While you are right in saying that it takes some sysadmin's time to do things like check queues and all that, if one assumes that the sysadmin is a salaried (or full-time) employee to begin with, then there is no additional cost because of the virus; the sysadmin is just doing his job. Now, if there were no virusus, you might need a sysadmin for less time, which might be a savings; but that's hardly a cost (depending, again, on your definitions of course). Unless, even given your example of "diverting people's attention to address the bounces" above, you can show me how that reduces income, or increases out-of-pocket expenses (i.e., those things which reduce profit), then I might be apt to believe these cost numbers. My guess is they don't affect revenue or cost - except if the price of A/V software goes up per instance.
In general, I have a hard time believing something is a "cost" when it is not an incremental cost over what is being done already. Call it semantics or being picky, but that's my take on things.
Put another way, when a virus hits, a company (as far as I know) doesn't have to spend more money than it is already spending - so how does the virus incur more cost? The nonsense about lost productivity due to the rank and file employee spending 1 hour fooling around with system reboots and deleting emails is also garbage in my book. It's very rare in wealth-producing industries for those responsible for production to actually spend time reading emails (you ever seen a factory floor worker taking time out to read emails?). It's also rare that a rank-and-file losing 1 hour of "work" will drop revenues by 1 hours' worth of salary and benefits. The equation does get fuzzy when you factor in lots of employees, though; I'll admit that.
Now, I'm not saying that viruses and such aren't annoying - I'm just suggesting we might look at things differently. After all, I question just about every way the "established industries" spin things.
Given that, I figure getting a patent should be a time consuming and expensive process, if for no other reason to prevent people applying for - and potentially getting - trivial or ridiculous patents.
Part of the problem with making patents expensive is that it then makes it more difficult for the garage inventor to get a patent, who is whom patents are supposed to help. I think, originally, patents were to protect the "small" guys from the "big" guys - think about it, why does a big huge company (and I work for one; our annual revenue is about $165 Billion) need protection when they can afford $100 Million in equipment to make it en masse tomorrow, where the little garage guy can't?
I think I'm going to work on a proposal where you can only work on a patent if you don't have the capability to do something already, and that you can't transfer a patent to [a big company] either. I'd have to do some thinking on how to make this work fairly, to be sure, but the patent system currently does not promote innovation; it merely promotes fear of getting sued.
As far as "prior art" is concerned, I think the bigger issue is not "prior art" but "obvious to someone skilled in the art." Most of the stuff getting patented might not be in prior art, but it sure as anything is obvious to people skilled in the art. That, in my book, is the real shortcoming of the current patent examination process.
The worst I've ever had to deal with, and I know others can top this, is to do extreme temperature shake tests of vehicles. Basically this means freezing a vehicle overnight to minus twenty (F), then spending about 30 minutes sitting in said vehicle to evaluate its performance. Mind you, this means the vehicle is tossing around on giant hydraulic cylinders like you're driving over the worst (non-)road you can imagine. Then, the heat lamps come on, and 8 hours later we do the same test after soaking the vehicle at 150 F. Do three times a week for 4 months straight. It's always fun when you come out of the minus 20 freezer to the plus-twenty outside temp and need to take off your coat. Also remember not to lean up against the heat-lamps, you might catch your coat on fire...
Re:Mars environment
on
News from Mars
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· Score: 2, Informative
Try Here
for more info. It's got info on all the planets.
I'm sure there are indeed laws, but they are unenforceable (as long as you are in space, anyway). Think about it: you launch a spacecraft, sit in space, turn the unused junk into something else, and then sell it or use it for fuel or whatever. Well, unless said owner is willing to spend money to send rockets up at you to blow you up, then you can do whatever you want.
Space is a place to be truly free to do what you want, which is both great and dangerous. Great, because most people won't bother to enforce anything. Dangerous, because the only way to enforce anything reverts back to force.
