I'm not saying that software has to be copyrighted, nor am I saying that inventions have to be patented. All I'm saying is that if I were to invent the op-amp or write OSX on my own time I'd exercise my patent or copyright respectively. It doesn't matter which is harder to reverse engineer they both have IP protections. If someone else were to do the work and release it for free more power to 'em.
Third; like everyone else, they have to allow for patent fights. Get rid of that. Want to make a drug? Go ahead and make it. Design the system so that there is more of a percentage in sharing the idea than hiding it. There are several ways to go about that I can think of (pooling risk, pooling R&D and results, pooling or staging manufacturing capabilities), I'm sure others, far more clever than I am, could do better.
I don't think there is an easy solution, the problem that patents solve isn't Merck vs. GSK, it is big-pharma vs. generics. The difference between the two groups is essentially that big pharma has R&D overhead and generics don't. Even if there were, as you suggest, a pharma conglomerate (IMO a cure worse than the disease - pun not intended) it still couldn't compete against generics not participating in the R&D process and ripping off their inventions at a rapid rate with little to no development cost.
In general I like your idea, but I think you underestimate the importance of recognizing the problem. The innovation around pencils and erasers (speculating) wasn't that we put rubber on the end of the pencil, but rather that it would be useful to be able erase things that we wrote on paper. If you know about graphite and rubber maybe it is obvious once someone asks you how to erase something, but if no one has ever thought to ask the question that is notable in and of itself.
I'm with you, all the problems you described are most certainly real, and I have no problem saying the patent system is broken. However, I'm not sure that it is doing more harm than good, and think that it should be fixed rather than scrapped.
Right, because everyone knows about hamburgers. The really critical part of R&D is that it is studying something we don't already know...
The government isn't going to provide financial protection for your burger joint, but if in the course of running your burger joint you invent a novel, nonobvious devise that cooks the best burger in the world you should be rewarded for your ingenuity. The alternatives are either you keep it a secret for as long as possible and are able to charge whatever you want for a burger for as long as you want, or the first person who figures out your trick gets to build his own devise and you have no protection and make no money - neither is a good solution. With patents the world gets better burgers, and you get to profit.
I don't know how hardware patents are working, but I think that patents in general are necessary to support R&D overheads.
This is where some laissez faire guy usually touts the first-mover advantage. Frankly, first-mover advantage is vastly over-rated. Sure it works for the iPod, but if the patent system were about to collapse I'd put my life-saving on the line that big-pharma would close their R&D facilities within a year. Big pharma, for all their massive short-comings, spends tons of money on R&D. Generally speaking I think people agree that having new and better drugs is a good thing.
Now, today pharma tells us what their molecule (and their process) is and the minute it comes off patent a generic is there to supply it for cheap. This is also a good thing, (putting the limited in limited monopoly) but the reason that generics can make the drug cheaper than big pharma is that they don't have to pay for R&D. Even if pharma kept the molecule a secret it would take a chemist specializing in structure elucidation, a process chemist, and a process engineer maybe a year to figure out how to make it. So big pharma spends 7-10 years employing hundreds of people finding developing and testing hundreds of analogs and tens of millions of dollars on animal and clinical trials only to be under-cut in a year by less than a dozen people doing reverse engineering.
I would say that drugs, engine parts, and hardware are similar as far as patents go in that it is far easier to figure out someone else's idea than come up with your own - which would cause R&D departments across the country to shut down if there were no patent protection.
I think patents are a good idea, but also that the patent system is broken.
I think that hardware patents should be allowed because if I invent the op-amp I want to get paid for it. Without a hardware patent I'm SOL. There is no copyright protecting hardware (which should be the major IP protector for software), and reverse engineering and reproducing my hardware design would be trivial once I sold the first one.
Not a chance. The patent game is being played by major corporations firing volleys of offensive and defensive patents at each other. They are certainly not swayed by the fee structure of the patent office, they spend far far more money on their corporate lawyers. The way to break the cycle is to stop granting stupid patents.
