But this is Macroeconomics, not micro! Things that are mistakes on lower economic levels stop being mistakes when you blow them up by a factor of 1,000 or so, right?
To paraphrase the above: If the center of the Earth was hollow, then there wouldn't be any rocks there, so there wouldn't be any rocks to squish you.
(but it's not hollow, so there are rocks there, so they would.)
And this is currently up to +3 Insightful how?
There is no "mass canceling out" involved. Even though in a hollow shell, the gravetational attractions for rocks in the shell on you at the center all cancel, the gravitational attractions of those rocks on each other don't, so big hollow shells of rock collapse into planets. All the rock trying to get to the lowest spot is what squishes things, not the pull that rock exerts on you.
In the same way, if you were in the asteroid belt, and you got between two floating rocks coming together at a thousand miles an hour, they would squish you quite thoroughly even though they were both too small to have significant gravity. It doesn't matter one little bit whether they are drawn together by their own gravity, by your gravity as well (if you are big enough to matter), or brought together by some other means, like attacked rockets or just starting out with the right vectors.
3.... (Copies of) obsolete material can be made up to 3 times if no actual manufacturer copy can be obtained...
This, plus the other refferences to 1 time, 3 times, etc, seem to go to the heart of the problem of copyright's current supression of older works.
The library can meet isolated demand, if it is for 3 copies total or less for a given work. Normally, that same work will not be brought back into print unless there is a demand for at least 500 copies or more, given typical minimum print runs, AND the publisher has high confidence that such a demand actually exists. That gap between three and 500 or so represents the deliberate disregard for potential markets of just 4 to 499 people. The old fashioned publishing system treats these as too small to consider, and effectively says they are not even potential customers. Then those same publishers want to treat these small markets, too insignificant to even consider, as a massive threat that requires extreme legal restraint or it will somehow imperil their whole business. Which is it?
People almost always miss the plot of LotR entirely. To put it in your own terms, 1. "good guys get ring back from bad guys - 10 Min, tops. 2. good guys find out that using it will destroy everything they hope to preserve - that ought to be good for another 10 min, at least. 3. good guys find they can't just sit on the damned thing and ignore it either - that gives us at least a half hour total. 4. good guys have to destroy ring - Jackson got about 4 hours out of this. Maybe that's excessive, but I'll bet it's worth more than 10 more minutes. 5. Add in a recapitulation of ALL major themes in English Lit from about Beowulf to just before T.S. Eliot - I think we can safely give that at least 1/2 an hour, but yes we could leave that out as re. actual plot - it counts more as what Rand called a Plot/Theme. 6. Plus Aragorn gets to the far side of the board and says "Crown Me!", while the Gondorians argue about whether they should have a king or not - That ought to count as part of your plot somewhere, and be good for at least 10 more minutes. 7. Add in Frodo resists temptation, Golum does too (a bit), both give in before the end, but it works out anyway - I don't see dealing with this in less than 1/2 an hour myself, but maybe.
If the lord of the Rings could be summed up in your plot, all those 900,000 bad generic fantasy novels that tried to imitate it with '"good guys get ring back from bad guys", use it to defeat bad guys, yay!', would all also be great literature. In fact, one of the best proofs that LotR IS literature is the sheer number of people who have written imitations that assume any good guy getting the powerful magic item automatically wins. The best parellel is to those idiots who rewrote Shaxpur's tragedys to give them happy endings.
SARCASM ENABLED It's those pesky founding fathers! They revolted against the King and supported a right to vote. This took away our rights, because they didn't also include a right to vote many times in the same election, and a right to stop people we disagree with from voting too, and all those other rights we should have gotten too. We were free when we had no vote, now we are slaves because we have recognition of just one right which wasn't recognized before, instead of unlimited rights that 'should' go with it.
No, worse, it's God's (or the FSM's, or whomever's) fault. He made us with free will, and that took away our right not to have to decide, because "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice".* We were free before we had the ability to make choices, now our rights are restricted by freedom itself. Fredom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and we have always been at war with the GPL! SARCASM OFF
By the way, how did you come up with a phrase like "Copyright does not have a restriction against not sharing", and not see what that implies for your own arguement? Cancel both negatives and you get "Copyright has a restriction against sharing", which is a.) true, and b.) precisely the point you are trying to ignore by using your tortuous double negative. You yourself have just claimed that the restriction you are attributing to the CC liscence actually originates within copyright instead. Your whole subsequent claim is then predicated on ignoring your own earlyer statement.
* Pert and Lee, after some French dead white male.
"The patent reviewer should instead estimate the time until he would expect an independent rediscovery if the invention was hypothetically kept secret."
And of course, the "tricorder", "communicator", and "non-invasive medical scanner bed" are all obviously things we weren't likely to spontaniously invent until the 23rd century without some incredible act of genius, so the basic cell phone patents, PET scan patents and such should 'fairly' be protected for at least another 200 years. There were plenty of well educated and reasonable people of just the sort a patent office is likely to employ, who thought at the time that original Star Trek's estimates for when these technologies would become available were, if anything, optimistic. You could probably find plenty of them now who would still bet we are 50 or even 100 years away from the real world equivalent of Dr. McCoy's saltshakers, whereas I'd say about 10, or even less.
