If you count the prices of the missiles launched at Israel, you'd have enough to get food to most of the Palestinians, to repair most of the buildings, to create medic centers, schools, ...

How could they repair the buildings, when the Israelis won't let them import building materials?

... as are Android and Windows Phone devices, they do the same kind of tracking and leeching of personal data.

News at 11!!!

Will this pact also prevent patent trolling by Google, Dropbox, and Others? Whoever others are but one would hope they include: Oracle? Microsoft? Samsung? Apple?

I'm not so sure too few patent examiners is the only problem. According to a patents documentary I watched recently one of the big problems is a piece of legislation passed in the USA during the 80s or 90s in a panic over patent rates in Asia outstripping those in the USA. It caused the number of patents in the USA to rise sharply but it also allowed people to patent ridiculous crap because the patent office was now totally overworked and the restrictions on what could be patented had been relaxed. The Danes have a saying "He just tried to patent hot water" which is equivalent to the English proverb "He's not the sharpest knife in the kitchen", i.e. "he's stupid". The unfortunate thing is that these days you'd actually stand a good chance of patenting hot water if you tried, especially in the US where the rules are very lax. Come to think of it I'd actually like to see somebody try to patent hot water, just to see if they succeed. That being said I'm not generally against patents, I just think the system need major reform. This same documentary I cited above also included an interesting interview with James Dyson, the vaccuum cleaner guy. He described patents as a major pain because they are expensive to obtain and defend and don't really do much to help the small inventor anymore (which is what they were originally intend to do) and because patents have become weapons used by big players to stifle competition. But at the same time he also said he wouldn't want to live without some sort of patent system and took an example in his company's bladeless fan. It took them several years and tons of money to develop and they'd hardly released it when the market was flooded with cheap ass Chinese copies. The problem from Dyson's point of view is firstly that the copies are crappy and don't work very well which reflects badly on Dyson whose product actually works. Secondly the patent system (broken as it is) still helps companies like Dyson to crack down on copycats, even in China and even though the Chinese take significantly longer (years) to process foreign patent applications than they do Chinese patent applications (months) in violation of WTO regulations.

The Nazi leadership was blinded by the "grass is greener beyond the next hill" syndrome. If they had put the Heinkel 280 which first flew in 1941 into production and put some serious resources into making the HeS-8 and HeS-30 engines reliable enough for service they'd have had a workable jet fighter in 1943 with less of a performance advantage than the Me-262 but that would still have mopped the floor with most of the Allied opposition at the time. The Nazis failed to understand that fielding a mediocre jet fighter in time is better than fielding an outstanding one when it is too late. They were defeated by their aversion towards doing what Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond called "...the most un-German thing possible, a half-assed job".

Eisenhower was also right to be suspicious of 'think tanks', 'intelligence experts' and 'analysts'. One of the reasons he first pushed the U-2 program and then Corona was because 'expert intelligence tanalysts' told him the Soviets had Over 800 Myasishchev M-4 'Bison' bombers. Reconnaissance later revealed that the grand total strenght of the Soviet B-4 bomber force at the time was 20 aircraft, in fact one U-2 actually managed to catch the entire B-4 fleet in a single photograph. By the time Eisenhowers insistance on hard reconnaissance finally won out the USA had built hundreds of bombers to bridge an imaginary 'bomber gap'.

Yeah, F-35s replacing the A-10 good luck with that. The idea of the F-35 flying into the operational environment of the A-10, i.e. 0-3000ft which in a real shooting war is likely to be saturated by scrap fire and dominated by Manpads, full blown SAMs and mobile Flak such as Shilkas and Tunguskas and having the same survial rates as the A-10 always struck me as funny. Stealth is pretty much useless down there most of the kills are done with heat seeking missiles and the good old Mk.1 eyeball. Experience has shown several times now that no matter how many smart weapons they cook up there is no replacement for getting in good and close and blasting the shit out of the target with a 30mm gun.

THANKS for letting me know there are nude photos of you on the internet -- and where to find them! YOU are a font of information and those of us who never even knew this site existed are thankful you are too stupid to realize you just made yourself even more of a search topic. And your lawsuit will fail.

Congrats! :)

While specialization for humans is becoming more and more of the "norm," I think Heinlein said it best:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

So, in that context, yes -- every normal human should, in some fashion, be able to program a computer or a web app or what have you. I believe you should always seek to bring the knowledge and abilities of those around you UP to your level and if they exceed you, great, hopefully they will return the favor. Idealist, aren't I?

But it is a real world coding language. When I was taking my CS degree we had a mandatory algorithms course (and not the "how does a for loop work" kind of course, they were teaching the kind of algorithms where a slight performance improvement can shave hours or even days off your execution time). On the first day there was much discontent when everybody discovered that they had to learn C/C++ because it was required to code assignment solutions in those languages. Finally somebody asked the teacher if they could hand in assignments written in Python. There was a short silence from the professor, an odd look flashed across his face and then he just said "NO" and went back to explaining how pointers work in C/C++.

Which is pretty amusing since it's pretty easy to design an algorith that will predict pollution levels for most major Chinese cities with pretty much 100% accuracy every day of the year:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main()
{
    while(1)
    {
        printf("Predicted polution level for today: Very High\n");
        printf("Health hazard: Extreme\n");
        sleep(86400);
    }

    return 1;
}

"Allegedly" is right. The level of rhetoric here is nuts: Mayday's stated goal is to change the way that campaigns are funded such that each person (voter) can contribute equally to the campaigns of their choice.

That's the exact problem I have with it. It's an effective tax raise, and what happens to the money raised? It goes to support candidates I might vehemently disagree with. To buy them TV commercials. I find that pretty objectionable.

I have no issue with Lessig's end-goal here, I think it's noble and needed. But the way he's going about it is awful, and I won't be contributing money to it.

I have - they should be e-liminated, not limited.

Ok. Fine. That works too. But you're missing the point.

The issue I have with this entire thing is they want to use *my* tax money to buy ads for politicians I don't support. If they have another solution to the problem that doesn't involve spending my money, well great. But that's not what Lessig is soliciting money for right now. He's soliciting money to (effectively) raise my tax rate, with the additional funds going towards political campaigns.

I also have to wonder how many people actually read their proposal instead of the feel good vagueness on the homepage... it seems strange to me that $5 million-worth of donors would actually want this. But maybe I'm just projecting.

The system is purely money-driven, doubtful if the idea behind MAYDAY-PAC can change that, but worth a try.

If the problem is, "money has too much influence", I don't see how adding more money into the system could possibly change that. But hey, whatever.

I have no problem with laws *limiting* campaign donations. If Lessig's campaign was aimed at that goal, I might even contribute myself.

But I do have a problem with the government taking my tax money, and giving it to some political candidate so they can buy TV commercials. That is what both of his proposals involve.

As for your aversion of using tax money used - where do you think is all that corporate money coming from?

Whether or not it *does* come from there does not change the fact that it *should not* come from there.

If he's successful, he'll take tax money from you and 300 million others and give it to candidates running for office.

If he's unsuccessful, you'll be a sucker and we'll all be a lot better off.