Such questions are hard, bad, and pointless. Even if we could do so, there is no real value in coming up with the exact number we should use for making an arbitrary distinction about an invention's obviousness. It's bad because as well as implying all kinds of things, it frames the debate in a useless way. We want to encourage invention, not enrich lawyers.
We can change the system so that answers to questions like that are not important.
Taxes is just one of many ways. But that is so difficult to get and keep accepted politically. A levy, such as the one on blank CDs in several countries, including Canada, is similar. The difference is that the government never touches the money, which may make it slightly more acceptable to some. The collections all go to a private corporation. Could set up levies on music playing devices as well.
As for government agencies, one is the National Endowment for the Arts. Conservatives have been trying to kill the NEA for years, and not just for budgetary reasons. To avoid this sort of ongoing controversy, this constant use of the NEA as a political football, I would rather see private organizations with private funding. But this is very difficult to do, as governments are the natural vehicles for setting up anything of national scope.
UL, as I already mentioned, is funded in a variety of ways. Primarily, they collect fees from manufacturers who need product testing. I would guess they also collect fees from insurers (membership fees, perhaps?). They are officially a non-profit organization, and they have an official designation from OSHA.
The Nobel Prizes are taken from the interest generated by a fund that a rich industrialist set up in his will. Don't know how well that would scale.
Worth a mention is the highway system. The public highway system is funded through the gas tax. (Or it was. The gas tax has been in decline for 18 years.) Governments run this of course, but that work could be spun off into private hands. It arose partly in response to the expense of travel on railroads, which were all private, and which did indulge in a bit of price gouging. They weren't called robber barons for nothing. It was also moved out of private hands because too many private road owners engaged in questionable practices to generate more revenue, such as deliberately making the roads longer, and trying to direct people onto more roundabout routes, so they would have to pass through more towns. It's an early example of the Broken Window Fallacy. One example of that was the Bee Line in Alabama. Came from the north and went straight to Birmingham, until new owners seized control and tried to reroute it to go way out of the way to pass through Gadsden. That sort of thing tarnished the reputation of private roads. Today, private toll roads have been seeing a revival in popularity-- among the influential, not the general public. I have never liked them because I think the overhead of toll collection is far higher than the overhead of collecting a tax on gasoline. At least, it was when we needed to man toll booths and stop traffic to collect. Now with cameras that photograph license plates while the vehicle keeps rolling, perhaps tolls can compete with the efficiency of a gas tax. If new tech makes toll roads worth revisiting, why not revisit patronage too?
I tried out Scalable Vector Graphics on a 2nd grader. Whipped up a little text file and loaded it in Firefox. She and her father complained that SVG was too hard.
And I see their point. SVG is much inferior to LOGO. SVG has a turtle of sorts. Problem is, the SVG turtle remembers position only, no orientation. For instance, could not draw a 5 pointed star by ordering it to rotate 288 degrees and drawing a line 5 times, had to calculate the x,y coordinates.
The so called human readable XML style syntax was another impediment. We could use a big revamp of HTML. Reduce the verbosity and cut down the excessive structure. It wouldn't be backward compatible like HTML5 is, but web pages sure would be a lot smaller and more readable. And maybe a 2nd grader wouldn't have such a rough time with it.
That's why I think many different methods is the way to go. Don't agonize over which is best, try every one that looks good. Have a bunch of competing private companies all promoting and using their own different methods, both for choosing recipients and for raising revenue. An individual artist will do well with some, and not so well with others. I hope the competition would also keep the corruption down. There will be corruption, there always is. But something like the Nobel Prize is well regarded. If we could just scale that up, and multiply it, we'd have our replacement system.
The key is competition, not capitalism per se. Competition is why capitalism works, and why a competitive patronage system could work. It's also why we have to have some rules. Got to keep the competition alive, stop monopolies from forming, or failing that, make sure they play fair. For an example of a working system, consider safety agencies. There is Underwriter's Laboratory, as well as various government agencies. But UL is not government, it is a creation of the insurance industry, hence the 'U' in UL. No manufacturer would dare release a product that has not been approved by at least 1 agency, and these agencies actually do compete somewhat for business. Manufacturers pay UL and others to test their products. Insurers also chip in. UL saves insurers more money than they spend on UL, by stopping obviously dangerous products from being released, thereby reducing claims.
Use some other system, not copyright. Copyright is only a means of encouraging art and science. It's hardly the only means. Nor is it a good means. Nor is it necessary for other purposes, such as stopping plagiarism. No, it is not communist to want to abolish intellectual property. Do you think it is? Why?
Patronage is one such system. It worked for Mozart and Beethoven. Today, we can do up a much better patronage system. Base pay on various measures of value and popularity. The idea would be that with enough different prizes, criteria and so on, every worthy contributor will get something. Collect money through sales of real goods, advertising, donations, and possibly even levies and taxes. Would have to watch for corruption and cheating of course, but you always have to do that when money is involved.
What I'm outlining is thoroughly capitalist. You create something of value. The value is measured in some kind of market. You get paid according to that measure. What could be more capitalist than that?
erasing a weird 200-or-so-year blip where ideas, songs, and knowledge can "belong" to someone
Exactly. The fundamental problem is that information is not material. Laborious to create, yes, and valuable, yes. But not material. Once created, it can be copied easily, at virtually no cost. And it will be copied. Data is not a scarce resource. It therefore makes little sense to try to apply property laws to information, to assign and trade ownership thereof among individual entities. But this and worse is what many have tried to do. Many have tried to have it both ways, treating information like a scarce resource when it is to their advantage to do so, even at the expense of their sources, the actual artists whom they rob and cheat, and then shamelessly turning around and using the fact that it is not scarce to improve the efficiency of their businesses. In the process, they've greatly exceeded the limited scope originally intended for copyright, and they've confused the public, getting many to unthinkingly accept that copying is stealing, when it is not. No, we really need some other treatment of this valuable thing, something that doesn't treat information as property, and also is more pro-growth rather than anti-loss.
Sounds like you think this law isn't all that bad. Worse, you think sharing is an activity that should be restricted, regulated, and punished. And that "owners" of content should have "rights" over it, to "protect" their profits. Innocent people don't have to pay up? But we can still be harassed, accused, and dragged into court, and our equipment seized. And the law is so broad that hardly anyone is technically innocent.
