I was with a group in the 1970s that saw a clear connection between doctor-assisted abortion and doctor-assisted euthansia.
If it is OK for a doctor to terminate what will become a baby, then it must also be OK for a doctor to terminate a person with a "diminished quality of life", right? It can be argued, and has been, that a person with one or more conditions that contribute to a diminished quality of life isn't really a person anymore. Therefore, it is OK to kill them because you aren't really killing a whole person.
What we had in 1972 was a rule that said 24 weeks was the dividing point between a bunch of cells that had the unrealized potential of human life and a real human. I think we need that dividing line because right now you can find folks arguing the entire spectrum from fertilization to birth. In 1972 the 24 weeks division was both arbitrary and based on what was medically possible - before 24 weeks you could consider a fetus to be non-viable. That has changed today with the possibility of viability much, much earlier. However, it doesn't change the fact that from a legal and reasonably moral perspective there should be a dividing line.
I do not believe fertilization is a good point for this, nor am I in favor of placing it out at one year after birth - there have been a number of times when a baby wasn't named or considered to be a person until after one year of age. I think the division can be made at some time before birth without causing too much of a problem - and acknowledging that this eliminates the legality of partial-birth abortion.
Why is this any of my concern? Because as a society we should not be killing individuals and claiming it is a medical procedure. Partial birth abortion is clearly killing a viable infant. If we allow this to be a legal medical procedure there is no reason we cannot also decide to terminate those that have become a burden to their caregivers. While it would be a fine way to eliminate the concept of the "nursing home" it doesn't change the fact that it would be killing an individual.
Humans have a great capacity for justifying their actions and given the opportunity to do so I have no doubt that it is a small step from deciding old people that are a burden can be killed to expand this to include persons of diminshed capacity, gays, autistics, gypsys and any other group that those in power find to be burdensome.
I'm not sure you have a firm grasp of the problem.
The problem, from my reading, can be explained as analogous to having a numeric data item that sometimes gets letters put in it. Rather than rejecting this as invalid browsers are making stuff up as they go along so A=1, B=2, and so on and so forth. This has the obvious benefit to users of not exposing them to the improper construction of web pages, but it does create sort of a sub-standard whereby other authors recognize this work-around and decide to make use of it in a widespread manner. Suddenly, we have a data item that is supposed to accept only numeric values but now it also accepts other things as well and interprets them.
Maladjusted Teenager then discovers that not only do we have A=1 but on some browser !@#!=exception and makes use of this.
The problem is the original non-validation and non-rejection of illegal input. Sure it makes this more "user friendly" but it opens huge gaping holes in any sort of standard. It then also encourages folks to intentionally code ABC when they want 123 because the browser accepts it. With widespread enough usage this interpretation is forced on all browsers because otherwise they are left flagging huge swaths of the web as "invalid". Keep doing this sort of stuff and you have the mess that we have today.
I assure you the solution isn't to not validate and accept anything unless you are prepared to throw out the idea of any sort of restricted content data item and everything becomes a string containing any possible character. And even that doesn't really work because of context - there are contexts where a numeric value is needed and having a non-numeric string is really incorrect. Where we have gone is pushing browsers to "interpret" this as something legal even when they should not. You can see where that has gotten us.
I'd say the correct behavior in all cases is to not interpret and not accept improper input but to throw it back. Perhaps go to the drastic step of saying because one part of this document is malformed, the document cannot be properly formatted. This would make it a lot more obvious to web designers, developers and authors they have done something wrong the first time they look at what they have done. Instead, we have interpretation trying to cover up mistakes and the result is they are hidden from both the author and the end user.
My experience with BIS and export regulations while not complete does indicate to me that trade with Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea is permitted from the US only with a license. An unobtainable license. Which is the same thing as being completely banned.
I do not believe there is any company in the US that would put forth the effort to even inquire how someone gets such a license. So while there is no law specifically saying "Trade with Iran is banned" it is a case of de facto banning because the license is unobtainable.
Buying a full auto machine gun is possible in the US, but you need a tax stamp on your license to do so. The stamp costs $3000 last time I heard. You need to be pretty committed if you want to own a MAC-10 legally. Having held one once where the owner was describing the hoops he had to go through to get it legally (he was a cop) was pretty interesting. I would consider the licensing required for trade with Iran to be somewhat more severe than the ban on full auto weapons.
I would like to believe the government has an obligation to take care of me and support me in a style compatible with my personality. I would like to believe that there are a few fat cats out there that are ruining it for the rest of us and if it wasn't for them, the government would be able to take care of all of us. All it would take is taxing the heck out of these fat cats.
Looking back, though, it seems the government has had more than a few problems with mismanagement on a huge scale. They can't seem to get anything done without spending 10 times more than it was planned to cost. Government at all levels tend to increase in scope and expenditures until some kind of a external limit is reached.
It should be pretty obvious that the more money that is given to the US government, such as a 50% tax rate, the more money will be wasted, misspent and mismanaged. While some folks might not mind working half a year, every year, to support my granny it starts to grate on people when they understand that like a badly-run charity only a small fraction ends up in the hands of grannies. The rest is going to studies that prove cockroaches are really nasty critters or that we would all be in trouble if the oxygen level in the atmosphere dropped to 0%.
The most important thing to understand is that people in the US have a somewhat different culture than the rest of the world. In most of the rest of the world when a 70-year-old man is told he is dying it is a sad message but one that everyone understands is the way things are. In the US the response is to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to put off the date of death as long as possible. The disparity between these two things is why the US health care system is incomprehensible to a lot of people. A good part of the US population will never accept the "you're dying, accept it" message, and the spending caused by this will insure that the US health care system cannot function like the rest of the world. It also means that old people from the rest of the world come here to squeeze out a couple of more years if they can afford it.
The second most important thing to understand is that people in government aren't doing it because they feel an obligation to serve the rest of humanity. They are doing it because it will lead to power and riches for themselves. We can try to curb this, but that is the motivation. Giving these people more power and access to more money doesn't solve any problems for the rest of us on the outside, but it does make it possible for more and more people to get in on the gravy train that is government service. One possible outcome is that we all are working for the government and everyone is happy. That has been tried and it didn't work out very well.
No, the reasons behind the anti-vax movement are pretty clear. It is based on the idea that the US government is completely owned by corporate interested and these corporate interests want to create a population that is dependent on them for everything. A society where the majority of people were autistic would be extremely dependent.
This also assumes that anyone with more money that the average Joe is a sociopathic monster. Or a Republican. Or both.
Iran is committed to the extinction of the Jews. This is a publicly stated policy and one they have enshrined in their laws, along with a lot of other Middle East nations. Do not decide to put on a Star of David and visit Iran even as a joke. They will treat you just like the TSA does with people that joke about bombs.
People with a lot more knowledge than you or I have concluded it makes no sense for Iran to pursue nuclear generation of electricity and even less sense for them to build their own nuclear fuel cycle for doing so. I suppose it might make sense if they "know" their trade with the rest of the world is going to be cut off and their oil supplies burned. Interesting thought, huh?
Alternatively, they are clearly enriching uranium way past the power generating reactor level. They say it is for "research reactors" and "medical purposes". Interesting in that I believe most of the medical purpose radioactive materials are made in reactors in the US that are fueled by pretty much the same sort of low-enrichment uranium that is in power generation reactors. Today it is pretty clear that if you want anything over 3% enrichment there are few non-weapon uses. When you push that up to 90% there is only one possible use. Iran has the capability of the 98% or so that is needed for weapons.
Iran does appear to some uninformed people to be seriously short of delivery vehicles. These people have been playing superpower games too long and "know" the only possible way to deliver a nuclear warhead is with a missle or a bomber. They utterly neglect to think that all first-generation nuclear weapons were extremely heavy (over 10,000lbs) and many second-generation weapons were similarly weighty. Since all of the important targets for Iran are along a seacoast a cargo ship would seem to be a simple and obvious delivery vehicle and they have plenty of them already.
You can pretty clearly see the evaporation of the "freedoms" you are talking about over the last 50 years or so.
Why do you need ID? Because there are a lot of criminals on the streets. Why are they there? It seems we have an economic system that divides people into winners and losers and if the losers aren't accepting of their role in life crime is the obvious solution. So we have somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the people in the country stealing, robbing, defrauding and doing whatever they can to get by - at the expense usually of other "losers" in the system. Sounds cruel, doesn't it? The problem is when you come home to find every single item of value removed from your house or apartment you don't want to go quietly, you want revenge! You want to see someone punished. Well, that is how we got here.
Why do you need to show registration and proof of insurance? Simple. People like me when I was younger. No insurance and I did get in accidents. Sucks to be the guy that gets hit, big time. Because I had nothing there was no point in suing me. So there was a strong move to prevent such people from driving. So today without insurance you aren't going anywhere and if stopped by the cops you will walk home.
Why do you need to show some kind of proof that you belong in the US? Because a lot of people would like to come here and grab what is lying around waiting to be grabbed. Frankly, anyone that is still in a place like Nigeria is there because they can't get out. Everyone else left already or is running the place for their own benefit. So why do we want to keep them out? Because if we let them all in the US will be just like Nigeria (or Bangladesh, or Uganda or whatever) in a few years. Again, sounds cruel doesn't it? But the fact is there is only so much to go around and collectively humanity has spent the last 100 years or so spreading things thinner and thinner. There are a few places where it isn't spread quite so thin and people can live decently - but this all depends on not having a few extra millions of people with their hand out.
I see you bought into the Cuba blockade in a big way. You want to go to Cuba, you do what the other 10,000 people that go there every year do and fly through Mexico City. Yes, there are no flights direct from Miami, partly because if there were there would be 100 people left in Cuba after a couple of years. A good part of Cuba's economy is keeping the people there bottled up so they cannot leave. I will say the Cuban blockade is somewhat silly, but the alternative is for the Cuban half of Miami to bring all their relatives over - which they have been trying to do since 1963. It also is difficult for anyone, including governments, to admit their policy is a failure and just drop it. Remind yourself of this when you figure out your son or daughter is found using drugs after the fifth time you warned them and "forbid it". Hard to give in an just say "Use all the drugs you want, I don't care." Well, it is pretty much the same for the US government and Cuba - and it would be like a really wild weekend if we opened the doors now - a wild weekend that lasted twenty or thirty years. And the "house" would look just like it would after that sort of party.
Yes, there is less "freedom" but a lot of this is less freedom to be an asshole and these freedoms were abused by assholes in the past. The moral of the story is clear: if you let the assholes do as they want after a while they ruin it for everyone.
I believe there was a pretty good statement of how this worked in Brave New World. There was enough information available then (1931) to say that this didn't work worth a damn.
People haven't changed much since 1931 and what didn't work then doesn't work now. However, the idea that this could be used to influence people (rather than to educate them) has not really been explored to any depth. Sure, it might work. There is some evidence that the "self confidence" tapes from long ago (1960s?) had some effect or at least people were buying them for "sleep improvement". However, this has the rather nasty implications of "programming" people and the unfortunate ways this could be utilized. Also explored by Brave New World as it was pretty obvious how this could be misused back then.
If pinch-to-zoom existed and that can be documented in court then a patent on it - any patent at all - will simply be thrown out. Once something has been publicly disclosed you have 12 months to file or it becomes permanently unpatentable.
Something tells me that Apple wouldn't bother with trying to patent the unpatentable unless they thought they had something new to bring to it. Sometimes it is worth the effort to chase after something unpatentable but generally it makes you look pretty silly when it gets thrown out.
You can say it should be impossible to patent the unpatentable, but that would require the patent office to have complete knowledge of everything in the world. I think that power is reserved for deities, and I am glad the patent office doesn't want to be considered as such.
What I realized a while back is there are plenty of people that would welcome as you put it "semi-permanent malthusian depression" but so far they have done very little to push their cause.
We have a rather fragile infrastructure involved with the production of CO2 in mass quantities. It wouldn't take much to damage a coal-fired power plant enough so that it shut down, perhaps for years. For example, damage to high-pressure steam conduits would require a huge amount of work as work damage to chimneys. Both are pretty fragile so we aren't talking about aircraft with nuclear weapons but people with picks and dynamite.
Want to reduce the CO2 from cars? How about damaging some bridges around major cities that feed them? Suddenly there will be less commuter traffic, thus reducing the CO2 emissions. Same thing goes for passenger aircraft - these are extremely fragile and it wouldn't take much to disable aircraft in ways that wouldn't kill people but would make people very reluctant to fly.
Why haven't the true belivers - those that believe millions, if not billions will die in the coming climate catestrophe if something isn't done immediately to curb CO2 emissions? Do we have a shortage of true believers?
Sorry, but the computing experience for the average Joe is a pretty bad one these days. He can be certain that his computer will be used by malware authors for their own ends and he is powerless to stop them.
Anti-virus solutions do not work when the user of the computer makes bad decisions. Because the user is incapable of being the knowledgable administrator of the computer that is required, it is going to turn into a bad experience. Nothing can prevent that - Joe doesn't want the training that would be required for him to effectively administer his computer.
