"this [theage.com.au] is something to get upset about"
Nonsense, you are merely repeating what your news headlines told you was important.
Publicity for terroist actions is counterproductive for a start. Both sides are behaving disgracefully from the perspective of people living in politicaly stable societys - they have to make an agreement to find ways of settling their differences by negociation, encouraging either side to use violence to solve the problem will lead to continued violence. Focusing on one sides atrocities is merely propoganda for the other side.
In addition it is deffinitely within the scope of this discussion forum to consider how the interaction between Internet usage and political decision making is working.
It seems that net access is not as restricted as one might have thought and that closing some public access points because of a fire although disagreeable is also pragmatic rather than unfair.
I agree, maybe it would be more useful to ask if the fire regulations are being applied as effectively in Chinese industry which is increasingly being used to make the things that we buy in the west.
The time to run in my experience is when you get that huge pay rise - it usually means that they think you might run. The only reason they think you might run is because they know your name is on the list for the next downsize - and they need you for just a bit longer.
Never accept a counter offer, unless it gives you the chance to aim even higher than the move you had planned.
I am a Brit living and working in Sweden currently. We pay huge taxes in Sweden and the trains I have to say are excellent in comparison to the UK.
I dont think that the place could be described as left wing though. America won the cold war remember - nobody believes in left wing politics anymore. We all eat McDonalds and buy Nike shoes - as I see the Russians are doing in the advertising on the Russian cable tv channel.
Actualy today it is the most sucessfull businesses which have control of your freedom. The government of a state looks pretty much the same wherever you are - some spend a bit more of your money to make sure that the trains that run dont kill you at random intervals (Sweden 1 UK 0) But every one suscribes to free market capitalism - even the Chinese.
Utopia is an ideal which can never be achieved - but as something which is aspired to, it can easily be described by those things that we do not want rather than by those that we do want.
Inefficient centralised economic systems are something we do not want - but I suggest that the new wave of ultra sucessful capitalism that the USA has spawned is also something that we do not want. I do not want my shoes made by slave labour in free trade zones and I do not want the national food of the world to be the Big Mac (much though I like eating them) Most of all I do not want half of my country to be unemployed and drawing government money because their jobs got exported to employment/environmental law/tax free zones in the third world.
I suppose you describe these unemployed fellow citizens as scroungers who are stealing your tax dollars.
Government is the old enemy, and largely irrelevant. Wake up to the new enemy - shareholder value - because its going to eat you for breakfast then flush you down the can. It will be a long time before an individual business gets big enough to worry about killing the host with its parasitic activity - at least the government has to balance the effects of its actions in case the population gets so pissed off it kicks them out. With business there are no limits or obligations except the bottom line.
Of course the government should be aware of this and should be passing legislation to moderate the behaviour of business. However government doesnt have the power to do this anymore - in fact people like you have encouraged this.
Looks like you have put yourself in a no win situation to me. Take a closer look at the world - its changing and your ideas come from yesterday.
I cant wait for your occupation to firstly get contracted out to an agency then contracted overseas. I guess I'm going to have to wait until that happens before you recognise that free enterprise should be controlled. And if you have your own business - watch out for the brand franchises who will be coming to eat your business at a loss until they have driven you out of the market.
Agreed, any habit becomes boring if worn sufficiently long. Life becomes significantly more interesting if the hem line is forever sweeping up and down.
Good luck with the mind control project though. I've never found a way of programming my feelings myself by willing them. I find It usually takes a combination of trying out new things and randomly repeating some of the ones that were fun before.
All hail Eris. And in the case of this debate I seem to have struck Erisian gold - by unjustly criticising a person because what they said automatically put them in a box in my mind - and that box was completely off the mark. Terribly pink behavior.
I do apologise. This has reminded me to concentrate on the subject matter at hand and not to use sarcasm (the lowest form of wit) to support my own rhetoric.
