There really should be a law stating that is a law hasn't been broken or tested in 10 years, it should be removed from the books. In a country of such a high population, I'm sure the laws that matter get broken more often than that.
Isn't asserting that sort of thing what the 9th Amendment is for? As opposed to requiring a law. Rights trump laws.
Of course, there's just one small problem. Excessive laws creates long term demand for the service of legal professionals, so good luck getting this kind of right to be acknowledged. In ethics terms, that is known as "conflict of interest". It runs the US legal system.
But seriously, the problem with the boundary conditions is that you have a choice: set boundary conditions that are too lax and some people will get away with being dirtbags; set boundary conditions that are too loose and some people will get jailed for no good reason; set boundary conditions in the middle, and both of the above will happen.
I respectfully disagree that the problem with boundary conditions is that you have a choice.
The problem with the boundary condition is the attempt to impose the boundary!
In other words, the fact that the government has chosen to set an arbitrary limit is the problem. It's not clear that any legitimate government has the right to do this. Also, even attempting this sort of thing simply leads rational people to even further mistrust or hold in contempt their own government. Further, the creation and enforcement of arbitrary laws can also be considered to involve ethical conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals, never a desirable thing.
A better approach would be to make it illegal for adults to knowingly have sex with children, without the arbitrary age limit. Let the jury decide whether or not "adult" and "child" applies, then, if they decide it does, also require the judge to agree. Unless both parties do so, no violation has occurred. Any such decision would be subject to reasonable appeal if circumstances were such that bias or prejudice could reasonably be inferred.
In other words, the criteria should be, "Would a reasonable person, aware of the circumstances and the knowledge of the parties involved, decide that an adult knowingly had sex with a child?"
A similar approach could be used for other situations where governments chose to impose abitrary conditions in the law.
In the US, probably not, treaties are the supreme law of the land, as indicated in the constitution. A signed treaty is tantamount to a constitutional amendment, and authorizes the legislature to enforce the treaty, but not to "ignore it"
No, the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution because of a general lack of trust of government, and as such supercedes anything written in the Constitution itself. The Bill of Rights is the supreme law of the land. It is not within the legal authority of the government to create any treaty that infringes the Bill of Rights. Any attempt to create a treaty that infringed fundamental rights would neccesarily be a violation of the oaths of office of the parties involved, and would be immediately null and void.
I'd suggest a counter example to be duplicating a piece of art to hang on your own wall instead of buying one of the artist's prints. I'd personally view that as a non-commercial infringement which substantially violates a creator's right to pick their own business model.
Is it unreasonable to suppose that most people wouldn't do this, and that only regulating the commercial (and possibly public non-commercial) copying of artist's works is a legitimate function of government?
There is always going to be a certain amount of entropy in any system, or things that don't work the way you would like them to. All businesses have to deal with a certain amount of inefficiency, or, in other words, lost potential income from various human factors. In businesses dealing with physical goods, for example, things get lost or broken. Equipment dies. It doesn't happen very often, but it's something that can't be avoided either, any more than it can be avoided in one's own home. Beyond a certain point, it doesn't make sense to worry about (or create legislation to prevent) these things.
Another consideration here is that "castle rights", or very strong rights to freedom within the privacy of one's home (i.e. the idea that a person's home is his or her castle), are likely to be viewed by most people as fundamental rights in any free country or as fundamental to a government's legitimacy. As such, there will be strong (and entirely understandable) desire to limit the ability of government to regulate activities within the home to really important stuff, such as violence, and not worrying about minor stuff.
It is not really clear that a "right to pick a business model" should be a fundamental right.
My favourite is the one where American's thing that they saved the U.K. from invasion by Germany. Sorry to disappoint but operation Sea Lion was permanently postponed on the 17th September 1940 months before for the USA entered the war and thanks to Ultra we knew it was postponed
You over-simplify, like many Americans do in reverse.
Ultimately, the Germans were unsuccessful in defeating the RAF during 1940 more as a result of the short range of their fighters than any other single reason. The Allies faced exactly the same problem later in the war, and developed long range fighter technology to solve it. These long range fighters shattered the Luftwaffe and made the D-Day invasion possible.
It's not an unreasonable assumption to suppose the Germans would have eventually been able to develop the same technology, had they not been distracted. Improving their drop tank technology might have been a simple way to start -- that's not an area I know much about, so I can't be specific.
Consider how much technology the German's managed to develop later in the war despite being bombed around the clock...
The same is true for developing effective air-dropped naval torpedoes and armor piercing bombs, especially with the potential for technology transfers from Italy, which was already starting to deploy the superb Sparviero torpedo bomber during the same time as the 1940 "Battle of Britain".
The Germans were distracted by the threat from Russia, primarily by the Russian threat to Germany's single oil supply, see Viktor Suvorov's book on Stalin for details.
It is also worth remembering that Britain, with its many Victorian-era industries, and a long history of poor labor-management relations, had extremely serious problems with producing high technology in the quantities needed for the war (which consumed equipment at prodigious rates). For example, a large percentage of critical components for the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters and other high technology systems came from overseas sources, including the USA. Britain could produce these components, it just couldn't do so in large enough quantities. British military historian Corelli Barnett wrote a book on this, "The Audit of War", that provides more details.
I'm not going to discuss the war at sea, except to note that at one point Britain came within a few weeks of running out of aviation gasoline, and the USA was playing an important role both in fighting the war at sea and in shipping fuel to Britain. In fact, so many tankers were required that the US battleship fleet (reconstituted after Pearl Harbor) was unable to participate in the fight against the Japanese for a long time as there weren't enough tankers left to supply the British, the US Navy battleships, and the US Navy aircraft carriers. The US Navy decided the carriers were more valuable...
Thus, in the short term, Britain was able to defend itself, but over the long term, Britain's survival depended not only on the undeniable courage and skill of her own people (plus the Free French, the Poles, the Canadians, and so forth), but also upon the involvement of other powers, including a massive and critical contribution by the USA. World War 2 was a team effort.
The PTO was part of WWII, but not one Canada was really fighting in... after all, Canada wasn't being threatened in any way by Japan until after Pearl Harbour -- and by that point the US was already in full swing and needed no help
Pearl Harbor was in 1941. 1942 was the darkest year of the war for the Allies. The US was not "in full swing" until mid 1943.
There was a significant campaign in Alaska in 1942-1943, including a major amphibious invasion (Attu) and a major naval battle (Komandorski Islands). I don't know to what extent the Canadians participated in the earlier actions, but there were over 5000 Canadian troops, including some elite units, in the invasion force for Kiska.
It would be fair to say that Canadian help was of less potential use in the PTO, not from lack of ability -- given the superb record of the Canadian troops -- but rather because Australia and New Zealand were already making major commitments in that area, also had superb troops, and were much closer to the majority of the action. Stopping the Japanese in the PTO was a joint effort by many nations.
It is interesting to note that Australian militia units, not regular army, were tasked with slowing down the Japanese in New Zealand, as the regular army troops had been committed to the African desert and Malaysia, and were not immediately available due to the time it would take to get them shipped back to the South West Pacific.
While it is true there have been conflicts (often with the US involved), you should go back and look at Europe between the years 1100 and 1950. It was a situation of many mostly-equal powers, and they were generally at each others throats.
An excellent point.
Another good example is the The Peloponnesian War: the relatively equal strengths of the Athenian and Spartan alliances were what made this war last so long and be so devestating. For that matter, the history of the Greek city-states in general provides many examples of the point you make.
The Chinese had a similiar period, known as the Warring States period. Different scholars use different dates to describe this period, but it was roughly 250 years. So the situation you describe is not by any means unique to Europe.
