Also, most solutions aren't going to be "perfect" for everyone, and if you're a demonstrably good programmer, you can contract your services at fairly healthy price levels to provide all sorts of custom solutions to the people who really like your open source software, but just want "a few tweaks".
If you're adding that level of complexity to the system, then you'll have to look at the 'effective energy density' of both hybrid engines and/or fuel cell implementations, in addition to that of a battery system.
See, you're looking at patents from the idea of "what would be 'fair' for me" in this situation. That's not really a good basis for deciding a system which is supposed to designed to increase innovation for the benefit of the overall society.
From the viewpoint of what's good for society, why should YOU be allowed to keep that neat new algorithm under your control when it would be much more beneficial to society if it got spread all over the place as quickly as possible and usable by everyone? A big company is going to be much better at that than you are, and it's not like THEY would be allowed to control that new algorithm either (so they'll have competition).
In addition, if one of Microsoft's engineers managed to work out the same algorithm on their own, why should you be able to stop them from using their own implementation?
The question is, can you come up with a system that encourages widespread dissemination of innovative & valuable ideas for use throughout society, while not discouraging "small" inventors from contributing to that idea pool?
(I've got a couple of ideas about that, but I"m interested in hearing what you might come up with.)
The problem is, the majority of the "ruling class" in management, government and all other areas are generally not scientifically inclined nor are they actively promoting science.
It's worse than that. A lot of the "ruling class" would prefer that the general public NOT be knowledgeable about scientific method, or the principles of critical thought. It makes them MUCH harder to manipulate.
Unfortunately, there is no standard mechanism by which such managers can be rejected by the "rank-and-file" - most of the people under those kinds of managers have to suffer until the manager ends up falling through their own incompetence.
I don't think it needs to be all or nothing - the approach could be applied incrementally for those services where people don't really agree that the government should be the one providing the service, such as the National Endowment for the Arts, public radio, certain types of education, a lot of public basic & applied research, roads, chamber of commerce activities, public parks & recreation areas, etc.
Other services that people can agree should be basic services, such as police, fire, basic utilities, military, etc., can still be mandated.
I think there'd still be a lot of argument about whether stuff like food & drug safety, fighting pollution, public health care & higher-level education falls into this category (a lot of people probably feel that those should be required services of a "civilized" society), but perhaps the ability to dictate where at least SOME of your tax monies goes will help ameliorate the bad feelings that you get by being forced to finance some programs that you don't agree with (versus the current situation).
There would have to be some systemic process to make sure that programs on the "mandated" list are regularly reviewed to make sure that someone hasn't slyly pushed something from the "choice" list to the "mandated" list - perhaps setting a high voting bar (2/3?) that needs to be renewed on a regular basis for items to stay on the mandated list.
Also, as far as people choosing to donate towards football stadiums & such - I don't think that is going to necessarily be the result. There might be some stupid results at the beginning of such a plan, but I think as people are able to observe the results of how their money is contributed, they will get a pretty good idea of what parts of their local organizations need to be funded by how much to get the best results.
In the case of people hating police departments, as you mentioned, I don't think it's so much a case of people hating the idea of law and order, but more of a case of people not trusting the local police department to be looking out for their best interests. If the local police department's funding depends on keeping the local population happy, somehow I don't think you'd hear quite as many stories about cops abusing citizens as you do now. With local decision-making for funding, you might also have the ability to have "competing" police departments, with the department providing the better service being awarded by the local citizenship.
Like I said, though, I think the whole idea is a non-starter from the viewpoint of the current political system, since it takes a lot of control away from the politicians about where the money gets to go.
I'm really not sure what the solution is other than draconian taxes on the "winners" who get too big.
Right now, I think 90% taxation on anyone with an income (including corporate provided "benefits") over $5 mill a year is about right. Making 5 mill a year is a phenomenal income.
I think there is some historical data that indicates at the time that the U.S. economy was expanding the most, the rich WERE paying about 90% marginal tax bracket. I'm not sure about the $5mil threshhold you were mentioning, but I think at that time the rich didn't whine about how much tax they had to pay anywhere as much as they do today.
I think a lot of people wouldn't be so annoyed about paying taxes if they thought they were getting their money's worth. As an alternative to the existing tax system, I thought an interesting approach might be instead of paying your taxes directly to the government, you are required to pay the same amount in money, but you get to choose which organization(s) you pay the money to.