I don't think software patents are a good thing, so I'm not going to argue with you there. But hardware should be patentable - it is a real physical devise, and provided it does something novel and non-obvious, the R&D investment should be protected. In the rare case that individuals independently discover something - tough luck if you didn't think of it first - that is the way it works.
You seem to be mistaken as to how the US patent system works. The US operates under a first-inventor principle, which means that it isn't the guy who makes it to the office with the money first that gets the rights. Not that first-inventor isn't without problems, but the race to the patent office isn't one of them.
The US system is most certainly broken, but clearly not in the ways you think it is. I'm looking forward to reading the article, but it appears slashdotted. IMHO the biggest problem with the current state of the patent office is the rubber stamping of obvious and trivial inventions.
I find it strange to assume that the most powerful entity in the universe, the creator of the universe, cannot directly be observed.
Maybe we observe god everyday, we are simply incapable of noticing.
As for how we got from god of myth to god that we can't see I think the explanation is pretty simple. The mythical gods are embellishments. Maybe something real happened, maybe individuals can communicate with god, but I think the fantastic stories are supposed to be fantastic. Besides even the mythic gods rarely communicate with more than a few people. In the OT for example god talks to Abraham and Moses and Isaac and a few others who act as intermediates and spread the word to the masses. I personally don't think that the ten commandments happened Charlton Heston, or even Exodus style.
How often have mythic gods communicated to large groups of people in a way that left no doubt that god was speaking? The closest case I can think of is the Israelites following a pillar of smoke and fire, but even then it wasn't as if a voice cried out - turn left in 500 feet.
As for destruction, devastation etc. I can think of plenty of examples. The holocaust, the tsunami in Indonesia, AIDs in Africa etc. Of course there is no flaming sword, but neither was there when the walls of Jericho collapsed. Who is to say that that wasn't an earthquake while the soldiers were en route or camping out, and all the marching around the city was a dramatic detail added later?
I had a colleague who was testing out a new mass-spec machine (probably similar to the one in TFA) to verify cleanliness between campains at a plant site. The machine had been developed for use in airports, and the software already contained the profiles for a number of drugs and explosives. Apparently, as the sibling points out, coke is on a lot of our money. Most of the time it is in the ppb level, which could be transfer from money that was with money that was with money that was with coke. Occasionally however a bill would show 100 - 1000x the typical amount, we concluded that those were bills that made it into peoples noses.
A related note, a lot of money on the also has measurable levels of meth.
I don't think the point to this how much money is involved in drug trade, but rather how inter-connected out money is, and how good our analytical chemistry techniques are.
Although... a terrorist would probably be using money that hasn't been in wide circulation - perhaps we could spot them by seeing if too much money any individual is carrying is devoid of drugs.
Proving the either the existence or non-existence of anything which cannot directly be observed by both parties to the argument is exceedingly difficult (even if we ignore the non-trivial anti-realist argument). So personally I'd consider the difficulty of proving either the existence or non-existence of God neutral.
If an apologist is trying to convince you or the GP, then you are correct that it would be his job to supply the proof. However, I'd argue that anyone trying to convince you is not an apologist, because apologists strive to make arguments that are logically consistent, arguing that proof of God demonstratively exists is incompatible with a whole host of arguments that an apologist relies on, not the least of which is that if demonstrable proof of god exists there'd be no need for apologetics, the discipline would reduce to pointing a finger and saying well look at that. In a similar vein people who point to the bible, the weather, or toast with the Virgin Mary emblazoned upon it are not apologists, they do not strive for consistency.
Apologetics find it most productive to talk to people who are willing to accept their premise, they typically leave the converting to the evangelicals.
On the other hand, if you or the GP or anyone else were to tell a person of faith that there is no god it'd be up to you to substantiate your case - which is what my first post said. My first post was a response to what I interpreted as a rather vitriolic attitude specifically towards apologists, and towards people of faith in general. It is my belief that the GP is wrong to generalize all persons of faith, and I simply pointed out that his admonition of apologetics was unwarranted. I felt the need to point out that of all religious people it is probably least appropriate, and he is least suited to attack an apologist.
