The biggest barrier to switching to a Free OS is, and has always been, technical difficulty. The second biggest barrier, and the biggest for people who are sufficiently clueful to handle the technical difficulties, has always been the number of activities that you still need Windows for (games, Office, and whatnot). Paladium is going to turn this problem on its head. Windows users are going to find that there are many things that their Paladium compatible OS simply cannot do. If they want to do those things then they will need a Free OS (or at least a non-MS OS).
The timing could not be better. Linux is ready for the desktop now. By the time Paladium products hit the stores it will be even more polished and ready to use. Just as Linux is getting to the point where is ready for widespread adoption, MS is getting ready to give everyone a reason to switch.
You raise an interesting question here. Overpeer is employed by the copyright holders, and presumably they have been given permission to make these files available on P2P networks. Both Overpeer and the copyright holders *expect* these files to be copied and redistributed.
Obviously they cannot complain about copyright infingement when people download from Overpeer servers. Maybe they could complain if other people make the file available for download, but even then it is unclear because it is obvious that they expect this to happen.
There is also a fair use problem. If the bogus files contain a sufficiently small or insignificant part of the original work, then copying the bogus files might fall within the fair use exception. One test for the fair use exception is to ask whether the potentially infinging material could serve as an effective substitute for the original (i.e. would people buy the "review with quotations" as a substitute for the "original work"). In this case it is clear that the copyright holders do not regard the bogus files as effective substitutes for their copyrighted material, so they would have a hard time maintaining in court that these bogus files are not covered by the fair use exception.
Sounds like just what you would need to block a list of copyrighted files. If anyone does develop an effective method of doing this - how long do you think it will be before a court *requires* that it be done?
In gtk-gnutella (and I suppose others) you can also limit the number of search results that will be returned. Pick a low number and you should have no trouble.
This is a pretty good question. MS is already in the content business, but not in a big way, so it is not clear why they would screw over their software customers in order to introduce the protections that content providers want.
Here is my best guess at what the strategy is. Content providers want these protections (foolishly I think, but anyway they want them). So content providers will go with those formats and methods of delivery that provide such protection. If MS manages to position itself so that it has the only set of formats and methods of delivery that provide these protections, then all the content providers will go with MS. The result is that MS gets a monopoly on content, without actually having to produce all the content. In effect they gain a monopoly by being the bottleneck through which all content passes.
I doubt (again just my best guess) that MS will try to make money off this monopoly directly. Instead they will use it to reinforce their OS monopoly. Users want content. They won't like the restrictions, but if there is only one way to get content then they will go that way. Users will wind up buying Windows because there is no other way to listen to music or watch video online.
Criminal conviction carries all sorts of lasting penalties and/or penalties in addition to those set by the sentencing judge.
In the US is is not unusual for convited felons to lose the right to vote.
In states that allow gambling is is usually impossible for convicted fellons to obtain gambling licences, or for gambling venues to employ convicted fellons. Same goes for liquor licences.
Convicted fellons are often barred from certain professions, either by the governing professional bodies, or by law (common examples include lawyers, doctors, teachers, and accountants).
In the US, college students who are convicted for drug offenses are not elegible for Federal assistance.
And so on...these are just some examples I can think of off the top of my head.
Sometimes the additional penalties even make sense, like the prohibitions on giving gambling licences to convicted fellons. I don't think that any general claim can be made about whether such lasting or extra-judicial penalties are always right or wrong.
In this particular case I think the penalty makes good sense. Governments should not, as a general rule, do business with people who have a history of breaking the law. If you want honest government then excluding criminals is a good start.
Niiice...I can cancel my cable subscription and just watch the end of life as we know it via my living room window.
Seriously though, this kind of objection has been raised against every revolution in military technology. Nothing has changed since we developed weapons that enabled us to kill people without having to look them in the eye (i.e. since the development of the bow and arrow).
It would be interesting to know the nationalities of the people on each side of this argument.
By and large, when there is fighting to be done on behalf of the free world, it is americans who have to do it. Maybe that would tend to make americans more enthusiastic for technologies that enable them to fight without taking casualties.
