If we were to accept that any extension in testing were bad, and any reduction in testing were good, then it would follow that drug testing only black unemployed people would be better than drug testing all unemployed people, but I think (hope) it's obvious that this would actually be worse.
No, it would in fact actually be better because it would be cheaper and impact fewer people. The racism in the selectivity of the reduction is on just you. Just as the bigotry of testing those in poverty vs anyone getting a tax credit/deduction or benefit of a government program is on those who made that decision.
My feeling is that it would create more animosity between people, and disrespect for the law generally. Those people who were disadvantaged would have fewer allies to seek change. If the situation persisted long enough, I think some people may even come to believe it was the right thing to do. Think about DC voting rights, and whether there would be many people advocating against equal DC voting rights if not simply for the fact that DC residents don't currently have them. I think all this would outweigh any positives.
Also, I find your allegation of bigotry puzzling, since I wasn't actually advocating for this (I thought that was clear).
Extending such a screwed up program to more people doesn't make things better, it makes things worse.
I'm not sure about that. I think it would make things more equal, and in that sense it would be more fair. If we were to accept that any extension in testing were bad, and any reduction in testing were good, then it would follow that drug testing only black unemployed people would be better than drug testing all unemployed people, but I think (hope) it's obvious that this would actually be worse.
Perhaps I'm not a real-world user (at least not in this decade), but the machine I'm using has 1GB of RAM. (I got the upgrade option instead of going with the default 512MB when I got it, maybe about 8 years ago.) Besides me though, I think memory usage may also be relevant for kids with a low-end smart phone or Raspberry Pi, and/or people living in the third world. I think at least one of those probably does count as legitimate a real-world use.
Nearly every time I see someone demanding sources, it's because they're whining and pouting due to not being able to counter.
I do know that it's a pain being asked for sources. I often can't remember where I read stuff. On the other hand though, I can't automatically accept every claim made by someone I don't know who doesn't provide a source. If I did, I'd have to accept a lot of contradictory claims.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not a virus is 'life' -- this question would apply to a bacterial disease as well -- how is this any different than the attempts in the last century to eradicate the North American wolf?
I think 'life' is an ambiguous term, and confuses moral issues. Bacteria are biologically alive, but so are individual human cells (e.g. skin cells), and individual human cells do not have a right to life. A person could be brain dead, but their body might be kept on life support for the purpose of organ donation. When we're considering moral issues, it's the mind that matters, IMHO.
I think sentience of a species (the capacity for feelings) raises the question of a right to not be subjected to cruel or inhumane treatment, but not a right to life. I think self-awareness of a species is needed to raise the question of a right to life.
However I think protecting a species is often not so much done out of concern for rights of members of that species as it is in order to keep the species from extinction because we want it to continue to exist.
I'm not disagreeing with you. The example I was looking for was something along the lines of the Diary of Anne Frank. Perhaps it is a lot more cloudy that I initially thought. Especially since Anne Frank is dead and the copyright if applicable would be inherited by her legal heirs.
That makes sense. I've found an article Do you lose the right to privacy when you die?, which seems to conclude, more or less, yes. Apparently in the USA at least there is specific legislation covering medical records, death-scene images are covered because they might be distressing for relatives, and unauthorised access to an electronic account is covered on that basis. In general, though, people don't have a right to privacy after they die.
But here is a different scenario. Suppose it is security footage of a house fire instead of a diary and the rest was the same outside of it being footage like this
http://www.theblaze.com/storie...
Do you think the privacy angle would be any different even though you or the home owner would essentially own the footage originally?
Since they were watching the footage 20 minutes after evacuating, I guess the camera was accessible via the Internet. I'm given to understand that a right to privacy under common law depends on having a reasonable expectation to privacy (e.g. you don't have a right to privacy in a room with a window facing a busy street, with the curtains open). I'd wonder if someone could have a reasonable expectation to privacy if they had a camera connected to the Internet and it was unsecured. This article suggests there is no right to privacy in USA for unsecured webcams: Controversial website feature shows alarming lack of webcam security. I don't know if the camera in question was unsecured though.