Actually, socialism and communism are both political and economic systems. Socialism is a stage between other systems (say, capitalism or feudalism) and communism. Communism is "no private property" but "everything available to everyone as they need it." Socialism is actually characterized by unequal distribution of wealth, where, ideally, communism could be characterized by uniform distribution of wealth.
If you think about in theory, mind you, communism is actually "nicer" than capitalism because everyone always has what they need, where captialism is based on, promotes, and thrives on an unequal distribution of wealth. In practice though, you can't ever get through socialism to reach communism due to human greed. So, unfortunately, communism is a pipe dream in the strictest sense.
I always chuckle at people complaining about the off-shoring of jobs and all that, because that is exactly the expected result of capitalism. Not that I like the idea of off-shoring, but I still chuckle.
Hrm, don't know why your particular post prompted this thought, but:
Is the default mode of the window clear or dark? That is, do I have to apply power to see through it or make it dark? Which is better? The bonus with blinds / curtains, aside from being vastly less expensive, is that they work with the power out...it seems the tech folks seem to forget stuff like that. *shrug*
I'll have to check when I go home, but I'm almost positive that a minimized, say, PDF, in the dock, has a little Acrobat Reader badge on it... is that what you're talking about?
Thanks for the link. I almost figured this was the case, but just using anisotropy of the earth (rather than tidal bulges).
Re:Global Slowing - not significant enough to worr
on
Clean Nuclear Launches?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
A truck speeds the earth back up when it brakes, though.
Incidentally, the earth has an angular momentum of about 9e33 kg-m^2/s (I might be off by a factor of two), for all those interested. For comparison, a 6000 pound (about 3000 kg) truck moving 30 m/s (about 70 mph) only has an angular momentum about the earth center of about 6e11 kg-m^2/s. A 10000kg spacecraft moving at 3000 m/s at 30000 km altitude, though, has 1e15 kg-m^2/s. Launching one spacecraft - just ONE - at this rate will take off about 4e-12 seconds of earth rotation per year. So, yeah, I guess that's small, but it's real!
I'm not sure I completely agree*; the moon only exerts a gravitational force on the earth and so cannot exert a torque on the earth. If there's no torque, it cannot change the rotation of the earth. However, the tides are energy-dissipative, but are not momentum dissipative. The only way the earth can slow down is if the atmosphere / oceans speed up, since those can exert a torque on the earth. Granted, this has a lot to do with the moon, but the moon's direct forces cannot slow down the earth. Or, I suppose, the moon might be able to exert a torque on the earth due to the uneven distribution of mass within the planet (i.e., the force of a moon on the mountain will produce a torque on the earth), but this doesn't have anything to do with tides.
That said, I haven't read anything on the subject of the earth-moon system other than that the moon is getting farther away from the earth. If you have any references, I'd appreciate them.
*Hrm. After writing this, I think I agree more than I originally thought I did...
I'm more concerned about Global Slowing. From the article istelf:
The extra angular momentum is stolen from the Earth's rotation.
Unless they plan on catching everything they launch again, then we will slowly be slowing the earth down. (Things traveling up and down only have a net zero momentum balance; the issue is launching spacecraft) This will, over time, have way more adverse effects on the planet's climate than all the gasoline-powered cars, forest burning, and nuclear engines combined. I could care less about stuff falling, but I do care about longer days totally wacking out the distribution of temperatures across the planet!
Hrm. I read this article, and it's clear to me that this is not a comparison, per se, of language. There doesn't seem to be any mechanism for accounting for the compiler used. The article also does not seem to indicate such things as file size, time to compile, or that information, which is also part of the "performance" of a language. I'm not sure how you could come up with a benchmark that would do this in the first place. A good study would look at the various languages across different platforms and compilers, determine the variability of "time to perform function X" due to compiler / platform, and then compare against the differences in different languages to determine if there is a statistically significant difference. Right now we only have some partial data - we don't know how much is due to the language, the compiler, or some other unknown noise factors.
