All economic theory I have been exposed to makes as one of its base assumptions availability of information to make good decisions. When good information does not exist then you can kiss your free market theory goodbye. Imagine the corrected tobacco adverts:
This stuff tastes terrible at first (but you'll get used to it) and it will eventually give you lung or throat cancer, BUT hey, it'll make you look cool and give you a brief high...
There is another aspect to this stuff too. If you have a minute go to http://www.henrygeorge.org and consider how our tax system also supports corporatism at the expense of quality of life for most of us. Do the quiz they have - quite an eye opener for me.
Oh come on, English is riddled with so many stupid rules, exceptions and non-sensicalities that caring about virii vs viruses is meaningless to the point of being stupid.
When English is 95% sensible rules and consistant patterns then I'll pay attention to the ravings of folks like you. Until then I'm for hacking and bastardizing the language as much as possible. Make up words, spell 'em as they sound, follow the patterns even when they are "wrong" anything to boycott the English language snobs.
"I would die to have some red dye." "Please polish the Polish furniture." "Would you hand me that piece of wood?"
Stupid pathetic excuse for a language.
If you can't tell, I'm mad 'cuz I spent too many damn years learning the language - and I still don't rate as a good speaker or writer.
I strongly agree with this. I have two young kids and have seen how seemingly innoculous (sp?) stuff strongly influences them. Teaching a six year old that being kind and courteous can be much more funtional in most (many?) situations is tough. You see, a six year old (at least my six year old son) would rather dispense with the "can you move, you're blocking my view" and go right to the Power Rangers approach - kick, shove and thump on the head. At this stage of his life I'd rather not have my son looking over the shoulder of some fifth grader who has just found that cindy and joe have a nice site on Fst-Fkng completely open and un-protected to anyone smart enough to use google.
However I would say that closed censoring ain't such a great idea either. How about every time someone proposes censoring porn that we add "Yeah great idea, hey, how about also censoring violent acts?" Watch the Senators squirm when they have to decline censoring violence but must still push their agenda of censoring sex.
So anyway what gets me so mad is I see decisions being made that feel at odds with making our collective quality of life better. Would Amazon have kept their "one click" idea secret if they couldn't patent it? Would they have had less incentive to develop such an idea if it wasn't patentable? I would say no and probably no. I don't see how Amazon's ability to patent their so called "idea" did anything for our collective quality of life. I can see how it did some harm. Did the guy (or gal) who came up with the idea make good money from it?
With respect to patents I think the original purpose of patents might be better met by making patents automatically the property of the inventor and not of the corporation.
For me it often seems that the greater good at the root of many legal issues is forgotten while people fight for so called rights or justice. Patents for example are intended to get people to reveal their ideas instead of keeping them secret. This is clearly a "greater good" (if the system works right that is).
There is no "right" to have a monopoly on intelectual property but it serves our greater good to judiciously give out such a right.
Baloney! Its a myth, you can get minerals from water but ya don't have to. Lots of people around the world drink rain water that (except for sulphur, nitrates and mercury compounds:) is essentially distilled. Just make sure you have a nice varied diet (ummmm... haven't eaten dog in over 15 years, poodle stew time). If you are worried about minerals take a multi-vitamin/mineral suplement. I have references for this somewhere and could dig 'em up if anyone cared.
How'd you measure that head start? Not by number of fluent speakers surely. Part of the idea is to choose something that is _nobodys_ first language. Kind of levels the playing ground. Unfortunately lots of folks don't really like level playing grounds. Especially those who have the current advantage.
Pricy, clumsy and arguably unnecessary. Choose a common second language - Esperanto, Ido, Cook Island Maori, who cares which one just so long as its not as twisted as English and make it the official SECOND language. Too bad so many folks are so attached to our "mother tongue" to be open to such a simple, elegant and efficient idea.
Note: I said second language - I'm not advocating replacing anyones precious national language.
I think two things would make patents useful again.
1) Make patents non-transferable property with only limited duration leases allowed.
2) Make the life of a patent reflect the rate of change of the technology in the applicable field.