Otherwise, if the camera was secured, or the footage was obtained from the property itself, I'd guess that a right to privacy covers footage inside an empty home, but I don't know.
The Wikipedia page on Donaldson v Beckett suggests that this is a British common law right, which, by my understanding, means it would apply in the USA also, unless expressly overridden. "The United States and most Commonwealth countries are heirs to the common law legal tradition of English law" Law of the United States.
With regard to the particular situation you've described, I see what you're saying, and I found the article The privacy in one's garbage, which may be relevant. From my reading, I think this would be covered under a right to privacy, as the writings were to be picked up for disposal from within the property. If the writings had been placed outside the property for collection, the situation might be different.
In any case, if there is an issue with privacy here, I think it would be better dealt with by reforming privacy law. Using this as an argument against the original suggestion for reforming copyright law seems a bit convoluted. I think your other argument was better.
But lets go further. Your house catches fire, I'm on the clean up crew that is meant to dispose of all the damaged items and prepare the area for the workers who come in and rebuild. In this mess, I find your diary or memoirs of your happy but boring life. I decipher it, put it in a novel called why flammable houses suck and use it to enrich myself while claiming to be promoting science in spreading the word about the necessity of inflammable building materials being used in building homes. It's your story, you wrote it, you do not have any copyright, you essentially threw it away, and now I have a copyright on it and am making money. Well, according to your "test" that is.
I'm calling BS on this point. A right to privacy does not depend on copyright. (In Britain at least) people had a right to not have their writings published against their wishes before the Statute of Anne (copyright) gave them the right to not have published works reprinted.
P. How about a reassessment of copyright law in line with patent laws. Works must demonstrate true worth and value to society prior to achieve copyright protection...
Patents are supposed to be novel, non-obvious, and useful. However, as far as I know, to qualify as useful they don't actually have to be any better than, or even as good as, existing free alternatives. The Microsoft FAT patents cover a way of storing long file names that is arguably novel and non-obvious precisely because it is a needlessly convoluted way of doing something that had already been done. In any case, I don't want to see the copyright system based on the patent system, because I think the patent system is even more broken than the copyright system is.
If not for the rise of cloud computing, I would say scrap them both. The patent system only provides a net benefit in the areas of chemicals and pharmaceuticals (Bessen and Meurer, 2008), and I expect government research grants could do just as well. I'm not convinced copyright provides a net benefit at all, since for entertainment it seems to deliver form over substance, which I think we could do without, and for practical works, it takes mind share from free works. However, scrapping copyright would accelerate the shift to cloud computing, which is even worse than copyright.
Bessen, James & Meurer, Michael J. (2008) Patent failure. Princeton University Press. <http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8634.pdf>
Yeah, you measure reflexes and decision making skills, and take them off the road if they are unsafe.
There's some obvious sense in this, but I have two concerns with it. One is that I think it may be subjective, in which case police may (consciously or subconsciously) hold different groups to different standards. The other is (assuming this is used as a basis for a conviction) people could be penalised for having a bad day for some reason, without realising it is impairing their driving. For example, people may be worse drivers when they're experiencing a stressful time in their lives. While on the one hand it may be reasonable to take people off the road in this case, I do think it would be unfair to convict people for crossing a line, if they can't reasonably know that they may have crossed it.
The paper (or at least its abstract) doesn't seem to mention "free will". This seems to be a term introduced by reports of the paper. The paper itself seems to refer to choices that are made consciously as opposed to those that aren't (and are therefore made subconsciously). I think the term "free will" confuses the issue, because it's used in different ways.
In practical usage it more or less refers to choices that are made without being controlled by an outside agent (e.g. not choices made under duress), and in philosophical usage it more or less refers to "choices" that are made without any cause (although I don't think this idea makes sense).
So the factors that give rise to a 0.1% chance today will be subtley different next year, and the next and in 50 years time will have altered drastically. Just like the risk factors today are much different from those of 1966, when climate disasters weren't even a consideration. We are all probably worrying about the wrong things.
