Re:Removing motivation to create innovative IP
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Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
Without IP however, those who are good at creating have to find something else to do to put food on the table.
Yes, it's called working. Creating a good or providing a service that somebody is willing to compensate you for. Not being paid _over and over_ everytime a particular idea is used, even though it only took you the effort of a single act of creation to initiate that idea. You want regular payments for being a creator? Then keep creating things that people will pay for.
You want socialism? Socialism is expecting someone to provide something to society for free.
No, socialism is individuals expecting society for provide for them for free (or at least subsidized). Capitalism is where people say how much they are willing to pay for real property or a provided service, and if that matches what a person is willing to sell such things for, then they make the deal.
As the popularity of P2P shows, people aren't willing to pay that much to build their collection of music/shows/whatever. Instead of whining to the government to force people to pay them, so-called "intellectual property owners" should have to figure out what people _are_ willing to pay for, and provide that instead.
In the case of musicians & other audience-focused performers, I would hazard a guess that live performances would probably become more popular again.
But really, it wouldn't do anything noticable to the user since it works during "idle" times only.
That's what I thought, until I tried to install the distributed.net client on my coworkers' workstations. I thought they wouldn't notice, since it was niced down to the "idlest" priority.
They definitely noticed; after the bruises healed (metaphorically & reputationally speaking), I scrubbed all of their workstations of "extra" processes quite thoroughly.
Our education system is in shambles, our young people are complete morons, and we as a culture pretty much revile the educated and glorify the average.
I'd kind of agree with this, except I'd call the young people "ignorant" rather than morons, which still results in a lot of the same societal symptoms.
Oh, and the scary bit is that a lot of the ignorant people have become our leaders, because of the second effect that you mentioned. *Sigh*
The form for submitting a patent application will become cryptic and archaic. An entire segment of attorneys will be bred to deal with the proper preparation of the papers.
And this is different from the current system how?
The fees to enter the auction will be prohibitively expensive
Why?
but the sale price of the patents themselves will be subject to a downward spiral of lowest bidding.
I haven't seen too many auctions where the prices go in a downward spiral. They might get stuck at the minimum (in which case the patented idea would become public domain), but I doubt they would spiral downward.
In the end, it will cost an unlimited amount of money to submit patents to auction and the patents will all be sold for a penny--or one penny above the set minimum bid.
Your final scenario is obviously very bad, but hardly inevitable, and I don't see why it invalidates the value of my conceptual idea of auctioning patents over the current system. I get the impression that you'd find the pathological outcome of _any_ alternative to the current patent system.
If the inventor patents the "invention", he has no guarentee that he will realize any profit from the invention, which he doesn't now either, but at least under the existing system he would have the right to control it's implimentation for 20 years. Hmmm. So, I guess I'm missing your systems impetus for the inventor to expend time, effort, and money to create new inventions.
As I mentioned in another reply to this thread, the inventor would submit their idea for a patent to the auction. People/companies would bid on that idea (perhaps including the inventor themselves). Whatever the winning bid was, would go to the inventor (although you'd have to come up with a different scenario if the inventor was bidding for their own idea). So there would be a HUGE incentive for inventive individuals to submit a steady stream of ideas into the auction, since they could become quite wealthy very rapidly without requiring much more effort than the labor it takes to describe their idea to the public.
Whoever won the ownership of the patent would get typical patent rights, including perhaps the ability to resubmit the patent back into the auction (to try and recoup some value from it if they couldn't find a buyer through other channels).
There's lots of potential for "idea churn" with a scheme like this, and there would be lots of people looking for good concepts to buy & exploit. All the submitted patents would be evaluated carefully by the market for prior art & obviousness issues (since if a patent was successfully challenged on these grounds, then it would become worthless and the money you spent on the auction would be wasted). Items whose auction value (either because of prior art, obviousness or imminent expiration) fell below a minimum threshhold would become public domain.
While it is an interesting idea, the one problem that I see with it is that MS can bid billions on a patent while I can not.
