Too late -- several, scratch that, a gazillion people already have the patent on internet patents. Now if they all get busy and start suing each other, they won't have time to sue anybody doing real work.
Japanese syllables generally start with a consonant and end with a vowel, or are a vowel alone. Thus "McDonalds" is something like "ma ku do na ru do" and a Big Mac is a biggu makku.
For some reason, they used the American pronunciation of "Mexico" (meks sih ko) as the basis for their word, which comes out as "may kee shi ko". But the Spanish pronunciation "may hee ko" copies over almost perfectly into Japanese. It's a shame they copied the wrong pronunciation.
I suppose the proper pronunciation could be coming into vogue. It ought to be.
I am not exactly sure what you mean by "data transmission". But might running SMTP by hand using telnet be on the right path for beginners?
I have astonished a few friends who think computers are complicated just by "telnet domain.com 25" and running through a simple SMTP session to send a simple email. It's suddenly not quite so mysterious as before.
You can also do HTTP, but usually the returned data is too complex for a tty window. On the other hand, if you run your own webserver and "telnet localhost 80", you can set up simple pages to return.
If you want to look for a result, you already have one: descendant lives, potential competitor doesn't. It's nothing new under the sun. Put it down to genetic reflex if you want, but only someone willfully blind won't see it as having solved the problem. Just because it's abhorrent to most everybody else doesn't make it irrational to his thinking.
Refusing to understand delusions does nothing to help prevent the results of those delusions. How can you fix problems you don't understand? I consider that irrational too. If you like living in a world governed by irrational fiat rather than understanding, you're on the right track.
In many species, including chimpanzees, when a male takes over leadership, it is common for him to kill infants because they are not his.
What is irrational about killing someone else's unborn baby, and the traitorous mother bearing it, and leaving your own 4 year old child alive? It may be insane, it's certainly not very nice, but I don't see anything irrational about it, if the stabber is thinking only of propagating his own seed.
Just because behavior violates every norm of civilization doesn't make it irrational.
If someone is insane and thinks everyone is spying on him, it may be entirely rational to kill a bunch of them.
If someone thinks a comet is an alien spaceship come to take away true believers, it may be entirely rational to kill oneself as an act of volunteering to travel with the aliens.
You single out the "super conservatives" as the radicals?
There are so many nutjobs to choose from. I guess we can tell where you come from.
No mainstream politician has any interest in reducing the national debt. Reagan was the first president to raise the national debt after WW II, close to tripled it. Clinton actually started it down the road to lessening it, then Bush II also came close to tripling it, although Obama's own contribution could also be said to nearly triple it, but Bush II and Obama are so intertwined in the debt department that it's hard to tell how to divvy that up.
Of course neither party is even willing to admit that we are spending too much. The Republican plan, if you can call it that, was to balance the budget in 2061 or so; Obama hasn't even submitted a budget for three years, and his talking points grudgingly accept the possibility of maybe trimming growth by $1T over ten years, when that isn't even the full deficit from a single year's budget. Cheney must have been speaking for both parties when he said deficits don't matter.
Then the left refuses to accept the science of GMOs and refuses to admit there's any uncertainty in the degree of global warming, let alone how much man causes, while the right plugs their ears when anyone mentions evolution or any human contribution to global warming. Both have tons of nuts (Obama and Rubio being the latest) who won't even cop to the simple scientific fact that the earth is 4.5B years old.
Republican platform was to actually increase military spending, while Democrats merely howled that any decrease would be a disaster. We could cut the military budget in half and still be spending as much as 10 years ago in inflation adjusted dollars.
Civil rights? Oh yeah, they've heard of them. Both parties are racing to be the most Orwellian government in our history. Obama thinks it's just great that he can pick people to kill with drones, without any judicial inquiry, even if the targets are American citizens in countries where we are not at war. Yet they had so little foresight that eben wile being scared of Romney winning, they never considered how he would have handled the secret kill authority.
And you pick "super conservatives" out of all that as the radicals? It's the moderates in charge who are doing what was unthinkable just a few years ago.