Maybe, but if we worry a little bit about a range of things, then we reduce the chance of not worrying about the right thing. Wear your seatbelt, get your immunisations, keep up to date with your health insurance, and look both ways before you cross the street. Together, they will reduce your chance of a shortened life. These thing may well never be an issue, and perhaps something else will be, but I think it's still worthwhile mitigating credible risks.
Yes, the Condorcet method is less gameable than Borda count. I don't think gaming the vote is going to be too much of an issue in ratings of favourite works, however, where most voters probably don't have too much riding on the outcome. I think there may be a different point in Condorcet's favour in this case, but there's also a practical difficulty.
Borda count is going to be biased towards more well-known works, since these will be rated more often, so receive more points. The Condorcet method can be calculated so that when people don't include a work in their rating list, they don't influence its rating, avoiding bias toward well-known works. On the other hand, I think calculating Condorcet for n options requires building an n * n matrix. For a large number of options that will get unwieldy.
Microsoft revolutionized the PC marked, Apple the smartphone market and Bell revolutionized telecommunication. Whether they actually invented the necessary technology or not, I think we can all agree that it was them who got the avalanches going.
I don't know about the others, but I wouldn't say Microsoft did much revolutionary. I would say that Bill Gates and Paul Allen were accomplished hackers (in the sense of someone who can quickly write good-enough software) and shrewd (and somewhat unscrupulous) businessmen.
AFAIK, BASIC was widely used on mainframes before the advent of home computers, and versions would almost certainly have been written for home computers without Microsoft. I don't think their version was anything special, they just got it out the door quicker than anyone else, and struck a good deal over it. MS DOS again wasn't anything special, AFAIK. They bought the rights for an existing DOS and adapted it. I think it's fair to say Digital Research (and probably others) could have done the job at least as well. Microsoft just got it out the door quicker, and again, struck a good deal over it. AFAIK, Digital Research actually produced a usable GUI for the IBM PC before Microsoft did, so I don't think Microsoft could be claimed to have done anything revolutionary there. Rather, Microsoft marketed MS Windows better, and benefited from already controlling the DOS.
More generally, I'm not convinced copyright has promoted the progress of software in the long run. IBM (and other hardware manufacturers) would have had OSes developed in order to sell their hardware anyway. Once PC clones were developed, keeping the source code secret would have become a losing proposition, because it would have simply burdened them with the full development costs, while their competitors could benefit from the use of the object code.
Copyright seems to get software done fast, but not always particularly well. Free and open-source software projects often take longer to get started, then face an uphill battle since potential users are already locked in to something else. FOSS has managed to achieve a lot in spite of that uphill battle, and I expect it could have achieved a great deal more without it.
If there is a bias towards producers, that's only logical because copyright law is there to protect them.
As has already been pointed out, according to the US Constitution, copyright law exists "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Similarly, the first modern copyright law, the Statute of Anne, justified it "for the Encouragement of Learning". Perhaps you could argue that the purpose of copyright law has changed, and it has become an ends unto itself, but even so, this wouldn't establish that to be a valid purpose.
It's a good thing that people who create something have some legally protected say in how their creations can be used. This is not just about money, it's about the freedom to create something on your own terms.
I think you've conflated freedom to create a work with a right to control how others use it if it's published. I can't argue with the former, but I think the latter is something different. I'll ask you to consider the following thought experiment. (It's in the style of Robert Nozick's Tale of the Slave, which I don't entirely buy into the content of, but that's another matter.)
1. Unbeknownst to us, Martians exist, and are copying our broadcasts via radio telescopes. For the sake of argument, they live in bio-domes, or similar, and have laws and institutions comparable to those of Western democracies, but no copyright laws. (For the sake of tradition, they're little, compared to us, and green, and have antennae, if you like.)
2. We become aware of them. We can see them through our telescopes, but have no interaction with them.
3. We begin to communicate with them.
4. On principle, we recognise them as people under our laws, and they recognise us as people under theirs.
5. We begin to trade with them (during close approaches of the two planets, which are about every two years). They retain their laws and we retain ours.
