So can someone explain why we're "reinventing the wheel" here?
All of the unemployed aerospace engineers in Utah, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas (note the states and what political party tends to hold the senate and house districts where those engineers work at) all need to have "jobs" created with a stimulus bill to help out the economy of those respective congressional districts, in addition to some more campaign financing coming from the taxpayers of the United States that happens to pass through the hands of these contractors first.
Simply put, the reason we are "reinventing the wheel" is purely so members of Congress can "bring home the bacon". They really don't even care if the thing works at all or even gets into space, as the one purpose is to keep a whole bunch of people, as many as possible, busy as beavers doing essentially nothing. They could be digging ditches followed by another crew filling up that same ditch behind them for all the good it will be doing.
While the rocket equation has to work for getting something to orbit, the real trick is trying to keep politicians re-elected. That won't happen if these programs get cut and thousands of "highly skilled workers" are unemployed.... or if they become unemployed it will be easy to blame the "other" political party for failure to support this particular program.
BTW, I have asserted and will continue to assert that had the Saturn V been allowed to continue in an assembly line for the past 40 years doing all of the American launches over these years instead of using the Space Shuttle, that we would have sent more stuff into space, more astronauts would have flown, and the whole manned spaceflight program would have been cheaper with fewer deaths and we would have been to far more places in the Solar System than being stuck at LEO. Returning to a stacked capsule design like the Saturn V is basically a public acknowledgment that the entire Shuttle program was a colossal mistake.
Rule One of Life -- Never Get Caught There is no appeal, no reprieve, no forgiveness, no redemption, and no hope. Once you are caught, you can never be uncaught.
The problem here is the concept that anything is ethical and proper until you are caught. The real "truth" is that he shouldn't have been doing this in the first place, regardless of if he was caught or not.
Yes, I know human nature is that you act impulsively and ignore ethics and principles. That is why we try to pound them into kids at an early age with the remote hope that eventually some of that is going to sink into their skulls that unethical and immoral behavior eventually leads to ruin and it is better for everybody including yourself if you don't even start down that path.
Sadly, some adults either never learned those lessons or have deliberately chosen to ignore them.
BTW, I do think you can have "forgiveness" after a fashion. Those who you've wronged can have restitution, you can admit what you did was wrong, and you can "do the time" if you have broken criminal law. Somebody who can fess up, admit they have done something wrong, try to make things right and not do it again is to me somebody much more worthy of my sympathy and mercy than somebody who acts like a jerk and pretends like it never happened in spite of being caught red handed. You might not be able to be "uncaught", but you can be forgiven for what is human weakness if you try to be better next time. That is for me what is hope that humanity can become better in the future, however you define "better".
The para-sail was something that was a part of the Big Gemini program. I think it would have been an interesting project by itself. I don't know if that is the vehicle you thought was an Apollo spacecraft, as it was supposed to carry seven crew members.
All they are doing is taking the worst aspects of the DIRECT launcher design and combining them with the worst parts of Constellation. I don't see how anything wrong with that approach can help out.
Building a rocket that will carry a payload for a program that still doesn't exist to a destination that will no longer be there because this rocket will finally be completed after nobody cares sounds like an excellent idea.
His paranoia is justified, however. Can you imagine what somebody would do to say "yeah, I hacked Kevin Mitnick and imaged his computer"?
Security through obscurity can be helpful at times, and I think this is one of them. There is certainly no reason to disclose this kind of information.
If a company can invest its profits at a higher rate of return than the market in general, particularly in a high growth industry, it certainly makes sense to keep that money in the company and use it for expanding the company rather than pulling it out for investment elsewhere.
I think the classic example is Microsoft, which kept its profits for a great many years until finally they pretty much saturated their market to the point that the rate of return was no longer working out, and Microsoft was basically investing its cash reserves into the stock markets with other companies purely for keeping that money increasing in value. As a result, it offered dividends so its investors could do the same thing with that money using their own judgements rather than depending on Microsoft employees trying to outguess the market when they really weren't a mutual fund or financial services company.
The problem is when other companies try to duplicate the success of Microsoft only to find themselves on the short end of the stick. Then again, if the end result is that you are bought out by Microsoft (or another major company), the end result for investors is pretty much the same thing: The money eventually does get pulled out of the company and the equity returned to the shareholders, unless mismanagement of the company results in the equity being frittered away.
Every single time I've seen government intervention into a market, even if well intentioned, tends to backfire and cause the opposite reaction in the market than intended with the regulation. You want longer term investment thinking with this idea? You really will have the opposite happening where "contracts" will be traded instead of shares or some other instrument that will happen instead of the actual trading of shares. Perhaps something else will happen if those contracts are prohibited, then you have to keep piling on regulations on top of regulations to the point you simply can't trade at all.
Yeah, that does wonders for a market. The only role that a government ought to have is to make sure that the person selling and buy are being honest in whatever it is that they are doing. In other words, if they claim to be selling X number of shares in corporation ABC, those shares ought to be legitimate and not something made up out of thin air by a 3rd party.
