Well, you don't need to ask becasue scientific consensus among the experts clearly say yes, it is real, and yes we are the cause for temperature changes on top of normal cycles.
Right, but things like this make me doubt the 'scientific consensus':
One series of these e-mails called out the journal Climate Research, which had the audacity to publish a paper surveying a voluminous scientific literature that didn't support Mann's claim that the last 50 years are the warmest in the past millennium. Along with the CRU head Phil Jones and other climate luminaries, they then cooked up the idea of boycotting any scientific journal that dared publish anything by a few notorious "skeptics," myself included.
Their pressure worked. Editors resigned or were fired. Many colleagues began to complain to me that their good papers were either being rejected outright or subject to outrageous reviews — papers that would have been published with little revision just a few years ago.
Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know.
More by Patrick J. Michaels So what is Pauchari's response to all of this? Denial.
"IPCC relies entirely on peer-reviewed literature in carrying out its assessment and follows a process that renders it unlikely that any peer reviewed piece of literature, however contrary to the views of any individual author, would be left out."
That's just not true. The last IPCC compendium on climate science, published in 2007, left out plenty of peer-reviewed science that it found inconveniently disagreeable.
These include articles from the journals Arctic, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Earth Interactions, Geophysical Research Letters, International Journal of Climatology, Journal of Climate, Journal of Geophysical Research, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Quaternary Research.
No one else has presented in credible argument to the contrary in decades.
That article I linked gives an explanation as to how 1) water vapor is far more effective a 'greenhouse gas' than carbon dioxide and 2) carbon dioxide levels rise after the globe warms up, not before. The argument sounds credible to me.
" The extreme haste with which seemingly the entire world immediately accepted the idea of Anthropogenic" This is false. The theory is over 100 years old. it has a lot of data to support it.
Did you read the Super Freakonomics chapter about global warming? It says that just 20 years ago people were complaining that we were entering a cooling period and we had to do something to warm the globe up. Hint: There's a reason people are starting to call it "climate change" now instead of "global warming".
Protip: When anyone uses the 'medieval warm period' of proof against AGW, they have no clue what they are talking about.
Can you go into why that is the case?
Seriously, experts in the field agree, and you pull a 'scientist' that isn't an expert. Why would you give a few non experts more credence then the experts?
Because stuff like the ClimateGate emails makes it seem like a lot of those 'experts' care more about being right and proving global warming to be true instead of figuring out what the actual science is.
Thanks for the info. I was also going by this letter which had 100 names with PhD attached to the title, but I'll admit I didn't look into who they each were.
There is certainly a danger with scientific consensus, though, in that at some point it can become an appeal to authority - those scientists did that research, therefore it must be true. Then one is not going on facts but what on other people say the facts are, without knowing anything about it yourself. Further, the climategate emails, though they were not sufficient proof that the research was all bunk, indicates to me that there are people working there who have a vested interest not foremost in the scientific method but rather in proving they are right... which seems like the precursor to a lot of bad science. Thus I am not 100% convinced that global warming is anthropogenic, nor am I certain I know the extent to which it is happening.
You have spent a lot of time debunking religion and thinking about how to think rationally - something that I have come to appreciate immensely. I'm curious what your take on climate change/global warming is. Is it happening? What does it mean for it to be happening? Is it caused by humans? It would be rather ironic if I were simply asking you so I could then take your word for it and believe whatever you say, so I'm curious about your thought processes as well. Contrary to the "there is no debate; the scientific community 100% agrees on this issue and the only ones who disagree are funded by oil companies" line the pro-global-warming crowd says, I see much evidence that not all scientists agree, and not all the ones that disagree have hideous ulterior motives. Further, I see similarities between the religious preachings of doomsday scenarios and the claims that the world is going to explode soon unless we do something right now.
How can I separate the BS claims and the politicization of the issue from what the factual data actually is?
The amount of money in circulation has nothing to do with how much wealth there is in the economy. Printing a trillion dollars right now won't magically generate a trillion dollars in wealth (e.g. physical goods) - rather it will make everybody who currently holds USD collectively one trillion dollars poorer, as you'll have the same amount of goods being chased by a larger amount of 'money'.
