew the accusation was false and you did it with "actual malice", you could be sued for libel.
Private individuals have a different status. Whatley did more than call Newman a fool but the story doesn't say why the court found for the plaintiffs. Wrecklessly, maliciously and repeatedly calling into question a private individual's competence is plausible grounds.
In any case, I don't see how you could define "opinion" as permitting a lower standard of truth that some other kinds of public statements. Conceivably vagueness would be a defense.
Defendant Whatley said: If Steve Newman was not a relative his job would consist of ... 'Would you like fries with that?'"
According to the company's Web site:
Dr. Newman is the former President and CEO of Fed American Inc., President and CEO of SANDCO American Corporation, and President and CEO of SAN Medical Corporation. A graduate of the University of Rochester School of Medicine, he also has degrees from UCLA and Brooklyn College. Dr. Newman's articles and presentations on the future of technology have been distributed worldwide.
On the face of it, Whatley's statement is wrong, defamatory, and made with wreckless disregard for the truth. The only question is whether $450,000 is an appropriate penalty for what he said, that is, did Newman or the company suffer that much in damages or did Whatley's conduct need a substantial judgment to deter him in the future.
The main line of Whatley's defenders appears to be that nobody should take what he says seriously, a curious position for people who claim the moral high ground over corporations.
With so much true stuff that needs to be said, why would anyone waste their time on malicious nonsense?
These differences do not strike me as statistically different.
The U.S. is the highest in these categories of all western countries. The difference is usually attributed to the availability in Canada and western Europe of free pre-natal care and free regular checkups that result in early detection of problems. It's an example of how the simple availability of care is more effective than sophisticated procedures to deal with illness well after it appears.
Not for six months anyway.
It varies by province. In Ontario, the residency requirement is 3 months. But the point is that health insurance is guaranteed regardless of medical condition. In the U.S. laid off employees who apply for personal insurance will be denied if they have a pre-existing health condition. This problem is a particular concern for older employees who would naturally have a higher incidence of health problems.
Monopolies are generally bad for the consumer.
The usual economic formulas don't apply to health care, nor should they. Health care is heavily regulated because consumers cannot be expected to know enough to make an informed choice everytime they choose a physician, a medical procedure or go to an emergency room. Hospitals and physicians in no sense compete for customers.
It's significant that the only reason laid-off workers have any medical coverage is because of federal regulation. Under the free market model, insurance companies simply raised premiums or denied coverage to people for the sole reason that they lost their job. The fact that this process makes some kind of economic sense in no way justifies it.
It is the same with health insurance. The objective is delivery of health care to sick people, not the efficient running of a business. A profitable insurance company at the expense of a high infant mortality rate is skewed set of values for sure. I believe you used the term "barbaric".
this sounds like complaining about getting a day off of school...
Exactly. Why shouldn't telecom outages be treated like a sick day? People take sick days and life goes on. People get stuck in traffic on the way to work or the commuter train breaks down. My crummy home ADSL service is plenty more reliable than the expressway at rush hour.
It's a case of expectations always exceeding the improvements in the technology. The theory behind telecommuting is that people who work at home are more productive than people who commute. That extra productivity should more than make up for occasional downtime.
The bottom line is that people die in Canada because there isn't enough quality health care to go around, and ultimately the state choses who lives or dies.
The two most basic indicators of health care are the infant mortality rate and life expectancy. In both these stats, Canada is ahead of the United States. Infant mortality in Canada is 5.0/1000 live births vs. 6.7/1000 in the U.S. Life expectancy in Canada is 79.5 years vs 77.3 in the U.S. If the Canadian government is deciding anything, it is that more children should live and live longer.
Should the healthy bear the costs of the sick to that degree?
That's the way insurance works, even in the U.S.
That's why this Canadian legally works in the U.S.A.
Let us hope then that you don't have a catastrophic illness and have your insurance cancelled or get laid off and have no insurance at all. You can, of course, always come back to Canada and receive treatment as soon as you cross the border.
My father died (in Canada), of a ruptured aortic anurysm.
Medical malpractice occurs in every health care system. Condemning a whole system based on one possible example is unreasonable.
I think it better that people die for lack of money to save themselves than lack of technology to save them...
These alternatives in no way describe the difference between Canadian and American health care. Every western country except the U.S. has adopted some system of public health insurance to allow universal access to health care.
