China has a very real reason to crack down on piracy and trademark infringement, as their economy grows so too will the IP portion of the economy.
China has very _little_ reason to pay IP any more attention than lip service. By ignoring the bogus economic arguments given by intellectual property proponents, China can grow their economy in a robust manner by developing real goods & services instead of wasting their resources by supporting the parasitic overhead caused by "intellectual property" laws.
IP laws are just a way for developed countries to try and reduce competition from the economies of developing countries. If the developing countries are smart, they'll continue to pay lip service about IP (to avoid being punished by the developed countries), but will still basically keep ignoring it so that they can grow their economy in a robust manner.
This is basically the method that the U.S. used to become an economic superpower (ripping off industrial devices & processes from Europe & ignoring their complaints about IP violations).
If everyone dropped proprietary software and went to Open Source, what would all these developers do to pay the bills and put food on the table?
They could behave like every other craftsperson on the planet & work for a living, as in: providing services for getting paid. If you want to keep getting paid, you keep working. It's not that complicated a concept.
if you sell beer to a person that appears to be intoxicated
I think the reasoning behind that, is that if a person is truly intoxicated, then their judgement is potentially impaired to the point where you can't expect them to make good decisions (like insanity/mental retardation/being a child/etc). If that is true, and YOUR (hopefully rational) judgement tells you how to stop them from committing a crime that they normally wouldn't do if they weren't intoxicated, then why shouldn't you get some blame for not trying to stop them?
I certainly can't deny that a lot of people use intoxication as a means to avoid personal responsibility, but not stopping an intoxicated person from doing something that could end up hurting other people is also a form of avoiding personal responsibility.
it's either firing or not. 1 or 0 just like a computer.
That's a _really_ simplistic view of a neuron. Try a slightly more complicated model: a neuron fires when its incoming stimulation (the signals being delivered to its "positive" neurotransmitter receptors) (minus incoming inhibition - the signals being delivered to its "inhibiting" neurotransmitter receptors) reaches a programmable threshhold. The "priority" of these signals can vary depending on where contact is being made with the neuron's dendrite tree. Its rate of fire, and the frequency of its pulses, and the "shape" of the pulse trains, is also programmable (depending on past electrical & environmental history) & will affect how it stimulates its target neurons.
Furthermore, whether or not a particular neuron fires can ALSO be dictated by the _relative_ pulses being received from all of the sources stimulating it (if the pulses are in phase, it might trigger an event, or vice versa), and signals of the right relative phases can also switch on & off genes inside the neuron (which will cause it to change its programming, grow new receptors, change its threshold, etc).
The response of single neuron is MUCH more complicated than just an on-or-off proposition. Of course, this could all eventually be simulated or recreated using basic analog circuits - but the really hard part is probably going to be making a computer-component that can grow like neurons do to form the same kind of distant connections that our brain does. Fixed-in-silicon circuits aren't going to cut it - we might have to go nanotech to achieve something like that.
S market is getting so freaked out about a search engine. Google is neither making an OS to compete with MSFT, nor are they trying to compete with any other software MSFT produces. (Games, Office Products, etc...)
I think you're seriously underestimating Google's potential influence. They are well on their way to become THE search interface for all electronic-based information. If Google has its way, when anyone wants to find _anything_ on a computer, they will use a Google interface - whether it be web pages, text files, images, video, whatever. They will be the gatekeepers to all major sources of information in the net.
Needless to say, Microsoft does not consider this to be a desirable business situation - they did not get to where they are today by letting anyone else control access to their products/content/data. I'm sure they regard it as a survival issue to make sure that Google does not achieve the "search engine" market domination that Microsoft has in the operating system area.
They might decide that there is a small group of people at the top who are responsible.
Unfortunately, if the L.A. Riots are any precedent, they will more likely go around killing each other & anyone they can reach rather than go after the people who put them into their situation in the first place.
The type of adults who throw temper tantrums don't usually think too much about consequences before they throw a punch. If one of those guys loses their temper & they've got a gun in their hand, they WILL use it - and just because they get shot afterward won't make the original victim any happier.
There are a LOT of people out there who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near anything that can hurt anyone (and the # of those people seem to be growing every day).
And if most citizens carried weapons on them at all times
Then there'd be regular shootings, and regular funerals, going on all the time. Any time somebody threw a temper tantrum, there'd be another death - and maybe multiple deaths by the time all the OTHER armed citizens got done. _You_ might want to live in a society like that, but I sure don't.
The more I hear from 2nd Amendment supporters, the more I'm convinced that the last people in the world who should be allowed to have guns are the people who want them the most. I am definitely no fan of the government (magnified by the actions of the current administration), but the irrationality of most 2nd Amendment proponents scare me 2x more than the potential for any terrorism attack.