That's OK - the money that the winner of the auction pays will go to the person who submitted the patent. (There'll have to be an exception in the case where the submitter of the patent is bidding on their own patent, to avoid where the submitter is bidding a million-jillion dollars to themselves:-)
That way, the submitter of the patent will get paid what the market thinks their idea was worth, and society will (hopefully) get the benefit of using the idea from the patent (assuming that the new owner properly exploits the idea, of course).
Re:Removing motivation to create innovative IP
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
treating IP as property, and protecting peoples' rights to those properties, is what provides the motivation for many of people to be so creative and to pour themselves into their work.
Being "creative" is often an exercise in synthesizing many concepts that other people have "created". How many acts of creation have been compromised or even prevented because so-called "intellectual property" laws have prevented the free expression of ideas? Why should I bother working on a product I have a great idea for if I feel like I'd be crushed by some company with a huge patent portfolio?
However, if you remove the financial benefits of its creation, there will (IMHO) be a drastic drop in the creation of what we now consider to be IP.
I strongly disagree (also IMHO). There will always be idea-creation. People will want to express themselves. Entrepreneurs will want to have competitive advantages. "Intellectual property" is only good for giving arbitrary people the power to stop other people from generating ideas.
Again, I realize this motivation doesn't apply to everyone. But it does to me, and many of my heartless capitalistic cohorts.
That's just because you and your "heartless capitalistic cohorts" are greedy, and want the government to enforce some laws that allow you & them to force people to pay you money for a "good" which they would otherwise not think it was worth to pay you.
In a sensible market system, people should have to pay only for concrete goods or services rendered. Anything else is socialism.
Until we up the pay in the patent office and address the real problems these will continue.
Nah, have people bid on the patents in an auction, including the person who is submitting the patent. That way you let the market do the "due diligence" on how much each individual patent is worth, and you don't really need patent examiners any more (except that you will still want to evaluate obviousness & prior art challenges - maybe you can handle this with a panel of subject-related peers).
By requiring the inventor to participate in the bidding, you also prevent the inventor from sitting on a good idea & preventing the society from being able to use it. (If the inventor doesn't want to tell anyone, then he/she can treat it as a trade secret, but runs the risk that someone else will develop the idea independently - either way, society wins.)
Anything which doesn't meet a certain minimum bid value (the participants might think it's worthless because it will be killed by obviousness or prior art challenges, for instance) can be considered too worthless to be worth granting a patent, and would therefore become public domain.
And so the only option left is for schools to focus on objective yet useless facts--memorizing sequences of names, dates, places. Useless everywhere in the world outside game shows.
A lot of that is just due to lack of resources. When you've got too many kids per teacher, the teacher has to resort to strict, across-the-board discipline and an assembly-line mentality, resulting in very little of the individual attention that is required to make any particular student blossom. I can't remember _ever_ talking to a teacher who thought such a situation was a desirable outcome, but between ridiculously large class sizes & the mindboggling amount of paperwork that even average teachers are subjected to, they _have_ to do things that way just to survive.
Big surprise such an environment doesn't stimulate many students; only kids who thrive on mindless repetitive procedures will be happy with such an environment. (And then you've got idiot parents who seem to think that since they are raising a couple kids just fine by beating them when they get out of line, that teachers should have no problem dealing with 30 or more bored kids who know the school will get its butt sued off if a teacher scolds a kid too severely.)
Of course, hiring enough decent teachers costs money - and a lot of idiots seem to think that there is _no_ connection between paying taxes & a decent educational system. Either that, or they figure that it's a waste of _their_ money to paying to educate other peoples' kids. (Then they complain about how they have to pay so much in taxes to build prisons. No connection there, nosiree.)
(To be fair to those idiots, after being fed a continuous diet of stories about government waste, fraud, pork-barrel politics & boondoggles, I'm definitely feeling a little disconnect between the concepts of paying taxes & public services myself.)
