No, in fact, you are trying to project your identity outside the body. You're hanging on to a mind body dichotomy...or tri-chotomy in your case, which is a completely false differentiation between things that exist, and things that don't. We are creatures of meat. Minus the meat, and all we are is memories to other meat, and eventually not even that.
It does exist, which is why it is perceived. Even if it does not exist (in an ontological sense) our perception of it is so pervasive, that living our lives as if it didn't exist would be impossible.
The cogito answered? It is not an answerable question. People give incorrect answers all the time, but in my experience only about half of people understand the point he was trying to make in the first place. Descartes himself posed a bad answer. They all lack a little thing called proof, and proof is effectively impossible to obtain without a priori knowledge of the existence of things besides the self, which is impossible to obtain.
If by proving your point you mean, "Gave an example of empty philosophy" I'll agree with that. Such things exist. Moving from that and saying that religion is the answer, however, is pointless.
As for meaningful philosophy, I direct you to work being done currently with regards to linguistic theory, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.
Sibling post (above) has it exactly right. Deductive logic is a priori. It has no bearing on the universe. Given true premises, it's true. Mathematics, especially, with its foundation in pure logic, isn't going to suddenly cease to be valid. The value of some constants may change, but there is no universe where (1+1 != 2).
We can imagine a universe with vastly different physical laws, but conclusions arrived at through deductive logic will be equally valid regardless.
Philosophy isn't intellectual masturbation...There is some solid stuff being done in philosophy, even to the current day. That does not include the so called "great questions," one of which, the cogito, is at the root of this discussion.
Since you seem to be religiously inclined, I'll throw out a religious example. Can God create a stone so heavy that God can't lift it? Answer: Who cares?
Human language is quite odd. It allows for the expression of some wild ideas. It's also unfortunately vague at points and allows for linguistic koans like the one above; sentences that seem like they have meaning, but really...well...don't.
Does the universe as we perceive it exist? Props to the language for allowing that question to be framed, but it's not the kind of question that has an answer. You have to force some seriously hardcore mind/body dualism to even conceive of a universe that exists without your body.
I still think having people explore odd ideas serves a valuable purpose. Science is as vulnerable to dogma as any other field. Let the guy throw some stones at the sacred cows.
For one thing, the fact that there could conceivably be an Operator standing by to adjust the results doesn't mean that we should suspect there is.
How about "The fact that the universe could be a VR simulation doesn't mean that we should suspect it is"? That's the real root of the problem; there is zero evidence the universe is anything other than it appears to be.
As soon as you start saying, "Well this could be a simulation" then you have to throw out all knowledge that comes to you through sense data. ALL of it. It's not trustworthy when you know it could all be manufactured. That leaves you with nothing outside of deductive logic, and you're stuck trying to prove the universe as we know it a priori, which is effectively impossible.
You're treating it like you'll be able to trust empirical experimentation, and that's just not the case. Even the possibility that the simulation is being gamed from the outside is enough to screw all your results, regardless of whether they're being changed or not. As for inconsistent results...I've run simulations before where things started going haywire; the most common course is to try and fix it, and if that fails, it's time to load saved game, and move forward from there, taking care to remove whatever screwed you up the first time.
I believe you're mistaken. Descartes didn't have an answer. He reduced everything down to the cogito, and then got stuck there, with only himself in the whole of existence. He then pulled himself out of the hole by deducing that if he existed, then god must exist, and if God exists, then the world must exist because God just wouldn't fuck with poor Descartes like that.
That's why it's fruitless. Prove your own existence, sure, but at the cost of the rest of existence, and no way to get from you, yourself, to creation without some deus ex machina action. As soon as you start doubting the existence of the world a priori without any scrap of real evidence that the world needs to be doubted, you're stuck in the land of solipsism (population: you).
Living in a simulation may in fact create the conditions that must exist for that non-computable condition to exist.
Anyway, I think it's too limited to think a simulation must be actuated on some advanced computer of the types with which we are familiar. As long as you're wildly speculating, speculate that we're a pocket dimension held together by some controllable force in the "real" world. Here it manifests itself as gravity (which is why we still can't find the mechanism for gravity, as it exists outside the bounds of our reality), and imperfections in the control of the artificial space account for dark matter and the incorrect expansion speed of the universe, etc.
