Not that it matters. If she was undercover at one time, and some of her contacts are still undercover, then any foreign intelligence agency is going to have a clue about their identities now.
This whole thread was about whether the current system of intellectual property is necessary for SOCIETY, not whether an individual software developer can make good under the existing system. When I pointed out that it was perfectly possible for software development to occur _without_ any support from intellectual property laws, you very sarcastically commented that my thought scenario was completely hypothetical, completely ignoring the examples that I was discussing about how people make a living without depending on intellectual property.
If you don't want pissy, then don't piss first.
Frankly, I think an individual software developer is pretty much screwed under the current system - if they're not working for a big company, then they have to pretty much hope that nobody sues them since there's almost nothing interesting that any individual developer can do which doesn't violate somebody's intellectual property somehow.
But that doesn't mean that it's wrong to use the current system of software revenue generation to feed my family... If I create something unique, I don't want someone else to profit from it.
Sounds like a selfish reason to me. Why should you have control over what other people want to do? How is that going to benefit society? It certainly doesn't benefit the people you are trying to control.
How about all the work that other people did that YOU took advantage of to create your "unique" thing? What if THEY didn't want you to be able to use their ideas to do YOUR creative work? How would you feel about intellectual property then?
And what if somebody completely unrelated & who had no idea you existed ends up creating something very similar (which occurs quite often due to the widespread distribution of interesting research) - should you have the right to crush THEIR creative efforts because you had money & filed some papers with the government first?
It's funny - I have _never_ seen any studies indicating that intellectual property laws have had a net benefit for society (although there's a lot of hot air by people with vested interests), but I sure have seen a lot of anecdotes about how intellectual property laws were hurting innovation.
Why should a patent holder give up his monopoly to the highest bidder?
I'm proposing a _replacement_ for the existing patent system. Auction-participants would be bidding on the chance to MAKE something a patent, not on things which are already patents. Of course, once somebody has won the rights for a patent, then they could do the typical things with it like any patent holder, including licensing it to other companies or selling it completely (if they think they can get a better deal than the amount they paid to win the auction).
If merck is willing to pay $50M for the patent the new chemical compound I have discovered, but I could license it for $20M a pop to 5 drug manufacturers, you have just taken $50M of my potential money away and given Merck the monopoly. On top of that, if I licensed it to 5 manufacturers which maximized my profit, it would force them to compete which would mean lower prices.
Or a consortium of companies could get together to outbid Merck & own the resultant patent collectively.
Frankly, though, your counterexample really applies only a fairly well-off patent holder. There aren't many "small" patent holders who could hit 5 big companies for $20mil each (much less a single company for $50mil), at least not without major legal muscle to fight the teams of lawyers that those companies can muster to ignore or invalidate any of your attempts to enforce your little patent.
With my scheme, 1) the total # of patents is kept to a manageable level so that frivolous patents don't unnecessarily retard innovation in the society, 2) you don't have to depend on the availability of expert patent examiners to attach an accurate valuation to each patent, 3) people with bright ideas but no resources don't have to compete with the legal resources of huge companies plus they get a rapid potentially-substantial payoff in direct proportion to the perceived value of their idea, 4) the good ideas are immediately available to agents who do and can have the resources to take full advantage of them.
Your thought scenario is interesting, but I do not think it completely invalidates the advantages of my scheme. Certainly I believe that my scheme would be much better for society than the current patent system.
My proposal is a patent auction (I came up with this idea myself...honest - although I can't claim nobody else came up with it either).
Let there be a fixed number of allowed patents - something reasonably small (1000? 10000?), so that the patent database never grows very large (and is easily searchable, and doesn't infringe so much on normal innovation).
Anyone who wants can submit a patent application. As each patent slot is freed up due to expiration (or cancellation after successful litigation due to prior art or obviousness), entities (whether people or companies) would submit bids on the various patent applications they want to own as patents.
The top bidder will end up owning the patent, and the money paid will go to the submitter of the patent.