You CAN'T know what the scope of a patent is without reading the claims, and without parsing every word and every piece of punctuation in the claims in order to determine just what features are being claimed. In some cases, you can't know what patent actually covers without reviewing the prosecution history that led up to the final issued version. Seriously. And you can't have any idea about the relevant issues from simply reading the title of a patent and a one-paragraph summary by a person who thinks that, because he or she is a whiz at C++, that he or she can understand patent claim language (assuming that he or she even read the claims, which is unlikely).
You are completely missing the point here. If, as you describe, someone has to parse the patent document and study it and any associated legal history for weeks or months on end, in order to understand it, then that neccesarily requires a LARGE time commitment.
If large numbers of patents are being issued, even if those patents represent really new ideas (which most of them don't) then we will end up expecting people to spend not just LARGE amounts of time, but HUGE amounts of time studying patents, as every potentially relevant patent must be studied in excruciating detail and we get a multiplication of the time per patent with the total number of patents. This time, of course, is time that can not be spent developing a person's own ideas.
Given the number of patents issued in a typical year, it is becoming more and more likely that doing this properly would leave no time left to do anything else! This is an enormously inefficient use of a person's time, and it is inappropriate for government to expect this from people.
Human time has value, because the human life span is precious, and in fact, far too short for most individuals to get anywhere near their full potential.
That doesn't stop people from wanting to try to do as much with their lives as possible, and that in turn is why so many people on Slashdot and elsewhere are objecting to the current system.
The behavior that you are seeing does not reflect ignorance, rather, it reflects an insight into what is actually happening now, and into a dangerous long term trend, that seems to be eluding you.
Recognition of the value of human time is why human societies (at least those with separation of church and state) treat actions such as kidnapping and murder as crimes -- the persons commiting these crimes are stealing a precious and irreplacable portion of a person's life.
It is not a legitimate role of government to become a contributor to the very abuses it is supposed to prevent, by acting in a manner that requires people to give up large portions of their lives, or face severe legal and financial consequences, when they are just engaging in things that should be considered reasonable conduct.
This is stealing a portion of a person's life, just as the kidnapper or murderer does.
In practice, given what a mess the patent system currently is, we can expect most people doing creative work to simply ignore the whole system, develop their own ideas, and hope that nobody else already patented the very same ideas they came up with on their own! This in turn means that ordinary people have to live in fear of an unreasonable (and in a free country, illegitimate) legal system. The legal system (and those who uphold it) becomes the enemy, instead of being a tool to limit the damage sociopaths can do to others (which is what legal systems should be focusing on). This sort of thing will invariably do tremendous long term harm to society.
Huh. I would have thought the only thing to do in that case is to reject the patent as obvious to someone skilled in the art. But I guess that's just me.
And how would this policy make more money for patent lawyers or provide better job security for the folks making decisions at the patent office than the current one?
My hope is that the Court will do the opposite and make it clear that people have the right to re-sell what they've already paid for.
As an exercise of free speech, I am going to say that right already exists. In fact, it's one of the most fundamental rights that can exist in any free country: the Right To Transfer items that one buys is certainly a form of reasonable conduct (provided the item is transferred in full), and the Right to Reasonable Conduct is indisputably a fundamental human right, arguably THE single most important fundamental right.
As these particular rights are not explicitly stated in the Bill of Rights, they necessarily arise under US law as rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment and "reserved to the people" under the 10th Amendment. James Madison deliberately made the Bill of Rights an open-ended document because he anticipated these kinds of situations would eventually occur.
In other words, businesses do not have a legal right to artificially segment markets. There is no such thing as an "Asian Edition" of a book, in the sense of an edition that can only be sold in Asia. There is no such thing as a "region code", in these sense of a mark on an item that indicates it can only be sold in certain parts of the world.
All legal professionals in the USA are required to swear oaths to uphold the law. The Bill of Rights is the highest law in the land and supersedes all laws below the level of the Bill of Rights. If these oaths of office have any meaning at all, then by bringing this case, the legal professionals representing the publisher violated these oaths. In ruling as they did, the lower courts and the appeals courts violated these oaths. If the Supreme Court justices were to uphold this illegal ruling, then the Supreme Court justices would be in violation of THEIR oaths.
We can assert the equivalent of the Nuremberg precedent in this case, as another right arising under the 9th Amendment. Just as military officers are expected to refuse to obey illegal orders, civil officials and legal professionals are expected to refuse to enforce OR MAKE USE OF illegal laws or precedents, and any law or precedent that infringes fundamental rights is by definition illegal.
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. A legal system that is, or even merely seems to be, complex, confusing, or contradictory, or one that makes people afraid of engaging in reasonable conduct, necessarily creates a long term demand for the services of legal professionals, leading to massively increased job security and income (if the complexity increase fast enough, the supply will never keep up, especially when the legal professionals can artificially limit the supply). As such, the behavior of legal professionals who make the legal system have these attributes does not merely involve a minor, technical, or accidental violation of their oaths, but rather involves EXTREMELY serious unethical conduct. I emphasize EXTREME because this kind of behavior affects everyone else in society.
Such a violation can only carry one penalty: the persons involved are immediately and permanently disqualified from holding any position of public trust or responsibility, or engaging in the practice of law, or receiving any form of pension or other benefit from the United States government. Any member of government who permits an oath-breaker to stay in office becomes an accessory to the original violation.
This penalty for violating fundamental rights also means that legal professionals in the highest office are also in positions of conflict of interest with respect to their oaths. After all, these people have typically made many decisions during their careers before reaching the highest office, and if these earlier decisions were later found to involve violations of an oath to uphold the Bill of Rights, these people would necessarily l
Try Barbara Hambly for some strong female characters. Her best books, IMHO, are:
The Starhawk/Sun Wolf books: The Ladies of Mandrigyn, The Witches of Wenshar, The Dark hand of Magic Dragonsbane The Darwath Trilogy: The Time of the Dark, The Walls of Air, and The Armies of Daylight
Also: The Deed of Paksenarrion, by Elizabeth Moon. Also: The War God's Own, David Weber
With respect to the Deed of Paksenarrion, I'm not sure what you mean by "the woman protagonist is not particularly a woman".
This book was written by Elizabeth Moon, a female writer and former US marine, who presumably knows what it is to be a woman, and how a woman might behave if she ended up being a soldier. What aspects of her characterization do you object to?
This sounds like yet another example of legal professionals creating laws that don't make sense, in order to create future business for their profession.
In other words, ethical conflict of interest is determining the shape and form of our legal system, in place of logic and reason.
Please consider the following from a book by Peter A. Lorge, "Chinese Martial Artists from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century", pp. 13-30:
"One of the first named martial artists in Chinese history is a woman known as Fu Hao... over a hundred inscriptions relate to Lady Hao, with twelve specifically concerned with her military activities... We know that Lady Hao led troops in battle... Martially capable women arose with some regularity throughout Chinese history, though the ethnicity and class of women who did so changed over time."
While records of these ancient periods are spotty and not entirely reliable, there is some evidence to suggest that at least some women were participating actively in warfare or other martial activities at some level or in some manner: your statement that women weren't adventurers or warriors is probably not valid.
None of this is to say that this sort of thing was common, but it may have happened more than your statements suggest.
2) Regardless of what court you brought suit in, it was always going to be a judge who resolved legal questions like, say, whether TSA's procedures were unconstitutional. A jury would only be tasked with factual questions like figuring out, if it were disputed, what TSA's procedures actually were.
Unfortunately, legal policies that would give jury only authority over factual questions exist in violation of the 9th and 10th Amendments (rights retained by the people, rights reserved to the people). James Madison put these words into the Bill of Rights, and in doing so, made it open-ended, precisely because he knew that there would be times when the interests of legal professionals as a class would not align with the interests of the people.
