Not just scientific views, I would add, but an interesting take on how a post-scarcity society might function
Didn't seem so "post scarcity" to me: lots of people were fighting wars over resources. And although you could live a pretty decent life on Earth by current standards, access to spacecraft etc. was limited.
The entire Star Trek universe eventually turned into some kind of European style technocracy, albeit unreasonably well governed even as such.
What 'happened' to the native americans was the US!
The US was founded nearly three centuries after Columbus. By that time, the Native American population had already declined by probably at least 95%.
What happened to Native Americans was European colonialism and European imperialism. And the same kind of European brutality and greed that killed the Native Americans is the reason so many Europeans emigrated to the Americas, because European elites didn't just slaughter and oppress people abroad, they also did it to their own populations.
The entire continent of Australia is marginal land; it has about 6% arable land. European nations are around 35%.
Furthermore, I was responding to the notion that the hunter gatherer lifestyle was idyllic; Australian aboriginals had short life expectancies and a rough life.
Finally, the AC seemed to believe that Native Americans were hunter gatherers. In fact, there were many diverse civilizations in the Americas, many of which had towns, cities, and farming, as well as overpopulation and environmental degradation.
If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop.
I'm saying: that's not an option because you can't prevent these tribes from being contacted. All we can do is to minimize the impact of contact. Obviously, as the cited research shows, populations dramatically decline post-contact, and these are all populations in which the government is attempting cultural preservation.
Hence my suggestion that it's better to give up on cultural preservation altogether and focus on keeping these groups alive: vaccination programs, public health education, healthcare, schooling, training, and assimilation into Western society.
Finally, you say:
Corpses everywhere. No living members remain.
That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.
Wait, hold on a second - from that long list of reasons - which one exactly is *worse* than GOING COMPLETELY EXTINCT ? Because I can't find it.
None is worse, actually. All of us come from extinct tribal societies, and we are better off for it. A society "going completely extinct" doesn't mean its members are killed, it means ending injustice and poverty if those are the hallmarks of the society that goes extinct.
Don't you think ending injustice and poverty is a good thing?
Whatever happened to "Native Americans" a couple of centuries ago, the US has gone out of its way to try to help Native American communities for more than half a century. Calling this an ongoing genocide or oppression is just wrong.
At this point, the "Native American" identity really has become a corrupt and racist farce: there simply is no separate group or culture of Native Americans; it's people who pick a particular identity for various personal, political, and economic reasons.
If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop.
You can't "not contact" them. People are pushing into their habitats no matter what. There is simply no option.
Even if we had a choice, it's unclear that not contacting them would be the right thing to do. First, you are depriving them of many of the benefits of modern civilization: immunizations, agriculture, education. Second, they are occupying and using land very inefficiently. Finally, their societies generally violate basic rights of their members; should we really let that go on?
Hunter/Gatherers don't really work all that hard. Their life expectancy is quite longer than 30 years.
Under ideal conditions that is true: a stable habitat with abundant resources and low population densities. But under such conditions, populations grow and people get pushed out into more and more marginal habitats. People didn't adopt farming and civilization for fun, we adopted it because most of us got pushed into poor habitats and had to be clever in order to make a better life for ourselves.
"Art, spiritual development, and other pleasures?" What does that have to do with life in pre-contact societies or tribes? Most of the time in such societies is taken up with working very hard to get enough food not to starve. Medical care is non-existent, and disease widepreas. Violence is rampant in many of those societies. Justice and power are arbitrary There isn't much room for "spiritual development".
Well, I'm sure that refusing to understand the language you're arguing about will be really convincing when you're trying to convince legislators to enact patent reforms
Ah, there's your problem: you're confused about what Slashdot is and who is on it. Slashdot is a site for developers and engineers, and we use language appropriate to our audience and our interests. We're smart enough to use legal and legislative language when in those other forums, and to know the difference. You apparently are not.
To show a patent claim is not new, you have to show that a single piece of prior art shows everything in the patent claim.
It is, of course, easiest to invalidate a patent if each of claim has prior art for each of its components. But that is not necessary. For example, just because nobody has published prior art specifically for a wheel painted in red polka dots doesn't mean that a patent on such a thing would be valid. The red polka dots have nothing to do with the actual technical contribution of the patent.