Nobody else wants to do this job for free either. Sure, there are services Joe can sign up for that will do this for him and keep uninstalling Weather Bug every time he installs it. But they cost money and it is money Joe would rather spend elsewhere.
Bring in the walled garden or the Internet appliance and you have the solution to Joe's worries. His experience will not be sullied by malware, bots, trojans and viruses. This isn't what the geeks would like to happen, but unfortunately the malware authors have spoken and turned the world of general purpose computing into a minefield. Sucks to live in a minefield when you don't understand the mines or even that they exist.
The problem that we face today is that "general purpose computers" need administration. In a corporate environment they get this from the IT department. In a geek home, they get this from the users. In Joe Sixpack's home there isn't any at all.
The end result of this is Joe Sixpack's home computer is laden with trojans, viruses and malware. His banking information isn't safe and neither are credit cards or any other financial information. His computer is used by others to send spam and to infect other computers on the Internet. Needless to say every once in a while Joe gets his computer fixed (or replaced) and he isn't happy about the cost of doing this. When one of his neighbors gets an iPad and he sees the functionality without the risks he is sold and he will never go back to a PC that needs administering but doesn't get it.
The geeks are (of course) offended by this move. In many ways the response needs to be "Too bad, the marketplace has spoken."
When Joe Sixpack also happens to be involved in the government at some level this takes on a whole new aspect. Why should the government not take steps to protect other Joes from what he has experienced? Why should their private and financial information be at risk? We have pretty much proven that anti-virus and anti-malware software doesn't work, so that isn't a solution. The walled garden approach or the restricted functionality Internet appliance approach works and fits in well with what most users really want.
Of course you are going to see legislative moves to push people further and further towards solutions to the malware problem. And this is a good thing because we cannot as a society continue to tolerate unadministered computers that are actively being used against their owner's interests.
Any insurance company that allowed an airline to continue to fly with full coverage for crashes, hijackings, etc. after 9/11 would just be irresponsible. There are very few irresponsible insurance companies. The airlines proved they could not handle the security screening so Somthing Had To Be Done. Result: TSA.
You want to get rid of the TSA, the first thing you have to figure out is how the insurance companies get to continue to offer coverage to airlines. Anything that omits this is a non-starter. After you figure that out, you just might have a plan to get rid of the TSA.
Remember, the airlines can't take it back because they proved they can't do the job. Nobody is going to allow them to resume security screenings. So somebody else has to do it. And so far, nobody has figured out a way that isn't a carbon-copy of the TSA.
Single payer would be great, if there was actually a vote on this and it was implemented if it passed.
The problem for the US right now is a minority wants single payer right now whereas the majority isn't so sure. Especially considering the costs. And plenty of people are worried when the government is trying to cut costs in a big way what that might mean for a single payer plan - Canada tried that a while back in the 1980s I think and it was a disaster.
What we have lined up is all employer health care pretty much ends 1 Jan 2014 - the only approved plans will be dictated in Washington and they will just have to include the kitchen sink - acupuncture, homeopathy, chanting care, etc. So costs will be very, very high for everyone except the government. So what every business that I have had contact is planning is to pull the plug in 2014 and just pay the fine. It is a very, very small fine compared to the costs of insurance even today.
Well then, we will have single payer then, now won't we? Except who voted for this? Who explained what the costs would be. Not today with employers picking up a good part of the tab but in 2015 when it is all on the government? Nobody voted for this, nobody knows what the costs are going to be other than very, very high. And we will likely be in that government cost cutting mode. Not a good combination for starting a single payer system, now is it?
Not only that, but today the government is paying Medicaid and Medicare charges at about 30% of what is billed. This is why it can be a challange to find a doctor that will take a new Medicaid patient. What do you think will happen when everyone is a Medicaid patient in terms of what fees the doctors and hospitals get paid? No more cost shifting from the Medicare patients over to the privately insured.
Grey market refers to any unauthorized distribution channel. This ranges from bypassing normal distribution channels to import a product to selling one off the back of a truck. Most manufacturers disclaim any warranty responsibility for grey market goods, meaning that if it is not purchased through a legitimate and authorized distribution channel they aren't going to take any responsibility for it.
Since grey market includes both legal and illegal distribution it gets pretty messy if you want to get into a warranty fight. Yes, the manufacturer probably does have some responsibility, but it may be up to the person making the claim to thoroughly prove the item was not stolen at some point. That can range from being hard to impossible.
I do not believe grey market has ever referred to used goods. If some group is trying to stretch it out that far, that is interesting and novel. And is probably stretching things a bit too far.
As far as rebadged items go - meaning the piece is the same as something else but simply being sold under different names - it happens all the time and you may find it is cheaper with a less prestigious name on it. Meaning something that says Realistic on it may be identical to something sold by Hammacher Schlemmer under a different name but the price at Radio Shack may be a lot less. I don't see how this relates to grey market distribution at all.
Most countries require a customs declaration on the outside of the package so they don't have to open it. Also, a lot of times the exporter has to put the recipient's tax number on the customs declaration.
Of course lying on the customs declaration can mean a long, long prison term for the guy picking the item up.
We ship a lot of stuff to different countries and get to follow a different set of rules for almost every shipment. China requires a recipient id number, for example, which is utterly unique to China. Germany has a space for the tax id of the recipient but it isn't required.
Basically, it is a hugely manpower intensive task but it also relies on the fear of prosecution if the exporter lies on the customs documents.
The drug pricing and import restrictions are pretty simple to explain. If you look around a little bit you find that the drug manufacturers cut a deal in non-US markets and they do not offer that deal in the US, under any circumstances.
So a pill may be $1 CDN in Canada and $10 USD across the border with the only difference being the labelling on the box. Sometimes the pills are made in the same factory. Part of the problem is the attitude that "people in the US can afford it" and part of the problem is there is no single agency that can block the import or sale of a drug and force the manufacturer into a price deal. A significant problem is the drug company figures all of the costing based on US sales only and the rest of the world is pure profit. End result is the US pays for R&D and testing and the rest of the world rides for free. Because it is perceived that "we can afford it" and other such nonsense.
This is likely to change in two years. Most companies will be dropping health insurance and pushing the employees onto the government plan. This is single-payer through the back door without anyone voting on it, approving it or even being aware that it is going to happen. Expensive? Sure, for a while. You can bet the first thing to get knocked down will be drug prices. Hospital care will be the 2nd item on the list. The health care providers - doctors, nurses, PAs, etc. - get knocked down because the government reimbursement rate is today about 30% of the billed cost. Of course that means a lot of doctors will simply fold up because they can't take the 70% revenue hit, just like today a lot of doctors do not take Medicare or Medicaid patients because of this. Well, when they are all government-plan patients there aren't going to be any others.
