Because you called cancelling *one single* patent, an action that could save many thousands of lives (and which they are entitled to do under international law), "IP scoffing". Therefore, you must value the IP at least as dearly as the lives of the thousands who would perish.
The only silver lining in all of this is that poor Brazilian patients will benefit
A "silver lining" is an inferior outcome. I.e, you admit that helping those patients survive was OK, but preserving the pristine sanctity of IP would have been more desireable. Maybe you'd like to fly down there and explain your abstractions to dying patients: "You should be proud that you're giving up your life in order to drive up the market value of AIDS drugs. Your sacrifice could be generating cash flow that spurs research that could one day save the life of somebody else in a richer country, or maybe even solve their erectile dysfunction problems!"
Which basically makes it state-sponsored IP-scoffing.
You say that as if "IP" were a God-given right. It's not: "IP" is a collection of government entitlement programs, and what a government gives, a government can take away.
The total amount of oil exists is irrelevant. All that matters is how much oil there is that can be extracted more cheaply than other energy sources. As the amount of easy-to-pump oil diminishes, the cost of oil rises, and the usual market forces result in increased usage of alternative energy sources and conservation. Thus, oil production drops.
I think that "peak oil" usually refers to extraction of petroleum oil in the ground. Other than oil shale, all of those examples are converting something that's not oil in the ground into a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. If and when those processes are start to be used compensate for a shortage of oil, it will be a good indication that peak oil has indeed occurred.
I worked for a while in a building where the offices had no light switches, only motion sensors. If you got too wound up in your work and didn't make any big movements for about 10 minutes, the lights would suddenly flip off. Usually your startled reflex would be enough to flip them back on, not to mention make you lose your train of thought. Also, walking down the hall too close to the open office doors would often leave a trail of lit-up offices.
They are going batshit over Iran because Iran has deliberately, repeatedly violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran signed the NPT of its own free will. The NPT allows signatories to develop nuclear technology, provided that they declare their activities, and submit to inspections.
So what? What does a stinking piece of paper have to do with anything? The fact of the matter is, any country that has nuclear plants has the capability to start a nuclear program. The more plants, the easier it is to hide. Every country has at least some nationalists that would love to develop a nuclear capability of their own. These people often tend to gravitate towards government or military careers where they can act on their sentiments.
If nuclear power is The Answer (tm) to the world's energy supply, then every country will eventually have to be allowed to have their own nuclear industry. The current major powers are never going to implement policies that allow that to happen, so nuclear power is not be The Answer.
Why is it that you don't worry about Canada, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Australia, Switzerland, South Korea or Italy developing nuclear bombs?
Wow, there are at least eight "trustworthy" countries out of a couple of hundred. BTW, if N. Korea doesn't stop, it's not unlikely that you'll have to eventually scratch Japan off of your list.
Even if you could somehow pinpoint which countries are "trustworthy" now, political climates shift all the time. Remember, at one time we thought that Pakistan was trustworthy enough to provide them with nuclear reactors. Once India tested a nuke, that all changed in a hurry.
Due to nonproliferation concerns, substantial increase in worldwide nuclear power use is a non-starter. It just isn't going to happen, so give it up and focus on alternative technologies. The hippies and environmentalists aren't driving this, the neocons are. If nuclear power were a viable option, we wouldn't be going batshit over Iran and its little nuclear industry. Now imagine every other country on earth demanding to control their own nuclear infrastructure: This isn't ever going be allowed to happen.
Nuclear power serves mainly as a red herring that people who don't want to change anything wave around to criticize environmentalists.
It should have, but the people in charge convinced themselves that all the new toys invented in the intervening three decades would be silver bullets that would guarantee success. Their plan could have been written by the Underpants Gnomes:
Cleanly knock out a few key sites with precision missiles.
Yeah, well unfortunately, it doesn't matter. All the armored HUMMVs, M16s, and plasma shields in the world aren't going give us a snowball's chance in hell of "winning" this particular conflict. The 1944-style scorched earth tactics that would be required to beat the populace into submission are completely off the table, prolonging the current bloody stalemate is pointless, so ultimately we're just going end up pulling a Vietnam and hand the country over to the Iranians. This whole episode will mainly serve as yet another hard-earned lesson to future presidents that military force isn't very often the right tool for the job at hand.
b) Ejecting CDs - I understand that disabling the physical "Eject" button is insure that the volume is properly unmounted
This has always been my top pet peeve for Linux. Blah, blah, so it would cause an I/O error to eject the disk: well, that's why God invented errno. All I know, is when I press the button on the front of the drive, I want the tray to open, NOW. I don't want to have to open a terminal, run sudo, run lsof, or even hunt for a drive icon on the desktop. I don't want to have to rely on 5 layers of automounting software that only work 80% of the time. I just want my friggin disk out of the friggin computer!
I've been tempted to learn how to write a kernel driver just so that I can unconditionally connect the eject button to the tray motor.
