I would suggest that perhaps Perl is particularly effective in separating good from bad programmers. In other languages, restrictions allow bad programmers to write code that *looks* good.
But if you see readable, understandable Perl code, you know you've got a keeper.
I've looked at Perl like I look at English. It's possible to write really well done English that uses some obscure structures for emphasis, or to increase clarity. It is however more likely that someone will piece together the most incoherent confusing material into an English essay, and you will have difficulty following it.
Illegible code in Perl is not a fault of the language, but rather a fault of the programmer. Whether the matter of Perl letting people write so hideously is a good or bad thing, it must simply be noted that no one complains about English for allowing people to write horrible messes.
An "Open" game platform and standards would kick PS3...XBox to the curb of ancient technology history, and finally allow global "Open" game platform innovation.
I am one of the people entirely for Free and Open software, but games just don't work well in this model. They are a form of artistic expression to me, and thus truly deserving of things like copyright. (I don't think copyright is handled perfectly, but at least some part of the idea is reasonable.)
Namely, I don't think content providers should be making their games an annoying piece of crap to use or share (especially share), but they should be afforded the ability to reasonably protect themselves from their work being ripped off.
There was no reserved parking at apple. It was one of those "round table" things - first come first served, no one felt superior about their parking place. Very frustrating since there wasn't visitor parking either. You're really left to the wolves if you show up at 11:)
I parked in BFE a few times at Microsoft as well...
"Or how very few even saw the current economic collapse"
Y'know, there's an entire school of economics that predicted the collapse. And the collapse before it and the ones before that. It's called the Austrian school. But even though they predicted every single damned collapse because they didn't use shiny models and after the mid 90's shiny powerpoints nobody pays any attention to them.
Wow, they managed to predict every crash... because they're always predicting a crash. AMAZING! If I always call "heads", I would always predict heads... but my predictions would still be no better than random chance.
For instance, right now there are some people predicting a UK housing market crash of about 20% in the next year. If theres no crash this year, they'll just move forwards to next year. Eventually they'll be right, and will parade their insight for all to see.
Actually, TFA is saying exactly what you're saying.
Even if you could have "perfect data", you're only taking into account some of the variables involved. Your model would be perfect but partial. One of the factors that you ignored might not have had an effect in the past, but it might be precisely the one that makes it different next time.
The TFA actually points out that even if you have perfect data and a "perfect model" (he defined his model to define the physics of a hypothetical field), finding the initial conditions is fairly arbitrary, and thus even with perfect data and a perfect model, one will still be wrong, just because the models are so complex that a large set of somewhat arbitrary parameters will satisfy any limited data set, yet vary wildly upon the predictions for the future.
Last I heard, Austrian economics had all the problems related to the use of parameter-fitting that more mainstream economics did, except that their models were known to be inaccurate and couldn't even predict the past very well and they just ignored this issue.
Models? Austrian economics is widely criticized because it specifically REJECTS scientific models. Sure it has a few "thought-experiment" models that turn out to be wishy-washy, but parameterized models? They specifically reject.
You have correctly predicted every financial disaster because you've always prepared for a financial disaster.
Sure, you've done well for yourself by predicting disaster, but guess what? All it takes is for someone to predict all the same disasters as you, and one bubble, to make more money than you did. In fact, the banks and bankers have predicted with far greater accuracy than you have. Sure, eventually a crash will come and reduce their earnings by 50%... but if they keep betting on wins, and making 100% profits each bet, then the crash will only wipe out their last bet. And in that case, betting "always win" results in a net better gain than Austrian economics would give you.
I got the dotcom burst, the real estate mortgage burst, the recent renewable energy burst, with US education and the EU bonds bursts coming up. Pretty lucky, eh? How many pats on the back do I get?
No, it's not. Austrian economics always predicts that everything we're doing today will result in a catastrophic financial event. If you're always predicting disaster, then you will always successfully predict disaster. But your track record is going to be horrible.
