Democracy is equally about choosing your leaders and about individual rights. A nation that allows its citizens to elect the government, but that punishes free speech, is not a real democracy (for how can leaders be elected wisely if nobody is allowed to criticize them?).
So a weak definition of a "fascist" could be someone who supports the close relationship between government and business. However, if that person also agrees with the rights granted by the constitution, that person is not a "fascist" in the national socialist sense.
This implies your research inputs are patented as well and the free exchange of ideas that is critical to good research is stifled, despite what patent boosters like to naively claim.
How does a patent stifle a free exchange of ideas? The patent documents are open and available for anyone who wants to read them. Without patents, information also has value in its secrecy. If I am not protected when I disclose my invention, there is nothing preventing me from keeping it partially (or wholly) secret -- in fact you admit as much in your post. This surely does more damage to free exchange than any patent.
See the solutions I've listed above. If you can't think of any others you're not being very creative.
I already have my solution, and it's a pretty good one: use patents. The challenge was for you to convince me that you had a better one, but I'm not impressed. Your solutions include:
growing the business fast to get a jump on the competitors and the econonomic network effect working for you -- i.e., "Work harder" (but can an individual outwork and out-network a large tech company with hundreds of millions in the bank?)
partial release of the idea, to concentrating on execution rather than idea, to using the idea inhouse -- so working without patent's doesn't lead to the "free exchange of ideas" after all?
Your entire post confirms my point. Without patent protection, if my idea was "worth something", the big company would have no penalty for stealing my idea. Why should I bother spending the time to invent it in the first place, when it is ultimately worth nothing to me? Unlike a musician, I can't make money by giving my inventions away and inventing live in front of an audience.
I reiterate: patents foster innovation by protecting the small inventors, who take the most risks. Most large companies like the status quo and are less likely to develop innovative ideas that could fundamentally change their business.
Stealing an idea is not like other kinds of competition in the marketplace. To make your Starbucks analogy precise, suppose Starbucks opened a store across the street from mine, identical in every way, but with lower prices.
Patentable ideas do not occur instantaneously. The first entrant inevitably invests time, and one year of the full-time attention of a few engineers is worth quite a bit.
I should also point out that Google has a sizable portfolio of patents, which means two things: firstly, smart and successful tech businessmen appreciate the value of patents; and secondly, in keeping with their corporate philosophy, Google does not believe software patents are evil.
The big guys can lock you out of even entering the market using patents. Look at how Ericcson locked out Sendo using 11000 GSM patents.
So one large company restricts another large company from entering the market by patenting ideas related to an existing technology. I'm not seeing how this relates to my original point concerning small inventors.
A world without patents may well see products make it faster to market, and would certainly incur fewer legal costs or patent portfolio companies. Your final sentence claiming a patentless utopia is entirely speculative (and furthermore, I disagree).
But I think you have missed my main point, which is that patents protect small innovators from big companies. Say I come up with a great tech idea that could make a lot of money. What is to prevent a certain company in Redmond, WA from taking my idea and squeezing me out of the marketplace? At least with the patent, I have legal recourse. Even if I don't have enough money to litigate myself, I have leverage to offer contingency fees, etc.
In a world without patents, I expect that most innovation would take place within large companies, and very little would take place in small startups, because the startups would have no way to protect their ideas. This turns the current tech environment on its head -- startups tend to take more risks and innovate, while big companies play it safe. So I think a world without patents would see less innovation.
Giving the sales pitch under an NDA does not protect you if the customer has the ability to develop the technology itself. For example, say you wanted to sell your page ranking algorithm to Google -- a patent would still protect you where the NDA didn't. Most tech startups only exist to sell solutions to large tech companies, so this is an important issue.
And if you want your NDA to contain language that gave you the same protection as a patent, then why not go the whole way?
Patents really *are* great if, like me, you are a researcher. Without them it would be nearly impossible for an independent inventor to get a product to market: either everything about your product would have to be secret (giving you a credibility problem), or you would risk that your product ideas would be stolen whenever you gave a sales pitch.
I firmly believe that without patent protection, very little innovation would occur at startup companies -- which is a shame, because that is where much innovation and technological risk-taking occurs today.
If anyone can come up with a solution other than patents that protects the small inventor against a big corporation, I'd like to hear it.
The power in the word "fascist" is that it is strongly associated with the brutal national socialist regimes in Germany and Italy.
