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Ok, this is probably a bit offtopic, but the search is so horrible and broken I can't find the original topic. It dealt with a question about memory as a disk drive. Lo and behold, our CIO, a gadget junky if there ever was one, got his hands on a Pen Drive from Frys (an evil store in Silicon Valley we turn to as a last resort) with 64 Meg of flash RAM. You install the little driver on whichever systems you want to use it on and it plugs in through a USB port. Here's what amazed me... they actually have it working for Win98 forward, Linux, and Mac OS (dunno about OSX, check it yourself at the link above) Sizes are supposed to be up to 1 Gig, tho I've only seen vendors for the smaller capacity drives. Since it's flash it doesn't need a battery. 64Meg about $84 bucks.

Wow. The gap between us is very wide. I can't even respond to your "points" here; they just fall apart when I try to pick them up. (Being eaten alive by rats can't be "a terrible thing" because all terrible things are felonies? How do you tell "self-deceiving libertarians" from libertarians that are deceived by others? Do you mean that atheist libertarians think contracts are worthless?)

But what boggles me most is that, leaving aside the various reasons someone might want to honour their contracts (e.g., self respect), you don't even seem to realize that it's often demonstrably a good strategy. How can you even function in society?

-- MarkusQ

Also, my mother still picks out my clothing for me. Decisions like this worry me so much.

If you took volunteers and told them they were (for example) staffing a career counseling intranet chat system, and had them interact with a blind mix of real people and machine systems, then I'd be more impressed by machines convincing judges that the machines are people.

Just look at the people who appear to be fooled when they come across AOLiza

Yeah, experts in AI should probably not be juding these contests. I was seriously creeped out by chatting with an Alice bot. Despite the fact that I knew it was a bot, I couldn't break it and get it to say something stupid in just a few minutes like I can with any given Eliza implimentation. I *know* it would fool someone of my parents' or grandparents' generation if they weren't told in advance that it was a computer program.

The system does work, and this piece of crap will end up getting thrown out just like all the other junk legislation.

That's a rather bold statement considering the history of congress in relation to technological issues. They've proved themselves time and again to be incapable of comprehending the consequences of their legislation. The DMCA makes it illegal to backup DVDs. UTICA (Passed in Virginia and Maryland) gives legal teeth to shrink wrap licenses regardless of how rediculous or overbearing they might be. Dismissing out of hand the possibility of the SSSCA being passed is obtuse. There's no reason to bash people for voicing their opinions, call them paranoid, or tell them not to complain. Communication, regardless of its effect on votes in the Capitol, is a right we enjoy. If not therapeutic, it is at least entertaining. True, people need to write their legislators, but there's no reason not to discuss it in this forum.

-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.

On the off chance that your signature isn't a joke, and that the joke is actually you, Mensa membership is hardly an indication of omniscience. With one in every fifty people eligible for membership, Mensa is the trailer trash of high IQ societies. According to The Mega Society, "IQ is not demonstrably identical to intelligence," therefore it's entirely possible that stupid people could be members of Mensa. But I think you've just proved that.

By the way, tolerance is the correct spelling.

How about the people who INVENTED it? Jef Raskin, originator of the Macintosh product, was often a visiting academic and consultant at PARC and joined Apple. He had done useability studies which demonstrated that NORMAL people (the target market for the "for the rest of us" Macintosh) found a ONE button mouse easier to use than the original Xerox mice (which had THREE buttons. Remember, not EVERYONE in the world has a PhD in CS. Hell, even people at PARC (plenty of PhDs there.. and plenty of human interface experts as well) and Raskin HIMSELF had mouse button errors, as he describes here.

While I was the first PARC-savvy person at Apple, Larry Tesler was the first PARC employee to join the company. At first he was strongly opposed to the Mac's easier-to-use mouse methods, and I eventually wrote a memo that showed, point by point, that the one-button mouse could do everything that PARCs three-button mouse could do and with the same number or fewer user actions. It was faster and more efficient, and much easier to learn and remember how to use. I had observed that people (including myself) at PARC often made wrong-button errors in using the mouse, which was part of my impetus for doing better.