How can we rationally consider and listen to the guy who every month is shouting, "We're going to have an economic disaster by the end of the month!"? If we don't have a financial disaster for 12 years, and then one month, BOOM! Disaster! Everyone goes "the guy totally predicted the disaster!" No, he made 144 WRONG predictions before finally having an inevitable outcome that he could then boast as a prediction.
"But he saw the disaster coming 12 YEARS AHEAD!" No, he did not. He predicted 144 separate events all of which failed to pan out, just because he was eventually right does not mean that his 12 year old prediction was right, or even just "early".
As an example, when flipping a coin, if I called out "heads" every time, I would have an about 50% accuracy rate. However, no one would ever claim that I had amazing foresight for predicting when the coin would come u heads, because I AM CALLING IT EVERY TIME.
Oddly, you've almost recreated TFA right here. Turns out that multiple different tuned parameters to models can fit historical data, yet differ wildly on the predictions they produce, all because of chaotic interference, and the nature of chaotic systems.
I want to make a good pun off "zig" and "sig", but I can't think of anything that works plainly and makes the pun apparent. So, please pretend that instead of reading this lengthy explanatory paragraph, you instead read a pithy short sentence that involves said pun noted earlier.
It's not just biased vs unbiased. There were biased economists predicting the mortgage crisis as well. Just because someone was right does not mean that they had followed rational and unbiased processes to get there. And the whole article is pointing out how even if you are rational and unbiased you are constrained by mathematical conditions to almost always be wrong.
The problem wasn't just between distinguishing the unbiased from the biased, but also from distinguishing between the unbiased rational people who turned out to be right, and the unbiased rational people who turned out to be wrong.
The long history of corporation show that they will poison people, leave the countryside a barren waste land, and level mountains. Based on the history of corporation, I would wager that without regulation they would have dumped the nuclear waste about 50 miles off the coast.
lololol, it's funny that you would think they would bother going that far out. At most if they dumped it off the coast, it would be at the very start of international waters (12 miles), although since that requires a functional boat (boats are holes in the water that you throw money into) more than likely, they would drive it a few miles and dump it in a local park. (Simpson's reference.)
That's incorrect. Once you've piled up enough risk that an accident would end your career (which is what you care about, not the company), then you don't expend more money on avoiding additional risk. This "all in" behavior is not only painfully obvious, it's also empirically demonstrable. It's the same mechanism that renders harsher punishment for extraordinary crimes moot.
The market will at best work to deflect the risk, not avoid it. Without oversight, these risks would be ignored completely, because their magnitude makes them career killers no matter what you do.
I'm reminded of an episode of "Homicide" on Spike, where a wife killed her husband because her very conservative the church disapproved of murder. So, between divorcing him and being publicly shamed, or secretly killing him and maybe getting away with it, she chose the most appealing choice from a selfish system: kill him and try and get away with it.
I've talked about this before with people, that it's a form of extension from the Prisoner's Dilemma... the best individual choice is the one that people will regularly choose, even though everyone else making that choice will make the world a distopian nightmare.
I get what you're saying with the legal versus civil disobedience part, but that example was awful!
It was, wasn't it? All analogies are kind of shitty. Kind of like cars, no matter what kind of car you have it is still bound by the rules of physics. (Joke intended.)
I get what you're saying though, and I disagree with patents in some ways, precisely because extremely new novel inventions can be patented, and then block all independent creations of that idea as well. And that's kind of the crappy thing here, is that Monsanto's patents blocks any and all Round-Up resistant crops, not just those that descend from their crop lines. So, really, I can't even legally breed a resistant cultivar of corn by artificial selection.
Thus, the problem that the guy got into. Patented crop infests his lot, and by law he was not allowed to take advantage of this: contract or not. It's a shitty system, but inventors and investors of R&D insist that is the only way that they could possibly make money.