The trick is that the wealth of an economy is not best measured by spending, but rather, by what is actually produced. Spending is epiphenomenal. You can notice that rich families tend to spend more dollars per year, so there is certainly a correlation between how much a family spends and how wealthy they are, but if a poor family starts borrowing money and sending as much as a rich family, they don't magically become a rich family. However, if you only look at spending, then that poor family will seem just as rich as the family that is actually wealthy.
When the government prints money, spending certainly increases. This is because it's impossible for prices to adjust instantaneously. For example, if there were $1 million in the economy and the government printed another $1 million, with all else being equal, all the prices should double. It takes a while for that to happen, though, so the first people to receive the printed money get a huge discount, as they're essentially paying half of what things are now worth. The people who are way down the line in terms of receiving that inflated money (e.g. after many many transactions have been made) receive less of a benefit as the prices have already begun to adjust. And the people who are attempting to do the rational thing - save money - are completely boned, because now all the money they have accumulated is suddenly worth half of what it is.
Printing money is immensely beneficial to the government, as they can essentially tax people without them knowing it. Far easier to increase the money supply by 10% - where prices might take months or years to adjust - instead of levying a 10% tax on everybody. It also benefits the people who are closest to the government the most, as they receive those printed funds first and get everything at a discount. Yet they have brainwashed people into thinking inflation is good, deflation is horrible, so yes, please continue to steal our money at an acceptable rate.
Why is it such a bad thing for prices to go down? Prices go down every year in computer goods - hard drives, video cards, RAM, processors, etc., are all cheaper and higher quality. What would be the problem if this were to happen across the board? It would reward saving tremendously - you could literally leave your money in the mattress and you would be gaining more value with it each year. Compare this to today's economy where if you were to do that it would slowly be taken away from you by the massive amount of money printing going on.
The argument, of course, is that if you would accumulate wealth by leaving your money in a mattress, everyone will do that, no one will spend, and the economy will tank. This is specious at best and intentionally deceptive at worst.
First of all, there's the moral argument - why is it okay for the government to steal your money without your knowledge or consent to promote the economy elsewhere? At least a tax is up front and explicit.
Secondly, people like to have shiny things. There will always be demand - how could there not be? What's preventing you from buying a jetski and an apartment with a swimming pool in it and expensive clothing and whatnot? Just a lack of the economic resources to do so. You can argue, given limited resources, everyone will decide to just wait a little more so they have more wealth before finally spending it. And, indeed, some people will do so. But not everybody is a miser who will hoard their wealth without spending a penny of it. That is an extreme, but the reasoning stands: that activity defeats the purpose of money, which is to allow you
If only 1/4 of the coins are in circulation, the value of the BitCoin isn't really that high. If the other 3/4 were to start being used on a regular basis, you'd have 3x more bitcoins available which would mean each one would be worth about 1/3rd of what it is now.
You insensitive clod! The invisible pink unicorn is a demon implanted into the minds of credulous cretins by the Flying Spaghetti Monster to test our faith! Obviously the FSM, his spaghetiness be praised, was the one who created the moon by spontaneously generating a meatball and applying his large-body creation sauce to it. o one listen to parent - he is a deluded fool.
The moon was put there by the invisible pink unicorn, her pinkness be praised! Of course, there is no evidence of her having put the moon there because she is invisible.
Mod parent up. How does it help business for the government to set the example of: "Oh, if you become too successful, we'll sue the shit out of you. Because it's unfair to your competitors that you did a better job than they did. Unless, of course, you've donated sufficiently to some of our campaigns; then we'll probably leave you alone."