6. People begin to migrate between the two planets, but still, they retain their laws and we retain ours.
At what stage can we claim to have suffered harm from their copying? At what stage do we have a right, on principle, to forcibly prevent this harm, and/or take compensation for it?
... keep living in your encrypted utopia and kill yourself yesterday for all our sakes.... why does it have to be ten times the price this hotel already paid for?...
I'm guessing this was intended as hyperbole, and I don't know what the actual additional cost would have been for the hotel, although I expect a lack of security is common, and it may well have cost the hotel somewhat more to put some kind of security in place.
Where some kind of security is common practice though, I don't think it need cost an awful lot more. Cars tend to come with locks as standard, and builders tend to put them in buildings. (Not necessarily great locks, but at least something.) Police may encourage people to ensure they use their locks, and insurance may not be available otherwise. This is widely accepted, and few people complain about the additional cost of locks, or deride their use.
If some kind of security were standard in these sorts of set ups too, then I expect economy of scale would make it affordable. I don't think it ought to be any different from using locks. To me it just seems sensible.
the US is already way more intrusive than even the Stasi could have dreamed of... -- AC
In the Soviet era, in the Eastern block, typewriters and photocopiers were licensed and closely watched, and ordinary people were restricted from owning one.
Here in the 'intrusive' US you could go to Sears or JC Penneys and buy a typewriter any time you wished. -- Bing Tsher E
I'm not sure exactly what your argument is here. If you're saying the US Government doesn't impose as much restriction in order to carry out surveillance, or in general expend as much effort on it, then I expect you're right. They don't have to. On the other hand, if you're saying that digital surveillance doesn't make the US Government more intrusive today than the USSR was when it existed, because cellphones and the Internet weren't around in those days anyway, and US citizens can just choose not to use them, then I don't buy the argument. I think most adults in the US today have a cellphone and Internet access, and not having these may disadvantage people in business and social situations. I think cellphones and the Internet are as important today as typewriters and photocopiers were back then.
this one case is a bit more tricky, since the fbi can reasonably say that apple can do what they want and it's not even that expensive....
on iphone 5S and onwards it would not be possible. but try explaining this to a normal journalist. if apple opens it, they think that iphones all can be opened in same way - and apple has been publicly saying that they can't open them, (which is true for newer iphones than the 5C). suppose they do open it for them? what then? lawsuits from 5C owners who could arguably argue that they were mislead with marketing about the capabilities of their phone.
That makes sense to me. It sounds like Apple doesn't want to break their encryption because they don't want to admit it can be broken. By refusing, they're not really providing their customers with much more than a false sense of security. I'm all for security, but it has to be genuine. In this case I think it sounds like the horse has already bolted.
There's a ton of aspie freaks online that can't seem to figure out sarcasm or humor in general, either.
I don't know if it's just me, but I seem to have as much trouble having irony understood by others.
e.g. when I was in sea cadets, we spent a night in cabins on a small isle within a channel. The caretaker told us that there had been something of a tradition of midnight raids between our group and another local cadet group, called Nimrod (I kid you not), and he was keen to see the end of it. He told us we were to keep the cabin doors locked, not to open them should we hear anything.
So I pipe up, "would it be all right if we just have a quiet raid?" Dead silence, everyone in the room looking at me, and the caretaker sternly intones "you obviously don't know anything about raids, because they are never quiet".
Re:She's a dumb woman who drove HP into the ground
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Carly Is Out
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This is what happens when you give a dumb, emotional woman the reigns. I'm not saying all women are like this (please don't burn me at the stake, libtard SJWs). I'm just saying she was a dumb woman who sucked at business management. Dumb men can be bad leaders too (again, for clarification to all libtard SJWs)
I think you are casting aspersions on women generally. If your post was reworded replacing "women" with "conservative", I expect you'd think it was casting aspersions on conservatives generally, e.g.
