if Eve not only controls all the communication of Alice to Bob, but from Bob back to Alice. So you still have the problem of authenticating Alice & Bob to each other.
If you've got an authenticated channel between Bob & Alice though (not necessarily encrypted, just authenticated), then this sounds pretty cool.
Higher profits (remember, in the absence of government-guaranteed industries) means a stronger economy.
Incorrect. Higher profits means more money in the bank - but doesn't necessarily mean a stronger economy.
Assuming that the strength of an economy is measured by the width & depth of the money flowing through it, then a stronger economy is actually characterized by the amount of SPENDING occurring by all of its elements. There is also an underlying assumption that all of those elements are earning enough revenue to keep up with their expenses - you'll note that they don't actually have to be making a lot of profit to be part of a strong economy, they just have to be making enough to be stable.
What we really need in the USA is to make it easier for courts to rule that the loser pays the winner's lawyers.
Anything that requires expenditure of money will favor the parties with more money, unless you've got some way of making the expenditure of money proportional to each party's assets (wouldn't THAT put a crimp in a large corporations legal strategies:-)
If the long-term benefits to the society outweigh the short-term benefit to you, then society has a perfect "right" to crush your so-called rights like a bug. And it generally does.
Of course, it usually takes a while for "society" to figure out what is in its long-term benefit (read: large scale arguments, protests, riots, etc). Once it has settled on a meme (racial discrimination is bad, for instance), your "rights" don't mean diddly-squat.
A lot of people benefit from this. Besides, without the Bayh-Dole Act, how would any of this government-funded research (still 92%) get put to market? The Government would own all the IP.
Uh - maybe the law could say that the results of the government-funded research belong in the PUBLIC DOMAIN. Then anyone who can figure out how to market a product based on those research results could do so.
The real benefit of this act is that it gives the researchers the ability to make some money off of their own ideas.
You mean their salary wasn't enough?
If they want to be the sole beneficiary of the results of their research, then they'd better pay for the research themselves.
If they're using public money to do the research, then they're working for the public - the results should belong to the public.
Re:Here's something DNA can be converted to...
on
Protein Music
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· Score: 1
Okay.:-)
Re:Here's something DNA can be converted to...
on
Protein Music
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· Score: 1
I guess I'd better qualify my statement - I'd put the "default" folded state for the molecule as a compilation.
The dynamic folding behavior of the molecule in the context of an active environment would be equivalent to its execution (perhaps as a thread?).
Its interactions with other molecules would be my equivalent to inter-process/thread communication.
Re:Here's something DNA can be converted to...
on
Protein Music
·
· Score: 1
Dunno, I'd put the protein-folding in the "run-time behavior" category, not the compilation phase.
However, it costs money to produce software, if only to feed the authors, and GPL explicitly denies the software itself as a source of revenue. Has any pure software company ever made money by releasing all its software under GPL? (and selling support?)
Dunno, and don't care. I think companies should make profit on providing goods or services, not because they are granted a monopoly on an "idea". Greedy people don't like this, though, 'cause then they have to keep working for their dough instead of doing some upfront work, then sitting back & raking it in.
There's quite a few web sites up about the "Farnsworth Fusor" (Google search top site yields http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~kronjaeg/hv/ fusor/construction) which apparently is an electric-field tube created by Philo Farnsworth (invented most of the fundaments of the tubes used for CRTs) which could actually cause real, measurable fusion reactions (measured through neutron flux).
He died before he could get something sustainable and past the break-even point (if it were possible). The theoretical physics of the device is pretty cool - apparently, his "tube" creates concentric electric field "shells" of increasing strength, which concentrate & pinch the fuel to fusion-density. After the setup, the field apparently gets its strength from the reaction itself.
From what I read, the main reason it that the reaction isn't sustainable is because once the field becomes strong enough to initiate fusion, it also completely prevents any NEW fuel from entering the fusion area.
Pretty darn interesting stuff, and done a long time ago. I'm assuming that the electric & magnetic field "pinching" technologies are probably based on much more sophisticated approaches than this.
Oh come on, even as old as they are, those planes are designed to keep function fine WHEN STRUCK BY LIGHTNING! This is going to create a little more EMP than a sub-watt cell phone (even - gasp - MORE than one cell phone!).
Given today's knowledge about building robust wireless communications protocols and equipment, there's no real engineering excuse for airplane electronics to be "vulnerable" to consumer electronics. Somebody's either being lazy or there's some other reason why they keep this requirement.
