There are quite a few assumptions that have to be taken for granted to leap to that conclusion.
I tried to make my assumptions explicit. I am not leaping to a conclusion, I am suggesting a plausible hypothesis.
I believe the usual sci-fi scenario of a hodgepodge of spacefaring races in a single galaxy is, on the other hand, totally implausible, based on pretty basic considerations of the evolution of ecosystems.
The only hope for SETI, in my opinion, is that deep space travel is totally uneconomical for any civilization, no matter how long-lived and advanced.
very easy to imagine many species evolving, and never coming into contact with each other.
Sure, if technology is common and spacefaring isn't economical. That's the presumption I'm questioning.
If spacefaring is economical, the frontier of the evolving species will probably evolve at a rate that is one or two orders below the physical speed limit, which means the galaxy would be inhabited in order 10^7 years.
So, if in the rate of emergence of the most rapidly evolving technological species is less than 1/10^7yr, then the first one to persist into the spacefaring phase owns the galaxy, and the other ones never show up.
I'm not saying I know this to be the case, only that I suspect it to be so. I'm saying it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that the Drake equation and the SETI community totally neglects.
I actually believe my hypothesis is correct, for what it's worth. I think deep space exploration will be economical in the next 10000 years if the species survives. I'm guessing the galaxy doesn't come up with species as promising as ours often enough that we have any competition that hasn't flamed out already. I hope we survive and win the race. I expect any ETs we run into will be extragalactic and many centuries in the future.
I can't prove any of this, so by all means keep looking. Just don't hold your breath or anything.
I've thought this for a long time. Maybe this is the occasion to get this idea across to people who might be interested.
While the equation is clearly true since it's basically redundant, it may not elucidate the problem very well. This is because some of the terms may be nonlinearly coupled.
If interstellar propagation of a technological species is possible, the rate of emergence of such species is not independent of whether such species have emerged in the past. There is an ecological competition between hypothetical spacefaring species. Unless two such species emerge simultaneously and accomodate each other, the emergence of one will essentially foreclose the emergence of another.
If the rate of formation of stable technological civilizations is sufficiently low, and the rate of interstellar spread of such civilizations is sufficiently high, there will only be time for one such civilization to emerge per galaxy. By the time the second one could emerge, the first one would have filled the entire niche.
In this scenario, by virtue of the fact that we have emerged, we can conclude that no stable competitors have emerged yet.
In fact, my intuition is that the universe is in precisely this regime, and therefore that we are very unlikely to succeed in SETI.
...the implicit purpose of most corps is to make money for the investors.
Which is as it should be. But the marketplace is structured for short term returns, as if the main value added were commodities like wheat and steel.
If that were otherwise (for instance, by imposing more capital gains tax for short-term holdings) companies wouldn't be as motivated to suck the value out of their intellectual and social capital to make a few cents this year and collapse in a worthless heap a few years from now.
Everything I've encountered from HP in the last several years (certainly anything post-Carly) has been amazingly failure-prone. I've been foolish enough, on the strength of old habits and low prices, to buy a laser printer, and a desktop machine from them since then. Both failed very quickly. The institutional setting where I work has a departmental color laser, much higher end than I've ever purchased for myself. Its downtime approaches 50%; it has no less than three types of chronic problems (paper feed, intermittent connectors, and some peculiar software glitch than can be power cycled away). We are looking for a replacement and will not consider an HP machine. I paid out of pocket for a cheap USB lexmark laser in my office so I could get listings and get my work done.
This may be a coincidence but I doubt it.
I'm old enough to remember a time when HP products were ubiquitous in labs and scientists' offices. In those days they were paragons of good design and reliability.
Folger's used to be a brand associated with gourmet coffee. Once the brand got bought out, it was used in a sort of goodwill mining operation to sell vile instant coffee crystals.
This is the way of the publicly traded corporation with its short time horizons. A respected brand is just a resource to be cashed in.
