> Patents started out as a 20 year protection on mechanical mechanisms or chemical processes as long as what was protected was publicly documented in full.

1) Patents are not an American invention. England had them before, and the Romans before that.

2) I'll assume you implied U.S. patents. The Founders regarded patents so highly that they wrote them into the U.S. Constitution. It was written generically and not limited or fixed to only "mechanical or chemical" but rather "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".

> Thing is though that 20 years is a very long time when we are talking software. By the time the RSA patent ran out, the algorithm described was largely obsolete.

RSA patent expired nearly 20 years ago yet RSA is still used today. For example, the public key used to secure https://news.ycombinator.com is RSA.

> Not that patents have not been a problem even before computers. Serious refinements of the steam engine for example didn't happen until after the initial patent ran out. > > Similarly Smith and Weston sat on their refinements for the Colt revolver until the patent ran out.

The myth is that patents block innovation. The reality is that blocking someone from doing something incentives them to find another way to do it. Afterall, if all you want to do is copy then how is that "blocking innovation"?

One has to wonder who the customers this is setup to appease. If something is later found, corporate customers have litigation options - so more likely this is for nation-states.

Well, even for corporate customers, litigation will not wind back the clock and erase the compromised data the [insert 3 letter agency] already got ahold of.

The more slow-moving government will get involved, the more industry will be pulled towards open source where there is no need to get government approval.

Sure - it won't be easy and will come with other pitfalls, but in some circumstances these may be easier hurdle than waiting months/years for some government to approve your product sale.

No, Easter island wouldn't have had taro, chickens, goats, pigs WITHOUT the polynesian humans bringing them.

The point is there was an ecological collapse (Collapse by Jared Diamond catalogues this well)

I think you're missing the point. The vast majority of the ecosystem is only economically useful indirectly by maintaining an equilibrium and once that is destroyed, it is almost completely irreversible except for bio- and geoengineering on a scale that humans have never done wittingly. In your example, the delay between the tree getting cut down and replanted is such that the local environment supported by the trees largely disappear and restoring it becomes practically impossible. The consequences of this destruction are easily visible even in forests replanted by the logging industry decades ago.

In an information theory sense, the information disappears and cannot be recovered, no matter how many trees you plant. Entire local evolutionary trees disappear or permanently migrate, land erodes under the rain without old root networks to hold it, once diverse micro- and macro-biomes get taken over by opportunistic members better suited to human industrial/agricultural environments, and fertile lands wither without the balance developed over stretches of time far beyond what we as societies or individuals are capable of dealing with.

Our Earth cannot be "used up" but it can become unusable through the slow but irreversible destruction of even small parts of the monolithic, heavily interdependent system.

"I think you're missing the point."

Ditto. I know exactly what you're saying - tree's take long time to grow, the world is complex and subtly nuanced, once we lose that it's gone, etc. FYI I get all that - or for the purpose of this conversation pretend that I get it and try to look past that and at what I'm saying.

We can either fight change or adapt. Cavemen once complained about demand of caves outstripping supply too. The cost of fighting change is likely far greater than the cost of adapting.

Secondly, if you're going to worry about the Amazon (not saying we shouldn't worry about it) then why aren't you worried about the lost biodiversity once under Silicon Valley? Or NYC? Or Paris? Or Johannesburg? Or Beijing? It just seems we're getting involved in other people's business when we have a lot to cleanup ourselves.

I'm advocating for changing wisely and carefully because fighting change necessarily means dooming billions of people to a life of poverty. As a civilization, I don't think we can in good conscience restrict the development of the rest of the world but we can strive to help them do it in a way that doesn't harm the environment more than is absolutely necessary (although objectively pinning down what that point is probably impossible). Even if our actions are passive like driving down the cost of wind or solar through R&D spending and economies of scale, we have the ability to make massive global industrialization safer for the planet without placing an undue burden on the economic growth that will vastly improve the lives of billions.