On the subject of chemical experimentation I have to admit that I've played and am no longer playing. I dont miss the potential for winding up living in a fog and would regret it if anyone ended up in a fog they couldnt escape from because of something I said.
On the other hand I do detest the alcoholic hangovers that we all seem to accept as the perfectly acceptable penalty for having a good social night out. Ive had excellent fun playing with the civil war re-enactment society "the sealed knot" back in the uk and my oh my can they drink..:-)
All things in moderation I guess is my own boring conclusion.
Oh dear me, we are getting a bit boring dont you think?
So I have to avoid any chemicals that muck with my brain like alcohol - just in case it rots my personality?
What about avoiding being a parent - that sure as hell mucks with your brain and changes who you are.
Same thing with almost any significant life experience.
Not everybody wants to live a life of danger of course and shooting smack with dirty needles is statistically likely to shorten your life by a considerable margin. But take heart from the fact that experience is generally regarded as great training for a personality.
Enjoy your life, live it to the max and dont be such a wimp:-)
Re:more important things to do in space ...
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 1
But by the end of the decade there will be as many transistors in your wearable pc as there are nurons in the human brain. It seems fairly likely that robotic exploration devices will at this point out evolve the usefullness of human presence in space exploration.
Of course our consumer driven society will also have evolved by this point. We will demand that the robotic explorers are accompanied by human spiritural advisors and artists with oil paint and canvas.
"No Shit! is that the way its going to be?"
- "Er, no. there aint even going to be any robotic explorers. We can simulate them in VR space and sell just as much through the advertising - so why bother with the expense of going anywhere at all."
Mind you wouldnt it be cool if the first robot as smart as a person on mars was running open source software... wonder if Linus will mind adding in this 4 1/2 terabyte Artificial Intelligence Module to the Kernel. Anybody got some spare time over the next ten years?
Rich - Poor Free Market - Regulated Market Black - White greyscale?
We are dealing with a very complicated situation when looking at the choices available for the direction of a future world economy. It is by no means clear that what has worked in the past will necessarily work in the future. For example there is an implicit assumption by many people that the most rapid progress elicited by greed unleashed in the free market is the best thing. This may have served us well in the last century but it has also brought us to the point where we might be empowered to make a choice about the kind of world we live in.
So under the umbrella logo of the Globalisation - Anti Globalisation debate we can see smart people - even highly sucessfull people like George Soros start to ask questions. Do we want to go on the way we are or can we improve the way we do things.
Raising political issues from the last century probably only confuses the issue, times have changed. For example the cold war is over, the capitalism verses communism argument is over. There are no communists left - only a few facist states which maintain control of their populations by massive state intervention.
The debate has moved on - it is now about a connected world where world trade in goods is complemented by a world trade in culture and methods and ways of doing things. The USA is currently the most powerfull and influential nation on earth and this places a responsibility on Americans. Your decisions will largely dictate how the rest of the world will behave in future.
As some posters have pointed out there may be some kinds of wealth which you may not have noticed too much before. Some kinds of wealth which the unbridled competition of the free market may take away from you largely because you havent had a chance to recognise what that wealth is yet. We take it for granted for example that businesses have a responsibility not to kill their employees by giving them unsafe conditions to work in. To enforce this we have dull tedious and expensive safety regulations. The same goes for pollution and workers contracts - we had to control behaviour in these fields outside of the market.
The question put metaphorically - is how much 'safety' should we expect our global corporations to give those workers in economys which are less developed than ours. Under the logic of free trade we should expect rapid economic development for those economies which have no safety rules at all and the continuation of rapid 'progress'. There are decisions to be made about the environment too, should we let the developing economies pollute? Should we allow them to have slave labour? The principle of free trade has nothing to say on these things. But we now know that serious bad things could happen to us if economic activity screws the climate, our neighbours behaviour is suddenly our concern also.
We are more than economic units. We are Human. Humanity has done some pretty gross things but thats not what we tell our children first. We tell them about all the good stuff people do. We tell them about artists, heros who did things that benefited other people. We tell them that we are altruistic and generaly look for the greatest good for the greatest number from our actions.
