The truth is, there is almost no true poverty in the US.
The following facts about persons defined as "poor" by the Census Bureau are taken from various government reports:
In 1995, 41 percent of all "poor" households owned their own homes.
The average home owned by a person classified as "poor" has three bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
Over three-quarters of a million "poor" persons own homes worth over $150,000; and nearly 200,000 "poor" persons own homes worth over $300,000.
Only 7.5 percent of "poor" households are overcrowded. Nearly 60 percent have two or more rooms per person.
The average "poor" American has one-third more living space than the average Japanese does and four times as much living space as the average Russian. 2
Seventy percent of "poor" households own a car; 27 percent own two or more cars.
Ninety-seven percent have a color television. Nearly half own two or more televisions.
Nearly three-quarters have a VCR; more than one in five has two VCRs.
Two-thirds of "poor" households have air conditioning. By contrast, 30 years ago, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
Sixty-four percent of the "poor" own microwave ovens, half have a stereo system, and over a quarter have an automatic dishwasher.
As a group, the "poor" are far from being chronically hungry and malnourished. In fact, poor persons are more likely to be overweight than are middle-class persons. Nearly half of poor adult women are overweight.
The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children, and in most cases is well above recommended norms.
Poor children actually consume more meat than do higher-income children and have average protein intakes that are 100 percent above recommended levels.
Most poor children today are in fact super-nourished, growing up to be, on average, one inch taller and ten pounds heavier that the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.
First off, if the coroner had indeed provided the system's password, wasn't he the one contravening security policy (if not the law)?
By this logic, if your roommate lends me the key to your storage locker, and I use the key to break in and take your stuff, you're asserting that I've done nothing wrong.
Islam is not *merely* a religion; it is a combined religion, culture, and political system, in a way that western religions are not. The Bible has been translated into hundreds of languages - the Koran is *inherently* an Arabic document, and - it is argued -can not be translated, but only glossed in other languages. Christianity and Judaism speak to morality and salvation, but do not specify the political system. Islam does, and specifies crimes, punishments, etc.
From time to time other Western religions have taken control of the apparatus of governments, and resulted in theocracy. In Islam, this is not an abberation - it is a key tenet of the politico-religious philosophy.
We recently (five weeks ago) switched to a Zencart based storefront. For those who don't know, Zencart is an OSC fork.
Apparently Zencart is much cleaner than OSC, which makes me shudder in fear at the idea of OSC's source code.
I like nice, clean, documented, tested code.
Zencart is a mess. The documentation is close to non-existent, there are no comments, there's no MVC distinctions, we found several major security holes in a code audit before going live, weird little UI bugs abound (e.g. in the admin interface when you edit a customer's addr, you're *forced* to specify his phone number, or you can not proceed), there are places where code chunk A generates SQL, then passes it to code chunk B, which passes it to C, which *LOOKS AT THE SQL* and edits it, then executes it.
With code like this, try editing an SQL query just a little bit, and you get a complaint on a web page with error messages pointing to an entirely different place.
On the "security" topic, I note that once we got a demo of Zencart installed on a testing machine, with the tell-tale URL (<machinename>/catalog), I started noticing that a lot of the phishing spam I was receiving directed folks to <domainname>/catalog...yes, the phishers were using hacked OSC accounts, which they had (presumably) gotten into through SQL injection attacks on OSC.
This is not to minimize the work of the OSC and Zencart developers - either package is a huge improvement over nothing...but if you want to do surgery on the code, it's a disaster. At Technical Video Rental, we need to track individual serial numbers of copies as they go in and out, and we needed to present sets of videos in a certain way.
This work took two pretty darned good software engineers (me and the CTO of the company) about four man weeks.
I'm not going to say something inflammatory and stupid like "I could have written an operating system in less time", but four man weeks is a pretty major investment of time to do something fairly simple like this.
We're doing a lot of interesting stuff with the code base: we've spliced in WordPress for the corporate blog, I'm writing some AJAX stuff right now to allow customers to report problems with their orders from the order status page, etc.
...and the more we hack on it, the more we think "there's got to be another way".
There's a good chance that over the next 6-9 months we'll end up preserving the OSC/Zencart db schema and data (for continuity with the running site), and dumping major components of the package.
