That's not what first-to-file means. Even if Bitcoin is never patented, the Patent Office can still (and should) reject the JP Morgan application based on the Bitcoin prior art. First-to-file means that if JP Morgan files first, the Bitcoin people cannot obtain priority over JP Morgan, as JP Morgan filed first despite inventing second.
Seriously, if I had a secret compartment in my car, I would keep a copy of the King James Bible, a copy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and a registered handgun in there.
Electronics tend to have a bathtub failure curve. Like us, electronics tend to die in their infancy or of old age. When I get hardware for work, I still break them in before "putting them into production," i.e., use them.
The problem hasn't been one with material sciences. The Air Force had wanted to preserve the "through-the-canopy" ejection option in the T-38, where the crew is shot through the canopy during the eject sequence. This makes low-level ejections faster because you don't have to wait for the canopy to separate before firing the ejection motors. However, this clearly makes it harder to make the canopy resistant to bird strikes. Other TTC systems destroy the canopy with embedded det cord but in a high-speed trainer, you probably are okay with a regular ejection sequence.
I have a Ford Fusion that has the Assisted Parking Technology. The driver has to remain in the car, shift gears, and hit the gas and brake pedals. The new system takes care of all of that.
Apple isn't complaining that it costs $2.4 million a month to work around the patent or that there are 500,000 complaints after the workaround was instituted. The patent-holder brought up these facts to show that their patent should carry a hefty royalty payment because Apple could not work around them--not only do you have to pay $2.4 million a month you also have to lower quality to the extent where you have 500,000 complaints even after paying that money.
Dear Uneducated Citizen:
Our Founding Fathers were okay with slavery. Who really cares what they envisioned with regard to what's okay and what's not okay?
Yours,
An Educated Citizen
Did you read the decision? It sounds like you based your comment on a quick read of the summary. The decision focused on a very specific issue:
The ruling focused on a program under which the N.S.A. has been searching domestic Internet links for communications â" where at least one side is overseas â" in which there are âoestrong selectorsâ indicating insider knowledge of someone who has been targeted for foreign-intelligence collection. One example would be mentioning a personâ(TM)s private e-mail address in the body of an e-mail.
Most of the time, the system brings up single communications, like an e-mail or text message. But sometimes many messages are packaged and travel in a bundle that the N.S.A. calls âoemulti-communication transactions.â A senior intelligence official gave one example: a Web page for a private e-mail in-box that displays subject lines for dozens of different messages â" each of which is considered a separate communication, and only one of which may discuss the person who has been targeted for intelligence collection.
While Judge Bates ruled that it was acceptable for the N.S.A. to collect and store such bundled communications, he said the agency was not doing enough to minimize the purely domestic and unrelated messages to protect Americansâ(TM) privacy. In response, the N.S.A. agreed to filter out such communications and store them apart, with greater protections, and to delete them after two years instead of the usual five.
In short, the court was okay with most of the spying program and the intelligence architecture. The court was not that happy about specific details. That's kind of scary, isn't it, that a court thinks this program is mostly okay?
The spying program is supposed to spy on foreigners and Americans who talk to them. The "F" in the FISC and FISA stands for "Foreign". If you call someone in Pakistan, they're allowed to spy on you. But they are collecting everyone's phone call metadata. Is that spying? According to the US Supreme Court, no. Commonsense? Uh, probably.
When will people understand that the U.S. military loses these mock battle so they can demand more funding? American aircraft were outnumbered 3:1 at Cope Indian. But that allows us to say, "Oh, noes, we lost to Indians. We need $100 billion in new planes." From an article: "The Cope India exercise also seemingly shocked some in Congress and the Pentagon who used the event to renew the call for modernizing the U.S. fighter force with stealthy F/A-22s and F-35 Joint Strike Fighters."
It's really a matter of money, time, and process. I have referred to this article for years. Writing mission-critical code is about having a process in place that sets standards, guidelines, and checks and balances. These guys wrote code that had 420,000 lines and only one bug; commercial quality code of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors. They are one of four organizations in the world rated SEI Level 5.
The most important part is the constant red-teaming. Verifiers are allowed to go to town and challenge the coders. It is clear that the rest of NASA doesn't have this mentality. We have seen shuttles explode and crash and burn because some political guy told the engineers to go fuck themselves. Imagine if there were a red-team that could have went to HQ and said, "We're not launching because of blow-by on the O-rings, and it's too fucking cold for too fucking long for the O-rings to stay pliant."
If anyone in the organization can frustrate the purposes of the organization by unauthorized disclosure, that would constitute a veto under any real definition of the word. You can have every system in the world to address their grievances but sometimes, there are just nuts who cannot be placated. It is naive that loyalty is the only thing that works. But then you acknowledge that by saying that you have to chase down the "occasional psycho". That kills your entire thesis; loyalty is not enough.
That's why there are coercive laws against espionage and the like. The honor system is really just not going to work. You use data control measures in conjunction with investigations, audits, lie detector tests, legal action against leakers, etc. It's nuts to just say that you have to make everyone happy because you admitted that you cannot. How do you detect the occasional psycho and stop him or her from leaking unless you have data control systems and routine audits to detect them? Or unless you have laws to punish them to persuade them from stopping?
TL;DR: Honor or loyalty isn't enough; you need all of the above.
PRISM is supposedly not reading the contents of your mail. Forget the honor system; it's just that there isn't enough computing power to store and review all of it. (There are reports that England stores all domestic data for a rolling three day period, but I don't think the US can do it because of how fucking huge its portion of the Internet is.)
PRISM is supposed to build a spiderweb of everyone you talk to, and who they talk to, etc. out of every fucking sort of data system that the NSA can get their grubby little hands on. It is the overlay of these data nets that is so fucking scary. I am 100% certain that PRISM has access to banking information. You know how American Express calls you with a suspicious activity alert because they know you have never bought $50.00 in burritos from Chipotle before? Imagine that information, the link from the AMEX account to your personal email, the address, etc. etc. etc.
We already knew about PRISM since 2006. Or rather, we knew about the giant government wiretapping program that worked in conjunction with telecoms to steal our data. There was a lawsuit and a documentary about the whole thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Snowden isn't a hero. If he only revealed PRISM, I'd root for him, but his disclosures about Stuxnet, hacking against China, etc. make me think that the guy is just a deluded, self-important loon who gives zero shits about America.
This is a very naive and unrealistic worldview. You cannot run any sort of organization if everyone gets a right to veto. Keep in mind that workers with ministerial duties such as secretaries and janitors have access to secure zones and informations. Thus, loyalty will definitely not work because not everyone in an organization of any sort can be loyal, especially when there are third parties paying millions to get this information.
In a perfect world, the CIA, NSA, and other guys don't need to keep secrets. But they do. Your solution is the honor system? LOL. Anyway, Edward Snowden swore a vow that he intended to break. He has no honor or personal ethics. Note that in 2009, Edward Snowden was perfectly fine with government espionage and wiretapping, and excoriated the NY Times and Wikileaks for divulging that information.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire
