The parent post asserts that Driessen is a paid oil industry lobbyist. NOWHERE in the Motherjones article does it say that. NOWHERE.
The parent posts asserts that Driissen promotes junk science. Again, NOWHERE in the Motherjones article does it say that. NOWHERE.
All the article says is that Driessen is a global warming skeptic, is critical of the environmentalist movement, and participants in events put on by conservative think tanks. It's hard to find anything nefarious or evil in that.
Motherjones is a magazine of the political far left, but even it is honest enough not to say the factually incorrect statements svejk is attributing to it.
Qouting Wikipedia:
The primary advantage of a pebble bed reactor is that it can be designed to be inherently safe. As the reactor gets hotter, the rate of neutron capture by 238U increases, reducing the number of neutrons available to cause nuclear fission.
I think a huge problem for the environmental movement has been that it has ignored economics, ignored costs, and been too quick to ask for heavy handed governt intervention. Sound economics and "conservative" (in American politics sense of the word) policies can be quite beneficial to the environment, such as allowing nuclear power plants. Just for kicks, I'll list a few examples:
Problem: Too much sulfur dioxide is getting into the atmosphere.
Leftist environmentalist solution: Require installation of scrubbers on powerplants when they are upgraded.
What happens?: Powerplants don't upgrade their powerplants. Those that do upgrade then burn cheaper&dirtier coal leaving net pollution even worse.
Conservative environmentalist solution: Implement pollution trading credits.
What happens?: Pollution reduced in the most cost effective way.
Problem: Power production is heavilly dependent on on fossil fuels... long term issue of global warming.
Leftist environmentalist solution: Subsidize wind, solar, geothermal. Campaign against nuclear, hydropower dams, etc...
What happens?: Power prices go up because wind, solar, and geothermal is massively expensive. Also, these alternative energy sources can't produce enough electricity and today we are more reliant on coal than we have been before.
Conservative environmentalist solution: Implement a modest carbon tax and let the market sort the problem out.
What happens?: Unclear because it hasn't been tried! Theory would predict a slow shift towards nuclear, and low carbon emitting technologies.
Problem: A number of species in the United States are close to extinction.
Leftist environmentalist solution: Ban all construction/anything ANYWHERE these species are found.
What happens?: Developers/landowners have huge incentives to follow a policy of "Shoot, Shovel, and Shut-Up" If the federal government finds that a *insertspeciesnamehere* is living on your land, then your land will become worthless. Therefore, if you see a *insertspeciesnamehere* you shoot it, bury it, and don't tell anyone about it. (Don't think this doesn't happen.)
Conservative environmentalist solution:
Pay landowners some fee if *insertspeciesnamehere* is living on their land. They will then have an incentive not to kill it. Also, the government can try to buy the land from the landowner if it is critical habitat for the animal.
What happens?: Species are protected and society as a WHOLE (not just a few unlucky landowners) is paying the cost of protecting the endagered species. This is a more effective and fair solution.
Scenario 1:
US forces raid a house in Afghanistan based on a tipoff that the house contains Al Qaeda members. People inside the house shoot back, killing a US soldier. US forces kill 2 and manage to capture 3 individuals: 2 Pakistanis and a Saudi. A quick search of the house finds that is loaded with guns and grenades. US forces have no idea who in the house was actually doing the shooting. US forces have no evidence that they are members of Al Qaeda other than the tipoff from locals (this would be hearsay testimony and is NOT admissable in a US civillian court). The region is dangerous, and the US forces leave with the prisoners quickly so that more US forces are not killed by snipers.
(1) If the prisoners were uniformed soldiers of an army, it is uncontested that the US could automatically hold them for the duration of the conflict without a trial.
(2) If the US proceeded with a criminal prosectuion in civilian courts, there is no way the three individuals would convicted. There is a lack of evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The three dudes will simply claim that the other two people that the US killed were the only ones doing the shooting.
So what do you do? Do you let them go? (sounds pretty insane to me) Do you hold a military tribunal with a different standard of evidence than a civillian court?
The basic problem is that you are trying to apply civilian law to a warzone and to soldiers fighting in a war. This does not work.
People are either soldiers, or civilians. A civilian attempting to harm or kill people is breaking the law and should be tried by a civilian court.
I agree with that.
The term 'illegal combatant' is illegitimate.
I disagree. Al Qaeda, and members of Al Qaeda, ARE soldiers fighting a war to eliminate the United States, to eliminate secular governments, and to establish an Islamic caliphate across the entire world under Islamic religious law. (Yes it is crazy, but that is explicitly what they are fighting for). Al Qaeda is a military organization under any sense of the word.
However, the Geneva Conventions do NOT apply because Al Qaeda is not under the control of a nation state. It is outside the international system of nation states. Protections that are granted to the agents of nation states do NOT apply to Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda is not an agent of a nation state.
What processes and rights should be granted to "illegal combatants" or alleged "illegal combatants" is a source of significant debate, proposed legislation, and litigation in the United States. The process is slowly, very slowly sorting itself out.
I think the basic problem is that if the US army picks up a non-Afghani with an AK47 in Afghanistan, and the group of people he was with were just firing at U.S. troops and they weren't members of the Taliban, then what do you do with him? You don't want to release him (he and/or the people with were just shooting at US soldiers!!) But you aren't going to get a conviction in any civilian court. You have no proof that HE specifically actually shot at US troops. To prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt under the standards of a civilian court, the FBI would have to go in, search the entire area for bullets and shell casings, fingerprint the AK47 and all weapons in the area, check which weapons were fired, test if the weapons were fired recently, do ballistic tests to match weapons with bullets, and do this all with a careful paper trail so it will withstand challenges of sloppiness by the defense. This is NOT POSSIBLE in a warzone. If this were a normal war between nation states, you could automatically hold this guy until the war was over without any legal proceeding. However, this war has no clear ending, and this guy isn't a soldier for the Taliban (I assumed he's non-Afghani and doesn't have Taliban id or whatever the Taliban has). I think this is quite a difficult problem.
In any case, McKinnon doesn't even come close to fitting ANY possible criteria for being declared an illegal combatant, and so for the purposes of the McKinnon computer hacking case, all the Guantanamo stuff is just not relevant.
There is absolutely no chance McKinnon will end up in Guantanamo.
(1) He is not a member of Al Qaeda.
(2) He has never been a member of Al Qaeda.
(3) He has not provided material support to Al Qaeda.
(4) He was not captured on a battlefield.
(5) He has not committed an act of war against the United States.
(**6**) HE IS NOT AN ILLEGAL COMBATANT (an individual who has engaged in acts of war against the United States and violated the laws of war).
To be held in Guantanamo, an individual MUST be an illegal combatant (violated the laws of war). There is no chance McKinnon falls under this category.
Furthermore, the US government has explicitly stipulated that he will be tried under civilian courts.
McKinnon's lawyers are simply doing their job and advancing any claim against extradition they can think of, but the argument is completely invalid.
I think the basic issue is that price of a domain name is significantly below the market value. As I understand it, there are therefore huge incentives for Mr.DomainCamper to try to grab coke.eu for $10 and try to resell it to Coca Cola for $10 billion. There are also huge incentives for Coca Cola to create their own registrar company and get coke.eu before Mr.DomainCamper does. (btw, I know nothing about coke.eu, I picked it at random.)
A more efficient way to initially allocate major domain names might be to run an auction.
Currently, domain names are allocated according to the law of capture. He/she who first claims the domain name and pays a nominal fee has rights to the name. It IS like a land grab where you can acquire the rights to land by just showing up, except it's even worse because to grab land in the American West you generally had to show up and use it.
My rough idea:
(1) Auction period will last one month
(2) At the end of the auction period, domain names that were bid on will go to the highest bidder. (As long as bid is above the minimum bid.)
(3) After the auction ends, domain names will be allocated under the old retarded process
This doesn't solve all domain name problems, but it would get popular domain names to the people/companies that value the name the most.
I like open formats, but REQUIRING them would be a disaster.
Does Microsoft Word file formats qualify as an "open format?"
Does Adobe Photoshop file qualify as an "open format?"
Does Quark Express document file qualify as an "open format?"
Does an Oracle database count as an "open format?"
As far as I can see, all this proposal would do is to:
(1) Stop the state government from using a TREMENDOUS amount of useful software. (2) Incur insane compliance costs when trying to get employees not to save in the default format. (These training sessions would be comically dumb... "No you can't click 'save', you must click 'save as' and select a format on this approved list...")
As far as I can tell, the costs (including opportunity cost) would be gargantuan and the benefit insanely trivial.
And just one OpenOffice/Microsoft anecdote. I have a couple of spreedsheets with tens of thousands of cells and thousands of formulas. Open Office running on my linux box has absolutely choked (speed = 0) trying to handle it, while if I boot into windows, Microsoft Excel is responsive and can compute it in a few seconds. In my experience, OpenOffice works quite well, but I've hit a number of cases where I need Excel (hehe, or Matlab)
The technology is there (PGP etc.. etc...) but as far as I can tell, hardly anyone besides comp security lists use it.
If you visit a website and initiate an SSL session, the public-private key cryptography (along with the public root certificates imbedded in your browser) will verify that the website you're visiting is really who they say they are. (Or at least that Verisign thinks they are legit.)
I don't see why companies don't make a similar effort to cryptographically authenticate their e-mail. People use PGP for security advisories etc......, but I don't understand why all e-mail coming from my bank, coming from Paypal etc... shouldn't be signed.
If there was a portion of your e-mail window at the bottom right hand of your screen that said stuff like:
"This is an authentic e-mail from BankOfBlanBlah signed on 3/31/06 at 3:52PM"
or
"This is an unsigned e-mail. It is possible that this e-mail is fraudulent."
or
"This e-mail has an incorrect signature. It is highly possible that its contents are fraudulent."
My rough guess that e-mail authentication isn't done because (1) programmers are lazy and sending plain text is easier to program and (2) The way you do e-mail auth in e-mail clients is all different and a huge mess from a usability standpoint.
It might put at least a dent in some of this phishing stuff if people expected all e-mail from e-bay, paypal, their bank, amazon etc... to be signed.
I was just recently at a conference with several venture capital guys doing work on nano-technology. Those guys are pouring money into nano-tech and I doubt they would be doing that if they didn't have patents.
I'm not saying the patent system doesn't have problems, but that patents DO play an extremely important role in creating the incentives to develop technology and to bring certain technologies to market. Even after a researcher/inventor has a completely working prototype, I think most people underestimate the vast amount of resources required to setup a company, produce a product efficiently, and actually sell the goddamn thing (especially something difficult to manufacture like nano-tech). Patents play a critical role in giving business people and companies the incentives to make that happen. Nanomaterials is probably the furthest along commercially; Quite a few nano material companies exist and several already have commercial products. I think we'd be much further back if not for the strong IP system in the US.
If I had mod points I would have modded the parent post up! (I'd also wager some biased moderator will mod it as troll because the post is pro-IP, but hopefully I'm wrong.)
A mainstream news organization will have multiple articles on the same "story" over time.
If there is new information, if the story has new developments, if the context of the story has changed, then an article is not a dupe. It's a new article, with new information, on the same story.
This is to intelligence as open source is to programming. Anyone on the Internet can go in and do analysis based upon these original documents. I would have thought Slashdot people would love something like this.
Individuals are looking too. Here is a link from an Iraq blogger who blogs from Baghdad. This document suggests that members of Al Qaeda met with Iraqi intelligence.
I just find it really cool that enterprising people can go in and look at ORIGINAL documents, and that we don't have to purely rely on what the government says they say. Pro-war, anti-war, historians, anyone can go in and look at what was going on inside Iraq.
Exactlty how important is CATO in the scheme of things. Will this report reach the ears of politicians / mass media, or will it go largely unnoticed except by slashdot? I don't think we are going to see the DMCA revoked unless the public cares enough to put pressure on their representatives, and honestly the public isn't informed enough to care. So will this report help mobize people or are they just preaching to the choir?
They are THE libertarian think tank and one of the top think tanks in the nation. (Some other top think tanks are Hoover Institution, Heritage, AEI, and Brookings)
People on the more libertarian side of the Republican party will take it seriously. Personally, I love CATO, but many people will dismiss anything CATO does out of hand because they are libertarian. They are for legalization of drugs, private accounts for Social Security, Health Savings Accounts, school vouchers, repeal of Health Information Privacy Act, etc...
As I said, they are read and respected, but libertarians and people sympathetic to more libertarian ideas are (unfortunately IMHO) a small percentage of congress and the population.
Non-profit foundations that develop open source are already tax deductible.
I hate to be the one pouring cold water on this proposal, but it sounds more like an abusable deduction that would allow any programmer to write off 20% of all their computer equipment purchases. If I wanted to abuse the system, couldn't I just write a hello world program, say I spent 2 monthes writing it, throw it on my website, and claim a fat deduction on everything? Would the government have to get in the business of deciding what's worthwhile open source?
Heck, I'm a programmer so this proposal is probably good for me, but stuff like this is why the complete Interal Revenue Code is 3.4 million words, literally 7500 pages long, and filled with loopholes.
You've hit upon the fundamental tension between (1) incentives for developing new ideas (2) efficiently using all currently known information
Information, especially in today's Internet age, has a distribution cost of close to 0. The cost of giving information to 1 additional person (marginal cost) is close to 0 and therefore the economically efficient price is close to 0. To efficiently distribute CURRENTLY KNOWN information, the price should be close to 0.
BUT, if the price for all information were 0, then there would be no incentives to create new ideas. There would be no incentive to develop AIDS drugs etc... To create incentives to create new ideas, the price of information has to go above 0, but any price above 0 leads to less dissemination of information that we would like.
As I understand it, this is a fundamental problem with no solution. I think the goal of a patent/copyright system isn't to create a perfect system (which is impossible) but to create a workable system that strikes a reasonable balance between disseminating information and creating new information.
**Warning: the following is an impossible solution** This is totally theoretical, but if you were some kind of all seeing god of pricing, you could charge different people different prices for the same information. If Alex valued a new mp3 from SuperAwesomeBand at $0.50 I would charge him $0.45 or something like that. If Bob valued the same mp3 at $0.02, I would charge him $0.01 If it were possible to know how much each person valued a piece of information, then you could practice price discrimination and you would have efficient creation of new information and efficient dissemination of information. But practicing price discrimination like that is impossible.
And unfortunately it appears to be the prevailing Slashdot logic.... The fallacious argument reduces to this:
(1) SOME patents are bad patents (they patent obvious and/or previously innovated ideas)
(2) Therefore ALL patents are bad and our society shouldn't have patents
(1) is true. (2) is false. (2) does not follow from (1). The hostility to IP on slashdot really amazes me, especially considering all the stuff we would not have if it were not for patents:
AIDs drugs would never have been developed if after billions of dollars spent on research, the drug would instantly be copied by generics and sold for zilch. For example Gilead Sciences was founded in 1987 and burned investor money for a decade before getting its AIDS drug approved. If they couldn't sell it for a high price, investors would stop making expensive long term investments in biotech.
If some invention costs $X to develop, it is ILLOGICAL to invent it if the inventing person/company cannot earn more than $X from the invention. If some knockoff company can come in and steal the idea, then the inventing company will NOT earn $X. This is especially true if the development cost is high and the distribution cost is low. Knockoff companies will compete and drive the product's price close to the cost of manufacturing the product, and there will be no way to recoup development costs.
I agree there needs to be more separating the wheat from the chaffe in patents, but the blanket hostility to patents I so often see here is logically unsound and in the real world, will literally lead to disease, death, and worse lives for everyone.
Cool science! But there's no landfill problem
on
Bacteria Eat Styrofoam
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Don't get me wrong, I think the science here is really awesome!
But on a public policy side, there's no landfill shortage at all.
Check out this article from the New York Times magazine, "Recycling is Garbage" by John Tierney. From the article:
A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side.
This doesn't seem a huge imposition in a country the size of America. The garbage would occupy only 5 percent of the area needed for the national array of solar panels proposed by environmentalists. The millennial landfill would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the range land now available for grazing in the continental United States. And if it still pains you to think of depriving posterity of that 35-mile square, remember that the loss will be only temporary. Eventually, like previous landfills, the mounds of trash will be covered with grass and become a minuscule addition to the nation's 150,000 square miles of parkland.
I'll name one: the creation of the Secret Service Uniform Division
You're WRONG. The Patriot did NOT create this. The Secret Service Uniformed division was created in 1860. It is uniformed officers that protect the White House etc... Read a history here
I think this simply proves my point. Almost everybody who is posting all these crazy diatribes against the Patriot Act has NO FACTS and no clue what he/she is talking about.
We have a new police force, this for the homeland security department. They have the power to arrest and detain anyone seen as a threat to the United States of America. That's an awfull lot of power, don't you think?
There isn't a new police force. You're wrong.
And where in the bill does it say, "They have the power to arrest and detain anyone seen as a threat to the United States of America" ?????? Again, this is simply not true.
I don't mind people who disagree with me, but I can't stand people who are dishonest and don't have their facts right. Furthermore, slashdot moderators should do a better job and maybe take 10 seconds to check the accuracy of a post before they mod something to informative.
Why don't you cite a few specific provisions you find objectionable and why.
I'm rather tired of people going nuts over the Patriot Act when their only source for information is the Daily Show with John Stewart. To have an informed opinion, do at least some of the following: (1) Read the bill (2) Read analysis by law PROFESSORS (not tv-journalists) (3) Read analysis by lawyers nationally regarded as experts.
I bet 98% of people posting here can't name two provisions in the Patriot Act.
"The ACLU said that most of the voluminous Patriot Act is actually unobjectionable from a civil liberties point of view and added that the law makes important changes that give law enforcement agents the tools they need to protect against terrorist attacks."
I think most people going hysterical actually have not read up on what the Patriot Act does in a SERIOUS and ACADEMIC way. Before passing judgement, I recommend you do.
This site has a tremendous amount of quality, specific information. And for those too lazy to read, there's some interesting video at c-span at this link: rtsp://cspanrm.fplive.net/cspan/project/ter/ter071 805_discourse.rm Go about 49 minutes in and listen to Stuart Taylor, a fellow at the Brookings Institute (yes, a left of center policy think tank).
