On casual inspection, your suitcase looks like a really *big* bomb.
And what freedom is at risk? She was arrested and charged with a crime because someone stupidly thought her nametag "might be a bomb". Is anything now a crime if any other person thinks something you have could be a bomb? It is clear to me that anything might be a bomb, so please surrender yourself at the nearest police station and bring all your posessions for confiscation as "hoax devices".
If someone is going to take a bomb to the airport, would it look like her sweatshirt or your carry-on? If she should be apprehended, anyone with a briefcase should be shot. I mean, OMG, who knows what could be in there! You're just carrying stuff around *concealed* at the *airport*, what are you thinking!?!
It was founded as a co-op, and continues to call itself one, and to refer to the holders of it's rebate-cards as "members" (but so does my bike shop). In day-to-day operations, it has little in common with any other co-op I've been involved with. In corporate governance it is definitely not a co-op, but bastardized freak of a thing that could only exist as a sub-entity in the context of the org-chart monstrosity of a large university (or two).
Yes, I understand. Your argument depends on the assumption the interest paid on government debt is not enough to compensate for inflation and still provide a positive return. That assumption is false. Moreover, it's falseness is amongst the most trivially verified facts about the US economy you could choose. Even beginning to research any topic somewhat related to what you are discussing would reveal such basic information as a matter of course.
As a mathematician of sorts, I'll readily agree that everything is worthwhile is really just math.
But as far as US patent law goes, facts are not patentable, methods are. The difference is certainly fuzzy in many areas. My point is, if we're discussing whether instructions for how to do something should be patentable, why does it matter if they are instructions for how to perform some complex transformation on some data, or instructions for how to build a device that will extract the seeds from cotton?
"Practically and morally however, the two actions are equivalent."
No, they are not. Expanding the money supply does not create one dime that the government gets to spend, nor reduce the debt at all.
Borrowing money gets the government money to spend, but it doesn't magically create it. They owe it to someone, whether me or the government of China. The US Government owes me some of the debt, and I expect it to be repaid, with interest greater than the rate of inflation. When people do not have this expectation, they will stop lending the US Government money.
Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.
If algorithms should not be patentable, neither should anything else.
If you just want to abolish patents entirely, I see some potential problems with that that would need to be addressed, but it's an arguable position. If you think inventions that manipulate stuff deserve protection, but not ones that manipulate data do not, I don't buy the distinction. All patents are essentially for algorithms. Eli Whitney's patent protected not a particular instance of the device, but the idea of how to construct a cotton gin.
"Printing money" (by which I assume you mean expanding the money supply) does not cover the budget deficit, as the government does not get the money. It is widely understood to encourage inflation, though it is not itself inflation as your "i.e." would imply. We borrow money to cover the budget deficit, not print it.
The trade deficit is a big problem, with complex, hard to summarize causes.
The budget deficit (and resulting national debt) is a big problem, with straight a forward, easily summarized cause: the election of idiots, particularly the last 3 Republican ones.
Note that the store in the article is the Harvard Coop. It is certainly frequented by more than just Harvard students, but is not actually a co-op: it is run by B&N.
Who would buy new wrenches? We'd just get rid of half of them and have less confusion and more space in our toolboxes. You can't have a decently competent shop without metric tools now anyway.
"There are times when its not exactly bad to have one entity, whether it be a company or an individual, who puts an end to the bickering, makes a decision, sets the direction, imperfect though it may be, and makes everyone pull in the same direction."
Definitely, except I'd say those times are all the time. The processes of gathering input and making decisions may look different in open source vs. proprietary devlopment, but both can support either design-by-committee or benevolent-dictators. The quality of the software will frequently depend much more on the decision-making methodology than the open/closed nature of the code. This goes triple for UI design.
The Afghans did not take over Russia, nor does it appear likely the Iraqis will conquer the US. "Beating" someone in the sense of making them decide to go home because it's not worth fighting you is one thing, and it is something that guerrilla warfare against a far better armed foe can do. There are plenty of examples (The American Revolution, Vietnam, etc.).
"Beating" someone when that means utterly deposing them, and taking over the country that is their home; that is something different. For that you'll want equivalent armament and/or overwhelming popular support.
From what I can tell of the Iranian opposition, they have limited armament, and hard to measure (but somewhere less than overwhelming) popular support.