But what you're saying is that most people are fascists if the definition is suitably relaxed. Similarly, you might read a medical textbook and recognize that you are suffering from "symptoms" of various disorders. It is not impossible to meet some of the criteria of being a "fascist" and still support constitutional rights, which are they keys to democratic government.
It's not just Slashdot. Just look at any political blog on the left or right -- there is no debate, just constant character assassination and sarcastic comments.
... except that I was serious. The human body was not intended for interstellar travel -- we can't hibernate, we need energy in a difficult form to provide in space (food), we need an atmosphere, we are quarrelsome when contained in small spaces for long periods, we don't deal with zero-gee very well, and our 100-year lifespan is far too short. At least some of these problems would be solved with genetic engineering.
In fact you can imagine multiple races of engineered humanoids to fulfil various tasks on the ship. You could have a species of "leaders", one of "workers" to do the menial tasks, one of "engineers" to run the equipment (maybe they could be unusually resistant to radiation), and so on.
Another point is this. I read a survey, published by NASA, of the prospects for interstellar travel using existing and forseeable technology. One conclusion was that sending a ship across the heavens would require the dedicated effort of a large chunk of humanity, and that the required level of committment has thus far only been observed in religious believers. For example, consider that pious tradesmen dedicated their lives to constructing some of the great cathedrals in Europe, with the knowledge that the work would only be completed long after they died. So if I were NASA, I would be seeing what I could learn from the Catholic church.
It was an interlibrary loan request. These requests incur some cost to the library, so they probably didn't want it to be frivolous. And presumably they would want to contact him when the book arrived from the other library so that he could come and pick it up. Don't know why they would need his SSN, but once you know name, address, and phone number, SSN is not much extra loss of privacy.
On the other hand, personal identifying information is needed to get a plain old library card, so that people have some incentive to bring the books back. If you want to keep your tinfoil hat on tightly, you would never check anything out of the library.
Let's not forget that the US government had ample opportunity to stop the Sept 11 attacks even without the PATRIOT act. They failed thanks to ossified bureaucracy, not a lack of police powers.
And it is quite possible to plan a large-scale attack on Americans without setting foot in the United States (for example, this). But thanks to a stubbornly unilateral foreign policy, the United States has trouble getting the international cooperation it needs to protect its citizens.
Thirty years from now, the current administration will be a textbook example of how not to conduct a campaign against terrorism.
The first time he took office, he was appointed by the Supreme Court (a national first, not to mention thoroughly unconstitutional and illegal.
Firstly, the supreme court is the ultimate arbiter of what is legal and constitutional, and what is not. To say that a decision of the supreme court is unconstitutional and illegal is a contradiction.
Secondly, complaints about what happened in 2000 are ridiculous and partisan. If the positions of the principals had been reversed and Gore ended up 100 votes ahead rather than behind, would the left be complaining that his election was illegitimate? Of course not.
Nobody will take the left seriously until they stop whining about 2000. I say this as someone who wishes Gore had won.
There are an awful lot of Wikipedia articles (esp. articles on historical figures) which are heavily based on the 1911 edition of Britannica, an edition that is in the public domain. As an example, I found this one with hardly any effort.
So the question of "which model is better" is not as simple as you make it seem.
Mice don't really love cheese. If you're baiting a trap, it is much better to use peanut butter.
The tools/crossword puzzle thing comes down to opposable thumbs. Pretty hard to do the crossword when you can't hold a pen, or when nobody can hold a hammer to build the headquarters of the New York Times.
Wikipedia is much closer to anarchy than democracy.
Imagine if the federal government worked like Wikipedia. I could log on to wiki.gov and add new laws and edit existing ones at will, but so could anyone else.
It would be pretty cool to see how that would turn out, if you didn't have to live there.
People cite Wikipedia's unreliability almost as a feature, because it insulates Wikipedia from criticism over accuracy, libel, etc.
But if Wikipedia is intended to be so unreliable that it is worthless for debating purposes (which are pretty trivial compared to, say, public safety), then is there any point to having it at all?
Personally, I love Wikipedia and would be very happy if it found a way to be both open and reliable.
Based on the context of the list, I think it's Swedish. "Ram" means "frame" in Swedish, and "sex" is the number six.
I love Swedish. Another fun word in Swedish is "fart", which means "speed" (as in "fartlek", which is an exercise for runners). So in Sweden, schoolchildren can legitimately go around saying "fart" and "sex" all day.
