Re: digital ethics
Posted by
Steve Smith on
Apr 19, 2013; 7:52pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/digital-ethics-tp7582823p7582864.html
Roger -
I fear you have something here... but I hate to give over to it.
It is sending restless kids to detention where they learn from the
rowdy kids there how to be rowdy, then send the rowdies to juvie
where the nasties teach them... only to have 20% of our population
in prison breeding new, more bad ways of being like antibiotic
resistant strains of TB in the Soviet Prison system (read Paul
Farmer), etc. ad nauseum.
I used to use the excuse for not voting of not wanting to
"encourage the bastards" I weighed in thrice to get and keep
the neoCons out of the White House, but I still feel this way. I
love my lawyer, he's a total tech weenie and he loves what we do,
but I hate feeding the machine.
Many of my non-science/non-engineering friends consider most of
science/engineering to be a an "ad-hoc full employment act" for
eggheads/geeks and that at least building nuclear weapons and
redesigning the human genome keeps us from doing *more* dangerous
stuff.
Those English Majors were *watching* us when we poured various
substances into beakers over flames only to watch (and smell) them
erupt in disgustingly colored, frothy, exothermic and fouls
smelling reactions... even then they knew what we would turn
into! Not all of them find this kind of behaviour sexy (nod to
Dede on Owen's behalf?).
Good luck with your invention and I presume subsequent patent... I
hope to be prolific enough to find a way infringe upon it!
- Steve
Steve --
I think we do it not because every patented
invention is an exemplar of the system, but because some
patents are so brilliant that they make up for all the grief
that the rest of them put us through. Sort of like public
education?
It's funny that you bring up patents, because I've
been writing up an invention for the past few days.
Obviousness is a real sticky point. If it weren't somewhat
obvious, no one would understand it when you explain it. But
if it were really obvious, then why isn't everyone doing it
already?
Consider the possibility that all of the morass of
lobbying, patent trolling, copyright enforcement, tax
avoidance, hedge funding, securities fraud, insider trading,
election rigging, and so on that our society supports might
actually be our way of keeping those devious people from
finding even more damaging things to do. Our society, its
legal and political system, is an ad hoc full employment act
for the ethically challenged. We tolerate a population of
unsavory things done by people in order to avoid the even less
savory things they might do if we didn't give them some kind
of sandbox to play in.
-- rec --
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