Well, you'd have to buy some deforested land to plant them on, so not very many; and planting trees is mostly a stupid way to help the environment anyway. If there's enough incentive to cut trees down, you won't keep up by planting them, and if there isn't, they'll plant themselves. I consider myself an "environmental type" because when I spend money on things that benefit me, I try to do it in ways that don't have a negative impact on shared resources. Planting trees does little for the environment, and squat for me.
"The COBE data doesn't line up with expectations."
Are you kidding? Maybe we're not speaking of the same thing? When I say "the COBE data" I should point out I specifically mean the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation curve measured by the FIRAS instrument, which the big-bang theory predicted should be the spectral curve of a 2.7K black body. If there is a more stunningly perfect fit between a theoretical prediction and experimental data in the history of science, I should like to hear of it.
And as an aside, of course nothing predicted dark matter. Dark matter is a theory. Nothing predicts theories. Theories predict data.
Based on the astro-physicists I have known, you are incorrect. They have all absolutely delighted in kicking around whatever odd-ball cosmology theory someone could come up with to figure out how it fails. Which is generally not too hard as there is currently a lot of different data that fits with the standard model, and an alternative has to explain all that.
All three of your links go to the same web site, which spends most of it's time talking about ways the standard model is incomplete, as opposed to giving any sort of quick summary of what their theory claims. Not to be dismissive, but this is a bit of a red flag.
In any case, it is silly to complain nobody is spending time and money trying to falsify a particular theory just because someone else thought it up; give us some reason to think it's worthwhile. While there are some rather gaping holes the standard model cannot explain, people like it because it has made stunningly accurate predictions (e.g. the COBE data).
The question for any new theory then is "What does it predict that is different than what the standard model does?" People ridicule String Theory because (in the opinion of the ridiculers) it doesn't predict anything in particular.
In a quick scan of the web site you link, I can't see an answer to, or even acknowledgement of, that question.
I believe the point that the Coward was making was that if I run a tissue company, and buy a sponsored link for the search term "Kleenex", then Kleenex ought to sue me, not Google. In my opinion they should lose that lawsuit, but if we temporarily pretend we buy their wack legal theory, it still doesn't make sense to sue Google.
Car insurance will ensure that someone else is compensated if my car injures them, which is reasonably likely even if I'm a good driver. My computer maiming someone else is not terribly plausible.
Besides that, I can get car insurance in 10 minutes on the phone with a credit card, knowing nothing about cars or insurance. What do you propose users should be required to do in 10 minutes that OS vendors or ISPs could not better do?
"I'm not expecting the individual user to fix the issue by himself. After all, could you fix a broken turn signal on a car?"
I can and have; it's easy. Far easier than securing a computer, largely because you know when you're done. Expecting people to do something complex, like securing their computer, with no apparent benefit before they get infected... I don't see it happening.
"At the same time, once users are directly on the hook for the inconvenience that their computers cause others, they will protest and generate demand for secure operating systems."
If you fine people because they hooked up a computer to surf the web and some third party took it over to do bad stuff with, they'll think the regulation is grossly unfair, and demand it be changed.
Now, if ISPs drop the connection of machines that are generating spam, (not caring why), users will seek out someone who can fix the problem. Some of these someone's will recommend using a more secure OS, and if it happens a lot users may take that advice. So that I think is your path to getting people to fix the problem: make it their problem.
"Why should you be allowed onto the internet without a firewall at the very least?"
Because unlike the unsafe car driver, they are not going to kill anyone. One home computer getting compromised is just not a big deal in the world. Lots getting compromised might be a bigger deal, so it's reasonable to ask OS dealers to care about it, because they can affect lots of computers. Asking the vast mass of non-technical users to understand or even care about firewalls, etc. is not realistic. Heck, I'm an uber-geek, and even I hate being expected to care about that stuff.
Relative to anything a generation or more ago, (first-world) farms today are almost completely automatic. The number of people fed per agricultural worker is crazily high by historical standards, and the price of food and profit margins are low as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
On casual inspection, your suitcase looks like a really *big* bomb.
And what freedom is at risk? She was arrested and charged with a crime because someone stupidly thought her nametag "might be a bomb". Is anything now a crime if any other person thinks something you have could be a bomb? It is clear to me that anything might be a bomb, so please surrender yourself at the nearest police station and bring all your posessions for confiscation as "hoax devices".
"I seem to remember a man with explosives that looked like the heel of a shoe."
