For the same reason I can't sue you for not giving me money on what ever basis you don't give me money. Umm, but you can. You can sue for not being offered employment for the reason of being a member of one of the protected classes. Apparently NOT giving something which is yours to a complete stranger requires a reason that is compliant with the law.
It's funny. Laugh. It would be if you didn't let is sink in.
IANAL, but I read.
IANAL, but "sue federal government" on Google links to a great deal of news articles, including from LexisNexis, involving that very action. These are not "torts" -- suits for damages. These are suits to clarify, interpret or strike a law for reasons that the law (as written) does not comply with the standards for writing of laws that we have established. You can't sue the federal government for damages.
Where there's a will there's a way. Isn't that what punitive damages are for? Punitive are a legal contraption. There are laws that allow for punitive damages to be awarded. A suit is a claim that you've been damaged and a request that a the counterparty be forced to compensate you for the damages it caused. There are laws which establish certain types of damages to be so egregious that they must be actively discouraged. Thus in addition to damages, you can request punitive damages. Since these are established by law and the federal law does not establish such types of damages against itself, you can't sue for punitive damages.
Just because somebody is employed "at will" doesn't mean an employer can terminate an employee due to his or her religious affiliation. I am not sure that religion is a protected class, but certainly you can be terminated for your political affiliation (otherwise, you'd be able to sue politicians for not hiring members of the opposing parties and such). You can argue that's censorship, I would disagree. Freedom of association cannot exist if there is no freedom of disassociation. The law (as it stands) does not always agree.
Since this is government, censorship does apply, and censorship is censorship no matter the vehicle. False and true. The vehicle of censorship does not matter, but dissassociating from an opinion is not censorship. This is as true for the government as it is for individuals. Censorship requires coercion. Chosing not to engage in an interraction with a party is not a coercion. If your arguement worked, then you'd be able to sue an organization for (for instance) boycotting a store. But you can't. And since the (elected!!!) government functions on the premise that it gets to represent the people, it can chose not to act in certain cases even though they are similar to the cases where it choses to act. To put it plainly, closing your ears while someone is talking is not censorship, but closing their mouth is. By not paying those who voice certain opinions, the government is closing its proverbial ears.
But in this case the government has essentially squelched something it doesn't like without passing a law and without due process. Needless to say, due process would be an expensive tack to take. So are we going to give up all of our freedoms for this type of idiocy just because we can't afford to defend ourselves? This is precisely how subsidies creates slaves. If the colleges weren't addicted to the federal money, they would be charging tuitions affordable to students (as they used to before federal student loans) and do research that is useful to the industry (as they do in most computer science cases and few life sciences cases). Free federal money is not an essential freedom -- it is a burden from which we should protect ourselves. Actually, something good might come out of this debacle -- JH might find private donars that will have a say (some say -- not full say) in what information the database must gather (based on the real-world consideration of what information is useful).
Well, it might work if they allow for a rather broad variation in the frequence of mistakes. But personally, I make much more typos depending on how tired I am and how much caffeine I've had lately. I would assume that others do too. So when I am well-rested I might appear to be a completely different person from when I am even slightly tired.
why doesn't Johns Hopkins simply sue the federal government? Two reasons: (i) you can't sue the Federal Government (ii) they have nothing to sue them for. The Federal government gives away money (in the form of loans with subsidized interest). It's the government's prerogative to decide on the criterion for receiving that money. To sue for money is to sue for damages. You can no more sue someone who decides to exclude you from their charitable donation than you can sue someone who choses not to pull you out of a burning building. In both cases, that someone is free not to help you.
argh... to early in the morning. I meant, of course, "it doesn't say irrevocable...". Congress (as the legislative body) stil has the power to make any provision of any treaty to no longer be the law. Besides, I insist that if there is no mechanism of enforcement, a "law" is a law in name only.
Destabilize why? That's a non-issue. It could have different end-goals. The word defines a strategy of action. And strategies don't define goals which they try to achieve -- just the operational details.
and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land It say non-revokable law of the land. Congress has the power to make laws and by doing so revoke provisions of any treaties. Congress modifies other "laws of the land" all the time. It's within Congress' power.