Myself, I don't have Raskin's expertise, nor have I done any "useability studies". But I worked tech support and helldesk jobs when I was in college. And *I* can sure tell you the anguish of getting a call from someone who didn't understand "left-click" vs. "right-click", and trying to explain the difference.

cya,
john

This is absolutely fantastic news. I find it astonishing that any court would consider these so-called "contracts" valid at all, but we have to take our victories where we can. This could be "camel's nose in the tent" that will lead to the invalidation of all shrinkwrap and clickwrap "agreements". For an explanation of why shrinkwrap agreements should not be allowed to exist, see my five-year-old editorial on the subject.

Those who worry that this decision may weaken the GPL, or any other Open Source/Free Software license, need not fear. Shrinkwrap "agreements" purport to constrain your right to use the software, whereas the GPL simply constrains your ability to copy and redistribute the software. In other words:

• GPL: You may use this software in any way you wish, but copyright law prohibits you from making and distributing copies. If you wish to make and distribute copies, here are the terms you must agree to.
• Typical shrinkwrap "agreement": You must agree to these onerous terms and conditions, or we won't let you use the software you just paid for at all.

Which one is the product of a less childish mind is left as an exercise for the reader.

The effect of striking down a shrinkwrap "agreement" would be that the default terms of copyright law would apply, which is that you would still be free to use your software, and you still wouldn't be allowed to make copies of it, but all the other "rights" the vendor granted themselves would vanish. This means that the spyware the vendor installed on your machine without your consent would now be actionable.

The effect of striking down the GPL would be that you'd still be able to use your copy of the software but, legally, you wouldn't be entitled to make and distribute copies anymore. However, the practical effect would likely be nil. By releasing under the GPL, the authors are representing that they won't go after you if make and distribute copies of the source. It is likely they would continue to make that representation even absent an enforceable GPL. And they would still have the right to go after people who distribute binaries absent source (since binaries are considered a protected derivative work). That means Linus could still go after Microsoft -- and, to be fair, any other organization -- that tried to loot Linux.

All in all, this decision is a good thing for consumers and users everywhere.

Schwab

A slightly more detailed chronology.

James Earl Jones would be great. He could easy fill those shoes without the overdramatization.
Besides think about him saying: http://www.best.com/~kennahm/life.wav
wave file

Ah. The old mis-represent the data trick. Hawaiian lava dated as ancient is pure urban legend by the creationists, snails (all aquatic animals actually) don't get the carbon in their bodies directly from the atmosphere (and so can't be carbon dated), and as for trees, I'll need details before we can debunk you on them (I'm reasonably confident since you have already had two strikes, you will round it out with a third).

Ah. The old mis-represent the data trick. Hawaiian lava dated as ancient is pure urban legend by the creationists, snails (all aquatic animals actually) don't get the carbon in their bodies directly from the atmosphere (and so can't be carbon dated), and as for trees, I'll need details before we can debunk you on them (I'm reasonably confident since you have already had two strikes, you will round it out with a third).

Well, we could remove them with high-power lasers. This has already been proposed, and is quite feasible:

In-depth article on ORION space debris removal project
Photonics Spectra discussion of ORION project
ORION summary
ORION details
Military Discussion of LISK-BROOM
High power laser ablation conference

Iceland had a similar system in the middle ages. Citizens were able to choose their chieftain (gothar). Gothar were able to vote in the council, and could transfer their authority as they wished. Citizens were able to choose the gothar they were allied to with few obligations. For more on Medieval Iceland, see David Friedman's writings. His article Private Creation and Enforcement of Law: a Historical Case is a little dense (as a journal article) but readable. You can also check out some usenet responses he wrote at http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Libertarian/My_Posts/Ice land_Anarch_FAQ1_reply.html. Also, Danny Yee has a review of the book Medieval Iceland.

P. E. de Puydt suggested a similar system of government in the 1800s, which he called "panarchy". De Puydt envisioned a system of non-physical political divisions which people could "emigrate" between without changing physical location. De Puydt was suggesting a blueprint for the government of Belgium. You can read his tract "Panarchy" online (also here. You can read introductions by contemporary authors here and here. Roderick Long of the Free Nation Foundation wrote a piece on Virtual Cantons influenced by panarchy and the Swiss government.