This is what happens when you give a dumb, emotional conservative the reigns. I'm not saying all conservatives are like this (please don't burn me at the stake, RepubliNazis). I'm just saying she was a dumb conservative who sucked at business management. Dumb liberals can be bad leaders too (again, for clarification to all RepubliNazis).
There is a common pattern with aggregator sites today which deal with scientific press releases to simply regurgitate press releases that other sites are posting.
Isn't that the nature of aggregation?
Why not try a bit harder to educate the tech community on some of the most vocal critics of both science and tech?
Like democracy, science is the worst at what it does, aside from (at least) everything else that's been tried. Devise a better system, then use it to discover something significant and verifiable about the world, that science has not discovered, and I'll be interested.
In the mean time, would you like to hear my ideas about what's wrong with democracy?
Under Applications (right-hand side), click Advanced Search.
Enter the Query: PD/20151126 AND (CPCL/G06F OR CPCL/H04L)
Click Search.
This will give you the 1,247 applications relating to Electrical Digital Data Processing or Transmission of Digital Information that were published last week. (Applications are published on the Thursday of each week.)
To submit documents relevant to a patent application:
The submission process could no doubt be easier, but on the other hand, this might create more work for patent clerks, having to read through more low-quality submissions. I'm not really sure how much high-quality community involvement is likely here, because reading patent applications and searching for prior art just doesn't sound like a fun way to spend free time.
So the Nazis weren't really racist? The death camps were more of an anti-religion kind of thing?
Actually, sort of, to an extent. From Wikipedia (which references other sources):
Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated without exception. In other genocides, people were able to escape death by converting to another religion or in some other way assimilating. This option was not available to the Jews of occupied Europe,[29] unless their grandparents had converted before 18 January 1871 [the day the German Empire was proclaimed]. All persons of enough recent Jewish ancestry to be considered a Jew were to be exterminated in the German occupied territories.[30] The Holocaust
This is clearly not a purely religious classification (as converting away from Judaism is not relevant from 18 January 1871 onwards). However it doesn't seem to be a purely racial classification either, on the face of it, since the lineage is traced back to people who were adherents of Judaism on the 18 January 1871 (unless I've read it wrong).
That said, I guess that would be adherents of Judaism according to some official record, and people may be unlikely to officially denounce a religion their parents believe, even if they don't believe it themselves, so in practice the point may be somewhat moot.
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My feeling is that it would create more animosity between people, and disrespect for the law generally. Those people who were disadvantaged would have fewer allies to seek change. If the situation persisted long enough, I think some people may even come to believe it was the right thing to do. Think about DC voting rights, and whether there would be many people advocating against equal DC voting rights if not simply for the fact that DC residents don't currently have them. I think all this would outweigh any positives.
Also, I find your allegation of bigotry puzzling, since I wasn't actually advocating for this (I thought that was clear).
Aren't iPhones made in China though? That would make it kind of hard for Apple to avoid China.
I'm not sure about that. I think it would make things more equal, and in that sense it would be more fair. If we were to accept that any extension in testing were bad, and any reduction in testing were good, then it would follow that drug testing only black unemployed people would be better than drug testing all unemployed people, but I think (hope) it's obvious that this would actually be worse.
Perhaps I'm not a real-world user (at least not in this decade), but the machine I'm using has 1GB of RAM. (I got the upgrade option instead of going with the default 512MB when I got it, maybe about 8 years ago.) Besides me though, I think memory usage may also be relevant for kids with a low-end smart phone or Raspberry Pi, and/or people living in the third world. I think at least one of those probably does count as legitimate a real-world use.
I do know that it's a pain being asked for sources. I often can't remember where I read stuff. On the other hand though, I can't automatically accept every claim made by someone I don't know who doesn't provide a source. If I did, I'd have to accept a lot of contradictory claims.
I think 'life' is an ambiguous term, and confuses moral issues. Bacteria are biologically alive, but so are individual human cells (e.g. skin cells), and individual human cells do not have a right to life. A person could be brain dead, but their body might be kept on life support for the purpose of organ donation. When we're considering moral issues, it's the mind that matters, IMHO.