Personally I that an evangelical who tries to logically persuade people is doomed to failure, regardless of whether that evangelical is a theist or atheist.
I don't know about you but I'd rather hear from the people well versed in apologetics than a biblical literalist.
Apologists are concerned about learning and understanding and asking why - things most slashdotters value. Also, when all is said and done, you end up with a pretty darn consistent and logically solid defense of religion. Granted, the final argument is that you have to have some faith and no amount of logic can conclusively prove the existence of God - let alone a particular god. Of course proving the non-existence of God is equally impossible.
Literalists on the other-hand argue that it must be this way because god says so (in their reading of course - but don't try to tell them that...)
Of course, I suspect that the real problem is that you are annoyed whenever anyone subscribes to a belief you don't understand or share - and even more annoyed when those people make internally consistent logical arguments. You should feel free to demonstrate such people beliefs to be wrong - but if you're going after apologists I'd suggest you start with "there is no god because" - and try to follow with something logical.
the average car buyer would have no use for anthing not in a typical owners manual
The average car-buyer might not have a need for engine computer code, but then again you don't release any technical information for the average buyer, yet right there on the pamphlet is the compression ratio...
There is loads of technical information that isn't useful to the average buyer, but is useful if you want your equipment to be serviced or modified, for example there are piggy back chips for engine computers today, and people have been boring cylinders and changing timings and such since well before a computer lived under the hood.
Even if the manufacturer decided the end user could not utilize such information, you'd have a hard time convincing anyone that it wouldn't benefit independent mechanics, tuner garages, and more importantly manufacturers of third-party diagnostic equipment. Of course, that could well be the point, make the factory certified mechanics $85/hr less repulsive.
But such a scenario really cuts to the heart of the issue, either manufacturers of devices with embedded code don't understand their market and moder sub-market that goes with any piece of equipment, the manufacturer is afraid that they'll lose a competitive edge by releasing embedded code that cannot be justified by the increased sales resulting from such a decision, or the manufacturer is looking to leverage a lock-in.
if you go back into the 70s and 80s, it wasn't considered that strange to get a big book or binder of source code when you bought (high priced) items with embedded programming.
I'm curious, this is not a rhetorical question, if you bought a car in that time frame would the engine management code be available? Clearly the computers in cars of that era were much less sophisticated, but I wouldn't be surprised if even then engine optimization was considered a trade secret.
Or by high priced did you mean things closer to the Apache than a Cadillac?
both have told me I must buy a new phone to make any changes to my contract
Seriously? Whenever I've talked to Sprint or Verizon they're only too happy to make changes to my plan. Then I ask them if that restarts my contract - funny how they don't mention that up front. Then they always say yes, then I tell them to go screw themselves.
So after reading through a bit of the comments to this article I gather that the collective wisdom of slashdot thinks that the state of extra-terrestrial life basically looks like some combination of Star Trek's Prime Directive, Babylon 5/ SG1's elder races, and Might and Magic's this colony forgot about technology motif.
I don't know why that surprises me...
Seriously, SciFi has so many holes in it that become quite obvious even as the story plays out, we shouldn't be extending out fiction to the universe.
If there is extra terrestrial life capable of FTL travel, wouldn't it stand to reason that it would put out colonies? Wouldn't it become successful by gathering resources when and where it can? Wouldn't we be able to spot either that or pick up their communications by now if it had ever happened within a reasonable distance of us? I can think of no reason why advanced ETs would bother to try to shield us younger species, it just doesn't make sense, unless you're looking for a plot device for a long running TV series.