Canadian health care is not barbaric by any standard. What's absurd, if not barbaric, is the fact that half of the one million Americans who file for bankruptcy each year do so because of medical bills and other problems arising from serious illness or injury. It's a problem that does not occur in Canada.
Purgamentum init, exit purgamentum.
This guy was supposed to have been head of business development at a dot com but you'd never know it from looking at his Web site. His sad sack sense of humour may have gotten him some sympathy and attention but I doubt if an employer would hand him responsibility based on what they see at his site.
If he's in business development you'd expect him at least to use the success of the site to promote his skills to a potential employer. There's not even a resumé. He actually has some ads at the bottom of the home page and buried behind a link called Odd Todd Officials, but even when you find them they're so poorly done you're not sure what you're looking at.
From the point of view of getting a job, his site is worse than useless. Let's see how his goofy outlook holds up after another few months of eating potatochips.
The Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative, for the National Institutes of Health, says: Today the disciplines of computer science and biology are often too far apart to help one another. A computer-science student often stops studying other sciences after freshman biology or chemistry; a biology student, even one knowledgeable about computers, may not ever have had formal computer-science classes. Biomedical computing needs a better -- and more attractive -- meld of those disciplines. Today computer-science students have little incentive to learn about biomedicine. The barrier is not just the rigorous demands of computer science, it is also the relative rewards: The $50,000 to $80,000 a year that professional programmers earn makes the compensation associated with many research positions in biology laughable. This situation is even more risible when one includes the reality that staff positions on NIH research grants are guaranteed for no longer than the grant award.
This is a problem in every field of scientific computing but it is particularly acute in biology because of the bizarre and heterogeneous data set. Ultimately, the question is whether it is more efficient to teach a computer science student biology or teach programming to a biology student.
People who go into computer science typically do so because of fascination with the tools and techniques, not because they are interested so much in the data. The scientific mindset of the biologist might transfer to computer science much easier than the mindset of the programmer transfer to biology.
The computer has the same fundamental status in biology as the microscope. Computer science in the form of bioinformatics should perhaps be as basic to the study of biology as organic chemistry.
in cases where current law is unclear or ambiguous, the courts have looked back to pre-colonial laws and practices for prececent.
Supreme Court rulings cite common law all the time, sometime where existing law is ambiguous and sometime to reinforce existing interpretations.
See, for example, WASHINGTON et al. v. GLUCKSBERG et al.. In this case, which asserted a 14th Amendment right to assisted suicide, Judge Rehnquist wrote: "More specifically, for over 700 years, the Anglo American common law tradition has punished or otherwise disapproved of both suicide and assisting suicide." He cites a 13th century legal treatise and Blackstone Commentaries from the 18th century.
Justice Scalia, concurring, writes: "We now inquire whether this asserted right has any place in our Nation's traditions. Here ... we are confronted with a consistent and almost universal tradition that has long rejected the asserted right, and continues explicitly to reject it today, even for terminally ill, mentally competent adults. To hold for respondents, we would have to reverse centuries of legal doctrine and practice..."
In effect, he makes an appeal to common law to justify a narrow interpretation of the 14th Amendment instead of broadening it.
They seperated about 25 years ago from the crown.
Part of the rich legacy of common law that Canada inherited from the Crown are:
Writs of assistance . Senior officers of the RCMP still carry the very same universal search warrants that were one of the causes of the American Revolution.
Cats may not be restrained. To combat the rats that caused the Black Death in London in 1665, Charles II ordered that cats be allowed to roam free. This decree has the force of law in Canada and municipalities cannot issue cat licenses.
Bring some 1297 smack down on em.
What about some 1780 BC? Hammurabi may well have been anticipating spam in his Code:
If a shepherd, without the permission of the owner of the field, and without the knowledge of the owner of the sheep, lets the sheep into a field to graze, then the owner of the field shall harvest his crop, and the shepherd, who had pastured his flock there without permission of the owner of the field, shall pay to the owner twenty gur of corn for every ten gan.
And he was clearly thinking of sys admins who left open email relays when he decreed:
If any one be too lazy to keep his dam in proper condition, and does not so keep it; if then the dam break and all the fields be flooded, then shall he in whose dam the break occurred be sold for money, and the money shall replace the corn which he has caused to be ruined.
"Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us." --Ecclesiastes, 2:9
The most dangerous person is the true believer...
