Don't worry, there's a coalition in the Canadian governmnet that makes sure that Canadian TV is not soiled by American thoughts and things, I would guess this Oscar broadcast won't reach any Canadians...
Sure, but to get you started, get a dictionary or search the web for things like "real estate" and "private property". Private property is nice concept invented by capitalists to describe when you can buy something and then you control it and don't have to share it if you don't want to.
And I'm not recommending private individual ownership of rivers, a logical owner of a river might be a county or a state, "regulated" by an elected group of representatives, keeping with the american system of government.
Don't assume when thinking of this enhanced GUI that you're going to have a Von Neumann-based architecture, a "GUI" like he describes is more than just a new way of looking at old stuf, its all new. And the Von Neumann archiecture might not be the one to make the transition...
Now we just need to find a couple non-Von-Neumann architectures that will work with this information model;)
I finally got around to watching the Douglas Engelbart colloquim on Stanford (it was/.d for about a month) Online. In it some guy (not Doug and I can't remember who it was) said near the end of one segment that he feared standards because they stick around longer than we ever intend them to. For the most part, i think he's right and the answers in this interviwe seem to be fighting themselves about it. Consider this:
"I am basically hopeful that we will see more respect for standards on the Web. The concept of proprietary extensions has lost and very few mainstream sites do anything any more that cannot be seen by the vast majority of users. This is one of the true benefits from the boom in e-commerce. No self-respecting salesperson wants to turn away paying customers at the door just because they don't have the latest beta-download of some browser. "
Sounds like its all gung-ho for standards right? Well, what about those standards we've got? What about the fact that TONS of people are still using 3.0 compliant browsers and that the majority of sites pander to them so as not to turn away the customer as this guy says will happen withOUT standards. it seems to me a different solution is in order. Auto-updating seems the logical choice - give the user no choice to upgrade - but some upgrades suck. Consider the newest RealPlayer over the old versions. It's titanic, bloated beyond all belief, and riddled with an ugly user interface presenting a million options no sane user would ever frequent (I mean wouild never frequent all of them enough to warrant their top-level exposure).
Esperandi BTW, if you wanna search for the original guys statement I talked about from the colloquim, I'm 85% sure that he makes the statement within the last 5 minuts of part 1 or 2, more likely 2.
You might help to take the suggestions and present your theory better, but beyond that you're right.
Good prediction of the market would require near-perfect emulation of the human brains of every person in the world as well as the entire physical universe.
How else would the computational model take into account the president that kills himself, the mom who gets jilted and sels all the stock low, the solar flares that disrupt a critical transmission of stock ticker information and scramble it to read IBM down $100 and leads to an explosion in trading activity, first on IBM and next on companies that study and predict solar flares, companies that shield stock transmissions from the effects of those flares, the news organizations that got the real poop first, etc, etc, etc.
The stock market is not some weird lottery, it is based on the performance of individual human beings. If you know what to look for inside the company, its easy to make big. If you rely on finding patterns, well, then it IS a lottery.
Just wait until one of the countries in the EU sustains a substantial hit to their economy and the currency of the other countries takes a dive, I have a feeling almost everyone will kill the idea of "large" currency like this, let alone a global one.
There are always a substantially smaller number of well-doing countries compared to how many poorly-performing countries there are. The world is smaller to *US* (people on the net) but not to the people in third world countries whose fuckups on the road to progess (we had them too, so don't jump on me and say I'm cutting the third world short) we will be funding... and we'll be losing that. At best case the currency would get to the point where no child goes to school until theres enough money to send EVERY child to school. Heh, yeah, right. That's been tried before and it killed millions of people every single time it has been tried...
I think he's harking back to the cultural malaise and its effect on the economy in a way. For instance, everyone is taught that there is no breakout stock, there are no great companies, there are no achievements. if this was not just something you read or were told but actually believed and everyone followed this as well, how would the economy get picked up once it fell exactly?