These guys need to learn how to run designed experiments and provide useful data! This seems more like something to placate management...
Outsourcing is the worst thing that can possible happen to a local economy
That, my friend, is correct (emphasis mine). Offshoring is in fact quite damaging (in the short term) to the economy that off-shores. However, at the same time, it is very beneficial to the economy that receives the off-shoring "contracts" or whatever. In the long run, however, this will improve the overall - by which I mean "world" - economy. Unless, of course, we decide to start blowing each other up over the short-term pain.
I guess I should have stipulated that I meant "world" by "overall" - not "the US economy".
It's not slave labor, it's the nature of the beast. When we can pay someone in a foreign country, oh, say, $400/month and they can buy all they want and need because a)it's just cheaper over there and/or b)they don't want as much crap as we Americans do, that's not "slave labor". Also, we're not forcing anyone (in most of the tech instances) to undercut our local prices and work - it's their choice. Again, not slavery.
The problem here is that while offshoring is great for the overall economy, it does suck for the person that just lost their income. I'm with the camp that believes that while it's difficult and unfortunate it does drive people to do something for which people *will* pay them in their current location. If folks aren't willing to do that the I don't really have any tears for them. (Case in point: I had a friend get laid off, out of work for 12 months. When unemployment ran out, he was not "above" getting a $7/hour night security job. It's not great and he's still looking for an engineering job, but he's not complaining and sitting on his rear. I admire him for his ability to do what's necessary for income in these "adverse conditions". Oh, and his job wasn't off-shored; it was killed when his (large national telecomm company) went bankrupt.)
You're right. There is no reason to allow more of our "hard earned" cash to go to the current government. Simply establish a new political party, convice lots of people to give you money and elect someone from your party, then change things.
I can't say that you will be successful, but this is an option for you to try.
I just finished a class last semester that drilled into our heads that projects can be calculated in ways that will show them to be profitable, or calculated another way, to be unprofitable.
So what you're saying is that accounting is only one step above statistics? (The old "Statistics never lie, but you can make them say whatever you want" adage.)
This reminds me of an interesting bit of educated fiction I read about information passing methods used in intelligence communities (i.e., spy rings). The problem with this type of system is that you will always know the source of the (in this case) file. So, if you want to get the person sharing the file, you just back up the tree from anywhere. For instance - once you knoa a packet has stuff that you don't want sent, you can just back up the "sent from" arrow-tree and arrive at the sender, then send your cops or whatever to the point of entry. However, you have no way to locate the recipient quickly. This is NOT a Good Thing in some peoples' books, to be sure. The most secure information trasportation mechanism is the double-blind drop: the info source drops the [message] at some location, then the recipient picks it up from that spot. The recipient and sender do not know each other. (In spy rings, that means if one of them gets captured, the other one can't give info about them - the only weak point is the drop-point).
For computers, if you really want anonymity, you use encrypted files, broadcast everywhere always, and always listen to every packet (which you have to do anyway to select out yours) and see if it's yours. If it is, you keep it, otherwise ignore it and pass it on. Granted, this will not find the "most direct" route from source to target, but it is the most secure.
Network speed / anonymity are conflicting tradeoffs with the current implementation of the infrastructure.
Observation: if everyone always captures the whole file - like what if you just copied and stored every single packet that came your way, and everyone did this - then how could "ownership" be enforced? Would this (assuming it's technically feasible) be a Good Thing? I'm not sure I know how to answer that one...
This brings up many many questions and thoughts, but here's the one on which I will focus today:
What necessitates the need for granting of rights? Is it sentience? Or is it something else? I would posit that no matter what level of human mimicry our technology allows, it will at best be a mimicry. Why?
