Your post in turn reminds me of this lecture about situational contributors to violent and aggressive behavior. At 47:40 the lecturer discusses what he calls the "Lord of the Flies Effect".
He refers to a psychological study about the impact of anonymity on violent behavior. More interestingly, in my opinion, he mentions an anthropological literature review in which 12.5% of primitive societies that do not ritualistically alter their appearance (with face paint or masks) before battle are found to kill, mutilate, and torture their captives while 80% of those that do alter their appearance do so.
In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed...
A university degree from Russia now and has always equated with a Masters in the US.
I don't think this is generally true. I have a couple Russian friends who I met in a US masters program. They were at a disadvantage coming in. They were both capable people and they managed to get by, but they had a difficult time catching up.
The problem was that, at the Universities they had attended in Moscow, cheating and bribery were rampant. I got the impression that one of them had been accustomed to cheating all the time. I mean on every exam.
Given the many contributions Russians have made in diverse academic disciplines, there is obviously some very good education happening in Russia. But I'm pretty sure that such a wide sweeping statement about the superiority of Russian education is unjustified.
People in areas that are sparsely populated and/or geographically isolated tend to have relatively weak government (think Scottish highlands vs rest of England, or England vs mainland Europe, or Japan vs China, or sub-Saharan vs N. Africa, or Guinean Highlanders, or native Americans, or...). There aren't enough idle people for an entrenched bureaucracy and a monolithic government capable of crushing all resistance to be established.
Essentially any sort of authoritarian government like communism or theocracy (possible for a time if you import a religiously homogeneous population I suppose) is out. These systems tend to piss a lot of people off and, in a small group of people, all you need is a handful of malcontents to start a revolution (whereas in a massive state like the USSR even millions of pissed off people can be ground to hamburger without much trouble).
I think colonies off of Earth would have a similar social structure to those on earth. Anarcho-Capitalistic, like the early British empire or the American west (i.e. I don't think the wildness of the wild west was an historical coincidence).
Black markets emerge for commodity goods when there are significant discrepancies between marginal costs and market price.
The problem is that the marginal cost of media is now roughly zero. The whole price of production is fixed up front costs. Obviously nobody can make a profit selling at a price of zero.
I think that voluntary payment has a future but it will require a cultural shift. People worship their favorite artists/authors/actors. People will send them money. It will just take an effort to make the transition. We're not used to it yet. We need a new attitude/psychology.
It should also be noted though that only a small fraction of the advertising money paid for a TV show actually goes to the production of the programming. If a producer could get just the equivalent of the price of a couple thirty second adds (using product placement, little sponsor logos where network logos currently go, or just a sponsored by X at the beginning and end), they could independently produce the media and then distribute it costlessly through bittorrent.
It might not work for a really expensive show but it could definitely work for something that was maybe 500k to 1m per episode. Although bittorrent distribution might restrict the audience some (probably not by much for a show targeting an audience under 40).
I don't think that patent examiners fulfill the role I'm looking for. Rather than a neutral processor or clerk, I'm suggesting there should be an active opponent to the patent. A "The People of the US vs Patent X" sort of thing.
I don't know. Maybe it's not a good idea. But I do feel like the system as it is should somehow be improved.
It seems to me that any use of voice recognition to replace the human ear in speech processing tasks is obvious. I wouldn't have thought of using voice recognition for this particular purpose, but I bet anybody in the broadcasting industry would have. I suspect that this would already have been done if voice recognition software was robust enough for radio stations to trust it. That is, no one is doing this yet, not because it is innovative or non-obvious, but because it's not quite implementable yet.
This sort of patent spamming irks me. It obviously does precisely the opposite of what a patent is supposed to do. It is not rewarding innovations or making a costly investment feasible (given a sufficiently advanced voice recognition system I suspect a lone coder could write a program to do this in a day or two). It's just walling off potential innovations. It's giving away profits to Microsoft at the expense of everyone else in the US.
Not that I blame Microsoft. Any company with its act together ought to be doing the same thing. It's the patent office that's to blame.