Meanwhile, take a look at fashion, where there is no IP protection, and anyone can steal your ideas and designs at any time, and people regularly copy high-end design into the less expensive Target stuff. Has this put the designers out of business? Nope, in fact, they're still doing fairly well, and innovation is fast and furious. Even more so than the "double speed every 18 months" technology.
Your local city/county/state/country holds true ownership of your land.
As with all hard questions, the answer is actually "it depends".
Depends on what? Unless you are one of the rare owners of an alloidal title, which basically doesn't exist in most countries today, your land is ultimately owned by the government, who can confiscate it or restrict its use for a variety of reasons (nonpayment of taxes, etc.).
The vast majority of land in common law countries (like the U.S.) only allows deeds to be granted in fee simple, essentially the way that lower nobility were generally subject to their feudal lords in days gone by. If the lord wants use of your manor, or wants you to pay him taxes or whatever each year, you have to do it, or he takes your land away.
There are some limited alloidal concepts in Texas and Nevada within the U.S., but they are still ultimately subject to the whims of the federal government regarding eminent domain, etc.
So... your argument for "you don't really own your property" is that the government can confiscate it? Good goat, no one owns anything then. zOMG, I'M NOT EVEN REALLY ALIVE, because at any time the government could condemn me to death! This notion that property ownership has to be complete and unencumbered in order to be "real" ownership is a matter of almost "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
Allodial titles on the Shetland islands could be seized by the UK government if the UK government so chose to do so. What are you going to do? Secede? Fine then, war, boom, the UK government owns your property now as spoils of war. Grats on how much that "allodial" title meant.
As an example, let's say I own a car. The car is worth $25,000. I fall into debt, and in order to deal with my excessive debt, I seek to declare bankruptcy. The trustee can force me to sell my car and use the proceeds to pay off debts. So, I don't really own the car, right? Of course, the trustee could also compel me to sell off anything and use the proceeds to pay off debts (retaining, if listed in the exception schedule, the monetary amount listed in that schedule), so now I don't really own anything at all. So, let's just throw out the entire notion of "ownership", because nothing can be owned completely unencumbered.
Except that "fee simple" is still ownership, and not just simply a license.
When bullets were invented with the gun powder and everything contained into a self-contained casing, that was really big, and no one else was able to produce anything like it until the patent expired. "But SPECIFIC implementation blah blah blah", no. Patents cover very wide implementations, but in cases where the basic idea has already passed into public domain (say, the dimensions and designs of speaker housings) then those generic designs are then repackaged with a specific novel criteria that then makes it unique enough to allow a repatent (this time, with cobalt! this time with chromium! this time with XY!)
So, let's invent a hypothetical world with limited enough inventions to make this relevant. I invent the pencil and patent it as "a self-contained object that allows writing without any necessity to regularly refill with ink every other word". Then if you came along and invented the pen, then your pen would be infringing upon my patent, since I invented the notion of self-contained writing implements. That your pen uses a different mechanism is beside the point, it still infringes upon the broadest novel invention that I created. In a world where lead pencils exist, and I come out with a new graphite-clay pencil, then my patent is a much more narrow invention of "self-contained writing implement but this time with XY!" and you inventing the pen would not infringe upon my invention at that point, but if you invented a pencil with a different mixture of graphite-clay, then you would be infringing again, even though you're not matching my exact specific implementation.
So, Monsanto has patents on "corn that is resistant to Round-Up". Regardless of the way you produce a Round-Up resistant corn line, and the ways that it is resistant, it is still infringing upon the broad patent. Now, once Monsanto's patent expires, and they come with with "corn that is resistant to Round-Up because it uses really cool gene technique #4739!" then you'll be able to produce Round-Up resistant corn that uses really cool gene technique #4740 and not infringe upon their patents.
So, while you may be acutely aware of the idea behind patents, you don't seem to actually understand the implementations of patents in the real world, nor the fine details about the ideas behind patents. (Because a really cool new novel technique is protected against any and all competing inventions. The more broad the new invention is, the more broadly the patent provides protection.)