How long till computer voice recognition actually works? Till we get true AI? Teleportation? My own guesses would be respectively 20 years, 50-80 years, and Never, but plenty of people smarter than me would disagree on any of the above.
Also, the current economics of invention mean large corporations would be trying to pack the patent offices with people who were hyper-cautious types, likely to decide that no one else would have thought of one click shopping for 100 years, if they possibly can.
Still, your additional rule about trade secrets does make your overall proposal sound a bit more workable. Mind you, I still think you're off the mark, but in a way that might lead to something genuinely interesting in the end. You've shown enough sense to logically plug one of the worst holes that would otherwise result, maybe you can turn this into a fully fleshed out alternative.
Another rule you might look at is greatly expanding precidence, i.e. prior art's durations in a specific field would need to be vey significant in helping determine projected durations for new inventions in the same field. That might even include not just how long the invention existed before improvements were developed, but how long until some country with less repect for patents started producing knock-off versions, how long after patenting did anyone actually make a profit off of it, and so on.
I don't know how this idea would impact those rare, really revolutionary devices that create a whole new field, and just offhand, that might be a flaw big enough to shoot my whole suggestion down. I can also think of a lot of other questions, like "What impact should creating a safer or more 'environmentally friendly' version of an existing device, still under patent have on duration, both of the original version and the new one?"
The word you want is depreciation, not devaluation. Office furniture is usually depreciated with a period of either 5 or 7 years, for example stock shelves are usually figured at 5, file cabinets at 7, and so on. (if memory serves, the lawmakers in the New York legislature that first set up this system in the US (about 1790) actually had a debate where it was argued that shelves handled by the general public depreciate a bit faster than most office furniture since the latter is only being handled by people of the employable classes). Buildings and fixed constructions of various types are depreciated over 15 year (seen a lot for fences, baseball park benches and backstops, and such), 27.5 (the period most often required for residential rental property), 29, 39 (usually for non-residential real property) or 40 year periods. For these longer times, the periods that are only a year or two off of others exist mostly because there are some options such as straight line depreciation vrs various curves where more of the total comes off in the first years and less in the later ones, and these have become associated with specific periods.
Land itself is never depreciated, and generally appreciates instead, which is one reason why real estate almost always increases in value.
For what it's worth, helicopters depreciate in 5 years, and working horses still under age 12 in 7 years. There's lots of things beside fixtures and buildings that can be depreciated.
Depreciation does NOT mean the same thing as devaluation. No one is claiming by taking depreciation that any car over 5 years old is somehow totally worthless, for example. The claim is that the worth that remains comes not just from the initial money spent on the car but increasingly from more money spent on maintenance and upkeep. This approach is pretty fair in most cases - how much is a 5 year old car that's never been serviced going to be worth? What shape would a 27.5 year old rental property be in if the landlord didn't do any maintenance, painting, or repairs the whole time?
In more complex business situations, a lot of depreciation is basically "What's the equivalent of a 14 year old assembly line set-up likely to be worth in terms of potential profit to the business, if a competitor has a 3 year old version, or a brand new one?" (Or, if a potential competitor could rely on you having to stick with the 14 year old stuff for at least 10 more years before you could even consider replacing it, what would that do to your bottom line?).
One good example of this is a car used for business. The car can be depreciated using a standard curve that also allows taking standard mileage, but if the business does this, they can't claim the maintenance, gas, oil, and so on. Alternately, they can claim the maintenance, parts, and actual fuel and oil costs, but then there's no depreciation or standard mileage at all allowed.
Why is it every time someone says something completely idiotic, the defense is "dummy.. you thought I was serious? It was a joke!"?
Um, maybe because it really was a joke, and some of us readers actually got it, and you didn't? And then you started trying to cover for yourself by calling names, PLUS you accused the other poster of calling names first (With your dummy paraphrase) when he actually didn't? Pot, meet Asperger's syndrome!
More seriously, you appear to be a totally humorless, hyper-defensive and somewhat paranoid individual (witness you accusing the other poster of what you yourself were about to do, that they had not) who threatens violence every post in his sig. You might want to work on all that. Most seriously of all, GET PROFESSIONAL HELP!!!!
"After all, Dr Ellerman concedes that their may be no way of distinguishing minds from machines purely on the basis of behavior." "It seems that Dr Ellerman's essay considers two different types of physical devices that are potentially indistinguishable on the basis of behavior. "
It seems that the reviewer considers both mind and brain to both be purely physical things, and indeed synonyms - Physical devices that are thus potentially indistinguishable on the basis of behavior. Upon adopting this axiom, he is then (somewhat unsurprisingly) able to conclude there is no distinction! But the lack of a distinction simply arises from the fact that he has arbitrarily defined amind and brain into a single category in the first place.
Review translated: Trust me, I don't have any underlieing assumptions like he does, so I'm right and he's wrong, PH33R MY L33T PH1L0S0PHY SKILZ!
If your friends and relatives can reliably get you music for X-mas that you like, then in principle, a sufficiently advanced algorythm can match your tastes as well. Sufficiently advanced in the context of my first sentence probably doesn't mean anything approaching true A.I., but just means able to take as much input on one limited subject from you as your friends and relatives do, and weigh it according to a few observed habits while ignoring many others. This is actually a pretty well defined problem - for example, it should in theory be far, far easier to get you new works that are similar to many you've liked already, than to find something you would consider novel or strange to your tastes but still end up liking.