I don't know how they handle patent applications, but I have a suggestion. For every patent there should be a knowledgeable 'state's advocate' appointed who's job it is to try to get the patent rejected. I know it sound like it would be costly and more complicated, but the potential savings (in terms of monopoly profits not granted and innovation not cut off) to the American people would almost certainly be worth it.
Government, logically, is force. The government is that entity in a society which has a practical monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Insomuch as there are others able to ignore the dictates of the government or to use force to their own ends (think corruption/organized crime), the government is not sovereign.
In this sense the Open Source approach is not suited to government. The actions of government apply to everyone and are supported by the application of force (i.e if you disobey you will be arrested, if you resist arrest you will be shot) while an Open Source project is defined by voluntary action and a pluralistic, meritocratic, approach to system design. The two are inherently contradictory.
I think that to apply Open Source principles to government would require a Minimalist, Libertarian, style government. The Government Proper, the entity with the monopoly on force, would be restricted to ensuring that the various open development units don't attempt to use force against each other. Other than that policy would be left up to non-government units.
For instance, rather than having a monolithic federal welfare system, we could have a plurality of nonprofit organizations for the reduction and alleviation of poverty. If you have resources or skills and are concerned about poverty, you could join one of the existing organizations (the one which takes the approach that you find most appropriate) and contribute your time or money to helping them. Or, if you don't really identify with the approach of any of the existing organizations, you could get together with a group of like minded people and start an organization of your own.
Rather than taking a single ad hoc approach to solving civic problems we could have a diversity of parallel approaches being undertaken. Those that prove most effective will draw more and more contributors and donors, and, if they become too big and crufty, concerned members can fork off, or fledgling organizations can step in to break new paths and undercut the giants.
Under such a system, enlightened people would ask each other what organizations they work with, rather than what party they support. Instead of flaming each other in bars about which set of leaders should rule us, we could argue about which social projects take the best approach. Instead of sitting around reading the news and getting pissed, we could be designing new tactics and strategies for our favorite organizations. In other words, we could have real participatory "government" (as opposed to submitting a laughable, 0 = Democrat, 1 = Republican, every two years).
I think that this has been the major failing of the Libertarian movement. They've failed to paint a picture of a compassionate Libertarian world. Eliminating federal programs to assist the needy (poor, unhealthy, undereducated) does not mean that we'd all selfishly go around ignoring impoverished people begging on our doorsteps any more than legalizing drugs would mean that we'd all be out shooting heroin the next day. It just means that, instead of passing off our problems as a people to some faceless bureaucracy, we'd take responsibility for them ourselves.
Individualism isn't about greed. It's about standing on your own two feet and taking care of the world yourself, like an adult, rather than handing all of your problems over to our paternalistic government and then wallowing in childish self-pity when the world goes to shit.
The real concern that I think this report addresses is more fundamental than misquotations and the motivations for publication. Citations are used to establish the demonstrated truths upon which new work is founded. By analogy, imagine what would occur if a mathematical theorem where accepted without due rigor and new mathematical work and theory was then developed admiting the validity of this theorem. All new work would be rendered lame until the full validity the first theorem was established. This, in the field of mathematics, is not a threat as mathematical theorems can be guaranteed, by logical consistency, of absolute truth. This is not the case in the field of experimental science.
All truth in the applied sciences flows from experimental validation. Experimental truth relies upon the interpretation of data and the validty of the experimental methods and assumptions used to obtain that data. While in mathematics truth is a boolean quality, for the applied sciences truth relies upon the accumulation, and interpretation, of physical evidence which inserts margins of uncertainty and requires a probabalistic notion of truth.
Thus when justifying the assumptions upon which new scientific work is to be founded, (as is the goal of citation) it is essential that one investigate the tools of interpretation that lead to earlier discoveries and not merely accept their conclusions at face value. It is by this process that one may uncover the regions in which standard theories and conceptions might be flawed or incomplete. This is one of the principle mechanisms by which science advances and it is crippled when researchers fail to make the effort to fully comprehend the state of the field which they are striving to advance.
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Slashdot Mirror
Your post in turn reminds me of this lecture about situational contributors to violent and aggressive behavior. At 47:40 the lecturer discusses what he calls the "Lord of the Flies Effect".