As others say, it's not just schools that are to blame--it's a consumerist culture that throws us into peer groups that discourage learning. I think the effect of our peers is greater than the effect of our teachers on our education--let me ask you, when you were a kid whose opinion did you value more?
I'm not really a good example of that; I didn't respect the judgement of my "peers" very much ("Why the f*ck are you poking that rattlesnake with a stick?!" or "What the hell did you think would happen if you punched him?!"), and tended to end up in more interesting discussions with the adults. I've observed the effects you're talking about though.
I think that some of the effectiveness of peer pressure might be a little lessened if school was more interesting & stimulating - which isn't going to be possible if society continues to shortchange its public education system for reasons of shortsightedness or selfishness. (One might argue that the average members of society make stupid decisions like that because they weren't properly educated in the techniques of critical analysis & rational decision-making when they were being educated.)
At this point, a lot of people wish that the U.S. President had paid more attention to history - say, the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam (and other semi-official regional conflicts), plus maybe some world history about all of the other countries besides "Texas".
Also, if more people like you had paid attention to history, economics, civic duty, etc, the general population would have a much better appreciation about why it is so important to pick its leaders carefully.
I am personally wishing I had taken some more foreign language classes instead of computer-languages, given the increased percentage of my neighbors & family who don't speak English so well. It's much harder to pick up new languages if you haven't built up the necessary flexible mental circuits during elementary school.
Get them dealing with problems themselves, instead of running to mommy and daddy.
Unfortunately, you need to start earlier than the teens to make those lessons stick. It seems like once kids have reached their teens, barring any life-altering experiences, their basic attitudes about life & society have solidified and they will resist any attempts to "retrain" them.
I've read some interesting case studies dealing with sibling rivalries (disclaimer: IANAParent). The kids of those parents who basically ignored the "little problems" (Mom, he won't let me play with his toys/That's too bad, dear.) tended to end up with more tools in their social-skills repertoire to resolve such situations. The parents basically intervened only when medical or legal complications were imminent, and did so in as even-handed manner as possible.
So far almost every attack on the Swift Boat Veterans has been a personal, ad hominem attack on these veterans' character, not on their claims.
Really? Almost everything I've heard has been about how the Swift Boat Veteran's claims contradict the official records & the few eye witnesses who are still living.
I suppose you could consider it an attack on their character when people talk about how these veterans insist that _they_ are right, and the records & the eye-witnesses are wrong (or lying), even though many of these guys weren't directly involved in the incidents they are criticising. And when people point out that many of the same people made similar criticisms about McCain (with about as much credibility).
If these guys were talking about they had heard that the fish that some competitor caught wasn't really all that big (even though the fish had been weighed & recorded by the official fishing organization), then most of the audience would probably call them liars - especially if they were caught being paid lots of money by another fisherman after saying such things, and if they had also said such things about another competitor at the _last_ fishing competition. Since this is politics though, anybody supporting Kerry calls them liars, and anyone supporting Bush says anybody contradicting them is lying.
you mean to tell me that abc, cbs, nbc, cnn, nytimes, latimes, all are not run by liberals.
No, all of those organizations are _corporations_. They'll report whatever will make the most money, in either advertiser and/or subscriber dollars. They _won't_ report what might hurt their revenue flow - which often includes what their advertisers (often other large corporations) don't want them to report.
Real investigative journalism is often expensive (paying bodies to dig around in all those musty old records that powerful people are often deliberately trying to hide), so those so-called news organizations also try and cut costs by doing the least amount of work necessary to get enough info to put out to the public - which usually involves just repeating whatever info was handed to them by folks who want to make sure that the media repeats only what they're supposed to.
I personally feel that the standards of journalism have really fallen into the bottom of the barrel, where "news" is regarded more as entertainment for sale than a reasonable effort to inform the public about anything important (or truthful). Anyone who is really interested in the truth has to try and piece it together by reading between the lines, or gathering, sifting & cross-referencing information from dozens of different, biased viewpoints - the activity that _real_ journalists are supposed to be helping us do, but where they often have surrendered their integrity to the task of making a buck for their employer.