One of the problems I see with the Republican proposal is that it has a sliding scale for renewal too, but it is based on revenue from the work. That requires an intrusive bureaucracy to verify the income figures, and Hollywood is notorious for cooking the books; supposedly Titanic and a few other block busters have never generated a net profit. One of the rules for any contract with Hollywood is to always get a percentage of the gross, never the net, because they set up shell companies and structure expenses such that nothing makes a profit.
So you've got the right track there. But I's set the first 4-year renewal much higher. If something is only worth $100 after four years, it isn't worth much at all.
I like that idea! Hand out 640K years of copyright, total. As time goes by and years expire and are returned to the 640K year pool, auction them off to the highest bidder.
News flash: politicians, like broken clocks, are right once in a while. Broken clocks have the advantage of being otherwise useless, while politicians actively get in the way.
Do you object to utility workers getting double and triple overtime for working during and after storms?
If not, then why do you object to truckers and warehouse workers charging extra for working long hours bringing in extra supplies, and why do you object to store owners passing along the extra cost in the form of higher prices?
Why is it immoral for a store to make more money during a storm for extra and more dangerous work but not for utility workers?
The mammoth system required to make ration cards work is a poor substitute for self-rationing through normal supply and demand raising prices. Bureaucrats are indifferent and ignorant and can't even come close to duplicating the intelligence built into supply and demand. It's like bureaucrats deciding who should wear lead shoes and who should have anti-gravity shoes to compensate for gravity.
The people selling at that price know this and are taking advantage of the emergency situation to exploit the needs of the victims for profit.
When did profit become such a dirty word? Do you not want the most pay you can get for your job? How would you like a bunch of ignorant indifferent bureaucrats putting wage controls on you?
That is what you are claiming the moral authority for. You claim, without the slightest shred of knowledge, that you know how much scarce supplies should cost, and that charging more is exploitation. You know nothing of what it costs to bring in supplies during an emergency. You know nothing of the extra hours worked, the extra resources expended, or anything else that goes into the higher prices.
Here's some more econ 101 for your enlightenment. If a store runs out of supplies and calls around to find more, they will pick the cheapest source. If one supplier charges $15 per gallon for gas and a second charges $20, the store will choose the $15 supplier. If the $20 supplier can deliver within an hour but the $15 supplier will come tomorrow, the store will probably order enough of the expensive stuff to get by for one day until the cheaper stuff comes in -- he will *ration* himself.
That's exactly what everybody should want. Rational decisions made possible by realistic fungible prices, not by bureaucrats with their head up their ass.
No, by charging 15 dollars more, they are making it unattainable by the hardest hit and most in need.
Everyone has their own definition of need. How do you define it -- as those with the least money? That's as arbitrary as even/odd license plate numbers. "Hardest hit" and "most in need" are cute phrases meant to wring tears of empathy but devoid of meaning.
The attitude that the government can control prices is right up there with King Canute trying to control the tides. At least he knew he couldn't; you still need to learn basic economics. Whether price is measured in dollars, hours, bribes, or family relationships, the price will go up when demand exceeds supply. It is as inexorable as gravity or Boyle's law.
When the price rises, there's a wonderful effect -- it discourages people buying scarce supplies they don't really need. They will buy one roll of toilet paper instead of a month's worth. They will buy one gallon of gasoline and run their generator only as much as necessary instead of running it all day long on a full tank.
And they will remember and plan ahead next time.
When that price rise includes fungible money, it's even better, because that excess will encourage bringing in more supplies. Hours and effort are not fungible -- the store owner can't treasure up those hours and exchange them for more supplies. They are lost, gone wit the wind, a wasted resource.
Every time the government bureaucrats substitute their elitist snobbery for reality, they make a hash of it. Laws against price gouging are a perfect example.
If the gas was cheap, many would buy it. So they would have gas. With the price gouging the prices are exorbitantly high, so few can obtain it.