The government's role would be to 1) audit the various organizations to make sure they aren't running some kind of scam, and 2) make sure that the "taxpayers" are not trying to maintain control of the money somehow (by adding conditions or by being personally involved with the destination organization somehow).
Such a system should improve peoples' sense of civic involvement, and if they really want to make sure their money isn't wasted, they'll be encouraged on doing due diligence on any organization they want to donate to. I also suspect there will be a big tendency to donate to local organizations.
Unfortunately, I'm fully aware that this kind of system would be a non-starter with the current political system, since it removes control over where all the money goes from the hands of the politicians.
I prefer the idea of smashing politicians into each other to see if the resultant collision creates an honest politician (the equivalent of antimatter).
None of the above: you're just a hallucination, probably due to that old fuzzy pizza I finished off last night, plus the beer to wash it down. The sleeping pills probably didn't help either.
You're not parsing his (Joel's) article correctly. The Hungarian notation that everyone learned to hate is not the type of notation which was originally proposed.
He describes the original form of Hungarian notation as a way to add a concise description of how the data that a particular variable is holding is intended to be used, NOT just a way to restate the type info already maintained by the compiler.
Way, way, down in the article he has a short blurb which has some short examples of how the original notation was meant to be used:
Apps Hungarian had very useful, meaningful prefixes like "ix" to mean an index into an array, "c" to mean a count, "d" to mean the difference between two numbers (for example "dx" meant "width"), and so forth.
He contrasts that with the way that people ended up understanding Hungarian notation:
Systems Hungarian had far less useful prefixes like "l" for long and "ul" for "unsigned long" and "dw" for double word, which is, actually, uh, an unsigned long. In Systems Hungarian, the only thing that the prefix told you was the actual data type of the variable.
My favorite proposal is to put a strong limit on the total # of patents that can be valid at any given moment (as a wild-assed guess, like 5000?).
Every year, as new patent "slots" open up due to expiration, obviousness or prior art, you arrange for some kind of "idea" competition so that people trying to get patents have to compare their ideas against each other & only the best idea(s) are allowed to get one of those patent "slots" & to become bona fide patents.
Not only does this make it a lot easier to search the "currently valid" patent database to find out if you're violating things, but if the total # of valid patents is fairly small, then you're much less likely to violate a patent by inventing little things that engineers tend to do just in the course of doing their jobs. Also, forcing patent "ideas" to compete with each other should tend to weed out the bullshit patents.
Fair enough. I'll try to remember to use "socialistic" instead of "socialism" in the future when discussing this particular topic, although I suspect I will still confuse some people:-)
A difference in my terminology I guess - when I see the word "socialism", I think of any government-enforced behavior which distorts the normal behavior of a free market for the purposes of achieving some sort of social goal. Having the government be the main property-owner would be one example of that kind of behavior. Intellectual property is another.
The basic idea is that giving a patent-holder a limited time monopoly to profit from their inventions encourages invention. It does make sense...
It makes sense in a "pop psychology" sort of way, but I've never heard of or been pointed to a peer-reviewed study which showed that this "encourages invention"-effect could be shown, even in a highly-artificial academic "game theory"-based sort of market.
Until I can refer to a study like that (and assuming that the study has been properly controlled to resist researcher bias), it seems very counter-intuitive to me that a socialistic idea like "intellectual property" which limits competition is going to encourage innovation. (I refer to it as a socialistic idea since it is a government-enforced distortion of a free market motivated to create a social effect: the so-called encouragement of invention).
The rest of your description seems to me to be the natural end-game of "intellectual property", but I'd like to see a study which supports the idea that even the early stages of "intellectual property" actually has the type of effect that its proponents say it does.
That's like saying if you have perfect knowledge of a cryptographic system, then you will always be able to break it. If your system is strong enough, then it doesn't matter whether you have perfect knowledge of the system or not - it will still be hard to break.
I'm certainly not claiming that our current system is even remotely close to "unbreakable", but you are making the classic argument of "security through obscurity", which is almost as much a logical fallacy when applied to physical security as it is when applied to electronic security.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, most solutions aren't going to be "perfect" for everyone, and if you're a demonstrably good programmer, you can contract your services at fairly healthy price levels to provide all sorts of custom solutions to the people who really like your open source software, but just want "a few tweaks".
