Yes, some things are improving. But others are not. And to say that the things these people picked define "the world" is nothing more than hubris.

There are many things that are not improving. Some of them bode extremely poorly for the future. Climate may be one of those (or not... we will see.) Loss of privacy is another. Militarization of police is another. Constitutional erosion is another. A continuously increasing burden of badly crafted and anti-liberty legislation is another. The US justice system is a horror show from one end to the other. We're presently building a mostly unemployable permanent lower class by the continuing and increased implementation of never forgive, never forget social patterns and supporting technology. The vast majority of wealth has become concentrated in the hands of a very few people and corporations, and those same people and corporations have assumed de-facto control of our political system everywhere it does something that matters to them.

Depending on where you sit in regard to these issues, and others, your world may be sucking harder on an ever-increasing curve.

The world is what it is. Happy-assed optimism isn't called for outside of your own situation, and only then if that's how you see it.

A person's property is their property. No committee should be able to decide how much a patent (or any other property or possession) is worth and force a sale.

I reject the entire concept that an idea can be your property. The only thing about an idea that is of personal significance is that you might have it first. You can't prevent someone else from having the same idea, even if you never open your mouth about your idea. Because it's not inherently yours; it's just a product of thinking. Property can really only be physical.

This is exactly the same as you liking chocolate, and then telling me I can't like chocolate for X years because you liked it first. Ideas are a product of the mind, and that's about all you can say about them in terms of where they come from. That doesn't lead to "property", in fact, since we all have minds, it leads precisely the other way. But the reason that monetizing ideas is encouraged is because some of them have the potential to advance society enough that it is thought that a period of monopoly is enough to justify everyone having access to that idea a bit down the road. The whole point is to make that idea available to everyone.

Right now, society grants temporary monopolies for the one who seems to have been first to describe the idea (although they're not very good at determining that, they can't be.) You'll note that even under the current system, society does not create a situation where the idea is "yours", that is, it's not your property. All they're doing is saying, you lay out the idea in detail, we'll let you have a limited time to monetize it. After that, anyone can -- so it's not your property. What you get is an opportunity, one that comes at everyone else's disadvantage, and which can (and does) lead to zero progress at all if you sit on it. In which case, thanks for retarding progress we could have had, eh?

I think offering a monopoly was a poor choice. If you have an idea, you should be able to do whatever with it. If I have or use the same idea, same thing. Being first shouldn't be worth much -- not a monopoly. Just enough to incentivize having ideas. Actually selling ideas -- that's where they have real value. So to maximize value to society, we should let anyone sell who feels they can make money doing so.

There are lots of opinions on this. Now you know mine, that's all.

The main thing wrong with software patents is the nonobviousness bar.

It's bloody obvious you can write just about anything you're competent to write and that is possible to implement. That's the whole point of a generally programmable architecture. To then say, "look, ma, I wrote an algorithm!" and THEN expect that no one else is allowed to write the same thing... the only thing obvious about that is that it is stupid.

Digital hardware is not very different software

That's one case of doing digital hardware, and it doesn't address the 99% of the realm of other hardware. See, the problem here -- unlike software -- is that you don't get to make a very effective choice about the amount of resources thrown at the problem. I can attack the same software problem as a large corporation and even come out ahead, and faster. With hardware, that's not true. There are all kinds of limits from certifications (FCC, UL, etc.) to lab equipment to mechanical design, assembly, testing, prototyping, packaging, distribution and so on; patents exist in order to encourage the investments required to address those costs. For software, such encouragement is unnecessary. It doesn't face the same problems unless you choose that it does (mainly by hiring less effective programmers and/or constraining programmer options (like choice of language) and/or putting layers of management in the way of progress.)

doesn't the current patent system already do that?

No. The current patent system enforces a monopoly, and then you get to earn whatever. I'm suggesting that if the invention is found worthy, the government immediately pay the inventor based on an initial estimation, and then revise that upwards if called for when presented with sales and social data ten years later, and anyone can use the invention. So the inventor gets rewarded; the risks of commercializing land equally on everyone's shoulders. If the invention is worthy, that is, it can be sold at a profit, that'll probably happen. If not, well, phbbbt.