Bush is respected by almost all the current and former US military personnel I know, in distinct contrast to Bill Clinton.
It's always weird to hear military folks praising Bush in contrast to say, Kerry.
I dearly want to know _why_ they support & respect a group of people who pulled every string they could to stay out of harm's way (while fully supporting sending _everyone else_), and yet have no respect for someone who actually volunteered for two tours of fairly hazardous duty in Vietnam & managed came back alive (and reasonably healthy). Can someone please rationalize this for me?
This is largely because the right is much more pro-business and -capitalism than the left, who are typically seen to increasingly resent the wealth builders and creators with the more wealth they build and create.
You've got an inflated idea of who the "wealth builders" and "creators" are. Big clue: the guys who are building & creating _aren't_ the guys at the top. Those guys just cause money to be shifted around and provide a figurehead for the organization, but in terms of actually providing goods or services to consumers, they aren't that important (except that if they cause money to be shifted to the _wrong_ places, they can destroy a company).
Unfortunately, most people in those positions seem to have such an inflated ego, they come to believe that _they_ are doing all the real work in the company, and _they_ are the most important person in the company, and the company wouldn't be able to do anything productive without them, so _they_ should be compensated several thousand times more than anyone else, even though they're not doing any more work than anyone else. And when some political demagogue comes along and strokes their ego for them, they'll hand out the cash in wads, just to preserve their I'm-so-important reality.
NOTE: My complaints are only targeted toward large organizations, where the highly hierarchical command structure separates "management" from the workers, and necessitates a large bureaucracy in-between. Most of the _real_ productivity in our society gets performed by individuals & small businesses, where the organization is so small, that to be successful the people "in charge" _have_ to get their hands dirty & who therefore have a much more accurate idea of their own self-worth to the organization.
Bleach, unless used in huge quantities (worse than swimming pool water), then let sit for a few hours, then boiled for 10 minutes, will not be effective.
Really? I realize that the resultant liquid might not be good to drink, but won't it at least be sterile? I had the impression that bleach was pretty good at killing anything that got immersed in it, even after being diluted quite a bit.
Won't help - too many people that if you have a bad connection, you can sometimes make it work by talking louder. If the cell tower keeps dropping their connection, you'll just get a lot of people going "Hello? Hello?" at the top of their voices before they redial & start talking again.
Or rather, the entertainment industry wants DRM. The consumer electronics industry just wants to sell products and would probably prefer that they were able make whatever product they want without having to worry about adding the complexities of DRM.
Weird how the entertainment industry has such a disproportionate influence in Congress even though the consumer electronics industry is so much larger.
On the other hand, the big players in the consumer electronics industry are definitely gung-ho to patent everything in sight. So between the entertainment industry pushing expansion of copyright power, and the manufacturing industries pushing expansion of patenting powers, and every marketing entity in existence pushing the expansion of trademark power, is it any wonder that those humans (i.e., not fictional entities existing only due legal definitions) who like to think & discuss freely are feeling a little frustrated?
The military is less than, I think 3 million strong. And lets not forget that there's a significant portion of the military that isn't combat troops (Air Force and Navy).
If you had an absolutely ruthless leader & a completely loyal military with modern weaponry (perhaps an automated military?) who didn't give a damn about human life, that's all you'd need. Just keep killing people until whoever is left over gives in. There's no way non-military forces could resist.
The only reason the U.S. military is having problems in Iraq is because they're trying to preserve the lives of civilians. If they didn't give a damn about that, they could've easily turned Iraq into a wasteland by now (even more of a wasteland than it already is, I mean).
Short of nuking the country, the US military wouldn't have a chance.
Yes, nuking large groups of disobedient civilians would be an option for such a military force.
And that doesn't take into account that the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines are made up of normal people, someone's brother, sister, mom, dad, and, yes, even grandma or grandpa.
