And neither do you. And that's my main point.

You then go on about avoiding a well known danger and how GM might be safer in that respect.

But that's not the point. It's the unknown unknown, that's the danger.

And with GM you open up whole vistas of unknown, unknown. The computer analogy is very apt. Even in the "deliberately designed world of computer programming" we can't foresee the consequences, and our experience is quite clearly on the side of outright manipulation being more dangerous than random chance change. The risks from the known unknown is readily dealt with in both situations, you have to check for known dangerous compounds using both methods, so your "you can be certain since you didn't fiddle with that" (paraphrase) doesn't fly in that case either. (Also a well known result from the complex systems that are computer programmes, "But that couldn't possibly affect that..." Famous last words.

But in either case, your characterisation of mine in particular, and our in general, concerns aren't about "unsafe" GMO's in the sense of knowingly "directly harmful to humans", it's "letting known psychopath organisations play with fire". We, well I specifically, don't distrust science and technology, we distrust you (in the "ya'll" sense of "you"). We didn't trust Dow Chemical when they said "trust us, our chemicals are completely safe", and we don't trust Monsanto now, when they're doing and saying the exact same thing. And the risk isn't really that we're afraid that they'll poison us outright (not that we hold them above such behaviour, just witness the British when they realised that scrapie had jumped the species boundary to cows and decided against saying anything lest they harm the British beef industry), we believe them to be smarter than that, no, its basically everything else, including the rest of the ecosystem, economy, and laying their grubby hands on a strategic resource...

Note that here in Sweden we don't just ban GMO, we also ban Belgian Blue, because we don't believe in the concept of breeding for what is a genetic disorder in animals just to make beef $0.10 cheaper by the pound. Banning the use of artificial growth hormones in animal husbandry, and the use of antibiotics to promote growth in same, is just plain common sense (esp. the latter).

We note that you don't care one way or the other about any of these. So that you don't care about GMO, and the risks with said, isn't surprising in the least, but also not very much of an endorsement... Especially since our farmers, even though we've "hamstrung" them instead of letting red blooded american capitalism be our guiding star, still manage to overproduce themselves into an unsustainable market situation, almost just as bad as yours. We don't actually need them to be more efficient, and we can't afford them to be anyway...

You were the one who claimed that most would-be pirates were discouraged from doing it prior to the invention of the printing press. Guess what? The high cost of making copies (and the relative lack of literate people to share them with, assuming that the author himself was even literate) discouraged authors from writing things down too.

Wrong. You're conflating authors with their works. The only sure way an author could prevent Alexandrians from copying their works was to not create works in the first place.

If they created works, even if they were not written down, nothing stopped someone else from writing it down. (For example, Socrates never wrote anything; what we know of him comes primarily from the writings of his student, Plato; Another example is from the days of Elizabethan theater, when printers would have people dictate the scripts to plays, sometimes actors who had memorized the lines, sometimes just people with good memories who had been in the audience)

If works were created, written down, and shared with anyone, there was absolutely nothing that could keep the scrolls from getting copied or moved. Consider Virgil, who wrote fanfic (The Aneid) based on the epic poems of Homer (The Illiad and The Odyssey), but wanted all the copies burned; this was ignored, and the world is better off for it.

Fundamentally, it's the same issue with secrets, or any other information. The only way to control the spread of it is to either convince other people to respect your wishes (which they may or may not do according to their own self interest, and other factors), or to never tell anyone.

I don't think we can credit copyright with the increase in the number of works in existence in recent history, as compared with ages past. The real credit is probably owed to increases in literacy, improved artificial lighting, the development of printing (as well as improved paper and ink to support it), greater leisure time available due to a variety of technological and social advances, increases in the internal stability of much of the world (hard to sell books when bandits rob every wagon, or war ravages the country), etc. Copyright can be nice, but it gets way more credit than it deserves.

Authors really just don't engage in self-censorship as a means of control. Copyright, from an author's point of view, is a way to recoup their investment. If they can't do that, they have to have other jobs that take time away from creating. Potentially, those jobs take away all their time from creating, so they don't create. It's rare as hell to find someone who is interested in creating works, has the financial means to do so without having to worry about the cost (and opportunity cost), yet refuses because they're a control freak. I'm confident that the sorts of authors you've identified are so rare as to not be worth concerning ourselves with.