These people increased the scarcity of these items (buy buying large quantities for themselves) to try to extort money from people who needed them. Regardless of what your hero Ayn might think, a completely free enterprise doesn't always work.
You are sooo unimaginative.
Everything you say would be true -- if supplies were normal. They aren't. It costs more to bring supplies into a disaster area, believe it or not. Prices are a very simple fact of life: when demand exceeds supply, they rise, and when supplies exceed demand, they drop.
So with dwindling supplies, prices rise. Note carefully: humans CAN NOT CONTROL prices artificially. The money price may be legally limited, but all that means is that the time or effort price rises. People wait in line or bribe suppliers to get first dibs.
Why aren't more supplies brought in? Because it costs more, in money and time and effort, and if they can't get paid correspondingly more for that effort, they aren't going to lose money just to be noble.
If the government had kept its paws off, the price would rise enough to bring in more supplies.
Supplies are always rationed one way or another. Even in normal times, there is a cost of production and distribution, and that limits supplies.
In bad times, when supplies dwindle, the government can force rationing in ugly ways by forcing the money price so low that more supplies are not brought in. Then rationing goes by who is willing to wait in line, or knows the right people, or has the extra money to bribe. Whereas if money prices were left alone, prices would rise, and rationing would be by money price.
You are just another one of those unthinking idiots who suppose that passing laws accomplishes something, no matter how illogical. Ban alcohol? Sure that worked. Ban drugs? Guns? Price rises? All the same, pass a law, mission accomplished.
The government's own auditor says Medicare / Medicaid has $60B a year of fraud. A government program especially created to recover it spent several hundred million dollars and recovered only $50 million or some other pitiful amount. You call that efficient?
Social Security is an entirely different non-health care program. Bringing in that strawmanonly shows the weakness of your argument.
I never said a free market exists. I said that the socialist excuse of taking over from a failed free market was hogwash.
The current system fails because it is not designed to work, but rather for cronies to cover up for each other. Left, right, and all statists in between all have the same fear of individuals looking out for themselves. That is why all political flavors expand government, and why so many cronies get to resign to spend more time wth their families when any other ordinary person would be sent to jail.
Bureaucracies of all stripes are built of ignorant uncaring drones. It's the bosses that make the difference. When the bosses have no checks on their empire building, when moeny is unlimited from taxes instead of limited by bankruptcy and competition, the government gets no feedback other than whose empire is bigger and badder, and actual useful work is counterproductive to the goal of keeping your head down and paycheck coming in.
If you think government can be more efficient when it has absolutely no pressure to be so, and every pressure to simply expand mindlessly, then you are naive and deserve the government you get. Unfortunately, the rest of us get it too.
Statists are power mad selfish assholes who can't even imagine how the rest of us are capable of living our own lives without their guidance.
First off, very few big companies control entire markets.
Second, the government has a monopoly on prosecuting big companies, and the people who run big companies and big government are the same, therefore they don't prosecute each other. It's called cronyism.
The solution takes a few simplechanges:
Let anybady prosecute the big companies.
Make losers pay, so if big companies want to spend millions fighting something, they know they have little chance of recovery if they win, and little people are much more likely to find a lawyer to take on the case knowing the big company *can* afford to pay.
Don't let vexatious litigators keep on filing charges -- make that itself a crime for wasting everybody's time.
And make access to courts strictly by time of filing charges. Stop letting criminal cases take years to resolve and civil cases taking even longer. When the fat cats can't move their cases to the head of teh queue, they will be right quick at hiring new judges.
Slashdot Mirror
It was too far to go around.
Try a mirror or two.
Too late -- several, scratch that, a gazillion people already have the patent on internet patents. Now if they all get busy and start suing each other, they won't have time to sue anybody doing real work.
Bear with me here ...
Japanese syllables generally start with a consonant and end with a vowel, or are a vowel alone. Thus "McDonalds" is something like "ma ku do na ru do" and a Big Mac is a biggu makku.
For some reason, they used the American pronunciation of "Mexico" (meks sih ko) as the basis for their word, which comes out as "may kee shi ko". But the Spanish pronunciation "may hee ko" copies over almost perfectly into Japanese. It's a shame they copied the wrong pronunciation.
