Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2013 February 14

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February 14

Ballistic protection of vehicles

In light of the recent Chris Dorner events, I was wondering if standard, regular production (not special ballistic armored versions) cars such as the cruisers that the LAPD uses or a pick up truck provides any relevant ballistic protection to people hiding behind them? Obviously, I understand that any cover is better than no cover, but can cars stop handgun or rifle bullets either sideways (bullet passes through passenger door to driver's door ) or length-wise (bullet passes from front of car to back of car)? Acceptable (talk) 01:53, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

The glass and sheet metal provide just about no protection, but a shot through a door might just happen to hit something more substantial in there. The engine block or wheel hubs are more likely to stop a bullet. And, of course, cover also helps by hiding you. If the assailant doesn't know you're there at all, he isn't likely to shoot. And if he knows you're there, but not quite where, shots are likely to miss or hit a non-vital area. StuRat (talk) 02:34, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Mythbusters tested this and found that bullets go through pretty much everything but the engine block. However, even passing through the door of a car will at least slow a bullet down. There are anecdotal reports of assault rifle rounds, slowed by car doors, being stopped by bullet proof vests they normally would have penetrated. Someguy1221 (talk) 08:46, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

The inability to see where someone precisely is - because a car door is in the way - obviously interferes with the shooter's ability to target that person accurately. Another part of it is that most criminals are extremely stupid and get their ideas of the protection that a car door offers from movies and TV shows - perhaps they decide not to shoot when they think their bullet will be stopped by the door. Sadly, in the case of Dorner, that benefit was not present because he knew only too well what would happen. But no matter what, some protection is better than none - slowing the bullet down even a little is generally going to be a good thing. So in the absence of any other cover - a car door is better than nothing at all. SteveBaker (talk) 14:01, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

The original question was, does the LAPD have any additional ballistic protection. Our article on the subject Black_and_white_(police_vehicle)#Los_Angeles_Police_Department says they have ballistic protection in the front doors. Standard car doors will not stop most bullets. Shadowjams (talk) 20:19, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

intellectual property

Intellectual property itself is a property. So why does the government give time limitations on patents and copyrights? Isn't one's property his/hers as long as he lives? Also, if I were not wrong, a patent is obtained in return to public disclsure. Isn't it right to say that the government must protect the rights of a man on his property (and in this case, intellectual property) without any such condition? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.52.145.100 (talk) 13:16, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Certainly intellectual property is property, but not all property is treated exactly the same way before the law. Different countries, of course, deal with intellectual property differently. The Wikipedia article titled Public domain contains information on why some types of intellectual property is allowed to expire. You can get your answers there. However, be aware that this desk is not the place to start a debate over a subject, so if you have a disagreement with the ethics or morality of what is written there, it would be best if you didn't express it here. --Jayron32 13:22, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

A "property" is only protected if the law says that it is. There are plenty of things that you might think you own - but are not in fact considered to be your property (the words printed in books that you've purchased, for example) - and there are things that you, as a human being, produce that is not yours to keep (the carbon dioxide you expel from your body when you breathe, for example, does not belong to you). There have been quite a few legal cases about what you "own" - and it's often unclear. For example: Do you own the trash you put out on the sidewalk for trash pickup and disposal - or can just anyone rummage through it and take what they want? Are words that you speak to someone else yours or theirs? Does your memory of words spoken to you not belong to you? Should it be illegal to come home to your wife and say "My boss told me 'Work harder!' today" because by doing so, you're infringing on your boss's intellectual property rights? What if you wrote that in an email to her? If that's OK, then why can't someone who heard Martin Luthor King's "I have a dream" speech write that down and publish it? Is your image on a photograph taken by someone else "yours"? Is the image of a pop star "theirs" - what if they are one face in a crowd of 10,000 people at a soccer match that you photograph from the other side of the stadium? These are all complicated decisions about "property" that are not at all simple to decide upon.