Any patent applications which don't end up becoming patents are treated as "public domain" from that point on (as well as being useful as prior art for future applications).
A few reasons I like this idea:
1) The relatively small number of patents makes it a lot easier to see if you're infringing anything. Also having a small # of valuable patents makes it harder for people to get patents on really stupid trivial things that a lot of people use in their normal lives.
2) the bidders will figure out how much each patent is worth
For a good valuation, they have to figure out stuff like whether the patent is likely to be invalidated easily due to prior art or obviousness, how long the technology will be useful, how hard will it be to implement the technology, what the potential payoff is, etc.
In any case, you don't have to rely on the dubious expertise of patent examiners, and you can depend on the power of greed so that the bidders will make a best effort to determine what they're willing to pay for a particular patent.
3) The submitter of the patent will get a potentially big payoff
*BIG* incentive for submitting patent applications, even for the "little guys" who might be smart but not have the resources to take advantage of their idea.
From society's viewpoint, this is the best case scenario - the "innovator" gets richly rewarded for contributing, and the entity that buys the patent rights should have the resources to take advantage of the innovation.
And frankly, there are PLENTY of poor citizens on welfare, etc...that we should put to work doing these jobs if they still want to remain on 'the dole'.
Ah yes, I long for those days of legal indentured servitude as well. Just as long as I'm the one with the money.
Gee, I can tell you're really up for the challenge.
What's so hypothetical about a business model which doesn't depend on intellectual property laws? Try every single business which provides a service or sells an actual physical product. I'll leave it up to your so-obviously-superior intellectual abilities to think of a few.
How is $30 billion/year profit a failed business model?
I assume you're referring to the current software industry. Their "business model" is subsidized by special laws ("intellectual property" laws). A "successful", natural business model doesn't require special laws to prop up that business model - it becomes successful by providing desired goods & services at a value that customers are willing to pay for.
Software licensing is an excellent way to generate revenue...
Getting a law passed that forces everyone to give me 1% of their income would be a great way for me to generate revenue too, but I really doubt that I could convince everyone that it would be in their best interests to do so.
Try to evaluate whether a business model would succeed in the absence of "intellectual property" laws. If it looks like it can, then _that's_ a good business model.
Because the first purchase of that software very rarely covers all the costs.
Then selling large, expensive-to-develop software packages as a retail product isn't a successful business model, is it? Why am I being required to subsidize a failed business model? And even worse, instead of just being taxed & the money being used to subsidize the failed business model, I am subsidizing that failed business model by being forced to give up my natural rights to do whatever I want with my own private property (like make copies of it for my friends).
People got out of the habit of paying $250,000 for a bit of software years ago, back when it was called 'custom designed' software. Software still costs $250,000 or more to create, but now its called 'off the shelf' where one solution is good for many people, and they all pay less for it than they would if they had commissioned it independantly.
The type of software that "regular people" would use does not cost $250k to create - especially if software developers can reuse code wherever they can get it without worrying about getting their asses sued off by litigous parasites. Using freeware software, I could build a decent text editor in a couple of days - hardly $250k in cost even with my best consultant fees:-) - and at that point it would be just a matter of time & incremental development to build a word processor that could do everything I wanted. If you've got 100,000 developers spread across the globe doing that incremental development, in parallel & borrowing ideas from each other, you _will_ end up with something very usable (probably with a lot of weird sidebranches - look at emacs for goodness sake:-).
In the absence of IP laws, there would still be cheap software - although it would've been developed in a more evolutionary way, with each advance being used to support the next, and certainly wouldn't have supported the growth of a certain Software Behemoth.
It sounds like it's difficult for you to conceive of the development of a market for software in any form other than what already exists. But that's one of the good things about a free market - over time, there WILL be cost-effective solutions to whatever problems need solving, even if the individuals involved can't comprehend the full path to get from "here" to "there" (or even what the eventual "there" might look like).