However, our Founders most certainly did intend for the United States to grant copyright and patent protections, from Day One.
Considering the modern-day abuse of this clause by both government & corporations, I suspect that if the Founders could have seen how this experiment in "intellectual protection" turned out, they'd have probably dropped the clause.
I'm not the person you were replying to, but I don't think being a criminal is a good enough reason to stop someone from voting.
My reasoning is pretty simple: allowing criminals to vote provides a valuable form of negative feedback against stupid legislators. If buttheaded legislators go around making most of the population into criminals, they will eventually be thrown out of office & their mistakes fixed.
Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that criminals should not be allowed to vote, which makes a pretty convenient way for legislators to disenfranchise the segments of society who might not agree with what they're doing.
That's odd, I associate the right-wing religious nuts with the people who want laws passed to control everyone else's behavior. Maybe you were thinking of libertarian nuts?
Yeah, that would work really well assuming that one doesn't mind dying a few years later when the body can barely function due to the aprophy muscles undergo in extremely low gravity.
You _did_ read the bit about how it was much easier to get 1G gravity on satellite by spinning it than it is to get 1G on a planet, right?
Then think up a new term than "intellectual property," but the concept is solid.
No it's not. It's just a way of forcing people to pay more for a service/product than they are willing to pay in a free market.
Anything that requires substantial investment to develop and has value to people should have a system whereby that investment can be recouped.
A lot of the crap being passed as "intellectual property" nowadays didn't require much of an investment - however, even if something DOES require a substantial investment to develop, the value of that "thing" is NOT set by the seller - it is set by what people are willing to pay to get it in a free market. If you can't get people to pay a certain amount to get something in a free market, then it isn't worth that amount.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that the countries that allow invention to be rewarded in this manner are the ones that tend to do better.
Really? You got some studies to back this up? All of the historical studies that I've read indicate that the U.S. became as economically successful as it is today by riding roughshod over European "intellectual property" concerns. China is getting rich & still growing during tough times by pretty much ignoring "intellectual property" laws (except for some lip service).
It seems more like developed countries try to encumber competitor countries by getting to them to go along with "intellectual property" laws (either by bribing or threatening them). Developing countries which ignore those intellectual property laws often end up with economies which go like gangbusters (except for economy-destroying scenarios like massive corruption).
So give me a few examples of countries that have benefited by passing laws which restrict the ability of their citizens to innovate (which is exactly what "intellectual property" laws do).
...if you place the value of the individual at 0 and the value of the "collective" at infinity.
If you are a public leader, and you are doing your job correctly, then BY DEFINITION you _must_ choose policies which are beneficial to the overall society. If you are doing your job correctly, then you will not prioritize the needs of any individual over the needs of the society as a whole.
That being said, it's fairly obvious that a society which does not allow each individual a decent amount of control over their own lives is not a healthy society, and no public leader doing their job right would try to crush all individual rights. As a public leader, however, they can not legitimately follow policies which give preference to any particular individual.
I have my own idea for a "fair" tax: a periodic tax as a percentage of total asset value, calibrated so that most people are paying about what they pay now, with a large exemption for real people (not fictional legal entities).
1) It's pretty simple in concept: if you declare you own something, then it is one of your assets & you have take it into account when determining your total value,
2) doesn't provide undue hardship on poor people (since they will not start paying taxes until their assets rise above the exemption threshhold),
3) prevents people from using fictional legal entities to avoid personal taxation (since no matter what legal entity owns the asset, the asset value gets taxed at the same percentage), and
4) encourages reinvestment of assets into the economy (since stagnant money will keep gradually shrinking).
Of course, I'll be booking a skiing vacation in Hell before the powers-that-be would allow any kind of taxation on their overall assets, but it's kind of a nice daydream.
Too bad all that speed-without-armor is useless against a roadside bomb, mines, or when the vehicles are being used while protecting slower vehicles.
Just another example of poor planning by the U.S. leadership - and ending up with the grunts digging "through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass" to try and give themselves a slightly higher probability of making it home in one piece.
Who the hell let them have access to the machines? Tha machines should have been secured from tampering, among other things. Idiot commissioners seem to be a bigger threat than anything else.
The fact that "idiot commissioners" can make our voting system prone to corruption is just an indication that the system needs fixing.
If you are getting regular reports of voting irregularities due to "idiot commissioners", then the best solution is NOT to try and get "smarter commissioners" - the proper answer is to change the system so it doesn't really matter whether the comissioners are idiots or not.