Ideas (which is what most "intellectual property" is) are particularly problematic. When you own a car, that is a physical object that either you have use of - or has been taken away from you by someone else (theft). But when you have an idea, even if someone else makes use of that idea, they have not deprived you of your use of it - so it's not so obviously, ethically, clear that there can truly be "theft" of intellectual property at all. It's even worse in the case of things like music. I might even purchase a piece of music from you (eg as a digital download of an MP3 file) - I bought it, yet I don't own it because (you'll say) that the musician still owns it.

At any rate, with physical objects, the laws of theft state what happens if someone deprives you of something so that you no longer have the benefit of it. With intellectual objects (ideas, songs, writings, etc) you are not being deprived of the idea when someone copies or uses it. So the act of breaching copyright or infringing on a patent is a very different matter than theft. What you're (possibly) being deprived of is possible earnings from future use of that idea - and that's not obviously your "property".

So, the law steers a compromise path. It gives you the legal right to benefit from your ideas for some large amount of time - giving you a reasonable prospect of earning money or other benefits from them. In exchange for that, you agree to provide your ideas in full for the benefit of everyone else once that time has expired. You're doing a trade of your long-term ideas for the benefit of legal protection in the shorter term.

The original reason for creating patent laws was that inventors and other "intellectual workers" would often attempt to carry their ideas with them to their death. Unlike a physical object which is subject to inheritance laws, an idea that's kept secret and dies with it's owner is utterly lost to the world. This was a sufficiently large problem at the time that it was considered reasonable and just to offer such workers the protection of the government in exchange for the ultimate release of the idea for the benefit of all mankind. That is what turned mere ideas into "property" in the first place...and it is a matter of debate (especially in this digital age) as to whether that protection should still be given at all. Does it benefit mankind that we have to pay a royalty every time we sing "Happy Birthday to You" to our children? (What? You don't pay that? OMG! You're 'stealing' the intellectual property of Warner/Chappell Music! How could you do that? How dare you steal that poor companies intellectual property?)

SteveBaker (talk) 13:51, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Government can and does deprive us of our property. That's what taxes are, after all. There's also forfeiture/seizure, escheatment, liens, etc. As for intellectual property, a balance must be struck. If the period is too short, innovation will not be rewarded, so people won't bother to innovate. If the period is too long, then innovation will also be slowed, because using any new ideas will be prohibitively expensive. Some inventions really never take off until they go off-patent, because the owner of the patent is just too greedy. One example is some prescription meds, which are prohibitively expensive until they go off patent, and then the competition enters the market as generic equivalents. StuRat (talk) 15:59, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Considering that the designs on banknotes are often copyrighted, perhaps your money isn't even yours in the first place, and therefore the government isn't really depriving you of your property through the tax system. Astronaut (talk) 17:03, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Well...the banknote is a token that is just one physical representation of money - the actual "money" might just be a number in a computer someplace...a computer that you don't own. Right now, I don't happen to possess a single US banknote - but I'm fairly sure they'll still want to tax me! That the government owns the copyright on this or that nicely engraved picture of a dead president, hardly constitutes grounds for taxation! When you think about a currency like bitcoin - which has no physical representation at all, it's much harder to pin down what "financial property" means. SteveBaker (talk) 17:40, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

The numbers "in" a computer, for example for bitcoins, are just as much physical representations of the money as are banknotes. Nothing new. Just recording with digital computers instead of banknotes, account ledgers, shubati, tally sticks or coins - which were just old-fashioned computers.John Z (talk) 22:24, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Intellectual property is an example of a good having the property of being non-rivalrous. (This is one of the two defining properties of a public good.) Being non-rivalrous means that one person's consumption of it doesn't decrease the amount available for someone else to consume. One implication of this is that the marginal cost of producing another unit of it is essentially zero, or at least trivial compared to the cost of producing the first unit. For example, it's very costly in terms of money, time, and intellectual effort to come up with a great song wonderfully performed, but once the performance exists in an electronic medium it costs virtually nothing to replay it again and again. So from society's point of view, once the non-rivalrous good exists, societal welfare as a whole can be increased by letting everyone have access to it. That's the argument against providing full property rights to it, and it's an argument that does not apply in the case of a so-called private good. On the other hand, in a dynamic context if society provides no property rights to non-rivalrous goods, no one will ever create them and there won't be a good for everyone to enjoy. These are the positive aspects of the issue. The normative aspect, which is a matter of philosophy or ethics or whatever, and which economics therefore cannot say anything definitive about, is whether it is "right" to provide anything other than perpetual property protection to the good's creator. But this normative question is more complicated than the corresponding question for a private good, for the reasons brought out by the positive analysis Duoduoduo (talk) 17:59, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

never had much truck with that argument about no property rights = no one will ever create. people made up stories and sang songs a long time before anyone came up with a stupid fiction about owning things that don't exist. ---- _nonsense ferret 19:37, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