As for the type of software which _does_ and would cost $250k to create - the type of large software packages used by companies are _still_ custom (or at least heavily customized), except that it runs behind the scenes where you don't usually see it. Many companies consider their in-house software to be a competitive advantage, and usually think it's worth it to pay for the services of software developers to maintain it & keep it up-to-date.
And those things don't usually start as expensive packages - they usually start as small, simple solutions to some problem & get incrementally modified as business needs drive them. That's a _natural_ business model - getting paid for actual services rendered, instead of having laws which force people to pay you something they wouldn't ordinarily do.
By spreading the cost over many copies, developers bring down the cost of the software to levels where more people can buy it. Or would you enjoy not being able to play Halflife 2 until someone stumped up $1million for the first copy and then the developers put subsequent copies out there for free?
As I said above, wherever there is a demand, there will be solutions - it just wouldn't take the highly-distorted form of the current market that IP laws cause today. As far as the highly-advanced games - I suspect that they would've ended up being developed more on game-console type of hardware instead of on generic PCs. So they'd still be available, although tied more to the hardware.
Why should software developers create one piece of software, then get paid over and over every time that piece of software is copied?
_Most_ craftspeople assume that they will get paid if they provide a desired product or service. If they want to _continue_ to get paid by people, they will have to keep creating new products and/or keep providing desired services.
Why should software developers get special privileges over every other craftsperson on the planet?
I'd rather have a big pile of nuclear waste to guard than a giant cloud of oil/coal pollution that enters the air and the oceans,
OTOH, ecosystems (& the bodies of living creatures) usually have mechanisms for dealing with the kind of low-level pollution that oil/coal-burning plants can generate (same way they deal with smoke f/forest fires) - although it is certainly possible to overwhelm those mechanisms if you allow too high a concentration of such plants to operate simultaneously. (Granted, dealing with that pollution on a long-term basis will probably cause a constant additional stress to the various ecosystems & organisms, which they might not be able to handle in addition to habitat loss, severe weather, etc.)
But there's not too many ecosystems/organisms that could handle a serious nuclear event (either from the primary material or from the toxic byproducts). Witness the damage caused to people/landscape by Chernobyl, even though the actual amount of energy released by that accident was probably much smaller than typical forest fire.
Except that there is so little chance of life occuring the way it is today through evolution alone. I suppose I developed an 'intelligent design' belief, but there are WAY too many coincedences to support evolution alone.
All that shows is that you don't understand the basics of science & statistics enough to rebut the bogus arguments being put forth by the creationists to confuse the issues, and have settled for the emotionally-comforting fallback position that "I don't understand how it could be possible, so God must've done it."
The fact that our educational system didn't teach you enough critical thinking techniques to recognize such propaganda is just another data point in the favor of point of the article.
(if anyone wishes to debate on why I think we are here because of evolution alone, think of all the physiological intricacies of the human body. the counter-current systems in the lungs, and of the nephrons in the kidneys. the remarkable ability to maintain homeostasis, and how meiosis magically mixes up dna to increase genetic diversity. Try to convince me that all of that
There are reasonable answers for all of those issues, but your last phrase indicates that you don't really want to believe any of them.
I understand Roger Penrose, who worked with Hawking on black holes, calculated the odds of the supposed Big Bang producing our ordered universe at "one in 10^10^123" - a number with more zeroes than there are particles in the known universe...
Did Penrose also calculate the probability of our ordered universe coming to existence if you assume an infinite number of Big Bangs spread over an infinite amount of time? I'm not much of a mathematician, but I'm pretty sure that limit approaches 100%, no matter how small the probability of any given Big Bang producing our particular ordered universe.
you take out trees that are in their late maturity phase before they go into decline
There's some evidence that these "slowly-degrading" mature trees are important to a typical forest's ecosystem, however.
I don't think there's _any_ way to log a forest without disturbing the ecosystem. The question is whether or not your logging techniques & the quantity of logging disturb the system beyond the point where it can maintain its usual ecological balance.