(A friend of mine was wondering whether they didn't like cell phones competing w/the on-line airphones, since when you're at 35000ft, your cell phone can probably contact a bazillion line-of-site cell phone towers - if the signal can get through the skin of the plane.)
Huh? Protecting the public health is a legitimate function of government. It'd be nice to know that those needles were offered as part of an overall effort to reduce drug use in the first place, but I certainly consider it to be a more legitimate function of government than giving massive handouts of taxpayer money to industries & rich individuals (e.g., through pork-barrel spending & protective legislation).
I would imagine that if you spent that money DIRECTLY on the research, instead of being happy of getting those research results as an incidental benefit of learning how to kill people more efficiently, society would be much better off. (Granted, at least some of that money is spent trying to figure out how to avoid getting killed.)
I regard the military as a distasteful (but necessary) overhead for a society to protect themselves from the forces of greed & irrationality. I also think that, as a species, we'd be a helluva lot more advanced socially & technologically if we spent the same amount of resources directly seeking to improve our standard of living.
One example & an assertion doesn't prove a case. And I'd argue that the intellectual property environment today is not what existed when patents were generally perceived as "useful".
Sounds like a chicken & egg thing - are those companies making more profit mainly because they can take advantage of their government-provided monopoly on a concept to milk money out of consumers that they would not otherwise be able to get?
The REAL question is: does SOCIETY receive a net benefit by granting entities (either individuals or companies) these hopefully-temporary monopolies on ideas?
Of course, this is complicated by the idea that nobody can agree on a good, quantitative way of measuring the overall health of a society (I submit that simple macroeconomic numbers like GDP are probably too myopic to be good measures of the health of an entire society).
The way to get a lot of money is to club somebody and take it.
Well, in the short term.
In the longer term, if you perform this activity regularly to get money, people will run away from you anytime they see you and it will require much more effort to get the same amount of money.
If you provide a service or good that other people want, then people will COME FIND YOU in order to give you money in exchange for that good or service.
As you say, this is so basic that if you won't accept it, there's no communication...
I'd vote for him. Dumb politicians are entertaining enough when they don't mean to be - one who was TRYING to be entertaining would probably keep me laughing for days at a time.
If they're bored, they should take a friggin' walk outside, or barring that, do everything they can to GET AWAY from the damn computers. Give your mind, eyes, and wrists a break.
I'll let you know when I think your opinions on my recreation & entertainment choices are worth anything.
I think that as long as your "new" source code is merely a straight machine-translation of the original, and still performed exactly the same function, it would be pretty easy to argue in court that the "new" source code is still equivalent to the old. (An aggressive lawyer would go after you for attempting to willfully violate the license terms.)
You'd have to manually add or change functionality to claim creative control over the "new" source code, and given the way the GPL is written, as long as you have any original GPLed code left in the source code (translated or not), you're still in violation.
Of course, in the absense of perfect formal verification tools which can match the functionality of two programs regardless of naming, your "technique" would probably make it difficult for people to easily tell that you were violating the GPL. If it came down to a court case though, I wouldn't count on a simple translation to protect yourself.
I think Mickey Mouse would probably fall under a trademark of Disney, and I think that trademarks are good for as long as their owner is willing to defend them.
No, that's the results of PATENTS. In the absence of patents, you'd still be able to reap the fruits of your research, even if somebody else happened to get the same results from their research a little ahead of you.
Like it has been said many times before, people don't starve because of bad crops, but because of bad governements and wars.
So? It would still help starving rural people if you gave them free seeds. And you have a helluva lot more chance of helping them than you do of trying to deal with the greedy people who are the primary cause of bad governments & wars.
Most GM crops are sterile anyway, so you would have to distribute FREE crops to starving people every year.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? If you're going to all the trouble of trying to make people self-sufficient by giving them free seeds, then you're going to give them stuff they can reuse!
Besides, if you're referring to the Monsanto "Terminator" seeds, Monsanto (the primary global source of GMed crops today) decided several years ago not to distribute those types of seeds (at least not where the public would find out) due to public criticism. I haven't heard any reports of them sneaking the seeds into the general supply, especially given the current publicity concerning ANY GMed food, so your scenario of having to give free crops to starving people every year is bogus.
"Normal" was the incorrect word to describe the current situation - I meant it SHOULD be normal.