Rough road coming, but ready-or-not here comes single payer in the US.
We are running on overbuilt capacity from the 1960s. After that it became very, very expensive to build a large power plant - with most of the new costs being public protests and public comment sessions that turned into more and more evironmental impact studies. Often the result was the project was abandoned.
In Arizona and Illinois (both places I have lived) the solution was simple: build "peaker" plants that run on natural gas and build them up over time from 200MW to more like 1000MW over time. This still results in a lot of protest activity but governing bodies are far more likely to ignore protests when the plant has been safely and cleanly operating for five years or so when it comes time to expand.
The problem is that this is just a delaying tactic that will not solve the problem in the long run. Most parts of the country could use another 2000MW of capacity right now. Certainly if the economy recovers there will be considerable need for more and more electric power which today simply isn't available.
It is just barely possible today to build a data center that is independent of the grid but the costs for the battery storage are huge. Solar PV generation is constantly being touted as a solution, but the only way it is a real solution would be to have it on a lot of homes and other buildings - a lot meaning probably over 50% of them. Unfortunately, this doesn't address the grid problems at 5-9 PM when everyone gets home, turns down the air conditioner temperature and turns on the microwave and the washing machine. To fix that we are going to need capacity that doesn't depend on the sun and today's grid-tied PV systems do not address that at all.
One way out of the coming capacity crisis would be to have a big switch at the power company office: Day (offices) and Night (homes). This is literally what we might be facing soon. The problem is that we could easily have this kind of capacity problem in five years. It takes five years to build a new coal plant without any public opposition - and there would be plenty no matter where it was going to be built. It takes more like ten years to build a nuclear plant and we almost certainly do not have ten years before really running into a big capacity problem. We also need maybe 20-30 new plants coming on line in five years and we haven't even started building them.
The power companies really don't care. They will not be the enemy when you find your refrigerator doesn't run during the day and there is a new box that shuts off your house power whenever the capacity is needed. You can bet their PR departments and outside agencies will be working overtime to make sure someone else gets the blame.
But hey, if we don't build any new plants you can bet everyone will be shouting about how our CO2 emissions are down.
The problem is people do not understand. There is a substantial minority that believe electric power transmission lines are hazardous - not just when the wire breaks but living, playing, working or existing near one is a hazard. These people always know a friend of a friend that went to the doctor and was told they had cancer and it was because of electric power lines.
Such people show up at public comment sessions and pretty much mean that new transmission lines are NOT BUILT anywhere near them. Put five such people in a room and it is a done deal. The transmission line companies have no defense really - science and things like evidence are not a factor with public comment sessions. See why I think the new "smart grid" is a non-starter?
So, we have pseudo-doctors handing out diagnoses of RF Sensitivity and Environmental Sensitivity and such. There is pressure on insurance companies to pay on such claims. We now have a Congressman that wants to put warning stickers on every cell phone, thereby legitimizing this nonsense.
This is not going to end well. Would you like to live in a world where RF emissions were considered to be a cause of cancer and we were all protected by strong federal regulations against such things?
You have to understand that Stranger in a Strange Land was about 1,000 page diatribe against organized religion. Probably the most telling was Revernd Digby arriving in heaven after being killed.
Sure, at the end Mike died... well, moved onto a different plane of existence, but in reality there was little else for him to do on Earth. With Mike's passing Jubal was at the head of a group that was positioned to probably make significant changes in society and would clearly have had both the money and power to do it. Jubal's group at that point was nearly equal in influence to the Fosterite Church but better positioned by being a lot more covert.
No, I don't see the ending of Stranger in a Strange Land as sad. A very complicated set of circumstances was laid out at the end. Sure, we can miss Mike as he was a pretty unique fellow. But the journey was just beginning for the rest of humanity and the outlook was very positive.
Taken together, Dune (the whole series) and The White Plague, you do end up with a clear vision of someone that has a real problem with humanity.
In reading the "Dune prequel" books that would appear to have been written by Frank's son I get the idea that this philosophy has been inherited and perhaps strengthened. The foundation of the Butlerian Jhiad is one thing, but carrying it on required an unusual dedication to achieving a goal at all costs. In many ways, the Dune universe required just as much dedication to wrong-headed thinking by groups of people.
I believe I met Frank Herbert once and overall I am pretty glad it was just saying "Hi" and moving on.
The problem isn't regulation because in some ways no matter what regulations are in place there will be winners and losers. The problem is the idea that we can somehow mandate that there be only winners and no losers. This is like the schoolyard game where everyone gets a trophy. Trying to make that a reality in life doesn't work no matter how hard you try.
What we are looking at are people that would very much like to mandate there be only winners. Equality of both opportunity and outcome. Eliminate poverty by simply making it illegal to be either too rich or too poor. The problem is, as has been shown time and time again throughout history, is that if you do not have losers you do not have real winners. Without the incentive to be a "winner" and the disincentive to be a "loser" humanity sits on the sidelines and waits to see what happens without participation. This was a huge factor in the Soviet economy and it took them about 40 years to figure it out. We are apparently going to try again even with overwhelming evidence that it doesn't work.
Specifically what you are thinking of is that banks can be regulated to be trustworthy guardians of all things financial. Problem is, there is a very small area where it is profitable to be in the banking business - outside of this area it is either too risky or not enough return on investment. Admittedly, the has been some miscalculation both ways recently but it tends to be self correcting. This self correction is a good thing. Trying to construct a regulatory framework where the rules prevent straying outside of an even smaller defined area is very likely to miss. So far, you will note there is no regulatory framework - likely by intent. A real risk to the economy would be to try to build such a framework, likely one again mandating there be only winners.
I think if you research it carefully you will find that just about any "public commons" is owned by a government organization or agency. Like the Washington Monument is likely owned by the National Park Service.
Sure, it is "licensed" so that it can be used by people with some restrictions, just like anything else in the software world. However, if this were not the case and it was owned collectively by everyone it would be impossible to block people putting up tents on the Mall - because they would be "owners" just like everyone else.
So no while everyone may enjoy a right to use, they do not have ownership rights. Pretty much the same for any "public commons" anywhere in the world. Or at least US and UK - laws in other places vary significantly from what we would recognize as a public commons.
What makes a Qualcomm camera different from some generic Chinese camera? The hardware? Probably not. The only differentiating factor may be the driver which does special stuff.
Therefore, releasing the driver is effectively ending the product and turning any future profits in that area over to a Chinese company.
Slashdot Mirror
I was with a group in the 1970s that saw a clear connection between doctor-assisted abortion and doctor-assisted euthansia.