Bah! An evolutionary left-over. A pitiful remnant which only goes to show the limitations of blind nature. I'll take my genetically-enhanced pleasure receptors massively stimulated by the electrodes plugged into my brain-in-a-vat set in tandem with the visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations of dozens of impossibly (and I mean physically impossibly) attractive females, each specifically designed by the PleasureSystem to cater to my specific tastes thanks to it having completely emulated my brain neurons and run hundreds of thousands of simulations to predict with almost 100% accuracy what I will most respond to above and beyond even what I know, servicing my mentally generated avatar for days at a time, any day.
You cannot make a cellular phone which is compatible with modern networks without patent encumbrance of some sort or another.
That's precisely my point. But if the patent system didn't exist as it does now, you would be able to, if you could set your engineers to the task of figuring out how modern networks work and how to make something that interoperates with them.
Purchasing patent portfolios is to R&D what buying a building is to building one. If you need a building and one exists which fits your purpose, and your time is better spent in other aspects of your business than the construction of something fitting that purpose, you buy it outright. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
The analogy is flawed. When you buy a patent, you don't buy any information or knowledge, let alone anything physical. You merely buy the right to use certain information/knowledge because the legal system is set up such that it is illegal to use it - this even if you could have come up with it on your own. The analogy would be more accurate if you said "purchasing technology/blueprints/research" instead of "purchasing patents"
There is indeed nothing wrong with paying somebody who has already done good research for their research. There is something wrong when you have to buy a company, not because of the research or technology they've developed, but for the right to use the technology you could have developed on your own, anyway.
And as was said before, in no way does any of the above constitute "legal fees," even if the purpose of the acquisition is primarily to launch legal assaults backed by those patents.
Perhaps for the technical definition of "legal fees" it does not. But the point still stands - if you buy a patent in order to launch legal assaults, you are spending money on things for the sole purpose of dealing with litigation instead of spending that money on producing anything useful.
You mean, meeting in meat space? Heaven forbid. These mortal coils of ours are getting more and more outdated. It requires such effort to synchronize two intellects to meet at a certain point and time, and then to move two 200lb bodies from wherever they happen to be to that point in time and place in space.
The inconvenience of course is in experiencing any sort of fleshy exertion as well as having to deal with the vicissitudes of the physical world. Going up a flight of stairs, getting delayed in traffic, etc. All serve to frustrate the would-be mortal coil transcender.
It will help when we have cybernetic implants such that we can control our environment more readily with our thoughts. I'm thinking bionic arms and legs, and perhaps jetpacks, which are mentally-commanded, much like our regular arms and legs are, except they won't tire or feel pain.
However, that's still not ideal as the machinery can break and still has to deal with physical forces. That'll just be a temporary stopgap until we can integrate everything meaningful into a consensual hallucination existing only on the computers of the world. Plug in, upload your consciousness, and then move about in and interact with a world entirely of your own making. No more need to move heavy bodies in the physical world, thus all of those muscles required for motion can atrophy, reducing the required caloric intake. The body becomes a more capable yet more powerful machine thanks to the mental interface into cyberspace.
This won't be ideal at first until all the kinks are worked out. You're not gonna want a server outage to fry the brains of everyone currently uploaded to that server. It's that blasted physical world, again. But eventually the electronics will get smaller, we'll need less and less of our bodies, and we'll have a brilliantly glorious future consisting of billions of disembodied human brains side-by-side in gigantic clusters all uploaded to the most powerful networked computer program ever made, dependent upon almost-invisible/ethereal hardware. Boring from the outside, but inside, we won't have to eat, drink or sleep to survive. Just one long massive near-eternal dream whose inhabitants can do what they want, when they want: mass orgies, gigantic visceral FPSs, mini-golf simulations, RPGs, petting kitties, you name it.
What a glorious future awaits this human race. Until then, I will continue living in this painful physical world... my first action will be to finish consuming this bag of fried pork skins.
How is spending billions of dollars buying patents not "legal fees"? It's certainly not R&D. For example, Google could have spent money and come up with a phone on their own (R&D), but they had to buy Motorola in order to not be sued into oblivion by the other phone makers (legal fees).
My point is that the patent system itself is what makes the market not free. A freer market would be one without the patent system.