Which is why anyone wearing shoes to the airport is arrested at gunpoint and charged with a crime. Gee, you're right, it all makes sense now.
If someone is going to take a bomb to the airport, would it look like her sweatshirt or your carry-on? If she should be apprehended, anyone with a briefcase should be shot. I mean, OMG, who knows what could be in there! You're just carrying stuff around *concealed* at the *airport*, what are you thinking!?!
It was founded as a co-op, and continues to call itself one, and to refer to the holders of it's rebate-cards as "members" (but so does my bike shop). In day-to-day operations, it has little in common with any other co-op I've been involved with. In corporate governance it is definitely not a co-op, but bastardized freak of a thing that could only exist as a sub-entity in the context of the org-chart monstrosity of a large university (or two).
Yes, I understand. Your argument depends on the assumption the interest paid on government debt is not enough to compensate for inflation and still provide a positive return. That assumption is false. Moreover, it's falseness is amongst the most trivially verified facts about the US economy you could choose. Even beginning to research any topic somewhat related to what you are discussing would reveal such basic information as a matter of course.
As a mathematician of sorts, I'll readily agree that everything is worthwhile is really just math.
But as far as US patent law goes, facts are not patentable, methods are. The difference is certainly fuzzy in many areas. My point is, if we're discussing whether instructions for how to do something should be patentable, why does it matter if they are instructions for how to perform some complex transformation on some data, or instructions for how to build a device that will extract the seeds from cotton?
"Practically and morally however, the two actions are equivalent."
No, they are not. Expanding the money supply does not create one dime that the government gets to spend, nor reduce the debt at all.
Borrowing money gets the government money to spend, but it doesn't magically create it. They owe it to someone, whether me or the government of China. The US Government owes me some of the debt, and I expect it to be repaid, with interest greater than the rate of inflation. When people do not have this expectation, they will stop lending the US Government money.
Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.
If algorithms should not be patentable, neither should anything else.
If you just want to abolish patents entirely, I see some potential problems with that that would need to be addressed, but it's an arguable position. If you think inventions that manipulate stuff deserve protection, but not ones that manipulate data do not, I don't buy the distinction. All patents are essentially for algorithms. Eli Whitney's patent protected not a particular instance of the device, but the idea of how to construct a cotton gin.
"Printing money" (by which I assume you mean expanding the money supply) does not cover the budget deficit, as the government does not get the money. It is widely understood to encourage inflation, though it is not itself inflation as your "i.e." would imply. We borrow money to cover the budget deficit, not print it.
The trade deficit is a big problem, with complex, hard to summarize causes.
The budget deficit (and resulting national debt) is a big problem, with straight a forward, easily summarized cause: the election of idiots, particularly the last 3 Republican ones.
Note that the store in the article is the Harvard Coop. It is certainly frequented by more than just Harvard students, but is not actually a co-op: it is run by B&N.
Who would buy new wrenches? We'd just get rid of half of them and have less confusion and more space in our toolboxes. You can't have a decently competent shop without metric tools now anyway.
"There are times when its not exactly bad to have one entity, whether it be a company or an individual, who puts an end to the bickering, makes a decision, sets the direction, imperfect though it may be, and makes everyone pull in the same direction."
Definitely, except I'd say those times are all the time. The processes of gathering input and making decisions may look different in open source vs. proprietary devlopment, but both can support either design-by-committee or benevolent-dictators. The quality of the software will frequently depend much more on the decision-making methodology than the open/closed nature of the code. This goes triple for UI design.
The Afghans did not take over Russia, nor does it appear likely the Iraqis will conquer the US. "Beating" someone in the sense of making them decide to go home because it's not worth fighting you is one thing, and it is something that guerrilla warfare against a far better armed foe can do. There are plenty of examples (The American Revolution, Vietnam, etc.).
"Beating" someone when that means utterly deposing them, and taking over the country that is their home; that is something different. For that you'll want equivalent armament and/or overwhelming popular support.
From what I can tell of the Iranian opposition, they have limited armament, and hard to measure (but somewhere less than overwhelming) popular support.
Well, you'd have to buy some deforested land to plant them on, so not very many; and planting trees is mostly a stupid way to help the environment anyway. If there's enough incentive to cut trees down, you won't keep up by planting them, and if there isn't, they'll plant themselves. I consider myself an "environmental type" because when I spend money on things that benefit me, I try to do it in ways that don't have a negative impact on shared resources. Planting trees does little for the environment, and squat for me.