By and large other parts of the free world know that they do not need to do anything, and will not be expected to fight. Maybe that makes them more willing to put the lives of soldiers on the line.
There is an interesting problem of economics revealed here.
We tend to think that economies of scale apply to management costs. If you double the size of a company, then management costs should increase, but they will still be less than double what they were.
In fact this is often the case, especially when the company is simply doing more of the same activity that it was doing before. The task of management is to solve an information problem. If the problem remains much the same, even as the company grows in size, then the management costs will remain much the same.
Sometimes, however, the information problem becomes considerably more complex as the size of the company grows. This is often the case if the company diversifies its product line. If the difficulty of the information problem increases at a faster rate than the size of the company, then management costs will come to make a up a larger part of overall expenditure.
This is most of the reason why the economy has not be taken over by a single monopoly (as Marx claimed would happen). At a certain point growth becomes impossible because the increases in management costs would outweigh any remaining economies of scale.
Universities provide particularly acute examples of this problem. In a university there are always economies of scale to be had - you can squeeze more students into a class, you can utilize sqace more efficiently, and so on. But at the same time the task of managing all the resources of a university becomes imensely complex as the university grows. So the result is a lot of universities that are growing in size, and spending an ever increasing share of their total expenditure on management.
I see no problem with having tougher enforcement of intellectual property rights - so long as those property rights are themselves justifiable. If you think that there should be at least some IP rights, you ought to accept that the government has some obligation to take care of the enforcement of those rights. The real problem here is not that the RIAA wants IP rights enforced, but that they are demanding rights which are unjustifiable.
Of course there is a matter of priority. If your car gets stolen then chances are the police will do very little about it. I see no reason for the police to go to greater lengths to protect the IP rights of corportations than they do to protect the real property rights of individual citizens.
BTW, the stuff about piracy being a crime against us all is true enough, but applies equally to any other kind of theft. Shop lifting raises prices. Burglary raises insurance rates. Any kind of theft will increase the demand for, and expenditure on, law enforecement and private security. So the claim that there is something especially bad about piracy is BS.
You are right about advertisements - they can print a retraction - but this does not apply to prices on goods in the store. If they put a price on something, and you you try to buy it, then they cannot refuse to sell it at that price.
So a court might have to decide whether a price published on a website is just an advertisement, or effectively an in-store price. I suspect that the courts would come down of the later side. If you can pay for the good online, or place an order, then the prices on the website are more like those in a store than like those in an advertisement.
Retailers are required by law to honour the prices that they advertise or display. The fact that Best Buy asked customers to sign an agreement saying otherwise *might* make a difference, but probably will not.
Retailers cannot, for example, post a "EULA" on their front door saying that "by entering this store you waive any consumer rights granted to you by state or federal law". It seems unlikely that the courts will allow online retailers to what amounts to the same thing by requiing their customers to waive some of their rights before they shop online.
If it cloudy in the day then the clouds keep light out reducing temperature. If it is cloudy at night then clouds can keep heat in, maintaining temperture.
You are right that this makes the green house effect self correcting, to an extent. This is something that weather models take into account. However, most models show that this effect does not keep pace with the warming effect. So the weather gets cloudier and warmer - but not as warm as it would get without all the extra clouds.
As for humidity (mentioned by someone else), it makes no difference to actual temperture. It makes a difference to apparent temperature (i.e how warm it feels) because humidity makes sweating a less efficient way of dumping heat.
I'm not a biologist, but I can think of a reason why this case might have been unusually successful. Presumably when the body rejects alien DNA it is some part of the immune system that does the work.
If the DNA mods were applied to the cells which are responsible for the immune system, then rejection seems less likely.
Fibre-optic cables do it quite effectively. In principle you could make a suit which used something like nano-scale fibre-optic cables to re-route photons around the suit wearer. Of course this can't be done with current technology, or even plausible near future technology, so my guess is that they have something like your chameleon suit in mind.
Infra-red (or any other part of the spectrum) cammo is also possible.
A simple passive system might use insulating material distrubuted in such a way that the shape of the soldier, in infra-red, would be broken up. You would still see the glow - it just wouldn't look much like a person. This is pretty much the same principle as regular cammo, and could be done with today's tech.
A more complex active system might use really good insulation combined with some method for disipating heat that makes the soldier look even less like a person. Think portable air conditioning. In principle you could even store heat, and dump it at convenient intervals (i.e. when you think no one is watching). This kind of thing is not beyond the possiblities of near future tech.
Many posters seem to be unaware that HK already has a mandatory ID card. HK residents have to carry the ID card at all times, and must present it when asked to by a police officer (visitors to HK have to carry their passports). It is quite common to see police officers in MTR (subway) stations checking people at "random" (people who look like illegal immigrants).
The ID card was introduced by the British for two reasons. One was terrorism (the British had a lot of trouble with communist agitators back in the 60's and 70's). The other was illegal immigration, mostly from mainland China (this is still a problem even though Hong Kong is now a part of China).
So the only question raised by this new smart card is that of whether the new smart card is any better or worse than the old dumb card.
Here are a few considerations:
What's in it for the government:
(1) It's more difficult to counterfiet (although given the Chinese/Hong Kong talent for conterfieting almost anything at all, I wonder how long it will be before good counterfiet cards are produced).
(2) Information. It makes it easier for government officials to obtain information about the person standing in front of them.
(3) Of course a centralised database would be just as good for (2). The advantage of storing information on the card is that it allows the cardholder to supply "government-gauranteed" information to other people (officials and otherwise), without the government having to supply those other people with access to the centralised database.
This is the real advantage of smart cards. The dispersed nature of the data storage means that you can make access to small parts of the database easy, while making access to the entire database very hard (if not impossible).
(4) Automated screening. This is what governments all over the place are really after, although of course it has not been implemented yet. Smart cards are more easily machine readable, and if you can store biological information about the cardholder, then in principle it becomes much easier to make a machine that automatically identifies people. This is much cheaper than having policemen standing all over the place, comparing faces with photos.
What's in it for the cardholder:
(1) Convenience. It makes it easy for them to provide reliable identification, which in turn makes all sorts of transactions easier.
(2) The cards are harder to counterfiet, which makes it harder for someone to steal their identity (recall that we are just comparing smart cards with dumb cards - whether ID cards in general make identity theft easy is a seperate question).
(3) Control over access to the data. If there is a centralised database then people might be able to obtain information about you without you ever knowing about it. At least with a smartcard they actually have to steal the card before they can obtain access, and this is no worse than having other documents stolen.
(4) If you trust the state more than you trust other individuals then the improved ability of the state to identify people and enforce laws will be an advantage.
What is not in it for the citizen:
Most of the advantages for the state involve an increased ability to control its citizens. Unless there is a comparable increase in the ability of citizens to control the state, this represents an erosion of democracy. In a place like Hong Kong, where the barest glimer of democracy exists, any erosion of democracy has to be viewed as a disaster.
Personally I think that it is OK to increase the power of the state as long as such increases are balanced by increases in the power of the citizens (acting together) to control the state. What this suggests is that, rather than just worrying about the risks and dangers involved in developments like smart cards, we should also be thinking about the kinds of checks and balances that would make such developments less threatening.
If I remember the story rightly I think Heinlien did give an explanation of why "naturals" remained (and were even subsidized by the state). He thought the natural population was needed to preserve the possibility of new beneficial mutations arising.
If all you do is select for genes that you know to be good, and you never deliberately add new genes (i.e. no engineering or splicing), then the chances of new beneficial genes entering the gene pool seem pretty slim.
They are asking for a patent on a chemical which can be used to generate DNA with a certain sequence. The patent is only violated if you make the chemical that is used to make the DNA sequence.
That is not my understanding. I would agree that they would be entitled to a patent for some technique for making DNA, but 1) I would not agree that a "chemical" is a "technique", and 2) they seem to be seeking a patent on a particular sequence regardless of how it is constructed. This sounds much more like what should have been a copyright, but even there I maintain that it is more of a "discovery" than a "creation."
