If by "world", you mean GM, yes it will end before then.
Open your eyes, folks: Here's GM's financials. Notice how most of the numbers are useless since they weren't designed for handling negative numbers. It's trading at $23, after last year's *per share* loss of $65. If Google dropped 90%, it would still be worth 50% more than GM.
It's even trying to pay a dividend (!) while suffering massive legacy costs that its foreigners don't have, or properly funded.
Q: What do you do if you know how to program a driverless car? A: Work for a car company that can pay you WITHOUT deducting from your pay to cover the pensions of millions of people you've never met.
As much as it pains me to admit it, in the future, information may become as important as physical goods, making data on a laptop potentially just as dangerous as any of those illegal goods.
Because the carbon alarmism has nothing to do with concern about the fate of humanity, and everything to do with shutting down successful economies?
Before you ridiculue it, ask yourself if there's a better theory that fits the data.
As usual, I'm going to give the most convincing reason: There is an optimal solution to the environmental dangers of carbon emission, but it's rejected because it's not harmful enough to the economy. That solution is to tax carbon fuels in proportion to their externality and apply the funds toward carbon sinks and abatements that anyone can bid on. Then, it simply doesn't matter anymore how much carbon someone emits, because it's balanced by resources to take care of it. Because it would become profitable to find cheaper ways to sink carbon, eventually it would get to the point that the tax was negligible for most purposes, assuming it wasn't that way at the beginning.
So what? Notional experts' assets--that is, their reputation and ability, therefore, to make money as predictors of future outcomes--already depend on the success of their predictions. And--unlike with prediction markets--there is no easy way to limit exposure.
Experts are rarely held to account for wrong predictions, and rarely make the kind of quantifiable, objectively observable predictions that go into futures markets.
So, as far as individuals making predictions go, because they are essentially anonymous and exposure is limited, prediction markets reduce the marginal "return to honesty" (really, the returns in either case are to accuracy, not honesty.)
Please recall the context of my original remarks. The eventual occurrence of the predicted event determines the prediction's accuracy. One's willingness to pay $3 (on a $100 bet) when one has stated that he believes the odds to be 90%, is a reflection of his honesty. If he claims the odds are 90%, but won't buy at $3, the prediction market has successfully tamed his *dishonest* characterization of his certainty, which was the point.
The total amount invested in all political futures markets that interested parties might wish to invest in is a drop in the bucket in the world of political expenditures, so that's not wouldn't be a big challenge to the people who would be interested in doing so. [...]
Yes, because no one's tried to run a campaign focused that way. If and when it happens, traders will enter the market to the point where it's not longer a "drop in the bucket".
It isn't an "analogy" at all. "Investments" in political futures markets designed to drive perceptions are a form of political advertisement
A purchase of a political future IS a bet on a future event. It can be used to change perceptions, making it in some respects analagous to a political advertisement. However, the incentive structure and future obligations resulting, are completely different, making them not identical. For example, the monetary value (in my net worth) of my donation to the Hillary campaign does not vary based on future events, while in the political future purchase, it does. The correctness of the facts on which the future purchase is predicated, is validated or invalided, while this does not happen for a political donation. And so on. These are pretty fundamental distinctions.
So I absolutely agree people can get attention and credibility for a certain candidate but throwing in eye-catching bets, but your characterization of the activity as identical to political advertisement is not justified.
Obviously, not everyone's going to be honest. The point is, having your assets depend on whether your statement is true increases the returns to honesty significantly. Yes, people can bet heavily on a candidate without regard for real truth. However, there is more than one prediction market, and to really influence revealed odds, they have to bet in all of them, or else other traders will "Dutch book" them until they can't invest anymore.
The comparison to honesty in political donations is about the worst analogy I can imagine. You're just equivocating on the concept of "honesty".
That's my point: yes, men reject women merely because of looks -- but they're not going to admit it in a survey! I'd estimate that any survey claiming that men don't do this, isn't very accurate, for the same reason as the ring/house question.
Prediction markets reflect information that is known; they are not perfect crystal balls. They also fall victim to groupthink. Very true, but the question is, compared to what? Prediction markets force people to be honest -- there's real money at stake, and a cost to your arrogance. (Well, not at Google, but at other markets.) It's harder to be a know-it-all when you have to back up your claims with your own money.