Well, it wouldn't. He's ignoring something that people absolutely love to ignore by doing this. it's not the megacorps that break the market and do fantabulous things (altho if IBm releases half the stuff they've been claiming to be doing, they'll be really close, but even then it's not the company doing it), its individuals. If everyone in the world believes there are no breakout products except for one guy and that guy's even moderately sharp, he's going to turn the world on its head.
There will always be geniuses, and they will always be the ones moving the world.
Esperandi (please do not rebut with things like "But everyone is special, nobody is any better than anyone else")
Well, as soon as one of the countries goes into an economic nosedive and drives the currency of the entire EU into the toilet along with it, I have a feeling we'll see an end to this kind of nonsense...
Esperandi What if the dollar had shared the decline of the yen in that japanese crash recently? People would not be happy about that kind of stuff... Wow, a global currency might make warfare a zero-sum game with nothing to lose on either side, at least currency-wise... think bout it.
Did you read the article? He specifically said that food was hard to come by unless you would eat bacteria-grown food.
Right there he puts himself in the cross-hairs for being targetted as being overly influenced by current trends. I mean, come on, any idiot can see that genetically engineered foods is the new luddite ploy that has come across every technological innovation. If he was quick he'd notice that there will be problems, even deaths, for the luddites to grab onto, but the technology will continue to progress, become perfected, etc, and become publicly accepted with only the churches dissenting... and if you can't imagine a church being against genetically engineered food, what about the many churches against medicine, blood transfusions, etc?
Well, i think he might have considered the nanotech issue actually. Why wasn't it prominent and mentioned? Well, simple, it's sorta like the observation you made about the 16th century guy seeing the 20th.
Currently, people see the rate of progress speeding up and see no sign of it stopping. If you're going on this assumption and thinking of the future, what are you going to surmise? That progress will get so fast and IMPOSSIBLE to follow that people just will not care any more, or even be able to care.
Ahh, but he's wrong and you're right. This can never happen. Why? Because it takes longer to develop something new than it does to learn to use something new. It takes years to invent a car, minutes to learn how to drive it. Took generations to get a working computer out and a few weeks to learn (going by the original ones, now the learning curve is smaller - so is the production cycle).
If we ever get to a point where it would be technically possible to break this barrier, it will be avoided. The scenario I'm thinking of is something like 90 companies all making radically different computers. I mean, different architectures, different user interfaces (I mean DIFFERENT in the sense that Linux, Windows, MacOS, and all those are all the same... I mean like one is traditional, based on graphical windows on a monitor, the other is based on a heat pattern on the back of your hand, THAT different). If they're all developing at the same time, increasing their development curve and producing radically different products not only from each other but from their previous products... now, this of course is never ever going to happen. Why would the companies want it to? Even if the market was split exactly evenly to each company, capitalism (and it has to be capitalism) will drive one company to reduce the learning cycle below the development cycle. To do that, they'd have to do things like backwards compatibility, etc, etc.
So I don't worry about progress getting so fast that we sit back complacent and watch the big commercials for things without wonder. Also, Bruce kinda smashed his own dick in the door on that. Why would there be commercials if no one cared about them or even moreso, if people had the view that a breakout product was impossible?
You know, it wouldn't surprise me one bit... Smoking isn't viewed as a health risk by anti-smoking advocates, it's viewed either as being duped by big tobacco companies or being an uncaring jerk evilly infringing on the rights of others to not breathe second-hand smoke (all so clearly outlined in our constitution of course)
"One base efficiency--really, the major efficiency stressed by pure capitalism is the maximization of pure monetary profit in the foreseeable future. So in the case of MythicalCorp, Inc., if it's possible to save a buck by spewing pollutants into your local river, it's most efficient to do so!"
Would it still be efficient to do so if the owner of the river could sue you royally? Of course not. What about if the owner of the river specifically did not let you have access to the river in addition to suing? Wel, you'd have to do smething else. I think the owners of the environments being harmed should be responsible for protecting them, but it's al handed off the EPA. It's too big of a job for the EPA to regulate it down, but if the property owners are doing it, it might turn out better.
