And apparently they are correct, because the link I posted also has a list of companies who decided it was cheaper to pay license fees than try to beat the patents in court.
Given how trivial and obvious these ideas are, this can be taken as evidence that the purpose of the patent system has little to do with its stated goals.
It can also be taken as evidence that unethical conduct is a cancer within the US legal system, that is causing enormous damage to the rest of society.
Because, half the cost of the programming you are watching comes from commercials.
The trick here is to view things in terms of fundamental rights. An often overlooked aspect to freedom of speech and the press is the concept of audience rights. In particular, human beings a right to not be forced to be part of an audience. Forcing someone to be part of an audience is not really all that different from kidnapping them: in either case, a portion of precious and irreplaceable time is taken from a person's finite lifespan.
The only way for ad-sponsored programming to be consistent with this right is to make the programming available on two pay scales, a lower one for those that are willing to put up with the cost of the commercials, and a more expensive one for those that don't want to see the ads (which includes NO station advertising and no little text advertising messages that run the across the top or bottom of the screen). A system that does else is a violation of fundamental rights.
A similar approach can be taken with respect to web-based services that depend upon advertising: the service can be (and must be) provided on two pay scales, with and without advertising.
This concept of audience rights also makes things like junk mail and unsolicited business phone calls a violation of fundamental rights.
This is the kind of thing economists with no real world experience (or good engineering experience) tend to believe. Perhaps it works for the kinds of ideal situations found in their journals. However, there are only so many degrees of freedom in any given engineering design, and all real-world designs have non-linear aspects to them, which can (and often does) make standardization difficult. Human factors, such as politics, complicate things even further. Much like software re-use, only so much standardization makes sense.
Unfortunately, because the limits on standardization, like the limits on software re-use, are not really understood by most people it is very easy for uninformed outsiders (or those with a political agenda and no integrity) to attack designers who do sensible designs. This in turn creates a tendency for political systems to force the creation of bad designs, in a misguided attempt to avoid these forms of attack.
It is especially difficult to design aircraft that are both suitable for the naval role, and for other roles. The corrosive effects of the ocean environment impose significant constraints on design. Having to design aircraft to land on carriers poses additional problems. The engineering required to deal with this reduces the degrees of freedom available for other design decisions.
Yet South Africa is near the top of the African economic pile, while Ethiopia is near the bottom.
While there are many gaps in our knowledge of the history of Ethiopia, it is generally accepted that what we now refer to as Ethiopia was once a powerful kingdom known as Axum (or Aksum) with a strong Red Sea naval and trade presence. They also traded with India. Axum was listed, along with Rome, Persia, and China, as one of the four great world powers by a Persian writer.
Presumably they didn't achieve this by being genetically "less diverse" from others.
Axum (which became a Christian kingdom) declined in large part due to the rise of Islam (along with most of the other Mediterranean powers). Essentially, the Axumites were forced into the less desirable portions of their territory, and lost their maritime trade and naval capability. Unlike some of the other Christian powers affected by Islam, for Ethiopia there were no neighboring Christian powers to eventually reverse the negative aspects of this situation. Long term isolation resulted, which is not an entirely bad thing, but certainly had a negative influence from an economic perspective (given the importance of trade to the history of civilization).
It would be overly-simplistic to account for the relatively low level of economic development in Ethiopia purely on the basis of this history, but it certainly has had an influence.
A lot of what we learned about just how bad radiation can be was learned as a result of studies done after the bombing (see, for example, the research done by Terufumi Sasaki's group, or the work of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission).
This doesn't mean that no appreciation of the danger existed prior to that: Rontgen reported getting burns from x-rays as early as 1895, for example.
A lot of things associated with the bomb project was (and probably remains) classified, and it's not entirely clear exactly what they knew. However, it is certain that they wouldn't have fully understood the dangers of radiation because they didn't possess today's medical knowledge about things like genetics and dna.
Between 40 and 50 percent of everyone believes in the Genesis story as literal truth depending on the poll. It's been that way for 50 years. The last Gallup survey had it somewhere around 46-48 percent.
Many people tend to assume that measurement with a poll is no more difficult than measurement of the length of everyday objects with a ruler.
In actuality, making good measurements is a very hard problem in social science (it's also a lot harder in physical science -- in many situations -- than most people realize). There are many complex and subtle issues with using polls or surveys as a measurement tool.
Polls can be a decent way of predicting some elections: we know this because we can compare the poll results against the actual election results. Unfortunately, we can't do this for a lot of other things that polls supposedly measure.
It's particularly difficult to determine whether the results of a poll can be generalized to the actual population, or whether it just applies to the subset of the population that chooses to respond to polls (which may be a very different group from the population as a whole). There are statistical techniques that can be applied here, if certain assumptions are first met, but proving that those assumptions are in fact valid is yet another difficult problem (which many professional social scientists get wrong)...
Another thorny issue is the effect on the poll results of the wording of questions (to a certain extent, a skilled social scientist can try to correct for this by having multiple questions that address the same issue, possibly spread across multiple polls, but proving that you've actually done this correctly can be quite challenging and can be an entire career for a social scientist).
From a social science nerd's perspective, it's best to assume that a poll or survey is completely meaningless unless you can verify that multiple methods of measurement have been used and lead to the same conclusions. Note that having multiple polls does not mean one has multiple methods of measurement: you need to have fundamentally different types of measurement.
Unfortunately, most folks in the mainstream press organizations, and most politicians, do not have enough background in social science to understand these issues, which is one reason why we tend to get bad reporting and bad decision making.
Hard to say Hiroshima/Nagasaki were covered by the "laws or conventions" of any society, since they were such singular events.
From our perspective today, these are singular events.
However, the horror of radiation was not fully understood at that time.
From the perspective of the decision makers of the time, these were just much more powerful bombs.
The conventional bombing campaign against Japan, by that point in the war, had probably killed more people than those who were killed by the atomic bombs (the wikipedia page Air Raids on Japan is a good starting point for reading up on just how bad things were).
For that matter, the high end estimates for people killed due to the use of nuclear weapons is around 280k. The high end estimate of the total people killed by WW2 is 60 million, so the nuclear weapons were responsible for only (very roughly) half of one percent of the total deaths in the war.
It was an ugly period in history.
It's always struck me as paradoxical, the effort to set out a set of rules for modern warfare.
I suspect everyone who has studied the subject would agree with you there.
However, having rules does have some practical consequences, and that matters quite a bit.