If it is OK for a doctor to terminate what will become a baby, then it must also be OK for a doctor to terminate a person with a "diminished quality of life", right? It can be argued, and has been, that a person with one or more conditions that contribute to a diminished quality of life isn't really a person anymore. Therefore, it is OK to kill them because you aren't really killing a whole person.
What we had in 1972 was a rule that said 24 weeks was the dividing point between a bunch of cells that had the unrealized potential of human life and a real human. I think we need that dividing line because right now you can find folks arguing the entire spectrum from fertilization to birth. In 1972 the 24 weeks division was both arbitrary and based on what was medically possible - before 24 weeks you could consider a fetus to be non-viable. That has changed today with the possibility of viability much, much earlier. However, it doesn't change the fact that from a legal and reasonably moral perspective there should be a dividing line.
I do not believe fertilization is a good point for this, nor am I in favor of placing it out at one year after birth - there have been a number of times when a baby wasn't named or considered to be a person until after one year of age. I think the division can be made at some time before birth without causing too much of a problem - and acknowledging that this eliminates the legality of partial-birth abortion.
Why is this any of my concern? Because as a society we should not be killing individuals and claiming it is a medical procedure. Partial birth abortion is clearly killing a viable infant. If we allow this to be a legal medical procedure there is no reason we cannot also decide to terminate those that have become a burden to their caregivers. While it would be a fine way to eliminate the concept of the "nursing home" it doesn't change the fact that it would be killing an individual.
Humans have a great capacity for justifying their actions and given the opportunity to do so I have no doubt that it is a small step from deciding old people that are a burden can be killed to expand this to include persons of diminshed capacity, gays, autistics, gypsys and any other group that those in power find to be burdensome.
I'm not sure you have a firm grasp of the problem.
The problem, from my reading, can be explained as analogous to having a numeric data item that sometimes gets letters put in it. Rather than rejecting this as invalid browsers are making stuff up as they go along so A=1, B=2, and so on and so forth. This has the obvious benefit to users of not exposing them to the improper construction of web pages, but it does create sort of a sub-standard whereby other authors recognize this work-around and decide to make use of it in a widespread manner. Suddenly, we have a data item that is supposed to accept only numeric values but now it also accepts other things as well and interprets them.
Maladjusted Teenager then discovers that not only do we have A=1 but on some browser !@#!=exception and makes use of this.
The problem is the original non-validation and non-rejection of illegal input. Sure it makes this more "user friendly" but it opens huge gaping holes in any sort of standard. It then also encourages folks to intentionally code ABC when they want 123 because the browser accepts it. With widespread enough usage this interpretation is forced on all browsers because otherwise they are left flagging huge swaths of the web as "invalid". Keep doing this sort of stuff and you have the mess that we have today.
I assure you the solution isn't to not validate and accept anything unless you are prepared to throw out the idea of any sort of restricted content data item and everything becomes a string containing any possible character. And even that doesn't really work because of context - there are contexts where a numeric value is needed and having a non-numeric string is really incorrect. Where we have gone is pushing browsers to "interpret" this as something legal even when they should not. You can see where that has gotten us.
I'd say the correct behavior in all cases is to not interpret and not accept improper input but to throw it back. Perhaps go to the drastic step of saying because one part of this document is malformed, the document cannot be properly formatted. This would make it a lot more obvious to web designers, developers and authors they have done something wrong the first time they look at what they have done. Instead, we have interpretation trying to cover up mistakes and the result is they are hidden from both the author and the end user.
My experience with BIS and export regulations while not complete does indicate to me that trade with Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea is permitted from the US only with a license. An unobtainable license. Which is the same thing as being completely banned.
I do not believe there is any company in the US that would put forth the effort to even inquire how someone gets such a license. So while there is no law specifically saying "Trade with Iran is banned" it is a case of de facto banning because the license is unobtainable.
Buying a full auto machine gun is possible in the US, but you need a tax stamp on your license to do so. The stamp costs $3000 last time I heard. You need to be pretty committed if you want to own a MAC-10 legally. Having held one once where the owner was describing the hoops he had to go through to get it legally (he was a cop) was pretty interesting. I would consider the licensing required for trade with Iran to be somewhat more severe than the ban on full auto weapons.
I would like to believe the government has an obligation to take care of me and support me in a style compatible with my personality. I would like to believe that there are a few fat cats out there that are ruining it for the rest of us and if it wasn't for them, the government would be able to take care of all of us. All it would take is taxing the heck out of these fat cats.
Looking back, though, it seems the government has had more than a few problems with mismanagement on a huge scale. They can't seem to get anything done without spending 10 times more than it was planned to cost. Government at all levels tend to increase in scope and expenditures until some kind of a external limit is reached.
It should be pretty obvious that the more money that is given to the US government, such as a 50% tax rate, the more money will be wasted, misspent and mismanaged. While some folks might not mind working half a year, every year, to support my granny it starts to grate on people when they understand that like a badly-run charity only a small fraction ends up in the hands of grannies. The rest is going to studies that prove cockroaches are really nasty critters or that we would all be in trouble if the oxygen level in the atmosphere dropped to 0%.
The most important thing to understand is that people in the US have a somewhat different culture than the rest of the world. In most of the rest of the world when a 70-year-old man is told he is dying it is a sad message but one that everyone understands is the way things are. In the US the response is to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to put off the date of death as long as possible. The disparity between these two things is why the US health care system is incomprehensible to a lot of people. A good part of the US population will never accept the "you're dying, accept it" message, and the spending caused by this will insure that the US health care system cannot function like the rest of the world. It also means that old people from the rest of the world come here to squeeze out a couple of more years if they can afford it.
The second most important thing to understand is that people in government aren't doing it because they feel an obligation to serve the rest of humanity. They are doing it because it will lead to power and riches for themselves. We can try to curb this, but that is the motivation. Giving these people more power and access to more money doesn't solve any problems for the rest of us on the outside, but it does make it possible for more and more people to get in on the gravy train that is government service. One possible outcome is that we all are working for the government and everyone is happy. That has been tried and it didn't work out very well.
No, the reasons behind the anti-vax movement are pretty clear. It is based on the idea that the US government is completely owned by corporate interested and these corporate interests want to create a population that is dependent on them for everything. A society where the majority of people were autistic would be extremely dependent.
This also assumes that anyone with more money that the average Joe is a sociopathic monster. Or a Republican. Or both.
I'm suprised this isn't a more popular belief.
Of course it is possible.
But then again it is pretty easy to believe the worst of a country that punishes female infidelity by stoning.
