Chapter 4, "Moving Forward," does mention patents but in language so brief and vague it could mean anything: "[ensure] that the intellectual property system continues to function in a way that encourages growth."
It's the word "continues" in the preceding statement that suggest the government actually does have its head up its ass.
The report on page 1-8 has a nice graph of average math scores. However it occurs to me that what matters most for innovation is not average scores but the number of students above a certain level of ability. Basically, if a country has enough high-scoring math students to fill the pipeline of scientists and engineers, it doesn't matter how many low-performing students are dragging down the mean. One of the reasons large Asian countries (China, India, and I would guess Indonesia) are well poised for technical progress is that they have a large population and hence a large talent pool. As long as they can efficiently discover and cultivate their talent they should be fine.
I have never seen anyone talk about the number of high-performing students a country really needs to fill its pipeline. But if you want to talk about being competitive, especially in the next decade where pressure on public budgets at all levels will go from bad to worse, doesn't it make more sense to concentrate on finding the good students and giving them opportunities (scholarships, etc.), and on bumping the above-average ones over that threshold into excellence, than to continue vain attempts to improve the average?
You seem to echoing the U.S. Declaration of Independence, but misquoting it. The actual text does not mention "pursuit of property":
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
So, this does beg the question, who stuck the word "property" in there expecting us not to notice?
IANAL, but no. In the U.S. the only people who can't be called to testify is the accused or his lawyer (and I am not even sure about the lawyer). I was surprised to learn when I served on a jury that a court can order a psychiatrist to testify. Confidentiality to a psychiatrist means he/she can only disclose the patient's details with a court order, not that the records are immune to a court order. The other jurors were surprised by this too. I imagine the defense lawyer had a chance to object and so on, but the bottom line is that excerpts from defendant's medical records were entered into evidence and the jury got to read through them during deliberations.
That depends upon how good the religion's lobbyists and lawyers are.
I think that's kind of a cynical view. I'm quite pleased to see that inclusiveness in America can be more than just lip service, and we the people are willing to make some reasonable accommodations for bona fide religious groups. As another example, members of pacifist religions (Amish, Quaker, maybe Buddhists) can get an exemption from military conscription.
Note however that several religions believe polygamy is perfectly acceptable, but we are in my opinion a very long way from legalizing that in the U.S. So I think getting a religious exception depends heavily on the degree of the exception being sought and how different the minority group's view is from the mores of the wider society.
You mean, sort of like the way FreeDOS includes large file support, memory management, a CD-ROM driver, etc. -- none of which were present in the original DOS? Just like a street-legal Model T would look somewhat different, I would presume FreeDOS does not, for example, fit on five 3.5" floppies?;-) Yes, the modern user has additional requirements, both for FreeDOS or a Model T.
If someone released a new version of the Model T Ford, would you expect many people to be excited?
Absolutely! Haven't you ever been to an antique car show? If Ford put the Model T, or an updated replica, back into production I think it would create a lot of excitement.
You are more than welcome to make a version of the Little Mermaid to rival Disney's film. You just need to stump-up the $20 million to create and distribute the film.
You must be a copyright lawyer for Disney, trolling for new defendants. If anyone made another movie based on the public-domain "Little Mermaid" story, do you seriously think Disney would not sue the producer out of existence?
The problem is that software only has virtual scarcity, don't expect people to be willing to pay for it and it is foolish to try to base an economy on it.
I agree that's true for the off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped sort of software but you seem to be neglecting the need for customized in-house software. Companies and other organizations (institutions, governments) want software to support their business processes: database schemas, Web front-ends, that sort of thing. That customized kind of software is a professional service, like law or medicine or architecture, and like them is a perfectly solid basis for a company or a career.
Average stage lifespan for a garden-variety artist is 3 years.
This is a case where the mean may not be representative. I doubt there are a lot of artists whose career last about 3 years. More likely, there are lots who have to go back to their day jobs within the first year, and a few who last 5, 10, or 20+ years. Parent's point remains though, record producers tend to last longer than the artists the create/exploit.