No, I took that into account - that's why I said that a nation's military must have closer ties to the population than to the leader. Every tin-pot dictator solidifies their power by gathering a band of "elite" thugs around them and basically bribes them with gifts & power so that their loyalty is to the leader rather than their nation. Even though the overall numbers of these thugs are small relative to the overall population, they can still effectively control the population through fear & intimidation tactics. Bear in mind that quite a few Arabs have firearms, but Hussein was still able to easily pacify a fairly large population by bribing a reasonably large group (the Baath party & his own tribe members) and by scaring the %()$*@! out of the rest.
The U.S. military currently has quite a few ties between population & members (witness widespread outpouring of support for the troups) so I don't think this is a real issue in the U.S., but if a sizeable chunk of the military & law-enforcement (and their families) should start developing an us-versus-them attitude about the general population (or maybe robotic armies under the control of a small # of people?), that's when democracy-in-major-danger alarm bells should start ringing.
When it's time for the third american revolution, you might be glad we still have our guns.
When it's time for the "3rd American Revolution", if the bulk of the military isn't on your side, _your_ little pop-guns aren't gonna do diddly-squat except annoy a few soldiers.
The real means of preventing military dictatorships are making sure that the military is more connected to the general populace than it is to its "leaders" so that when the "leaders" try to takeover, the military shoots _them_ instead of their friends & family.
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Yes, it's called working. Creating a good or providing a service that somebody is willing to compensate you for. Not being paid _over and over_ everytime a particular idea is used, even though it only took you the effort of a single act of creation to initiate that idea. You want regular payments for being a creator? Then keep creating things that people will pay for.
No, socialism is individuals expecting society for provide for them for free (or at least subsidized). Capitalism is where people say how much they are willing to pay for real property or a provided service, and if that matches what a person is willing to sell such things for, then they make the deal.
As the popularity of P2P shows, people aren't willing to pay that much to build their collection of music/shows/whatever. Instead of whining to the government to force people to pay them, so-called "intellectual property owners" should have to figure out what people _are_ willing to pay for, and provide that instead.
In the case of musicians & other audience-focused performers, I would hazard a guess that live performances would probably become more popular again.
That's what I thought, until I tried to install the distributed.net client on my coworkers' workstations. I thought they wouldn't notice, since it was niced down to the "idlest" priority.
They definitely noticed; after the bruises healed (metaphorically & reputationally speaking), I scrubbed all of their workstations of "extra" processes quite thoroughly.
I'd kind of agree with this, except I'd call the young people "ignorant" rather than morons, which still results in a lot of the same societal symptoms.
Oh, and the scary bit is that a lot of the ignorant people have become our leaders, because of the second effect that you mentioned. *Sigh*
And this is different from the current system how?
Why?
I haven't seen too many auctions where the prices go in a downward spiral. They might get stuck at the minimum (in which case the patented idea would become public domain), but I doubt they would spiral downward.
Your final scenario is obviously very bad, but hardly inevitable, and I don't see why it invalidates the value of my conceptual idea of auctioning patents over the current system. I get the impression that you'd find the pathological outcome of _any_ alternative to the current patent system.
As I mentioned in another reply to this thread, the inventor would submit their idea for a patent to the auction. People/companies would bid on that idea (perhaps including the inventor themselves). Whatever the winning bid was, would go to the inventor (although you'd have to come up with a different scenario if the inventor was bidding for their own idea). So there would be a HUGE incentive for inventive individuals to submit a steady stream of ideas into the auction, since they could become quite wealthy very rapidly without requiring much more effort than the labor it takes to describe their idea to the public.
Whoever won the ownership of the patent would get typical patent rights, including perhaps the ability to resubmit the patent back into the auction (to try and recoup some value from it if they couldn't find a buyer through other channels).
