That's begging the question... What evidence do you have that these patents
are "useless"? Consider, if they successfully "harass new entries to the
market" then they're clearly useful, even if you don't like it.
On the contrary. If there are new entries to the market, that indicates that the patented invention isn't so difficult to develop, therefore the patent was incorrectly approved in the first place. The only effect of patenting an idea that anybody can easily come up with is to prevent innovation.
No, we need to cut out the "who will pay me" entitlement generation's worldview. The net is free, and we put stuff on it for free so that others can check it out for free, and they will do the same. If someone can't do something without getting paid for it with micropayments they're not needed. If they want to get paid, why don't they mow their neighbour's lawn.
Thats not the real problem. The real problem with R and Octave/Matlab etc is that when you want to use a specialized function to analyze your data, the function isn't usually implemented in an efficient way (ie it will create temporary tables/vectors and perform operation that don't scale, etc).
So effectively your rich exploration environment is unusable unless you refrain from using all but the simplest operations, or you write your own versions of commands from scratch with efficiency in mind.
This is _particularly_ noticeable with graphics. Try plotting a terabyte dataset _entirely_ on the screen in 3d and rotating it.
The issue with such
blanket privacy laws is that they will always have unintended consequences,
and the only people who benefit are lawyers, who get to sue and try the cases
that will inevitably result.
That makes no sense. A blanket law has no loopholes, it applies to everything.
It's specific laws like you suggest here that are riddled with loopholes:
Then make laws disallowing the use of genetic testing, or any medical testing
in general, for setting premium rates.
Let me count the loopholes: it still allows use of genetic testing for accepting/rejecting individuals, it allows it for all fees that aren't premium rates, it allows it for any other actions which aren't specifically discrimination of medical insurance type, etc.
You've got it exactly backwards. Privacy laws are on the table, but you think that taking them off the table and letting everyone do what they please is better because that will reduce(!) opportunities for lawyers? Not only will that lead to more lawsuits, it will require the lawsuits to identify new laws that are needed to reduce the lawsuits.
Do Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa (4 of the BRICS) also need to
approve? All 200 or so countries of the world?
Of course. Any country in which you do business can tell you what you can and cannot do as a business in their part of the world. And so it should be. Deal with it.
Google wanted to reap the tax benefits of opening subsidiaries in lots of countries. Those subsidiaries are subject to local laws, and antitrust therefore potentially needs to be approved everywhere. Nothing to see here.
What abuses are you subject to if you join a medical study that gives you the
best treatment available and also studies your outcomes?
If your privacy is breached, your future insurance rates can unfairly suffer, you can be denied other treatments, your genes can be patented by companies causing increased costs for other researchers later, your relatives can be identified as being higher risk (therefore higher premiums for them as well etc).
That's just medically. Your mortgage rates and loan approvals can be affected, your kids school application can be denied etc. That's when other companies and organizations buy your records or pay some company for data mining publically available information, which is what happens to nonprivate data.
You should be allowed to make an informed decision if that is what you want, and for how long you want to make this information available. Also, your children won't thank you for making decisions which affect them adversely, so they should have a say too.
It didn't matter so much when records used to be kept on yellowing paper in a basement where nobody would go searching for them, but when it's in a computer file that gets traded around to lots of companies it matters. Moreover, when that happens, conversion errors always creep in and the records become corrupted, and you can even end up with several diseases and deaths that you never knew you had.
That's what privacy is. "The state of being alone or kept apart from others". It means you don't get the benefits, but you're also not subject to the abuses.
Overall, I think that most agree that the abuses outweigh the benefits these days. With Facebook like corporations mining data from literally millions of people, the benefit of scientists having access to the names of 100 thousand people in a study isn't comparable, even if they are able to incidentally warn or help maybe 50 who exhibit certain symptoms.
We've created psychotic monster corporations, and now we have to accept the consequences, which includes a steep price to limit the privacy problem and an even greater economic one if we decide to fix it.
It's not a "google" algorithm. Google's contribution to science isn't the ranking algorithm, it's the _scale_ of application on the order of billions of nodes. People have been doing calculations using "PageRank" for about a century before Google was founded (by hand obviously).
Stop trolling. Unity is unusable (for many, many people). He should know that before trying it, so that he can prepare himself in case he needs to revert. He *may* like it, in which case the warning won't do any harm.
You've been around long enough to know all the technical stuff and you've seen a lot of the business side. If you just do one degree, you'd be coasting through. So do both degrees at once, then you won't be wasting your time. You can mention only one or the other when talking to a fellow geek or a PHB.
I fail to see your point. The human company employee who writes the press release isn't part of the news industry, isn't paid by a newspaper, and has no relationship with the journalist we're discussing. The press release is just a raw material which enters into the production of the news story.
What you're implying is that humans will always have a role, but that role is entirely on the fringes of the economy, as high value consumers and as low value producers. All the value added stuff, the selection, analysis, packaging, etc is what algorithms are aiming to do.
Take the analogy with the iPad: it takes humans in America to buy them at a few hundred dollars a piece, and it takes humans in China to do the repetitive assembly at a few cents an hour. All the in between stuff is where the money gets made.
