And that works great for all the areas where companies aren't competing - which is basically anything that isn't a major source of advantage. For example, android. However, android works just great with IP law as it is (again, I'm all for reigning in some of the abuses).
What about the areas where companies actually compete? If you eliminate IP the only areas companies could compete would be on things like manufacturing costs (but not with regard to process improvements - which anybody could copy). Basically the biggest source of competitive advantage would be the ability to pollute without penalty and pay your people a near-starving wage. Welcome to outsourcing!
Fellowship of the ring was a fluke, big dollars spent on people with little background rarely happens in any industry. Basing your argument on that case is a terrible idea because it is not representative.
I agree that huge successes like LOTR are flukes - they are not the norm. That is the whole point! A system of IP allows entrepeneurs to invest, and if it turns out good they reap the rewards. Huge members of the general public didn't have to commit funds to the effort prior to knowing how it would turn out. Instead, investors took a risk and reaped a reward (or stood to lose).
The fact that you think the "ransom" must come from a single group or entity tells me that you are shooting from the hip, that indeed you really are ignorant of implications of the models of I've pointed out.
I never claimed that it had to come from a single group. The ransom for LOTR could have come from the entire population of the world - in fact my example was 1-10 million people offering $20 each. The problems with this model are:
1. How do you get so many people to commit to a single project? It works great for some $10k video game - not for a $200M cinematic production or a $100M drug (with a 75% chance of failure).
2. If people do commit to a single project, how do you get the right person/entity to do the work? Suppose Fred Simpson makes Fellowship of the Rings and gets it done six months before Peter Jackson - but his movie lacks the brilliance of the latter's effort. Well, he claims the ransom, and the millions of people who shelled out $20 decide it isn't worth spending that kind of money again since the product wasn't worth their money. If all those individuals get to decide whether or not they want to pay out, then who is going to spend all that money on the production if 80% of the investors could say it isn't good enough?
3. What does the risk/reward ratio work out to? If Peter Jackson has to spend $190M to maybe collect $200M, it probably isn't worth the effort. That $190M could make more money than that in a bank account (assuming that the bank can find anything to do with the money in a world where no IP exists). There is also the risk that somebody beats him to the finish - maybe with an inferior product. To be worth taking a gamble there needs to be substantial rewards at stake. Most ransom efforts today (like the X-Prize) aren't designed to be the reward - they're just a mild motivation and a source of prestige to help companies get off the ground. Those companies will reap the real profits down the line as a result of IP law.
I'm really not interested in what you have to say, because well, I've heard it all before and I am not your teacher.
I never asked you to teach me anything - you're welcome to reply or not. However, if you actually want to sway others to your viewpoint you might actually have to engage with them at some point. It isn't like this is the first time that I've ever heard anybody advocating your position. Believe it or not, the reason that not everybody on Earth agrees on everything is not the sheer ignorance of of everybody who doesn't hold to your views.:)
Because the ransom model can guarantee profit before a dime is spent on production, the need to pay big names in order to reduce risk of failure at the box office is eliminated.
Sure - zero risk for the producer if you have a ransom. However, very few people will offer such ransoms. Again, who is going to offer $200M to produce LOTR? In fact, LOTR used quite a bit of no-name talent (who ever heard of Elijah Wood before LOTR?).
And the risk still exists. The risk now belongs to all the people who forked out the money for the ransom expecting LOTR but instead getting some flop, because the producer only did the minimum effort required to claim the ransom.
Yes, we agree. Just as plenty of industries have gone under over the years when technology made them irrelevant. Stagnation is bad, especially legally mandated stagnation.
However, these are not industries that depend on obsolete techonology. In fact, most of these industries are pushing the envelope when it comes to technology - since they can monetize their investments. Replacing the buggy whip industry with the auto industry is a no-brainer. Do you really want to replace the movie industry with Joe's Amateur Movie?
Maybe its because I've worked contract for most of my life so it comes more naturally to me, but it shouldn't be that hard to sit down and see how pretty much all applied science doesn't require ip protection - just a willingness of a consortium of companies to contract for development in coopetition.
Ok, that last word could be cooperation or competition, and since they're antonyms I'm going to have to guess that you mean the former.
Companies working in cooperation is nice and all, but without competition there is no incentive to innovate. The last thing I want is that the only way technology is developed is if ALL the big companies agree that it makes sense to develop it. Apple decides to make some clever smartphone, but Motorola says that the idea is dumb, so no iphone. Or, Apple spends a fortune and comes out with the phone, and then six months later everybody else is cloning it (down to the finest detail) and Apple barely recoups their development costs (and if they mess up the loss is all theirs).
Companies that want to keep their research to themselves can rely on that law of nature - the trade secret.
Great, but there are no laws backing that up in your vision of the future. So, if 10 scientists collaborate and discover a $30M invention, the company has to pay them VERY well on a regular basis so that it isn't worth their while to tell all their competitors about the secret. Then to develop that trade secret they have to let 100 more people in on it. You'd never keep them all quiet. The reason nobody talks now is that they'd get sued out the wazoo, and the companies that learn the secret couldn't make use if it anyway. Take away those laws and companies would just periodically bribe each other's R&D workers while cutting their own R&D - until nobody is doing R&D.
So, what's wrong with those workers getting paid big for discovering that $30M discovery? Well, the problem is that this is like the lottery. If the company employs 1000 scientists for 5 years, chances are that 10 of them will come up with some big discoveries worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and the rest will go bust. So, the financial model is that everybody is paid the same, spreading out the risk and the reward. The alternative is that the company pays peanuts unless you discover something, and then they pay out big. Well, that alternative is available to anybody who wants it today - just start your own company. You'll either boom or bust.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for IP reform in a number of areas. However, if we want huge research programs to happen, they either need to be government funded or somebody has to be able to make money from them. If you want government funding you don't need to do anything about IP - just start funding it. If you wa
And these aren't hypotheticals, people small and large, have been experimenting with these variations and in many cases have had a lot of success.
Show me one example of something whose sole revenue source was one (or more) of the things you cite, and whose cost of production was at least 50 million dollars. Oh, and I mean a situation where these revenue sources didn't benefit from IP protection. For example, a movie showing in a theater could be considered a physical tie in, but it only works because the theater can't sell its reels to somebody to run off 10,000 copies so that a week after the show no theater is buying their reels from the producer.