As for the purpose of modern, authorial copyright (as opposed to the old stationers' copyright), you're almost entirely right: I'd only say that mere access is not enough. Rather, copyright is intended to provide an overall benefit to society by increasing the number of works which are created and published, while imposing the fewest and shortest restrictions on the public. It operates by providing some temporary benefits (whose actual value is determined by the market) to authors, but this is merely a means to an end, not an end in itself. If copyright were actually meant to benefit authors, it's clear that it has never done a good job of it at all. The stereotype of the starving author exists for a reason.

Personally, I would drop terms to a year, with numerous opportunities for renewal, but with overall maximum lengths that were still quite short (probably no more than 20 years or so, and less in the case of some types of works, such as computer software). The reason is that when we had renewal terms, many rights holders failed to renew, evidencing a lack of desire for longer copyright on their part, and getting works into the public domain faster through their inaction. Since everyone winds up as happy as they wanted to be in that scenario, I see no reason not to return to it.

Regarding maximum lengths, you may be interested to read the following paper on the subject: http://rufuspollock.org/papers...

What the hell are you talking about?

Unauthorized copying was absolutely standard practice everywhere in the world until the 18th century, and most places until well into the 19th and 20th centuries. Hell, some places, like Alexandria during the days of the famous library, made it government policy; any books that entered the city had to be turned over for the library to make copies of, if the librarians wanted.

And it's a good thing too, since every written work we have from antiquity which wasn't carved into stone or clay survived only thanks to unauthorized copying -- often many generations of copying, by many different copyists. Even then, we've lost a tremendous amount of material.

As for the difficulty of copying books by hand, that was equally difficult for everyone, whether authorized or not, so it didn't deter piracy.

Copyright originated because publishers printed books (often without authorization; the authors had no rights) but didn't like to compete amongst themselves. So the publishers set up a cartel whereby they would agree which of them had the right to print a particular book. The author had no real say. And the government cooperated so long as they could censor anything they didn't like. It wasn't until substantially later that this system fell apart -- because people didn't like the monopoly -- and a replacement based on authors getting the rights was suggested. (And then the publishers fought that when they were unable to fully control it in the way that they had before, and even now publishers are the real powers behind and beneficiaries of copyright; authors need publishers far more than publishers need authors)

That's true. The problem you face, however, is that the social norm concerning creative works appears to be that it's perfectly okay for ordinary people to do things that constitute copyright infringement, at least if they aren't doing so for direct financial gain (i.e. if they aren't selling the copies). If the law were to reflect this social norm, copyright would not be as interesting an issue as it has become in the past 30-40 years. Instead we see copyright holders suing individuals, and trying to control the Internet so as to indirectly control individuals by limiting their options, so as to preserve the laws that enable a particular market, regardless of whether or not they conform to social norms.

And it looks as though even for a sort of infringement that most people would agree should be illegal, the copyright maximalist faction is still going overboard. I certainly would agree that professional, profit-oriented copyright infringement ought to be prevented, but I would not go so far as to say that it would ever be appropriate to put someone in jail for as much as ten years over it; it's just not that important. Punishments should not be so draconian, especially given that it seems unlikely that it will accomplish a damn thing. A better solution would be to reform copyright so that there's less of a point in engaging in professional, profit-oriented infringement, rather than the current strategy which is to simply make it high risk, high reward. For example, just as repealing Prohibition undercut the mafia, and just as drug legalization and decriminalization undercuts criminals in the drug trade, legalizing some copyright infringement by people acting not for profit, and thus able to act openly, could undercut professional infringers.

Well, I'd point out two things here. First, there are pre-existing incentives that act independently of copyright; in many cases, copyright is not the primary incentive, and in many cases copyright is not even a necessary incentive.

Second, I agree that copyright is useful, but we ought to regulate how much copyright we have, and for how long it lasts, with an eye toward its utility. I'd bet good money that adding a ten year sentence for certain copyright infringements, and even enforcing it, will have zero meaningful effects on how well copyright serves society. Therefore, such punishments are inappropriate. Indeed, we ought to pare copyright down to the point where it has both the fewest restrictions on the public with the greatest incentivizing effects. Given the economics of the various copyright-related fields, I think you'll find that this would involve no criminal punishments, minimal civil penalties, minimal restrictions on individuals, and copyright terms of far shorter length than we see now.