They are trying to patent a particular sequence, but as you note this is not legally possible, so they do the next best thing. They patent the only pratical method for generating DNA with that sequence. And again, whether the sequence is a discovery or an invention has nothing to do with whether you can use an integer to represent it.
Different function, different number, so obviously the mapping function is doing a lot of work here
This does not follow. If I measure something in feet instead of meters, I get a different number--that doesn't mean that my measuring stick was "doing a lot of work" or that I should be able to patent that particular distance, preventing anyone from using 2.7385 meters without my permission.
Actually your measuring stick is doing almost *all* of the work here. The bare number is absolutely useless without the units. I agree that you should not be able to patent numbers, or distances. My point was merely that they are not the same thing.
You claimed that patenting DNA sequences amounted to patenting numbers. It quite clearly does not. It does not amount to patenting distances either (or any other simple number+unit combination). So if you want to show that DNA sequences should not be patented then you will need another argument. The integer stuff doesn't do it.
Your argument rules out all patents
Not so (as someone has already explained on this thread) (link deleted).
That is just someone getting confused in the same way that you were getting confused. They recognise that there is a difference between the representation, and the thing being represented, but then make the mistake of supposing that people are trying to patent the representation.
Just to make this clear. No one wants to patent a sequence of letters that represent a DNA sequence (digital information). What they want to (indirectly) patent is the DNA sequence itself (a particular chemical).
Galileo spent quite a bit of time trying to sell his method for detemining longitude at sea.
Newton spent a lot of his time tring to turn lead into gold.
Arcimedes was on a royal commission when he had his "eureka" moment.
The truth is that almost all great scientists have been motivated by money to some degree or another.
This debate about whether scientists should be motivated by the search for truth, or the search for financial gain, goes all the way back to the very earliest days of philosophy (and thus science as well). Socrates claimed that he was better than the sophists because they were in it for the money, while he worked for free. Notably both Plato and Aristotle (his two greatest intellectual descendants) both charged fees. In other words the debate was also settled a very long time ago. Even accademics have to eat, and there is no reason why great scientists (and philosophers) can't make a buck along the way.
(1) For legal and practical purposes they are not asking for a patent on a number. They are asking for a patent on a chemical which can be used to generate DNA with a certain sequence. The patent is only violated if you make the chemical that is used to make the DNA sequence.
True the DNA sequence can be represented as a number, but they are not patenting a representation let alone a number. (If we were talking about copyright then it would be a different story).
If you think the two are the same thing then just ask yourself, "which number is being patented?" The answer depends on the mapping function. Different function, different number, so obviously the mapping function is doing a lot of work here.
If all this still doesn't persuade you then try asking yourself whether you would be happy if you asked God for a summary of all his knowledge, in digital form, and he handed you a printout of the set of all integers.
My point here is just that, even if you have an integer which can be mapped back to a particular DNA sequence, you still need to know two more things before you can make any use of it. You need to know the mapping function, and you need to know that the number represnts a DNA sequence.
(2) Your argument rules out all patents (maybe that is what you wanted, but I got the impression that you were trying to draw a line between legitimate patents and illegitimate ones).
The objects of all patents are capable of finite description. Thus the objects of all patents can be represented as integers. So if we accept your argument then it looks like nothing can be patented.
If you read the article that you link to, then you will see that it quotes from the Economist (which is published in the US). The Economist takes as its source a series of articles that were published in a US newspaper (the Philadelphia Inquirer). The articles in question were latter turned into the book "Black Hawk Down".
The story was told in the US.
Re:This event will set an important record
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Million Man LAN
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· Score: 2, Funny
There is a link to be found here with some Catholic mythology (see Dante's Inferno for an example). The elves are like the virtuous pagans. When the pagans leave this world they continue live in very much the same way, in an idealised version of this world. Only christians get to move on to a genuinely different mode of existence.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest barrier to switching to a Free OS is, and has always been, technical difficulty. The second biggest barrier, and the biggest for people who are sufficiently clueful to handle the technical difficulties, has always been the number of activities that you still need Windows for (games, Office, and whatnot). Paladium is going to turn this problem on its head. Windows users are going to find that there are many things that their Paladium compatible OS simply cannot do. If they want to do those things then they will need a Free OS (or at least a non-MS OS).