Apart from just rooting for different companies as if they were in a horse race, which seems to be a popular pastime in the press and blogosphere, the summary omits any reason why we might care about Intel's new offering. In what way is it different from the prevailing ARM chip? The answer is buried on page 2 of TFA:
Intel has tested its reference handset against a handful of the leading phones on sale today. It says these tests show that Medfield offers faster browsing and graphics performance and lower power consumption than the top three, says Smith.
and
"Medfield is based on 32-nanometer technology, while the biggest fabs making ARM-based processors are today shipping either 40 or 45 nanometers," he says.
So it looks like a bit of incremental leapfrog (if that), not some kind of breakthrough. Meh.
Google's product is not a search engine. Google's product is advertising space on its search engine -- that is what they sell to make money. That advertising space is definitely not free.
I don't think an apology was really needed but I do respect you for offering one.:-) No problem.
I do think there may still come a time for America to turn around; democracy has looked ready to fail before (1786, 1860) and our ancestors muddled through.
You'll notice a sentence or two later I mentioned Obama's precedent of assassinating U.S. citizens by presidential decree. I fully expect such killings to continue regardless of who holds office. So while the Republicans are in fact evil and their religious rhetoric worries me, the Democrats are also evil and it was a Democratic president who was first to cross the line into ordering a hit on a U.S. citizen.
Actually if you recognize the converging trends of a police-state mentality, a major political party increasingly dominated by religious fundamentalists, the unprecedented technology to enable surveillance, and the recent extra-judicial assassination of U.S citizens on foreign soil, you might start to think "TRUST NOBODY ZOMG" is an appropriate response.
I believe the approach authoritarians use to justify new surveillance powers is to split hairs about the applicability of existing law. They make sophist arguments such as: wiretapping laws were written for switched-telephone lines and don't apply to packet-switched VoIP; the Fourth Amendment protects citizens' "papers" but electronic data such as e-mail are not "papers." So I think there is reason to be concerned that a court may rule surveillance drones are not constrained by existing statues.
That latter is literally a book on sword fighting and military tactics from c.1640, but I understand modern Japanese businessmen study it. Read broadly it contains insights into leadership and adapting to ever-changing events. I've seen it in the management section of book stores even in the U.S.
What I'm saying is that the question of "Does religion make us more moral" is not relevant to the wider question of "is religion correct/true/real/whatever", and that conflating the two (as these internet arguments often do) is not helpful.
Well the discussion of "is religion correct/true/real/whatever" is not a productive one to have in my opinion. I do not want to "convert" any atheists or denigrate them for their beliefs and I would ask them to likewise let me be myself. Even in public.
It is the bizarre cry of a certain type of theist "but without god you can have no morals",
Yeah those people bother me too.:-) I can understand why they think that way, and it's more or less the reason why certain atheists think religious faith is mutually exclusive with personal responsibility or rational thought. It boils down to not having thought deeply enough about the opposing point of view. It's easier to condemn one's opponents than to tolerate them. People can outgrow that.
Surely an individual believes or disbelieves due to an assessment of the truth of the matter, not the relative outcomes?
"Belief" is a tricky word. I prefer "faith." Belief is asserting X is true and not-X is false; faith is more like saying "Jesus says you should forgive people who mistreat you, and it sounds like a good thing, so I will give it a try." So strictly speaking belief is not a prerequisite to faith. There is interplay between the two.
WHY is the Christian you more generous and courageous?
Basically because Christian theology directs me, for example, to give charity to the poor, and says if I am not helping the poor I'm doing it (Christianity) wrong. It's not that I never gave to charity as an atheist, but now it's an affirmative directive. Courage, likewise: I used to be able to look the other way when someone else was being dishonest or unethical. Now I am more prone to take a stand and talk to someone when I think they are out of line. So in a nutshell practicing Christianity makes me more mindful of the things I used to aspire to do, but was less consistent about.
WHAT is the Christian you's motivation for being more generous and courageous?
