Is the government enforcing a law that terrifying to you?
Well, I don't know - if I found a law that said that anyone using or who had used the handle "stupidpuppy" on an online forum must be arrested and summarily executed, would you be a little worried that someone in the government might enforce that law?
_Every_ part of the government needs oversight, preferably via a process which is not under the control of the part which is being audited. There should be no part of the government which can do what it wants without worrying about somebody else kicking its collective head when it misbehaves.
If you've been reading about the subject, then you'd know that the magnetic reversal allows greater solar radiation to hit the surface of the planet while the magnetic field is in transition.
Dunno, I'm so cynical about the government right now that I figure anything different than the status quo will be automatically rejected unless it either helps a politician's "buddies" or satisfies some ideological or political goal.
I'd have to personally know an "influential politician" before I would feel like I could trust them to actually care about whether the patent system is working or not.
Even if there WERE such a politico who was excited about reforming the patent system, the system itself (as is the nature of any bureaucracy) would fight tooth & nail to maintain its current shape.
Actually, you could do something simpler: only allow a small, fixed number of valid patents at any given time (10,000?).
Use some kind of "competition" process (auction?) so that patentable ideas "compete" with each other to be awarded patent "slots" (which become open due to expiration, or because patent is thrown out due to prior art or obviousness).
This kind of process would encourage due diligence by the people bidding for patents (since they wouldn't want to pay a whole lot of money just to see their patent thrown out in court).
Also, you could encourage innovation by small innovators by allowing _anyone_ to submit an idea for potential patent, and then whoever wins the auction will give the money directly to the submitter. Win-win for the submitter, the winning bidder & society, since there'll be a lot of smart (but probably poor) people trying to hit the innovation jackpot, and the winning bidder will be much more likely to have the resources to bring that patentable idea to market (thus making it available to society).
No, corporations aren't inherently evil structures we should be protected from.
Any organization (corporate or government) with a high concentration of resources has a high probability of being "evil" (I prefer the larger-coverage term of "dangerous"), simply because minor screwups or negligent/incompetent decision-making (setting aside actual maliciousness for the monent) are magnified by the sheer amount of resources that such orgnizations have available.
When a small group of entities has the resources necessary to destroy a community's economic equilibruim (especially when those entities have no particular vested interest in the welfare of that community), then that community is going to be in deep sh*t sooner or later.
Society would be much healthier & adaptable if there were an emphasis on supporting individuals & small organizations, rather than the wholesale bigger-is-better mentality going on nowadays.
This couldn't happen with wireless. As long as the two components remain within reach of each other then all is fine.
Sounds like someone hasn't ever set up a "real" wireless network. What dimension did you come from where your wireless connections never had a problem with interference?
Heh - you sound like a Linux apologist, claiming that everything is easy to use, and then when somebody points out something that isn't, you immediately counter with "well, it's easy to use if you just change this configuration option from its default".
I suppose you think that the process you described to restore the Classic Start menu behavior is a lot easier/intuitive for a newbie to figure out than any similar configuration operations on a Linux system - assuming that a newbie would even know that such an operation could be performed.
Actually, too-large businesses are much more problematic from an economic viewpoint, simply because their size means that their screwups cause MUCH larger perturbations in the social & economic fabric.
While individual small businesses may come and go (along with the accompanying heartaches for the owners & employees of those businesses), good societal support for small businesses in general will provide a wide ecosystem of goods & service providers, which can adapt & respond rapidly to changing market conditions.
Contrast that with the effects of a large business, where a single round of layoffs can devastate the communities involved, where the financial shenanigans of a few corporate executives can destroy the retirement plans of all their employees, and where the concentration of wealth makes it hard for even the most principled-politician to keep their eye on the overall public good.
Also, many small businesses exemplify the "total competition" environment that makes capitalism more efficiently allocate resources based on Adam Smith's "invisible hand", where there is much more opportunity and probability that a few large businesses will end up cooperating (either explicitly or implicitly) to make extra profit at the expense of the consumer.
