punk

I'm inclined to compary the US evangelical movement to the Nazi, and Communist movements of the 1920's and 1930's. It is a result of a profound social insecurity. People feel that something they were "entitled" to (i.e. the American dream) is being "taken away" from them, and they are looking at a future that bears less and less resemblance to the present. So they find solace in a mass movement (and my point is that it is more the mass movement aspect that appeals to people than the theological part). So the problem is that as the economic situation changes in the US, and regions are unable to adapt, the people will join the evangelical movement. In effect progress is feeding the opponents of progress until they gain enough mass to put an end to things and create their own anti-progressive state. What do rational people do when rational progress leads to growth in the ranks of the anti-progressives which will inevitably result in enough anti-progressives to put an end to rational progress? One might contend that this is precisely the problem that mixed economies were created to deal with, that is to manage the "anti-progressive" element enough to allow real progress to continue (at an albeit much slowed rate).

I'd say the simple answer is: power corrupts. For those who remember, one of the ideas in 1994 was term limits, and quite a few Republican candidates had promised that even if they failed to make term limits law, they would step down voluntarily after the appropriate time. While some who made this promise did in fact step down, I think most did not. Its that taste of power, that gets all but the most committed people. It is sort of the political "fruit" offered by the serpent. Once you are enamored of power for power's sake your motivation is to keep power, and not to act on principle. I'd say most of our big government problems stem from politicians doing what they see as preserving or expanding their own power at the cost of principle. It is less a Republican versus Democrat ideological thing, and more that the party holding all the power ends up sinking into corruption.

The problem here is that statistically merely from what you have said it does not follow that even if most terrorists are arabs, that an airport should focus their attention on arabs. Look up "Bayes's Theorem". We want to find the probability that an arab is a terrorist given the probability that a terrorist is an arab, and these are not the same thing. And given all this you also need the probabilities that a caucasian is a terrorist, an asian is a terrorist and so on. So a given airport can weight *these* probabilities to get the best course of action. "Knowledge gained from statistics" is a tricky business, and you have to be clear what you actually know, and what you actually need to know.

There has been quite a bit of pulp fiction devoted to some sort of Nazi "colony" somewhere (usually Latin America) trying to revive the Nazi cause. There's no reason to suppose taking place after WWII preclude Indiana Jones from taking on Nazis.

Try reading it out loud in your best oratory and see if you think you should stress the verbs. Mostly its a matter of rhythm. So why is it: General, rational and Liberal plan and not: general, rational, and liberal Plan as it would be in German? or even: General, Rational and Liberal Plan as it would be if you were right? In this case 2 of three adjectives are capitalized but not the noun. The writer wants "General" and "Liberal" to stand out and "rational" and "plan" to be more supporting rhythm.

The usage in English at that time was to capitalize words based on perceived importance. It was supposed to reflect which words would be more stressed in oratory. German did a similar thing, but since capitalization was fixed to nouns they used spaces so if you read 19th century German, you see a lot of things like: The i m p o r t a n c e of the matter at hand is beyond m e a s u r i n g. English never had the German capitalization rule. English capitalization was always a haphazard affair until 20th century norms. It looks like in the 20th century there was less stress on oratory, so writing normalized to the simple rules it has, although you still find attempts at stress using italics, though only with a few words.

I had in mind by "stem cell patents" the patenting of technical processes and technologies for working with and manipulating stem cells, the idea being that perhaps there are only certain techniques which can take stem cell "input" and produce appropriate stem cell "output" for therapeutic use. Let's think of this as a sort of modified "Weimar Republic Scenario" under the (perhaps debatable, but let's not debate it here) understanding that the Nazi's took power in the Weimar Republic entirely by legal means and working within the country's constitutional/legal framework. What ought we to make of a legal structure which allows within its framework the possibility of a legally instituted tyranny? That is to say a tyranny which erects itself entirely within the realm of the society's laws. As for the Bush and oil scenario: -If you can think of a scenario that *can* actually arise within a rational society, then I think it shouldn't be dismissed merely for being *unlikely*, if it is *impossible* that is one thing, but as long as it is possible, then it should be treated as a flaw in the legal structure. Unlikely does not equal impossible, and the law should rule out intolerable *possibilities*