The open source offerings are good enough for most people, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft's software isn't any good. Soup kitchens will feed you for free; this doesn't put the restaurants out of business.
Depends.
Just hypothetically, suppose the soup kitchen soup is both tastier and healthier. (The restaurant just has nicer bowls, but not as much nicer as you'd expect.) What's more, the soup kitchen staff is friendly and is happy to share recipes with you, while the restaurant puts all its staff under NDA and sues the hell out of any former employee who so much as tries to use a toaster.
Now suppose you hired a B-school type to save your business. He'd probably say "hmm, you could improve your recipe and your service, but that would require a big cultural shift. It would be a lot faster to hire some people to vaguely but loudly give folks the idea that the soup kitchen stuff makes you sick."
Not that this is happening, you understand. This is just a scenario about restaurants.
Saw the trailer for "Polar Express" before the new Harry Potter movie. I was revolted, far beyond my ordinary mundane revulsion for Christmas stories, but couldn't really express why.
Microsoft stuff makes me cringe. I avoid it not primarily because of their business practices, but because iI find it viscerally unpleasant.
I can mention lots of examples of how and why it is misdesigned, aesthetically, cognitively, and technically. The best summary I have heard was "it's tasteless". I heard that in the '80s and it hasn't changed.
I also avoid the Microsoft environment for reasons of empowerment. Microsoft sets up pretty high walls between developers, administrators and users. If you live in their world, you will never really experience the full power of your computer.
The responsibility is with the wrong object. The device which accepts money has the responsibility of detecting fakes.
It's ludicrous to assign the responsibility of detecting fakes to all devices which process images, because that's essentially any Turing complete system. This means that all computing is illegal unless it can detect money. Since it's impossible to build computers which detect money without computers which cannot detect money, all computing is therefore effectively illegal.
If it's impossible to build cash machines which reject counterfeits, then cash is ill-specified and needs to be redesigned.
If it's impossible to build cash machines which reject counterfeits, how on earth is it supposed to be possible to build scanners which reject real cash anyway? Isn't it the same problem?
We have pretty solid data for global mean surface temperature backed out of some simple ocean-surface physics that is isotope dependent. We get O18/O16 ratios from bubbles trapped in ice. The oldest air samples we have are about 400Ka old, nicely meeting your criteria. (From Antarctic ice cores). There's some hope of going back 1 Ma using this technique.
For older temperature proxies, the data is weaker. One of the best methods is based on a related measure. We obtain the isotope ratio from fossil samples, though, instead of from
bubbles in ice cores. In this case, we get a measurement of the water temperature in which the fossil formed.
There's nice introductory material on this subject here
As for more local temperatures, there is considerable available evidence about these as well from sedimentary deposits.
Regarding lava flows, of course we have to account for continental drift, geomorphology, pole drift... It appears you are understating the difficulties of science that doesn't affect policy at the same time as you are overstating the difficulties of science that does.
The geophysical record is a complicated beast, but it's the same people getting the magnetic and the climatic data. You don't get to choose which one you believe based on how convenient they are for your political philosophy. Different paleogeophysical records have different amounts of uncertainty associated with them, but the global mean temperature record appears well resolved for the past 400Ka.
It matches the greenhouse gas signature pretty well, too, as is well-known.
I had some of this Meccano stuff as a kid in Canada. I didn't think it was still being produced. Great stuff, although there are, after all, parts small enough that a toddler can swallow them.
So, is it available in the USA? If not, are lawyers at fault? (presumably) Has it ever been available in the States?
My web search so far led to an interesting dead end. Click on the USA link from meccano.com, and you end up at a toy distributor that doesn't appear to carry the stuff!
Yeah, it sure would be nice if that worked. However, it's wishful thinking.
If what you said were true, politics would be about policy, not about innuendo and symbolism. Most people do not have time to critically evaluate most political claims. Just saying something publicly enough (especially with some ideological color added) means that some people will believe it.