That's stupid, because customers will always low-ball what they want to pay

That's why the revisit. Show the data, get the pay.

The price of any goods/service should be set by the seller, not the buyer.

This isn't about the buyer or the seller or the manufacturer. This is about the inventor. We want things invented. We don't want monopolies. So if I invent a widget, I get paid for inventing it. Anything from $10 to whatever they think it's worth. After ten years, it turns out this thing was used *everywhere* (say it's in cellphones) then I get more. But that more came from legit sales of the device (taxed), a tax that is built into its cost and doesn't make it any harder for one little guy to make it , or a big corporation. Given that the sales are known, so is the recompense.

nobody knows how much a patent is worth beforehand.

Estimates can be made -- we do that kind of thing all the time -- and the revisit can ensure that the actual worth is eventually related to the reward.

It could be worthless, or a few bucks, or billions.

No invention is worth billions. Monopolies on inventions are worth billions. And we should get rid of those. Then if you can make billions off of sales of devices, fine. But everyone gets a chance at it, and the inventor is already compensated.

You just want to create a system where the patent holders are royally screwed and you can get their ideas for cheap.

No. That's nonsense. Use your head. I want the inventor(s) paid well, and I want it to be related to the actual value of the invention. What I want to eliminate is the monopoly, because that's an albatross around everyone else's neck, a huge, hemorrhoidal, bleeding, infected open sore on the ass of progress.

especially the open source folks, who think everything should be free

The software types are entitled to value their work product at zero. Open source hardware is tougher to address within the bounds of my idea, but frankly, so few people actually build open source hardware for their own use I just don't think it's a serious issue. If they're building it to sell, then the sales get taxed based on inventions used, no problem.

According to the paper, EEC only reduces but does not eliminate the problem (section 6.3). Multiple bits can be corrupted at once.

If you're wanting to narrow it down, you won't like this line from the paper:

In particular, all modules manufactured in the past two years (2012 and 2013) were vulnerable,

It's pretty clever, and something I always wondered whether would be possible. They're exploiting the fact that DRAM rows need to be read every so often to refresh them because they leak charge, and eventually would fall below the noise threshold and be unreadable. Their exploit works by running code that - by heavily, cyclicly reading rows - makes adjacent rows leak faster than expected, leading to them falling below the noise threshold before they get refreshed.

Russia imports processed foods *and* staples. Just because there's some products that they're net positive on doesn't change that picture, their food imports are about 6x larger than their exports. And even some of your examples are off. For example, Russia exports a couple hundred million dollars of milk every year but imports 1 1/2 *billion* worth.

Russia's top ag imports are beef, beverges, pork, milk, tobacco, sugar and honey, poultry, and cheese. Beverages is mainly alcohol. So take beverages and tobacco out of the picture, you've still got mostly staples. And the funny thing is, see the milk and all that meat on the list? Russia's biggest subsidies to its ag industry are *already* on its meat and dairy production, and it still vastly underproduces.

It should also be noted that the very thing that keeps Russia's ag industry competitive at all has been its steady shift from lousy Soviet-era farm equipment to modern equipment. The vast majority of which (and spare parts to keep current systems operational) are imported.

Software patents are utter bullshit from word one. They should just go away and stay away.

Hardware patents are something else, but it's pretty clear they are being *very* poorly managed. I don't even like saying it, but I'm afraid I agree with you: they do more harm than good now.

We need an entirely new model of encouraging invention. Trade secret is useful in providing a reasonable profit window and establishment of precedence in the marketplace (the only way to go with software, as far as I'm concerned) as the window you get correlates well with the complexity of what you've done, but has its limits when we're talking hardware.

Perhaps a way for society to pay for an invention, and once that's been done, it goes right into the "available to everyone" pool. Panels of experts setting perceived value and an immediate payment being made, followed by a revisit ten years later to determine how it all went, with extra reward possible if the invention's impact was underestimated?

