hmmmm, yes, like spam out of third-world countries, credit card fraudsters out of Mala(i)sia... I dunno, it might do the US economy some good to have the world go play on their own.
'Sorry, your email was destined for a ICANN address but was sourced from an ICANT address. Bouncy bouncy!'
Seriously, this seems like an excellent way for the rest of the world to shoot itself right in the foot. Maybe we should just let them. Isolationism in reverse.
I have never had to reset my Palm; I've had a 500 and the 505. Maybe I'm just not using the apps with problems; I don't use "documents to go" or any of that stuff, just the PDA-level apps and the ones I named here. I do hot-sync regularly, and I've never had a problem with that, either.
I suppose the T|X will be a whole new experience, I'm hoping it'll be as reliable, but a web browser (via wifi no less) sure is a lot more complex than most of the stuff I've been using. So I guess I can expect some level of annoyance. Especially considering how pathological some web pages are.
Part of what made owning those Palms so pleasant was that they just worked. Well. I'm ready to find out, anyway.:-)
...or "A Case of Conscience" by James Blish. It won the Hugo award. An even better read with regard to this subject. Catholic priest/scientist encounters "perfect" ET's and is slam-dunked by multiple religious issues.
A laptop is pretty bulky, even a light one, so inevitably, I don't have one with me all the time. I have both a Mac Powerbook and a Windows XP laptop, the Mac is a lot more pleasant to use but isn't any more convenient.
But... my Palm (the M505, soon to be the T|X) is always with me. On my Palm, I have, and use:
An app named "Silver" that lets you customize the look and feel of the 505
An address book (this is stock software, but very useful)
Note taking software, both handwritten and text -- again, stock and mega-useful
Chinese character flashcard software (both the traditional and the icky modern characters)
A comprehensive guitar chord reference
Photo display software (and lots of photos)
An "ear trainer" which teaches one to precisely recognize musical notes
An RPN calculator (I'm so into RPN I can hardly use an algebraic calculator these days)
A decent chess game and some other "arcade" type games
A very nice list management program "ListPro" upon which I keep:
An encrypted list of passwords and ids
A list of music I hear that interests me (and probably will buy eventually)
A couple of outlines for books I am writing
Notes for a house I am designing
A complete list of 31 martial arts forms move by move
There are tons of other apps for the Palm, these are just the ones that I've found (so far) that are particularly useful to me. YMWDV.
What this all boils down to is that I am never without something interesting to do, a place to make, keep and use notes and lists, and share photos and ideas.
The T|X will add web browsing and email, a lot more memory, the ability to play back music and audiobooks, and basically the form factor won't change at all. The T|X is just about the size of my current M505.
I can turn on my Palm anywhere without aggravating anyone or looking for some desk space — in a meeting or a movie theatre, at my desk, in a car, on a train, bus or plane, in a restaurant, store or at a customer's job site (we do some consulting and fast note taking capability is always useful in that venue.)
Palm just about as fast as I can write "normal" text on paper. It's really a very good system, and I'm eager to see what the T|X's Graffiti II will be like.
Palms really aren't laptops, and vice-versa. I'd truly hate to be without a Palm or Palm-like device. I use it every day. I use a laptop very seldom by comparison. Mostly on trips when I'm going to be out of town for more than a day or two — at that point, things I need to do require a full blown computer. But I still take the Palm everywhere, and usually leave the laptop in the hotel room or the car.:-)
I placed my order for the T|X this afternoon, hopefully I'll have it Friday.
The specs say the T|X runs Palm OS 5.4, and the camera says it's good for OS 5, without specifying a subrevision, so one would think it'd work ok. $80.00 doesn't seem out of line, either, though the reviews on Amazon are a bit mixed.
I also found this Veo camera, which is 640 x 680 instead of 1.3 MP, and is about 25% less expensive.
...a replacement for my M505. Wifi, web browsing and email in my pocket AND all my old software will work. It's about bloody time is all I have to say.