And the point about it being in the corporations best interest to preserve the enviroment cannot be discounted simply because there are a few stupid corporations that don't deserve it...
Did anyone thinking this article is slamming capitalism stop to think about the things that were dropped in that article prety subltly? For instance, when he says all children are taught probability theory and there are no breakout stocks and no one imagines they can beat the market, there is no greed, etc. This to me sounds like a call FOR capitalism. If a company wants to be greedy and make tons of money, they have to serve the customers above and beyond their competitors, if there is no greed, why would someone make a better computer?
Next he mentions the globo. He says it reduced currency fluctuations and such. Have you ever considered a global currency in an eceonomic aspect? Say the economy in Uganda takes a big dive - all the currency in the entire world takes a devaluation. Disasters are distributed to the entire world. So are booms, so if a country starts doing fantabulous, the country doesn't grow at all, the value of the currency just goes up a few bits. And considering how often a huge boom comes along compared to how often disasters hit all over the globe, this is a bad situation.
When he says that people have forgotten about alternatives to capitalism and the like, I wonder if he realizes that the world he depicts is already devoid of capitalism. I don't have any idea what it would be called, its certainly not any Marxist offshoot or anything like that, but it's missing all of the key features of capitalism. He already stated that there is no free market because everything is controlled and there can be no breakout products and no market fluctuations, greed, or competition.
The rest of the article is basically a blowup of an old dystopian view of any given future that all the good stuff has already been invented and in the future everything will just be more of the same. All the new technology he describes is boring and pase. I find it hard to believe that this would happen this close in the future. Do you still get jazzed when you see that in a couple years your computer is going to be 10x faster than it is now? Of course! And if you hear in 2 years that your compter is going to be 20x faster in another 2 years, you're still going to get jazzed. You're not going to get bored with it.
There is a human condition that I think is ignored or viewed as nonexistant here. That is the desire to see great works doen by other humans and perhaps even the innate desire to do great things and show them to other people. There was never a point in history when this was not alive and well. It is not simply that humans wish to improve the condition of their life, they wish to see achievements. Maybe its some evolutionary device or something, but I definitely see it.
Esperandi Is there an obscure economic model similar to the one this article says capitalism turned into?
Read upwards... one of the posts moderated up above this tells of a much better way of doing this that does not involve removing the BIOS *at*all* and only involves flashing the BIOS and adding a 10ohm resistor...
Basically you want to live another life inside a computer game... well, that is being done. They're called MUDs. Probably caused more divorces and flunked students than anything else in the world...
You have to have an imagination though, it won't draw all the pretty pictures for you.
Hey, was Parsec the game where if you fired your guns too fast your ship overheated and got destroyed (or maybe you just couldn't fire any more for awhile,I forget)... my neighbor had a TI, and I think I remember this game;) Of course I only had a Vic-20 at my house, but I learned to code while he dropped out of school;)
Well, they hate hip-hop so they can't be hardly that bad... but then again, their choice is mariachi music which is almost as bad... damn, between a rock and a hard place.
Tell me where they stand on technology issues, maybe then you can get me to hate them;)
Esperandi They can eat my dog, they can take my neighbors SUV, they can even take my hemoglobin, as long as they promise to beat the hell out of the AT&T execs until I get a motherfucking cable modem!
Is this a plausible scenario (polluting Europa I mean) considering all the radiation the probe has endured? Shouldn't all organic organisms be completely destroyed?
Esperandi Are viruses immune to radiation? Considering we've never been able to cure a single one (go ahead, do the research, we can't kill the buggers) I'm guessing that they are...
I would bet money that he believes the money should be given to people who hate money and people with money which is where it came from in the first place...
Some people don't quite understand the point of taxes unless it's taking from the rich and giving to the poor, forcing the rich to subsidize the people who hate them the most (and the poor hate the rich because the rich subsidize them, its a nasty cycle)..
personally, I wish my money could go towards more Mars probes and such, the promising speeches I've heard of terraforming and all those sorts of neato things we might be able to do on Mars have really gotten me jazzed up. Hell, I'll pay even more to be one of the first million colonists as long as they don't decide on a socialist-based form of government! For free! (I'm guessing they'll have to pay, most people wouldn't want to leave everyone they know to live on another planet...)
