"So I'm skeptical about the usefulness of having patents at all."
I find the consistency of this opinion quite reasonable; I have no strong opinion for a specific outcome, but a logically consistent position would seem to be all or nothing (sans business method patents, which are a different kind of beast). My objections to most arguments is the lack of internal, logical consistency -- they look more like self-serving rationalizations and rent-seeking than reasoned policy.
I've worked in a couple different areas of patentable subject matter, and most of them are functionally indistinguishable from computer algorithm patents in terms of what happens. Business method patents are a whole 'nother kind of mess.
The real software patents have only been acceptable in the US since State Street (Diamond vs. Diehr was about curing rubber, except that the rubber curing was software-controlled; i.e., the patent claimed a process for curing rubber, the fact that it was computer-controlled was just an aside and not central to the patentability). State Street was in 1998.
State Street was a business method patent, not an algorithm patent. While both types of patents are often classified under the rubric of "software patents" they have very different histories. It is only business method patents that were recently allowed in the US. Bilski et al is about business method patents.
True computer algorithm patents have been allowed for many decades just about everywhere. They are (correctly) viewed as strict abstractions of circuit designs, circuit designs being unambiguously patentable subject matter. Business method patents are not an abstraction of a circuit design and therefore have traditionally not been allowed; doing something on a computer does not imply that the process reduces to a particular circuit design. The only kinds of software patents that are vulnerable to a court decision are those that are not equivalent to circuit design.
Things like encryption algorithms are obviously equivalent to specific, novel circuit designs, "one-click shopping" or "selling pet food on the Internet" quite obviously are not.
"Allowing patents on this means giving somebody the ownership of a piece of math."
No, this is only true for a particular patentable algorithm in the same way it is true for *all* patentable subject matter. This is another argument that is not consistently applied (any math argument that applies to a computer algorithm trivially generalizes to all physical machines and material processes).
To use your quicksort example, if someone patents the quicksort algorithm it does not prevent you from sorting data generally. Sure the alternative existing methods might be less efficient (something you could hopefully say about all types of patents), but there are an infinite number of alternative methods to achieve the end result. You are not patenting "sorting", you are patenting one method of doing that transformation. In the same way, you cannot patent a particular chemical, but you *can* patent a process for synthesizing that chemical. There are cases where the patented method is the only known (practical) method for achieving a particular result, but those are precisely the cases patents were intended for.
An argument that does not really follow is like your one above that someone might patent the basic building block algorithms of software. How can an algorithm that does not exist be a "basic building block"? What has everyone been using up until the point where it is invented? The algorithms we consider "basic" are so because they have been around forever and are therefore in the public domain. What were people doing before the existing "basic building block" algorithms were invented? An algorithm that becomes a future "basic building block", those are arguably the algorithms that more than any other deserve patent protection if you are going to bother at all. Pretty much non-obvious, novel, and eminently useful by definition.
There are open algorithm problems in computer science that, if solved, would generate new basic building blocks that don't exist now. This has been true in the chemical process patent field many times as well. But it seems odd to lay claim to them as "basic building blocks" before they exist. If someone invents an anti-gravity device it may become a basic building block of transportation, but does that suddenly make it non-patentable subject matter? I'm just looking for consistent treatment, not any particular outcome. If we exclude all the inventions that are good enough that they become basic building blocks, there is really no point to having patents at all. Arguably the goal of the patent system is to encourage the invention of basic building blocks that do not currently exist.
This particular argument from the article is oft-repeated but weak:
"Software developers already enjoy strong copyright protections for their work, rendering patent protection largely redundant."
The exact same argument could be made for several classes of patent, such as chemical process patents, that people seem to generally consider legitimate patents in pretty much every country that has patents. If I am to believe that this is a compelling argument against software patents, then it is also a compelling argument against some other patentable areas. (Most arguments against software patents have this feature.)
On the other hand, a much more compelling argument can be made against "business method" patents (a subset of the suitcase called "software" patents) because they do not strictly define a machine. The reason algorithm patents (also part of the "software" patent suitcase) have long been acceptable just about everywhere is that they are strict abstractions of novel circuits (patentable material in virtually every country). As a general observation, most proponents of software patents are thinking of algorithm patents while most opponents of software patents are thinking of business method patents. The ambiguity of the term "software patent" muddies the context and makes intelligent discussions more difficult. It would help if everyone was more precise in their selection of terms.
Interestingly, for some government contracts the lowest bidder is automatically discarded -- it is the *second* lowest bidder that gets the contract. This is a well-known theoretical mechanism for removing bullshit from the bidding process. The end price will be slightly higher, but the price will usually be more accurate for a given contract spec.
USA has the highest rate of incarcerated people per capita of any country other than possibly China.
It is a bipartisan thing, unfortunately. Counter-intuitively, the most drug friendly states in the US tend to be western "red" states, due to their more libertarian perspective on individual liberty. For as nominally progressive as states like California are, their laws are awfully socially conservative even though they vote for people like Obama in a landslide. Honestly, most "blue" states are every bit as socially provincial as the "red" states. I guess that doesn't say much for American culture.