If anything shouldn't be dignified with a response, I agree it's this ridiculous claim that Linus stole Linux from Tannenbaum. Unfortunately, once you're playing in the political arena, dignity doesn't enter into it.
I don't understand why you believe that we have no climate information older than 100 years and yet we have reliable information about the magnetic field that is 1000 times older. These data come from the same sorts of sources.
We have climate information going back tens of millions of years.
Economics 101 is wrong with its "Principle of Revealed Choice". Just because someone chooses A over B doesn't mean they "prefer" A. In fact, that's central to the Microsoft strategy, as well as that of several other companies.
McDonald's has been known to advertise "America's favorite fries". I don't think there's any doubt that they sell more fries than anyone else, but I doubt that many fry eaters as individuals would list McD's as their preference.
Frito-Lay (sorry to dwell on fried foods) does the same with crunchy snacks. Even more than McDonald's, and much like Microsoft, they achieve marketplace dominance by driving their competitors' products off the shelf, rather than by actually competing for preference.
There's even a B-school concept of "hyper-competition" about how to own a marketplace. Basically by bullying the middlemen: highway planners, groceries, OEMs.
The word "prefer" carries no meaning if there's a conclusion that I prefer McDonald's food when my choices have been limited to McDonald's and Wendy's. My choices have already been constrained. I *prefer* a competent local business to McDonald's, but non-chain budget restaurants are too marginal to afford both a location visible to non-locals and competence.
I prefer corn chips that taste like corn rather than like construction debris, but most convenience stores don't carry them.
Similarly, I have to go out of my way if I want to avoid Microsoft.
My preference in a meaningful sense is only revealed when I accept some inconvenience to avoid the near-monopolist. Someone driving a half-mile out of their way to get some decent food reveals a preference. Someone not doing so just reveals that they are burned out and hassled, and lack the information to make a more satisfactory choice. In other words, the hypercompetition strategy (make everybody's life systematically worse and call it "great") is working.
How many times have you used a Microsoft product and said to yourself "gee, I'd certainly prefer to be using X..." for some value of X?
To dispel skepticism over computer scoring, student essays were simultaneously graded by a computer and trained readers during a two-year pilot program. Using artificial intelligence to mimic the grading process of human readers, the computer's automated scoring engine, known as e-rater, generated grades on a six-point scale that were virtually identical to those of the readers.
Clearly this is an inadequate test. The fact that the system performs reliably on essays that were going to be graded by humans does not mean it will perform reliably on essays that no human (other than the author) will see. In practice, students will reverse engineer the probably very shallow AI pretty quickly and a contest to get high grades on particularly stupid submissions will ensue.
This will amount to an education of sorts, I guess...
Sure enough, the referenced document says exactly as quoted. (The document is not a document about climate, though, so it isn't a primary source. It's about transportation policy. I'm inclined to suspect it isn't a very good document about transportation policy, either, but that being as it may...)
This assertion has absolutely nothing to do with what science believes about Venus.
The current idea (dating back to the late '80s) of the history of Venus is that it once had an ocean, got hot enough thanks to proximity to the sun and presence of CO2 that a "runaway greenhouse effect" kicked in. So originally the catastrophic warming was a combination of CO2 and water vapor. Since the ocean vanished, there has been no hydrological cycle to chemically scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, so it has gotten hotter and hotter as the infrared opacity of the atmosphere increases. Most of the enormous heat at the surface is due to the CO2 contribution to the radiative balance.
I've been fishing around for a good URL to back this up. So far the best I can do is this undergrad lecture. It's not formatted very well, but the relevant points toward the end are clear enough.
So Venus is much more opaque to IR radiation, due mostly to CO2. Why does Venus have so much CO2 in its atmosphere? On the Earth, CO2 is mostly bound up in limestone deposits. Only a tiny fraction is in the atmosphere. Most of it has reacted with surface rocks (silicates) and is washed out to sea by running water. There it is dissolved and precipitates out into sediments. These sediments are eventually subducted and the CO2 is spewed out again as volcanoes, but the sediment (limestone) deposits represent the most significant source of carbon on the Earth. This is the carbonate-silicate geochemical cycle. There is approximately as much carbon in the Earth's crust and atmosphere as in Venus' atmosphere. The reason all the carbon is in Venus' atmosphere is that there is no water to facilitate the reactions and no plate tectonics to close the cycle.