By definition, rights retained by the people are retained by the people. They are not retained by the legal professionals. They are not retained by the government. They may not be stolen by either group, because if either group stole such rights, they would no longer retained.
Legal professionals form a class within society that does not necessarily have interests aligning with the rest of the population. It is not an accident that we live in a "land of the lawsuit" and that laws that take hundreds of pages to write are being passed by legislators. Legal professionals, as a class within society, have a vested interest in having a legal system that is (or even just seems to be) complex, confusing, scary, and even contradictory: this creates long term demand for their profession. This places these people, as a class, in a position of ethical conflict of interest when they are writing, prosecuting or judging laws.
A fundamental human right is the right to not be subject to laws, policies, procedures, rules, orders, or precedents that can reasonably be supposed to involve conflict of interest on the part of members of government. Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest should be avoided whenever possible.
As such, any person (at any level in the legal hierarchy) that has sworn an oath to uphold the Bill of Rights, and who perpetuates policies that try to deny juries the right to decide whether a given law or policy or practice of the government is violating fundamental rights, is necessarily in violation of that oath. It is not within the authority of any legal professional or group of legal professionals to change this.
It is entirely appropriate for the people to be deciding what these rights are, a jury is one place where such decisions can be made, and such decisions, as one way of expressing the rights arising under the 9th and 10th Amendments, will necessarily supersede the authority granted to judges.
The MANY legal professionals who made slavery such an awful mess (allowing especially terrible things such as enslaving children) and who then permitted the horrible "separate but not-actually-equal" nonsense to persist for so many years, clearly demonstrated that this class of persons is not to be trusted as a class. Some individual legal professionals have integrity, and can be trusted, but the concept "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" does not only refer to vigilance over just the government, but also over the legal profession.
However, in regards to [6], sometimes longer code samples are useful. In some situation, having a runnable complete program that one can modify can be a huge timesaver when trying to figure out concepts.
Sometimes having a code sample with a configurable gui is especially useful.
For example, this is helpful in documenting signal processing algorithms or functions used to do signal processing.
Documentation of the algorithm alone, without any form of interface, would be "simpler", in the sense of less lines of code, but not neccesarily as useful to someone trying to understand it.
Some concepts are just difficult to present in isolation.
Or, putting this a different context to illustrate what I'm saying, mathematicians often manage to state ideas in a very compact and simple way, in the sense of having no unneeded steps in their proofs.
This does not at all mean that their writing, while arguably as "simple as possible", is easy to understand without lots of additional explanation.
I really appreciate the lengthy examples in books on writing compilers that take the "learning-by-coding" approach. These are not neccesarily short examples, but they taught me far more than the dense books on theory.
I would modify rule 5 to say that longer code samples are permissible if and only if simple code samples are FIRST provided to demonstrate the basic idea.
I would also add: 7. Have pictures when (and only when) they aid in communication.
Not all people think the same way or approach problems from the same perspective. A picture can often help a lot in improving documentation.
On the other hand, putting lots of useless pictures in documentation -- perhaps because they are required by some arbitrary standard an organization has decided to adopt -- just make it less likely anyone will read the documentation.
8. Always include a key and units when appropriate (this may be part of what you intended by [6]).
When was the last time you looked up a patent rather than reinventing the wheel?
Certainly with software I am reinventing wheels on a daily basis, but it is easier and quicker for me to do this than find an appropriate patent and adapt it to my situation.
I have never looked up a patent to solve a problem in many years of writing software.
This may because 100% of the patents I have read through -- while participating in discussions of patent validity, the only time I read patents -- I ended up deciding were obvious ideas and therefore invalid.
The other negative conclusion that I came to from this exercise is that it's a huge waste of my time to look at patents: the amount of filler material I would have to read through to get to the core idea of the patent (if any, and however lame it might be) is huge.
If we assert a fundamental human right exists to not have one's time wasted by government, bureaucracy, or legal professionals (which we could readily do in the USA under the 9th Amendment -- rights retained by the people -- or under the 10th Amendment -- rights reserved to the people) then I must necessarily conclude the patent system in its current form exists in violation of that right.
Presumably this ugly and undesirable situation exists because of ethical conflicts of interest within government, and/or on the part of legal professionals as a class in society. A law that doesn't make much sense, or which creates situations where ordinary people need to be protected from their own legal system, necessarily creates an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals.
The whole point of having a strong software education is to allow people to be able to solve their own problems. An idea would have to be truly extraordinary to not be something that I could readily come up with on my own, and I haven't yet seen any patents that met that criteria. So far good patents have the same existence status as unicorns!
I believe the idea of black holes largely developed as a result of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. In particular, the Schwarzschild solution to the equations Einstein proposed described a stationary black hole, and the Kerr solution described a rotating black hole. Several others contributed. The math associated with the General Theory of Relativity is fairly dense IMHO, with things like tensor calculus that are rarely addressed until graduate level classes.
We only get simple math if we apply Newton's Gravity to the concepts predicted by Einstein's Gravity.
That's not a bad approximation for many circumstances, of course.
There's a further complication in that quantum mechanics and theories of gravity are not well integrated. If the black hole really could be a point or anything really small, then it would seem that quantum mechanics would be applicable, but nobody knows exactly how that would work.
Attempts to integrate these two theories are incomplete at best, and tend to involve high level math.
Nothing in physics (or any science) depends upon mysticism.
I agree completely: noise made by dogs barking (and sometimes noise made by other animals) is a huge problem that our society does not competently deal with, and is often worse than other noise sources.
This really needs to be handled in terms of fundamental rights being violated, not just nuisance laws, and technology for measuring the noise for evidence purposes is well within our current capabilities and needs to be readily available. This sort of technology would also help with the original poster's noise problems: we don't have to have people driving around with stereos blaring.
Unfortunately, most dog owners do not fully understand that owning a dog carries with it responsibility. In addition to the noise problem, I often see dogs not on leashes assaulting people in parks where I live, even though the signs clearly require leashes. I am using assault in the technical legal sense: moving into a human's personal space or making unwanted physical contact with them. In most jurisdictions this is considered indistinguishable from the owner committing the assault, but the dog owners don't seem to care, and the dog owners rarely even apologize.
One of the strengths proponents of HOAs claim is an ability to deal with noise issues. Perhaps things are different where you are. Unfortunately, HOAs also interfere with a number of fundamental rights, effectively create an extra level of government, involve excessive bureaucracy, and generally force people to harm the environment as a result of the lawn regulations. A green, well-trimmed lawn carries an environmental cost in terms of gasoline wasted, noise pollution from the mower, chemical pollution from the fertilizer, often wasted water, and so forth, but that's another thing people don't seem to care about.
A person's home should be his or her castle, provided he or she doesn't make noise or have pets that make noise audible by others, and HOAs routinely interfere with this right.
Another big problem is living in an apartment with dogs upstairs: they can run around for hours on end, and if the sound insulation between floors is poor -- it usually is -- you'll hear rumbling sounds for hours at a time.
I lost my hearing in one ear as a result of a childhood illness. So I grew up appreciating the hearing I have left (and understand how vulnerable it is) a lot more than most people. I wasn't playing loud music as a teen, or ever, so I've never done anything noise-related that needs forgiveness. Other things, sure, but not this.
The professor of the course I took on human sensory systems mentioned a study that showed that people in industrial societies have measurable hearing loss compared to people from more primitive societies, even by their teen-age years, and it only gets worse as people age. This hearing loss is due to the kinds of noise that the original poster was complaining about. I can't provide a reference, it's been too long: if someone else is familiar with this study, please respond.
