It'd be too expensive to do a detailed analysis of every patent someone applies for... The system is based on granting all patents which are not obviously infringing, and let the courts sort it out if and when someone objects. Most patents are never going to be questioned anyway (I'm guessing this is because most patents are never used).
Or would you seriously argue that someone skilled in the arts of electronics design wouldn't obviously have thought of something rectangular with rounded corners and a glass screen when designing a tablet?
The idea of a tablet computer can be seen in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" from the late 1960's. (I don't know if it had rounded corners, though.)
"Samsung's infringing sales have enabled Samsung to overtake Apple as the largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world. Samsung has reaped billions of dollars in profits and caused Apple to lose hundreds of millions of dollars through its violation of Apple's intellectual property."
So... Apple is saying that Samsung stole their ideas, and used them to make a tablet that was better than Apple's?
Right in saying that the West in general, and the USA in particular, is their enemy.
Even if you blame the person who risked your life by hiding among you, you blame the person who went ahead and dropped the bomb even more.
In a perverted way, the terrorists and the leaders in the West feed off each other. The terrorists provoke conflicts with the West and try to get them to over-react, so the local population will start hating the West and join the terrorists' cause. The leaders in the West, meanwhile, use terrorism as an excuse to overthrow governments which have been troubling them, as a way to divert people's attention from domestic problems, and as a way to funnel money to themselves and their friends through oil and weapon companies.
Both the terrorists and the leaders in the West have increased their power significantly since 9/11, and the bill is, as always, paid by the small people.
They work whether we drop the bomb or not... if we do drop the bomb, people will blame the one who dropped it, and the terrorists will have achieved their goal of antagonising people against the West and rallying more support for their cause.
Why follow the rules if there're no consequences for not following them?
Those who choose to operate outside the Geneva Conventions deserve all the Hellfire that's coming to them.
Because the people who give the orders are the guilty ones, and the soldiers who are killed or put in POW camps don't have much choice but to follow orders.
Uncontrolled area are not sovereign nations. If a government can not control an area it is no longer part of their country.
Bin Laden was killed in a residential area in Pakistan. Sending a military team into another country to arrest or kill someone, without prior consent of their government, is definitely a breach of their soverignity.
A death for a death would fit into this philosophy. But does that mean that any Muslim can legitimately kill any American? I don't think so.
And vice versa. For example, if a terrorist hides in a village, Americans are not justified in dropping a bomb that kills half the population, including children.
It would probably help almost as much if people understood what that line actually means. It's not saying that you must take an eye for an eye, but that you must not take more. That is, you can't blind a man because he damaged one of your eyes, or knock out all of his teeth because he knocked out one of yours.
Is that a generally agreed-upon interpretation?
A priest friend of mine claimed that "an eye for an eye" was a principle used in civil trials instead of criminal ones. E.g, if someone accidentally killed one of your sheep, they had to reimburse you with one sheep.
How many terrorist commanders are deliberately staying in civilian areas to try to protect themselves. Should we allow enemy commanders to use human shields? It is well known that the US will take out and al-Qaeda leader they find. It is up to the al-Qaeda leader to decide whose lives are put at risk by being close by. How many of the "innocent civilians" are actually supplying and supporting terrorists or possibly terrorists themselves?
Let's say half the civilians are supporting the terrorists, for the sake of argument. Then only half the civilians killed are truly innocent, and justified in launching retaliatory attacks against the USA.
On a tangent, Bin Laden didn't orchestrate the 9/11 attacks. He provided funding and inspiration for other terrorists, but he was never a tactical leader.
Keep in mind that the US had just fought the Second World War. My take is that they wouldn't have agreed to a treaty that would have hamstrung it against similar brutal, ruthless foes as say Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the USSR.
The Nazis respected the Geneva convention on the Western front, where the enemy respected it, but not on the Eastern, where the enemy didn't. In other words, they followed precisely the "treat others as they treat you" philosophy you're advocating.
As far as I know, Nazi Germany didn't fight particularly dirty, despite their crimes in other areas (the Holocaust).
You see the U.S. drones did not miss the target..... everyone in the killzone is defined as an "enemy combatant" even if they weren't. Hence the president can claim zero civilian casualties in his speeches.
And if they weren't "enemy combatants", it's obviously their own fault they were hit, since they were in a "war zone".
2. Nobody said get rid of patents. At least in this culture, the original purpose of patents was to spur invention by protecting an inventors rights to his own creation for some fair period of time, allowing to benefit from his creativity and productivity.
The original purpose of patents was to encourage the publication of inventions. People got a time-limited monopoly on an invention in return for filing the design with the patent office, where anyone could look at and learn from it, as opposed to the inventor keeping the design secret to protect it.