For basic R&D it rocks since the payoff horizon is too far for most companies
That's pretty much what I mean - in the absence of draconian intellectual property law, all that stuff tends to have a payoff horizon too far for most companies. Therefore in the absence of draconian intellectual property law, the expensive, up-front basic R&D stuff for the sake of the public good should be paid for with public funds - to the point where companes CAN see a reasonable payoff horizon (even given competition). At that point they'll be happy to pick up the ball & do the development to get the product to market.
Without public financing, though, you pretty much have to give someone/an organization a pretty big handout (monopoly) to make them interested in the investment - and then the results are under the control of THAT entity, not for the public good.
And of course, you really want to add a multi-billion dollar line item into the government budget? Merck's R&D budget was $2.3 billion last year. Total up Pfizers', Glaxo's and the other few hundred drug companies budgets out there. Even allowing for overlap, it's a huge amount.
I believe that the savings in health costs to the public would far outweigh the expense of doing this basic research. And, as you mention, there is the potential for a fair bit of synergy if all your researchers are working together & sharing information.
Also, I dunno about you, but the major reason that I complain about the amount being taken from my paycheck for taxes isn't really the amount - our European friends get docked significantly larger percentages than we (USians) do - it's because I feel like a significant amount of my money is being wasted on pork barrel projects, bureaucratic waste & corporate subsidies. If I was getting regular reports of useful ideas & seeing inexpensive incredible new products/services using technologies where the basics had been worked out with my tax money, I'd feel a lot happier about our governmental representatives.
Of course, we end up with problems with this approach as well. For example, little research dollars into malaria, which is probably the single worst disease in terms of productivity lost in the world.
Quite true, and there is also the cynical view that many drug companies are deliberately trying to find drugs which "manage" sicknesses instead of actually curing them, so that they can milk the consumer for every penny. A publically-financed organization whose charter specifically required a goal of research for the greater public good (and which can be public audited to maintain accountability) is much less likely to make decisions designed to screw as many consumers as possible for as long as possible.
Drug companies have become whipping boys since they make a lot of money. But they also have immense expenses and the possibility of having R&D fail. How would you do it?
Classic situation of wanting to encourage the massive R&D expenditure for a product which is supposed to benefit the general public, but also wanting the typical laws of supply & demand to make sure that the product is made available to the generic public as efficiently as possible.
The classic answer is, of course, since the R&D is for the public good, then the generic public should pay for it in the form of taxpayer-financed basic research. Then you let private companies use non-exclusive access to the results of that R&D so that they will compete with each other to provide the most value to their customers.
This is a normal scenario for any situation where the act of creation has a large up-front cost, but the actual implementation is more incremental. No one entity wants to be responsible for the upfront cost & then get screwed by the others for the implementation, so the only way to "naturally" get through this dilemna is by forcing some sort of cooperation between all the entities to share the upfront cost.
1- Once again: Patents do not stop research. They just stop people from making money with someone else's discovery. Or at least that is the urpose of patents.
Patents can make it worthless to do research. Not only are you prohibited from making money from the patented idea (even if you did the work to "discover" it yourself & they just happened to get to the patent office a little earlier), but you can't do anything with the idea that might hurt the patent-holder's profit stream (like distribute seeds with patented genes for FREE to starving people).
Slashdot Mirror
if Eve not only controls all the communication of Alice to Bob, but from Bob back to Alice. So you still have the problem of authenticating Alice & Bob to each other.
If you've got an authenticated channel between Bob & Alice though (not necessarily encrypted, just authenticated), then this sounds pretty cool.
Incorrect. Higher profits means more money in the bank - but doesn't necessarily mean a stronger economy.
Assuming that the strength of an economy is measured by the width & depth of the money flowing through it, then a stronger economy is actually characterized by the amount of SPENDING occurring by all of its elements. There is also an underlying assumption that all of those elements are earning enough revenue to keep up with their expenses - you'll note that they don't actually have to be making a lot of profit to be part of a strong economy, they just have to be making enough to be stable.
Anything that requires expenditure of money will favor the parties with more money, unless you've got some way of making the expenditure of money proportional to each party's assets (wouldn't THAT put a crimp in a large corporations legal strategies :-)
Sure they do.
If the long-term benefits to the society outweigh the short-term benefit to you, then society has a perfect "right" to crush your so-called rights like a bug. And it generally does.
Of course, it usually takes a while for "society" to figure out what is in its long-term benefit (read: large scale arguments, protests, riots, etc). Once it has settled on a meme (racial discrimination is bad, for instance), your "rights" don't mean diddly-squat.