Information isn't controllable in ways that promote the functioning of this sick fantasy system that content owners have managed to create through their expertise at working politics. These laws should never have been enacted. Now we waste a great deal of money trying to enforce the unenforceable, all for the sake of the mythical starving artist. It's a terribly inefficient and unfair system. Stop thinking so much of fairness to artists, and start thinking a bit more about fairness to us, the general public. You sneer at us all for wanting a "free ride". You shouldn't. And you shouldn't put it that way. It is the content owners who have been getting way more than they deserve or earned. Sharing between private individuals should never have been criminalized, as some policitians realized way back in the 19th century.
You kid, but seriously, this position is not as radical as you suggest. I want to see artists and scientists encouraged with monetary compensation, and I want the compensation based at least loosely on the value of their contributions. The market economy, when not warped by artificial monopoly protection (such as copyrights) or other government bungling, has been one of the best tools we have for determining a fair valuation, and I would like to keep a little of that if possible. Marxists would not care about any of that. They would expect the scientists and artists to produce regardless of compensation.
You know what? Linux users will go right on using plain Linux. Not SE Linux, not OpenBSD, and certainly not Windows. We're not even going to change our root passwords. Why? Because this security breach is not that big a deal.
Yes, it is embarrassing for kernel.org, but the damage is not that great. Sure, we'd all like to prevent security breaches from ever happening in the first place, but I have always thought detection and recovery is more important than prevention. Kernel.org has that covered in spades. Keep backups. Keep many backups. Keep them in many different locations. A distributed source code revision control system such as git does that automatically. Whoever did this wasn't too smart if they were seriously trying to inject a backdoor into the Linux kernel. Now they've blown their cover. They can't have seriously expected the code modifications they tried to go unnoticed for long, unless they have no idea how large projects handle source code. So either they were dumb, or all they were trying to do was embarrass Linux.
I think ultimately we will replace copyright. We will create better systems. They will be so much better that artists will abandon copyright. Creating better systems won't be that hard because copyright sets such a low bar. Copyright won't be repealed; societies are much too conservative to consider a move like that. It'll just fall into disuse. But for the present, we'll have to wait for a generational change or 2.
I think I know what the 1st step is too. We need free and secure digital notaries, so that people can prove authorship. The other big, big problem is funding. All taxes are odious, of course. Don't know that other means could raise enough revenue. Well, we will work out something.
What I find most troubling is the negativity and habits of thought that an idea like copyright promotes. Copyright is fascism. It's a legalized taking of harmless actions that occur in nature all the time. It's a list of petty rules. You can't do this. You can't do that. You didn't think of it first. You have to get permission to the nth degree. You have to spend inordinate amounts of time and money accounting for every last fraction of a cent. We would need a police state to try to enforce it all, and it still wouldn't be enforceable. We have confused police, and greedy descendents of the famous, and museums who really think citizens shouldn't be allowed to photograph them and theirs. We create owners and turn them into possessive, grasping, denying, fearful monsters who could starve if they don't go around beating up everyone who infringes on the works they bought. This is not the spirit of freedom. This is not what the West stands for!
I'd much rather see a permissive system. Do anything you want with art, and we'll sort out later how much compensation is owed to the artists. By necessity it would have to have simplifications. Rather than attempting to count every last copy, every last play on every music player in existence, perhaps tiered patronage systems based on statistical sampling would do. Might do something like pay out for 10 years $100K/$50K/$30K per year per song that reaches some level of popularity.
Is it possible to run a user supplied file sharing site without eventually if not immediately being accused of aiding copyright infringement? What will they do after they are inundated with DMCA takedown notices? After they are sued?
Seems likely the whole thing is some kind of ploy. Appeasing the music industry doesn't sound possible. Perhaps they aim for appeasement of the courts?
Stop talking as if copyright is the only way to compensate authors. Compensation, in order to encourage creation, is what's important, is what we want, not copyright per se. Performance may be impractical for authors, but that and copyright are hardly the only ways to compensate artists. There's patronage. There's ad revenue, endorsements, merchandising, commissions. And there are donations, prizes, awards.
We really need better alternative systems. We can certainly do up a new, improved patronage system that is far better than the one that supported art in the 19th and earlier centuries. With alternatives, people would see that we could live without copyright.
Traffic signals are still nearly brainless. And 50m is far too short a distance. I drive like one of those regular drivers you maligned in your previous post, because I want to save gas. I don't brake hard, and I don't shift to neutral, I just take my foot off the gas and leisurely approach. Trying to time the light so that it will turn green when I reach the intersection. Thanks to the boneheaded sensor placement and tardy responses of the lights, I actually like to have 1 or 2 racers on the road with me. They race ahead and sit at the red, setting the change to green in motion, which completes just as I reach the intersection. I get to roll through, and often end up in front of the racers momentarily. Without them, I'm the one who ends up forced to stop at the red light no matter how quickly or slowly I approach. By the time I reach the crossing, the stupid light has not turned green, it is still red.
You want me to drive more "normally"? Then make the lights better at anticipating approaching traffic, maybe, you know, synchronize with nearby intersections and do a little basic math about the lead time necessary to get the light to the green before the approaching car has to stop.
Or so I thought when I heard HP was mass producing memristors. Memory that was far denser, faster, and longer lived than current flash memory technologies. It was so good, memristor based memory products would also replace DRAM and SRAM, and we'd finally have computers that would not forget everything when the power was cut. Was that just so much talk and vaporware?
Part of the reason for HTML being crappy, for everything including UI, is a simple matter of performance. HTML is horribly bloated. Back in the day, the creators of HTML contended that the glaring inefficiencies, particularly the </stupidlylongclosingtags> were firstly an acceptable tradeoff to make HTML more human readable, and secondly, didn't matter much because data compression could optimize the extra wordiness away. Makes me cringe whenever I hear inefficiency dismissed as unimportant because computers and algorithms will get more powerful.
Except the idea didn't make HTML more readable, it actually made it worse by adding more useless clutter for a person to scan through. Almost immediately, people started leaving out closing tags. We tend to use special purpose HTML editors rather than generic text editors. And the bloat did matter, and did negatively affect performance despite data compression, if the latter was even used. What percentage of a web page is actual content and not markup? Can easily dip below 50%. Throw in a bunch of cute javascript, and we can end up with content percentages worse than 1%. I've seen web pages that pump 50k of javascript, css, and html over the network to display the equivalent of just 1 tweet. So today, all our devices have to have the power to handle double or more the number of bytes to compensate for HTML's awful design decisions. And that's hardly all. How about abominations of waste such as MIME encoding? Yes, let's email not a simple link, nah, but a 3MB movie clip to a friend, and watch the encoding bloat that up to 4 or 5MB. Then let's cry about how slow Internet connections are.
Perhaps what the article was trying to get at (and not very well), is that you shouldn't wear your religion on your sleeve.
