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Comment Re:"standard-essential patents” (Score 2) 83

You have to have pretty strong regulations for patents to even exist. In an anarchy, you're allowed to implement whatever you want, without groveling for anyone's permission. So libertarians, if they super-concerned about avoiding being conflated with anarchists, have to weigh all the evils and decide which is the least bad. But it'll definitely involve someone's liberties being infringed.

Once possible decision as "Libertarian Tyrant" would be to point a gun at the patent holders' heads and say they're required to license against their will. My justification would be that they submitted the patented tech to the standards body, knowing that it would become a burden and risk on other parties' liberties. Doing that signals an implicit endorsement of other people using the tech, so the patent holder OPTED to sacrifice their government-granted monopoly.

If they don't like that, then they should abstain from offering their "forbidden tech" to standards bodies, and if they learn of someone else doing it, they should be should be suing them (and possibly the standards body too) for inducing infringement.

Another way to go, might be to just get rid of patents. There's already so much overwhelming incentive to invent things, that it's basically impossible to even prevent much less needing incentive.

Comment Is My Religious Liberty Being Threatened? (Score 5, Insightful) 1168

How to Determine if Your Religious Liberty Is Being Threatened in Just 10 Quick Questions.
  Just pick "A" or "B" for each question.

  My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to go to a religious service of my own choosing.
B) Others are allowed to go to religious services of their own choosing.

2. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to marry the person I love legally, even though my religious community blesses my marriage.
B) Some states refuse to enforce my own particular religious beliefs on marriage on those two guys in line down at the courthouse.

3. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am being forced to use birth control.
B) I am unable to force others to not use birth control.

4. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to pray privately.
B) I am not allowed to force others to pray the prayers of my faith publicly.

5. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) Being a member of my faith means that I can be bullied without legal recourse.
B) I am no longer allowed to use my faith to bully gay kids with impunity.

6. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to purchase, read or possess religious books or material.
B) Others are allowed to have access books, movies and websites that I do not like.

7. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) My religious group is not allowed equal protection under the establishment clause.
B) My religious group is not allowed to use public funds, buildings and resources as we would like, for whatever purposes we might like.

8. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) Another religious group has been declared the official faith of my country.
B) My own religious group is not given status as the official faith of my country.

9. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) My religious community is not allowed to build a house of worship in my community.
B) A religious community I do not like wants to build a house of worship in my community.

10. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to teach my children the creation stories of our faith at home.
B) Public school science classes are teaching science.

If you answered "A" to any question, then perhaps your religious liberty is indeed at stake. You and your faith group have every right to now advocate for equal protection under the law.

If you answered "B" to any question, then not only is your religious liberty not at stake, but there is a strong chance that you are oppressing the religious liberties of others.

Comment Re:I'd have thought the main reason was... (Score 1) 447

A major change to the black box system like adding video would require a new design, flight qualifications, etc. etc. It's a lot of effort, and most of the people who regulate aviation seem to have a pretty firm grasp on cost/benefit analysis, from what I can see.

At minimum, a video recorder would need a lot more fixed storage than a audio recorder, it would need a higher speed IO bus and probably more buffer memory, and camera placement would need to be determined for every model plane it would be installed in. Then this new design would have to be tested to make sure it can survive crash conditions while preserving the data.

It would take a multi-million dollar program involving dozens of engineers just to take a prototype from design to basic functional testing.

No one is going to do that unless it offers a substantial benefit.

Comment Re:Time to stock up on shotgun shells (Score 2) 162

That is silly. A falling bullet has a much lower speed than one that was just shot. I've been hit by shotgun pellets at the end of their range, it was like having gravel slung at you.

A returning bullet CAN hit someone, and possibly injure them if everything is lined up right, or there is a very low angle of fire, but they have a small fraction of the energy they had in the first km after being fired.

Comment Sloppy's One Rule of Robotics (Score 1) 129

My one rule of robotics (and pointed sticks, cars, crackpipes and umbrellas) is this: my stuff ought to perform in accordance with my wishes.

There might be additional laws ("weld here and here, but nowhere else," or "use the rules in /etc/iptables/rules.v4" or "don't shoot at anyone whose IFF transponder returns the correct response") which vary by whatever the specific application is, but these rules aren't as important as The One above.

There are various corollaries that you can infer from the main law, but since they can be derived, they don't need to be laws themselves. (e.g. if my interests conflict with someone else's, then my robot and my umbrella ought to serve my interests at the expense of the other person's interests.)

With regard to harming other robots, that also can be derived. If I desire to kill a knight on a robot horse, then my robot ought to turn them into a pile of bloody gore and shredded circuitboards immediately. OTOH, if I don't desire to kill a robot, then my robot should not do things that incur unnecessary liabilities.

Comment Re:Just like Evergreen State College (Score 1) 213

Well, there's right and wrong, and then there's textbook grammar rules, and then there's the way people actually speak and write. Which way do you think the hierarchy runs?

Does right and wrong dictate which rules are the correct rules of grammar, which then informs the writers of grammar textbooks, which in turn gets people to speak and write the way they do?

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