The timing could not be better. Linux is ready for the desktop now. By the time Paladium products hit the stores it will be even more polished and ready to use. Just as Linux is getting to the point where is ready for widespread adoption, MS is getting ready to give everyone a reason to switch.
IANAL
You raise an interesting question here. Overpeer is employed by the copyright holders, and presumably they have been given permission to make these files available on P2P networks. Both Overpeer and the copyright holders *expect* these files to be copied and redistributed.
Obviously they cannot complain about copyright infingement when people download from Overpeer servers. Maybe they could complain if other people make the file available for download, but even then it is unclear because it is obvious that they expect this to happen.
There is also a fair use problem. If the bogus files contain a sufficiently small or insignificant part of the original work, then copying the bogus files might fall within the fair use exception. One test for the fair use exception is to ask whether the potentially infinging material could serve as an effective substitute for the original (i.e. would people buy the "review with quotations" as a substitute for the "original work"). In this case it is clear that the copyright holders do not regard the bogus files as effective substitutes for their copyrighted material, so they would have a hard time maintaining in court that these bogus files are not covered by the fair use exception.
Sounds like just what you would need to block a list of copyrighted files. If anyone does develop an effective method of doing this - how long do you think it will be before a court *requires* that it be done?
In gtk-gnutella (and I suppose others) you can also limit the number of search results that will be returned. Pick a low number and you should have no trouble.
This is a pretty good question. MS is already in the content business, but not in a big way, so it is not clear why they would screw over their software customers in order to introduce the protections that content providers want.
Here is my best guess at what the strategy is. Content providers want these protections (foolishly I think, but anyway they want them). So content providers will go with those formats and methods of delivery that provide such protection. If MS manages to position itself so that it has the only set of formats and methods of delivery that provide these protections, then all the content providers will go with MS. The result is that MS gets a monopoly on content, without actually having to produce all the content. In effect they gain a monopoly by being the bottleneck through which all content passes.
I doubt (again just my best guess) that MS will try to make money off this monopoly directly. Instead they will use it to reinforce their OS monopoly. Users want content. They won't like the restrictions, but if there is only one way to get content then they will go that way. Users will wind up buying Windows because there is no other way to listen to music or watch video online.
Criminal conviction carries all sorts of lasting penalties and/or penalties in addition to those set by the sentencing judge.
In the US is is not unusual for convited felons to lose the right to vote.
In states that allow gambling is is usually impossible for convicted fellons to obtain gambling licences, or for gambling venues to employ convicted fellons. Same goes for liquor licences.
Convicted fellons are often barred from certain professions, either by the governing professional bodies, or by law (common examples include lawyers, doctors, teachers, and accountants).
In the US, college students who are convicted for drug offenses are not elegible for Federal assistance.
And so on...these are just some examples I can think of off the top of my head.
Sometimes the additional penalties even make sense, like the prohibitions on giving gambling licences to convicted fellons. I don't think that any general claim can be made about whether such lasting or extra-judicial penalties are always right or wrong.
In this particular case I think the penalty makes good sense. Governments should not, as a general rule, do business with people who have a history of breaking the law. If you want honest government then excluding criminals is a good start.
Niiice...I can cancel my cable subscription and just watch the end of life as we know it via my living room window.
Seriously though, this kind of objection has been raised against every revolution in military technology. Nothing has changed since we developed weapons that enabled us to kill people without having to look them in the eye (i.e. since the development of the bow and arrow).
It would be interesting to know the nationalities of the people on each side of this argument.
By and large, when there is fighting to be done on behalf of the free world, it is americans who have to do it. Maybe that would tend to make americans more enthusiastic for technologies that enable them to fight without taking casualties.
By and large other parts of the free world know that they do not need to do anything, and will not be expected to fight. Maybe that makes them more willing to put the lives of soldiers on the line.