There are only a few economic situations where a few big business are better for society than a whole bunch of small businesses, and those are where you can get major economies-of-scale for a highly-desirable product.
"Slippery slope" arguments are mentally seductive, albeit logically flawed, since they usually make so much damn common sense.
In situations where "leaders" can amass power with no feedback to enforce accountability, history tells us that (probability-wise) it is almost inevitable they will push the envelope until something happens (usually something very painful for everyone concerned) to stop them.
It makes "common sense" to people because most of them would do the SAME thing if they were in those leaders' shoes.
But that doesn't change the fact that they are convicted felons. In our system of justice (which works pretty well most of time, regardless of what you read), these people have been convicted of the most serious and egregious class of crimes.
Considering that in some states _copyright infringement_ is considered a felony and can potentially get you more time than actually physically hurting someone, I am greatly unimpressed at the "serious and egregious" attribute of many crimes.
I've always felt that it should actually be a Constitutional Right that even criminals, no matter what the "classification", should be given the opportunity to vote. It gives a much-needed source of negative feedback to out-of-control legislators - if you put too many of your constituents in jail, you will face a dedicated voting bloc who hates your guts and won't be swayed much by how much money you spend on propaganda. Right now, it is pretty simple for a fascist-leaning legislator to make sure that classes of people that they don't like can be disenfranchised and become a non-factor in political calculations.
For those alarmists who would whine about serial murderers & rapists getting to vote, I'd point out that there aren't enough of those to make a significant percentage of the voting public, so it's a baseless worry.
I never said that illegal immigrants have the "right" to live in the country - I've been saying that they have the "right" to try and make their lives better (i.e., pursuit of happiness), and that just because they are "illegally" in the country, does not mean they are not being oppressed.
I'm not saying this is ethically correct, but I'll admit I wouldn't have much sympathy.
Yeah, that's usually the attitude which allows a lot of misery to continue to exist in the world.
But enforcing the law against criminals, regardless of their citizenship status, is not oppression, assuming the laws are just.
That's a _BIIIIG_ assumption. I'm pretty sure that (as a progressive) I wouldn't want someone like you, who has little sympathy for anyone you perceive as a "criminal", to decide whether the laws are "just" or not.
In other words, there's always that 0.01% chance that a hole could be poked somewhere in the legalese, no matter how well-written the legal document is.
At least part of that problem is due to the ambiguity of the "programming language" that the law is written in, however, which is exactly why I was suggesting requiring that legal documents be written in a machine-parseable unambiguous "legal" language.
If the language were not ambiguous, then legislators could turn their attention to "debugging" (law doesn't do what they intended) or design (law doesn't have the effect that they intended). In either case, being able to "run" the new law against various population simulations would be a useful way for them (the legislators) to determine the probable effects of any legislation (one more alternative viewpoint rather than trusting to gut-level or ideological forecasting).
I think that the end of cheap oil is a godsend at this point.
It might be a godsend for the environment & society, but if you're so poor that you can't afford the transition to another style of living, it's going to feel like your world is caving in.
outlaw the use of any electronic, and therefore hackable, voting machines
I think the machines are fine for generating user-readable & verifiable ballots - meaning, people can use the machines to create a piece of paper or plastic which they can easily read to determine that their desired decisions were recorded properly.
As long as people can easily verify that, and the counting process uses the same method of reading the ballot that the people do (no secret bar codes, which might be different than the descriptive text), then it doesn't really matter if the ballot-producing machines are very secure or not.
The _counting_ part of the process is a whole different ballgame. _That_ process will need a solid secure structure, large-scale independent public oversight & lots of double-checks.
The big problem with the current machines is that they combine both those steps & don't provide any means of independent public oversight.
I thought it would be interesting if it were required that all legal documents be written in an unambiguous computer-parseable language.
