>the unemployed were effectively prevented from starting up their own companies because they would lose benefits the day they registered their company.
This, I think, is a key point and deserves amplification.
Not only can you not start your own business and still have healthcare (...unless you're on your spouse's policy... ); you can't hire people without having to factor in healthcare costs, which terribly skews the hiring decision.
I know whereof I speak. I would happily hire 2 people to do the less-interesting part of my small business, the part I can easily train and equip them to do. In an ideal environment, it would be a straightforward calculation comparing their wages & bennies to the increase in business income they'd bring in. Alas, but healthcare is too darn expensive for me to cover for them, so I'm not going to create those jobs. Competitors in Canada & Europe have a great advantage which we are literally killing ourselves to maintain for them.
All the blah-blah about increasing technology graduates is very nice, but it does not address our infrastructure problems. Either that politician is ignorant, or he thinks we are.
These are books! Not paper books (...which I love...) but effective books: an entire dictionary, access to google, and even Wikipedia [snicker]
>...a trade system which doesn't punish the poorest...
That's a fair 'nuf righteous comment, but I submit these poor people are going to have to implement a fairer trade system on their own because the people who profit from the current trading system have no motivation to give it to them. And because knowledge=power, the improved access to information this technology offers may be the decisive force multiplier.
>... taxes specific to the means of Freedom of the Press were unconstitutional infringements on same...
A good point, that would be interesting to apply to other media, e.g. a tax on internet access, a recycling fee for print cartridges. However, with respect to the programming problem, the same result would obtain if a jurisdiction were to tax all sales occurring within its jurisdiction, and in the case of internet sales (...necessarily problematic as to geography...) to define "within" as being where the buyer takes delivery of the item. Online sellers of books would then share the tax and its attendant programming problems with sellers of Viagara. Hmmmm, not a bad idea....
>Assuming this logic were valid with the current Supreme Court (they like precedent as much as any Court
Which is to say, they use it when they like it, and when they don't, they 'distinguish' it. Real-world phenomena being necessarily complex, it is always possible to make a distinction between any precedent and the instant case. And (...no troll intended...) the current Court is extremely activist in ignoring, overruling, or distinguishing precedent. In part, this is inevitable as over time the sheer bulk of precedent increases.
Maybe not. If what you're looking for is reaction mass, it's far better to harvest comets... the Moon is still in a gravity well.
If what you're looking for is top-quality construction materials, e.g. titanium rebar or silicon chips, the Earth is still home because for the effort of shipping a smelter to the Moon, you might as well just build the ship on earth.
If the law is gonna be that Borders must pay sales tax to California for items sold into California... how hard would that be to implement?
I appreciate that, taken to the extreme, this principle could mean that Borders must pay every little sales tax add-on implemented by every town anywhere. For example, parts of Puget Sound has a special tax to pay for a sports stadium... lucky for Borders this silly tax is on restaurants, not on book sales, but under the same principle, nothing prevents, let us say, Dallas or Oakland from imposing a tax on books to help out the stuggling millionaires who own their sports franchiases except the political power of people who read books.
However, this is a problem that must affect programmers of cash-registers already. Somebody, somewhere, must be making good money for maintaining a database of local sales taxes. They could make a little more good money renting that database to Borders, Amazon, etc. Then the programming problem is simply to compare the ZIP code of the book buyer to the database.
(5) They are a million years ahead of us in development, and no longer wish to communicate with a species that, to them, is about as smart as chimps are to us.
(6) They believe in the Prime Directive.
(7) They believe in the Prime Directive EXCEPT they mentally influence SF writers to introduce the concept of the Prime Directive so that when we do go out into space, we treat others nicely.
(8) They believe in the Prime Directive EXCEPT that if we don't stop broadcasting Star Trek re-runs into space, they'll induce global warming in self-defence.
>If IP creators don't want something to be copied, they can keep it to themselves
That is an argument in favor of taxing copyrighted IP. The gummint offers a service to IP creators, in the form of copyright. If the IP creator takes advantage of it, what's wrong with fee for service?
I'll admit that what would be subject to registration fees, under Lessig's idea, or outright property taxes, under my variation, is not so much IP itself as the copyrighting of IP, that is to say, the right to exclude others from non-fair-use. However the distinctions between real and intellectual properties cut in favor of gummint charging for the service of excluding non-fair-use, because scarcity is no reason for taxation.