Ahh, but by choosing to remain in America, he also chooses to participate in a democratic republic which requires a certain amount of people to do some bitching. So to him I say, bitch on!
Esperandi P.S. Yes, your tax money is stolen from you, there is no other word for it. Even if you WANT to pay, it is taken involuntarily with the threat of removing your freedom behind it. This is required to maintain a democratic republic, you change it so that if you don't pay the taxes, you get absolutely no benefit from anyone elses payment either.
If you go to the USPTO website, you will find there are several job openings for people in computer science to help establish the legitimacy of patents. If the jobs are available, that means they are not filled oddly enough. Which means we don't need a patent watch any more than any other industry, we need some people to apply for the damn jobs!
I don't have the experience they require and I abhor filling out the 99 forms they want you to fill out to even get considered, or I'd do it.
The only thing I can think of using.sucks for is to provide satirists an easy way to be caught and busted to the full extent of the law for every copyrighted image and trademarked phrase/logo they use.
With more and more top-level domains, companies will have to invest several grand just to be able to have a domain name that isn't the launching point for a million "these people suck" sites. Now, I think critical sites should still exist, but EVERY retailer on the net has something bad that can be said about them, if you started checking the.sucks version of the URL every time you went to a place, you'd probably never buy anything at all...
Which would lead to a torrent of libel and defamation lawsuits... oh this smells all bad
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, there's a coalition in the Canadian governmnet that makes sure that Canadian TV is not soiled by American thoughts and things, I would guess this Oscar broadcast won't reach any Canadians...
Esperandi
Sure, but to get you started, get a dictionary or search the web for things like "real estate" and "private property". Private property is nice concept invented by capitalists to describe when you can buy something and then you control it and don't have to share it if you don't want to.
And I'm not recommending private individual ownership of rivers, a logical owner of a river might be a county or a state, "regulated" by an elected group of representatives, keeping with the american system of government.
Esperandi
Don't assume when thinking of this enhanced GUI that you're going to have a Von Neumann-based architecture, a "GUI" like he describes is more than just a new way of looking at old stuf, its all new. And the Von Neumann archiecture might not be the one to make the transition...
;)
Now we just need to find a couple non-Von-Neumann architectures that will work with this information model
Esperandi
I finally got around to watching the Douglas Engelbart colloquim on Stanford (it was /.d for about a month) Online. In it some guy (not Doug and I can't remember who it was) said near the end of one segment that he feared standards because they stick around longer than we ever intend them to. For the most part, i think he's right and the answers in this interviwe seem to be fighting themselves about it. Consider this:
"I am basically hopeful that we will see more respect for standards on the Web. The concept of proprietary extensions has lost and very few mainstream sites do anything any more that cannot be seen by the vast majority of users. This is one of the true benefits from the boom in e-commerce. No self-respecting salesperson wants to turn away paying customers at the door just because they don't have the latest beta-download of some browser. "
Sounds like its all gung-ho for standards right? Well, what about those standards we've got? What about the fact that TONS of people are still using 3.0 compliant browsers and that the majority of sites pander to them so as not to turn away the customer as this guy says will happen withOUT standards. it seems to me a different solution is in order. Auto-updating seems the logical choice - give the user no choice to upgrade - but some upgrades suck. Consider the newest RealPlayer over the old versions. It's titanic, bloated beyond all belief, and riddled with an ugly user interface presenting a million options no sane user would ever frequent (I mean wouild never frequent all of them enough to warrant their top-level exposure).
Esperandi
BTW, if you wanna search for the original guys statement I talked about from the colloquim, I'm 85% sure that he makes the statement within the last 5 minuts of part 1 or 2, more likely 2.
Remember his answer the next time you start to believe that in capitalism, a better product won't always pull the consumer.