Heres why. If you assume the original idea of a patent was to give the inventor(s) a short term monopoly to use the idea in exchange for disclosing the idea to the public then we have a problem with 99% of the patents being granted today. The problem is that the patents are being granted to inventors who work for corporations BUT the patent rights are automatically going to the corporations! The inventor in many cases gets next to nothing. Corporations do not have ideas, inventors do. Thus solution 1) will put the power back into the hands of the inventors.
Imagine: you work for megacorp A. You have a bright idea that you know will improve megacorp A's product. The law lets YOU patent your idea and then lease it to whomever you please. YOU get some nice royalties from being creative and the public gets your idea put into the public view. Megacorp A gets to do what megacorps are supposed to do - efficiently bring massive resources to bear on meeting societies needs. In this case by leasing your patent to help them produce a product more effiently.
Of course the Corporate world has a lot to loose from something like this. As a society I think we would have a lot to gain.
I'm using Varkon to design steam engines and love it. It takes some getting used to and a little work to setup but for me it is great. Since I am designing a n-cylinder rotary engine where I haven't decided whether n will be 4, 6 or some other number I have been able to use the parametric ability of Varkon to make n one of the design parameters. Besides, I just like being able to type "make" as part of my design process. It just feels right:)
I don't remember the details but I believe that the government invalidated one of the patents that the original ENIAC designers had to enable competition in the very early days of computing. For better or for worse the government has been involved from the very beginning.
Running out of oil is an unlikely scenario. However energy prices rising steadily is a likely scenario. Oil extracted from tar sands is more expensive than oil pumped out of the ground. Also note that solar power, biodiesel etc. are very capital intensive and consequently expensive. I'd be all for fission and fusion except that so often it seems like selfish, insensitive and shortsighted people somehow seem to end up making the decisions and are only too happy to compromise safety, liveabilty and the environment to achieve their goals. Just look to relatively recent news for examples.
For all the aforementioned reasons I very much agree with the planet full of nukes. *sigh*
There was a good article in Scientific American last year about oil prices. I think they were predicting the "knee" in the price curve to hit in about ten years. So enjoy that gas guzzling SUV now!
I once - along time ago - consulted for a Russian ballet dancer who wanted to write his memoirs on a computer. He had a very hard time with basic things like hand eye co-ordination with the mouse and alien concepts like the hard disk/floppy disk and directories/folders metaphor. What I did was set him up with a bunch of macros under Word Perfect and showed him _one_ way to do things. Then he would note down step by step how to do that thing on a 3" x 5" card. This seemed to work pretty well except that Windows/Word Perfect was less than perfectly reliable and recovering when things didn't work perfectly was hard for him.
I think setting Linux up so that when he logs in KDE (or your favorite WM) comes up *with* say netscape and staroffice already started would be good. One of the 3x5 cards would be "switching to StarOffice - hold the ALT key down and hit the tab key until the little box on the screen says StarOffice then release the keys." In the case of the guy I was helping key combinations were much easier than mastering the mouse to "click once on the StarOffice icon."
By the by, one of the things that I see lacking when people get into discussing issues like making a computer accessable to people like this is a lack of respect for the challenge that seemingly simple tasks can be to someone who either doesn't have any frame of reference or background to do a supposedly easy task. There is nothing, in my opinion, intuitive nor natural about using a mouse, but it is a reasonably easy skill to learn for many people.
Seems to me I've heard it argued (and quite well) that decreasing freedoms around the world are mostly related to population growth. Imagine for instance that you halved the number of people in your town/city/whatever. Stands to reason I think that all else being equal everyone could drive twice as much and you'd *still* have less traffic issues. So if you want to be free - don't breed so damn fast...:)
Almost but not quite. If google becomes aware of who you are and gives you an opportunity to associate yourself with certain groups (e.g. Debian, Linux user or detests the NRA etc.) then they would be close to what was proposed. Also google would have to know how you felt about the site *after* you went and perused it. Just surfing to it is not enough.
I coined the phrase "Forever Free" because I think it captures the sense of ownership jf talked about above. Linux is forever free. It cannot be forked into a closed branch where my contributions may even be debugged without me getting to see the fixes. Open source was a good catch phrase for getting businesses to open up to some new and scary ideas but for me and I think many others the real appeal lies in the GPL and how it makes things Forever Free. Whilst Sun opening up things like Star Office and Solaris is a good thing it won't slow down or distract those of us focused on projects like Linux and KOffice.