This is a big problem, because it means anybody likely to be reading slashdot already HAS some hearing loss, and those of us who have suffered a mishap are especially vulnerable to further hearing loss.
The really nasty thing about hearing loss is that we don't realize it's happening and it never heals. Perhaps some day we will be able to use cloning to replace damaged tissue, but that is likely to be at least 50 years off, could be several centuries off, and would doubtless require surgery.
My take on the loud noise sometimes generated by various human activities works like this: in a free country, a person is free to wave their fist around until they start trying to put it into someone else's face. Similarly, a person is free to make as much noise as they want until other people have to hear it or until it crosses into other people's space.
This really needs to be viewed as a fundamental right in any free country. In the USA, as it doesn't appear explictly in the Bill of Rights, it is appropriate to consider this to be the sort of thing James Madison intended to protect by means of the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people), and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). It's a right that often doesn't get protected by our government or by our legal professionals, perhaps because the damage occurs over a long time scale and we aren't good as a society at thinking past the next election. Educating people on this issue is also something that seems to be neglected.
People that are generating avoidable loud or annoying noise, especially noise that can be heard in other people's homes, are probably best viewed as sociopaths -- a sociopath being a person that does not consider other people to be real -- who are violating other people's fundamental rights and causing permanent, irreversible harm to them in the process. In many ways, this sort of thing is worse than if the perpetrators simply walked up to random strangers in the street and punched them in the face -- that damage would at least heal.
Sometimes generating noise is unavoidable but most of the time it can be avoided or reduced.
A sound level meter is an inexpensive means for restaurants, clubs, or bands to monitor the sound level the produce or permit: many people in our society are too deaf to have good judgment when it comes to measuring sound levels.
It is unfortunately quite common for nightclubs (and sometimes restaurants) to permit sound levels vastly in excess of the limits where hearing damage is likely, in my experience (based upon the frequent use of my sound level meter).
This is a very serious problem, not just for the customer or the person passing by on the street, but also for the owners, managers, band members, DJ's, etc..., all of whom are likely to be considered in violation of state laws regarding assault/battery and/or federal laws concerning generation of noise in a workplace where hearing protection is not being used. The fact that these laws are rarely enforced today is no guarantee that they won't be someday.
Given the current technology we have in portable electronics, encryption, and GPS systems, there really isn't any reason why devices couldn't be designed
"Hitler made the traditional mistake of not listening to his generals/admirals, the Battle of Britain could have been won, the strategy was just taking effect around the time Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to cease operations."
I'm not sure this is true, for about 500 dead RAF pilots, Germany saw around 2500 dead Luftwaffe pilots and 1000 captured. How could that ever be sustainable a 7:1 loss in airmen for the Luftwaffe vs. the RAF? Their aircraft loss was about 1800 vs. 1500, and many of their lost aircraft were vastly slower and more expensive to produce bombers vs. the RAF's cheap, light, fast to produce fighters. It's not like the UK was at breaking point unlike say, Malta was where the Nazis could probably have broken Malta with just a little bit more effort as it really was right on the edge.
You are definitely right in the general trend of your thinking: the Battle of Britain could not have been won with "just a little more effort" as the previous poster implies, however, there is more to the story than you may be aware.
See Stephen Bungay's book "The Most Dangerous Enemy" for a thorough and modern discussion of the Battle of Britain. He notes that the German kill ratio in fighter combat was better, but the British were inflicting heavy losses in German bombers: many of the casualties you are counting are losses to bomber crews.
The key limitation in the German air attack was the limited range of their fighters, just as the key limitation in the later Allied air attack on Germany would prove to be.
It seems likely that the Germans would have had to give up the air attack on Britain for a time, even ignoring the Soviet threat (see my other post below), given the heavy losses they were taking, but one can reasonably suppose that eventually they would have developed long range fighter technology. This technology (when paired with good doctrine for employing fighters) permitted the Allies to shatter the German fighter force in 1944 and it is likely that the same thing would have happened to the British had the situation been reversed.
Given the Soviet threat, none of this would have really mattered: the Germans had to deal with the immanent threat from Stalin so they didn't have the time needed.
Fortunately.
There's also this view too, that even if the Luftwaffe had won in the air it probably still wouldn't have been enough:
I'm a big Navy Buff, and I know the British navy executed some really superb operations during the war. But the title of this article is superficial and misleading. The navy posed a serious threat to any water-borne crossing, that is true. The British navy would not have been able to do anything about the excellent German paratrooper forces and the massive airlift capacity the German air force had: stopping that sort of assault required the British army and air force. It is worth recalling that much of the success of the German army in France was due to their ability to use their air force as "mobile artillery": they didn't need to get tanks to England to be able to fight.
It is far from clear to what extent the navy would have been effective had the Germans won air superiority with a significant portion of their air force surviving.
Consider, for example, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off Singapore by Japanese air power.
Admittedly, the Japanese were far better prepared than the Germans for attacking warships from the air, but I suspect the Germans would have proved quick learners had the situation arisen. Also, they may have been able to adapt weapons and techniques from the Italians, who did have a superb torpedo bomber.
Also consider the very heavy losses the British navy took while under attack from German and Italian air units during the
No, Hitler's big mistake was invading the Soviet Union. Western Europe was a sideshow compared to the Eastern front.
Older works on WW2 tend to view things in this way, i.e. that a German big mistake was invading the Soviet Union. However, more modern works that have come out since the end of the cold war, such as Viktor Suvorov's (e.g. "Chief Culprit: Stalin's Grand Design to Start World War II") make a compelling case that Stalin was not only intending to invade Germany, but he was probably only a few weeks away from doing it when the German's attacked first. There is some reason to believe that Hitler realized this was about to happen (particularly given the known presence of a large number of Soviet troops right across the border from his ONLY oil supply) and recognized the need to strike first.
If we accept this scenario, then the only likely reason the Battle of Britain played out as it did was a desire to try to nuetralize the ability of the British to provide future aid to the Soviets via the ocean.
In all likelihood, had the Soviets not presented a compelling threat, the Germans would have eventually defeated the British. It would have taken a considerable period of time, however, it can reasonably be supposed that the Germans would have eventually developed the same types of long range fighter technology that allowed the allies to shatter the fighter component of the German Air Force in 1944, and that would probably have spelled the end of Britain (despite its generally superb navy).
The real mistake was not the decision to invade Russia: the real mistake was in the manner which the invasion was conducted. Had the Germans gone in as liberators instead on conquerers, they would have beaten Stalin. Fortunately for the rest of us, the Nazis were too stupid, and too blinded by ideology, to see or be able to implement the smart option. Thinking this way is not something that sociopaths would be good at, and that's what the Nazi leadership undeniably was.
A further mistake was declaring war on the United States, which resulted in staggering quantities of material being shipped to Russia (something else that has only been fully appreciated since the Iron Curtain came down and there was no longer any reason to lie about it), and not just via the Arctic route.
For that matter, had Hitler been smart enough to go hands-off on military decisions, the Germans probably would have won or at least gotten a draw on the Eastern front, in spite of all the Allied aid.
Real history tends to be quite a bit more complex then most people believe, which makes drawing lessons from it challenging (but still a very important and worthwhile thing to attempt).
Only a fool would suppose that China could not perform creditably in military operations in Asia, should they so desire. They are every bit as smart and capable as anyone else, and it is not neccesary to have the best toys for a competent military force to be effective.
Or, in other words, we should be referring to current DRM systems as AFMs, or "Anti-Fair-Use-Mechanisms", as preventing reasonable or fair copies of digital media is exactly what these systems are intended to achieve.
Slashdot Mirror
There really should be a law stating that is a law hasn't been broken or tested in 10 years, it should be removed from the books. In a country of such a high population, I'm sure the laws that matter get broken more often than that.