It's diamagnetism, not paramagnetism, but yes, the frogs are generally fine, or at least they live as long as average. (If levitated frogs all acquire borderline personality disorders, beleve in Thetans and Zemu, or gain triskaidekaphobia, how would we tell?)
The Higgs Boson has never been observed experimentaly. A small number of events were recorded by the LEP experiment (CERN), and these could be interpreted as resulting from Higgs Bosons, but the evidence is inconclusive.
The Large Hadron Collider, currently under construction (also at CERN), is expected to eventually confirm or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson with a few months of experiments once completed. At this point, we have only indirect experimental evidence. We can't test another prediction like inflation with it until some of Higg's own predictions become testable.
Inflation actually solves several problems, at the expense of predicting an infinite number of unobservable phenomina (whole parallel universes with differing physical laws). By Occam's Razor, absolutely any alternate explanation to inflation is to be preferred - I can claim the Flying Spagetti Monster did it, right after He invented time travel, assisted by exactly 144,000 seraphim, whose names, in order of mightyness, start with Larry, Moe, and Curley Sue, and I've still proposed a theory that generates fewer unprovable hypothesi than an infinite number of undetectable "alternate' universes.
That's just for Guth's original work. Hawking tried to give some more backing to it, and had to postulate an unobservable second time dimension, an unobservable imaginary property to this second time axis, and as it turned out a way to apply a whole new form of math that involved rotation, ala trigonometry, without the negative quadrents existing to rotate through (since he dropped the negative half of the regular time axis fifty pages back). Even the totally mind boggleing concept of rotating vectors through dimensions that he had already rejected as non-existant didn't actually get rid of the infinite number of unobservable predictions problem, as Hawking finally acknowledged. Hawking was roundly criticized for treating imaginary in the mathematical sense as meaning imaginary in the common sense, and has since admitted he made both that and a few other mistakes in the papers behind "A Brief History of Time". If you know of someone who has done a better job, by all means, give a link, but all the ones I've seen seem to make the untestable predictions problem worse, not better.
That's precisely what's wild about inflation - it makes an infinite number of untestable predictions, and is still considered science for the testable ones. It does explain a few things very well (like homogeneity), so it's probably on the right track somewhere, but the real thory we need (IMNSHO) is going to explain why the universe looks superficially like the classic Big Bang model, deal with the ways the very early universe deviates from that classical model, fully (and not partially or selectively)include QM in the first few femtoseconds, and either prove that some physical constants are non-random, or show that they don't, at the least, have to be random and so don't have to spin off so many untestable predictions.
Well said, gardnermike. Isn't one of the basic points of natural selection that species are sets with fuzzy bondaries rather than rigid ones? Species sometimes split into branches, or otherwise give rise to new species, right? Species become extinct, but new ones usually rush in to fill the same ecological niches, right? No species has ever become un-extinct once dead, but we are not down to a handful of species, so new ones must be comeing from somewhere, right? Amazing how many people claim to be pro-evolution/anti-creation science here on Slashdot, while clinging to a definition of species that would make William Jennings Bryan glad.
The theory of Evolution really consists of two sub-theories: Mendellian Genetics and Darwinian Selection. Mutation is a part of genetics, and happens randomly - Natural Selection is the NON-random part of the overall theory. Natural selection always proceeds towards the immediately optimum goal of increasing the number of viable copies of a given gene that exist in the ecosystem, ignoring all other, possibly longer term goals (including the integrity of species boundaries, and the survival of the parent organism, if these conflict). That's an extremely non-random filtering process.
Proudhon also said "Property is Liberty", and various other Property== quotes. The only way I see to make sense of Proudhon is to assume he wasn't talking about the same kinds of property in the same applications. We're left with "Property (subscript 1) is Theft", "Property (subscript 2) is Liberty", etc.
Oh, but if we do that, we're essentially discussing a system where property rights have to be balanced with other rights. Wonder what that would be like? Anyone know of a real world case?
I'm six foot tall, and every single time I maxed an army physical fitness test, I weighed right around 185. The military physical fitness standards assumed possible overweight for a six foot tall male started at about 192 for 18 year olds, and about 200 lbs. even for 30 year olds. Even that's just 'possibly' overweight, not guarenteed. At those numbers you tape the individual and do a body fat calculation to get a percentile instead of just relying on the scale, and some cases would tape above the mil spec standard of 18% (at age 18-24) while others might still have numbers like 9%. Civilan bodyfat indexes don't even start calling it overweight until bodyfat is over 25%, usually 30%. Sorry, but 185 is normal for a 6 ft. 30 year old male, if he is physically active (and I mean active, like 5 mile runs, 20 mile marches with a 55 lb pack, and the like, not a little jogging). 155 is likely to be grossly underweight in such conditions, and unless you are talking about totally sedentary individuals, is generally regarded as quite unsafe. Yes, you are usually better off as a 155 lb. sedentary type than a 220 lb. one, but normal means physically active.
But politicians exist to create laws - it's how they prove that they're actually doing something in Congress (or wherever they are.) So as long as there are politicians, and as long as there are special interests and lobbying, there will be more laws.