Blah blah blah. It's an interesting exercise of the imagination, but without some concrete anomaly that can only be explained by the fact that what we see isn't reality, I'm not going to speculate.
Shrug. I tend to side with Wittgenstein who would have written the entire thing up as a problem of language, not a problem rooted in the actual world.
The only way to not fall into solipsism is to not play the game. As soon as you doubt the universe exists, then the only thing you're left with is that you personally exist, and from that point there is nowhere to go. Doubting sense data without an adequate reason just dumps you in a hole with no shovel.
One of the strengths of science is that there are always people asking weird questions.
Granted, this one is a bit over the edge, but if you force people to bend to the orthodoxy in all things, then your science has become a religion. Either the current theory can withstand a dissenting voice, or the current theory sucks, and needs to be replaced.
Philosophers have been pondering this nonsense for centuries, and have gotten nowhere...It's an argumentative blackhole, a solipsim. It's not testable...his "testable" experiments are like the sort of thing you see an idiot do to try and demonstrate that they have free will (e.g. "See? I just punched myself in the face, no way would anyone make me do that, so I must have free will!") If our reality is virtual, then all data is suspect, and it would be impossible to trust any sort of experimental data. Even if you come up with a clever test that would pierce the illusion, one would have to assume whoever maintains the illusion would simply fix it so that didn't work a second time. Nothing would be repeatable.
It's just not a useful avenue for speculation. This guy brings nothing new to the table except the kinda crap the ID people bring..."Hey, if the universe was a simulation, it would explain why everything tastes like chicken!" Just because there is no currently workable theory for some occurrence, there is no reason to invent a wild explanation that just makes it go away.
Without some compelling proof (which he lacks) this is nothing more than a conversational topic over a bag of weed.
I somehow missed the math in all that generalized ranting.
The real problem is economics, however. Not necessarily in the way you mean because this is actually relatively robust and proven tech, but economics none-the-less.
People aren't going to get behind it because it would involve a lot of new taxes. Industry isn't going to get behind it because fossil fuels are still cheap(er than alternatives), and the infrastructure around them is well established and proven. The government isn't going to get behind it because A) they're all too scared to raise taxes, and B) if they throw half a trillion dollars at this stuff and something new comes up that's 10% more effective for the same price, they'll never live it down.
In short: People won't push for it until the energy produced is the cheapest they can buy. Corporations won't adopt it until it's already established. Governments won't lead the way because they aren't stupid enough to think that they can guess where the future of energy generation is going to be in 2050.
I do it because of the stuff we're talking about...I look to see what's available that's roughly what I want, and I register everything I see. Then I think about it, pick the one I really want (or show 'em to a customer and let THEM pick the one they want) and release the rest.
It's the only way to make sure someone doesn't swipe it out from under you.
Well, I have to say, in many respects I liked book version of The Shining better than the movie version, though they are both exceptional. I think of it more like the movie version of Dune...An excellent attempt to make a book that is nearly impossible to convey on the screen into something that, while not to the letter true to the original, is still awesome in it's own right and carries forward something of the spirit of the piece. King's attempt to re-vision it fell flat because he doesn't understand how to make something that is cool and suspenseful on the page into something that is cool and suspenseful on the screen.
I also remember that episode of Friends, which happened to be one of the few I'd actually watched, and which forever cemented in my mind the idea that I wasn't missing much at all. If you're going to write an episode where one of the central plots revolves around a pair of books, you'd think someone would have bothered to read them.
Meh. Hardly matters. I've been trying to get (my actual name).com forever...Used to be held by a law office, but they ditched it and it got snapped up by a squatter because it's less than 6 letters long. Pretty much no hope of ever getting it now, and there isn't even anything on the damn page but a goddamn squatter splash page...though I'm told I could possibly buy it for a meager 25,000...Maybe.
Just a pisser. The system isn't fair, and isn't set up to reward fairness.
If you don't expect a strong money bias on a PC Mag article, you haven't been paying attention. There are a lot of whores out there, and PC Mag is one of the worst.
Yea, I can't speak to laptops...My business we go through laptops like a fat guy at a twinkie convention. I brought a department head down into the shop and showed her a pile taller than my head (I'm tall) of shattered, mangled, broken, doused, and otherwise destroyed laptops in response to her question, "Where do all the laptops go?" Seems like Dell and Mac both die about the same under that sort of abuse.
As far as desktops go, we're pretty solidly moving away from Dell. Slow delivery, crappy support, mediocre quality. Apple desktops are pretty reliable, though you're right about OS 9, it was a fricking dog.
Well, again, I think this is more a problem of how it's working right now than a problem with how it would work if it were working correctly. Bad patents should not be granted. Incomplete patents should not be granted. Patents for trivial changes should not be granted (drug companies, I'm looking at you! Changing the dose and treatment schedule on a drug doesn't make it a new drug.)
I actually think patents tend to encourage a bit of innovation, as long as you're not in a situation like now where people are allowed to patent the most vague crap. If the most obvious way to do something has been taken, it pays to try and find another way, and that other way may be better, or may lead to more interesting research. After a time though, I think that original application should become public domain, so that the hobbiests and tinkerers can have their fun with it, and wring applications out of it that the original creators never dreamed possible.
Just looking at it I don't see where you get "clunky"...They both just look like bloated monitors to me. The only difference is, one's black, and the other one is white.
Surface appearances aside, it's time to talk about the quality of the internal hardware...Apple hardware vs Dell hardware.
Tossing all OS considerations, I think that Apple's hardware is traditionally much more robust and reliable than Dell's has been. I'm working in a shop that always buys Dell PCs and Apple iMacs. We have more problems with the Dells, hands down, than we do with the Apples. All other things being equal, I'd take an Apple.
I doubt I'll ever be in a position to try out a side by side comparison, because we're not buying Dell anymore, and (as one of the above posters mentioned) we don't like tossing a good monitor whenever the computer goes south, so we've been buying Mac Mini's since they came out as an option.
Still, if I was offered one or the other, I'd take the Apple.
I think the evidence is self-evident. If I told you how to make a pie, you could then go make a pie. If I gave you fruit, sugar, butter, flour, and an oven and said, "Make me something" it's unlikely that you'd come up with a passable pie, and nearly impossible if the idea of "pie" hasn't even touched your consciousness.
The idea for a patent system is that you can register your idea for a reasonable period, after which it becomes public. Yes, this is being abused. The solution is to return to the original idea of patents of limited duration, and also to cease granting obvious patents. I'm not sure what you mean about things being "hidden" in patents. If you patent something, it's not hidden by definition, because you have to spell it out.
I agree with your assertions 1,2,4 and 8. I think 1 and 2 properly applied make 3 pointless, and I think 3 by itself would cause too much extra work if 1 and 2 are functioning as they ought to be. I think 5 should be replaced by sensible expiration dates on patents, and I think 6 needs to be worked out by people who know what the hell they're talking about, which has nothign to do with the public.
That's a bit incoherent. That's like saying the idea for a microchip can come straight from a guy looking at a handful of sand. It's all an incremental process, and every part of that process starts with someone looking at his current tools and saying, "What if?"
If we already had every tool and process we'd need for profitable, efficient fusion, we would be done, because we absolutely have the "idea" of fusion. The same was true for the first guy who ever looked at a horse and said, "Hey, I bet it'd be cool to ride one of those." He had to invent processes, tools, training methods, all to realize that comparatively simple idea.
I think you've got it backwards, actually. Implementation is cheap, once the idea is understood. If the only barrier was implementation, then there would be nothing new, only things that we knew could be done, that we have finally become able to produce.
The reason for the patent system is to keep people from hiding their ideas away. The alternative to the patent system isn't free information, but severely protected, jealously guarded information. Products would be more expensive, because you'd have to safeguard the ideas that went into them by building misdirection into the product. Ideas could actually be lost, in cases where the inventor dies with his secret, which, of course, he'd be unable to share with anyone without endangering his livelihood.
I don't disagree that the patent system is completely screwed up right now, but the solution is not to throw it away. It has a purpose.
I have even a good example...I was participating in a thread, right here on Slashdot...Some outsourcing thing, I have no idea. This is the thread in particular...It was in a random outsourcing thread, so you can imagine the level of comments. Mine in particular are pretty much devoid of racial content...I reserve my true hatred for Dell, and that's pretty much why I jumped into a semi-OT thread about tech support.
Week or so later I start getting nasty emails, calling me a racist. Arrooo? I have vices, but that's not one of them. So I start looking around and quite quickly find "http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1326921,prtpage-1.cms" an article singling out me in particular for some of the semi-racist yammering that was going on in that thread. If you bother to read the article (which I don't recommend as it's pretty much "look at how evil all americans are" and filled with the sort of good reporting that can misquote a forum post) you'll see that the out-of-context quote attributed to me was from the parent post, and I hadn't even quoted him. Typical.
So I know how this crap goes, and I'm not particularly offended that someone has smeared an internet handle of mine, but, as things do on the internet, it persists...It even came right back around on Slashdot with some Indian user quoting it as gospel truth and evidence that we're all complete racists.
Sigh.
So yea, you can try to associate good stuff with your handle, but someone else is free to associate whatever they want to it as well, and truth, no truth, it doesn't really matter if people want to believe the lie. What if this handle was associated with my name? I get looked up, and apparently I'm some kinda racist. If you were concerned about it and searched me and racism, that's the only hit.
So yea, protect your identity. The good that you do is buried with you, but the bad stuff will live forever...even if you didn't do it.
Setting up a backup schedule so that you're basically keeping all email is freaking expensive, even when you're only doing incrementals. Tape "rotation"? Forget that. It's tape storage for ever and ever.
You need drives, and tape storage, and a tape inventory system, and let's not forget a never-ending stream of tapes.
Slashdot Mirror
No, in fact, you are trying to project your identity outside the body. You're hanging on to a mind body dichotomy...or tri-chotomy in your case, which is a completely false differentiation between things that exist, and things that don't. We are creatures of meat. Minus the meat, and all we are is memories to other meat, and eventually not even that.
It does exist, which is why it is perceived. Even if it does not exist (in an ontological sense) our perception of it is so pervasive, that living our lives as if it didn't exist would be impossible.
The cogito answered? It is not an answerable question. People give incorrect answers all the time, but in my experience only about half of people understand the point he was trying to make in the first place. Descartes himself posed a bad answer. They all lack a little thing called proof, and proof is effectively impossible to obtain without a priori knowledge of the existence of things besides the self, which is impossible to obtain.
If by proving your point you mean, "Gave an example of empty philosophy" I'll agree with that. Such things exist. Moving from that and saying that religion is the answer, however, is pointless.
As for meaningful philosophy, I direct you to work being done currently with regards to linguistic theory, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.
Sibling post (above) has it exactly right. Deductive logic is a priori. It has no bearing on the universe. Given true premises, it's true. Mathematics, especially, with its foundation in pure logic, isn't going to suddenly cease to be valid. The value of some constants may change, but there is no universe where (1+1 != 2).
We can imagine a universe with vastly different physical laws, but conclusions arrived at through deductive logic will be equally valid regardless.
Philosophy isn't intellectual masturbation...There is some solid stuff being done in philosophy, even to the current day. That does not include the so called "great questions," one of which, the cogito, is at the root of this discussion.
Since you seem to be religiously inclined, I'll throw out a religious example. Can God create a stone so heavy that God can't lift it? Answer: Who cares?
Human language is quite odd. It allows for the expression of some wild ideas. It's also unfortunately vague at points and allows for linguistic koans like the one above; sentences that seem like they have meaning, but really...well...don't.
Does the universe as we perceive it exist? Props to the language for allowing that question to be framed, but it's not the kind of question that has an answer. You have to force some seriously hardcore mind/body dualism to even conceive of a universe that exists without your body.
I agree with you
I still think having people explore odd ideas serves a valuable purpose. Science is as vulnerable to dogma as any other field. Let the guy throw some stones at the sacred cows.
For one thing, the fact that there could conceivably be an Operator standing by to adjust the results doesn't mean that we should suspect there is.
How about "The fact that the universe could be a VR simulation doesn't mean that we should suspect it is"? That's the real root of the problem; there is zero evidence the universe is anything other than it appears to be.
As soon as you start saying, "Well this could be a simulation" then you have to throw out all knowledge that comes to you through sense data. ALL of it. It's not trustworthy when you know it could all be manufactured. That leaves you with nothing outside of deductive logic, and you're stuck trying to prove the universe as we know it a priori, which is effectively impossible.
You're treating it like you'll be able to trust empirical experimentation, and that's just not the case. Even the possibility that the simulation is being gamed from the outside is enough to screw all your results, regardless of whether they're being changed or not. As for inconsistent results...I've run simulations before where things started going haywire; the most common course is to try and fix it, and if that fails, it's time to load saved game, and move forward from there, taking care to remove whatever screwed you up the first time.
I believe you're mistaken. Descartes didn't have an answer. He reduced everything down to the cogito, and then got stuck there, with only himself in the whole of existence. He then pulled himself out of the hole by deducing that if he existed, then god must exist, and if God exists, then the world must exist because God just wouldn't fuck with poor Descartes like that.
That's why it's fruitless. Prove your own existence, sure, but at the cost of the rest of existence, and no way to get from you, yourself, to creation without some deus ex machina action. As soon as you start doubting the existence of the world a priori without any scrap of real evidence that the world needs to be doubted, you're stuck in the land of solipsism (population: you).
Living in a simulation may in fact create the conditions that must exist for that non-computable condition to exist.
Anyway, I think it's too limited to think a simulation must be actuated on some advanced computer of the types with which we are familiar. As long as you're wildly speculating, speculate that we're a pocket dimension held together by some controllable force in the "real" world. Here it manifests itself as gravity (which is why we still can't find the mechanism for gravity, as it exists outside the bounds of our reality), and imperfections in the control of the artificial space account for dark matter and the incorrect expansion speed of the universe, etc.
Blah blah blah. It's an interesting exercise of the imagination, but without some concrete anomaly that can only be explained by the fact that what we see isn't reality, I'm not going to speculate.
Shrug. I tend to side with Wittgenstein who would have written the entire thing up as a problem of language, not a problem rooted in the actual world.
The only way to not fall into solipsism is to not play the game. As soon as you doubt the universe exists, then the only thing you're left with is that you personally exist, and from that point there is nowhere to go. Doubting sense data without an adequate reason just dumps you in a hole with no shovel.
One of the strengths of science is that there are always people asking weird questions.
Granted, this one is a bit over the edge, but if you force people to bend to the orthodoxy in all things, then your science has become a religion. Either the current theory can withstand a dissenting voice, or the current theory sucks, and needs to be replaced.
In a word: Crap.
Philosophers have been pondering this nonsense for centuries, and have gotten nowhere...It's an argumentative blackhole, a solipsim. It's not testable...his "testable" experiments are like the sort of thing you see an idiot do to try and demonstrate that they have free will (e.g. "See? I just punched myself in the face, no way would anyone make me do that, so I must have free will!") If our reality is virtual, then all data is suspect, and it would be impossible to trust any sort of experimental data. Even if you come up with a clever test that would pierce the illusion, one would have to assume whoever maintains the illusion would simply fix it so that didn't work a second time. Nothing would be repeatable.
It's just not a useful avenue for speculation. This guy brings nothing new to the table except the kinda crap the ID people bring..."Hey, if the universe was a simulation, it would explain why everything tastes like chicken!" Just because there is no currently workable theory for some occurrence, there is no reason to invent a wild explanation that just makes it go away.
Without some compelling proof (which he lacks) this is nothing more than a conversational topic over a bag of weed.
I somehow missed the math in all that generalized ranting.
The real problem is economics, however. Not necessarily in the way you mean because this is actually relatively robust and proven tech, but economics none-the-less.
People aren't going to get behind it because it would involve a lot of new taxes. Industry isn't going to get behind it because fossil fuels are still cheap(er than alternatives), and the infrastructure around them is well established and proven. The government isn't going to get behind it because A) they're all too scared to raise taxes, and B) if they throw half a trillion dollars at this stuff and something new comes up that's 10% more effective for the same price, they'll never live it down.
In short:
People won't push for it until the energy produced is the cheapest they can buy.
Corporations won't adopt it until it's already established.
Governments won't lead the way because they aren't stupid enough to think that they can guess where the future of energy generation is going to be in 2050.
Basically, economics.
Actually, I got that one. ;D
Maybe one day I'll even do something with it other than host my email. =P
My name's common, so I'd be stuck with myname.eu.com or something like that.
I do it because of the stuff we're talking about...I look to see what's available that's roughly what I want, and I register everything I see. Then I think about it, pick the one I really want (or show 'em to a customer and let THEM pick the one they want) and release the rest.
It's the only way to make sure someone doesn't swipe it out from under you.
Well, I have to say, in many respects I liked book version of The Shining better than the movie version, though they are both exceptional. I think of it more like the movie version of Dune...An excellent attempt to make a book that is nearly impossible to convey on the screen into something that, while not to the letter true to the original, is still awesome in it's own right and carries forward something of the spirit of the piece. King's attempt to re-vision it fell flat because he doesn't understand how to make something that is cool and suspenseful on the page into something that is cool and suspenseful on the screen.
I also remember that episode of Friends, which happened to be one of the few I'd actually watched, and which forever cemented in my mind the idea that I wasn't missing much at all. If you're going to write an episode where one of the central plots revolves around a pair of books, you'd think someone would have bothered to read them.
Meh. Hardly matters. I've been trying to get (my actual name).com forever...Used to be held by a law office, but they ditched it and it got snapped up by a squatter because it's less than 6 letters long. Pretty much no hope of ever getting it now, and there isn't even anything on the damn page but a goddamn squatter splash page...though I'm told I could possibly buy it for a meager 25,000...Maybe.
Just a pisser. The system isn't fair, and isn't set up to reward fairness.
If you don't expect a strong money bias on a PC Mag article, you haven't been paying attention. There are a lot of whores out there, and PC Mag is one of the worst.
Yea, I can't speak to laptops...My business we go through laptops like a fat guy at a twinkie convention. I brought a department head down into the shop and showed her a pile taller than my head (I'm tall) of shattered, mangled, broken, doused, and otherwise destroyed laptops in response to her question, "Where do all the laptops go?" Seems like Dell and Mac both die about the same under that sort of abuse.
As far as desktops go, we're pretty solidly moving away from Dell. Slow delivery, crappy support, mediocre quality. Apple desktops are pretty reliable, though you're right about OS 9, it was a fricking dog.
Well, again, I think this is more a problem of how it's working right now than a problem with how it would work if it were working correctly. Bad patents should not be granted. Incomplete patents should not be granted. Patents for trivial changes should not be granted (drug companies, I'm looking at you! Changing the dose and treatment schedule on a drug doesn't make it a new drug.)
I actually think patents tend to encourage a bit of innovation, as long as you're not in a situation like now where people are allowed to patent the most vague crap. If the most obvious way to do something has been taken, it pays to try and find another way, and that other way may be better, or may lead to more interesting research. After a time though, I think that original application should become public domain, so that the hobbiests and tinkerers can have their fun with it, and wring applications out of it that the original creators never dreamed possible.
Just looking at it I don't see where you get "clunky"...They both just look like bloated monitors to me. The only difference is, one's black, and the other one is white.
Surface appearances aside, it's time to talk about the quality of the internal hardware...Apple hardware vs Dell hardware.
Tossing all OS considerations, I think that Apple's hardware is traditionally much more robust and reliable than Dell's has been. I'm working in a shop that always buys Dell PCs and Apple iMacs. We have more problems with the Dells, hands down, than we do with the Apples. All other things being equal, I'd take an Apple.