Let's see... A DVD has 3.76e10 bits. If you drove 20,000 miles at 70mph, that would take 1.03e6 seconds. So each DVD in the wagon would give you about 37Kb/s bandwidth. So you'd need about 248,000 DVDs in the car. My little postal scale here says that a DVD in a paper sleeve weighs in at 20g, so you'd need almost 5000kg of DVDs, which is probably too much for a station wagon. You could probably manage the task with BluRay or HD-DVD, though.
If their codec source is offered under a BSD-style license, then why in the hell would anyone waste their time reimplementing the codec? There's no reason to create an independent implementation. Anybody can just use the reference code.
Obviously optical media is not an acceptable backup solution, due to its many failure points.
However, what if they sent data that needs to be archived permanently through the first stages of the DVD mastering process, and produced an etched glass master disk. It seems to me that such a disk should last forever as long as it is protected from physical damage.
To avoid damage from creating new DVD stampers from the master if it needs to be read, maybe they could create a special archival reader based on electron microscope or something similar that could read the master disk directly without touching it.
What's important is that it serves the public interest, not any one person specifically.
Then why do you care at all about first to file vs. first to invent? Both equally and arbitrarily shaft some individual(s) or another, and both equally serve your alleged public interest. If you're going to have a stupid and unfair system, why not pick the simpler one?
As I said, if you invent something second, who cares?
I do, if I invented it independently. Why should I be deprived of the fruits of my labor?
Like I said, the entire patent concept as it exists today is fundamentally unfair. At the very least, the burden of proof should be on the patent holder to prove in each case that an "infringer" had prior knowledge of the patent holder's work before any injunctions or damages are made. The benefit of the doubt should go the person who is being potentially subjected to intrusive government action.
If you came up with something independently and without knowledge of others' work, you're still an inventor. You've gone through the exact same effort and used the exact same brilliant mental processes regardless of whether the other guy did his work. The Constitution doesn't specify that the patent must awarded strictly to the earliest inventor. In fact, many times people from the patent industry have posted here pointing out how under technicalities certain prior art fails to "teach" some claim or another even though everyone here in the real world knows the prior art was clearly the same invention. In these cases, the USPTO routinely awards the patents to inventors who were not the first to come up with an idea.
But this just points out how the entire patent concept is fundamentally unfair: it penalizes people who independently invent things, presuming without evidence or proof that they *must* be guilty of copying ideas simply because a patent exists, and punishes them by taking away the ability to use their work. Never mind that with tens of millions of patent claims currently in force, many of them intentionally obfuscated and vague, odds are pretty slim that anyone is aware of any particular patented invention.
With many of the obvious patent claims that are being granted today, a single patent can penalize hundreds of people who would have independently come up with an idea, depriving them of the fruits of their labors for 2 decades, just so that one lucky guy that spent time filling in paperwork for bureaucrats can be rewarded with a monopoly. It's a self-serving government entitlement program that's gone completely out of control.
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Oh, then if you redefine words to mean whatever you want them to mean, then anything you say must be true. QED.
Because you called cancelling *one single* patent, an action that could save many thousands of lives (and which they are entitled to do under international law), "IP scoffing". Therefore, you must value the IP at least as dearly as the lives of the thousands who would perish.
A "silver lining" is an inferior outcome. I.e, you admit that helping those patients survive was OK, but preserving the pristine sanctity of IP would have been more desireable. Maybe you'd like to fly down there and explain your abstractions to dying patients: "You should be proud that you're giving up your life in order to drive up the market value of AIDS drugs. Your sacrifice could be generating cash flow that spurs research that could one day save the life of somebody else in a richer country, or maybe even solve their erectile dysfunction problems!"
Then please explain how human civilization managed to survive for over 5,000 years before "IP" was invented.
You say that as if "IP" were a God-given right. It's not: "IP" is a collection of government entitlement programs, and what a government gives, a government can take away.
It was killed by the Xbox lockdown hardware.
The total amount of oil exists is irrelevant. All that matters is how much oil there is that can be extracted more cheaply than other energy sources. As the amount of easy-to-pump oil diminishes, the cost of oil rises, and the usual market forces result in increased usage of alternative energy sources and conservation. Thus, oil production drops.
I think that "peak oil" usually refers to extraction of petroleum oil in the ground. Other than oil shale, all of those examples are converting something that's not oil in the ground into a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. If and when those processes are start to be used compensate for a shortage of oil, it will be a good indication that peak oil has indeed occurred.
Apparently, some people still aren't satisfied. The first entry under the BUGS section of the bash manpage reads: "It's too big and too slow."
What was the last big American company to focus its marketing efforts on 85 year old uncles... wasn't it Oldsmobile?
I worked for a while in a building where the offices had no light switches, only motion sensors. If you got too wound up in your work and didn't make any big movements for about 10 minutes, the lights would suddenly flip off. Usually your startled reflex would be enough to flip them back on, not to mention make you lose your train of thought. Also, walking down the hall too close to the open office doors would often leave a trail of lit-up offices.
