So you met some kooks who identify themselves as 'libertarians'.... and you believed them?
Yes, well, the 'kooks' in question actually seem to identify themselves as the Libertarian Party of Canada. So I guess I did believe them, yes. The fact that they are kooks—that was my point.
In your terminology, is there any circumstance under which objects in relative motion can be said to be 'aligned'? While I agree that relativistically speaking alignment isn't generally symmetric, I would have thought that this was exactly the situation in which one would have used the word - despite their limited speed, photon paths are the best 'lines' we have.
Personal freedom, sound economic policy, measured intervention in things that won't look after themselves - isn't this what we used to call 'Liberalism'? All the Libertarians I have encountered labour under the delusion that they are universal experts and that nobody but them (least of all people with actual domain-specific training!) should be doing any resource allocation. They don't want to fund street repairs - in case someone else uses tarmac they helped pay for - let alone science. Certainly a total failure to grasp the notions of insurance and natural monopoly is de rigeur. So... since you aren't a selfish fool, why do you label yourself this way? Is there some benefit?
I'm sorry, I know I sound rude, but otherwise intelligent Libertarians are an endless source of frustration in my life.
Seconded. If I did my arithmetic correctly, then aircraft are still safer than cars even if we account the events of Sept. 11 as routine collateral damage like that done by a drunk driver or the truck that ended up in my aunt's living room.
Our long-term goal should be to eliminate human operators of vehicles; our short term goal should be to stay focussed on our long term goal.
Except not. Inverse square has to do with the distance from the source, not the square area of the reflected surface. (An argument can be made that the area of the reflected surface has a relationship to the distance from the source, but it's not the same thing at all.)
Except yes, because the relationship between distance and cross-section that you consider to be not-the-same-thing is a characteristic property of (flat) three-dimensional space. It's why we get inverse square laws as a default physical behaviour (or rather, inverse square laws and macroscopically 3D space are immediate consequences of the same piece of mathematics the details of which we're still working on).
Or if you're thinking at a higher level of mathematical sophistication, notice that it's only in so far as the surface is normal to the illumination that we're doing any projection. Even by making strangely shaped surfaces you can't pack more projectable area into three space than the square law permits.
The inverse square law only applies to an isotropic source - a light that's being emitted in every direction (like a candle). This is why lasers stay bright at a distance.
All that matters here is light output divided by the square inches of the screen.
When you say "light output divided by the square inches of the screen" - that's what we call an inverse square law. On account, you see, of the light output being divided by the square - oh, never mind.
Morally speaking, there is a huge distinction between third party and first party recording. Since other people have vastly better memories than I, I consider it a disability/accessibility issue that I should be permitted to record anything that I see or hear. I think this applies most especially to things that happen in official contexts, not so much because I am concerned about occasional abuses of authority (though I am that), but because conversations that happen in police stations, immigration offices, and government bureaux are often of high criticality, and the law will presume that I have knowledge of what transpired in my presence. Absent a memory or a recording I can refer back to, what use is it if I am informed of my rights? What help is it if I am given advice?
But this is hugely different from the situation where someone's supervisor is scanning phone recordings after the fact, checking to see if perhaps I shared a dirty joke with a sales representative; or if I plant a recording device on someone to learn things that they have every right to expect are private.
What then should be admissible as evidence? Everything that is evidence, of course. What is needed there is not a law that an inappropriately made recording is disregarded, but a mechanism to ensure that those who introduce improperly acquired evidence are punished for their crime in obtaining it. The right method of ensuring that the police obey the law is simply to make them subject to it. No strange artificial blind spots are required.
Of course a recording may be edited. A verbal account may be untruthful, too. This is just one more thing that must be assessed in the course of a trial. A recording is just a representation of a memory, for all the technology involved. As with so many other issues of law, there's no need to mystify, here. The necessary principles were worked out centuries ago.