Are you kidding? Those kinds of events were some of the hilights of my electronic classes! :-)
Some of the other events involved high-voltage arcing
If you're adding that level of complexity to the system, then you'll have to look at the 'effective energy density' of both hybrid engines and/or fuel cell implementations, in addition to that of a battery system.
Did anyone else hesitate to clink on a link about Japanese researchers which has a domain name of "pinktentacle"?
Are they working off the Firefox 3 code base? That's supposedly been improved quite a bit, performance-wise.
See, you're looking at patents from the idea of "what would be 'fair' for me" in this situation. That's not really a good basis for deciding a system which is supposed to designed to increase innovation for the benefit of the overall society.
From the viewpoint of what's good for society, why should YOU be allowed to keep that neat new algorithm under your control when it would be much more beneficial to society if it got spread all over the place as quickly as possible and usable by everyone? A big company is going to be much better at that than you are, and it's not like THEY would be allowed to control that new algorithm either (so they'll have competition).
In addition, if one of Microsoft's engineers managed to work out the same algorithm on their own, why should you be able to stop them from using their own implementation?
The question is, can you come up with a system that encourages widespread dissemination of innovative & valuable ideas for use throughout society, while not discouraging "small" inventors from contributing to that idea pool?
(I've got a couple of ideas about that, but I"m interested in hearing what you might come up with.)
They've got to meet their quotas somehow.
Could you theoretically keep doing that between various banks until the whole system went bust? (Just curious...)
Until the AIs decide that the playing humans are utterly useless, and a waste of resources...
Unfortunately, "they" are probably not likely to fall for the same sorts of tactics that they use to control everyone else.
It's worse than that. A lot of the "ruling class" would prefer that the general public NOT be knowledgeable about scientific method, or the principles of critical thought. It makes them MUCH harder to manipulate.
Wonderful! A perfect example of one of the reasons why it's so difficult to get the public to listen to good science.
Unfortunately, there is no standard mechanism by which such managers can be rejected by the "rank-and-file" - most of the people under those kinds of managers have to suffer until the manager ends up falling through their own incompetence.
I don't think it needs to be all or nothing - the approach could be applied incrementally for those services where people don't really agree that the government should be the one providing the service, such as the National Endowment for the Arts, public radio, certain types of education, a lot of public basic & applied research, roads, chamber of commerce activities, public parks & recreation areas, etc.
Other services that people can agree should be basic services, such as police, fire, basic utilities, military, etc., can still be mandated.
I think there'd still be a lot of argument about whether stuff like food & drug safety, fighting pollution, public health care & higher-level education falls into this category (a lot of people probably feel that those should be required services of a "civilized" society), but perhaps the ability to dictate where at least SOME of your tax monies goes will help ameliorate the bad feelings that you get by being forced to finance some programs that you don't agree with (versus the current situation).
There would have to be some systemic process to make sure that programs on the "mandated" list are regularly reviewed to make sure that someone hasn't slyly pushed something from the "choice" list to the "mandated" list - perhaps setting a high voting bar (2/3?) that needs to be renewed on a regular basis for items to stay on the mandated list.
Also, as far as people choosing to donate towards football stadiums & such - I don't think that is going to necessarily be the result. There might be some stupid results at the beginning of such a plan, but I think as people are able to observe the results of how their money is contributed, they will get a pretty good idea of what parts of their local organizations need to be funded by how much to get the best results.
In the case of people hating police departments, as you mentioned, I don't think it's so much a case of people hating the idea of law and order, but more of a case of people not trusting the local police department to be looking out for their best interests. If the local police department's funding depends on keeping the local population happy, somehow I don't think you'd hear quite as many stories about cops abusing citizens as you do now. With local decision-making for funding, you might also have the ability to have "competing" police departments, with the department providing the better service being awarded by the local citizenship.
Like I said, though, I think the whole idea is a non-starter from the viewpoint of the current political system, since it takes a lot of control away from the politicians about where the money gets to go.
I think there is some historical data that indicates at the time that the U.S. economy was expanding the most, the rich WERE paying about 90% marginal tax bracket. I'm not sure about the $5mil threshhold you were mentioning, but I think at that time the rich didn't whine about how much tax they had to pay anywhere as much as they do today.
