That said, yes, abolishing patents would bring us closer to pure capitalism, so if you think:
closer to pure capitalism -> good idea
you should favor abolishing patents.
Patents are actually a barrier to a "free market". The reasoning behind having them is that the benefits of them outweigh the costs. Thus their usage really needs frequent review. One quite obvious problem with drug patents is that they encourage pharmaceutical companies to most always be pushing new drugs, since they can make most money on them. Old drugs, including those which predate drugs patenting, may be as effective (even more effective) at actually treating people.
Anyway, we are NOT proposing to nationalize an entire indusstry. The drug industry spends twice as much on advertizing as it does on R&D (cousing posts provide sources) - and we're here completely ignoring the money it costs to actually *make* the drugs.
Typically drugs are quite cheap to manufacture, regardless of if the drug in question is "Tamiflu" or silver iodide. The difference is that Roche can only put a huge markup on the former.
My guess is that you would be hard-pressed to find many economists who support the notion that nationalizing an entire industry is a "capitalist solution."
You can still find quite a few who advocate "privatisation" as being some kind of universal cure-all.
This software is only slightly less critical than the software which is used in the space program. There, people die. In this case, lives can be destroyed by a wrongful conviction. At least if you die, your problems are over and done with. Now, what if a particular test case was missed? How would you know? Even worse, what if THAT test case shows that one in every 10 readings will be wildly inaccurate?
If some of these readings are "false negatives" there is also a risk of people dieing.
The issue is whether or not, all things being equal, a certain software package that is unmodifiable by civilians (since it's military grade, they won't just accept your patches) gains nothing by being open source, but loses any security through obscurity (which exists until the software is cracked, and it can't be cracked by enemies if the only people who have access to the software are those in my government (traitors aside).
Shouldn't your government's "bosses", which in a democracy is any citizen, have the right to verify what their government is up to. Especially given how "trustworthy" and "government" have often been shown to be mutually exclusive.
I don't see a reason why China should have access to all the internal military projects going on at Lockheed, Boeing, etc. Let them build their own technology - they're quite capable.
or they can pay for some spies, if that proves to be the cheaper option.
How long a plane can stay up there, is limited by fuel. Now if you use a solar cell powered plane (NASA built one some time ago), the time it can stay up there is mostly limited by wear and tear of mechanical parts. That might be much longer than a leaking balloon.
The other likely limitation is the battery. It needs to be able to hold enough charge to operate the machine all night, with the worst case senario being mid-winter.
Also, it's not clear since both the slashdot post (quoting accurately from the article) and the article mention coverage at "..., With each airship being able to support an area of 60 kilometres...". Ignoring the fact that kilometres is a measurement of distance not area, what does this mean? Since the article claims at that coverage they would only need a "handful" or airships to provide complete coverage
It could make sense if it means that the transciever on the airship could communicate up to a maximum distance of 60km. Which given an altitude of 24km equates to a circular coverage with a radius of just under 55km. Thus an area of around 9,500 square kilometres. The most obvious complication is that you don't actually want uniform coverage.
Regardless, I would still be curious if that many craft in the air would be an eyesore, or something we adapt to.
At more than twice the height of an airliner you'd have a hard time seeing them at all.
the sticker sheet that has the serial # that is applied to the device, is kept down the assembly line with the device, until it is boxed, at which point the other sticker on the sheet is applied to the box.
Alternativly if the whatever is boxed by machine that machine can read the barcode on the device and print either a sticker or directly onto the box.
Tak eoff your tinfoil hat. That is *not* the barcode scanned when you check out the item at your local PC superstore. They scan the UPC code, not the serial number code.
If you buy your printer at a retail store where you pick it off the shelf and a handheld scanner is used then you know which barcodes they have scanned. Otherwise you have no idea which barcodes they may or may not have scanned.
My big complaint on this is it's an example of the military's tendency to spend where there isn't a real-world problem. This problem climbs all the way up into the executive branch. In his first term, George W. Bush decided to pull the US out of the ABM treaty. This was because our government wanted the freedom to develop technology to destroy ICBMs. Even after Sept. 11th, the US government wasn't convinced that low-tech is the more plausible threat.
This has been dubbed the "Movie Script" approach to security. The problem being that not only do the methods tend to be expensive they also tend to be utterly useless if the "script" isn't guessed correctly.
The entities who will actually do us harm aren't going to invest in complex systems that send explosive material guided by computers and lasers.
Rockets are a very difficult technology to get right. Effectivly you have a fragile structure made up mostly of explosive. It's almost certainly easier to build a working nuclear weapon than it is to build a working ICBM.