I suppose the proper pronunciation could be coming into vogue. It ought to be.
But there's your Japanese Mexico USA connection.
I am not exactly sure what you mean by "data transmission". But might running SMTP by hand using telnet be on the right path for beginners?
I have astonished a few friends who think computers are complicated just by "telnet domain.com 25" and running through a simple SMTP session to send a simple email. It's suddenly not quite so mysterious as before.
You can also do HTTP, but usually the returned data is too complex for a tty window. On the other hand, if you run your own webserver and "telnet localhost 80", you can set up simple pages to return.
If you want to look for a result, you already have one: descendant lives, potential competitor doesn't. It's nothing new under the sun. Put it down to genetic reflex if you want, but only someone willfully blind won't see it as having solved the problem. Just because it's abhorrent to most everybody else doesn't make it irrational to his thinking.
Refusing to understand delusions does nothing to help prevent the results of those delusions. How can you fix problems you don't understand? I consider that irrational too. If you like living in a world governed by irrational fiat rather than understanding, you're on the right track.
In many species, including chimpanzees, when a male takes over leadership, it is common for him to kill infants because they are not his.
What is irrational about killing someone else's unborn baby, and the traitorous mother bearing it, and leaving your own 4 year old child alive? It may be insane, it's certainly not very nice, but I don't see anything irrational about it, if the stabber is thinking only of propagating his own seed.
Just because behavior violates every norm of civilization doesn't make it irrational.
If someone is insane and thinks everyone is spying on him, it may be entirely rational to kill a bunch of them.
If someone thinks a comet is an alien spaceship come to take away true believers, it may be entirely rational to kill oneself as an act of volunteering to travel with the aliens.
There is a rational possibility: the stabber was not the father of the unborn child.
You have a problem with verb tenses?
No, as an example of someone who only heard what he wanted to hear, and possibly died as a result of it.
You single out the "super conservatives" as the radicals?
There are so many nutjobs to choose from. I guess we can tell where you come from.
No mainstream politician has any interest in reducing the national debt. Reagan was the first president to raise the national debt after WW II, close to tripled it. Clinton actually started it down the road to lessening it, then Bush II also came close to tripling it, although Obama's own contribution could also be said to nearly triple it, but Bush II and Obama are so intertwined in the debt department that it's hard to tell how to divvy that up.
Of course neither party is even willing to admit that we are spending too much. The Republican plan, if you can call it that, was to balance the budget in 2061 or so; Obama hasn't even submitted a budget for three years, and his talking points grudgingly accept the possibility of maybe trimming growth by $1T over ten years, when that isn't even the full deficit from a single year's budget. Cheney must have been speaking for both parties when he said deficits don't matter.
Then the left refuses to accept the science of GMOs and refuses to admit there's any uncertainty in the degree of global warming, let alone how much man causes, while the right plugs their ears when anyone mentions evolution or any human contribution to global warming. Both have tons of nuts (Obama and Rubio being the latest) who won't even cop to the simple scientific fact that the earth is 4.5B years old.
Republican platform was to actually increase military spending, while Democrats merely howled that any decrease would be a disaster. We could cut the military budget in half and still be spending as much as 10 years ago in inflation adjusted dollars.
Civil rights? Oh yeah, they've heard of them. Both parties are racing to be the most Orwellian government in our history. Obama thinks it's just great that he can pick people to kill with drones, without any judicial inquiry, even if the targets are American citizens in countries where we are not at war. Yet they had so little foresight that eben wile being scared of Romney winning, they never considered how he would have handled the secret kill authority.
And you pick "super conservatives" out of all that as the radicals? It's the moderates in charge who are doing what was unthinkable just a few years ago.