So the next time some corporation tells you that you are just an economic unit by selling you something from an unregulated market - consider the question of whether you are just an economic unit or whether you are human. Its not easy being human - it means you have to take responsibility for understanding the world and the way your actions affect it. This is the real challenge for the century - how to keep our kick ass technological fun, medicine etc and stay human in the process.
Globalisation just means that the corporations we created are now affecting people somewhere else in an unprecedented way. And their actions are affecting us also. We need to talk to those people and cut a deal with them. Soros thinks the politicians should be doing this on our behalf. Globalisation is neither good or bad, it just is - and we have to understand and act on its affects.
Unrestricted access for IS and controlled access for everybody else? This presupposes that only IS have the ability to use the internet for adding value for the shareholders with reasonable retraint exercised for personal use.
This reminds me of the question of who should be policing the policemen, at least in the case of the police, society can have a reasonable expectation that a law has been legislated which is accepted should also apply to the police. In the case of the internet it is not yet clear exactly how much interaction is providing hidden value to the shareholder by motivating informing and improving the quality of the workforce. Since lifelong learning is supposed to be part of work now I doubt that preventing access to the internet is going to turn out to be a survival trait.
It would seem to me that IS might spend the time more productively in leveraging the skills of the rest of the workforce by providing bookmarks to information that people could learn from. Provided with a buffet of preselected stuff that helped people survive the working day might divert mindshare away from less productive use of the internet.
But I suppose we would all like things to go back to the old days when only the fully qualified acolytes of the machine were actualy allowed to touch the computers.
Remember also that any industry goes through a life cycle. To start with it is run by highly valued artisans who can command high saleries because they have been part of the birth and have learned all the secrets. 20 years later its a Ford factory, automated up to the eyeballs. IS will go the same way, by the end of the decade the average pc will have the same number of logical elements as the human brain, someone will have written a program that takes advantage of that and after the money's gone out of the current multimedia boom its going to go into the people replacement boom.
Your jobs next - suggest you start learning off the internet how to do realy artistic basket weaving if you want to eat in ten years time.
Framework sums it up nicely. With wireless home networking comming along we need a protocol to enable all these devices to work together. The thin client never got very far because we do not want everything piled into one vendors box. I agree we want to be able to choose the best of breed components and bolt on anything new that turns up.
802.11 and Bluetooth support in Linux should be the first step, what we need is for appliances to come with not just the remote control to operate them but the ability to stream or read the information they handle to your "Borg unit" which will be an application that can do the remote control salutes and then switch the data between your personal network storage device and whatever sources and outputs you happen to own.
When there are no more wires we will have moved the information into a channel that is open to control by software. We need to start dreaming about how that software should work.
Wrong, patenting business methods will lead to stagnation and ill treatment of you the customer.
Competition in business is assured by globalisation, the market will kill you if you are not evolving. Companies do not "research" new business practises in the way that you imagine. We often use benchmarking and best practise. Methods develop in one market and are devolved to others. Fashions and philosophies come and go. Consultants and purveyors of Enterprise Resource Planning software redesign companies with Business Process Re Engineering methodology every day.
The bottom line is that you have to reinvent yourself over and over again if you want to succeed. No single method can win for long, even the tough monopolistic methods of Microsoft and Intel won't keep them in power forever, a hard lesson that IBM learned.
Patenting of methods would actually lead to stagnation of the marketplace and the extension of monopolistic power. After all the biggest companies can afford to buy the best technology and would buy the smaller companies with successful business methods and their patents in order to use them to strengthen their position and crush the smaller opposition in the marketplace. In this way they would be assured of keeping market share forever by suing anyone who tried to get into their markets.
IMHO business methodology patents are only of interest to very big business as a method of stifling the opposition and will lead to stagnation and unhealthy monopoly. Currently with the free flow of ideas the small businesses can change faster than the large and are in fact at an advantage because of this.
If you view a market place as a kind of democracy with the customer as voter then you should view the patenting of business methods as the police force of a one party state. It also incidentally would provide another method of keeping the third world from participating higher up the food chain.
On the other hand here in Britain and probably out there in the third world we dont want to go down that path of granting the power of monopoly to big business as you are doing in the USA by making business methods patentable.
So dont come complaining when our new small enterprising businesses rip the guts out of your stagnant economy. Remember for example, as affluence grows - one day people may lose their taste for branded products like Coke and MacDonalds. The impossible may be entirely possible. Stay awake at the back there.
A worrying drift towards intolerance is detectable in recent British Politics. The current government although arguably the rightfull inheritors of liberal progressive thought have consistantly persecuted small minorities for policical reasons. For example the use of guns for target practise has almost been extinguished for the reason that a few high media profile events in the press have made it easier for the administration to ban their possesion rather than to improve the administration of their ownership. In effect the government avoids bad press by opressing minorities rather than catering for their lifestyles.
There is a strong case to be made that any minority interest is under extreme threat of being criminalised should any individuals within that minority commit acts that become big negative media stories. In this context it is becoming more necessary to hide ones membership of a minority interest group and seek anonimity.
I am not aware that I am in a particular minority myself, except that I post to/. and hold the views I express here...
This is one very good reason why I advocate a reduction in the ammount of information that the government is legaly allowed to hold by default about people. The fears that people express about the misuse of DNA data by insurance companies reflects the same wrongheaded thinking that appears to be evanescant in policical thought as is appearing in commercial activities. (I thought we used insurance to pool our risk, not as a way of creating a genetic underclass). So for those of you here advocating the holding of genetic data by commercial interests as being safer than by the government, remember that it is generally the government that regulates commercial interests.
The use of data about individuals to manipulate and control them is as much a practical reason for fighting for the right to withold personal information from companies and governments as is any general moral imperative.
Slashdot Mirror
"this [theage.com.au] is something to get upset about"
Nonsense, you are merely repeating what your news headlines told you was important.
Publicity for terroist actions is counterproductive for a start. Both sides are behaving disgracefully from the perspective of people living in politicaly stable societys - they have to make an agreement to find ways of settling their differences by negociation, encouraging either side to use violence to solve the problem will lead to continued violence. Focusing on one sides atrocities is merely propoganda for the other side.
In addition it is deffinitely within the scope of this discussion forum to consider how the interaction between Internet usage and political decision making is working.
It seems that net access is not as restricted as one might have thought and that closing some public access points because of a fire although disagreeable is also pragmatic rather than unfair.
I agree, maybe it would be more useful to ask if the fire regulations are being applied as effectively in Chinese industry which is increasingly being used to make the things that we buy in the west.
The time to run in my experience is when you get that huge pay rise - it usually means that they think you might run. The only reason they think you might run is because they know your name is on the list for the next downsize - and they need you for just a bit longer.
Never accept a counter offer, unless it gives you the chance to aim even higher than the move you had planned.
I am a Brit living and working in Sweden currently. We pay huge taxes in Sweden and the trains I have to say are excellent in comparison to the UK.
I dont think that the place could be described as left wing though. America won the cold war remember - nobody believes in left wing politics anymore. We all eat McDonalds and buy Nike shoes - as I see the Russians are doing in the advertising on the Russian cable tv channel.
Actualy today it is the most sucessfull businesses which have control of your freedom. The government of a state looks pretty much the same wherever you are - some spend a bit more of your money to make sure that the trains that run dont kill you at random intervals (Sweden 1 UK 0) But every one suscribes to free market capitalism - even the Chinese.
Utopia is an ideal which can never be achieved - but as something which is aspired to, it can easily be described by those things that we do not want rather than by those that we do want.