Look at me, suggesting government committees. Oy. I should go bang my head on a table.

But damn, we *really* need to clean out the drains. Patents are the disgusting glop that are making the system run slower and slower, while getting legal sewage all over everyone involved. The only consistent winners here are the plumbers (lawyers.)

The physical effects of a major asteroid/meteorite strike should duplicate a nuclear war fairly well, other than the radiation and mutants part.

Plenty of ionizing radiation from an impact like that.

But aside from that, a major impact would very likely crack the crust of the planet, and shroud any part that wasn't outright baked in sunlight-blocking suspended particulates. We could, entirely reasonably, expect the human race to survive a major nuclear war. There have already been 500+ megatons of nuclear weapons detonated in ~2100 separate events, and it'd be stretching it considerably to say it affected us globally.

A war would of course destroy a lot of infrastructure, but there would still be a lot of people wandering around afterwards, and plenty of opportunities to survive at various levels. Not so much with a major asteroid or comet strike.

If you have a 17 mile in diameter ~round asteroid that hits us at 20 km/sec, that impact would release 1,000,000,000 megatons (not a typo.) In terms of global survivability... Perhaps for sulphur-matabolizing colonies of organisms that live in the dark at the bottom of the sea. Although one would think that any life-supporting vent is likely to have a pretty severe "hiccup" as a consequence of such an impact.

But for us, on the surface? It's over.

If it comes down to military force stopping loss of assets for failure to pay debt, then you're saying "stop all international trade with me this instant".

Russia imports nearly 40% of its food. So, say hello to the largest famine of this century.

GDP comparisons:

Major pro-sanctions players:
US: 16,8T
EU: 17,5T
Japan: 4,9T

Major anti-sanctions players:
Russia: 2,1T
China: 9,5T

Just ignoring the whole fiat currency issue and controlling the global banking system which act as large multipliers, China is simply not comparable to the economic pressure being levied against Russia.

China's in this thing with Russia for precisely one thing: China. They're taking advantage of a weakened Russia to strike deals that they never would have gotten before. A good example is the "Power of Siberia" gas pipeline deal that they signed for a few years back. China's been trying for years to get Russia to bite at bargain-basement prices that leave almost no profit for Gazprom (perhaps even a slight negative that would have to be somewhat subsidized by the government's gas royalties), and Russia had been refusing. Then they sign the exact same deal they'd been refusing a few months ago and herald it as a great victory.

China has Russia in an excellent position and is going to squeeze every drop of potential profit out of their bad situation that they can. And Russia will herald it as a glorious blow to the west all the way down.

That said - even China's GDP doesn't compare to the sanction imposers (US + Europe + Japan + misc), all the leverage multipliers of global banking and fiat currency that the sanction imposers have aside. Even if China's goal was to break sanctions - which it's not - it's just not big enough, it's a third their size. And Russia a trivial fraction of that. And the multipliers of controlling the banking system and a fiat currency are very real. Throw trade into the picture, forget it - Moscow is closer to Newfoundland and Liberia than it is to Beijing. There's a giant barren wasteland between the two. They have a border but it's more of a barrier than a facilitator for trade.

As the very article linked by Slashdot put it:

"In the current conditions, any help is very welcome," Vladimir Miklashevsky, a strategist at Danske Bank A/S, said by e-mail. "Yet, it can't substitute the losses of the Russian banking system and economy from western sanctions."

...the somewhat tounge-in-cheek poster from cold war has this covered in its last step:

o Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye

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Fine; but Cuba is one, at least as far as I know, that doesn't have a significantly built-out Internet structure, even though the hardware to do so is pretty far down the road to commoditization. They're very late to the game, and this should (ok, could) afford them some advantages. So what I was trying to say (and apparently, saying badly) was that it will be interesting to see how they go about it.

Conditioning has a lot of scientific basis. A psychotherapist talking about translating neuroscience to raising kids sounds suspicious.