Sure, those kinds of models can work for SOME content - but you're typically talking about something that takes one or two people a month or two to create.
Suppose you wanted to make the LOTR trilogy movies with this kind of a model. Those probably cost a few hundred million dollars to produce. So, you'd need to get 1-10 million people to fork out $20 each to Peter Jackson and New Line, who to that date hadn't really made any movie that any of them had ever heard of. Then, once he gets all that money he makes the movies. It would never work - nobody would fork out that kind of money, and even if they did, who is to say that they wouldn't have given it to Fred Simpson instead of Peter Jackson, and Fred makes an unnotable flop further reinforcing the mistake everybody made to spend that kind of money on a product that hadn't been created yet.
The whole concept of IP lets somebody take a risk to create something, and then recoup the money by selling products that people can actually research before they buy it. If they don't think that based on reviews and word of mouth that LOTR is worth $12 to see, then they don't need to see it.
Trust me - if you got rid of IP laws entirely you'd see entire industries go under. Right now piracy is limited to underground movements. Imagine if movie theaters could legally choose to buy their reels from some copy shop for 1/100th the cost, or if any publisher could run off copies of any book out there, or if your local car dealer could buy junkers from China and slap Toyota logos on them. How about Microsoft just incorporating code from linux in their products wholesale? Right now even though copying is easy major institutions don't do it since they're easy legal targets.
Much of the modern world is based on service industries that don't work without IP. Sure, you could envision other business models - and you could argue that some film some hobbiest made in his spare time is as much a work of art as LOTR, but does society really want to give up major productions in any industry that cost millions of dollars to make and which employ thousands of people?
Who would even employ scientists? Right now they're mostly employed in industries where IP protects their research, or in academia. However, academia is only funded because lots of people want to study science since there are so many good-paying jobs - get rid of the jobs and you'll see as much funding in academic science departments as you see in art departments. Trust me - the money doesn't go as far when you're paying for chemical waste disposal and not paint.
Uh, did you just use libertarian and authoritarian in the same sentence? You do realize that they're almost polar opposites.
I lean fairly libertarian, although I do believe in a regulatory framework that allows and forces companies to compete on fair ground, with control over externalities. For example, I'm all for taxing oil from the Middle East to pay for wars in that region. I'm also all for tarrifs on imports from countries that don't have reasonable worker safety and environmental standards. I'm fine with anti-monopoly regulation as well. In fact, you'll find I support all kinds of regulation.
That said, I'm also for minimizing the role of government in general, and on the balance I'm fairly libertarian.
There are many areas where libertarian approaches can provide the best experience from even a socialist perspective. Take schools - you can have highly controlled state-run schools that are essential social laboratories with mandatory union teachers. Or, you could still provide a free or cheap eduction to everybody but with a more competitive school system.
Healthcare is another example where there are socialized solutions that provide for care for the indigent, and a more sane system of billing/etc than what we have now, but which allow consumer choice to drive quality. Health care, admittedly, is a bigger challenge since people tend to be poor consumers when it comes to health care - probably not the best place to start implementing a libertarian paradise.
This sort of thing is a perfect application for VMWare. Create some interface where engineers can order up a server, and poof, a cloned vmware system is provided to them. Then they can have console-level access to that single server and do whatever they want with it. When they're done they hit a button, and poof it is disposed of. Since these kinds of development systems tend to sit around idle most of the time you can oversubscribe the hardware.
If you must use physical servers then there are lots of remote administration options. Of course good old RDP works just fine for 95% of the tasks. If you're actually working on OS-level changes then you might need a way to remotely boot off of CDs and get remote console-level access. Lots of server-grade solutions provide this kind of capability. VMWare does as well.
No doubt an AI machine would be as well. If a company spent the money to build an AI supercomputer to design products, don't you think they'd make sure that the electricity was kept running and the room was properly cooled? They would take VERY good care of it.
Of course, if the machine complained about working too hard they'd tweak the program to make it spend its time thinking about more productive matters.
Most companies take better care of their equipment than their personnel. You can always hire more people, but that welding robot cost $2M to purchase. If a senior manager found out that a low-level manager had neglected such a capital investment to save a few pennies they'd put the person responsible out on the street.
Why, the ports used to trigger this exploit are like the DCOM RPC ports and MS-SQL ports - nobody allows those to be accessed over the internet which is why we've never had any large-scale worms take advantage of them...
I don't work with DNA, so I have to trust what I read on the internet. According to numerous sources, the base substitution error rate of the DNA replication process is estimated to be about one error per billion.
Yes - with error correction. If you look at the error frequency in an exonuclease-deficient DNA polymerase you're not going to get anywhere near those error rates. When performing PCR on 1kb sized DNA fragments I'd find it almost impossible to get an error-free copy using such an enzyme. With the exonuclease capability the error rate is 10-100x lower, maybe. Further error reductions are the result of other proofreading mechanisms (and I'm sure that in the native cellular enviornment these enzymes also work somewhat better than in a test tube).
Hard disk manufacturers don't advertise their natural error rates, but they are much, much higher than the DNA error rate. This is why modern hard disks use on the order of 200 bits of error correction per sector. Hard disk error rates are well over 1,000 per billion.
Yes - if you look at the error rates BEFORE error correction. That is already bettern than DNA polymerases in many cases. Again, you're comparing a complete solution to a partial solution. The reason we have error correction with computers is the same reason our DNA machinery also has it - too many errors otherwise.
As for the "redundancy" of DNA due to the twin helical strands, they cannot be considered redundant since they are required for stability of the DNA molecule. Their appearance of redundancy is merely an artifact of evolution.
And the redundancy of ECC on a hard drive is required to maintain the integrity of the data. Just because you can't get rid of it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
All the DNA-repair mechanisms I'm aware of take advantage of the redundancy in DNA. The only reason it can be repaired is BECAUSE it is redundant. How would you detect an error otherwise? It isn't like DNA contains checksums.
Also - single stranded DNA is a perfectly viable molecule. I don't believe it is particularly unstable, except to the degree that cells tend to chop it up since it isn't normally kept around long-term. Now, it does form a tangled mess and since all the cellular machinery uses duplex DNA it can't be used. RNA is almost always single-stranded and it works just fine (it is unstable for two reasons - it is chemically less stable and also there are enzymes everywhere that chew it up).