Sadly there are many people who profess deep faith, but they don't have it, and don't understand that. A line in the profile like "God is Very Important to me" raises suspicions of that. Does that mean they're going to thump on the Bible all the time? And that they just might support the teaching of Creationism in science class? Probably anti-choice, and maybe would like to see a bit of prayer in public school too. And all the other issues facing society? Not important to them. They are very noisy about their faith, and they think that makes them more religious. Go around thinking everyone they meet has not yet been saved. Gets old, fast. If you bother to talk to Creationists for a while (often they aren't willing, and will just cut and run even though they initiated the discussion), and manage to get them to the point where they begin to see that Creationism is bunk, suddenly they're having a crisis of faith! Was once at a sermon where the preacher was busy doing damage control in a case where a mere movie, the DaVinci Code, had possibly shaken the faith of his flock. This is because the movie employed the same sort of pseudoscience used for Creationism. If they had genuine faith that wouldn't happen. They likely aren't very smart, and very possibly are anti-intellectual. At the least, they haven't given the matter much thought. I have encountered idiot savant sorts who aren't stupid but turn their brains off when it comes to religion. Big, big turn off for the mainstream. You can be faithful without being in-your-face about it.
Yes, we can tax the city for being irresponsible. Don't shop in those cities that use and abuse red light cameras. Boycott. That's what I do. I checked Plano TX, and they cheat. They claim that for a 40 mph speed zone, their yellow lasts 4 seconds. It does not. It lasts 3.9 seconds. Yes, they do bust people for violations of less than 1 second, so, yes, 1/10th of a second matters. In any case, the old rule of thumb of 1 second per 10 mph is known to be too short, so even if they followed their own standard, it wouldn't be good enough. If enough people boycott, the fall in sales tax revenue will more than offset what they make with these cameras.
These cameras aren't about saftey, they're all about the money. Everyone ought to realize that. The biggest safety improvement is making certain that the yellow light is long enough. If the city makes sure the lights aren't rigged to create violations, by for instance making the duration of the yellow unreasonably short, if they don't split hairs and bust people for missing the light by half a second, if it doesn't actually make safety worse by inducing more rear end collisions, if the intersection isn't negliglently designed and timed with ureasonably long reds that goad people into pushing the limits of the yellows, then maybe I could go along with the idea. But if they do all that, actually do a good job of designing the intersection, what tends to happen is that cities abandon the red light cameras because they don't generate enough revenue. We don't have much in the way of standards for how long a yellow light should last. Last time a standard of sorts was made was 1976, and it has considerable slop in it. This is actually quite deliberate. With no good standard, who can say how short a yellow is too short?
No, that's not what patents are ultimately intended to do. The protection is merely a step. The goal is advancement of the arts and sciences. It was thought "protecting" an idea was the most practical way to achieve the goal, but the writers of the Constitution were uncertain.
The whole system is a very negative approach to the problem. It's made people so afraid of losing, so concerned with clinging to what they seemingly have, of "protecting" it, that many have severely reduced or even given up exploration of new things. See the recent Slashdot article about the decline in research by businesses. Most of our thought is spent on timid defensive efforts, trying to stop losses rather than seek out gains. Our language reflects this, with talk of copying being no different than stealing and a great deal of marketing spin exerted to equate the 2, and the concept that ideas can be owned, controlled, traded, sold, denied to others, and protected, stolen or lost. Perhaps at the root of all this is the possessiveness implied in a simple phrase such as "my idea", as if it had much the same meaning as "my car". Many people feel it is impolite not to ask permission to "borrow" an idea. Note that the above quote is not from an intellectual property extremist, but from a person who professes a great deal of doubt about the patent system.
If not government, what do you suggest we use to police business and markets? Or do you seriously suggest we don't police them? After the housing bubble, and Madoff? Not to mention Enron, Worldcom, and Parmalat from the last market collapse? And before that, the S&L fraud of the late 80s, and Milken of junk bond infamy? And all the other frauds and scandals, going back to the original Mr. Ponzi and well before him?
Yes of course there is corruption and collusion between government and business, and the system is less than perfect. There is also waste and inefficiency. But despite the constant drama in the news, there is less of that than of largely honest and smart dealings. I have worked on government contracts, and seen a bit of the slime, but also other things. One project I was on was a success. But in the next project, we failed, and while we were to blame for a lot of the failure, the government was also actually very demanding, and asked for a heck of a lot. They're so afraid of being ripped off, cheated, etc. and being blasted for it, that they routinely ask for the moon. Others requests are, admittedly, cooked, so that only one favored company can qualify. Sometimes it's done backwards, and the requests are made after they already know there's something possibly good to ask for. You should read some of their SBIRs (Small Biz Innovation Research) sometime.
In our case, most of our people didn't believe anyone could achieve what was wanted, and no one thought it could be done in the ridiculously short time frames given. Nothing wrong with that. We were a fallback for the government bureaucrats anyway. They would rather have worked with a nearby university, but the school knew what they were like, how demanding, pushy, controlling, and prone to driving people down blind alleys and off metaphorical cliffs they are, and turned them down. Clearly, the bureaucrats are under considerable pressure to justify themselves. The bad part was what our management did about it, which was to feed the bureaucrats bull for as long as they could. Didn't even give the problem an honest try. Stupid, stupid management. Had we honestly tried, we probably would have been told our efforts weren't good enough, and fired anyway, but at least I wouldn't have to be ashamed of being part of the whole mess. And that wasn't the worst of the idiocy they practiced. I should have jumped ship sooner. As it was, I was part of the group of underlings blamed and quitted for the failure when the management was desperately trying to hang on near the end. Didn't work. They lost the contract. Does all this sound like the simplistic notion you seem to have of government incompetence? Of low accountability? Sure, you could hold up our management as an example of the worst sort of lying, cheating filth, and make a nice dramatic sound bite out of it, and wallow in that aspect, but that's only a small part of the story. There's always finger pointing and blame, some justified and some not, when there is a failure. The ultimate goal actually was possible, and desirable, just very hard. Also, it's just the sort of project business would not undertake, for several reasons, not least being the enormous cost. The other main reason is that the results would really not be that useful to businesses, who do not need the same level of security as the military. For them, the costs of things like credit card fraud are the lesser costs. Sure, they'd take highly secure systems if available and cheap and usable enough, but they aren't going to sink millions into an effort to create such.
If there's a better alternative to government of the people (even if seemingly only nominally of the people), and to considering it for certain sorts of work, particularly the big and highly speculative, I haven't heard of one. Governments fund most of the scientific research in our society. Labs, universities, expensive equipment such as colliders and space telescopes and probes, gathering and interpreting data as impartially and fairly as possible on things like health issues, climate change, public policy, etc. If you know of something better for organizing all this, for being more impartial, enlighten us.
