From my understanding of software patents vs. real mechanical patents: a software patent allows you to patent the concept of an action, rather than the action itself. Lets use the standard example of the cotton gin. If the machine had been covered under a software patent you would be able to patent the entire IDEA of ginning cotton (a device that inputs raw user cotton plants and outputs refined cotton) and not just the particular method of getting that refined cotton (which is what was really patented, all those years ago)
with physical patent, if a machine is already patented, you are still free to build a machine that does the same task, as long as its a different method. but with software you can't do that because there is usually only one possible method.
Also, software ends up covered by 2 separate IP laws, patent AND copyright, unlike physical machines which can't be copyrighted
What's next, are they going to argue that books and movies need patent protection too?
If you actually looked at how mod points are distributed on slashdot you would see that it's always a different random group of people with mod points. You can't cry "mod abuse" when the mods are anonymous and random
look under the history part, it explains where mod points come from. If you get modded down, its because the mathematically "average" user disagrees with you and believes you should get modded down
Allowing the FBI to wiretap the phone system was, at most, a minor inconvienience. Allowing tapping of the Internet is a much larger violation of privacy
Because phone taps had a physical location, you could control exactly who had access to it, just by securing the building. Internet taps have no such limits, "secure" FBI accounts can be stolen and passwords can be hacked and nobody would even know until it was far too late
The only time a phone tap can "spy" on you is when you are on the phone, and we only really use the phone to talk to other people. The internet on the other hand, is always on and contains multitudes more information than a simple phone call, including things that the police would normally need a separate warrant to look at, like the contents of your personal diary (on cloud storage) or a live video feed of the inside of your house.
Internet taps also remove the burden of individual warrants, With a phone tap you could only tap and record the single line that the warrant covers. The type of broad internet taps the FBI wants would be the equivalent of permanently tapping and recording every line at the exchange, and saving the recordings "just in case"
In the case of Montecello, they had been working on the plan for years. There had been city hall meetings, and bond meetings, and bond votes, and everything was ready. The city was just about to start actual construction when TDS sued.
Well there's your problem. Seriously, I don't know if the groundwater is heavily contaminated there or what the deal is, but far too much stupidity (especially concerning textbooks) seems to be centering around Texas.
My last English teacher was nice enough to just scan the relevant chapter and post it (securely) online, for legitimately educational purposes.
This is in contrast with the music teacher from the same school, who specifically instructed the school library to wait 2 weeks into the semester before allowing students to borrow the relevant class textbook, in order to force us to buy the book.
Getting a government permit to protest the government is like asking someone for permission to punch them in the face. Even if they give you permission, they are going to do whatever it takes to minimize the damage/message.
It would be like the RNC protests in Minnesota in 2008, the protesters were literally keep in a chain-link cage, with DOZENS of mounted police patrolling the area rounding up any loose protesters
It's funny how the DSL providers will swear up and down for years that they can't get DSL or fiber into your area. Then one day, they hear that the city itself is planning to roll out city-wide broadband, so the DSL company is "suddenly" able to serve your area, and sues the city for unfair competition.
If we knew the exact chemical formula for a "runner's high" and could copy it, then you would not be able to tell the difference between natural and non-natural, unless someone shot-up with an unnaturally large amount of the stuff.
Those chemicals which have increased in concentration in our immediate environment since the advent of agriculture (or the industrial revolution, if you prefer) are hereby deemed non-natural chemicals for the purpose of this discussion.
By mentioning increasing concentration you get at the the real heart of the problem. Its not the chemical formula or whether or not the chemical is "natural", it's the unnaturally large concentrations that result from mass production (and mass by-production) of them.
The law is only useless if you assume that stopping meth was the point of this law. However, if you assume the point of this law was to stop SCIENCE, then I say it's been pretty effective
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that the other planets are also warming up? Especially since we have never even landed a probe on most of them.
I suppose that all of those robotic probes that mankind has landed throughout the solar system are generating so much CO2 from their internal combustion engines that we are causing the global warming of these other planets (besides Earth).
You know that every single one of the probes ever sent into space was battery/solar powered right? An internal combustion engine requires either an oxygen atmosphere or oxygen in stored tanks
also, do you even know what depleted uranium is used for? it's used instead of lead in a bullet because it's denser and goes farther, not because it's radioactive. If such a small about of uranium could pose a threat, just imagine all the tons of lead-poisoning in the environment from every gun fired since the invention of the gun.
I really hope you were were just trolling and PRETENDING to be ignorant
The word "Drugs" has also shared a similar fate. I'm so sick of people saying "drugs are bad" and "don't do drugs". without realizing that ALL medications are drugs
I think it's mostly just the ignorant conservative anti-science rednecks in Texas that give conservatives a bad name. Nothing says anti-science like trying to force evolution out of a science textbook. Or banning ALL chemistry equipment, because it could be used to make meth (seriously, you have to have a permit to buy an Erlenmeyer flask in TX)
I think their new legal counsel used to be a man, because Magnolia Mansourkia Mobley totally sounds like a sex change name. No real woman would use a name like that unless she has delusions of royalty or something.
Well, AT&T managed to invent and then bury the answering machine (and the magnetic tape) for a full 50 years before someone else re-invented it elsewhere and brought it to market. All it takes is for the board to vote to destroy all the research and evidence, and then gag everyone involved with permanent NDAs.
What you're promoting is at best forced temporary slavery on one person for the benefit of others.
No, No,No! what we are promoting is temporary slavery for EVERYONE for the benefit of EVERYONE
Stop thinking in terms of "the greedy government is taking money from me" and start thinking in terms of "what is cheaper (for everyone, on average), paying a corp to do it, or paying the government to do it"
when you have something that EVERYONE needs, such as healthcare, education, housing, and food, it makes more sense to make a cooperative effort instead of trying to go it alone.
My school (MCTC in Minneapolis,MN) offers a culinary arts program and also has a cafeteria for the students. The problem is that NONE of the culinary arts students work at the cafeteria because it's being privately run by a french company called Sodexo, and they hire employees off the street like any other restaurant would, instead of favoring student workers. What makes things even worse, is that that Sodexo's greed, coupled with a college-provided monopoly, means the prices in this cafeteria are actually HIGHER than the prices of nearby for-profit restaurants. At one point they were even charging $1.39 for the cans of Peace Tea and Arizona Tea that have "only 99" printed right on the can. When people complained about it, Cedexo just stopped selling the tea, instead of lowering the price.
Apparently it's been like this since 1987. no wonder we have entire generations of Texans that are anti-science, they have all been brainwashed to think that chemistry has no purpose EXCEPT making meth.
Also, the condenser they are talking about is a glass coil designed to be suspended in a flask of cold water, not an A/C condenser.
It may be that the rest of the world gets the cancer cure but it will be illegal in the US. Or only available to the few who can afford it.
They call this a patent. It's illegal to make the drug, unless the patent owner says you can (and they won't). But, for the most part, the rest of the world just ignores US patents, so everyone else will have the drug, but the US won't (except for the rich)
The only way this could be different is if the drug is somehow very difficult/expensive to make in large amounts, in which case only the rich will have it, no matter what country it is
This kind of thinking is fantastically disconnected from reality - naive, junior-high, my-parents-don't-get-it thinking. Big pharma execs would do anything for a cancer cure; it would mean fame, money, and prestige out their eyes. And if one solitary idiot at that board meeting said something about not releasing it because of long term profits (or some other BS) he'd get laughed out of a job and be a funny story in someone's memoirs.
Now sure, they'd do what they could to milk it for profits - but they'd be damn sure it got out there before anyone else could. Hell, even if releasing it wasn't profitable at all (and it would be - obviously, obviously, obviously, obviously), they'd burn their company down if they had to.
Very, very few people would consider holding back on a cure for money; not many of those psychopaths have the personal skills to end up at the top of a big corporation, and getting a whole raft of them together would be nigh impossible. Imagining collusion across all the companies on something like this is ridiculous.
What exactly is a psychopath?
"Superficially charming, psychopaths tend to make a good first impression on others and often strike observers as remarkably normal. Yet they are self-centered, dishonest and undependable, and at times they engage in irresponsible behavior for no apparent reason other than the sheer fun of it. Largely devoid of guilt, empathy and love, they have casual and callous interpersonal and romantic relationships. Psychopaths routinely offer excuses for their reckless and often outrageous actions, placing blame on others instead. They rarely learn from their mistakes or benefit from negative feedback, and they have difficulty inhibiting their impulses."
Replace the word "fun" with "profit", and the word "romantic" with "economic", and you have the DEFINITION of any large publicly traded company
There has been at least one documentary showing that all corporations engage in psychopathic and sociopathic behaviors on a regular basis, especially in thier callous disregard for human life, the union carbide disaster is a great example of this.
if one solitary idiot at that board meeting said something about not releasing it because of long term profits (or some other BS) he'd get laughed out of a job
What if that "one solitary idiot" is the single largest shareholder (directly representing himself)? what are they going to do, laugh at him till he sells his share of the company? You assume that board members can be fired, but the majority of board members either personally own significant stock in the company, or they represent someone who does. The CEO (and CFO, CTO, etc) are the only ones who can be fired, because they are employees of the company, not shareholder representatives.
The US has a much higher ratio of home owners to renters than any other country in the world. In most parts of the world, it's fairly common for a family to uproot and move in search of work. Just look at distant history, humans were perpetually moving their families in search of work (animals to hunt)
The situation you describe, having to sell you house, move a ton of crap, and then buy a new house, is entirely intentional and was created by the US government in the 1940s specifically to prevent people from moving around in search of better pay and conditions, in an attempt to reduce the bargaining power of the unions.
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From my understanding of software patents vs. real mechanical patents: a software patent allows you to patent the concept of an action, rather than the action itself. Lets use the standard example of the cotton gin. If the machine had been covered under a software patent you would be able to patent the entire IDEA of ginning cotton (a device that inputs raw user cotton plants and outputs refined cotton) and not just the particular method of getting that refined cotton (which is what was really patented, all those years ago)
with physical patent, if a machine is already patented, you are still free to build a machine that does the same task, as long as its a different method. but with software you can't do that because there is usually only one possible method.
Also, software ends up covered by 2 separate IP laws, patent AND copyright, unlike physical machines which can't be copyrighted
What's next, are they going to argue that books and movies need patent protection too?
If you actually looked at how mod points are distributed on slashdot you would see that it's always a different random group of people with mod points. You can't cry "mod abuse" when the mods are anonymous and random
http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
look under the history part, it explains where mod points come from. If you get modded down, its because the mathematically "average" user disagrees with you and believes you should get modded down
the FBI can install spyware on a computer just as stealthily as they can bug a room.
At which point there will be a new push from the government to ban "unapproved" encryption
Allowing the FBI to wiretap the phone system was, at most, a minor inconvienience. Allowing tapping of the Internet is a much larger violation of privacy
Because phone taps had a physical location, you could control exactly who had access to it, just by securing the building.
Internet taps have no such limits, "secure" FBI accounts can be stolen and passwords can be hacked and nobody would even know until it was far too late
The only time a phone tap can "spy" on you is when you are on the phone, and we only really use the phone to talk to other people.
The internet on the other hand, is always on and contains multitudes more information than a simple phone call, including things that the police would normally need a separate warrant to look at, like the contents of your personal diary (on cloud storage) or a live video feed of the inside of your house.
Internet taps also remove the burden of individual warrants, With a phone tap you could only tap and record the single line that the warrant covers. The type of broad internet taps the FBI wants would be the equivalent of permanently tapping and recording every line at the exchange, and saving the recordings "just in case"
In the case of Montecello, they had been working on the plan for years. There had been city hall meetings, and bond meetings, and bond votes, and everything was ready. The city was just about to start actual construction when TDS sued.
... I live in Texas....
Well there's your problem.
Seriously, I don't know if the groundwater is heavily contaminated there or what the deal is, but far too much stupidity (especially concerning textbooks) seems to be centering around Texas.
My last English teacher was nice enough to just scan the relevant chapter and post it (securely) online, for legitimately educational purposes.
This is in contrast with the music teacher from the same school, who specifically instructed the school library to wait 2 weeks into the semester before allowing students to borrow the relevant class textbook, in order to force us to buy the book.
A permit to protest? are you completely insane?
Getting a government permit to protest the government is like asking someone for permission to punch them in the face. Even if they give you permission, they are going to do whatever it takes to minimize the damage/message.
It would be like the RNC protests in Minnesota in 2008, the protesters were literally keep in a chain-link cage, with DOZENS of mounted police patrolling the area rounding up any loose protesters
It's funny how the DSL providers will swear up and down for years that they can't get DSL or fiber into your area. Then one day, they hear that the city itself is planning to roll out city-wide broadband, so the DSL company is "suddenly" able to serve your area, and sues the city for unfair competition.
http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/09/telco-to-town-were-suing-you-because-we-care/
Take a company, any company at all, and give them the choice between money and truth, they will ALWAYS pick money.
If we knew the exact chemical formula for a "runner's high" and could copy it, then you would not be able to tell the difference between natural and non-natural, unless someone shot-up with an unnaturally large amount of the stuff.
Those chemicals which have increased in concentration in our immediate environment since the advent of agriculture (or the industrial revolution, if you prefer) are hereby deemed non-natural chemicals for the purpose of this discussion.
By mentioning increasing concentration you get at the the real heart of the problem. Its not the chemical formula or whether or not the chemical is "natural", it's the unnaturally large concentrations that result from mass production (and mass by-production) of them.
It's just stupid people making stupid laws.
Sounds like government to me.
The law is only useless if you assume that stopping meth was the point of this law. However, if you assume the point of this law was to stop SCIENCE, then I say it's been pretty effective
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that the other planets are also warming up? Especially since we have never even landed a probe on most of them.
I suppose that all of those robotic probes that mankind has landed throughout the solar system are generating so much CO2 from their internal combustion engines that we are causing the global warming of these other planets (besides Earth).
You know that every single one of the probes ever sent into space was battery/solar powered right? An internal combustion engine requires either an oxygen atmosphere or oxygen in stored tanks
also, do you even know what depleted uranium is used for? it's used instead of lead in a bullet because it's denser and goes farther, not because it's radioactive. If such a small about of uranium could pose a threat, just imagine all the tons of lead-poisoning in the environment from every gun fired since the invention of the gun.
I really hope you were were just trolling and PRETENDING to be ignorant
Except you are MADE OF chemicals, and not MADE OF snakes
Also, most snakes aren't poisonous, it's just the famous ones that are.
The word "Drugs" has also shared a similar fate. I'm so sick of people saying "drugs are bad" and "don't do drugs". without realizing that ALL medications are drugs
I think it's mostly just the ignorant conservative anti-science rednecks in Texas that give conservatives a bad name. Nothing says anti-science like trying to force evolution out of a science textbook. Or banning ALL chemistry equipment, because it could be used to make meth (seriously, you have to have a permit to buy an Erlenmeyer flask in TX)
I think their new legal counsel used to be a man, because Magnolia Mansourkia Mobley totally sounds like a sex change name. No real woman would use a name like that unless she has delusions of royalty or something.
Well, AT&T managed to invent and then bury the answering machine (and the magnetic tape) for a full 50 years before someone else re-invented it elsewhere and brought it to market. All it takes is for the board to vote to destroy all the research and evidence, and then gag everyone involved with permanent NDAs.
What you're promoting is at best forced temporary slavery on one person for the benefit of others.
No, No ,No! what we are promoting is temporary slavery for EVERYONE for the benefit of EVERYONE
Stop thinking in terms of "the greedy government is taking money from me" and start thinking in terms of "what is cheaper (for everyone, on average), paying a corp to do it, or paying the government to do it"
when you have something that EVERYONE needs, such as healthcare, education, housing, and food, it makes more sense to make a cooperative effort instead of trying to go it alone.
My school (MCTC in Minneapolis,MN) offers a culinary arts program and also has a cafeteria for the students. The problem is that NONE of the culinary arts students work at the cafeteria because it's being privately run by a french company called Sodexo, and they hire employees off the street like any other restaurant would, instead of favoring student workers. What makes things even worse, is that that Sodexo's greed, coupled with a college-provided monopoly, means the prices in this cafeteria are actually HIGHER than the prices of nearby for-profit restaurants. At one point they were even charging $1.39 for the cans of Peace Tea and Arizona Tea that have "only 99" printed right on the can. When people complained about it, Cedexo just stopped selling the tea, instead of lowering the price.
Apparently it's been like this since 1987. no wonder we have entire generations of Texans that are anti-science, they have all been brainwashed to think that chemistry has no purpose EXCEPT making meth.
Also, the condenser they are talking about is a glass coil designed to be suspended in a flask of cold water, not an A/C condenser.
It may be that the rest of the world gets the cancer cure but it will be illegal in the US. Or only available to the few who can afford it.
They call this a patent. It's illegal to make the drug, unless the patent owner says you can (and they won't). But, for the most part, the rest of the world just ignores US patents, so everyone else will have the drug, but the US won't (except for the rich)
The only way this could be different is if the drug is somehow very difficult/expensive to make in large amounts, in which case only the rich will have it, no matter what country it is
This kind of thinking is fantastically disconnected from reality - naive, junior-high, my-parents-don't-get-it thinking. Big pharma execs would do anything for a cancer cure; it would mean fame, money, and prestige out their eyes. And if one solitary idiot at that board meeting said something about not releasing it because of long term profits (or some other BS) he'd get laughed out of a job and be a funny story in someone's memoirs.
Now sure, they'd do what they could to milk it for profits - but they'd be damn sure it got out there before anyone else could. Hell, even if releasing it wasn't profitable at all (and it would be - obviously, obviously, obviously, obviously), they'd burn their company down if they had to.
Very, very few people would consider holding back on a cure for money; not many of those psychopaths have the personal skills to end up at the top of a big corporation, and getting a whole raft of them together would be nigh impossible. Imagining collusion across all the companies on something like this is ridiculous.
What exactly is a psychopath?
"Superficially charming, psychopaths tend to make a good first impression on others and often strike observers as remarkably normal. Yet they are self-centered, dishonest and undependable, and at times they engage in irresponsible behavior for no apparent reason other than the sheer fun of it. Largely devoid of guilt, empathy and love, they have casual and callous interpersonal and romantic relationships. Psychopaths routinely offer excuses for their reckless and often outrageous actions, placing blame on others instead. They rarely learn from their mistakes or benefit from negative feedback, and they have difficulty inhibiting their impulses."
Replace the word "fun" with "profit", and the word "romantic" with "economic", and you have the DEFINITION of any large publicly traded company
There has been at least one documentary showing that all corporations engage in psychopathic and sociopathic behaviors on a regular basis, especially in thier callous disregard for human life, the union carbide disaster is a great example of this.
if one solitary idiot at that board meeting said something about not releasing it because of long term profits (or some other BS) he'd get laughed out of a job
What if that "one solitary idiot" is the single largest shareholder (directly representing himself)? what are they going to do, laugh at him till he sells his share of the company? You assume that board members can be fired, but the majority of board members either personally own significant stock in the company, or they represent someone who does. The CEO (and CFO, CTO, etc) are the only ones who can be fired, because they are employees of the company, not shareholder representatives.
The US has a much higher ratio of home owners to renters than any other country in the world. In most parts of the world, it's fairly common for a family to uproot and move in search of work. Just look at distant history, humans were perpetually moving their families in search of work (animals to hunt)
The situation you describe, having to sell you house, move a ton of crap, and then buy a new house, is entirely intentional and was created by the US government in the 1940s specifically to prevent people from moving around in search of better pay and conditions, in an attempt to reduce the bargaining power of the unions.