There is an interesting problem of economics revealed here.
We tend to think that economies of scale apply to management costs. If you double the size of a company, then management costs should increase, but they will still be less than double what they were.
In fact this is often the case, especially when the company is simply doing more of the same activity that it was doing before. The task of management is to solve an information problem. If the problem remains much the same, even as the company grows in size, then the management costs will remain much the same.
Sometimes, however, the information problem becomes considerably more complex as the size of the company grows. This is often the case if the company diversifies its product line. If the difficulty of the information problem increases at a faster rate than the size of the company, then management costs will come to make a up a larger part of overall expenditure.
This is most of the reason why the economy has not be taken over by a single monopoly (as Marx claimed would happen). At a certain point growth becomes impossible because the increases in management costs would outweigh any remaining economies of scale.
Universities provide particularly acute examples of this problem. In a university there are always economies of scale to be had - you can squeeze more students into a class, you can utilize sqace more efficiently, and so on. But at the same time the task of managing all the resources of a university becomes imensely complex as the university grows. So the result is a lot of universities that are growing in size, and spending an ever increasing share of their total expenditure on management.
I see no problem with having tougher enforcement of intellectual property rights - so long as those property rights are themselves justifiable. If you think that there should be at least some IP rights, you ought to accept that the government has some obligation to take care of the enforcement of those rights. The real problem here is not that the RIAA wants IP rights enforced, but that they are demanding rights which are unjustifiable.
Of course there is a matter of priority. If your car gets stolen then chances are the police will do very little about it. I see no reason for the police to go to greater lengths to protect the IP rights of corportations than they do to protect the real property rights of individual citizens.
BTW, the stuff about piracy being a crime against us all is true enough, but applies equally to any other kind of theft. Shop lifting raises prices. Burglary raises insurance rates. Any kind of theft will increase the demand for, and expenditure on, law enforecement and private security. So the claim that there is something especially bad about piracy is BS.
You are right about advertisements - they can print a retraction - but this does not apply to prices on goods in the store. If they put a price on something, and you you try to buy it, then they cannot refuse to sell it at that price.
So a court might have to decide whether a price published on a website is just an advertisement, or effectively an in-store price. I suspect that the courts would come down of the later side. If you can pay for the good online, or place an order, then the prices on the website are more like those in a store than like those in an advertisement.
IANAL, but...
Retailers are required by law to honour the prices that they advertise or display. The fact that Best Buy asked customers to sign an agreement saying otherwise *might* make a difference, but probably will not.
Retailers cannot, for example, post a "EULA" on their front door saying that "by entering this store you waive any consumer rights granted to you by state or federal law". It seems unlikely that the courts will allow online retailers to what amounts to the same thing by requiing their customers to waive some of their rights before they shop online.
If it cloudy in the day then the clouds keep light out reducing temperature. If it is cloudy at night then clouds can keep heat in, maintaining temperture.
You are right that this makes the green house effect self correcting, to an extent. This is something that weather models take into account. However, most models show that this effect does not keep pace with the warming effect. So the weather gets cloudier and warmer - but not as warm as it would get without all the extra clouds.
As for humidity (mentioned by someone else), it makes no difference to actual temperture. It makes a difference to apparent temperature (i.e how warm it feels) because humidity makes sweating a less efficient way of dumping heat.
This is entirely wrong. Water vapour reflects visible light and thus reduces any greenhouse effect.
(Ever noticed how it gets cold when the sky is cloudy?)
I'm not a biologist, but I can think of a reason why this case might have been unusually successful. Presumably when the body rejects alien DNA it is some part of the immune system that does the work.
If the DNA mods were applied to the cells which are responsible for the immune system, then rejection seems less likely.
"Bending" light is not impossible.
Fibre-optic cables do it quite effectively. In principle you could make a suit which used something like nano-scale fibre-optic cables to re-route photons around the suit wearer. Of course this can't be done with current technology, or even plausible near future technology, so my guess is that they have something like your chameleon suit in mind.