The best example is that the prediction markets predicted Hillary would win the Democratic nomination by a wide margin. Now the consensus is that it will be Obama by a wide margin. I'd classify that as a feature rather than a flaw. Changes in odds are useful information too and allow us to avoid hindsight bias. It keeps us from saying, "Well everyone knew Obama would win." You can look at the history of the bets and say, "No, they didn't -- the general consensus was that he had no chance." Furthermore, "Hey, if you really knew it all along, why weren't you swiping up those underpriced Obama bets?"
One thing I'm interested in seeing is how Candidate/Party X's chance of winning correlates with critical financial metrics like long-term interest rates and oil prices. That is, do traders revise their estimates as a party's chance of winning goes up? Intrade recently started "shock future" bets where you can bet on the changes in such variables on election day (although I think to avoid the noise you should instead look at the long-term correlation rather than one day, which has noise from other factors).
For all their flaws, prediction markets truly fascinate me.
The reason for this is, the companies who make money out of diamonds did a survey of couples considering marriage, and asked the women if they wanted a diamond ring. A lot of women knew how expensive it was, and replied that they didn't want a diamond ring, and they'd much rather put the money towards a house, furnishings, a car, etc. Okay, just so you don't overreact, let me first say: I am on your side. De Beers's tactics sicken me, and I want the cultural obsession of "marriage = diamond" to end.
HOWEVER, the statistic you just quoted needs to be taken with a HUGE grain of salt. Asking women whether they want a status symbol they can lord over their friends and show off in public, or a resonsible investment for their financial future? There is a severe social desirability bias in such a question. Women simply won't be truthful on the question, for the same reason that men won't be truthful on, "Would you write a woman off merely because of looks?"
So yes, it's important to end this tradition, but please be aware that there are strong barriers to changing it in BOTH sexes.
Bingo. I mean, that is just basic, basic design. It's like how if I install the ultra-well-designed Ubuntu to the fucking THIRD hard drive, and the installation fails, I can still access the other installed OS. That's just what you *do* when you want to avoid cascading failures, and I think that's what the FOSS community "gets" and proprietary vendors like Honeywell don't.
Anyone capable of making a good website, would go work for a company that could pay them what they're worth, WITHOUT having their pay deducted to pay for massive legacy pension and health care obligations that GM agreed to and never bothered fully funding.
But if the software fork bomb has a physical analogue in this Universe (e.g. anything that self-replicates in parallel, such as rabbits, humans and sci-fi nanobot "grey goo") then it won't be enough to know how many there are. You'll also need to know where they are and what they are doing in order to observe them. So the Universe will need to model the physical behaviour of all of them.
No, I think you're misunderstanding what the criteria are for when something "must be computed to continue fooling us". All that's necessary is that the reality it shows us is consistent with what it has shown previously. Therefore, nanobots don't necessarily eat up a lot of simulation computation time. After all, for all we know, any number of resultant instantiations of nanobots are consistent with what we dumped out of the lab. Only when we know (from previous observations that led to formulation of the laws of physics!) that a certain observation must occur, is the simulator required to churn through the calculations, because its failure to do so would reveal an inconsistency.
The experiment I proposed, then, is to make it so it's hard for the *simulator* to keep up, but not us, and to do that, you would need to run a bunch of systems, and only check a few for consistency.
Thanks for introducing me to the term "fork bomb", but unless you know of a real world, deterministic-in-practice, implementation of a fork bomb *that must be fully computed to generate our current observations*, it isn't a viable option. Remember, it's not enough that it self-replicate, but that the *observable part* can only be inferred by working through each spawned process. That is, while fork bombs take up computer memory, knowing how many will exist after a given amount of time, does not.
I agree, chaotic does not imply non-deterministic, just "really hard to compute for prediction".
As for your question, yes, there is a classic example of a deterministic-but-not-computable system. However, it is not chaotic. I will describe it anyway, just to be cool. The system is as follows:
Let A(n,s) be a random algorithm that operates on the input, integers n and s. Let t be number for the current state. (If you are on the 1000th iteration in time of the system, t is 1000.)
The system has one binary variable, s.
The state at any given time t is defined by:
If A(t-1,s(t-1)) halts, s=1 at time t; s=0 otherwise.
As you can see from the description, each state t is fully determined by the previous state, s(t-1). Therefore, it is deterministic. However, there exists no algorithm that can tell you if an arbitrary algorithm, for an arbitrary input, halts. (That is the famous Halting Theorem.) Therefore, you cannot compute it.