Uh - maybe the law could say that the results of the government-funded research belong in the PUBLIC DOMAIN. Then anyone who can figure out how to market a product based on those research results could do so.
You mean their salary wasn't enough?
If they want to be the sole beneficiary of the results of their research, then they'd better pay for the research themselves.
If they're using public money to do the research, then they're working for the public - the results should belong to the public.
Okay. :-)
I guess I'd better qualify my statement - I'd put the "default" folded state for the molecule as a compilation.
The dynamic folding behavior of the molecule in the context of an active environment would be equivalent to its execution (perhaps as a thread?).
Its interactions with other molecules would be my equivalent to inter-process/thread communication.
Dunno, I'd put the protein-folding in the "run-time behavior" category, not the compilation phase.
Dunno, and don't care. I think companies should make profit on providing goods or services, not because they are granted a monopoly on an "idea". Greedy people don't like this, though, 'cause then they have to keep working for their dough instead of doing some upfront work, then sitting back & raking it in.
There's quite a few web sites up about the "Farnsworth Fusor" (Google search top site yields http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~kronjaeg/hv/ fusor/construction) which apparently is an electric-field tube created by Philo Farnsworth (invented most of the fundaments of the tubes used for CRTs) which could actually cause real, measurable fusion reactions (measured through neutron flux).
He died before he could get something sustainable and past the break-even point (if it were possible). The theoretical physics of the device is pretty cool - apparently, his "tube" creates concentric electric field "shells" of increasing strength, which concentrate & pinch the fuel to fusion-density. After the setup, the field apparently gets its strength from the reaction itself.
From what I read, the main reason it that the reaction isn't sustainable is because once the field becomes strong enough to initiate fusion, it also completely prevents any NEW fuel from entering the fusion area.
Pretty darn interesting stuff, and done a long time ago. I'm assuming that the electric & magnetic field "pinching" technologies are probably based on much more sophisticated approaches than this.
What weenies, it took those guys thousands of years to cause mass extinctions. _WE'RE_ accomplishing the same goal in decades!
Oh come on, even as old as they are, those planes are designed to keep function fine WHEN STRUCK BY LIGHTNING! This is going to create a little more EMP than a sub-watt cell phone (even - gasp - MORE than one cell phone!).
Given today's knowledge about building robust wireless communications protocols and equipment, there's no real engineering excuse for airplane electronics to be "vulnerable" to consumer electronics. Somebody's either being lazy or there's some other reason why they keep this requirement.
(A friend of mine was wondering whether they didn't like cell phones competing w/the on-line airphones, since when you're at 35000ft, your cell phone can probably contact a bazillion line-of-site cell phone towers - if the signal can get through the skin of the plane.)
Huh? Protecting the public health is a legitimate function of government. It'd be nice to know that those needles were offered as part of an overall effort to reduce drug use in the first place, but I certainly consider it to be a more legitimate function of government than giving massive handouts of taxpayer money to industries & rich individuals (e.g., through pork-barrel spending & protective legislation).
I would imagine that if you spent that money DIRECTLY on the research, instead of being happy of getting those research results as an incidental benefit of learning how to kill people more efficiently, society would be much better off. (Granted, at least some of that money is spent trying to figure out how to avoid getting killed.)
I regard the military as a distasteful (but necessary) overhead for a society to protect themselves from the forces of greed & irrationality. I also think that, as a species, we'd be a helluva lot more advanced socially & technologically if we spent the same amount of resources directly seeking to improve our standard of living.
One example & an assertion doesn't prove a case. And I'd argue that the intellectual property environment today is not what existed when patents were generally perceived as "useful".
Sounds like a chicken & egg thing - are those companies making more profit mainly because they can take advantage of their government-provided monopoly on a concept to milk money out of consumers that they would not otherwise be able to get?
The REAL question is: does SOCIETY receive a net benefit by granting entities (either individuals or companies) these hopefully-temporary monopolies on ideas?
Of course, this is complicated by the idea that nobody can agree on a good, quantitative way of measuring the overall health of a society (I submit that simple macroeconomic numbers like GDP are probably too myopic to be good measures of the health of an entire society).
Well, in the short term.
In the longer term, if you perform this activity regularly to get money, people will run away from you anytime they see you and it will require much more effort to get the same amount of money.
If you provide a service or good that other people want, then people will COME FIND YOU in order to give you money in exchange for that good or service.
