Let me rephrase, then. It's hard to find a correct scaling argument that says the duration of weather events should scale with the size of an atmosphere.
Coming up with wrong but logically consistent arguments for a given conclusion is easy. That's what numerology and astrology are all about.
It's true that there's not much on Jupiter besides atmosphere, but it's still weird to see what amounts to just a huge cyclone lasting for centuries -- or more -- I suppose we don't have any good idea when the Gred Red Spot first appeared.
Presumably Earth's atmosphere is just too thin to support weather systems of that longevity, although it's hard to think of a good scaling argument for why the size, thickness, mass et cetera of the atmosphere should dictate the scale of the duration of events in it.
But I wonder if there are parallels in ocean events, here? We have the El Nino/Nina business, the Atlantic Oscillation, and these things at least have periods near decades. Perhaps some of what we consider "permanent" features of the oceans, like the Gulf Stream, are merely "storms" like Jupiter's Red Spot that last several centuries.
It's a reasonable argument, but you seem to be assuming the only purpose of land is to live on. Hardly. There's a reason that range land in NM is $40 an acre and Manhattan real estate is probably roughly a million times more. It's what you can do there that matters.
So what can you do on the Moon that would make it so fabulously valuable? Beats me. The only unique resources the Moon has (exceedingly low temperatures in the shade, unbelievably good vacuum) you can also get in orbit, where you don't have to worry about any gravity at all, and can build eight-mile wide factories out of gossamer and shoe strings, if you want.
But it could happen. Suppose it turns out 1/6 gee allows you (don't ask me how) to grow perfect crystals of membrane-bound proteins fast and easy, something nearly impossible to do on Earth. That could lead to the possibility of rational design of fantastically valuable drugs, e.g. genuine cancer cures and the like. What would that be worth? Very likely far more than $100 billion. (The cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor will have earned its inventors about $65 billion by the time its patent expires in 2010.)
Um, yes. But the Moon does not sit at rest at the top of that well. You can't just "let things drop" and hope they'll hit the Earth. They won't. Anything at rest relative to the Moon is orbiting the Earth just as fast as the Moon, and will continue to "miss" the Earth just like the Moon does, forever.
Look at it this way. Say you're speeding above my mailbox in a low-flying plane at 300 MPH. Can you, at the moment you pass over, "just drop" a bag of dogshit onto my mailbox to express your opinion? Nope. The only way you can hit the mailbox is to throw it backwards at 300 MPH, which is pretty tough, pretty expensive if you need rockets and stuff to get that kind of velocity.
It's a little easier to hit the Earth with rocks from the Moon, because you can make use of the Earth's atmosphere; you only have to graze the atmosphere and friction will do the rest, gradually, although when you're counting on friction heating to use up a metric fuckload of kinetic energy, you may have additional problems keeping your bombs from melting and vaporizing, unless they really are just rocks.
Furthermore, the real stiff part of the gravity well is only from the surface to low Earth orbit. You can almost as easily reach the Moon from there as you can reach the Earth from the Moon. So the Lunies are going to have to extend (and enforce) their territorial claims down to within about 150 miles of the Earth's surface if they really want to be safe from reprisals. Good luck with that. Remember the Chinese ASAT test? Relatively easy to blow stuff out of low orbit.
...shame the historical facts squarely contradict it. Google "tragedy of the commons," or for a more concrete and squalid example look up the history of the Cabrini Green project in Chicago.
Fact is, ownership of land has zip to do with any kind of ethereal moral justification. People want it because it makes them feel safe. Other people allow it because experience shows that when people are allowed to own land they take care of it better, preserve its resources better for the future, are more agreeable to allowing others temporary and conditional use of it (instead of defending it fanatically), et cetera and so forth.
When land is held "in common" that just tends to mean a free for all where everyone grabs as much as he can of what's valuable about it as fast as he can before someone else beats him to it, with zero thought for the future. Sad fact o' life. All the lovely theories about how things ought to work, with, say, some other species, whose actions were driven strictly by pure logic, are quite nice -- but useless in practise.
No, I doubt they have "independent studies and surveys." That's not how government works. What they probably do have is an earful of angry correspondence and phone calls from constituents telling them to do something about this damn downloading/file-sharing stuff. So they've done something. Should they not have? Isn't the purpose of government to respond to the demands of its constituents?
I mean, if you've got evidence that the LA City Council just thought this up on their own, out of the blue, without the least bit of urging from their constituents, then you have an interesting case. But my experience of local government is that it has so much on its plate, it's so backed-up and behind, that they do nothing until people scream very loud indeed. They're not just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, wondering how to fill up the day. Oh I know! Let's draft some statements about that nasty ol' downloading I saw a story about on the news last night! Doesn't work that way. They move only when constituents bitch at them loud and hearty.
I suspect that this is just another example of lobbyists writing self-serving legislation & regulation.