What are you smoking? A nation can marshall far greater resources than any corporation. The railroad companies needed all the help they could get to finance the enormous and risky undertaking of building the transcontinental. The US government gave them massive loans, far more money than they could ever hope to get from the market. They also raised money that way of course. And all that still didn't cover the costs. They resorted to various financial tricks, they delayed paying bills, they relentlessly beat down the cost of labor, they gouged their customers, they built just as fast and cheap as they could, they shifted every possible cost onto others. And they still struggled. They also deliberately understated the projected costs whenever it was necessary to sell people on the whole idea. The UP went bankrupt shortly after it was finished. Hurt a lot of people, and weakened faith in the honesty of the market. This wasn't only because of the expense of the work, but that was a major factor. It was quite a scandal. In the end, the railroad was very valuable however it got built, even with all the corruption and cheating. The loans were repaid. This brings up the idea that the public sometimes should be deceived for our own good, that the railroad could not have been financed even by the government if the true costs had been widely known beforehand. A railroad is a relatively minor endeavor compared to something such as a war, yet the market couldn't do even that in this rather special case. Markets can handle small amounts of railroad construction in more predictable environments, but the 1st transcontinental was too big and radical. As for wars, markets participate in them but cannot run them.
You talk of "profit" as if it is pure goodness. But it isn't. The most profitable behavior of all is parasitic and criminal, if there are no consequences. Others do the work, and clean up any mess, while the business collects the money. We have to have rules and policing to stop things from getting out of hand. The market is supposed to be a fair game on a level playing field, not unrestrained anarchy. We want a civilized competition, not a street brawl. There doesn't seem to be any problem with rival stores bombing each others' facilities or hijacking delivery trucks or anything crude like that. But we do have more subtle problems. A very common one is siccing the government on the rival, through favorable legislation, or in the courts. The softer approach is to get some sneaky legislation passed that somehow disproportionately benefits one business. Doesn't look like a direct assault on any particular rival. Patents are one of the most powerful tools for launching an assault on a rival. They also serve as a means to engage in plain old blackmail rather than rivalry. They cause a great deal of damage, so much that they are mostly stockpiled and used to make and counter threats. And so we have a sort of Patent Cold War, except it often does turn hot. Another common strategy is monopolization, and patents were set up to be monopolies. Every time any business managed to obtain a monopoly, everyone else suffered. In the case of a patent, it's even worse. Not only does some business enjoy a monopoly as a reward, we have to spend additional resources to enforce it! It's too big a reward for supposedly being innovative. And it's qualitatively bad, being tough to capitalize on without legal expertise, and very costly to work for everyone, even the holder. We have some arguing that therefore we ought to make patents even more powerful! There is also the upsell. Are there 5 different ways of accomplishing something? Then engage marketing to persuade consumers to go for the one with the highest price to cost ratio. Patents can sometimes be used to shut down cheap alternatives, another problem with monopolies. The monopolist might just sit on its exclusive right in order to peddle a more expensive solution.
Funny that you praise AT&T's monopoly. Very typical of a monopolist to argue that their monopol
Corporations are lousy organizations for anything long term or big. 1st, they really do not have the resources. 2nd, they warp everything for profit. With the current legal climate, there's not much point in private research, as they'd try to lock up everything and then some with patents, copyrights, and so on.
Not saying the profit motive is bad, but for some things it is not the best guide. Why did we go to the Moon? Not for profit! Why was the Titanic operated so recklessly? A huge engineering project such as the Panama Canal couldn't be built by a single corporation. That was done by the US government. The transcontinental railroad was built by 2 private companies, but only with a great deal of help from the government in the form of land grants, military protection from Native Americans, and Civil War training and experience in running large organizations and operations. Some of the leaders of the UP considered cheating. They looked into whether it would be worth purposely making the route longer, much longer than necessary, in order to grab more land. Such thinking is all too typical, and the UP is hardly the only corporation to consider such schemes. Hoover Dam was another effort that could not have been done solely with private resources. The people had to negotiate all the details of water rights, power generation, and land use before turning over the work itself to private industry. The Channel Tunnel, the Erie Canal, the Transatlantic cable, and the Internet were similar. Most large civil engineering projects are government organized.
Blind hatred? Blind?? After all the antisocial things MS has done? And that GNU/Linux has not done. Google hopes they are good. GNU/Linux is good.
You want the list? Or do you think you might be able to remember a few of the sleazy, scummy things MS has done?
The reason Linux still won't be on every desktop anytime soon is practical concerns. Look at all the pain buyers of the Linux versions of the Humble Indie Bundles had to go through to get those games to work. Chase down and install missing libraries, and hope they are compatible versions. Dump the open graphics drivers for the proprietary ones, because decent 3D performance is impossible otherwise. Search the Internet for solutions to the cryptic error messages. Deal with random crashes and hangs. Think about installing WINE and running the Windows versions.
What you think the US ought to be rated is your business. But the subject of this article is not the US, not directly. It's the S&P rating agency, and the whopping mistake they made in the calculations they say they used to arrive at their decision. It's not an understandable mistake, it's plain bad, big, and shameful. Where are all their quants who hold PhDs in the sciences? Then, once the mistake was pointed out, they merely pulled another few justifications out of the air and kept their decision! Talk about compounding the mistake. Sounds like the sort of thing a government bureaucracy might do, doesn't it? But that's still not all. Why aren't the other rating agencies condemning this? Perhaps they aren't really competing with one another?
It raises the question, just what do these rating people base their decisions on? One basis that leaps to mind are personal considerations. Perhaps they're primarily interested in decisions that will increase the personal fortunes of a few rich favorites, "spending" the trust that many people still seem to have in them. (One has to wonder about the sanity of anyone who would entrust money to clowns who could make mistakes like that.) Does this clearly demonstrate that they are corrupt? And what would any big corporation do if this had happened to them? Sue the slipshod bastards of course.
Meantime, the rating agencies, which should have much worse reputations than the US after all their mistakes and bad judgments, are getting away with this outrage while everyone piles onto the favorite whipping boy, the US government. Yes, yes, we have wasteful military spending. We also have needless automobile deaths thanks to poor maintenance and delays in making desperately needed improvements to dangerous highway designs. It's outrageous, it ought not to happen, but this article is about the incredible behavior of a big, trusted rating agency.
Slashdot Mirror
Moot.