In case you're wondering, I would love such a system! I wish I could vote for Mr. Boucher.

It seems like every six months these days, someone comes out with a head-motion pointer. They go way, way back.

They're not even new to /.

Way back in the pre-ibmpc haze, Sage/Stride marketed one that required you to put a reflective dot on your forehead. Never took off.

This one looks real expensive, you can get a similar device for a lot cheaper HERE , for fifty bucks. Even has built in headphones.

Emacs did not begin as an open source project. It was part of a proprietary operating system, Honeywell's Multics. You can read more than you want to know about its history here.

Tim

I wrote a fake news story about this some months ago, except I set it in the US. Seems like it's getting closer to reality every day.

Talk to your friends and relatives about this issue. Raise awareness. And make sure you vote, both at the polling place and the cash register.

Schwab

In May 1949, Maurice Wilkes' team at Cambridge University completed the "EDSAC" ("Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer"), closely based on the EDVAC design report from von Neumann's group.

Instead of fiber it used 16 mercury delay lines that yielded 256 35-bit words (or 512 17-bit words) of storage.

Source: Chronology of Digital Computing Machines

Sorry, but I have to take issue with this:

Seriously, though - it's very hard to rewrite a program from the ground up; somehow, it's never as good. I'd clean up the code, but not rewrite.

This statement is wrong, just plain wrong. The axiom in computer science is "Don't fix bad code, rewrite it. Yes, I realize that's the CS take on things, and that it doesn't always jive with business needs. But I digress.

Second systems are typically easier to write because the hard part is already done: transforming the mental model of the system into real, working code. Plus, you get the benefit of lifting out portions of the old code that are worth saving. Also, second systems are easier to write because the entire idea has been realized via code once, and that means that you should see patterns and behavior that were not obvious when the initial coding began.

OTOH (because I like to argue, even with myself ;) developers should always be weary of what Brooks calls the "Second System Effect", whereby needless features and are added. More info on that here.

I wrote a fake news story last year about exactly this kind of thing, except I set it in the U.S.

Anyone else feeling as powerless as I am right now?

Schwab

I certainly don't want to pay for a portion of what the other users at my ISP are looking at. If I'm reading web sites for various Linux distros, gnu.org, slashdot, and sourceforge and none of them are charging anything, why should I pay for someone's reading habits at various predigested news sites.

Separating the payment from the use, especially spreading it around, encourages overuse. It is a large part of the problem with the cost of medical care in the US. If you don't have to bear the costs, why not have the best and use as much of it as you want.

David Friedman talks about Information as a Public Good in his book Price Theory. Follow the link and search for "Information as a Public Good".

I certainly don't want to pay for a portion of what the other users at my ISP are looking at. If I'm reading web sites for various Linux distros, gnu.org, slashdot, and sourceforge and none of them are charging anything, why should I pay for someone's reading habits at various predigested news sites.

Separating the payment from the use, especially spreading it around, encourages overuse. It is a large part of the problem with the cost of medical care in the US. If you don't have to bear the costs, why not have the best and use as much of it as you want.

David Friedman talks about Information as a Public Good in his book Price Theory. Follow the link and search for "Information as a Public Good".

In case anyone is keeping score, Maldivian's latest copyright violation is from here: http://www.best.com/~cphoenix/winvunix.html It's amazing how he managed to copy the entire page, except those three words at the top: "by Chris Phoenix".

(I don't mean to seem like I'm stalking Maldivian, but someone has to give credit where credit is due.)

You're right - there's a lack of clarity - it's not theoretically impossible, in the same way as proving Fermat is not impossible, but since mathematicians have been trying to do it since pretty much the dawn of mathematics with no success, it's fair to say it's impossible for us at the moment.

There's different grades of trespassing and use of others property. Computer law should reflect this as well.

I tried to do something along these lines by creating a license that would forbid people from sending me spam. I was informed by an experienced attorney that what I drafted wouldn't stand up, since there was no "consideration" involved. Frankly, I couldn't see how offering the right to send me mail was qualitatively different from offering the right to use a piece of software I'd just purchased. Since IANAL, I dropped the subject.

If nothing else, writing it was cathartic...

Schwab

The following is an email I sent to Bruce Rolston, the author of the article.