Yes, it is true that companies must, by law, work in their shareholders' interests. However, this does not mean that the stock price must be maximized from quarter to quarter. There is nothing illegal about taking the long view and realizing that long-term profitability is maximized when the public respects your brand.
The "shareholder's interest" argument really means that you can't use the company's money to put a new deck on your house. It is not sinister.
The corollary to your post (and the counter-argument to the grandparent) is that a person planning nefarious acts should send everything in plaintext.
Sending encrypted e-mails, for example, when nobody else in the world is doing so, is like putting a huge sign on your front lawn saying, "INTRIGUING SECRETS ARE GOING ON IN HERE!".
Remember that cryptography is only one link in the information security chain, and that everything has to get back to plaintext eventually. Once the feds are interested in your data, there is nothing stopping them from parking a truck across the street and harvesting your info using TEMPEST.
If you take us out, we will make it very painful to you. N. Korea would absolutely NEVER fire a nuke at the US. Why would they, the standard response to that is for us to nuke them flat, and we can, and we will.
Are you sure? In Europe during the Cold War, senior NATO officers operated on the policy of "use it or lose it" -- if their position was about to be overrun, and their nukes captured, they were expected to launch. Surely this logic would also appeal to North Korean officers.
Your argument is based on the premise that if a few American cities were attacked by nuclear weapons, civilization would collapse and the military would be neutralized. I think this is unlikely. Experience from World War 2 has shown that nations can absorb horrific damage without collapsing, and still retain most of their military strength. Also, if you look here (using 0.02 megatons for a Hiroshima-sized weapon) and compare it to this, you will find that the damage inflicted by Katrina is about the same, or greater.
Container bombs can also be stopped by intelligence. If the government is tipped off to expect a container bomb, the navy can be used to hold and inspect all ships to find the weapon(s). There will be some economic stress, but the attack will have been thwarted.
What I'm saying is that a government that is serious about conducting a nuclear war will use ICBMs in large numbers. For a state (even in the guise of state terrorism) to use a container bomb against a handful of US cities, leaving the military intact, would be suicidal. This is why missile defence is important.
Slashdot Mirror
Democracy is equally about choosing your leaders and about individual rights. A nation that allows its citizens to elect the government, but that punishes free speech, is not a real democracy (for how can leaders be elected wisely if nobody is allowed to criticize them?).
So a weak definition of a "fascist" could be someone who supports the close relationship between government and business. However, if that person also agrees with the rights granted by the constitution, that person is not a "fascist" in the national socialist sense.
This implies your research inputs are patented as well and the free exchange of ideas that is critical to good research is stifled, despite what patent boosters like to naively claim.
How does a patent stifle a free exchange of ideas? The patent documents are open and available for anyone who wants to read them. Without patents, information also has value in its secrecy. If I am not protected when I disclose my invention, there is nothing preventing me from keeping it partially (or wholly) secret -- in fact you admit as much in your post. This surely does more damage to free exchange than any patent.
See the solutions I've listed above. If you can't think of any others you're not being very creative.
I already have my solution, and it's a pretty good one: use patents. The challenge was for you to convince me that you had a better one, but I'm not impressed. Your solutions include:
growing the business fast to get a jump on the competitors and the econonomic network effect working for you -- i.e., "Work harder" (but can an individual outwork and out-network a large tech company with hundreds of millions in the bank?)
partial release of the idea, to concentrating on execution rather than idea, to using the idea inhouse -- so working without patent's doesn't lead to the "free exchange of ideas" after all?
Yeah, you caught me making an appeal to authority ...
Your entire post confirms my point. Without patent protection, if my idea was "worth something", the big company would have no penalty for stealing my idea. Why should I bother spending the time to invent it in the first place, when it is ultimately worth nothing to me? Unlike a musician, I can't make money by giving my inventions away and inventing live in front of an audience.
I reiterate: patents foster innovation by protecting the small inventors, who take the most risks. Most large companies like the status quo and are less likely to develop innovative ideas that could fundamentally change their business.
Stealing an idea is not like other kinds of competition in the marketplace. To make your Starbucks analogy precise, suppose Starbucks opened a store across the street from mine, identical in every way, but with lower prices.
Patentable ideas do not occur instantaneously. The first entrant inevitably invests time, and one year of the full-time attention of a few engineers is worth quite a bit.
I should also point out that Google has a sizable portfolio of patents, which means two things: firstly, smart and successful tech businessmen appreciate the value of patents; and secondly, in keeping with their corporate philosophy, Google does not believe software patents are evil.