Infra-red (or any other part of the spectrum) cammo is also possible.
A simple passive system might use insulating material distrubuted in such a way that the shape of the soldier, in infra-red, would be broken up. You would still see the glow - it just wouldn't look much like a person. This is pretty much the same principle as regular cammo, and could be done with today's tech.
A more complex active system might use really good insulation combined with some method for disipating heat that makes the soldier look even less like a person. Think portable air conditioning. In principle you could even store heat, and dump it at convenient intervals (i.e. when you think no one is watching). This kind of thing is not beyond the possiblities of near future tech.
Many posters seem to be unaware that HK already has a mandatory ID card. HK residents have to carry the ID card at all times, and must present it when asked to by a police officer (visitors to HK have to carry their passports). It is quite common to see police officers in MTR (subway) stations checking people at "random" (people who look like illegal immigrants).
The ID card was introduced by the British for two reasons. One was terrorism (the British had a lot of trouble with communist agitators back in the 60's and 70's). The other was illegal immigration, mostly from mainland China (this is still a problem even though Hong Kong is now a part of China).
So the only question raised by this new smart card is that of whether the new smart card is any better or worse than the old dumb card.
Here are a few considerations:
What's in it for the government:
(1) It's more difficult to counterfiet (although given the Chinese/Hong Kong talent for conterfieting almost anything at all, I wonder how long it will be before good counterfiet cards are produced).
(2) Information. It makes it easier for government officials to obtain information about the person standing in front of them.
(3) Of course a centralised database would be just as good for (2). The advantage of storing information on the card is that it allows the cardholder to supply "government-gauranteed" information to other people (officials and otherwise), without the government having to supply those other people with access to the centralised database.
This is the real advantage of smart cards. The dispersed nature of the data storage means that you can make access to small parts of the database easy, while making access to the entire database very hard (if not impossible).
(4) Automated screening. This is what governments all over the place are really after, although of course it has not been implemented yet. Smart cards are more easily machine readable, and if you can store biological information about the cardholder, then in principle it becomes much easier to make a machine that automatically identifies people. This is much cheaper than having policemen standing all over the place, comparing faces with photos.
What's in it for the cardholder:
(1) Convenience. It makes it easy for them to provide reliable identification, which in turn makes all sorts of transactions easier.
(2) The cards are harder to counterfiet, which makes it harder for someone to steal their identity (recall that we are just comparing smart cards with dumb cards - whether ID cards in general make identity theft easy is a seperate question).
(3) Control over access to the data. If there is a centralised database then people might be able to obtain information about you without you ever knowing about it. At least with a smartcard they actually have to steal the card before they can obtain access, and this is no worse than having other documents stolen.
(4) If you trust the state more than you trust other individuals then the improved ability of the state to identify people and enforce laws will be an advantage.
What is not in it for the citizen:
Most of the advantages for the state involve an increased ability to control its citizens. Unless there is a comparable increase in the ability of citizens to control the state, this represents an erosion of democracy. In a place like Hong Kong, where the barest glimer of democracy exists, any erosion of democracy has to be viewed as a disaster.
Personally I think that it is OK to increase the power of the state as long as such increases are balanced by increases in the power of the citizens (acting together) to control the state. What this suggests is that, rather than just worrying about the risks and dangers involved in developments like smart cards, we should also be thinking about the kinds of checks and balances that would make such developments less threatening.
If I remember the story rightly I think Heinlien did give an explanation of why "naturals" remained (and were even subsidized by the state). He thought the natural population was needed to preserve the possibility of new beneficial mutations arising.
If all you do is select for genes that you know to be good, and you never deliberately add new genes (i.e. no engineering or splicing), then the chances of new beneficial genes entering the gene pool seem pretty slim.
They are asking for a patent on a chemical which can be used to generate DNA with a certain sequence. The patent is only violated if you make the chemical that is used to make the DNA sequence.
That is not my understanding. I would agree that they would be entitled to a patent for some technique for making DNA, but 1) I would not agree that a "chemical" is a "technique", and 2) they seem to be seeking a patent on a particular sequence regardless of how it is constructed. This sounds much more like what should have been a copyright, but even there I maintain that it is more of a "discovery" than a "creation."