Okay, I might have gotten the system a bit wrong...
If our reality is virtual, then all data is suspect, and it would be impossible to trust any sort of experimental data.
False. You can do experiments within virtual worlds to determine the rules under which it operates, just like you can in the real world. For example, in second life, if you don't RTFM, you can still do scientific tests with your avatars to learn the internal physics of that virtual world.
Even if you come up with a clever test that would pierce the illusion, one would have to assume whoever maintains the illusion would simply fix it so that didn't work a second time. Nothing would be repeatable.
You shut off too soon. Take it further -- if the creators "fix it", would we notice? If, as I suggest in my other post on this article, we piece the illusion via overloading the system with computations it must perform, the creator may be forced to start "simplifying" the laws of physics in observable ways.
FYI: Someone mentioned the Bostrom argument, so rather than make another post, I thought I'd concisely summarize it here:
"If it's possible to make fully-real-seeming simulations, any civilization will eventually discover this and make on the order of thousands of them. Thus, only one out of 1000+ real-seeming worlds is real. From a Bayesian perspective, then, GIVEN that the world seems real, there is only a 1 in 1000+ chance it is real."
Not, necessarily -- don't some people today "realize" (believe strongly enough) they are in a simulation?
He is proposing something similar to what I proposed in this post, but I suggested testing it, not by finding some natural process inherently incomputable, but by "overloading the system" by increasing our observations to the point that it cannot keep up with the computations necessary, and has to take a "short cut" that violates known laws of physics. Though in fairness, instead of taking shortcuts, it could just end the simulation.
We would probably want to find some natural process we can predict with extreme accuracy, but only through extensive calculations. Then, run trillions of them, but only predict-and-then-check-on a few.
Some might say patents are already too hard to get, to which I say, No, they aren't. They aren't NEARLY hard ENOUGH to get.
Well, I would more characterize it as being the wrong *kind* of hard. It is hard in being expensive and cumbersome for individuals and small companies to work with, which is bad. It is not hard enough in terms of the technical merit you have to establish in order to be granted the patent, which is also bad. We need to somehow make the former less hard, and the latter harder.
IMHO, patents should only be granted for such stunning works of genius that it is unlikely anyone else would have come up with it any time soon. A good "obviousness test" for this would be to present the problem it intents to solve, to other people in the field and ask them to submit solutions. If they don't list yours, even as a sketch, then it's non-obvious. This has the problem of making it more expensive (the first, bad, kind of hard), but that could be fixed by having a system where you do this for other applications, in exchange for it being done for free on yours.
IMHO, it's a myth that Mac's have an optimal interface. I recently got a MacBook, and while I'm generally satisfied with it, there is a LOT Of irritating stuff.
-email client: Why the hell are the subject lines all darkened? Nothing in help about this. Ah, must be a "mail rule". Oh, there it is, I'll just turn it off. Wait, that option is all the way at the bottom of the screen, on top of the program launch icons. *click* No, I didn't want to load that program. Okay, I'll scroll down so that the button is in the middle screen and I can click it without launching another app. Wait, no scroll option? ****! Okay, how do I turn the lower app launch bar off? *search search search* Okay, there we go. Wait, they're still darkened. Oh, okay, I've got to tell it to apply to all. [finds option somewhere] Now, how do I get the bottom bar to come back...
-iMovie: I want to export some video captures from an image I made. Let's see, right click on the point in the video I want to use, where's the export-frame option? Nowhere. Okay, help search: "video capture". Nothing. Okay, "frame". Ahah, 8th option, how to make a frame into a clip. Closest option. I go to the frame I want and then ctrl-click it. Hm, OH, wait, I can right-click too! Why hide this option from me? Oh yes, I forgot: people who prefer using one hand (or are disabled losers) need not apply.
I grab the frame, and it makes me put it as a non-moving clip somewhere in the video. So, I do a few of these from different pictures. Now where are they? Okay, I get to dig through finder again. Now, let me move them all to one folder for easy upload. Wait, the second one I moved (and the rest) have the same name as the first. Okay, so let me choose a different name on moving it. I can't? Okay, fine, I'll rename them all, THEN move them.