I don't think that's true. Sure, I know about the lifestyle of someone like Kim Dotcom, but he's something of an outlier. Benny Glover made some money, but I don't think you'd say it was a lot.

Making counterfeit anything, and selling it to someone who knows it's counterfeit, only makes sense if you sell it for a very substantial discount below the legitimate price. The negative effect on the legitimate supplier, if there's any at all, is going to be far greater than the positive effect for the counterfeiter.

Not really. You see, random mutation from radiation is a fact of nature, and it's been going on for a long time. It's a sledge hammer approach and most mutations will result in a non-viable seed. It's a method that's limited in power and hence risk.

The chances of being accidentally clever on purpose is essentially zero with a random mutation approach. You're basically just speeding up nature. Can that result in dangerous crops? Sure, but experience tells us that to really screw up you need to add intelligence into the mix. The risk of tomatoes all of a sudden sprouting fish genes that might code for a fish protein that could kill those allergic to fish is as near to zero as damn it, with the random approach to "genetic engieering". With GMO the chances of success are several orders of magnitude higher.

I think of a car analogy off the top of my head, but in my own field, computer security/safety the examples abound. Even though the safety/reliability field is a difficult one, we can at least reason about it, because the insults to those systems follows the laws of nature and are amenable to statistical analysis. Not so with security. There we have an intelligent attacker that can change things, not at random, but at will. That means that a small software or hardware flaw that, statistically speaking, could never hurt us, can become our undoing each and every time. Those completely improbable circumstances that need to arise by chance for the danger to be realised, can be put in place by the intelligent attacker at will.

So, you can't really even begin to compare the power of random genetic mutation as a tool for changing DNA to (more or less, well "less" but still) being able to edit that DNA as you please. They're not in the same league, and hence while restricting Monsanto to the former is a cause for concern, giving them access to the later is a cause for abject terror. It's the difference between them having access to a hand grenade and a nuke...

P.S. And they know it. If they were of equal power and utility, they would just abandon GM as not being worth the bother and press on with random mutation. But they are different, and that's why they're not happy being restricted to the much less powerful of the techniques.

I don't know about "much harder". It was a help that's certain and they provided a few insights, but if Turing's biography is anything to go by, it wasn't crucial. Turing and his ilk did most of the work esp. when it came to automating the process. And it's the automation that made the process quick enough to be of practical value.

At the onset of serious illness often the answer to that is "yes". And that's a good thing. Because the "symptoms" can kill you. A common fever from an infection can kill you, even in cases where the actual infection can be cleared by the body itself is short order. The same with anaphylaxis. The allergic reaction as such won't kill you, it's the lack of breath from your throat swelling shut, or precipitous drop in blood pressure, (with heart failure) that kills you. Treating those symptoms is 99% of "curing" the underlying cause. The body will take care of that in short order as well if it survives that long, that is.

And yes. Seizures aren't exactly healthy either, with many serious complications, including death, so even if you don't do anything else to the patient, you damn well try and control the seizures first. Everything else comes second.

The diseases are after all divided into two major groups, the self healing and the incurable. HOWEVER, that's not to say that there aren't a few very important cases in the middle. Scraping away a melanoma before it's gone too far definitely "cures" you and isn't "treating the symptoms". Even so, and in all cases first you treat the (serious) symptoms, then you see if you can stop them from recurring.

Many serious diseases, including but not limited to, having no kidney function at all, can now be managed, by "treating the symptoms" of having no kidney function. Even if we "fix" that condition by transplanting a new kidney; guess what, we then have to treat the rejection symptoms by suppressing them. And people get to live long and productive lives that they wouldn't have been able to, just a few short years ago.

By always treating the symptoms.

That goes beyond my knowledge of the subject, but it makes sense. That said, the British did have the know how, with Turing and company building computers just after the war, but Britain was just too deep in the hole financially and otherwise to devote much energy, effort, determination to the task. So that the Americans pulled ahead was probably due to a number of (other) factors as well.

And those vacuum tubes ran hot as well as silent. Several kW:s total if if memory serves. At the aforementioned tour we told the story of having asking the "girls" that ran the computer how they managed cooling in the summer, when it was already very hot in the hut. "We just opened the window, silly!" was the answer. :-)

All of which I said? ... Or didn't voice an opinion on. (Of course the war time secrecy was to prevent the enemy from knowing you're knowing. Anything else would have been daft beyond belief, and I didn't say anything else.)