They are trying to patent a particular sequence, but as you note this is not legally possible, so they do the next best thing. They patent the only pratical method for generating DNA with that sequence. And again, whether the sequence is a discovery or an invention has nothing to do with whether you can use an integer to represent it.
Different function, different number, so obviously the mapping function is doing a lot of work here
This does not follow. If I measure something in feet instead of meters, I get a different number--that doesn't mean that my measuring stick was "doing a lot of work" or that I should be able to patent that particular distance, preventing anyone from using 2.7385 meters without my permission.
Actually your measuring stick is doing almost *all* of the work here. The bare number is absolutely useless without the units. I agree that you should not be able to patent numbers, or distances. My point was merely that they are not the same thing.
You claimed that patenting DNA sequences amounted to patenting numbers. It quite clearly does not. It does not amount to patenting distances either (or any other simple number+unit combination). So if you want to show that DNA sequences should not be patented then you will need another argument. The integer stuff doesn't do it.
Your argument rules out all patents
Not so (as someone has already explained on this thread) (link deleted).
That is just someone getting confused in the same way that you were getting confused. They recognise that there is a difference between the representation, and the thing being represented, but then make the mistake of supposing that people are trying to patent the representation.
Just to make this clear. No one wants to patent a sequence of letters that represent a DNA sequence (digital information). What they want to (indirectly) patent is the DNA sequence itself (a particular chemical).
Galileo spent quite a bit of time trying to sell his method for detemining longitude at sea.
Newton spent a lot of his time tring to turn lead into gold.
Arcimedes was on a royal commission when he had his "eureka" moment.
The truth is that almost all great scientists have been motivated by money to some degree or another.
This debate about whether scientists should be motivated by the search for truth, or the search for financial gain, goes all the way back to the very earliest days of philosophy (and thus science as well). Socrates claimed that he was better than the sophists because they were in it for the money, while he worked for free. Notably both Plato and Aristotle (his two greatest intellectual descendants) both charged fees. In other words the debate was also settled a very long time ago. Even accademics have to eat, and there is no reason why great scientists (and philosophers) can't make a buck along the way.
This is wrong for a couple of reasons.
(1) For legal and practical purposes they are not asking for a patent on a number. They are asking for a patent on a chemical which can be used to generate DNA with a certain sequence. The patent is only violated if you make the chemical that is used to make the DNA sequence.
True the DNA sequence can be represented as a number, but they are not patenting a representation let alone a number. (If we were talking about copyright then it would be a different story).
If you think the two are the same thing then just ask yourself, "which number is being patented?" The answer depends on the mapping function. Different function, different number, so obviously the mapping function is doing a lot of work here.
If all this still doesn't persuade you then try asking yourself whether you would be happy if you asked God for a summary of all his knowledge, in digital form, and he handed you a printout of the set of all integers.
My point here is just that, even if you have an integer which can be mapped back to a particular DNA sequence, you still need to know two more things before you can make any use of it. You need to know the mapping function, and you need to know that the number represnts a DNA sequence.
(2) Your argument rules out all patents (maybe that is what you wanted, but I got the impression that you were trying to draw a line between legitimate patents and illegitimate ones).
The objects of all patents are capable of finite description. Thus the objects of all patents can be represented as integers. So if we accept your argument then it looks like nothing can be patented.
If you read the article that you link to, then you will see that it quotes from the Economist (which is published in the US). The Economist takes as its source a series of articles that were published in a US newspaper (the Philadelphia Inquirer). The articles in question were latter turned into the book "Black Hawk Down".
The story was told in the US.
Vatican City.
There is a link to be found here with some Catholic mythology (see Dante's Inferno for an example). The elves are like the virtuous pagans. When the pagans leave this world they continue live in very much the same way, in an idealised version of this world. Only christians get to move on to a genuinely different mode of existence.
He needs to think about this from the horse's point of view. Would you rather be knackered or upgraded?