Look, I'm not making this stuff up - I do have a degree in Biochemistry. I'm certainly not an expert in DNA repair mechanisms, and I'd gladly defer to somebody who is. However, it sounds like you're looking up error rates online without understanding what part of the entire system they apply to. When I copy a hard drive I get an error rate of zero apparent bits per TB - that doesn't mean that the error rate is zero at all stages of the process, but the overall error rate is VERY low. The same applies to DNA replication - errors are constantly introduced and corrected - it is only the overall process that is accurate.
Within water you can't have anything more basic than OH- since the base will just dissocate water and be neutralized (leaving lots of OH-). In other solvents you can have far more acidic and basic substances and do lots of chemistry that wouldn't be possible in water.
However, I don't believe that the actual term pH is defined outside of water, since it is the concentration of H3O+ which doesn't exist outside of water. You could define something analogous for another solvent. However, since that solvent will have a different dissociation constant and/or pKa a "pH" of 7 might or might not be neutral.
In any case, if you make your measurements in a non-aqueous solvent you can have pKas that are far greater than 14 or less than 2.
Disclaimer, it has been a while since I took General/Organic Chemistry, but I am a chemist...
We already do - that's why optical media typically incorporates ECC of some kind. We can't write data at those densities without some loss, which we need to correct for (and we do so in a way that is definitely more efficient than is used for DNA).
The only advantage DNA really has is storage density. We definitely don't get to the level of 2 bits per 600 hydrogen atoms worth of mass.
My point is that the error rate is much, much higher in the modern computer equipment. In fact, it gets worse the higher the density of whatever memory technology you choose. The fact that you don't notice it does not change the fact that the errors occurred.
The error rate for DNA is also much higher if you want to measure it that way. I suspect that computers would still be superior in that regard. You can't compare DNA with error correction to computers without it. Also - most forms of computer data storage actually have a very low error rate without correction - especially at non-bleeding-edge storage densities. You can't look at CDs/DVDs as the model for all of computer data storage.
Also, when thinking about competing approaches we have to consider that technology achieves it's error correction through redundancy and overhead. DNA achieves it through repair.
Uh, you do realize that the only reason DNA can be repaired is because two identical copies of the entire genome are stored? On top of that the genome is diploid so it also contains two mostly-identical versions of those copies. I wouldn't call that being free of overhead - almost all computer-based data correction algorithms only have a small amount of ECC data stored (maybe 10% - vs 100%-200% for DNA depending on how you look at it).
A little more detail - a DNA strand consists of two antiparallel molecules of DNA which are complementary. They store exactly the same information. If a point in the DNA strand is not complementary then it contains an error which needs to be repaired (using any number of algorithms - the trick is figuring out which redundant copy is right since DNA doesn't contain checksums/etc). Those long strands of DNA form a chromosome, and every one of our cells contains a pair of each one (one from each parent). Those aren't a complete duplication since they are slightly different, but they're probably 95+% redundant. Then, during cellular division all of those chromosomes are replicated so at some points the cell has another level of redundancy (granted, this one isn't really a waste since it is just holding onto it to give it to a new daughter cell).
Look, I'm not saying that DNA isn't a marvel. However, just because it is natural doesn't mean that it is superior to a hard drive.
Sure, but the assertion I replied to is that modern computer technology couldn't achieve what biology accomplishes with replicating all that DNA with such a low error rate.
The DNA replication machinery has error-correction capabilities built into it, and so do modern hard drives/etc. My point was that the best of modern technology can easily compete with the best of biological "technology" in this particular regard.
In fact, I suspect that to some degree a less than perfect error rate in DNA replication could be a source of advantage. After all, how can you have evolution without mutation?
The diploid human genome is 8 gigabases. Each base encodes 2 bits of data. That is 4GB of data per genome. Let's say that a gamete is produced after 1000 generations of cells from the fertilized egg (no idea what the right number is, but I suspect that the true figure is lower). That means that 4TB of data is being copied, with an error rate of 450 bits.
If I want I can set up two 4TB raids on my server at home (assuming I had more disk space), and issue the command dd if=/dev/mdx of=/dev/mdy bs=1M count=4000000. Then I could do a diff on the two volumes. I'd be shocked if they had any errors at all.
These kinds of error rates are actually not all that uncommon with computers.
Now, the 204 year bit sounds impressive, but it isn't like a piece of DNA lasted 204 years without any decay. Instead it was copied repeatedly over that time. If I copied that 4TB hard drive once every 25 years (generation time) onto a brand new drive (assuming that you could keep making them compatible) I don't think that getting the data across 200 years without any bit-flips is really that tall of an order. Sure, technology will change, but that really is a different matter, and I doubt that any commodity computer technology used in the next 200 years will do any worse than what we have today.
If you post a comment on a government-run website, it is reasonable to think that the comment will be saved as part of an official record. If that website happens to be hosted via facebook it is a reasonable extension to think that comments stored there would also be an official record.
If they were spidering all of facebook looking for anybody who says anything mean about the President that would be different. However, it is pretty dumb to post death threats on Obama's facebook page and not think that somebody would notice it and take action (indeed this would probably be illegal on any website, but I believe that threatening the life of the President is specifically a crime).
Except, this isn't a PB array. This is a 0.067PB array. Is there any evidence that this solution can practically scale to a level where calculating cost in dollars per PB makes any sense?
Hey, its a great achievement. However, the kinds of people who need storage by the PB aren't going to roll out hundreds of these smaller arrays and figure out who to organize the data on them.
You can do even better than the price quoted in this article. On Newegg I found a 1TB drive for $95 - that is only $95k/PB. What a bargain!
Except that I don't have a PB of space with my solution. I have 0.001PB of space. If I want 1PB of space then I need hundreds of drives, and some kind of system capable of talking to hundreds of drives and binding them into some kind of a useful array.
This sounds like criticizing the space shuttle as being wasteful as you can cover the same distance in a truck for 1/10000000 x the cost. Except of course for the minor detail that the truck can't fly in space, and can't do all that distance on a single load of fuel in a few hours.
Or, I can generate completely green energy at a very low price per gigawatt using a small generator and a hamster wheel. Except that I'm not generating a gigawatt - I'm generating maybe a few mW and scaling it up. Unless I bury China in rats I'm not going to be competing with the Three Gorges Dam.
The purpose of these types of journals/studies is to communicate advances in the science/field to your peers not the general public.