I don't have problems with short selling, but naked shorting does seem problematic based upon the honesty issue I raised earlier. Even that isn't necessarily the end of the world, but disclosure and reporting is the key on that point too rather than simply prohibiting the practice where attempts to regulate the concept only drive the practice underground.
That makes as much economic sense as paying people to move a mountain of rocks from one place to another, and then paying people to move them all back.
Isn't that very similar to digging gold and then paying people to protect its transport?
The problem with this line of thinking is ignoring the value of the metal itself in terms of its use as an industrial product. Having gold sitting in the ground (in usually a very diffuse form) isn't readily useful if you want to take it out and make computer chips or create some jewelry with it. Gold has a whole bunch of really impressive qualities where it would be valuable even if we had a Star Trek Replicator technology which could spontaneously create piles of whatever it is that you wanted from pure energy.
The point is well taken, though, when the gold is otherwise just sitting in a vault and otherwise not being used.
The reason why pharmaceutical patents are a special case unto themselves is due to the clinical trials and the fact that the "start date" of a patent hits as soon as that clinical trial begins or even earlier if there has been some research into a drug idea. Reasonable clinical trials take years, sometimes decades to work out, by which time the patent has expired. It also costs literally millions of dollars to develop primarily because of government regulations involved in developing the drug, not really the chemical engineering aspects or the actual science to discover the drug itself which in comparison is statistical noise in the development budget.
It is for this reason I assert pharmaceutical patents ought to have perhaps even their own completely separate code that doesn't infect the rest of the patent code.
Yeah, patents suck, but for a great many other reasons I didn't address in my previous post. I was merely addressing the specific issue of pharmaceutical patents and how they might be beneficial, but they really are something completely different from almost anything else being patented.
The problem here is that the "killer app" of Bitcoin turns out to be financing Wikileaks and other subversive organizations, or providing a medium of exchange for black market transactions (by definition illegal). If those applications for the use of Bitcoins could turn out to set this kind of activity as a minority application rather than the chief rational for its existence, the issue wouldn't be so controversial.
Had Bitcoin been invented at or about the same time as PayPal, very likely it would have taken over the electronic purchasing exchange market share. Because it was developed much later, it is attempting to fill an application that already has solutions. In this sense, it is sort of like the Wankel engine where it can't really get a foothold into the marketplace because it really isn't all that superior to other market solutions.
The one "killer app" that I can see it being used for is perhaps something equivalent to Facebook credits.... but that would cut the Facebook developers out of the loop.
That only works if there is demand in the private sector for jobs which occurs in a growing economy. During a recession, cutting public jobs will just increase unemployment which lowers economic activity.
Over the short term, you are correct. Cutting public jobs will increase unemployment, particularly if cutting those jobs doesn't really resolve the issues that are hampering business growth and development. Since for most people's view that a recession is just a couple years long anyway, that is short term thinking.
The real key here to get the government to get out of the way so entrepreneurial development will happen. That doesn't necessarily imply that government workers have to be fired, although if they have nothing to do because they aren't enforcing non-existent regulations their value as being employed by the government is as useless as a government agency smashing windows and then paying people to repair them. See also the Parable of the broken window.
That makes as much economic sense as paying people to move a mountain of rocks from one place to another, and then paying people to move them all back.
The issue you are addressing here is a known issue, and something that anybody holding Bitcoins should be well aware of. Sadly, you don't mention that this "inflation" is kept in check by the fact that the growth in the number of Bitcoins is fixed by definition. Unlike the U.S. Dollar which can have Ben Bernanke type a few keys on the computer in his office and produce several trillion dollars, Bitcoins can't be "minted" enmass by any one person at once. Their rate of production is fixed and limited... where the "Bitcoin economy" more than takes that rate of production into stride.
This "30% annual rate" of growth is not a geometric progression, but an arithmetic increase of a fixed amount. Furthermore, the number of new coins "minted" is built into the software to gradually decrease to become practically non-existent. In other words, over time this growth diminishes. The philosophy here is that the growth of the economy in terms of adopters would be larger than the rate of increase in the money supply.... which generally has been true for the past year or so. As to if that growth in the number of users is sustainable is another question entirely.
Unless bitcoin quickly finds a legitimate source of commerce to own they are toast. And that is making the assumption for the sake of argument that the tech isn't bogus.
You can decide for yourself if the "tech" if legit or not, but as for using it for "legitimate commerce", I'd have to agree as well. I said as much numerous times on the official bitcoin forums and even tried to come up with some ways to make that happen. I still am doing that.... sort of.
I have a few problems with the way Bitcoin itself is set up, even if the concept of an electronic currency protected through encryption might be a good idea. My issues are down in the gritty details and some of the presumptions that were arbitrarily decided upon by "Satoshi" that I simply don't agree with. The core idea, that a currency base protected through encryption was as strong as the majority of the CPU power of the network is a pretty sound idea. Still, if a majority of the network is engaged in illegal activity, you have to wonder about those CPU cycles too.