The whole elder younger races thing, is even sillier, if there had been hundreds or thousands of apex species maybe we wouldn't know everything about all of them, but wouldn't it make sense that if there are multiple species in contact with each other eventually younger species will figure out the tech of the older ones, build on it and they will advance together? It seems unlikely to me that any species will have passed its prime keeping its technology secret, to the point that a younger race would be unable to reverse engineer it, so that the elder race is viewed as mystical.
Finally, I think that far-flung colonies forgetting about technology and regressing is possibly the most plausible, doesn't it also stand to reason that if we are such a colony we know enough about our planet that we'd be able to detect and "advanced tech" from our distant past?
I think the possibility that another poster mentioned, that we're just not in a sweet spot of galactic geography makes sense. If the c speed limit holds, any real colonization is likely to happen somewhat closer to the galactic center where interstellar distances are more manageable.
OTOH if the c speed limit doesn't hold, then I agree with Fermi, we really should have seen some ET life by now.
Which would be fine, but thanks to napster, and all the p2p that has come since, they've already been forcibly thrown from the cliff. They better start flapping, or things could get ugly.
I think you're giving the content industries more credit then they deserve. I don't think that anyone is actually thinking about the relative pros and cons of DRM. (At least they aren't paying anyone to do so in order to issue recommendations effect policy in any non-trivial way.)
I think the only reason they do it is because that is the way the market is trending - which promptly becomes a self-filling prophesy.
The RIAA is a machine, and like any poorly managed machine/corporation, it will continue to do what it is doing because that is what it does.
copy and paste from my comment on Job's proclamation here
Apparently the argument isn't as transparent as the Economist says, (or maybe I'm just a bit tin-foilly today) but Jobs is a PR genius. If comes out against DRM, maybe he gets the French off his back, knowing full well that the RIAA will never allow him to sell non-DRM music. He's counting on not having to switch in a heart-beat. This way, he not only gets to look like "a champion of consumer rights," but also gets to maintain his lock in.
Apple would be fine without DRM, but the are better off with it - and even better with it while saying the don't want it.
Note: it wasn't modded troll.
I do think this is the recording industry doing the same thing.
Alight, I'm not going to go as far as saying that there shouldn't be a tax on anything bought online, but I'm not content with your explanation either.
Levying any tax discourages investment in that state. Go to any state boarder and you can see dozens of businesses that were build in the pre-internet era right along the state line on the side with the lower tax. (Sometimes when different goods are taxed differently you will see furniture stores on one side and liquor stores on the other) So the fact that sales tax is a disincentive for investment is something states should just have to deal with, either they should be content with a lowered investment, or they should lower taxes and make up for it in volume. Look at Delaware - there is a reason so many of your credit card offers come from Wilmington (extremely favorable tax laws for banking and incorporating).
So this whole argument really strikes me as the states wanting it both ways. Not that that is anything new.
On the otherhand, I'm originally from Ohio, and their sales tax system is just crazy. Sales tax varies county to county, and is almost universally high (6-8+%). Streamlining that mess so that I can pay the same for a widget in Lucas county as it cost in Franklin county would be a big positive. It is also a major reason that Streamlined sales tax will fall on its face. Ohio seems to be totally disinterested in sorting things out (especially with the current governor - although he is on his way out,) which would involve figuring a way to rectify the different counties income.
And then there is the idea of state's rights - which has been waning in popularity since the new deal to be sure, but is still brought up when it involves income streams. Of course this isn't a federal mandate, and the states are more than within their rights to enter into an agreement to harmonize taxes, but it would hamper their ability to make changes to their tax codes when they wanted to - it is after all the reason the summary states for Cali dropping out.
I'm not saying global warming isn't something that is worth spending money on, or that the cos to doing nothing is zero.
I'm just saying some of the little things, like making white roads, putting blankets on glaciers, and painting roofs white, might be extremely expensive, and have little or no effect. It's a cost-benefit thing, if the money spent on white roads were instead funneled to something like alternative energy research we'd probably be better off.
That is the whole problem with global warming - there isn't one big solutions. And while all the small solutions may add up to a solution to climate change, they certainly will add up financially.
The other problem is inertia. Even if every new road were constructed of light concrete, rather than dark asphalt, how long before there is even a 5% increase in concrete roads? And then what is the cost differential between concrete and asphalt?
Lets face it we're lazy and cheap, but I think (could be wrong) that we are more lazy than cheap so some expensive but easy (for the general public) solution - what this article talks about - are more attractive than options that are hard, but cheap solutions.
I think we're more likely to launch trillions of orbital sunshades than to convince China (or even Pennsylvania) to stop burning coal.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying that software has to be copyrighted, nor am I saying that inventions have to be patented. All I'm saying is that if I were to invent the op-amp or write OSX on my own time I'd exercise my patent or copyright respectively. It doesn't matter which is harder to reverse engineer they both have IP protections. If someone else were to do the work and release it for free more power to 'em.
I don't think there is an easy solution, the problem that patents solve isn't Merck vs. GSK, it is big-pharma vs. generics. The difference between the two groups is essentially that big pharma has R&D overhead and generics don't. Even if there were, as you suggest, a pharma conglomerate (IMO a cure worse than the disease - pun not intended) it still couldn't compete against generics not participating in the R&D process and ripping off their inventions at a rapid rate with little to no development cost.
See my post here
In general I like your idea, but I think you underestimate the importance of recognizing the problem. The innovation around pencils and erasers (speculating) wasn't that we put rubber on the end of the pencil, but rather that it would be useful to be able erase things that we wrote on paper. If you know about graphite and rubber maybe it is obvious once someone asks you how to erase something, but if no one has ever thought to ask the question that is notable in and of itself.
I'm with you, all the problems you described are most certainly real, and I have no problem saying the patent system is broken. However, I'm not sure that it is doing more harm than good, and think that it should be fixed rather than scrapped.
Right, because everyone knows about hamburgers. The really critical part of R&D is that it is studying something we don't already know...
The government isn't going to provide financial protection for your burger joint, but if in the course of running your burger joint you invent a novel, nonobvious devise that cooks the best burger in the world you should be rewarded for your ingenuity. The alternatives are either you keep it a secret for as long as possible and are able to charge whatever you want for a burger for as long as you want, or the first person who figures out your trick gets to build his own devise and you have no protection and make no money - neither is a good solution. With patents the world gets better burgers, and you get to profit.
I don't know how hardware patents are working, but I think that patents in general are necessary to support R&D overheads.
This is where some laissez faire guy usually touts the first-mover advantage. Frankly, first-mover advantage is vastly over-rated. Sure it works for the iPod, but if the patent system were about to collapse I'd put my life-saving on the line that big-pharma would close their R&D facilities within a year. Big pharma, for all their massive short-comings, spends tons of money on R&D. Generally speaking I think people agree that having new and better drugs is a good thing.
Now, today pharma tells us what their molecule (and their process) is and the minute it comes off patent a generic is there to supply it for cheap. This is also a good thing, (putting the limited in limited monopoly) but the reason that generics can make the drug cheaper than big pharma is that they don't have to pay for R&D. Even if pharma kept the molecule a secret it would take a chemist specializing in structure elucidation, a process chemist, and a process engineer maybe a year to figure out how to make it. So big pharma spends 7-10 years employing hundreds of people finding developing and testing hundreds of analogs and tens of millions of dollars on animal and clinical trials only to be under-cut in a year by less than a dozen people doing reverse engineering.
I would say that drugs, engine parts, and hardware are similar as far as patents go in that it is far easier to figure out someone else's idea than come up with your own - which would cause R&D departments across the country to shut down if there were no patent protection.
I think patents are a good idea, but also that the patent system is broken.
I think that hardware patents should be allowed because if I invent the op-amp I want to get paid for it. Without a hardware patent I'm SOL. There is no copyright protecting hardware (which should be the major IP protector for software), and reverse engineering and reproducing my hardware design would be trivial once I sold the first one.