The big guys can lock you out of even entering the market using patents. Look at how Ericcson locked out Sendo using 11000 GSM patents.
So one large company restricts another large company from entering the market by patenting ideas related to an existing technology. I'm not seeing how this relates to my original point concerning small inventors.
A world without patents may well see products make it faster to market, and would certainly incur fewer legal costs or patent portfolio companies. Your final sentence claiming a patentless utopia is entirely speculative (and furthermore, I disagree).
But I think you have missed my main point, which is that patents protect small innovators from big companies. Say I come up with a great tech idea that could make a lot of money. What is to prevent a certain company in Redmond, WA from taking my idea and squeezing me out of the marketplace? At least with the patent, I have legal recourse. Even if I don't have enough money to litigate myself, I have leverage to offer contingency fees, etc.
In a world without patents, I expect that most innovation would take place within large companies, and very little would take place in small startups, because the startups would have no way to protect their ideas. This turns the current tech environment on its head -- startups tend to take more risks and innovate, while big companies play it safe. So I think a world without patents would see less innovation.
Giving the sales pitch under an NDA does not protect you if the customer has the ability to develop the technology itself. For example, say you wanted to sell your page ranking algorithm to Google -- a patent would still protect you where the NDA didn't. Most tech startups only exist to sell solutions to large tech companies, so this is an important issue.
And if you want your NDA to contain language that gave you the same protection as a patent, then why not go the whole way?
Patents really *are* great if, like me, you are a researcher. Without them it would be nearly impossible for an independent inventor to get a product to market: either everything about your product would have to be secret (giving you a credibility problem), or you would risk that your product ideas would be stolen whenever you gave a sales pitch.
I firmly believe that without patent protection, very little innovation would occur at startup companies -- which is a shame, because that is where much innovation and technological risk-taking occurs today.
If anyone can come up with a solution other than patents that protects the small inventor against a big corporation, I'd like to hear it.
The power in the word "fascist" is that it is strongly associated with the brutal national socialist regimes in Germany and Italy.
But what you're saying is that most people are fascists if the definition is suitably relaxed. Similarly, you might read a medical textbook and recognize that you are suffering from "symptoms" of various disorders. It is not impossible to meet some of the criteria of being a "fascist" and still support constitutional rights, which are they keys to democratic government.
It's not just Slashdot. Just look at any political blog on the left or right -- there is no debate, just constant character assassination and sarcastic comments.
Rhetoric is dead; the Internet killed it.
... except that I was serious. The human body was not intended for interstellar travel -- we can't hibernate, we need energy in a difficult form to provide in space (food), we need an atmosphere, we are quarrelsome when contained in small spaces for long periods, we don't deal with zero-gee very well, and our 100-year lifespan is far too short. At least some of these problems would be solved with genetic engineering.
In fact you can imagine multiple races of engineered humanoids to fulfil various tasks on the ship. You could have a species of "leaders", one of "workers" to do the menial tasks, one of "engineers" to run the equipment (maybe they could be unusually resistant to radiation), and so on.
Another point is this. I read a survey, published by NASA, of the prospects for interstellar travel using existing and forseeable technology. One conclusion was that sending a ship across the heavens would require the dedicated effort of a large chunk of humanity, and that the required level of committment has thus far only been observed in religious believers. For example, consider that pious tradesmen dedicated their lives to constructing some of the great cathedrals in Europe, with the knowledge that the work would only be completed long after they died. So if I were NASA, I would be seeing what I could learn from the Catholic church.
It was an interlibrary loan request. These requests incur some cost to the library, so they probably didn't want it to be frivolous. And presumably they would want to contact him when the book arrived from the other library so that he could come and pick it up. Don't know why they would need his SSN, but once you know name, address, and phone number, SSN is not much extra loss of privacy.
On the other hand, personal identifying information is needed to get a plain old library card, so that people have some incentive to bring the books back. If you want to keep your tinfoil hat on tightly, you would never check anything out of the library.
Let's not forget that the US government had ample opportunity to stop the Sept 11 attacks even without the PATRIOT act. They failed thanks to ossified bureaucracy, not a lack of police powers.
And it is quite possible to plan a large-scale attack on Americans without setting foot in the United States (for example, this). But thanks to a stubbornly unilateral foreign policy, the United States has trouble getting the international cooperation it needs to protect its citizens.
Thirty years from now, the current administration will be a textbook example of how not to conduct a campaign against terrorism.