One of the problems I see with the Republican proposal is that it has a sliding scale for renewal too, but it is based on revenue from the work. That requires an intrusive bureaucracy to verify the income figures, and Hollywood is notorious for cooking the books; supposedly Titanic and a few other block busters have never generated a net profit. One of the rules for any contract with Hollywood is to always get a percentage of the gross, never the net, because they set up shell companies and structure expenses such that nothing makes a profit.
So you've got the right track there. But I's set the first 4-year renewal much higher. If something is only worth $100 after four years, it isn't worth much at all.
640K years seems enough for everybody.
I like that idea! Hand out 640K years of copyright, total. As time goes by and years expire and are returned to the 640K year pool, auction them off to the highest bidder.
By George, I LIKE this idea!
You sound like you think Democrats are better.
News flash: politicians, like broken clocks, are right once in a while. Broken clocks have the advantage of being otherwise useless, while politicians actively get in the way.
Here, take a look.
Other nonsense patents include a kids' swing. It happens all the time. That's a broken system.
Do you complain equally that utility workers get paid double and triple overtime for their efforts to restore supplies during and after disasters?
Why then do you complain about truckers and other workers getting extra pay for bringing in supplies, and the store passing along that cost?
Or are you so naive that you think those utility workers are working straight time, or donating their time?
Is greed ok when it's union, but not otherwise?
Is greed by the truckers ok, but the store is supposed to absorb that cost?
Do you object to utility workers getting double and triple overtime for working during and after storms?
If not, then why do you object to truckers and warehouse workers charging extra for working long hours bringing in extra supplies, and why do you object to store owners passing along the extra cost in the form of higher prices?
Why is it immoral for a store to make more money during a storm for extra and more dangerous work but not for utility workers?
The mammoth system required to make ration cards work is a poor substitute for self-rationing through normal supply and demand raising prices. Bureaucrats are indifferent and ignorant and can't even come close to duplicating the intelligence built into supply and demand. It's like bureaucrats deciding who should wear lead shoes and who should have anti-gravity shoes to compensate for gravity.
You think I should be embarrassed and ashamed because I don't think like you.
You should be ashamed for having nothing but strawman arguments, and for thinking everybody should think like you, blindly, regardless of reason.
The people selling at that price know this and are taking advantage of the emergency situation to exploit the needs of the victims for profit.
When did profit become such a dirty word? Do you not want the most pay you can get for your job? How would you like a bunch of ignorant indifferent bureaucrats putting wage controls on you?
That is what you are claiming the moral authority for. You claim, without the slightest shred of knowledge, that you know how much scarce supplies should cost, and that charging more is exploitation. You know nothing of what it costs to bring in supplies during an emergency. You know nothing of the extra hours worked, the extra resources expended, or anything else that goes into the higher prices.
Here's some more econ 101 for your enlightenment. If a store runs out of supplies and calls around to find more, they will pick the cheapest source. If one supplier charges $15 per gallon for gas and a second charges $20, the store will choose the $15 supplier. If the $20 supplier can deliver within an hour but the $15 supplier will come tomorrow, the store will probably order enough of the expensive stuff to get by for one day until the cheaper stuff comes in -- he will *ration* himself.
That's exactly what everybody should want. Rational decisions made possible by realistic fungible prices, not by bureaucrats with their head up their ass.
No, by charging 15 dollars more, they are making it unattainable by the hardest hit and most in need.
Everyone has their own definition of need. How do you define it -- as those with the least money? That's as arbitrary as even/odd license plate numbers. "Hardest hit" and "most in need" are cute phrases meant to wring tears of empathy but devoid of meaning.
The attitude that the government can control prices is right up there with King Canute trying to control the tides. At least he knew he couldn't; you still need to learn basic economics. Whether price is measured in dollars, hours, bribes, or family relationships, the price will go up when demand exceeds supply. It is as inexorable as gravity or Boyle's law.
When the price rises, there's a wonderful effect -- it discourages people buying scarce supplies they don't really need. They will buy one roll of toilet paper instead of a month's worth. They will buy one gallon of gasoline and run their generator only as much as necessary instead of running it all day long on a full tank.
And they will remember and plan ahead next time.