Such questions are hard, bad, and pointless. Even if we could do so, there is no real value in coming up with the exact number we should use for making an arbitrary distinction about an invention's obviousness. It's bad because as well as implying all kinds of things, it frames the debate in a useless way. We want to encourage invention, not enrich lawyers.
We can change the system so that answers to questions like that are not important.
Taxes is just one of many ways. But that is so difficult to get and keep accepted politically. A levy, such as the one on blank CDs in several countries, including Canada, is similar. The difference is that the government never touches the money, which may make it slightly more acceptable to some. The collections all go to a private corporation. Could set up levies on music playing devices as well.
As for government agencies, one is the National Endowment for the Arts. Conservatives have been trying to kill the NEA for years, and not just for budgetary reasons. To avoid this sort of ongoing controversy, this constant use of the NEA as a political football, I would rather see private organizations with private funding. But this is very difficult to do, as governments are the natural vehicles for setting up anything of national scope.
UL, as I already mentioned, is funded in a variety of ways. Primarily, they collect fees from manufacturers who need product testing. I would guess they also collect fees from insurers (membership fees, perhaps?). They are officially a non-profit organization, and they have an official designation from OSHA.
The Nobel Prizes are taken from the interest generated by a fund that a rich industrialist set up in his will. Don't know how well that would scale.
Worth a mention is the highway system. The public highway system is funded through the gas tax. (Or it was. The gas tax has been in decline for 18 years.) Governments run this of course, but that work could be spun off into private hands. It arose partly in response to the expense of travel on railroads, which were all private, and which did indulge in a bit of price gouging. They weren't called robber barons for nothing. It was also moved out of private hands because too many private road owners engaged in questionable practices to generate more revenue, such as deliberately making the roads longer, and trying to direct people onto more roundabout routes, so they would have to pass through more towns. It's an early example of the Broken Window Fallacy. One example of that was the Bee Line in Alabama. Came from the north and went straight to Birmingham, until new owners seized control and tried to reroute it to go way out of the way to pass through Gadsden. That sort of thing tarnished the reputation of private roads. Today, private toll roads have been seeing a revival in popularity-- among the influential, not the general public. I have never liked them because I think the overhead of toll collection is far higher than the overhead of collecting a tax on gasoline. At least, it was when we needed to man toll booths and stop traffic to collect. Now with cameras that photograph license plates while the vehicle keeps rolling, perhaps tolls can compete with the efficiency of a gas tax. If new tech makes toll roads worth revisiting, why not revisit patronage too?
I tried out Scalable Vector Graphics on a 2nd grader. Whipped up a little text file and loaded it in Firefox. She and her father complained that SVG was too hard.
And I see their point. SVG is much inferior to LOGO. SVG has a turtle of sorts. Problem is, the SVG turtle remembers position only, no orientation. For instance, could not draw a 5 pointed star by ordering it to rotate 288 degrees and drawing a line 5 times, had to calculate the x,y coordinates.
The so called human readable XML style syntax was another impediment. We could use a big revamp of HTML. Reduce the verbosity and cut down the excessive structure. It wouldn't be backward compatible like HTML5 is, but web pages sure would be a lot smaller and more readable. And maybe a 2nd grader wouldn't have such a rough time with it.
That's why I think many different methods is the way to go. Don't agonize over which is best, try every one that looks good. Have a bunch of competing private companies all promoting and using their own different methods, both for choosing recipients and for raising revenue. An individual artist will do well with some, and not so well with others. I hope the competition would also keep the corruption down. There will be corruption, there always is. But something like the Nobel Prize is well regarded. If we could just scale that up, and multiply it, we'd have our replacement system.
The key is competition, not capitalism per se. Competition is why capitalism works, and why a competitive patronage system could work. It's also why we have to have some rules. Got to keep the competition alive, stop monopolies from forming, or failing that, make sure they play fair. For an example of a working system, consider safety agencies. There is Underwriter's Laboratory, as well as various government agencies. But UL is not government, it is a creation of the insurance industry, hence the 'U' in UL. No manufacturer would dare release a product that has not been approved by at least 1 agency, and these agencies actually do compete somewhat for business. Manufacturers pay UL and others to test their products. Insurers also chip in. UL saves insurers more money than they spend on UL, by stopping obviously dangerous products from being released, thereby reducing claims.
Use some other system, not copyright. Copyright is only a means of encouraging art and science. It's hardly the only means. Nor is it a good means. Nor is it necessary for other purposes, such as stopping plagiarism. No, it is not communist to want to abolish intellectual property. Do you think it is? Why?
Patronage is one such system. It worked for Mozart and Beethoven. Today, we can do up a much better patronage system. Base pay on various measures of value and popularity. The idea would be that with enough different prizes, criteria and so on, every worthy contributor will get something. Collect money through sales of real goods, advertising, donations, and possibly even levies and taxes. Would have to watch for corruption and cheating of course, but you always have to do that when money is involved.
What I'm outlining is thoroughly capitalist. You create something of value. The value is measured in some kind of market. You get paid according to that measure. What could be more capitalist than that?
erasing a weird 200-or-so-year blip where ideas, songs, and knowledge can "belong" to someone
Exactly. The fundamental problem is that information is not material. Laborious to create, yes, and valuable, yes. But not material. Once created, it can be copied easily, at virtually no cost. And it will be copied. Data is not a scarce resource. It therefore makes little sense to try to apply property laws to information, to assign and trade ownership thereof among individual entities. But this and worse is what many have tried to do. Many have tried to have it both ways, treating information like a scarce resource when it is to their advantage to do so, even at the expense of their sources, the actual artists whom they rob and cheat, and then shamelessly turning around and using the fact that it is not scarce to improve the efficiency of their businesses. In the process, they've greatly exceeded the limited scope originally intended for copyright, and they've confused the public, getting many to unthinkingly accept that copying is stealing, when it is not. No, we really need some other treatment of this valuable thing, something that doesn't treat information as property, and also is more pro-growth rather than anti-loss.
Sounds like you think this law isn't all that bad. Worse, you think sharing is an activity that should be restricted, regulated, and punished. And that "owners" of content should have "rights" over it, to "protect" their profits. Innocent people don't have to pay up? But we can still be harassed, accused, and dragged into court, and our equipment seized. And the law is so broad that hardly anyone is technically innocent.
Information isn't controllable in ways that promote the functioning of this sick fantasy system that content owners have managed to create through their expertise at working politics. These laws should never have been enacted. Now we waste a great deal of money trying to enforce the unenforceable, all for the sake of the mythical starving artist. It's a terribly inefficient and unfair system. Stop thinking so much of fairness to artists, and start thinking a bit more about fairness to us, the general public. You sneer at us all for wanting a "free ride". You shouldn't. And you shouldn't put it that way. It is the content owners who have been getting way more than they deserve or earned. Sharing between private individuals should never have been criminalized, as some policitians realized way back in the 19th century.