Sliding buttons have been well-known UI elements for decades, as the Microsoft video shows. There shouldn't be anything patentable about using a UI element in the way it was intended to be used.
The patent system is intended to help engineers and inventors. It is their understanding of "obvious" and "prior art" that is relevant, not the understanding of (imitation) lawyers with a stick up their ass, like you.
Yes, slide-to-unlock has plenty of prior art in every sense of the word, and the arguments people have been making here are relevant: (1) it's a simple simulation of a familiar physical paradigm, and (2) it has been implemented numerous times before Apple patented it.
Furthermore, even in legal discussions, it is legitimate and reasonable to talk about "prior art" and "obviousness", just like in science and engineering, we also use convenient shorthands and aren't 100% precise every time we talk about some concept. If you have trouble following such discussions, the problem is with your understanding.
Not defending their current practice (slide to unlock and pinch zoom clearly have prior art), but it comes from their past experience.
Apple has been patenting stuff for decades, so your contention that they started patenting because they were the victims of patent trolls is just wrong.
Besides, Apple didn't invent the pointing-device-below-keyboard layout anyway, they merely popularized it. If they had invented it and it had been patentable, you can be sure they would have patented it.
Actually, yes, that is how it works: prior art invalidates patents. So does obviousness. And the people most capable of judging the relevance of prior art, as well as obviousness, are actually engineers. So cut the crap and stop pretending that patents are some arcane, magical incantation that normal human beings can't make sense of.
The objective reality is that this process has been observed to happen in the brain. Repeatedly; consensually; experientially.
The objective reality is that intoxication, aneurisms, drug trips, and brain tumors also have been observed in the brain; that doesn't mean they have anything to do with thinking or the mind.
Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot by discontinuing XP because so many devices rely on it. And the market is reacting with a move to Linux. Companies who bet too heavily on Microsoft and Windows XP, i.e., companies run by stupid people, are losing big time. That's the way markets are supposed to work.
If the government intervenes, it will do three things: it will perpetuate a lousy operating system, it would prop up Microsoft's desktop OS position a little longer, and it would prevent companies that made stupid beds on Microsoft's proprietary software from suffering the consequences of their poor choices. I don't see any compelling public interest in any of that.
The paper contains none of the cryptographic analysis necessary to show that this is a secure cryptographic system. It's just another one of these "let's take a chaotic dynamical system and use it for cryptography" papers.
The paper doesn't tell you much about cryptography, but it does illustrate the failures of peer review.
What are you talking about? iPhone users are more likely to be Republican than Democrat.
Read the f*ing link.
There is nothing hypocritical from decrying the economic divide regardless of whether you are benefiting from it.
Of course it's hypocritical to say "making lots money is bad" and "the rich are corrupting the political process" when you yourself are making lots of money and are rich.
And there is no "divide"; the income distribution is smooth with a long tail, and year after year it shifts to the right. Inequality in the US has been increasing, mostly because more people get rich here than elsewhere.
The hypocrisy would be to claim to decry it in general and then to rebel against most all specific policies to correct it.
They aren't proposing policies to "correct it", they are proposing policies to enrich themselves. When they do it without understanding it, they are hypocritical; when they do it deliberately, they are just frauds.
We need to recognize that interesting photographs of people should be seen by default as a collaboration between the photographer and the subject, and ought not to be publishable without the subject's consent.
The law already recognizes that in general: your photo can't be used for commercial purposes or in the news unless there is effectively a compelling public interest, and your photo may not be used to misrepresent you. On the other hand, the law also protects the legitimate interest of the public to get truthful information, so if you are incidental to a picture, or if your picture is of public interest, it can be published even against your objections and even if doing so causes you discomfort or harm.
These are issues that have centuries of legal history; there really isn't much new to be worked out there.
That's nonsense. Photographers cannot do "whatever they choose" with images they have of you. For example, they can't sell them to stock photo agencies, and there are many ways in which they are not allowed to misrepresent you. You don't need a "contractual agreement" for that.
In fact, you don't need a contractual agreement to recover civil damages; if someone causes you harm in some unreasonable way, you can usually recover damages from them in civil court. Before we went on this fascist kick and criminalized everything, that's how many legal issues got resolved.