It doesn't take much to moderate this. Get enough good publicity and support for any politician that simplifies laws, cleans obsolete laws off the books, or proposes laws with clearly limited focuses, and they will emphasize such methods instead of making the code more complex. Senator Proxmire used to do a lot with his "Golden Fleece" awards, but they were focused on his causes, for better, AND QUITE OFTEN for worse (like his anti-NASA slant).
Found a group with some name like "Buddies of the Taxpayer" (or a little more serious), seek out junior congresscritters that spend time on legeslative reform comittees, and give them award plaques and occasional small speaking honoraria (honorariums?) within the legal limits, and in 20 years, congress will be increasingly full of power players who brag about reducing or simplifying legislation, because that's what got them started up the ladder. To make the reinforcement more effective, give a few negative awards to politicians who propose unnecessarily complex bills or tack on blatently unrelated amendments. Make up new names for these awards now and then, so it all looks more like news. The News agencies are looking for things that look new even (some say particularly) if they are are really just respun.
Oh, "that will never work"? This is how "Friends of the Family" got going, or for that matter the AARP or the NRA, and those groups power has generally grown even without them taking nearly maximum advantage of the media. For that matter, there are existing groups interested in legislative oversight. Join or contribute to them, help them maximize publicity rather than fall into a rut, and maybe that 20 years I suggested becomes 10.
Ooops! If I had to screw up a tag, at least I'm glad it was the bold face and not the link, but still, I'm sorry - the only part that should have been bold was the second occurance of the word 'old'.
Yes, but...
The old model isn't really the old model. There was a time, that ended around World War 1, that the best enyclopedias tended to have articles by really top experts in their fields, i.e. Thomas Edison writng about his own inventions, or Woodrow Wilson about European geopolitics. That didn't necessarily eliminate bias (sometimes far from it), but it did often greatly boost quality in other ways.
Here's an online version of one of the best examples - the "Love to Know" encyclopedia, based on the Britanica 11th edition, for those interested in seeing what encyclopedia meant once:
By 1940 or so at most, the overwhelming majority of new encyclopedia articles were by staff writers, who were generally not known for any original (as opposed to synthetic) contributions to the fields they addressed, who sometimes interviewed really primary sources directly, but were often at third remove or more. For articles updating older entries, there was almost never new deep research done. An update on Relativity, for example was likely to involve taking the opinion of an easily accessable local college professor as to how an older version should be rewritten for modern readers.
Digital Universe could be very similar to the late era print model, and have entries mostly by academics for 'major' subjects and hobby writers for 'minor' ones, or it could deliberately leverage the hypertext-like online model, the ease and speed of modifying flawed entries and seeing the corrections propagate, the easing of editorial space restrictions for 'minor' subjects, and other net-typical advantages to go back to the older old model, which (IMHO), would make the results much more tolerable.
You know that Frist changed his vote. You infer it was to swap over to the winning side.
News about how the patriot act has been used against U.S. citizens in cases where a warrent was normally required, by agencies normally barred from domestic activity, has been rapidly breaking over the last 72 hours. Yet somehow, you can swear Bill Frist didn't hear anything in that time that could have caused him to vote 'No' on principle, only on expediency?
Since the first patriot act vote was almost unanimous, it's obvious that it was mostly Democrats that changed their minds in the ensuing four years, and mostly Republicans that didn't. You're defending the Democratic party by claiming that changing your mind is a bad thing? That arguement will come back to haunt you when the next Democrat running for the presidency is painted as just another wishy-washy fence straddler, just like in the last few elections.
The Bible also claims that the individual was made by God, while the state is merely made by man. It further claims that the individual will last forever, while the state is of finite duration.*
* specific verses quoted on request.
I'm not sure from your post just what you mean, so please, if my disagreement seems blunt or harsh, consider this my limitation: 1. I don't understand why you wrote "(King James)" without an actual quote from that translation following. 2. From what you wrote following that, I can't tell if you are referring to something in the New Testament or the Old. If the New, and particularly some of the things attributed to Christ Himself, you may be responding fairly on thread to the earlier poster, but if you're thinking of some of the Old Testament verses that could apply, it's not much of a response to that poster's claim. Even if you are referring to the "render unto Caesar" verses, that's open to a lot of interpretation. Speaking of that interpretation, you do know that "Christian philosophy", would normally be as much a reference to the writings of Augustine or Aquinas, if not newer authors up to Berkley, Kirkegaard, and Tolstoy, and probably way beyond, as directly to the Bible? People have been defining how (and if) they think that verse should be balanced with their versions of the ideal of human freedom for nearly two thousand years, and they've come up with some pretty good answers. Right now, you're parroting an arguement every Christian abolitionist during the Civil war considered and rejected.
The Constitution of the United States does not contain the word "privacy". Nowehere in the 14th amendment is there a reference to corporations. From these two facts, I can, using your logic, offer a hearty "no it's not." and "Nothing about freedom" to just about every person today who claims the Constitution is about the value and freedom of individuals, since the overwhelming majority of people today subscribe to at least one of those two points as being interpretable from the document.
Slashdot Mirror
But this is Macroeconomics, not micro! Things that are mistakes on lower economic levels stop being mistakes when you blow them up by a factor of 1,000 or so, right?