Attaching a cost to pollution is meaningless. You either reduce (in absolute terms) by a certain fixed amount or you don't. Nature doesn't care about your greenbacks.
The only thing an economic system of carbon emissions trading does is grow the economy by introducing a new ficticious form of wealth that can be used as leverage for investment games. It's literally creating wealth out of thin air (and I won't go into how useful that really is).
Then the journalists are fucked. What most of them do is rewriting press releases submitted by companies, copying subscription news stories, and maybe adding a critical sentence or two cribbed from wikipedia.
You must not download enough movies. Whenever I see one that says SCREENER NOT FOR RESALE in half the scenes, I spare a kind thought for the poor pirate who voluntarily put his rectum in TSA's way just to bring one more movie into the Free World.
So, "owning" a movie is vastly more important than maximizing rent profits. Piracy tickles rent profits, but completely
destroys the ability to own the asset, and hence reduces the wealth of everyone who has a large ownership stake in IP.
Suppose piracy destroys ownership. Then without ownership at all, the asset can't be sold or generate rent revenue for the "owner". So rent profits disappear. But wait, you've already asserted that piracy only tickles rent profits. So the chain of logic must break, ergo piracy *doesn't* completely destroy ownership.
I think it's better to view piracy as a normal risk of doing business. When you manufacture products, there are always a small number of defective units. When you sell products, there are always a small number of complaints. When you create "IP", there are always a small number of pirate copies. Sometimes, the number is larger than expected. It's no good blaming the machines that produce the units, or blaming the people who complain about your product, or the pirates who copy your movie.
The solution is to improve your manufacturing process, to improve your customer service, and to improve your movie delivery experience. If a business can't invest in its own quality control process, it's time for it to get out, not blame everyone else in the world.
We teach math for a reason. If you go into a store and want to pay your bill, you have to know how to count so you can present the correct amount of money, and so you can check that your change is correct also.
It's not strictly been necessary to know how to do that for about two generations now, people *could* just carry an electronic pocket calculator and do the sums on demand at the store counter, but nobody does. It's stupid, and using the counting machinery in your head is much better and more practical.
The same is true with browsing facts on demand, it's generally stupid. It's like taking out the calculator in the store, then fishing out the manual from your pocket to learn how to operate the keys, and another piece of paper which has pictures of the bills in your wallet, and a conversion table so you can enter the proper values in the calculator, etc. Oh, and the manual is in Chinese, so you also have to take out the English-Chinese dictionary that you carry in your manbag...
We're better off with as many facts as possible in our heads, but realistically each of us only has limited capacity. We should still aim to fill the capacity completely.
Then God ran out of money, and sold off the word to Oracle.
"May 12, 2012. In a highly controversial Ohio court filing today, Oracle Corp. demanded damages of 6 quintillion dollars for the unauthorized use of derived literary works, including the sun, sea and sky, and fishes, animals and rocks dated from about 6000 years ago. A tiny chosen sample of humans is also expected to be sold off to the highest bidder to pay for initial court expenses."
Slashdot Mirror
Why aren't you? Isn't he innocent until proven guilty? Right now, he's 100% innocent.
He's being a good slashdot commenter who's offering stuff that matters to the small contingent of us who have advanced maths degrees?
On the contrary. If there are new entries to the market, that indicates that the patented invention isn't so difficult to develop, therefore the patent was incorrectly approved in the first place. The only effect of patenting an idea that anybody can easily come up with is to prevent innovation.
No, he described the current *means* of implementing patents, not the *intent* of their existence.
I only buy Lenovo laptops. Nobody was ever fired for buying Chinese!
No, we need to cut out the "who will pay me" entitlement generation's worldview. The net is free, and we put stuff on it for free so that others can check it out for free, and they will do the same. If someone can't do something without getting paid for it with micropayments they're not needed. If they want to get paid, why don't they mow their neighbour's lawn.
So effectively your rich exploration environment is unusable unless you refrain from using all but the simplest operations, or you write your own versions of commands from scratch with efficiency in mind.
This is _particularly_ noticeable with graphics. Try plotting a terabyte dataset _entirely_ on the screen in 3d and rotating it.
That makes no sense. A blanket law has no loopholes, it applies to everything. It's specific laws like you suggest here that are riddled with loopholes:
Let me count the loopholes: it still allows use of genetic testing for accepting/rejecting individuals, it allows it for all fees that aren't premium rates, it allows it for any other actions which aren't specifically discrimination of medical insurance type, etc.
You've got it exactly backwards. Privacy laws are on the table, but you think that taking them off the table and letting everyone do what they please is better because that will reduce(!) opportunities for lawyers? Not only will that lead to more lawsuits, it will require the lawsuits to identify new laws that are needed to reduce the lawsuits.
Of course. Any country in which you do business can tell you what you can and cannot do as a business in their part of the world. And so it should be. Deal with it.
Google wanted to reap the tax benefits of opening subsidiaries in lots of countries. Those subsidiaries are subject to local laws, and antitrust therefore potentially needs to be approved everywhere. Nothing to see here.