Not a chance. The patent game is being played by major corporations firing volleys of offensive and defensive patents at each other. They are certainly not swayed by the fee structure of the patent office, they spend far far more money on their corporate lawyers. The way to break the cycle is to stop granting stupid patents.
I don't think software patents are a good thing, so I'm not going to argue with you there. But hardware should be patentable - it is a real physical devise, and provided it does something novel and non-obvious, the R&D investment should be protected. In the rare case that individuals independently discover something - tough luck if you didn't think of it first - that is the way it works.
You seem to be mistaken as to how the US patent system works. The US operates under a first-inventor principle, which means that it isn't the guy who makes it to the office with the money first that gets the rights. Not that first-inventor isn't without problems, but the race to the patent office isn't one of them.
The US system is most certainly broken, but clearly not in the ways you think it is. I'm looking forward to reading the article, but it appears slashdotted. IMHO the biggest problem with the current state of the patent office is the rubber stamping of obvious and trivial inventions.
Maybe we observe god everyday, we are simply incapable of noticing.
As for how we got from god of myth to god that we can't see I think the explanation is pretty simple. The mythical gods are embellishments. Maybe something real happened, maybe individuals can communicate with god, but I think the fantastic stories are supposed to be fantastic. Besides even the mythic gods rarely communicate with more than a few people. In the OT for example god talks to Abraham and Moses and Isaac and a few others who act as intermediates and spread the word to the masses. I personally don't think that the ten commandments happened Charlton Heston, or even Exodus style.
How often have mythic gods communicated to large groups of people in a way that left no doubt that god was speaking? The closest case I can think of is the Israelites following a pillar of smoke and fire, but even then it wasn't as if a voice cried out - turn left in 500 feet.
As for destruction, devastation etc. I can think of plenty of examples. The holocaust, the tsunami in Indonesia, AIDs in Africa etc. Of course there is no flaming sword, but neither was there when the walls of Jericho collapsed. Who is to say that that wasn't an earthquake while the soldiers were en route or camping out, and all the marching around the city was a dramatic detail added later?
I had a colleague who was testing out a new mass-spec machine (probably similar to the one in TFA) to verify cleanliness between campains at a plant site. The machine had been developed for use in airports, and the software already contained the profiles for a number of drugs and explosives. Apparently, as the sibling points out, coke is on a lot of our money. Most of the time it is in the ppb level, which could be transfer from money that was with money that was with money that was with coke. Occasionally however a bill would show 100 - 1000x the typical amount, we concluded that those were bills that made it into peoples noses.
A related note, a lot of money on the also has measurable levels of meth.
I don't think the point to this how much money is involved in drug trade, but rather how inter-connected out money is, and how good our analytical chemistry techniques are.
Although... a terrorist would probably be using money that hasn't been in wide circulation - perhaps we could spot them by seeing if too much money any individual is carrying is devoid of drugs.
Proving the either the existence or non-existence of anything which cannot directly be observed by both parties to the argument is exceedingly difficult (even if we ignore the non-trivial anti-realist argument). So personally I'd consider the difficulty of proving either the existence or non-existence of God neutral.
If an apologist is trying to convince you or the GP, then you are correct that it would be his job to supply the proof. However, I'd argue that anyone trying to convince you is not an apologist, because apologists strive to make arguments that are logically consistent, arguing that proof of God demonstratively exists is incompatible with a whole host of arguments that an apologist relies on, not the least of which is that if demonstrable proof of god exists there'd be no need for apologetics, the discipline would reduce to pointing a finger and saying well look at that. In a similar vein people who point to the bible, the weather, or toast with the Virgin Mary emblazoned upon it are not apologists, they do not strive for consistency.
Apologetics find it most productive to talk to people who are willing to accept their premise, they typically leave the converting to the evangelicals.
On the other hand, if you or the GP or anyone else were to tell a person of faith that there is no god it'd be up to you to substantiate your case - which is what my first post said. My first post was a response to what I interpreted as a rather vitriolic attitude specifically towards apologists, and towards people of faith in general. It is my belief that the GP is wrong to generalize all persons of faith, and I simply pointed out that his admonition of apologetics was unwarranted. I felt the need to point out that of all religious people it is probably least appropriate, and he is least suited to attack an apologist.
Personally I that an evangelical who tries to logically persuade people is doomed to failure, regardless of whether that evangelical is a theist or atheist.
I don't know about you but I'd rather hear from the people well versed in apologetics than a biblical literalist.
Apologists are concerned about learning and understanding and asking why - things most slashdotters value. Also, when all is said and done, you end up with a pretty darn consistent and logically solid defense of religion. Granted, the final argument is that you have to have some faith and no amount of logic can conclusively prove the existence of God - let alone a particular god. Of course proving the non-existence of God is equally impossible.
Literalists on the other-hand argue that it must be this way because god says so (in their reading of course - but don't try to tell them that...)
Of course, I suspect that the real problem is that you are annoyed whenever anyone subscribes to a belief you don't understand or share - and even more annoyed when those people make internally consistent logical arguments. You should feel free to demonstrate such people beliefs to be wrong - but if you're going after apologists I'd suggest you start with "there is no god because" - and try to follow with something logical.
The average car-buyer might not have a need for engine computer code, but then again you don't release any technical information for the average buyer, yet right there on the pamphlet is the compression ratio...
There is loads of technical information that isn't useful to the average buyer, but is useful if you want your equipment to be serviced or modified, for example there are piggy back chips for engine computers today, and people have been boring cylinders and changing timings and such since well before a computer lived under the hood.
Even if the manufacturer decided the end user could not utilize such information, you'd have a hard time convincing anyone that it wouldn't benefit independent mechanics, tuner garages, and more importantly manufacturers of third-party diagnostic equipment. Of course, that could well be the point, make the factory certified mechanics $85/hr less repulsive.
But such a scenario really cuts to the heart of the issue, either manufacturers of devices with embedded code don't understand their market and moder sub-market that goes with any piece of equipment, the manufacturer is afraid that they'll lose a competitive edge by releasing embedded code that cannot be justified by the increased sales resulting from such a decision, or the manufacturer is looking to leverage a lock-in.
I'm curious, this is not a rhetorical question, if you bought a car in that time frame would the engine management code be available? Clearly the computers in cars of that era were much less sophisticated, but I wouldn't be surprised if even then engine optimization was considered a trade secret.
Or by high priced did you mean things closer to the Apache than a Cadillac?
Yeah I wouldn't worry about quantum effects on machines built at the quantum level either.
Seriously? Whenever I've talked to Sprint or Verizon they're only too happy to make changes to my plan. Then I ask them if that restarts my contract - funny how they don't mention that up front. Then they always say yes, then I tell them to go screw themselves.
So after reading through a bit of the comments to this article I gather that the collective wisdom of slashdot thinks that the state of extra-terrestrial life basically looks like some combination of Star Trek's Prime Directive, Babylon 5/ SG1's elder races, and Might and Magic's this colony forgot about technology motif.
I don't know why that surprises me...
Seriously, SciFi has so many holes in it that become quite obvious even as the story plays out, we shouldn't be extending out fiction to the universe.
If there is extra terrestrial life capable of FTL travel, wouldn't it stand to reason that it would put out colonies? Wouldn't it become successful by gathering resources when and where it can? Wouldn't we be able to spot either that or pick up their communications by now if it had ever happened within a reasonable distance of us? I can think of no reason why advanced ETs would bother to try to shield us younger species, it just doesn't make sense, unless you're looking for a plot device for a long running TV series.
The whole elder younger races thing, is even sillier, if there had been hundreds or thousands of apex species maybe we wouldn't know everything about all of them, but wouldn't it make sense that if there are multiple species in contact with each other eventually younger species will figure out the tech of the older ones, build on it and they will advance together? It seems unlikely to me that any species will have passed its prime keeping its technology secret, to the point that a younger race would be unable to reverse engineer it, so that the elder race is viewed as mystical.