Yes, there is much truth in that. (Though you discount the rapid advances in computational power just after the war. Even though the computational effort is "massive" that only spurred the various signals intelligence organisations to buy more computers).

However, as no-one thought the Enigma had been broken to the extent that it had, no-one put that much effort in to perfect crypto hygiene, not reusing or reordering rotors (the Germans famously got that completely wrong, thinking that the strength was increased by changing rotor order), etc.

So while a properly configured and expanded Enigma could have been the basis of a sound and secure means of communication, that wasn't how it was typically used.

I mean, even the Germans had somewhat proper cryptographic procedures, but since they didn't believe that their crypto could be broken, they developed a very lackadaisical attitude in practice. Not so the allies, where their own knowledge of the fallibility of such systems made them stress proper procedure at all times to a much greater degree.

(There's a famous example from Beurlings Gehimschreiber break in Sweden. We can surmise that there was an order that all messages should start with a random word, to avoid stereotypical cribs at the start of a message. All good and well so far. But then the order probably continued "for example Sonnenschein".

You guessed it. All of a sudden more than 95% or so of all messages started with the word "Sonnenschein". The odd bright young spark managed "Mondschein" and a jester put "Donaudampfschiffsfhartskapitaensmuetze". So, while the intention was good, in actual practice messages got easier to break after that...)

All joking aside, historically that's exactly what happened! The crack of the Enigma in particular and German/Axis crypto in general, was kept very secret just to foist broken encryption onto the world. Winston Churchill himself actually ordered the plans for the Colossus electronic computer (built to crack the Geheimschreiber) was to be destroyed and the machines (there were several at that time) to be broken up, no piece to be bigger than a man's fist.

It was kept secret with the expressed intent of luring, in particular, South American countries to adopt German, esp. Enigma technology, so that all the work that had gone into the break could be reused. And it worked. Many countries adopted variations of the Enigma after the war and the break was kept a closely guarded secret. These machines were then used for diplomatic and other communication for years. It wasn't until 1967 that it was mentioned in one off hand sentence, and that was it. The full(er) story didn't come out until much later, with the publication of David Kahn's seminal "The Code Breakers" if memory serves, where it's all documented.

Winston Churchill even kept up the farce when writing his master work on the history of the English speaking peoples. He "retconned" many important events and facts to look like they weren't informed of what the allies knew of German plans from actual intercepted communications, instead keeping up the faÃade that their decisions had been governed by other factors, and other information than the true one. Of course, one shouldn't exaggerate the impact of the breaks on higher level decision making, but it's of course a fabrication to discount it. After all it was considered so valuable that they allies went to great lengths to deceive the Germans as to where they allies got their information from. Sending out "fake" reconnaissance missions to "happen upon" German convoys to North Africa to take just one example.

The secrecy of course, however relevant at the time, make problems for the historians. I remember when the curator of the Bletchely park museum held a talk about the reconstruction of the Colossus, and quipped, that "Well, of course all the plans weren't destroyed, engineers always squirrel away what they consider their best work. So bits and pieces ended up at the bottom of drawers and in attics everwhere." (Paraphrase). He then went around to all the old-timers and collected bits and bobs here and there, bread borded what he thought a particular piece would look like and came back and presented it to the original designers (the ones that were still alive). That was often sufficient to further jog their memory: "No, now that you mention it, that wasn't quite how it worked."

Does it have good Linux drivers? I.e. that have the same performance, memory requirements etc. that the windows counterpart? Doesn't have to be free, only good.

No? Then I'm not interested...

Even if trial by combat became legal once again, it wouldn't be done with surprise sniping. Instead the litigants would have to fight it out at their municipal thunderdome or something.

That doesn't really cover local politics, the "taking place outside of parts of town where they're expected", i.e. city hall, so you probably want to add that.

Local politics, e.g. major building projects etc., often have a greater direct effect on you than state-wide politics, so local's actually more important to keep track of. (But its even more boring, for the most part, so people don't bother, unfortunately.)

Which is easier to believe: That a sophisticated criminal organization is involved in an ongoing plot to usurp your wife's identity and destroy her credit, or that the local cable company is run by a a bunch of half-wits who couldn't figure out how to cancel an account or correct false customer information if their jobs depended on it?

Or, perhaps that Slashdot is a good source for legal advice?