Inefficient centralised economic systems are something we do not want - but I suggest that the new wave of ultra sucessful capitalism that the USA has spawned is also something that we do not want. I do not want my shoes made by slave labour in free trade zones and I do not want the national food of the world to be the Big Mac (much though I like eating them) Most of all I do not want half of my country to be unemployed and drawing government money because their jobs got exported to employment/environmental law/tax free zones in the third world.
I suppose you describe these unemployed fellow citizens as scroungers who are stealing your tax dollars.
Government is the old enemy, and largely irrelevant. Wake up to the new enemy - shareholder value - because its going to eat you for breakfast then flush you down the can. It will be a long time before an individual business gets big enough to worry about killing the host with its parasitic activity - at least the government has to balance the effects of its actions in case the population gets so pissed off it kicks them out. With business there are no limits or obligations except the bottom line.
Of course the government should be aware of this and should be passing legislation to moderate the behaviour of business. However government doesnt have the power to do this anymore - in fact people like you have encouraged this.
Looks like you have put yourself in a no win situation to me. Take a closer look at the world - its changing and your ideas come from yesterday.
I cant wait for your occupation to firstly get contracted out to an agency then contracted overseas. I guess I'm going to have to wait until that happens before you recognise that free enterprise should be controlled. And if you have your own business - watch out for the brand franchises who will be coming to eat your business at a loss until they have driven you out of the market.
Welcome to Utopia
Agreed, any habit becomes boring if worn sufficiently long. Life becomes significantly more interesting if the hem line is forever sweeping up and down.
Good luck with the mind control project though. I've never found a way of programming my feelings myself by willing them. I find It usually takes a combination of trying out new things and randomly repeating some of the ones that were fun before.
All hail Eris.
:-)
And in the case of this debate I seem to have struck Erisian gold - by unjustly criticising a person because what they said automatically put them in a box in my mind - and that box was completely off the mark. Terribly pink behavior.
I do apologise. This has reminded me to concentrate on the subject matter at hand and not to use sarcasm (the lowest form of wit) to support my own rhetoric.
On the subject of chemical experimentation I have to admit that I've played and am no longer playing. I dont miss the potential for winding up living in a fog and would regret it if anyone ended up in a fog they couldnt escape from because of something I said.
On the other hand I do detest the alcoholic hangovers that we all seem to accept as the perfectly acceptable penalty for having a good social night out. Ive had excellent fun playing with the civil war re-enactment society "the sealed knot" back in the uk and my oh my can they drink..
All things in moderation I guess is my own boring conclusion.
Oh dear me, we are getting a bit boring dont you think?
:-)
So I have to avoid any chemicals that muck with my brain like alcohol - just in case it rots my personality?
What about avoiding being a parent - that sure as hell mucks with your brain and changes who you are.
Same thing with almost any significant life experience.
Not everybody wants to live a life of danger of course and shooting smack with dirty needles is statistically likely to shorten your life by a considerable margin. But take heart from the fact that experience is generally regarded as great training for a personality.
Enjoy your life, live it to the max and dont be such a wimp
But by the end of the decade there will be as many transistors in your wearable pc as there are nurons in the human brain. It seems fairly likely that robotic exploration devices will at this point out evolve the usefullness of human presence in space exploration.
Of course our consumer driven society will also have evolved by this point. We will demand that the robotic explorers are accompanied by human spiritural advisors and artists with oil paint and canvas.
"No Shit! is that the way its going to be?"
- "Er, no. there aint even going to be any robotic explorers. We can simulate them in VR space and sell just as much through the advertising - so why bother with the expense of going anywhere at all."
Mind you wouldnt it be cool if the first robot as smart as a person on mars was running open source software... wonder if Linus will mind adding in this 4 1/2 terabyte Artificial Intelligence Module to the Kernel. Anybody got some spare time over the next ten years?
Rich - Poor
Free Market - Regulated Market
Black - White
greyscale?