Decision points where ambiguity had to be resolved would be referred to human actors (judges, government officials, etc) who would have to provide their decisions in terms of data that was unambiguously interpreted (in terms of the legal language).
Couple of benefits that I can think of (aside from reducing the number of arguments about what the laws actually mean):
1) Trials could be reduced to a "legal" computer, where the prosecutors & defense lawyers write their cases in terms of the legal language, feed it into the computer, the computer asks the judge & juries to make decisions at key points, then renders the verdict.
The more interesting possibility was being able to "test" the effects of new laws by running through large population "simulators", and try to forecast how they might affect your society.
I discussed my brilliant idea with my brother (a lawyer), who laughed at me and told me to get a life. *sigh*
If "citizens" were subject to being ripped out of their homes or jobs and suddenly deported without benefit of trial, wouldn't you consider those citizens to be oppressed?
If companies and/or landlords could demand that "citizens" put up with almost any kind of unsafe work conditions or outrageous financial terms, since complaining would cause an "anonymous" caller to tell the government where to find the complainer, who would then be subject to the sudden deportation as described above, wouldn't you consider that citizen to be oppressed?
The final question is: why does not being a citizen mean that person is not being "oppressed"?
The correct answer, of course, is that you can have oppressive acts performed on you whether or not you are legal or illegally in the country. Even if those acts are perfectly legal, they are still oppressive. Oppression can be performed by agents other than the government as well.
I can think of all kinds of ways to screw over someone who doesn't dare to raise their profile for fear of alerting the authorities to their existence.
People who insist that such actions are _not_ oppressive have basically buried a big chunk of their basic human decency so that it won't bother their ideology.
Aliens have no basis in citizenship to fight for anything.
Eh?! Oppressed people _anywhere_ have a "right" to fight for a better life, regardless of their citizenship status. There are no citizenship qualifiers to the "unalienable rights" clause.
If you're any kind of progressive (i.e., actually caring about improving most peoples' lives), you might argue from the viewpoint that encouraging illegal immigration makes it easier for employers to keep the wages of the poor depressed, but arguing that they have no rights because they are "illegal" is morally wrong.
I always thought there were two things required to make the patent system bearable:
#1 Severely limit the total number of valid patents - maybe 10,000 or so, although
I'm sure there could be kind of criteria to decide what total # would be "best".
This makes the patent database practically searchable, and allows product-makers to have a decent chance of knowing whether or who's patent they might be violating.
This also sets up the scenario for #2:
#2 Set up some kind of "idea" competition so that people who are trying to get a patent
granted need to have the ideas presented in their patent application compared against
all of the other patent applications for "value".
My favorite process for this so far will probably make economics professors happy: hold an auction for each "open" patent slot which becames available (either because the previous patent holding that slot reached expiration, or was knocked out in the courts due to prior art and/or obviousness).
Anybody can submit "ideas" for patenthood into the auction, and anybody can bid to try and secure the patent rights for each particular idea.
Part of the reason I like this idea is that each bidder has to perform "due diligence" on the idea that they are bidding for (i.e., doesn't require much USPTO involvement, since if that idea ends up getting knocked down in the courts due to prior art or obviousness, or there are so many variations of the idea that it can be easily worked around, then it wouldn't be worth the money that they'd end up spending on it.
Since a normal auction favors rich people/organizations, I prefer adding a following twist: the money paid by the winning bidder goes to the person who submitted the idea to the auction.
This works out for both small inventors & society, since small but clever inventors could receive jackpot windfall returns depending on how valuable their submitted idea was, and the entities who win those auctions are much more likely to have the resources to widely distribute the benefits of those ideas to society.
The main things that I haven't worked out a good answer for:
You need to make sure that someone who bids for their own submitted patent idea doesn't "pay themself" if they win, since in that case anyone could bid outrageously. In order to make the auction assign proper "values" to the ideas, you need to make sure that the winning bidders cough up real money.