Let's not forget the fact that when it is pointless to fire a torpedo at a ship because it doesn't do anything except waste very expensive torpedos, then there is no damage to ecology whatsoever.
The first thing any self respecting torpedo manufacturer is going to do is start designing a torpedo which is resistant to such a countermeasure.
So what are we supposed to do with despotic regimes that threaten world peace?
Assuming that "we" equates to the USA then the best thing to do would be to stop supporting them. A good starting point would be the one in Washington DC.
What were they thinking?!? Clearly, 2/3rds of the Earth surface should remain completely unguarded. You're right, what humanity needs is a throwback to the old pirate days!
It isn't really the job of a national navy to police international waters, any more than it is the job of a national airforce to police international airspace. The job of both is to protect their nation against invasion. In the case of pirates operating in international waters there are several possibilities, including armed merchant ships, an international navy created by treaty or warship escorted convoys.
Let's be serious, though. The navy is no different from any other military organization, save for the fact that they operate on the water. Perhaps in a perfect world, no military would ever be required, but until that world comes into fruition, a military in all its forms (land, sea, and air) will be a necessity for all important states.
It a country dosn't have any coastline or large lakes then having a navy is probably not a priority.
It is very unlikely that any of the big major countries will go for a conventional war with each other, because they know that no one is going to emerge victorious.
Assuming that all the "leaders" involved are sane and rational. It only needs for one of them not to be in order to start a war.
Basically, a blank HD is a custom part. I can see how they would have to go out of thier way to put a blank HD in a system instead of one from thier normal pipeline that gets imaged. Custom parts cost more. They probably have to add a second HD pipeline, and extra QA control to make sure the two otherwise identical parts don't get mixed up during assembly.
With the vast majority of Dell machines there are multiple options for hard disks. Until Dell is at the point of actually fitting a HDD into a machine they cannot possibly know which software image should go onto it. It's pefectly possible that they don't actually put any software on until near completion anyway.
So.. the logical thing to do is buy the PC with Windows and then resell the Windows license. Or is that not allowed?
It depends where you are. Microsoft (and Dell) will make all sorts of fuss about the software being tied to the hardware. If you are in Germany then things are simple, since there is a court ruling saying that this is nonsense and the software is simply a component. If you are in the corporate friendly USA then you'd probably be completly out of luck.
It was really well done, especially the acting the CGI space battles. I'd disagree that the action scenes were weak. They weren't hollywood blockbuster,
This kind of ties in with the article about Hollywood admitting that they arn't producing very good movies.
I've only ever seen a few Star Treks (allergy to bad physics and internal inconsistency) but I did love Babylon V and this was an excellent take off. Spectacular for a small private production, really.
Wonder how much money these people would need to produce a "blockbuster"... Probably a fraction of that spent in California.
Very simple. Read some history. Read about Hoover's direction of the FBI, McCarthy, COINTELPRO, and REALIZE, that one of the primary roles of the FBI (at least within the past 50 years) has been to trample all over people and freedom in general.
IIRC another problem with Hoover's FBI is that they tended to ignore the likes of actual criminals...
The CIA couldn't legally spy on Americans on American soil before the Patriot Act. Then again, their only oversight is the President, so I wouldn't be suprised if plenty of undisclosed shennanigans have gone on.
You should probably be suprised if there wern't. Since that would have made the CIA about the only "intelligence service" on the planet to have suck to it's public mandate. (Either by policy or by being lucky enough to have no criminal members.)
In this circumstance the Governments job is to protect the general public from those that would do it harm.
At best evesdropping on random people does nothing to prevent harm. At worst those doing the evesdropping are harming members of the public.
Do you really want to make that harder than it needs to be ?
What makes you think that giving government lots of special powers and privileges, without any oversight, will ensure that they will do a decent job of protecting anyone from anything? In practice you soon run into the problem of "who watches the watchers". Without proper supervision and oversight any such organisation becomes highly attractive to those seeking to do harm.
The people enforcing the laws NEED to be held to a higher standard, because they have more power than a common citizen.
Hence the concept of "high crimes". However it too often appears that such people are held to lower standards than members of the public, especially when it comes to breaking the law.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, yes, abolishing patents would bring us closer to pure capitalism, so if you think: closer to pure capitalism -> good idea you should favor abolishing patents.
Patents are actually a barrier to a "free market". The reasoning behind having them is that the benefits of them outweigh the costs. Thus their usage really needs frequent review. One quite obvious problem with drug patents is that they encourage pharmaceutical companies to most always be pushing new drugs, since they can make most money on them. Old drugs, including those which predate drugs patenting, may be as effective (even more effective) at actually treating people.