Isn't asserting that sort of thing what the 9th Amendment is for? As opposed to requiring a law. Rights trump laws.
Of course, there's just one small problem. Excessive laws creates long term demand for the service of legal professionals, so good luck getting this kind of right to be acknowledged. In ethics terms, that is known as "conflict of interest". It runs the US legal system.
But seriously, the problem with the boundary conditions is that you have a choice: set boundary conditions that are too lax and some people will get away with being dirtbags; set boundary conditions that are too loose and some people will get jailed for no good reason; set boundary conditions in the middle, and both of the above will happen.
I respectfully disagree that the problem with boundary conditions is that you have a choice.
The problem with the boundary condition is the attempt to impose the boundary!
In other words, the fact that the government has chosen to set an arbitrary limit is the problem. It's not clear that any legitimate government has the right to do this. Also, even attempting this sort of thing simply leads rational people to even further mistrust or hold in contempt their own government. Further, the creation and enforcement of arbitrary laws can also be considered to involve ethical conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals, never a desirable thing.
A better approach would be to make it illegal for adults to knowingly have sex with children, without the arbitrary age limit. Let the jury decide whether or not "adult" and "child" applies, then, if they decide it does, also require the judge to agree. Unless both parties do so, no violation has occurred. Any such decision would be subject to reasonable appeal if circumstances were such that bias or prejudice could reasonably be inferred.
In other words, the criteria should be, "Would a reasonable person, aware of the circumstances and the knowledge of the parties involved, decide that an adult knowingly had sex with a child?"
A similar approach could be used for other situations where governments chose to impose abitrary conditions in the law.
In the US, probably not, treaties are the supreme law of the land, as indicated in the constitution. A signed treaty is tantamount to a constitutional amendment, and authorizes the legislature to enforce the treaty, but not to "ignore it"
No, the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution because of a general lack of trust of government, and as such supercedes anything written in the Constitution itself. The Bill of Rights is the supreme law of the land. It is not within the legal authority of the government to create any treaty that infringes the Bill of Rights. Any attempt to create a treaty that infringed fundamental rights would neccesarily be a violation of the oaths of office of the parties involved, and would be immediately null and void.
I'd suggest a counter example to be duplicating a piece of art to hang on your own wall instead of buying one of the artist's prints. I'd personally view that as a non-commercial infringement which substantially violates a creator's right to pick their own business model.
Is it unreasonable to suppose that most people wouldn't do this, and that only regulating the commercial (and possibly public non-commercial) copying of artist's works is a legitimate function of government?
There is always going to be a certain amount of entropy in any system, or things that don't work the way you would like them to. All businesses have to deal with a certain amount of inefficiency, or, in other words, lost potential income from various human factors. In businesses dealing with physical goods, for example, things get lost or broken. Equipment dies. It doesn't happen very often, but it's something that can't be avoided either, any more than it can be avoided in one's own home. Beyond a certain point, it doesn't make sense to worry about (or create legislation to prevent) these things.
Another consideration here is that "castle rights", or very strong rights to freedom within the privacy of one's home (i.e. the idea that a person's home is his or her castle), are likely to be viewed by most people as fundamental rights in any free country or as fundamental to a government's legitimacy. As such, there will be strong (and entirely understandable) desire to limit the ability of government to regulate activities within the home to really important stuff, such as violence, and not worrying about minor stuff.
It is not really clear that a "right to pick a business model" should be a fundamental right.
My favourite is the one where American's thing that they saved the U.K. from invasion by Germany. Sorry to disappoint but operation Sea Lion was permanently postponed on the 17th September 1940 months before for the USA entered the war and thanks to Ultra we knew it was postponed
You over-simplify, like many Americans do in reverse.
Ultimately, the Germans were unsuccessful in defeating the RAF during 1940 more as a result of the short range of their fighters than any other single reason. The Allies faced exactly the same problem later in the war, and developed long range fighter technology to solve it. These long range fighters shattered the Luftwaffe and made the D-Day invasion possible.
It's not an unreasonable assumption to suppose the Germans would have eventually been able to develop the same technology, had they not been distracted. Improving their drop tank technology might have been a simple way to start -- that's not an area I know much about, so I can't be specific.
Consider how much technology the German's managed to develop later in the war despite being bombed around the clock ...
The same is true for developing effective air-dropped naval torpedoes and armor piercing bombs, especially with the potential for technology transfers from Italy, which was already starting to deploy the superb Sparviero torpedo bomber during the same time as the 1940 "Battle of Britain".
The Germans were distracted by the threat from Russia, primarily by the Russian threat to Germany's single oil supply, see Viktor Suvorov's book on Stalin for details.
It is also worth remembering that Britain, with its many Victorian-era industries, and a long history of poor labor-management relations, had extremely serious problems with producing high technology in the quantities needed for the war (which consumed equipment at prodigious rates). For example, a large percentage of critical components for the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters and other high technology systems came from overseas sources, including the USA. Britain could produce these components, it just couldn't do so in large enough quantities. British military historian Corelli Barnett wrote a book on this, "The Audit of War", that provides more details.
I'm not going to discuss the war at sea, except to note that at one point Britain came within a few weeks of running out of aviation gasoline, and the USA was playing an important role both in fighting the war at sea and in shipping fuel to Britain. In fact, so many tankers were required that the US battleship fleet (reconstituted after Pearl Harbor) was unable to participate in the fight against the Japanese for a long time as there weren't enough tankers left to supply the British, the US Navy battleships, and the US Navy aircraft carriers. The US Navy decided the carriers were more valuable ...
Thus, in the short term, Britain was able to defend itself, but over the long term, Britain's survival depended not only on the undeniable courage and skill of her own people (plus the Free French, the Poles, the Canadians, and so forth), but also upon the involvement of other powers, including a massive and critical contribution by the USA. World War 2 was a team effort.
The PTO was part of WWII, but not one Canada was really fighting in... after all, Canada wasn't being threatened in any way by Japan until after Pearl Harbour -- and by that point the US was already in full swing and needed no help
Pearl Harbor was in 1941. 1942 was the darkest year of the war for the Allies. The US was not "in full swing" until mid 1943.
There was a significant campaign in Alaska in 1942-1943, including a major amphibious invasion (Attu) and a major naval battle (Komandorski Islands). I don't know to what extent the Canadians participated in the earlier actions, but there were over 5000 Canadian troops, including some elite units, in the invasion force for Kiska.
It would be fair to say that Canadian help was of less potential use in the PTO, not from lack of ability -- given the superb record of the Canadian troops -- but rather because Australia and New Zealand were already making major commitments in that area, also had superb troops, and were much closer to the majority of the action. Stopping the Japanese in the PTO was a joint effort by many nations.
It is interesting to note that Australian militia units, not regular army, were tasked with slowing down the Japanese in New Zealand, as the regular army troops had been committed to the African desert and Malaysia, and were not immediately available due to the time it would take to get them shipped back to the South West Pacific.
While it is true there have been conflicts (often with the US involved), you should go back and look at Europe between the years 1100 and 1950. It was a situation of many mostly-equal powers, and they were generally at each others throats.
An excellent point.
Another good example is the The Peloponnesian War: the relatively equal strengths of the Athenian and Spartan alliances were what made this war last so long and be so devestating. For that matter, the history of the Greek city-states in general provides many examples of the point you make.
The Chinese had a similiar period, known as the Warring States period. Different scholars use different dates to describe this period, but it was roughly 250 years. So the situation you describe is not by any means unique to Europe.