Total decriminalization of drugs has been tried in Portugal since 2001, and by all accounts has been a raging success by just about any metric you care to use. I'm happy to see other countries jumping on board the clue train, not that I expect to see something similar in the US for the foreseeable future.
If it was easier to enter the country legally fewer people would do it illegally.
As a point of fact, the US allows more legal immigration than any other country in the world. It is not as though the US is stingy about letting people immigrate compared to the rest of the world. Canada beats the US on a per capita basis, though generally North American immigration policy makes the rest of the industrialized world look like a joke. Compared to the EU, the US is positively libertine with its immigration policy. What, precisely, is so horribly wrong with US immigration policy that does not make most of the rest of the industrialized world look even worse? Exactly how many more millions of immigrants must the US accept every year before the US earns your approval? The entire EU, with twice the population of the US, only accepts a measly 1.8M immigrants.
The US is pretty liberal about who it accepts as well. From Wikipedia: "Of the top ten countries accepting resettled refugees in 2006, the United States accepted more than twice as much as the next nine countries combined..." The US may have policy problems, but its willingness to accept immigrants is not one of them.
And yes, at one point long ago, back probably before you were born, the United States used to pride itself on being the longest average lifespan in the world.
The United States still has the longest average life expectancy if you control for fatal injury rates. The actuarial statistics are misleading for the purposes of determining medical effectiveness. In essence, American medical life expectancy is at the top of the heap, but the OECD averages are brought down because people in the US have a relatively high probability of dying in vehicular accidents or being murdered when young compared to other industrialized countries. If a fatal injury does not end your life prematurely, you'll outlive your counterparts in the rest of the industrialized world. More on that here:
Not only mirrors (that occurred to me as well), but have the missile spin so the energy of the laser is spread out over a much larger surface. Spinning would also allow the areas of the missile to cool down somewhat.
All of the "obvious" solutions like you mention generally will not work. The power levels for the lasers are specifically designed to defeat the known technical counter-measures available to a missile designer. This is why laser weapons have a power rating orders of magnitude greater than is strictly required in most conventional circumstances; they are obviating counter-measures before anyone tries to develop them. Among other things, they are designed to ablate the target faster than you can reflect it or physically spin it.
This is also the reason a lot of US military research focuses on hyper-kinetic weapons these days; good ones can defeat all plausible molecular armor and even weak ones can defeat all current armor. The power levels of US weapon systems are getting to the point where any passive counter-measure would have to be very exotic.
In all military advances in offense, the defense will find a way around it (and vice-versa). It's a cat and mouse game. Look at how Iraq tried to foil GPS guided ordinance, they jammed the GPS signals. I don't know how successful they were but given time they might have been successful.
This is based on a media-created myth. The US has never had GPS-guided weaponry, precisely because GPS can be jammed. Therefore, it would not have done much good to have a GPS jammer beyond attracting the attention of missiles designed to destroy RF emitters.
The primary guidance mechanism usually mislabeled as "GPS guided" is ultra-precise inertial guidance, which can't be jammed at all short of altering the physics of the universe. These inertial guidance systems can optionally accept micro-corrections from a GPS input, but only within the (classified) error bounds of the inertial system which are already known to be very small. If the GPS signal deviates from the inertial guidance, the GPS is assumed to be compromised and ignored.
The "GPS-guided weapon" thing is one of many myths about US weapon systems perpetuated by the media. The US never has and never will produce a GPS-guided weapon.
The great irony of the glacier retreat being the harbinger of doom for humanity is that on most continents the glacial retreat is uncovering substantial quantities of archaeological evidence. I wonder what the people whose archaeological evidence we are finding thought about the glaciers when they encroached on their lives thousands of years ago. It is an interesting juxtaposition.
Empirical models of thermodynamic properties are definitely protected by copyright. There is a high-value market for these models, and different models of the same thermodynamic process will evaluate differently so it is a valuable creative product rather than a mere description of reality. For fields where tiny improvements in efficiency generate big cost savings, you want to use the most accurate model available where "most accurate" will be a function of the use case.
Thermodynamic property models are not measurements of reality, they are mathematical models of a physical process derived from empirical data. They are what you use to predict reality when it is not possible or practical to measure it. Turning the empirical data points into continuous functions is a creative step and the value of the creative step is in minimizing the divergence between the model and reality over as broad a range as possible. There are companies that specialize in producing and selling ultra-accurate thermodynamic property models.
I'd point out that software is covered under copyright. If I make a great new program and you copy it, I can sue under existing copyright laws. Giving that program patent protection "protects" it twice which isn't needed and merely reduces competition.
This is incorrect, in that the same argument applies to all patentable material. Patents apply to abstract processes ("algorithms"), copyrights apply to implementations (e.g. "software"). The abstract chemistry for producing a chemical output is an algorithm with no physical implementation and eminently patentable if novel, being a traditional subject of patents for centuries. The creation of an implementation of that algorithm is protected by copyright, and worth quite a bit of money in fact. This is indistinguishable from the case of algorithm patents in all important ways, up to and including the fact that the chemical process algorithm is a purely mathematical construct that only produces effects in implementation.
SQL is not a database, it is a standard interface to a feature set commonly associated with relational models. Before everyone standardized on SQL, there were other relational query languages. The "No" part of "NoSQL" refers to the fact that some basic elements of relational implementations cannot be usefully expressed using a much simpler distributed hash table model.