To boil it down: I give OSC / Zencart a grade of "C minus". It's like a decent looking house with a lot of rot inside the walls. As long as you're content to never look inside the cabinets or crawlspaces, you're OK, but once you do some poking, or decide to add an addition, you'll realize how much work you've got in store, and you'll start to wonder if you should just buy a new house.
The BBC is reporting that US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is unhappy with the existing propaganda systems in place and insists that the US must create a 'more effective, 24-hour propaganda machine' or risk losing the battle for the minds of Muslims. In an era where we've already got government-created and funded media outlets and the Pentagon bribing Iraqi journalists to run favorable war stories, not to mention other departments paying journalists to endorse their positions, it begs the question, how much more can they possibly do?"
The poster is confused about what begs the question means. In truth, it is "the term for a type of fallacy...in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises."
Thus, the news article SUGGESTS the question "how much more can they possibly do"?
For a good example of BEGGING the question, see the original poster's totally biased description of the situation, which allows for only one view on the subject, admits of no disagreement, andt then asks a purely rhetorical "how much more can they possibly do?".
Bah.
If you're going to do a Usenet-style driveby, at least don't commit logical fallacies and semantic fallacies in the same post.
It's impossible that things were warmer in the 8th century than in the 20th.
There were no SUVs in the 8th century, so in order to believe this headline, I'd have to accept that the temperature of the planet can vary a few degrees even without 20th century technology, which is against my core tenants as a Green.
Further, the 8th century did not destroy all life on the planet, which means that high temperatures a fraction of a degree above normal are tolerated by the ecosystem. This is also in conflict with a principle of my ideology.
Taiwan had US diplomatic recognition for a few decades, until Carter revoked it. The result is that we recognize a dictatorial communist government, and refuse to recognize a free-market, democratic government.
Why? Because everything runs smoother that way. It's a cost-benefit analysis, and principles be damned.
If any of these congressman vote to extend diplomatic recognition to Taiwan despite the costs, then I'll know that they're for real.
Until then, they're just trying to score cheap political shots.
The sad thing is that much of this "used up" copper is sitting in landfills (current and former).
Why is this sad? A bunch of resources have been moved from thousands of feet under the earth, where they were alloyed with other junk we don't want are ore. Now, thanks to previous generations, that copper has been moved upwards, transported closer to us, concentrated, and made easilly accessible.
All we need is the desire and the cleverness to mine it, and it's a pile of gold, waiting for us.
Saying that this is sad is like saying "There's not a lot of food at the supermarket...and the sad thing is, there are several large juicy steaks conveniently located in my refrigerator."
he instead suggests communities plan for survival in a Mad Max type world with limited resources ruled by violent warlords.
Well, shit, if complete and total disaster is already a given, wouldn't it make more sense to take steps now to end up *AS* one of those violent war lords (buy nunchuks, take karate lessons, stockpile ammunition)?
I mean, better to be the guy with the mohawk driving the motorcycle than the poor bastard chained to the sissy bar behind him, no?
"The evidence is compelling that body-on-frame light trucks cannot safely coexist with passenger cars "
The author of the study is making the mistake that safety is a boolean, and that things are either safe or unsafe.
In fact, everything is unsafe, to varying degrees. ("Life", in the words of Warren Zevon, "is gonna killa you").
The important thing, when contemplating questions of public policy, is to COMPARE one risk to the next, and make sure that we're making reasonable decisions and tradeoffs.
For example, over the last 10-15 years, a lot of states have dropped the DUI (driving under the influnce) BAC cutoff (blood alcohol content) from 0.1% to 0.08%. Lower is better, right?
Well, as it turns out, having a BAC in the 0.08 - 0.10% range has the same effect on driving ability as (a) having a cold; (b) getting a poor night's sleep; (c) being over the age of 50.
If we're going to make a 0.81% BAC illegal (and punish it with major fines), should we not also have the same punishments for driving while having the sniffles, or while being 51?
The answer is that one behavior gets a penalty because it sounds good, makes politicians look like They're Doing Something(tm) and has moralistic overtones ("get those damn drunks off the road!").
To say that "light trucks cannot safely coexist with passenger cars " is purest nonsense. We've had light trucks coexisting with passenger cars for 70 years, and the fatality rate drops every single year. Sure, if you could snap your fingers and get every pickup truck, minivan, delivery van, and SUV off the road, things would get incrementally safer for the average driver of a passenger car....but how much safer?
I don't know off the top of my head, but is it a level of safety comparable to every passenger car driver making sure that their tires are fully inflated before each trip? Or more, or less?