I'm being misunderstood. I'm not saying that there's no point in having passports for dealing with foreign countries (although if they adopt the policy that the US advocates, that their documents are checked before boarding for a trip, then in fact the same arguments do apply). But any electronic card passport 'replacement' would not be a conventional passport anyway. Furthermore, the claimed benefits are not benefits for foreign countries, either; they are benefits for Americans returning to the US.
So, to try again: it's not that passports have no use, but all the new electronic IDs being tossed around recently can be reduced to serial numbers.
As to the question of a DOS against the border posts—first, there's no need for them to use the public 'net, and second, I will bet you dollars to donuts that if the 'net goes down now and they can't check if you're on the blacklist, the border guards will not let you pass. I don't think anything would change.
Perhaps the creative process is different for you than it is for me. When I am working on something I produce many notes, and perhaps several drafts. After a while—and, crucially, after I have sought others' opinions—I may decide that there's something there I might care to publish. Your model would discourage me from working, which is contrary to your stated goal. The old-style US model which basically meant that only work for hire (and indeed, work produced in the US itself) received copyright protection was the broken one.
If an author isn't going to publish the work, then we might as well drop it into the public domain immediately; the possibility of copyright clearly wasn't working as an incentive to such an author, and perhaps having the work uncopyrightable will work out better.
I think it's silly to make plagiarism and identity theft legal. Works not intended for publication, or for which a determination has not been made, deserve more protection than commercial ventures, not less.
What I really don't understand about the entire discussion is this: what the border guards actually look at is not what's written on your passport; it's what's stored in their database (from which, in the case of your own citizens, the passports were generated in the first place). So all that is needed is a serial number, right? You type your SSN into a keypad (or for that matter, swipe any one of your credit cards—nobody believes that the security establishment pays any attention to data protection laws, anyway), your photo pops up on the guy's screen, and if it's you, you're through. Everything else is either a holdover from the days before networks, or a diversion.
So... what's this really about? I ask this not as a tinfoil hat question, but because I'm truly mystified.
I'll say it again. Now there's an Internet, you do not need to carry ID. The Man already has your file, and it's only because 'biometric' face recognition doesn't actually work yet that you carry any cards at all. There's no reason for cards to hold any data beyond a big number. There's no reason for them to be unique. There's no need for them to encode anything that can be used against you. There's no reason for any of this nonsense.
The only motivation I can think of for these measures is so that they can charge you more application fees for the new ID. What on earth am I missing?
Yes, of course. Copyright law serves a useful purpose in attacking corporate theft, but pre-Internet measures were already more than adequate in dealing with this. Indeed, it makes sense to scale copyright protections back in duration as social time constants shrink and the technical tools for enforcement advance, rather than extending them—though as I said before, it's important to keep pre-release copyright durations long enough to allow works to be completed. But be that as it may, things like the DMCA and the *AA wars serve no purpose in this regard.
I'm not sure I agree with you about P2P, however. As I said before, I believe these things to be protocol details, and even saying that P2P tools is a misdemeanor is nonsensical; copyright is about content and not protocol. If someone places a copyright work on their server for distribution, have they done anything wrong? They have participated in a distribution medium, as a library would, for example, but they have made no copies themselves. People who already have a hardcopy of an object have (or should have) a fair use right to an electronic copy, and obtaining it by download rather than by ripping/scanning just makes technological sense. The only 'rights' that have been circumvented are self-help rights that have no place in a society based on the rule of law. People who do not have a right to a copy they make are in many cases infringing the owner's rights by doing so, but it is the download and assembly process, not the P2P protocol or even the uploading peer which does this.
I seriously believe that in order to preserve and advance our culture, everything possible should be online in non-DRMed form. Authors and artists, both individual and corporate, still deserve our respect and support, but why cripple the Internet to accomplish this, when there are perfectly good laws already in place from many years ago?