... so your response to me providing a counter-example to "all free lawyers are shit" is to provide me with yet another example of a free lawyer being shitty?
"All sheep are white". My counter-example? I produce a black sheep. Your response? Present another white sheep. My response? Bewilderment at why you think your response is at all notable...
So what you're saying is that no one else is allowed to produce a Round-Up-resistant crop?
Do you understand the idea behind patents? Because if you did, then you wouldn't be asking why Monsanto has exclusive rights to Round-Up resistant crops...
So fucking what? Here, let me take your computer, and keep it for my own. "But you're breaking the law!" So fucking what, right?
The guy was breaking the law, and that is why Monsanto sued. This shouldn't be a hard thing to work out.
I seriously hope you don't actually believe that seeds should be protected as trade secrets,
As trade secrets? No... but we're talking about patents. Regardless of if I think patents are a moral good or moral wrong, they're still in place. Rosa Parks was arrested and charged for her actions. Civil disobedience does not mean immunity from law.
And the free lawyer is rarely as good as the paid lawyer. Otherwise, they would be working for higher pay in the private sector.
Lawyers are expected to provide some amount of pro bono work as a public good in order to remain in good standing with the bar. Of course, I will grant you that they rarely can invest the time that they would invest in a pay-for case, but eh... In fact, actually of the three lawyers I dealt with for a ex-boyfriend's family: two were downtown high-rise lawyers with powerful law firms, and the third was a sole-working lawyer, who had affordable prices. Guess which one(s) we paid for.
Name some of them who have successfully taken Monsanto to court and won.
There was a grain washer that was sued by Monsanto for tortuous interference. He lost in court, because he was inducing people to violate their contracts with Monsanto. Monsanto primarily declined to actually sue any of the farmers the grain washer induced to breach contract on condition that they would tell Monsanto who washed their grain.
To date, Monsanto has only had 9 trials that have gone on to a full jury trial suit. And each of those were decided in Monsanto's favor, because--I'll repeat this again--the farmers signed a contract saying that they would not reuse seed.
One of those was Percy Schmeiser who claims that Round-Up Ready plants ended up on his property (not his fault), and suspecting this, he then sprayed his entire crop with Round-Up, which would have killed all the non Round-Up Ready plants. Now, knowing full well that he had Monsanto patented seed growing on his property, he saved THOSE seeds and then replanted them, having planted nearly 95~98% Round-Up Ready plants in his fields the year AFTER they invaded his property. Now, get all the facts there, and even based on his own stories... he had an invasion (not illegal), wiped out all his legal crops leaving only the crops he knew to be patent protected, and then used the patent protected crops to almost exclusively plant his next year's crops. He knew he was breaking patent law.
"Blah blah blah, all this stuff is coming from Monsanto you can't trust them!" And you can trust the people who Monsanto sued at face value without considering the other side? Of course, since Monsanto is an evil corporation that makes genetically-modified freak plants, it's ok to rag on them, and deny everything they say...
If you are wondering how skin could last for such a long time you may find this (http://creation.com/dinosaur-soft-tissue-and-protein-even-more-confirmation) article relevant.
I agree it's boring, but they still keep dragging themselves out into public discourse...
Although, they have found some biological matter preserved in the center of large bones before. T-rex bones, I believe.
Not exactly, I don't remember the specifics exactly, but it wasn't soft matter itself. It was either fossilized itself or only the successor chemicals to like hemoglobin or such like that. (There are some YouTube videos that talk about it, probably try C0nc0rdance). I know this detail because some creationists bring it up as a statement of "oh, well, this stuff breaks up in only a couple thousand years, so obviously the remains couldn't be as old as scientists claim it to be." Don't worry about being misled, all of the media articles about it were either unclear or wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I would suggest that perhaps Perl is particularly effective in separating good from bad programmers. In other languages, restrictions allow bad programmers to write code that *looks* good.