Absolutist boolean statements like "X can not safety coexist with Y" do not answer questions like this. These statements are public-policy-by-press-release and deserve to be condemned.
This is actually the least interesting part of the discussion, because the answer is well-settled. Legislatively dealing with porn (and defining it) is nothing new; laws are already in place limiting what newstands can sell, at what age consumers can purchase it, what penalties exist for selling it to people beneath that age, etc.
Computers break much more easilly than books do. Even when broken, books degrade gracefully.
Computers require energy (at the very least, solar panels). Books do not.
Computers, even the pie-in-the-sky, not-yet-delivered $100 ones that MIT is attempting to create, cost more than books. For one $200 computer, we could print up 20 $10 hardcover books.
Computers overheat, choke on sand, and have moving parts. Books do not.
We still have 500+ year old books around.
How many 20 year old computers are still running?
The argument that "printed copies go out of date" is a vast exaggeration. Encylopedias from 1950 are still quite interesting, and have perfectly acceptable information on 95% of all topics.
Computers are good for some things, but books are a great solution to many other problems.
There's a rhetorical fallacy called "argument from authority", which is when someone tries to prove a point by saying either "I'm quite wise", or "I'm just repeating what so-and-so said, and he's quite wise.
That being said, let's review:
I'm a student of economics, and I can say with authority that this kind of market trend is not one we want to gravitate toward.
Now, personally, I think the original article is a bit silly...but asking me to agree with you that it's a bad idea because YOU'RE A STUDENT and THEREFORE I should agree with you is just inane.
look at it from a new perspective
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The H-1B Swindle
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· Score: 1
Oh, those poor exploited H1-B visa workers.
Imagine this scenario:
Tomorrow, we in the west are contacted by the aliens of Planet UltraFirstWorld.
The aliens of UltraFirstWorld speak English. And they need lots and lots of robotics engineers, sysadmins, perl programmers, and customer support folks. Because they are a very wealthy society, they can pay $1 million / year for every techie who goes over there.
So, they set up a visa program whereby Earthlings can travel there, work for a year, and come back home.
Go for one year, and you can buy yourself a McMansion inside Rt 128, or a sweet loft in San Francisco, and all the stuff from ThinkGeek you could ever want.
Go for a few years, and you can come back and catapult your entire family into the upper class.
Oh...but wait, there is one hitch.
Alien techies from UltraFirstWorld earn $2 million / year, not the mere $1 million / year they're offering you.
It turns out that, in accordance with the fundamental laws of economics, you are only being offered the job because hiring more UltraFirstWorld alien techies would cost the firms $2 million or more a year. Doubling the size of all-alien tech staff would require giving bonuses to tempt alien lawyers and doctors into engineering...that might cost $3 million / year.
So, see, by paying you only $1 million / year, they're exploiting you.
What the software industry of planet UltraFirstWorld should *really* (a) raise wages for natives from $2 million to something higher; (b) tell you to stay home and keep earning $60 or 90 k on Earth.
Who benefits from such a proposal?
Not consumers. They end up paying more for products and services produced at $3 million / year, instead of $1 million.
Not Earthlings. We end up earning $80k instead of $1 million.
Not the UltraFirstWorld companies: they have to pay higher wages and work hard to recruit extra workers.
Only one group benefits: the semi-skilled and semi-employed aliens who would have been hired if the supply of workers was artificially constrained.
Why should this group be privileged over all of the other groups? What makes them so special?
I run Technical Video Rental, and I've had - literally - dozens of legal threats over the simple fact that I buy DVDs, then rent them out. Despite the fact that this is deeply settled case law, I've gotten everything from a legal cease-and-desist from one firm's CEO (who has a degree from Harvard Law School and was formerly Chief Counsel of the United States Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources) to a threat to - ahem - anally rape me (from a guy who think's he's anonymous, because he doesn't know what website logs and IP addrs are).
I spend about $2,000 - $3,000 per month on attorney fees trying to explain to people what the First Sale Doctrine is.
This is money that could be spent growing the business, and delivering more interesting videos to my customers...but it gets squandered because so many folks (a) don't understand what the copyright law says; (b) don't understand that exposure increases sales (see also: MP3s and the RIAA).
Bah.
It'd be nice to spend more time doing business, instead of doing meta-business (lawsuits).