Once you start reading with an open mind, I think that most people will find that extending the Patriot Act provisions is quite a good idea, and that maybe this is why it passed in the Senate 89-10.
A monopoly is a persistent market situation where there is only ONE provider of a product or service.
Under this definition, Intel isn't even close to a monopoly. I thought this would be obvious to everyone but apparently it isn't.
To list a few reasons why:
I can buy x86 chips from Intel, AMD, or Transmeta. I can buy servers and desktops from Gateway with AMD chips, I can buy servers from SUN with Sparc chips, I can buy servers from IBM with PowerPC chips. I can buy laptops with Transmeta chips. I can buy desktops and laptops from Apple with PowerPC chips. There are about a billion Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers.
Currently I own 2 laptops and 3 desktop machines, and only 1 of these has an Intel chip inside.
Slashdot Mirror
The parent posts asserts that Driissen promotes junk science. Again, NOWHERE in the Motherjones article does it say that. NOWHERE.
All the article says is that Driessen is a global warming skeptic, is critical of the environmentalist movement, and participants in events put on by conservative think tanks. It's hard to find anything nefarious or evil in that.
Motherjones is a magazine of the political far left, but even it is honest enough not to say the factually incorrect statements svejk is attributing to it.
Qouting Wikipedia: The primary advantage of a pebble bed reactor is that it can be designed to be inherently safe. As the reactor gets hotter, the rate of neutron capture by 238U increases, reducing the number of neutrons available to cause nuclear fission.
Problem: Too much sulfur dioxide is getting into the atmosphere.
Leftist environmentalist solution: Require installation of scrubbers on powerplants when they are upgraded.
What happens?: Powerplants don't upgrade their powerplants. Those that do upgrade then burn cheaper&dirtier coal leaving net pollution even worse.
Conservative environmentalist solution: Implement pollution trading credits.
What happens?: Pollution reduced in the most cost effective way.
Problem: Power production is heavilly dependent on on fossil fuels... long term issue of global warming.
Leftist environmentalist solution: Subsidize wind, solar, geothermal. Campaign against nuclear, hydropower dams, etc...
What happens?: Power prices go up because wind, solar, and geothermal is massively expensive. Also, these alternative energy sources can't produce enough electricity and today we are more reliant on coal than we have been before.
Conservative environmentalist solution: Implement a modest carbon tax and let the market sort the problem out.
What happens?: Unclear because it hasn't been tried! Theory would predict a slow shift towards nuclear, and low carbon emitting technologies.
Problem: A number of species in the United States are close to extinction.
Leftist environmentalist solution: Ban all construction/anything ANYWHERE these species are found.
What happens?: Developers/landowners have huge incentives to follow a policy of "Shoot, Shovel, and Shut-Up" If the federal government finds that a *insertspeciesnamehere* is living on your land, then your land will become worthless. Therefore, if you see a *insertspeciesnamehere* you shoot it, bury it, and don't tell anyone about it. (Don't think this doesn't happen.)
Conservative environmentalist solution:
Pay landowners some fee if *insertspeciesnamehere* is living on their land. They will then have an incentive not to kill it. Also, the government can try to buy the land from the landowner if it is critical habitat for the animal.
What happens?: Species are protected and society as a WHOLE (not just a few unlucky landowners) is paying the cost of protecting the endagered species. This is a more effective and fair solution.
Why should this surprise anyone?
US forces raid a house in Afghanistan based on a tipoff that the house contains Al Qaeda members. People inside the house shoot back, killing a US soldier. US forces kill 2 and manage to capture 3 individuals: 2 Pakistanis and a Saudi. A quick search of the house finds that is loaded with guns and grenades. US forces have no idea who in the house was actually doing the shooting. US forces have no evidence that they are members of Al Qaeda other than the tipoff from locals (this would be hearsay testimony and is NOT admissable in a US civillian court). The region is dangerous, and the US forces leave with the prisoners quickly so that more US forces are not killed by snipers.
(1) If the prisoners were uniformed soldiers of an army, it is uncontested that the US could automatically hold them for the duration of the conflict without a trial.
(2) If the US proceeded with a criminal prosectuion in civilian courts, there is no way the three individuals would convicted. There is a lack of evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The three dudes will simply claim that the other two people that the US killed were the only ones doing the shooting.
So what do you do? Do you let them go? (sounds pretty insane to me) Do you hold a military tribunal with a different standard of evidence than a civillian court?
The basic problem is that you are trying to apply civilian law to a warzone and to soldiers fighting in a war. This does not work.
I agree with that.
The term 'illegal combatant' is illegitimate.
I disagree.