All the "NoSQL" does is eliminate all the parts of traditional relational databases that do no scale -- discarding the bottleneck rather than fixing it. These are things like joins and external indexing. Unfortunately, discarding those things means you discard a lot of very important functionality as a practical matter, notably the ability to do fast, complex analytics. Adopting the NoSQL architecture runs contrary to the trend toward more real-time, contextual analytical processing. There are a great many analytical applications that are not amenable to batch-mode pattern-matching, and the NoSQL model is a lot less applicable than I think some people want to acknowledge. In its domain, it is a great tool but it has many, many prohibitive limits. We are essentially trading power for scale.
That said, do not take this as an endorsement of traditional SQL relational databases either, as they have a number of serious limitations themselves. As just mentioned, a number of the core analytical operations those models support are based on algorithms that scale poorly. The SQL language itself has mediocre support for many abstract data types (e.g. spatial) and data models (e.g. graph), which in part reflects the inadequacies of the assumed underlying database algorithms (e.g. B-trees) that are implicit in SQL. The inability to efficiently do event-driven/real-time applications is also more a reflection of the access methods used in databases than any intrinsic weakness in SQL; SQL may be clunky for that purpose, but that is not the real limiter.
A truly revolutionary deviation from SQL would usefully implement a superset of the features SQL supports, not take them away. Of course, we would need access methods more capable than hash tables and B-trees to useful implement those features, which is a lot more work than discarding features that scale poorly. NoSQL is a stopgap technical measure for that small subset of applications where the serious tradeoffs are acceptable.
There are bigger issues that many people seem to be overlooking. First of all, the individual States pay for the vast majority of the highways, the Federal funds are not nearly as important as is often assumed. Second, in some States highways and roads are paid for entirely by gas taxes and use fees, a big chunk of which would evaporate if people stopped burning gas which raises the question of how to pay for the highways. In such cases that I am familiar with, gas taxes account for 60% of the highway budget with use fees (e.g. car registration fees) making up the rest. This model has a lot of advantages and efficiencies in practice, mostly due to the government not having a guaranteed budget.
You could increase use fees 150% to make up the shortfall, but that has two problems. First, it makes it a lot more expensive to own a car even if you do not drive it very often, which will have an adverse impact on some groups of people and reduce elasticity. Second, it will encourage people to register their vehicles in adjacent states where highways are (inefficiently) paid via other kinds of taxes. Vehicle registration shopping between adjacent states already happens in some parts of the US.
I call BS. If I stole a cow from one of those giant farms, the damn rancher'd be able to identify it in a second, but the instant you want to track something for public safety reasons, "there is no way they could ever collect that information."
I call BS on your BS. If we were talking about corporate feed lots it would be one thing, but a very significant percentage of the US beef herd is raised by independent cattle producers on open range in very sparsely populated country. It can take months to find all of your cattle to tag them in the first place, so it is very easy to "lose" cattle without noticing. In fact, the law in the ranching areas I am familiar with is that you only have rights to your free-range cattle if you can find and tag them within the first year after birth, after which they enter the public domain (first person to tag them owns them). It is not at all uncommon for me to find a rancher's untagged cattle in one of my canyons.
Beef ranching in the western US does not work the way you think it does. Much of the basic logistics of it have not changed much since the 19th century.
Internet access isn't a good excuse as a low-bandwidth cellular scanner would be enough to report via SOAP web-service to whatever database; not to mention that every industry has costs-of-doing-business and this will/could be one of those things.
You assume far too much, out in the western US ranch country there is usually no communication services of any kind. I have a small (a few square kilometers) ranch in Nevada that is 20 miles from the next ranch (never mind a road), typical for western ranching operations. I get cellular reception -- one bar -- if I climb to the peak of the adjacent mountain, that several thousand extra feet gives me line-of-sight to an area near an Interstate highway 30-40 miles away.
There seems to be a presumption (1) that western ranches are the size of hobby farms, (2) that they are located anywhere near infrastructure, and (3) that free-range cattle is a tidy local pasture-and-barn affair instead of a horseback operation in remote canyons. In many parts of the western ranching areas, you don't even locate all of your cattle for the better part of a year.
all the jackasses at the SEC that ignored data again and again which pointed to fraud and enabled him to get away with this for so many years?
They not only were not punished, they were given a promotion. The Obama administration made Mary Schapiro the head of the SEC, despite a pattern of what could only be described as egregious incompetence if we are generous, stonewalling or ignoring whistleblowers in a number of high-profile fraud cases including Madoff.
Madoff goes to prison, the regulators who bent over backward to not notice the fraud when it was brought to their attention get a promotion. See how this works?
Tell me how the US can't do better than Canada and England.
Define "better". According to a recent Lancet Oncology study (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1560849/UK-cancer-survival-rate-lowest-in-Europe.html) for males the average cancer survival rate in the UK is 44.8%. Compare to 66.3% in the USA for the same period. The US has the highest cancer survival rates in the world, and by a pretty large margin. That has to be worth something in your metrics of "better". I do not go to the doctor for social justice, I go to the doctor to get medical problems, say cancer and cardiovascular disease, fixed. The US is tops for fixing medical problems even if the system surrounding that medicine is a wreck.