I think IP (intellectual property) has a certain global property that MP (material property) lacks. If I own a plot of land and do whatever I want with it the immediate effect on my neighbor is relatively low. The exceptions would be for instance if my property contained a unique resource (say I held the only water in an otherwise waterless area and outside resources were otherwise unavailable), or if a river ran through the property and I dammed it up this putting farmers downstream out of business. But again with MP my ability to coerce others is rather limited. With IP and patents we are saying that once I get the patent, I now have something that no one else can ever have. It has a certain global effect where my patent has an effect on everyone that I think is distinctly different from the case of MP, and should be explored in greater detail. I've thought of a hypothetical that is slightly less contrived and a little more contemporary: Let's say we live in a society with perpetual patents. Now the conservative christians who oppose stem cell research get the bright idea to form a corporation and buy up key stem cell patents. They secretly form StemCell Inc. and buy the patents by stealth. They have a decent and increasing pool of money since the flock is willing to tithe money to StemCell Inc. for moral reasons. They then go public and say "Look, we have all the key patents and we are telling you up front that we will never license anything out for stem cells. You can do all the research you want but you will never be able to create a commercial therapeutic product. We've scored the moral victory." So now stem cell research is effectively dead simply because some group owns the rights to key points in it. No amount of creative thinking and genius can revive the field, not because of lack of intelligence in human beings but because some group has purchased a veto on the entire field. If my neighbor wants to use his MP of his house to spread the message against stem cell research, that doesn't really effect me in a rational society. If all the conservative christians do the same, that doesn't effect me unless I am persuaded by them. But if they now own the perpetual patent, there is nothing I or any scientist in the field can do about it. The way I see it all the arguments for patents and a rational society assume the owner of a patent is going to want to profit off it, but the way I see it this is the case of arguing from the best case scenario, the interesting case is the worst case scenario. So I apologize if my original post sounded a bit "socialistic", but this is what I had in mind by appeals to "society". Should human beings in the above case just shrug and say "Well I guess you own stem cell research, we'll just do research in competing fields and hope we can get comparable results, fingers-crossed." Should a rational society find itself in a position of having to deny itself a promising avenue of scientific research solely because an idealist group has purchased a veto on the field?

I'd say once again the argument I was getting out was weaseled around a bit. An implicit point in the argument was that Og and Og Enterprises acts *irrationally*. Og enterprises says to Henry Ford: "Its our terms take it or leave, we don't care if we lose money." Ford can opt not to make cars and Og Enterprises can opt to forgo the money. The end. A society cannot assume everyone in it acts rationally. In fact if society hinges on everyone acting rationally then it is doomed. Og Enterprises tells Ford "You either take the finite life span contract whereby you can make cars but we retain all our rights, or none of us make money." What happens when a rational society comes under the leverage of an irrational member? In a law abiding society you can't simply resort to some sort of vigilantism. A rational society should be structured so that any power accrued to an irrational party naturally dilutes itself over time. Think of it as a sort of an "error-correction" mechanism. An irrational person doesn't work the land they own, and naturally it becomes valueless over time. Similarly an irrational person who owns a patent but doesn't want to put any work into it, but rather make money for nothing should have the power represented in the patent dissolve over time through a patent lifetime. An aristocracy represents a mechanism that allows irrational persons to maintain power in spite of themselves and without work. A perpetual patent holds the distinct potential to form such an aristocracy.