Considering that the general public paid for the work to be done 95% of the time, I wouldn't be so quick to suggest that they should be left out. However, I do concede that aiming for them in a scholarly work is probably a bit much to ask. I'd be happy if an article in the field of Astronomy could be understood by any astronomer, and an article in the field of Medicine could be understood by anybody with an MD. Again, the target is somebody with a strong scientific eduction, but who hasn't necessarily spent the last 10 years studying a particular membrane receptor protein or plasma currents in the Milky Way whatever.
For the benefit of the public I'd be fine with any government grant requiring the writing of a 200 word popular science article suitable for a newspaper or magazine. Sure, I know many researchers don't like doing this stuff - they can pay somebody else to do it if they want as long as it is accurate. If they don't want to do that, then they can look elsewhere for their funding - it isn't like there isn't a long line of applicants.
Having state-of-the-art work reviewed by non-experts wouldn't be particularly useful. Plus it would be tough to find anyone to actually do these reviews if you need to hit a stack of textbooks before you can make heads or tails of the article you have volunteered to review.
If you couldn't make heads or tails of it without reading anything at all, then you'd just indicate that the article is indecipherable, and it would need a rewrite. The whole point is to ensure that the article can be ready without reading 300 textbooks. I'm not talking about making articles that somebody who dropped out of school in 8th grade could read - but articles which somebody with advanced education in the general field, but not the specific topic, could understand.
Nature has a 1400 word limit. So if you want to get published in the top-tier broad-scope journal, you have to explain why your study is of interest to a wide variety of scientists worldwide in 3 pages or less...
If your study is of interest to a wide variety of scientists worldwide, then it should be written so that they can actually read it. If a Biologist can't understand an article on Astrophysics, then why bother writing it in a journal that is mostly read by non-astrophysicists. The whole concept of Nature and Science is more about prestige than communication. You'd get just as much communication if you published the article in the #1 astrophysics journal.
In any case, I wasn't really aiming at Nature or Science in particular. But since you bring it up if you're going to write a journal read by everybody, why not write articles that anybody could read?
So, suppose you have a machine that takes a picture of the pill and compares it to a library? Even better, why not have manufacturers print barcodes on as many pills as possible? Pills also have specifications for weight and color, and these can be very easy to test.
Maybe you also have a two-person check process every time you fill a hopper as well.
And how does the Pharmacist know that the pill that matches the normal color and shape of the pills that were prescribed actually contains the drug on the bottle label and not something completely different? The answer isn't a whole bunch of pharmacists watching the pills being made - rather there are lots of process controls at every step to make sure the right stuff ends up in the pills.
I don't suggest that there isn't a need for process quality control. What I question is the need for people with degrees and licenses in pharmacy (at least for 100% of all orders).
Public Universities don't seem to be requiring drug tests for employees yet. They can be a nice place to work.
Sure, if you don't mind not being paid much. And, if you don't mind the fact that there are almost no job openings that pay a living wage...
Your typical large corporation employs tens of thousands of people averaging in the 80th percentile of national incomes or better. A typical Public University might employ hundreds or maybe a thousand people - and despite often having fairly advanced job qualifications they're way down below the 50th percentile on income. Sure, specific jobs might do better (senior tenured professor in a field where the university is in the top 20), but the guys working at the state college down the street aren't pulling in that kind of dough.
...they may or may not read the actual article, which are often aimed at specialists and can be a difficult read at times
Fet me fix that for you:...they may or may not read the actual article, which are always aimed at highly-focused specialists and are always a difficult read, although at times it might actually be decipherable by somebody who is a less-focused specialist.
I really dislike academic writing style - it is almost intentionally obfuscated so that only those are intimately familiar with the exact work in question have any chance of reading it with only moderate difficulty. Don't get me wrong, I understand the need for precision and consise writing, but that can be accomplished without the need to make a paper unreadable without reading every related paper written in the last 20 years on that specific topic. Before publishers accept an article one of the peer reviewers ought to be somebody with a doctorate in the same subject, but with no knowledge at all of the area of specialization (for example, a paper written on some gene that indirectly controls some step in the cell cycle should be reviewed by a PhD biochemist who studies muscle fibers). Then, that reviewer should write up a one page summary of the work and its significance and implication, which would be submitted to one of the more specialized peer reviewers. If that summary is not judged accurate then the original paper needs a rewrite.
The purpose of publication is to communicate your results. It is not to prove that you're smarter than everybody else by writing something that nobody else can understand. Likewise, I've seen far too many people nod in agreement in discussions when it is clear that nobody actually understands what is being talked about but everybody is afraid to admit it...
The real irony is that these kinds of places need pharmacists at all. The machines should be able to just fill and check their own prescriptions. If a patient has any potential drug conflicts then the system would flag them for review by a pharmacist, of course, but that would happen before prescriptions are filled. It seems like the only reason we have pharmacists in these sorts of places is due to outdated regulations. No pharmacist was involved in getting the right pills to the pharmacy, so why is one needed to get the right pills to the patient?
However, in this case, you do not yet need a cause for the brain aging because we know that obesity causes many problems.
I don't think that p->q in this case. Sure, obesity might cause lots of problems (though in many cases there is no proven true causal relationship), but that doesn't mean that obesity causes brain aging. No doubt that when obesity is correlated with some other problem its link to brain aging will be sited as evidence that it causes lots of other problems...
Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to suggest that obesity doesn't cause problems. I just don't see it as a root cause. Obesity is as much as symptom as a problem. We're just not sure what it is a symptom of. From the other posts here perhaps it is a symptom of living in a world with lots of cheap food...
Well, the danger of these kinds of correlation studies is that you have no idea what the relationship is.
Maybe people who have brain degeneration are prone to eating more food, thus becoming obese? In that case getting them to eat less won't fix their brains because you have it the wrong way around.
Likewise, just why is it that SO many people are overweight? Is the present generation just collectively lacking in willpower? Sure, you can shout at people to go on a diet, but they've been doing that for the last 20 years and I don't see much to show for it. There has to be an underlying cause. I don't pretend to know what it is - maybe it is high-fructose corn syrup, or maybe obesity is cross-linked to genes that give computer proficiency and we've been selecting for it. My point is that while it is true that eating more = weight gain, why is it that people are eating so much more today?
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And that works great for all the areas where companies aren't competing - which is basically anything that isn't a major source of advantage. For example, android. However, android works just great with IP law as it is (again, I'm all for reigning in some of the abuses).