The motivation is probably not that different. I just want to be a good person. I don't think Christians or theist generally have a monopoly on that. The difference is that I have a network of people (at my church) who are trying to do the same thing and in more or less the same way. And I have a book I can read that both reminds me of the principles of ethical behavior, and gives me a chance to reflect on them and interpret them.
You see, the atheist me would have been strongly tempted to counter-attack in response to remark like that. As it is I'll just point out that you're being a lot more unpleasant than you have a right to be.
I'm not claiming one cannot improve one's self without religion. I'm claiming I tried it and it seemed to help. Maybe I could have tried something else and that would have helped too. So as far as "needing" anything, those are your words. I don't feel they belong in my mouth.
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Chapter 4, "Moving Forward," does mention patents but in language so brief and vague it could mean anything: "[ensure] that the intellectual property system continues to function in a way that encourages growth."
It's the word "continues" in the preceding statement that suggest the government actually does have its head up its ass.
That's true, but this time it is coming from the government, which is actually a bit new.
The report on page 1-8 has a nice graph of average math scores. However it occurs to me that what matters most for innovation is not average scores but the number of students above a certain level of ability. Basically, if a country has enough high-scoring math students to fill the pipeline of scientists and engineers, it doesn't matter how many low-performing students are dragging down the mean. One of the reasons large Asian countries (China, India, and I would guess Indonesia) are well poised for technical progress is that they have a large population and hence a large talent pool. As long as they can efficiently discover and cultivate their talent they should be fine.
I have never seen anyone talk about the number of high-performing students a country really needs to fill its pipeline. But if you want to talk about being competitive, especially in the next decade where pressure on public budgets at all levels will go from bad to worse, doesn't it make more sense to concentrate on finding the good students and giving them opportunities (scholarships, etc.), and on bumping the above-average ones over that threshold into excellence, than to continue vain attempts to improve the average?
Not just software. Biotechnology patents appear headed for the same sort of train wreck from what little I know of them.
So, this does beg the question, who stuck the word "property" in there expecting us not to notice?
IANAL, but no. In the U.S. the only people who can't be called to testify is the accused or his lawyer (and I am not even sure about the lawyer). I was surprised to learn when I served on a jury that a court can order a psychiatrist to testify. Confidentiality to a psychiatrist means he/she can only disclose the patient's details with a court order, not that the records are immune to a court order. The other jurors were surprised by this too. I imagine the defense lawyer had a chance to object and so on, but the bottom line is that excerpts from defendant's medical records were entered into evidence and the jury got to read through them during deliberations.
I think that's kind of a cynical view. I'm quite pleased to see that inclusiveness in America can be more than just lip service, and we the people are willing to make some reasonable accommodations for bona fide religious groups. As another example, members of pacifist religions (Amish, Quaker, maybe Buddhists) can get an exemption from military conscription.
Note however that several religions believe polygamy is perfectly acceptable, but we are in my opinion a very long way from legalizing that in the U.S. So I think getting a religious exception depends heavily on the degree of the exception being sought and how different the minority group's view is from the mores of the wider society.
You mean, sort of like the way FreeDOS includes large file support, memory management, a CD-ROM driver, etc. -- none of which were present in the original DOS? Just like a street-legal Model T would look somewhat different, I would presume FreeDOS does not, for example, fit on five 3.5" floppies? ;-) Yes, the modern user has additional requirements, both for FreeDOS or a Model T.
Absolutely! Haven't you ever been to an antique car show? If Ford put the Model T, or an updated replica, back into production I think it would create a lot of excitement.
You must be a copyright lawyer for Disney, trolling for new defendants. If anyone made another movie based on the public-domain "Little Mermaid" story, do you seriously think Disney would not sue the producer out of existence?
I agree that's true for the off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped sort of software but you seem to be neglecting the need for customized in-house software. Companies and other organizations (institutions, governments) want software to support their business processes: database schemas, Web front-ends, that sort of thing. That customized kind of software is a professional service, like law or medicine or architecture, and like them is a perfectly solid basis for a company or a career.