For example, there were attempts prior to WWI to develop rules of war that prohibited naval blockages from interfering with the shipment of food and medical supplies. The British refused to sign these treaties, and implemented a naval blockage in WWI against Germany (and the bordering neutral nations) that resulted in many civilian deaths, primarily children and the elderly, from starvation or lack of medical care. This created considerable long-term hatred in Germany, which in turn became one of the factors that led to WW2. So the presence, or absence, of rules on the conduct of warfare can have significant long term effects.
Similar blockades in modern history, in comparison, permit the passage of food and medical supplies, so I suppose we've learned something from the mistakes of the past.
I know for sure, based upon first-hand accounts from my dad, who I am bound by blood to believe, that there were violations by both sides in the Pacific theater of WWII.
I don't think anyone who has studied the written history in depth doubts this.
For that matter, there were violations by both sides in the European theater.
There were also acts of honor and charity by both sides, in both theaters.
One particular Catholic writer, whose name escapes me at the moment, asserts that besides being immoral, war is also always unnecessary - that even WWII could have been averted.
Conversely, other thinkers have asserted that peace is an abstraction whose existence we deduce from the existence of intervals between wars. That's not intended to be sarcastic: depends upon how one counts, the 20th century saw between 30 and over 100 wars. Hopefully we will do better during this century.
Murder, absolutely. No less or more than Hiroshima or Dresden.
If you defined murder as the killing of human beings, then war IS murder. War is organized, systematic murder, generally governed by some form of laws or conventions, but murder none the less.
However, it is more common to define murder as killing that goes beyond the laws or conventions of a society or set of societies, in which case war (and acts of war) are not murder.
If you do the research, you'll find out that the decision to bomb Hiroshima was based upon very clear logic, and was intended to avoid an estimated 1 million Allied casualties that an invasion of Japan would cause, plus probably vastly more Japanese casualties (including civilian casualties) than were actually killed by the bomb. This decision was consistent with how the war was being fought, and was not contrary to any law or convention. It's an ugly truth that many people choose not to accept because they don't want to be confused by facts, but working through the research and coming to the right conclusion shouldn't be a problem for a Slashdot reader.
Similarly, if you look at the history of the Dresden bombing (for instance, read "The Bomber War - The Allied Air Offensive Against Nazi Germany", by Robin Neillands) you'll find it wasn't particularly different from many other air attacks made during the war, either in the nature of the target or the objectives. The firestorm generated in this particular raid resulted in massive casualties, but this wasn't the first or only time that heavy casualties happened as a result of a bombing raid.
Ideally, bombing raids on cities should have been made illegal before the war, but nobody was willing to get together to pass laws to achieve that (any more than they were willing to outlaw naval blockades of food and medical supplies). In the absence of law to the contrary, by our second definition, this was not murder.
Warfare throughout history has resulted in direct and indirect civilian casualties on many, many occasions. It's an ugly truth, but that's the way things are. It takes far more than just civilian casualties to turn an act of war into murder.
You might also want to read the "Laws of Land Warfare", the US Army field manual that covers many of the key points on how these matters are viewed today.
Nice to see somebody intelligent debunking this myth, which seems to keep recurring on Slashdot in these kinds of discussions.
In addition to military aspect to spending in the red states, another key point could be made, revolving around the fact that where money gets spent does not necessarily tell us who is the primary beneficiary of that money.
Many red states produce valuable resources (mining, agriculture, timber, oil, water and water-related resources) in low population regions, resources that end up being used in blue states, either in raw or finished form (benefiting blue states directly). Further, in some cases, such as with the goods participating in Great Lakes shipping, these goods are exported to other countries and thus contribute to the national balance of trade (benefiting blue states indirectly).
These low population regions naturally produce little in the way of tax income, but federal spending on things like the transportation infrastructure allows the resources they produce to be transferred at lower cost (in raw or finished form) to the high population regions. Often goods produced in red states are produced in places that are hard to get to (e.g. mountains and deserts), or which are relatively far from the large urban populations that desire to consume those goods, thus requiring relatively expensive transportation infrastructure to transport the goods efficiently.
Essentially, blue areas receive a subsidy that substantially lowers the cost of goods not produced in those areas, since the federal government is paying for part of the real cost of transporting those goods.
Thus, in many cases, it can reasonably be concluded that the blue states are actually the primary beneficiaries of the money being spent in the red states.
Perhaps you would benefit from a course in the philosophy of language, if you believe there is an "actual definition". Even just reading the wikipedia pages on "definition" and "fallacy of definition" might be a good start in understanding the limitations of this concept.
Do you really think all companies with an interest in copyright are US owned corporations? Anyone can buy stock in publicly held companies. In all likelihood, wealthy people from many countries around the world, including your own, hold substantial amounts of stock in these companies. Many ordinary people will hold stock in these companies as well, without even realizing it, primarily through holding mutual funds.
The problems with copyright don't really come down to a battle between the US and the rest of the world, rather, its a battle between short-sighted, greedy, abusive, and stupid people (who exist in every country of the world) versus the rest of humanity.
A tax is designed to provide income to support the government. What you are describing is NOT a tax.
It's all a question of what you define as a tax.
If you define a tax as any removal of value (in whatever form that value may take) from an individual's life as a result of the norms and conventions of some social organization (such as a government or a society), then lost time can reasonably be regarded as a tax. The human span is finite, none of us knows how long we have, and presumably most people would like to make the what of whatever we end up with.
If you have a more narrow definition of tax, limiting it to mechanisms not involving debt for providing money to a government , then lost time does not represent a tax.
Both definitions have their uses, in different circumstances. In this age of increasing government bureaucracy, there is considerable value in recognizing that the time of individuals is itself something of value.
This is not a new idea: both kidnapping and murder can be viewed as stealing a portion of a person's life, and thus we have an implicit recognition within the legal system that the time of individuals has value.
Attempting to artificially limit the scope of definitions is sometimes used in debate as a clever (but often amoral) form of sophistry.
You may be living in a state where the sales tax rules are simple. In some states there are many exceptions and exemptions: not every purchase or every customer is subject to the same sales tax, and the rules can change from year to year or situation to situation. The situation is especially problematic for single person operating a business when the nature of that business requires them to sell in many different legal jurisdictions (such as anyone taking goods to shows, country fairs, conventions, and similar events).
Further, the legal professionals in the legislature who write the rules may do in a fashion that arguably creates artificial demand for the services of their profession to interpret those rules.