Terrorism has always been defined as the use of violence or the threat of violence to achieve political goals. Defined by whom? That's not the definition at all. Terrorism is an attempt to destabilize cohesiveness of a society through violence and threats of violence. War-time saboteurs are generally considered terrorists as well. Certainly, they do not have any political goals in mind (only military). Military is not in itself a terrorist organization. It can use terrorist tactics, but the purpose of a military is two-fold: protecting violent attacks coming from without and attempting establishment of (hopefully temporary) dictatorial control over territories outside of one's country. Neither one of these goals is in itself terrorist. You are attempting to make the word "terrorism" mean more than it does in order to make it encompass activities which (while are not necessarily innocent) are not as abhorrent as terrorism is.
The military is a terrorist organization when used in an aggressive manner not congruent with international law. "International Law" is a misnomer. "Law" is a set of rules enforcible and enforced by an overseeing authority. No such authority exists for the globe. Don't even start with the UN: it doesn't have the power to enforce it's resolutions. Whatever little power it does have it is mostly to shill opinions and wag its finger. The best we have is international agreements. But those are not even contracts (again, because contracts must have a law organization to enforce them). The international agreements are simply pacts -- which can be(and often are) broken in plain sight with no repercussions.
Slashdot needs a "spam" moderation category. These posts are becoming more frequent and pretty soon "off-topic" won't do it -- there won't be enough moderators with mod points to kill these off.
no there's legions of other dumbass's posting about this obvious pun. Thank God! And if you don't like geeky jokes, may I suggest a different website for your "news": http://www.mtv.com/
If by "freedom" you mean the abstract concept for which it is Ok to kill people (and, naturally, do other lesser harmful things to them), then we have a problem. People distinguish between "free"-as-in-speech and free-as-in-"beer" for a reason. The reason is that ambiguity of context allows for mischaracterization of opponents' remarks (generally for the purpose of inflaming passions and curtailing reasonable discourse).
That's the thing about ownership.... if you own something, you get to name the price for it. The last thing we want is government stepping in and telling us how to set prices on things we own. If it were illegal (as in against the law enforced by the government) to set your own prices for things which are yours, you wouldn't really own it.
They blundered quite a bit when it was discovered that the design of the U-boats that Germans used in WWI came from the patents filed by an American engineer.
In one of the lectures that you can still find on Google video Sergey tells Stanford students that he is a believer that structure should be found within contexts by computers. Meaning that he believes that computers would do a better job finding what's related to what than one could possible hope to get people to indicate what's related to what via tags. He was actually saying that as a reason for his opposition to relying on tags. Well, applying the same belief to privacy (automation is better than relying on people) would mean that Google tools should be structured in such a way as to make lack of privacy impossible. Solve the problem with technology and then relying on people will be unnecessary. Why doesn't Google, for instance, encrypt all the data they store on their servers with keys which never hit the wire and are always stored on people's computers. Surely, all browsers' ssl infrastructure can be utilized for that. It seems like whoever is making these business decisions is not fully aware of what it is that makes Google better -- least human intervention with the data. Humans (in Google-paradigm... go ahead... I deserve the paradigm shift jokes) are supposed to write code and the code is supposed be the only thing touching the data. Well, just go one step further and make sure that the code is the only thing that can touch the data. Just my 2 cents.