But if you see readable, understandable Perl code, you know you've got a keeper.
I've looked at Perl like I look at English. It's possible to write really well done English that uses some obscure structures for emphasis, or to increase clarity. It is however more likely that someone will piece together the most incoherent confusing material into an English essay, and you will have difficulty following it.
Illegible code in Perl is not a fault of the language, but rather a fault of the programmer. Whether the matter of Perl letting people write so hideously is a good or bad thing, it must simply be noted that no one complains about English for allowing people to write horrible messes.
An "Open" game platform and standards would kick PS3...XBox to the curb of ancient technology history, and finally allow global "Open" game platform innovation.
I am one of the people entirely for Free and Open software, but games just don't work well in this model. They are a form of artistic expression to me, and thus truly deserving of things like copyright. (I don't think copyright is handled perfectly, but at least some part of the idea is reasonable.)
Namely, I don't think content providers should be making their games an annoying piece of crap to use or share (especially share), but they should be afforded the ability to reasonably protect themselves from their work being ripped off.
There was no reserved parking at apple. It was one of those "round table" things - first come first served, no one felt superior about their parking place. Very frustrating since there wasn't visitor parking either. You're really left to the wolves if you show up at 11 :)
I parked in BFE a few times at Microsoft as well...
"Or how very few even saw the current economic collapse"
Y'know, there's an entire school of economics that predicted the collapse. And the collapse before it and the ones before that. It's called the Austrian school. But even though they predicted every single damned collapse because they didn't use shiny models and after the mid 90's shiny powerpoints nobody pays any attention to them.
Wow, they managed to predict every crash... because they're always predicting a crash. AMAZING! If I always call "heads", I would always predict heads... but my predictions would still be no better than random chance.
For instance, right now there are some people predicting a UK housing market crash of about 20% in the next year. If theres no crash this year, they'll just move forwards to next year. Eventually they'll be right, and will parade their insight for all to see.
Austrian economics at work!
Actually, TFA is saying exactly what you're saying.
Even if you could have "perfect data", you're only taking into account some of the variables involved. Your model would be perfect but partial. One of the factors that you ignored might not have had an effect in the past, but it might be precisely the one that makes it different next time.
The TFA actually points out that even if you have perfect data and a "perfect model" (he defined his model to define the physics of a hypothetical field), finding the initial conditions is fairly arbitrary, and thus even with perfect data and a perfect model, one will still be wrong, just because the models are so complex that a large set of somewhat arbitrary parameters will satisfy any limited data set, yet vary wildly upon the predictions for the future.
Last I heard, Austrian economics had all the problems related to the use of parameter-fitting that more mainstream economics did, except that their models were known to be inaccurate and couldn't even predict the past very well and they just ignored this issue.
Models? Austrian economics is widely criticized because it specifically REJECTS scientific models. Sure it has a few "thought-experiment" models that turn out to be wishy-washy, but parameterized models? They specifically reject.
You have correctly predicted every financial disaster because you've always prepared for a financial disaster.
Sure, you've done well for yourself by predicting disaster, but guess what? All it takes is for someone to predict all the same disasters as you, and one bubble, to make more money than you did. In fact, the banks and bankers have predicted with far greater accuracy than you have. Sure, eventually a crash will come and reduce their earnings by 50%... but if they keep betting on wins, and making 100% profits each bet, then the crash will only wipe out their last bet. And in that case, betting "always win" results in a net better gain than Austrian economics would give you.
I got the dotcom burst, the real estate mortgage burst, the recent renewable energy burst, with US education and the EU bonds bursts coming up. Pretty lucky, eh? How many pats on the back do I get?
No, it's not. Austrian economics always predicts that everything we're doing today will result in a catastrophic financial event. If you're always predicting disaster, then you will always successfully predict disaster. But your track record is going to be horrible.