You CAN'T know what the scope of a patent is without reading the claims, and without parsing every word and every piece of punctuation in the claims in order to determine just what features are being claimed. In some cases, you can't know what patent actually covers without reviewing the prosecution history that led up to the final issued version. Seriously. And you can't have any idea about the relevant issues from simply reading the title of a patent and a one-paragraph summary by a person who thinks that, because he or she is a whiz at C++, that he or she can understand patent claim language (assuming that he or she even read the claims, which is unlikely).
You are completely missing the point here. If, as you describe, someone has to parse the patent document and study it and any associated legal history for weeks or months on end, in order to understand it, then that neccesarily requires a LARGE time commitment.
If large numbers of patents are being issued, even if those patents represent really new ideas (which most of them don't) then we will end up expecting people to spend not just LARGE amounts of time, but HUGE amounts of time studying patents, as every potentially relevant patent must be studied in excruciating detail and we get a multiplication of the time per patent with the total number of patents. This time, of course, is time that can not be spent developing a person's own ideas.
Given the number of patents issued in a typical year, it is becoming more and more likely that doing this properly would leave no time left to do anything else! This is an enormously inefficient use of a person's time, and it is inappropriate for government to expect this from people.
Human time has value, because the human life span is precious, and in fact, far too short for most individuals to get anywhere near their full potential.
That doesn't stop people from wanting to try to do as much with their lives as possible, and that in turn is why so many people on Slashdot and elsewhere are objecting to the current system.
The behavior that you are seeing does not reflect ignorance, rather, it reflects an insight into what is actually happening now, and into a dangerous long term trend, that seems to be eluding you.
Recognition of the value of human time is why human societies (at least those with separation of church and state) treat actions such as kidnapping and murder as crimes -- the persons commiting these crimes are stealing a precious and irreplacable portion of a person's life.
It is not a legitimate role of government to become a contributor to the very abuses it is supposed to prevent, by acting in a manner that requires people to give up large portions of their lives, or face severe legal and financial consequences, when they are just engaging in things that should be considered reasonable conduct.
This is stealing a portion of a person's life, just as the kidnapper or murderer does.
In practice, given what a mess the patent system currently is, we can expect most people doing creative work to simply ignore the whole system, develop their own ideas, and hope that nobody else already patented the very same ideas they came up with on their own! This in turn means that ordinary people have to live in fear of an unreasonable (and in a free country, illegitimate) legal system. The legal system (and those who uphold it) becomes the enemy, instead of being a tool to limit the damage sociopaths can do to others (which is what legal systems should be focusing on). This sort of thing will invariably do tremendous long term harm to society.
Huh. I would have thought the only thing to do in that case is to reject the patent as obvious to someone skilled in the art. But I guess that's just me.
And how would this policy make more money for patent lawyers or provide better job security for the folks making decisions at the patent office than the current one?
My hope is that the Court will do the opposite and make it clear that people have the right to re-sell what they've already paid for.
As an exercise of free speech, I am going to say that right already exists. In fact, it's one of the most fundamental rights that can exist in any free country: the Right To Transfer items that one buys is certainly a form of reasonable conduct (provided the item is transferred in full), and the Right to Reasonable Conduct is indisputably a fundamental human right, arguably THE single most important fundamental right.
As these particular rights are not explicitly stated in the Bill of Rights, they necessarily arise under US law as rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment and "reserved to the people" under the 10th Amendment. James Madison deliberately made the Bill of Rights an open-ended document because he anticipated these kinds of situations would eventually occur.
In other words, businesses do not have a legal right to artificially segment markets. There is no such thing as an "Asian Edition" of a book, in the sense of an edition that can only be sold in Asia. There is no such thing as a "region code", in these sense of a mark on an item that indicates it can only be sold in certain parts of the world.
All legal professionals in the USA are required to swear oaths to uphold the law. The Bill of Rights is the highest law in the land and supersedes all laws below the level of the Bill of Rights. If these oaths of office have any meaning at all, then by bringing this case, the legal professionals representing the publisher violated these oaths. In ruling as they did, the lower courts and the appeals courts violated these oaths. If the Supreme Court justices were to uphold this illegal ruling, then the Supreme Court justices would be in violation of THEIR oaths.
We can assert the equivalent of the Nuremberg precedent in this case, as another right arising under the 9th Amendment. Just as military officers are expected to refuse to obey illegal orders, civil officials and legal professionals are expected to refuse to enforce OR MAKE USE OF illegal laws or precedents, and any law or precedent that infringes fundamental rights is by definition illegal.
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. A legal system that is, or even merely seems to be, complex, confusing, or contradictory, or one that makes people afraid of engaging in reasonable conduct, necessarily creates a long term demand for the services of legal professionals, leading to massively increased job security and income (if the complexity increase fast enough, the supply will never keep up, especially when the legal professionals can artificially limit the supply). As such, the behavior of legal professionals who make the legal system have these attributes does not merely involve a minor, technical, or accidental violation of their oaths, but rather involves EXTREMELY serious unethical conduct. I emphasize EXTREME because this kind of behavior affects everyone else in society.
Such a violation can only carry one penalty: the persons involved are immediately and permanently disqualified from holding any position of public trust or responsibility, or engaging in the practice of law, or receiving any form of pension or other benefit from the United States government. Any member of government who permits an oath-breaker to stay in office becomes an accessory to the original violation.
This penalty for violating fundamental rights also means that legal professionals in the highest office are also in positions of conflict of interest with respect to their oaths. After all, these people have typically made many decisions during their careers before reaching the highest office, and if these earlier decisions were later found to involve violations of an oath to uphold the Bill of Rights, these people would necessarily l
Try Barbara Hambly for some strong female characters. Her best books, IMHO, are:
The Starhawk/Sun Wolf books: The Ladies of Mandrigyn, The Witches of Wenshar, The Dark hand of Magic
Dragonsbane
The Darwath Trilogy: The Time of the Dark, The Walls of Air, and The Armies of Daylight
Also: The Deed of Paksenarrion, by Elizabeth Moon.
Also: The War God's Own, David Weber
With respect to the Deed of Paksenarrion, I'm not sure what you mean by "the woman protagonist is not particularly a woman".
This book was written by Elizabeth Moon, a female writer and former US marine, who presumably knows what it is to be a woman, and how a woman might behave if she ended up being a soldier. What aspects of her characterization do you object to?
This sounds like yet another example of legal professionals creating laws that don't make sense, in order to create future business for their profession.
In other words, ethical conflict of interest is determining the shape and form of our legal system, in place of logic and reason.
Please consider the following from a book by Peter A. Lorge, "Chinese Martial Artists from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century", pp. 13-30:
"One of the first named martial artists in Chinese history is a woman known as Fu Hao... over a hundred inscriptions relate to Lady Hao, with twelve specifically concerned with her military activities... We know that Lady Hao led troops in battle... Martially capable women arose with some regularity throughout Chinese history, though the ethnicity and class of women who did so changed over time."
While records of these ancient periods are spotty and not entirely reliable, there is some evidence to suggest that at least some women were participating actively in warfare or other martial activities at some level or in some manner: your statement that women weren't adventurers or warriors is probably not valid.
None of this is to say that this sort of thing was common, but it may have happened more than your statements suggest.
This sound like abuse of the legal system and fairly serious unethical legal conduct.
This sounds like a major ethics issue. How do we solve this?
2) Regardless of what court you brought suit in, it was always going to be a judge who resolved legal questions like, say, whether TSA's procedures were unconstitutional. A jury would only be tasked with factual questions like figuring out, if it were disputed, what TSA's procedures actually were.
Unfortunately, legal policies that would give jury only authority over factual questions exist in violation of the 9th and 10th Amendments (rights retained by the people, rights reserved to the people). James Madison put these words into the Bill of Rights, and in doing so, made it open-ended, precisely because he knew that there would be times when the interests of legal professionals as a class would not align with the interests of the people.