When that price rise includes fungible money, it's even better, because that excess will encourage bringing in more supplies. Hours and effort are not fungible -- the store owner can't treasure up those hours and exchange them for more supplies. They are lost, gone wit the wind, a wasted resource.
Every time the government bureaucrats substitute their elitist snobbery for reality, they make a hash of it. Laws against price gouging are a perfect example.
If the gas was cheap, many would buy it. So they would have gas. With the price gouging the prices are exorbitantly high, so few can obtain it.
These people increased the scarcity of these items (buy buying large quantities for themselves) to try to extort money from people who needed them. Regardless of what your hero Ayn might think, a completely free enterprise doesn't always work.
You are sooo unimaginative.
Everything you say would be true -- if supplies were normal. They aren't. It costs more to bring supplies into a disaster area, believe it or not. Prices are a very simple fact of life: when demand exceeds supply, they rise, and when supplies exceed demand, they drop.
So with dwindling supplies, prices rise. Note carefully: humans CAN NOT CONTROL prices artificially. The money price may be legally limited, but all that means is that the time or effort price rises. People wait in line or bribe suppliers to get first dibs.
Why aren't more supplies brought in? Because it costs more, in money and time and effort, and if they can't get paid correspondingly more for that effort, they aren't going to lose money just to be noble.
If the government had kept its paws off, the price would rise enough to bring in more supplies.
Supplies are always rationed one way or another. Even in normal times, there is a cost of production and distribution, and that limits supplies.
In bad times, when supplies dwindle, the government can force rationing in ugly ways by forcing the money price so low that more supplies are not brought in. Then rationing goes by who is willing to wait in line, or knows the right people, or has the extra money to bribe. Whereas if money prices were left alone, prices would rise, and rationing would be by money price.
You are just another one of those unthinking idiots who suppose that passing laws accomplishes something, no matter how illogical. Ban alcohol? Sure that worked. Ban drugs? Guns? Price rises? All the same, pass a law, mission accomplished.
The government's own auditor says Medicare / Medicaid has $60B a year of fraud. A government program especially created to recover it spent several hundred million dollars and recovered only $50 million or some other pitiful amount. You call that efficient?
Social Security is an entirely different non-health care program. Bringing in that strawmanonly shows the weakness of your argument.
I never said a free market exists. I said that the socialist excuse of taking over from a failed free market was hogwash.
The current system fails because it is not designed to work, but rather for cronies to cover up for each other. Left, right, and all statists in between all have the same fear of individuals looking out for themselves. That is why all political flavors expand government, and why so many cronies get to resign to spend more time wth their families when any other ordinary person would be sent to jail.
Bureaucracies of all stripes are built of ignorant uncaring drones. It's the bosses that make the difference. When the bosses have no checks on their empire building, when moeny is unlimited from taxes instead of limited by bankruptcy and competition, the government gets no feedback other than whose empire is bigger and badder, and actual useful work is counterproductive to the goal of keeping your head down and paycheck coming in.
If you think government can be more efficient when it has absolutely no pressure to be so, and every pressure to simply expand mindlessly, then you are naive and deserve the government you get. Unfortunately, the rest of us get it too.
Statists are power mad selfish assholes who can't even imagine how the rest of us are capable of living our own lives without their guidance.
What makes you think bargaining is the answer?
First off, very few big companies control entire markets.
Second, the government has a monopoly on prosecuting big companies, and the people who run big companies and big government are the same, therefore they don't prosecute each other. It's called cronyism.
The solution takes a few simplechanges:
Let anybady prosecute the big companies.
Make losers pay, so if big companies want to spend millions fighting something, they know they have little chance of recovery if they win, and little people are much more likely to find a lawyer to take on the case knowing the big company *can* afford to pay.
Don't let vexatious litigators keep on filing charges -- make that itself a crime for wasting everybody's time.
And make access to courts strictly by time of filing charges. Stop letting criminal cases take years to resolve and civil cases taking even longer. When the fat cats can't move their cases to the head of teh queue, they will be right quick at hiring new judges.