Iran is committed to the extinction of the Jews. This is a publicly stated policy and one they have enshrined in their laws, along with a lot of other Middle East nations. Do not decide to put on a Star of David and visit Iran even as a joke. They will treat you just like the TSA does with people that joke about bombs.
People with a lot more knowledge than you or I have concluded it makes no sense for Iran to pursue nuclear generation of electricity and even less sense for them to build their own nuclear fuel cycle for doing so. I suppose it might make sense if they "know" their trade with the rest of the world is going to be cut off and their oil supplies burned. Interesting thought, huh?
Alternatively, they are clearly enriching uranium way past the power generating reactor level. They say it is for "research reactors" and "medical purposes". Interesting in that I believe most of the medical purpose radioactive materials are made in reactors in the US that are fueled by pretty much the same sort of low-enrichment uranium that is in power generation reactors. Today it is pretty clear that if you want anything over 3% enrichment there are few non-weapon uses. When you push that up to 90% there is only one possible use. Iran has the capability of the 98% or so that is needed for weapons.
Iran does appear to some uninformed people to be seriously short of delivery vehicles. These people have been playing superpower games too long and "know" the only possible way to deliver a nuclear warhead is with a missle or a bomber. They utterly neglect to think that all first-generation nuclear weapons were extremely heavy (over 10,000lbs) and many second-generation weapons were similarly weighty. Since all of the important targets for Iran are along a seacoast a cargo ship would seem to be a simple and obvious delivery vehicle and they have plenty of them already.
You can pretty clearly see the evaporation of the "freedoms" you are talking about over the last 50 years or so.
Why do you need ID? Because there are a lot of criminals on the streets. Why are they there? It seems we have an economic system that divides people into winners and losers and if the losers aren't accepting of their role in life crime is the obvious solution. So we have somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the people in the country stealing, robbing, defrauding and doing whatever they can to get by - at the expense usually of other "losers" in the system. Sounds cruel, doesn't it? The problem is when you come home to find every single item of value removed from your house or apartment you don't want to go quietly, you want revenge! You want to see someone punished. Well, that is how we got here.
Why do you need to show registration and proof of insurance? Simple. People like me when I was younger. No insurance and I did get in accidents. Sucks to be the guy that gets hit, big time. Because I had nothing there was no point in suing me. So there was a strong move to prevent such people from driving. So today without insurance you aren't going anywhere and if stopped by the cops you will walk home.
Why do you need to show some kind of proof that you belong in the US? Because a lot of people would like to come here and grab what is lying around waiting to be grabbed. Frankly, anyone that is still in a place like Nigeria is there because they can't get out. Everyone else left already or is running the place for their own benefit. So why do we want to keep them out? Because if we let them all in the US will be just like Nigeria (or Bangladesh, or Uganda or whatever) in a few years. Again, sounds cruel doesn't it? But the fact is there is only so much to go around and collectively humanity has spent the last 100 years or so spreading things thinner and thinner. There are a few places where it isn't spread quite so thin and people can live decently - but this all depends on not having a few extra millions of people with their hand out.
I see you bought into the Cuba blockade in a big way. You want to go to Cuba, you do what the other 10,000 people that go there every year do and fly through Mexico City. Yes, there are no flights direct from Miami, partly because if there were there would be 100 people left in Cuba after a couple of years. A good part of Cuba's economy is keeping the people there bottled up so they cannot leave. I will say the Cuban blockade is somewhat silly, but the alternative is for the Cuban half of Miami to bring all their relatives over - which they have been trying to do since 1963. It also is difficult for anyone, including governments, to admit their policy is a failure and just drop it. Remind yourself of this when you figure out your son or daughter is found using drugs after the fifth time you warned them and "forbid it". Hard to give in an just say "Use all the drugs you want, I don't care." Well, it is pretty much the same for the US government and Cuba - and it would be like a really wild weekend if we opened the doors now - a wild weekend that lasted twenty or thirty years. And the "house" would look just like it would after that sort of party.
Yes, there is less "freedom" but a lot of this is less freedom to be an asshole and these freedoms were abused by assholes in the past. The moral of the story is clear: if you let the assholes do as they want after a while they ruin it for everyone.
I believe there was a pretty good statement of how this worked in Brave New World. There was enough information available then (1931) to say that this didn't work worth a damn.
People haven't changed much since 1931 and what didn't work then doesn't work now. However, the idea that this could be used to influence people (rather than to educate them) has not really been explored to any depth. Sure, it might work. There is some evidence that the "self confidence" tapes from long ago (1960s?) had some effect or at least people were buying them for "sleep improvement". However, this has the rather nasty implications of "programming" people and the unfortunate ways this could be utilized. Also explored by Brave New World as it was pretty obvious how this could be misused back then.
If pinch-to-zoom existed and that can be documented in court then a patent on it - any patent at all - will simply be thrown out. Once something has been publicly disclosed you have 12 months to file or it becomes permanently unpatentable.
Something tells me that Apple wouldn't bother with trying to patent the unpatentable unless they thought they had something new to bring to it. Sometimes it is worth the effort to chase after something unpatentable but generally it makes you look pretty silly when it gets thrown out.
You can say it should be impossible to patent the unpatentable, but that would require the patent office to have complete knowledge of everything in the world. I think that power is reserved for deities, and I am glad the patent office doesn't want to be considered as such.
What I realized a while back is there are plenty of people that would welcome as you put it "semi-permanent malthusian depression" but so far they have done very little to push their cause.
We have a rather fragile infrastructure involved with the production of CO2 in mass quantities. It wouldn't take much to damage a coal-fired power plant enough so that it shut down, perhaps for years. For example, damage to high-pressure steam conduits would require a huge amount of work as work damage to chimneys. Both are pretty fragile so we aren't talking about aircraft with nuclear weapons but people with picks and dynamite.
Want to reduce the CO2 from cars? How about damaging some bridges around major cities that feed them? Suddenly there will be less commuter traffic, thus reducing the CO2 emissions. Same thing goes for passenger aircraft - these are extremely fragile and it wouldn't take much to disable aircraft in ways that wouldn't kill people but would make people very reluctant to fly.
Why haven't the true belivers - those that believe millions, if not billions will die in the coming climate catestrophe if something isn't done immediately to curb CO2 emissions? Do we have a shortage of true believers?
Sorry, but the computing experience for the average Joe is a pretty bad one these days. He can be certain that his computer will be used by malware authors for their own ends and he is powerless to stop them.
Anti-virus solutions do not work when the user of the computer makes bad decisions. Because the user is incapable of being the knowledgable administrator of the computer that is required, it is going to turn into a bad experience. Nothing can prevent that - Joe doesn't want the training that would be required for him to effectively administer his computer.
