I completely support this technology. Right now, you pay for roads whether you drive on them or not, through your taxes. If the every road could be made a toll road, then the people who drove on the roads would pay for them, and people who take public transportation or choose not to own a car wouldn't pay.
Even if you drive a lot, there are possible advantages. The road operator has an incentive to keep the roadway in good condition and clear of congestion, since they maximize tolls when the roads are free flowing and accident clear. Also, there would be fewer cars on the road since there's a disincentive to take unnecessary trips - you don't want to pay the toll.
So your commute time would almost certainly go down in this scenario, and I imagine that if you are spending an hour in the car to get to work now, and that drops to 45 minutes, the time saved would be worth more than the toll.
Overall, automated tolls would result in LESS driving and LESS congestion, which seems like a good thing.
Patents are supposed to encourage innovation by allowing people to reveal their inventions to the general public, and therefore allow everyone to build on that innovation. The patent holder now has an incentive to reveal their craft rather than keep it a trade secret.
The reason this shouldn't apply in software is that patents don't encourage people to reveal how they did things - commercial software is closed source. Effectively, everything is a "trade secret". Microsoft holds a ton of software patents, but it doesn't reveal it's source code or anything that would benefit the industry as a whole. In effect, software patents become for that company a one-way grant of rights over the public, with no benefit flowing to the public as a consequence. They could achieve the same result by keeping everything a trade secret, without hampering anyone else's ability to innovate. I would argue that a company that seeks patent protection for software should be required to reveal the source code of that software, so that general innovation is promoted. They can still claim patent protection on that software, but everyone is entitled to learn from and build on the source code it protects.
Scientists don't have a monopoly on "Planet"
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Pluto Making a Comeback
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"Planet" is only a label, and it's one used in contexts other than Science. Literature, History, Mythology, and Religion, among other things. When someone says Pluto is a planet in those contexts, it has no bearing on science. So, popular culture can continue to define Pluto as a planet and why not? Why should science have a monopoly? This is NOT like saying the Earth is flat. Saying the Earth is flat is a claim about the universe, saying Pluto is a planet is only giving it a label. When you say Pluto is a planet, most people aren't saying anything OTHER than the fact that it's an object in our solar system that's always been called a planet, and what's wrong with that?
Why couldn't you say: "A Planet is one of the following nine objects in our solar system : Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, and various other objects found outside our solar system, as decided by common useage." An Astronomer is free to say, "Pluto is not technically a planet, by the scientific definition." But that doesn't give any grounds to criticize people who want to call it a planet anyway.
A good attempt, but you started contradicting yourself too early in the post.
And even when natural selection is responsible, why is that "right"? Evolution has no ethics, it simply is. Moreover, even if we start from the assumption that natural selection is right (or is best not interfered with), how can we seperate it out from every other factor involved in an extinction? Death by evolution is like death from old age; it's not a specific cause, it's a general description of what went wrong.
Nothing can ever go wrong if your paradigm is evolution through random natural selection. Things just die. There is nothing ever wrong or unnatural about this, whether a human being was involved or not.
We are ourselves unnatural creatures. The natural state of humans is poor health, early death, superstitious ignorance and starvation. We're hunter-gatherers naturally. Do we view our deviation from evolution as wrong?
Two mistakes. One, human beings can't be unnatural, nor can our activities be unnatural. That would imply the possibilty of a non-natural cause or factor involved, which you already said can't exist. Pumping petroleum out of the ground, killing each other with cruise missiles and causing mass extinctions are all completely natural, the consequence of random evolution and all within the understood laws of physics. Thus, nothing we do can be wrong, nor can it be unnatural. Under an evolutionary paradigm, how can the natural state of human beings (or anything else, for that matter) be anything else than what it is? Secondly, by definition, a human being can't deviate from evolution, becuase again, that would imply a non-naturalistic cause or involvement, which can't exist. Everything we do is part of the natural course of our evolution. Finally, if there WERE some way to deviate from evolution, there is certainly no way it could be described as "wrong", except under some sort of arbitrary cultural and human constructed ethical viewpoint.
And even if the tasmanian devils are dying out purely due to non-human factors, what arguement is there against trying to preserve them?
There are plenty of arguments on both sides, I'm sure, but as far as evolution is concerned, there is no argument for or against preserving them.
If you want to argue that the only species we have an obligation to preserve are the ones that our own actions have endangered, then that's fine - you're entitled to your own point of view. However, I don't agree with that line of thinking. The fact that we're probably blameless in the fate of the tasmanian devil doesn't mean we have no cause to preserve them.
Ok, now you've totally lost it. Species can't possibly have any obligations under evolution. You survive and reproduce, or you don't. Do tasmanian devils help us survive and reproduce? Maybe. Do we have an obligation to the tasmanian devil, or any other species? Maybe. But I don't see how.
I assume that to continue arguing in favor of saving species, you would have to appeal to some sort of religious entity, or an arbitrary and culturally constructed ethic which uses words like "right", "wrong", and "should"?
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I completely support this technology. Right now, you pay for roads whether you drive on them or not, through your taxes. If the every road could be made a toll road, then the people who drove on the roads would pay for them, and people who take public transportation or choose not to own a car wouldn't pay. Even if you drive a lot, there are possible advantages. The road operator has an incentive to keep the roadway in good condition and clear of congestion, since they maximize tolls when the roads are free flowing and accident clear. Also, there would be fewer cars on the road since there's a disincentive to take unnecessary trips - you don't want to pay the toll. So your commute time would almost certainly go down in this scenario, and I imagine that if you are spending an hour in the car to get to work now, and that drops to 45 minutes, the time saved would be worth more than the toll. Overall, automated tolls would result in LESS driving and LESS congestion, which seems like a good thing.
Patents are supposed to encourage innovation by allowing people to reveal their inventions to the general public, and therefore allow everyone to build on that innovation. The patent holder now has an incentive to reveal their craft rather than keep it a trade secret.
The reason this shouldn't apply in software is that patents don't encourage people to reveal how they did things - commercial software is closed source. Effectively, everything is a "trade secret". Microsoft holds a ton of software patents, but it doesn't reveal it's source code or anything that would benefit the industry as a whole. In effect, software patents become for that company a one-way grant of rights over the public, with no benefit flowing to the public as a consequence. They could achieve the same result by keeping everything a trade secret, without hampering anyone else's ability to innovate. I would argue that a company that seeks patent protection for software should be required to reveal the source code of that software, so that general innovation is promoted. They can still claim patent protection on that software, but everyone is entitled to learn from and build on the source code it protects.
"Planet" is only a label, and it's one used in contexts other than Science. Literature, History, Mythology, and Religion, among other things. When someone says Pluto is a planet in those contexts, it has no bearing on science. So, popular culture can continue to define Pluto as a planet and why not? Why should science have a monopoly? This is NOT like saying the Earth is flat. Saying the Earth is flat is a claim about the universe, saying Pluto is a planet is only giving it a label. When you say Pluto is a planet, most people aren't saying anything OTHER than the fact that it's an object in our solar system that's always been called a planet, and what's wrong with that? Why couldn't you say: "A Planet is one of the following nine objects in our solar system : Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, and various other objects found outside our solar system, as decided by common useage." An Astronomer is free to say, "Pluto is not technically a planet, by the scientific definition." But that doesn't give any grounds to criticize people who want to call it a planet anyway.