Esperandi
You might help to take the suggestions and present your theory better, but beyond that you're right.
Good prediction of the market would require near-perfect emulation of the human brains of every person in the world as well as the entire physical universe.
How else would the computational model take into account the president that kills himself, the mom who gets jilted and sels all the stock low, the solar flares that disrupt a critical transmission of stock ticker information and scramble it to read IBM down $100 and leads to an explosion in trading activity, first on IBM and next on companies that study and predict solar flares, companies that shield stock transmissions from the effects of those flares, the news organizations that got the real poop first, etc, etc, etc.
The stock market is not some weird lottery, it is based on the performance of individual human beings. If you know what to look for inside the company, its easy to make big. If you rely on finding patterns, well, then it IS a lottery.
Esperandi
Just wait until one of the countries in the EU sustains a substantial hit to their economy and the currency of the other countries takes a dive, I have a feeling almost everyone will kill the idea of "large" currency like this, let alone a global one.
There are always a substantially smaller number of well-doing countries compared to how many poorly-performing countries there are. The world is smaller to *US* (people on the net) but not to the people in third world countries whose fuckups on the road to progess (we had them too, so don't jump on me and say I'm cutting the third world short) we will be funding... and we'll be losing that. At best case the currency would get to the point where no child goes to school until theres enough money to send EVERY child to school. Heh, yeah, right. That's been tried before and it killed millions of people every single time it has been tried...
Esperandi
I think he's harking back to the cultural malaise and its effect on the economy in a way. For instance, everyone is taught that there is no breakout stock, there are no great companies, there are no achievements. if this was not just something you read or were told but actually believed and everyone followed this as well, how would the economy get picked up once it fell exactly?
Well, it wouldn't. He's ignoring something that people absolutely love to ignore by doing this. it's not the megacorps that break the market and do fantabulous things (altho if IBm releases half the stuff they've been claiming to be doing, they'll be really close, but even then it's not the company doing it), its individuals. If everyone in the world believes there are no breakout products except for one guy and that guy's even moderately sharp, he's going to turn the world on its head.
There will always be geniuses, and they will always be the ones moving the world.
Esperandi
(please do not rebut with things like "But everyone is special, nobody is any better than anyone else")
Well, as soon as one of the countries goes into an economic nosedive and drives the currency of the entire EU into the toilet along with it, I have a feeling we'll see an end to this kind of nonsense...
Esperandi
What if the dollar had shared the decline of the yen in that japanese crash recently? People would not be happy about that kind of stuff...
Wow, a global currency might make warfare a zero-sum game with nothing to lose on either side, at least currency-wise... think bout it.
Did you read the article? He specifically said that food was hard to come by unless you would eat bacteria-grown food.
Right there he puts himself in the cross-hairs for being targetted as being overly influenced by current trends. I mean, come on, any idiot can see that genetically engineered foods is the new luddite ploy that has come across every technological innovation. If he was quick he'd notice that there will be problems, even deaths, for the luddites to grab onto, but the technology will continue to progress, become perfected, etc, and become publicly accepted with only the churches dissenting... and if you can't imagine a church being against genetically engineered food, what about the many churches against medicine, blood transfusions, etc?
Esperandi
Well, i think he might have considered the nanotech issue actually. Why wasn't it prominent and mentioned? Well, simple, it's sorta like the observation you made about the 16th century guy seeing the 20th.
Currently, people see the rate of progress speeding up and see no sign of it stopping. If you're going on this assumption and thinking of the future, what are you going to surmise? That progress will get so fast and IMPOSSIBLE to follow that people just will not care any more, or even be able to care.
Ahh, but he's wrong and you're right. This can never happen. Why? Because it takes longer to develop something new than it does to learn to use something new. It takes years to invent a car, minutes to learn how to drive it. Took generations to get a working computer out and a few weeks to learn (going by the original ones, now the learning curve is smaller - so is the production cycle).