Al Qaeda, and members of Al Qaeda, ARE soldiers fighting a war to eliminate the United States, to eliminate secular governments, and to establish an Islamic caliphate across the entire world under Islamic religious law. (Yes it is crazy, but that is explicitly what they are fighting for). Al Qaeda is a military organization under any sense of the word.
However, the Geneva Conventions do NOT apply because Al Qaeda is not under the control of a nation state. It is outside the international system of nation states. Protections that are granted to the agents of nation states do NOT apply to Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda is not an agent of a nation state.
What processes and rights should be granted to "illegal combatants" or alleged "illegal combatants" is a source of significant debate, proposed legislation, and litigation in the United States. The process is slowly, very slowly sorting itself out.
I think the basic problem is that if the US army picks up a non-Afghani with an AK47 in Afghanistan, and the group of people he was with were just firing at U.S. troops and they weren't members of the Taliban, then what do you do with him? You don't want to release him (he and/or the people with were just shooting at US soldiers!!) But you aren't going to get a conviction in any civilian court. You have no proof that HE specifically actually shot at US troops. To prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt under the standards of a civilian court, the FBI would have to go in, search the entire area for bullets and shell casings, fingerprint the AK47 and all weapons in the area, check which weapons were fired, test if the weapons were fired recently, do ballistic tests to match weapons with bullets, and do this all with a careful paper trail so it will withstand challenges of sloppiness by the defense. This is NOT POSSIBLE in a warzone. If this were a normal war between nation states, you could automatically hold this guy until the war was over without any legal proceeding. However, this war has no clear ending, and this guy isn't a soldier for the Taliban (I assumed he's non-Afghani and doesn't have Taliban id or whatever the Taliban has). I think this is quite a difficult problem.
In any case, McKinnon doesn't even come close to fitting ANY possible criteria for being declared an illegal combatant, and so for the purposes of the McKinnon computer hacking case, all the Guantanamo stuff is just not relevant.
(1) He is not a member of Al Qaeda.
(2) He has never been a member of Al Qaeda.
(3) He has not provided material support to Al Qaeda.
(4) He was not captured on a battlefield.
(5) He has not committed an act of war against the United States.
(**6**) HE IS NOT AN ILLEGAL COMBATANT (an individual who has engaged in acts of war against the United States and violated the laws of war).
To be held in Guantanamo, an individual MUST be an illegal combatant (violated the laws of war). There is no chance McKinnon falls under this category.
Furthermore, the US government has explicitly stipulated that he will be tried under civilian courts.
McKinnon's lawyers are simply doing their job and advancing any claim against extradition they can think of, but the argument is completely invalid.
Then there was the i craze. iPod,iMac,ivillage.com, BMW's iDrive, ....
Maybe "open" is the new cool prefix to use. I'm sure anyday now someone will be selling OpenPods, sending openMail...
A more efficient way to initially allocate major domain names might be to run an auction.
Currently, domain names are allocated according to the law of capture. He/she who first claims the domain name and pays a nominal fee has rights to the name. It IS like a land grab where you can acquire the rights to land by just showing up, except it's even worse because to grab land in the American West you generally had to show up and use it.
My rough idea:
(1) Auction period will last one month
(2) At the end of the auction period, domain names that were bid on will go to the highest bidder. (As long as bid is above the minimum bid.) (3) After the auction ends, domain names will be allocated under the old retarded process
This doesn't solve all domain name problems, but it would get popular domain names to the people/companies that value the name the most.
Does Microsoft Word file formats qualify as an "open format?"
Does Adobe Photoshop file qualify as an "open format?"
Does Quark Express document file qualify as an "open format?"
Does an Oracle database count as an "open format?"
As far as I can see, all this proposal would do is to:
(1) Stop the state government from using a TREMENDOUS amount of useful software.
(2) Incur insane compliance costs when trying to get employees not to save in the default format. (These training sessions would be comically dumb... "No you can't click 'save', you must click 'save as' and select a format on this approved list...")
As far as I can tell, the costs (including opportunity cost) would be gargantuan and the benefit insanely trivial.
And just one OpenOffice/Microsoft anecdote. I have a couple of spreedsheets with tens of thousands of cells and thousands of formulas. Open Office running on my linux box has absolutely choked (speed = 0) trying to handle it, while if I boot into windows, Microsoft Excel is responsive and can compute it in a few seconds. In my experience, OpenOffice works quite well, but I've hit a number of cases where I need Excel (hehe, or Matlab)
I guess that's another way to get an account with good karma!
If you visit a website and initiate an SSL session, the public-private key cryptography (along with the public root certificates imbedded in your browser) will verify that the website you're visiting is really who they say they are. (Or at least that Verisign thinks they are legit.)
