"direct authority over the executive (which can be blocked by congressional oversight)"
That one covers everything you just mentioned. Executive orders are hardly something the President gave itself. The President has always had the right to directly command all agencies in the executive branch. Everyone talks about changing the law at election time but in reality, bossing around the military and executive branch is the primary function of the President.
I think a voluntary cooperative would be communist.
"I disagree with the 'stable' part. What is the basis for making that claim?"
What is the basis for denying it? There do tend to be a lot of them around and they don't seem to be going anywhere soon. That would suggest stability to me.
"Are representative governments really more stable than autocratic ones?"
That is a different question. The GP said they are stable, he didn't say "more" stable.
The problem with actual anarchy is that no matter how independent the individual is, as soon as someone else begins "cooperating" in any structure their collective strength overtakes you. So basically, it doesn't last long.
"Well, I doubt they know as much about patents as I do."
As a random Slashdot user with no established credentials I'd have gone with a plea to authority fallacy where the authority is myself as well. In the face of your well established vast knowledge of patents I can't see the point in even bothering to read what these guys have to say.
Setting that aside. None of the other problems with the patent system that you've pointed out support your original premise that we economically need patents or that people won't invent things without them. These guys at the Fed are saying that the simplest way to fix all the problems you've described is to dismantle the unneeded patent system.
I tend to agree with them. Rather than encouraging invention patents seem to seriously retard it. Killing patents won't kill invention, it will just change the way people invent for money.
" Representative governments may be inefficient and suboptimal, but they are stable for the long term and do not require violent "fixes" periodically. "
I'll agree with the stable part. As for the rest, it is more likely that provide enough of an illusion of fairness and they divide people into enough factions that it is difficult for those willing to implement the violent "fix" to gain enough support to pull it off. That is a far cry from not needing the fix.
And I could run it through a disassembler. I can even convert it to C code if that is my preference. Copyleft is a path for a world with copyright. Without copyright, you need no copyleft.
Yes. Everyone is just going to pack up and leave and NOBODY is going to bother trying to sell to this massive market ever again.
Massive pharma's need billions for a drug to be worth it to them. But the actual cost of the gear is thousands spread across hundreds of drugs if you make communal labs and making the time investment worthwhile is a need easily met by a million or two. The same companies that profit making generics now would find 0-day drugs just as profitable. All that is needed is to get rid of the direct costs associated with FDA approval.
"It takes years of testing to get a drug approved by the FDA, and that costs big big money to do."
Something that would have to be fixed if we get rid of drug patents. We shouldn't leave the patent system in place just to work around the broken FDA system. That needs fixed anyway. The FDA currently shields drug companies from liability.
It isn't against the Constitution to get rid of patents altogether. The constitutional amendment isn't because the constitution forces us to have patents, its because the only way to abolish patents is to take away congresses authority to create them. Congress will never willingly dismantle the patent system. Too many private parties are paying them not to.
"presidential power has increased since 1933 pretty much continuously"
You haven't given a single example of that or refuted any of the supporting examples I gave. If the President has the support of Congress he has a great deal of power. If not, then he does not. Bottom line, if support of Congress decides that, the power belongs to Congress and not the President.
The expanding power under both parties is expanding federal power across the board. I'm talking about the President power vs Congress not the President vs the people.
The President only has four powers. Veto (which congress can bypass), appointment (which congress can reject), direct authority over the executive (which can be blocked by congressional oversight), and pardon (which has been effectively blocked by mass media). He also has no time for form lasting political power. That is the reason congress put in the term limit.
If Congress passed a law George Washington had unilateral authority with regard to it's execution and only a new law, the judicial, or the people via jury nullification could change his actions. Today if he didn't do what a handful of congressmen in an oversight committee wanted checks would bounce the next day. Presidential power vs congress has definitely diminished.
Congress critters always bitch about judges legislating from the bench (as if checking congress isn't the primary function of the judiciary) and the expanding power of the President. The actual result is always the same, more power for the feds across the board and greater centralization of power in Congress. Turns out no matter who is in the white house or if the supreme has more D's or R's, there are always more D's AND R's in congress than elsewhere.
"No, it is Congress that is supposed to be bound by the law"
If you re-read my post I think you'll find I already addressed "supposed to be" vs what actually is. The authority of Congress is defined by what they are able to do in actuality, not what they are they are supposed to be able to do.
Having the authority to do something is defined by being able to do it, not by existing laws. It is the Constitution that lacks the authority to hinder congress.
It all started with the courts discovering they had the authority to take the people's power of direct representation via juries away. That meant the people no longer had veto authority on laws on a case by case basis. At that point congress was the only check on the judicial in their appointment blocking capacity. Congress then made funding conditional upon their oversight and renewable. A little bug not seen by the forefathers that pretty much eliminated all power held by the executive branch. The president is supposed to head the executive but instead all executive agencies answer to congressional oversight committees. The president can't even hire people in his branch without congressional approval. That only leaves the president veto authority and congress is given the ability to override that as well.
So who is left to check congress if they decide they have the authority to violate the Constitution?
">There couldn't be more than a handful of jobs that require as much direct math and physics as working in a precision machine shop
Design a cam or gear without geometry, trig, and algebra, and get back to me."
How does an example math required in a specific example of machining work dispute an argument about how not many jobs require as much math as machining work?
"A shop owner and toolmaker who makes stamped and bent wireform items I know was asked by some teachers what he considered "basic math"
Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, and Trig. The math teachers were aghast. But it's true. How the fuck do you set the depth of a spotter drill so you don't make the spot circle too big without fucking trig?"
I agree. You are supporting my argument but your choice of words suggests you are arguing. These aren't even hard maths. I've never understood why schools teach basic Arithmetic over and over instead of covering ground more rapidly.
All I'm really saying is that if we are looking for examples of where to use algebra to show someone (where someone is effectively everyone) it really is useful we need examples from life and not from work so that those examples are as broad as possible. If we use work related examples they aren't going to convince someone interested in an unrelated career that algebra is going to be useful to them. In addition to appealing to a broader audience I also maintain that if someone learns to use math as a routine component in their day to day life they will find no shortage of applications for that math when they go into the work place. Even if they didn't, not everything taught in school needs to be targeted at a career. Enriching the life of the student is more than enough justification.
"Ugh. Its to teach that symbolic manipulation is possible and how to think symbolically, not the training task of how to factor equations."
You said that the first time. Apparently you thought I didn't get it. So let me rephrase with an example.
There are many systems that use symbolic manipulation. Computer programming does this in a far more direct, freethinking, and obvious way than Algebra. Algebra does a poor job of teaching people logic. Instead they walk away with a bunch of recipes for solving problems and not a mind that is enhanced with the ability to understand and apply logic and abstract thought. Programming (as opposed to computer science) on the other hand teaches that logic, every program task is a logic problem. I would also contend that the importance of direct mathematical logic isn't fully appreciated without something like a critical thinking course that teaches the use of logic in day to day discourse and rhetoric. Without that many people will complete problem sets with recipes instead of true logic no matter what the system.
I think people are afraid of putting coherent, organized, logical thought combined with critical analysis skills in the hands of young people they are trying to manipulate and control so they save this stuff for college. I think they should teach simplified forms of critical thinking in grade school cultivating entire generations taught to question information and pleas to authority from the start. Kids who will challenge educators and parents and thereby force them to come up with a sound logical structure for how they govern children and god forbid actually share with them the "why" of the way things are.
Yes but the topic being discussed was showing the general population how algebra is useful. That is the whole point. There is a widespread feeling that outside of a few industries people don't need to know this. So why teach algebra to everyone? Unfortunately people find it much easier to do math on paper than to translate that math to the real world. Algebra I and II are useful for everyone, not just a tiny subset of people with jobs that simply can't be done without more advanced maths.
There couldn't be more than a handful of jobs that require as much direct math and physics as working in a precision machine shop.
All of those are heavy math examples. Concepts from basic algebra are useful in daily life. Even simple things like figuring out how much to paypal someone if you want them to end up with $25 AFTER the fees.
Why would you teach a symbolic manipulation system that nobody is going to use?
It doesn't make sense to have people go through algebra courses if the end goal is just to learn the concept of a variable, a formula, the properties of real numbers, basic logic, and a convoluted system in which we build giant equations to explain how to write down basic mental math most people find intuitive.
You don't need to know basic algebra to perform basic algebra. Basic math combined with the properties of real numbers (mostly intuitive themselves) makes basic algebra intuitive. Building these problems out as traditional equations involves a bunch of extra steps that serves no purpose except to satisfy a teacher who wants you to show your work. It's sort of like unit conversion. They give lessons on this and show frustrating slow processes where you put numbers over other numbers and toss in a conversion factor. But nobody would actually go through that garbage to convert a unit you added a bunch of extra crap to the problem just to cancel it out later.
A foot is 12 inches. If you have 36 inches how many feet do you have?
Anyone who understands multiplication and division can solve this problem without being taught a formal unit conversion process. If writing this down they would write 36/12 = 3.
Ouch, I stand corrected. That was pricing for srx100b maybe a year ago you could get them for $200-300 all day long. They've gone up, maybe people aren't willing to sell them so far below retail now that the platform is a fairly solid. They were pretty buggy early on.
Yup. I can build the oldest most well known off the shelf crap and obfuscate it the point that no AV catches it. There are no shortage of utilities that do this for you and multi-scanners that make sure it beats all the AV programs.
It's best to run the latest FireFox, in private mode, with the no-script plugin. Keep windows updates applied. If you don't go auto make sure to apply them as a habit. Of course this all applies to the virtual machine you use for windows. Even if you run windows as a habit, you shouldn't be using the net from windows directly. Use a vm and snapshots. Then if you get infected you can do a complete rollback.
Also get a REAL firewall like a juniper srx (no, not just NAT) and run intrusion detection. At home you can do the SNORT thing. If you are running anything that accepts incoming internet isolate it into a separate security zone on the firewall that blocks intrazone communication by default. Keep internally facing servers in their own zone as well.
All that will cost $200 for the srx firewall the rest is free, there are free alternatives if you've got a decent switch a trimmed down linux or BSD box will work just fine. For home use or even small office I suggest just rolling your own ESXi 5 server for $500-600 (hardware cost, esxi is free). Then you can have a bunch of locked down separate virtual systems using a single box rather than running all that on a single OS and having all your stuff compromised if any of it is compromised.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't make the submission news. Forget reading TFA, there is no FA.
"direct authority over the executive (which can be blocked by congressional oversight)"
That one covers everything you just mentioned. Executive orders are hardly something the President gave itself. The President has always had the right to directly command all agencies in the executive branch. Everyone talks about changing the law at election time but in reality, bossing around the military and executive branch is the primary function of the President.
I think a voluntary cooperative would be communist.
"I disagree with the 'stable' part. What is the basis for making that claim?"
What is the basis for denying it? There do tend to be a lot of them around and they don't seem to be going anywhere soon. That would suggest stability to me.
"Are representative governments really more stable than autocratic ones?"
That is a different question. The GP said they are stable, he didn't say "more" stable.
The problem with actual anarchy is that no matter how independent the individual is, as soon as someone else begins "cooperating" in any structure their collective strength overtakes you. So basically, it doesn't last long.
"Well, I doubt they know as much about patents as I do."
As a random Slashdot user with no established credentials I'd have gone with a plea to authority fallacy where the authority is myself as well. In the face of your well established vast knowledge of patents I can't see the point in even bothering to read what these guys have to say.
Setting that aside. None of the other problems with the patent system that you've pointed out support your original premise that we economically need patents or that people won't invent things without them. These guys at the Fed are saying that the simplest way to fix all the problems you've described is to dismantle the unneeded patent system.
I tend to agree with them. Rather than encouraging invention patents seem to seriously retard it. Killing patents won't kill invention, it will just change the way people invent for money.
" Representative governments may be inefficient and suboptimal, but they are stable for the long term and do not require violent "fixes" periodically. "
I'll agree with the stable part. As for the rest, it is more likely that provide enough of an illusion of fairness and they divide people into enough factions that it is difficult for those willing to implement the violent "fix" to gain enough support to pull it off. That is a far cry from not needing the fix.
If only these economists at the Federal Reserve knew as much about economics as you John_3000.
Now if we could just figure out how they got people to invent things before patents.
And I could run it through a disassembler. I can even convert it to C code if that is my preference. Copyleft is a path for a world with copyright. Without copyright, you need no copyleft.
Aside from just abolishing patents, IP should be abolished in all forms for anything produced with public funds. Get rid of the contractor bug.
A pay check? People who work in government offices do get paid you know.
Yes. Everyone is just going to pack up and leave and NOBODY is going to bother trying to sell to this massive market ever again.
Massive pharma's need billions for a drug to be worth it to them. But the actual cost of the gear is thousands spread across hundreds of drugs if you make communal labs and making the time investment worthwhile is a need easily met by a million or two. The same companies that profit making generics now would find 0-day drugs just as profitable. All that is needed is to get rid of the direct costs associated with FDA approval.
"It takes years of testing to get a drug approved by the FDA, and that costs big big money to do."
Something that would have to be fixed if we get rid of drug patents. We shouldn't leave the patent system in place just to work around the broken FDA system. That needs fixed anyway. The FDA currently shields drug companies from liability.
It isn't against the Constitution to get rid of patents altogether. The constitutional amendment isn't because the constitution forces us to have patents, its because the only way to abolish patents is to take away congresses authority to create them. Congress will never willingly dismantle the patent system. Too many private parties are paying them not to.
"presidential power has increased since 1933 pretty much continuously"
You haven't given a single example of that or refuted any of the supporting examples I gave. If the President has the support of Congress he has a great deal of power. If not, then he does not. Bottom line, if support of Congress decides that, the power belongs to Congress and not the President.
The expanding power under both parties is expanding federal power across the board. I'm talking about the President power vs Congress not the President vs the people.
The President only has four powers. Veto (which congress can bypass), appointment (which congress can reject), direct authority over the executive (which can be blocked by congressional oversight), and pardon (which has been effectively blocked by mass media). He also has no time for form lasting political power. That is the reason congress put in the term limit.
If Congress passed a law George Washington had unilateral authority with regard to it's execution and only a new law, the judicial, or the people via jury nullification could change his actions. Today if he didn't do what a handful of congressmen in an oversight committee wanted checks would bounce the next day. Presidential power vs congress has definitely diminished.
Congress critters always bitch about judges legislating from the bench (as if checking congress isn't the primary function of the judiciary) and the expanding power of the President. The actual result is always the same, more power for the feds across the board and greater centralization of power in Congress. Turns out no matter who is in the white house or if the supreme has more D's or R's, there are always more D's AND R's in congress than elsewhere.
I didn't elect anybody. If you actually think there is an answer to this dilemma in the voting booth you are dreaming. It has gone far beyond that.
"No, it is Congress that is supposed to be bound by the law"
If you re-read my post I think you'll find I already addressed "supposed to be" vs what actually is. The authority of Congress is defined by what they are able to do in actuality, not what they are they are supposed to be able to do.
Having the authority to do something is defined by being able to do it, not by existing laws. It is the Constitution that lacks the authority to hinder congress.
It all started with the courts discovering they had the authority to take the people's power of direct representation via juries away. That meant the people no longer had veto authority on laws on a case by case basis. At that point congress was the only check on the judicial in their appointment blocking capacity. Congress then made funding conditional upon their oversight and renewable. A little bug not seen by the forefathers that pretty much eliminated all power held by the executive branch. The president is supposed to head the executive but instead all executive agencies answer to congressional oversight committees. The president can't even hire people in his branch without congressional approval. That only leaves the president veto authority and congress is given the ability to override that as well.
So who is left to check congress if they decide they have the authority to violate the Constitution?
">There couldn't be more than a handful of jobs that require as much direct math and physics as working in a precision machine shop
Design a cam or gear without geometry, trig, and algebra, and get back to me."
How does an example math required in a specific example of machining work dispute an argument about how not many jobs require as much math as machining work?
"A shop owner and toolmaker who makes stamped and bent wireform items I know was asked by some teachers what he considered "basic math"
Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, and Trig. The math teachers were aghast. But it's true. How the fuck do you set the depth of a spotter drill so you don't make the spot circle too big without fucking trig?"
I agree. You are supporting my argument but your choice of words suggests you are arguing. These aren't even hard maths. I've never understood why schools teach basic Arithmetic over and over instead of covering ground more rapidly.
All I'm really saying is that if we are looking for examples of where to use algebra to show someone (where someone is effectively everyone) it really is useful we need examples from life and not from work so that those examples are as broad as possible. If we use work related examples they aren't going to convince someone interested in an unrelated career that algebra is going to be useful to them. In addition to appealing to a broader audience I also maintain that if someone learns to use math as a routine component in their day to day life they will find no shortage of applications for that math when they go into the work place. Even if they didn't, not everything taught in school needs to be targeted at a career. Enriching the life of the student is more than enough justification.
"Ugh. Its to teach that symbolic manipulation is possible and how to think symbolically, not the training task of how to factor equations."
You said that the first time. Apparently you thought I didn't get it. So let me rephrase with an example.
There are many systems that use symbolic manipulation. Computer programming does this in a far more direct, freethinking, and obvious way than Algebra. Algebra does a poor job of teaching people logic. Instead they walk away with a bunch of recipes for solving problems and not a mind that is enhanced with the ability to understand and apply logic and abstract thought. Programming (as opposed to computer science) on the other hand teaches that logic, every program task is a logic problem. I would also contend that the importance of direct mathematical logic isn't fully appreciated without something like a critical thinking course that teaches the use of logic in day to day discourse and rhetoric. Without that many people will complete problem sets with recipes instead of true logic no matter what the system.
I think people are afraid of putting coherent, organized, logical thought combined with critical analysis skills in the hands of young people they are trying to manipulate and control so they save this stuff for college. I think they should teach simplified forms of critical thinking in grade school cultivating entire generations taught to question information and pleas to authority from the start. Kids who will challenge educators and parents and thereby force them to come up with a sound logical structure for how they govern children and god forbid actually share with them the "why" of the way things are.
Yes but the topic being discussed was showing the general population how algebra is useful. That is the whole point. There is a widespread feeling that outside of a few industries people don't need to know this. So why teach algebra to everyone? Unfortunately people find it much easier to do math on paper than to translate that math to the real world. Algebra I and II are useful for everyone, not just a tiny subset of people with jobs that simply can't be done without more advanced maths.
There couldn't be more than a handful of jobs that require as much direct math and physics as working in a precision machine shop.
All of those are heavy math examples. Concepts from basic algebra are useful in daily life. Even simple things like figuring out how much to paypal someone if you want them to end up with $25 AFTER the fees.
Why would you teach a symbolic manipulation system that nobody is going to use?
It doesn't make sense to have people go through algebra courses if the end goal is just to learn the concept of a variable, a formula, the properties of real numbers, basic logic, and a convoluted system in which we build giant equations to explain how to write down basic mental math most people find intuitive.
You don't need to know basic algebra to perform basic algebra. Basic math combined with the properties of real numbers (mostly intuitive themselves) makes basic algebra intuitive. Building these problems out as traditional equations involves a bunch of extra steps that serves no purpose except to satisfy a teacher who wants you to show your work. It's sort of like unit conversion. They give lessons on this and show frustrating slow processes where you put numbers over other numbers and toss in a conversion factor. But nobody would actually go through that garbage to convert a unit you added a bunch of extra crap to the problem just to cancel it out later.
A foot is 12 inches. If you have 36 inches how many feet do you have?
Anyone who understands multiplication and division can solve this problem without being taught a formal unit conversion process. If writing this down they would write 36/12 = 3.
http://www.math.com/school/subject2/lessons/S2U2L1GL.html
Ouch, I stand corrected. That was pricing for srx100b maybe a year ago you could get them for $200-300 all day long. They've gone up, maybe people aren't willing to sell them so far below retail now that the platform is a fairly solid. They were pretty buggy early on.
Yup. I can build the oldest most well known off the shelf crap and obfuscate it the point that no AV catches it. There are no shortage of utilities that do this for you and multi-scanners that make sure it beats all the AV programs.
It's best to run the latest FireFox, in private mode, with the no-script plugin. Keep windows updates applied. If you don't go auto make sure to apply them as a habit. Of course this all applies to the virtual machine you use for windows. Even if you run windows as a habit, you shouldn't be using the net from windows directly. Use a vm and snapshots. Then if you get infected you can do a complete rollback.
Also get a REAL firewall like a juniper srx (no, not just NAT) and run intrusion detection. At home you can do the SNORT thing. If you are running anything that accepts incoming internet isolate it into a separate security zone on the firewall that blocks intrazone communication by default. Keep internally facing servers in their own zone as well.
All that will cost $200 for the srx firewall the rest is free, there are free alternatives if you've got a decent switch a trimmed down linux or BSD box will work just fine. For home use or even small office I suggest just rolling your own ESXi 5 server for $500-600 (hardware cost, esxi is free). Then you can have a bunch of locked down separate virtual systems using a single box rather than running all that on a single OS and having all your stuff compromised if any of it is compromised.
They do have additional information about removing the IR filters from the camera. Should improve the spectrum.