Five years is clearly too short a cutoff for copyright in general, since it can take much longer than that to write a book, and making it impossible to circulate drafts helps nobody. What's needed is anti-squatting measures where (as is done with book/journal copies made in libraries, I believe) payments for copyright, patents, etc., are made to a central authority at reasonable standard rates; and where 'strategic' obstructive practices result in loss of protection. If someone gets upset about a file or two on your computer (the issue that seems to irk slashdotters the most, though it is 'squatting' on pieces of mathematics and human biology that does us the most real harm IMO), then you can produce your hardcopy original or pay them their buck. It's fundamentally a less serious problem than having a turn signal that doesn't work—perhaps on the order of having an overloud party—and should be dealt with as such.
Of course, as a separate matter, someone also has to educate the legislators that bittorrent is essentially a protocol, a method of allocating bandwidth, and not a business. I'm truly not quite sure how they've missed that point.
As to your other point, about sovereignty, I'm afraid I have to point out that you are insane. In your house, who has sovereignty? You, the actual residents, or your neighbours? The answer is you, until you start acting like an asshole and/or breaking the law. When you start killing people, taking prisoners, or (in the present case) stealing people's stuff, the community comes into play—and rightly so. And no, it doesn't matter if you work as a cop (or think you do). The law applies to everyone. Stop whining and behave yourself!
<sarcasm apology="half-hearted">If you don't like this planet, America, go somewhere else!</sarcasm>
I think decaying respect for science and fixation on short term issues are missing from your list of pressing matters - and your post itself is evidence!:)
I believe my deck is pre version 2, though I don't have it to hand. I do have to admit that we got pretty carried away with the blank cards at one point, so the deck I currently play is a little more chaotic than the one I bought - but I was trying not to base my comments on that.
If that's your usual reaction, then it is just hindsight talking. Most things seem a lot easier once someone tells you how to do them.
Well, except for the frequency with which I can find the approach in my notes from 15 years ago, or when I can pull the relevant textbook off the shelf, or when my friends can recall the discussions we had about whether there was a business to be had from it.
I'm certainly not saying that all patents are like this, but a positively alarming number of things that take only a few moments thought get patented.
Sure! But anyone who thinks that they can prove or disprove the existence of a hypothetical being that is omniscient and omnipotent by physical experiment would not make a good rocket scientist, either - no matter how unnecessary the hypothesis is to the business of rocketry. Random unprovable beliefs are *un*scientific, but they are not *anti*scientific. They are quite different from the random *false* beliefs of the true loony.:)
I go completely the other way. If you can spare the money, I'd vote for the iLiad. It's nothing like a PDA or much a laptop - but since I've had one I've barely touched paper. I read my journals on it, I take my notes on it, I read books on it. I haven't had so much enthusiasm for a gadget in years.
And yes, it's huge. That's great. Technical PDFs originally formatted for 8.5x11 (such as conference proceedings) are entirely legible in full page rendering. So what if I am now carrying around an object the size of a book? It is presently replacing a bag holding a quad pad, a paper notebook, three pens, four journals, a maths text, several rather weighty programming language specs, a novel, and - on days when I am not cutting code - my laptop. And to my taste, it's actually got better ergonomics than a print book - easier to use while drinking coffee, and blows around less when you're sitting under a tree (not, I guess, that your PDA has wind problems, either).
Don't get me wrong, getting a PDA with a full VGA and wifi is also a good move if you can afford it, but it's not even in the running for a paper replacement technology.
I think I'd be even blunter than you. Microsoft's profits come from a small range of technologies and philosophies that are often old at deployment, often weak by design, and fixed by the 'vision' of a small number of powerful people with strong personalities but extremely limited technical competence. Its strategy is to protect those profits, by limiting the extent to which innovation reaches the marketplace. This can be accomplished by destroying competition financially, by acquiring and dismantling competition, by obtaining (through patent law and, if necessary, research) exclusive rights to the technology that would enable competition, by hiring the researchers who might otherwise help the competition, and by actually innovating only as an absolute last resort. This is because change, any change at all, in a Microsoft product, is a tacit admission that the existing version is not already the best it could be. While to normal people progress is just the nature of the technological world, to the personality types who reign at Microsoft it means that they were ignorant and they were wrong, and this is very, very hard for them to accept.