It is my belief that there is this thing called a "soul" which is the defining thing between humans and all other sentient life on earth. (There are arguments for other animals, such as dogs, dolphins, cats, etc. to have a soul, or not, but I won't go into that one for now). Considering we don't know what a soul is, how to measure it, whatever, then how can we say that a machine would have this? If we turn off a machine, it is turned off. What happens when you restart it? It comes back on (assuming it's not broken). Is it wrong to smash a (soulless) piece of machinery (considering you own it, destroying won't damage anyone, etc. etc.)? Why would a machine with "AI" be any different than a car? Just because it says "ow" when its sensors say that it is being damaged, and it starts to avoid being damaged, what is that? Single-celled organisms do that. Humans do that. But is that what makes humans special? Why is it OK for lions to kill other animals for food, but we get mad when lions kill humans? Why do we get mad when humans kill other animals for food? The troubling thing is this: the outcome of "sentient" AI will either mean that humans are simply machines as well and our laws and moral structure is simply hubris, and there is no real reason to preserve life at all, or there really is something more to humanity then the chemical mechanics of the body. There are only those two possibilities, and there isn't much grey area as far as I see it. One is full of despair, the other awe and wonder.
Mankind must come to first understand what it is that makes him different, and why, before he even thinks about granting "rights" to man's creations. After all, what is a "right" anyway but an agreement between the people with the bigger weapons to let you do something? For that is all a "right" really is in this world. Sure, that's kind of a cynical view, but it's the truth.
This is a bit off-topic, perhaps, but I posit the only "right" we have is the right to make choices. We can choose to do anything, but we must do so knowing that there are consequences. True rights cannot be taken away, and nobody can take away the ability for us to make decisions. Why? Because decisions can be made in the absence of anything else. Sure, we may be prevented from acting on our decisions, but nobody can take away the ability to make them. Sure, they can give us a lobotomy, but then what is left? (This is a possible hole in this idea that even decision-making is a right).
So, when it comes down to it, if we build robots, and start giving them priviledges (i.e., we won't shut them off for certain things and will punish others for doing so), then we have to understand what the consequences of this choice may be. And there's the old Law of Unintended Consequences to think about.... for every outcome you can forsee, there are usually (at least) two more you don't.
What I think bugs me most about this article, though, is that I want to know where I can get a job making cool robots like that!
Most Americans care only about Americans, and screw everyone else.
Almost. Most Americans only care about themselves, not even other Americans. If you don't believe me, watch people drive, shop, or perform any other "routine" activity.
Well, my problem is not so much with this particular patent, as usual, as it is with the patent system in general. I could argue the merits (and lack thereof) of this particular patent but that would hardly help solve the current issues with the patent system.
In order to address the issue with the patent system, the RIAA, SCO, the MPAA, and any other acronym you decide to dislike today, we have to figure out what it is the patent / copyright holders are requesting and what customers want (i.e., the reason innovation is Good).
Firstly, let's say I have just come up with a neat little gadget. Now if I'm a small operation, I don't want some giant company to come and use my idea to beat me out of business through mass production. I simply want to be able to make a living off my idea. If I'm an artist, or an author, I want to be able to make a living off my concepts / performance. There's a little difference between both these concepts, so I'll focus on the patent idea.
A patent, historically, applied to a new device or a new way of doing something (there are process patents, but typically they apply to things like "here's what you need to do to make chemical X"). Now, consider a patent to be something like an "implementation right". Basically a patent says that only the patent holder or the holder's approved agent may implement the said concept. This is similar to a copyright, which states that only the copyright holder or the holder's approved agent my copy a work. I don't have a problem with either of these concepts - with some caveats but I won't discuss those here.
Now, we can argue whether or not it is good for society to have a single entity or authorized group implementing some process. It is generally assumed that it is good for the person implementing it - assuming that the implementation yeilds something for which people are willing to pay. However, what about situations where the person holding the rights to implementation isn't really good at it, and someone knows they could do it better but aren't allowed to because the original holder won't give them approval. This would be a Bad Thing.