A _lot_ of smart people have come up with a lot of ways to make an election system more robust against chance & corruption. There ARE well-thought-out technical solutions to many of these problems. Due to laziness, short-sightedness, or straight-out corruption, not very many of those ideas get implemented.
Secondly, you should have both machine readable and HUMAN readable votes on the same paper.
More specifically, you want the marks to be both machine AND human-readable. If the marks can be different, then you could record different values for the machine than for the humans.
I read that something like 50% or less of people registered to vote actually register, and that many of those that ARE registered don't vote.
Heh - it might be amusing if voting was made one of the requirements of citizenship - if you miss n consecutive changes to vote, you lose your citizenship (and any rights thereof). Such a situation might also be good for patriotism (which might be not good in itself:).
County election supervisors test and verify the machines to make sure they are working properly ahead of time.
A lot of election supervisors didn't, or allowed the company's techs to test & give the A-OK, or just followed the testing procedure that the company told them to do (i.e., didn't do full-spectrum blackbox testing). None of which is conducive to confidence in the systems.
Also, I highly doubt any commissioner is going to let the manufacturers come out with a "patch" 2 months before an election.
There were documented cases of company techies patching the machines ON THE DAY of elections, and in some cases not telling the election officials (admitting only after they were caught). Even if they were doing only "normal" bug fixes, it _still_ doesn't give much confidence in the system. You can find lots of news articles about these cases, although the story didn't seem to gain much traction in the press (i.e., not enough people got pissed off about it).
You seem to be either really naive or disingenuous about the possibility of voter fraud. When the results of a election can cost the public hundreds billions of dollars of taxpayer money & a steady erosion of civil liberties, don't you think it's worth making our voting process as robust as possible?
200 years of precedent don't just get there by accident, something in the system evidently allowed copyright, and allowed it to stay.
That's just because the founding fathers thought it might be an interesting experiment to encourage innovation, and the bad effects of the system didn't start showing up until enough information-distribution framework had been built to make it clear that "intellectual property" will actually end up suppressing innovation.
Has _anyone_ been able to come up with some solid studies showing that intellectual property actually encourages innovation? And I don't mean all of the anecdotes that get thrown around every time the subject is argued...
So, what you propose is if nobody bids on a patent, it becomes public domain. And free for these "effective exploiters" to make money off of without compensating anyone.
So? If the auction participants figure that a particular patent idea is not worth enough to grab exclusive rights to it, then why should such a patent be granted?
That's part of the reason I constructed my system the way I did, so that that a limited number of the the most valuable ideas (as determined by the auction mechanism) will be allowed to be patented, and stuff which is judged not be quite so valuable doesn't get any protection.
This provides a great deal of incentive for people to submit good ideas for patent protection, while preventing the patent system from causing major damage to a primarily free market.
All that happens is everything ends up being given over free to the most capable distributors and nobody else gets a dime.
You've got a really weird way of looking at a free market system. How do you think the situation will be any better if you allow large companies to lock up many different combinations of ways of implementing things?
By severely restricting possible patents, you allow the great majority of people to compete for business, using whether resources they can marshall without worrying about whether they're violating someone's "intellectual property".
Slashdot Mirror
China has very _little_ reason to pay IP any more attention than lip service. By ignoring the bogus economic arguments given by intellectual property proponents, China can grow their economy in a robust manner by developing real goods & services instead of wasting their resources by supporting the parasitic overhead caused by "intellectual property" laws.
IP laws are just a way for developed countries to try and reduce competition from the economies of developing countries. If the developing countries are smart, they'll continue to pay lip service about IP (to avoid being punished by the developed countries), but will still basically keep ignoring it so that they can grow their economy in a robust manner.
This is basically the method that the U.S. used to become an economic superpower (ripping off industrial devices & processes from Europe & ignoring their complaints about IP violations).
They could behave like every other craftsperson on the planet & work for a living, as in: providing services for getting paid. If you want to keep getting paid, you keep working. It's not that complicated a concept.
I think the reasoning behind that, is that if a person is truly intoxicated, then their judgement is potentially impaired to the point where you can't expect them to make good decisions (like insanity/mental retardation/being a child/etc). If that is true, and YOUR (hopefully rational) judgement tells you how to stop them from committing a crime that they normally wouldn't do if they weren't intoxicated, then why shouldn't you get some blame for not trying to stop them?
I certainly can't deny that a lot of people use intoxication as a means to avoid personal responsibility, but not stopping an intoxicated person from doing something that could end up hurting other people is also a form of avoiding personal responsibility.