As for the idea that one is not diminished when one's IP is copy'd... that is simply incorrect. Ask any professional author. Ask J.R.R. Tolkien what he thought when an American publisher brought out the Lord of the Rings without bothering to offer him payment first. Even authors need to eat.
A variation: Make copy-rights into a property right that is just like real property rights.
When you buy a piece of real property ( land), it's yours for-ever. However, the gummit can vote property taxes on the land and if you don't pay up, it gets sold out from under you. That's harsh but, in a democracy where landowners get to vote on taxes, fair.
Likewise, I suggest that when you buy or create a piece of intellectual property, it would be yours for-ever. However, the gummit can vote property taxes on it and if you don't pay up, it gets sold out from under you to pay the tax.
There are of course practical issues, e.g. valuing intellectual property is difficult, but then again, there are practical issues to real property as well, e.g. valuation. For intellectual property, a nominal valuation of $1/year would give all the advantages of Lessig's scheme plus the advantage of direct reference to the well-established principles of property law.
Ah, maybe so... but a well-designed program, when asked to open a data file it cannot recognize, might suggest alternative courses of action, perhaps even comparing the extension (...or whatever they call it these days...) to a list of standard extensions.... at least those used by the program's own vendor.
I can't believe that I'm that much smarter than the largest software vendor in the world....
Plants often use predation by another species to facilitate their reproduction, e.g. bird excrement spreads seeds. So perhaps focussing on the dinos has it backwards... the plants have a positive incentive to encourage the saurians to try a little salad with their mammalburger.
If God, or a pantheon of gods, exists in any meaningful way, then it can be studied scientifically.
The canonical experiment would be to get a bunch of people together and have them pray for an event to occur, then measure the results.
Of course, we will swiftly determine that the God or gods do not respond equally to all prayers (...otherwise Bingo night at St. Alphonse's wouldn't make any money...) but that is no barrier to science; after all, not all objects fall equally, yet we can still study gravity. We just have to make the study more sophisticated:
What kind of prayers does the God or gods respond to?
Is there a particularly effective format (Latin? rhymes?) or routing protocol (directly to God? route through a patron saint?)?
Is there a limit on prayer packet size (small vs. big prayers)?
Does it help to spam God?
Will the State of Kansas fund research of this type... and where do I apply for the money?
At the very least, companies that make shareholder reports or seek venture capital have to report this sort of risk, or else when things go bad the executives who kept mum may get the orange jumpsuit.
It may or may not be true that software patents are dumb but the risk of lawsuits can make a difference to investors.
Thanks for the reference to Christopher Logue's War Music, which I'll add to the reading stack. But I think you're making my point a little bit... Homer qua Homer may have been great for his time, but times have moved on so much that today he wouldn't get published until he'd mastered modern writing techniques.
The theme-material of Homer can be, should be, and has been re-worked to create newer and better works. For a few examples: the catalog of ships needs extensive modification. Akilles' conflict with Agememnon (...or was it Menelaos?) over the captive woman Breseis (or was it Chreseis?) should be brought out in dialogue, not exposition. More can be made of the comic defeat of Aphrodite in combat. And so on...
The recent movie "Troy" for all its faults actually did a neat job of re-working the storyline into something both bigger and more efficient.
> I don't think the concept of the trinity could be considered nitpicking. It is the thing that most differentiates Christianity from the other Abrahamic religions.
I diagree on two counts:
1. Christ = Messiah is the fundamental belief that differentiates Christianity from Judaism & Islam.
2. Trinitarianism is but one, very successful branch of Christianity. At one time, most Christians were non-trinitarian, but that was a long time ago and mixed up in Imperial politics. Today there are still a few Unitarians.
Likewise: H.G. Wells and SF, or Lovecraft and horror. They're still very readable, but in a head-to-head contest against, say, Niven and Stephen King, would not come off well. Writing is a technology that advances, that's all I'm saying.
Slashdot Mirror
>the unemployed were effectively prevented from starting up their own companies because they would lose benefits the day they registered their company.
This, I think, is a key point and deserves amplification.
Not only can you not start your own business and still have healthcare (...unless you're on your spouse's policy ... ); you can't hire people without having to factor in healthcare costs, which terribly skews the hiring decision.