He refers to a psychological study about the impact of anonymity on violent behavior. More interestingly, in my opinion, he mentions an anthropological literature review in which 12.5% of primitive societies that do not ritualistically alter their appearance (with face paint or masks) before battle are found to kill, mutilate, and torture their captives while 80% of those that do alter their appearance do so.
a further 1.8M not knowing whether they have read it or not
Hmmm. Not an encouraging indicator of level of reading comprehension among Britons.
In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed...
A university degree from Russia now and has always equated with a Masters in the US.
I don't think this is generally true. I have a couple Russian friends who I met in a US masters program. They were at a disadvantage coming in. They were both capable people and they managed to get by, but they had a difficult time catching up.
The problem was that, at the Universities they had attended in Moscow, cheating and bribery were rampant. I got the impression that one of them had been accustomed to cheating all the time. I mean on every exam.
Given the many contributions Russians have made in diverse academic disciplines, there is obviously some very good education happening in Russia. But I'm pretty sure that such a wide sweeping statement about the superiority of Russian education is unjustified.
People in areas that are sparsely populated and/or geographically isolated tend to have relatively weak government (think Scottish highlands vs rest of England, or England vs mainland Europe, or Japan vs China, or sub-Saharan vs N. Africa, or Guinean Highlanders, or native Americans, or...). There aren't enough idle people for an entrenched bureaucracy and a monolithic government capable of crushing all resistance to be established.
Essentially any sort of authoritarian government like communism or theocracy (possible for a time if you import a religiously homogeneous population I suppose) is out. These systems tend to piss a lot of people off and, in a small group of people, all you need is a handful of malcontents to start a revolution (whereas in a massive state like the USSR even millions of pissed off people can be ground to hamburger without much trouble).
I think colonies off of Earth would have a similar social structure to those on earth. Anarcho-Capitalistic, like the early British empire or the American west (i.e. I don't think the wildness of the wild west was an historical coincidence).
Black markets emerge for commodity goods when there are significant discrepancies between marginal costs and market price.
The problem is that the marginal cost of media is now roughly zero. The whole price of production is fixed up front costs. Obviously nobody can make a profit selling at a price of zero.
I think that voluntary payment has a future but it will require a cultural shift. People worship their favorite artists/authors/actors. People will send them money. It will just take an effort to make the transition. We're not used to it yet. We need a new attitude/psychology.
It should also be noted though that only a small fraction of the advertising money paid for a TV show actually goes to the production of the programming. If a producer could get just the equivalent of the price of a couple thirty second adds (using product placement, little sponsor logos where network logos currently go, or just a sponsored by X at the beginning and end), they could independently produce the media and then distribute it costlessly through bittorrent.
It might not work for a really expensive show but it could definitely work for something that was maybe 500k to 1m per episode. Although bittorrent distribution might restrict the audience some (probably not by much for a show targeting an audience under 40).
I don't think that patent examiners fulfill the role I'm looking for. Rather than a neutral processor or clerk, I'm suggesting there should be an active opponent to the patent. A "The People of the US vs Patent X" sort of thing.
I don't know. Maybe it's not a good idea. But I do feel like the system as it is should somehow be improved.
It seems to me that any use of voice recognition to replace the human ear in speech processing tasks is obvious. I wouldn't have thought of using voice recognition for this particular purpose, but I bet anybody in the broadcasting industry would have. I suspect that this would already have been done if voice recognition software was robust enough for radio stations to trust it. That is, no one is doing this yet, not because it is innovative or non-obvious, but because it's not quite implementable yet.
This sort of patent spamming irks me. It obviously does precisely the opposite of what a patent is supposed to do. It is not rewarding innovations or making a costly investment feasible (given a sufficiently advanced voice recognition system I suspect a lone coder could write a program to do this in a day or two). It's just walling off potential innovations. It's giving away profits to Microsoft at the expense of everyone else in the US.
Not that I blame Microsoft. Any company with its act together ought to be doing the same thing. It's the patent office that's to blame.
I don't know how they handle patent applications, but I have a suggestion. For every patent there should be a knowledgeable 'state's advocate' appointed who's job it is to try to get the patent rejected. I know it sound like it would be costly and more complicated, but the potential savings (in terms of monopoly profits not granted and innovation not cut off) to the American people would almost certainly be worth it.