I don't see why companies don't make a similar effort to cryptographically authenticate their e-mail. People use PGP for security advisories etc......, but I don't understand why all e-mail coming from my bank, coming from Paypal etc... shouldn't be signed.
If there was a portion of your e-mail window at the bottom right hand of your screen that said stuff like:
"This is an authentic e-mail from BankOfBlanBlah signed on 3/31/06 at 3:52PM" or "This is an unsigned e-mail. It is possible that this e-mail is fraudulent." or "This e-mail has an incorrect signature. It is highly possible that its contents are fraudulent."
My rough guess that e-mail authentication isn't done because (1) programmers are lazy and sending plain text is easier to program and (2) The way you do e-mail auth in e-mail clients is all different and a huge mess from a usability standpoint.
It might put at least a dent in some of this phishing stuff if people expected all e-mail from e-bay, paypal, their bank, amazon etc... to be signed.
I'm not saying the patent system doesn't have problems, but that patents DO play an extremely important role in creating the incentives to develop technology and to bring certain technologies to market. Even after a researcher/inventor has a completely working prototype, I think most people underestimate the vast amount of resources required to setup a company, produce a product efficiently, and actually sell the goddamn thing (especially something difficult to manufacture like nano-tech). Patents play a critical role in giving business people and companies the incentives to make that happen. Nanomaterials is probably the furthest along commercially; Quite a few nano material companies exist and several already have commercial products. I think we'd be much further back if not for the strong IP system in the US.
If I had mod points I would have modded the parent post up! (I'd also wager some biased moderator will mod it as troll because the post is pro-IP, but hopefully I'm wrong.)
If there is new information, if the story has new developments, if the context of the story has changed, then an article is not a dupe. It's a new article, with new information, on the same story.
And INTERESTING stuff has come out. For example, ABC News found documents that seem to show that the Russian ambassador gave the US war plans to Iraq.
Individuals are looking too. Here is a link from an Iraq blogger who blogs from Baghdad. This document suggests that members of Al Qaeda met with Iraqi intelligence.
I just find it really cool that enterprising people can go in and look at ORIGINAL documents, and that we don't have to purely rely on what the government says they say. Pro-war, anti-war, historians, anyone can go in and look at what was going on inside Iraq.
They are THE libertarian think tank and one of the top think tanks in the nation. (Some other top think tanks are Hoover Institution, Heritage, AEI, and Brookings)
People on the more libertarian side of the Republican party will take it seriously. Personally, I love CATO, but many people will dismiss anything CATO does out of hand because they are libertarian. They are for legalization of drugs, private accounts for Social Security, Health Savings Accounts, school vouchers, repeal of Health Information Privacy Act, etc...
As I said, they are read and respected, but libertarians and people sympathetic to more libertarian ideas are (unfortunately IMHO) a small percentage of congress and the population.
I hate to be the one pouring cold water on this proposal, but it sounds more like an abusable deduction that would allow any programmer to write off 20% of all their computer equipment purchases. If I wanted to abuse the system, couldn't I just write a hello world program, say I spent 2 monthes writing it, throw it on my website, and claim a fat deduction on everything? Would the government have to get in the business of deciding what's worthwhile open source?
Heck, I'm a programmer so this proposal is probably good for me, but stuff like this is why the complete Interal Revenue Code is 3.4 million words, literally 7500 pages long, and filled with loopholes.
Directly comments on the theme of the article
Is 100% factualy accurate
Is logically sound
I guess anyone who doesn't buy the anti-IP hype gets modded as a troll. I think that's a shame.
Information, especially in today's Internet age, has a distribution cost of close to 0. The cost of giving information to 1 additional person (marginal cost) is close to 0 and therefore the economically efficient price is close to 0. To efficiently distribute CURRENTLY KNOWN information, the price should be close to 0.
BUT, if the price for all information were 0, then there would be no incentives to create new ideas. There would be no incentive to develop AIDS drugs etc... To create incentives to create new ideas, the price of information has to go above 0, but any price above 0 leads to less dissemination of information that we would like.
As I understand it, this is a fundamental problem with no solution. I think the goal of a patent/copyright system isn't to create a perfect system (which is impossible) but to create a workable system that strikes a reasonable balance between disseminating information and creating new information.
**Warning: the following is an impossible solution** This is totally theoretical, but if you were some kind of all seeing god of pricing, you could charge different people different prices for the same information. If Alex valued a new mp3 from SuperAwesomeBand at $0.50 I would charge him $0.45 or something like that. If Bob valued the same mp3 at $0.02, I would charge him $0.01 If it were possible to know how much each person valued a piece of information, then you could practice price discrimination and you would have efficient creation of new information and efficient dissemination of information. But practicing price discrimination like that is impossible.