We are dealing with a very complicated situation when looking at the choices available for the direction of a future world economy. It is by no means clear that what has worked in the past will necessarily work in the future. For example there is an implicit assumption by many people that the most rapid progress elicited by greed unleashed in the free market is the best thing. This may have served us well in the last century but it has also brought us to the point where we might be empowered to make a choice about the kind of world we live in.
So under the umbrella logo of the Globalisation - Anti Globalisation debate we can see smart people - even highly sucessfull people like George Soros start to ask questions. Do we want to go on the way we are or can we improve the way we do things.
Raising political issues from the last century probably only confuses the issue, times have changed. For example the cold war is over, the capitalism verses communism argument is over. There are no communists left - only a few facist states which maintain control of their populations by massive state intervention.
The debate has moved on - it is now about a connected world where world trade in goods is complemented by a world trade in culture and methods and ways of doing things. The USA is currently the most powerfull and influential nation on earth and this places a responsibility on Americans. Your decisions will largely dictate how the rest of the world will behave in future.
As some posters have pointed out there may be some kinds of wealth which you may not have noticed too much before. Some kinds of wealth which the unbridled competition of the free market may take away from you largely because you havent had a chance to recognise what that wealth is yet. We take it for granted for example that businesses have a responsibility not to kill their employees by giving them unsafe conditions to work in. To enforce this we have dull tedious and expensive safety regulations. The same goes for pollution and workers contracts - we had to control behaviour in these fields outside of the market.
The question put metaphorically - is how much 'safety' should we expect our global corporations to give those workers in economys which are less developed than ours. Under the logic of free trade we should expect rapid economic development for those economies which have no safety rules at all and the continuation of rapid 'progress'. There are decisions to be made about the environment too, should we let the developing economies pollute? Should we allow them to have slave labour? The principle of free trade has nothing to say on these things. But we now know that serious bad things could happen to us if economic activity screws the climate, our neighbours behaviour is suddenly our concern also.
We are more than economic units. We are Human. Humanity has done some pretty gross things but thats not what we tell our children first. We tell them about all the good stuff people do. We tell them about artists, heros who did things that benefited other people. We tell them that we are altruistic and generaly look for the greatest good for the greatest number from our actions.
So the next time some corporation tells you that you are just an economic unit by selling you something from an unregulated market - consider the question of whether you are just an economic unit or whether you are human. Its not easy being human - it means you have to take responsibility for understanding the world and the way your actions affect it. This is the real challenge for the century - how to keep our kick ass technological fun, medicine etc and stay human in the process.
Globalisation just means that the corporations we created are now affecting people somewhere else in an unprecedented way. And their actions are affecting us also. We need to talk to those people and cut a deal with them. Soros thinks the politicians should be doing this on our behalf. Globalisation is neither good or bad, it just is - and we have to understand and act on its affects.
Unrestricted access for IS and controlled access for everybody else? This presupposes that only IS have the ability to use the internet for adding value for the shareholders with reasonable retraint exercised for personal use.
This reminds me of the question of who should be policing the policemen, at least in the case of the police, society can have a reasonable expectation that a law has been legislated which is accepted should also apply to the police. In the case of the internet it is not yet clear exactly how much interaction is providing hidden value to the shareholder by motivating informing and improving the quality of the workforce. Since lifelong learning is supposed to be part of work now I doubt that preventing access to the internet is going to turn out to be a survival trait.
It would seem to me that IS might spend the time more productively in leveraging the skills of the rest of the workforce by providing bookmarks to information that people could learn from. Provided with a buffet of preselected stuff that helped people survive the working day might divert mindshare away from less productive use of the internet.
But I suppose we would all like things to go back to the old days when only the fully qualified acolytes of the machine were actualy allowed to touch the computers.
Remember also that any industry goes through a life cycle. To start with it is run by highly valued artisans who can command high saleries because they have been part of the birth and have learned all the secrets. 20 years later its a Ford factory, automated up to the eyeballs. IS will go the same way, by the end of the decade the average pc will have the same number of logical elements as the human brain, someone will have written a program that takes advantage of that and after the money's gone out of the current multimedia boom its going to go into the people replacement boom.