The first time he took office, he was appointed by the Supreme Court (a national first, not to mention thoroughly unconstitutional and illegal.
Firstly, the supreme court is the ultimate arbiter of what is legal and constitutional, and what is not. To say that a decision of the supreme court is unconstitutional and illegal is a contradiction.
Secondly, complaints about what happened in 2000 are ridiculous and partisan. If the positions of the principals had been reversed and Gore ended up 100 votes ahead rather than behind, would the left be complaining that his election was illegitimate? Of course not.
Nobody will take the left seriously until they stop whining about 2000. I say this as someone who wishes Gore had won.
There are an awful lot of Wikipedia articles (esp. articles on historical figures) which are heavily based on the 1911 edition of Britannica, an edition that is in the public domain. As an example, I found this one with hardly any effort.
So the question of "which model is better" is not as simple as you make it seem.
run with both feet off the ground at up to 10mph
... which is not easy even for an average person in good physical shape.
For those readers who don't get much exercise, that's a six minute mile pace
Mice don't really love cheese. If you're baiting a trap, it is much better to use peanut butter.
The tools/crossword puzzle thing comes down to opposable thumbs. Pretty hard to do the crossword when you can't hold a pen, or when nobody can hold a hammer to build the headquarters of the New York Times.
Wikipedia is much closer to anarchy than democracy.
Imagine if the federal government worked like Wikipedia. I could log on to wiki.gov and add new laws and edit existing ones at will, but so could anyone else.
It would be pretty cool to see how that would turn out, if you didn't have to live there.
People cite Wikipedia's unreliability almost as a feature, because it insulates Wikipedia from criticism over accuracy, libel, etc.
But if Wikipedia is intended to be so unreliable that it is worthless for debating purposes (which are pretty trivial compared to, say, public safety), then is there any point to having it at all?
Personally, I love Wikipedia and would be very happy if it found a way to be both open and reliable.
Based on the context of the list, I think it's Swedish. "Ram" means "frame" in Swedish, and "sex" is the number six.
I love Swedish. Another fun word in Swedish is "fart", which means "speed" (as in "fartlek", which is an exercise for runners). So in Sweden, schoolchildren can legitimately go around saying "fart" and "sex" all day.
Yes, it is true that companies must, by law, work in their shareholders' interests. However, this does not mean that the stock price must be maximized from quarter to quarter. There is nothing illegal about taking the long view and realizing that long-term profitability is maximized when the public respects your brand.
The "shareholder's interest" argument really means that you can't use the company's money to put a new deck on your house. It is not sinister.
The corollary to your post (and the counter-argument to the grandparent) is that a person planning nefarious acts should send everything in plaintext.
Sending encrypted e-mails, for example, when nobody else in the world is doing so, is like putting a huge sign on your front lawn saying, "INTRIGUING SECRETS ARE GOING ON IN HERE!".
Remember that cryptography is only one link in the information security chain, and that everything has to get back to plaintext eventually. Once the feds are interested in your data, there is nothing stopping them from parking a truck across the street and harvesting your info using TEMPEST.
If you take us out, we will make it very painful to you. N. Korea would absolutely NEVER fire a nuke at the US. Why would they, the standard response to that is for us to nuke them flat, and we can, and we will.
Are you sure? In Europe during the Cold War, senior NATO officers operated on the policy of "use it or lose it" -- if their position was about to be overrun, and their nukes captured, they were expected to launch. Surely this logic would also appeal to North Korean officers.
I never specified that the act of genocide did not include conventional weapons. So you are confirming my argument.
Also, are you saying that because the US is friendly with nuclear-armed nations today, that it will be friendly with them forever?
Your argument is based on the premise that if a few American cities were attacked by nuclear weapons, civilization would collapse and the military would be neutralized. I think this is unlikely. Experience from World War 2 has shown that nations can absorb horrific damage without collapsing, and still retain most of their military strength. Also, if you look here (using 0.02 megatons for a Hiroshima-sized weapon) and compare it to this, you will find that the damage inflicted by Katrina is about the same, or greater.
Container bombs can also be stopped by intelligence. If the government is tipped off to expect a container bomb, the navy can be used to hold and inspect all ships to find the weapon(s). There will be some economic stress, but the attack will have been thwarted.
What I'm saying is that a government that is serious about conducting a nuclear war will use ICBMs in large numbers. For a state (even in the guise of state terrorism) to use a container bomb against a handful of US cities, leaving the military intact, would be suicidal. This is why missile defence is important.