If we ever get to a point where it would be technically possible to break this barrier, it will be avoided. The scenario I'm thinking of is something like 90 companies all making radically different computers. I mean, different architectures, different user interfaces (I mean DIFFERENT in the sense that Linux, Windows, MacOS, and all those are all the same... I mean like one is traditional, based on graphical windows on a monitor, the other is based on a heat pattern on the back of your hand, THAT different). If they're all developing at the same time, increasing their development curve and producing radically different products not only from each other but from their previous products... now, this of course is never ever going to happen. Why would the companies want it to? Even if the market was split exactly evenly to each company, capitalism (and it has to be capitalism) will drive one company to reduce the learning cycle below the development cycle. To do that, they'd have to do things like backwards compatibility, etc, etc.
So I don't worry about progress getting so fast that we sit back complacent and watch the big commercials for things without wonder. Also, Bruce kinda smashed his own dick in the door on that. Why would there be commercials if no one cared about them or even moreso, if people had the view that a breakout product was impossible?
Esperandi
You know, it wouldn't surprise me one bit... Smoking isn't viewed as a health risk by anti-smoking advocates, it's viewed either as being duped by big tobacco companies or being an uncaring jerk evilly infringing on the rights of others to not breathe second-hand smoke (all so clearly outlined in our constitution of course)
Esperandi
"One base efficiency--really, the major efficiency stressed by pure capitalism is the maximization of pure monetary profit in the foreseeable future. So in the case of MythicalCorp, Inc., if it's possible to save a buck by spewing pollutants into your local river, it's most efficient to do so!"
Would it still be efficient to do so if the owner of the river could sue you royally? Of course not. What about if the owner of the river specifically did not let you have access to the river in addition to suing? Wel, you'd have to do smething else. I think the owners of the environments being harmed should be responsible for protecting them, but it's al handed off the EPA. It's too big of a job for the EPA to regulate it down, but if the property owners are doing it, it might turn out better.
And the point about it being in the corporations best interest to preserve the enviroment cannot be discounted simply because there are a few stupid corporations that don't deserve it...
Esperandi
Did anyone thinking this article is slamming capitalism stop to think about the things that were dropped in that article prety subltly? For instance, when he says all children are taught probability theory and there are no breakout stocks and no one imagines they can beat the market, there is no greed, etc. This to me sounds like a call FOR capitalism. If a company wants to be greedy and make tons of money, they have to serve the customers above and beyond their competitors, if there is no greed, why would someone make a better computer?
Next he mentions the globo. He says it reduced currency fluctuations and such. Have you ever considered a global currency in an eceonomic aspect? Say the economy in Uganda takes a big dive - all the currency in the entire world takes a devaluation. Disasters are distributed to the entire world. So are booms, so if a country starts doing fantabulous, the country doesn't grow at all, the value of the currency just goes up a few bits. And considering how often a huge boom comes along compared to how often disasters hit all over the globe, this is a bad situation.
When he says that people have forgotten about alternatives to capitalism and the like, I wonder if he realizes that the world he depicts is already devoid of capitalism. I don't have any idea what it would be called, its certainly not any Marxist offshoot or anything like that, but it's missing all of the key features of capitalism. He already stated that there is no free market because everything is controlled and there can be no breakout products and no market fluctuations, greed, or competition.
The rest of the article is basically a blowup of an old dystopian view of any given future that all the good stuff has already been invented and in the future everything will just be more of the same. All the new technology he describes is boring and pase. I find it hard to believe that this would happen this close in the future. Do you still get jazzed when you see that in a couple years your computer is going to be 10x faster than it is now? Of course! And if you hear in 2 years that your compter is going to be 20x faster in another 2 years, you're still going to get jazzed. You're not going to get bored with it.
There is a human condition that I think is ignored or viewed as nonexistant here. That is the desire to see great works doen by other humans and perhaps even the innate desire to do great things and show them to other people. There was never a point in history when this was not alive and well. It is not simply that humans wish to improve the condition of their life, they wish to see achievements. Maybe its some evolutionary device or something, but I definitely see it.