You kid, but seriously, this position is not as radical as you suggest. I want to see artists and scientists encouraged with monetary compensation, and I want the compensation based at least loosely on the value of their contributions. The market economy, when not warped by artificial monopoly protection (such as copyrights) or other government bungling, has been one of the best tools we have for determining a fair valuation, and I would like to keep a little of that if possible. Marxists would not care about any of that. They would expect the scientists and artists to produce regardless of compensation.
You know what? Linux users will go right on using plain Linux. Not SE Linux, not OpenBSD, and certainly not Windows. We're not even going to change our root passwords. Why? Because this security breach is not that big a deal.
Yes, it is embarrassing for kernel.org, but the damage is not that great. Sure, we'd all like to prevent security breaches from ever happening in the first place, but I have always thought detection and recovery is more important than prevention. Kernel.org has that covered in spades. Keep backups. Keep many backups. Keep them in many different locations. A distributed source code revision control system such as git does that automatically. Whoever did this wasn't too smart if they were seriously trying to inject a backdoor into the Linux kernel. Now they've blown their cover. They can't have seriously expected the code modifications they tried to go unnoticed for long, unless they have no idea how large projects handle source code. So either they were dumb, or all they were trying to do was embarrass Linux.
Sure, why not? Do it for scientists too.
I think ultimately we will replace copyright. We will create better systems. They will be so much better that artists will abandon copyright. Creating better systems won't be that hard because copyright sets such a low bar. Copyright won't be repealed; societies are much too conservative to consider a move like that. It'll just fall into disuse. But for the present, we'll have to wait for a generational change or 2.
I think I know what the 1st step is too. We need free and secure digital notaries, so that people can prove authorship. The other big, big problem is funding. All taxes are odious, of course. Don't know that other means could raise enough revenue. Well, we will work out something.
What I find most troubling is the negativity and habits of thought that an idea like copyright promotes. Copyright is fascism. It's a legalized taking of harmless actions that occur in nature all the time. It's a list of petty rules. You can't do this. You can't do that. You didn't think of it first. You have to get permission to the nth degree. You have to spend inordinate amounts of time and money accounting for every last fraction of a cent. We would need a police state to try to enforce it all, and it still wouldn't be enforceable. We have confused police, and greedy descendents of the famous, and museums who really think citizens shouldn't be allowed to photograph them and theirs. We create owners and turn them into possessive, grasping, denying, fearful monsters who could starve if they don't go around beating up everyone who infringes on the works they bought. This is not the spirit of freedom. This is not what the West stands for!
I'd much rather see a permissive system. Do anything you want with art, and we'll sort out later how much compensation is owed to the artists. By necessity it would have to have simplifications. Rather than attempting to count every last copy, every last play on every music player in existence, perhaps tiered patronage systems based on statistical sampling would do. Might do something like pay out for 10 years $100K/$50K/$30K per year per song that reaches some level of popularity.
FTP is not dead. Still useful for anonymous dowloading like for the latest Linux kernels. Don't recall ever seeing an anonymous SCP transfer method.
Is it possible to run a user supplied file sharing site without eventually if not immediately being accused of aiding copyright infringement? What will they do after they are inundated with DMCA takedown notices? After they are sued?
Seems likely the whole thing is some kind of ploy. Appeasing the music industry doesn't sound possible. Perhaps they aim for appeasement of the courts?
Stop talking as if copyright is the only way to compensate authors. Compensation, in order to encourage creation, is what's important, is what we want, not copyright per se. Performance may be impractical for authors, but that and copyright are hardly the only ways to compensate artists. There's patronage. There's ad revenue, endorsements, merchandising, commissions. And there are donations, prizes, awards.
We really need better alternative systems. We can certainly do up a new, improved patronage system that is far better than the one that supported art in the 19th and earlier centuries. With alternatives, people would see that we could live without copyright.
Traffic signals are still nearly brainless. And 50m is far too short a distance. I drive like one of those regular drivers you maligned in your previous post, because I want to save gas. I don't brake hard, and I don't shift to neutral, I just take my foot off the gas and leisurely approach. Trying to time the light so that it will turn green when I reach the intersection. Thanks to the boneheaded sensor placement and tardy responses of the lights, I actually like to have 1 or 2 racers on the road with me. They race ahead and sit at the red, setting the change to green in motion, which completes just as I reach the intersection. I get to roll through, and often end up in front of the racers momentarily. Without them, I'm the one who ends up forced to stop at the red light no matter how quickly or slowly I approach. By the time I reach the crossing, the stupid light has not turned green, it is still red.
You want me to drive more "normally"? Then make the lights better at anticipating approaching traffic, maybe, you know, synchronize with nearby intersections and do a little basic math about the lead time necessary to get the light to the green before the approaching car has to stop.
Or so I thought when I heard HP was mass producing memristors. Memory that was far denser, faster, and longer lived than current flash memory technologies. It was so good, memristor based memory products would also replace DRAM and SRAM, and we'd finally have computers that would not forget everything when the power was cut. Was that just so much talk and vaporware?
Part of the reason for HTML being crappy, for everything including UI, is a simple matter of performance. HTML is horribly bloated. Back in the day, the creators of HTML contended that the glaring inefficiencies, particularly the </stupidlylongclosingtags> were firstly an acceptable tradeoff to make HTML more human readable, and secondly, didn't matter much because data compression could optimize the extra wordiness away. Makes me cringe whenever I hear inefficiency dismissed as unimportant because computers and algorithms will get more powerful.
Except the idea didn't make HTML more readable, it actually made it worse by adding more useless clutter for a person to scan through. Almost immediately, people started leaving out closing tags. We tend to use special purpose HTML editors rather than generic text editors. And the bloat did matter, and did negatively affect performance despite data compression, if the latter was even used. What percentage of a web page is actual content and not markup? Can easily dip below 50%. Throw in a bunch of cute javascript, and we can end up with content percentages worse than 1%. I've seen web pages that pump 50k of javascript, css, and html over the network to display the equivalent of just 1 tweet. So today, all our devices have to have the power to handle double or more the number of bytes to compensate for HTML's awful design decisions. And that's hardly all. How about abominations of waste such as MIME encoding? Yes, let's email not a simple link, nah, but a 3MB movie clip to a friend, and watch the encoding bloat that up to 4 or 5MB. Then let's cry about how slow Internet connections are.