What they did was take a system that would be best modelled with a Fourier series
If the data is so chaotic & noisy, how do you know that the Fourier series would be the best way to model it?
By choosing a Fourier series, aren't you making the assumption that the data is primarily cyclical, and wouldn't that assumption tend to obscure any non-cyclical behavior of the data?
Very well, then, can you come up with an identity system, that ensures that there are unique ID's, and nobody votes twice or gets to steal someone else's ID, yet the government can't tell who the voters was?
That system is already being used, and is almost right (almost because of physical limitations).
You go to a place with voting booths. The workers there identify that you are a real, unique voter & give you an anonymous, unique "I-can-vote!" token with no way to connect that token back to your original voting id. You submit your vote choices using that token, then trash the token so that no one else can use it.
Of course, as I mentioned above, the problems with this system are mainly with the physical implementation: 1) security for all of the steps (making sure that no one figures out how to connect the tokens back to the id), and 2) how do the workers verify that you are a real life unique voter?
#2 gets to be a lot more difficult over the 'net, when you can't be sure of anything about the person on the other side of the keyboard.
As ABG said, the courts determine who can tap lines, and it should be the same for the internet.
The "courts" tend to be rubber-stampers - even if they read the request carefully, the folks asking them for permission tend to present biased information, "shop" for judges who will grant permission for just about anything (or in corrupt cases false information or don't bother asking for permission).
The only way you can be sure that someone in power won't abuse a "perfect" identification system is if you make sure one doesn't exist.
Well, the people in charge do anyway. You can just ignore the whining from the hoi polloi (the poor people, the women, etc) when you ask them how they like their own culture.
Not that gives anyone the right to go "liberate" them by force, but saying that such cultures are universally satisfactory to their constituents is not a valid argument.
If I were a telemarketer, I'd love do not call lists.
That's because you're not an _aggressive_ telemarketer. An aggressive telemarketer "knows" that a lot of people have put their name on the Do-Not-Call list because they're trying to protect themselves because they don't know how to say "No" when they're confronted with a pushy salesperson on the phone.
Do you think Joe Six Pack cares whether his toast is toasted in a light, medium, or high manner?
You're not even close to the options available - Linux-enabled toasters allow you to toast to 32-bit resolution of doneness, and with the right loadable kernel module, also allow you to toast grayscale images from all supported image formats (BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, PostScript, etc) directly on your toast. (They're waiting for the toaster manufacturers to support inkjet heads with edible color ink before allowing color image files).
Planned further enhancements include autoadjustment for type of toast being used (requiring an internal heat-resistant CCD camera to examine the pattern of the toast surface), but right now you have to specify one of the 64 predefined keywords indicating toast pattern in the toaster's/etc/toasttype.conf file.
Oh wait, you were talking about Joe Sixpack. Well, just show him the feature which autoselects a random image from his extensive porn collection - I'm sure he'll see the benefits of open-source then.
P.S. I'm not kidding about the toaster display device, although I doubt it's running Linux:-)
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Not that it matters. If she was undercover at one time, and some of her contacts are still undercover, then any foreign intelligence agency is going to have a clue about their identities now.
This whole thread was about whether the current system of intellectual property is necessary for SOCIETY, not whether an individual software developer can make good under the existing system. When I pointed out that it was perfectly possible for software development to occur _without_ any support from intellectual property laws, you very sarcastically commented that my thought scenario was completely hypothetical, completely ignoring the examples that I was discussing about how people make a living without depending on intellectual property.
If you don't want pissy, then don't piss first.
Frankly, I think an individual software developer is pretty much screwed under the current system - if they're not working for a big company, then they have to pretty much hope that nobody sues them since there's almost nothing interesting that any individual developer can do which doesn't violate somebody's intellectual property somehow.
Sounds like a selfish reason to me. Why should you have control over what other people want to do? How is that going to benefit society? It certainly doesn't benefit the people you are trying to control.
How about all the work that other people did that YOU took advantage of to create your "unique" thing? What if THEY didn't want you to be able to use their ideas to do YOUR creative work? How would you feel about intellectual property then?