By definition, rights retained by the people are retained by the people. They are not retained by the legal professionals. They are not retained by the government. They may not be stolen by either group, because if either group stole such rights, they would no longer retained.
Legal professionals form a class within society that does not necessarily have interests aligning with the rest of the population. It is not an accident that we live in a "land of the lawsuit" and that laws that take hundreds of pages to write are being passed by legislators. Legal professionals, as a class within society, have a vested interest in having a legal system that is (or even just seems to be) complex, confusing, scary, and even contradictory: this creates long term demand for their profession. This places these people, as a class, in a position of ethical conflict of interest when they are writing, prosecuting or judging laws.
A fundamental human right is the right to not be subject to laws, policies, procedures, rules, orders, or precedents that can reasonably be supposed to involve conflict of interest on the part of members of government. Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest should be avoided whenever possible.
As such, any person (at any level in the legal hierarchy) that has sworn an oath to uphold the Bill of Rights, and who perpetuates policies that try to deny juries the right to decide whether a given law or policy or practice of the government is violating fundamental rights, is necessarily in violation of that oath. It is not within the authority of any legal professional or group of legal professionals to change this.
It is entirely appropriate for the people to be deciding what these rights are, a jury is one place where such decisions can be made, and such decisions, as one way of expressing the rights arising under the 9th and 10th Amendments, will necessarily supersede the authority granted to judges.
The MANY legal professionals who made slavery such an awful mess (allowing especially terrible things such as enslaving children) and who then permitted the horrible "separate but not-actually-equal" nonsense to persist for so many years, clearly demonstrated that this class of persons is not to be trusted as a class. Some individual legal professionals have integrity, and can be trusted, but the concept "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" does not only refer to vigilance over just the government, but also over the legal profession.
I like this list a lot!
However, in regards to [6], sometimes longer code samples are useful. In some situation, having a runnable complete program that one can modify can be a huge timesaver when trying to figure out concepts.
Sometimes having a code sample with a configurable gui is especially useful.
For example, this is helpful in documenting signal processing algorithms or functions used to do signal processing.
Documentation of the algorithm alone, without any form of interface, would be "simpler", in the sense of less lines of code, but not neccesarily as useful to someone trying to understand it.
Some concepts are just difficult to present in isolation.
Or, putting this a different context to illustrate what I'm saying, mathematicians often manage to state ideas in a very compact and simple way, in the sense of having no unneeded steps in their proofs.
This does not at all mean that their writing, while arguably as "simple as possible", is easy to understand without lots of additional explanation.
I really appreciate the lengthy examples in books on writing compilers that take the "learning-by-coding" approach. These are not neccesarily short examples, but they taught me far more than the dense books on theory.
I would modify rule 5 to say that longer code samples are permissible if and only if simple code samples are FIRST provided to demonstrate the basic idea.
I would also add:
7. Have pictures when (and only when) they aid in communication.
Not all people think the same way or approach problems from the same perspective. A picture can often help a lot in improving documentation.
On the other hand, putting lots of useless pictures in documentation -- perhaps because they are required by some arbitrary standard an organization has decided to adopt -- just make it less likely anyone will read the documentation.
8. Always include a key and units when appropriate (this may be part of what you intended by [6]).
When was the last time you looked up a patent rather than reinventing the wheel?
Certainly with software I am reinventing wheels on a daily basis, but it is easier and quicker for me to do this than find an appropriate patent and adapt it to my situation.
I have never looked up a patent to solve a problem in many years of writing software.
This may because 100% of the patents I have read through -- while participating in discussions of patent validity, the only time I read patents -- I ended up deciding were obvious ideas and therefore invalid.
The other negative conclusion that I came to from this exercise is that it's a huge waste of my time to look at patents: the amount of filler material I would have to read through to get to the core idea of the patent (if any, and however lame it might be) is huge.
If we assert a fundamental human right exists to not have one's time wasted by government, bureaucracy, or legal professionals (which we could readily do in the USA under the 9th Amendment -- rights retained by the people -- or under the 10th Amendment -- rights reserved to the people) then I must necessarily conclude the patent system in its current form exists in violation of that right.
Presumably this ugly and undesirable situation exists because of ethical conflicts of interest within government, and/or on the part of legal professionals as a class in society. A law that doesn't make much sense, or which creates situations where ordinary people need to be protected from their own legal system, necessarily creates an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals.
The whole point of having a strong software education is to allow people to be able to solve their own problems. An idea would have to be truly extraordinary to not be something that I could readily come up with on my own, and I haven't yet seen any patents that met that criteria. So far good patents have the same existence status as unicorns!
I believe the idea of black holes largely developed as a result of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. In particular, the Schwarzschild solution to the equations Einstein proposed described a stationary black hole, and the Kerr solution described a rotating black hole. Several others contributed. The math associated with the General Theory of Relativity is fairly dense IMHO, with things like tensor calculus that are rarely addressed until graduate level classes.
We only get simple math if we apply Newton's Gravity to the concepts predicted by Einstein's Gravity.
That's not a bad approximation for many circumstances, of course.
There's a further complication in that quantum mechanics and theories of gravity are not well integrated. If the black hole really could be a point or anything really small, then it would seem that quantum mechanics would be applicable, but nobody knows exactly how that would work.
Attempts to integrate these two theories are incomplete at best, and tend to involve high level math.
Nothing in physics (or any science) depends upon mysticism.
I agree completely: noise made by dogs barking (and sometimes noise made by other animals) is a huge problem that our society does not competently deal with, and is often worse than other noise sources.
This really needs to be handled in terms of fundamental rights being violated, not just nuisance laws, and technology for measuring the noise for evidence purposes is well within our current capabilities and needs to be readily available. This sort of technology would also help with the original poster's noise problems: we don't have to have people driving around with stereos blaring.
Unfortunately, most dog owners do not fully understand that owning a dog carries with it responsibility. In addition to the noise problem, I often see dogs not on leashes assaulting people in parks where I live, even though the signs clearly require leashes. I am using assault in the technical legal sense: moving into a human's personal space or making unwanted physical contact with them. In most jurisdictions this is considered indistinguishable from the owner committing the assault, but the dog owners don't seem to care, and the dog owners rarely even apologize.
One of the strengths proponents of HOAs claim is an ability to deal with noise issues. Perhaps things are different where you are. Unfortunately, HOAs also interfere with a number of fundamental rights, effectively create an extra level of government, involve excessive bureaucracy, and generally force people to harm the environment as a result of the lawn regulations. A green, well-trimmed lawn carries an environmental cost in terms of gasoline wasted, noise pollution from the mower, chemical pollution from the fertilizer, often wasted water, and so forth, but that's another thing people don't seem to care about.
A person's home should be his or her castle, provided he or she doesn't make noise or have pets that make noise audible by others, and HOAs routinely interfere with this right.
Another big problem is living in an apartment with dogs upstairs: they can run around for hours on end, and if the sound insulation between floors is poor -- it usually is -- you'll hear rumbling sounds for hours at a time.
I lost my hearing in one ear as a result of a childhood illness. So I grew up appreciating the hearing I have left (and understand how vulnerable it is) a lot more than most people. I wasn't playing loud music as a teen, or ever, so I've never done anything noise-related that needs forgiveness. Other things, sure, but not this.
The professor of the course I took on human sensory systems mentioned a study that showed that people in industrial societies have measurable hearing loss compared to people from more primitive societies, even by their teen-age years, and it only gets worse as people age. This hearing loss is due to the kinds of noise that the original poster was complaining about. I can't provide a reference, it's been too long: if someone else is familiar with this study, please respond.