Project Gutenberg has yet to recover from his decision to limit the original texts to just ASCII w/ no mark-up --- providing even the most minimal of text markup was verboten.
At the time he made that decision, there was no other markup language which was available to use on the texts, at least one which was available under a public specification that also wasn't encumbered by proprietary restrictions like a patent, trade secret, or copyright. That there were other problems along the way only emphasizes more that he was a pioneer who sort of stumbled along the way and had to discover all of these things that you obviously know with perfect 20/20 hindsight.
Considering he started this before HTML or even SGML, I think Michael Hart did a pretty good job of anticipating future technologies. Every single one of these criticisms can be accounted for in terms of the history of computing and the fact that storage technology has changed dramatically since he entered Gutenberg Text #1. In terms of storage costs, the entire current Gutenberg archive including "original scans", markup, illustrations, and even fonts can be stored on a device that costs less today in even raw dollars (ignoring inflation adjustment) than it cost to store that original Declaration of Independence. Posts of this nature show sheer ignorance to me. It only goes to show to me that pioneers have arrows in their backs from people like this.
If you see a problem... fix it. Either you are a blowhard and just like to criticize, or you have the technological capability to be able to improve all of the things you are complaining about. Michael Hart started the process, and he knew it was going to take more than a lifetime to be able to get it all put together with the vision he had. These texts are in the public domain, so there is absolutely no excuse for you to sit back and complain if you haven't at least made a reasonable effort to improve upon these texts and tried to make the improvements you are suggesting are necessary.
Go, spend your own money, set up a website, and show us how to do it right. I dare you! Seriously! If you want to tell other people how to do something they are doing as best as they can, you won't get any sympathy from me.
I think his reasoning behind ASCII-only content was not only sound, but prescient. I have seen dozens (hundreds?) of data file formats come and go, where the only thing from previous eras is a data code which pre-dates not just the internet but electronic computers in general. Even now, HTML is not nearly as standard, where it seems like everybody (especially the major browser developers) want to keep tweaking the standard with all kinds of bells and whistles.
In this sense, in spite of people otherwise complaining, I think it was a good move on his part to "wait and see". At the very least, any data files containing Gutenberg Project e-books should be in a format that is either completely in the public domain (as ASCII was back when he started unlike nearly all other text formats at the time) or something whose specification is patent free and where the specification is available under an open source license (like the GFDL or CC-by-SA). HTML fits that definition, but we happen to be lucky that it does. Had he gone with WordPerfect files years ago (then considered a reasonable standard when I first came across the Gutenberg texts), there would be some real problems today. Don't get me started on Microsoft Word files.
Such is the life of leeches on society, who take and take without a thought of trying to give back. If this AC was genuine with his desire to spread this content, he would have purchased a server and hosted this content on his own dime rather than sucking bandwidth off of somebody else.
I agree, the GP must die in fire, or spend an eternity in some for that attitude alone.
I would dare say that without Michael Hart, Eldred v. Ashcroft would not have happened, and his effort to speak out against the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Act (also known as CTEA) will still have political consequences into the future. He drew a line in the sand and there are now many others who are picking up his torch to push back. That the line might have been crossed, at least people know now that territory has been lost and needs to be recaptured.
The most amazing thing he did, ultimately, was to make the decision to do something useful with his enormous grant of computer resources back at a time when such things were almost insanely expensive and to try and contribute back to humanity in general rather than waste his time on computer games or other nonsense. Instead of hunting a Wumpus, chasing a dwarf through a twisted maze of caves looking alike in all directions, or talking to a rather lousy psychoanalyzing savant, he choose instead to type in the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and started to work on Shakespeare. While I have no doubt that he may have done the other stuff too, he spent his time in a very noble pursuit at a time most of the rest of us really didn't care about such matters and therefore thought more deeply about what would happen to his efforts before the rest of us caught up to him and his leadership.
I was never so fortunate as to have met Michael personally, but I have been instrumental in spreading his works and have been a minor cog in trying to spread this knowledge even further. I certainly owe him a debt of gratitude and he will be missed.
Copyright law is a tricky thing, and Michael Hart had to navigate through that maze all while trying to preserve books which were in theory part of the public domain in spite of the best efforts of many people to assert copyright on these older works and somehow getting away with it. In as litigious of a society that the United States of America has become, legal disclaimers are not just useful but necessary.
If you read the fine print, you could take Gutenberg texts and send them into "every possible nook and cranny", but you merely had to remove anything which mentioned the Gutenberg Project by doing so. Copyright was never asserted, and what you are quoting here is one of but many paragraphs like this.
What you are complaining about here is the need for lawyers because other lawyers want to screw you over and grind you to dust. Michael Hart lived in the real world, unlike some people. That he also had to pay rent, buy food, and do a few other things all the while trying to promote the archiving of the world's historical literature into electronic form is just more proof that sometimes people just don't get it. Michael Hart certainly didn't die a very wealthy man in terms of Wall Street recognizable assets, but he certainly left the world as a whole much richer as a result of his living on this planet and and certainly left a legacy that will live on for generations to come. That is a hell of a lot more than I can say about you (whoever you are AC) or even myself.