Unfortunately, whether the idea is outside of the direct implications of the prior art (or indeed outside of what is already common knowledge) is apparently judged by people who have no technical background whatsoever. Or don't you find that your usual reaction on reading a patent is, "huh, someone found the time and money to file this" rather than "wow! I wish I had thought of that!"? I know I do. At least when I'm not thinking, "I wonder why they are doing this in such a stupid way? Has someone already locked down the obvious method?"
First of all, if you are so obsessed with winning, I'm not really sure you've mastered the concept of a 'game'. Secondly, Fluxx being (like, say, Cribbage) a game in which skill shows in the long run, if you lose against your cat best-of-seven, then I'm sorry, but you are probably dumber than your cat. There's a lot of strategy to games like Fluxx, but it is not static. Unless and until you can force the rules to give you a run on control, you have to reanalyse every turn or two. That's what the game is about. That, along with the silliness, is the point.
I can say this quite smugly, I fear; I'm pretty good at Fluxx. Which is to say that I win well above chance against nearly everyone I've played. But then I tend to win other games the first time I play them—I happen to have a talent for rules analysis, even though I'm weaker in other areas. So Fluxx is, perhaps, my game.
At the same time, I have to say that I do like the fact that there's enough randomness in Fluxx that you need never feel bad about losing a hand. It strengthens it on a social level, even as it weakens it as a tool for determining who is the alpha-geek.
And the purpose of games, at least among people I care to play with, is to have fun, not to make your opponent cry.
Well, the arithmetic says that it becomes plausible to kill someone at the point that they have already killed one person and seem likely to kill another. The arithmetic also suggests that it is plausible to lock someone up at the moment that they acquire a hand gun (threat of death being an attempt to do an end-run around the inherent game theory of society by eliminating subsequent rounds; removal from society would seem to be the appropriate response). I can't imagine that it makes much difference in this calculation whether someone is a cop or not, except perhaps in that the police are paid to deal with dangerous situations while civilians are not - meaning that a policeman's life may in some sense be worth fractionally less than someone else's, by their own choice.
As to marijuana laws, I think this is a nice example that we can't get anywhere without more variety in verdicts. Along with 'guilty' and 'not guilty' there's a clear need for 'not proven', 'malicious prosecution' and 'the law's an ass'. This does raise the philosophical question of whether these should be mutually exclusive, since the usual case with marijuana is that all three of 'guilty', 'malicious prosecution' and 'the law's an ass' obtain - the law maybe moronic, after all, and the crime inconsequential and clearly beneath the notice of a policemen lacking other, less appropriate, motivation; but compliance is not something requiring any effort at all, except in a few exceptional cases such as chronic pain management. So I say, lock 'em all up! The scofflaw smokers, the vindictive cops, the pandering legislators, all of them! And don't let them out until they kiss and promise to play nice in the future.
Now, of course, back at the original article, someone trying to blind the driver of a vehicle (and a flying one, no less!) is without doubt well into attempted-homicide-land. 20 years in jail seems like a measured maximum penalty, should the court determine that was indeed what was really going on.
But this is a surprisingly deep philosophical question. Words like 'real' and 'exist' mean different things in theology than they do in physics, as you can see very clearly by considering the interaction of the notions of omnipotence and observability. And this was all hashed out very thoroughly by the philosophers, many centuries ago; then again by mathematicians such as Goedel; and yet again, if you will, by computer scientists with virtualisation. The underlying nature of reality is inherently indeterminate from the perspective inside the box, but our best path forward is to rely on its very striking local consistency. Bible-thumping fundamentalists and vacuum-thumping atheists may try to cloud the issue by conflating ideas taken from physics with analogous ones from metaphysics, but these are the crazies on both sides, who ought simply to be ignored.
And of course Firefly is real. It says more about life than any ten regular shows put together, and in the context of science fiction, that is the operative definition of reality.
I see. So Firefly fans are not welcome at NASA? It's crazy people and idiots, not religious people, who are the problem. So long as a religious person is willing to face the question 'how accurate a scientific text is a religious document written three thousand years ago' - and most, in my experience (at least outside the US), are - there is no cause for concern.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, well, the 'kooks' in question actually seem to identify themselves as the Libertarian Party of Canada. So I guess I did believe them, yes. The fact that they are kooks—that was my point.