And what if somebody completely unrelated & who had no idea you existed ends up creating something very similar (which occurs quite often due to the widespread distribution of interesting research) - should you have the right to crush THEIR creative efforts because you had money & filed some papers with the government first?
It's funny - I have _never_ seen any studies indicating that intellectual property laws have had a net benefit for society (although there's a lot of hot air by people with vested interests), but I sure have seen a lot of anecdotes about how intellectual property laws were hurting innovation.
I'm proposing a _replacement_ for the existing patent system. Auction-participants would be bidding on the chance to MAKE something a patent, not on things which are already patents. Of course, once somebody has won the rights for a patent, then they could do the typical things with it like any patent holder, including licensing it to other companies or selling it completely (if they think they can get a better deal than the amount they paid to win the auction).
Or a consortium of companies could get together to outbid Merck & own the resultant patent collectively.
Frankly, though, your counterexample really applies only a fairly well-off patent holder. There aren't many "small" patent holders who could hit 5 big companies for $20mil each (much less a single company for $50mil), at least not without major legal muscle to fight the teams of lawyers that those companies can muster to ignore or invalidate any of your attempts to enforce your little patent.
With my scheme, 1) the total # of patents is kept to a manageable level so that frivolous patents don't unnecessarily retard innovation in the society, 2) you don't have to depend on the availability of expert patent examiners to attach an accurate valuation to each patent, 3) people with bright ideas but no resources don't have to compete with the legal resources of huge companies plus they get a rapid potentially-substantial payoff in direct proportion to the perceived value of their idea, 4) the good ideas are immediately available to agents who do and can have the resources to take full advantage of them.
Your thought scenario is interesting, but I do not think it completely invalidates the advantages of my scheme. Certainly I believe that my scheme would be much better for society than the current patent system.
Yeah, to make the auction work you have to make sure that the bidders actually end up paying the money they say they would.
My proposal is a patent auction (I came up with this idea myself...honest - although I can't claim nobody else came up with it either).
Let there be a fixed number of allowed patents - something reasonably small (1000? 10000?), so that the patent database never grows very large (and is easily searchable, and doesn't infringe so much on normal innovation).
Anyone who wants can submit a patent application. As each patent slot is freed up due to expiration (or cancellation after successful litigation due to prior art or obviousness), entities (whether people or companies) would submit bids on the various patent applications they want to own as patents.
The top bidder will end up owning the patent, and the money paid will go to the submitter of the patent.
Any patent applications which don't end up becoming patents are treated as "public domain" from that point on (as well as being useful as prior art for future applications).
A few reasons I like this idea:
1) The relatively small number of patents makes it a lot easier to see if you're infringing anything. Also having a small # of valuable patents makes it harder for people to get patents on really stupid trivial things that a lot of people use in their normal lives.
2) the bidders will figure out how much each patent is worth
For a good valuation, they have to figure out stuff like whether the patent is likely to be invalidated easily due to prior art or obviousness, how long the technology will be useful, how hard will it be to implement the technology, what the potential payoff is, etc.
In any case, you don't have to rely on the dubious expertise of patent examiners, and you can depend on the power of greed so that the bidders will make a best effort to determine what they're willing to pay for a particular patent.
3) The submitter of the patent will get a potentially big payoff
*BIG* incentive for submitting patent applications, even for the "little guys" who might be smart but not have the resources to take advantage of their idea.
From society's viewpoint, this is the best case scenario - the "innovator" gets richly rewarded for contributing, and the entity that buys the patent rights should have the resources to take advantage of the innovation.
Yeah, there was really no point in putting _that_ clause in the Constitution, was there? Could be kind of hard to take out though.
Ah yes, I long for those days of legal indentured servitude as well. Just as long as I'm the one with the money.
Gee, I can tell you're really up for the challenge.