I think sentience of a species (the capacity for feelings) raises the question of a right to not be subjected to cruel or inhumane treatment, but not a right to life. I think self-awareness of a species is needed to raise the question of a right to life.
However I think protecting a species is often not so much done out of concern for rights of members of that species as it is in order to keep the species from extinction because we want it to continue to exist.
That makes sense. I've found an article Do you lose the right to privacy when you die?, which seems to conclude, more or less, yes. Apparently in the USA at least there is specific legislation covering medical records, death-scene images are covered because they might be distressing for relatives, and unauthorised access to an electronic account is covered on that basis. In general, though, people don't have a right to privacy after they die.
Since they were watching the footage 20 minutes after evacuating, I guess the camera was accessible via the Internet. I'm given to understand that a right to privacy under common law depends on having a reasonable expectation to privacy (e.g. you don't have a right to privacy in a room with a window facing a busy street, with the curtains open). I'd wonder if someone could have a reasonable expectation to privacy if they had a camera connected to the Internet and it was unsecured. This article suggests there is no right to privacy in USA for unsecured webcams: Controversial website feature shows alarming lack of webcam security. I don't know if the camera in question was unsecured though.
Otherwise, if the camera was secured, or the footage was obtained from the property itself, I'd guess that a right to privacy covers footage inside an empty home, but I don't know.
The Wikipedia page on Donaldson v Beckett suggests that this is a British common law right, which, by my understanding, means it would apply in the USA also, unless expressly overridden. "The United States and most Commonwealth countries are heirs to the common law legal tradition of English law" Law of the United States.
With regard to the particular situation you've described, I see what you're saying, and I found the article The privacy in one's garbage, which may be relevant. From my reading, I think this would be covered under a right to privacy, as the writings were to be picked up for disposal from within the property. If the writings had been placed outside the property for collection, the situation might be different.
In any case, if there is an issue with privacy here, I think it would be better dealt with by reforming privacy law. Using this as an argument against the original suggestion for reforming copyright law seems a bit convoluted. I think your other argument was better.
I'm calling BS on this point. A right to privacy does not depend on copyright. (In Britain at least) people had a right to not have their writings published against their wishes before the Statute of Anne (copyright) gave them the right to not have published works reprinted.
Patents are supposed to be novel, non-obvious, and useful. However, as far as I know, to qualify as useful they don't actually have to be any better than, or even as good as, existing free alternatives. The Microsoft FAT patents cover a way of storing long file names that is arguably novel and non-obvious precisely because it is a needlessly convoluted way of doing something that had already been done. In any case, I don't want to see the copyright system based on the patent system, because I think the patent system is even more broken than the copyright system is.
If not for the rise of cloud computing, I would say scrap them both. The patent system only provides a net benefit in the areas of chemicals and pharmaceuticals (Bessen and Meurer, 2008), and I expect government research grants could do just as well. I'm not convinced copyright provides a net benefit at all, since for entertainment it seems to deliver form over substance, which I think we could do without, and for practical works, it takes mind share from free works. However, scrapping copyright would accelerate the shift to cloud computing, which is even worse than copyright.
Bessen, James & Meurer, Michael J. (2008) Patent failure. Princeton University Press. <http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8634.pdf>
There's some obvious sense in this, but I have two concerns with it. One is that I think it may be subjective, in which case police may (consciously or subconsciously) hold different groups to different standards. The other is (assuming this is used as a basis for a conviction) people could be penalised for having a bad day for some reason, without realising it is impairing their driving. For example, people may be worse drivers when they're experiencing a stressful time in their lives. While on the one hand it may be reasonable to take people off the road in this case, I do think it would be unfair to convict people for crossing a line, if they can't reasonably know that they may have crossed it.
The paper (or at least its abstract) doesn't seem to mention "free will". This seems to be a term introduced by reports of the paper. The paper itself seems to refer to choices that are made consciously as opposed to those that aren't (and are therefore made subconsciously). I think the term "free will" confuses the issue, because it's used in different ways.