Your jobs next - suggest you start learning off the internet how to do realy artistic basket weaving if you want to eat in ten years time.
Framework sums it up nicely. With wireless home networking comming along we need a protocol to enable all these devices to work together. The thin client never got very far because we do not want everything piled into one vendors box. I agree we want to be able to choose the best of breed components and bolt on anything new that turns up.
802.11 and Bluetooth support in Linux should be the first step, what we need is for appliances to come with not just the remote control to operate them but the ability to stream or read the information they handle to your "Borg unit" which will be an application that can do the remote control salutes and then switch the data between your personal network storage device and whatever sources and outputs you happen to own.
When there are no more wires we will have moved the information into a channel that is open to control by software. We need to start dreaming about how that software should work.
Wrong, patenting business methods will lead to stagnation and ill treatment of you the customer.
Competition in business is assured by globalisation, the market will kill you if you are not evolving. Companies do not "research" new business practises in the way that you imagine. We often use benchmarking and best practise. Methods develop in one market and are devolved to others. Fashions and philosophies come and go. Consultants and purveyors of Enterprise Resource Planning software redesign companies with Business Process Re Engineering methodology every day.
The bottom line is that you have to reinvent yourself over and over again if you want to succeed. No single method can win for long, even the tough monopolistic methods of Microsoft and Intel won't keep them in power forever, a hard lesson that IBM learned.
Patenting of methods would actually lead to stagnation of the marketplace and the extension of monopolistic power. After all the biggest companies can afford to buy the best technology and would buy the smaller companies with successful business methods and their patents in order to use them to strengthen their position and crush the smaller opposition in the marketplace. In this way they would be assured of keeping market share forever by suing anyone who tried to get into their markets.
IMHO business methodology patents are only of interest to very big business as a method of stifling the opposition and will lead to stagnation and unhealthy monopoly. Currently with the free flow of ideas the small businesses can change faster than the large and are in fact at an advantage because of this.
If you view a market place as a kind of democracy with the customer as voter then you should view the patenting of business methods as the police force of a one party state. It also incidentally would provide another method of keeping the third world from participating higher up the food chain.
On the other hand here in Britain and probably out there in the third world we dont want to go down that path of granting the power of monopoly to big business as you are doing in the USA by making business methods patentable.
So dont come complaining when our new small enterprising businesses rip the guts out of your stagnant economy. Remember for example, as affluence grows - one day people may lose their taste for branded products like Coke and MacDonalds. The impossible may be entirely possible. Stay awake at the back there.
A worrying drift towards intolerance is detectable in recent British Politics. The current government although arguably the rightfull inheritors of liberal progressive thought have consistantly persecuted small minorities for policical reasons. For example the use of guns for target practise has almost been extinguished for the reason that a few high media profile events in the press have made it easier for the administration to ban their possesion rather than to improve the administration of their ownership. In effect the government avoids bad press by opressing minorities rather than catering for their lifestyles. There is a strong case to be made that any minority interest is under extreme threat of being criminalised should any individuals within that minority commit acts that become big negative media stories. In this context it is becoming more necessary to hide ones membership of a minority interest group and seek anonimity. I am not aware that I am in a particular minority myself, except that I post to /. and hold the views I express here...
This is one very good reason why I advocate a reduction in the ammount of information that the government is legaly allowed to hold by default about people. The fears that people express about the misuse of DNA data by insurance companies reflects the same wrongheaded thinking that appears to be evanescant in policical thought as is appearing in commercial activities. (I thought we used insurance to pool our risk, not as a way of creating a genetic underclass). So for those of you here advocating the holding of genetic data by commercial interests as being safer than by the government, remember that it is generally the government that regulates commercial interests.
The use of data about individuals to manipulate and control them is as much a practical reason for fighting for the right to withold personal information from companies and governments as is any general moral imperative.