I made a mistake in installing a virus on my computer in the first place. It is called Microsoft Windows with an internet connection. The rest, as they say, is history. Otherwise, you are correct that if I used an operating system I wrote myself and my own compilers, as well as avoided a network connection, I wouldn't have to worry about that stuff. Good luck with that.
What the patent law does is protection your investment that was needed for the invention. (Like the 100 millions spend to develop a new drug in the pharma industry)
Pharmaceutical companies and their efforts to patent drugs is a special case all unto itself and is not a valid argument either for nor against patents, with extra rules that come from the Food and Drug Administration which make the process of creating new drugs extra hard and almost impossibly expensive. The role of the USPTO in that game is mostly incidental other than the rules of the game are even more complex as a result of patents getting into the mix. I would dare say that patenting of drugs out to be its own law if for nothing else than to deal with the fact that the issues are unique to that one areas of technical development.
For more ordinary "inventions", the "protection of investment" is a big deal, but not nearly so important nor does it really cause the same kinds of problems. If you can't market and sell an invention within the period of time that the patent covers, you are likely doing a lousy job of marketing and have some serious problems even trying to get people to recognize you.
By far and away the best reason for seeking a patent is not for protection of the investment to stop somebody from making something like what you have made, but rather to keep somebody else from suing you into oblivion when they make something similar and have been issued patents protecting their inventions. If you've created a proper patent application, odds are very high that your competitor has violated your patent even if you have technically violated theirs. That is where "cross-licensing" comes in, where both of you then license each other's patents, walk away happy, and screw over your mutual competition. See also MPEG-LA as a classic example of this.
My reasoning is if the ultimate goal is cross-licensing, wouldn't it be easier if such patents never existed in the first place since it really doesn't give exclusive rights to an invention?
The problem with this philosophy is that the patent application does not document the concept except on a very broad basis. Rarely have I ever seen a patent application document what exactly it is supposed to do even by somebody "skilled in the field". At best, a patent application disclaims what it isn't in very terse legal language, basically listing previous patents and explaining why it is something different and therefore patentable.
Years ago the Patent Office required an inventor to submit either a model or a sample of the patented invention. When that was done, there at least was some documentation in terms of having the device and having something physical to compare with other inventions. Yes, I know it is difficult to file away a locomotive or even a steam valve, but it did require some effort on the part of the inventor to have something to patent. Those early models are documentation in terms of industrial progress and can be referenced to make new inventions or to rebuild something which was claimed as a novel invention in the past. Such documentation simply does not exist with the current patent system.
By far and away the best repository of documentation for software and technology in general is Source Forge and perhaps GitHub, which has long ago replaced the USPTO as a repository of knowledge in this field. I would dare say even for mechanical engineering the USPTO is a lousy repository if it ever was that good. If it was such a good repository of knowledge, you would have patent applications as a standard reference library for almost every engineer.... instead of having employers go out of their way to tell you to never read patent applications and even use reading them as grounds for dismissal. Patent applications simply don't perform this claimed duty of documenting concepts or recording the state of knowledge in the industry.
Part of this is because there seems to be far fewer Slashdot readers than in the past. The stupider ones have moved to Digg, reddit and Hacker News, apparently
While I will admit there have been many Slashdot readers who have moved to other websites, I think the issue here is more that as a percentage of the web community Slashdot no longer is the dominate community of discussion. This is more because there simply are fewer geeks running around on the web any more as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other "social media" sites have more ordinary non-geek people.... any one of which can also post a link going viral that will dwarf anything Slashdot would ever produce. Many of the larger websites routinely expect a large number of visitors for some things they post, and can more than compensate for what happens when they become the focus of a lot of people at once.
Slashdot will still bring a huge number of visitors to a site and for somebody doing a homebrew website it can be a big deal, but I'd agree that due to improvements in hardware and better software management there isn't nearly so much of a problem any more.
I'll admit that quantifying ratios or percentages of a particular element is a bit more difficult as opposed to simply detecting if it exists in a star. What I was trying to get across is that the theory under which spectral data is calculated is pretty sound and has been subjected to numerous experiments to back up that theory where a suggestion that spectral analysis needs a whole new theory to explain what is being seen is quite a bit of a stretch.
Yes, trying to get increased precision in measurement data is difficult, and there are other examples in astronomy where the theory is very sound but measurement data is still approximate. Stellar parallax is one of those areas where only recently has data for even nearby stars been able to get beyond a single digit of accuracy or even been able to get the order of magnitude down to any precision.
I should note that increasing precision of measurement has resulted in a number of scientific breakthroughs, with a classical example of how the work of Tycho Brahe (using naked eye measurements and not even a telescope) was able to provide a data set which allowed Johannes Kepler to more accurately determine the orbit of Mars and established the theories in Kepler's Laws. I see what is happening here with this particular star to be precisely that sort of breakthrough, and how pushing back the frontiers of science can and does result in increased knowledge about our universe.
Slashdot Mirror
So can someone explain why we're "reinventing the wheel" here?