Venus has little water in its atmosphere because most of it was photodissociated by the strong UV of the early Sun, and the hydrogen lost to space. This may be due to the fact that Venus is a little closer to the Sun, but it may also be due to subtler differences between the two planets early in the Solar System's history.
There is still a little water in Venus' atmosphere (recall that some of it goes into making the clouds), and it is very important in Venus' efficient greenhouse effect. Water IR absorption occurs in different parts of the IR spectrum than CO2's, effectively blocking almost all the outgoing radiation.
Now, regarding the referenced page, the main thing it illustrates is that government is made up of fallible humans. I don't think a single utterance in a single report can be taken as policy for a whole administration. That said, it is odd to note that the page, from a 1994 report, displays a "last edit" date of 2002. Hopefully this recent update didn't introduce any substantive changes.
Economic arguments often add up costs and not benefits or vice versa. This is the core flaw of the article.
A decline in the unit cost of software is a net benefit to anyone whose primary product is anything else, and thus a net beenfit to the economy.
Adding it all up, the article is anti-competitive, anti-globalization and anti-capitalist. These sorts of arguments are always wheeled out by industries in decline. I'm not totally pro-competitive pro-globalization myself, but solid arguments against these approaches can't be made economically (they have to be made on a social or moral basis).
The intended purpose of intellectual property is to allow inventors to recoup their costs and fair return. As the cost of development of software inevitably tends toward zero, that protection becomes moot, and IP law tends toward a pure cost center.
This being the case, since there are so many volunteers who are happy to produce software at small or zero cost, and whose efforts violate IP only accidentally (rather than directly drawing upon expensive efforts of others), the economic arguments presented here are pure nonsense. From an economic point of view, as the production cost of a unit of software function drops, software IP increasingly protects vested interests and is increasingly a net drag on the economy as a whole.
You just can't argue against globalization using econometric arguments. The article is manipulative nonsense.
Yeah, and by now most word processing users have never seen anything better. If anything illustrates the inability of the omniscient marketplace to settle on a good product, this endlessly exasperating piece of garbage, making thousands of people miserable at this very instant, has to be it.
Ever see a numbered list where all the numbers were "1"? That document was authored in MSWord. Once it managed to give me an autonumbered list where all the items were numbered "8".
Let me put in a, errr, word for Lotus Word Pro (formerly Ami Pro), which never does anything innovative with your cursor, font or tab settings, and still is rich in features, all of which work reliably and sensibly...
Is Lotus/IBM still supporting it their office suite? It sure would be nice to have a Linux port... IBM, hello?
Y'know, if most of the people who show up here on the climate change discussions even knew as much as the "dumbed down" museum pages, we could have a lot more sensible discussion of the topic.
The passive pages in the climate section were excellent. They found exactly the right words to express complex situations in clear, simple language, without skewing the importance in either direction. If you actually understand the situation you will understand how very carefully the words were chosen. Excellent job.
I tried one of their FLASH applets, though, and it was silly.
I have to admit no such thing. What I'd like to see is some empirical evidence in favor of human intervention over naturally changing conditions. So far no such evidence exists.
If you'd really like to see such evidence, you really need to work on your Google skills. Meanwhile here's some.
Without a list of kinds of evidence that would qualify, the 'global-warming-is-natural' crowd has to fall back on the same set of arguments as the 'global-warming-is-due-to-carbon-output' crowd: "We have a model."
Err, the 'global-warming-is-natural-crowd' has a model? You mean a global circulation model with computational fluid dynamics and everything? Which one?