Now, what we see here is that independent of what is being implemented we can have unintended consequences with any "exclusive rights" kind of philosophy. What it is saying, though, is that such philosophies only work for "the greater good" if people are inherently altruistic, which history continually demonstrates is not the case.
On top of the above idea, there is also the question of "what constitues an idea for which the implementation authority should be limited?" This is the current hot-topic with IP, specifically patents. What implementable ideas should be protected? What are the costs and benefits of both? Who benefits from the choice? Rarely do we see some small company which is unable to manufacture many things, with small market presence, and some company comes and stomps on them by "copying" their idea. Typically we see one guy with a patent, no ability to produce it, not trying to produce it, but only waiting for someone to copy it. From time to time we may see a small entity with a patent and license (i.e., authorize) some company to produce the product. That is the intended purpose of a patent - to allow the authorized to get started. We also see large corporations, with no real risk of losing their "livelihood", with large portfolios of patents - typically they use these to keep other people out of their industry by requiring large licensing fees, which is opposite the desired effect of patents - they prop up artificial barriers to market entry.
As an aside, I have some issues with performance copyrights. For instance, people might be paying to see a particular person perform a song, not hear the particular song performed. For instance, me performing Beethoven's 9th on a kazoo is hardly the same as the London Symphony Orchestra playing it. So performance pieces, oddly, have a weird effect of there is the thing that is being performed i
I was just thinking about SCO's claim that they have "trade secrets" that they don't want to get out. There was a post later in this thread mentioning "what if some other guy came up with code that has the same functionality without stealing it?".
It is my understanding that this is one risk of "trade secret". If someone develops something the same time as you, but independently ('course, there could be issues of determining independence), then you don't have any claim to the idea because you did not disclose it. This is one aspect of patents, actually: you are making some technology public, but the patent gives you exclusive rights for the patent term. You are trading public knowledge for exclusive use. If I develop some widget in my basement, and some guy on the other side of the country does the same and we both sell it without protecting the idea, we don't have any mechanism for protection.
The fact that SCO is claiming "trade secret" could possibly be an advantage: "Hey folks, well their code was secret so we had to come up with our own way to do it, and we did. But since it was math, there was only really one way to do it, so it looks the same." (This you might be able to prove by giving 6 people some differential equations and having them solve it - my guess is they will all arrive at the same answer (if they know what they're doing, at any rate)).
So, in summary, do "trade secrets" have any protection if they are not stolen? If I make a competing technology for one that is a "trade secret" that does the same thing but without copying the guts, is there any grounds on which the offended party may seek damanges? Is that not part of the risk of keeping an idea "secret"?
Slashdot Mirror
Aramaic, yes. Latin, no. The other predominant language was Greek.
In general, I have a hard time believing something is a "cost" when it is not an incremental cost over what is being done already. Call it semantics or being picky, but that's my take on things.
Put another way, when a virus hits, a company (as far as I know) doesn't have to spend more money than it is already spending - so how does the virus incur more cost? The nonsense about lost productivity due to the rank and file employee spending 1 hour fooling around with system reboots and deleting emails is also garbage in my book. It's very rare in wealth-producing industries for those responsible for production to actually spend time reading emails (you ever seen a factory floor worker taking time out to read emails?). It's also rare that a rank-and-file losing 1 hour of "work" will drop revenues by 1 hours' worth of salary and benefits. The equation does get fuzzy when you factor in lots of employees, though; I'll admit that.
Now, I'm not saying that viruses and such aren't annoying - I'm just suggesting we might look at things differently. After all, I question just about every way the "established industries" spin things.
Part of the problem with making patents expensive is that it then makes it more difficult for the garage inventor to get a patent, who is whom patents are supposed to help. I think, originally, patents were to protect the "small" guys from the "big" guys - think about it, why does a big huge company (and I work for one; our annual revenue is about $165 Billion) need protection when they can afford $100 Million in equipment to make it en masse tomorrow, where the little garage guy can't?