All of the unemployed aerospace engineers in Utah, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas (note the states and what political party tends to hold the senate and house districts where those engineers work at) all need to have "jobs" created with a stimulus bill to help out the economy of those respective congressional districts, in addition to some more campaign financing coming from the taxpayers of the United States that happens to pass through the hands of these contractors first.
Simply put, the reason we are "reinventing the wheel" is purely so members of Congress can "bring home the bacon". They really don't even care if the thing works at all or even gets into space, as the one purpose is to keep a whole bunch of people, as many as possible, busy as beavers doing essentially nothing. They could be digging ditches followed by another crew filling up that same ditch behind them for all the good it will be doing.
While the rocket equation has to work for getting something to orbit, the real trick is trying to keep politicians re-elected. That won't happen if these programs get cut and thousands of "highly skilled workers" are unemployed.... or if they become unemployed it will be easy to blame the "other" political party for failure to support this particular program.
BTW, I have asserted and will continue to assert that had the Saturn V been allowed to continue in an assembly line for the past 40 years doing all of the American launches over these years instead of using the Space Shuttle, that we would have sent more stuff into space, more astronauts would have flown, and the whole manned spaceflight program would have been cheaper with fewer deaths and we would have been to far more places in the Solar System than being stuck at LEO. Returning to a stacked capsule design like the Saturn V is basically a public acknowledgment that the entire Shuttle program was a colossal mistake.
Rule One of Life -- Never Get Caught
There is no appeal, no reprieve, no forgiveness, no redemption, and no hope. Once you are caught, you can never be uncaught.
The problem here is the concept that anything is ethical and proper until you are caught. The real "truth" is that he shouldn't have been doing this in the first place, regardless of if he was caught or not.
Yes, I know human nature is that you act impulsively and ignore ethics and principles. That is why we try to pound them into kids at an early age with the remote hope that eventually some of that is going to sink into their skulls that unethical and immoral behavior eventually leads to ruin and it is better for everybody including yourself if you don't even start down that path.
Sadly, some adults either never learned those lessons or have deliberately chosen to ignore them.
BTW, I do think you can have "forgiveness" after a fashion. Those who you've wronged can have restitution, you can admit what you did was wrong, and you can "do the time" if you have broken criminal law. Somebody who can fess up, admit they have done something wrong, try to make things right and not do it again is to me somebody much more worthy of my sympathy and mercy than somebody who acts like a jerk and pretends like it never happened in spite of being caught red handed. You might not be able to be "uncaught", but you can be forgiven for what is human weakness if you try to be better next time. That is for me what is hope that humanity can become better in the future, however you define "better".
The para-sail was something that was a part of the Big Gemini program. I think it would have been an interesting project by itself. I don't know if that is the vehicle you thought was an Apollo spacecraft, as it was supposed to carry seven crew members.
All they are doing is taking the worst aspects of the DIRECT launcher design and combining them with the worst parts of Constellation. I don't see how anything wrong with that approach can help out.
Building a rocket that will carry a payload for a program that still doesn't exist to a destination that will no longer be there because this rocket will finally be completed after nobody cares sounds like an excellent idea.
His paranoia is justified, however. Can you imagine what somebody would do to say "yeah, I hacked Kevin Mitnick and imaged his computer"?
Security through obscurity can be helpful at times, and I think this is one of them. There is certainly no reason to disclose this kind of information.
If a company can invest its profits at a higher rate of return than the market in general, particularly in a high growth industry, it certainly makes sense to keep that money in the company and use it for expanding the company rather than pulling it out for investment elsewhere.
I think the classic example is Microsoft, which kept its profits for a great many years until finally they pretty much saturated their market to the point that the rate of return was no longer working out, and Microsoft was basically investing its cash reserves into the stock markets with other companies purely for keeping that money increasing in value. As a result, it offered dividends so its investors could do the same thing with that money using their own judgements rather than depending on Microsoft employees trying to outguess the market when they really weren't a mutual fund or financial services company.
The problem is when other companies try to duplicate the success of Microsoft only to find themselves on the short end of the stick. Then again, if the end result is that you are bought out by Microsoft (or another major company), the end result for investors is pretty much the same thing: The money eventually does get pulled out of the company and the equity returned to the shareholders, unless mismanagement of the company results in the equity being frittered away.
Every single time I've seen government intervention into a market, even if well intentioned, tends to backfire and cause the opposite reaction in the market than intended with the regulation. You want longer term investment thinking with this idea? You really will have the opposite happening where "contracts" will be traded instead of shares or some other instrument that will happen instead of the actual trading of shares. Perhaps something else will happen if those contracts are prohibited, then you have to keep piling on regulations on top of regulations to the point you simply can't trade at all.
Yeah, that does wonders for a market. The only role that a government ought to have is to make sure that the person selling and buy are being honest in whatever it is that they are doing. In other words, if they claim to be selling X number of shares in corporation ABC, those shares ought to be legitimate and not something made up out of thin air by a 3rd party.