-I took a photo of myself in PhotoBooth. Now I want to crop it and upload it. Okay, click on iPhoto. Crop image. Great, now I have it in an album. But where's the picture file? Um, show-in-Finder option? Nope. Save cropped picture somewhere? Nope. I have to go deep into the directory, photos->iphoto library->various weird folder -> copy it to a more useful place, then upload.
-Now I want to make the cropped image my ichat buddy icon. Drag to chat pic? No, that would imply interoperability. Export to ichat? No. I have to go to the buddy icon and then load it from the useful place I moved it to.
User interface design really interests me. I understand that other people don't share this passion. Still, I think simple rules can provide a good guide, even if you have no clue. Here is rule I would propose instead of (or in addition to) that one:
Have ONE potential user try to use it as they would for its intended purpose. Then, eliminate the things that severely bother them until there are none. (Severe means things like, "Can't find a function after trying obvious ways of searching for it", takes a lot of effort to instruct it to do very common tasks, anythink irritating enough that they want to avoid using that part of the program.)
Believe it or not, that will put you ahead of about 50% of user interfaces out there.
"Weaken" only compared to current practice. Fine. Good. Current practice is bad No, weaken compared to the goal of protecting the right of the author to exclusive copying of the work. If a creator doesn't have the right to alienate the right, it's not a right, but more of an obligation. I suspect you don't think that the right to life implies an obligation not to e.g. cut off your own treatment in a hospital.
Congress doesn't "protect" the copyright, it creates it de novo. And it has no Constitutional power for such an "extension". Yes it does -- it's part of the copyright. Put it this way: Congress has the power to e.g. protect property rights in physical objects, or, if you prefer, create property rights de novo. Does it have to specifically, as a separate power, have the power to protect the right of people to fully transfer a property right to someone else, or is this typically taken as inherent in the right of property ownership? If the Constitution or body of law did not specify that Congress has the right to protect property *that has been transferred to someone else*, would you assume people did or did not have the right to legally and fully transfer property to others?
And I know you're going to say, "Property rights are real rights that people deserve with or without Congress, while IP is artificial." but then you're adding a questionable, and easily refutable assumption.
Well, that ought to be a big clue that you're on the wrong track. Inherited power of any sort - economic, political - is a horrendous idea. Depends on what worldview you come in with. But I could just as easily say that one big clue you're on the wrong track is that "non-transferrable rights" is more characteristic of feudalism, which treated land exactly that way. A lord could not sell land outright to someone else.
But allowing copying != transferring copyright Agreed.
Debatable, but irrelevant. The purpose of copyright is not to add value for the creator, it is to benefit us all by promoting the arts Yes, I get the broader point. But my remark was relevant to the part of your original post that I was replying to:
Congress is authorized only to secure copyrights to creators ("Authors and Inventors") - not to employers, assignees, or heirs. You were characterizing this transfer (and by extension, the creator's option to transfer) of rights to others, as somehow in contravention of the goal of securing copyrights to *creators*. My point (though I couldn't quite phrase it right) was that, no, denying the transfer of rights to the employers/assignees *itself* is a violation of the creator's copyright. To limit how much of the right can be transferred weaken's the creator's rights. Assignees deserve the rights not because Congress is authorized to secure copyrights for *them*, but as an extension of Congress's protection of the copyright of the creator.
(A similar argument can be made in defense of inherited wealth.)
In other words, if copyright is for the benefit of everyone, we should include "right of full transfer benefits creators" in our analysis.
And it's not very debatable that the option to fully alienate adds value for the creator. A bundle of rights with one more option must have the same or more value than if that option were removed -- just ask options traders!
Slashdot Mirror
If by "world", you mean GM, yes it will end before then.
Open your eyes, folks: Here's GM's financials. Notice how most of the numbers are useless since they weren't designed for handling negative numbers. It's trading at $23, after last year's *per share* loss of $65. If Google dropped 90%, it would still be worth 50% more than GM.
It's even trying to pay a dividend (!) while suffering massive legacy costs that its foreigners don't have, or properly funded.
Q: What do you do if you know how to program a driverless car?
A: Work for a car company that can pay you WITHOUT deducting from your pay to cover the pensions of millions of people you've never met.
As much as it pains me to admit it, in the future, information may become as important as physical goods, making data on a laptop potentially just as dangerous as any of those illegal goods.
No, 480i is standard def, and that's what most PS2 games (and all of the DDR series) output as.
Just don't try to play any rhythm games on it (or any hidef tv) from a 480i input game...