What's more perverse: having a woman shit in your mouth or dedicating your life to seeking out women shitting in mens' mouths (something you would could never come across by accident) just so you can tell them not to do it?
Neither one is my idea of fun, but if I *HAD* to choose, it would be the one that didn't leave me with a mouthful of shit.
You're making an incoherent argument, or at the very least, skipping a step.
If your argument is "patents are bad for society", then state that, and be done with it.
If your argument is "patents are good, but having a quantifiable probability of how a judge will rule on your particular case is bad", then state that.
If your argument is "patents are good, but jurisdiction shopping is bad", then say that.
The argument you actually seem to be making is that when (a) patents exist; (b) people have hard data on courts; (c) they jurisdiction shop, the end result is overall less utility.
I do not believe this to be true.
There are two economic concepts that need to be disambiguated: the first is how one divides up a certain amount of utility that exists. If I have an apple that I value at $1 and you value at $2, I can sell it to you, thus improving total societal utility. If I sell it to you at $1, I break even, and you reap $1 of utility profit (you got a $2 apple for just $1!). If I sell it to you at $2, you break even, and I reap $1 of utility profit (I sold a $1 apple for $2). If I sell the apple to you at $1.50, we profit evenly.
The second concept is the total amount of utility. Let's say that 10 of us each have one apple, and we each value them at $1 each. The total societal wealth if $10. Now let's say that one of us announces his plan to sneak around at night, stealing apples. In response, we band together and institute shift sleeping to guard our apples. We have now decreased the total wealth of our society, because staying up late at night is a cost (well, OK, maybe not for most/.-ers, but the point holds).
Now, you (and the article you cite) are conflating these two things: you're saying that the decision of how two parties sell an apple (which affects only the RELATIVE profit of those two parties, and does not increase or decrease total utility) decreases overall utility in the population.
Now, it is just barely possible that this is true. If the result of the software was a chilling effect, where inventors feared inventing lest they get sued by someone, then society as a whole would have less inventions, and there would be a deadweight loss.
However, there is not even the kernel of an argument to support such an argument. There could be one, but no one has made it.
The article is arguing that the mere transfer of wealth from one party to another is a bad thing...but this is not at all true. Say that you start a small company, work hard, come up with an idea, patent it, mortgage your home, invest $200k in the idea...and then, just before coming to market, you find that Sony or Microsoft has stolen your patented idea, blatantly and egregiously.
Which do you prefer: picking the nearest court, with no idea whether you can win, or using computer research to find a court that has a competent clueful judge?
Of course, you prefer the latter.
Now, does the ability to find courts that rule a certain way increase or decrease the total number of lawsuits? And is increasing or decreasing the total number of lawsuits a good thing?
First, I assert that it's not clear that this data would increase the total number of lawsuits. Imagine that Wealthy But Easily Offended Bob gets upset at your new joystick design and decides to sue you (it looks a WHOLE lot like a hockey puck-with-LEDs that he patented four years ago). With out hard data on what his chances are in various courts, he might plunge right in, swamp you with legal briefs, and destroy your bank account. He'd likely lose, in the end, but he doesn't know that. Now, imagine that this service exists. He shops for jurisdictions, but finds that his chances of winning the suite vary all the way from 2% in one jurisdiction to 6% in another. Having hard data, he decides not to sue at all.
Addressing the topic of whether more lawsuits (even if that's the result of this software) is a good thing: if you accept the validity of patents at
And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress.'
Read only government approved scare stories. Believe only government
approved computer climate models (even if they do not yet generate
outputs that conform to the real data we see). Accept as an article
of faith that the "cause" of the "problem" is fossil fuels (even
though the majority of warming in the last 200 years occurred before
the Industrial Revolution really got underway). Accept only
"solutions" to the "problem" like Kyoto (even though Kyoto does not
bind the fastest growing nations to any curbs in carbon use, and even
though Kyoto would drastically depress standards of living growth in
the first world).
When anyone challenges the government story on global warming, accuse
them of being in the pay of "Big Oil". DO NOT judge the data and
theories on their own merits; preemptorilly disbelieve anything that
does not conform to what you've read in Time magazine and heard in Al
Gore's political speeches, even if it comes from Mars probes, or
experts on solar energy.
* bind hydrogen * that is completely safe at room temperature * has no loss of hydrogen * thus enabling cheap storage * allows for simple extraction of hydrogen
I use a proprietary process involving oxygen. I'm not at liberty to give more details until the patent is issued.