I think I'm going to work on a proposal where you can only work on a patent if you don't have the capability to do something already, and that you can't transfer a patent to [a big company] either. I'd have to do some thinking on how to make this work fairly, to be sure, but the patent system currently does not promote innovation; it merely promotes fear of getting sued.
As far as "prior art" is concerned, I think the bigger issue is not "prior art" but "obvious to someone skilled in the art." Most of the stuff getting patented might not be in prior art, but it sure as anything is obvious to people skilled in the art. That, in my book, is the real shortcoming of the current patent examination process.
The worst I've ever had to deal with, and I know others can top this, is to do extreme temperature shake tests of vehicles. Basically this means freezing a vehicle overnight to minus twenty (F), then spending about 30 minutes sitting in said vehicle to evaluate its performance. Mind you, this means the vehicle is tossing around on giant hydraulic cylinders like you're driving over the worst (non-)road you can imagine. Then, the heat lamps come on, and 8 hours later we do the same test after soaking the vehicle at 150 F. Do three times a week for 4 months straight. It's always fun when you come out of the minus 20 freezer to the plus-twenty outside temp and need to take off your coat. Also remember not to lean up against the heat-lamps, you might catch your coat on fire...
Try Here for more info. It's got info on all the planets.
Space is a place to be truly free to do what you want, which is both great and dangerous. Great, because most people won't bother to enforce anything. Dangerous, because the only way to enforce anything reverts back to force.
If you think about in theory, mind you, communism is actually "nicer" than capitalism because everyone always has what they need, where captialism is based on, promotes, and thrives on an unequal distribution of wealth. In practice though, you can't ever get through socialism to reach communism due to human greed. So, unfortunately, communism is a pipe dream in the strictest sense.
I always chuckle at people complaining about the off-shoring of jobs and all that, because that is exactly the expected result of capitalism. Not that I like the idea of off-shoring, but I still chuckle.
Is the default mode of the window clear or dark? That is, do I have to apply power to see through it or make it dark? Which is better? The bonus with blinds / curtains, aside from being vastly less expensive, is that they work with the power out...it seems the tech folks seem to forget stuff like that. *shrug*
I'll have to check when I go home, but I'm almost positive that a minimized, say, PDF, in the dock, has a little Acrobat Reader badge on it... is that what you're talking about?
Thanks for the link. I almost figured this was the case, but just using anisotropy of the earth (rather than tidal bulges).
Incidentally, the earth has an angular momentum of about 9e33 kg-m^2/s (I might be off by a factor of two), for all those interested. For comparison, a 6000 pound (about 3000 kg) truck moving 30 m/s (about 70 mph) only has an angular momentum about the earth center of about 6e11 kg-m^2/s. A 10000kg spacecraft moving at 3000 m/s at 30000 km altitude, though, has 1e15 kg-m^2/s. Launching one spacecraft - just ONE - at this rate will take off about 4e-12 seconds of earth rotation per year. So, yeah, I guess that's small, but it's real!
Just thought I'd throw more fun into the discussion...
That said, I haven't read anything on the subject of the earth-moon system other than that the moon is getting farther away from the earth. If you have any references, I'd appreciate them.
*Hrm. After writing this, I think I agree more than I originally thought I did...
Unless they plan on catching everything they launch again, then we will slowly be slowing the earth down. (Things traveling up and down only have a net zero momentum balance; the issue is launching spacecraft) This will, over time, have way more adverse effects on the planet's climate than all the gasoline-powered cars, forest burning, and nuclear engines combined. I could care less about stuff falling, but I do care about longer days totally wacking out the distribution of temperatures across the planet!
These guys need to learn how to run designed experiments and provide useful data! This seems more like something to placate management...
I guess I should have stipulated that I meant "world" by "overall" - not "the US economy".