In practical usage it more or less refers to choices that are made without being controlled by an outside agent (e.g. not choices made under duress), and in philosophical usage it more or less refers to "choices" that are made without any cause (although I don't think this idea makes sense).
Maybe, but if we worry a little bit about a range of things, then we reduce the chance of not worrying about the right thing. Wear your seatbelt, get your immunisations, keep up to date with your health insurance, and look both ways before you cross the street. Together, they will reduce your chance of a shortened life. These thing may well never be an issue, and perhaps something else will be, but I think it's still worthwhile mitigating credible risks.
Yes, the Condorcet method is less gameable than Borda count. I don't think gaming the vote is going to be too much of an issue in ratings of favourite works, however, where most voters probably don't have too much riding on the outcome. I think there may be a different point in Condorcet's favour in this case, but there's also a practical difficulty.
Borda count is going to be biased towards more well-known works, since these will be rated more often, so receive more points. The Condorcet method can be calculated so that when people don't include a work in their rating list, they don't influence its rating, avoiding bias toward well-known works. On the other hand, I think calculating Condorcet for n options requires building an n * n matrix. For a large number of options that will get unwieldy.
I don't know about the others, but I wouldn't say Microsoft did much revolutionary. I would say that Bill Gates and Paul Allen were accomplished hackers (in the sense of someone who can quickly write good-enough software) and shrewd (and somewhat unscrupulous) businessmen.
AFAIK, BASIC was widely used on mainframes before the advent of home computers, and versions would almost certainly have been written for home computers without Microsoft. I don't think their version was anything special, they just got it out the door quicker than anyone else, and struck a good deal over it. MS DOS again wasn't anything special, AFAIK. They bought the rights for an existing DOS and adapted it. I think it's fair to say Digital Research (and probably others) could have done the job at least as well. Microsoft just got it out the door quicker, and again, struck a good deal over it. AFAIK, Digital Research actually produced a usable GUI for the IBM PC before Microsoft did, so I don't think Microsoft could be claimed to have done anything revolutionary there. Rather, Microsoft marketed MS Windows better, and benefited from already controlling the DOS.
More generally, I'm not convinced copyright has promoted the progress of software in the long run. IBM (and other hardware manufacturers) would have had OSes developed in order to sell their hardware anyway. Once PC clones were developed, keeping the source code secret would have become a losing proposition, because it would have simply burdened them with the full development costs, while their competitors could benefit from the use of the object code.
Copyright seems to get software done fast, but not always particularly well. Free and open-source software projects often take longer to get started, then face an uphill battle since potential users are already locked in to something else. FOSS has managed to achieve a lot in spite of that uphill battle, and I expect it could have achieved a great deal more without it.
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the spy and the home of the safe?
As has already been pointed out, according to the US Constitution, copyright law exists "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Similarly, the first modern copyright law, the Statute of Anne, justified it "for the Encouragement of Learning". Perhaps you could argue that the purpose of copyright law has changed, and it has become an ends unto itself, but even so, this wouldn't establish that to be a valid purpose.
I think you've conflated freedom to create a work with a right to control how others use it if it's published. I can't argue with the former, but I think the latter is something different. I'll ask you to consider the following thought experiment. (It's in the style of Robert Nozick's Tale of the Slave, which I don't entirely buy into the content of, but that's another matter.)
1. Unbeknownst to us, Martians exist, and are copying our broadcasts via radio telescopes. For the sake of argument, they live in bio-domes, or similar, and have laws and institutions comparable to those of Western democracies, but no copyright laws. (For the sake of tradition, they're little, compared to us, and green, and have antennae, if you like.)
2. We become aware of them. We can see them through our telescopes, but have no interaction with them.
3. We begin to communicate with them.
4. On principle, we recognise them as people under our laws, and they recognise us as people under theirs.
5. We begin to trade with them (during close approaches of the two planets, which are about every two years). They retain their laws and we retain ours.
6. People begin to migrate between the two planets, but still, they retain their laws and we retain ours.
At what stage can we claim to have suffered harm from their copying? At what stage do we have a right, on principle, to forcibly prevent this harm, and/or take compensation for it?