How can we rationally consider and listen to the guy who every month is shouting, "We're going to have an economic disaster by the end of the month!"? If we don't have a financial disaster for 12 years, and then one month, BOOM! Disaster! Everyone goes "the guy totally predicted the disaster!" No, he made 144 WRONG predictions before finally having an inevitable outcome that he could then boast as a prediction.
"But he saw the disaster coming 12 YEARS AHEAD!" No, he did not. He predicted 144 separate events all of which failed to pan out, just because he was eventually right does not mean that his 12 year old prediction was right, or even just "early".
As an example, when flipping a coin, if I called out "heads" every time, I would have an about 50% accuracy rate. However, no one would ever claim that I had amazing foresight for predicting when the coin would come u heads, because I AM CALLING IT EVERY TIME.
Oddly, you've almost recreated TFA right here. Turns out that multiple different tuned parameters to models can fit historical data, yet differ wildly on the predictions they produce, all because of chaotic interference, and the nature of chaotic systems.
Will you take off every zig?
I want to make a good pun off "zig" and "sig", but I can't think of anything that works plainly and makes the pun apparent. So, please pretend that instead of reading this lengthy explanatory paragraph, you instead read a pithy short sentence that involves said pun noted earlier.
It's not just biased vs unbiased. There were biased economists predicting the mortgage crisis as well. Just because someone was right does not mean that they had followed rational and unbiased processes to get there. And the whole article is pointing out how even if you are rational and unbiased you are constrained by mathematical conditions to almost always be wrong.
The problem wasn't just between distinguishing the unbiased from the biased, but also from distinguishing between the unbiased rational people who turned out to be right, and the unbiased rational people who turned out to be wrong.
The long history of corporation show that they will poison people, leave the countryside a barren waste land, and level mountains. Based on the history of corporation, I would wager that without regulation they would have dumped the nuclear waste about 50 miles off the coast.
lololol, it's funny that you would think they would bother going that far out. At most if they dumped it off the coast, it would be at the very start of international waters (12 miles), although since that requires a functional boat (boats are holes in the water that you throw money into) more than likely, they would drive it a few miles and dump it in a local park. (Simpson's reference.)
That's incorrect. Once you've piled up enough risk that an accident would end your career (which is what you care about, not the company), then you don't expend more money on avoiding additional risk. This "all in" behavior is not only painfully obvious, it's also empirically demonstrable. It's the same mechanism that renders harsher punishment for extraordinary crimes moot.
The market will at best work to deflect the risk, not avoid it. Without oversight, these risks would be ignored completely, because their magnitude makes them career killers no matter what you do.
I'm reminded of an episode of "Homicide" on Spike, where a wife killed her husband because her very conservative the church disapproved of murder. So, between divorcing him and being publicly shamed, or secretly killing him and maybe getting away with it, she chose the most appealing choice from a selfish system: kill him and try and get away with it.
I've talked about this before with people, that it's a form of extension from the Prisoner's Dilemma... the best individual choice is the one that people will regularly choose, even though everyone else making that choice will make the world a distopian nightmare.
I get what you're saying with the legal versus civil disobedience part, but that example was awful!
It was, wasn't it? All analogies are kind of shitty. Kind of like cars, no matter what kind of car you have it is still bound by the rules of physics. (Joke intended.)
I get what you're saying though, and I disagree with patents in some ways, precisely because extremely new novel inventions can be patented, and then block all independent creations of that idea as well. And that's kind of the crappy thing here, is that Monsanto's patents blocks any and all Round-Up resistant crops, not just those that descend from their crop lines. So, really, I can't even legally breed a resistant cultivar of corn by artificial selection.
Thus, the problem that the guy got into. Patented crop infests his lot, and by law he was not allowed to take advantage of this: contract or not. It's a shitty system, but inventors and investors of R&D insist that is the only way that they could possibly make money.
Meanwhile, take a look at fashion, where there is no IP protection, and anyone can steal your ideas and designs at any time, and people regularly copy high-end design into the less expensive Target stuff. Has this put the designers out of business? Nope, in fact, they're still doing fairly well, and innovation is fast and furious. Even more so than the "double speed every 18 months" technology.