The problem here is that while offshoring is great for the overall economy, it does suck for the person that just lost their income. I'm with the camp that believes that while it's difficult and unfortunate it does drive people to do something for which people *will* pay them in their current location. If folks aren't willing to do that the I don't really have any tears for them. (Case in point: I had a friend get laid off, out of work for 12 months. When unemployment ran out, he was not "above" getting a $7/hour night security job. It's not great and he's still looking for an engineering job, but he's not complaining and sitting on his rear. I admire him for his ability to do what's necessary for income in these "adverse conditions". Oh, and his job wasn't off-shored; it was killed when his (large national telecomm company) went bankrupt.)
I can't say that you will be successful, but this is an option for you to try.
Or Fahrenheit 451... can't forget the robot dogs in that one!
So what you're saying is that accounting is only one step above statistics? (The old "Statistics never lie, but you can make them say whatever you want" adage.)
For computers, if you really want anonymity, you use encrypted files, broadcast everywhere always, and always listen to every packet (which you have to do anyway to select out yours) and see if it's yours. If it is, you keep it, otherwise ignore it and pass it on. Granted, this will not find the "most direct" route from source to target, but it is the most secure.
Network speed / anonymity are conflicting tradeoffs with the current implementation of the infrastructure.
Observation: if everyone always captures the whole file - like what if you just copied and stored every single packet that came your way, and everyone did this - then how could "ownership" be enforced? Would this (assuming it's technically feasible) be a Good Thing? I'm not sure I know how to answer that one...
What necessitates the need for granting of rights? Is it sentience? Or is it something else? I would posit that no matter what level of human mimicry our technology allows, it will at best be a mimicry. Why?
It is my belief that there is this thing called a "soul" which is the defining thing between humans and all other sentient life on earth. (There are arguments for other animals, such as dogs, dolphins, cats, etc. to have a soul, or not, but I won't go into that one for now). Considering we don't know what a soul is, how to measure it, whatever, then how can we say that a machine would have this? If we turn off a machine, it is turned off. What happens when you restart it? It comes back on (assuming it's not broken). Is it wrong to smash a (soulless) piece of machinery (considering you own it, destroying won't damage anyone, etc. etc.)? Why would a machine with "AI" be any different than a car? Just because it says "ow" when its sensors say that it is being damaged, and it starts to avoid being damaged, what is that? Single-celled organisms do that. Humans do that. But is that what makes humans special? Why is it OK for lions to kill other animals for food, but we get mad when lions kill humans? Why do we get mad when humans kill other animals for food? The troubling thing is this: the outcome of "sentient" AI will either mean that humans are simply machines as well and our laws and moral structure is simply hubris, and there is no real reason to preserve life at all, or there really is something more to humanity then the chemical mechanics of the body. There are only those two possibilities, and there isn't much grey area as far as I see it. One is full of despair, the other awe and wonder.
Mankind must come to first understand what it is that makes him different, and why, before he even thinks about granting "rights" to man's creations. After all, what is a "right" anyway but an agreement between the people with the bigger weapons to let you do something? For that is all a "right" really is in this world. Sure, that's kind of a cynical view, but it's the truth.
This is a bit off-topic, perhaps, but I posit the only "right" we have is the right to make choices. We can choose to do anything, but we must do so knowing that there are consequences. True rights cannot be taken away, and nobody can take away the ability for us to make decisions. Why? Because decisions can be made in the absence of anything else. Sure, we may be prevented from acting on our decisions, but nobody can take away the ability to make them. Sure, they can give us a lobotomy, but then what is left? (This is a possible hole in this idea that even decision-making is a right).
So, when it comes down to it, if we build robots, and start giving them priviledges (i.e., we won't shut them off for certain things and will punish others for doing so), then we have to understand what the consequences of this choice may be. And there's the old Law of Unintended Consequences to think about.... for every outcome you can forsee, there are usually (at least) two more you don't.
What I think bugs me most about this article, though, is that I want to know where I can get a job making cool robots like that!