Nobody else wants to do this job for free either. Sure, there are services Joe can sign up for that will do this for him and keep uninstalling Weather Bug every time he installs it. But they cost money and it is money Joe would rather spend elsewhere.
Bring in the walled garden or the Internet appliance and you have the solution to Joe's worries. His experience will not be sullied by malware, bots, trojans and viruses. This isn't what the geeks would like to happen, but unfortunately the malware authors have spoken and turned the world of general purpose computing into a minefield. Sucks to live in a minefield when you don't understand the mines or even that they exist.
The problem that we face today is that "general purpose computers" need administration. In a corporate environment they get this from the IT department. In a geek home, they get this from the users. In Joe Sixpack's home there isn't any at all.
The end result of this is Joe Sixpack's home computer is laden with trojans, viruses and malware. His banking information isn't safe and neither are credit cards or any other financial information. His computer is used by others to send spam and to infect other computers on the Internet. Needless to say every once in a while Joe gets his computer fixed (or replaced) and he isn't happy about the cost of doing this. When one of his neighbors gets an iPad and he sees the functionality without the risks he is sold and he will never go back to a PC that needs administering but doesn't get it.
The geeks are (of course) offended by this move. In many ways the response needs to be "Too bad, the marketplace has spoken."
When Joe Sixpack also happens to be involved in the government at some level this takes on a whole new aspect. Why should the government not take steps to protect other Joes from what he has experienced? Why should their private and financial information be at risk? We have pretty much proven that anti-virus and anti-malware software doesn't work, so that isn't a solution. The walled garden approach or the restricted functionality Internet appliance approach works and fits in well with what most users really want.
Of course you are going to see legislative moves to push people further and further towards solutions to the malware problem. And this is a good thing because we cannot as a society continue to tolerate unadministered computers that are actively being used against their owner's interests.
There is another aspect you haven't considered.
Any insurance company that allowed an airline to continue to fly with full coverage for crashes, hijackings, etc. after 9/11 would just be irresponsible. There are very few irresponsible insurance companies. The airlines proved they could not handle the security screening so Somthing Had To Be Done. Result: TSA.
You want to get rid of the TSA, the first thing you have to figure out is how the insurance companies get to continue to offer coverage to airlines. Anything that omits this is a non-starter. After you figure that out, you just might have a plan to get rid of the TSA.
Remember, the airlines can't take it back because they proved they can't do the job. Nobody is going to allow them to resume security screenings. So somebody else has to do it. And so far, nobody has figured out a way that isn't a carbon-copy of the TSA.
Single payer would be great, if there was actually a vote on this and it was implemented if it passed.
The problem for the US right now is a minority wants single payer right now whereas the majority isn't so sure. Especially considering the costs. And plenty of people are worried when the government is trying to cut costs in a big way what that might mean for a single payer plan - Canada tried that a while back in the 1980s I think and it was a disaster.
What we have lined up is all employer health care pretty much ends 1 Jan 2014 - the only approved plans will be dictated in Washington and they will just have to include the kitchen sink - acupuncture, homeopathy, chanting care, etc. So costs will be very, very high for everyone except the government. So what every business that I have had contact is planning is to pull the plug in 2014 and just pay the fine. It is a very, very small fine compared to the costs of insurance even today.
Well then, we will have single payer then, now won't we? Except who voted for this? Who explained what the costs would be. Not today with employers picking up a good part of the tab but in 2015 when it is all on the government? Nobody voted for this, nobody knows what the costs are going to be other than very, very high. And we will likely be in that government cost cutting mode. Not a good combination for starting a single payer system, now is it?
Not only that, but today the government is paying Medicaid and Medicare charges at about 30% of what is billed. This is why it can be a challange to find a doctor that will take a new Medicaid patient. What do you think will happen when everyone is a Medicaid patient in terms of what fees the doctors and hospitals get paid? No more cost shifting from the Medicare patients over to the privately insured.
Well, no...
Grey market refers to any unauthorized distribution channel. This ranges from bypassing normal distribution channels to import a product to selling one off the back of a truck. Most manufacturers disclaim any warranty responsibility for grey market goods, meaning that if it is not purchased through a legitimate and authorized distribution channel they aren't going to take any responsibility for it.
Since grey market includes both legal and illegal distribution it gets pretty messy if you want to get into a warranty fight. Yes, the manufacturer probably does have some responsibility, but it may be up to the person making the claim to thoroughly prove the item was not stolen at some point. That can range from being hard to impossible.
I do not believe grey market has ever referred to used goods. If some group is trying to stretch it out that far, that is interesting and novel. And is probably stretching things a bit too far.
As far as rebadged items go - meaning the piece is the same as something else but simply being sold under different names - it happens all the time and you may find it is cheaper with a less prestigious name on it. Meaning something that says Realistic on it may be identical to something sold by Hammacher Schlemmer under a different name but the price at Radio Shack may be a lot less. I don't see how this relates to grey market distribution at all.
Most countries require a customs declaration on the outside of the package so they don't have to open it. Also, a lot of times the exporter has to put the recipient's tax number on the customs declaration.
Of course lying on the customs declaration can mean a long, long prison term for the guy picking the item up.
We ship a lot of stuff to different countries and get to follow a different set of rules for almost every shipment. China requires a recipient id number, for example, which is utterly unique to China. Germany has a space for the tax id of the recipient but it isn't required.
Basically, it is a hugely manpower intensive task but it also relies on the fear of prosecution if the exporter lies on the customs documents.
The drug pricing and import restrictions are pretty simple to explain. If you look around a little bit you find that the drug manufacturers cut a deal in non-US markets and they do not offer that deal in the US, under any circumstances.
So a pill may be $1 CDN in Canada and $10 USD across the border with the only difference being the labelling on the box. Sometimes the pills are made in the same factory. Part of the problem is the attitude that "people in the US can afford it" and part of the problem is there is no single agency that can block the import or sale of a drug and force the manufacturer into a price deal. A significant problem is the drug company figures all of the costing based on US sales only and the rest of the world is pure profit. End result is the US pays for R&D and testing and the rest of the world rides for free. Because it is perceived that "we can afford it" and other such nonsense.
This is likely to change in two years. Most companies will be dropping health insurance and pushing the employees onto the government plan. This is single-payer through the back door without anyone voting on it, approving it or even being aware that it is going to happen. Expensive? Sure, for a while. You can bet the first thing to get knocked down will be drug prices. Hospital care will be the 2nd item on the list. The health care providers - doctors, nurses, PAs, etc. - get knocked down because the government reimbursement rate is today about 30% of the billed cost. Of course that means a lot of doctors will simply fold up because they can't take the 70% revenue hit, just like today a lot of doctors do not take Medicare or Medicaid patients because of this. Well, when they are all government-plan patients there aren't going to be any others.
Rough road coming, but ready-or-not here comes single payer in the US.
We are running on overbuilt capacity from the 1960s. After that it became very, very expensive to build a large power plant - with most of the new costs being public protests and public comment sessions that turned into more and more evironmental impact studies. Often the result was the project was abandoned.
In Arizona and Illinois (both places I have lived) the solution was simple: build "peaker" plants that run on natural gas and build them up over time from 200MW to more like 1000MW over time. This still results in a lot of protest activity but governing bodies are far more likely to ignore protests when the plant has been safely and cleanly operating for five years or so when it comes time to expand.
The problem is that this is just a delaying tactic that will not solve the problem in the long run. Most parts of the country could use another 2000MW of capacity right now. Certainly if the economy recovers there will be considerable need for more and more electric power which today simply isn't available.
It is just barely possible today to build a data center that is independent of the grid but the costs for the battery storage are huge. Solar PV generation is constantly being touted as a solution, but the only way it is a real solution would be to have it on a lot of homes and other buildings - a lot meaning probably over 50% of them. Unfortunately, this doesn't address the grid problems at 5-9 PM when everyone gets home, turns down the air conditioner temperature and turns on the microwave and the washing machine. To fix that we are going to need capacity that doesn't depend on the sun and today's grid-tied PV systems do not address that at all.
One way out of the coming capacity crisis would be to have a big switch at the power company office: Day (offices) and Night (homes). This is literally what we might be facing soon. The problem is that we could easily have this kind of capacity problem in five years. It takes five years to build a new coal plant without any public opposition - and there would be plenty no matter where it was going to be built. It takes more like ten years to build a nuclear plant and we almost certainly do not have ten years before really running into a big capacity problem. We also need maybe 20-30 new plants coming on line in five years and we haven't even started building them.
The power companies really don't care. They will not be the enemy when you find your refrigerator doesn't run during the day and there is a new box that shuts off your house power whenever the capacity is needed. You can bet their PR departments and outside agencies will be working overtime to make sure someone else gets the blame.
But hey, if we don't build any new plants you can bet everyone will be shouting about how our CO2 emissions are down.
The problem is people do not understand. There is a substantial minority that believe electric power transmission lines are hazardous - not just when the wire breaks but living, playing, working or existing near one is a hazard. These people always know a friend of a friend that went to the doctor and was told they had cancer and it was because of electric power lines.
Such people show up at public comment sessions and pretty much mean that new transmission lines are NOT BUILT anywhere near them. Put five such people in a room and it is a done deal. The transmission line companies have no defense really - science and things like evidence are not a factor with public comment sessions. See why I think the new "smart grid" is a non-starter?
So, we have pseudo-doctors handing out diagnoses of RF Sensitivity and Environmental Sensitivity and such. There is pressure on insurance companies to pay on such claims. We now have a Congressman that wants to put warning stickers on every cell phone, thereby legitimizing this nonsense.
This is not going to end well. Would you like to live in a world where RF emissions were considered to be a cause of cancer and we were all protected by strong federal regulations against such things?
You have to understand that Stranger in a Strange Land was about 1,000 page diatribe against organized religion. Probably the most telling was Revernd Digby arriving in heaven after being killed.
Sure, at the end Mike died ... well, moved onto a different plane of existence, but in reality there was little else for him to do on Earth. With Mike's passing Jubal was at the head of a group that was positioned to probably make significant changes in society and would clearly have had both the money and power to do it. Jubal's group at that point was nearly equal in influence to the Fosterite Church but better positioned by being a lot more covert.
No, I don't see the ending of Stranger in a Strange Land as sad. A very complicated set of circumstances was laid out at the end. Sure, we can miss Mike as he was a pretty unique fellow. But the journey was just beginning for the rest of humanity and the outlook was very positive.
Taken together, Dune (the whole series) and The White Plague, you do end up with a clear vision of someone that has a real problem with humanity.
In reading the "Dune prequel" books that would appear to have been written by Frank's son I get the idea that this philosophy has been inherited and perhaps strengthened. The foundation of the Butlerian Jhiad is one thing, but carrying it on required an unusual dedication to achieving a goal at all costs. In many ways, the Dune universe required just as much dedication to wrong-headed thinking by groups of people.
I believe I met Frank Herbert once and overall I am pretty glad it was just saying "Hi" and moving on.
The problem isn't regulation because in some ways no matter what regulations are in place there will be winners and losers. The problem is the idea that we can somehow mandate that there be only winners and no losers. This is like the schoolyard game where everyone gets a trophy. Trying to make that a reality in life doesn't work no matter how hard you try.
What we are looking at are people that would very much like to mandate there be only winners. Equality of both opportunity and outcome. Eliminate poverty by simply making it illegal to be either too rich or too poor. The problem is, as has been shown time and time again throughout history, is that if you do not have losers you do not have real winners. Without the incentive to be a "winner" and the disincentive to be a "loser" humanity sits on the sidelines and waits to see what happens without participation. This was a huge factor in the Soviet economy and it took them about 40 years to figure it out. We are apparently going to try again even with overwhelming evidence that it doesn't work.
Specifically what you are thinking of is that banks can be regulated to be trustworthy guardians of all things financial. Problem is, there is a very small area where it is profitable to be in the banking business - outside of this area it is either too risky or not enough return on investment. Admittedly, the has been some miscalculation both ways recently but it tends to be self correcting. This self correction is a good thing. Trying to construct a regulatory framework where the rules prevent straying outside of an even smaller defined area is very likely to miss. So far, you will note there is no regulatory framework - likely by intent. A real risk to the economy would be to try to build such a framework, likely one again mandating there be only winners.
I think if you research it carefully you will find that just about any "public commons" is owned by a government organization or agency. Like the Washington Monument is likely owned by the National Park Service.
Sure, it is "licensed" so that it can be used by people with some restrictions, just like anything else in the software world. However, if this were not the case and it was owned collectively by everyone it would be impossible to block people putting up tents on the Mall - because they would be "owners" just like everyone else.
So no while everyone may enjoy a right to use, they do not have ownership rights. Pretty much the same for any "public commons" anywhere in the world. Or at least US and UK - laws in other places vary significantly from what we would recognize as a public commons.
What makes a Qualcomm camera different from some generic Chinese camera? The hardware? Probably not. The only differentiating factor may be the driver which does special stuff.
Therefore, releasing the driver is effectively ending the product and turning any future profits in that area over to a Chinese company.