Perhaps what the article was trying to get at (and not very well), is that you shouldn't wear your religion on your sleeve.
Sadly there are many people who profess deep faith, but they don't have it, and don't understand that. A line in the profile like "God is Very Important to me" raises suspicions of that. Does that mean they're going to thump on the Bible all the time? And that they just might support the teaching of Creationism in science class? Probably anti-choice, and maybe would like to see a bit of prayer in public school too. And all the other issues facing society? Not important to them. They are very noisy about their faith, and they think that makes them more religious. Go around thinking everyone they meet has not yet been saved. Gets old, fast. If you bother to talk to Creationists for a while (often they aren't willing, and will just cut and run even though they initiated the discussion), and manage to get them to the point where they begin to see that Creationism is bunk, suddenly they're having a crisis of faith! Was once at a sermon where the preacher was busy doing damage control in a case where a mere movie, the DaVinci Code, had possibly shaken the faith of his flock. This is because the movie employed the same sort of pseudoscience used for Creationism. If they had genuine faith that wouldn't happen. They likely aren't very smart, and very possibly are anti-intellectual. At the least, they haven't given the matter much thought. I have encountered idiot savant sorts who aren't stupid but turn their brains off when it comes to religion. Big, big turn off for the mainstream. You can be faithful without being in-your-face about it.
Yes, we can tax the city for being irresponsible. Don't shop in those cities that use and abuse red light cameras. Boycott. That's what I do. I checked Plano TX, and they cheat. They claim that for a 40 mph speed zone, their yellow lasts 4 seconds. It does not. It lasts 3.9 seconds. Yes, they do bust people for violations of less than 1 second, so, yes, 1/10th of a second matters. In any case, the old rule of thumb of 1 second per 10 mph is known to be too short, so even if they followed their own standard, it wouldn't be good enough. If enough people boycott, the fall in sales tax revenue will more than offset what they make with these cameras.
These cameras aren't about saftey, they're all about the money. Everyone ought to realize that. The biggest safety improvement is making certain that the yellow light is long enough. If the city makes sure the lights aren't rigged to create violations, by for instance making the duration of the yellow unreasonably short, if they don't split hairs and bust people for missing the light by half a second, if it doesn't actually make safety worse by inducing more rear end collisions, if the intersection isn't negliglently designed and timed with ureasonably long reds that goad people into pushing the limits of the yellows, then maybe I could go along with the idea. But if they do all that, actually do a good job of designing the intersection, what tends to happen is that cities abandon the red light cameras because they don't generate enough revenue. We don't have much in the way of standards for how long a yellow light should last. Last time a standard of sorts was made was 1976, and it has considerable slop in it. This is actually quite deliberate. With no good standard, who can say how short a yellow is too short?
What leapt out at me was this line:
Patents are meant to protect innovation
No, that's not what patents are ultimately intended to do. The protection is merely a step. The goal is advancement of the arts and sciences. It was thought "protecting" an idea was the most practical way to achieve the goal, but the writers of the Constitution were uncertain.
The whole system is a very negative approach to the problem. It's made people so afraid of losing, so concerned with clinging to what they seemingly have, of "protecting" it, that many have severely reduced or even given up exploration of new things. See the recent Slashdot article about the decline in research by businesses. Most of our thought is spent on timid defensive efforts, trying to stop losses rather than seek out gains. Our language reflects this, with talk of copying being no different than stealing and a great deal of marketing spin exerted to equate the 2, and the concept that ideas can be owned, controlled, traded, sold, denied to others, and protected, stolen or lost. Perhaps at the root of all this is the possessiveness implied in a simple phrase such as "my idea", as if it had much the same meaning as "my car". Many people feel it is impolite not to ask permission to "borrow" an idea. Note that the above quote is not from an intellectual property extremist, but from a person who professes a great deal of doubt about the patent system.
If not government, what do you suggest we use to police business and markets? Or do you seriously suggest we don't police them? After the housing bubble, and Madoff? Not to mention Enron, Worldcom, and Parmalat from the last market collapse? And before that, the S&L fraud of the late 80s, and Milken of junk bond infamy? And all the other frauds and scandals, going back to the original Mr. Ponzi and well before him?
Yes of course there is corruption and collusion between government and business, and the system is less than perfect. There is also waste and inefficiency. But despite the constant drama in the news, there is less of that than of largely honest and smart dealings. I have worked on government contracts, and seen a bit of the slime, but also other things. One project I was on was a success. But in the next project, we failed, and while we were to blame for a lot of the failure, the government was also actually very demanding, and asked for a heck of a lot. They're so afraid of being ripped off, cheated, etc. and being blasted for it, that they routinely ask for the moon. Others requests are, admittedly, cooked, so that only one favored company can qualify. Sometimes it's done backwards, and the requests are made after they already know there's something possibly good to ask for. You should read some of their SBIRs (Small Biz Innovation Research) sometime.
In our case, most of our people didn't believe anyone could achieve what was wanted, and no one thought it could be done in the ridiculously short time frames given. Nothing wrong with that. We were a fallback for the government bureaucrats anyway. They would rather have worked with a nearby university, but the school knew what they were like, how demanding, pushy, controlling, and prone to driving people down blind alleys and off metaphorical cliffs they are, and turned them down. Clearly, the bureaucrats are under considerable pressure to justify themselves. The bad part was what our management did about it, which was to feed the bureaucrats bull for as long as they could. Didn't even give the problem an honest try. Stupid, stupid management. Had we honestly tried, we probably would have been told our efforts weren't good enough, and fired anyway, but at least I wouldn't have to be ashamed of being part of the whole mess. And that wasn't the worst of the idiocy they practiced. I should have jumped ship sooner. As it was, I was part of the group of underlings blamed and quitted for the failure when the management was desperately trying to hang on near the end. Didn't work. They lost the contract. Does all this sound like the simplistic notion you seem to have of government incompetence? Of low accountability? Sure, you could hold up our management as an example of the worst sort of lying, cheating filth, and make a nice dramatic sound bite out of it, and wallow in that aspect, but that's only a small part of the story. There's always finger pointing and blame, some justified and some not, when there is a failure. The ultimate goal actually was possible, and desirable, just very hard. Also, it's just the sort of project business would not undertake, for several reasons, not least being the enormous cost. The other main reason is that the results would really not be that useful to businesses, who do not need the same level of security as the military. For them, the costs of things like credit card fraud are the lesser costs. Sure, they'd take highly secure systems if available and cheap and usable enough, but they aren't going to sink millions into an effort to create such.