I've had single person business owners complain to me about both of these things, so the problem is real and the situation not as simple as it may be in the location where you are living.
The issue is even simpler than that. Excessive government, excessive law, excessive bureaucracy are all violations of fundamental rights in a free country. The government that governs best governs least. Having to keep track of complex sales tax rules even within a single state (something I've heard MANY small business owners complain about) is a violation of these fundamental rights. Extending this to keeping track of all sales tax rules in every possible legal jurisdiction in the country is simply absurd (it's also poor legal ethics: unneeded complexity in the legal system creates artificial demand for the services of legal professionals).
Governments at various levels in the USA are already violating fundamental rights on a massive scale by having an income tax system so complex multiple companies can make money selling software to help people navigate it: we need to be correcting that situation, not making it worse!
The most fair way to tax would be to tax companies based both on how much the community benefits the company, and what other options the community has to utilize the land and other resources the company is using.
There is no rational, sane way to measure how much a company benefits a community or vice versa. We can measure distances, we can measure voltage, we can even measure income, but we can not measure "benefit" with any accuracy or precision, or without ambiguity and strong differences of opinion as to what we are actually measuring. This is a nice idea, but not a practical one.
To be honest, progress bars shouldn't be used for indeterminate timescales.
Except for real-time systems, which are designed to support things happening in a fixed amount of time, modern computer systems are fundamentally indeterminate. Scheduling algorithms that allocate processing time between different processes running on a typical operating system make the timing of even seemingly simple tasks difficult.
The problem of determining program timing gets even more complex when you consider preemption of the operating system by hardware devices, delays due to the need to share resources, the timing effect of any distributed processing that may be required, and the time cost of communication between multiple machines.
In short, measurement of software progress ultimately is probabilistic, not deterministic.
Having said all this, it is often the case when writing software that not enough time gets put into thinking about how to write basic user interface components such as progress bars. This is a result of many factors, amongst them the inability of management in many organizations to understand that seemingly simple things can take time to do right.
Uncertainty about the halting status of programs can only occur if we first postulate the existence of a fantasy world governed by rules that don't correspond to any real world conditions known to science. If we're going to do that, we might as well postulate an impossible (or at least improbable) creator.
Perhaps we should teach mathematicians thermodynamics instead.
While bashing the US is popular on Slashdot, those with a more balanced perspective understand that real situations almost never come down to a question of USA vs. The Rest of The World.
The organizations that make money from copyright have stockholders and / or owners that are citizens of many different countries. Further, in all likelihood, as is the case with other big corporations, many of the employees of these organizations will come from countries other than the USA.
Wealthy people and organizations from around the world have considerable ability to influence the political and legal side of the US government, as a result both of the incompetence of the US campaign finance laws, and as a result of major ethics problems in the US legal profession.
I agree that if an employee is divulging trade secrets and they had a contractual obligation not to that is one thing.
The situation with respect to trade secrets is much more complex then you might realize.
The 1st Amendment, which all legal professionals swear oaths to uphold, denys Congress the right to pass laws infringing freedom of speech, which implies Congress can not interfere with the freedom to speak about trade secrets (that, of course, being a form of speech).
The 14th Amendment can reasonably be taken to extend this to state government (necessarily so, as otherwise people could simply move to another state and thereby gain the freedom to speak about trade secrets). As with other fundamental rights, this protection supersedes contract law. As such, contracts regarding these secrets are not enforceable, and can't even be written by legal professionals without a violation of their oaths, unless our legal professionals choose to hold their oaths in contempt.
Further, creating contradictions in the legal system creates artificial demand for the services of legal professionals, as it makes it more difficult for ordinary people to understand the law. Not only is this harmful for the exercise of long term public oversight over government, the law, and businesses, but this situation inherently involves ethical conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals. Artificial demand leads to higher pay and better job security, so long as the market that provides additional numbers of trained legal professionals is not elastic and able to instantaneously match the demand with increased supply (it isn't).
This situation can be thought of as analogous to one where a group of software developers forces a customer to buy and use, at gunpoint, a software system that not only blatantly violates its specifications, but which creates an artificial long term demand for the services of the developers to maintain it.
Having trade secrets protected by law may or may not be a rational policy (there are some good reasons to protect trade secrets, subject to some reasonable limitations), but it certainly isn't a legal one without a new amendment to the Bill of Rights that creates the authority to do this. It necessarily follows that ANY legal professionals -- including judges at ANY level -- making rulings or taking actions to the contrary are in violation of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights.
Until this situation is resolved in a rational way, we will continue to have messes like the one being discussed here. Corporations (in the form of their legal professionals and executives) will attempt to do things that benefit themselves without full and balanced consideration of the consequences for society. Having trade secret protection enforceable by law may be reasonable, but that law must in turn be subject to reasonable limitation (for example, not biased towards employers at the expense of workers) and must be written in a form such that it can readily be understood and accepted by most of the public.
Unfortunately our legal profession is apparently living in a fantasy world where oath-breaking and unethical conduct carries no meaningful penalty, as shown by the existence of both trade secret laws and of trade secret provisions in contracts, each outside the scope of Constitutional authority.
It is not just the 1st Amendment where this problem occurs, of course. Similar issues and considerations arise with respect to the 2nd Amendment, and with many fundamental rights that might reasonably be asserted under the 9th Amendment.
I would like to see a system where commercial publishers could have rights to publish for a very limited time, but in return for getting the opportunity to do this, would have to make articles based upon taxpayer funded research available for free download after that time.
Maintaining the servers holding the free downloads, and paying for the internet access, might be a reasonable task to give to a government funded library, such as the Library of Congress, or perhaps to third parties on a contract basis.
This approach would still support the business of publishing, while allowing the taxpayers access to the material. Easy taxpayer access is important to further the progress of science and the useful arts, to provide long term public oversight over government, and because the taxpayers did, after all, pay for this research.
Note that the current copyright system does NOT provide this kind of model: it has been corrupted through apparently perpetual extension and other problems. For science and mathematics research, the period in which publishers would have control should not exceed five years.
I have seen TOS contracts that (in non-digital format) would be dozens of pages long. Users simply click "Ok" with the assumption that "There's probably nothing bad in there". But this assumption is clearly false in a large number of cases when one considers privacy and security clauses.
Legal professionals, as a class in society, are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system.
In the USA, the inability of the public to understand what should and should not be considered ethical for legal professionals has allowed this conflict of interest to create all sorts of problems within the legal system. It is not a huge stretch to say that "Of the people, by the people, and for the people" has morphed into "Of the lawyer, by the lawyer, and for the lawyer".