______________________________________________

Shrinkwrap license "agreements" are a hot-button issue for me, so I was disappointed when I read your article, "Look Before You Click" (linked to by Slashdot).

I wrote an editorial putting the case against such "agreements" over four years ago, which was published in MicroTimes. The text is on my Web site:

http://www.best.com/~ewhac/belarfnq/shrinkwrap.htm l

I have two primary objections to license "agreements" as currently practiced.

First are the terms of the "agreements" themselves. Those which are not a redundant statement of existing law I find to be completely without any ethical foundation whatsoever. In particular, I most strenuously object to anti-reverse-engineering clauses. Indeed, you make reference to these clauses in your article:

The third promise every game obtains from the user is that they will not try to reverse engineer or modify the product in any way using the program they've received. Keeping this protection is at the core of what differentiates owning the software from licensing it. If software companies ever had to transfer ownership of their work when they sell it, it would be impossible to prevent people from taking it apart and figuring out how it ticks. [ ... ]

That's correct. I argue that it should be impossible to prevent people taking apart their software, at least within the scope of mass-market software that is sold over-the-counter.

The software industry spends billions every year on research and development. But as large as this sum is, billions more are invested by auto manufacturers in the development of new cars. When finally released for sale, auto manufacturers routinely purchase the products of their competitors, take them apart bolt by bolt, and figure out how they were designed and built. And they use the knowledge gained from this to improve their own products.

The auto industry doesn't have a problem with this practice. I therefore fail to see why the software industry has any business objecting to the very same practice.

You also cite the writings of Microsoft's legal department:

They argued that most people have no interest in looking under the hood of their software. But software publishers who sold their product outright would have to assume that some people would, and raise the price for everyone accordingly in order to be confident of recouping their investment.

Frankly, I'm surprised that you re-printed this; it is devoid of logic, or even common sense.

There is no logical path between taking apart your software and software prices rising, any more than there is a path between opening the hood of your car and car prices rising. Indeed, the argument can be made that allowing people to take apart their software will drive prices lower, since people will more readily be able to analyze and identify jewels from junk, thereby lowering the price of junk (#include <gratuitous_microsoft_bash.h>).

Furthermore, the fact that most people have no interest in opening the hood of their software -- or their car -- in no way justifies obstructing people who do. Humans are naturally curious; they are going to take stuff apart and figure out how it works. It is an unalterable fact of the marketplace. Tune your business model accordingly.

My second primary objection to EULAs is the mechanism by which these so-called "contracts" are put in force. In short, any vendor anywhere can place any restriction on you they wish, without reasonable prior notice, and bind you to it using the most tenuous forms of assent.

Frankly, I should not have to take a contract attorney with me every time I go shopping at Fry's. The mechanism used by these "agreements" is fundamentally unethical, and wide open to egregious abuse:

• There is no restriction on terms. The vendor can declare anything they want,
• There is no adaquate notice given to the consumer that an onerous, binding contract is being formed,
• There is no adaquate notice of the terms of the contract,
• The contract attempts to alter the terms of the transaction after the fact,
• Assent to these contracts is established by the most tenuous -- almost unconscious -- acts.

If shrinkwrap "agreements" are enforceable, then what is to prevent retail sales of any item being replaced by "licenses?" Consider what would happen if Sears started selling their hammers only under "license:"

You see two hammers on the wall. One is the Craftsman Personal Hammer; the other is the Enterprise Edition Hammer. The Personal Hammer comes with a "license" forbidding you from using the hammer to build objects intended for sale, or Sears will sue you. The Enterprise Hammer "license" allows you to build object for sale, provided you kick back to Sears 1% of the gross sale price. The Personal Hammer costs $30.00; the Enterprise Edition Hammer costs $500.00. As far as the hammers themselves are concerned, in all material respects, they are identical.

Would you tolerate this? Would you take Sears' "contracts" seriously, especially if there were no record of you actually signing it? What if your minor child bought you the hammer as a gift? Whom does the "contract" bind?

"Well," I hear you say, "I'll just buy one from Home Depot." Surprise, surprise, they just changed all their hammers over to the same scheme last week. Further investigation reveals that you can no longer buy a hammer any more; you can only "license" them.