In your terminology, is there any circumstance under which objects in relative motion can be said to be 'aligned'? While I agree that relativistically speaking alignment isn't generally symmetric, I would have thought that this was exactly the situation in which one would have used the word - despite their limited speed, photon paths are the best 'lines' we have.
Personal freedom, sound economic policy, measured intervention in things that won't look after themselves - isn't this what we used to call 'Liberalism'? All the Libertarians I have encountered labour under the delusion that they are universal experts and that nobody but them (least of all people with actual domain-specific training!) should be doing any resource allocation. They don't want to fund street repairs - in case someone else uses tarmac they helped pay for - let alone science. Certainly a total failure to grasp the notions of insurance and natural monopoly is de rigeur. So ... since you aren't a selfish fool, why do you label yourself this way? Is there some benefit?
I'm sorry, I know I sound rude, but otherwise intelligent Libertarians are an endless source of frustration in my life.
Seconded. If I did my arithmetic correctly, then aircraft are still safer than cars even if we account the events of Sept. 11 as routine collateral damage like that done by a drunk driver or the truck that ended up in my aunt's living room.
Our long-term goal should be to eliminate human operators of vehicles; our short term goal should be to stay focussed on our long term goal.
Except yes, because the relationship between distance and cross-section that you consider to be not-the-same-thing is a characteristic property of (flat) three-dimensional space. It's why we get inverse square laws as a default physical behaviour (or rather, inverse square laws and macroscopically 3D space are immediate consequences of the same piece of mathematics the details of which we're still working on).
Or if you're thinking at a higher level of mathematical sophistication, notice that it's only in so far as the surface is normal to the illumination that we're doing any projection. Even by making strangely shaped surfaces you can't pack more projectable area into three space than the square law permits.
When you say "light output divided by the square inches of the screen" - that's what we call an inverse square law. On account, you see, of the light output being divided by the square - oh, never mind.
Morally speaking, there is a huge distinction between third party and first party recording. Since other people have vastly better memories than I, I consider it a disability/accessibility issue that I should be permitted to record anything that I see or hear. I think this applies most especially to things that happen in official contexts, not so much because I am concerned about occasional abuses of authority (though I am that), but because conversations that happen in police stations, immigration offices, and government bureaux are often of high criticality, and the law will presume that I have knowledge of what transpired in my presence. Absent a memory or a recording I can refer back to, what use is it if I am informed of my rights? What help is it if I am given advice?
But this is hugely different from the situation where someone's supervisor is scanning phone recordings after the fact, checking to see if perhaps I shared a dirty joke with a sales representative; or if I plant a recording device on someone to learn things that they have every right to expect are private.
What then should be admissible as evidence? Everything that is evidence, of course. What is needed there is not a law that an inappropriately made recording is disregarded, but a mechanism to ensure that those who introduce improperly acquired evidence are punished for their crime in obtaining it. The right method of ensuring that the police obey the law is simply to make them subject to it. No strange artificial blind spots are required.
Of course a recording may be edited. A verbal account may be untruthful, too. This is just one more thing that must be assessed in the course of a trial. A recording is just a representation of a memory, for all the technology involved. As with so many other issues of law, there's no need to mystify, here. The necessary principles were worked out centuries ago.
I'm being misunderstood. I'm not saying that there's no point in having passports for dealing with foreign countries (although if they adopt the policy that the US advocates, that their documents are checked before boarding for a trip, then in fact the same arguments do apply). But any electronic card passport 'replacement' would not be a conventional passport anyway. Furthermore, the claimed benefits are not benefits for foreign countries, either; they are benefits for Americans returning to the US.
So, to try again: it's not that passports have no use, but all the new electronic IDs being tossed around recently can be reduced to serial numbers.