What's so hypothetical about a business model which doesn't depend on intellectual property laws? Try every single business which provides a service or sells an actual physical product. I'll leave it up to your so-obviously-superior intellectual abilities to think of a few.
I assume you're referring to the current software industry. Their "business model" is subsidized by special laws ("intellectual property" laws). A "successful", natural business model doesn't require special laws to prop up that business model - it becomes successful by providing desired goods & services at a value that customers are willing to pay for.
Getting a law passed that forces everyone to give me 1% of their income would be a great way for me to generate revenue too, but I really doubt that I could convince everyone that it would be in their best interests to do so.
Try to evaluate whether a business model would succeed in the absence of "intellectual property" laws. If it looks like it can, then _that's_ a good business model.
Then selling large, expensive-to-develop software packages as a retail product isn't a successful business model, is it? Why am I being required to subsidize a failed business model? And even worse, instead of just being taxed & the money being used to subsidize the failed business model, I am subsidizing that failed business model by being forced to give up my natural rights to do whatever I want with my own private property (like make copies of it for my friends).
The type of software that "regular people" would use does not cost $250k to create - especially if software developers can reuse code wherever they can get it without worrying about getting their asses sued off by litigous parasites. Using freeware software, I could build a decent text editor in a couple of days - hardly $250k in cost even with my best consultant fees :-) - and at that point it would be just a matter of time & incremental development to build a word processor that could do everything I wanted. If you've got 100,000 developers spread across the globe doing that incremental development, in parallel & borrowing ideas from each other, you _will_ end up with something very usable (probably with a lot of weird sidebranches - look at emacs for goodness sake :-).
In the absence of IP laws, there would still be cheap software - although it would've been developed in a more evolutionary way, with each advance being used to support the next, and certainly wouldn't have supported the growth of a certain Software Behemoth.
It sounds like it's difficult for you to conceive of the development of a market for software in any form other than what already exists. But that's one of the good things about a free market - over time, there WILL be cost-effective solutions to whatever problems need solving, even if the individuals involved can't comprehend the full path to get from "here" to "there" (or even what the eventual "there" might look like).
As for the type of software which _does_ and would cost $250k to create - the type of large software packages used by companies are _still_ custom (or at least heavily customized), except that it runs behind the scenes where you don't usually see it. Many companies consider their in-house software to be a competitive advantage, and usually think it's worth it to pay for the services of software developers to maintain it & keep it up-to-date.
And those things don't usually start as expensive packages - they usually start as small, simple solutions to some problem & get incrementally modified as business needs drive them. That's a _natural_ business model - getting paid for actual services rendered, instead of having laws which force people to pay you something they wouldn't ordinarily do.
As I said above, wherever there is a demand, there will be solutions - it just wouldn't take the highly-distorted form of the current market that IP laws cause today. As far as the highly-advanced games - I suspect that they would've ended up being developed more on game-console type of hardware instead of on generic PCs. So they'd still be available, although tied more to the hardware.
Why should software developers create one piece of software, then get paid over and over every time that piece of software is copied?
_Most_ craftspeople assume that they will get paid if they provide a desired product or service. If they want to _continue_ to get paid by people, they will have to keep creating new products and/or keep providing desired services.
Why should software developers get special privileges over every other craftsperson on the planet?
OTOH, ecosystems (& the bodies of living creatures) usually have mechanisms for dealing with the kind of low-level pollution that oil/coal-burning plants can generate (same way they deal with smoke f/forest fires) - although it is certainly possible to overwhelm those mechanisms if you allow too high a concentration of such plants to operate simultaneously. (Granted, dealing with that pollution on a long-term basis will probably cause a constant additional stress to the various ecosystems & organisms, which they might not be able to handle in addition to habitat loss, severe weather, etc.)
But there's not too many ecosystems/organisms that could handle a serious nuclear event (either from the primary material or from the toxic byproducts). Witness the damage caused to people/landscape by Chernobyl, even though the actual amount of energy released by that accident was probably much smaller than typical forest fire.