Anyway, we are NOT proposing to nationalize an entire indusstry. The drug industry spends twice as much on advertizing as it does on R&D (cousing posts provide sources) - and we're here completely ignoring the money it costs to actually *make* the drugs.
Typically drugs are quite cheap to manufacture, regardless of if the drug in question is "Tamiflu" or silver iodide. The difference is that Roche can only put a huge markup on the former.
My guess is that you would be hard-pressed to find many economists who support the notion that nationalizing an entire industry is a "capitalist solution."
You can still find quite a few who advocate "privatisation" as being some kind of universal cure-all.
Since, historically, every single civilisation that conquered Greece was later assimilated by them (Romans would be an excellent example, actually),
Even to the point that quite a few "Roman technologies" turn out to actually be of Greek origin.
This software is only slightly less critical than the software which is used in the space program. There, people die. In this case, lives can be destroyed by a wrongful conviction. At least if you die, your problems are over and done with. Now, what if a particular test case was missed? How would you know? Even worse, what if THAT test case shows that one in every 10 readings will be wildly inaccurate?
If some of these readings are "false negatives" there is also a risk of people dieing.
The issue is whether or not, all things being equal, a certain software package that is unmodifiable by civilians (since it's military grade, they won't just accept your patches) gains nothing by being open source, but loses any security through obscurity (which exists until the software is cracked, and it can't be cracked by enemies if the only people who have access to the software are those in my government (traitors aside).
Shouldn't your government's "bosses", which in a democracy is any citizen, have the right to verify what their government is up to. Especially given how "trustworthy" and "government" have often been shown to be mutually exclusive.
I don't see a reason why China should have access to all the internal military projects going on at Lockheed, Boeing, etc. Let them build their own technology - they're quite capable.
or they can pay for some spies, if that proves to be the cheaper option.
How long a plane can stay up there, is limited by fuel. Now if you use a solar cell powered plane (NASA built one some time ago), the time it can stay up there is mostly limited by wear and tear of mechanical parts. That might be much longer than a leaking balloon.
The other likely limitation is the battery. It needs to be able to hold enough charge to operate the machine all night, with the worst case senario being mid-winter.
Also, it's not clear since both the slashdot post (quoting accurately from the article) and the article mention coverage at "..., With each airship being able to support an area of 60 kilometres...". Ignoring the fact that kilometres is a measurement of distance not area, what does this mean? Since the article claims at that coverage they would only need a "handful" or airships to provide complete coverage
It could make sense if it means that the transciever on the airship could communicate up to a maximum distance of 60km. Which given an altitude of 24km equates to a circular coverage with a radius of just under 55km. Thus an area of around 9,500 square kilometres.
The most obvious complication is that you don't actually want uniform coverage.
Regardless, I would still be curious if that many craft in the air would be an eyesore, or something we adapt to.
At more than twice the height of an airliner you'd have a hard time seeing them at all.
Do you really want Iran, North Korea and China having a say in how DNS is administered?
How many governments actually have clean hands anyway?
the sticker sheet that has the serial # that is applied to the device, is kept down the assembly line with the device, until it is boxed, at which point the other sticker on the sheet is applied to the box.
Alternativly if the whatever is boxed by machine that machine can read the barcode on the device and print either a sticker or directly onto the box.
Tak eoff your tinfoil hat. That is *not* the barcode scanned when you check out the item at your local PC superstore. They scan the UPC code, not the serial number code.
If you buy your printer at a retail store where you pick it off the shelf and a handheld scanner is used then you know which barcodes they have scanned. Otherwise you have no idea which barcodes they may or may not have scanned.
Also patents help small organizations from having their ideas stolen from larger more funded organizations.
In theory. In practice the larger entity can just pay lawyers to spin out the case until the smaller entity either runs out of money or gives up.
My big complaint on this is it's an example of the military's tendency to spend where there isn't a real-world problem. This problem climbs all the way up into the executive branch. In his first term, George W. Bush decided to pull the US out of the ABM treaty. This was because our government wanted the freedom to develop technology to destroy ICBMs. Even after Sept. 11th, the US government wasn't convinced that low-tech is the more plausible threat.
This has been dubbed the "Movie Script" approach to security. The problem being that not only do the methods tend to be expensive they also tend to be utterly useless if the "script" isn't guessed correctly.
The entities who will actually do us harm aren't going to invest in complex systems that send explosive material guided by computers and lasers.
