jkn

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1866

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08...

Hey, care to give some details? This is exactly one point of view I've been trying to understand without much success: why people would be non-progressive for intellectual rather than emotional reasons. I'm sincerely curious what your rationale is.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/when_is_it_ethical_to_kill_s...

It's not about filing patents. Patents are routinely filed for defensive purpose and it's hard to blame the companies that do it, especially in light of the abuse by e.g. Microsoft. It's what companies do with the patents. Like getting Motorola phones banned in Germany due to FAT16 patent infringement [1].

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/motorola-android-devices-banned-in-germ...

The Microsoft-created features protected by the patents infringed by the Nook and Nook Color tablet are core to the user experience. For example, the patents we asserted today protect innovations that:

• Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;

• Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;

• Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;

• Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and

• Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.

And here's a list of patents from a lawsuit against Mororola [4] (the first two concern FAT16 I believe):

5,579,517: Common name space for long and short filenames

5,758,352: Common name space for long and short filenames (yes, again)

6,621,746: Monitoring entropic conditions of a flash memory device as an indicator for invoking erasure operations

6,826,762: Radio interface layer in a cell phone with a set of APIs having a hardware-independent proxy layer and a hardware-specific driver layer

6,909,910: Method and system for managing changes to a contact database

7,644,376: Flexible architecture for notifying applications of state changes

5,664,133: Context sensitive menu system/menu behavior

6,578,054: Method and system for supporting off-line mode of operation and synchronization using resource state information

6,370,566: Generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device

As for your questions: So why is it wrong for them to put a claim on it? Wouldn't Apple do the same? It's not like Apple gets a free pass when they sue Android manufacturers for patent infringement...

[1] http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2...

[2] http://androidcommunity.com/barnes-noble-reveals-microsofts-...

[3] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2011111122291296

[4] http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/10/01/microsoft-files-itc-p...

"The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not. There could be some series of events that cause that technology level to decline. Given that this is the first time in 4.5bn years where it's been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth, it seems like we'd be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time."

I find it really hard to imagine our society going back to a dark age though...

It's really not comparable though... It took Yahoo six years to earn the right to communicate about one particular lawsuit[1]. We have no idea how many legal challenges Google, Apple, and others are involved in but prevented from talking about.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/yahoo-fight-for-users-...

These cases seem comparatively insignificant to me. I think patent infringement will be the real "intellectual property" issue with 3D printing. I'm looking forward to a renewed debate on the ethics of having governments intrude in people's private lives to enforce corporate monopolies.

Midlist artists maybe suffer from something akin to increased competition?

Two bugs for 0 lines of code...

Actually if someone sends an email to my Gmail account using his ISP SMTP server, is the connection between the two SMTP servers likely to be encrypted?

I won't advocate the destruction of ant colonies in forests because for ecological reasons, not because of individual ant suffering.

To me there are ecological and moral reasons why you should not destroy ant colonies. I am aware that not everybody agrees.

Regarding the drone strikes: whether videos of the strikes are also used for entertainment is irrelevant here, as long as it is not part of the motivation behind performing the strikes.

I don't think motivations factor into it at all. A death is a death.

I don't know what you are getting at here. Are you seriously suggesting that shooting people for fun is morally equivalent to shooting them for a good reason?

I think it is sad but ethically acceptable to kill an ant colony in my house, yet I don't think it is OK for children to go in the forest and destroy ant colonies for fun. Or even to dismember one ant for fun, though I may be in a small minority here.

To take a more extreme example, a majority of people seem to find it ethical to have drone strikes in Pakistan despite the civilian casualties. They would certainly not approve of the same drone strikes if they were made for entertainment, even though the physical consequences on the targets would be the same.

[1] http://paritynews.com/business/item/847-moody-apples-cash-re...

I'm OK with whistleblowing of illegal actions performed by secret services (enough of this sh*t!). Though I don't know whether he's right regarding the illegality of NSA's actions.

To give some numbers: according to Wikipedia[1], about a third of MEPs have previously held positions in country parliaments, and about 10% in country ministries.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_of_the_European_Parliame...

Investigating the nothing-to-hide argument a little more deeply, we find that it looks for a singular and visceral kind of injury. Ironically, this underlying conception of injury is sometimes shared by those advocating for greater privacy protections. For example, the University of South Carolina law professor Ann Bartow argues that in order to have a real resonance, privacy problems must "negatively impact the lives of living, breathing human beings beyond simply provoking feelings of unease." She says that privacy needs more "dead bodies," and that privacy's "lack of blood and death, or at least of broken bones and buckets of money, distances privacy harms from other [types of harm]."