This is a case where the mean may not be representative. I doubt there are a lot of artists whose career last about 3 years. More likely, there are lots who have to go back to their day jobs within the first year, and a few who last 5, 10, or 20+ years. Parent's point remains though, record producers tend to last longer than the artists the create/exploit.
Smart fortwo EV is doubleplus good.
and
So it looks like a bit of incremental leapfrog (if that), not some kind of breakthrough. Meh.
Google's product is not a search engine. Google's product is advertising space on its search engine -- that is what they sell to make money. That advertising space is definitely not free.
Why? "We" have already used drones to kill U.S. citizens more than once. The government is already operating well outside the law.
Simple. He was modded troll because he dared to write critically of Google's shiny new gadget.
I don't think an apology was really needed but I do respect you for offering one. :-) No problem.
I do think there may still come a time for America to turn around; democracy has looked ready to fail before (1786, 1860) and our ancestors muddled through.
You'll notice a sentence or two later I mentioned Obama's precedent of assassinating U.S. citizens by presidential decree. I fully expect such killings to continue regardless of who holds office. So while the Republicans are in fact evil and their religious rhetoric worries me, the Democrats are also evil and it was a Democratic president who was first to cross the line into ordering a hit on a U.S. citizen.
Actually if you recognize the converging trends of a police-state mentality, a major political party increasingly dominated by religious fundamentalists, the unprecedented technology to enable surveillance, and the recent extra-judicial assassination of U.S citizens on foreign soil, you might start to think "TRUST NOBODY ZOMG" is an appropriate response.
I believe the approach authoritarians use to justify new surveillance powers is to split hairs about the applicability of existing law. They make sophist arguments such as: wiretapping laws were written for switched-telephone lines and don't apply to packet-switched VoIP; the Fourth Amendment protects citizens' "papers" but electronic data such as e-mail are not "papers." So I think there is reason to be concerned that a court may rule surveillance drones are not constrained by existing statues.
I don't read a lot of management books but there are two I would recommend:
That latter is literally a book on sword fighting and military tactics from c.1640, but I understand modern Japanese businessmen study it. Read broadly it contains insights into leadership and adapting to ever-changing events. I've seen it in the management section of book stores even in the U.S.
Well the discussion of "is religion correct/true/real/whatever" is not a productive one to have in my opinion. I do not want to "convert" any atheists or denigrate them for their beliefs and I would ask them to likewise let me be myself. Even in public.
Yeah those people bother me too. :-) I can understand why they think that way, and it's more or less the reason why certain atheists think religious faith is mutually exclusive with personal responsibility or rational thought. It boils down to not having thought deeply enough about the opposing point of view. It's easier to condemn one's opponents than to tolerate them. People can outgrow that.
"Belief" is a tricky word. I prefer "faith." Belief is asserting X is true and not-X is false; faith is more like saying "Jesus says you should forgive people who mistreat you, and it sounds like a good thing, so I will give it a try." So strictly speaking belief is not a prerequisite to faith. There is interplay between the two.
Basically because Christian theology directs me, for example, to give charity to the poor, and says if I am not helping the poor I'm doing it (Christianity) wrong. It's not that I never gave to charity as an atheist, but now it's an affirmative directive. Courage, likewise: I used to be able to look the other way when someone else was being dishonest or unethical. Now I am more prone to take a stand and talk to someone when I think they are out of line. So in a nutshell practicing Christianity makes me more mindful of the things I used to aspire to do, but was less consistent about.
The motivation is probably not that different. I just want to be a good person. I don't think Christians or theist generally have a monopoly on that. The difference is that I have a network of people (at my church) who are trying to do the same thing and in more or less the same way. And I have a book I can read that both reminds me of the principles of ethical behavior, and gives me a chance to reflect on them and interpret them.
You see, the atheist me would have been strongly tempted to counter-attack in response to remark like that. As it is I'll just point out that you're being a lot more unpleasant than you have a right to be.
I'm not claiming one cannot improve one's self without religion. I'm claiming I tried it and it seemed to help. Maybe I could have tried something else and that would have helped too. So as far as "needing" anything, those are your words. I don't feel they belong in my mouth.