The idea that patents should reward the inventor for spending time and money on R&D is something which has become popular later.
The OP specifically mentioned strange attractors, which are involved in chaotic systems that exhibit chaotic features but settle towards a predictable state or set of states (the attractor), just like the bucket of air. Psychohistory was specifically described this way: individuals were completely unpredictable, the precise timeline was moderately predictable, and the outcome was almost inevitable.
It's conceivable there are attractor states for history, and if you find such an attractor ahead of time, you can predict history. But that means there will be no long-term historical change from that point onward; history will just orbit (unpredictably) through the limited set of states within the attractor. That's the only reason it becomes long-term predictable.
It is indeed something you find in typical high-entropy systems, including your own example. You also find it in the same bucket of air at lower temperatures, although if you lower the temperature enough and freeze out the gasses you will not find it.
You can say that the system is chaotic at small scales. But it's imortant to note that you don't need chaos theory to understand the system at large scales. Since the small differences tend to even out, you only need statistical mechanics.
If psychohistory works the same way (the small differences even out, so the system is predictable at galactic scales), then you don't need chaos theory to understand history at galactic scales. You can predict it using only classical models that don't take chaos into account. You don't need to model the chaotic behaviour of the smaller scales at all, since they can be treated as an average.
What chaos theory has made us realise, is that most complex systems *don't* behave this way. Instead, the unpredictability on smaller scales tend to propagate to the larger scales.
Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.
Weather is unpredictable at the molecular level, is moderately predictable at the system level over a few days, and is quite predictable over longer terms (when it's called climate).
There's a fundamental difference between predicting the weather and predicting climate change. The weather varies unpredictably around an average, and the only thing we can predict over longer periods is that average (because it stays the same). Climate change doesn't occur until one of the underlying factors change, such as atmospheric composition, or the Earth's distance to the sun. Climate change is *not* the accumulated result of varying weather. If we extrapolated a weather forecest into the far future, we'd just get nonsense. Weather and climate need to be treated as two different systems that obey different laws.
If psychohistory worked in a similar way, it'd mean that in smaller timeframes, historical events would vary unpredictably, but in larger timeframes, the effects would average out so the system as a whole stayed the same. Change would need to come from external factors, such as new and unexpected technological inventions, or discovery of previously unknown habitable regions.
I'm not saying it's impossible to build a model of history based on chaos theory, and even make predictions from it or use it to manipulate history, but I don't think Asimov (or his successors) has explained it very well. Nor do I expect him to; the first Foundation stories were written long before we knew anything about chaos theory-
I agree in the case of competitors duplicating your goods and competing with you on the market. That forces you to lower your prices and gives you a shorter time frame in which to recover your development costs.
However, there's evidence that illegal file sharing has no impact on music sales, or maybe even a small positive impact. (Industry Canada)
If that seems paradoxical, consider that the money people don't spend when they download a pirated song must go somewhere -- like buying another song. And indeed, there are numerous studies showing that the people who pirate the most, are also the ones who buy the most music. (TechDirt)
It seems like people pirate music to get access a wider selection for the same amount of money, not to save money.
Yes. But the tractor company would be first to market and have an effective monopoly until its competitors had reverse engineered their design, incorporated it into their own design, and modified their production lines to make the new type of tractor.
During the time it took for the competitors to catch up with the new design, the tractor company would have the opportunity to do more R&D and fine-tune their design (or cut production costs). They'd be forced to keep investing in R&D to keep their lead.
Under the current system, a company that makes a highly profitable innovation can sit on its ass for almost 20 years, since the competitors are legally prohibited from catching up.
Yes, eventually, but they do a lot of damage before then. For example, it causes real capital and labour to be wasted on projects which won't yield any returns.
Irrational speculation causes some stocks to be overpriced. Isn't that a form of market distortion?
It's not high entropy which causes the individual air molecules to move chaotically. They move just as chaotically in a gas at 1 Kelvin, only slower.
On a macroscopic level, the air molecules' movements will even out, and the air will exert a constant and uniform pressure on the walls of its container, so on a macroscopic level, the system is not chaotic. This is in contrast to, for example, weather, where the chaotic movements of individual air molecules will propagate up to the macroscopoic level and cause vastly different weather.
In fact, you can make the bucket of air behave more chaoticically by reducing the entropy. If you introduce cooler air into the container, the cooler air will mix with the warmer and create air currents -- i.e, molecular movements which do not even out statistically, and behave chaotically also on the macroscopic level.
Slashdot Mirror
It'd be too expensive to do a detailed analysis of every patent someone applies for... The system is based on granting all patents which are not obviously infringing, and let the courts sort it out if and when someone objects. Most patents are never going to be questioned anyway (I'm guessing this is because most patents are never used).