Your local city/county/state/country holds true ownership of your land.
As with all hard questions, the answer is actually "it depends".
Depends on what? Unless you are one of the rare owners of an alloidal title, which basically doesn't exist in most countries today, your land is ultimately owned by the government, who can confiscate it or restrict its use for a variety of reasons (nonpayment of taxes, etc.).
The vast majority of land in common law countries (like the U.S.) only allows deeds to be granted in fee simple, essentially the way that lower nobility were generally subject to their feudal lords in days gone by. If the lord wants use of your manor, or wants you to pay him taxes or whatever each year, you have to do it, or he takes your land away.
There are some limited alloidal concepts in Texas and Nevada within the U.S., but they are still ultimately subject to the whims of the federal government regarding eminent domain, etc.
So... your argument for "you don't really own your property" is that the government can confiscate it? Good goat, no one owns anything then. zOMG, I'M NOT EVEN REALLY ALIVE, because at any time the government could condemn me to death! This notion that property ownership has to be complete and unencumbered in order to be "real" ownership is a matter of almost "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
Allodial titles on the Shetland islands could be seized by the UK government if the UK government so chose to do so. What are you going to do? Secede? Fine then, war, boom, the UK government owns your property now as spoils of war. Grats on how much that "allodial" title meant.
As an example, let's say I own a car. The car is worth $25,000. I fall into debt, and in order to deal with my excessive debt, I seek to declare bankruptcy. The trustee can force me to sell my car and use the proceeds to pay off debts. So, I don't really own the car, right? Of course, the trustee could also compel me to sell off anything and use the proceeds to pay off debts (retaining, if listed in the exception schedule, the monetary amount listed in that schedule), so now I don't really own anything at all. So, let's just throw out the entire notion of "ownership", because nothing can be owned completely unencumbered.
Except that "fee simple" is still ownership, and not just simply a license.
When bullets were invented with the gun powder and everything contained into a self-contained casing, that was really big, and no one else was able to produce anything like it until the patent expired. "But SPECIFIC implementation blah blah blah", no. Patents cover very wide implementations, but in cases where the basic idea has already passed into public domain (say, the dimensions and designs of speaker housings) then those generic designs are then repackaged with a specific novel criteria that then makes it unique enough to allow a repatent (this time, with cobalt! this time with chromium! this time with XY!)
So, let's invent a hypothetical world with limited enough inventions to make this relevant. I invent the pencil and patent it as "a self-contained object that allows writing without any necessity to regularly refill with ink every other word". Then if you came along and invented the pen, then your pen would be infringing upon my patent, since I invented the notion of self-contained writing implements. That your pen uses a different mechanism is beside the point, it still infringes upon the broadest novel invention that I created. In a world where lead pencils exist, and I come out with a new graphite-clay pencil, then my patent is a much more narrow invention of "self-contained writing implement but this time with XY!" and you inventing the pen would not infringe upon my invention at that point, but if you invented a pencil with a different mixture of graphite-clay, then you would be infringing again, even though you're not matching my exact specific implementation.
So, Monsanto has patents on "corn that is resistant to Round-Up". Regardless of the way you produce a Round-Up resistant corn line, and the ways that it is resistant, it is still infringing upon the broad patent. Now, once Monsanto's patent expires, and they come with with "corn that is resistant to Round-Up because it uses really cool gene technique #4739!" then you'll be able to produce Round-Up resistant corn that uses really cool gene technique #4740 and not infringe upon their patents.
So, while you may be acutely aware of the idea behind patents, you don't seem to actually understand the implementations of patents in the real world, nor the fine details about the ideas behind patents. (Because a really cool new novel technique is protected against any and all competing inventions. The more broad the new invention is, the more broadly the patent provides protection.)
... so your response to me providing a counter-example to "all free lawyers are shit" is to provide me with yet another example of a free lawyer being shitty?