There's lots of potential for "idea churn" with a scheme like this, and there would be lots of people looking for good concepts to buy & exploit. All the submitted patents would be evaluated carefully by the market for prior art & obviousness issues (since if a patent was successfully challenged on these grounds, then it would become worthless and the money you spent on the auction would be wasted). Items whose auction value (either because of prior art, obviousness or imminent expiration) fell below a minimum threshhold would become public domain.
That's OK - the money that the winner of the auction pays will go to the person who submitted the patent. (There'll have to be an exception in the case where the submitter of the patent is bidding on their own patent, to avoid where the submitter is bidding a million-jillion dollars to themselves :-)
That way, the submitter of the patent will get paid what the market thinks their idea was worth, and society will (hopefully) get the benefit of using the idea from the patent (assuming that the new owner properly exploits the idea, of course).
Being "creative" is often an exercise in synthesizing many concepts that other people have "created". How many acts of creation have been compromised or even prevented because so-called "intellectual property" laws have prevented the free expression of ideas? Why should I bother working on a product I have a great idea for if I feel like I'd be crushed by some company with a huge patent portfolio?
I strongly disagree (also IMHO). There will always be idea-creation. People will want to express themselves. Entrepreneurs will want to have competitive advantages. "Intellectual property" is only good for giving arbitrary people the power to stop other people from generating ideas.
That's just because you and your "heartless capitalistic cohorts" are greedy, and want the government to enforce some laws that allow you & them to force people to pay you money for a "good" which they would otherwise not think it was worth to pay you.
In a sensible market system, people should have to pay only for concrete goods or services rendered. Anything else is socialism.
I want the lawyers to lose too :-)
Nah, have people bid on the patents in an auction, including the person who is submitting the patent. That way you let the market do the "due diligence" on how much each individual patent is worth, and you don't really need patent examiners any more (except that you will still want to evaluate obviousness & prior art challenges - maybe you can handle this with a panel of subject-related peers).
By requiring the inventor to participate in the bidding, you also prevent the inventor from sitting on a good idea & preventing the society from being able to use it. (If the inventor doesn't want to tell anyone, then he/she can treat it as a trade secret, but runs the risk that someone else will develop the idea independently - either way, society wins.)
Anything which doesn't meet a certain minimum bid value (the participants might think it's worthless because it will be killed by obviousness or prior art challenges, for instance) can be considered too worthless to be worth granting a patent, and would therefore become public domain.
Except where the law trumps that contract.
A lot of that is just due to lack of resources. When you've got too many kids per teacher, the teacher has to resort to strict, across-the-board discipline and an assembly-line mentality, resulting in very little of the individual attention that is required to make any particular student blossom. I can't remember _ever_ talking to a teacher who thought such a situation was a desirable outcome, but between ridiculously large class sizes & the mindboggling amount of paperwork that even average teachers are subjected to, they _have_ to do things that way just to survive.
Big surprise such an environment doesn't stimulate many students; only kids who thrive on mindless repetitive procedures will be happy with such an environment. (And then you've got idiot parents who seem to think that since they are raising a couple kids just fine by beating them when they get out of line, that teachers should have no problem dealing with 30 or more bored kids who know the school will get its butt sued off if a teacher scolds a kid too severely.)
Of course, hiring enough decent teachers costs money - and a lot of idiots seem to think that there is _no_ connection between paying taxes & a decent educational system. Either that, or they figure that it's a waste of _their_ money to paying to educate other peoples' kids. (Then they complain about how they have to pay so much in taxes to build prisons. No connection there, nosiree.)
(To be fair to those idiots, after being fed a continuous diet of stories about government waste, fraud, pork-barrel politics & boondoggles, I'm definitely feeling a little disconnect between the concepts of paying taxes & public services myself.)
I'm not really a good example of that; I didn't respect the judgement of my "peers" very much ("Why the f*ck are you poking that rattlesnake with a stick?!" or "What the hell did you think would happen if you punched him?!"), and tended to end up in more interesting discussions with the adults. I've observed the effects you're talking about though.