In other words, as a results of ethics problems, the US legal system is an unholy mess.
The ongoing attempt legal professionals have been making to infringe fundamental rights (such as privacy rights, the right to long term public oversight over business, the right to not have one's time wasted, and the right to not be subject to excessive law) through long, complex, difficult-to-read, and difficult-to-understand click-to-sign contracts is yet another aspect of this very serious ethics problem.
Contract law is one of the foundations of legal practice, and in many ways is the bread-and-butter of the legal profession. If the legal professionals can make this aspect of the legal system more complex, and applicable to everybody in a wide variety of circumstances, they automatically increase the long term demand for the services of their profession. This creates an ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of contract law.
In other words, the binding nature of current click-to-sign agreements (and shrink-wrap-licenses, which are often equally long, and equally infringing) can reasonably be presumed to be a reflection of unethical legal practice.
And then of course prosecutors have qualified immunity, which means that it is very difficult to make any kind of charges stick against them, no matter how egregious their behavior.
It can be shown that the government does not have the right to extend immunity (or right to pardon) to members of government that violate other people's fundamental rights arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) or the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people).
The argument uses a fundamental technique of logic, dating back at least to Euclid, known as "proof by contradiction".
It works as follows: we assume the government CAN extend such immunity. Therefore, the government can prevent any member of the government from being penalized for ANY action taken to prevent rights being asserted under the 9th Amendment. If there is no penalty for such actions, the assertion of any right that might otherwise be reasonably asserted under the 9th Amendment can be blocked. Therefore, there can be no rights "retained by the people". However, the Bill of Rights explicitly provides for rights retained by the people. We have a contradiction: the original assumption was false, and the government CAN NOT extend immunity to prosecutors who violate other people's fundamental rights.
Further, from an ethics perspective, a legal system in which prosecutors can do absurd or abusive things to other people creates an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals as a class in society, to protect people (at least, to protect those who can afford the services of the legal professional) from abusive prosecution. In short, we have an ethical conflict of interest in the legal system, not just on the part of the legal professionals engaged in prosecution, but on the part of all legal professionals as a class in society.
If we suppose that ethical conduct on the part of members of government and the legal profession is a fundamental right, and that even the appearance of conflict of interest should be avoided, then the conclusion follows: as a matter of ethics, prosecutors do NOT have the right to abuse people by any means or mechanism.
The previous informational post provides a concise summary of what might be called the "conventional viewpoint", which is the say the viewpoint that those legal professionals take who are not particularly concerned with the meaning of their oaths to uphold the law, and can't be bothered with thinking too much about ethics and the implications of the Bill of Rights.
James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to counter the position of the Anti-Federalists. There were two key considerations in doing this: 1. The Constitution had no Bill of Rights, and 2. Any finite Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete and might preclude the people from asserting rights that were left out. The 9th Amendment (in whole) and the 10th Amendment (in part) were written to deal with the second objection, by providing for rights "retained by the people" and "reserved to the people" and thus making the Bill of Rights open-ended.
When legal professionals, including judges and prosecutors, swear oaths to uphold the law, they are swearing oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights, including the open-ended aspects of the 9th and 10th Amendments. This creates an individual and personal responsibility to recognize when a law or practice within the legal system is violating a fundamental right.
Think of this as the equivalent within the US legal system of the Nuremberg Precedent: just as military personnel are expected to recognize that there are situations when the laws of their country are invalid, so to are legal personnel expected to recognize when acting according to the laws, norms, and conventions of the legal system, or acting as directed by their superiors in the legal chain of command, are going to cause them to do something that is morally or ethically wrong, or which violate fundamental human rights appropriate to a free country.
Legal professionals who do not want to accept this are, of course, welcome to practice law in some other country.
Fundamental rights applicable to this case might include a right not to be subject to excessive government or to excessive law (the first is consistent with the notions of individual liberty that were instrumental in founding the USA, both the first and the second are a required foundation to have legal ethics), a right not to have one's time wasted (if kidnapping or murder are wrong, then surely to have government officials steal a portion of a person's life is equally wrong), a right to expect ethical conduct from legal professionals (all kinds of reasons for this), and -- finally -- a right to not have excessive penalties for violations of the law (necessary for many reasons, amongst them -- again -- legal ethics: excessive penalties create an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals).
If we accept these rights, then it follows that the actions of some of the legal professionals in this case were clearly not consistent with the obligations of their oaths.
While a game of chicken might be appropriate for juveniles, it has no place in any ethical legal system. Nor is appropriate to waste someone's time by forcing them to spend large amounts of it dealing with inflated charges, or to force someone to spend money (which also, indirectly, wastes their time) on bail, lawyers, and related legal expenses by having to go all the way to trial to demonstrate the government exaggerated the charges or to reduce the penalty for a set of charges to something reasonable.
Regrettably, the "conventional viewpoint" seems to be held by many legal professionals (but certainly not all), a situation that has been creating and will continue to create many problems in the US legal system, with many costs to the USA as a nation and a society, including destroyed lives.
All tax dollars for software should go only for the development of software for which source is available gratis to all taxpayers, and that secret-source software makers are free to change to fit this requirement any time they'd like to have their software considered for a bid.
Doing something along these lines is essential to have long term public oversight over government.
In fact, you need to go a little bit further, and have a requirement not just for the source to be available, but for it to be well-documented, and build-able to exactly produce the binaries being used. Otherwise you'll get people playing all kinds of games with the system, adhering to the letter of the law while massively violating the intent.
The "well-documented" concept would take some thought to define, but I'd imagine something reasonable and workable could be developed.
We don't necessarily need to make all source code created for any possible purpose open source as soon as it is created, however.
For some applications, such as source code running equipment that could reasonably be expected to be used in a legal case (e.g. security cameras, drug measurement tools, radar guns), the source should always be open. We might even extend this requirement to include firmware and hardware design details in addition to source code.
In some applications that are less time critical, the source might be held closed for ten years or so. A delay of this kind would provide a reasonable opportunity for businesses to have trade secrets for a limited time. Mechanisms could be set up to insure that the source would eventually be produced, including some sort of reward / penalty system.
For that matter, something like this is needed to have long term public oversight over businesses in general, not just those working with the government.
Slashdot Mirror
And apparently they are correct, because the link I posted also has a list of companies who decided it was cheaper to pay license fees than try to beat the patents in court.