This is a good generalization - but it's far from being universally true. At this very moment, I'm using Wikipeda which uses PHP and Apache, communicating via the HTTP protocol - I'm viewing it using Firefox, inside KDE, running under Linux and I'm donating my ideas about whatever our OP's are interested in for absolutely no financial gain. All of those things are non-rivalrous goods where the "owners" have essentially waived whatever rights they may have had (well, not quite all - but my point remains). I'm very sure that all of them would still have been created without property protection for their intellectual content.

In the world of the Internet, the top ten websites are (in order of decreasing popularity):

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. YouTube
4. Yahoo!
5. Baidu
6. Wikipedia
7. Windows Live
8. QQ
9. Amazon.com
10. Twitter

It's notable that not one of those sites produces more than a miniscule amount of their own original content - and only Amazon contains any material whatever that wasn't put there by someone for free or charges money for their services.

There are plenty of sources of free music, video, etc. So it's certainly arguable that intellectual goods would still be produced without the protection of patents and copyrights. Certainly it wouldn't be the same set of goods that we see right now - but it certainly wouldn't be a barren landscape.

SteveBaker (talk) 19:45, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

In regards to those sites, for a critical (in the sense of critique) view, one might want to read You Are Not a Gadget. μηδείς (talk) 20:29, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Right, I was being sloppy by saying that no one would ever create them, since I was creating some non-rivalrous property and relinquishing the rights to it, right as I typed that! But I think you vastly exaggerate the point. For example, Google doesn't produce its own content, but a lot of what you access there was produced by someone who made money off it originally. And those owners sometimes complain that Google stifles their ability to get compensation for their efforts (and the expense of those efforts) and that that will in turn stifle content creation. And what about pharmaceuticals? Finding a new drug is vastly expensive, and most of what is accomplished in that area is done by drug companies that are profit-driven. If we eliminated patent protection, they wouldn't dump money into research because they couldn't recoup their costs. So we'd have to rely on research institutes, university-affiliated or otherwise, funded either by generous donors like Bill Gates (who by the way has the money to donate because he had intellectual property protection) or by the taxpayers. Would such non-profits take up the slack? I don't know, but I'm very skeptical. And consider the writing of novels (I mean the ones that are popular enough to make a living for the novelist). If the novel was in the public domain as soon as it was released, the novelist couldn't make a living doing that and would have to find another job, relegating novel-writing to her spare time. Duoduoduo (talk) 20:39, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Imagine that! a world with no one direction or justin biebers! What a tragedy! These are myths put about by large corporations lobbying governments to create an industry out of selling things to people that don't really exist. The fiction of intellectual property is holding back mankind rather than advancing it. Imagine if people just created art for its own sake and the simple love of art and communication, rather than creating things for the sake of trying to make money for a company - this actually happens, and always did. Imagine if knowledge was just shared freely with people who can benefit mankind, rather than commodified and sold. ---- _nonsense ferret 20:55, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Concerning drugs, this gets things backwards. A "future" of non-profits which might not "take up the slack", was basically how things were done, especially before the turning point of the Bayh–Dole Act. Government and non-profit academic research has generally been the source of new drug research: "most of what is accomplished in that area is done by drug companies" is and was not true. Compare Marcia Angell & Arnold S. Relman's "The few drugs that are truly innovative have usually been based on taxpayer-supported research done in nonprofit academic medical centers or at the National Institutes of Health. In fact, many drugs now sold by drug companies were licensed to them by academic medical centers or small biotechnology companies.", or Angell's book The Truth About the Drug Companies. IIRC she points out there that since the trend toward "privatization" and exaltation of "intellectual property rights", the pipeline of new drugs and research has slowed down. So it would be more logical to say that history has shown that the "private sector" (more like a feudal sector in the modern USA, especially with regard to health care) is unable to take up the slack of a shrinking public / non-profit sector.John Z (talk) 00:30, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Imagine a reference desk where people answered questions with references to verified information, and didn't merely try to start a debate with other users. --Jayron32 05:43, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