I think a lot of people wouldn't be so annoyed about paying taxes if they thought they were getting their money's worth. As an alternative to the existing tax system, I thought an interesting approach might be instead of paying your taxes directly to the government, you are required to pay the same amount in money, but you get to choose which organization(s) you pay the money to.
The government's role would be to 1) audit the various organizations to make sure they aren't running some kind of scam, and 2) make sure that the "taxpayers" are not trying to maintain control of the money somehow (by adding conditions or by being personally involved with the destination organization somehow).
Such a system should improve peoples' sense of civic involvement, and if they really want to make sure their money isn't wasted, they'll be encouraged on doing due diligence on any organization they want to donate to. I also suspect there will be a big tendency to donate to local organizations.
Unfortunately, I'm fully aware that this kind of system would be a non-starter with the current political system, since it removes control over where all the money goes from the hands of the politicians.
I prefer the idea of smashing politicians into each other to see if the resultant collision creates an honest politician (the equivalent of antimatter).
None of the above: you're just a hallucination, probably due to that old fuzzy pizza I finished off last night, plus the beer to wash it down. The sleeping pills probably didn't help either.
You're not parsing his (Joel's) article correctly. The Hungarian notation that everyone learned to hate is not the type of notation which was originally proposed.
He describes the original form of Hungarian notation as a way to add a concise description of how the data that a particular variable is holding is intended to be used, NOT just a way to restate the type info already maintained by the compiler.
Way, way, down in the article he has a short blurb which has some short examples of how the original notation was meant to be used:
He contrasts that with the way that people ended up understanding Hungarian notation:
That's why I always make sure I wear my tinfoil hat with the shiny side out, to deflect all the lasers. Even from sharks.
I haven't figured out how to stop the sharks from biting me though, except by staying out of the water.
My favorite proposal is to put a strong limit on the total # of patents that can be valid at any given moment (as a wild-assed guess, like 5000?).
Every year, as new patent "slots" open up due to expiration, obviousness or prior art, you arrange for some kind of "idea" competition so that people trying to get patents have to compare their ideas against each other & only the best idea(s) are allowed to get one of those patent "slots" & to become bona fide patents.
Not only does this make it a lot easier to search the "currently valid" patent database to find out if you're violating things, but if the total # of valid patents is fairly small, then you're much less likely to violate a patent by inventing little things that engineers tend to do just in the course of doing their jobs. Also, forcing patent "ideas" to compete with each other should tend to weed out the bullshit patents.
Fair enough. I'll try to remember to use "socialistic" instead of "socialism" in the future when discussing this particular topic, although I suspect I will still confuse some people :-)
A difference in my terminology I guess - when I see the word "socialism", I think of any government-enforced behavior which distorts the normal behavior of a free market for the purposes of achieving some sort of social goal. Having the government be the main property-owner would be one example of that kind of behavior. Intellectual property is another.
It makes sense in a "pop psychology" sort of way, but I've never heard of or been pointed to a peer-reviewed study which showed that this "encourages invention"-effect could be shown, even in a highly-artificial academic "game theory"-based sort of market.
Until I can refer to a study like that (and assuming that the study has been properly controlled to resist researcher bias), it seems very counter-intuitive to me that a socialistic idea like "intellectual property" which limits competition is going to encourage innovation. (I refer to it as a socialistic idea since it is a government-enforced distortion of a free market motivated to create a social effect: the so-called encouragement of invention).
The rest of your description seems to me to be the natural end-game of "intellectual property", but I'd like to see a study which supports the idea that even the early stages of "intellectual property" actually has the type of effect that its proponents say it does.
If he wants to get paid for his work, then he'd better keep working. No one has a "right" to get paid over and over for a single act of creation.
And its copyright infringement, not theft.
That's like saying if you have perfect knowledge of a cryptographic system, then you will always be able to break it. If your system is strong enough, then it doesn't matter whether you have perfect knowledge of the system or not - it will still be hard to break.
I'm certainly not claiming that our current system is even remotely close to "unbreakable", but you are making the classic argument of "security through obscurity", which is almost as much a logical fallacy when applied to physical security as it is when applied to electronic security.