Absolutely it is. What you've forgotten, however, is that the job description of "lobbyist" is "someone who represents a large class of voters/consumers/producers" et cetera. The guy from the Sierra Club who goes to Washington to say "2 million of our members think there should be no drilling for oil of the coast" is a lobbyist. The guy from the EFF who similarly buttonholes members of Congress about the detrimental effect of the DMCA is also a lobbyist who represents all those who send the EFF a check to support their work.
It makes perfect sense to translate "MPAA lobbyist" to "spokesman for those who make and fund movies." Now, does it seem a priori unreasonable for the city council running the city in which most of those people live and work to be responding to their self-selected spokesmen? Uh, no. That's democracy. You may not like the result, but if you're in the minority (in LA County at least), then that's just too bad for you.
Well, in the first place, even if I granted your arguments, the fact that two recent patents (out of several hundred thousand) don't make sense to me is not much of an argument. You might as well pick out two cases in which grad students have taken out student loans and used them to buy cars to prove that the student loan system is fscked up and all grad students are cheats. As they say, the plural of anecdote is not data. You'd have a much better case if you could point to multiple cases in which patents clearly stifled important innovation (that, say, had to succeed outside of US patent protection, in some other country).
Secondly, you're basing your criticism of the validity of the patent on your own ignorant opinion (unless you happen to be an IP lawyer) of what actual effect the patent has in the real world. Having had a few experiences with the law and lawyers (ugh), let me assure you it ain't nearly that simple. If you think an ordinary joe can read the law and predict exactly (or even roughly) how it's going to work out in the real world, in the rulings of actual judges, then...er, to be kind, you must be mystified by why lawyers make as much money as they do. People don't actually read the law? They're just idiots and hire expensive trained legal minds to do what any logically-thinking layman could do?
Uh, no. Ha ha. The practical effect of patents is something only someone pretty skilled in the field could predict, and even then, experts predict it wrongly often enough that we have actual patent litigation. (There wouldn't be any litigation if the lawyers for both sides could predict with near certainty who would win, right? No one wastes $millions on a trial if he can guess the outcome beforehand.)
It sounds to me like you're criticizing the patents based on the fact that their grant doesn't seem consistent with some five-page Cliff's Notes version you've got in your head about how IP law works. Perhaps you're right, or perhaps you're not. I wouldn't know, myself. I know enough to know that there's no way I could ever predict accurately what the effect of a particular patent is out in the real world. I'd have to hire a clever lawyer to do that, and obviously I'm not going to for a naive argument among amateurs on/..
Finally, you seem to rely on a certain programmer's or compulsive personality's assumption of precise definitions of words to make arguments about inconsistency and illogical in PTO rulings. The problem with this is, as I said in my original post, lawyers and regulators do not think like this. They don't run on rigid logical rails, where the meaning of every word is as precisely defined as the length in bits of a double in Java. They have a very different way of thinking, one much more flexible and fuzzy and based on empirical observations about how people behave. It may be confusing and frustrating to programmer types, but that does not mean it doesn't work, or make sense in its own context of application. The typical male programmer would have better luck understanding the mind of women he's trying to date than the mind of lawyers working over in the IP department.
Sounds like generic mindless Big Bidness Been Bery Bery Bad Tuh Me sloganeering to me. Try thinking for yourself. Much harder, but more rewarding in the end.
Yeah. Check your immediate surroundings. See any cool devices (iPods, personal computers, Internet) that use technology recently invented in the United States? Call up some of your older friends and family. Any using medical technology (knee replacements, cholesterol-lowering statins, heart-attack preventing stents, implantable pacemakers) that was invented here? Clear evidence, if you're actually paying attention, that there's been no slackening in the pace of innovation and invention lately. If the PTO is dragging the inventiveness of Americans down, it ain't showing, not where it matters, not out in the marketplace.
When companies who hold thousands of patents agree that the patent system is broken
Oh dear, someone is complaining and has a nice theory of how things can be improved? Gosh, how surprising. Next you'll be telling me that sometimes it rains in California, or that folks living in $1 million mansions occasionally take antidepressants.
People complain. Always. They'll complain in Paradise about the flying speed limit or the lubricity of their virgins or the texture of the roast beef. What you need to find, to make any kind of case, is actual, you know, facts 'n' figures, that suggest that American inventiveness and technology improvement is being throttled by PTO policies and actions. Good luck with that. You complain about the PTO just accepting flimsy arguments based on pure logic and zero actual measurements and facts and working models -- and do exactly the same yourself in criticizing them. If that isn't irony, I don't know what is.
Apparently you're under the impression that the Patent Office is run by morons.
Fair enough, you're entitled to whatever POV you like. But there's no way to argue logically with you, since your assumptions are so fantastically different from mine.
FWIW, I assume the PTO is run by pretty clever people who do the best they can, given the general difficulty with predicting the future, and who have a pretty decent -- albeit not perfect -- track record over the past 200 years, and who would normally see right through any such transparently bogus scam, and, since they're human beings exercising judgment, and not Pentium Core Duos executing a giant Perl script written by Congress, would use the discretion the law gives them to just deny such an application forthwith.
You're only looking at this from the consumer end, which is hardly surprising given that this is/.