What about the areas where companies actually compete? If you eliminate IP the only areas companies could compete would be on things like manufacturing costs (but not with regard to process improvements - which anybody could copy). Basically the biggest source of competitive advantage would be the ability to pollute without penalty and pay your people a near-starving wage. Welcome to outsourcing!
Fellowship of the ring was a fluke, big dollars spent on people with little background rarely happens in any industry. Basing your argument on that case is a terrible idea because it is not representative.
I agree that huge successes like LOTR are flukes - they are not the norm. That is the whole point! A system of IP allows entrepeneurs to invest, and if it turns out good they reap the rewards. Huge members of the general public didn't have to commit funds to the effort prior to knowing how it would turn out. Instead, investors took a risk and reaped a reward (or stood to lose).
The fact that you think the "ransom" must come from a single group or entity tells me that you are shooting from the hip, that indeed you really are ignorant of implications of the models of I've pointed out.
I never claimed that it had to come from a single group. The ransom for LOTR could have come from the entire population of the world - in fact my example was 1-10 million people offering $20 each. The problems with this model are:
1. How do you get so many people to commit to a single project? It works great for some $10k video game - not for a $200M cinematic production or a $100M drug (with a 75% chance of failure).
2. If people do commit to a single project, how do you get the right person/entity to do the work? Suppose Fred Simpson makes Fellowship of the Rings and gets it done six months before Peter Jackson - but his movie lacks the brilliance of the latter's effort. Well, he claims the ransom, and the millions of people who shelled out $20 decide it isn't worth spending that kind of money again since the product wasn't worth their money. If all those individuals get to decide whether or not they want to pay out, then who is going to spend all that money on the production if 80% of the investors could say it isn't good enough?
3. What does the risk/reward ratio work out to? If Peter Jackson has to spend $190M to maybe collect $200M, it probably isn't worth the effort. That $190M could make more money than that in a bank account (assuming that the bank can find anything to do with the money in a world where no IP exists). There is also the risk that somebody beats him to the finish - maybe with an inferior product. To be worth taking a gamble there needs to be substantial rewards at stake. Most ransom efforts today (like the X-Prize) aren't designed to be the reward - they're just a mild motivation and a source of prestige to help companies get off the ground. Those companies will reap the real profits down the line as a result of IP law.
I'm really not interested in what you have to say, because well, I've heard it all before and I am not your teacher.
I never asked you to teach me anything - you're welcome to reply or not. However, if you actually want to sway others to your viewpoint you might actually have to engage with them at some point. It isn't like this is the first time that I've ever heard anybody advocating your position. Believe it or not, the reason that not everybody on Earth agrees on everything is not the sheer ignorance of of everybody who doesn't hold to your views. :)
Because the ransom model can guarantee profit before a dime is spent on production, the need to pay big names in order to reduce risk of failure at the box office is eliminated.
Sure - zero risk for the producer if you have a ransom. However, very few people will offer such ransoms. Again, who is going to offer $200M to produce LOTR? In fact, LOTR used quite a bit of no-name talent (who ever heard of Elijah Wood before LOTR?).
And the risk still exists. The risk now belongs to all the people who forked out the money for the ransom expecting LOTR but instead getting some flop, because the producer only did the minimum effort required to claim the ransom.
Yes, we agree. Just as plenty of industries have gone under over the years when technology made them irrelevant. Stagnation is bad, especially legally mandated stagnation.
However, these are not industries that depend on obsolete techonology. In fact, most of these industries are pushing the envelope when it comes to technology - since they can monetize their investments. Replacing the buggy whip industry with the auto industry is a no-brainer. Do you really want to replace the movie industry with Joe's Amateur Movie?
Maybe its because I've worked contract for most of my life so it comes more naturally to me, but it shouldn't be that hard to sit down and see how pretty much all applied science doesn't require ip protection - just a willingness of a consortium of companies to contract for development in coopetition.
Ok, that last word could be cooperation or competition, and since they're antonyms I'm going to have to guess that you mean the former.
Companies working in cooperation is nice and all, but without competition there is no incentive to innovate. The last thing I want is that the only way technology is developed is if ALL the big companies agree that it makes sense to develop it. Apple decides to make some clever smartphone, but Motorola says that the idea is dumb, so no iphone. Or, Apple spends a fortune and comes out with the phone, and then six months later everybody else is cloning it (down to the finest detail) and Apple barely recoups their development costs (and if they mess up the loss is all theirs).
Companies that want to keep their research to themselves can rely on that law of nature - the trade secret.
Great, but there are no laws backing that up in your vision of the future. So, if 10 scientists collaborate and discover a $30M invention, the company has to pay them VERY well on a regular basis so that it isn't worth their while to tell all their competitors about the secret. Then to develop that trade secret they have to let 100 more people in on it. You'd never keep them all quiet. The reason nobody talks now is that they'd get sued out the wazoo, and the companies that learn the secret couldn't make use if it anyway. Take away those laws and companies would just periodically bribe each other's R&D workers while cutting their own R&D - until nobody is doing R&D.
So, what's wrong with those workers getting paid big for discovering that $30M discovery? Well, the problem is that this is like the lottery. If the company employs 1000 scientists for 5 years, chances are that 10 of them will come up with some big discoveries worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and the rest will go bust. So, the financial model is that everybody is paid the same, spreading out the risk and the reward. The alternative is that the company pays peanuts unless you discover something, and then they pay out big. Well, that alternative is available to anybody who wants it today - just start your own company. You'll either boom or bust.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for IP reform in a number of areas. However, if we want huge research programs to happen, they either need to be government funded or somebody has to be able to make money from them. If you want government funding you don't need to do anything about IP - just start funding it. If you wa
And these aren't hypotheticals, people small and large, have been experimenting with these variations and in many cases have had a lot of success.
Show me one example of something whose sole revenue source was one (or more) of the things you cite, and whose cost of production was at least 50 million dollars. Oh, and I mean a situation where these revenue sources didn't benefit from IP protection. For example, a movie showing in a theater could be considered a physical tie in, but it only works because the theater can't sell its reels to somebody to run off 10,000 copies so that a week after the show no theater is buying their reels from the producer.
Sure, those kinds of models can work for SOME content - but you're typically talking about something that takes one or two people a month or two to create.