To paraphrase the above: If the center of the Earth was hollow, then there wouldn't be any rocks there, so there wouldn't be any rocks to squish you.
(but it's not hollow, so there are rocks there, so they would.)
And this is currently up to +3 Insightful how?
There is no "mass canceling out" involved. Even though in a hollow shell, the gravetational attractions for rocks in the shell on you at the center all cancel, the gravitational attractions of those rocks on each other don't, so big hollow shells of rock collapse into planets. All the rock trying to get to the lowest spot is what squishes things, not the pull that rock exerts on you.
In the same way, if you were in the asteroid belt, and you got between two floating rocks coming together at a thousand miles an hour, they would squish you quite thoroughly even though they were both too small to have significant gravity. It doesn't matter one little bit whether they are drawn together by their own gravity, by your gravity as well (if you are big enough to matter), or brought together by some other means, like attacked rockets or just starting out with the right vectors.
3. ... (Copies of) obsolete material can be made up to 3 times if no actual manufacturer copy can be obtained...
This, plus the other refferences to 1 time, 3 times, etc, seem to go to the heart of the problem of copyright's current supression of older works.
The library can meet isolated demand, if it is for 3 copies total or less for a given work. Normally, that same work will not be brought back into print unless there is a demand for at least 500 copies or more, given typical minimum print runs, AND the publisher has high confidence that such a demand actually exists. That gap between three and 500 or so represents the deliberate disregard for potential markets of just 4 to 499 people. The old fashioned publishing system treats these as too small to consider, and effectively says they are not even potential customers. Then those same publishers want to treat these small markets, too insignificant to even consider, as a massive threat that requires extreme legal restraint or it will somehow imperil their whole business. Which is it?
People almost always miss the plot of LotR entirely. To put it in your own terms,
1. "good guys get ring back from bad guys - 10 Min, tops.
2. good guys find out that using it will destroy everything they hope to preserve - that ought to be good for another 10 min, at least.
3. good guys find they can't just sit on the damned thing and ignore it either - that gives us at least a half hour total.
4. good guys have to destroy ring - Jackson got about 4 hours out of this. Maybe that's excessive, but I'll bet it's worth more than 10 more minutes.
5. Add in a recapitulation of ALL major themes in English Lit from about Beowulf to just before T.S. Eliot - I think we can safely give that at least 1/2 an hour, but yes we could leave that out as re. actual plot - it counts more as what Rand called a Plot/Theme.
6. Plus Aragorn gets to the far side of the board and says "Crown Me!", while the Gondorians argue about whether they should have a king or not - That ought to count as part of your plot somewhere, and be good for at least 10 more minutes.
7. Add in Frodo resists temptation, Golum does too (a bit), both give in before the end, but it works out anyway - I don't see dealing with this in less than 1/2 an hour myself, but maybe.
If the lord of the Rings could be summed up in your plot, all those 900,000 bad generic fantasy novels that tried to imitate it with '"good guys get ring back from bad guys", use it to defeat bad guys, yay!', would all also be great literature. In fact, one of the best proofs that LotR IS literature is the sheer number of people who have written imitations that assume any good guy getting the powerful magic item automatically wins. The best parellel is to those idiots who rewrote Shaxpur's tragedys to give them happy endings.
SARCASM ENABLED
It's those pesky founding fathers! They revolted against the King and supported a right to vote. This took away our rights, because they didn't also include a right to vote many times in the same election, and a right to stop people we disagree with from voting too, and all those other rights we should have gotten too. We were free when we had no vote, now we are slaves because we have recognition of just one right which wasn't recognized before, instead of unlimited rights that 'should' go with it.
No, worse, it's God's (or the FSM's, or whomever's) fault. He made us with free will, and that took away our right not to have to decide, because "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice".* We were free before we had the ability to make choices, now our rights are restricted by freedom itself. Fredom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and we have always been at war with the GPL!
SARCASM OFF
By the way, how did you come up with a phrase like "Copyright does not have a restriction against not sharing", and not see what that implies for your own arguement? Cancel both negatives and you get "Copyright has a restriction against sharing", which is a.) true, and b.) precisely the point you are trying to ignore by using your tortuous double negative. You yourself have just claimed that the restriction you are attributing to the CC liscence actually originates within copyright instead. Your whole subsequent claim is then predicated on ignoring your own earlyer statement.
* Pert and Lee, after some French dead white male.
"The patent reviewer should instead estimate the time until he would expect an independent rediscovery if the invention was hypothetically kept secret."
And of course, the "tricorder", "communicator", and "non-invasive medical scanner bed" are all obviously things we weren't likely to spontaniously invent until the 23rd century without some incredible act of genius, so the basic cell phone patents, PET scan patents and such should 'fairly' be protected for at least another 200 years. There were plenty of well educated and reasonable people of just the sort a patent office is likely to employ, who thought at the time that original Star Trek's estimates for when these technologies would become available were, if anything, optimistic. You could probably find plenty of them now who would still bet we are 50 or even 100 years away from the real world equivalent of Dr. McCoy's saltshakers, whereas I'd say about 10, or even less.
How long till computer voice recognition actually works? Till we get true AI? Teleportation? My own guesses would be respectively 20 years, 50-80 years, and Never, but plenty of people smarter than me would disagree on any of the above.