Finally, I think that far-flung colonies forgetting about technology and regressing is possibly the most plausible, doesn't it also stand to reason that if we are such a colony we know enough about our planet that we'd be able to detect and "advanced tech" from our distant past?
I think the possibility that another poster mentioned, that we're just not in a sweet spot of galactic geography makes sense. If the c speed limit holds, any real colonization is likely to happen somewhat closer to the galactic center where interstellar distances are more manageable.
OTOH if the c speed limit doesn't hold, then I agree with Fermi, we really should have seen some ET life by now.
Which would be fine, but thanks to napster, and all the p2p that has come since, they've already been forcibly thrown from the cliff. They better start flapping, or things could get ugly.
I think you're giving the content industries more credit then they deserve. I don't think that anyone is actually thinking about the relative pros and cons of DRM. (At least they aren't paying anyone to do so in order to issue recommendations effect policy in any non-trivial way.)
I think the only reason they do it is because that is the way the market is trending - which promptly becomes a self-filling prophesy.
The RIAA is a machine, and like any poorly managed machine/corporation, it will continue to do what it is doing because that is what it does.
Note: it wasn't modded troll.
I do think this is the recording industry doing the same thing.
The religious right will be the first to argue against morality defined by law. Otherwise wouldn't abortion be moral?
Alight, I'm not going to go as far as saying that there shouldn't be a tax on anything bought online, but I'm not content with your explanation either.
Levying any tax discourages investment in that state. Go to any state boarder and you can see dozens of businesses that were build in the pre-internet era right along the state line on the side with the lower tax. (Sometimes when different goods are taxed differently you will see furniture stores on one side and liquor stores on the other) So the fact that sales tax is a disincentive for investment is something states should just have to deal with, either they should be content with a lowered investment, or they should lower taxes and make up for it in volume. Look at Delaware - there is a reason so many of your credit card offers come from Wilmington (extremely favorable tax laws for banking and incorporating).
So this whole argument really strikes me as the states wanting it both ways. Not that that is anything new.
On the otherhand, I'm originally from Ohio, and their sales tax system is just crazy. Sales tax varies county to county, and is almost universally high (6-8+%). Streamlining that mess so that I can pay the same for a widget in Lucas county as it cost in Franklin county would be a big positive. It is also a major reason that Streamlined sales tax will fall on its face. Ohio seems to be totally disinterested in sorting things out (especially with the current governor - although he is on his way out,) which would involve figuring a way to rectify the different counties income.
And then there is the idea of state's rights - which has been waning in popularity since the new deal to be sure, but is still brought up when it involves income streams. Of course this isn't a federal mandate, and the states are more than within their rights to enter into an agreement to harmonize taxes, but it would hamper their ability to make changes to their tax codes when they wanted to - it is after all the reason the summary states for Cali dropping out.
I'm not saying global warming isn't something that is worth spending money on, or that the cos to doing nothing is zero.
I'm just saying some of the little things, like making white roads, putting blankets on glaciers, and painting roofs white, might be extremely expensive, and have little or no effect. It's a cost-benefit thing, if the money spent on white roads were instead funneled to something like alternative energy research we'd probably be better off.
That is the whole problem with global warming - there isn't one big solutions. And while all the small solutions may add up to a solution to climate change, they certainly will add up financially.
The other problem is inertia. Even if every new road were constructed of light concrete, rather than dark asphalt, how long before there is even a 5% increase in concrete roads? And then what is the cost differential between concrete and asphalt?
Lets face it we're lazy and cheap, but I think (could be wrong) that we are more lazy than cheap so some expensive but easy (for the general public) solution - what this article talks about - are more attractive than options that are hard, but cheap solutions.
I think we're more likely to launch trillions of orbital sunshades than to convince China (or even Pennsylvania) to stop burning coal.