Because the carbon alarmism has nothing to do with concern about the fate of humanity, and everything to do with shutting down successful economies?
Before you ridiculue it, ask yourself if there's a better theory that fits the data.
As usual, I'm going to give the most convincing reason: There is an optimal solution to the environmental dangers of carbon emission, but it's rejected because it's not harmful enough to the economy. That solution is to tax carbon fuels in proportion to their externality and apply the funds toward carbon sinks and abatements that anyone can bid on. Then, it simply doesn't matter anymore how much carbon someone emits, because it's balanced by resources to take care of it. Because it would become profitable to find cheaper ways to sink carbon, eventually it would get to the point that the tax was negligible for most purposes, assuming it wasn't that way at the beginning.
So what? Notional experts' assets--that is, their reputation and ability, therefore, to make money as predictors of future outcomes--already depend on the success of their predictions. And--unlike with prediction markets--there is no easy way to limit exposure.
Experts are rarely held to account for wrong predictions, and rarely make the kind of quantifiable, objectively observable predictions that go into futures markets.
So, as far as individuals making predictions go, because they are essentially anonymous and exposure is limited, prediction markets reduce the marginal "return to honesty" (really, the returns in either case are to accuracy, not honesty.)
Please recall the context of my original remarks. The eventual occurrence of the predicted event determines the prediction's accuracy. One's willingness to pay $3 (on a $100 bet) when one has stated that he believes the odds to be 90%, is a reflection of his honesty. If he claims the odds are 90%, but won't buy at $3, the prediction market has successfully tamed his *dishonest* characterization of his certainty, which was the point.
The total amount invested in all political futures markets that interested parties might wish to invest in is a drop in the bucket in the world of political expenditures, so that's not wouldn't be a big challenge to the people who would be interested in doing so. [...]
Yes, because no one's tried to run a campaign focused that way. If and when it happens, traders will enter the market to the point where it's not longer a "drop in the bucket".
It isn't an "analogy" at all. "Investments" in political futures markets designed to drive perceptions are a form of political advertisement
A purchase of a political future IS a bet on a future event. It can be used to change perceptions, making it in some respects analagous to a political advertisement. However, the incentive structure and future obligations resulting, are completely different, making them not identical. For example, the monetary value (in my net worth) of my donation to the Hillary campaign does not vary based on future events, while in the political future purchase, it does. The correctness of the facts on which the future purchase is predicated, is validated or invalided, while this does not happen for a political donation. And so on. These are pretty fundamental distinctions.
So I absolutely agree people can get attention and credibility for a certain candidate but throwing in eye-catching bets, but your characterization of the activity as identical to political advertisement is not justified.
You can't buy a house with your credit and income. Do no houses exist?
Obviously, not everyone's going to be honest. The point is, having your assets depend on whether your statement is true increases the returns to honesty significantly. Yes, people can bet heavily on a candidate without regard for real truth. However, there is more than one prediction market, and to really influence revealed odds, they have to bet in all of them, or else other traders will "Dutch book" them until they can't invest anymore.
The comparison to honesty in political donations is about the worst analogy I can imagine. You're just equivocating on the concept of "honesty".
That's my point: yes, men reject women merely because of looks -- but they're not going to admit it in a survey! I'd estimate that any survey claiming that men don't do this, isn't very accurate, for the same reason as the ring/house question.
One thing I'm interested in seeing is how Candidate/Party X's chance of winning correlates with critical financial metrics like long-term interest rates and oil prices. That is, do traders revise their estimates as a party's chance of winning goes up? Intrade recently started "shock future" bets where you can bet on the changes in such variables on election day (although I think to avoid the noise you should instead look at the long-term correlation rather than one day, which has noise from other factors).
For all their flaws, prediction markets truly fascinate me.
HOWEVER, the statistic you just quoted needs to be taken with a HUGE grain of salt. Asking women whether they want a status symbol they can lord over their friends and show off in public, or a resonsible investment for their financial future? There is a severe social desirability bias in such a question. Women simply won't be truthful on the question, for the same reason that men won't be truthful on, "Would you write a woman off merely because of looks?"
So yes, it's important to end this tradition, but please be aware that there are strong barriers to changing it in BOTH sexes.