Also, the current economics of invention mean large corporations would be trying to pack the patent offices with people who were hyper-cautious types, likely to decide that no one else would have thought of one click shopping for 100 years, if they possibly can.
Still, your additional rule about trade secrets does make your overall proposal sound a bit more workable. Mind you, I still think you're off the mark, but in a way that might lead to something genuinely interesting in the end. You've shown enough sense to logically plug one of the worst holes that would otherwise result, maybe you can turn this into a fully fleshed out alternative.
Another rule you might look at is greatly expanding precidence, i.e. prior art's durations in a specific field would need to be vey significant in helping determine projected durations for new inventions in the same field. That might even include not just how long the invention existed before improvements were developed, but how long until some country with less repect for patents started producing knock-off versions, how long after patenting did anyone actually make a profit off of it, and so on.
I don't know how this idea would impact those rare, really revolutionary devices that create a whole new field, and just offhand, that might be a flaw big enough to shoot my whole suggestion down. I can also think of a lot of other questions, like "What impact should creating a safer or more 'environmentally friendly' version of an existing device, still under patent have on duration, both of the original version and the new one?"
The word you want is depreciation, not devaluation. Office furniture is usually depreciated with a period of either 5 or 7 years, for example stock shelves are usually figured at 5, file cabinets at 7, and so on. (if memory serves, the lawmakers in the New York legislature that first set up this system in the US (about 1790) actually had a debate where it was argued that shelves handled by the general public depreciate a bit faster than most office furniture since the latter is only being handled by people of the employable classes).
Buildings and fixed constructions of various types are depreciated over 15 year (seen a lot for fences, baseball park benches and backstops, and such), 27.5 (the period most often required for residential rental property), 29, 39 (usually for non-residential real property) or 40 year periods. For these longer times, the periods that are only a year or two off of others exist mostly because there are some options such as straight line depreciation vrs various curves where more of the total comes off in the first years and less in the later ones, and these have become associated with specific periods.
Land itself is never depreciated, and generally appreciates instead, which is one reason why real estate almost always increases in value.
For what it's worth, helicopters depreciate in 5 years, and working horses still under age 12 in 7 years. There's lots of things beside fixtures and buildings that can be depreciated.
Depreciation does NOT mean the same thing as devaluation. No one is claiming by taking depreciation that any car over 5 years old is somehow totally worthless, for example. The claim is that the worth that remains comes not just from the initial money spent on the car but increasingly from more money spent on maintenance and upkeep. This approach is pretty fair in most cases - how much is a 5 year old car that's never been serviced going to be worth? What shape would a 27.5 year old rental property be in if the landlord didn't do any maintenance, painting, or repairs the whole time?
In more complex business situations, a lot of depreciation is basically "What's the equivalent of a 14 year old assembly line set-up likely to be worth in terms of potential profit to the business, if a competitor has a 3 year old version, or a brand new one?" (Or, if a potential competitor could rely on you having to stick with the 14 year old stuff for at least 10 more years before you could even consider replacing it, what would that do to your bottom line?).
One good example of this is a car used for business. The car can be depreciated using a standard curve that also allows taking standard mileage, but if the business does this, they can't claim the maintenance, gas, oil, and so on. Alternately, they can claim the maintenance, parts, and actual fuel and oil costs, but then there's no depreciation or standard mileage at all allowed.
Why is it every time someone says something completely idiotic, the defense is "dummy.. you thought I was serious? It was a joke!"?
Um, maybe because it really was a joke, and some of us readers actually got it, and you didn't? And then you started trying to cover for yourself by calling names, PLUS you accused the other poster of calling names first (With your dummy paraphrase) when he actually didn't? Pot, meet Asperger's syndrome!
More seriously, you appear to be a totally humorless, hyper-defensive and somewhat paranoid individual (witness you accusing the other poster of what you yourself were about to do, that they had not) who threatens violence every post in his sig. You might want to work on all that. Most seriously of all, GET PROFESSIONAL HELP!!!!
"After all, Dr Ellerman concedes that their may be no way of distinguishing minds from machines purely on the basis of behavior."
"It seems that Dr Ellerman's essay considers two different types of
physical devices that are potentially indistinguishable on the basis
of behavior. "
It seems that the reviewer considers both mind and brain to both be purely physical things, and indeed synonyms - Physical devices that are thus potentially indistinguishable on the basis of behavior. Upon adopting this axiom, he is then (somewhat unsurprisingly) able to conclude there is no distinction! But the lack of a distinction simply arises from the fact that he has arbitrarily defined amind and brain into a single category in the first place.
Review translated: Trust me, I don't have any underlieing assumptions like he does, so I'm right and he's wrong, PH33R MY L33T PH1L0S0PHY SKILZ!
If your friends and relatives can reliably get you music for X-mas that you like, then in principle, a sufficiently advanced algorythm can match your tastes as well. Sufficiently advanced in the context of my first sentence probably doesn't mean anything approaching true A.I., but just means able to take as much input on one limited subject from you as your friends and relatives do, and weigh it according to a few observed habits while ignoring many others. This is actually a pretty well defined problem - for example, it should in theory be far, far easier to get you new works that are similar to many you've liked already, than to find something you would consider novel or strange to your tastes but still end up liking.