If you could make a bot that would outperform humans under these circumstances then the US Army wants to talk to you.:) US army wants to talk to you if you have a pulse. </trolling>
As for the whole "government-created monopoly" arguement, the same is true of all property. As an owner of my home I have a monopoly on saying who can use it. The only difference is that I keep my home indefinately, but IP goes away after a limited period of time. Monopoly is a situation in which no one can enter the market regardless of how much capital they try to spend on entering the market. Natural monopolies disappear with time because their products get outdated because of innovation. All monopolies that are in the business of doing rather than simply owning are natural. Property ownership is, in itself, a monopoly because I don't have to sell my home to anyone regardless of how much money they offer (yes, I am sidestepping the issue of imminent domain because I am talking about true private property). And all monopolies which are based on owning of something (rather than doing something) are protected at the threat of violence. The unnatural monopolies are situations where the doing monopolies are perpetuated by the threat of violence (government, mob protection racket, religious rules, etc) byond the period of time during which they provided unique solutions to problems (which is what gave them their monopolies in the first place). You try to portray patents as an unnatural monopoly, but it doesn't fit that category. It is an owning monopoly. All it does is give the owner the right to refuse anyone utility of an idea.
No one is restricting you to say no. And IP does not guarantee the right to say yes or no, is simply defines who's the owner.
The only thing that ownership give you is the right to refuse utility to others. And, pray tell, how I can say, "no, you can't use my idea." If there is no legal means of stopping you, you can just ignore me. So the only option I have is to hide my ideas. This is precisely how people behave when a government does not provide protection for property. You might (or might not) be interested to know that in the modern-day Russia, there is a concept of (roughly translated) not-flasing. It exists because the post-Soviet Russian government does not provide protection of tangible property, so those who have anything that can be taken by force can only protect it by hiding the fact that they have it. The concept did not emerge as a hypothetical. It emerged in response to many people getting killed as soon as they had something which could be taken from them.
BTW your post is really inconsistent. You apparently are a person that makes a living from IP. But your statement about monopolies is just our of context.
I was simply addressing your assertions about monopolies (not specifically the ones created by IP laws, but all of them).
Let me explain something that I think is missing from the consideration here. You are not just a victim of patents. You are also their beneficiary. More than that, you are currently a victim of the regime in which patents do not really exist (or exist in a very broken way). That's not the explanation that's an assertion. Here's the explanation:
As a programmer, you rely on other domains' specialists to share information with you that would allow you to write code that is useful to non-programmers. The more useful code you can write, the more money you can make. If a system exists under which domain experts can describe their ideas concretely and publish those explanations and then hope to be able to negotiate a price with anyone who uses the ideas that they published, then they would be encouraged to make their publications very well-presented, very approachable, well-illustrated, etc. Why? Because they would want them to be widely-understood. The more programmers understood their ideas, the more likely it would be that some programmers would to use them to write code.
As the system stands now, here's what happens. Domain experts and programmers coalese into secret societies in which they cooperate to write code that roughly addresses problems identified by the domain experts in those secret societies. This gives advantage to bigger economic players because they can make those secret societies contain more players (thus making it more likely that a good explanation of a particular domain problem will emerge and be used by programmers). The smaller economic players generally fail in this situation because they can only gain access to very few domain experts, so they have a lesser chance of comming across a good explanation of any one domain problem.
Domain experts (mathematicians, chemists, engineers) try to make a living by publishing books on that which would teach others about their domain of knowledge. But to make use of such books anyone who wants to write code useful for a particular domain must first become a semi-expert in the domain. Short of teaching (ie, creating more semi-experts) and publishing books, the domain experts live off tips. Those are hand-outs from the government (which gets its resources from your taxes) and other large economic players that hope that the experts will share their discoveries in exchange for the tips they receive. Of course, once these discoveries do occur, most of the time they are published in a way that is not useful to you as a programmer. They are only useful to other domain experts. So they all agree with each other that the discovery is new and good. But you rarely get any benefit from it. The domain expert is not inter
Without software patents, you can make different code that solves that same problem in a different (better?) way. The code is protected and can be licensed either way. Not at all true. You can't patent solution to a problem. You can only patent a particular solution to a particular problem. I am not arguing for the current patent system. I am arguing that one should be able to patent an algorithm. I don't want to go into the details of how that has to be defined (certainly Knuth's definition of any program being an algorith is an exageration). A different solution to the same problem is not a violation of a patent. Patents on business methods and patents that are overly broad should be stopped. But that's a different story (because, again, I am not defending the current patent system just the concept of usefulness of a good patent system).