Slashdot Mirror
I tried to make my assumptions explicit. I am not leaping to a conclusion, I am suggesting a plausible hypothesis.
I believe the usual sci-fi scenario of a hodgepodge of spacefaring races in a single galaxy is, on the other hand, totally implausible, based on pretty basic considerations of the evolution of ecosystems.
The only hope for SETI, in my opinion, is that deep space travel is totally uneconomical for any civilization, no matter how long-lived and advanced.
Yup.
very easy to imagine many species evolving, and never coming into contact with each other.
Sure, if technology is common and spacefaring isn't economical. That's the presumption I'm questioning.
If spacefaring is economical, the frontier of the evolving species will probably evolve at a rate that is one or two orders below the physical speed limit, which means the galaxy would be inhabited in order 10^7 years.
So, if in the rate of emergence of the most rapidly evolving technological species is less than 1/10^7yr, then the first one to persist into the spacefaring phase owns the galaxy, and the other ones never show up.
I'm not saying I know this to be the case, only that I suspect it to be so. I'm saying it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that the Drake equation and the SETI community totally neglects.
I actually believe my hypothesis is correct, for what it's worth. I think deep space exploration will be economical in the next 10000 years if the species survives. I'm guessing the galaxy doesn't come up with species as promising as ours often enough that we have any competition that hasn't flamed out already. I hope we survive and win the race. I expect any ETs we run into will be extragalactic and many centuries in the future.
I can't prove any of this, so by all means keep looking. Just don't hold your breath or anything.
What you're proposing is the implicit presumption of the usual SETI argument. That presumption is not indefensible, but it is a presumption.
While the equation is clearly true since it's basically redundant, it may not elucidate the problem very well. This is because some of the terms may be nonlinearly coupled.
If interstellar propagation of a technological species is possible, the rate of emergence of such species is not independent of whether such species have emerged in the past. There is an ecological competition between hypothetical spacefaring species. Unless two such species emerge simultaneously and accomodate each other, the emergence of one will essentially foreclose the emergence of another.
If the rate of formation of stable technological civilizations is sufficiently low, and the rate of interstellar spread of such civilizations is sufficiently high, there will only be time for one such civilization to emerge per galaxy. By the time the second one could emerge, the first one would have filled the entire niche.
In this scenario, by virtue of the fact that we have emerged, we can conclude that no stable competitors have emerged yet.
In fact, my intuition is that the universe is in precisely this regime, and therefore that we are very unlikely to succeed in SETI.
Which is as it should be. But the marketplace is structured for short term returns, as if the main value added were commodities like wheat and steel.
If that were otherwise (for instance, by imposing more capital gains tax for short-term holdings) companies wouldn't be as motivated to suck the value out of their intellectual and social capital to make a few cents this year and collapse in a worthless heap a few years from now.
This may be a coincidence but I doubt it.
I'm old enough to remember a time when HP products were ubiquitous in labs and scientists' offices. In those days they were paragons of good design and reliability.
Folger's used to be a brand associated with gourmet coffee. Once the brand got bought out, it was used in a sort of goodwill mining operation to sell vile instant coffee crystals.
This is the way of the publicly traded corporation with its short time horizons. A respected brand is just a resource to be cashed in.
Depends.
Just hypothetically, suppose the soup kitchen soup is both tastier and healthier. (The restaurant just has nicer bowls, but not as much nicer as you'd expect.) What's more, the soup kitchen staff is friendly and is happy to share recipes with you, while the restaurant puts all its staff under NDA and sues the hell out of any former employee who so much as tries to use a toaster.
Now suppose you hired a B-school type to save your business. He'd probably say "hmm, you could improve your recipe and your service, but that would require a big cultural shift. It would be a lot faster to hire some people to vaguely but loudly give folks the idea that the soup kitchen stuff makes you sick."
Not that this is happening, you understand. This is just a scenario about restaurants.
Screen: lots of corpselike CGs prancing merrily at the north pole amid endless tedious jingling...
Me: (muttering) That strangely didn't work for me...