It's diamagnetism, not paramagnetism, but yes, the frogs are generally fine, or at least they live as long as average. (If levitated frogs all acquire borderline personality disorders, beleve in Thetans and Zemu, or gain triskaidekaphobia, how would we tell?)
http://www.hfml.sci.kun.nl/froglev.html
The Higgs Boson has never been observed experimentaly. A small number of events were recorded by the LEP experiment (CERN), and these could be interpreted as resulting from Higgs Bosons, but the evidence is inconclusive.
The Large Hadron Collider, currently under construction (also at CERN), is expected to eventually confirm or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson with a few months of experiments once completed. At this point, we have only indirect experimental evidence. We can't test another prediction like inflation with it until some of Higg's own predictions become testable.
Inflation actually solves several problems, at the expense of predicting an infinite number of unobservable phenomina (whole parallel universes with differing physical laws). By Occam's Razor, absolutely any alternate explanation to inflation is to be preferred - I can claim the Flying Spagetti Monster did it, right after He invented time travel, assisted by exactly 144,000 seraphim, whose names, in order of mightyness, start with Larry, Moe, and Curley Sue, and I've still proposed a theory that generates fewer unprovable hypothesi than an infinite number of undetectable "alternate' universes.
That's just for Guth's original work. Hawking tried to give some more backing to it, and had to postulate an unobservable second time dimension, an unobservable imaginary property to this second time axis, and as it turned out a way to apply a whole new form of math that involved rotation, ala trigonometry, without the negative quadrents existing to rotate through (since he dropped the negative half of the regular time axis fifty pages back). Even the totally mind boggleing concept of rotating vectors through dimensions that he had already rejected as non-existant didn't actually get rid of the infinite number of unobservable predictions problem, as Hawking finally acknowledged. Hawking was roundly criticized for treating imaginary in the mathematical sense as meaning imaginary in the common sense, and has since admitted he made both that and a few other mistakes in the papers behind "A Brief History of Time". If you know of someone who has done a better job, by all means, give a link, but all the ones I've seen seem to make the untestable predictions problem worse, not better.
That's precisely what's wild about inflation - it makes an infinite number of untestable predictions, and is still considered science for the testable ones. It does explain a few things very well (like homogeneity), so it's probably on the right track somewhere, but the real thory we need (IMNSHO) is going to explain why the universe looks superficially like the classic Big Bang model, deal with the ways the very early universe deviates from that classical model, fully (and not partially or selectively)include QM in the first few femtoseconds, and either prove that some physical constants are non-random, or show that they don't, at the least, have to be random and so don't have to spin off so many untestable predictions.
Well said, gardnermike. Isn't one of the basic points of natural selection that species are sets with fuzzy bondaries rather than rigid ones? Species sometimes split into branches, or otherwise give rise to new species, right? Species become extinct, but new ones usually rush in to fill the same ecological niches, right? No species has ever become un-extinct once dead, but we are not down to a handful of species, so new ones must be comeing from somewhere, right? Amazing how many people claim to be pro-evolution/anti-creation science here on Slashdot, while clinging to a definition of species that would make William Jennings Bryan glad.
The theory of Evolution really consists of two sub-theories: Mendellian Genetics and Darwinian Selection.
Mutation is a part of genetics, and happens randomly - Natural Selection is the NON-random part of the overall theory. Natural selection always proceeds towards the immediately optimum goal of increasing the number of viable copies of a given gene that exist in the ecosystem, ignoring all other, possibly longer term goals (including the integrity of species boundaries, and the survival of the parent organism, if these conflict). That's an extremely non-random filtering process.
Proudhon also said "Property is Liberty", and various other Property== quotes. The only way I see to make sense of Proudhon is to assume he wasn't talking about the same kinds of property in the same applications. We're left with "Property (subscript 1) is Theft", "Property (subscript 2) is Liberty", etc.
Oh, but if we do that, we're essentially discussing a system where property rights have to be balanced with other rights. Wonder what that would be like? Anyone know of a real world case?
5
(Try reading the puzzle upside down)
I'm six foot tall, and every single time I maxed an army physical fitness test, I weighed right around 185. The military physical fitness standards assumed possible overweight for a six foot tall male started at about 192 for 18 year olds, and about 200 lbs. even for 30 year olds. Even that's just 'possibly' overweight, not guarenteed. At those numbers you tape the individual and do a body fat calculation to get a percentile instead of just relying on the scale, and some cases would tape above the mil spec standard of 18% (at age 18-24) while others might still have numbers like 9%. Civilan bodyfat indexes don't even start calling it overweight until bodyfat is over 25%, usually 30%. Sorry, but 185 is normal for a 6 ft. 30 year old male, if he is physically active (and I mean active, like 5 mile runs, 20 mile marches with a 55 lb pack, and the like, not a little jogging). 155 is likely to be grossly underweight in such conditions, and unless you are talking about totally sedentary individuals, is generally regarded as quite unsafe. Yes, you are usually better off as a 155 lb. sedentary type than a 220 lb. one, but normal means physically active.
But politicians exist to create laws - it's how they prove that they're actually doing something in Congress (or wherever they are.) So as long as there are politicians, and as long as there are special interests and lobbying, there will be more laws.