No, in my hypothetical, no ancestor sold out the patent for a lump sum. You are changing the problem and being intellectually dishonest. In the hypothetical Og invented the wheel, acquired a non-terminating patent, the family never sold out, I hold the original patent today without dilution. Any licensing agreements we made were for finite terms, and I hate global warming so I am not renewing any of those licensing agreements. All the improvements still require a license from the original patent to be of use, and I don't care about money so I don't care what they offer me. The only way out is that someone invented something entirely unrelated to the wheel that does the same thing. Except no one has invented something like that that you have been able to point to. At this point in time there is no replacement for the wheel, and it looks a way off. You can't argue by pulling some nebulous "someone will have invented something to compete with the wheel" out of your hat. If there is a competitor, then point to it. If you can't point to it, then it may be entirely possible that there is *no* competitor at our current level of technology. The problem with these arguments is that they assume anything anyone can think of can be invented. Or that just because one wants a device which does such and such it must be possible to build such a thing. Personally I want a car that goes 10000 miles on a tank of gas, does 0 to 60 in 1 second has all of the interior of a high-end luxury car, and costs $10 to make, but nature being what it is and being defined by laws, I don't expect to get it. This all comes out of looking at intellectual property as some kind of footrace. The person that gets there first gets the prize and devil take the rest. This is kind of like saying that if Thomas Edison had died age 5 we'd still be using candles. The fact that someone invented something doesn't mean that other people never would have invented it had that person not lived to do it. This view of intellectual property belonging to one person in perpetuity really only makes sense if we assume no one else could have invented it. Progress in science and engineering would seem to require that ideas become public domain over time. Which goes back to the original post: If X holds a patent but is making no effort to exploit it, should the patent still hold, or should it become public domain so that someone else interested in exploiting it can make use of the technology? Should patents become a means of *inhibiting* progress and innovation. Again, that this might be a "necessary evil" may well be a reasonable response. Unless there is an argument that actions which inhibit scientific and technological progress aren't necessarily evil? (setting aside some sort of lifeboat argument that inhibiting nuclear weapons in Iran isn't evil. Indeed it isn't, but I want to keep to more benign technologies here). Patents would seem to simultaneously inhibit and promote progress. They inhibit by providing a short-term "monopoly" of sorts on a particular technology and preventing others from perhaps using it better. They promote by providing a window within which the inventor can recoup his investment and make profits without fearing someone taking it from him. The student of mathematical optimization in me wants to think that perhaps the timeframe is chosen to balance these two competing factors.

A=>C is just shorthand for ~(A&~C). Nobody would confuse the latter with "causality". This kind of formal logic has nothing to do with causality. Modal logics attempt to get at some notion of "material implication". Honestly though, I don't know what kind of meaning "cause" can have outside of a physical theory.

Okay, let's say I own the patent to the wheel (my great great...great grandfather Og made it and it stayed in the family). I decide I don't like cars because they cause global warming so I stop licensing out the wheel thus making all the improvements useless. What substitute do you forsee for all those wheels we have on cars and trucks and wheelbarrows and things?

So you think if I held a patent on the wheel it would have declined in value by now?

Indeed the argument for patent expiration is that freely available knowledge is furthers technological innovation. For example if screwdivers had been patented originally, and the patent existed forever, then many inventions using screws would be either unavailable or substantially more expensive. The argument being that in the long run patents stifle innovation. Innovation is also stifled when other people can steal an idea and prevent the originator from making money from it (i.e. without patents the incentive to innovate collapses). So an expiring patent steers to best route between two undesirable scenarios. I haven't seen a good argument that makes ideas property like land. If you build it the thing you built is property, the idea is an idea, a tad nebulous. If patent law exists to encourage innovation, then it seems defensive patents run counter to this.

I'm not thinking in terms of "fairness". A patent is a piece of law created by a rational society to improve itself. Conceivably it might be more rational to limit patents to people actually using them. Of course the alternative is to treat a patent as property like any other, and say that unfortunately defensive patents are a "necessary evil". That might be the answer.

The arguments in defense of the legal process of "patenting" usually include some attempt to link patents to helping further innovation and progress by providing incentives to invent new things by allowing one to enjoy exclusive profits from them. If you disagree with the above preamble, that's fine, it is just a preamble and the interesting meat comes next. I used to work for a corporation which expressly researched and gained patents in areas related to its own product with the express intent of *denying* the innovation to the competition and with no intention of using the patents to innovate away from their current strategy for their product. The company in question produced semi-conductor capital equipment, and the nature of the market at the time was that there were basically two suppliers of the equipment and maybe a dozen costumers (probably fewer). It strikes me that one condition for holding a patent ought to be that one is actively working to exploit the technology in question, and that if one is not doing so the patent ought to be void and others able to exploit the technology. On the other hand the parallel to this would be land use where a person could only claim title to land they are using, and would lose ownership of land they are just holding and not using. Of course property rights allow one to own land they never use for anything. Thoughts? Should one be allowed to hold a patent they are not trying to make use of and thereby stifle technological progress?

I disagree with the above attempt to slander intuitionistic logic as being "Kantian". From the standpoint of Topos Theory (which theory is a good contender to replace Set Theory as a foundational theory of mathematics), inituitionistic logic naturally arises as the more general logic on a topos. Classical logic arises on a subset of topoi, and so can only be viewed as a less general logic specific to systems with a certain extra structure. The rub is that the topoi most used in mathematics and physics until now have come from that special subset wherein classical logic arises. Anyway, the axioms of Topos Theory arose in the context of Algebraic Geometry, so cannot be rejected as being an arbitrary "Kantian" construct, but rather fell out of structures that were discovered while investigating problems in that field. To repeat, intuitionistic is a perfectly valid and more general logic than classical logic which ought to be viewed as intuitionistic logic with extra structure (axioms).