Discard all the policy issues and ask yourself one simple question: what country will give me the best average statistical odds of having my condition cured/fixed? The US looks very, very good by that metric, and the reason people go to the doctor is to get cures. The medical system may be a wreck, but that is a semi-separate issue and I would be reluctant to throw away stellar medical outcomes as the price for cleaning up a broken system.
One of the more interesting statistical anomalies is that if it was not for the extremely high death rates due to accidents (e.g. vehicular) and homicides, Americans would have the longest lifespans in the industrialized world instead of average ones (better medical outcomes offset high non-disease death rates). As is amusingly observed in health outcome statistics, the only demographic group that lives longer than Japanese women are Japanese women that live in the US. It is a relevant observation in this discussion, many people here are far too eager to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Research pays for itself more than investing in corporations.
Weird. The vast majority of US research is privately funded, by a huge margin, and the US leads the world in research spending (more than all of the countries in Asia combined, never mind Europe which runs a somewhat distant third). Even in the case of basic, "pure science" research, the government funded research is a shrinking majority. Clearly those corporations are doing something with that investment in the research department.
I am going to guess you never googled the statistics, easily found, before you posted.
Removed bank regulations that were intended to prevent the current financial crisis
As something of a tangent, this is a canard parroted by people who do not know much about banking regulations. It is worth pointing out, for example, that a number of industrialized countries that had no banking problems (like Canada) have never had a regulatory equivalent of the Glass-Steagall whipping boy. Ironically, that body of regulation was modified over the last few decades in order to *reduce* the number of bank failures, which it did, by allowing them to diversify their business. If diversifying investments was so bad it would 1) not be one of the fundamental rules of investment generally and 2) I would expect the industrialized countries without any such restrictions to have fared far worse than they did.
The problem wasn't lack of regulation, but a lot of stupid regulation and arguably pervasive corruption that is still in place today. Add on top of this a regulatory monoculture in global banking that allowed exploits to propagate, and the problem starts to become obvious.
That has to be one of the oddest and most ill-informed rants ever. The modern public library system in the US was built by Andrew Carnegie with his own money, a philanthropic enterprise. Government attempts prior to Carnegie's private effort were spotty and somewhat less than wildly successful. It is maintained with public money today, but at least in the US the public library system was famously built by massive private investment. Carnegie built something like 2500 libraries, no small number.
...US research is just fine and growing if you look at, you know, the actual numbers. As is Asia. Europe, by contrast, is in serious decline.
The vast majority of research in the US is privately funded, and has been for many decades. A half century ago this was not the case, but today it is. Furthermore, private research in the US is highly productive as such things go, so this distribution is not necessarily a bad thing. It is not so much that the US government is cutting research funding as it is that private funding continues to grow faster than public funding.
The US government is even a declining percentage of so-called "basic research", though still the majority of such funding at around 60%. These are all the pure science things that would nominally never get funded if the government didn't though obviously that is overstating the case given the stats.
On the upside, total US research spending continues to grow, just faster in the private sector than the public sector as it has for many decades, and the US still invests more in public and private R&D than anyone else by a large margin.
The most startling statistic related to R&D funding is that Europe runs a somewhat distant *third* behind the US and Asia despite its GDP and per capita GDP. Europe is arguably the most glaring example of a region not pulling its weight, though Germany is doing a decent job of it. A lot of European R&D has migrated to the US and Asia, but they should be a wee bit embarrassed about that.
This research is essentially stating that what is and is not "green" transportation is significantly dependent on the context of the layout of the region it is located in. This should be obvious but it is not hard to find people that think forcing everyone into the same transportation options regardless of objective context is sound environmental policy. Or in other words, attempting to force people to be "green" often generates more pollution than doing nothing at all, and if you do not change the underlying equilibrium that created the original distribution you will just piss people off as a bonus to your non-accomplishment.
The sad truth is that most American cities are ill-suited to public transportation at the fundamental design level. It would be like trying to make MS-DOS function as an enterprise server environment, the impedance mismatch is extreme. You can't hack an effective and economic public transportation system onto them, and taking a wrecking ball to three-quarters of the American landscape would be expensive beyond belief for a very modest benefit -- you would see more pollution reduction by simply shutting down coal power plants and building nuclear power plants. You have to build the green cities before you can demand people live in them, but for some reason politicians often seem to get that backward.
Even though I am all for green cities, punishing people who live in car-only suburbs is a non-solution because for the most part Americans have no practical choice but to live in such places. For some reason, the same people that refuse to allow the building of green cities as a matter of policy (or at a minimum show a complete lack of political will to propose such things) have no problem coming up with punishments for not living in cities they would not allow to be built. It is a bipartisan failing, even the extreme "environmental progressives" that control the politics where I live rabidly oppose any city development that does not look an awful lot like crappy suburban sprawl.
The article is confused about where most of the real differences are purported to be.
No one credible claims that females have less ability to learn mathematics or crunch numbers in most cases, which is what this article is contesting. In other words, they built themselves a strawman. The differences involve application, not learning.
What *is* credibly claimed, in the sense that there is not insignificant quantities of direct and indirect evidence in literature, is that females are markedly poorer at certain classes of applied mathematical problems, notably applications involving complex, high-dimensionality metric spaces. Females understand the mathematics just fine, they have relative difficulty applying it to real-world problems when system complexity exceeds a certain threshold. This is largely attributed to male brains having more neurons dedicated to conceptualizing and manipulating spatial relationships.
There are real differences, but it is mostly in specific areas of the applied side and there is a relatively straightforward causal theory related to brain structure. That people feel it necessary to repeatedly trot out the strawman that women have less ability to learn math while conveniently ignoring supportable arguments for differences in practical ability reeks of a political agenda. There are other biases in application spaces strongly favoring females that also have straightforward causal links related to differences in brain structure but which say nothing about the ability of males to learn.
Slashdot Mirror
"So I'm skeptical about the usefulness of having patents at all."
I find the consistency of this opinion quite reasonable; I have no strong opinion for a specific outcome, but a logically consistent position would seem to be all or nothing (sans business method patents, which are a different kind of beast). My objections to most arguments is the lack of internal, logical consistency -- they look more like self-serving rationalizations and rent-seeking than reasoned policy.
I've worked in a couple different areas of patentable subject matter, and most of them are functionally indistinguishable from computer algorithm patents in terms of what happens. Business method patents are a whole 'nother kind of mess.
State Street was a business method patent, not an algorithm patent. While both types of patents are often classified under the rubric of "software patents" they have very different histories. It is only business method patents that were recently allowed in the US. Bilski et al is about business method patents.
True computer algorithm patents have been allowed for many decades just about everywhere. They are (correctly) viewed as strict abstractions of circuit designs, circuit designs being unambiguously patentable subject matter. Business method patents are not an abstraction of a circuit design and therefore have traditionally not been allowed; doing something on a computer does not imply that the process reduces to a particular circuit design. The only kinds of software patents that are vulnerable to a court decision are those that are not equivalent to circuit design.
Things like encryption algorithms are obviously equivalent to specific, novel circuit designs, "one-click shopping" or "selling pet food on the Internet" quite obviously are not.
"Allowing patents on this means giving somebody the ownership of a piece of math."
No, this is only true for a particular patentable algorithm in the same way it is true for *all* patentable subject matter. This is another argument that is not consistently applied (any math argument that applies to a computer algorithm trivially generalizes to all physical machines and material processes).
To use your quicksort example, if someone patents the quicksort algorithm it does not prevent you from sorting data generally. Sure the alternative existing methods might be less efficient (something you could hopefully say about all types of patents), but there are an infinite number of alternative methods to achieve the end result. You are not patenting "sorting", you are patenting one method of doing that transformation. In the same way, you cannot patent a particular chemical, but you *can* patent a process for synthesizing that chemical. There are cases where the patented method is the only known (practical) method for achieving a particular result, but those are precisely the cases patents were intended for.
An argument that does not really follow is like your one above that someone might patent the basic building block algorithms of software. How can an algorithm that does not exist be a "basic building block"? What has everyone been using up until the point where it is invented? The algorithms we consider "basic" are so because they have been around forever and are therefore in the public domain. What were people doing before the existing "basic building block" algorithms were invented? An algorithm that becomes a future "basic building block", those are arguably the algorithms that more than any other deserve patent protection if you are going to bother at all. Pretty much non-obvious, novel, and eminently useful by definition.
There are open algorithm problems in computer science that, if solved, would generate new basic building blocks that don't exist now. This has been true in the chemical process patent field many times as well. But it seems odd to lay claim to them as "basic building blocks" before they exist. If someone invents an anti-gravity device it may become a basic building block of transportation, but does that suddenly make it non-patentable subject matter? I'm just looking for consistent treatment, not any particular outcome. If we exclude all the inventions that are good enough that they become basic building blocks, there is really no point to having patents at all. Arguably the goal of the patent system is to encourage the invention of basic building blocks that do not currently exist.
This particular argument from the article is oft-repeated but weak:
"Software developers already enjoy strong copyright protections for their work, rendering patent protection largely redundant."
The exact same argument could be made for several classes of patent, such as chemical process patents, that people seem to generally consider legitimate patents in pretty much every country that has patents. If I am to believe that this is a compelling argument against software patents, then it is also a compelling argument against some other patentable areas. (Most arguments against software patents have this feature.)
On the other hand, a much more compelling argument can be made against "business method" patents (a subset of the suitcase called "software" patents) because they do not strictly define a machine. The reason algorithm patents (also part of the "software" patent suitcase) have long been acceptable just about everywhere is that they are strict abstractions of novel circuits (patentable material in virtually every country). As a general observation, most proponents of software patents are thinking of algorithm patents while most opponents of software patents are thinking of business method patents. The ambiguity of the term "software patent" muddies the context and makes intelligent discussions more difficult. It would help if everyone was more precise in their selection of terms.
Interestingly, for some government contracts the lowest bidder is automatically discarded -- it is the *second* lowest bidder that gets the contract. This is a well-known theoretical mechanism for removing bullshit from the bidding process. The end price will be slightly higher, but the price will usually be more accurate for a given contract spec.
It is a bipartisan thing, unfortunately. Counter-intuitively, the most drug friendly states in the US tend to be western "red" states, due to their more libertarian perspective on individual liberty. For as nominally progressive as states like California are, their laws are awfully socially conservative even though they vote for people like Obama in a landslide. Honestly, most "blue" states are every bit as socially provincial as the "red" states. I guess that doesn't say much for American culture.
Total decriminalization of drugs has been tried in Portugal since 2001, and by all accounts has been a raging success by just about any metric you care to use. I'm happy to see other countries jumping on board the clue train, not that I expect to see something similar in the US for the foreseeable future.
For more on the Portuguese experience, see: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/14/portugal/
As a point of fact, the US allows more legal immigration than any other country in the world. It is not as though the US is stingy about letting people immigrate compared to the rest of the world. Canada beats the US on a per capita basis, though generally North American immigration policy makes the rest of the industrialized world look like a joke. Compared to the EU, the US is positively libertine with its immigration policy. What, precisely, is so horribly wrong with US immigration policy that does not make most of the rest of the industrialized world look even worse? Exactly how many more millions of immigrants must the US accept every year before the US earns your approval? The entire EU, with twice the population of the US, only accepts a measly 1.8M immigrants.
The US is pretty liberal about who it accepts as well. From Wikipedia: "Of the top ten countries accepting resettled refugees in 2006, the United States accepted more than twice as much as the next nine countries combined..." The US may have policy problems, but its willingness to accept immigrants is not one of them.
The United States still has the longest average life expectancy if you control for fatal injury rates. The actuarial statistics are misleading for the purposes of determining medical effectiveness. In essence, American medical life expectancy is at the top of the heap, but the OECD averages are brought down because people in the US have a relatively high probability of dying in vehicular accidents or being murdered when young compared to other industrialized countries. If a fatal injury does not end your life prematurely, you'll outlive your counterparts in the rest of the industrialized world. More on that here:
http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2009/07/per-capita-spending-and-life-expectancy.html
All of the "obvious" solutions like you mention generally will not work. The power levels for the lasers are specifically designed to defeat the known technical counter-measures available to a missile designer. This is why laser weapons have a power rating orders of magnitude greater than is strictly required in most conventional circumstances; they are obviating counter-measures before anyone tries to develop them. Among other things, they are designed to ablate the target faster than you can reflect it or physically spin it.
This is also the reason a lot of US military research focuses on hyper-kinetic weapons these days; good ones can defeat all plausible molecular armor and even weak ones can defeat all current armor. The power levels of US weapon systems are getting to the point where any passive counter-measure would have to be very exotic.
This is based on a media-created myth. The US has never had GPS-guided weaponry, precisely because GPS can be jammed. Therefore, it would not have done much good to have a GPS jammer beyond attracting the attention of missiles designed to destroy RF emitters.
The primary guidance mechanism usually mislabeled as "GPS guided" is ultra-precise inertial guidance, which can't be jammed at all short of altering the physics of the universe. These inertial guidance systems can optionally accept micro-corrections from a GPS input, but only within the (classified) error bounds of the inertial system which are already known to be very small. If the GPS signal deviates from the inertial guidance, the GPS is assumed to be compromised and ignored.
The "GPS-guided weapon" thing is one of many myths about US weapon systems perpetuated by the media. The US never has and never will produce a GPS-guided weapon.
The great irony of the glacier retreat being the harbinger of doom for humanity is that on most continents the glacial retreat is uncovering substantial quantities of archaeological evidence. I wonder what the people whose archaeological evidence we are finding thought about the glaciers when they encroached on their lives thousands of years ago. It is an interesting juxtaposition.
Empirical models of thermodynamic properties are definitely protected by copyright. There is a high-value market for these models, and different models of the same thermodynamic process will evaluate differently so it is a valuable creative product rather than a mere description of reality. For fields where tiny improvements in efficiency generate big cost savings, you want to use the most accurate model available where "most accurate" will be a function of the use case.
Thermodynamic property models are not measurements of reality, they are mathematical models of a physical process derived from empirical data. They are what you use to predict reality when it is not possible or practical to measure it. Turning the empirical data points into continuous functions is a creative step and the value of the creative step is in minimizing the divergence between the model and reality over as broad a range as possible. There are companies that specialize in producing and selling ultra-accurate thermodynamic property models.
This is incorrect, in that the same argument applies to all patentable material. Patents apply to abstract processes ("algorithms"), copyrights apply to implementations (e.g. "software"). The abstract chemistry for producing a chemical output is an algorithm with no physical implementation and eminently patentable if novel, being a traditional subject of patents for centuries. The creation of an implementation of that algorithm is protected by copyright, and worth quite a bit of money in fact. This is indistinguishable from the case of algorithm patents in all important ways, up to and including the fact that the chemical process algorithm is a purely mathematical construct that only produces effects in implementation.
SQL is not a database, it is a standard interface to a feature set commonly associated with relational models. Before everyone standardized on SQL, there were other relational query languages. The "No" part of "NoSQL" refers to the fact that some basic elements of relational implementations cannot be usefully expressed using a much simpler distributed hash table model.
All the "NoSQL" does is eliminate all the parts of traditional relational databases that do no scale -- discarding the bottleneck rather than fixing it. These are things like joins and external indexing. Unfortunately, discarding those things means you discard a lot of very important functionality as a practical matter, notably the ability to do fast, complex analytics. Adopting the NoSQL architecture runs contrary to the trend toward more real-time, contextual analytical processing. There are a great many analytical applications that are not amenable to batch-mode pattern-matching, and the NoSQL model is a lot less applicable than I think some people want to acknowledge. In its domain, it is a great tool but it has many, many prohibitive limits. We are essentially trading power for scale.
That said, do not take this as an endorsement of traditional SQL relational databases either, as they have a number of serious limitations themselves. As just mentioned, a number of the core analytical operations those models support are based on algorithms that scale poorly. The SQL language itself has mediocre support for many abstract data types (e.g. spatial) and data models (e.g. graph), which in part reflects the inadequacies of the assumed underlying database algorithms (e.g. B-trees) that are implicit in SQL. The inability to efficiently do event-driven/real-time applications is also more a reflection of the access methods used in databases than any intrinsic weakness in SQL; SQL may be clunky for that purpose, but that is not the real limiter.
A truly revolutionary deviation from SQL would usefully implement a superset of the features SQL supports, not take them away. Of course, we would need access methods more capable than hash tables and B-trees to useful implement those features, which is a lot more work than discarding features that scale poorly. NoSQL is a stopgap technical measure for that small subset of applications where the serious tradeoffs are acceptable.
There are bigger issues that many people seem to be overlooking. First of all, the individual States pay for the vast majority of the highways, the Federal funds are not nearly as important as is often assumed. Second, in some States highways and roads are paid for entirely by gas taxes and use fees, a big chunk of which would evaporate if people stopped burning gas which raises the question of how to pay for the highways. In such cases that I am familiar with, gas taxes account for 60% of the highway budget with use fees (e.g. car registration fees) making up the rest. This model has a lot of advantages and efficiencies in practice, mostly due to the government not having a guaranteed budget.
You could increase use fees 150% to make up the shortfall, but that has two problems. First, it makes it a lot more expensive to own a car even if you do not drive it very often, which will have an adverse impact on some groups of people and reduce elasticity. Second, it will encourage people to register their vehicles in adjacent states where highways are (inefficiently) paid via other kinds of taxes. Vehicle registration shopping between adjacent states already happens in some parts of the US.
I call BS on your BS. If we were talking about corporate feed lots it would be one thing, but a very significant percentage of the US beef herd is raised by independent cattle producers on open range in very sparsely populated country. It can take months to find all of your cattle to tag them in the first place, so it is very easy to "lose" cattle without noticing. In fact, the law in the ranching areas I am familiar with is that you only have rights to your free-range cattle if you can find and tag them within the first year after birth, after which they enter the public domain (first person to tag them owns them). It is not at all uncommon for me to find a rancher's untagged cattle in one of my canyons.
Beef ranching in the western US does not work the way you think it does. Much of the basic logistics of it have not changed much since the 19th century.
You assume far too much, out in the western US ranch country there is usually no communication services of any kind. I have a small (a few square kilometers) ranch in Nevada that is 20 miles from the next ranch (never mind a road), typical for western ranching operations. I get cellular reception -- one bar -- if I climb to the peak of the adjacent mountain, that several thousand extra feet gives me line-of-sight to an area near an Interstate highway 30-40 miles away.
There seems to be a presumption (1) that western ranches are the size of hobby farms, (2) that they are located anywhere near infrastructure, and (3) that free-range cattle is a tidy local pasture-and-barn affair instead of a horseback operation in remote canyons. In many parts of the western ranching areas, you don't even locate all of your cattle for the better part of a year.
They not only were not punished, they were given a promotion. The Obama administration made Mary Schapiro the head of the SEC, despite a pattern of what could only be described as egregious incompetence if we are generous, stonewalling or ignoring whistleblowers in a number of high-profile fraud cases including Madoff.
Madoff goes to prison, the regulators who bent over backward to not notice the fraud when it was brought to their attention get a promotion. See how this works?
Define "better". According to a recent Lancet Oncology study (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1560849/UK-cancer-survival-rate-lowest-in-Europe.html) for males the average cancer survival rate in the UK is 44.8%. Compare to 66.3% in the USA for the same period. The US has the highest cancer survival rates in the world, and by a pretty large margin. That has to be worth something in your metrics of "better". I do not go to the doctor for social justice, I go to the doctor to get medical problems, say cancer and cardiovascular disease, fixed. The US is tops for fixing medical problems even if the system surrounding that medicine is a wreck.
Discard all the policy issues and ask yourself one simple question: what country will give me the best average statistical odds of having my condition cured/fixed? The US looks very, very good by that metric, and the reason people go to the doctor is to get cures. The medical system may be a wreck, but that is a semi-separate issue and I would be reluctant to throw away stellar medical outcomes as the price for cleaning up a broken system.
One of the more interesting statistical anomalies is that if it was not for the extremely high death rates due to accidents (e.g. vehicular) and homicides, Americans would have the longest lifespans in the industrialized world instead of average ones (better medical outcomes offset high non-disease death rates). As is amusingly observed in health outcome statistics, the only demographic group that lives longer than Japanese women are Japanese women that live in the US. It is a relevant observation in this discussion, many people here are far too eager to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Weird. The vast majority of US research is privately funded, by a huge margin, and the US leads the world in research spending (more than all of the countries in Asia combined, never mind Europe which runs a somewhat distant third). Even in the case of basic, "pure science" research, the government funded research is a shrinking majority. Clearly those corporations are doing something with that investment in the research department.
I am going to guess you never googled the statistics, easily found, before you posted.
As something of a tangent, this is a canard parroted by people who do not know much about banking regulations. It is worth pointing out, for example, that a number of industrialized countries that had no banking problems (like Canada) have never had a regulatory equivalent of the Glass-Steagall whipping boy. Ironically, that body of regulation was modified over the last few decades in order to *reduce* the number of bank failures, which it did, by allowing them to diversify their business. If diversifying investments was so bad it would 1) not be one of the fundamental rules of investment generally and 2) I would expect the industrialized countries without any such restrictions to have fared far worse than they did.
The problem wasn't lack of regulation, but a lot of stupid regulation and arguably pervasive corruption that is still in place today. Add on top of this a regulatory monoculture in global banking that allowed exploits to propagate, and the problem starts to become obvious.
That has to be one of the oddest and most ill-informed rants ever. The modern public library system in the US was built by Andrew Carnegie with his own money, a philanthropic enterprise. Government attempts prior to Carnegie's private effort were spotty and somewhat less than wildly successful. It is maintained with public money today, but at least in the US the public library system was famously built by massive private investment. Carnegie built something like 2500 libraries, no small number.
...US research is just fine and growing if you look at, you know, the actual numbers. As is Asia. Europe, by contrast, is in serious decline.
The vast majority of research in the US is privately funded, and has been for many decades. A half century ago this was not the case, but today it is. Furthermore, private research in the US is highly productive as such things go, so this distribution is not necessarily a bad thing. It is not so much that the US government is cutting research funding as it is that private funding continues to grow faster than public funding.
The US government is even a declining percentage of so-called "basic research", though still the majority of such funding at around 60%. These are all the pure science things that would nominally never get funded if the government didn't though obviously that is overstating the case given the stats.
On the upside, total US research spending continues to grow, just faster in the private sector than the public sector as it has for many decades, and the US still invests more in public and private R&D than anyone else by a large margin.
The most startling statistic related to R&D funding is that Europe runs a somewhat distant *third* behind the US and Asia despite its GDP and per capita GDP. Europe is arguably the most glaring example of a region not pulling its weight, though Germany is doing a decent job of it. A lot of European R&D has migrated to the US and Asia, but they should be a wee bit embarrassed about that.
This research is essentially stating that what is and is not "green" transportation is significantly dependent on the context of the layout of the region it is located in. This should be obvious but it is not hard to find people that think forcing everyone into the same transportation options regardless of objective context is sound environmental policy. Or in other words, attempting to force people to be "green" often generates more pollution than doing nothing at all, and if you do not change the underlying equilibrium that created the original distribution you will just piss people off as a bonus to your non-accomplishment.
The sad truth is that most American cities are ill-suited to public transportation at the fundamental design level. It would be like trying to make MS-DOS function as an enterprise server environment, the impedance mismatch is extreme. You can't hack an effective and economic public transportation system onto them, and taking a wrecking ball to three-quarters of the American landscape would be expensive beyond belief for a very modest benefit -- you would see more pollution reduction by simply shutting down coal power plants and building nuclear power plants. You have to build the green cities before you can demand people live in them, but for some reason politicians often seem to get that backward.
Even though I am all for green cities, punishing people who live in car-only suburbs is a non-solution because for the most part Americans have no practical choice but to live in such places. For some reason, the same people that refuse to allow the building of green cities as a matter of policy (or at a minimum show a complete lack of political will to propose such things) have no problem coming up with punishments for not living in cities they would not allow to be built. It is a bipartisan failing, even the extreme "environmental progressives" that control the politics where I live rabidly oppose any city development that does not look an awful lot like crappy suburban sprawl.
The article is confused about where most of the real differences are purported to be.
No one credible claims that females have less ability to learn mathematics or crunch numbers in most cases, which is what this article is contesting. In other words, they built themselves a strawman. The differences involve application, not learning.
What *is* credibly claimed, in the sense that there is not insignificant quantities of direct and indirect evidence in literature, is that females are markedly poorer at certain classes of applied mathematical problems, notably applications involving complex, high-dimensionality metric spaces. Females understand the mathematics just fine, they have relative difficulty applying it to real-world problems when system complexity exceeds a certain threshold. This is largely attributed to male brains having more neurons dedicated to conceptualizing and manipulating spatial relationships.
There are real differences, but it is mostly in specific areas of the applied side and there is a relatively straightforward causal theory related to brain structure. That people feel it necessary to repeatedly trot out the strawman that women have less ability to learn math while conveniently ignoring supportable arguments for differences in practical ability reeks of a political agenda. There are other biases in application spaces strongly favoring females that also have straightforward causal links related to differences in brain structure but which say nothing about the ability of males to learn.