Suppose you wanted to make the LOTR trilogy movies with this kind of a model. Those probably cost a few hundred million dollars to produce. So, you'd need to get 1-10 million people to fork out $20 each to Peter Jackson and New Line, who to that date hadn't really made any movie that any of them had ever heard of. Then, once he gets all that money he makes the movies. It would never work - nobody would fork out that kind of money, and even if they did, who is to say that they wouldn't have given it to Fred Simpson instead of Peter Jackson, and Fred makes an unnotable flop further reinforcing the mistake everybody made to spend that kind of money on a product that hadn't been created yet.
The whole concept of IP lets somebody take a risk to create something, and then recoup the money by selling products that people can actually research before they buy it. If they don't think that based on reviews and word of mouth that LOTR is worth $12 to see, then they don't need to see it.
Trust me - if you got rid of IP laws entirely you'd see entire industries go under. Right now piracy is limited to underground movements. Imagine if movie theaters could legally choose to buy their reels from some copy shop for 1/100th the cost, or if any publisher could run off copies of any book out there, or if your local car dealer could buy junkers from China and slap Toyota logos on them. How about Microsoft just incorporating code from linux in their products wholesale? Right now even though copying is easy major institutions don't do it since they're easy legal targets.
Much of the modern world is based on service industries that don't work without IP. Sure, you could envision other business models - and you could argue that some film some hobbiest made in his spare time is as much a work of art as LOTR, but does society really want to give up major productions in any industry that cost millions of dollars to make and which employ thousands of people?
Who would even employ scientists? Right now they're mostly employed in industries where IP protects their research, or in academia. However, academia is only funded because lots of people want to study science since there are so many good-paying jobs - get rid of the jobs and you'll see as much funding in academic science departments as you see in art departments. Trust me - the money doesn't go as far when you're paying for chemical waste disposal and not paint.
Uh, did you just use libertarian and authoritarian in the same sentence? You do realize that they're almost polar opposites.
I lean fairly libertarian, although I do believe in a regulatory framework that allows and forces companies to compete on fair ground, with control over externalities. For example, I'm all for taxing oil from the Middle East to pay for wars in that region. I'm also all for tarrifs on imports from countries that don't have reasonable worker safety and environmental standards. I'm fine with anti-monopoly regulation as well. In fact, you'll find I support all kinds of regulation.
That said, I'm also for minimizing the role of government in general, and on the balance I'm fairly libertarian.
There are many areas where libertarian approaches can provide the best experience from even a socialist perspective. Take schools - you can have highly controlled state-run schools that are essential social laboratories with mandatory union teachers. Or, you could still provide a free or cheap eduction to everybody but with a more competitive school system.
Healthcare is another example where there are socialized solutions that provide for care for the indigent, and a more sane system of billing/etc than what we have now, but which allow consumer choice to drive quality. Health care, admittedly, is a bigger challenge since people tend to be poor consumers when it comes to health care - probably not the best place to start implementing a libertarian paradise.
This sort of thing is a perfect application for VMWare. Create some interface where engineers can order up a server, and poof, a cloned vmware system is provided to them. Then they can have console-level access to that single server and do whatever they want with it. When they're done they hit a button, and poof it is disposed of. Since these kinds of development systems tend to sit around idle most of the time you can oversubscribe the hardware.
If you must use physical servers then there are lots of remote administration options. Of course good old RDP works just fine for 95% of the tasks. If you're actually working on OS-level changes then you might need a way to remotely boot off of CDs and get remote console-level access. Lots of server-grade solutions provide this kind of capability. VMWare does as well.
No doubt an AI machine would be as well. If a company spent the money to build an AI supercomputer to design products, don't you think they'd make sure that the electricity was kept running and the room was properly cooled? They would take VERY good care of it.
Of course, if the machine complained about working too hard they'd tweak the program to make it spend its time thinking about more productive matters.
Most companies take better care of their equipment than their personnel. You can always hire more people, but that welding robot cost $2M to purchase. If a senior manager found out that a low-level manager had neglected such a capital investment to save a few pennies they'd put the person responsible out on the street.
I dunno. I'd be happy if I could find a mechanic who doesn't use an impact wrench as a torque wrench when putting in my oil plug...
Yup - this could never impact anybody.
Why, the ports used to trigger this exploit are like the DCOM RPC ports and MS-SQL ports - nobody allows those to be accessed over the internet which is why we've never had any large-scale worms take advantage of them...
I don't work with DNA, so I have to trust what I read on the internet. According to numerous sources, the base substitution error rate of the DNA replication process is estimated to be about one error per billion.
Yes - with error correction. If you look at the error frequency in an exonuclease-deficient DNA polymerase you're not going to get anywhere near those error rates. When performing PCR on 1kb sized DNA fragments I'd find it almost impossible to get an error-free copy using such an enzyme. With the exonuclease capability the error rate is 10-100x lower, maybe. Further error reductions are the result of other proofreading mechanisms (and I'm sure that in the native cellular enviornment these enzymes also work somewhat better than in a test tube).
Hard disk manufacturers don't advertise their natural error rates, but they are much, much higher than the DNA error rate. This is why modern hard disks use on the order of 200 bits of error correction per sector. Hard disk error rates are well over 1,000 per billion.
Yes - if you look at the error rates BEFORE error correction. That is already bettern than DNA polymerases in many cases. Again, you're comparing a complete solution to a partial solution. The reason we have error correction with computers is the same reason our DNA machinery also has it - too many errors otherwise.
As for the "redundancy" of DNA due to the twin helical strands, they cannot be considered redundant since they are required for stability of the DNA molecule. Their appearance of redundancy is merely an artifact of evolution.
And the redundancy of ECC on a hard drive is required to maintain the integrity of the data. Just because you can't get rid of it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
All the DNA-repair mechanisms I'm aware of take advantage of the redundancy in DNA. The only reason it can be repaired is BECAUSE it is redundant. How would you detect an error otherwise? It isn't like DNA contains checksums.
Also - single stranded DNA is a perfectly viable molecule. I don't believe it is particularly unstable, except to the degree that cells tend to chop it up since it isn't normally kept around long-term. Now, it does form a tangled mess and since all the cellular machinery uses duplex DNA it can't be used. RNA is almost always single-stranded and it works just fine (it is unstable for two reasons - it is chemically less stable and also there are enzymes everywhere that chew it up).