Absolutely. A printout fits in the pocket, doesn't hum, whirr or get hot. It is almost instantly accessable and rm -rf won't unwittingly destroy it.
Now there is one thing folks could be doing: use the pstools psbook command to print stuff out as booklets - four pages to an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. I wrote a trivial STk script that pops up a little window when my wife or I prints from netscape. It allows printing the first (odd) side then prompts you to put the paper back in for printing the even side. We also have a long reach stapler so you just print, fold and staple to make very handy little booklets for reading where and when you want. A four-X reduction in paper and I find the booklets MORE convient than regular printouts.
It depends on what you value - i.e. the things that are important to you and your quality of life. I value diversity in species, large natural areas without parking lots and strip malls. So for me bringing back an extinct species doesn't quite solve the problem as I see it. How about you, what do you value? Do you look forward to a world of big cities where the gaps inbetween are filled with endless burbs and the occasional nicely manicured park? If you are an american have you been to one of the more popular national parks recently? Many of them are very crowded. I suppose if you personally love being around throngs of people thats just fine. Me, I really like to listen to the breeze in the trees once in awhile without the sound of Fred yelling at Martha to shut the damn kids up.
I love a city experience, but I also want to be able to paddle my canoe, sail my boat, hike, or go on safari in wild areas. I am very thankful that "conservationists" are fighting to keep some places on our once beautiful planet for enjoying these things. Currently the evidence sugests to me that population growth (NOT economic growth) is at the root of these trends that to me, are BIG and very sad problems.
Hmmm.. I really shouldn't post when sleep deprived.
Hmmm... is "Torvalds" in the Ispell checker by default?
Now is some enterprising hacker/coder could go out and write a "Flame checking" program. I know I could sure use it. Sometimes I see red so bad I don't even know I'm flaming. Make it one of those irritating active things that checks as you type.
Slashdot Mirror
All economic theory I have been exposed to makes as one of its base assumptions availability of information to make good decisions. When good information does not exist then you can kiss your free market theory goodbye. Imagine the corrected tobacco adverts:
This stuff tastes terrible at first (but you'll get used to it) and it will eventually give you lung or throat cancer, BUT hey, it'll make you look cool and give you a brief high...
There is another aspect to this stuff too. If you have a minute go to http://www.henrygeorge.org and consider how our tax system also supports corporatism at the expense of quality of life for most of us. Do the quiz they have - quite an eye opener for me.
Oh come on, English is riddled with so many stupid rules, exceptions and non-sensicalities that caring about virii vs viruses is meaningless to the point of being stupid.
When English is 95% sensible rules and consistant patterns then I'll pay attention to the ravings of folks like you. Until then I'm for hacking and bastardizing the language as much as possible. Make up words, spell 'em as they sound, follow the patterns even when they are "wrong" anything to boycott the English language snobs.
"I would die to have some red dye."
"Please polish the Polish furniture."
"Would you hand me that piece of wood?"
Stupid pathetic excuse for a language.
If you can't tell, I'm mad 'cuz I spent too many damn years learning the language - and I still don't rate as a good speaker or writer.
I strongly agree with this. I have two young kids and have seen how seemingly innoculous (sp?) stuff strongly influences them. Teaching a six year old that being kind and courteous can be much more funtional in most (many?) situations is tough. You see, a six year old (at least my six year old son) would rather dispense with the "can you move, you're blocking my view" and go right to the Power Rangers approach - kick, shove and thump on the head. At this stage of his life I'd rather not have my son looking over the shoulder of some fifth grader who has just found that cindy and joe have a nice site on Fst-Fkng completely open and un-protected to anyone smart enough to use google.
However I would say that closed censoring ain't such a great idea either. How about every time someone proposes censoring porn that we add "Yeah great idea, hey, how about also censoring violent acts?" Watch the Senators squirm when they have to decline censoring violence but must still push their agenda of censoring sex.
Argh! I wasn't done, I meant to hit preview...
So anyway what gets me so mad is I see decisions being made that feel at odds with making our collective quality of life better. Would Amazon have kept their "one click" idea secret if they couldn't patent it? Would they have had less incentive to develop such an idea if it wasn't patentable? I would say no and probably no. I don't see how Amazon's ability to patent their so called "idea" did anything for our collective quality of life. I can see how it did some harm. Did the guy (or gal) who came up with the idea make good money from it?
With respect to patents I think the original purpose of patents might be better met by making patents automatically the property of the inventor and not of the corporation.
For me it often seems that the greater good at the root of many legal issues is forgotten while people fight for so called rights or justice. Patents for example are intended to get people to reveal their ideas instead of keeping them secret. This is clearly a "greater good" (if the system works right that is).
There is no "right" to have a monopoly on intelectual property but it serves our greater good to judiciously give out such a right.
Baloney! Its a myth, you can get minerals from water but ya don't have to. Lots of people around the world drink rain water that (except for sulphur, nitrates and mercury compounds :) is essentially distilled. Just make sure you have a nice varied diet (ummmm... haven't eaten dog in over 15 years, poodle stew time). If you are worried about minerals take a multi-vitamin/mineral suplement. I have references for this somewhere and could dig 'em up if anyone cared.
How'd you measure that head start? Not by number of fluent speakers surely. Part of the idea is to choose something that is _nobodys_ first language. Kind of levels the playing ground. Unfortunately lots of folks don't really like level playing grounds. Especially those who have the current advantage.
Pricy, clumsy and arguably unnecessary. Choose a common second language - Esperanto, Ido, Cook Island Maori, who cares which one just so long as its not as twisted as English and make it the official SECOND language. Too bad so many folks are so attached to our "mother tongue" to be open to such a simple, elegant and efficient idea.
Note: I said second language - I'm not advocating replacing anyones precious national language.
I think two things would make patents useful again.
1) Make patents non-transferable property with only limited duration leases allowed.
2) Make the life of a patent reflect the rate of change of the technology in the applicable field.
Heres why. If you assume the original idea of a patent was to give the inventor(s) a short term monopoly to use the idea in exchange for disclosing the idea to the public then we have a problem with 99% of the patents being granted today. The problem is that the patents are being granted to inventors who work for corporations BUT the patent rights are automatically going to the corporations! The inventor in many cases gets next to nothing. Corporations do not have ideas, inventors do. Thus solution 1) will put the power back into the hands of the inventors.
Imagine: you work for megacorp A. You have a bright idea that you know will improve megacorp A's product. The law lets YOU patent your idea and then lease it to whomever you please. YOU get some nice royalties from being creative and the public gets your idea put into the public view. Megacorp A gets to do what megacorps are supposed to do - efficiently bring massive resources to bear on meeting societies needs. In this case by leasing your patent to help them produce a product more effiently.
Of course the Corporate world has a lot to loose from something like this. As a society I think we would have a lot to gain.
I suspect item 2) speaks for itself.
I'm using Varkon to design steam engines and love it. It takes some getting used to and a little work to setup but for me it is great. Since I am designing a n-cylinder rotary engine where I haven't decided whether n will be 4, 6 or some other number I have been able to use the parametric ability of Varkon to make n one of the design parameters. Besides, I just like being able to type "make" as part of my design process. It just feels right :)
I don't remember the details but I believe that the government invalidated one of the patents that the original ENIAC designers had to enable competition in the very early days of computing. For better or for worse the government has been involved from the very beginning.
Running out of oil is an unlikely scenario. However energy prices rising steadily is a likely scenario. Oil extracted from tar sands is more expensive than oil pumped out of the ground. Also note that solar power, biodiesel etc. are very capital intensive and consequently expensive. I'd be all for fission and fusion except that so often it seems like selfish, insensitive and shortsighted people somehow seem to end up making the decisions and are only too happy to compromise safety, liveabilty and the environment to achieve their goals. Just look to relatively recent news for examples.
For all the aforementioned reasons I very much agree with the planet full of nukes. *sigh*
There was a good article in Scientific American last year about oil prices. I think they were predicting the "knee" in the price curve to hit in about ten years. So enjoy that gas guzzling SUV now!
I once - along time ago - consulted for a Russian ballet dancer who wanted to write his memoirs on a computer. He had a very hard time with basic things like hand eye co-ordination with the mouse and alien concepts like the hard disk/floppy disk and directories/folders metaphor. What I did was set him up with a bunch of macros under Word Perfect and showed him _one_ way to do things. Then he would note down step by step how to do that thing on a 3" x 5" card. This seemed to work pretty well except that Windows/Word Perfect was less than perfectly reliable and recovering when things didn't work perfectly was hard for him.