I do care about the loss of biodiversity in the Bay Area, NYC, Paris, Johannesburg, and Beijing. So do many people and that's why environmental impact assessments are a standard part of any nontrivial construction or infrastructure project in many nations. The effectiveness of each countries legal and regulatory framework varies but we have made massive strides in the last hundred years and continue to improve. Our shortcomings don't mean that we should just "shut up and mind our own business" on an issue that has global impact and potentially catastrophic consequences for every living thing.

Regardless of how we do it, we will all be forced to sacrifice for the environment whether it is paying more for clean water, air, and lumber later or in regulatory costs now. Like with health and so many other things, its a hell of a lot cheaper to take preventative measures now than to repair broken things later.

Not expensive. It will be impossible to repair the damage later. What will be lost will be lost forever.

This has to be a person who has never been to a rainforest or you wouldn't say this kind of shit. I also suspect that you rarely connect with nature.

The rainforest isn't just the woods on an empty lot. It's not even just an old growth forest, though those are pretty damn important too. I do care about the forests and as an inhabitant of the Pacific Northwest I go out in them regularly.

Nobody can bring back the Forests that are under where people live now but we can sure preserve the most important remaining ecosystems with the Amazon Basin at the top of the list but protect the last of the Old growth on the West Coast is on the list, too.

Please have some respect for people who care about this if nothing else. I find your attitude offensive to the core. I am pretty sure it's not intentional and that you're not just a mere troll but I just want to mention it. I guess I'm wondering if this is even a topic that you and others who think about it this way have given it much serious thought?

This is such a massive misunderstanding of the concepts of ecosystems and biodiversity as well as the short term profit orientation of unrestrained markets. It is what caused deforestation in the first place.

"Going to be interesting watching this one play out."

I suspect, access of "14,000 highly confidential and proprietary files shortly before his resignation" will play a major role in swaying the deciders. Experience tells us that not all of those 14k were critical, what if it had be 1 or 2 critical design docs? In a different or future case, we may see that happen. Corps have incentive to reduce competitors, but now may start recognizing the potential leverage they have - "Our network logs show Joe accessed our main design doc 1 week before he left for company doing similar work!".

Yeah, so the guy happened to do a git clone a few weeks before he left the company, that may have been related to work, and now gets this. I don't know about the "covering his tracks" part though.

I get the point you're trying to make and Google is rather vague on details, but I highly doubt it was as simple as a git clone. If for no other reason, it's generally considered an anti-pattern to have 10gb of content in a repo (not including revisions, but just content).

They were also very specific in the legal documents about how he "covered his tracks", I'd recommend reading it rather than the cliff notes version linked here.

"It is, however, sad to think that this technology could be set back a few years because of Levandowski's actions."

I am less concerned about one piece of technology and more concerned about the future of employer relations in general. Employers will become increasingly suspicious of employees leaving and will take actions to either prevent this or to stifle the actual knowledge gained to be used elsewhere.

What concerns me is that we are going to see more and more of this in the coming years - corporations concerned over ex-employees taking their knowledge with them and taking legal recourse. In this case, they complain about access of 14k proprietary files - which is pretty damning, but I could see similar damning evidence over accessing a couple of critically important design docs relatively near the end of employment. How do you distinguish between files being accessed merely for the purpose out your work vs theft? How can you ascertain what was in their minds and hearts for accessing for those files - and worse, how little would it take to sway a judge or jury that accessing of such files were deliberate (ie part of the bigger picture)? Courts have been wrong before. Previous generations this didn't come up because they stayed in 1 or 2 jobs their entire lives, at least in this aspect, today's environment is completely different.

There is a difference between weakened and backdoored. Weakened is along the lines what you're saying - that likely others than just the governments can easily access, whereas backdoored (if done properly) means only the govt. Of course, this assumes a perfect world and that there is a proper way to backdoor - in the real world, adversaries simply attack the governments backdoors/keys.

Nonetheless, given your context of "there is no encryption going on at all" I argue does not necessarily hold for a backdoor - or at least not at the outset and if done properly. If the govt backdoor is a key for which huge amount of care is taken to protect and take the extreme example of the govt encrypting the only copy of the key and firing it off in one direction into space - there is a backdoor but this is not necessarily equivalent to "no encryption at all".