...what I've seen commercial software doesn't want to add is costumizability(sic).
We make commercial graphics software and we provide for (one or more) custom tool sets and have for years. You can set up "operations caddies" of any organization (4x8, 16x5 etc) and drag tools in and out of them at any time, save them, load them, etc.
It's used just as you imagine; you can set up a specialized caddy for image repair work, one for special effects, one for ray tracing, one for landscape generation, one for painting, one for animation... I'd say that it is one of the features I use most.
We had to do this, as our complete toolbar has so many operations on it you can get lost even if you're an expert, and just as the parent describes, when you're doing one thing, you're not going to need a lot of specialized tools. Caddies just make sense. Does a mechanic drag every tool out for every job? Of course not.
Fabulous example of slashdot moderation pathology.
on
First Look at GIMP 2.4
·
· Score: 1
The grandparent directly asks: "As a Photoshop (and, occasionally, GIMP) user, I would be glad to know of what, in your opinion, is a good photo editing application for professionals? Am I missing out on something?" This is modded +4 Interesting.
The parent directly answers the question that was asked. Consequently, it is modded -1 Off-topic.
Ah, slashdot. Where any idiot can moderate. And does, as we see here. You gotta love it.
As a Photoshop (and, occasionally, GIMP) user, I would be glad to know of what, in your opinion, is a good photo editing application for professionals? Am I missing out on something?
Much (a great deal much) more powerful layered image handling, faster area selection / masking methodologies, more extensive wand and keying capabilities, a different approach to a lot of things. Many of which were designed specifically with the idea of image editing in mind.
I'd like to see them keep adding all the features they can, although I do wish that some of them were more "discoverable"--I certainly didn't realize how much was hidden behind the ctrl, alt & shift keys at first...
Call me crazy, but may I suggest that if you want to discover features in software (of any variety) that you have a nice sit-down session with (a) the documentation and (b) a notebook? A few hours invested there (or less... not all software is documented to the degree that ours is) can give you the "these interesting features are in there and this is basically how to use them " of an "expert" if you use that magic skill television is destroying. You know... we used to call it "reading" back when I had to walk uphill both ways through boiling lava and six foot deep snow just to carry a lower-case letter home to my mom.
So what alternative tool, specifically for web design imaging that would help out the professional graphic designer more than Photoshop, would you suggest?
From a logical standpoint, this DNA initiative is really no different than keeping the fingerprints of those who are detained but not convicted and I've heard little outcry about this
No. Fingerprints let someone know who you are. They can also correlate your physical presence at a scene. No more than that. And the system can be gamed.
A DNA sample potentially lets the holder know how smart you are, what diseases you're prone to, what genetic faults are inevitable, what kind of children you can have, exactly what race(s) you are, what poisons will work best on you, ditto what biologicals will work best on you, what color your eyes are, how strong your bones can get, how your nerves, airways and musculature form... in short, DNA lets the government know way too much. The reason I am convinced that it is way too much is that the government has proven that it will mismanage and break promises about data we allow it to handle. From social security numbers to tax records to the witness protection program, government FUBAR is evident at every turn. It goes beyond the government as well. Because in the final analysis, the government is made of people and most people have a price beyond which they will bend the rules. By extension, if the government has a database that has your DNA in it, you can be darned certain that database will end up (for instance) in the insurance companies hands.
Gaming... entirely possible. Someone gets a sample of your (whatever) and plants it at a crime scene. Now because DNA mismatch is extremely unlikely, you are a major suspect. Sadly, you have no alibi (you didn't know you'd need one and you were out driving around in the rain that night.) Guess what's going to happen to you?
You really think the government will never do anything you won't like with your DNA if you let them have it? I don't have that level of confidence, sorry.
You could hold up a pretty good distance with a balloon, if the balloon was large enough and you still have some atmosphere to work with. A nice bearing at the base (so the balloon and tether could spin, preventing fatal amounts of twisting) and maybe even a nice thin line to feed gas up to the balloon to replace losses... tether it in some water and make hydrogen right there, just hope you don't ever have a lightning strike...:-) Or be smarter and don't use hydrogen...
Y'know... gas balloons float because the content, by volume, is lighter than air. But the molecules are small, so they leak. The lightest thing you could put in a "baloon" would be a vacuum, but then the vessel (balloon) has to be so strong it'd be heavy again. Are carbon fibers strong enough to consider constructing a vacuum containing balloon? I don't know enough about their structural properties, or potential properties, to even hazard a guess. Anyone?
Well, what's the definition of "direction from society"?
Society, in the form of the death penalty, directs an executioner to kill. So that's not murder. In the case of defense, if we allow that, society directs killing in the case of defending a person (which might be yourself.) In the case of having war made on you or a group you are a member of, society directs you to kill in order to defend yourself and those others in your group.
I'm not sure which part of this covers self-defense. Or the case where person A is attempting to murder person B, and you, person C, are allowed to kill person A to stop them.
I wondered if you'd venture an opinion on how defense should be handled. The two cases you describe are really the same thing. Defense of a cognitive being from apparent threat of murder.
I see defense as having three fairly distinct approaches, the first two of which I will describe depend on how society would obligate its citizens:
First, defense can be seen as covered by something similar to the "equal force" dictum that is law in most states today: The law allows you to use equal force. In other words, if I punch you, you can punch me. If I hit you with a pot, you can hit me with a pot. But you can't kill me, because I didn't kill you. Society would place an obligation on the defender to disable, rather than kill, the attacker. In this case, the original verbiage is sufficient. This covers the A/B/C scenario, because authority is not given to kill to anyone but the courts to do anything but respond to disable.
I'd prefer to reserve the authority to authorize killing to the courts, myself, so this would be my choice. This won't always result in a fair outcome (we can imagine a scenario where the defender was be unable, or incompetent, to stop an attacker except by killing them, for instance, a child who had a gun against an adult), but neither will any other scenario always result in a fair outcome.
Secondly, "(making) war" can be defined as the act of the attacker, and "(making) defense" as the act of the attacked. In this case also, the original verbiage is sufficient. This isn't all that bad an approach, because it has a strong ethical basis in fact. Again, it covers the A/B/C scenario implicitly. I don't make this my first choice because fairness is eroded in that with authority to kill in the hands of the rank and file, people will be killed who should not have been — particularly by agents of the state (police and the military.) We have seen this in everything from the Kent State massacre to shooting that guy who was driving the tank in LA in the head. Cops are always killing people "by mistake" and getting away with it. It is my personal opinion that the majority of people who tend to go for jobs as cops and soldiers aren't there for what I consider the right reasons — helping citizens — but as a power trip and so on. I am not comfortable giving them the authority to kill. So that's my thinking there.
The third is if you want defense to be an explicit exception, eliminating citizen obligation either way. In that case it only adds a few words. We're definitely still in broad, clear, territory:
Murder: The intentional killing of a cognitive or potentially cognitive being who is not oneself and does not meet the definition of the not yet cognitive unborn, without their explicit and informed consent, and without direction from society as punishment or subject of war or defense against attempted murder. Punishable by death.
There is another set of factors, too: Jury nullification and not guilty verdicts. No matter what law there is, a jury can throw it out for any case. This is very important law, though it is seldom mentioned. For a bench trial, the judge can rule "not guilty" if the circumstances demand an exception. This allows law to be broader and less nit-picky by applying comm
You really think it's possible to have a just murder code that's a couple of sentences long? Or even a few paragraphs?
Absolutely...
Murder is the intentional killing of a cognitive or potentially cognitive being who is not oneself and does not meet the definition of the not yet cognitive unborn, without their explicit and informed consent, and without direction from society as punishment or subject of war. Punishable by death.
The ten commandments — like most things you pull out of a work of fantasy from another age — loses much relevance by modern lights. You know, graven images, oxen, who you can serve and who you can't, who with and under what conditions you can have sex, taking names in vain, what days you and you family and slaves can work, outright nonsense about how the world was created... pretty sorry stuff, only worthy of superstitious primitives. Which of course is no coincidence as this is precisely the audience it was written for.
If it's boiling things down to a set of basic precepts you're after, I prefer these:
Thou shalt be strong first in mind, and then in body, to thy limits
Thou shalt be fair
Thou shalt be honest
Thou shalt be peaceful, unless attacked
Thou shalt be kind to one another, animals and the earth
Thou shalt not trespass another's mind, body, home or possessions
Thou shalt not encourage ignorance and superstition, but advance knowledge
Thou shalt do what thou promises to do to the best of thy ability
Thou shalt not create unwanted children
Thou shalt not force they views upon others
I wrote these some years back, though I still tweak them now and then.
I get the impression you're looking at this the opposite way that I do.
My position is that if the patent laws allow distinctions made on such fine issues that it requires a judge to look at at them, then the laws are no good. This generalizes well to most other areas as well.
The fewer laws we have, and the clearer they are, and the less they depend on fine distinctions, the better off we will all be, in my estimation.
It is true that when laws try to nail down every factor, they're going to fail to work in many cases, and that is where we get into the trouble you describe... you can't account for situations you didn't anticipate. But... when a law is broad and general, it accounts for much more than a law that is nit-picky and has a large number of metrics to meet.
You can get an "ultra-clear" law without detailing every distinction, if the law is broadly and clearly stated. This has the beneficial side effect of (a) not requiring a lawyer to interpret the law, and (b) actually allowing the citizens to meet the standard of being responsible for obeying the law (because they can understand it, and because law on any one area it wouldn't be so overwhelming) and (c) judges could make a lot faster, clearer decisions if they weren't trying to figure out if the number of angels dancing on the head of your pin is the same as the number of angels dancing on the head of my pin.
I suspect — but can't defend in detail — that the more specific a law is, the less actually useful it is to society. I draw this conclusion from the fairly obvious (to me) consequences to increasing complexity of any one law which are: more effort required to interpret the law, fewer people and situations it affects, more easily it is misunderstood or mis-applied, the more it interacts with other law, the more professionals will be required to interpret the law, the more expensive dealing with the law is.
These observations are all true as far as they go, but it seems to me that they don't recognize the real problems — which aren't described in the summary, either.
First of all, if the laws allow one court to decide differently than another court, then they're probably not good enough laws. Laws should be ultra-clear. Patent law as much as any other law.
Secondly, if the laws are clear, then the judges should be deciding even-handedly. If they were, what would the software have to "detect"?
These things should not be matters of opinion. If they are, the legal system is at fault, not some chunk of software that winnows who has what opinion out of the pile of conflicting crap that comprises judicial patent rulings.
Not that I think any of this is going to change — far from it — but that is what I think the problem is.
Blaming the software seems to me to be the equivalent of blaming a newspaper photographer for photographing a murder scene. The photographer wasn't responsible for the problem. But that doesn't mean it isn't useful and worthwhile for people to know the facts of the matter. Stopping the newspaper reporter isn't the point. Stopping the murderer is.
That would work for one person; but not for two or more — think of the trouble you'd get into with two people dancing, for instance, or fighting — the only way the holodeck can work is with pressor force fields that let no individual interact with any "real" surface in the room.
Fascinating. Well, that solves the "expose the whole work" problem (and makes the service pretty useless in the process.) Now all they have to do is obtain the rights they don't have, so they can do this legally.
However, you also have to note that civil disobedience got people beaten, jailed, and killed before it achieved the desired result — and though it did in that case work, there were other factors, such as they were right, in the ethical structure that defined the nation they lived in. I'm not sure at all that's the case with copyright; at the very least, it's murkier.
Slashdot Mirror
hmmmm, yes, like spam out of third-world countries, credit card fraudsters out of Mala(i)sia... I dunno, it might do the US economy some good to have the world go play on their own.
'Sorry, your email was destined for a ICANN address but was sourced from an ICANT address. Bouncy bouncy!'
Seriously, this seems like an excellent way for the rest of the world to shoot itself right in the foot. Maybe we should just let them. Isolationism in reverse.
I suppose the T|X will be a whole new experience, I'm hoping it'll be as reliable, but a web browser (via wifi no less) sure is a lot more complex than most of the stuff I've been using. So I guess I can expect some level of annoyance. Especially considering how pathological some web pages are.
Part of what made owning those Palms so pleasant was that they just worked. Well. I'm ready to find out, anyway. :-)
Check it out on amazon.com
But... my Palm (the M505, soon to be the T|X) is always with me. On my Palm, I have, and use:
There are tons of other apps for the Palm, these are just the ones that I've found (so far) that are particularly useful to me. YMWDV.
What this all boils down to is that I am never without something interesting to do, a place to make, keep and use notes and lists, and share photos and ideas.
The T|X will add web browsing and email, a lot more memory, the ability to play back music and audiobooks, and basically the form factor won't change at all. The T|X is just about the size of my current M505.
I can turn on my Palm anywhere without aggravating anyone or looking for some desk space — in a meeting or a movie theatre, at my desk, in a car, on a train, bus or plane, in a restaurant, store or at a customer's job site (we do some consulting and fast note taking capability is always useful in that venue.)
Palm just about as fast as I can write "normal" text on paper. It's really a very good system, and I'm eager to see what the T|X's Graffiti II will be like.
Palms really aren't laptops, and vice-versa. I'd truly hate to be without a Palm or Palm-like device. I use it every day. I use a laptop very seldom by comparison. Mostly on trips when I'm going to be out of town for more than a day or two — at that point, things I need to do require a full blown computer. But I still take the Palm everywhere, and usually leave the laptop in the hotel room or the car. :-)
The specs say the T|X runs Palm OS 5.4, and the camera says it's good for OS 5, without specifying a subrevision, so one would think it'd work ok. $80.00 doesn't seem out of line, either, though the reviews on Amazon are a bit mixed.
I also found this Veo camera, which is 640 x 680 instead of 1.3 MP, and is about 25% less expensive.
Too bad it doesn't have a camera, though. :-(
We make commercial graphics software and we provide for (one or more) custom tool sets and have for years. You can set up "operations caddies" of any organization (4x8, 16x5 etc) and drag tools in and out of them at any time, save them, load them, etc.
It's used just as you imagine; you can set up a specialized caddy for image repair work, one for special effects, one for ray tracing, one for landscape generation, one for painting, one for animation... I'd say that it is one of the features I use most.
We had to do this, as our complete toolbar has so many operations on it you can get lost even if you're an expert, and just as the parent describes, when you're doing one thing, you're not going to need a lot of specialized tools. Caddies just make sense. Does a mechanic drag every tool out for every job? Of course not.
The parent directly answers the question that was asked. Consequently, it is modded -1 Off-topic.
Ah, slashdot. Where any idiot can moderate. And does, as we see here. You gotta love it.
<meta>Not that any improvement to slashdot is even imaginable...</meta>
Could be. Have you tried this?
Much (a great deal much) more powerful layered image handling, faster area selection / masking methodologies, more extensive wand and keying capabilities, a different approach to a lot of things. Many of which were designed specifically with the idea of image editing in mind.
Disclosure: My software, my company.
Call me crazy, but may I suggest that if you want to discover features in software (of any variety) that you have a nice sit-down session with (a) the documentation and (b) a notebook? A few hours invested there (or less... not all software is documented to the degree that ours is) can give you the "these interesting features are in there and this is basically how to use them " of an "expert" if you use that magic skill television is destroying. You know... we used to call it "reading" back when I had to walk uphill both ways through boiling lava and six foot deep snow just to carry a lower-case letter home to my mom.
Here is a definitive answer to your question. :-)
Disclosure: My company, my software.
Other useful HTML entities here
No. Fingerprints let someone know who you are. They can also correlate your physical presence at a scene. No more than that. And the system can be gamed.
A DNA sample potentially lets the holder know how smart you are, what diseases you're prone to, what genetic faults are inevitable, what kind of children you can have, exactly what race(s) you are, what poisons will work best on you, ditto what biologicals will work best on you, what color your eyes are, how strong your bones can get, how your nerves, airways and musculature form... in short, DNA lets the government know way too much. The reason I am convinced that it is way too much is that the government has proven that it will mismanage and break promises about data we allow it to handle. From social security numbers to tax records to the witness protection program, government FUBAR is evident at every turn. It goes beyond the government as well. Because in the final analysis, the government is made of people and most people have a price beyond which they will bend the rules. By extension, if the government has a database that has your DNA in it, you can be darned certain that database will end up (for instance) in the insurance companies hands.
Gaming... entirely possible. Someone gets a sample of your (whatever) and plants it at a crime scene. Now because DNA mismatch is extremely unlikely, you are a major suspect. Sadly, you have no alibi (you didn't know you'd need one and you were out driving around in the rain that night.) Guess what's going to happen to you?
You really think the government will never do anything you won't like with your DNA if you let them have it? I don't have that level of confidence, sorry.
Y'know... gas balloons float because the content, by volume, is lighter than air. But the molecules are small, so they leak. The lightest thing you could put in a "baloon" would be a vacuum, but then the vessel (balloon) has to be so strong it'd be heavy again. Are carbon fibers strong enough to consider constructing a vacuum containing balloon? I don't know enough about their structural properties, or potential properties, to even hazard a guess. Anyone?
Society, in the form of the death penalty, directs an executioner to kill. So that's not murder. In the case of defense, if we allow that, society directs killing in the case of defending a person (which might be yourself.) In the case of having war made on you or a group you are a member of, society directs you to kill in order to defend yourself and those others in your group.
I wondered if you'd venture an opinion on how defense should be handled. The two cases you describe are really the same thing. Defense of a cognitive being from apparent threat of murder.
I see defense as having three fairly distinct approaches, the first two of which I will describe depend on how society would obligate its citizens:
First, defense can be seen as covered by something similar to the "equal force" dictum that is law in most states today: The law allows you to use equal force. In other words, if I punch you, you can punch me. If I hit you with a pot, you can hit me with a pot. But you can't kill me, because I didn't kill you. Society would place an obligation on the defender to disable, rather than kill, the attacker. In this case, the original verbiage is sufficient. This covers the A/B/C scenario, because authority is not given to kill to anyone but the courts to do anything but respond to disable.
I'd prefer to reserve the authority to authorize killing to the courts, myself, so this would be my choice. This won't always result in a fair outcome (we can imagine a scenario where the defender was be unable, or incompetent, to stop an attacker except by killing them, for instance, a child who had a gun against an adult), but neither will any other scenario always result in a fair outcome.
Secondly, "(making) war" can be defined as the act of the attacker, and "(making) defense" as the act of the attacked. In this case also, the original verbiage is sufficient. This isn't all that bad an approach, because it has a strong ethical basis in fact. Again, it covers the A/B/C scenario implicitly. I don't make this my first choice because fairness is eroded in that with authority to kill in the hands of the rank and file, people will be killed who should not have been — particularly by agents of the state (police and the military.) We have seen this in everything from the Kent State massacre to shooting that guy who was driving the tank in LA in the head. Cops are always killing people "by mistake" and getting away with it. It is my personal opinion that the majority of people who tend to go for jobs as cops and soldiers aren't there for what I consider the right reasons — helping citizens — but as a power trip and so on. I am not comfortable giving them the authority to kill. So that's my thinking there.
The third is if you want defense to be an explicit exception, eliminating citizen obligation either way. In that case it only adds a few words. We're definitely still in broad, clear, territory:
There is another set of factors, too: Jury nullification and not guilty verdicts. No matter what law there is, a jury can throw it out for any case. This is very important law, though it is seldom mentioned. For a bench trial, the judge can rule "not guilty" if the circumstances demand an exception. This allows law to be broader and less nit-picky by applying comm
Absolutely...
Murder is the intentional killing of a cognitive or potentially cognitive being who is not oneself and does not meet the definition of the not yet cognitive unborn, without their explicit and informed consent, and without direction from society as punishment or subject of war. Punishable by death.
If it's boiling things down to a set of basic precepts you're after, I prefer these:
I wrote these some years back, though I still tweak them now and then.
My position is that if the patent laws allow distinctions made on such fine issues that it requires a judge to look at at them, then the laws are no good. This generalizes well to most other areas as well.
The fewer laws we have, and the clearer they are, and the less they depend on fine distinctions, the better off we will all be, in my estimation.
It is true that when laws try to nail down every factor, they're going to fail to work in many cases, and that is where we get into the trouble you describe... you can't account for situations you didn't anticipate. But... when a law is broad and general, it accounts for much more than a law that is nit-picky and has a large number of metrics to meet.
You can get an "ultra-clear" law without detailing every distinction, if the law is broadly and clearly stated. This has the beneficial side effect of (a) not requiring a lawyer to interpret the law, and (b) actually allowing the citizens to meet the standard of being responsible for obeying the law (because they can understand it, and because law on any one area it wouldn't be so overwhelming) and (c) judges could make a lot faster, clearer decisions if they weren't trying to figure out if the number of angels dancing on the head of your pin is the same as the number of angels dancing on the head of my pin.
I suspect — but can't defend in detail — that the more specific a law is, the less actually useful it is to society. I draw this conclusion from the fairly obvious (to me) consequences to increasing complexity of any one law which are: more effort required to interpret the law, fewer people and situations it affects, more easily it is misunderstood or mis-applied, the more it interacts with other law, the more professionals will be required to interpret the law, the more expensive dealing with the law is.
It's all IMHO, but I'm pretty convinced. :-)
First of all, if the laws allow one court to decide differently than another court, then they're probably not good enough laws. Laws should be ultra-clear. Patent law as much as any other law.
Secondly, if the laws are clear, then the judges should be deciding even-handedly. If they were, what would the software have to "detect"?
These things should not be matters of opinion. If they are, the legal system is at fault, not some chunk of software that winnows who has what opinion out of the pile of conflicting crap that comprises judicial patent rulings.
Not that I think any of this is going to change — far from it — but that is what I think the problem is.
Blaming the software seems to me to be the equivalent of blaming a newspaper photographer for photographing a murder scene. The photographer wasn't responsible for the problem. But that doesn't mean it isn't useful and worthwhile for people to know the facts of the matter. Stopping the newspaper reporter isn't the point. Stopping the murderer is.
They would probably be shot down if they flew near it.
That would work for one person; but not for two or more — think of the trouble you'd get into with two people dancing, for instance, or fighting — the only way the holodeck can work is with pressor force fields that let no individual interact with any "real" surface in the room.
Looks like it's not going to be a cakewalk.
However, you also have to note that civil disobedience got people beaten, jailed, and killed before it achieved the desired result — and though it did in that case work, there were other factors, such as they were right, in the ethical structure that defined the nation they lived in. I'm not sure at all that's the case with copyright; at the very least, it's murkier.
I don't think there ever was. Too many entrenched interests.
Sorry, my wording was unclear. The "just like" I was referring to was the purchase issue, not the pricing one.