The end of Intellectual Property

Posted on May 22, 2009

This is great.

Why Accountants are Dull and Guitarists are Glamorous – The End of Intellectual Property

by Adrian Bowyer

Go up to a stranger in the street and ask them to give you the keys to their car, and you will receive an abrupt and unhelpful reply. Go up to a stranger in the street and ask them to give you their most interesting idea, and fifteen minutes later you will be glancing at your watch and inventing fictitious dentist’s appointments.

This prompts a profound biological question: if information is such valuable property, what is the Darwinian selective advantage in the ubiquitous impulse to give it away?

The answer was worked out a few years ago by the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. He realised that the human mind did not just evolve as a problem-solving device, it also evolved by sexual selection – like the peacock’s tail – to waste resources in a way that cannot be faked. Peahens admire peacocks with fancy tails, because those peacocks are strong enough to waste the resources needed to grow the tail and to drag it about. That peacock has good genes for strength, growth, and endurance, and so is worth mating with.

Parts of the human mind are for wasting glucose in a way that cannot be faked. Your brain dumps about 20% of your body’s energy budget out of your head every second of your life. You cannot pretend to paint a picture well, or pretend to write a quatrain of iambic pentameters well – you cannot pretend to be witty. You need to waste real glucose to do those things, all of which have no utilitarian value.

“But hang on,” you say. “If that were so, then you would expect only men to be talented, because sexual selection works through the power of female choice selecting the best males. But everyone except the most unreconstructed chauvinist can see that women are as clever as men.”

True, normally: it is the peacocks that have to drag around the tail and the stags that have to hold the antlers aloft. But, to choose between them, peahens and hinds just need good eyesight, whereas the only way for a woman to judge if a man is clever is for her to be equally clever herself – the transmitting device and the receiving device are the same: their minds. That is why the most important four letters in lonely-hearts columns are GSOH, why musicians, painters, authors, and actors (who all do nothing actually useful, and so who waste great mental energy) are so attractive to the opposite sex, why bank managers, engineers and computer programmers (who don’t waste their intellect, but use it for gainful things) are considered geeky and unattractive, and why we all want to tell people any inspired idea as soon as it comes into our head. Showing off cleverness by frittering it away is one of the main things our brains are for.

Read the full article at http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/EndOfIntellectualProperty?skin=print.pattern

For the Love of God

Posted on May 20, 2009

Now obviously the Roman church has done this sort of thing all over the world, but there have been very few places in the modern world (other then perhaps Franco’s Spain) where the Catholic church has had more power then in Ireland.  I’d go on and rant about the hypocrisy and horror of religion and of the catholic church in particular, but I’ve said it before and I’ve got to run out the door this morning so I don’t really have time.  Instead, I’ll just let this new article from the AP do the talking.

Thousands beaten, raped in Irish reform schools

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK, Associated Press Writer
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090520/ap_on_re_eu/eu_ireland_catholic_abuse

DUBLIN – A fiercely debated, long-delayed investigation into Ireland’s Roman Catholic-run institutions says priests and nuns terrorized thousands of boys and girls in workhouse-style schools for decades — and government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rapes and humiliation.

Nine years in the making, Wednesday’s 2,600-page report sides almost completely with the horrific reports of abuse from former students sent to more than 250 church-run, mostly residential institutions.

It concluded that church officials always shielded their orders’ pedophiles from arrest to protect their own reputations and, according to documents uncovered in the Vatican, knew that many pedophiles were serial attackers.

The commission said overwhelming, consistent testimony from still-traumatized men and women, now in their 50s to 80s, had demonstrated beyond a doubt that the entire system treated children more like prison inmates and slaves than people with legal rights and human potential.

“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from,” the final report of Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded.

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The Police State strikes again.

Posted on May 18, 2009

Just in case anyone who reads my blog still has illusions about the federal government respecting our fundamental human right to free speach, free assembly, and protest (rights recognized by, but not in any way originating with the first amendment of the bill of rights); here’s yet another wakeup call.  This one from the DesMoines Register, a mainstream publication not known for their radical sympathies.

FBI infiltrated Iowa anti-war group before GOP convention

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090517/NEWS/905170341

By WILLIAM PETROSKI
© 2009, Des Moines Register and Tribune Company
May 17, 2009

An FBI informant and an undercover Minnesota sheriff’s deputy spied on political activists in Iowa City last year before the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.

Confidential FBI documents obtained by The Des Moines Register show an FBI informant was planted among a group described as an “anarchist collective” that met regularly last year in Iowa City. One of the group’s goals was to organize street blockades to disrupt the Republican convention, held Sept. 1-4, 2008, where U.S. Sen. John McCain was nominated for president.

The undercover Minnesota deputy who traveled to Iowa City was from the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department, which infiltrated a group known as the “RNC Welcoming Committee” that was coordinating convention protest activities in St. Paul.

The undercover officer accompanied two activists from the Twin Cities who attended the University of Iowa in April 2008 for a Midwest campus anti-war conference.

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