Your assertion that Bush "broke" the treaty is incorrect.
The treaty included an opt-out provision that allowed either signatory to leave the treaty, as long as adequate notice was given.
The US obeyed the details of this clause: it gave notice.
No treaty was broken.
Re:say good bye to gun control
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Fab
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You simply make it illegal to own the weapons and place heavy penalties on those who make those weapons.
The US has tons of strict laws that prevent criminals from owning guns. And yet...criminals own guns.
Thought experiment: Keep all other factors constant, and add in cheap and easy fabrication technology. Now, tell me how why criminals (and others) no longer own guns.
You yourself said that the shuttle was a reasonable idea when it was early on the drawing board, and it went bad as the project came to fruition...and now you're comparing the ACTUAL American shuttle to a THEORETICAL European shuttle.
The theoretical ANYTHING is always better than the actual ANYTHING.
If the ESA ever gets a shuttle up and running, then we can compare apples to apples.
Until then, your argument holds no water. It's like saying "the party I'm thinking about having is better than that party that you actually had, because your party sounded good, but then when you actually held it, things went wrong".
Slashdot Mirror
By this logic, if your roommate lends me the key to your storage locker, and I use the key to break in and take your stuff, you're asserting that I've done nothing wrong.
Islam is not *merely* a religion; it is a combined religion, culture, and political system, in a way that western religions are not. The Bible has been translated into hundreds of languages - the Koran is *inherently* an Arabic document, and - it is argued -can not be translated, but only glossed in other languages. Christianity and Judaism speak to morality and salvation, but do not specify the political system. Islam does, and specifies crimes, punishments, etc.
From time to time other Western religions have taken control of the apparatus of governments, and resulted in theocracy. In Islam, this is not an abberation - it is a key tenet of the politico-religious philosophy.
We recently (five weeks ago) switched to a Zencart based storefront. For those who don't know, Zencart is an OSC fork.
Apparently Zencart is much cleaner than OSC, which makes me shudder in fear at the idea of OSC's source code.
I like nice, clean, documented, tested code.
Zencart is a mess. The documentation is close to non-existent, there are no comments, there's no MVC distinctions, we found several major security holes in a code audit before going live, weird little UI bugs abound (e.g. in the admin interface when you edit a customer's addr, you're *forced* to specify his phone number, or you can not proceed), there are places where code chunk A generates SQL, then passes it to code chunk B, which passes it to C, which *LOOKS AT THE SQL* and edits it, then executes it.
With code like this, try editing an SQL query just a little bit, and you get a complaint on a web page with error messages pointing to an entirely different place.
On the "security" topic, I note that once we got a demo of Zencart installed on a testing machine, with the tell-tale URL (<machinename>/catalog), I started noticing that a lot of the phishing spam I was receiving directed folks to <domainname>/catalog...yes, the phishers were using hacked OSC accounts, which they had (presumably) gotten into through SQL injection attacks on OSC.
This is not to minimize the work of the OSC and Zencart developers - either package is a huge improvement over nothing...but if you want to do surgery on the code, it's a disaster. At Technical Video Rental, we need to track individual serial numbers of copies as they go in and out, and we needed to present sets of videos in a certain way.
This work took two pretty darned good software engineers (me and the CTO of the company) about four man weeks.
I'm not going to say something inflammatory and stupid like "I could have written an operating system in less time", but four man weeks is a pretty major investment of time to do something fairly simple like this.
We're doing a lot of interesting stuff with the code base: we've spliced in WordPress for the corporate blog, I'm writing some AJAX stuff right now to allow customers to report problems with their orders from the order status page, etc.
There's a good chance that over the next 6-9 months we'll end up preserving the OSC/Zencart db schema and data (for continuity with the running site), and dumping major components of the package.
To boil it down: I give OSC / Zencart a grade of "C minus". It's like a decent looking house with a lot of rot inside the walls. As long as you're content to never look inside the cabinets or crawlspaces, you're OK, but once you do some poking, or decide to add an addition, you'll realize how much work you've got in store, and you'll start to wonder if you should just buy a new house.
It's impossible that things were warmer in the 8th century than in the 20th.
There were no SUVs in the 8th century, so in order to believe this headline, I'd have to accept that the temperature of the planet can vary a few degrees even without 20th century technology, which is against my core tenants as a Green.