Relying on the doctrine of unconscionability is also a non-starter. Litigating a contract dispute is ruinously expensive, even if you're in the right.

The idea is worse than ridiculous, it is dangerous. The opportunity for abusing consumers is monumental. It is in fact already happening. DVD CCA is suing Jon Johansen (a foreign national) for his work on DeCSS, the DVD descrambling code; the suit is predicated on Johansen's alleged violation of Xing Software's "license" forbidding reverse-engineering. Mattel managed to arm-twist an out-of-court settlement out of Eddy L. O. Jansson and Matthew Skala for developing and publishing a program that decrypts the blocklist of CyberPatrol, a censorware package; the attendant "license" forbids reverse-engineering.

This method of forming contracts is grossly unethical, and should not be allowed to stand. It is for this reason that I do not, and have never, taken license "agreements" seriously.

There are many other points in the article I could raise, but this is already too long. At the very least, I hope, in part two of your article, you will give time to the opposing viewpoint. My sincerent thanks for your time.

Schwab

3dfx has never suggested in any forum that they will leave the PC market. Why would they? At worst what we're seeing is a return to the Voodoo 2 strategy: a successful one, before they took too much upon themselves. And by the way, Quantum 3D had a kick-ass SLI product on store shelves then, too.

Derina X. Pinchfish

The idea that progress is going through a sharp turn upward is not supported by the Kurzweil's reference to the "exponential", a curve that looks basically the same at any scale -- but on a more radical mathematical formulation that goes to infinity in finite time -- specifically by Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 (give or take). No, this isn't just some New Age eschatology -- it was actually arrived at by looking at historic data and extrapolating into the future.

Here is an excerpt from "Spasim (1974) The First First-Person-Shooter 3D Multiplayer Networked Game" that discusses the origin of the Transhumanist conception of "The Singularity":

They were trying to realize a man-machine cybernetic vision of this magical little gnome named Heinz von Foerster and needed an email system to go along with it.
...
When the semester was over, I threw a few things into my '64 Chevy Impalla, and headed east on Interstate 80 across the Illinois border for Urbana and CERL. It was my first paying job as a programmer.

Arriving at the Mecca of networking and meeting the magical little gnome who founded second order cybernetics (symbolized by the Ouroboros) in his Biological Computer Laboratory was an amazing experience.
...
A vital side note: Heinz von Foerster had published a paper in 1960 on global population: von Foerster, H, Mora, M. P., and Amiot, L. W., "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D." 2026, Science 132, 1291-1295 (1960). In this paper, Heinz shows that the best formula that describes population growth over known human history is one that predicts the population will go to infinity on a Friday the 13 in November of 2026. As Roger Gregory likes to say, "That's just whacko!" The problem is, after he published the paper, it kept predicting population growth better than the other models. (see section 4.1 "Systems Ecology Notes") One of Heinz's early University of Illinois colleagues was Richard Hamming of "Hamming code" fame. Once while visiting the Naval Postgraduate School, I asked Dr. Hamming what he thought of Heinz von Foerster. Professor Hamming's response was "Heinz von Foerster: Now there's a first class kook!" I suspect Heinz's publication of, what Transhumanists call, "the singularity" had really gotten to Hamming -- not that Heinz wasn't eccentric enough get Hamming's goat in any case. Well, to continue this digression so as to give the damn Transhumanists a much-deserved keyboard lashing: It's one thing to be a guy like Hamming and denounce Heinz as a "kook" for following his formulae where they lead -- it's another to turn Heinz's formulae into a virtual religion, call it "the singularity" and totally forget where the idea came from the first place. I suggest the Transhumanists cite Heinz in the future whenever they refer to "the singularity" and think about his assumptions -- the primary one being that societies success varies directly with population size. It might be good to see if his model fits the data subsequent to the last check of which I am aware -- 1973 -- which just happens to be right at the point high population density societies decided to abandon their forward progress toward the space frontier.

Re: your plug for Libertarian... forget it. I think Ayn Rand was a terrible hack of a writer, and her philosophy is as wide reaching in scope as it is shallow in practice. It's yet another utopian fantasy that attempts to shoe-horn a philosophical stance into unworkable policy.