If there's a better alternative to government of the people (even if seemingly only nominally of the people), and to considering it for certain sorts of work, particularly the big and highly speculative, I haven't heard of one. Governments fund most of the scientific research in our society. Labs, universities, expensive equipment such as colliders and space telescopes and probes, gathering and interpreting data as impartially and fairly as possible on things like health issues, climate change, public policy, etc. If you know of something better for organizing all this, for being more impartial, enlighten us.
What are you smoking? A nation can marshall far greater resources than any corporation. The railroad companies needed all the help they could get to finance the enormous and risky undertaking of building the transcontinental. The US government gave them massive loans, far more money than they could ever hope to get from the market. They also raised money that way of course. And all that still didn't cover the costs. They resorted to various financial tricks, they delayed paying bills, they relentlessly beat down the cost of labor, they gouged their customers, they built just as fast and cheap as they could, they shifted every possible cost onto others. And they still struggled. They also deliberately understated the projected costs whenever it was necessary to sell people on the whole idea. The UP went bankrupt shortly after it was finished. Hurt a lot of people, and weakened faith in the honesty of the market. This wasn't only because of the expense of the work, but that was a major factor. It was quite a scandal. In the end, the railroad was very valuable however it got built, even with all the corruption and cheating. The loans were repaid. This brings up the idea that the public sometimes should be deceived for our own good, that the railroad could not have been financed even by the government if the true costs had been widely known beforehand. A railroad is a relatively minor endeavor compared to something such as a war, yet the market couldn't do even that in this rather special case. Markets can handle small amounts of railroad construction in more predictable environments, but the 1st transcontinental was too big and radical. As for wars, markets participate in them but cannot run them.
You talk of "profit" as if it is pure goodness. But it isn't. The most profitable behavior of all is parasitic and criminal, if there are no consequences. Others do the work, and clean up any mess, while the business collects the money. We have to have rules and policing to stop things from getting out of hand. The market is supposed to be a fair game on a level playing field, not unrestrained anarchy. We want a civilized competition, not a street brawl. There doesn't seem to be any problem with rival stores bombing each others' facilities or hijacking delivery trucks or anything crude like that. But we do have more subtle problems. A very common one is siccing the government on the rival, through favorable legislation, or in the courts. The softer approach is to get some sneaky legislation passed that somehow disproportionately benefits one business. Doesn't look like a direct assault on any particular rival. Patents are one of the most powerful tools for launching an assault on a rival. They also serve as a means to engage in plain old blackmail rather than rivalry. They cause a great deal of damage, so much that they are mostly stockpiled and used to make and counter threats. And so we have a sort of Patent Cold War, except it often does turn hot. Another common strategy is monopolization, and patents were set up to be monopolies. Every time any business managed to obtain a monopoly, everyone else suffered. In the case of a patent, it's even worse. Not only does some business enjoy a monopoly as a reward, we have to spend additional resources to enforce it! It's too big a reward for supposedly being innovative. And it's qualitatively bad, being tough to capitalize on without legal expertise, and very costly to work for everyone, even the holder. We have some arguing that therefore we ought to make patents even more powerful! There is also the upsell. Are there 5 different ways of accomplishing something? Then engage marketing to persuade consumers to go for the one with the highest price to cost ratio. Patents can sometimes be used to shut down cheap alternatives, another problem with monopolies. The monopolist might just sit on its exclusive right in order to peddle a more expensive solution.
Funny that you praise AT&T's monopoly. Very typical of a monopolist to argue that their monopol
Corporations are lousy organizations for anything long term or big. 1st, they really do not have the resources. 2nd, they warp everything for profit. With the current legal climate, there's not much point in private research, as they'd try to lock up everything and then some with patents, copyrights, and so on.
Not saying the profit motive is bad, but for some things it is not the best guide. Why did we go to the Moon? Not for profit! Why was the Titanic operated so recklessly? A huge engineering project such as the Panama Canal couldn't be built by a single corporation. That was done by the US government. The transcontinental railroad was built by 2 private companies, but only with a great deal of help from the government in the form of land grants, military protection from Native Americans, and Civil War training and experience in running large organizations and operations. Some of the leaders of the UP considered cheating. They looked into whether it would be worth purposely making the route longer, much longer than necessary, in order to grab more land. Such thinking is all too typical, and the UP is hardly the only corporation to consider such schemes. Hoover Dam was another effort that could not have been done solely with private resources. The people had to negotiate all the details of water rights, power generation, and land use before turning over the work itself to private industry. The Channel Tunnel, the Erie Canal, the Transatlantic cable, and the Internet were similar. Most large civil engineering projects are government organized.
Blind hatred? Blind?? After all the antisocial things MS has done? And that GNU/Linux has not done. Google hopes they are good. GNU/Linux is good.
You want the list? Or do you think you might be able to remember a few of the sleazy, scummy things MS has done?
The reason Linux still won't be on every desktop anytime soon is practical concerns. Look at all the pain buyers of the Linux versions of the Humble Indie Bundles had to go through to get those games to work. Chase down and install missing libraries, and hope they are compatible versions. Dump the open graphics drivers for the proprietary ones, because decent 3D performance is impossible otherwise. Search the Internet for solutions to the cryptic error messages. Deal with random crashes and hangs. Think about installing WINE and running the Windows versions.
What you think the US ought to be rated is your business. But the subject of this article is not the US, not directly. It's the S&P rating agency, and the whopping mistake they made in the calculations they say they used to arrive at their decision. It's not an understandable mistake, it's plain bad, big, and shameful. Where are all their quants who hold PhDs in the sciences? Then, once the mistake was pointed out, they merely pulled another few justifications out of the air and kept their decision! Talk about compounding the mistake. Sounds like the sort of thing a government bureaucracy might do, doesn't it? But that's still not all. Why aren't the other rating agencies condemning this? Perhaps they aren't really competing with one another?
It raises the question, just what do these rating people base their decisions on? One basis that leaps to mind are personal considerations. Perhaps they're primarily interested in decisions that will increase the personal fortunes of a few rich favorites, "spending" the trust that many people still seem to have in them. (One has to wonder about the sanity of anyone who would entrust money to clowns who could make mistakes like that.) Does this clearly demonstrate that they are corrupt? And what would any big corporation do if this had happened to them? Sue the slipshod bastards of course.
Meantime, the rating agencies, which should have much worse reputations than the US after all their mistakes and bad judgments, are getting away with this outrage while everyone piles onto the favorite whipping boy, the US government. Yes, yes, we have wasteful military spending. We also have needless automobile deaths thanks to poor maintenance and delays in making desperately needed improvements to dangerous highway designs. It's outrageous, it ought not to happen, but this article is about the incredible behavior of a big, trusted rating agency.