How would that market operate? It means companies would no longer be able to make money by coming up with something and preventing other people from doing it (thus enjoying the benefits of a monopoly), but rather, to come up with something which they can make money from even if they have competition. Whenever there is competition in a free market, prices go down while quality goes up, thus consumers would benefit.
As for the argument that nobody would invent anything without patents, I find it specious. People are always willing to make money, and they will find ways to do so if you let them. All patents do in this regard is prevent people from making money because somebody else patented something. Ironically, the patent system, which is purported to promote innovation, ends up doing the exact opposite.
That's certainly possible. This is what happens when you don't have free markets. It becomes profitable to divert some effort into abusing the regulatory systems instead of spending all your time and energy actually producing things.
Step 1) Team up with someone. Step 2) One of you goes to work at Google. Step 3) Google employee introduces exploits. Step 4) You find them first and get paid by Google. Step 5) Profit!
Wait, usually there are ???s in there... I must have done it wrong.
"Children might buy drugs!" Their parents should really have talked to them about this.
"People might get high off drugs they buy online!" So what? They can do what they will with their bodies.
"People will get high from these drugs and commit crimes to fund their drug habit/because they're high and belligerent!" People who harm others should be prosecuted, regardless of whether they're on drugs or not.
"People will sell low-quality drugs online, advertising them as even something else entirely!" If you buy drugs online and you don't do a thorough check to make sure the seller is reputable or you're getting what you asked for, then you kind of have it coming to you.
Yes, it would require people to take more responsibility for their actions. But the benefit is that you wouldn't have the government-enforced pharmaceutical monopoly, which I think would benefit consumers far more than these other effects would hurt them.
A 'null pointer' is not a type - it's just a possible *value* for a pointer. Dereferencing a pointer is type-safe. Dereferencing a pointer whose value is null causes a run-time crash.
The idea with the 'end' is that 'end' would be a type. Your list elements would be U(T, end) - union of type T, and end. You won't be able to use a U(T, end) just like a T, cause you'll get type errors (as 'end' is not a subtype of any other type). You'll have to do some checking which the type-checker will verify. So you check for end, and in the True branch, the type is 'end', and in the False branch, the type is 'T'. It will be impossible (if a program passes type-checking and the type-checker is type-safe) to dereference an 'end' value.
See Haskell, which has no 'null', and to have a 'None' value you have to explicitly encode it with the Maybe monad.
The free market does not adjust itself overnight. But, had the DoJ not done anything, there is a good chance the situation would have changed in a few years. Why? Essentially, a certain group of X companies are colluding to keep employee salaries low. Say the market salary for an employee would be A, but it's reduced to D as a result of the collusion. This is an unstable situation for two reasons: first of all, it's possible that one of the X companies will start hiring employees for a slightly higher salary (C, where A > C > D). This would be to their individual advantage, as they would get A-level talent for only C, more so than the other companies in the collusion ring. Collusion is unstable.
But, more likely, there would just be tech companies that aren't one of those X companies, and they would simply hire employees at a higher rate (B, where A > B > D). This would get them better talent. Talent would just start bleeding out of the X companies towards the companies that are willing to pay more.
Government intervention seems to happen when people are way too impatient with the free market. If the government intervention produced the same result as a free-market adjustment that would take 10 years, but only in 1 year (or something like that), then that would be fine. The problem with government intervention is that it often has unintended consequences... which consequences are far harder to re-adjust as there is bureaucracy and what-not, and usually end up being worse than the problem they tried to fix in the first place (cf. minimum wage hurting unskilled workers the most).
An interesting follow-up question would be to look at who started this investigation in the first place. I haven't found the answer after a few minutes of googling, but I'd be interested to know if anyone else knows/can find out.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha, pithy and humorous, I like it.
1) Build machine to turn air into petrol.
2) Use machine's output to power itself and make more petrol.
3) Profit!
Well, you don't need to ask becasue scientific consensus among the experts clearly say yes, it is real, and yes we are the cause for temperature changes on top of normal cycles.
Right, but things like this make me doubt the 'scientific consensus':
One series of these e-mails called out the journal Climate Research, which had the audacity to publish a paper surveying a voluminous scientific literature that didn't support Mann's claim that the last 50 years are the warmest in the past millennium. Along with the CRU head Phil Jones and other climate luminaries, they then cooked up the idea of boycotting any scientific journal that dared publish anything by a few notorious "skeptics," myself included.
Their pressure worked. Editors resigned or were fired. Many colleagues began to complain to me that their good papers were either being rejected outright or subject to outrageous reviews — papers that would have been published with little revision just a few years ago.
Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know.
More by Patrick J. Michaels
So what is Pauchari's response to all of this? Denial.
"IPCC relies entirely on peer-reviewed literature in carrying out its assessment and follows a process that renders it unlikely that any peer reviewed piece of literature, however contrary to the views of any individual author, would be left out."
That's just not true. The last IPCC compendium on climate science, published in 2007, left out plenty of peer-reviewed science that it found inconveniently disagreeable.
These include articles from the journals Arctic, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Earth Interactions, Geophysical Research Letters, International Journal of Climatology, Journal of Climate, Journal of Geophysical Research, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Quaternary Research.
Link showing the actual emails is here.
No one else has presented in credible argument to the contrary in decades.
That article I linked gives an explanation as to how 1) water vapor is far more effective a 'greenhouse gas' than carbon dioxide and 2) carbon dioxide levels rise after the globe warms up, not before. The argument sounds credible to me.
" The extreme haste with which seemingly the entire world immediately accepted the idea of Anthropogenic"
This is false. The theory is over 100 years old. it has a lot of data to support it.
Did you read the Super Freakonomics chapter about global warming? It says that just 20 years ago people were complaining that we were entering a cooling period and we had to do something to warm the globe up. Hint: There's a reason people are starting to call it "climate change" now instead of "global warming".
Protip: When anyone uses the 'medieval warm period' of proof against AGW, they have no clue what they are talking about.
Can you go into why that is the case?
Seriously, experts in the field agree, and you pull a 'scientist' that isn't an expert. Why would you give a few non experts more credence then the experts?
Because stuff like the ClimateGate emails makes it seem like a lot of those 'experts' care more about being right and proving global warming to be true instead of figuring out what the actual science is.
Thanks for the info. I was also going by this letter which had 100 names with PhD attached to the title, but I'll admit I didn't look into who they each were.
There is certainly a danger with scientific consensus, though, in that at some point it can become an appeal to authority - those scientists did that research, therefore it must be true. Then one is not going on facts but what on other people say the facts are, without knowing anything about it yourself. Further, the climategate emails, though they were not sufficient proof that the research was all bunk, indicates to me that there are people working there who have a vested interest not foremost in the scientific method but rather in proving they are right... which seems like the precursor to a lot of bad science. Thus I am not 100% convinced that global warming is anthropogenic, nor am I certain I know the extent to which it is happening.
You have spent a lot of time debunking religion and thinking about how to think rationally - something that I have come to appreciate immensely. I'm curious what your take on climate change/global warming is. Is it happening? What does it mean for it to be happening? Is it caused by humans? It would be rather ironic if I were simply asking you so I could then take your word for it and believe whatever you say, so I'm curious about your thought processes as well. Contrary to the "there is no debate; the scientific community 100% agrees on this issue and the only ones who disagree are funded by oil companies" line the pro-global-warming crowd says, I see much evidence that not all scientists agree, and not all the ones that disagree have hideous ulterior motives. Further, I see similarities between the religious preachings of doomsday scenarios and the claims that the world is going to explode soon unless we do something right now.
How can I separate the BS claims and the politicization of the issue from what the factual data actually is?
This is poor economic reasoning at best.
The amount of money in circulation has nothing to do with how much wealth there is in the economy. Printing a trillion dollars right now won't magically generate a trillion dollars in wealth (e.g. physical goods) - rather it will make everybody who currently holds USD collectively one trillion dollars poorer, as you'll have the same amount of goods being chased by a larger amount of 'money'.
The trick is that the wealth of an economy is not best measured by spending, but rather, by what is actually produced. Spending is epiphenomenal. You can notice that rich families tend to spend more dollars per year, so there is certainly a correlation between how much a family spends and how wealthy they are, but if a poor family starts borrowing money and sending as much as a rich family, they don't magically become a rich family. However, if you only look at spending, then that poor family will seem just as rich as the family that is actually wealthy.
When the government prints money, spending certainly increases. This is because it's impossible for prices to adjust instantaneously. For example, if there were $1 million in the economy and the government printed another $1 million, with all else being equal, all the prices should double. It takes a while for that to happen, though, so the first people to receive the printed money get a huge discount, as they're essentially paying half of what things are now worth. The people who are way down the line in terms of receiving that inflated money (e.g. after many many transactions have been made) receive less of a benefit as the prices have already begun to adjust. And the people who are attempting to do the rational thing - save money - are completely boned, because now all the money they have accumulated is suddenly worth half of what it is.
Printing money is immensely beneficial to the government, as they can essentially tax people without them knowing it. Far easier to increase the money supply by 10% - where prices might take months or years to adjust - instead of levying a 10% tax on everybody. It also benefits the people who are closest to the government the most, as they receive those printed funds first and get everything at a discount. Yet they have brainwashed people into thinking inflation is good, deflation is horrible, so yes, please continue to steal our money at an acceptable rate.
Why is it such a bad thing for prices to go down? Prices go down every year in computer goods - hard drives, video cards, RAM, processors, etc., are all cheaper and higher quality. What would be the problem if this were to happen across the board? It would reward saving tremendously - you could literally leave your money in the mattress and you would be gaining more value with it each year. Compare this to today's economy where if you were to do that it would slowly be taken away from you by the massive amount of money printing going on.
The argument, of course, is that if you would accumulate wealth by leaving your money in a mattress, everyone will do that, no one will spend, and the economy will tank. This is specious at best and intentionally deceptive at worst.
First of all, there's the moral argument - why is it okay for the government to steal your money without your knowledge or consent to promote the economy elsewhere? At least a tax is up front and explicit.
Secondly, people like to have shiny things. There will always be demand - how could there not be? What's preventing you from buying a jetski and an apartment with a swimming pool in it and expensive clothing and whatnot? Just a lack of the economic resources to do so. You can argue, given limited resources, everyone will decide to just wait a little more so they have more wealth before finally spending it. And, indeed, some people will do so. But not everybody is a miser who will hoard their wealth without spending a penny of it. That is an extreme, but the reasoning stands: that activity defeats the purpose of money, which is to allow you
If only 1/4 of the coins are in circulation, the value of the BitCoin isn't really that high. If the other 3/4 were to start being used on a regular basis, you'd have 3x more bitcoins available which would mean each one would be worth about 1/3rd of what it is now.
You insensitive clod! The invisible pink unicorn is a demon implanted into the minds of credulous cretins by the Flying Spaghetti Monster to test our faith! Obviously the FSM, his spaghetiness be praised, was the one who created the moon by spontaneously generating a meatball and applying his large-body creation sauce to it. o one listen to parent - he is a deluded fool.
The moon was put there by the invisible pink unicorn, her pinkness be praised! Of course, there is no evidence of her having put the moon there because she is invisible.
I think the notion of 'credit' will become more and more obsolete as the end of time approaches.
Mod parent up. How does it help business for the government to set the example of: "Oh, if you become too successful, we'll sue the shit out of you. Because it's unfair to your competitors that you did a better job than they did. Unless, of course, you've donated sufficiently to some of our campaigns; then we'll probably leave you alone."
Bah! An evolutionary left-over. A pitiful remnant which only goes to show the limitations of blind nature. I'll take my genetically-enhanced pleasure receptors massively stimulated by the electrodes plugged into my brain-in-a-vat set in tandem with the visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations of dozens of impossibly (and I mean physically impossibly) attractive females, each specifically designed by the PleasureSystem to cater to my specific tastes thanks to it having completely emulated my brain neurons and run hundreds of thousands of simulations to predict with almost 100% accuracy what I will most respond to above and beyond even what I know, servicing my mentally generated avatar for days at a time, any day.
You cannot make a cellular phone which is compatible with modern networks without patent encumbrance of some sort or another.
That's precisely my point. But if the patent system didn't exist as it does now, you would be able to, if you could set your engineers to the task of figuring out how modern networks work and how to make something that interoperates with them.
Purchasing patent portfolios is to R&D what buying a building is to building one. If you need a building and one exists which fits your purpose, and your time is better spent in other aspects of your business than the construction of something fitting that purpose, you buy it outright. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
The analogy is flawed. When you buy a patent, you don't buy any information or knowledge, let alone anything physical. You merely buy the right to use certain information/knowledge because the legal system is set up such that it is illegal to use it - this even if you could have come up with it on your own. The analogy would be more accurate if you said "purchasing technology/blueprints/research" instead of "purchasing patents"
There is indeed nothing wrong with paying somebody who has already done good research for their research. There is something wrong when you have to buy a company, not because of the research or technology they've developed, but for the right to use the technology you could have developed on your own, anyway.
And as was said before, in no way does any of the above constitute "legal fees," even if the purpose of the acquisition is primarily to launch legal assaults backed by those patents.
Perhaps for the technical definition of "legal fees" it does not. But the point still stands - if you buy a patent in order to launch legal assaults, you are spending money on things for the sole purpose of dealing with litigation instead of spending that money on producing anything useful.
You mean, meeting in meat space? Heaven forbid. These mortal coils of ours are getting more and more outdated. It requires such effort to synchronize two intellects to meet at a certain point and time, and then to move two 200lb bodies from wherever they happen to be to that point in time and place in space.
The inconvenience of course is in experiencing any sort of fleshy exertion as well as having to deal with the vicissitudes of the physical world. Going up a flight of stairs, getting delayed in traffic, etc. All serve to frustrate the would-be mortal coil transcender.
It will help when we have cybernetic implants such that we can control our environment more readily with our thoughts. I'm thinking bionic arms and legs, and perhaps jetpacks, which are mentally-commanded, much like our regular arms and legs are, except they won't tire or feel pain.
However, that's still not ideal as the machinery can break and still has to deal with physical forces. That'll just be a temporary stopgap until we can integrate everything meaningful into a consensual hallucination existing only on the computers of the world. Plug in, upload your consciousness, and then move about in and interact with a world entirely of your own making. No more need to move heavy bodies in the physical world, thus all of those muscles required for motion can atrophy, reducing the required caloric intake. The body becomes a more capable yet more powerful machine thanks to the mental interface into cyberspace.
This won't be ideal at first until all the kinks are worked out. You're not gonna want a server outage to fry the brains of everyone currently uploaded to that server. It's that blasted physical world, again. But eventually the electronics will get smaller, we'll need less and less of our bodies, and we'll have a brilliantly glorious future consisting of billions of disembodied human brains side-by-side in gigantic clusters all uploaded to the most powerful networked computer program ever made, dependent upon almost-invisible/ethereal hardware. Boring from the outside, but inside, we won't have to eat, drink or sleep to survive. Just one long massive near-eternal dream whose inhabitants can do what they want, when they want: mass orgies, gigantic visceral FPSs, mini-golf simulations, RPGs, petting kitties, you name it.
What a glorious future awaits this human race. Until then, I will continue living in this painful physical world... my first action will be to finish consuming this bag of fried pork skins.
How is spending billions of dollars buying patents not "legal fees"? It's certainly not R&D. For example, Google could have spent money and come up with a phone on their own (R&D), but they had to buy Motorola in order to not be sued into oblivion by the other phone makers (legal fees).
My point is that the patent system itself is what makes the market not free. A freer market would be one without the patent system.