As to the question of a DOS against the border posts—first, there's no need for them to use the public 'net, and second, I will bet you dollars to donuts that if the 'net goes down now and they can't check if you're on the blacklist, the border guards will not let you pass. I don't think anything would change.
Perhaps the creative process is different for you than it is for me. When I am working on something I produce many notes, and perhaps several drafts. After a while—and, crucially, after I have sought others' opinions—I may decide that there's something there I might care to publish. Your model would discourage me from working, which is contrary to your stated goal. The old-style US model which basically meant that only work for hire (and indeed, work produced in the US itself) received copyright protection was the broken one.
I think it's silly to make plagiarism and identity theft legal. Works not intended for publication, or for which a determination has not been made, deserve more protection than commercial ventures, not less.
What I really don't understand about the entire discussion is this: what the border guards actually look at is not what's written on your passport; it's what's stored in their database (from which, in the case of your own citizens, the passports were generated in the first place). So all that is needed is a serial number, right? You type your SSN into a keypad (or for that matter, swipe any one of your credit cards—nobody believes that the security establishment pays any attention to data protection laws, anyway), your photo pops up on the guy's screen, and if it's you, you're through. Everything else is either a holdover from the days before networks, or a diversion.
So ... what's this really about? I ask this not as a tinfoil hat question, but because I'm truly mystified.
I'll say it again. Now there's an Internet, you do not need to carry ID. The Man already has your file, and it's only because 'biometric' face recognition doesn't actually work yet that you carry any cards at all. There's no reason for cards to hold any data beyond a big number. There's no reason for them to be unique. There's no need for them to encode anything that can be used against you. There's no reason for any of this nonsense.
The only motivation I can think of for these measures is so that they can charge you more application fees for the new ID. What on earth am I missing?
Yes, of course. Copyright law serves a useful purpose in attacking corporate theft, but pre-Internet measures were already more than adequate in dealing with this. Indeed, it makes sense to scale copyright protections back in duration as social time constants shrink and the technical tools for enforcement advance, rather than extending them—though as I said before, it's important to keep pre-release copyright durations long enough to allow works to be completed. But be that as it may, things like the DMCA and the *AA wars serve no purpose in this regard.
I'm not sure I agree with you about P2P, however. As I said before, I believe these things to be protocol details, and even saying that P2P tools is a misdemeanor is nonsensical; copyright is about content and not protocol. If someone places a copyright work on their server for distribution, have they done anything wrong? They have participated in a distribution medium, as a library would, for example, but they have made no copies themselves. People who already have a hardcopy of an object have (or should have) a fair use right to an electronic copy, and obtaining it by download rather than by ripping/scanning just makes technological sense. The only 'rights' that have been circumvented are self-help rights that have no place in a society based on the rule of law. People who do not have a right to a copy they make are in many cases infringing the owner's rights by doing so, but it is the download and assembly process, not the P2P protocol or even the uploading peer which does this.
I seriously believe that in order to preserve and advance our culture, everything possible should be online in non-DRMed form. Authors and artists, both individual and corporate, still deserve our respect and support, but why cripple the Internet to accomplish this, when there are perfectly good laws already in place from many years ago?
The biggest problem is the erosion of respect for the rule of law itself, and the *AA are complicit in this, as are those who say (with the parent of my original post) "we are the great US of A, why should we care about our legal obligations to our neighbours?"—and the framers of the DMCA, which above all else is legal protection for snake oil, in that it provides legal support for 'copy protection' schemes which in no way protect against copying. The © symbol already exists to alert consumers to copyright, and does not encourage fraudulent 'cryptography', or transfer control of consumers' hardware to corporate criminals (well, other than possibly O/S vendors).
Five years is clearly too short a cutoff for copyright in general, since it can take much longer than that to write a book, and making it impossible to circulate drafts helps nobody. What's needed is anti-squatting measures where (as is done with book/journal copies made in libraries, I believe) payments for copyright, patents, etc., are made to a central authority at reasonable standard rates; and where 'strategic' obstructive practices result in loss of protection. If someone gets upset about a file or two on your computer (the issue that seems to irk slashdotters the most, though it is 'squatting' on pieces of mathematics and human biology that does us the most real harm IMO), then you can produce your hardcopy original or pay them their buck. It's fundamentally a less serious problem than having a turn signal that doesn't work—perhaps on the order of having an overloud party—and should be dealt with as such.