Correlation is not causation, but correlation and an obvious causative mechanism is as good a hint as you're ever going to get.
"The COBE data doesn't line up with expectations."
Are you kidding? Maybe we're not speaking of the same thing? When I say "the COBE data" I should point out I specifically mean the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation curve measured by the FIRAS instrument, which the big-bang theory predicted should be the spectral curve of a 2.7K black body. If there is a more stunningly perfect fit between a theoretical prediction and experimental data in the history of science, I should like to hear of it.
And as an aside, of course nothing predicted dark matter. Dark matter is a theory. Nothing predicts theories. Theories predict data.
Based on the astro-physicists I have known, you are incorrect. They have all absolutely delighted in kicking around whatever odd-ball cosmology theory someone could come up with to figure out how it fails. Which is generally not too hard as there is currently a lot of different data that fits with the standard model, and an alternative has to explain all that.
All three of your links go to the same web site, which spends most of it's time talking about ways the standard model is incomplete, as opposed to giving any sort of quick summary of what their theory claims. Not to be dismissive, but this is a bit of a red flag.
In any case, it is silly to complain nobody is spending time and money trying to falsify a particular theory just because someone else thought it up; give us some reason to think it's worthwhile. While there are some rather gaping holes the standard model cannot explain, people like it because it has made stunningly accurate predictions (e.g. the COBE data).
The question for any new theory then is "What does it predict that is different than what the standard model does?" People ridicule String Theory because (in the opinion of the ridiculers) it doesn't predict anything in particular.
In a quick scan of the web site you link, I can't see an answer to, or even acknowledgement of, that question.
I believe the point that the Coward was making was that if I run a tissue company, and buy a sponsored link for the search term "Kleenex", then Kleenex ought to sue me, not Google. In my opinion they should lose that lawsuit, but if we temporarily pretend we buy their wack legal theory, it still doesn't make sense to sue Google.
"I guess it isn't 'wrong' until the law says it is, so from a business perspective, why stop doing the same type of thing."
I don't see how it's wrong at all, so I wouldn't stop doing it until the law made me either.
Car insurance will ensure that someone else is compensated if my car injures them, which is reasonably likely even if I'm a good driver. My computer maiming someone else is not terribly plausible.
Besides that, I can get car insurance in 10 minutes on the phone with a credit card, knowing nothing about cars or insurance. What do you propose users should be required to do in 10 minutes that OS vendors or ISPs could not better do?
"I'm not expecting the individual user to fix the issue by himself. After all, could you fix a broken turn signal on a car?"
I can and have; it's easy. Far easier than securing a computer, largely because you know when you're done. Expecting people to do something complex, like securing their computer, with no apparent benefit before they get infected... I don't see it happening.
"At the same time, once users are directly on the hook for the inconvenience that their computers cause others, they will protest and generate demand for secure operating systems."
If you fine people because they hooked up a computer to surf the web and some third party took it over to do bad stuff with, they'll think the regulation is grossly unfair, and demand it be changed.
Now, if ISPs drop the connection of machines that are generating spam, (not caring why), users will seek out someone who can fix the problem. Some of these someone's will recommend using a more secure OS, and if it happens a lot users may take that advice. So that I think is your path to getting people to fix the problem: make it their problem.
"Why should you be allowed onto the internet without a firewall at the very least?"
Because unlike the unsafe car driver, they are not going to kill anyone. One home computer getting compromised is just not a big deal in the world. Lots getting compromised might be a bigger deal, so it's reasonable to ask OS dealers to care about it, because they can affect lots of computers. Asking the vast mass of non-technical users to understand or even care about firewalls, etc. is not realistic. Heck, I'm an uber-geek, and even I hate being expected to care about that stuff.
Relative to anything a generation or more ago, (first-world) farms today are almost completely automatic. The number of people fed per agricultural worker is crazily high by historical standards, and the price of food and profit margins are low as a result.
Who modded this off-topic? That's the most spot-on analogy I've ever seen on slashdot (OK, that's not saying all that much...)
But that's essentially the "researchers" argument: it's a really strong correlation, so it must be genetic, not societal. Bollocks.
I can't make heads or tails of what "non-time/non-space" would mean :) But this part:
"that point is now smeared all over the universe"
is basically the deal.