But in Los Angeles, as someone else noted, you have the center of the movie industry, and one of the centers of the music industry. If it is correct that the fact that millions of people are distributing tunes and movies for free is depriving the folks in LA County who make music and movies of their income, then, yeah, I'd say there is a big impact on the LA economy. If movie companies and recording companies start hemorrhaging money, then they stop not only paying fat salaries to studio heads, but also start laying off janitors and secretaries, and, since those CEOs will be forgoing their bonuses, the number of Lexuses and plasma TVs sold will also go down, and a bunch of car and Best Buy salesmen are going to lose their jobs or take pay cuts.
Of course, the conventional wisdom here on/. is that the "if" clause above is nonsense, and that it's intuitively obvious that online distribution of music and movies for free has no effect whatsoever on the sales for real money of that music and those movies.
Hmm, your first sentence seems to have confused a small number with zero. They're not the same, as a close perusal of mathematics would demonstrate. If you have reduced the list of vulnerable targets, you have accomplished something, by definition. Any other conclusions requires some real Alice in Wonderland logic.
Whether the accomplishment is worth what it costs is another story. But pretending it isn't an accomplishment at all is just mindless sloganeering.
I dunno...patenting an idea which is impossible to implement, such as a perpetual motion machine, or which (more realistically) is wildly unprofitable to implement, isn't any real bar to progress. No one's ever going to implement those ideas, right? So that kind of "business" seems like just a honey pot for impractical dreamers.
I think people acquire attitudes like this not just because of PC groupthink in schools and stuff, but also because they have grown up in an atmosphere that is, historically speaking, astonishingly safe. If you're under about age 30, you don't personally remember a time when the existence or liberty or even economic prosperity of the United States had any serious threat whatsoever. You know what they say, familiarity breeds contempt. Perhaps many folks in the younger generation take their present fundamental security so much for granted that relatively minor threats and minor policy disagreements are magnified in a somewhat hysterical way to take on the shape and size of Armageddon.
Call it the "hygiene hypothesis" of political discourse. The original hygiene hypothesis explained the recent rise in auto-immune disorders like Crohn's and lupus, where the immune system attacks own's own body, by theorizing that the much better hygiene of modern living deprived the immune system of more legitimate targets (invading germs and viruses) to attack. Lacking more appropriate targets, it turns on itself. Perhaps, then, the lack of real serious threats to security and liberty makes people turn on minor and even nonexistent threats.
Nope, that doesn't pass the logic smell test either.
If you reduce the list of vulnerable targets, you reduce the probability of being hit ipso facto. For example, terrorist methodology is not equally adaptable to any target whatsoever. A lot of the reason airplanes are hit are because they're high in the sky, which means (1) even a small amount of damage can bring them down, killing everybody, and (2) they're very isolated from effective and timely outside help. The same kind of methodology that will work against an airplane is not going to work against, say, an oil terminal. So if, for example, you were able to completely forestall terrorism against airplanes, it would not all just shift over to oil terminals, because some of the people and methods focussed on airplanes just can't transfer. You might say that terrorist methods are not perfectly fungible.
Part of the problem is that both you and the OP are arguing by the (bogus) methods of extremes: either this extreme (terrorism is 100% preventable) or that extreme (terrorism is 0% preventable) must hold, and so if one extreme doesn't hold, the other must, QED. The problem is you've ignored (deliberately or otherwise) the many middle positions, e.g. terrorism is somewhat preventable and its frequency or severity can be economically reduced by some methods (but not others). Of course, you need a lot more subtle and well-informed POV to argue which methods are economical. A lot to expect from a generic/. AC, I know.
I don't feel guilt. I understand why I should, but...
Don't fret about it. Guilt is no more than a built-in pro-active self-preservation thing. It's an internal warning bell that lets you know that when your civilized neighbors catch up with you, they're going to beat the shit out of you, or maybe even kill you. Don't worry about ignoring it, it's not there for anyone else's benefit.
It is scary, real, and a major force on the rise.
The proper way to say this is:
"They LAUGHED at me when I was [born deformed/dismissed from my university post/lost the vote 434,555 to 1], but soon, when my [super Internet weapon/fiendish subversive plot/giant mutated killer penis clone] is finished, THEY'LL BE SORRY!!"
The problem with your thinking is that it seems to assume that children are just like adults, that they think the same way, have similar value systems, et cetera -- they just lack experience, so they should be "brought up to speed" in much the same way an ignorant adult would be.
Not so. Children are fundamentally different from adults. They don't think the same way. They don't experience the world the same way. Check out any good textbook on cognitive development and couple it with close, unprejudiced observation of your own children.
Most importantly, the way children think changes fairly rapidly as they grow. How a child reacts to a naked tit, for example, completely changes from age 1 to school-age, and again in middle school, and once again at sexual maturity. A wise parent considers these changes, and does not try to use the same reasoning and the same solutions at all ages.
And, in recognition of the fact that children don't think the same way at the same age, society tends to say that certain experiences should be shoved into certain age ranges, when they are easiest to successfully understand and cope with (either for the child or for the adults around him). It's among our oldest traditions as a species, the idea that certain experiences are best at certain ages, and it would generally be gross folly to overturn them without damn good reason. ("Gee! Tt seems reasonable to me! What could possibly go wrong?" doesn't qualify, by the way.)
The same arguments apply to purely intellectual stuff, too. For example, the present trend to teach algebra skills as early as grade 5 or 6 is almost certainly badly misguided. The mental circuitry required to easily learn algebra is usually (although not in every case) not "hooked up" until early adolescence. That means kids are tortured with stuff that is very hard to get, when waiting a few years would make it a piece of cake. Again, a failure to understand that children are not merely miniaturized, ignorant adults.
Why do you imagine the cost to manufacture a plastic disk should be the bulk of the cost to get music from a recording studio to a convenient store in your neighborhood? You might as well complain that the price of a new car exceeds the roughly $1600 price of refining the steel in it from iron ore by a factor of 15 or more.
In the modern industrial economy, the cost of almost everything is dominated not by the cost of manufacturing the basic material from which it's made, but in the services that are absorbed in assembling the product, controlling its quality, and transporting it all over the globe in such a flexible and clever way that it's available pretty much anywhere, anytime, without having to have massive inventories sitting around just in case. That's just reality, and it applies to everything from food to autos to MP3 players to music CDs. The major costs in your loaf of bread are not the cost to grow the wheat, and the major costs of your MP3 player are not the plastic and aluminum and electronic parts it contains, and so forth.
I don't know why you think they should be. Are you thinking you live in the 18th century, where instead of tripping down to the grocery store at 11 PM on Sunday evening to pick up a loaf of bread, they'd harness the team and drive out to the miller's twice a month to buy a sack of flour, which they then had to turn into bread themselves? It's only in a barely industrialized economy that the price of goods typically has very little price of services in it.
Er...how are all the sensors and stuff that might be sending data to the flight recorder going to be working if the power is out? Doesn't the data come in as electrical signals from some powered transducer? Seems to me with a battery on the flight recorder you'd just be recording some extra silence. The only thing that would continue to work would be any sensors actually inside the flight recorder, e.g. internal accelerometers and such. Certainly there's no way to record voices from the cockpit if all the cockpit microphones have lost power.
What makes a streaming solution better? Seems to me you're assuming (1) a large proportion of black boxes fail, so we need to ensure better survivability of the data by not tying it to the survivability of a physical box, or (2) there's some value in getting access to the data a day or two faster by having it on a disk drive somewhere immediately, instead of having to go find the box in the wreckage.
I think both are questionable. In the first place, I believe black boxes routinely survive crashes unscathed. You might make a case for mid-ocean crashes, where the wreck is unrecoverable (and leaving out the considerable expense in getting data off a plane in mid-ocean through a network of satellites, since no ground stations will be in sight). However, I believe generally deducing the cause of a crash is a multiple-pronged effort, using not just data from the BB, but also evidence from the wreck, ATC records, maintenance records, et cetera. If the wreck is unrecoverable, and there isn't any clue in the ATC data, i.e. everything hinges on the BB data, I'm thinking you're not going to solve that crash anyway, most of the time.
Secondly, I believe solving a puzzling crash generally takes at least weeks, if not months to years. Having the data in your hand a day or so faster seems unlikely to matter very much. I doubt the FAA has even assembled an investigative team that fast.
Twenty thousand people work in the Pentagon, the bulk of them secretaries, flunkies, gophers, paper pushers and form filers. They have, naturally, a plain old typical big business e-mail system for sending memos back and forth about whether the proper signatures have been affixed to form eight six four nine nine stroke seven aitch. This is what got hacked. To the extent "sensitive" data was compromised, it would be stuff like the Assistant Associate Deputy Secretary's daily conference call schedule, which is "sensitive" in the sense that in the remote chance that someone wants to assassinate him they'd find such data mildly useful.
There is of course also a serious network of computers at the Pentagon which handles serious military secrets. It doesn't run Windows. It isn't physically connected to the Internet. The Chinese can't touch it.
This is a silly FUD nonstory. There's no reason for the Pentagon to treat random secretarial computers with the same attention to security as they give classified computers. It would be very expensive, and my taxes are high enough already, thank you.
That would be Bush, Sr. He spent a lot of time negotiating with Gorbachev, at times secretly, at times openly, on how to wind down the Cold War (including safe stewardship of the Soviet nuclear arsenal) without giving nationalist fanatics in either country weapons -- literally or metaphorically -- with which to derail the process.
A measure of how much attention both these men gave to this delicate issue is the fact that both neglected domestic concerns and were promptly booted from power, Bush Sr. losing to Bill Clinton in 1992 in part because he was seen as unconcerned with US economic issues ("It's the economy, stupid!" being the famous Clinton campaign slogan), and Gorbachev being euchred out by Russian nationalist Boris Yeltsin after a failed coup against the former by Red Army hardliners.
It's ironic that few people know this, and that little historical credit goes to those who most successfully defused the Cold War bomb, so to speak. But then most people have short little attention spans, and are not intelligent enough to realize the significance of the dog that does not bark, or the bomb that does not go off.
How about dump the thermoelectrics and put up a real fission reactor? Then you can run it on any random mix of U-235 and Pu-239. IIRC, that was the plan for the Jupiter Icy Moons mission, now shelved.
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Let me rephrase, then. It's hard to find a correct scaling argument that says the duration of weather events should scale with the size of an atmosphere.
Coming up with wrong but logically consistent arguments for a given conclusion is easy. That's what numerology and astrology are all about.
It's true that there's not much on Jupiter besides atmosphere, but it's still weird to see what amounts to just a huge cyclone lasting for centuries -- or more -- I suppose we don't have any good idea when the Gred Red Spot first appeared.
Presumably Earth's atmosphere is just too thin to support weather systems of that longevity, although it's hard to think of a good scaling argument for why the size, thickness, mass et cetera of the atmosphere should dictate the scale of the duration of events in it.
But I wonder if there are parallels in ocean events, here? We have the El Nino/Nina business, the Atlantic Oscillation, and these things at least have periods near decades. Perhaps some of what we consider "permanent" features of the oceans, like the Gulf Stream, are merely "storms" like Jupiter's Red Spot that last several centuries.
It's a reasonable argument, but you seem to be assuming the only purpose of land is to live on. Hardly. There's a reason that range land in NM is $40 an acre and Manhattan real estate is probably roughly a million times more. It's what you can do there that matters.
So what can you do on the Moon that would make it so fabulously valuable? Beats me. The only unique resources the Moon has (exceedingly low temperatures in the shade, unbelievably good vacuum) you can also get in orbit, where you don't have to worry about any gravity at all, and can build eight-mile wide factories out of gossamer and shoe strings, if you want.
But it could happen. Suppose it turns out 1/6 gee allows you (don't ask me how) to grow perfect crystals of membrane-bound proteins fast and easy, something nearly impossible to do on Earth. That could lead to the possibility of rational design of fantastically valuable drugs, e.g. genuine cancer cures and the like. What would that be worth? Very likely far more than $100 billion. (The cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor will have earned its inventors about $65 billion by the time its patent expires in 2010.)
Um, yes. But the Moon does not sit at rest at the top of that well. You can't just "let things drop" and hope they'll hit the Earth. They won't. Anything at rest relative to the Moon is orbiting the Earth just as fast as the Moon, and will continue to "miss" the Earth just like the Moon does, forever.
Look at it this way. Say you're speeding above my mailbox in a low-flying plane at 300 MPH. Can you, at the moment you pass over, "just drop" a bag of dogshit onto my mailbox to express your opinion? Nope. The only way you can hit the mailbox is to throw it backwards at 300 MPH, which is pretty tough, pretty expensive if you need rockets and stuff to get that kind of velocity.
It's a little easier to hit the Earth with rocks from the Moon, because you can make use of the Earth's atmosphere; you only have to graze the atmosphere and friction will do the rest, gradually, although when you're counting on friction heating to use up a metric fuckload of kinetic energy, you may have additional problems keeping your bombs from melting and vaporizing, unless they really are just rocks.
Furthermore, the real stiff part of the gravity well is only from the surface to low Earth orbit. You can almost as easily reach the Moon from there as you can reach the Earth from the Moon. So the Lunies are going to have to extend (and enforce) their territorial claims down to within about 150 miles of the Earth's surface if they really want to be safe from reprisals. Good luck with that. Remember the Chinese ASAT test? Relatively easy to blow stuff out of low orbit.
...shame the historical facts squarely contradict it. Google "tragedy of the commons," or for a more concrete and squalid example look up the history of the Cabrini Green project in Chicago.
Fact is, ownership of land has zip to do with any kind of ethereal moral justification. People want it because it makes them feel safe. Other people allow it because experience shows that when people are allowed to own land they take care of it better, preserve its resources better for the future, are more agreeable to allowing others temporary and conditional use of it (instead of defending it fanatically), et cetera and so forth.
When land is held "in common" that just tends to mean a free for all where everyone grabs as much as he can of what's valuable about it as fast as he can before someone else beats him to it, with zero thought for the future. Sad fact o' life. All the lovely theories about how things ought to work, with, say, some other species, whose actions were driven strictly by pure logic, are quite nice -- but useless in practise.
sunlight
No, I doubt they have "independent studies and surveys." That's not how government works. What they probably do have is an earful of angry correspondence and phone calls from constituents telling them to do something about this damn downloading/file-sharing stuff. So they've done something. Should they not have? Isn't the purpose of government to respond to the demands of its constituents?
I mean, if you've got evidence that the LA City Council just thought this up on their own, out of the blue, without the least bit of urging from their constituents, then you have an interesting case. But my experience of local government is that it has so much on its plate, it's so backed-up and behind, that they do nothing until people scream very loud indeed. They're not just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, wondering how to fill up the day. Oh I know! Let's draft some statements about that nasty ol' downloading I saw a story about on the news last night! Doesn't work that way. They move only when constituents bitch at them loud and hearty.
I suspect that this is just another example of lobbyists writing self-serving legislation & regulation.
Absolutely it is. What you've forgotten, however, is that the job description of "lobbyist" is "someone who represents a large class of voters/consumers/producers" et cetera. The guy from the Sierra Club who goes to Washington to say "2 million of our members think there should be no drilling for oil of the coast" is a lobbyist. The guy from the EFF who similarly buttonholes members of Congress about the detrimental effect of the DMCA is also a lobbyist who represents all those who send the EFF a check to support their work.
It makes perfect sense to translate "MPAA lobbyist" to "spokesman for those who make and fund movies." Now, does it seem a priori unreasonable for the city council running the city in which most of those people live and work to be responding to their self-selected spokesmen? Uh, no. That's democracy. You may not like the result, but if you're in the minority (in LA County at least), then that's just too bad for you.
Well, in the first place, even if I granted your arguments, the fact that two recent patents (out of several hundred thousand) don't make sense to me is not much of an argument. You might as well pick out two cases in which grad students have taken out student loans and used them to buy cars to prove that the student loan system is fscked up and all grad students are cheats. As they say, the plural of anecdote is not data. You'd have a much better case if you could point to multiple cases in which patents clearly stifled important innovation (that, say, had to succeed outside of US patent protection, in some other country).
/..
Secondly, you're basing your criticism of the validity of the patent on your own ignorant opinion (unless you happen to be an IP lawyer) of what actual effect the patent has in the real world. Having had a few experiences with the law and lawyers (ugh), let me assure you it ain't nearly that simple. If you think an ordinary joe can read the law and predict exactly (or even roughly) how it's going to work out in the real world, in the rulings of actual judges, then...er, to be kind, you must be mystified by why lawyers make as much money as they do. People don't actually read the law? They're just idiots and hire expensive trained legal minds to do what any logically-thinking layman could do?
Uh, no. Ha ha. The practical effect of patents is something only someone pretty skilled in the field could predict, and even then, experts predict it wrongly often enough that we have actual patent litigation. (There wouldn't be any litigation if the lawyers for both sides could predict with near certainty who would win, right? No one wastes $millions on a trial if he can guess the outcome beforehand.)
It sounds to me like you're criticizing the patents based on the fact that their grant doesn't seem consistent with some five-page Cliff's Notes version you've got in your head about how IP law works. Perhaps you're right, or perhaps you're not. I wouldn't know, myself. I know enough to know that there's no way I could ever predict accurately what the effect of a particular patent is out in the real world. I'd have to hire a clever lawyer to do that, and obviously I'm not going to for a naive argument among amateurs on
Finally, you seem to rely on a certain programmer's or compulsive personality's assumption of precise definitions of words to make arguments about inconsistency and illogical in PTO rulings. The problem with this is, as I said in my original post, lawyers and regulators do not think like this. They don't run on rigid logical rails, where the meaning of every word is as precisely defined as the length in bits of a double in Java. They have a very different way of thinking, one much more flexible and fuzzy and based on empirical observations about how people behave. It may be confusing and frustrating to programmer types, but that does not mean it doesn't work, or make sense in its own context of application. The typical male programmer would have better luck understanding the mind of women he's trying to date than the mind of lawyers working over in the IP department.
Uh huh. Sure. And your proof would be....?
Sounds like generic mindless Big Bidness Been Bery Bery Bad Tuh Me sloganeering to me. Try thinking for yourself. Much harder, but more rewarding in the end.
Pretty decent track record?
Yeah. Check your immediate surroundings. See any cool devices (iPods, personal computers, Internet) that use technology recently invented in the United States? Call up some of your older friends and family. Any using medical technology (knee replacements, cholesterol-lowering statins, heart-attack preventing stents, implantable pacemakers) that was invented here? Clear evidence, if you're actually paying attention, that there's been no slackening in the pace of innovation and invention lately. If the PTO is dragging the inventiveness of Americans down, it ain't showing, not where it matters, not out in the marketplace.
When companies who hold thousands of patents agree that the patent system is broken
Oh dear, someone is complaining and has a nice theory of how things can be improved? Gosh, how surprising. Next you'll be telling me that sometimes it rains in California, or that folks living in $1 million mansions occasionally take antidepressants.
People complain. Always. They'll complain in Paradise about the flying speed limit or the lubricity of their virgins or the texture of the roast beef. What you need to find, to make any kind of case, is actual, you know, facts 'n' figures, that suggest that American inventiveness and technology improvement is being throttled by PTO policies and actions. Good luck with that. You complain about the PTO just accepting flimsy arguments based on pure logic and zero actual measurements and facts and working models -- and do exactly the same yourself in criticizing them. If that isn't irony, I don't know what is.
Apparently you're under the impression that the Patent Office is run by morons.
Fair enough, you're entitled to whatever POV you like. But there's no way to argue logically with you, since your assumptions are so fantastically different from mine.
FWIW, I assume the PTO is run by pretty clever people who do the best they can, given the general difficulty with predicting the future, and who have a pretty decent -- albeit not perfect -- track record over the past 200 years, and who would normally see right through any such transparently bogus scam, and, since they're human beings exercising judgment, and not Pentium Core Duos executing a giant Perl script written by Congress, would use the discretion the law gives them to just deny such an application forthwith.
You're only looking at this from the consumer end, which is hardly surprising given that this is /.
/. is that the "if" clause above is nonsense, and that it's intuitively obvious that online distribution of music and movies for free has no effect whatsoever on the sales for real money of that music and those movies.
But in Los Angeles, as someone else noted, you have the center of the movie industry, and one of the centers of the music industry. If it is correct that the fact that millions of people are distributing tunes and movies for free is depriving the folks in LA County who make music and movies of their income, then, yeah, I'd say there is a big impact on the LA economy. If movie companies and recording companies start hemorrhaging money, then they stop not only paying fat salaries to studio heads, but also start laying off janitors and secretaries, and, since those CEOs will be forgoing their bonuses, the number of Lexuses and plasma TVs sold will also go down, and a bunch of car and Best Buy salesmen are going to lose their jobs or take pay cuts.
Of course, the conventional wisdom here on
Whether the accomplishment is worth what it costs is another story. But pretending it isn't an accomplishment at all is just mindless sloganeering.
I dunno...patenting an idea which is impossible to implement, such as a perpetual motion machine, or which (more realistically) is wildly unprofitable to implement, isn't any real bar to progress. No one's ever going to implement those ideas, right? So that kind of "business" seems like just a honey pot for impractical dreamers.
Call it the "hygiene hypothesis" of political discourse. The original hygiene hypothesis explained the recent rise in auto-immune disorders like Crohn's and lupus, where the immune system attacks own's own body, by theorizing that the much better hygiene of modern living deprived the immune system of more legitimate targets (invading germs and viruses) to attack. Lacking more appropriate targets, it turns on itself. Perhaps, then, the lack of real serious threats to security and liberty makes people turn on minor and even nonexistent threats.
Nope, that doesn't pass the logic smell test either.
/. AC, I know.
If you reduce the list of vulnerable targets, you reduce the probability of being hit ipso facto. For example, terrorist methodology is not equally adaptable to any target whatsoever. A lot of the reason airplanes are hit are because they're high in the sky, which means (1) even a small amount of damage can bring them down, killing everybody, and (2) they're very isolated from effective and timely outside help. The same kind of methodology that will work against an airplane is not going to work against, say, an oil terminal. So if, for example, you were able to completely forestall terrorism against airplanes, it would not all just shift over to oil terminals, because some of the people and methods focussed on airplanes just can't transfer. You might say that terrorist methods are not perfectly fungible.
Part of the problem is that both you and the OP are arguing by the (bogus) methods of extremes: either this extreme (terrorism is 100% preventable) or that extreme (terrorism is 0% preventable) must hold, and so if one extreme doesn't hold, the other must, QED. The problem is you've ignored (deliberately or otherwise) the many middle positions, e.g. terrorism is somewhat preventable and its frequency or severity can be economically reduced by some methods (but not others). Of course, you need a lot more subtle and well-informed POV to argue which methods are economical. A lot to expect from a generic
I don't feel guilt. I understand why I should, but...
Don't fret about it. Guilt is no more than a built-in pro-active self-preservation thing. It's an internal warning bell that lets you know that when your civilized neighbors catch up with you, they're going to beat the shit out of you, or maybe even kill you. Don't worry about ignoring it, it's not there for anyone else's benefit.
It is scary, real, and a major force on the rise.
The proper way to say this is:
"They LAUGHED at me when I was [born deformed/dismissed from my university post/lost the vote 434,555 to 1], but soon, when my [super Internet weapon/fiendish subversive plot/giant mutated killer penis clone] is finished, THEY'LL BE SORRY!!"
The problem with your thinking is that it seems to assume that children are just like adults, that they think the same way, have similar value systems, et cetera -- they just lack experience, so they should be "brought up to speed" in much the same way an ignorant adult would be.
Not so. Children are fundamentally different from adults. They don't think the same way. They don't experience the world the same way. Check out any good textbook on cognitive development and couple it with close, unprejudiced observation of your own children.
Most importantly, the way children think changes fairly rapidly as they grow. How a child reacts to a naked tit, for example, completely changes from age 1 to school-age, and again in middle school, and once again at sexual maturity. A wise parent considers these changes, and does not try to use the same reasoning and the same solutions at all ages.
And, in recognition of the fact that children don't think the same way at the same age, society tends to say that certain experiences should be shoved into certain age ranges, when they are easiest to successfully understand and cope with (either for the child or for the adults around him). It's among our oldest traditions as a species, the idea that certain experiences are best at certain ages, and it would generally be gross folly to overturn them without damn good reason. ("Gee! Tt seems reasonable to me! What could possibly go wrong?" doesn't qualify, by the way.)
The same arguments apply to purely intellectual stuff, too. For example, the present trend to teach algebra skills as early as grade 5 or 6 is almost certainly badly misguided. The mental circuitry required to easily learn algebra is usually (although not in every case) not "hooked up" until early adolescence. That means kids are tortured with stuff that is very hard to get, when waiting a few years would make it a piece of cake. Again, a failure to understand that children are not merely miniaturized, ignorant adults.
Why do you imagine the cost to manufacture a plastic disk should be the bulk of the cost to get music from a recording studio to a convenient store in your neighborhood? You might as well complain that the price of a new car exceeds the roughly $1600 price of refining the steel in it from iron ore by a factor of 15 or more.
In the modern industrial economy, the cost of almost everything is dominated not by the cost of manufacturing the basic material from which it's made, but in the services that are absorbed in assembling the product, controlling its quality, and transporting it all over the globe in such a flexible and clever way that it's available pretty much anywhere, anytime, without having to have massive inventories sitting around just in case. That's just reality, and it applies to everything from food to autos to MP3 players to music CDs. The major costs in your loaf of bread are not the cost to grow the wheat, and the major costs of your MP3 player are not the plastic and aluminum and electronic parts it contains, and so forth.
I don't know why you think they should be. Are you thinking you live in the 18th century, where instead of tripping down to the grocery store at 11 PM on Sunday evening to pick up a loaf of bread, they'd harness the team and drive out to the miller's twice a month to buy a sack of flour, which they then had to turn into bread themselves? It's only in a barely industrialized economy that the price of goods typically has very little price of services in it.
Er...how are all the sensors and stuff that might be sending data to the flight recorder going to be working if the power is out? Doesn't the data come in as electrical signals from some powered transducer? Seems to me with a battery on the flight recorder you'd just be recording some extra silence. The only thing that would continue to work would be any sensors actually inside the flight recorder, e.g. internal accelerometers and such. Certainly there's no way to record voices from the cockpit if all the cockpit microphones have lost power.
Goodness, why not? On the scale of nanometer-size objects, 3g forces are miniscule.
What makes a streaming solution better? Seems to me you're assuming (1) a large proportion of black boxes fail, so we need to ensure better survivability of the data by not tying it to the survivability of a physical box, or (2) there's some value in getting access to the data a day or two faster by having it on a disk drive somewhere immediately, instead of having to go find the box in the wreckage.
I think both are questionable. In the first place, I believe black boxes routinely survive crashes unscathed. You might make a case for mid-ocean crashes, where the wreck is unrecoverable (and leaving out the considerable expense in getting data off a plane in mid-ocean through a network of satellites, since no ground stations will be in sight). However, I believe generally deducing the cause of a crash is a multiple-pronged effort, using not just data from the BB, but also evidence from the wreck, ATC records, maintenance records, et cetera. If the wreck is unrecoverable, and there isn't any clue in the ATC data, i.e. everything hinges on the BB data, I'm thinking you're not going to solve that crash anyway, most of the time.
Secondly, I believe solving a puzzling crash generally takes at least weeks, if not months to years. Having the data in your hand a day or so faster seems unlikely to matter very much. I doubt the FAA has even assembled an investigative team that fast.
Twenty thousand people work in the Pentagon, the bulk of them secretaries, flunkies, gophers, paper pushers and form filers. They have, naturally, a plain old typical big business e-mail system for sending memos back and forth about whether the proper signatures have been affixed to form eight six four nine nine stroke seven aitch. This is what got hacked. To the extent "sensitive" data was compromised, it would be stuff like the Assistant Associate Deputy Secretary's daily conference call schedule, which is "sensitive" in the sense that in the remote chance that someone wants to assassinate him they'd find such data mildly useful.
There is of course also a serious network of computers at the Pentagon which handles serious military secrets. It doesn't run Windows. It isn't physically connected to the Internet. The Chinese can't touch it.
This is a silly FUD nonstory. There's no reason for the Pentagon to treat random secretarial computers with the same attention to security as they give classified computers. It would be very expensive, and my taxes are high enough already, thank you.
That would be Bush, Sr. He spent a lot of time negotiating with Gorbachev, at times secretly, at times openly, on how to wind down the Cold War (including safe stewardship of the Soviet nuclear arsenal) without giving nationalist fanatics in either country weapons -- literally or metaphorically -- with which to derail the process.
A measure of how much attention both these men gave to this delicate issue is the fact that both neglected domestic concerns and were promptly booted from power, Bush Sr. losing to Bill Clinton in 1992 in part because he was seen as unconcerned with US economic issues ("It's the economy, stupid!" being the famous Clinton campaign slogan), and Gorbachev being euchred out by Russian nationalist Boris Yeltsin after a failed coup against the former by Red Army hardliners.
It's ironic that few people know this, and that little historical credit goes to those who most successfully defused the Cold War bomb, so to speak. But then most people have short little attention spans, and are not intelligent enough to realize the significance of the dog that does not bark, or the bomb that does not go off.
How about dump the thermoelectrics and put up a real fission reactor? Then you can run it on any random mix of U-235 and Pu-239. IIRC, that was the plan for the Jupiter Icy Moons mission, now shelved.