I think setting Linux up so that when he logs in KDE (or your favorite WM) comes up *with* say netscape and staroffice already started would be good. One of the 3x5 cards would be "switching to StarOffice - hold the ALT key down and hit the tab key until the little box on the screen says StarOffice then release the keys." In the case of the guy I was helping key combinations were much easier than mastering the mouse to "click once on the StarOffice icon."
By the by, one of the things that I see lacking when people get into discussing issues like making a computer accessable to people like this is a lack of respect for the challenge that seemingly simple tasks can be to someone who either doesn't have any frame of reference or background to do a supposedly easy task. There is nothing, in my opinion, intuitive nor natural about using a mouse, but it is a reasonably easy skill to learn for many people.
Seems to me I've heard it argued (and quite well) that decreasing freedoms around the world are mostly related to population growth. Imagine for instance that you halved the number of people in your town/city/whatever. Stands to reason I think that all else being equal everyone could drive twice as much and you'd *still* have less traffic issues. So if you want to be free - don't breed so damn fast ... :)
Almost but not quite. If google becomes aware of who you are and gives you an opportunity to associate yourself with certain groups (e.g. Debian, Linux user or detests the NRA etc.) then they would be close to what was proposed. Also google would have to know how you felt about the site *after* you went and perused it. Just surfing to it is not enough.
*sigh* yeah, I shoulda seen that coming. Not exactly the association I'm looking for. How about Bourne Free with some lions for mascots... :)
I coined the phrase "Forever Free" because I think it captures the sense of ownership jf talked about above. Linux is forever free. It cannot be forked into a closed branch where my contributions may even be debugged without me getting to see the fixes. Open source was a good catch phrase for getting businesses to open up to some new and scary ideas but for me and I think many others the real appeal lies in the GPL and how it makes things Forever Free. Whilst Sun opening up things like Star Office and Solaris is a good thing it won't slow down or distract those of us focused on projects like Linux and KOffice.
matt
--
matt@ocean.net
Absolutely. A printout fits in the pocket, doesn't hum, whirr or get hot. It is almost instantly accessable and rm -rf won't unwittingly destroy it.
Now there is one thing folks could be doing: use the pstools psbook command to print stuff out as booklets - four pages to an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. I wrote a trivial STk script that pops up a little window when my wife or I prints from netscape. It allows printing the first (odd) side then prompts you to put the paper back in for printing the even side. We also have a long reach stapler so you just print, fold and staple to make very handy little booklets for reading where and when you want. A four-X reduction in paper and I find the booklets MORE convient than regular printouts.
Dunno 'bout you but...
It depends on what you value - i.e. the things that are important to you and your quality of life. I value diversity in species, large natural areas without parking lots and strip malls. So for me bringing back an extinct species doesn't quite solve the problem as I see it. How about you, what do you value? Do you look forward to a world of big cities where the gaps inbetween are filled with endless burbs and the occasional nicely manicured park? If you are an american have you been to one of the more popular national parks recently? Many of them are very crowded. I suppose if you personally love being around throngs of people thats just fine. Me, I really like to listen to the breeze in the trees once in awhile without the sound of Fred yelling at Martha to shut the damn kids up.
I love a city experience, but I also want to be able to paddle my canoe, sail my boat, hike, or go on safari in wild areas. I am very thankful that "conservationists" are fighting to keep some places on our once beautiful planet for enjoying these things. Currently the evidence sugests to me that population growth (NOT economic growth) is at the root of these trends that to me, are BIG and very sad problems.
Hmmm.. I really shouldn't post when sleep deprived.
Consider Learning Esperanto: www.esperanto.net
Hmmm... is "Torvalds" in the Ispell checker by default?
Now is some enterprising hacker/coder could go out and write a "Flame checking" program. I know I could sure use it. Sometimes I see red so bad I don't even know I'm flaming. Make it one of those irritating active things that checks as you type.
Yeah, assuming it works. I'd still rather see
us all learning a common _second_ language such
as esperanto.
Note: I said second language - not all learning
a common language.
Look at http://www.esperanto.org if you're not familiar with esperanto.