In practice, political organizations of true believers, in Eric Hoffer's sense of "authoritarian faith", have proved to be emphemeral and unstable, although in the short-term they can be fairly disruptive. The reasons for their failure are that true believers are remarkably gullible and thus liable to exploitation and betrayal by their leaders. They are incapable of compromise and thus can't form alliances that give them broader influence. Even when they become large enough to pose a threat, they usually stir fair-minded centrists out of their torpor and find their opposition larger than ever.
Most important, true believers are prone to disillusionment when, over time, the world does not unfold as they expect it. True believers rarely moderate their views. Instead, they shift from irrational idealism to cynicism when their goals perpetually elude them. As cynics, they drop out of the political process and carp from the sidelines.
For some reason, cynicism is easier to sustain over a long period of time than irrational idealism. The result is that cynicism probably threatens public life and discourse more than hate groups and fanatics. True believers at least stir up debate and force the majority to think about and defend their values. Cynicism undermines the idea that things can ever get better.
The article says: The urgency in the field of patents is even greater. Here again, patents are not per se evil; they are evil only if they do no social good. They do no social good if they benefit certain companies at the expense of innovation generally. And as many have argued convincingly, that's just what many patents today do.
I'm not sure this statement of the problem corresponds with the reality.
Patents are crucial for innovation because they allow the inventor, usually a corporation, to recover his investment and make a profit. However, most inventions, typically over 80%, are not commercially successful. Therefore, patent holders must make enough money on successful inventions to pay for the total cost of a research and development and make a profit.
Because corporation cannot know in advance what innovations will by commercially successful, the only market-driven method of encouraging innovation is to increase the return on successful innovations.
The fact only a few patents are commercially successful leads to a lottery mentality in innovation. The larger the payoff in a lottery, the more people who will buy tickets even though the chance of winning becomes smaller. Similarly, in the process of innovation, the higher the return on a successful innovation, the more innovations will be devised in the hope of getting a commercially successful one.
One can imagine that in the high-risk, high reward environment, innovation would be greatest because the more innovative products one has, the greater the chance of a huge success.
The traditional criticism of how patents stifle innovation is that corporations will buy patents on new products that threaten their existing products and then suppress them. This problem suggests that patent laws should be changed so that patents should simply expire from lack use rather than have a fixed expiration date.
There's reason to think that in practice most products become obsolete before their patents expire. This behavior is what you would expect from a high rate of innovation, which a high return on patents encourages.
You have a typo on your home page: "Indistrials".
Unfortunately, this seems to be the "way" of our capitalistic society - middlemen, etc everywhere always scamming for a buck.
People looking for the highest price to sell aren't that much different from people looking for the lowest price to buy.
Scamming for a buck isn't an inherent feature of capitalism but of human nature. Capitalism is often criticized for not imposing restraints on the excesses of human behavior. However, those restraints can and should come from elsewhere: government regulation, public education, trade association codes of behavior, warranties and guarantees, media exposure of abuses.
If scamming on eBay were a big problem, it would collapse instead of growing spectacularly. In its own way, eBay's success is an unexpected affirmation of the honesty of ordinary people engaging in commerce.
I guess that is one reason why I will never own a business - I am too honest for my own "good"...
When employees sell their time to their employer they generally do so based on their employer's willingness to pay, not on what they think is a reasonable price for their labour. Essentially, everyone is engaged in some kind of commerce when they make a living.
I don't understand this at all..
for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself.
But the polyphosphazene polymers you provide a link to could easily be chiral...
I'm following Prof. Robert D. Minard (Penn State Astrobiology Research Center) who says they aren't chiral.
But why do we need a mathematical definition of life, or indeed any definition of life at all?
I was playing here with the previous post's idea that life might be more fundamental than its chemistry. There's a hint of this idea in Stephen Wolfram's theories. Coming up with a precise definition of life would only be pointless if it's impossible. The point would be that a mathematical description of life might give it the same standing as a natural law like gravity or entropy: The Law of Life.
The fact that all articles they publish are either neutral or tilting towards the left/green establishes without doubt their bias.
You say that the fact that some of the articles are neutral is evidence of bias. What sense does that make?
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents...
The environmental movement may be based on misinformation, unfounded fear or outright deception but it is not based on hatred.
The World Resources Institute's stated purposes is: WRI is an environmental think tank that goes beyond research to find practical ways to protect the earth and improve people's lives.
In so far as there is a "unifying agent" it is an appeal to people's concern for others, not their hatred.