Esperandi
Is there an obscure economic model similar to the one this article says capitalism turned into?
Damn, can't believe I remembered that game, I was YOUNG... like no older than 8...
Esperandi
But it looks like I'll be trying out this new one, that game was damn fun.
Read upwards... one of the posts moderated up above this tells of a much better way of doing this that does not involve removing the BIOS *at*all* and only involves flashing the BIOS and adding a 10ohm resistor...
Esperandi
Is the BIOS limitation why the newer geForce cards won't work on older mobos (well, older than the Athlon boards out now) with the VIA chipset?
Esperandi
Just bought an Athlon, new mobo, and geForce card... made sure I got one with the AMD bridges and NO VIA!
Basically you want to live another life inside a computer game... well, that is being done. They're called MUDs. Probably caused more divorces and flunked students than anything else in the world...
You have to have an imagination though, it won't draw all the pretty pictures for you.
Esperandi
Hey, was Parsec the game where if you fired your guns too fast your ship overheated and got destroyed (or maybe you just couldn't fire any more for awhile,I forget)... my neighbor had a TI, and I think I remember this game ;) Of course I only had a Vic-20 at my house, but I learned to code while he dropped out of school ;)
Esperandi
Well, they hate hip-hop so they can't be hardly that bad... but then again, their choice is mariachi music which is almost as bad... damn, between a rock and a hard place.
;)
Tell me where they stand on technology issues, maybe then you can get me to hate them
Esperandi
They can eat my dog, they can take my neighbors SUV, they can even take my hemoglobin, as long as they promise to beat the hell out of the AT&T execs until I get a motherfucking cable modem!
Is this a plausible scenario (polluting Europa I mean) considering all the radiation the probe has endured? Shouldn't all organic organisms be completely destroyed?
Esperandi
Are viruses immune to radiation? Considering we've never been able to cure a single one (go ahead, do the research, we can't kill the buggers) I'm guessing that they are...
I would bet money that he believes the money should be given to people who hate money and people with money which is where it came from in the first place...
Some people don't quite understand the point of taxes unless it's taking from the rich and giving to the poor, forcing the rich to subsidize the people who hate them the most (and the poor hate the rich because the rich subsidize them, its a nasty cycle)..
personally, I wish my money could go towards more Mars probes and such, the promising speeches I've heard of terraforming and all those sorts of neato things we might be able to do on Mars have really gotten me jazzed up. Hell, I'll pay even more to be one of the first million colonists as long as they don't decide on a socialist-based form of government! For free! (I'm guessing they'll have to pay, most people wouldn't want to leave everyone they know to live on another planet...)
Ahh, but by choosing to remain in America, he also chooses to participate in a democratic republic which requires a certain amount of people to do some bitching. So to him I say, bitch on!
Esperandi
P.S. Yes, your tax money is stolen from you, there is no other word for it. Even if you WANT to pay, it is taken involuntarily with the threat of removing your freedom behind it. This is required to maintain a democratic republic, you change it so that if you don't pay the taxes, you get absolutely no benefit from anyone elses payment either.
If you go to the USPTO website, you will find there are several job openings for people in computer science to help establish the legitimacy of patents. If the jobs are available, that means they are not filled oddly enough. Which means we don't need a patent watch any more than any other industry, we need some people to apply for the damn jobs!
I don't have the experience they require and I abhor filling out the 99 forms they want you to fill out to even get considered, or I'd do it.
Esperandi
The only thing I can think of using .sucks for is to provide satirists an easy way to be caught and busted to the full extent of the law for every copyrighted image and trademarked phrase/logo they use.
.sucks version of the URL every time you went to a place, you'd probably never buy anything at all...
With more and more top-level domains, companies will have to invest several grand just to be able to have a domain name that isn't the launching point for a million "these people suck" sites. Now, I think critical sites should still exist, but EVERY retailer on the net has something bad that can be said about them, if you started checking the
Which would lead to a torrent of libel and defamation lawsuits... oh this smells all bad
Esperandi