Given how trivial and obvious these ideas are, this can be taken as evidence that the purpose of the patent system has little to do with its stated goals.
It can also be taken as evidence that unethical conduct is a cancer within the US legal system, that is causing enormous damage to the rest of society.
Because, half the cost of the programming you are watching comes from commercials.
The trick here is to view things in terms of fundamental rights. An often overlooked aspect to freedom of speech and the press is the concept of audience rights. In particular, human beings a right to not be forced to be part of an audience. Forcing someone to be part of an audience is not really all that different from kidnapping them: in either case, a portion of precious and irreplaceable time is taken from a person's finite lifespan.
The only way for ad-sponsored programming to be consistent with this right is to make the programming available on two pay scales, a lower one for those that are willing to put up with the cost of the commercials, and a more expensive one for those that don't want to see the ads (which includes NO station advertising and no little text advertising messages that run the across the top or bottom of the screen). A system that does else is a violation of fundamental rights.
A similar approach can be taken with respect to web-based services that depend upon advertising: the service can be (and must be) provided on two pay scales, with and without advertising.
This concept of audience rights also makes things like junk mail and unsolicited business phone calls a violation of fundamental rights.
Yes standardization is economical.
This is the kind of thing economists with no real world experience (or good engineering experience) tend to believe. Perhaps it works for the kinds of ideal situations found in their journals. However, there are only so many degrees of freedom in any given engineering design, and all real-world designs have non-linear aspects to them, which can (and often does) make standardization difficult. Human factors, such as politics, complicate things even further. Much like software re-use, only so much standardization makes sense.
Unfortunately, because the limits on standardization, like the limits on software re-use, are not really understood by most people it is very easy for uninformed outsiders (or those with a political agenda and no integrity) to attack designers who do sensible designs. This in turn creates a tendency for political systems to force the creation of bad designs, in a misguided attempt to avoid these forms of attack.
It is especially difficult to design aircraft that are both suitable for the naval role, and for other roles. The corrosive effects of the ocean environment impose significant constraints on design. Having to design aircraft to land on carriers poses additional problems. The engineering required to deal with this reduces the degrees of freedom available for other design decisions.
Yet South Africa is near the top of the African economic pile, while Ethiopia is near the bottom.
While there are many gaps in our knowledge of the history of Ethiopia, it is generally accepted that what we now refer to as Ethiopia was once a powerful kingdom known as Axum (or Aksum) with a strong Red Sea naval and trade presence. They also traded with India. Axum was listed, along with Rome, Persia, and China, as one of the four great world powers by a Persian writer.
Presumably they didn't achieve this by being genetically "less diverse" from others.
Axum (which became a Christian kingdom) declined in large part due to the rise of Islam (along with most of the other Mediterranean powers). Essentially, the Axumites were forced into the less desirable portions of their territory, and lost their maritime trade and naval capability. Unlike some of the other Christian powers affected by Islam, for Ethiopia there were no neighboring Christian powers to eventually reverse the negative aspects of this situation. Long term isolation resulted, which is not an entirely bad thing, but certainly had a negative influence from an economic perspective (given the importance of trade to the history of civilization).
It would be overly-simplistic to account for the relatively low level of economic development in Ethiopia purely on the basis of this history, but it certainly has had an influence.
A lot of what we learned about just how bad radiation can be was learned as a result of studies done after the bombing (see, for example, the research done by Terufumi Sasaki's group, or the work of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission).
This doesn't mean that no appreciation of the danger existed prior to that: Rontgen reported getting burns from x-rays as early as 1895, for example.
A lot of things associated with the bomb project was (and probably remains) classified, and it's not entirely clear exactly what they knew. However, it is certain that they wouldn't have fully understood the dangers of radiation because they didn't possess today's medical knowledge about things like genetics and dna.
Between 40 and 50 percent of everyone believes in the Genesis story as literal truth depending on the poll. It's been that way for 50 years. The last Gallup survey had it somewhere around 46-48 percent.
Many people tend to assume that measurement with a poll is no more difficult than measurement of the length of everyday objects with a ruler.
In actuality, making good measurements is a very hard problem in social science (it's also a lot harder in physical science -- in many situations -- than most people realize). There are many complex and subtle issues with using polls or surveys as a measurement tool.
Polls can be a decent way of predicting some elections: we know this because we can compare the poll results against the actual election results. Unfortunately, we can't do this for a lot of other things that polls supposedly measure.
It's particularly difficult to determine whether the results of a poll can be generalized to the actual population, or whether it just applies to the subset of the population that chooses to respond to polls (which may be a very different group from the population as a whole). There are statistical techniques that can be applied here, if certain assumptions are first met, but proving that those assumptions are in fact valid is yet another difficult problem (which many professional social scientists get wrong) ...
Another thorny issue is the effect on the poll results of the wording of questions (to a certain extent, a skilled social scientist can try to correct for this by having multiple questions that address the same issue, possibly spread across multiple polls, but proving that you've actually done this correctly can be quite challenging and can be an entire career for a social scientist).
From a social science nerd's perspective, it's best to assume that a poll or survey is completely meaningless unless you can verify that multiple methods of measurement have been used and lead to the same conclusions. Note that having multiple polls does not mean one has multiple methods of measurement: you need to have fundamentally different types of measurement.
Unfortunately, most folks in the mainstream press organizations, and most politicians, do not have enough background in social science to understand these issues, which is one reason why we tend to get bad reporting and bad decision making.
Hard to say Hiroshima/Nagasaki were covered by the "laws or conventions" of any society, since they were such singular events.
From our perspective today, these are singular events.
However, the horror of radiation was not fully understood at that time.
From the perspective of the decision makers of the time, these were just much more powerful bombs.
The conventional bombing campaign against Japan, by that point in the war, had probably killed more people than those who were killed by the atomic bombs (the wikipedia page Air Raids on Japan is a good starting point for reading up on just how bad things were).
For that matter, the high end estimates for people killed due to the use of nuclear weapons is around 280k. The high end estimate of the total people killed by WW2 is 60 million, so the nuclear weapons were responsible for only (very roughly) half of one percent of the total deaths in the war.
It was an ugly period in history.
It's always struck me as paradoxical, the effort to set out a set of rules for modern warfare.
I suspect everyone who has studied the subject would agree with you there.
However, having rules does have some practical consequences, and that matters quite a bit.