I think that some of the effectiveness of peer pressure might be a little lessened if school was more interesting & stimulating - which isn't going to be possible if society continues to shortchange its public education system for reasons of shortsightedness or selfishness. (One might argue that the average members of society make stupid decisions like that because they weren't properly educated in the techniques of critical analysis & rational decision-making when they were being educated.)
At this point, a lot of people wish that the U.S. President had paid more attention to history - say, the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam (and other semi-official regional conflicts), plus maybe some world history about all of the other countries besides "Texas".
Also, if more people like you had paid attention to history, economics, civic duty, etc, the general population would have a much better appreciation about why it is so important to pick its leaders carefully.
I am personally wishing I had taken some more foreign language classes instead of computer-languages, given the increased percentage of my neighbors & family who don't speak English so well. It's much harder to pick up new languages if you haven't built up the necessary flexible mental circuits during elementary school.
Unfortunately, you need to start earlier than the teens to make those lessons stick. It seems like once kids have reached their teens, barring any life-altering experiences, their basic attitudes about life & society have solidified and they will resist any attempts to "retrain" them.
I've read some interesting case studies dealing with sibling rivalries (disclaimer: IANAParent). The kids of those parents who basically ignored the "little problems" (Mom, he won't let me play with his toys/That's too bad, dear.) tended to end up with more tools in their social-skills repertoire to resolve such situations. The parents basically intervened only when medical or legal complications were imminent, and did so in as even-handed manner as possible.
Really? Almost everything I've heard has been about how the Swift Boat Veteran's claims contradict the official records & the few eye witnesses who are still living.
I suppose you could consider it an attack on their character when people talk about how these veterans insist that _they_ are right, and the records & the eye-witnesses are wrong (or lying), even though many of these guys weren't directly involved in the incidents they are criticising. And when people point out that many of the same people made similar criticisms about McCain (with about as much credibility).
If these guys were talking about they had heard that the fish that some competitor caught wasn't really all that big (even though the fish had been weighed & recorded by the official fishing organization), then most of the audience would probably call them liars - especially if they were caught being paid lots of money by another fisherman after saying such things, and if they had also said such things about another competitor at the _last_ fishing competition. Since this is politics though, anybody supporting Kerry calls them liars, and anyone supporting Bush says anybody contradicting them is lying.
No, all of those organizations are _corporations_. They'll report whatever will make the most money, in either advertiser and/or subscriber dollars. They _won't_ report what might hurt their revenue flow - which often includes what their advertisers (often other large corporations) don't want them to report.
Real investigative journalism is often expensive (paying bodies to dig around in all those musty old records that powerful people are often deliberately trying to hide), so those so-called news organizations also try and cut costs by doing the least amount of work necessary to get enough info to put out to the public - which usually involves just repeating whatever info was handed to them by folks who want to make sure that the media repeats only what they're supposed to.
I personally feel that the standards of journalism have really fallen into the bottom of the barrel, where "news" is regarded more as entertainment for sale than a reasonable effort to inform the public about anything important (or truthful). Anyone who is really interested in the truth has to try and piece it together by reading between the lines, or gathering, sifting & cross-referencing information from dozens of different, biased viewpoints - the activity that _real_ journalists are supposed to be helping us do, but where they often have surrendered their integrity to the task of making a buck for their employer.
Excellent - I will now start referring to all my recursive loops as vicious cycles.
It's always weird to hear military folks praising Bush in contrast to say, Kerry.
I dearly want to know _why_ they support & respect a group of people who pulled every string they could to stay out of harm's way (while fully supporting sending _everyone else_), and yet have no respect for someone who actually volunteered for two tours of fairly hazardous duty in Vietnam & managed came back alive (and reasonably healthy). Can someone please rationalize this for me?
You've got an inflated idea of who the "wealth builders" and "creators" are. Big clue: the guys who are building & creating _aren't_ the guys at the top. Those guys just cause money to be shifted around and provide a figurehead for the organization, but in terms of actually providing goods or services to consumers, they aren't that important (except that if they cause money to be shifted to the _wrong_ places, they can destroy a company).