Bartow's objection is actually consistent with the nothing-to-hide argument. Those advancing the nothing-to-hide argument have in mind a particular kind of appalling privacy harm, one in which privacy is violated only when something deeply embarrassing or discrediting is revealed. Like Bartow, proponents of the nothing-to-hide argument demand a dead-bodies type of harm.

Bartow is certainly right that people respond much more strongly to blood and death than to more-abstract concerns. But if this is the standard to recognize a problem, then few privacy problems will be recognized. Privacy is not a horror movie, most privacy problems don't result in dead bodies, and demanding evidence of palpable harms will be difficult in many cases.

The author dismisses the "need for blood" as too extreme, but that is not convincing. For example, consider the most compelling argument in the article, which is that government data collection creates a Kafkaesque world in which the opacity of the procedures renders the individuals powerless:

Government information-gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system's use of personal data and its denial to the protagonist of any knowledge of or participation in the process. The harms are bureaucratic ones—indifference, error, abuse, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability.

This is a powerful argument, but it is not going to convince a majority of people unless you can show real harm. Not blood or broken bones, but actual cases where good guys (as perceived by the majority) were harmed by government surveillance, e.g. harassed or put to jail. Why would people feel a "suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability" if the Kafkaesque bureaucracy does not eventually bring actual harm? (The case of Aaron Swartz is not an example: the problem lied with the CFAA rather than government surveillance).

I'm still optimistic: the process will work as usual. Government powers will be abused. There will be scandals. In the long term, laws will be improved and transparency will increase. What reasons do I have to think otherwise?

Even if they did show add in these products, how does that relate to supporting standards as alternative means of accessing your data? Like in Gmail, which shows ads in the web interface but also supports POP and IMAP.

That's the question of whether genetic screening should be made mandatory in some cases... I don't think so, for the reasons you mentioned.

But I'm more interested in the other question, regarding voluntary screening of sperm/ovum/embryos... I wonder how big this will become in our lifetime, and how people will react to it.

Let's consider a simplified model, where there are only two different bases (A and G instead of A, T, G, C) and assume that the probabilities of mutations A->G and G->A are the same. Let's consider a single base mutation[1]. No matter what the mutation probability is, and no matter what the initial distribution is, I expect that the population will converge to about 50% A and 50% G. I guess you would agree.

Now if we make this very wrong model a bit less wrong by including the four base types A, T, G, C, we can expect that each allele will be found in about 25% of the population. And that is for single base mutations only. A mutation that depends on the precise value of 5 different bases would be displayed by a much smaller share of the population (1/4^5 = 0.1% I guess).

Of course people don't get born with fully random genomes like that, the vast majority of these mutations would not yield a living embryo. But still, the intuition we can get from this is that without evolutionary pressure, a particular mutation will eventually be found in a fraction of the population that is inversely proportional to the complexity of the mutation (in most cases that would be far from the 50% of my initial intuition).

No idea how close these layman's speculations are from the reality...

[1] Such as the gene that determines the type of ear wax: http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mythearwax.html

However, it might also be that in the long term, the quality of the gene pool objectively deteriorates. Taking it to the extreme, imagine if nobody can grow older than five years without medical assistance... I guess this is also something we should consider.

However the question is not if someone should have children or not. Genetic screening technologies are moving fast, as is our understanding of the human genome. The real question, that will take more and more importance in our society is Do I want to screen my sperm/ovum/embryos when I decide to have a child? and maybe Should genetic screening be mandatory in certain cases?

My intuition is that evolutionary pressure works against entropy. Without the pressure, the genome would evolve towards a state of maximum entropy, i.e. a particular mutation would reach a prevalence of about 50%. But of course there will always be some sort of evolutionary pressure.

People should not be treated because it would spoil the gene pool

but rather

We certainly want to treat diseases, but this will spoil the gene pool unless we prevent the spread of bad genes

Solutions to prevent the spread of bad genes range from quite evil (forced sterilization has been used extensively before WWII but I have never heard of something as bad as denying treatment) to slightly controversial, e.g. screening of embryos [1].

By the way, I have just stumbled on the Wikipedia page on dysgenics [2], which is more specifically what this argument is about.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimplantation_genetic_diagnos...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenics

Look at it from the point of view of an eugenics proponent: this disease is a good example of a genetic condition that you don't want spreading in future generations. Once we have treatments for the 7000 rare diseases mentioned in the article, we will have removed the evolutionary pressure that was keeping these diseases rare. Some eugenics supporters are afraid we are heading towards a society where everybody has to undergo a dozen lifelong treatments due to medicine effectively undermining the process of natural selection.

I can also imagine parents suffering from this disease, not wanting to pass it on to their children. So people affected might strongly disagree with you...

It is good that people keep the pressure on Google regarding openness, it gives weight to the voice of the many employees there who want to do the right thing.