For example, there were attempts prior to WWI to develop rules of war that prohibited naval blockages from interfering with the shipment of food and medical supplies. The British refused to sign these treaties, and implemented a naval blockage in WWI against Germany (and the bordering neutral nations) that resulted in many civilian deaths, primarily children and the elderly, from starvation or lack of medical care. This created considerable long-term hatred in Germany, which in turn became one of the factors that led to WW2. So the presence, or absence, of rules on the conduct of warfare can have significant long term effects.
Similar blockades in modern history, in comparison, permit the passage of food and medical supplies, so I suppose we've learned something from the mistakes of the past.
I know for sure, based upon first-hand accounts from my dad, who I am bound by blood to believe, that there were violations by both sides in the Pacific theater of WWII.
I don't think anyone who has studied the written history in depth doubts this.
For that matter, there were violations by both sides in the European theater.
There were also acts of honor and charity by both sides, in both theaters.
One particular Catholic writer, whose name escapes me at the moment, asserts that besides being immoral, war is also always unnecessary - that even WWII could have been averted.
Conversely, other thinkers have asserted that peace is an abstraction whose existence we deduce from the existence of intervals between wars. That's not intended to be sarcastic: depends upon how one counts, the 20th century saw between 30 and over 100 wars. Hopefully we will do better during this century.
Murder, absolutely. No less or more than Hiroshima or Dresden.
If you defined murder as the killing of human beings, then war IS murder. War is organized, systematic murder, generally governed by some form of laws or conventions, but murder none the less.
However, it is more common to define murder as killing that goes beyond the laws or conventions of a society or set of societies, in which case war (and acts of war) are not murder.
If you do the research, you'll find out that the decision to bomb Hiroshima was based upon very clear logic, and was intended to avoid an estimated 1 million Allied casualties that an invasion of Japan would cause, plus probably vastly more Japanese casualties (including civilian casualties) than were actually killed by the bomb. This decision was consistent with how the war was being fought, and was not contrary to any law or convention. It's an ugly truth that many people choose not to accept because they don't want to be confused by facts, but working through the research and coming to the right conclusion shouldn't be a problem for a Slashdot reader.
Similarly, if you look at the history of the Dresden bombing (for instance, read "The Bomber War - The Allied Air Offensive Against Nazi Germany", by Robin Neillands) you'll find it wasn't particularly different from many other air attacks made during the war, either in the nature of the target or the objectives. The firestorm generated in this particular raid resulted in massive casualties, but this wasn't the first or only time that heavy casualties happened as a result of a bombing raid.
Ideally, bombing raids on cities should have been made illegal before the war, but nobody was willing to get together to pass laws to achieve that (any more than they were willing to outlaw naval blockades of food and medical supplies). In the absence of law to the contrary, by our second definition, this was not murder.
Warfare throughout history has resulted in direct and indirect civilian casualties on many, many occasions. It's an ugly truth, but that's the way things are. It takes far more than just civilian casualties to turn an act of war into murder.
You might also want to read the "Laws of Land Warfare", the US Army field manual that covers many of the key points on how these matters are viewed today.
Nice to see somebody intelligent debunking this myth, which seems to keep recurring on Slashdot in these kinds of discussions.
In addition to military aspect to spending in the red states, another key point could be made, revolving around the fact that where money gets spent does not necessarily tell us who is the primary beneficiary of that money.
Many red states produce valuable resources (mining, agriculture, timber, oil, water and water-related resources) in low population regions, resources that end up being used in blue states, either in raw or finished form (benefiting blue states directly). Further, in some cases, such as with the goods participating in Great Lakes shipping, these goods are exported to other countries and thus contribute to the national balance of trade (benefiting blue states indirectly).
These low population regions naturally produce little in the way of tax income, but federal spending on things like the transportation infrastructure allows the resources they produce to be transferred at lower cost (in raw or finished form) to the high population regions. Often goods produced in red states are produced in places that are hard to get to (e.g. mountains and deserts), or which are relatively far from the large urban populations that desire to consume those goods, thus requiring relatively expensive transportation infrastructure to transport the goods efficiently.
Essentially, blue areas receive a subsidy that substantially lowers the cost of goods not produced in those areas, since the federal government is paying for part of the real cost of transporting those goods.
Thus, in many cases, it can reasonably be concluded that the blue states are actually the primary beneficiaries of the money being spent in the red states.
Perhaps you would benefit from a course in the philosophy of language, if you believe there is an "actual definition". Even just reading the wikipedia pages on "definition" and "fallacy of definition" might be a good start in understanding the limitations of this concept.
Do you really think all companies with an interest in copyright are US owned corporations? Anyone can buy stock in publicly held companies. In all likelihood, wealthy people from many countries around the world, including your own, hold substantial amounts of stock in these companies. Many ordinary people will hold stock in these companies as well, without even realizing it, primarily through holding mutual funds.
The problems with copyright don't really come down to a battle between the US and the rest of the world, rather, its a battle between short-sighted, greedy, abusive, and stupid people (who exist in every country of the world) versus the rest of humanity.
A tax is designed to provide income to support the government. What you are describing is NOT a tax.
It's all a question of what you define as a tax.
If you define a tax as any removal of value (in whatever form that value may take) from an individual's life as a result of the norms and conventions of some social organization (such as a government or a society), then lost time can reasonably be regarded as a tax. The human span is finite, none of us knows how long we have, and presumably most people would like to make the what of whatever we end up with.
If you have a more narrow definition of tax, limiting it to mechanisms not involving debt for providing money to a government , then lost time does not represent a tax.
Both definitions have their uses, in different circumstances. In this age of increasing government bureaucracy, there is considerable value in recognizing that the time of individuals is itself something of value.
This is not a new idea: both kidnapping and murder can be viewed as stealing a portion of a person's life, and thus we have an implicit recognition within the legal system that the time of individuals has value.
Attempting to artificially limit the scope of definitions is sometimes used in debate as a clever (but often amoral) form of sophistry.
You may be living in a state where the sales tax rules are simple. In some states there are many exceptions and exemptions: not every purchase or every customer is subject to the same sales tax, and the rules can change from year to year or situation to situation. The situation is especially problematic for single person operating a business when the nature of that business requires them to sell in many different legal jurisdictions (such as anyone taking goods to shows, country fairs, conventions, and similar events).
Further, the legal professionals in the legislature who write the rules may do in a fashion that arguably creates artificial demand for the services of their profession to interpret those rules.
I've had single person business owners complain to me about both of these things, so the problem is real and the situation not as simple as it may be in the location where you are living.