I'm sure the government would be happy to take that money off everyone's hands, but I'd really prefer a closed feedback system that encourages "good" societal results. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't know - if I found a law that said that anyone using or who had used the handle "stupidpuppy" on an online forum must be arrested and summarily executed, would you be a little worried that someone in the government might enforce that law?
_Every_ part of the government needs oversight, preferably via a process which is not under the control of the part which is being audited. There should be no part of the government which can do what it wants without worrying about somebody else kicking its collective head when it misbehaves.
Since when does "what the White House" says have to do with the actual law?
If you've been reading about the subject, then you'd know that the magnetic reversal allows greater solar radiation to hit the surface of the planet while the magnetic field is in transition.
Dunno, I'm so cynical about the government right now that I figure anything different than the status quo will be automatically rejected unless it either helps a politician's "buddies" or satisfies some ideological or political goal.
I'd have to personally know an "influential politician" before I would feel like I could trust them to actually care about whether the patent system is working or not.
Even if there WERE such a politico who was excited about reforming the patent system, the system itself (as is the nature of any bureaucracy) would fight tooth & nail to maintain its current shape.
Actually, you could do something simpler: only allow a small, fixed number of valid patents at any given time (10,000?).
Use some kind of "competition" process (auction?) so that patentable ideas "compete" with each other to be awarded patent "slots" (which become open due to expiration, or because patent is thrown out due to prior art or obviousness).
This kind of process would encourage due diligence by the people bidding for patents (since they wouldn't want to pay a whole lot of money just to see their patent thrown out in court).
Also, you could encourage innovation by small innovators by allowing _anyone_ to submit an idea for potential patent, and then whoever wins the auction will give the money directly to the submitter. Win-win for the submitter, the winning bidder & society, since there'll be a lot of smart (but probably poor) people trying to hit the innovation jackpot, and the winning bidder will be much more likely to have the resources to bring that patentable idea to market (thus making it available to society).
Any organization (corporate or government) with a high concentration of resources has a high probability of being "evil" (I prefer the larger-coverage term of "dangerous"), simply because minor screwups or negligent/incompetent decision-making (setting aside actual maliciousness for the monent) are magnified by the sheer amount of resources that such orgnizations have available.
When a small group of entities has the resources necessary to destroy a community's economic equilibruim (especially when those entities have no particular vested interest in the welfare of that community), then that community is going to be in deep sh*t sooner or later.
Society would be much healthier & adaptable if there were an emphasis on supporting individuals & small organizations, rather than the wholesale bigger-is-better mentality going on nowadays.
If we don't vote, how can we make sure that the other lizard doesn't get elected?
Perhaps in many cases that's because they can't afford it?
Sounds like someone hasn't ever set up a "real" wireless network. What dimension did you come from where your wireless connections never had a problem with interference?
"easy to measure" being one of those relative terms that make normal people roll their eyes when thinking about engineers & scientists :-)
Heh - you sound like a Linux apologist, claiming that everything is easy to use, and then when somebody points out something that isn't, you immediately counter with "well, it's easy to use if you just change this configuration option from its default".
I suppose you think that the process you described to restore the Classic Start menu behavior is a lot easier/intuitive for a newbie to figure out than any similar configuration operations on a Linux system - assuming that a newbie would even know that such an operation could be performed.
It's usually better than what most people can afford for themselves. Not sure why you seem to have so much contempt for it.
Actually, too-large businesses are much more problematic from an economic viewpoint, simply because their size means that their screwups cause MUCH larger perturbations in the social & economic fabric.
While individual small businesses may come and go (along with the accompanying heartaches for the owners & employees of those businesses), good societal support for small businesses in general will provide a wide ecosystem of goods & service providers, which can adapt & respond rapidly to changing market conditions.
Contrast that with the effects of a large business, where a single round of layoffs can devastate the communities involved, where the financial shenanigans of a few corporate executives can destroy the retirement plans of all their employees, and where the concentration of wealth makes it hard for even the most principled-politician to keep their eye on the overall public good.