Unfortunately, most people in those positions seem to have such an inflated ego, they come to believe that _they_ are doing all the real work in the company, and _they_ are the most important person in the company, and the company wouldn't be able to do anything productive without them, so _they_ should be compensated several thousand times more than anyone else, even though they're not doing any more work than anyone else. And when some political demagogue comes along and strokes their ego for them, they'll hand out the cash in wads, just to preserve their I'm-so-important reality.
NOTE: My complaints are only targeted toward large organizations, where the highly hierarchical command structure separates "management" from the workers, and necessitates a large bureaucracy in-between. Most of the _real_ productivity in our society gets performed by individuals & small businesses, where the organization is so small, that to be successful the people "in charge" _have_ to get their hands dirty & who therefore have a much more accurate idea of their own self-worth to the organization.
Really? I realize that the resultant liquid might not be good to drink, but won't it at least be sterile? I had the impression that bleach was pretty good at killing anything that got immersed in it, even after being diluted quite a bit.
Amusing, but somehow I don't think the cell phone companies would appreciate the public relations result.
Won't help - too many people that if you have a bad connection, you can sometimes make it work by talking louder. If the cell tower keeps dropping their connection, you'll just get a lot of people going "Hello? Hello?" at the top of their voices before they redial & start talking again.
Or rather, the entertainment industry wants DRM. The consumer electronics industry just wants to sell products and would probably prefer that they were able make whatever product they want without having to worry about adding the complexities of DRM.
Weird how the entertainment industry has such a disproportionate influence in Congress even though the consumer electronics industry is so much larger.
On the other hand, the big players in the consumer electronics industry are definitely gung-ho to patent everything in sight. So between the entertainment industry pushing expansion of copyright power, and the manufacturing industries pushing expansion of patenting powers, and every marketing entity in existence pushing the expansion of trademark power, is it any wonder that those humans (i.e., not fictional entities existing only due legal definitions) who like to think & discuss freely are feeling a little frustrated?
A non-anonymous coward admitting they were _wrong_ on _Slashdot_?!
Ye gods, where are my heart-attack pills?
If you had an absolutely ruthless leader & a completely loyal military with modern weaponry (perhaps an automated military?) who didn't give a damn about human life, that's all you'd need. Just keep killing people until whoever is left over gives in. There's no way non-military forces could resist.
The only reason the U.S. military is having problems in Iraq is because they're trying to preserve the lives of civilians. If they didn't give a damn about that, they could've easily turned Iraq into a wasteland by now (even more of a wasteland than it already is, I mean).
Yes, nuking large groups of disobedient civilians would be an option for such a military force.
No, I took that into account - that's why I said that a nation's military must have closer ties to the population than to the leader. Every tin-pot dictator solidifies their power by gathering a band of "elite" thugs around them and basically bribes them with gifts & power so that their loyalty is to the leader rather than their nation. Even though the overall numbers of these thugs are small relative to the overall population, they can still effectively control the population through fear & intimidation tactics. Bear in mind that quite a few Arabs have firearms, but Hussein was still able to easily pacify a fairly large population by bribing a reasonably large group (the Baath party & his own tribe members) and by scaring the %()$*@! out of the rest.
The U.S. military currently has quite a few ties between population & members (witness widespread outpouring of support for the troups) so I don't think this is a real issue in the U.S., but if a sizeable chunk of the military & law-enforcement (and their families) should start developing an us-versus-them attitude about the general population (or maybe robotic armies under the control of a small # of people?), that's when democracy-in-major-danger alarm bells should start ringing.
When it's time for the "3rd American Revolution", if the bulk of the military isn't on your side, _your_ little pop-guns aren't gonna do diddly-squat except annoy a few soldiers.
The real means of preventing military dictatorships are making sure that the military is more connected to the general populace than it is to its "leaders" so that when the "leaders" try to takeover, the military shoots _them_ instead of their friends & family.