That's a _really_ simplistic view of a neuron. Try a slightly more complicated model: a neuron fires when its incoming stimulation (the signals being delivered to its "positive" neurotransmitter receptors) (minus incoming inhibition - the signals being delivered to its "inhibiting" neurotransmitter receptors) reaches a programmable threshhold. The "priority" of these signals can vary depending on where contact is being made with the neuron's dendrite tree. Its rate of fire, and the frequency of its pulses, and the "shape" of the pulse trains, is also programmable (depending on past electrical & environmental history) & will affect how it stimulates its target neurons.
Furthermore, whether or not a particular neuron fires can ALSO be dictated by the _relative_ pulses being received from all of the sources stimulating it (if the pulses are in phase, it might trigger an event, or vice versa), and signals of the right relative phases can also switch on & off genes inside the neuron (which will cause it to change its programming, grow new receptors, change its threshold, etc).
The response of single neuron is MUCH more complicated than just an on-or-off proposition. Of course, this could all eventually be simulated or recreated using basic analog circuits - but the really hard part is probably going to be making a computer-component that can grow like neurons do to form the same kind of distant connections that our brain does. Fixed-in-silicon circuits aren't going to cut it - we might have to go nanotech to achieve something like that.
I think you're seriously underestimating Google's potential influence. They are well on their way to become THE search interface for all electronic-based information. If Google has its way, when anyone wants to find _anything_ on a computer, they will use a Google interface - whether it be web pages, text files, images, video, whatever. They will be the gatekeepers to all major sources of information in the net.
Needless to say, Microsoft does not consider this to be a desirable business situation - they did not get to where they are today by letting anyone else control access to their products/content/data. I'm sure they regard it as a survival issue to make sure that Google does not achieve the "search engine" market domination that Microsoft has in the operating system area.
Unfortunately, if the L.A. Riots are any precedent, they will more likely go around killing each other & anyone they can reach rather than go after the people who put them into their situation in the first place.
It's Arab Terrorists now. Get with the times.
And yes, we always have been at war with Eurasia.
The usual "request": do what we tell you, or we will have to reevaluate your broadcast license.
The type of adults who throw temper tantrums don't usually think too much about consequences before they throw a punch. If one of those guys loses their temper & they've got a gun in their hand, they WILL use it - and just because they get shot afterward won't make the original victim any happier.
There are a LOT of people out there who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near anything that can hurt anyone (and the # of those people seem to be growing every day).
Then there'd be regular shootings, and regular funerals, going on all the time. Any time somebody threw a temper tantrum, there'd be another death - and maybe multiple deaths by the time all the OTHER armed citizens got done. _You_ might want to live in a society like that, but I sure don't.
The more I hear from 2nd Amendment supporters, the more I'm convinced that the last people in the world who should be allowed to have guns are the people who want them the most. I am definitely no fan of the government (magnified by the actions of the current administration), but the irrationality of most 2nd Amendment proponents scare me 2x more than the potential for any terrorism attack.
Considering the modern-day abuse of this clause by both government & corporations, I suspect that if the Founders could have seen how this experiment in "intellectual protection" turned out, they'd have probably dropped the clause.
I'm not the person you were replying to, but I don't think being a criminal is a good enough reason to stop someone from voting.
My reasoning is pretty simple: allowing criminals to vote provides a valuable form of negative feedback against stupid legislators. If buttheaded legislators go around making most of the population into criminals, they will eventually be thrown out of office & their mistakes fixed.
Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that criminals should not be allowed to vote, which makes a pretty convenient way for legislators to disenfranchise the segments of society who might not agree with what they're doing.
That's odd, I associate the right-wing religious nuts with the people who want laws passed to control everyone else's behavior. Maybe you were thinking of libertarian nuts?
You _did_ read the bit about how it was much easier to get 1G gravity on satellite by spinning it than it is to get 1G on a planet, right?
Guess you didn't...
No it's not. It's just a way of forcing people to pay more for a service/product than they are willing to pay in a free market.
A lot of the crap being passed as "intellectual property" nowadays didn't require much of an investment - however, even if something DOES require a substantial investment to develop, the value of that "thing" is NOT set by the seller - it is set by what people are willing to pay to get it in a free market. If you can't get people to pay a certain amount to get something in a free market, then it isn't worth that amount.
Really? You got some studies to back this up? All of the historical studies that I've read indicate that the U.S. became as economically successful as it is today by riding roughshod over European "intellectual property" concerns. China is getting rich & still growing during tough times by pretty much ignoring "intellectual property" laws (except for some lip service).
It seems more like developed countries try to encumber competitor countries by getting to them to go along with "intellectual property" laws (either by bribing or threatening them). Developing countries which ignore those intellectual property laws often end up with economies which go like gangbusters (except for economy-destroying scenarios like massive corruption).