The issue is even simpler than that. Excessive government, excessive law, excessive bureaucracy are all violations of fundamental rights in a free country. The government that governs best governs least. Having to keep track of complex sales tax rules even within a single state (something I've heard MANY small business owners complain about) is a violation of these fundamental rights. Extending this to keeping track of all sales tax rules in every possible legal jurisdiction in the country is simply absurd (it's also poor legal ethics: unneeded complexity in the legal system creates artificial demand for the services of legal professionals).
Governments at various levels in the USA are already violating fundamental rights on a massive scale by having an income tax system so complex multiple companies can make money selling software to help people navigate it: we need to be correcting that situation, not making it worse!
The most fair way to tax would be to tax companies based both on how much the community benefits the company, and what other options the community has to utilize the land and other resources the company is using.
There is no rational, sane way to measure how much a company benefits a community or vice versa. We can measure distances, we can measure voltage, we can even measure income, but we can not measure "benefit" with any accuracy or precision, or without ambiguity and strong differences of opinion as to what we are actually measuring. This is a nice idea, but not a practical one.
To be honest, progress bars shouldn't be used for indeterminate timescales.
Except for real-time systems, which are designed to support things happening in a fixed amount of time, modern computer systems are fundamentally indeterminate. Scheduling algorithms that allocate processing time between different processes running on a typical operating system make the timing of even seemingly simple tasks difficult.
The problem of determining program timing gets even more complex when you consider preemption of the operating system by hardware devices, delays due to the need to share resources, the timing effect of any distributed processing that may be required, and the time cost of communication between multiple machines.
In short, measurement of software progress ultimately is probabilistic, not deterministic.
Having said all this, it is often the case when writing software that not enough time gets put into thinking about how to write basic user interface components such as progress bars. This is a result of many factors, amongst them the inability of management in many organizations to understand that seemingly simple things can take time to do right.
I prefer the Halting Problem to Godel...
All programs will halt, due to Entropy.
In other words, there is no Halting Problem.
Uncertainty about the halting status of programs can only occur if we first postulate the existence of a fantasy world governed by rules that don't correspond to any real world conditions known to science. If we're going to do that, we might as well postulate an impossible (or at least improbable) creator.
Perhaps we should teach mathematicians thermodynamics instead.
US does what they think is right for them
It's not that simple either.
While bashing the US is popular on Slashdot, those with a more balanced perspective understand that real situations almost never come down to a question of USA vs. The Rest of The World.
The organizations that make money from copyright have stockholders and / or owners that are citizens of many different countries. Further, in all likelihood, as is the case with other big corporations, many of the employees of these organizations will come from countries other than the USA.
Wealthy people and organizations from around the world have considerable ability to influence the political and legal side of the US government, as a result both of the incompetence of the US campaign finance laws, and as a result of major ethics problems in the US legal profession.
In other words, because something the government was doing is unconstitutional, the government is new doing something else that is unconstitutional.
I agree that if an employee is divulging trade secrets and they had a contractual obligation not to that is one thing.
The situation with respect to trade secrets is much more complex then you might realize.
The 1st Amendment, which all legal professionals swear oaths to uphold, denys Congress the right to pass laws infringing freedom of speech, which implies Congress can not interfere with the freedom to speak about trade secrets (that, of course, being a form of speech).
The 14th Amendment can reasonably be taken to extend this to state government (necessarily so, as otherwise people could simply move to another state and thereby gain the freedom to speak about trade secrets). As with other fundamental rights, this protection supersedes contract law. As such, contracts regarding these secrets are not enforceable, and can't even be written by legal professionals without a violation of their oaths, unless our legal professionals choose to hold their oaths in contempt.
Further, creating contradictions in the legal system creates artificial demand for the services of legal professionals, as it makes it more difficult for ordinary people to understand the law. Not only is this harmful for the exercise of long term public oversight over government, the law, and businesses, but this situation inherently involves ethical conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals. Artificial demand leads to higher pay and better job security, so long as the market that provides additional numbers of trained legal professionals is not elastic and able to instantaneously match the demand with increased supply (it isn't).
This situation can be thought of as analogous to one where a group of software developers forces a customer to buy and use, at gunpoint, a software system that not only blatantly violates its specifications, but which creates an artificial long term demand for the services of the developers to maintain it.
Having trade secrets protected by law may or may not be a rational policy (there are some good reasons to protect trade secrets, subject to some reasonable limitations), but it certainly isn't a legal one without a new amendment to the Bill of Rights that creates the authority to do this. It necessarily follows that ANY legal professionals -- including judges at ANY level -- making rulings or taking actions to the contrary are in violation of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights.
Until this situation is resolved in a rational way, we will continue to have messes like the one being discussed here. Corporations (in the form of their legal professionals and executives) will attempt to do things that benefit themselves without full and balanced consideration of the consequences for society. Having trade secret protection enforceable by law may be reasonable, but that law must in turn be subject to reasonable limitation (for example, not biased towards employers at the expense of workers) and must be written in a form such that it can readily be understood and accepted by most of the public.
Unfortunately our legal profession is apparently living in a fantasy world where oath-breaking and unethical conduct carries no meaningful penalty, as shown by the existence of both trade secret laws and of trade secret provisions in contracts, each outside the scope of Constitutional authority.
It is not just the 1st Amendment where this problem occurs, of course. Similar issues and considerations arise with respect to the 2nd Amendment, and with many fundamental rights that might reasonably be asserted under the 9th Amendment.
I would like to see a system where commercial publishers could have rights to publish for a very limited time, but in return for getting the opportunity to do this, would have to make articles based upon taxpayer funded research available for free download after that time.
Maintaining the servers holding the free downloads, and paying for the internet access, might be a reasonable task to give to a government funded library, such as the Library of Congress, or perhaps to third parties on a contract basis.
This approach would still support the business of publishing, while allowing the taxpayers access to the material. Easy taxpayer access is important to further the progress of science and the useful arts, to provide long term public oversight over government, and because the taxpayers did, after all, pay for this research.
Note that the current copyright system does NOT provide this kind of model: it has been corrupted through apparently perpetual extension and other problems. For science and mathematics research, the period in which publishers would have control should not exceed five years.
I have seen TOS contracts that (in non-digital format) would be dozens of pages long. Users simply click "Ok" with the assumption that "There's probably nothing bad in there". But this assumption is clearly false in a large number of cases when one considers privacy and security clauses.
Legal professionals, as a class in society, are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system.