Re: your plug for Libertarian... forget it. I think Ayn Rand was a terrible hack of a writer, and her philosophy is as wide reaching in scope as it is shallow in practice. It's yet another utopian fantasy that attempts to shoe-horn a philosophical stance into unworkable policy.

There are some activities for which a "specialized" controller is nearly indispensible.

I have a SpaceORB 360, which is basically a joystick with 6 axes (three translation axes and three rotation axes). It's in the shape of a sphere which you grab and twist (gently) to move around. It also has six buttons. It shows up as a DirectInput device under Windoze, and there's support for it in the Linux joystick driver suite. (Sadly, SpaceTec/Labtec no longer make the controller. They show up on eBay from time to time.)

Now, as a game playing controller, its use is limited. You can't whip around as quickly as you can with a mouse, nor can you aim as accurately. However, as a spectator camera controller, it kicks extreme ass. In fact, when John Carmack announced he was taking parametric joystick control out of Quake-3, I was very disappointed, since it meant it was now much more difficult to record good demos off a live server. I even created a page of ORB demos to make my argument but, alas, parametric control was still lost.

The point is: Keyboard and mouse is good for a lot, but for some work, specialized controllers are just amazing.

Schwab

No, that's in reference to what a particular Libertarian tried to convince me of one time. He felt that anyone has a perfect right to take shots at anyone else -- until they hit them. You see, you have the right to do anything you want until it infringes on someone else's rights, and the infringement didn't start until the bullet hit.

There are inconsistencies in libertarian philosophy and disagreements among libertarians as to what constitutes an infringement of another's rights. Most (all?) libertarians don't want some freak neighbor shooting a howitzer at us any more than you do.

In his book Th e Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism , Economist and anarchist David D. Friedman does an excellent job of explaining the problems with libertarianism, and in fact directly addresses your gun-firing-neighbor question. (Make sure also to see the following chapters, 42 and )

No, that's in reference to what a particular Libertarian tried to convince me of one time. He felt that anyone has a perfect right to take shots at anyone else -- until they hit them. You see, you have the right to do anything you want until it infringes on someone else's rights, and the infringement didn't start until the bullet hit.

There are inconsistencies in libertarian philosophy and disagreements among libertarians as to what constitutes an infringement of another's rights. Most (all?) libertarians don't want some freak neighbor shooting a howitzer at us any more than you do.

In his book Th e Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism , Economist and anarchist David D. Friedman does an excellent job of explaining the problems with libertarianism, and in fact directly addresses your gun-firing-neighbor question. (Make sure also to see the following chapters, 42 and )

No, that's in reference to what a particular Libertarian tried to convince me of one time. He felt that anyone has a perfect right to take shots at anyone else -- until they hit them. You see, you have the right to do anything you want until it infringes on someone else's rights, and the infringement didn't start until the bullet hit.

There are inconsistencies in libertarian philosophy and disagreements among libertarians as to what constitutes an infringement of another's rights. Most (all?) libertarians don't want some freak neighbor shooting a howitzer at us any more than you do.

In his book Th e Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism , Economist and anarchist David D. Friedman does an excellent job of explaining the problems with libertarianism, and in fact directly addresses your gun-firing-neighbor question. (Make sure also to see the following chapters, 42 and )

No, that's in reference to what a particular Libertarian tried to convince me of one time. He felt that anyone has a perfect right to take shots at anyone else -- until they hit them. You see, you have the right to do anything you want until it infringes on someone else's rights, and the infringement didn't start until the bullet hit.

There are inconsistencies in libertarian philosophy and disagreements among libertarians as to what constitutes an infringement of another's rights. Most (all?) libertarians don't want some freak neighbor shooting a howitzer at us any more than you do.

In his book Th e Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism , Economist and anarchist David D. Friedman does an excellent job of explaining the problems with libertarianism, and in fact directly addresses your gun-firing-neighbor question. (Make sure also to see the following chapters, 42 and )

Also on the subject of EULAs, there's a good article here.

Damn subject line length limit.

You do not need to be an anarchist to realize that property is not a natural state of affairs. Property is a "social construction" just like government. Once property did not exist. Later people decided that it would be a "good thing," as Martha Stewart might say, for people to be able to control other people and tangiable things so the idea of family was created wherein a man could be given government sanction of ownership over his tangiable possessions such as land, tools, slaves, wife, and children.