So give me a few examples of countries that have benefited by passing laws which restrict the ability of their citizens to innovate (which is exactly what "intellectual property" laws do).
If you are a public leader, and you are doing your job correctly, then BY DEFINITION you _must_ choose policies which are beneficial to the overall society. If you are doing your job correctly, then you will not prioritize the needs of any individual over the needs of the society as a whole.
That being said, it's fairly obvious that a society which does not allow each individual a decent amount of control over their own lives is not a healthy society, and no public leader doing their job right would try to crush all individual rights. As a public leader, however, they can not legitimately follow policies which give preference to any particular individual.
I have my own idea for a "fair" tax: a periodic tax as a percentage of total asset value, calibrated so that most people are paying about what they pay now, with a large exemption for real people (not fictional legal entities).
1) It's pretty simple in concept: if you declare you own something, then it is one of your assets & you have take it into account when determining your total value,
2) doesn't provide undue hardship on poor people (since they will not start paying taxes until their assets rise above the exemption threshhold),
3) prevents people from using fictional legal entities to avoid personal taxation (since no matter what legal entity owns the asset, the asset value gets taxed at the same percentage), and
4) encourages reinvestment of assets into the economy (since stagnant money will keep gradually shrinking).
Of course, I'll be booking a skiing vacation in Hell before the powers-that-be would allow any kind of taxation on their overall assets, but it's kind of a nice daydream.
How do you know? Isn't it against this law for the targets involved to tell anyone they've had to give up their records?
Too bad all that speed-without-armor is useless against a roadside bomb, mines, or when the vehicles are being used while protecting slower vehicles.
Just another example of poor planning by the U.S. leadership - and ending up with the grunts digging "through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass" to try and give themselves a slightly higher probability of making it home in one piece.
The fact that "idiot commissioners" can make our voting system prone to corruption is just an indication that the system needs fixing.
If you are getting regular reports of voting irregularities due to "idiot commissioners", then the best solution is NOT to try and get "smarter commissioners" - the proper answer is to change the system so it doesn't really matter whether the comissioners are idiots or not.
A _lot_ of smart people have come up with a lot of ways to make an election system more robust against chance & corruption. There ARE well-thought-out technical solutions to many of these problems. Due to laziness, short-sightedness, or straight-out corruption, not very many of those ideas get implemented.
More specifically, you want the marks to be both machine AND human-readable. If the marks can be different, then you could record different values for the machine than for the humans.
Heh - it might be amusing if voting was made one of the requirements of citizenship - if you miss n consecutive changes to vote, you lose your citizenship (and any rights thereof). Such a situation might also be good for patriotism (which might be not good in itself :).
A lot of election supervisors didn't, or allowed the company's techs to test & give the A-OK, or just followed the testing procedure that the company told them to do (i.e., didn't do full-spectrum blackbox testing). None of which is conducive to confidence in the systems.
There were documented cases of company techies patching the machines ON THE DAY of elections, and in some cases not telling the election officials (admitting only after they were caught). Even if they were doing only "normal" bug fixes, it _still_ doesn't give much confidence in the system. You can find lots of news articles about these cases, although the story didn't seem to gain much traction in the press (i.e., not enough people got pissed off about it).
You seem to be either really naive or disingenuous about the possibility of voter fraud. When the results of a election can cost the public hundreds billions of dollars of taxpayer money & a steady erosion of civil liberties, don't you think it's worth making our voting process as robust as possible?
That's just because the founding fathers thought it might be an interesting experiment to encourage innovation, and the bad effects of the system didn't start showing up until enough information-distribution framework had been built to make it clear that "intellectual property" will actually end up suppressing innovation.
Has _anyone_ been able to come up with some solid studies showing that intellectual property actually encourages innovation? And I don't mean all of the anecdotes that get thrown around every time the subject is argued...
So? If the auction participants figure that a particular patent idea is not worth enough to grab exclusive rights to it, then why should such a patent be granted?
That's part of the reason I constructed my system the way I did, so that that a limited number of the the most valuable ideas (as determined by the auction mechanism) will be allowed to be patented, and stuff which is judged not be quite so valuable doesn't get any protection.
This provides a great deal of incentive for people to submit good ideas for patent protection, while preventing the patent system from causing major damage to a primarily free market.
You've got a really weird way of looking at a free market system. How do you think the situation will be any better if you allow large companies to lock up many different combinations of ways of implementing things?
By severely restricting possible patents, you allow the great majority of people to compete for business, using whether resources they can marshall without worrying about whether they're violating someone's "intellectual property".