If your privacy is breached, your future insurance rates can unfairly suffer, you can be denied other treatments, your genes can be patented by companies causing increased costs for other researchers later, your relatives can be identified as being higher risk (therefore higher premiums for them as well etc). That's just medically. Your mortgage rates and loan approvals can be affected, your kids school application can be denied etc. That's when other companies and organizations buy your records or pay some company for data mining publically available information, which is what happens to nonprivate data.
You should be allowed to make an informed decision if that is what you want, and for how long you want to make this information available. Also, your children won't thank you for making decisions which affect them adversely, so they should have a say too.
It didn't matter so much when records used to be kept on yellowing paper in a basement where nobody would go searching for them, but when it's in a computer file that gets traded around to lots of companies it matters. Moreover, when that happens, conversion errors always creep in and the records become corrupted, and you can even end up with several diseases and deaths that you never knew you had.
Overall, I think that most agree that the abuses outweigh the benefits these days. With Facebook like corporations mining data from literally millions of people, the benefit of scientists having access to the names of 100 thousand people in a study isn't comparable, even if they are able to incidentally warn or help maybe 50 who exhibit certain symptoms.
We've created psychotic monster corporations, and now we have to accept the consequences, which includes a steep price to limit the privacy problem and an even greater economic one if we decide to fix it.
Yeah, what changed is that we stopped spanking them for lying :-(
Nah, they'd just replace the cupholder with an inbuilt LCD display that shows nthing but ads all the time...
It's not a "google" algorithm. Google's contribution to science isn't the ranking algorithm, it's the _scale_ of application on the order of billions of nodes. People have been doing calculations using "PageRank" for about a century before Google was founded (by hand obviously).
Stop trolling. Unity is unusable (for many, many people). He should know that before trying it, so that he can prepare himself in case he needs to revert. He *may* like it, in which case the warning won't do any harm.
Oh, is that like driving while black?
Well, if Jennifer Aniston was in that hole, that scene in episode VI where Boba Fett falls in would take on a whole new meaning...
You've been around long enough to know all the technical stuff and you've seen a lot of the business side. If you just do one degree, you'd be coasting through. So do both degrees at once, then you won't be wasting your time. You can mention only one or the other when talking to a fellow geek or a PHB.
What you're implying is that humans will always have a role, but that role is entirely on the fringes of the economy, as high value consumers and as low value producers. All the value added stuff, the selection, analysis, packaging, etc is what algorithms are aiming to do.
Take the analogy with the iPad: it takes humans in America to buy them at a few hundred dollars a piece, and it takes humans in China to do the repetitive assembly at a few cents an hour. All the in between stuff is where the money gets made.
The only thing an economic system of carbon emissions trading does is grow the economy by introducing a new ficticious form of wealth that can be used as leverage for investment games. It's literally creating wealth out of thin air (and I won't go into how useful that really is).
Then the journalists are fucked. What most of them do is rewriting press releases submitted by companies, copying subscription news stories, and maybe adding a critical sentence or two cribbed from wikipedia.
You must not download enough movies. Whenever I see one that says SCREENER NOT FOR RESALE in half the scenes, I spare a kind thought for the poor pirate who voluntarily put his rectum in TSA's way just to bring one more movie into the Free World.
Suppose piracy destroys ownership. Then without ownership at all, the asset can't be sold or generate rent revenue for the "owner". So rent profits disappear. But wait, you've already asserted that piracy only tickles rent profits. So the chain of logic must break, ergo piracy *doesn't* completely destroy ownership.
I think it's better to view piracy as a normal risk of doing business. When you manufacture products, there are always a small number of defective units. When you sell products, there are always a small number of complaints. When you create "IP", there are always a small number of pirate copies. Sometimes, the number is larger than expected. It's no good blaming the machines that produce the units, or blaming the people who complain about your product, or the pirates who copy your movie. The solution is to improve your manufacturing process, to improve your customer service, and to improve your movie delivery experience. If a business can't invest in its own quality control process, it's time for it to get out, not blame everyone else in the world.
It's not strictly been necessary to know how to do that for about two generations now, people *could* just carry an electronic pocket calculator and do the sums on demand at the store counter, but nobody does. It's stupid, and using the counting machinery in your head is much better and more practical.
The same is true with browsing facts on demand, it's generally stupid. It's like taking out the calculator in the store, then fishing out the manual from your pocket to learn how to operate the keys, and another piece of paper which has pictures of the bills in your wallet, and a conversion table so you can enter the proper values in the calculator, etc. Oh, and the manual is in Chinese, so you also have to take out the English-Chinese dictionary that you carry in your manbag...
We're better off with as many facts as possible in our heads, but realistically each of us only has limited capacity. We should still aim to fill the capacity completely.
Then God ran out of money, and sold off the word to Oracle.
"May 12, 2012. In a highly controversial Ohio court filing today, Oracle Corp. demanded damages of 6 quintillion dollars for the unauthorized use of derived literary works, including the sun, sea and sky, and fishes, animals and rocks dated from about 6000 years ago. A tiny chosen sample of humans is also expected to be sold off to the highest bidder to pay for initial court expenses."