It's pretty hypocritical to use iOS usage to illustrate "the economic divide", since "economic divide" and "inequality" is the rallying cry of the modern American left. Those wealthy iPhone users are also much more likely to be "liberals".
What that illustrates again is that many so-called "liberals" are using the supposed plight of the less well off as a smokescreen to advance their own agendas.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't seem so "post scarcity" to me: lots of people were fighting wars over resources. And although you could live a pretty decent life on Earth by current standards, access to spacecraft etc. was limited.
The entire Star Trek universe eventually turned into some kind of European style technocracy, albeit unreasonably well governed even as such.
The US was founded nearly three centuries after Columbus. By that time, the Native American population had already declined by probably at least 95%.
What happened to Native Americans was European colonialism and European imperialism. And the same kind of European brutality and greed that killed the Native Americans is the reason so many Europeans emigrated to the Americas, because European elites didn't just slaughter and oppress people abroad, they also did it to their own populations.
And typically, people in civilized countries spend only a few minutes a day on average accumulating food. So I'd say things have actually improved.
The entire continent of Australia is marginal land; it has about 6% arable land. European nations are around 35%.
Furthermore, I was responding to the notion that the hunter gatherer lifestyle was idyllic; Australian aboriginals had short life expectancies and a rough life.
Finally, the AC seemed to believe that Native Americans were hunter gatherers. In fact, there were many diverse civilizations in the Americas, many of which had towns, cities, and farming, as well as overpopulation and environmental degradation.
I was responding to the statement:
I'm saying: that's not an option because you can't prevent these tribes from being contacted. All we can do is to minimize the impact of contact. Obviously, as the cited research shows, populations dramatically decline post-contact, and these are all populations in which the government is attempting cultural preservation.
Hence my suggestion that it's better to give up on cultural preservation altogether and focus on keeping these groups alive: vaccination programs, public health education, healthcare, schooling, training, and assimilation into Western society.
Finally, you say:
That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.
None is worse, actually. All of us come from extinct tribal societies, and we are better off for it. A society "going completely extinct" doesn't mean its members are killed, it means ending injustice and poverty if those are the hallmarks of the society that goes extinct.
Don't you think ending injustice and poverty is a good thing?
Whatever happened to "Native Americans" a couple of centuries ago, the US has gone out of its way to try to help Native American communities for more than half a century. Calling this an ongoing genocide or oppression is just wrong.
At this point, the "Native American" identity really has become a corrupt and racist farce: there simply is no separate group or culture of Native Americans; it's people who pick a particular identity for various personal, political, and economic reasons.
You can't "not contact" them. People are pushing into their habitats no matter what. There is simply no option.
Even if we had a choice, it's unclear that not contacting them would be the right thing to do. First, you are depriving them of many of the benefits of modern civilization: immunizations, agriculture, education. Second, they are occupying and using land very inefficiently. Finally, their societies generally violate basic rights of their members; should we really let that go on?
Under ideal conditions that is true: a stable habitat with abundant resources and low population densities. But under such conditions, populations grow and people get pushed out into more and more marginal habitats. People didn't adopt farming and civilization for fun, we adopted it because most of us got pushed into poor habitats and had to be clever in order to make a better life for ourselves.
"Art, spiritual development, and other pleasures?" What does that have to do with life in pre-contact societies or tribes? Most of the time in such societies is taken up with working very hard to get enough food not to starve. Medical care is non-existent, and disease widepreas. Violence is rampant in many of those societies. Justice and power are arbitrary There isn't much room for "spiritual development".
There is no "instead of". Novelty and obviousness are closely linked.
And a whole bunch of engineers and software developers here are voicing their technically informed opinion that those differences should not matter.
I don't know what you're doing other than restating points that are both obvious and irrelevant.
Ah, there's your problem: you're confused about what Slashdot is and who is on it. Slashdot is a site for developers and engineers, and we use language appropriate to our audience and our interests. We're smart enough to use legal and legislative language when in those other forums, and to know the difference. You apparently are not.
It is, of course, easiest to invalidate a patent if each of claim has prior art for each of its components. But that is not necessary. For example, just because nobody has published prior art specifically for a wheel painted in red polka dots doesn't mean that a patent on such a thing would be valid. The red polka dots have nothing to do with the actual technical contribution of the patent.
Sliding buttons have been well-known UI elements for decades, as the Microsoft video shows. There shouldn't be anything patentable about using a UI element in the way it was intended to be used.
The patent system is intended to help engineers and inventors. It is their understanding of "obvious" and "prior art" that is relevant, not the understanding of (imitation) lawyers with a stick up their ass, like you.
Yes, slide-to-unlock has plenty of prior art in every sense of the word, and the arguments people have been making here are relevant: (1) it's a simple simulation of a familiar physical paradigm, and (2) it has been implemented numerous times before Apple patented it.
Furthermore, even in legal discussions, it is legitimate and reasonable to talk about "prior art" and "obviousness", just like in science and engineering, we also use convenient shorthands and aren't 100% precise every time we talk about some concept. If you have trouble following such discussions, the problem is with your understanding.
Apple has been patenting stuff for decades, so your contention that they started patenting because they were the victims of patent trolls is just wrong.
Besides, Apple didn't invent the pointing-device-below-keyboard layout anyway, they merely popularized it. If they had invented it and it had been patentable, you can be sure they would have patented it.
Actually, yes, that is how it works: prior art invalidates patents. So does obviousness. And the people most capable of judging the relevance of prior art, as well as obviousness, are actually engineers. So cut the crap and stop pretending that patents are some arcane, magical incantation that normal human beings can't make sense of.
The objective reality is that intoxication, aneurisms, drug trips, and brain tumors also have been observed in the brain; that doesn't mean they have anything to do with thinking or the mind.
Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot by discontinuing XP because so many devices rely on it. And the market is reacting with a move to Linux. Companies who bet too heavily on Microsoft and Windows XP, i.e., companies run by stupid people, are losing big time. That's the way markets are supposed to work.
If the government intervenes, it will do three things: it will perpetuate a lousy operating system, it would prop up Microsoft's desktop OS position a little longer, and it would prevent companies that made stupid beds on Microsoft's proprietary software from suffering the consequences of their poor choices. I don't see any compelling public interest in any of that.
The paper contains none of the cryptographic analysis necessary to show that this is a secure cryptographic system. It's just another one of these "let's take a chaotic dynamical system and use it for cryptography" papers.
The paper doesn't tell you much about cryptography, but it does illustrate the failures of peer review.
Not Apple, because they are still busy following that strategy.
Read the f*ing link.
Of course it's hypocritical to say "making lots money is bad" and "the rich are corrupting the political process" when you yourself are making lots of money and are rich.
And there is no "divide"; the income distribution is smooth with a long tail, and year after year it shifts to the right. Inequality in the US has been increasing, mostly because more people get rich here than elsewhere.
They aren't proposing policies to "correct it", they are proposing policies to enrich themselves. When they do it without understanding it, they are hypocritical; when they do it deliberately, they are just frauds.
The law already recognizes that in general: your photo can't be used for commercial purposes or in the news unless there is effectively a compelling public interest, and your photo may not be used to misrepresent you. On the other hand, the law also protects the legitimate interest of the public to get truthful information, so if you are incidental to a picture, or if your picture is of public interest, it can be published even against your objections and even if doing so causes you discomfort or harm.
These are issues that have centuries of legal history; there really isn't much new to be worked out there.
That's nonsense. Photographers cannot do "whatever they choose" with images they have of you. For example, they can't sell them to stock photo agencies, and there are many ways in which they are not allowed to misrepresent you. You don't need a "contractual agreement" for that.
In fact, you don't need a contractual agreement to recover civil damages; if someone causes you harm in some unreasonable way, you can usually recover damages from them in civil court. Before we went on this fascist kick and criminalized everything, that's how many legal issues got resolved.
That principle is already protected through civil suits: revenge porn harms people, so they can recover damages for that harm.
What is gained by criminalizing this conduct?
It's pretty hypocritical to use iOS usage to illustrate "the economic divide", since "economic divide" and "inequality" is the rallying cry of the modern American left. Those wealthy iPhone users are also much more likely to be "liberals".
http://blog.chron.com/techblog...
What that illustrates again is that many so-called "liberals" are using the supposed plight of the less well off as a smokescreen to advance their own agendas.