LOL! Oh come now maxune. You don't think XKCD's nerdy stick figure girls are sexy?
I don't recall who said it first, but to paraphrase somebody:
"From each according to his ability and to each according to his need" defines a system that rewards need and punishes ability.
Quite right.
Government, logically, is force. The government is that entity in a society which has a practical monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Insomuch as there are others able to ignore the dictates of the government or to use force to their own ends (think corruption/organized crime), the government is not sovereign.
In this sense the Open Source approach is not suited to government. The actions of government apply to everyone and are supported by the application of force (i.e if you disobey you will be arrested, if you resist arrest you will be shot) while an Open Source project is defined by voluntary action and a pluralistic, meritocratic, approach to system design. The two are inherently contradictory.
I think that to apply Open Source principles to government would require a Minimalist, Libertarian, style government. The Government Proper, the entity with the monopoly on force, would be restricted to ensuring that the various open development units don't attempt to use force against each other. Other than that policy would be left up to non-government units.
For instance, rather than having a monolithic federal welfare system, we could have a plurality of nonprofit organizations for the reduction and alleviation of poverty. If you have resources or skills and are concerned about poverty, you could join one of the existing organizations (the one which takes the approach that you find most appropriate) and contribute your time or money to helping them. Or, if you don't really identify with the approach of any of the existing organizations, you could get together with a group of like minded people and start an organization of your own.
Rather than taking a single ad hoc approach to solving civic problems we could have a diversity of parallel approaches being undertaken. Those that prove most effective will draw more and more contributors and donors, and, if they become too big and crufty, concerned members can fork off, or fledgling organizations can step in to break new paths and undercut the giants.
Under such a system, enlightened people would ask each other what organizations they work with, rather than what party they support. Instead of flaming each other in bars about which set of leaders should rule us, we could argue about which social projects take the best approach. Instead of sitting around reading the news and getting pissed, we could be designing new tactics and strategies for our favorite organizations. In other words, we could have real participatory "government" (as opposed to submitting a laughable, 0 = Democrat, 1 = Republican, every two years).
I think that this has been the major failing of the Libertarian movement. They've failed to paint a picture of a compassionate Libertarian world. Eliminating federal programs to assist the needy (poor, unhealthy, undereducated) does not mean that we'd all selfishly go around ignoring impoverished people begging on our doorsteps any more than legalizing drugs would mean that we'd all be out shooting heroin the next day. It just means that, instead of passing off our problems as a people to some faceless bureaucracy, we'd take responsibility for them ourselves.
Individualism isn't about greed. It's about standing on your own two feet and taking care of the world yourself, like an adult, rather than handing all of your problems over to our paternalistic government and then wallowing in childish self-pity when the world goes to shit.
The real concern that I think this report addresses is more fundamental than misquotations and the motivations for publication. Citations are used to establish the demonstrated truths upon which new work is founded. By analogy, imagine what would occur if a mathematical theorem where accepted without due rigor and new mathematical work and theory was then developed admiting the validity of this theorem. All new work would be rendered lame until the full validity the first theorem was established. This, in the field of mathematics, is not a threat as mathematical theorems can be guaranteed, by logical consistency, of absolute truth. This is not the case in the field of experimental science. All truth in the applied sciences flows from experimental validation. Experimental truth relies upon the interpretation of data and the validty of the experimental methods and assumptions used to obtain that data. While in mathematics truth is a boolean quality, for the applied sciences truth relies upon the accumulation, and interpretation, of physical evidence which inserts margins of uncertainty and requires a probabalistic notion of truth. Thus when justifying the assumptions upon which new scientific work is to be founded, (as is the goal of citation) it is essential that one investigate the tools of interpretation that lead to earlier discoveries and not merely accept their conclusions at face value. It is by this process that one may uncover the regions in which standard theories and conceptions might be flawed or incomplete. This is one of the principle mechanisms by which science advances and it is crippled when researchers fail to make the effort to fully comprehend the state of the field which they are striving to advance. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience