Your post is kind of vague but it sounds like your criticizing the evil pharmas for not giving away patents on drugs they spent billions researching when no one else did the same with the success they had, and that this therefore proves that the law doesn't care about saving lives.
I think it's an unfair criticism.
If you were to void all patents today, yes, you would make some medications more affordable and save more lives. You would also make these pharmas think really, really hard about investing another penny into drugs, and cancel work on anything that they can't break even on within about a month. You'd also scare the shit out of anyone who wants to make a long-term investment, since the government would reveal just how capricious it's willing to be.
Now, you may disagree about how exactly resources would be redirected if patents were voided, but it's certainly not a clear case of the law sacrificing lives for profits. It's sacrificing X1 lives and Y1 profits for X2 lives and Y2 dollars, where no one knows for sure what the relative values of those four are.
And how do you know the robot won't tell you: "Taking into account your values, future reputational damange, impacts on third parties, threats posed by your enemy, and discounting for the probability that you've fed me incomplete or optimistic information, your best course of action is to go war. Calculation has a margin of safety of 102%."
Trick question. The Senate is always going to phrase a law to technically work around whatever the latest court rulings are. I don't think it's helpful to ask whether there's been such an overt power struggle that the Senate would openly defy the Supreme Court.
Instead, I'll answer the question, "When was the last time the Senate imposed cirriculum requirements on local public schools?" and my immediate answer is the NCLB. For extra credit, I would note that it's arguably in contravention of 1990s rulings on restrictions of federal power.
In the early 1980s, the Louisiana legislature passed a law titled the "Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science in Public School Instruction Act". The act did not require teaching either evolution or creationism as such, but did require that when evolutionary science was taught, so-called creation science had to be taught as well.... the State appealed to the Supreme Court.... In 1987 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Louisiana act was unconstitutional, because the law was specifically intended to advance a particular religion.
Honestly, the only reason anyone ought to care what a politician thinks about creationism is if they decide what's taught in public schools. This is almost always a state matter. Your U.S. Congressman has bunk to do with it.
Ah, yes, thanks for reminding us about the theory of federalism, on which our governing system is ostensibly based.
Now I'm going to explain to you how it works in the real world.
In the real world, the national government has become intimately involved in decisions at the state and local level, well beyond its enumerated powers. If nothing else, federal funding of local education has enabled it to threaten states with, "Don't want to do what we tell you? Then kiss your funding goodbye."
Yes, the federal government does have significant control over what can be taught in public schools. Why do you think the Supreme Court ever rules on cirriculum issues? Why don't federal judges respond to all such lawsuits that make it to their level by saying, "Meh, state matter, go away"?
So please don't act like Congressmen are powerless over what's taught in public schools.
Daydreaming is basically shutting off (or at least ignoring) the bulk of the sensory inputs into your brain, and letting your imagination run the show for a period of time.
I accidentally discovered an interesting trick. I don't know if it's related to your point here, but if you get that "daydreaming" look in your eyes, you can stop (or rather, significantly alter) your eyes' saccadal movement (the way that they dart around to get a better model of your environment).
This illusion exploits your saccades to make it look like the snakes are rotating. However, if you start staring at it and get that "glazed" look that will tip people off you're not listening, the snakes stop rotating.
Huh? You're saying it's stupid to do something that others wouldn't anticipate?
Here's the flaw in that reasoning, borrowed from South Park:
Forensic Health Investigator: Vaccine Company X, um, did you deliberately engineer the Swine Flu Influenza so as to make obscenely huge amounts of money by selling the only cure? VCX: What? Nooooooooooooo, don't be ridiculous! FHI: Well, um, it looks like you did engineer it and all... VCX: Okay, FHI? Try to give us a little credit here. If we were going to start a pandemic by releasing an engineered virus on the general population, we wouldn't make it look like a virus engineered to cause a pandemic! We'd release it in some hick town in Mexico or something. FHI: Oh, okay.... Just checking. VCX: *dumbass*
Can someone tell me what's wrong with Slashdot's front page? I want my low-bandwidth, dialup-friendly version back but despite changing my preference multiple times, I'm getting some frakked-up yellow-and-white monstrosity.
Ditto. It looks like it's telling my browser to render it by some RSS settings. I see a lot of the tags like "em" "/em".
Is it really that hard for you idiots running slashdot to leave well-enough alone? If it ain't broke, don't sodomize it beyond recognition.
You forgot option 4), the cable TV model: instead of each newspaper trying to pay, a group of sites get together under some banner. Let's call it WumpusPay. If you have a subscription to Wumpus pay, you get past the gate at every site that is part of WumpusPay. This significantly reduces the exclusion that happens to sites that put up a pay barrier since you probably already have access, and you get a lot for you money.
Then, the members of WumpusPay distribute the revenues based on which newspapers are being read, which, if people have to log in to read, is pretty easy to do.
Low, but non-trivial. The complete policy changed I proposed should have a lot of supporters, but I guess a lot of people rule it out for stupid reasons.
In any case, the point was just that carbon restrictions need not hurt the poor, so we shouldn't use such concerns as a reason for inaction.
3. Cap and Trade . Backdoor tax on the poor and middle class without calling it that.
Wait, are you saying that because a certain carbon restriction policy hurts the poor, carbon shouldn't be restricted? Because it is possible for carbon policies to encourage everyone people to cut back on carbon without punishing the poor.
All you have to do is rebate to everyone (not just the poor) the revenues from auctioning permits, an amount equal to the additional cost of fuel due to C/T that you would pay if you earned 100+x% of the poverty level income.
So, if C/T imposes an additional cost of, say, $500/year for someone making 110% of the poverty level, give everyone $500/year from the permit auction revenues.
Note what happens: everyone, poor and rich, benefits from cutting any carbon use they can. But at the same time, if a poor person continues to use the standard amount of energy, their *net* taxes don't change: they pay an additional $500 througout the year for goods, but they get $500 from the government (from the permit auction revenues). Note it doesn't increase tax complexity, since the rebate is given to everyone, so there's no test to determine if you get it.
The same principle applies to a carbon tax, and seriously, if a catastrophe is going to happen due to excessive atmospheric CO2, policies like these are certainly warranted.
I think such a "tax and rebate" policy could be politically feasible if it were combined with elimination of all the misguided, inefficient policies to mandate energy efficiency like CAFE or bans on "inefficient" products.
The winners would be:
-The poor: their net taxes don't change, and actually go down if they can find ways to cut back on energy. -Most everyone else: even though their net taxes go up, they gain significant control over how much taxes they pay, and even if they're heavy fuel users, they gain from having significantly more autonomy in what they can buy. Plus, most cutbacks would be invisible to them, because they would be done by businesses reacting to different fuel prices.
5. I am quite sure the Military isn't friendly to the environment on a whole; but I excuse a lot of what they do.
I consider this a red herring. Libertarians (and I consider myself one) like to act like they're environmentally friendly by whining about how destructive the military is. However, as it pertains to climate change, it wouldn't make a difference. All the fuel that the military uses would *still* get used at about the same rate, even if it were disbanded tomorrow, since the suddend drop in demand would depress prices and make it available for satisfying real consumer demand.
The average person would benefit in terms of cheaper products, but the fuel would still get burned, and the CO2 would still make it to the atmosphere.
A similar point can be made about privatizing roads and utilities.
Call me crazy, but I actually think it's pretty noble for Colbert to volunteer his name for the swine flu. It helps clear up misconceptions about the flu (Egypt pointlessly slaughtered a lot of pigs because of its name), and at the same time makes the sacrifice of debasing Colbert's own name by association with something bad. Plus, "Colbert" is short an unobjectionable, which you can't say about "Mexican flu", "North American flu", and "AH1N1 flu", the other alternatives.
No, I'm not being sarcastic: his narcissism can actually do some good here.
Obviously. Which isn't to say that the concept of a classical regime versus a quantum one isn't useful. You wouldn't describe the motion of a baseball using Schroedinger's equation: it's perfectly possible, but impractical.
Good point. I was browsing Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop recenlty, and he made a great point about levels of description. He notes that when we discover "X is reducible to the more fundamental phenomenon of Y", people seem to think that means Y is more important and useful. But, he says, that discovery is equivalent to "Y can be ignored at the level X". That is, even though there might be a lower-level description, the discovery of enough regularity at that level is also useful since it means a simpler way to describe what's going on.
How dare they build an incandescent lamp! Where's the outrage? Don't you guys here think that incandescents should be banned? Since they're wasteful and all?
Or maybe you take the "non-absurd" position that incandescent bulb usage should be allowed, just as long as a central committee approves of your intended usage?
Because the truly absurd position is to just cap the total emissions and let people do whatever they want within that limit, right?
(Flamebait, I know, but some people really don't understand the implications and inefficiency of banning incandescent light bulbs.)
Yes, I had a good one. What settings would affect something like that? I remember someone advising something before about some setting you can fix, but as best I could understand, it's like there's really some option somewhere that says:
Yeah, that was what I hated about upgrading to an LCD. I could notice imperfections that were previously "finessed" by the CRT. Sharp color dropoffs, granularity... I thought something was wrong with my monitor at first!
Perfectly compressed data is indistinguishable from random noise. Well-compressed data is "close" to random noise. So I suspect any file type I have that uses a good compression method (jpeg, most mpeg codecs) looks close enough to completely random.
(Be nice, I'm just an information theory hobbyist.)
Since you seem to want to share your views on this, I'd like to ask you: How do you classify "prediction market" sites like Intrade.com, where you bet on real-world events. It doesn't represent ownership rights in a corporation (though it does represent ownership right to $10 conditional on a future event), but it is coupled to a real-world non-gambling event?
I guess my idea still isn't clear. The link you gave still describes, as best I can tell, fully-automatic translation which just happens to use an intermediate language to simplify the process. The article describes how the program has to infer, based on statistics and context, what each word means. That's the complete opposite of the "semi-automatic" translation I'm going for, which attempts to elimiate the need to guess by having someone who understands the source text in the source language assist the program in translating.
(Of course, my idea could certainly *make use* of known techniques to guess meaning, as that would save the user time, since they'd only have go change those that the "pre-parser" got wrong.)
Yes, you do need to know an intermediate language. It's the language which you use to identify the exact meaning of the original.... You'll need to know exactly how to define that meaning to "arbitrary precision", and to do that you have to use a language (whether represented as text or graph images). You'll have to use a specific language and it doesn't matter whether the representation is "run (verb)", "run (v)", "run is a verb", "run (v):rapid motion on foot", or "run -> p(3) * 2a + node(18)b".
Do you need to know html to make some of the text in a document bold? People seem to make text bold in MS Word all the time without knowing html. Certainly, the programmer needs to have an internal representation language, but again, the user does not. Now, what if bold means "this is a verb"? What if short superscripts indicate the particualr meaning of the preceding word? What if arrows point to antecedents? Is the text in a "new language" now?
So yes, if you call "English text with formatting" a different language from "English text without formatting", then you're right. And likewise (as I said before) if you consider learning how to draw lines in PhotoShop "learning a new language", then you're right.
It's just that that's not how people use the term.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I thought they were going to get a bailout...
And women will be receptive to a random MMO junkie because _______?
Your post is kind of vague but it sounds like your criticizing the evil pharmas for not giving away patents on drugs they spent billions researching when no one else did the same with the success they had, and that this therefore proves that the law doesn't care about saving lives.
I think it's an unfair criticism.
If you were to void all patents today, yes, you would make some medications more affordable and save more lives. You would also make these pharmas think really, really hard about investing another penny into drugs, and cancel work on anything that they can't break even on within about a month. You'd also scare the shit out of anyone who wants to make a long-term investment, since the government would reveal just how capricious it's willing to be.
Now, you may disagree about how exactly resources would be redirected if patents were voided, but it's certainly not a clear case of the law sacrificing lives for profits. It's sacrificing X1 lives and Y1 profits for X2 lives and Y2 dollars, where no one knows for sure what the relative values of those four are.
And how do you know the robot won't tell you: "Taking into account your values, future reputational damange, impacts on third parties, threats posed by your enemy, and discounting for the probability that you've fed me incomplete or optimistic information, your best course of action is to go war. Calculation has a margin of safety of 102%."
Trick question. The Senate is always going to phrase a law to technically work around whatever the latest court rulings are. I don't think it's helpful to ask whether there's been such an overt power struggle that the Senate would openly defy the Supreme Court.
Instead, I'll answer the question, "When was the last time the Senate imposed cirriculum requirements on local public schools?" and my immediate answer is the NCLB. For extra credit, I would note that it's arguably in contravention of 1990s rulings on restrictions of federal power.
Here you go. Issue: teaching of ... creationism.
Edwards v. Aguillard
In the early 1980s, the Louisiana legislature passed a law titled the "Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science in Public School Instruction Act". The act did not require teaching either evolution or creationism as such, but did require that when evolutionary science was taught, so-called creation science had to be taught as well. ... the State appealed to the Supreme Court. ... In 1987 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Louisiana act was unconstitutional, because the law was specifically intended to advance a particular religion.
Honestly, the only reason anyone ought to care what a politician thinks about creationism is if they decide what's taught in public schools. This is almost always a state matter. Your U.S. Congressman has bunk to do with it.
Ah, yes, thanks for reminding us about the theory of federalism, on which our governing system is ostensibly based.
Now I'm going to explain to you how it works in the real world.
In the real world, the national government has become intimately involved in decisions at the state and local level, well beyond its enumerated powers. If nothing else, federal funding of local education has enabled it to threaten states with, "Don't want to do what we tell you? Then kiss your funding goodbye."
Yes, the federal government does have significant control over what can be taught in public schools. Why do you think the Supreme Court ever rules on cirriculum issues? Why don't federal judges respond to all such lawsuits that make it to their level by saying, "Meh, state matter, go away"?
So please don't act like Congressmen are powerless over what's taught in public schools.
Daydreaming is basically shutting off (or at least ignoring) the bulk of the sensory inputs into your brain, and letting your imagination run the show for a period of time.
I accidentally discovered an interesting trick. I don't know if it's related to your point here, but if you get that "daydreaming" look in your eyes, you can stop (or rather, significantly alter) your eyes' saccadal movement (the way that they dart around to get a better model of your environment).
This illusion exploits your saccades to make it look like the snakes are rotating. However, if you start staring at it and get that "glazed" look that will tip people off you're not listening, the snakes stop rotating.
Huh? You're saying it's stupid to do something that others wouldn't anticipate?
Here's the flaw in that reasoning, borrowed from South Park:
Forensic Health Investigator: Vaccine Company X, um, did you deliberately engineer the Swine Flu Influenza so as to make obscenely huge amounts of money by selling the only cure? ... Just checking.
VCX: What? Nooooooooooooo, don't be ridiculous!
FHI: Well, um, it looks like you did engineer it and all...
VCX: Okay, FHI? Try to give us a little credit here. If we were going to start a pandemic by releasing an engineered virus on the general population, we wouldn't make it look like a virus engineered to cause a pandemic! We'd release it in some hick town in Mexico or something.
FHI: Oh, okay.
VCX: *dumbass*
Can someone tell me what's wrong with Slashdot's front page? I want my low-bandwidth, dialup-friendly version back but despite changing my preference multiple times, I'm getting some frakked-up yellow-and-white monstrosity.
Ditto. It looks like it's telling my browser to render it by some RSS settings. I see a lot of the tags like "em" "/em".
Is it really that hard for you idiots running slashdot to leave well-enough alone? If it ain't broke, don't sodomize it beyond recognition.
I can't believe they found a lawyer who thought this was a good idea."
Well, we recently learned how lawyers feel obligated not to read anything that could give them a clue how the world works...
You forgot option 4), the cable TV model: instead of each newspaper trying to pay, a group of sites get together under some banner. Let's call it WumpusPay. If you have a subscription to Wumpus pay, you get past the gate at every site that is part of WumpusPay. This significantly reduces the exclusion that happens to sites that put up a pay barrier since you probably already have access, and you get a lot for you money.
Then, the members of WumpusPay distribute the revenues based on which newspapers are being read, which, if people have to log in to read, is pretty easy to do.
Low, but non-trivial. The complete policy changed I proposed should have a lot of supporters, but I guess a lot of people rule it out for stupid reasons.
In any case, the point was just that carbon restrictions need not hurt the poor, so we shouldn't use such concerns as a reason for inaction.
3. Cap and Trade . Backdoor tax on the poor and middle class without calling it that.
Wait, are you saying that because a certain carbon restriction policy hurts the poor, carbon shouldn't be restricted? Because it is possible for carbon policies to encourage everyone people to cut back on carbon without punishing the poor.
All you have to do is rebate to everyone (not just the poor) the revenues from auctioning permits, an amount equal to the additional cost of fuel due to C/T that you would pay if you earned 100+x% of the poverty level income.
So, if C/T imposes an additional cost of, say, $500/year for someone making 110% of the poverty level, give everyone $500/year from the permit auction revenues.
Note what happens: everyone, poor and rich, benefits from cutting any carbon use they can. But at the same time, if a poor person continues to use the standard amount of energy, their *net* taxes don't change: they pay an additional $500 througout the year for goods, but they get $500 from the government (from the permit auction revenues). Note it doesn't increase tax complexity, since the rebate is given to everyone, so there's no test to determine if you get it.
The same principle applies to a carbon tax, and seriously, if a catastrophe is going to happen due to excessive atmospheric CO2, policies like these are certainly warranted.
I think such a "tax and rebate" policy could be politically feasible if it were combined with elimination of all the misguided, inefficient policies to mandate energy efficiency like CAFE or bans on "inefficient" products.
The winners would be:
-The poor: their net taxes don't change, and actually go down if they can find ways to cut back on energy.
-Most everyone else: even though their net taxes go up, they gain significant control over how much taxes they pay, and even if they're heavy fuel users, they gain from having significantly more autonomy in what they can buy. Plus, most cutbacks would be invisible to them, because they would be done by businesses reacting to different fuel prices.
5. I am quite sure the Military isn't friendly to the environment on a whole; but I excuse a lot of what they do.
I consider this a red herring. Libertarians (and I consider myself one) like to act like they're environmentally friendly by whining about how destructive the military is. However, as it pertains to climate change, it wouldn't make a difference. All the fuel that the military uses would *still* get used at about the same rate, even if it were disbanded tomorrow, since the suddend drop in demand would depress prices and make it available for satisfying real consumer demand.
The average person would benefit in terms of cheaper products, but the fuel would still get burned, and the CO2 would still make it to the atmosphere.
A similar point can be made about privatizing roads and utilities.
I could feel more sensation in my skin as it rubbed against hers.
You do realize that if you're just rubbing against her skin, you don't need birth control ... right?
You're the guy ... for Wallstreet right? ... your 45$ is worth exactly 1$ + Vapour.
Actually, since it's Wall Street, it's $1 + Vapor!
Call me crazy, but I actually think it's pretty noble for Colbert to volunteer his name for the swine flu. It helps clear up misconceptions about the flu (Egypt pointlessly slaughtered a lot of pigs because of its name), and at the same time makes the sacrifice of debasing Colbert's own name by association with something bad. Plus, "Colbert" is short an unobjectionable, which you can't say about "Mexican flu", "North American flu", and "AH1N1 flu", the other alternatives.
No, I'm not being sarcastic: his narcissism can actually do some good here.
Obviously. Which isn't to say that the concept of a classical regime versus a quantum one isn't useful. You wouldn't describe the motion of a baseball using Schroedinger's equation: it's perfectly possible, but impractical.
Good point. I was browsing Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop recenlty, and he made a great point about levels of description. He notes that when we discover "X is reducible to the more fundamental phenomenon of Y", people seem to think that means Y is more important and useful. But, he says, that discovery is equivalent to "Y can be ignored at the level X". That is, even though there might be a lower-level description, the discovery of enough regularity at that level is also useful since it means a simpler way to describe what's going on.
How dare they build an incandescent lamp! Where's the outrage? Don't you guys here think that incandescents should be banned? Since they're wasteful and all?
Or maybe you take the "non-absurd" position that incandescent bulb usage should be allowed, just as long as a central committee approves of your intended usage?
Because the truly absurd position is to just cap the total emissions and let people do whatever they want within that limit, right?
(Flamebait, I know, but some people really don't understand the implications and inefficiency of banning incandescent light bulbs.)
Yes, I had a good one. What settings would affect something like that? I remember someone advising something before about some setting you can fix, but as best I could understand, it's like there's really some option somewhere that says:
[x] Crappy color
[ ] Normal color
Yeah, that was what I hated about upgrading to an LCD. I could notice imperfections that were previously "finessed" by the CRT. Sharp color dropoffs, granularity ... I thought something was wrong with my monitor at first!
Don't you mean compression increases the entropy? Since it makes subsequent bits harder to predict?
Perfectly compressed data is indistinguishable from random noise. Well-compressed data is "close" to random noise. So I suspect any file type I have that uses a good compression method (jpeg, most mpeg codecs) looks close enough to completely random.
(Be nice, I'm just an information theory hobbyist.)
Since you seem to want to share your views on this, I'd like to ask you: How do you classify "prediction market" sites like Intrade.com, where you bet on real-world events. It doesn't represent ownership rights in a corporation (though it does represent ownership right to $10 conditional on a future event), but it is coupled to a real-world non-gambling event?
And how does US law treat prediction markets?
I guess my idea still isn't clear. The link you gave still describes, as best I can tell, fully-automatic translation which just happens to use an intermediate language to simplify the process. The article describes how the program has to infer, based on statistics and context, what each word means. That's the complete opposite of the "semi-automatic" translation I'm going for, which attempts to elimiate the need to guess by having someone who understands the source text in the source language assist the program in translating.
(Of course, my idea could certainly *make use* of known techniques to guess meaning, as that would save the user time, since they'd only have go change those that the "pre-parser" got wrong.)
Yes, you do need to know an intermediate language. It's the language which you use to identify the exact meaning of the original. ... You'll need to know exactly how to define that meaning to "arbitrary precision", and to do that you have to use a language (whether represented as text or graph images). You'll have to use a specific language and it doesn't matter whether the representation is "run (verb)", "run (v)", "run is a verb", "run (v):rapid motion on foot", or "run -> p(3) * 2a + node(18)b".
Do you need to know html to make some of the text in a document bold? People seem to make text bold in MS Word all the time without knowing html. Certainly, the programmer needs to have an internal representation language, but again, the user does not. Now, what if bold means "this is a verb"? What if short superscripts indicate the particualr meaning of the preceding word? What if arrows point to antecedents? Is the text in a "new language" now?
So yes, if you call "English text with formatting" a different language from "English text without formatting", then you're right. And likewise (as I said before) if you consider learning how to draw lines in PhotoShop "learning a new language", then you're right.
It's just that that's not how people use the term.