the twitching of my nonsense whiskers got the better of me there, of course you are right, comments withdrawn ---- _nonsense ferret 13:09, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

This isn't the place for such criticisms. StuRat (talk) 05:57, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your answers. I am not starting a debate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.52.145.100 (talk) 08:04, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

At what hour do you pull back your clocks in America?

when summer time ends? Thank. Kotjap (talk) 18:45, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

See Daylight saving time in the United States. --Jayron32 19:06, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Thank you!. Kotjap (talk) 19:22, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Note that, in the US, we say "set your clocks back", not "pull". StuRat (talk) 13:53, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

( ... and in the UK, we put them back.) Dbfirs 18:06, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

True, always confusing for me, because I never know where to put them. As far as I know, they have always just been where they are. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 13:53, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Off topic discussion.
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
There is a search bar on the top of this page. If you need help using it you can ask for that at the Help Desk. You are also encouraged to use various on line search tools such as Google. If you still have difficulty finding material on whatever has popped into your mind, then please feel free to request help here for a reference. μηδείς (talk) 19:35, 14 February 2013 (UTC) Well, to be fair in this case, the term "Daylight savings" is unique to the U.S. and may not be familiar to non-Americans, so it may not have been as simple as "type something in the search bar". --Jayron32 19:37, 14 February 2013 (UTC) Perhaps that's why the British House of Commons has just thrown out the Daylight Saving Bill ;-) Alansplodge (talk) 20:02, 14 February 2013 (UTC) (Perhaps having the wrong name was why it was thrown out???) The original bill was the Summer Time Act 1916 and the system is usually known here as British Summer Time (BST), but I agree with Alan that "Daylight savings" is not unknown on this side of the pond. Dbfirs 18:29, 15 February 2013 (UTC) I think you are quite aware the user in question is familiar with google and knows how to link to his search results, and will not be confused by my suggestion that he try researching such easy questions himself. The first hit here on change clocks america is the daylight savings time article. We should restore the suggestion to the guidelines of the refdesks that tells people to use search engines. μηδείς (talk) 19:48, 14 February 2013 (UTC) Of course, no one compels you to answer questions which you find to be a waste of your time. Doubly so for not being compelled to tell users that their question is a waste of your time, even if you take the care to sound as though you really aren't saying that, when it's obvious that's what you mean. In other words, if you find a question is beneath you, you're allowed to simply ignore it. --Jayron32 20:13, 14 February 2013 (UTC) I missed where the OP said he sought but could not find. Or where I criticized your answering him. Is there a feeling that users shouldn't use search engines? Or that I am not extremely generous with my time when people ask questions I can help with? Or that I shouldn't suggest that users try search engines? Or use our search bar? Because that is what I suggested. Teach a man to fish... μηδείς (talk) 20:26, 14 February 2013 (UTC) Teach a man to fish and he'll spout worthless platitudes at you all day? --Jayron32 20:51, 14 February 2013 (UTC) I entered "pull back clocks" into the Wikipedia search bar, and the top five results I received were Conformal pictures, Tampa Bay Rays, Fusee (horology), Atomic clock (no, not in a useful way), and Mainspring. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 20:32, 14 February 2013 (UTC) I'm hatting this, because the above suggestions belong on the talk pages (feel free to move it perhaps). BTW, Happy Valentine's Day to All! --Modocc (talk) 21:27, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Noticing new information once learned

A bad header for this question, but I'm not sure how best to summarize. This is a follow-up question from my post at the language desk, a part of which was about a children's game where a sentence is whispered down a line of people, and the last person announces it to the room, often times with interesting/funny changes from the meaning of the original sentence. Helpful editors told me this game was known as "telephone." So, that's the context, here's the question:

• Upon finding out the name of the game was "telephone," twice in the last two days I've heard the game referenced. First on the Tuesday Adam Corolla podcast (as being "the worst game of telephone, ever" and then today on Dan Patrick's radio show, talking about how relying on off-the-record sources were a "never ending game of telephone." I've experienced this multiple times in my life, where I learn a particular piece of information, and then suddenly start hearing it referenced a lot of places. So my question is: The game of telephone is obviously not something regularly referenced/talked about, so I get a feeling of something in-between coincidence & deja vu when I suddenly star hearing it referenced just days after I first learned about it. Do you know what I mean? (I am having trouble clearly describing this), and, if so, is there a psychological term that describes this? I'd be happy to clarify if necessary. It's just really weird! Ditch ∝ 21:31, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

This familiar effect is sometimes called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or Frequency Illusion. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 21:39, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Not really relevant, but in the UK, it's a well-known traditional parlour game called Chinese whispers. Alansplodge (talk) 21:54, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Andrew, that first link is a really cool read, and describes my experience exactly! The part that stuck with me was how some people find this phenomena so common that they come to actually expect it upon learning new information. So I will now be all ears for random references to the "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon" or "Frequency Illusion". Thanks! Ditch ∝ 22:15, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

(ec) Happens to me all the time. I think it's simply that the phrase or piece of information is out there all the time but you don't notice it because a zillion other things are also out there all the time; then after you've specifically had your attention drawn to it, and it stays in your short-term memory for a while before being filed away in long-term memory, you start noticing it every time. Duoduoduo (talk) 22:19, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I get it all the time. The most bizarre is that when I am reading (I read a lot), if the TV is on, or if I am in a restaurant or pub, or other public place, and if I am using my normal method of reading, i.e. pronouncing the words in my head rather than speed reading, I will very often hear the exact word I am currently reading at that exact time said by someone near me or on the TV. Jack calls it Synchronicity. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 05:38, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

He does indeed. I must get around to writing an article on Velpeau's Law: the phenomenon where a doctor sees a patient who presents with an extremely unusual medical condition, and then a short time later has another patient with the same extremely rare medical condition, although the two patients are not related, have never met, and all other possibilities of incidental transmission have been eliminated. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 04:42, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

The terms "frequency illusion" and "recency bias" are appropriate. These experiences are basically effects of biases in salience_(neuroscience). Note that "Baader-meinhof phenomenon" is a word made up by bloggers not that long ago; it doesn't really have any academic currency (WP used to have an article on it, but it was deleted due to lack of notability and reliable sources). SemanticMantis (talk) 16:26, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I noticed this phenomenon recently, then kept hearing about it afterwards, so I think it does exist. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 17:31, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Of course it exists. I just wanted to point out that "baader-meinhof phenomenon" is an internet neologism, and not the term that would be used in academic discourse of the (very real) phenomenon. Ordinarily, I wouldn't bother. But since the Baader-Meinhof Gang is widely known and discussed, overloading the term simply impedes communication. Google scholar reveals myriad interesting and relevant results for various combinations of /frequency recency salience bias/, but if you search for BMP, you get articles about the gang. I thought this information would be useful to the OP or others who wish to search the academic literature. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:44, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

When you learn of something new, then suddenly you hear about it all the time, and others are sure they've always been aware of it, maybe it is like the "Vacations on Venus" in The Marching Morons, the 1951 science fiction story by C.M. Kornbluth. The 3 million intelligent people on Earth hundreds of years in the future devise a strategy to commit genocide on the 5 billion morons on Earth by sending them to their death on "trips to Venus" for vacations or permanent residence in always-fatal rocket ships which kill them as soon as they are in space, and a publicity campaign introduces constant references to wonderful Venus. A doubter who says she thought there had been only one unsuccessful attempt to reach the Moon is ridiculed by her husband who is hearing frequent references to Venus rockets in the media and is convinced he has always known about Venus trips. Edison (talk) 04:00, 16 February 2013 (UTC)