Rockets are a very difficult technology to get right. Effectivly you have a fragile structure made up mostly of explosive. It's almost certainly easier to build a working nuclear weapon than it is to build a working ICBM.
Besides, in modern times, very few sailors have been injured by torpedos
Probably because the last time one was fired "in anger" was in 1982...
Let's not forget the fact that when it is pointless to fire a torpedo at a ship because it doesn't do anything except waste very expensive torpedos, then there is no damage to ecology whatsoever.
The first thing any self respecting torpedo manufacturer is going to do is start designing a torpedo which is resistant to such a countermeasure.
So what are we supposed to do with despotic regimes that threaten world peace?
Assuming that "we" equates to the USA then the best thing to do would be to stop supporting them. A good starting point would be the one in Washington DC.
What were they thinking?!? Clearly, 2/3rds of the Earth surface should remain completely unguarded. You're right, what humanity needs is a throwback to the old pirate days!
It isn't really the job of a national navy to police international waters, any more than it is the job of a national airforce to police international airspace. The job of both is to protect their nation against invasion.
In the case of pirates operating in international waters there are several possibilities, including armed merchant ships, an international navy created by treaty or warship escorted convoys.
Let's be serious, though. The navy is no different from any other military organization, save for the fact that they operate on the water. Perhaps in a perfect world, no military would ever be required, but until that world comes into fruition, a military in all its forms (land, sea, and air) will be a necessity for all important states.
It a country dosn't have any coastline or large lakes then having a navy is probably not a priority.
It is very unlikely that any of the big major countries will go for a conventional war with each other, because they know that no one is going to emerge victorious.
Assuming that all the "leaders" involved are sane and rational. It only needs for one of them not to be in order to start a war.
Basically, a blank HD is a custom part. I can see how they would have to go out of thier way to put a blank HD in a system instead of one from thier normal pipeline that gets imaged. Custom parts cost more. They probably have to add a second HD pipeline, and extra QA control to make sure the two otherwise identical parts don't get mixed up during assembly.
With the vast majority of Dell machines there are multiple options for hard disks. Until Dell is at the point of actually fitting a HDD into a machine they cannot possibly know which software image should go onto it. It's pefectly possible that they don't actually put any software on until near completion anyway.
So.. the logical thing to do is buy the PC with Windows and then resell the Windows license. Or is that not allowed?
It depends where you are. Microsoft (and Dell) will make all sorts of fuss about the software being tied to the hardware. If you are in Germany then things are simple, since there is a court ruling saying that this is nonsense and the software is simply a component. If you are in the corporate friendly USA then you'd probably be completly out of luck.
It was really well done, especially the acting the CGI space battles. I'd disagree that the action scenes were weak. They weren't hollywood blockbuster,
This kind of ties in with the article about Hollywood admitting that they arn't producing very good movies.
I've only ever seen a few Star Treks (allergy to bad physics and internal inconsistency) but I did love Babylon V and this was an excellent take off. Spectacular for a small private production, really.
Wonder how much money these people would need to produce a "blockbuster"... Probably a fraction of that spent in California.
Very simple. Read some history. Read about Hoover's direction of the FBI, McCarthy, COINTELPRO, and REALIZE, that one of the primary roles of the FBI (at least within the past 50 years) has been to trample all over people and freedom in general.
IIRC another problem with Hoover's FBI is that they tended to ignore the likes of actual criminals...
The CIA couldn't legally spy on Americans on American soil before the Patriot Act. Then again, their only oversight is the President, so I wouldn't be suprised if plenty of undisclosed shennanigans have gone on.
You should probably be suprised if there wern't. Since that would have made the CIA about the only "intelligence service" on the planet to have suck to it's public mandate. (Either by policy or by being lucky enough to have no criminal members.)
In short, I'm more worried about the government abusing it's power than of the terrorists blowing up a building. That happens alot more often.
These things aren't even mutually exclusive. Governments quite frequently support terrorists, even those acting against their own citizens.
In this circumstance the Governments job is to protect the general public from those that would do it harm.
At best evesdropping on random people does nothing to prevent harm. At worst those doing the evesdropping are harming members of the public.
Do you really want to make that harder than it needs to be ?
What makes you think that giving government lots of special powers and privileges, without any oversight, will ensure that they will do a decent job of protecting anyone from anything? In practice you soon run into the problem of "who watches the watchers". Without proper supervision and oversight any such organisation becomes highly attractive to those seeking to do harm.
The people enforcing the laws NEED to be held to a higher standard, because they have more power than a common citizen.
Hence the concept of "high crimes". However it too often appears that such people are held to lower standards than members of the public, especially when it comes to breaking the law.