Another example is Amazon's infamous single click to buy shopping cart. Besides the blatant obviousness of this idea, there's another problem: if this patent holds, no-one can create a shopping cart that has one click buying, without licensing with Amazon. So, my small time basement startup cannot have a decent online shop without paying up. This does stifle innovation. Agreed. And I don't think business methods should be patentable. Algorithms, however, should be.
Idea: "compress files to a smaller size using compression algorithms." That's not an "idea". That's a problem. An "idea" would contain an answer to the question "how?"
In short, we don't need software patents to cover code because it's already protected by copyright, That's not enough. If I come up with a way to solve a travelling salesman in polynomial time, I should be able to patent my algorithm. If all I can do is copyright my code, then anyone can come and write their own version using my algorithm. So if I want to profit from my idea under the current regime I have to keep my idea secret (thus promoting closed source). If we had a competent Patent office that could recognize truely innovative algorithms, most software would be written as open source. Because there would be no risk in disclosing a particular implementation of a patented algorithm. As it stands, people can only hope to profit their ideas by closing them and selling closed products or opening them and hoping to live off tips that they receive after that (grans, fellowships, offers of easy employment, etc.). This is silly. Being able to just sell what you create would be much more efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it might work if they allow for a rather broad variation in the frequence of mistakes. But personally, I make much more typos depending on how tired I am and how much caffeine I've had lately. I would assume that others do too. So when I am well-rested I might appear to be a completely different person from when I am even slightly tired.
argh... to early in the morning. I meant, of course, "it doesn't say irrevocable...". Congress (as the legislative body) stil has the power to make any provision of any treaty to no longer be the law. Besides, I insist that if there is no mechanism of enforcement, a "law" is a law in name only.
Comcast says "Mbps" the way airlines say "bonus miles".
I thought it was 4/1, too. But the Yahoo link appears legit.
Slashdot needs a "spam" moderation category. These posts are becoming more frequent and pretty soon "off-topic" won't do it -- there won't be enough moderators with mod points to kill these off.
His name is Schilling? And he shills for Hillary? Is her campaign manager Miss Moneypenny? Am I the only who sees the irony?
maybe. for nerds? i doubt it. "the math guys"... ok, definitely not news for nerds -- too dismissive of the experts
the parent post makes me think there should be a "spam" mod category.
If by "freedom" you mean the abstract concept for which it is Ok to kill people (and, naturally, do other lesser harmful things to them), then we have a problem. People distinguish between "free"-as-in-speech and free-as-in-"beer" for a reason. The reason is that ambiguity of context allows for mischaracterization of opponents' remarks (generally for the purpose of inflaming passions and curtailing reasonable discourse).
That's the thing about ownership.... if you own something, you get to name the price for it. The last thing we want is government stepping in and telling us how to set prices on things we own. If it were illegal (as in against the law enforced by the government) to set your own prices for things which are yours, you wouldn't really own it.
Here's the link to November 1, 1917 NYT article, btw. Sometimes Google search is too cool. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9905E1DC113AE433A25752C0A9679D946696D6CF&oref=slogin
They blundered quite a bit when it was discovered that the design of the U-boats that Germans used in WWI came from the patents filed by an American engineer.
In one of the lectures that you can still find on Google video Sergey tells Stanford students that he is a believer that structure should be found within contexts by computers. Meaning that he believes that computers would do a better job finding what's related to what than one could possible hope to get people to indicate what's related to what via tags. He was actually saying that as a reason for his opposition to relying on tags. Well, applying the same belief to privacy (automation is better than relying on people) would mean that Google tools should be structured in such a way as to make lack of privacy impossible. Solve the problem with technology and then relying on people will be unnecessary. Why doesn't Google, for instance, encrypt all the data they store on their servers with keys which never hit the wire and are always stored on people's computers. Surely, all browsers' ssl infrastructure can be utilized for that. It seems like whoever is making these business decisions is not fully aware of what it is that makes Google better -- least human intervention with the data. Humans (in Google-paradigm... go ahead... I deserve the paradigm shift jokes) are supposed to write code and the code is supposed be the only thing touching the data. Well, just go one step further and make sure that the code is the only thing that can touch the data. Just my 2 cents.