How would that market operate? It means companies would no longer be able to make money by coming up with something and preventing other people from doing it (thus enjoying the benefits of a monopoly), but rather, to come up with something which they can make money from even if they have competition. Whenever there is competition in a free market, prices go down while quality goes up, thus consumers would benefit.
As for the argument that nobody would invent anything without patents, I find it specious. People are always willing to make money, and they will find ways to do so if you let them. All patents do in this regard is prevent people from making money because somebody else patented something. Ironically, the patent system, which is purported to promote innovation, ends up doing the exact opposite.
That's certainly possible. This is what happens when you don't have free markets. It becomes profitable to divert some effort into abusing the regulatory systems instead of spending all your time and energy actually producing things.
Step 1) Team up with someone.
Step 2) One of you goes to work at Google.
Step 3) Google employee introduces exploits.
Step 4) You find them first and get paid by Google.
Step 5) Profit!
Wait, usually there are ???s in there... I must have done it wrong.
i know
The mods have spoken - he succeeded at funny.
What is the worst that could happen? Let's see...
"Children might buy drugs!" Their parents should really have talked to them about this.
"People might get high off drugs they buy online!" So what? They can do what they will with their bodies.
"People will get high from these drugs and commit crimes to fund their drug habit/because they're high and belligerent!" People who harm others should be prosecuted, regardless of whether they're on drugs or not.
"People will sell low-quality drugs online, advertising them as even something else entirely!" If you buy drugs online and you don't do a thorough check to make sure the seller is reputable or you're getting what you asked for, then you kind of have it coming to you.
Yes, it would require people to take more responsibility for their actions. But the benefit is that you wouldn't have the government-enforced pharmaceutical monopoly, which I think would benefit consumers far more than these other effects would hurt them.
A 'null pointer' is not a type - it's just a possible *value* for a pointer. Dereferencing a pointer is type-safe. Dereferencing a pointer whose value is null causes a run-time crash.
The idea with the 'end' is that 'end' would be a type. Your list elements would be U(T, end) - union of type T, and end. You won't be able to use a U(T, end) just like a T, cause you'll get type errors (as 'end' is not a subtype of any other type). You'll have to do some checking which the type-checker will verify. So you check for end, and in the True branch, the type is 'end', and in the False branch, the type is 'T'. It will be impossible (if a program passes type-checking and the type-checker is type-safe) to dereference an 'end' value.
See Haskell, which has no 'null', and to have a 'None' value you have to explicitly encode it with the Maybe monad.
that's the same meme, but GP's was funnier. INTERNET FAIL
The free market does not adjust itself overnight. But, had the DoJ not done anything, there is a good chance the situation would have changed in a few years. Why? Essentially, a certain group of X companies are colluding to keep employee salaries low. Say the market salary for an employee would be A, but it's reduced to D as a result of the collusion. This is an unstable situation for two reasons: first of all, it's possible that one of the X companies will start hiring employees for a slightly higher salary (C, where A > C > D). This would be to their individual advantage, as they would get A-level talent for only C, more so than the other companies in the collusion ring. Collusion is unstable.
But, more likely, there would just be tech companies that aren't one of those X companies, and they would simply hire employees at a higher rate (B, where A > B > D). This would get them better talent. Talent would just start bleeding out of the X companies towards the companies that are willing to pay more.
Government intervention seems to happen when people are way too impatient with the free market. If the government intervention produced the same result as a free-market adjustment that would take 10 years, but only in 1 year (or something like that), then that would be fine. The problem with government intervention is that it often has unintended consequences... which consequences are far harder to re-adjust as there is bureaucracy and what-not, and usually end up being worse than the problem they tried to fix in the first place (cf. minimum wage hurting unskilled workers the most).
An interesting follow-up question would be to look at who started this investigation in the first place. I haven't found the answer after a few minutes of googling, but I'd be interested to know if anyone else knows/can find out.
A lot of the modern world was invented by Scots. Maxwell's equations, animal cloning, telephones, trains, televisions, penicillin.
I guess when you're surrounded by fields and sheep, all you can do is drink or think.
I can think of something else involving the sheep.