Almost. Most Americans only care about themselves, not even other Americans. If you don't believe me, watch people drive, shop, or perform any other "routine" activity.
In order to address the issue with the patent system, the RIAA, SCO, the MPAA, and any other acronym you decide to dislike today, we have to figure out what it is the patent / copyright holders are requesting and what customers want (i.e., the reason innovation is Good).
Firstly, let's say I have just come up with a neat little gadget. Now if I'm a small operation, I don't want some giant company to come and use my idea to beat me out of business through mass production. I simply want to be able to make a living off my idea. If I'm an artist, or an author, I want to be able to make a living off my concepts / performance. There's a little difference between both these concepts, so I'll focus on the patent idea.
A patent, historically, applied to a new device or a new way of doing something (there are process patents, but typically they apply to things like "here's what you need to do to make chemical X"). Now, consider a patent to be something like an "implementation right". Basically a patent says that only the patent holder or the holder's approved agent may implement the said concept. This is similar to a copyright, which states that only the copyright holder or the holder's approved agent my copy a work. I don't have a problem with either of these concepts - with some caveats but I won't discuss those here.
Now, we can argue whether or not it is good for society to have a single entity or authorized group implementing some process. It is generally assumed that it is good for the person implementing it - assuming that the implementation yeilds something for which people are willing to pay. However, what about situations where the person holding the rights to implementation isn't really good at it, and someone knows they could do it better but aren't allowed to because the original holder won't give them approval. This would be a Bad Thing.
Now, what we see here is that independent of what is being implemented we can have unintended consequences with any "exclusive rights" kind of philosophy. What it is saying, though, is that such philosophies only work for "the greater good" if people are inherently altruistic, which history continually demonstrates is not the case.
On top of the above idea, there is also the question of "what constitues an idea for which the implementation authority should be limited?" This is the current hot-topic with IP, specifically patents. What implementable ideas should be protected? What are the costs and benefits of both? Who benefits from the choice? Rarely do we see some small company which is unable to manufacture many things, with small market presence, and some company comes and stomps on them by "copying" their idea. Typically we see one guy with a patent, no ability to produce it, not trying to produce it, but only waiting for someone to copy it. From time to time we may see a small entity with a patent and license (i.e., authorize) some company to produce the product. That is the intended purpose of a patent - to allow the authorized to get started. We also see large corporations, with no real risk of losing their "livelihood", with large portfolios of patents - typically they use these to keep other people out of their industry by requiring large licensing fees, which is opposite the desired effect of patents - they prop up artificial barriers to market entry.
As an aside, I have some issues with performance copyrights. For instance, people might be paying to see a particular person perform a song, not hear the particular song performed. For instance, me performing Beethoven's 9th on a kazoo is hardly the same as the London Symphony Orchestra playing it. So performance pieces, oddly, have a weird effect of there is the thing that is being performed i
It is my understanding that this is one risk of "trade secret". If someone develops something the same time as you, but independently ('course, there could be issues of determining independence), then you don't have any claim to the idea because you did not disclose it. This is one aspect of patents, actually: you are making some technology public, but the patent gives you exclusive rights for the patent term. You are trading public knowledge for exclusive use. If I develop some widget in my basement, and some guy on the other side of the country does the same and we both sell it without protecting the idea, we don't have any mechanism for protection.
The fact that SCO is claiming "trade secret" could possibly be an advantage: "Hey folks, well their code was secret so we had to come up with our own way to do it, and we did. But since it was math, there was only really one way to do it, so it looks the same." (This you might be able to prove by giving 6 people some differential equations and having them solve it - my guess is they will all arrive at the same answer (if they know what they're doing, at any rate)).
So, in summary, do "trade secrets" have any protection if they are not stolen? If I make a competing technology for one that is a "trade secret" that does the same thing but without copying the guts, is there any grounds on which the offended party may seek damanges? Is that not part of the risk of keeping an idea "secret"?