I doubt I'll ever be in a position to try out a side by side comparison, because we're not buying Dell anymore, and (as one of the above posters mentioned) we don't like tossing a good monitor whenever the computer goes south, so we've been buying Mac Mini's since they came out as an option.
Still, if I was offered one or the other, I'd take the Apple.
I think the evidence is self-evident. If I told you how to make a pie, you could then go make a pie. If I gave you fruit, sugar, butter, flour, and an oven and said, "Make me something" it's unlikely that you'd come up with a passable pie, and nearly impossible if the idea of "pie" hasn't even touched your consciousness.
The idea for a patent system is that you can register your idea for a reasonable period, after which it becomes public. Yes, this is being abused. The solution is to return to the original idea of patents of limited duration, and also to cease granting obvious patents. I'm not sure what you mean about things being "hidden" in patents. If you patent something, it's not hidden by definition, because you have to spell it out.
I agree with your assertions 1,2,4 and 8. I think 1 and 2 properly applied make 3 pointless, and I think 3 by itself would cause too much extra work if 1 and 2 are functioning as they ought to be. I think 5 should be replaced by sensible expiration dates on patents, and I think 6 needs to be worked out by people who know what the hell they're talking about, which has nothign to do with the public.
That's a bit incoherent. That's like saying the idea for a microchip can come straight from a guy looking at a handful of sand. It's all an incremental process, and every part of that process starts with someone looking at his current tools and saying, "What if?"
If we already had every tool and process we'd need for profitable, efficient fusion, we would be done, because we absolutely have the "idea" of fusion. The same was true for the first guy who ever looked at a horse and said, "Hey, I bet it'd be cool to ride one of those." He had to invent processes, tools, training methods, all to realize that comparatively simple idea.
I think you've got it backwards, actually. Implementation is cheap, once the idea is understood. If the only barrier was implementation, then there would be nothing new, only things that we knew could be done, that we have finally become able to produce.
The reason for the patent system is to keep people from hiding their ideas away. The alternative to the patent system isn't free information, but severely protected, jealously guarded information. Products would be more expensive, because you'd have to safeguard the ideas that went into them by building misdirection into the product. Ideas could actually be lost, in cases where the inventor dies with his secret, which, of course, he'd be unable to share with anyone without endangering his livelihood.
I don't disagree that the patent system is completely screwed up right now, but the solution is not to throw it away. It has a purpose.
I have even a good example...I was participating in a thread, right here on Slashdot...Some outsourcing thing, I have no idea.
This is the thread in particular...It was in a random outsourcing thread, so you can imagine the level of comments. Mine in particular are pretty much devoid of racial content...I reserve my true hatred for Dell, and that's pretty much why I jumped into a semi-OT thread about tech support.
Week or so later I start getting nasty emails, calling me a racist. Arrooo? I have vices, but that's not one of them. So I start looking around and quite quickly find "http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1326921,prtpage-1.cms" an article singling out me in particular for some of the semi-racist yammering that was going on in that thread. If you bother to read the article (which I don't recommend as it's pretty much "look at how evil all americans are" and filled with the sort of good reporting that can misquote a forum post) you'll see that the out-of-context quote attributed to me was from the parent post, and I hadn't even quoted him. Typical.
So I know how this crap goes, and I'm not particularly offended that someone has smeared an internet handle of mine, but, as things do on the internet, it persists...It even came right back around on Slashdot with some Indian user quoting it as gospel truth and evidence that we're all complete racists.
Sigh.
So yea, you can try to associate good stuff with your handle, but someone else is free to associate whatever they want to it as well, and truth, no truth, it doesn't really matter if people want to believe the lie. What if this handle was associated with my name? I get looked up, and apparently I'm some kinda racist. If you were concerned about it and searched me and racism, that's the only hit.
So yea, protect your identity. The good that you do is buried with you, but the bad stuff will live forever...even if you didn't do it.
Setting up a backup schedule so that you're basically keeping all email is freaking expensive, even when you're only doing incrementals. Tape "rotation"? Forget that. It's tape storage for ever and ever.
You need drives, and tape storage, and a tape inventory system, and let's not forget a never-ending stream of tapes.