Look, I'm not making this stuff up - I do have a degree in Biochemistry. I'm certainly not an expert in DNA repair mechanisms, and I'd gladly defer to somebody who is. However, it sounds like you're looking up error rates online without understanding what part of the entire system they apply to. When I copy a hard drive I get an error rate of zero apparent bits per TB - that doesn't mean that the error rate is zero at all stages of the process, but the overall error rate is VERY low. The same applies to DNA replication - errors are constantly introduced and corrected - it is only the overall process that is accurate.
Within water you can't have anything more basic than OH- since the base will just dissocate water and be neutralized (leaving lots of OH-). In other solvents you can have far more acidic and basic substances and do lots of chemistry that wouldn't be possible in water.
However, I don't believe that the actual term pH is defined outside of water, since it is the concentration of H3O+ which doesn't exist outside of water. You could define something analogous for another solvent. However, since that solvent will have a different dissociation constant and/or pKa a "pH" of 7 might or might not be neutral.
In any case, if you make your measurements in a non-aqueous solvent you can have pKas that are far greater than 14 or less than 2.
Disclaimer, it has been a while since I took General/Organic Chemistry, but I am a chemist...
We already do - that's why optical media typically incorporates ECC of some kind. We can't write data at those densities without some loss, which we need to correct for (and we do so in a way that is definitely more efficient than is used for DNA).
The only advantage DNA really has is storage density. We definitely don't get to the level of 2 bits per 600 hydrogen atoms worth of mass.
My point is that the error rate is much, much higher in the modern computer equipment. In fact, it gets worse the higher the density of whatever memory technology you choose. The fact that you don't notice it does not change the fact that the errors occurred.
The error rate for DNA is also much higher if you want to measure it that way. I suspect that computers would still be superior in that regard. You can't compare DNA with error correction to computers without it. Also - most forms of computer data storage actually have a very low error rate without correction - especially at non-bleeding-edge storage densities. You can't look at CDs/DVDs as the model for all of computer data storage.
Also, when thinking about competing approaches we have to consider that technology achieves it's error correction through redundancy and overhead. DNA achieves it through repair.
Uh, you do realize that the only reason DNA can be repaired is because two identical copies of the entire genome are stored? On top of that the genome is diploid so it also contains two mostly-identical versions of those copies. I wouldn't call that being free of overhead - almost all computer-based data correction algorithms only have a small amount of ECC data stored (maybe 10% - vs 100%-200% for DNA depending on how you look at it).
A little more detail - a DNA strand consists of two antiparallel molecules of DNA which are complementary. They store exactly the same information. If a point in the DNA strand is not complementary then it contains an error which needs to be repaired (using any number of algorithms - the trick is figuring out which redundant copy is right since DNA doesn't contain checksums/etc). Those long strands of DNA form a chromosome, and every one of our cells contains a pair of each one (one from each parent). Those aren't a complete duplication since they are slightly different, but they're probably 95+% redundant. Then, during cellular division all of those chromosomes are replicated so at some points the cell has another level of redundancy (granted, this one isn't really a waste since it is just holding onto it to give it to a new daughter cell).
Look, I'm not saying that DNA isn't a marvel. However, just because it is natural doesn't mean that it is superior to a hard drive.
Sure, but the assertion I replied to is that modern computer technology couldn't achieve what biology accomplishes with replicating all that DNA with such a low error rate.
The DNA replication machinery has error-correction capabilities built into it, and so do modern hard drives/etc. My point was that the best of modern technology can easily compete with the best of biological "technology" in this particular regard.
In fact, I suspect that to some degree a less than perfect error rate in DNA replication could be a source of advantage. After all, how can you have evolution without mutation?
Uh, we do all the time.
The diploid human genome is 8 gigabases. Each base encodes 2 bits of data. That is 4GB of data per genome. Let's say that a gamete is produced after 1000 generations of cells from the fertilized egg (no idea what the right number is, but I suspect that the true figure is lower). That means that 4TB of data is being copied, with an error rate of 450 bits.
If I want I can set up two 4TB raids on my server at home (assuming I had more disk space), and issue the command dd if=/dev/mdx of=/dev/mdy bs=1M count=4000000. Then I could do a diff on the two volumes. I'd be shocked if they had any errors at all.
These kinds of error rates are actually not all that uncommon with computers.
Now, the 204 year bit sounds impressive, but it isn't like a piece of DNA lasted 204 years without any decay. Instead it was copied repeatedly over that time. If I copied that 4TB hard drive once every 25 years (generation time) onto a brand new drive (assuming that you could keep making them compatible) I don't think that getting the data across 200 years without any bit-flips is really that tall of an order. Sure, technology will change, but that really is a different matter, and I doubt that any commodity computer technology used in the next 200 years will do any worse than what we have today.
Agreed.
If you post a comment on a government-run website, it is reasonable to think that the comment will be saved as part of an official record. If that website happens to be hosted via facebook it is a reasonable extension to think that comments stored there would also be an official record.
If they were spidering all of facebook looking for anybody who says anything mean about the President that would be different. However, it is pretty dumb to post death threats on Obama's facebook page and not think that somebody would notice it and take action (indeed this would probably be illegal on any website, but I believe that threatening the life of the President is specifically a crime).
Except, this isn't a PB array. This is a 0.067PB array. Is there any evidence that this solution can practically scale to a level where calculating cost in dollars per PB makes any sense?
Hey, its a great achievement. However, the kinds of people who need storage by the PB aren't going to roll out hundreds of these smaller arrays and figure out who to organize the data on them.
Yup.
You can do even better than the price quoted in this article. On Newegg I found a 1TB drive for $95 - that is only $95k/PB. What a bargain!
Except that I don't have a PB of space with my solution. I have 0.001PB of space. If I want 1PB of space then I need hundreds of drives, and some kind of system capable of talking to hundreds of drives and binding them into some kind of a useful array.
This sounds like criticizing the space shuttle as being wasteful as you can cover the same distance in a truck for 1/10000000 x the cost. Except of course for the minor detail that the truck can't fly in space, and can't do all that distance on a single load of fuel in a few hours.
Or, I can generate completely green energy at a very low price per gigawatt using a small generator and a hamster wheel. Except that I'm not generating a gigawatt - I'm generating maybe a few mW and scaling it up. Unless I bury China in rats I'm not going to be competing with the Three Gorges Dam.