Or would you seriously argue that someone skilled in the arts of electronics design wouldn't obviously have thought of something rectangular with rounded corners and a glass screen when designing a tablet?
The idea of a tablet computer can be seen in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" from the late 1960's. (I don't know if it had rounded corners, though.)
From the summary:
"Samsung's infringing sales have enabled Samsung to overtake Apple as the largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world. Samsung has reaped billions of dollars in profits and caused Apple to lose hundreds of millions of dollars through its violation of Apple's intellectual property."
So... Apple is saying that Samsung stole their ideas, and used them to make a tablet that was better than Apple's?
I can't speak for the GP, but I'm a member of Flattr, which means I put at least 2 Euros / month in the tip jar.
Or... I would, if more sites had a Flattr button so I could tip them. Most months, my 2 Euros are just transferred automatically to charity.
Right in saying that the West in general, and the USA in particular, is their enemy.
Even if you blame the person who risked your life by hiding among you, you blame the person who went ahead and dropped the bomb even more.
In a perverted way, the terrorists and the leaders in the West feed off each other. The terrorists provoke conflicts with the West and try to get them to over-react, so the local population will start hating the West and join the terrorists' cause. The leaders in the West, meanwhile, use terrorism as an excuse to overthrow governments which have been troubling them, as a way to divert people's attention from domestic problems, and as a way to funnel money to themselves and their friends through oil and weapon companies.
Both the terrorists and the leaders in the West have increased their power significantly since 9/11, and the bill is, as always, paid by the small people.
They work whether we drop the bomb or not... if we do drop the bomb, people will blame the one who dropped it, and the terrorists will have achieved their goal of antagonising people against the West and rallying more support for their cause.
I'm guessing they don't see it that way. From their POV, the bomb that was just dropped on them proved Al Qaeda was right.
Why follow the rules if there're no consequences for not following them?
Those who choose to operate outside the Geneva Conventions deserve all the Hellfire that's coming to them.
Because the people who give the orders are the guilty ones, and the soldiers who are killed or put in POW camps don't have much choice but to follow orders.
Uncontrolled area are not sovereign nations. If a government can not control an area it is no longer part of their country.
Bin Laden was killed in a residential area in Pakistan. Sending a military team into another country to arrest or kill someone, without prior consent of their government, is definitely a breach of their soverignity.
A death for a death would fit into this philosophy. But does that mean that any Muslim can legitimately kill any American? I don't think so.
And vice versa. For example, if a terrorist hides in a village, Americans are not justified in dropping a bomb that kills half the population, including children.
It would probably help almost as much if people understood what that line actually means. It's not saying that you must take an eye for an eye, but that you must not take more. That is, you can't blind a man because he damaged one of your eyes, or knock out all of his teeth because he knocked out one of yours.
Is that a generally agreed-upon interpretation?
A priest friend of mine claimed that "an eye for an eye" was a principle used in civil trials instead of criminal ones. E.g, if someone accidentally killed one of your sheep, they had to reimburse you with one sheep.
How many terrorist commanders are deliberately staying in civilian areas to try to protect themselves. Should we allow enemy commanders to use human shields? It is well known that the US will take out and al-Qaeda leader they find. It is up to the al-Qaeda leader to decide whose lives are put at risk by being close by. How many of the "innocent civilians" are actually supplying and supporting terrorists or possibly terrorists themselves?
Let's say half the civilians are supporting the terrorists, for the sake of argument. Then only half the civilians killed are truly innocent, and justified in launching retaliatory attacks against the USA.
On a tangent, Bin Laden didn't orchestrate the 9/11 attacks. He provided funding and inspiration for other terrorists, but he was never a tactical leader.
Keep in mind that the US had just fought the Second World War. My take is that they wouldn't have agreed to a treaty that would have hamstrung it against similar brutal, ruthless foes as say Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the USSR.
The Nazis respected the Geneva convention on the Western front, where the enemy respected it, but not on the Eastern, where the enemy didn't. In other words, they followed precisely the "treat others as they treat you" philosophy you're advocating.
As far as I know, Nazi Germany didn't fight particularly dirty, despite their crimes in other areas (the Holocaust).
You see the U.S. drones did not miss the target..... everyone in the killzone is defined as an "enemy combatant" even if they weren't. Hence the president can claim zero civilian casualties in his speeches.
And if they weren't "enemy combatants", it's obviously their own fault they were hit, since they were in a "war zone".
2. Nobody said get rid of patents. At least in this culture, the original purpose of patents was to spur invention by protecting an inventors rights to his own creation for some fair period of time, allowing to benefit from his creativity and productivity.
The original purpose of patents was to encourage the publication of inventions. People got a time-limited monopoly on an invention in return for filing the design with the patent office, where anyone could look at and learn from it, as opposed to the inventor keeping the design secret to protect it.