I have to second the above in a slightly different way: Goedel's work is of little or no interest to anyone who is not a mathematician. Any attempt to get something out of Goedel that is not purely mathematical in nature results only in nonsense. Or more technically: Goedel is only considered with certain kinds of mathematical theorems in certain kinds of formal systems. If you aren't talking mathematics expressed in a formal system Goedel isn't relevant.

Having only read Augustine's "Confessions", I see no reason not to compare the two. In any event, despite his testosterone filled bluster and bravado, Nietzsche was always something of a Victorian prude at heart. He just wanted to find a way to be a Victorian prude without Christianity. His early education was essentially training for becoming a pastor and that really continued to shape him to the end.

Well Nietzsche's aim was to replace the Christian metaphor of eternal life versus eternal damnation which caused the individual to consider their actions in the light of eternal consequences with a more secular metaphor. Nietzsche held that christianity once upon a time pushed people to consider each and every action they took as of utmost importance. Nihilism is what results when humans have lost that push and have nothing to replace it with (in effect making everyone listless sleepwalkers of sorts). Anyway the metaphor isn't that appalling. One might look at an action as worth doing on a lark, but if one reconsiders along Nietzsche's lines and say "is this action worth doing over and over again forever through eternity", one might choose to take a more serious look at the choices.

I believe Nietzsche's point with the "eternal return" was to make one consider that every decision they make (or fail to make) has eternal consequences. That is to say that *every* decision is supremely important. Nietzsche holds that most people spend most of their time in sort of a haze and never really make decisions and sort of let what happens happen. This implicitly means that everyone is holding to a philosophy that what they choose to do doesn't really matter, so why put effort into how one lives. If, instead, one follows a Nietzschean view, then *every* decision is important (eternally important) and everything one does should be done *deliberately*. In effect this is taking responsibility for one's living rather than evading responsibility. The "eternal return" is intended as a metaphor to focus one's consciousness on the problem to hand.

Having done things more or less similar to this in the past, I have the following advice: 1. Consider using a book that comes in a dual-language edition. It is much much less tedious to be able to glance over to an English translation and try to spot the word you are missing as against thumbing through a dictionary. The best book for this is typically the Bible since every sentence is numbered. 2. Consider not doing this in French. Unfortunately French (as with English) is not written remotely phonetically. You lose a lot of rhythm when your guessed pronunciation isn't correct. Or at least take a class where you can get some of the pronunciation information. Bare in mind with #2 that I did the initials once of using my Spanish and Latin to get French and was reading through a grammar book. I decided that the disconnect between spelling and pronunciation was too big of a hurdle. 3. Try things first on a short story and see how it goes. At least with the short story you have the goal being reached in the fore-seeable future. The length of something like Les Miserables tends to be a bit discouraging when things start getting rough and you feel like you've spent a couple hours on one page looking things up.

This isn't Germany saying it has a say in our affairs. Let's say the Germans go through try and convict these people in absentia (since they probably wouldn't go to Germany for the trial), what then? Well so long as they don't travel to Germany or to any country that might hand them over to Germany, nothing will happen. If they make the mistake of hopping on a plane to Berlin they will be arrested and thrown in prison. Every nation has the right to declare someone a criminal on their soil following due process, and to punish that person if they end up on the nation's soil. Germany wouldn't have the right to send a commando squad to abduct these people a la Israel and Eichmann. But that assumes you think Israel was wrong for abducting Eichmann to stand trial. If you think Israel was in the clear, I guess you think the Germans can abduct Rumsfeld and try him.

Read Campbell's "Hero With a Thousand Faces" The various hero myths across human cultures heed to a basic pattern. Why this pattern exists is an interesting question, and probably gives psychological insight into the human mind. But the point is the same elements occur over and over. For the most part, it looks like these stories are independently created rather than stolen from some ur-story.

One thing to bear in mind is that substances tend to be opaque at some frequencies and transparent others. So, to take an example, while water is transparent for the frequencies we see, it is opaque at other ranges. Actually if you look at the earth's atmosphere, the colors we see fall into a window where it is largely transparent, and the atmosphere is much more opaque outside of that range. Of course the eye evolved to be sensitive to those frequencies at which the atmosphere is transparent.