Further, the 8th century did not destroy all life on the planet, which means that high temperatures a fraction of a degree above normal are tolerated by the ecosystem. This is also in conflict with a principle of my ideology.
Therefore it can not be true.
Taiwan had US diplomatic recognition for a few decades, until Carter revoked it. The result is that we recognize a dictatorial communist government, and refuse to recognize a free-market, democratic government.
Why? Because everything runs smoother that way. It's a cost-benefit analysis, and principles be damned.
If any of these congressman vote to extend diplomatic recognition to Taiwan despite the costs, then I'll know that they're for real.
Until then, they're just trying to score cheap political shots.
Why is this sad? A bunch of resources have been moved from thousands of feet under the earth, where they were alloyed with other junk we don't want are ore. Now, thanks to previous generations, that copper has been moved upwards, transported closer to us, concentrated, and made easilly accessible.
All we need is the desire and the cleverness to mine it, and it's a pile of gold, waiting for us.
Saying that this is sad is like saying "There's not a lot of food at the supermarket...and the sad thing is, there are several large juicy steaks conveniently located in my refrigerator."
Well, shit, if complete and total disaster is already a given, wouldn't it make more sense to take steps now to end up *AS* one of those violent war lords (buy nunchuks, take karate lessons, stockpile ammunition)?
I mean, better to be the guy with the mohawk driving the motorcycle than the poor bastard chained to the sissy bar behind him, no?
The author of the study is making the mistake that safety is a boolean, and that things are either safe or unsafe.
In fact, everything is unsafe, to varying degrees. ("Life", in the words of Warren Zevon, "is gonna killa you").
The important thing, when contemplating questions of public policy, is to COMPARE one risk to the next, and make sure that we're making reasonable decisions and tradeoffs.
For example, over the last 10-15 years, a lot of states have dropped the DUI (driving under the influnce) BAC cutoff (blood alcohol content) from 0.1% to 0.08%. Lower is better, right?
Well, as it turns out, having a BAC in the 0.08 - 0.10% range has the same effect on driving ability as (a) having a cold; (b) getting a poor night's sleep; (c) being over the age of 50.
If we're going to make a 0.81% BAC illegal (and punish it with major fines), should we not also have the same punishments for driving while having the sniffles, or while being 51?
The answer is that one behavior gets a penalty because it sounds good, makes politicians look like They're Doing Something(tm) and has moralistic overtones ("get those damn drunks off the road!").
To say that "light trucks cannot safely coexist with passenger cars " is purest nonsense. We've had light trucks coexisting with passenger cars for 70 years, and the fatality rate drops every single year. Sure, if you could snap your fingers and get every pickup truck, minivan, delivery van, and SUV off the road, things would get incrementally safer for the average driver of a passenger car.
I don't know off the top of my head, but is it a level of safety comparable to every passenger car driver making sure that their tires are fully inflated before each trip? Or more, or less?
Absolutist boolean statements like "X can not safety coexist with Y" do not answer questions like this. These statements are public-policy-by-press-release and deserve to be condemned.
This is actually the least interesting part of the discussion, because the answer is well-settled. Legislatively dealing with porn (and defining it) is nothing new; laws are already in place limiting what newstands can sell, at what age consumers can purchase it, what penalties exist for selling it to people beneath that age, etc.
Computers break much more easilly than books do. Even when broken, books degrade gracefully.
Computers require energy (at the very least, solar panels). Books do not.
Computers, even the pie-in-the-sky, not-yet-delivered $100 ones that MIT is attempting to create, cost more than books. For one $200 computer, we could print up 20 $10 hardcover books.
Computers overheat, choke on sand, and have moving parts. Books do not.
We still have 500+ year old books around.
How many 20 year old computers are still running?
The argument that "printed copies go out of date" is a vast exaggeration. Encylopedias from 1950 are still quite interesting, and have perfectly acceptable information on 95% of all topics.
Computers are good for some things, but books are a great solution to many other problems.
That being said, let's review:
Now, personally, I think the original article is a bit silly...but asking me to agree with you that it's a bad idea because YOU'RE A STUDENT and THEREFORE I should agree with you is just inane.
Oh, those poor exploited H1-B visa workers.
Imagine this scenario:
Tomorrow, we in the west are contacted by the aliens of Planet UltraFirstWorld.