I don't have problems with short selling, but naked shorting does seem problematic based upon the honesty issue I raised earlier. Even that isn't necessarily the end of the world, but disclosure and reporting is the key on that point too rather than simply prohibiting the practice where attempts to regulate the concept only drive the practice underground.
That makes as much economic sense as paying people to move a mountain of rocks from one place to another, and then paying people to move them all back.
Isn't that very similar to digging gold and then paying people to protect its transport?
The problem with this line of thinking is ignoring the value of the metal itself in terms of its use as an industrial product. Having gold sitting in the ground (in usually a very diffuse form) isn't readily useful if you want to take it out and make computer chips or create some jewelry with it. Gold has a whole bunch of really impressive qualities where it would be valuable even if we had a Star Trek Replicator technology which could spontaneously create piles of whatever it is that you wanted from pure energy.
The point is well taken, though, when the gold is otherwise just sitting in a vault and otherwise not being used.
The reason why pharmaceutical patents are a special case unto themselves is due to the clinical trials and the fact that the "start date" of a patent hits as soon as that clinical trial begins or even earlier if there has been some research into a drug idea. Reasonable clinical trials take years, sometimes decades to work out, by which time the patent has expired. It also costs literally millions of dollars to develop primarily because of government regulations involved in developing the drug, not really the chemical engineering aspects or the actual science to discover the drug itself which in comparison is statistical noise in the development budget.
It is for this reason I assert pharmaceutical patents ought to have perhaps even their own completely separate code that doesn't infect the rest of the patent code.
Yeah, patents suck, but for a great many other reasons I didn't address in my previous post. I was merely addressing the specific issue of pharmaceutical patents and how they might be beneficial, but they really are something completely different from almost anything else being patented.
The problem here is that the "killer app" of Bitcoin turns out to be financing Wikileaks and other subversive organizations, or providing a medium of exchange for black market transactions (by definition illegal). If those applications for the use of Bitcoins could turn out to set this kind of activity as a minority application rather than the chief rational for its existence, the issue wouldn't be so controversial.
Had Bitcoin been invented at or about the same time as PayPal, very likely it would have taken over the electronic purchasing exchange market share. Because it was developed much later, it is attempting to fill an application that already has solutions. In this sense, it is sort of like the Wankel engine where it can't really get a foothold into the marketplace because it really isn't all that superior to other market solutions.
The one "killer app" that I can see it being used for is perhaps something equivalent to Facebook credits.... but that would cut the Facebook developers out of the loop.
That only works if there is demand in the private sector for jobs which occurs in a growing economy. During a recession, cutting public jobs will just increase unemployment which lowers economic activity.
Over the short term, you are correct. Cutting public jobs will increase unemployment, particularly if cutting those jobs doesn't really resolve the issues that are hampering business growth and development. Since for most people's view that a recession is just a couple years long anyway, that is short term thinking.
The real key here to get the government to get out of the way so entrepreneurial development will happen. That doesn't necessarily imply that government workers have to be fired, although if they have nothing to do because they aren't enforcing non-existent regulations their value as being employed by the government is as useless as a government agency smashing windows and then paying people to repair them. See also the Parable of the broken window.
That makes as much economic sense as paying people to move a mountain of rocks from one place to another, and then paying people to move them all back.
The issue you are addressing here is a known issue, and something that anybody holding Bitcoins should be well aware of. Sadly, you don't mention that this "inflation" is kept in check by the fact that the growth in the number of Bitcoins is fixed by definition. Unlike the U.S. Dollar which can have Ben Bernanke type a few keys on the computer in his office and produce several trillion dollars, Bitcoins can't be "minted" enmass by any one person at once. Their rate of production is fixed and limited... where the "Bitcoin economy" more than takes that rate of production into stride.
This "30% annual rate" of growth is not a geometric progression, but an arithmetic increase of a fixed amount. Furthermore, the number of new coins "minted" is built into the software to gradually decrease to become practically non-existent. In other words, over time this growth diminishes. The philosophy here is that the growth of the economy in terms of adopters would be larger than the rate of increase in the money supply.... which generally has been true for the past year or so. As to if that growth in the number of users is sustainable is another question entirely.
Unless bitcoin quickly finds a legitimate source of commerce to own they are toast. And that is making the assumption for the sake of argument that the tech isn't bogus.
You can decide for yourself if the "tech" if legit or not, but as for using it for "legitimate commerce", I'd have to agree as well. I said as much numerous times on the official bitcoin forums and even tried to come up with some ways to make that happen. I still am doing that.... sort of.
I have a few problems with the way Bitcoin itself is set up, even if the concept of an electronic currency protected through encryption might be a good idea. My issues are down in the gritty details and some of the presumptions that were arbitrarily decided upon by "Satoshi" that I simply don't agree with. The core idea, that a currency base protected through encryption was as strong as the majority of the CPU power of the network is a pretty sound idea. Still, if a majority of the network is engaged in illegal activity, you have to wonder about those CPU cycles too.
Project Gutenberg has yet to recover from his decision to limit the original texts to just ASCII w/ no mark-up --- providing even the most minimal of text markup was verboten.