... until it crashes the Xbox Live servers when everyone tries to download that game ;-)
Bingo. I mean, that is just basic, basic design. It's like how if I install the ultra-well-designed Ubuntu to the fucking THIRD hard drive, and the installation fails, I can still access the other installed OS. That's just what you *do* when you want to avoid cascading failures, and I think that's what the FOSS community "gets" and proprietary vendors like Honeywell don't.
There's a simple explanation:
Anyone capable of making a good website, would go work for a company that could pay them what they're worth, WITHOUT having their pay deducted to pay for massive legacy pension and health care obligations that GM agreed to and never bothered fully funding.
But if the software fork bomb has a physical analogue in this Universe (e.g. anything that self-replicates in parallel, such as rabbits, humans and sci-fi nanobot "grey goo") then it won't be enough to know how many there are. You'll also need to know where they are and what they are doing in order to observe them. So the Universe will need to model the physical behaviour of all of them.
No, I think you're misunderstanding what the criteria are for when something "must be computed to continue fooling us". All that's necessary is that the reality it shows us is consistent with what it has shown previously. Therefore, nanobots don't necessarily eat up a lot of simulation computation time. After all, for all we know, any number of resultant instantiations of nanobots are consistent with what we dumped out of the lab. Only when we know (from previous observations that led to formulation of the laws of physics!) that a certain observation must occur, is the simulator required to churn through the calculations, because its failure to do so would reveal an inconsistency.
The experiment I proposed, then, is to make it so it's hard for the *simulator* to keep up, but not us, and to do that, you would need to run a bunch of systems, and only check a few for consistency.
Thanks for introducing me to the term "fork bomb", but unless you know of a real world, deterministic-in-practice, implementation of a fork bomb *that must be fully computed to generate our current observations*, it isn't a viable option. Remember, it's not enough that it self-replicate, but that the *observable part* can only be inferred by working through each spawned process. That is, while fork bombs take up computer memory, knowing how many will exist after a given amount of time, does not.
I agree, chaotic does not imply non-deterministic, just "really hard to compute for prediction".
As for your question, yes, there is a classic example of a deterministic-but-not-computable system. However, it is not chaotic. I will describe it anyway, just to be cool. The system is as follows:
Let A(n,s) be a random algorithm that operates on the input, integers n and s. Let t be number for the current state. (If you are on the 1000th iteration in time of the system, t is 1000.)
The system has one binary variable, s.
The state at any given time t is defined by:
If A(t-1,s(t-1)) halts, s=1 at time t; s=0 otherwise.
As you can see from the description, each state t is fully determined by the previous state, s(t-1). Therefore, it is deterministic. However, there exists no algorithm that can tell you if an arbitrary algorithm, for an arbitrary input, halts. (That is the famous Halting Theorem.) Therefore, you cannot compute it.
Okay, I might have gotten the system a bit wrong...
If our reality is virtual, then all data is suspect, and it would be impossible to trust any sort of experimental data.
False. You can do experiments within virtual worlds to determine the rules under which it operates, just like you can in the real world. For example, in second life, if you don't RTFM, you can still do scientific tests with your avatars to learn the internal physics of that virtual world.
Even if you come up with a clever test that would pierce the illusion, one would have to assume whoever maintains the illusion would simply fix it so that didn't work a second time. Nothing would be repeatable.
You shut off too soon. Take it further -- if the creators "fix it", would we notice? If, as I suggest in my other post on this article, we piece the illusion via overloading the system with computations it must perform, the creator may be forced to start "simplifying" the laws of physics in observable ways.
FYI: Someone mentioned the Bostrom argument, so rather than make another post, I thought I'd concisely summarize it here:
"If it's possible to make fully-real-seeming simulations, any civilization will eventually discover this and make on the order of thousands of them. Thus, only one out of 1000+ real-seeming worlds is real. From a Bayesian perspective, then, GIVEN that the world seems real, there is only a 1 in 1000+ chance it is real."
True. It depends on the creators' tolerance for slower results. If they have avatars, they probably wouldn't like it.
Not, necessarily -- don't some people today "realize" (believe strongly enough) they are in a simulation?
He is proposing something similar to what I proposed in this post, but I suggested testing it, not by finding some natural process inherently incomputable, but by "overloading the system" by increasing our observations to the point that it cannot keep up with the computations necessary, and has to take a "short cut" that violates known laws of physics. Though in fairness, instead of taking shortcuts, it could just end the simulation.
We would probably want to find some natural process we can predict with extreme accuracy, but only through extensive calculations. Then, run trillions of them, but only predict-and-then-check-on a few.
Some might say patents are already too hard to get, to which I say, No, they aren't. They aren't NEARLY hard ENOUGH to get.
Well, I would more characterize it as being the wrong *kind* of hard. It is hard in being expensive and cumbersome for individuals and small companies to work with, which is bad. It is not hard enough in terms of the technical merit you have to establish in order to be granted the patent, which is also bad. We need to somehow make the former less hard, and the latter harder.
IMHO, patents should only be granted for such stunning works of genius that it is unlikely anyone else would have come up with it any time soon. A good "obviousness test" for this would be to present the problem it intents to solve, to other people in the field and ask them to submit solutions. If they don't list yours, even as a sketch, then it's non-obvious. This has the problem of making it more expensive (the first, bad, kind of hard), but that could be fixed by having a system where you do this for other applications, in exchange for it being done for free on yours.
IMHO, it's a myth that Mac's have an optimal interface. I recently got a MacBook, and while I'm generally satisfied with it, there is a LOT Of irritating stuff.
-email client: Why the hell are the subject lines all darkened? Nothing in help about this. Ah, must be a "mail rule". Oh, there it is, I'll just turn it off. Wait, that option is all the way at the bottom of the screen, on top of the program launch icons. *click* No, I didn't want to load that program. Okay, I'll scroll down so that the button is in the middle screen and I can click it without launching another app. Wait, no scroll option? ****! Okay, how do I turn the lower app launch bar off? *search search search* Okay, there we go. Wait, they're still darkened. Oh, okay, I've got to tell it to apply to all. [finds option somewhere] Now, how do I get the bottom bar to come back...
-iMovie: I want to export some video captures from an image I made. Let's see, right click on the point in the video I want to use, where's the export-frame option? Nowhere. Okay, help search: "video capture". Nothing. Okay, "frame". Ahah, 8th option, how to make a frame into a clip. Closest option. I go to the frame I want and then ctrl-click it. Hm, OH, wait, I can right-click too! Why hide this option from me? Oh yes, I forgot: people who prefer using one hand (or are disabled losers) need not apply.
I grab the frame, and it makes me put it as a non-moving clip somewhere in the video. So, I do a few of these from different pictures. Now where are they? Okay, I get to dig through finder again. Now, let me move them all to one folder for easy upload. Wait, the second one I moved (and the rest) have the same name as the first. Okay, so let me choose a different name on moving it. I can't? Okay, fine, I'll rename them all, THEN move them.
-I took a photo of myself in PhotoBooth. Now I want to crop it and upload it. Okay, click on iPhoto. Crop image. Great, now I have it in an album. But where's the picture file? Um, show-in-Finder option? Nope. Save cropped picture somewhere? Nope. I have to go deep into the directory, photos->iphoto library->various weird folder -> copy it to a more useful place, then upload.
-Now I want to make the cropped image my ichat buddy icon. Drag to chat pic? No, that would imply interoperability. Export to ichat? No. I have to go to the buddy icon and then load it from the useful place I moved it to.
User interface design really interests me. I understand that other people don't share this passion. Still, I think simple rules can provide a good guide, even if you have no clue. Here is rule I would propose instead of (or in addition to) that one:
Have ONE potential user try to use it as they would for its intended purpose. Then, eliminate the things that severely bother them until there are none. (Severe means things like, "Can't find a function after trying obvious ways of searching for it", takes a lot of effort to instruct it to do very common tasks, anythink irritating enough that they want to avoid using that part of the program.)
Believe it or not, that will put you ahead of about 50% of user interfaces out there.
And I know you're going to say, "Property rights are real rights that people deserve with or without Congress, while IP is artificial." but then you're adding a questionable, and easily refutable assumption. Well, that ought to be a big clue that you're on the wrong track. Inherited power of any sort - economic, political - is a horrendous idea. Depends on what worldview you come in with. But I could just as easily say that one big clue you're on the wrong track is that "non-transferrable rights" is more characteristic of feudalism, which treated land exactly that way. A lord could not sell land outright to someone else.
(A similar argument can be made in defense of inherited wealth.)
In other words, if copyright is for the benefit of everyone, we should include "right of full transfer benefits creators" in our analysis.
And it's not very debatable that the option to fully alienate adds value for the creator. A bundle of rights with one more option must have the same or more value than if that option were removed -- just ask options traders!