It doesn't take much to moderate this. Get enough good publicity and support for any politician that simplifies laws, cleans obsolete laws off the books, or proposes laws with clearly limited focuses, and they will emphasize such methods instead of making the code more complex. Senator Proxmire used to do a lot with his "Golden Fleece" awards, but they were focused on his causes, for better, AND QUITE OFTEN for worse (like his anti-NASA slant).
Found a group with some name like "Buddies of the Taxpayer" (or a little more serious), seek out junior congresscritters that spend time on legeslative reform comittees, and give them award plaques and occasional small speaking honoraria (honorariums?) within the legal limits, and in 20 years, congress will be increasingly full of power players who brag about reducing or simplifying legislation, because that's what got them started up the ladder. To make the reinforcement more effective, give a few negative awards to politicians who propose unnecessarily complex bills or tack on blatently unrelated amendments. Make up new names for these awards now and then, so it all looks more like news. The News agencies are looking for things that look new even (some say particularly) if they are are really just respun.
Oh, "that will never work"? This is how "Friends of the Family" got going, or for that matter the AARP or the NRA, and those groups power has generally grown even without them taking nearly maximum advantage of the media. For that matter, there are existing groups interested in legislative oversight. Join or contribute to them, help them maximize publicity rather than fall into a rut, and maybe that 20 years I suggested becomes 10.
Ooops! If I had to screw up a tag, at least I'm glad it was the bold face and not the link, but still, I'm sorry - the only part that should have been bold was the second occurance of the word 'old'.
Yes, but...
The old model isn't really the old model. There was a time, that ended around World War 1, that the best enyclopedias tended to have articles by really top experts in their fields, i.e. Thomas Edison writng about his own inventions, or Woodrow Wilson about European geopolitics. That didn't necessarily eliminate bias (sometimes far from it), but it did often greatly boost quality in other ways.
Here's an online version of one of the best examples - the "Love to Know" encyclopedia, based on the Britanica 11th edition, for those interested in seeing what encyclopedia meant once:
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/
By 1940 or so at most, the overwhelming majority of new encyclopedia articles were by staff writers, who were generally not known for any original (as opposed to synthetic) contributions to the fields they addressed, who sometimes interviewed really primary sources directly, but were often at third remove or more. For articles updating older entries, there was almost never new deep research done. An update on Relativity, for example was likely to involve taking the opinion of an easily accessable local college professor as to how an older version should be rewritten for modern readers.
Digital Universe could be very similar to the late era print model, and have entries mostly by academics for 'major' subjects and hobby writers for 'minor' ones, or it could deliberately leverage the hypertext-like online model, the ease and speed of modifying flawed entries and seeing the corrections propagate, the easing of editorial space restrictions for 'minor' subjects, and other net-typical advantages to go back to the older old model, which (IMHO), would make the results much more tolerable.
Remember, if the Weasleys can afford one of these, Lucas Malfoy has probably had a much more 'interesting' one for years and years.
That would be telling...
You are number six...
Your ringtone, however, has a name - Rover!
You know that Frist changed his vote. You infer it was to swap over to the winning side.
News about how the patriot act has been used against U.S. citizens in cases where a warrent was normally required, by agencies normally barred from domestic activity, has been rapidly breaking over the last 72 hours. Yet somehow, you can swear Bill Frist didn't hear anything in that time that could have caused him to vote 'No' on principle, only on expediency?
Since the first patriot act vote was almost unanimous, it's obvious that it was mostly Democrats that changed their minds in the ensuing four years, and mostly Republicans that didn't. You're defending the Democratic party by claiming that changing your mind is a bad thing? That arguement will come back to haunt you when the next Democrat running for the presidency is painted as just another wishy-washy fence straddler, just like in the last few elections.
The Bible also claims that the individual was made by God, while the state is merely made by man. It further claims that the individual will last forever, while the state is of finite duration.*
* specific verses quoted on request.
I'm not sure from your post just what you mean, so please, if my disagreement seems blunt or harsh, consider this my limitation:
1. I don't understand why you wrote "(King James)" without an actual quote from that translation following.
2. From what you wrote following that, I can't tell if you are referring to something in the New Testament or the Old. If the New, and particularly some of the things attributed to Christ Himself, you may be responding fairly on thread to the earlier poster, but if you're thinking of some of the Old Testament verses that could apply, it's not much of a response to that poster's claim. Even if you are referring to the "render unto Caesar" verses, that's open to a lot of interpretation. Speaking of that interpretation, you do know that "Christian philosophy", would normally be as much a reference to the writings of Augustine or Aquinas, if not newer authors up to Berkley, Kirkegaard, and Tolstoy, and probably way beyond, as directly to the Bible? People have been defining how (and if) they think that verse should be balanced with their versions of the ideal of human freedom for nearly two thousand years, and they've come up with some pretty good answers. Right now, you're parroting an arguement every Christian abolitionist during the Civil war considered and rejected.
The Constitution of the United States does not contain the word "privacy". Nowehere in the 14th amendment is there a reference to corporations. From these two facts, I can, using your logic, offer a hearty "no it's not." and "Nothing about freedom" to just about every person today who claims the Constitution is about the value and freedom of individuals, since the overwhelming majority of people today subscribe to at least one of those two points as being interpretable from the document.