Of course, as a separate matter, someone also has to educate the legislators that bittorrent is essentially a protocol, a method of allocating bandwidth, and not a business. I'm truly not quite sure how they've missed that point.
As to your other point, about sovereignty, I'm afraid I have to point out that you are insane. In your house, who has sovereignty? You, the actual residents, or your neighbours? The answer is you, until you start acting like an asshole and/or breaking the law. When you start killing people, taking prisoners, or (in the present case) stealing people's stuff, the community comes into play—and rightly so. And no, it doesn't matter if you work as a cop (or think you do). The law applies to everyone. Stop whining and behave yourself!
<sarcasm apology="half-hearted">If you don't like this planet, America, go somewhere else!</sarcasm>
I think decaying respect for science and fixation on short term issues are missing from your list of pressing matters - and your post itself is evidence! :)
I believe my deck is pre version 2, though I don't have it to hand. I do have to admit that we got pretty carried away with the blank cards at one point, so the deck I currently play is a little more chaotic than the one I bought - but I was trying not to base my comments on that.
You're a member of Prostitutes for the RIAA, or you mean 'could' in the technical sense of 'couldn't'?
Sorry, sometimes I just can't resist.
Well, except for the frequency with which I can find the approach in my notes from 15 years ago, or when I can pull the relevant textbook off the shelf, or when my friends can recall the discussions we had about whether there was a business to be had from it.
I'm certainly not saying that all patents are like this, but a positively alarming number of things that take only a few moments thought get patented.
Sure! But anyone who thinks that they can prove or disprove the existence of a hypothetical being that is omniscient and omnipotent by physical experiment would not make a good rocket scientist, either - no matter how unnecessary the hypothesis is to the business of rocketry. Random unprovable beliefs are *un*scientific, but they are not *anti*scientific. They are quite different from the random *false* beliefs of the true loony. :)
I go completely the other way. If you can spare the money, I'd vote for the iLiad. It's nothing like a PDA or much a laptop - but since I've had one I've barely touched paper. I read my journals on it, I take my notes on it, I read books on it. I haven't had so much enthusiasm for a gadget in years.
And yes, it's huge. That's great. Technical PDFs originally formatted for 8.5x11 (such as conference proceedings) are entirely legible in full page rendering. So what if I am now carrying around an object the size of a book? It is presently replacing a bag holding a quad pad, a paper notebook, three pens, four journals, a maths text, several rather weighty programming language specs, a novel, and - on days when I am not cutting code - my laptop. And to my taste, it's actually got better ergonomics than a print book - easier to use while drinking coffee, and blows around less when you're sitting under a tree (not, I guess, that your PDA has wind problems, either).
Don't get me wrong, getting a PDA with a full VGA and wifi is also a good move if you can afford it, but it's not even in the running for a paper replacement technology.
I think I'd be even blunter than you. Microsoft's profits come from a small range of technologies and philosophies that are often old at deployment, often weak by design, and fixed by the 'vision' of a small number of powerful people with strong personalities but extremely limited technical competence. Its strategy is to protect those profits, by limiting the extent to which innovation reaches the marketplace. This can be accomplished by destroying competition financially, by acquiring and dismantling competition, by obtaining (through patent law and, if necessary, research) exclusive rights to the technology that would enable competition, by hiring the researchers who might otherwise help the competition, and by actually innovating only as an absolute last resort. This is because change, any change at all, in a Microsoft product, is a tacit admission that the existing version is not already the best it could be. While to normal people progress is just the nature of the technological world, to the personality types who reign at Microsoft it means that they were ignorant and they were wrong, and this is very, very hard for them to accept.