Also, many small businesses exemplify the "total competition" environment that makes capitalism more efficiently allocate resources based on Adam Smith's "invisible hand", where there is much more opportunity and probability that a few large businesses will end up cooperating (either explicitly or implicitly) to make extra profit at the expense of the consumer.
There are only a few economic situations where a few big business are better for society than a whole bunch of small businesses, and those are where you can get major economies-of-scale for a highly-desirable product.
It should be. Allowing "criminals" to vote provides a highly-desirable negative feedback against out-of-control legislators.
"Slippery slope" arguments are mentally seductive, albeit logically flawed, since they usually make so much damn common sense.
In situations where "leaders" can amass power with no feedback to enforce accountability, history tells us that (probability-wise) it is almost inevitable they will push the envelope until something happens (usually something very painful for everyone concerned) to stop them.
It makes "common sense" to people because most of them would do the SAME thing if they were in those leaders' shoes.
Considering that in some states _copyright infringement_ is considered a felony and can potentially get you more time than actually physically hurting someone, I am greatly unimpressed at the "serious and egregious" attribute of many crimes.
I've always felt that it should actually be a Constitutional Right that even criminals, no matter what the "classification", should be given the opportunity to vote. It gives a much-needed source of negative feedback to out-of-control legislators - if you put too many of your constituents in jail, you will face a dedicated voting bloc who hates your guts and won't be swayed much by how much money you spend on propaganda. Right now, it is pretty simple for a fascist-leaning legislator to make sure that classes of people that they don't like can be disenfranchised and become a non-factor in political calculations.
For those alarmists who would whine about serial murderers & rapists getting to vote, I'd point out that there aren't enough of those to make a significant percentage of the voting public, so it's a baseless worry.
Hmmm...somehow I doubt increased exposure to solar radiation is going to reduce the indicidents of gene mutation.
It would be nice if all our cancer research starts paying off.
I never said that illegal immigrants have the "right" to live in the country - I've been saying that they have the "right" to try and make their lives better (i.e., pursuit of happiness), and that just because they are "illegally" in the country, does not mean they are not being oppressed.
Yeah, that's usually the attitude which allows a lot of misery to continue to exist in the world.
That's a _BIIIIG_ assumption. I'm pretty sure that (as a progressive) I wouldn't want someone like you, who has little sympathy for anyone you perceive as a "criminal", to decide whether the laws are "just" or not.
At least part of that problem is due to the ambiguity of the "programming language" that the law is written in, however, which is exactly why I was suggesting requiring that legal documents be written in a machine-parseable unambiguous "legal" language.
If the language were not ambiguous, then legislators could turn their attention to "debugging" (law doesn't do what they intended) or design (law doesn't have the effect that they intended). In either case, being able to "run" the new law against various population simulations would be a useful way for them (the legislators) to determine the probable effects of any legislation (one more alternative viewpoint rather than trusting to gut-level or ideological forecasting).
It might be a godsend for the environment & society, but if you're so poor that you can't afford the transition to another style of living, it's going to feel like your world is caving in.
I think the machines are fine for generating user-readable & verifiable ballots - meaning, people can use the machines to create a piece of paper or plastic which they can easily read to determine that their desired decisions were recorded properly.
As long as people can easily verify that, and the counting process uses the same method of reading the ballot that the people do (no secret bar codes, which might be different than the descriptive text), then it doesn't really matter if the ballot-producing machines are very secure or not.
The _counting_ part of the process is a whole different ballgame. _That_ process will need a solid secure structure, large-scale independent public oversight & lots of double-checks.
The big problem with the current machines is that they combine both those steps & don't provide any means of independent public oversight.
I thought it would be interesting if it were required that all legal documents be written in an unambiguous computer-parseable language.
Decision points where ambiguity had to be resolved would be referred to human actors (judges, government officials, etc) who would have to provide their decisions in terms of data that was unambiguously interpreted (in terms of the legal language).