I know whereof I speak. I would happily hire 2 people to do the less-interesting part of my small business, the part I can easily train and equip them to do. In an ideal environment, it would be a straightforward calculation comparing their wages & bennies to the increase in business income they'd bring in. Alas, but healthcare is too darn expensive for me to cover for them, so I'm not going to create those jobs. Competitors in Canada & Europe have a great advantage which we are literally killing ourselves to maintain for them.
All the blah-blah about increasing technology graduates is very nice, but it does not address our infrastructure problems. Either that politician is ignorant, or he thinks we are.
>but only if they first learn to type
Typing is much simpler than lots of skills children learn before the age of 7, such as speaking and figuring out what really bugs teachers.
The great secret of adulthood is that we're not really smarter than kids, we just have a head start.
>Lets start with books
These are books! Not paper books (...which I love...) but effective books: an entire dictionary, access to google, and even Wikipedia [snicker]
>...a trade system which doesn't punish the poorest ...
That's a fair 'nuf righteous comment, but I submit these poor people are going to have to implement a fairer trade system on their own because the people who profit from the current trading system have no motivation to give it to them. And because knowledge=power, the improved access to information this technology offers may be the decisive force multiplier.
>... taxes specific to the means of Freedom of the Press were unconstitutional infringements on same ...
A good point, that would be interesting to apply to other media, e.g. a tax on internet access, a recycling fee for print cartridges. However, with respect to the programming problem, the same result would obtain if a jurisdiction were to tax all sales occurring within its jurisdiction, and in the case of internet sales (...necessarily problematic as to geography ...) to define "within" as being where the buyer takes delivery of the item. Online sellers of books would then share the tax and its attendant programming problems with sellers of Viagara. Hmmmm, not a bad idea ....
>Assuming this logic were valid with the current Supreme Court (they like precedent as much as any Court
Which is to say, they use it when they like it, and when they don't, they 'distinguish' it. Real-world phenomena being necessarily complex, it is always possible to make a distinction between any precedent and the instant case. And (...no troll intended...) the current Court is extremely activist in ignoring, overruling, or distinguishing precedent. In part, this is inevitable as over time the sheer bulk of precedent increases.
>The moon is ideal for harvesting raw materials
Maybe not. If what you're looking for is reaction mass, it's far better to harvest comets ... the Moon is still in a gravity well.
If what you're looking for is top-quality construction materials, e.g. titanium rebar or silicon chips, the Earth is still home because for the effort of shipping a smelter to the Moon, you might as well just build the ship on earth.
If the law is gonna be that Borders must pay sales tax to California for items sold into California ... how hard would that be to implement?
I appreciate that, taken to the extreme, this principle could mean that Borders must pay every little sales tax add-on implemented by every town anywhere. For example, parts of Puget Sound has a special tax to pay for a sports stadium ... lucky for Borders this silly tax is on restaurants, not on book sales, but under the same principle, nothing prevents, let us say, Dallas or Oakland from imposing a tax on books to help out the stuggling millionaires who own their sports franchiases except the political power of people who read books.
However, this is a problem that must affect programmers of cash-registers already. Somebody, somewhere, must be making good money for maintaining a database of local sales taxes. They could make a little more good money renting that database to Borders, Amazon, etc. Then the programming problem is simply to compare the ZIP code of the book buyer to the database.
What could go wrong? It would be computerized!
You'd have to include some really good error-checking into the system, but you have to do that anyway.
... is consistently funny. Not intellectually stimulating, but funny!
(5) They are a million years ahead of us in development, and no longer wish to communicate with a species that, to them, is about as smart as chimps are to us.
(6) They believe in the Prime Directive.
(7) They believe in the Prime Directive EXCEPT they mentally influence SF writers to introduce the concept of the Prime Directive so that when we do go out into space, we treat others nicely.
(8) They believe in the Prime Directive EXCEPT that if we don't stop broadcasting Star Trek re-runs into space, they'll induce global warming in self-defence.
>If IP creators don't want something to be copied, they can keep it to themselves
That is an argument in favor of taxing copyrighted IP. The gummint offers a service to IP creators, in the form of copyright. If the IP creator takes advantage of it, what's wrong with fee for service?
I'll admit that what would be subject to registration fees, under Lessig's idea, or outright property taxes, under my variation, is not so much IP itself as the copyrighting of IP, that is to say, the right to exclude others from non-fair-use. However the distinctions between real and intellectual properties cut in favor of gummint charging for the service of excluding non-fair-use, because scarcity is no reason for taxation.