The aliens of UltraFirstWorld speak English. And they need lots and lots of robotics engineers, sysadmins, perl programmers, and customer support folks. Because they are a very wealthy society, they can pay $1 million / year for every techie who goes over there.
So, they set up a visa program whereby Earthlings can travel there, work for a year, and come back home.
Go for one year, and you can buy yourself a McMansion inside Rt 128, or a sweet loft in San Francisco, and all the stuff from ThinkGeek you could ever want.
Go for a few years, and you can come back and catapult your entire family into the upper class.
Oh...but wait, there is one hitch.
Alien techies from UltraFirstWorld earn $2 million / year, not the mere $1 million / year they're offering you.
It turns out that, in accordance with the fundamental laws of economics, you are only being offered the job because hiring more UltraFirstWorld alien techies would cost the firms $2 million or more a year. Doubling the size of all-alien tech staff would require giving bonuses to tempt alien lawyers and doctors into engineering...that might cost $3 million / year.
So, see, by paying you only $1 million / year, they're exploiting you.
What the software industry of planet UltraFirstWorld should *really* (a) raise wages for natives from $2 million to something higher; (b) tell you to stay home and keep earning $60 or 90 k on Earth.
Who benefits from such a proposal?
Not consumers. They end up paying more for products and services produced at $3 million / year, instead of $1 million.
Not Earthlings. We end up earning $80k instead of $1 million.
Not the UltraFirstWorld companies: they have to pay higher wages and work hard to recruit extra workers.
Only one group benefits: the semi-skilled and semi-employed aliens who would have been hired if the supply of workers was artificially constrained.
Why should this group be privileged over all of the other groups? What makes them so special?
Huh?
NASA's budget has been mostly flat, with a slight upward trend, for over 15 years.
Trends in Federal R&D, FY 1990-2006 (DOD, NIH, NSF, DOE, NASA) (pdf).
I have no problem believing this.
I run Technical Video Rental, and I've had - literally - dozens of legal threats over the simple fact that I buy DVDs, then rent them out. Despite the fact that this is deeply settled case law, I've gotten everything from a legal cease-and-desist from one firm's CEO (who has a degree from Harvard Law School and was formerly Chief Counsel of the United States Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources) to a threat to - ahem - anally rape me (from a guy who think's he's anonymous, because he doesn't know what website logs and IP addrs are).
I spend about $2,000 - $3,000 per month on attorney fees trying to explain to people what the First Sale Doctrine is.
This is money that could be spent growing the business, and delivering more interesting videos to my customers...but it gets squandered because so many folks (a) don't understand what the copyright law says; (b) don't understand that exposure increases sales (see also: MP3s and the RIAA).
Bah.
It'd be nice to spend more time doing business, instead of doing meta-business (lawsuits).
Neither one is my idea of fun, but if I *HAD* to choose, it would be the one that didn't leave me with a mouthful of shit.
You're making an incoherent argument, or at the very least, skipping a step.
/.-ers, but the point holds).
If your argument is "patents are bad for society", then state that, and be done with it.
If your argument is "patents are good, but having a quantifiable probability of how a judge will rule on your particular case is bad", then state that.
If your argument is "patents are good, but jurisdiction shopping is bad", then say that.
The argument you actually seem to be making is that when (a) patents exist; (b) people have hard data on courts; (c) they jurisdiction shop, the end result is overall less utility.
I do not believe this to be true.
There are two economic concepts that need to be disambiguated: the first is how one divides up a certain amount of utility that exists. If I have an apple that I value at $1 and you value at $2, I can sell it to you, thus improving total societal utility. If I sell it to you at $1, I break even, and you reap $1 of utility profit (you got a $2 apple for just $1!). If I sell it to you at $2, you break even, and I reap $1 of utility profit (I sold a $1 apple for $2). If I sell the apple to you at $1.50, we profit evenly.
The second concept is the total amount of utility. Let's say that 10 of us each have one apple, and we each value them at $1 each. The total societal wealth if $10. Now let's say that one of us announces his plan to sneak around at night, stealing apples. In response, we band together and institute shift sleeping to guard our apples. We have now decreased the total wealth of our society, because staying up late at night is a cost (well, OK, maybe not for most
Now, you (and the article you cite) are conflating these two things: you're saying that the decision of how two parties sell an apple (which affects only the RELATIVE profit of those two parties, and does not increase or decrease total utility) decreases overall utility in the population.