No, they're not. They only burn as much fuel as they need to generate the electricity being consumed. Less electricity used -> less power plant waste.
Back here in the real world, the limitations of HUMANITY put bounds on most everything else we do. Why would nuclear power be any different?
So what? What does a stinking piece of paper have to do with anything? The fact of the matter is, any country that has nuclear plants has the capability to start a nuclear program. The more plants, the easier it is to hide. Every country has at least some nationalists that would love to develop a nuclear capability of their own. These people often tend to gravitate towards government or military careers where they can act on their sentiments.
If nuclear power is The Answer (tm) to the world's energy supply, then every country will eventually have to be allowed to have their own nuclear industry. The current major powers are never going to implement policies that allow that to happen, so nuclear power is not be The Answer.
Wow, there are at least eight "trustworthy" countries out of a couple of hundred. BTW, if N. Korea doesn't stop, it's not unlikely that you'll have to eventually scratch Japan off of your list.
Even if you could somehow pinpoint which countries are "trustworthy" now, political climates shift all the time. Remember, at one time we thought that Pakistan was trustworthy enough to provide them with nuclear reactors. Once India tested a nuke, that all changed in a hurry.
Nuclear power serves mainly as a red herring that people who don't want to change anything wave around to criticize environmentalists.
Yeah, well unfortunately, it doesn't matter. All the armored HUMMVs, M16s, and plasma shields in the world aren't going give us a snowball's chance in hell of "winning" this particular conflict. The 1944-style scorched earth tactics that would be required to beat the populace into submission are completely off the table, prolonging the current bloody stalemate is pointless, so ultimately we're just going end up pulling a Vietnam and hand the country over to the Iranians. This whole episode will mainly serve as yet another hard-earned lesson to future presidents that military force isn't very often the right tool for the job at hand.
This has always been my top pet peeve for Linux. Blah, blah, so it would cause an I/O error to eject the disk: well, that's why God invented errno. All I know, is when I press the button on the front of the drive, I want the tray to open, NOW. I don't want to have to open a terminal, run sudo, run lsof, or even hunt for a drive icon on the desktop. I don't want to have to rely on 5 layers of automounting software that only work 80% of the time. I just want my friggin disk out of the friggin computer!
I've been tempted to learn how to write a kernel driver just so that I can unconditionally connect the eject button to the tray motor.
Let's see... A DVD has 3.76e10 bits. If you drove 20,000 miles at 70mph, that would take 1.03e6 seconds. So each DVD in the wagon would give you about 37Kb/s bandwidth. So you'd need about 248,000 DVDs in the car. My little postal scale here says that a DVD in a paper sleeve weighs in at 20g, so you'd need almost 5000kg of DVDs, which is probably too much for a station wagon. You could probably manage the task with BluRay or HD-DVD, though.
You could get fun add-ons like the Weitek 3167, which was a floating-point coprocessor for the 386 that was several times faster than Intel's 80387.
If their codec source is offered under a BSD-style license, then why in the hell would anyone waste their time reimplementing the codec? There's no reason to create an independent implementation. Anybody can just use the reference code.
However, what if they sent data that needs to be archived permanently through the first stages of the DVD mastering process, and produced an etched glass master disk. It seems to me that such a disk should last forever as long as it is protected from physical damage.
To avoid damage from creating new DVD stampers from the master if it needs to be read, maybe they could create a special archival reader based on electron microscope or something similar that could read the master disk directly without touching it.
Good analogy. The patent system as it exists today is about as meaningful as a lottery.
Then why do you care at all about first to file vs. first to invent? Both equally and arbitrarily shaft some individual(s) or another, and both equally serve your alleged public interest. If you're going to have a stupid and unfair system, why not pick the simpler one?
I do, if I invented it independently. Why should I be deprived of the fruits of my labor?
Like I said, the entire patent concept as it exists today is fundamentally unfair. At the very least, the burden of proof should be on the patent holder to prove in each case that an "infringer" had prior knowledge of the patent holder's work before any injunctions or damages are made. The benefit of the doubt should go the person who is being potentially subjected to intrusive government action.
But this just points out how the entire patent concept is fundamentally unfair: it penalizes people who independently invent things, presuming without evidence or proof that they *must* be guilty of copying ideas simply because a patent exists, and punishes them by taking away the ability to use their work. Never mind that with tens of millions of patent claims currently in force, many of them intentionally obfuscated and vague, odds are pretty slim that anyone is aware of any particular patented invention.
With many of the obvious patent claims that are being granted today, a single patent can penalize hundreds of people who would have independently come up with an idea, depriving them of the fruits of their labors for 2 decades, just so that one lucky guy that spent time filling in paperwork for bureaucrats can be rewarded with a monopoly. It's a self-serving government entitlement program that's gone completely out of control.