This is a big problem, because it means anybody likely to be reading slashdot already HAS some hearing loss, and those of us who have suffered a mishap are especially vulnerable to further hearing loss.
The really nasty thing about hearing loss is that we don't realize it's happening and it never heals. Perhaps some day we will be able to use cloning to replace damaged tissue, but that is likely to be at least 50 years off, could be several centuries off, and would doubtless require surgery.
My take on the loud noise sometimes generated by various human activities works like this: in a free country, a person is free to wave their fist around until they start trying to put it into someone else's face. Similarly, a person is free to make as much noise as they want until other people have to hear it or until it crosses into other people's space.
This really needs to be viewed as a fundamental right in any free country. In the USA, as it doesn't appear explictly in the Bill of Rights, it is appropriate to consider this to be the sort of thing James Madison intended to protect by means of the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people), and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). It's a right that often doesn't get protected by our government or by our legal professionals, perhaps because the damage occurs over a long time scale and we aren't good as a society at thinking past the next election. Educating people on this issue is also something that seems to be neglected.
People that are generating avoidable loud or annoying noise, especially noise that can be heard in other people's homes, are probably best viewed as sociopaths -- a sociopath being a person that does not consider other people to be real -- who are violating other people's fundamental rights and causing permanent, irreversible harm to them in the process. In many ways, this sort of thing is worse than if the perpetrators simply walked up to random strangers in the street and punched them in the face -- that damage would at least heal.
Sometimes generating noise is unavoidable but most of the time it can be avoided or reduced.
A sound level meter is an inexpensive means for restaurants, clubs, or bands to monitor the sound level the produce or permit: many people in our society are too deaf to have good judgment when it comes to measuring sound levels.
It is unfortunately quite common for nightclubs (and sometimes restaurants) to permit sound levels vastly in excess of the limits where hearing damage is likely, in my experience (based upon the frequent use of my sound level meter).
This is a very serious problem, not just for the customer or the person passing by on the street, but also for the owners, managers, band members, DJ's, etc..., all of whom are likely to be considered in violation of state laws regarding assault/battery and/or federal laws concerning generation of noise in a workplace where hearing protection is not being used. The fact that these laws are rarely enforced today is no guarantee that they won't be someday.
Given the current technology we have in portable electronics, encryption, and GPS systems, there really isn't any reason why devices couldn't be designed
"Hitler made the traditional mistake of not listening to his generals/admirals, the Battle of Britain could have been won, the strategy was just taking effect around the time Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to cease operations."
I'm not sure this is true, for about 500 dead RAF pilots, Germany saw around 2500 dead Luftwaffe pilots and 1000 captured. How could that ever be sustainable a 7:1 loss in airmen for the Luftwaffe vs. the RAF? Their aircraft loss was about 1800 vs. 1500, and many of their lost aircraft were vastly slower and more expensive to produce bombers vs. the RAF's cheap, light, fast to produce fighters. It's not like the UK was at breaking point unlike say, Malta was where the Nazis could probably have broken Malta with just a little bit more effort as it really was right on the edge.
You are definitely right in the general trend of your thinking: the Battle of Britain could not have been won with "just a little more effort" as the previous poster implies, however, there is more to the story than you may be aware.
See Stephen Bungay's book "The Most Dangerous Enemy" for a thorough and modern discussion of the Battle of Britain. He notes that the German kill ratio in fighter combat was better, but the British were inflicting heavy losses in German bombers: many of the casualties you are counting are losses to bomber crews.
The key limitation in the German air attack was the limited range of their fighters, just as the key limitation in the later Allied air attack on Germany would prove to be.
It seems likely that the Germans would have had to give up the air attack on Britain for a time, even ignoring the Soviet threat (see my other post below), given the heavy losses they were taking, but one can reasonably suppose that eventually they would have developed long range fighter technology. This technology (when paired with good doctrine for employing fighters) permitted the Allies to shatter the German fighter force in 1944 and it is likely that the same thing would have happened to the British had the situation been reversed.
Given the Soviet threat, none of this would have really mattered: the Germans had to deal with the immanent threat from Stalin so they didn't have the time needed.
Fortunately.
There's also this view too, that even if the Luftwaffe had won in the air it probably still wouldn't have been enough:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1527068/Battle-of-Britain-was-won-at-sea.-Discuss.html
I'm a big Navy Buff, and I know the British navy executed some really superb operations during the war. But the title of this article is superficial and misleading. The navy posed a serious threat to any water-borne crossing, that is true. The British navy would not have been able to do anything about the excellent German paratrooper forces and the massive airlift capacity the German air force had: stopping that sort of assault required the British army and air force. It is worth recalling that much of the success of the German army in France was due to their ability to use their air force as "mobile artillery": they didn't need to get tanks to England to be able to fight.
It is far from clear to what extent the navy would have been effective had the Germans won air superiority with a significant portion of their air force surviving.
Consider, for example, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off Singapore by Japanese air power.
Admittedly, the Japanese were far better prepared than the Germans for attacking warships from the air, but I suspect the Germans would have proved quick learners had the situation arisen. Also, they may have been able to adapt weapons and techniques from the Italians, who did have a superb torpedo bomber.
Also consider the very heavy losses the British navy took while under attack from German and Italian air units during the
No, Hitler's big mistake was invading the Soviet Union. Western Europe was a sideshow compared to the Eastern front.
Older works on WW2 tend to view things in this way, i.e. that a German big mistake was invading the Soviet Union. However, more modern works that have come out since the end of the cold war, such as Viktor Suvorov's (e.g. "Chief Culprit: Stalin's Grand Design to Start World War II") make a compelling case that Stalin was not only intending to invade Germany, but he was probably only a few weeks away from doing it when the German's attacked first. There is some reason to believe that Hitler realized this was about to happen (particularly given the known presence of a large number of Soviet troops right across the border from his ONLY oil supply) and recognized the need to strike first.
If we accept this scenario, then the only likely reason the Battle of Britain played out as it did was a desire to try to nuetralize the ability of the British to provide future aid to the Soviets via the ocean.
In all likelihood, had the Soviets not presented a compelling threat, the Germans would have eventually defeated the British. It would have taken a considerable period of time, however, it can reasonably be supposed that the Germans would have eventually developed the same types of long range fighter technology that allowed the allies to shatter the fighter component of the German Air Force in 1944, and that would probably have spelled the end of Britain (despite its generally superb navy).
The real mistake was not the decision to invade Russia: the real mistake was in the manner which the invasion was conducted. Had the Germans gone in as liberators instead on conquerers, they would have beaten Stalin. Fortunately for the rest of us, the Nazis were too stupid, and too blinded by ideology, to see or be able to implement the smart option. Thinking this way is not something that sociopaths would be good at, and that's what the Nazi leadership undeniably was.
A further mistake was declaring war on the United States, which resulted in staggering quantities of material being shipped to Russia (something else that has only been fully appreciated since the Iron Curtain came down and there was no longer any reason to lie about it), and not just via the Arctic route.
For that matter, had Hitler been smart enough to go hands-off on military decisions, the Germans probably would have won or at least gotten a draw on the Eastern front, in spite of all the Allied aid.
Real history tends to be quite a bit more complex then most people believe, which makes drawing lessons from it challenging (but still a very important and worthwhile thing to attempt).
Only a fool would suppose that China could not perform creditably in military operations in Asia, should they so desire. They are every bit as smart and capable as anyone else, and it is not neccesary to have the best toys for a competent military force to be effective.
Or, in other words, we should be referring to current DRM systems as AFMs, or "Anti-Fair-Use-Mechanisms", as preventing reasonable or fair copies of digital media is exactly what these systems are intended to achieve.