(1) SOME patents are bad patents (they patent obvious and/or previously innovated ideas)
(2) Therefore ALL patents are bad and our society shouldn't have patents
(1) is true. (2) is false. (2) does not follow from (1). The hostility to IP on slashdot really amazes me, especially considering all the stuff we would not have if it were not for patents:
AIDs drugs would never have been developed if after billions of dollars spent on research, the drug would instantly be copied by generics and sold for zilch. For example Gilead Sciences was founded in 1987 and burned investor money for a decade before getting its AIDS drug approved. If they couldn't sell it for a high price, investors would stop making expensive long term investments in biotech.
If some invention costs $X to develop, it is ILLOGICAL to invent it if the inventing person/company cannot earn more than $X from the invention. If some knockoff company can come in and steal the idea, then the inventing company will NOT earn $X. This is especially true if the development cost is high and the distribution cost is low. Knockoff companies will compete and drive the product's price close to the cost of manufacturing the product, and there will be no way to recoup development costs.
I agree there needs to be more separating the wheat from the chaffe in patents, but the blanket hostility to patents I so often see here is logically unsound and in the real world, will literally lead to disease, death, and worse lives for everyone.
But on a public policy side, there's no landfill shortage at all.
Check out this article from the New York Times magazine, "Recycling is Garbage" by John Tierney. From the article:
A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side.
This doesn't seem a huge imposition in a country the size of America. The garbage would occupy only 5 percent of the area needed for the national array of solar panels proposed by environmentalists. The millennial landfill would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the range land now available for grazing in the continental United States. And if it still pains you to think of depriving posterity of that 35-mile square, remember that the loss will be only temporary. Eventually, like previous landfills, the mounds of trash will be covered with grass and become a minuscule addition to the nation's 150,000 square miles of parkland.
It appears someone archived it here.... http://www.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/gar bage.html
And there's the actual nytimes page... http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/063096- tierney-magazine.html
(If you get to this link from John Tierney's nytimes columnist page, they give you this article for free, but if you follow any other link, they try to charge you. weird!)
You're WRONG. The Patriot did NOT create this. The Secret Service Uniformed division was created in 1860. It is uniformed officers that protect the White House etc... Read a history here
I think this simply proves my point. Almost everybody who is posting all these crazy diatribes against the Patriot Act has NO FACTS and no clue what he/she is talking about.
We have a new police force, this for the homeland security department. They have the power to arrest and detain anyone seen as a threat to the United States of America. That's an awfull lot of power, don't you think?
There isn't a new police force.
You're wrong. And where in the bill does it say, "They have the power to arrest and detain anyone seen as a threat to the United States of America" ?????? Again, this is simply not true.
I don't mind people who disagree with me, but I can't stand people who are dishonest and don't have their facts right. Furthermore, slashdot moderators should do a better job and maybe take 10 seconds to check the accuracy of a post before they mod something to informative.
I'm rather tired of people going nuts over the Patriot Act when their only source for information is the Daily Show with John Stewart. To have an informed opinion, do at least some of the following:
(1) Read the bill
(2) Read analysis by law PROFESSORS (not tv-journalists)
(3) Read analysis by lawyers nationally regarded as experts.
I bet 98% of people posting here can't name two provisions in the Patriot Act.
------ ACLU press release available here
I think most people going hysterical actually have not read up on what the Patriot Act does in a SERIOUS and ACADEMIC way. Before passing judgement, I recommend you do.
This site has a tremendous amount of quality, specific information. And for those too lazy to read, there's some interesting video at c-span at this link: rtsp://cspanrm.fplive.net/cspan/project/ter/ter071 805_discourse.rm Go about 49 minutes in and listen to Stuart Taylor, a fellow at the Brookings Institute (yes, a left of center policy think tank).
Once you start reading with an open mind, I think that most people will find that extending the Patriot Act provisions is quite a good idea, and that maybe this is why it passed in the Senate 89-10.
Under this definition, Intel isn't even close to a monopoly. I thought this would be obvious to everyone but apparently it isn't.
To list a few reasons why: I can buy x86 chips from Intel, AMD, or Transmeta. I can buy servers and desktops from Gateway with AMD chips, I can buy servers from SUN with Sparc chips, I can buy servers from IBM with PowerPC chips. I can buy laptops with Transmeta chips. I can buy desktops and laptops from Apple with PowerPC chips. There are about a billion Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers.
Currently I own 2 laptops and 3 desktop machines, and only 1 of these has an Intel chip inside.
So no, Intel isn't even close to a monopoly.