The idea that patents should reward the inventor for spending time and money on R&D is something which has become popular later.
How on Earth did the parent get modded "Informative"? Funny, yes, informative, no.
The OP specifically mentioned strange attractors, which are involved in chaotic systems that exhibit chaotic features but settle towards a predictable state or set of states (the attractor), just like the bucket of air. Psychohistory was specifically described this way: individuals were completely unpredictable, the precise timeline was moderately predictable, and the outcome was almost inevitable.
It's conceivable there are attractor states for history, and if you find such an attractor ahead of time, you can predict history. But that means there will be no long-term historical change from that point onward; history will just orbit (unpredictably) through the limited set of states within the attractor. That's the only reason it becomes long-term predictable.
It is indeed something you find in typical high-entropy systems, including your own example. You also find it in the same bucket of air at lower temperatures, although if you lower the temperature enough and freeze out the gasses you will not find it.
You can say that the system is chaotic at small scales. But it's imortant to note that you don't need chaos theory to understand the system at large scales. Since the small differences tend to even out, you only need statistical mechanics.
If psychohistory works the same way (the small differences even out, so the system is predictable at galactic scales), then you don't need chaos theory to understand history at galactic scales. You can predict it using only classical models that don't take chaos into account. You don't need to model the chaotic behaviour of the smaller scales at all, since they can be treated as an average.
What chaos theory has made us realise, is that most complex systems *don't* behave this way. Instead, the unpredictability on smaller scales tend to propagate to the larger scales.
From Wikipedia:
Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.
Weather is unpredictable at the molecular level, is moderately predictable at the system level over a few days, and is quite predictable over longer terms (when it's called climate).
There's a fundamental difference between predicting the weather and predicting climate change. The weather varies unpredictably around an average, and the only thing we can predict over longer periods is that average (because it stays the same). Climate change doesn't occur until one of the underlying factors change, such as atmospheric composition, or the Earth's distance to the sun. Climate change is *not* the accumulated result of varying weather. If we extrapolated a weather forecest into the far future, we'd just get nonsense. Weather and climate need to be treated as two different systems that obey different laws.
If psychohistory worked in a similar way, it'd mean that in smaller timeframes, historical events would vary unpredictably, but in larger timeframes, the effects would average out so the system as a whole stayed the same. Change would need to come from external factors, such as new and unexpected technological inventions, or discovery of previously unknown habitable regions.
I'm not saying it's impossible to build a model of history based on chaos theory, and even make predictions from it or use it to manipulate history, but I don't think Asimov (or his successors) has explained it very well. Nor do I expect him to; the first Foundation stories were written long before we knew anything about chaos theory-
I agree in the case of competitors duplicating your goods and competing with you on the market. That forces you to lower your prices and gives you a shorter time frame in which to recover your development costs.
However, there's evidence that illegal file sharing has no impact on music sales, or maybe even a small positive impact. (Industry Canada)
If that seems paradoxical, consider that the money people don't spend when they download a pirated song must go somewhere -- like buying another song. And indeed, there are numerous studies showing that the people who pirate the most, are also the ones who buy the most music. (TechDirt)
It seems like people pirate music to get access a wider selection for the same amount of money, not to save money.
Yes. But the tractor company would be first to market and have an effective monopoly until its competitors had reverse engineered their design, incorporated it into their own design, and modified their production lines to make the new type of tractor.
During the time it took for the competitors to catch up with the new design, the tractor company would have the opportunity to do more R&D and fine-tune their design (or cut production costs). They'd be forced to keep investing in R&D to keep their lead.
Under the current system, a company that makes a highly profitable innovation can sit on its ass for almost 20 years, since the competitors are legally prohibited from catching up.
Yes, eventually, but they do a lot of damage before then. For example, it causes real capital and labour to be wasted on projects which won't yield any returns.
Irrational speculation causes some stocks to be overpriced. Isn't that a form of market distortion?
I've read The End of Eternity too, and thought it was ok. Not as mind-blowing as the Foundation trilogy.
It's not high entropy which causes the individual air molecules to move chaotically. They move just as chaotically in a gas at 1 Kelvin, only slower.
On a macroscopic level, the air molecules' movements will even out, and the air will exert a constant and uniform pressure on the walls of its container, so on a macroscopic level, the system is not chaotic. This is in contrast to, for example, weather, where the chaotic movements of individual air molecules will propagate up to the macroscopoic level and cause vastly different weather.
In fact, you can make the bucket of air behave more chaoticically by reducing the entropy. If you introduce cooler air into the container, the cooler air will mix with the warmer and create air currents -- i.e, molecular movements which do not even out statistically, and behave chaotically also on the macroscopic level.
And in fact, there are systems just like this for finding music which suits your tastes.