"All sheep are white". My counter-example? I produce a black sheep. Your response? Present another white sheep. My response? Bewilderment at why you think your response is at all notable...
So what you're saying is that no one else is allowed to produce a Round-Up-resistant crop?
Do you understand the idea behind patents? Because if you did, then you wouldn't be asking why Monsanto has exclusive rights to Round-Up resistant crops...
He was breaking the law? So fucking what?
So fucking what? Here, let me take your computer, and keep it for my own. "But you're breaking the law!" So fucking what, right?
The guy was breaking the law, and that is why Monsanto sued. This shouldn't be a hard thing to work out.
I seriously hope you don't actually believe that seeds should be protected as trade secrets,
As trade secrets? No... but we're talking about patents. Regardless of if I think patents are a moral good or moral wrong, they're still in place. Rosa Parks was arrested and charged for her actions. Civil disobedience does not mean immunity from law.
Actually you are correct. Because Land is actually not owned by you but by your government. your DEED is not to the land but a use of that land.
Your local city/county/state/country holds true ownership of your land.
As with all hard questions, the answer is actually "it depends".
And the free lawyer is rarely as good as the paid lawyer. Otherwise, they would be working for higher pay in the private sector.
Lawyers are expected to provide some amount of pro bono work as a public good in order to remain in good standing with the bar. Of course, I will grant you that they rarely can invest the time that they would invest in a pay-for case, but eh... In fact, actually of the three lawyers I dealt with for a ex-boyfriend's family: two were downtown high-rise lawyers with powerful law firms, and the third was a sole-working lawyer, who had affordable prices. Guess which one(s) we paid for.
Name some of them who have successfully taken Monsanto to court and won.
There was a grain washer that was sued by Monsanto for tortuous interference. He lost in court, because he was inducing people to violate their contracts with Monsanto. Monsanto primarily declined to actually sue any of the farmers the grain washer induced to breach contract on condition that they would tell Monsanto who washed their grain.
To date, Monsanto has only had 9 trials that have gone on to a full jury trial suit. And each of those were decided in Monsanto's favor, because--I'll repeat this again--the farmers signed a contract saying that they would not reuse seed.
One of those was Percy Schmeiser who claims that Round-Up Ready plants ended up on his property (not his fault), and suspecting this, he then sprayed his entire crop with Round-Up, which would have killed all the non Round-Up Ready plants. Now, knowing full well that he had Monsanto patented seed growing on his property, he saved THOSE seeds and then replanted them, having planted nearly 95~98% Round-Up Ready plants in his fields the year AFTER they invaded his property. Now, get all the facts there, and even based on his own stories... he had an invasion (not illegal), wiped out all his legal crops leaving only the crops he knew to be patent protected, and then used the patent protected crops to almost exclusively plant his next year's crops. He knew he was breaking patent law.
"Blah blah blah, all this stuff is coming from Monsanto you can't trust them!" And you can trust the people who Monsanto sued at face value without considering the other side? Of course, since Monsanto is an evil corporation that makes genetically-modified freak plants, it's ok to rag on them, and deny everything they say...
Quoted from below.
If you are wondering how skin could last for such a long time you may find this (http://creation.com/dinosaur-soft-tissue-and-protein-even-more-confirmation) article relevant.
I agree it's boring, but they still keep dragging themselves out into public discourse...
Although, they have found some biological matter preserved in the center of large bones before. T-rex bones, I believe.
Not exactly, I don't remember the specifics exactly, but it wasn't soft matter itself. It was either fossilized itself or only the successor chemicals to like hemoglobin or such like that. (There are some YouTube videos that talk about it, probably try C0nc0rdance). I know this detail because some creationists bring it up as a statement of "oh, well, this stuff breaks up in only a couple thousand years, so obviously the remains couldn't be as old as scientists claim it to be." Don't worry about being misled, all of the media articles about it were either unclear or wrong.