As you say, this is so basic that if you won't accept it, there's no communication...
I'd vote for him. Dumb politicians are entertaining enough when they don't mean to be - one who was TRYING to be entertaining would probably keep me laughing for days at a time.
I'll let you know when I think your opinions on my recreation & entertainment choices are worth anything.
I think that as long as your "new" source code is merely a straight machine-translation of the original, and still performed exactly the same function, it would be pretty easy to argue in court that the "new" source code is still equivalent to the old. (An aggressive lawyer would go after you for attempting to willfully violate the license terms.)
You'd have to manually add or change functionality to claim creative control over the "new" source code, and given the way the GPL is written, as long as you have any original GPLed code left in the source code (translated or not), you're still in violation.
Of course, in the absense of perfect formal verification tools which can match the functionality of two programs regardless of naming, your "technique" would probably make it difficult for people to easily tell that you were violating the GPL. If it came down to a court case though, I wouldn't count on a simple translation to protect yourself.
I think Mickey Mouse would probably fall under a trademark of Disney, and I think that trademarks are good for as long as their owner is willing to defend them.
So? It would still help starving rural people if you gave them free seeds. And you have a helluva lot more chance of helping them than you do of trying to deal with the greedy people who are the primary cause of bad governments & wars.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? If you're going to all the trouble of trying to make people self-sufficient by giving them free seeds, then you're going to give them stuff they can reuse!
Besides, if you're referring to the Monsanto "Terminator" seeds, Monsanto (the primary global source of GMed crops today) decided several years ago not to distribute those types of seeds (at least not where the public would find out) due to public criticism. I haven't heard any reports of them sneaking the seeds into the general supply, especially given the current publicity concerning ANY GMed food, so your scenario of having to give free crops to starving people every year is bogus.
"Normal" was the incorrect word to describe the current situation - I meant it SHOULD be normal.
That's pretty much what I mean - in the absence of draconian intellectual property law, all that stuff tends to have a payoff horizon too far for most companies. Therefore in the absence of draconian intellectual property law, the expensive, up-front basic R&D stuff for the sake of the public good should be paid for with public funds - to the point where companes CAN see a reasonable payoff horizon (even given competition). At that point they'll be happy to pick up the ball & do the development to get the product to market.
Without public financing, though, you pretty much have to give someone/an organization a pretty big handout (monopoly) to make them interested in the investment - and then the results are under the control of THAT entity, not for the public good.
I believe that the savings in health costs to the public would far outweigh the expense of doing this basic research. And, as you mention, there is the potential for a fair bit of synergy if all your researchers are working together & sharing information.
Also, I dunno about you, but the major reason that I complain about the amount being taken from my paycheck for taxes isn't really the amount - our European friends get docked significantly larger percentages than we (USians) do - it's because I feel like a significant amount of my money is being wasted on pork barrel projects, bureaucratic waste & corporate subsidies. If I was getting regular reports of useful ideas & seeing inexpensive incredible new products/services using technologies where the basics had been worked out with my tax money, I'd feel a lot happier about our governmental representatives.
Quite true, and there is also the cynical view that many drug companies are deliberately trying to find drugs which "manage" sicknesses instead of actually curing them, so that they can milk the consumer for every penny. A publically-financed organization whose charter specifically required a goal of research for the greater public good (and which can be public audited to maintain accountability) is much less likely to make decisions designed to screw as many consumers as possible for as long as possible.
Classic situation of wanting to encourage the massive R&D expenditure for a product which is supposed to benefit the general public, but also wanting the typical laws of supply & demand to make sure that the product is made available to the generic public as efficiently as possible.
The classic answer is, of course, since the R&D is for the public good, then the generic public should pay for it in the form of taxpayer-financed basic research. Then you let private companies use non-exclusive access to the results of that R&D so that they will compete with each other to provide the most value to their customers.
This is a normal scenario for any situation where the act of creation has a large up-front cost, but the actual implementation is more incremental. No one entity wants to be responsible for the upfront cost & then get screwed by the others for the implementation, so the only way to "naturally" get through this dilemna is by forcing some sort of cooperation between all the entities to share the upfront cost.
Patents can make it worthless to do research. Not only are you prohibited from making money from the patented idea (even if you did the work to "discover" it yourself & they just happened to get to the patent office a little earlier), but you can't do anything with the idea that might hurt the patent-holder's profit stream (like distribute seeds with patented genes for FREE to starving people).