As for the idea that one is not diminished when one's IP is copy'd ... that is simply incorrect. Ask any professional author. Ask J.R.R. Tolkien what he thought when an American publisher brought out the Lord of the Rings without bothering to offer him payment first. Even authors need to eat.
People have been consuming apple tablets for years, so how can this patent survive a prior art challenge?
A variation: Make copy-rights into a property right that is just like real property rights.
When you buy a piece of real property ( land), it's yours for-ever. However, the gummit can vote property taxes on the land and if you don't pay up, it gets sold out from under you. That's harsh but, in a democracy where landowners get to vote on taxes, fair.
Likewise, I suggest that when you buy or create a piece of intellectual property, it would be yours for-ever. However, the gummit can vote property taxes on it and if you don't pay up, it gets sold out from under you to pay the tax.
There are of course practical issues, e.g. valuing intellectual property is difficult, but then again, there are practical issues to real property as well, e.g. valuation. For intellectual property, a nominal valuation of $1/year would give all the advantages of Lessig's scheme plus the advantage of direct reference to the well-established principles of property law.
Ah, maybe so ... but a well-designed program, when asked to open a data file it cannot recognize, might suggest alternative courses of action, perhaps even comparing the extension (...or whatever they call it these days...) to a list of standard extensions .... at least those used by the program's own vendor.
I can't believe that I'm that much smarter than the largest software vendor in the world ....
Running OS X 10.3.9, I get:
1. "No default application specified for SRL_Worm_Simulator.msi"
2. "Cannot play back the file. File format is invalid"
[Is SRI hinting at something???]
Plants often use predation by another species to facilitate their reproduction, e.g. bird excrement spreads seeds. So perhaps focussing on the dinos has it backwards ... the plants have a positive incentive to encourage the saurians to try a little salad with their mammalburger.
If God, or a pantheon of gods, exists in any meaningful way, then it can be studied scientifically.
The canonical experiment would be to get a bunch of people together and have them pray for an event to occur, then measure the results.
Of course, we will swiftly determine that the God or gods do not respond equally to all prayers (...otherwise Bingo night at St. Alphonse's wouldn't make any money ...) but that is no barrier to science; after all, not all objects fall equally, yet we can still study gravity. We just have to make the study more sophisticated:
(I'm not gonna pretend that I understood all the answers ...)
You mean I got them backwards? No wonder Morpheus looked so disgusted and stomped away when I picked ....
... I'm sure it's been said before, but isn't the end result of MMOG improvement, essentially, that we all take the red pill?
If you could live in an imaginery universe while robots tended your body ... would you?
At the very least, companies that make shareholder reports or seek venture capital have to report this sort of risk, or else when things go bad the executives who kept mum may get the orange jumpsuit.
It may or may not be true that software patents are dumb but the risk of lawsuits can make a difference to investors.
That's fair!
... hopefully with Dolby!
Thanks for the reference to Christopher Logue's War Music, which I'll add to the reading stack. But I think you're making my point a little bit ... Homer qua Homer may have been great for his time, but times have moved on so much that today he wouldn't get published until he'd mastered modern writing techniques.
The theme-material of Homer can be, should be, and has been re-worked to create newer and better works. For a few examples: the catalog of ships needs extensive modification. Akilles' conflict with Agememnon (...or was it Menelaos?) over the captive woman Breseis (or was it Chreseis?) should be brought out in dialogue, not exposition. More can be made of the comic defeat of Aphrodite in combat. And so on ...
The recent movie "Troy" for all its faults actually did a neat job of re-working the storyline into something both bigger and more efficient.
> I don't think the concept of the trinity could be considered nitpicking. It is the thing that most differentiates Christianity from the other Abrahamic religions.
I diagree on two counts:
1. Christ = Messiah is the fundamental belief that differentiates Christianity from Judaism & Islam.
2. Trinitarianism is but one, very successful branch of Christianity. At one time, most Christians were non-trinitarian, but that was a long time ago and mixed up in Imperial politics. Today there are still a few Unitarians.
>first almost never means best
Likewise: H.G. Wells and SF, or Lovecraft and horror. They're still very readable, but in a head-to-head contest against, say, Niven and Stephen King, would not come off well. Writing is a technology that advances, that's all I'm saying.