At the time he made that decision, there was no other markup language which was available to use on the texts, at least one which was available under a public specification that also wasn't encumbered by proprietary restrictions like a patent, trade secret, or copyright. That there were other problems along the way only emphasizes more that he was a pioneer who sort of stumbled along the way and had to discover all of these things that you obviously know with perfect 20/20 hindsight.
Considering he started this before HTML or even SGML, I think Michael Hart did a pretty good job of anticipating future technologies. Every single one of these criticisms can be accounted for in terms of the history of computing and the fact that storage technology has changed dramatically since he entered Gutenberg Text #1. In terms of storage costs, the entire current Gutenberg archive including "original scans", markup, illustrations, and even fonts can be stored on a device that costs less today in even raw dollars (ignoring inflation adjustment) than it cost to store that original Declaration of Independence. Posts of this nature show sheer ignorance to me. It only goes to show to me that pioneers have arrows in their backs from people like this.
If you see a problem... fix it. Either you are a blowhard and just like to criticize, or you have the technological capability to be able to improve all of the things you are complaining about. Michael Hart started the process, and he knew it was going to take more than a lifetime to be able to get it all put together with the vision he had. These texts are in the public domain, so there is absolutely no excuse for you to sit back and complain if you haven't at least made a reasonable effort to improve upon these texts and tried to make the improvements you are suggesting are necessary.
Go, spend your own money, set up a website, and show us how to do it right. I dare you! Seriously! If you want to tell other people how to do something they are doing as best as they can, you won't get any sympathy from me.
I think his reasoning behind ASCII-only content was not only sound, but prescient. I have seen dozens (hundreds?) of data file formats come and go, where the only thing from previous eras is a data code which pre-dates not just the internet but electronic computers in general. Even now, HTML is not nearly as standard, where it seems like everybody (especially the major browser developers) want to keep tweaking the standard with all kinds of bells and whistles.
In this sense, in spite of people otherwise complaining, I think it was a good move on his part to "wait and see". At the very least, any data files containing Gutenberg Project e-books should be in a format that is either completely in the public domain (as ASCII was back when he started unlike nearly all other text formats at the time) or something whose specification is patent free and where the specification is available under an open source license (like the GFDL or CC-by-SA). HTML fits that definition, but we happen to be lucky that it does. Had he gone with WordPerfect files years ago (then considered a reasonable standard when I first came across the Gutenberg texts), there would be some real problems today. Don't get me started on Microsoft Word files.
Such is the life of leeches on society, who take and take without a thought of trying to give back. If this AC was genuine with his desire to spread this content, he would have purchased a server and hosted this content on his own dime rather than sucking bandwidth off of somebody else.
I agree, the GP must die in fire, or spend an eternity in some for that attitude alone.
Then it is likely you know nothing about the history of e-books. Study up on the topic before you spout off other nonsense like this.
I would dare say that without Michael Hart, Eldred v. Ashcroft would not have happened, and his effort to speak out against the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Act (also known as CTEA) will still have political consequences into the future. He drew a line in the sand and there are now many others who are picking up his torch to push back. That the line might have been crossed, at least people know now that territory has been lost and needs to be recaptured.
The most amazing thing he did, ultimately, was to make the decision to do something useful with his enormous grant of computer resources back at a time when such things were almost insanely expensive and to try and contribute back to humanity in general rather than waste his time on computer games or other nonsense. Instead of hunting a Wumpus, chasing a dwarf through a twisted maze of caves looking alike in all directions, or talking to a rather lousy psychoanalyzing savant, he choose instead to type in the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and started to work on Shakespeare. While I have no doubt that he may have done the other stuff too, he spent his time in a very noble pursuit at a time most of the rest of us really didn't care about such matters and therefore thought more deeply about what would happen to his efforts before the rest of us caught up to him and his leadership.
I was never so fortunate as to have met Michael personally, but I have been instrumental in spreading his works and have been a minor cog in trying to spread this knowledge even further. I certainly owe him a debt of gratitude and he will be missed.
Copyright law is a tricky thing, and Michael Hart had to navigate through that maze all while trying to preserve books which were in theory part of the public domain in spite of the best efforts of many people to assert copyright on these older works and somehow getting away with it. In as litigious of a society that the United States of America has become, legal disclaimers are not just useful but necessary.
If you read the fine print, you could take Gutenberg texts and send them into "every possible nook and cranny", but you merely had to remove anything which mentioned the Gutenberg Project by doing so. Copyright was never asserted, and what you are quoting here is one of but many paragraphs like this.
What you are complaining about here is the need for lawyers because other lawyers want to screw you over and grind you to dust. Michael Hart lived in the real world, unlike some people. That he also had to pay rent, buy food, and do a few other things all the while trying to promote the archiving of the world's historical literature into electronic form is just more proof that sometimes people just don't get it. Michael Hart certainly didn't die a very wealthy man in terms of Wall Street recognizable assets, but he certainly left the world as a whole much richer as a result of his living on this planet and and certainly left a legacy that will live on for generations to come. That is a hell of a lot more than I can say about you (whoever you are AC) or even myself.