All that shows is that you don't understand the basics of science & statistics enough to rebut the bogus arguments being put forth by the creationists to confuse the issues, and have settled for the emotionally-comforting fallback position that "I don't understand how it could be possible, so God must've done it."
The fact that our educational system didn't teach you enough critical thinking techniques to recognize such propaganda is just another data point in the favor of point of the article.
There are reasonable answers for all of those issues, but your last phrase indicates that you don't really want to believe any of them.
Did Penrose also calculate the probability of our ordered universe coming to existence if you assume an infinite number of Big Bangs spread over an infinite amount of time? I'm not much of a mathematician, but I'm pretty sure that limit approaches 100%, no matter how small the probability of any given Big Bang producing our particular ordered universe.
Holy cr*p, try to organize your thoughts & insert some blank lines or something...I've never seen a correctly-spelled response be so hard to read.
There's some evidence that these "slowly-degrading" mature trees are important to a typical forest's ecosystem, however.
I don't think there's _any_ way to log a forest without disturbing the ecosystem. The question is whether or not your logging techniques & the quantity of logging disturb the system beyond the point where it can maintain its usual ecological balance.
If the data is so chaotic & noisy, how do you know that the Fourier series would be the best way to model it?
By choosing a Fourier series, aren't you making the assumption that the data is primarily cyclical, and wouldn't that assumption tend to obscure any non-cyclical behavior of the data?
If he just wanted that, scientific "experts" would have done just fine looking at the raw global warming data that the other guys used.
The data that _this_ guy wanted is only suitable for character assassination & harrasment.
That system is already being used, and is almost right (almost because of physical limitations).
You go to a place with voting booths. The workers there identify that you are a real, unique voter & give you an anonymous, unique "I-can-vote!" token with no way to connect that token back to your original voting id. You submit your vote choices using that token, then trash the token so that no one else can use it.
Of course, as I mentioned above, the problems with this system are mainly with the physical implementation: 1) security for all of the steps (making sure that no one figures out how to connect the tokens back to the id), and 2) how do the workers verify that you are a real life unique voter?
#2 gets to be a lot more difficult over the 'net, when you can't be sure of anything about the person on the other side of the keyboard.
The "courts" tend to be rubber-stampers - even if they read the request carefully, the folks asking them for permission tend to present biased information, "shop" for judges who will grant permission for just about anything (or in corrupt cases false information or don't bother asking for permission).
The only way you can be sure that someone in power won't abuse a "perfect" identification system is if you make sure one doesn't exist.
Well, the people in charge do anyway. You can just ignore the whining from the hoi polloi (the poor people, the women, etc) when you ask them how they like their own culture.
Not that gives anyone the right to go "liberate" them by force, but saying that such cultures are universally satisfactory to their constituents is not a valid argument.
That's because you're not an _aggressive_ telemarketer. An aggressive telemarketer "knows" that a lot of people have put their name on the Do-Not-Call list because they're trying to protect themselves because they don't know how to say "No" when they're confronted with a pushy salesperson on the phone.
We should just redefine local time "0000" the moment when dawn breaks at any given location.
You were so lucky. I had to input my binary by sticking my fingers into a wall socket.
You're not even close to the options available - Linux-enabled toasters allow you to toast to 32-bit resolution of doneness, and with the right loadable kernel module, also allow you to toast grayscale images from all supported image formats (BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, PostScript, etc) directly on your toast. (They're waiting for the toaster manufacturers to support inkjet heads with edible color ink before allowing color image files).
Planned further enhancements include autoadjustment for type of toast being used (requiring an internal heat-resistant CCD camera to examine the pattern of the toast surface), but right now you have to specify one of the 64 predefined keywords indicating toast pattern in the toaster's /etc/toasttype.conf file.
Oh wait, you were talking about Joe Sixpack. Well, just show him the feature which autoselects a random image from his extensive porn collection - I'm sure he'll see the benefits of open-source then.
P.S. I'm not kidding about the toaster display device, although I doubt it's running Linux :-)