Unfortunately, whether the idea is outside of the direct implications of the prior art (or indeed outside of what is already common knowledge) is apparently judged by people who have no technical background whatsoever. Or don't you find that your usual reaction on reading a patent is, "huh, someone found the time and money to file this" rather than "wow! I wish I had thought of that!"? I know I do. At least when I'm not thinking, "I wonder why they are doing this in such a stupid way? Has someone already locked down the obvious method?"
First of all, if you are so obsessed with winning, I'm not really sure you've mastered the concept of a 'game'. Secondly, Fluxx being (like, say, Cribbage) a game in which skill shows in the long run, if you lose against your cat best-of-seven, then I'm sorry, but you are probably dumber than your cat. There's a lot of strategy to games like Fluxx, but it is not static. Unless and until you can force the rules to give you a run on control, you have to reanalyse every turn or two. That's what the game is about. That, along with the silliness, is the point.
I can say this quite smugly, I fear; I'm pretty good at Fluxx. Which is to say that I win well above chance against nearly everyone I've played. But then I tend to win other games the first time I play them—I happen to have a talent for rules analysis, even though I'm weaker in other areas. So Fluxx is, perhaps, my game.
At the same time, I have to say that I do like the fact that there's enough randomness in Fluxx that you need never feel bad about losing a hand. It strengthens it on a social level, even as it weakens it as a tool for determining who is the alpha-geek.
And the purpose of games, at least among people I care to play with, is to have fun, not to make your opponent cry.
Well, the arithmetic says that it becomes plausible to kill someone at the point that they have already killed one person and seem likely to kill another. The arithmetic also suggests that it is plausible to lock someone up at the moment that they acquire a hand gun (threat of death being an attempt to do an end-run around the inherent game theory of society by eliminating subsequent rounds; removal from society would seem to be the appropriate response). I can't imagine that it makes much difference in this calculation whether someone is a cop or not, except perhaps in that the police are paid to deal with dangerous situations while civilians are not - meaning that a policeman's life may in some sense be worth fractionally less than someone else's, by their own choice.
As to marijuana laws, I think this is a nice example that we can't get anywhere without more variety in verdicts. Along with 'guilty' and 'not guilty' there's a clear need for 'not proven', 'malicious prosecution' and 'the law's an ass'. This does raise the philosophical question of whether these should be mutually exclusive, since the usual case with marijuana is that all three of 'guilty', 'malicious prosecution' and 'the law's an ass' obtain - the law maybe moronic, after all, and the crime inconsequential and clearly beneath the notice of a policemen lacking other, less appropriate, motivation; but compliance is not something requiring any effort at all, except in a few exceptional cases such as chronic pain management. So I say, lock 'em all up! The scofflaw smokers, the vindictive cops, the pandering legislators, all of them! And don't let them out until they kiss and promise to play nice in the future.
Now, of course, back at the original article, someone trying to blind the driver of a vehicle (and a flying one, no less!) is without doubt well into attempted-homicide-land. 20 years in jail seems like a measured maximum penalty, should the court determine that was indeed what was really going on.
But this is a surprisingly deep philosophical question. Words like 'real' and 'exist' mean different things in theology than they do in physics, as you can see very clearly by considering the interaction of the notions of omnipotence and observability. And this was all hashed out very thoroughly by the philosophers, many centuries ago; then again by mathematicians such as Goedel; and yet again, if you will, by computer scientists with virtualisation. The underlying nature of reality is inherently indeterminate from the perspective inside the box, but our best path forward is to rely on its very striking local consistency. Bible-thumping fundamentalists and vacuum-thumping atheists may try to cloud the issue by conflating ideas taken from physics with analogous ones from metaphysics, but these are the crazies on both sides, who ought simply to be ignored.
And of course Firefly is real. It says more about life than any ten regular shows put together, and in the context of science fiction, that is the operative definition of reality.
I see. So Firefly fans are not welcome at NASA? It's crazy people and idiots, not religious people, who are the problem. So long as a religious person is willing to face the question 'how accurate a scientific text is a religious document written three thousand years ago' - and most, in my experience (at least outside the US), are - there is no cause for concern.