Wife: (stage whisper) That's because you're Jewish.
Me: Oh, yeh, right...
This explains it.
I can mention lots of examples of how and why it is misdesigned, aesthetically, cognitively, and technically. The best summary I have heard was "it's tasteless". I heard that in the '80s and it hasn't changed.
I also avoid the Microsoft environment for reasons of empowerment. Microsoft sets up pretty high walls between developers, administrators and users. If you live in their world, you will never really experience the full power of your computer.
Come to think of it, there's lots of reasons.
The responsibility is with the wrong object. The device which accepts money has the responsibility of detecting fakes.
It's ludicrous to assign the responsibility of detecting fakes to all devices which process images, because that's essentially any Turing complete system. This means that all computing is illegal unless it can detect money. Since it's impossible to build computers which detect money without computers which cannot detect money, all computing is therefore effectively illegal.
If it's impossible to build cash machines which reject counterfeits, then cash is ill-specified and needs to be redesigned.
If it's impossible to build cash machines which reject counterfeits, how on earth is it supposed to be possible to build scanners which reject real cash anyway? Isn't it the same problem?
For older temperature proxies, the data is weaker. One of the best methods is based on a related measure. We obtain the isotope ratio from fossil samples, though, instead of from bubbles in ice cores. In this case, we get a measurement of the water temperature in which the fossil formed.
There's nice introductory material on this subject here
As for more local temperatures, there is considerable available evidence about these as well from sedimentary deposits.
Regarding lava flows, of course we have to account for continental drift, geomorphology, pole drift... It appears you are understating the difficulties of science that doesn't affect policy at the same time as you are overstating the difficulties of science that does.
The geophysical record is a complicated beast, but it's the same people getting the magnetic and the climatic data. You don't get to choose which one you believe based on how convenient they are for your political philosophy. Different paleogeophysical records have different amounts of uncertainty associated with them, but the global mean temperature record appears well resolved for the past 400Ka.
It matches the greenhouse gas signature pretty well, too, as is well-known.
Sorry for the delay in answering.
So, is it available in the USA? If not, are lawyers at fault? (presumably) Has it ever been available in the States?
My web search so far led to an interesting dead end. Click on the USA link from meccano.com, and you end up at a toy distributor that doesn't appear to carry the stuff!
If what you said were true, politics would be about policy, not about innuendo and symbolism. Most people do not have time to critically evaluate most political claims. Just saying something publicly enough (especially with some ideological color added) means that some people will believe it.
If anything shouldn't be dignified with a response, I agree it's this ridiculous claim that Linus stole Linux from Tannenbaum. Unfortunately, once you're playing in the political arena, dignity doesn't enter into it.
We have climate information going back tens of millions of years.
McDonald's has been known to advertise "America's favorite fries". I don't think there's any doubt that they sell more fries than anyone else, but I doubt that many fry eaters as individuals would list McD's as their preference.
Frito-Lay (sorry to dwell on fried foods) does the same with crunchy snacks. Even more than McDonald's, and much like Microsoft, they achieve marketplace dominance by driving their competitors' products off the shelf, rather than by actually competing for preference.
There's even a B-school concept of "hyper-competition" about how to own a marketplace. Basically by bullying the middlemen: highway planners, groceries, OEMs.
The word "prefer" carries no meaning if there's a conclusion that I prefer McDonald's food when my choices have been limited to McDonald's and Wendy's. My choices have already been constrained. I *prefer* a competent local business to McDonald's, but non-chain budget restaurants are too marginal to afford both a location visible to non-locals and competence.
I prefer corn chips that taste like corn rather than like construction debris, but most convenience stores don't carry them.
Similarly, I have to go out of my way if I want to avoid Microsoft.
My preference in a meaningful sense is only revealed when I accept some inconvenience to avoid the near-monopolist. Someone driving a half-mile out of their way to get some decent food reveals a preference. Someone not doing so just reveals that they are burned out and hassled, and lack the information to make a more satisfactory choice. In other words, the hypercompetition strategy (make everybody's life systematically worse and call it "great") is working.