I made a mistake in installing a virus on my computer in the first place. It is called Microsoft Windows with an internet connection. The rest, as they say, is history. Otherwise, you are correct that if I used an operating system I wrote myself and my own compilers, as well as avoided a network connection, I wouldn't have to worry about that stuff. Good luck with that.
What the patent law does is protection your investment that was needed for the invention. (Like the 100 millions spend to develop a new drug in the pharma industry)
Pharmaceutical companies and their efforts to patent drugs is a special case all unto itself and is not a valid argument either for nor against patents, with extra rules that come from the Food and Drug Administration which make the process of creating new drugs extra hard and almost impossibly expensive. The role of the USPTO in that game is mostly incidental other than the rules of the game are even more complex as a result of patents getting into the mix. I would dare say that patenting of drugs out to be its own law if for nothing else than to deal with the fact that the issues are unique to that one areas of technical development.
For more ordinary "inventions", the "protection of investment" is a big deal, but not nearly so important nor does it really cause the same kinds of problems. If you can't market and sell an invention within the period of time that the patent covers, you are likely doing a lousy job of marketing and have some serious problems even trying to get people to recognize you.
By far and away the best reason for seeking a patent is not for protection of the investment to stop somebody from making something like what you have made, but rather to keep somebody else from suing you into oblivion when they make something similar and have been issued patents protecting their inventions. If you've created a proper patent application, odds are very high that your competitor has violated your patent even if you have technically violated theirs. That is where "cross-licensing" comes in, where both of you then license each other's patents, walk away happy, and screw over your mutual competition. See also MPEG-LA as a classic example of this.
My reasoning is if the ultimate goal is cross-licensing, wouldn't it be easier if such patents never existed in the first place since it really doesn't give exclusive rights to an invention?
The problem with this philosophy is that the patent application does not document the concept except on a very broad basis. Rarely have I ever seen a patent application document what exactly it is supposed to do even by somebody "skilled in the field". At best, a patent application disclaims what it isn't in very terse legal language, basically listing previous patents and explaining why it is something different and therefore patentable.
Years ago the Patent Office required an inventor to submit either a model or a sample of the patented invention. When that was done, there at least was some documentation in terms of having the device and having something physical to compare with other inventions. Yes, I know it is difficult to file away a locomotive or even a steam valve, but it did require some effort on the part of the inventor to have something to patent. Those early models are documentation in terms of industrial progress and can be referenced to make new inventions or to rebuild something which was claimed as a novel invention in the past. Such documentation simply does not exist with the current patent system.
By far and away the best repository of documentation for software and technology in general is Source Forge and perhaps GitHub, which has long ago replaced the USPTO as a repository of knowledge in this field. I would dare say even for mechanical engineering the USPTO is a lousy repository if it ever was that good. If it was such a good repository of knowledge, you would have patent applications as a standard reference library for almost every engineer.... instead of having employers go out of their way to tell you to never read patent applications and even use reading them as grounds for dismissal. Patent applications simply don't perform this claimed duty of documenting concepts or recording the state of knowledge in the industry.
Part of this is because there seems to be far fewer Slashdot readers than in the past. The stupider ones have moved to Digg, reddit and Hacker News, apparently
While I will admit there have been many Slashdot readers who have moved to other websites, I think the issue here is more that as a percentage of the web community Slashdot no longer is the dominate community of discussion. This is more because there simply are fewer geeks running around on the web any more as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other "social media" sites have more ordinary non-geek people.... any one of which can also post a link going viral that will dwarf anything Slashdot would ever produce. Many of the larger websites routinely expect a large number of visitors for some things they post, and can more than compensate for what happens when they become the focus of a lot of people at once.
Slashdot will still bring a huge number of visitors to a site and for somebody doing a homebrew website it can be a big deal, but I'd agree that due to improvements in hardware and better software management there isn't nearly so much of a problem any more.
I'll admit that quantifying ratios or percentages of a particular element is a bit more difficult as opposed to simply detecting if it exists in a star. What I was trying to get across is that the theory under which spectral data is calculated is pretty sound and has been subjected to numerous experiments to back up that theory where a suggestion that spectral analysis needs a whole new theory to explain what is being seen is quite a bit of a stretch.
Yes, trying to get increased precision in measurement data is difficult, and there are other examples in astronomy where the theory is very sound but measurement data is still approximate. Stellar parallax is one of those areas where only recently has data for even nearby stars been able to get beyond a single digit of accuracy or even been able to get the order of magnitude down to any precision.
I should note that increasing precision of measurement has resulted in a number of scientific breakthroughs, with a classical example of how the work of Tycho Brahe (using naked eye measurements and not even a telescope) was able to provide a data set which allowed Johannes Kepler to more accurately determine the orbit of Mars and established the theories in Kepler's Laws. I see what is happening here with this particular star to be precisely that sort of breakthrough, and how pushing back the frontiers of science can and does result in increased knowledge about our universe.