I'm guessing this was intended as hyperbole, and I don't know what the actual additional cost would have been for the hotel, although I expect a lack of security is common, and it may well have cost the hotel somewhat more to put some kind of security in place.
Where some kind of security is common practice though, I don't think it need cost an awful lot more. Cars tend to come with locks as standard, and builders tend to put them in buildings. (Not necessarily great locks, but at least something.) Police may encourage people to ensure they use their locks, and insurance may not be available otherwise. This is widely accepted, and few people complain about the additional cost of locks, or deride their use.
If some kind of security were standard in these sorts of set ups too, then I expect economy of scale would make it affordable. I don't think it ought to be any different from using locks. To me it just seems sensible.
I'm not sure exactly what your argument is here. If you're saying the US Government doesn't impose as much restriction in order to carry out surveillance, or in general expend as much effort on it, then I expect you're right. They don't have to. On the other hand, if you're saying that digital surveillance doesn't make the US Government more intrusive today than the USSR was when it existed, because cellphones and the Internet weren't around in those days anyway, and US citizens can just choose not to use them, then I don't buy the argument. I think most adults in the US today have a cellphone and Internet access, and not having these may disadvantage people in business and social situations. I think cellphones and the Internet are as important today as typewriters and photocopiers were back then.
That makes sense to me. It sounds like Apple doesn't want to break their encryption because they don't want to admit it can be broken. By refusing, they're not really providing their customers with much more than a false sense of security. I'm all for security, but it has to be genuine. In this case I think it sounds like the horse has already bolted.
I don't know if it's just me, but I seem to have as much trouble having irony understood by others.
e.g. when I was in sea cadets, we spent a night in cabins on a small isle within a channel. The caretaker told us that there had been something of a tradition of midnight raids between our group and another local cadet group, called Nimrod (I kid you not), and he was keen to see the end of it. He told us we were to keep the cabin doors locked, not to open them should we hear anything.
So I pipe up, "would it be all right if we just have a quiet raid?" Dead silence, everyone in the room looking at me, and the caretaker sternly intones "you obviously don't know anything about raids, because they are never quiet".
I think you are casting aspersions on women generally. If your post was reworded replacing "women" with "conservative", I expect you'd think it was casting aspersions on conservatives generally, e.g.
This is what happens when you give a dumb, emotional conservative the reigns. I'm not saying all conservatives are like this (please don't burn me at the stake, RepubliNazis). I'm just saying she was a dumb conservative who sucked at business management. Dumb liberals can be bad leaders too (again, for clarification to all RepubliNazis).
Isn't that the nature of aggregation?
Like democracy, science is the worst at what it does, aside from (at least) everything else that's been tried. Devise a better system, then use it to discover something significant and verifiable about the world, that science has not discovered, and I'll be interested.
In the mean time, would you like to hear my ideas about what's wrong with democracy?
It looks like you can search US patent applications, and submit documents relevant to a patent application, for a fee.
To search patent applications:
This will give you the 1,247 applications relating to Electrical Digital Data Processing or Transmission of Digital Information that were published last week. (Applications are published on the Thursday of each week.)
To submit documents relevant to a patent application:
The submission process could no doubt be easier, but on the other hand, this might create more work for patent clerks, having to read through more low-quality submissions. I'm not really sure how much high-quality community involvement is likely here, because reading patent applications and searching for prior art just doesn't sound like a fun way to spend free time.
Actually, sort of, to an extent. From Wikipedia (which references other sources):
This is clearly not a purely religious classification (as converting away from Judaism is not relevant from 18 January 1871 onwards). However it doesn't seem to be a purely racial classification either, on the face of it, since the lineage is traced back to people who were adherents of Judaism on the 18 January 1871 (unless I've read it wrong).
That said, I guess that would be adherents of Judaism according to some official record, and people may be unlikely to officially denounce a religion their parents believe, even if they don't believe it themselves, so in practice the point may be somewhat moot.