How many times have you used a Microsoft product and said to yourself "gee, I'd certainly prefer to be using X..." for some value of X?
To dispel skepticism over computer scoring, student essays were simultaneously graded by a computer and trained readers during a two-year pilot program. Using artificial intelligence to mimic the grading process of human readers, the computer's automated scoring engine, known as e-rater, generated grades on a six-point scale that were virtually identical to those of the readers.
Clearly this is an inadequate test. The fact that the system performs reliably on essays that were going to be graded by humans does not mean it will perform reliably on essays that no human (other than the author) will see. In practice, students will reverse engineer the probably very shallow AI pretty quickly and a contest to get high grades on particularly stupid submissions will ensue.
This will amount to an education of sorts, I guess...
Nobody here knows, but Google does.
This assertion has absolutely nothing to do with what science believes about Venus.
The current idea (dating back to the late '80s) of the history of Venus is that it once had an ocean, got hot enough thanks to proximity to the sun and presence of CO2 that a "runaway greenhouse effect" kicked in. So originally the catastrophic warming was a combination of CO2 and water vapor. Since the ocean vanished, there has been no hydrological cycle to chemically scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, so it has gotten hotter and hotter as the infrared opacity of the atmosphere increases. Most of the enormous heat at the surface is due to the CO2 contribution to the radiative balance.
I've been fishing around for a good URL to back this up. So far the best I can do is this undergrad lecture. It's not formatted very well, but the relevant points toward the end are clear enough.
Now, regarding the referenced page, the main thing it illustrates is that government is made up of fallible humans. I don't think a single utterance in a single report can be taken as policy for a whole administration. That said, it is odd to note that the page, from a 1994 report, displays a "last edit" date of 2002. Hopefully this recent update didn't introduce any substantive changes.What about pop-up books?
This is a nice student project, but I don't see that there's anything unprecedented here.
A decline in the unit cost of software is a net benefit to anyone whose primary product is anything else, and thus a net beenfit to the economy.
Adding it all up, the article is anti-competitive, anti-globalization and anti-capitalist. These sorts of arguments are always wheeled out by industries in decline. I'm not totally pro-competitive pro-globalization myself, but solid arguments against these approaches can't be made economically (they have to be made on a social or moral basis).
The intended purpose of intellectual property is to allow inventors to recoup their costs and fair return. As the cost of development of software inevitably tends toward zero, that protection becomes moot, and IP law tends toward a pure cost center.
This being the case, since there are so many volunteers who are happy to produce software at small or zero cost, and whose efforts violate IP only accidentally (rather than directly drawing upon expensive efforts of others), the economic arguments presented here are pure nonsense. From an economic point of view, as the production cost of a unit of software function drops, software IP increasingly protects vested interests and is increasingly a net drag on the economy as a whole.
You just can't argue against globalization using econometric arguments. The article is manipulative nonsense.
Ever see a numbered list where all the numbers were "1"? That document was authored in MSWord. Once it managed to give me an autonumbered list where all the items were numbered "8".
Let me put in a, errr, word for Lotus Word Pro (formerly Ami Pro), which never does anything innovative with your cursor, font or tab settings, and still is rich in features, all of which work reliably and sensibly...
Is Lotus/IBM still supporting it their office suite? It sure would be nice to have a Linux port... IBM, hello?
The passive pages in the climate section were excellent. They found exactly the right words to express complex situations in clear, simple language, without skewing the importance in either direction. If you actually understand the situation you will understand how very carefully the words were chosen. Excellent job.
I tried one of their FLASH applets, though, and it was silly.
If you'd really like to see such evidence, you really need to work on your Google skills. Meanwhile here's some.
Err, the 'global-warming-is-natural-crowd' has a model? You mean a global circulation model with computational fluid dynamics and everything? Which one?
Where did you get that idea?