Couple of benefits that I can think of (aside from reducing the number of arguments about what the laws actually mean):
1) Trials could be reduced to a "legal" computer, where the prosecutors & defense lawyers write their cases in terms of the legal language, feed it into the computer, the computer asks the judge & juries to make decisions at key points, then renders the verdict.
The more interesting possibility was being able to "test" the effects of new laws by running through large population "simulators", and try to forecast how they might affect your society.
I discussed my brilliant idea with my brother (a lawyer), who laughed at me and told me to get a life. *sigh*
If "citizens" were subject to being ripped out of their homes or jobs and suddenly deported without benefit of trial, wouldn't you consider those citizens to be oppressed?
If companies and/or landlords could demand that "citizens" put up with almost any kind of unsafe work conditions or outrageous financial terms, since complaining would cause an "anonymous" caller to tell the government where to find the complainer, who would then be subject to the sudden deportation as described above, wouldn't you consider that citizen to be oppressed?
The final question is: why does not being a citizen mean that person is not being "oppressed"?
The correct answer, of course, is that you can have oppressive acts performed on you whether or not you are legal or illegally in the country. Even if those acts are perfectly legal, they are still oppressive. Oppression can be performed by agents other than the government as well.
I can think of all kinds of ways to screw over someone who doesn't dare to raise their profile for fear of alerting the authorities to their existence.
People who insist that such actions are _not_ oppressive have basically buried a big chunk of their basic human decency so that it won't bother their ideology.
Eh?! Oppressed people _anywhere_ have a "right" to fight for a better life, regardless of their citizenship status. There are no citizenship qualifiers to the "unalienable rights" clause.
If you're any kind of progressive (i.e., actually caring about improving most peoples' lives), you might argue from the viewpoint that encouraging illegal immigration makes it easier for employers to keep the wages of the poor depressed, but arguing that they have no rights because they are "illegal" is morally wrong.
I always thought there were two things required to make the patent system bearable:
#1 Severely limit the total number of valid patents - maybe 10,000 or so, although
I'm sure there could be kind of criteria to decide what total # would be "best".
This makes the patent database practically searchable, and allows product-makers to have a decent chance of knowing whether or who's patent they might be violating.
This also sets up the scenario for #2:
#2 Set up some kind of "idea" competition so that people who are trying to get a patent
granted need to have the ideas presented in their patent application compared against
all of the other patent applications for "value".
My favorite process for this so far will probably make economics professors happy:
hold an auction for each "open" patent slot which becames available (either
because the previous patent holding that slot reached expiration, or was knocked
out in the courts due to prior art and/or obviousness).
Anybody can submit "ideas" for patenthood into the auction, and anybody can bid to
try and secure the patent rights for each particular idea.
Part of the reason I like this idea is that each bidder has to perform "due diligence"
on the idea that they are bidding for (i.e., doesn't require much USPTO involvement,
since if that idea ends up getting knocked down in the courts due to prior art or
obviousness, or there are so many variations of the idea that it can be easily
worked around, then it wouldn't be worth the money that they'd end up spending on it.
Since a normal auction favors rich people/organizations, I prefer adding a following
twist: the money paid by the winning bidder goes to the person who submitted the idea
to the auction.
This works out for both small inventors & society, since small but clever inventors
could receive jackpot windfall returns depending on how valuable their submitted
idea was, and the entities who win those auctions are much more likely to have the
resources to widely distribute the benefits of those ideas to society.
The main things that I haven't worked out a good answer for:
You need to make sure that someone who bids for their own submitted patent idea
doesn't "pay themself" if they win, since in that case anyone could bid
outrageously. In order to make the auction assign proper "values" to the ideas,
you need to make sure that the winning bidders cough up real money.
I'm sure the government would be happy to take that money off everyone's hands,
but I'd really prefer a closed feedback system that encourages "good" societal
results. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.