As for the whole "government-created monopoly" arguement, the same is true of all property. As an owner of my home I have a monopoly on saying who can use it. The only difference is that I keep my home indefinately, but IP goes away after a limited period of time. Monopoly is a situation in which no one can enter the market regardless of how much capital they try to spend on entering the market. Natural monopolies disappear with time because their products get outdated because of innovation. All monopolies that are in the business of doing rather than simply owning are natural. Property ownership is, in itself, a monopoly because I don't have to sell my home to anyone regardless of how much money they offer (yes, I am sidestepping the issue of imminent domain because I am talking about true private property). And all monopolies which are based on owning of something (rather than doing something) are protected at the threat of violence. The unnatural monopolies are situations where the doing monopolies are perpetuated by the threat of violence (government, mob protection racket, religious rules, etc) byond the period of time during which they provided unique solutions to problems (which is what gave them their monopolies in the first place). You try to portray patents as an unnatural monopoly, but it doesn't fit that category. It is an owning monopoly. All it does is give the owner the right to refuse anyone utility of an idea.
No one is restricting you to say no. And IP does not guarantee the right to say yes or no, is simply defines who's the owner.
The only thing that ownership give you is the right to refuse utility to others. And, pray tell, how I can say, "no, you can't use my idea." If there is no legal means of stopping you, you can just ignore me. So the only option I have is to hide my ideas. This is precisely how people behave when a government does not provide protection for property. You might (or might not) be interested to know that in the modern-day Russia, there is a concept of (roughly translated) not-flasing. It exists because the post-Soviet Russian government does not provide protection of tangible property, so those who have anything that can be taken by force can only protect it by hiding the fact that they have it. The concept did not emerge as a hypothetical. It emerged in response to many people getting killed as soon as they had something which could be taken from them.
BTW your post is really inconsistent. You apparently are a person that makes a living from IP. But your statement about monopolies is just our of context.
I was simply addressing your assertions about monopolies (not specifically the ones created by IP laws, but all of them).
Let me explain something that I think is missing from the consideration here. You are not just a victim of patents. You are also their beneficiary. More than that, you are currently a victim of the regime in which patents do not really exist (or exist in a very broken way). That's not the explanation that's an assertion. Here's the explanation:
As a programmer, you rely on other domains' specialists to share information with you that would allow you to write code that is useful to non-programmers. The more useful code you can write, the more money you can make. If a system exists under which domain experts can describe their ideas concretely and publish those explanations and then hope to be able to negotiate a price with anyone who uses the ideas that they published, then they would be encouraged to make their publications very well-presented, very approachable, well-illustrated, etc. Why? Because they would want them to be widely-understood. The more programmers understood their ideas, the more likely it would be that some programmers would to use them to write code.
As the system stands now, here's what happens. Domain experts and programmers coalese into secret societies in which they cooperate to write code that roughly addresses problems identified by the domain experts in those secret societies. This gives advantage to bigger economic players because they can make those secret societies contain more players (thus making it more likely that a good explanation of a particular domain problem will emerge and be used by programmers). The smaller economic players generally fail in this situation because they can only gain access to very few domain experts, so they have a lesser chance of comming across a good explanation of any one domain problem.
Domain experts (mathematicians, chemists, engineers) try to make a living by publishing books on that which would teach others about their domain of knowledge. But to make use of such books anyone who wants to write code useful for a particular domain must first become a semi-expert in the domain. Short of teaching (ie, creating more semi-experts) and publishing books, the domain experts live off tips. Those are hand-outs from the government (which gets its resources from your taxes) and other large economic players that hope that the experts will share their discoveries in exchange for the tips they receive. Of course, once these discoveries do occur, most of the time they are published in a way that is not useful to you as a programmer. They are only useful to other domain experts. So they all agree with each other that the discovery is new and good. But you rarely get any benefit from it. The domain expert is not inter