The purpose of these types of journals/studies is to communicate advances in the science/field to your peers not the general public.
Considering that the general public paid for the work to be done 95% of the time, I wouldn't be so quick to suggest that they should be left out. However, I do concede that aiming for them in a scholarly work is probably a bit much to ask. I'd be happy if an article in the field of Astronomy could be understood by any astronomer, and an article in the field of Medicine could be understood by anybody with an MD. Again, the target is somebody with a strong scientific eduction, but who hasn't necessarily spent the last 10 years studying a particular membrane receptor protein or plasma currents in the Milky Way whatever.
For the benefit of the public I'd be fine with any government grant requiring the writing of a 200 word popular science article suitable for a newspaper or magazine. Sure, I know many researchers don't like doing this stuff - they can pay somebody else to do it if they want as long as it is accurate. If they don't want to do that, then they can look elsewhere for their funding - it isn't like there isn't a long line of applicants.
Having state-of-the-art work reviewed by non-experts wouldn't be particularly useful. Plus it would be tough to find anyone to actually do these reviews if you need to hit a stack of textbooks before you can make heads or tails of the article you have volunteered to review.
If you couldn't make heads or tails of it without reading anything at all, then you'd just indicate that the article is indecipherable, and it would need a rewrite. The whole point is to ensure that the article can be ready without reading 300 textbooks. I'm not talking about making articles that somebody who dropped out of school in 8th grade could read - but articles which somebody with advanced education in the general field, but not the specific topic, could understand.
Nature has a 1400 word limit. So if you want to get published in the top-tier broad-scope journal, you have to explain why your study is of interest to a wide variety of scientists worldwide in 3 pages or less...
If your study is of interest to a wide variety of scientists worldwide, then it should be written so that they can actually read it. If a Biologist can't understand an article on Astrophysics, then why bother writing it in a journal that is mostly read by non-astrophysicists. The whole concept of Nature and Science is more about prestige than communication. You'd get just as much communication if you published the article in the #1 astrophysics journal.
In any case, I wasn't really aiming at Nature or Science in particular. But since you bring it up if you're going to write a journal read by everybody, why not write articles that anybody could read?
So, suppose you have a machine that takes a picture of the pill and compares it to a library? Even better, why not have manufacturers print barcodes on as many pills as possible? Pills also have specifications for weight and color, and these can be very easy to test.
Maybe you also have a two-person check process every time you fill a hopper as well.
And how does the Pharmacist know that the pill that matches the normal color and shape of the pills that were prescribed actually contains the drug on the bottle label and not something completely different? The answer isn't a whole bunch of pharmacists watching the pills being made - rather there are lots of process controls at every step to make sure the right stuff ends up in the pills.
I don't suggest that there isn't a need for process quality control. What I question is the need for people with degrees and licenses in pharmacy (at least for 100% of all orders).
Public Universities don't seem to be requiring drug tests for employees yet. They can be a nice place to work.
Sure, if you don't mind not being paid much. And, if you don't mind the fact that there are almost no job openings that pay a living wage...
Your typical large corporation employs tens of thousands of people averaging in the 80th percentile of national incomes or better. A typical Public University might employ hundreds or maybe a thousand people - and despite often having fairly advanced job qualifications they're way down below the 50th percentile on income. Sure, specific jobs might do better (senior tenured professor in a field where the university is in the top 20), but the guys working at the state college down the street aren't pulling in that kind of dough.
...they may or may not read the actual article, which are often aimed at specialists and can be a difficult read at times
Fet me fix that for you: ...they may or may not read the actual article, which are always aimed at highly-focused specialists and are always a difficult read, although at times it might actually be decipherable by somebody who is a less-focused specialist.
I really dislike academic writing style - it is almost intentionally obfuscated so that only those are intimately familiar with the exact work in question have any chance of reading it with only moderate difficulty. Don't get me wrong, I understand the need for precision and consise writing, but that can be accomplished without the need to make a paper unreadable without reading every related paper written in the last 20 years on that specific topic. Before publishers accept an article one of the peer reviewers ought to be somebody with a doctorate in the same subject, but with no knowledge at all of the area of specialization (for example, a paper written on some gene that indirectly controls some step in the cell cycle should be reviewed by a PhD biochemist who studies muscle fibers). Then, that reviewer should write up a one page summary of the work and its significance and implication, which would be submitted to one of the more specialized peer reviewers. If that summary is not judged accurate then the original paper needs a rewrite.
The purpose of publication is to communicate your results. It is not to prove that you're smarter than everybody else by writing something that nobody else can understand. Likewise, I've seen far too many people nod in agreement in discussions when it is clear that nobody actually understands what is being talked about but everybody is afraid to admit it...
The real irony is that these kinds of places need pharmacists at all. The machines should be able to just fill and check their own prescriptions. If a patient has any potential drug conflicts then the system would flag them for review by a pharmacist, of course, but that would happen before prescriptions are filled. It seems like the only reason we have pharmacists in these sorts of places is due to outdated regulations. No pharmacist was involved in getting the right pills to the pharmacy, so why is one needed to get the right pills to the patient?
However, in this case, you do not yet need a cause for the brain aging because we know that obesity causes many problems.
I don't think that p->q in this case. Sure, obesity might cause lots of problems (though in many cases there is no proven true causal relationship), but that doesn't mean that obesity causes brain aging. No doubt that when obesity is correlated with some other problem its link to brain aging will be sited as evidence that it causes lots of other problems...
Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to suggest that obesity doesn't cause problems. I just don't see it as a root cause. Obesity is as much as symptom as a problem. We're just not sure what it is a symptom of. From the other posts here perhaps it is a symptom of living in a world with lots of cheap food...
Well, the danger of these kinds of correlation studies is that you have no idea what the relationship is.
Maybe people who have brain degeneration are prone to eating more food, thus becoming obese? In that case getting them to eat less won't fix their brains because you have it the wrong way around.
Likewise, just why is it that SO many people are overweight? Is the present generation just collectively lacking in willpower? Sure, you can shout at people to go on a diet, but they've been doing that for the last 20 years and I don't see much to show for it. There has to be an underlying cause. I don't pretend to know what it is - maybe it is high-fructose corn syrup, or maybe obesity is cross-linked to genes that give computer proficiency and we've been selecting for it. My point is that while it is true that eating more = weight gain, why is it that people are eating so much more today?