In the USA, the inability of the public to understand what should and should not be considered ethical for legal professionals has allowed this conflict of interest to create all sorts of problems within the legal system. It is not a huge stretch to say that "Of the people, by the people, and for the people" has morphed into "Of the lawyer, by the lawyer, and for the lawyer".
In other words, as a results of ethics problems, the US legal system is an unholy mess.
The ongoing attempt legal professionals have been making to infringe fundamental rights (such as privacy rights, the right to long term public oversight over business, the right to not have one's time wasted, and the right to not be subject to excessive law) through long, complex, difficult-to-read, and difficult-to-understand click-to-sign contracts is yet another aspect of this very serious ethics problem.
Contract law is one of the foundations of legal practice, and in many ways is the bread-and-butter of the legal profession. If the legal professionals can make this aspect of the legal system more complex, and applicable to everybody in a wide variety of circumstances, they automatically increase the long term demand for the services of their profession. This creates an ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of contract law.
In other words, the binding nature of current click-to-sign agreements (and shrink-wrap-licenses, which are often equally long, and equally infringing) can reasonably be presumed to be a reflection of unethical legal practice.
And then of course prosecutors have qualified immunity, which means that it is very difficult to make any kind of charges stick against them, no matter how egregious their behavior.
It can be shown that the government does not have the right to extend immunity (or right to pardon) to members of government that violate other people's fundamental rights arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) or the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people).
The argument uses a fundamental technique of logic, dating back at least to Euclid, known as "proof by contradiction".
It works as follows: we assume the government CAN extend such immunity. Therefore, the government can prevent any member of the government from being penalized for ANY action taken to prevent rights being asserted under the 9th Amendment. If there is no penalty for such actions, the assertion of any right that might otherwise be reasonably asserted under the 9th Amendment can be blocked. Therefore, there can be no rights "retained by the people". However, the Bill of Rights explicitly provides for rights retained by the people. We have a contradiction: the original assumption was false, and the government CAN NOT extend immunity to prosecutors who violate other people's fundamental rights.
Further, from an ethics perspective, a legal system in which prosecutors can do absurd or abusive things to other people creates an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals as a class in society, to protect people (at least, to protect those who can afford the services of the legal professional) from abusive prosecution. In short, we have an ethical conflict of interest in the legal system, not just on the part of the legal professionals engaged in prosecution, but on the part of all legal professionals as a class in society.
If we suppose that ethical conduct on the part of members of government and the legal profession is a fundamental right, and that even the appearance of conflict of interest should be avoided, then the conclusion follows: as a matter of ethics, prosecutors do NOT have the right to abuse people by any means or mechanism.
The previous informational post provides a concise summary of what might be called the "conventional viewpoint", which is the say the viewpoint that those legal professionals take who are not particularly concerned with the meaning of their oaths to uphold the law, and can't be bothered with thinking too much about ethics and the implications of the Bill of Rights.
James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to counter the position of the Anti-Federalists. There were two key considerations in doing this: 1. The Constitution had no Bill of Rights, and 2. Any finite Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete and might preclude the people from asserting rights that were left out. The 9th Amendment (in whole) and the 10th Amendment (in part) were written to deal with the second objection, by providing for rights "retained by the people" and "reserved to the people" and thus making the Bill of Rights open-ended.
When legal professionals, including judges and prosecutors, swear oaths to uphold the law, they are swearing oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights, including the open-ended aspects of the 9th and 10th Amendments. This creates an individual and personal responsibility to recognize when a law or practice within the legal system is violating a fundamental right.
Think of this as the equivalent within the US legal system of the Nuremberg Precedent: just as military personnel are expected to recognize that there are situations when the laws of their country are invalid, so to are legal personnel expected to recognize when acting according to the laws, norms, and conventions of the legal system, or acting as directed by their superiors in the legal chain of command, are going to cause them to do something that is morally or ethically wrong, or which violate fundamental human rights appropriate to a free country.
Legal professionals who do not want to accept this are, of course, welcome to practice law in some other country.
Fundamental rights applicable to this case might include a right not to be subject to excessive government or to excessive law (the first is consistent with the notions of individual liberty that were instrumental in founding the USA, both the first and the second are a required foundation to have legal ethics), a right not to have one's time wasted (if kidnapping or murder are wrong, then surely to have government officials steal a portion of a person's life is equally wrong), a right to expect ethical conduct from legal professionals (all kinds of reasons for this), and -- finally -- a right to not have excessive penalties for violations of the law (necessary for many reasons, amongst them -- again -- legal ethics: excessive penalties create an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals).
If we accept these rights, then it follows that the actions of some of the legal professionals in this case were clearly not consistent with the obligations of their oaths.
While a game of chicken might be appropriate for juveniles, it has no place in any ethical legal system. Nor is appropriate to waste someone's time by forcing them to spend large amounts of it dealing with inflated charges, or to force someone to spend money (which also, indirectly, wastes their time) on bail, lawyers, and related legal expenses by having to go all the way to trial to demonstrate the government exaggerated the charges or to reduce the penalty for a set of charges to something reasonable.
Regrettably, the "conventional viewpoint" seems to be held by many legal professionals (but certainly not all), a situation that has been creating and will continue to create many problems in the US legal system, with many costs to the USA as a nation and a society, including destroyed lives.
All tax dollars for software should go only for the development of software for which source is available gratis to all taxpayers, and that secret-source software makers are free to change to fit this requirement any time they'd like to have their software considered for a bid.
Doing something along these lines is essential to have long term public oversight over government.
In fact, you need to go a little bit further, and have a requirement not just for the source to be available, but for it to be well-documented, and build-able to exactly produce the binaries being used. Otherwise you'll get people playing all kinds of games with the system, adhering to the letter of the law while massively violating the intent.
The "well-documented" concept would take some thought to define, but I'd imagine something reasonable and workable could be developed.
We don't necessarily need to make all source code created for any possible purpose open source as soon as it is created, however.
For some applications, such as source code running equipment that could reasonably be expected to be used in a legal case (e.g. security cameras, drug measurement tools, radar guns), the source should always be open. We might even extend this requirement to include firmware and hardware design details in addition to source code.
In some applications that are less time critical, the source might be held closed for ten years or so. A delay of this kind would provide a reasonable opportunity for businesses to have trade secrets for a limited time. Mechanisms could be set up to insure that the source would eventually be produced, including some sort of reward / penalty system.
For that matter, something like this is needed to have long term public oversight over businesses in general, not just those working with the government.