Now, it is just barely possible that this is true. If the result of the software was a chilling effect, where inventors feared inventing lest they get sued by someone, then society as a whole would have less inventions, and there would be a deadweight loss.
However, there is not even the kernel of an argument to support such an argument. There could be one, but no one has made it.
The article is arguing that the mere transfer of wealth from one party to another is a bad thing...but this is not at all true. Say that you start a small company, work hard, come up with an idea, patent it, mortgage your home, invest $200k in the idea...and then, just before coming to market, you find that Sony or Microsoft has stolen your patented idea, blatantly and egregiously.
Which do you prefer: picking the nearest court, with no idea whether you can win, or using computer research to find a court that has a competent clueful judge?
Of course, you prefer the latter.
Now, does the ability to find courts that rule a certain way increase or decrease the total number of lawsuits? And is increasing or decreasing the total number of lawsuits a good thing?
First, I assert that it's not clear that this data would increase the total number of lawsuits. Imagine that Wealthy But Easily Offended Bob gets upset at your new joystick design and decides to sue you (it looks a WHOLE lot like a hockey puck-with-LEDs that he patented four years ago). With out hard data on what his chances are in various courts, he might plunge right in, swamp you with legal briefs, and destroy your bank account. He'd likely lose, in the end, but he doesn't know that. Now, imagine that this service exists. He shops for jurisdictions, but finds that his chances of winning the suite vary all the way from 2% in one jurisdiction to 6% in another. Having hard data, he decides not to sue at all.
Addressing the topic of whether more lawsuits (even if that's the result of this software) is a good thing: if you accept the validity of patents at
DO NOT believe the evidence! Just because warming trends are happening on two different planets is NO reason to think that there might be a common cause, like the solar energy cycle. DO NOT read up NASA predictions for solar cooling and cooler weather on Earth. DO NOT look at the graph showing the correlation between solar output and the Earth's climate. DO NIT read up on the data showing that most stars like the sun show variability in output. DO NOT read about how the Earth's climate has changed greatly in the past, but always oscillates in a limited range.
Read only government approved scare stories. Believe only government approved computer climate models (even if they do not yet generate outputs that conform to the real data we see). Accept as an article of faith that the "cause" of the "problem" is fossil fuels (even though the majority of warming in the last 200 years occurred before the Industrial Revolution really got underway). Accept only "solutions" to the "problem" like Kyoto (even though Kyoto does not bind the fastest growing nations to any curbs in carbon use, and even though Kyoto would drastically depress standards of living growth in the first world).
When anyone challenges the government story on global warming, accuse them of being in the pay of "Big Oil". DO NOT judge the data and theories on their own merits; preemptorilly disbelieve anything that does not conform to what you've read in Time magazine and heard in Al Gore's political speeches, even if it comes from Mars probes, or experts on solar energy.
I too have come up with a scheme to
* bind hydrogen
* that is completely safe at room temperature
* has no loss of hydrogen
* thus enabling cheap storage
* allows for simple extraction of hydrogen
I use a proprietary process involving oxygen. I'm not at liberty to give more details until the patent is issued.
Really?
Back this assertion up with evidence, please.
Your assertion that Bush "broke" the treaty is incorrect.
The treaty included an opt-out provision that allowed either signatory to leave the treaty, as long as adequate notice was given.
The US obeyed the details of this clause: it gave notice.
No treaty was broken.
You simply make it illegal to own the weapons and place heavy penalties on those who make those weapons.
The US has tons of strict laws that prevent criminals from owning guns. And yet...criminals own guns.
Thought experiment: Keep all other factors constant, and add in cheap and easy fabrication technology. Now, tell me how why criminals (and others) no longer own guns.
Leave it up to the Europeans to get it right
You yourself said that the shuttle was a reasonable idea when it was early on the drawing board, and it went bad as the project came to fruition...and now you're comparing the ACTUAL American shuttle to a THEORETICAL European shuttle.
The theoretical ANYTHING is always better than the actual ANYTHING.
If the ESA ever gets a shuttle up and running, then we can compare apples to apples.
Until then, your argument holds no water. It's like saying "the party I'm thinking about having is better than that party that you actually had, because your party sounded good, but then when you actually held it, things went wrong".
"One of the next"?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only Europeans to *ever* go into space did so by hitchiking on an American or Soviet vehicle.
The correct phrase is not "one of the next", but "one of the first...assuming it happens at all".