Later, people decided that owning other people might not be such a desirable thing so the definition of property was edited to exclude other people.

Much later than that, as printing became popular and lucrative, intellectual property was added to the list because people felt that it was desirable for authors and inventors to have some kind of property rights to their ideas and creative expressions.

Let's accept that although we may disagree with the definitions of property currently in vogue, there is no natural existence of property, so arguments based on nature won't pass muster. Further, arguments based on the historical concept of property will have to contend with the fact that for the first several thousand years of property, people could be considered property, which kind of dampens my desire to emulate those ideas.

The bright side, for those who would like to be able to take the work of others without being constrained by intellectual property laws (I too have chafed under the unfair laws that prohibit me from taking GPL code and wrapping it in my own closed source projects) is that property laws are no more nor less than arbitrary acts of legislation, which can be changed by amending our Constitution and persuading Congress to pass a few new laws. You can, however, find better fora in which to push for such action than bellyaching on /.

Base conversions are very complicated, and if it was easier to build a computer that was decimal all the way through than to divide and multiply by 10 (which is very computationally intensive) and subtract to get modulos... the instructions for this process can take a significant amount of punch-cards! Even the Motorola 680xx series (the not-too-distant anscestor of today's Palm s and many embedded DSPs) included add, subract, and conversions to and from BCD to aid driving numeric displays.

Actually, one of the main reasons for it being binary is probably the fact that floating-point arithmetic can hardly be done at all in any other base than 2. And binary isn't the same as digital: base-10 is still digital. The difference is that in digital computers all arithmetic results are infinitely precise and reproducible, as opposed to analog computers which add and subtract voltages, which are inherently irrational numbers and therefore cannot be represented as digits (i.e., not digital).

I'm sorry, it's late at night. I don't mean to be overly critical - this guy invented the first FPU, way ahead of his time - but if it didn't have conditional branching etc. you have to question if it really ran a program, per se. I just read this, a link I found elsewhere in this discussion. It goes into some detail about Zuse, you might like it.

Fsck this hard drive! Although it probably won't work...
foo = bar/*myPtr;

Computers were not invented, they were developed. The Mark I was electromechanical, where the Colossus was fully electronic. That made it much faster. But it was not the first. For a timeline, see - this.

This just won't work. It may help somewhat. But the reason that competition works in the marketplace is that customers choose which product to buy and which company to buy from based on which best meets their needs. Those needs may be the lowest price, the best quality, the most conveniently located store, or any of a number of other factors.

Now, lets examine publically funded space programs. That's a good phrase, "publically funded". It tells us where the money is coming from. All of the tax payers foot the bill. Now, who decides where to make the purchase? Government officials. Note, I did not say "the government". I meant that this decision is made by specific people. Their motives may be laudable, but they cannot know the full and various motivations of the people whose money they are spending.

David Friedman gives a good explanation of Public Choice Theory in the second half of Chapter 19: The Political Marketplace of his book Price Theory: An Intermediate Text.

This just won't work. It may help somewhat. But the reason that competition works in the marketplace is that customers choose which product to buy and which company to buy from based on which best meets their needs. Those needs may be the lowest price, the best quality, the most conveniently located store, or any of a number of other factors.

Now, lets examine publically funded space programs. That's a good phrase, "publically funded". It tells us where the money is coming from. All of the tax payers foot the bill. Now, who decides where to make the purchase? Government officials. Note, I did not say "the government". I meant that this decision is made by specific people. Their motives may be laudable, but they cannot know the full and various motivations of the people whose money they are spending.

David Friedman gives a good explanation of Public Choice Theory in the second half of Chapter 19: The Political Marketplace of his book Price Theory: An Intermediate Text.

All systems based on violence and force (whether communism, fascism, or capitalism) exist through the use of the Nation State.

You do make a good point. Under a minarchist capitalist system, the Nation State enforces private property rights, giving it a monopoly on the use of force in that area.

What it all boils down to is whether private property is theft (wasn't it Bakunin that said that?) or private property is absolute (a la capitalism).

Without the Nation State, capitalism would collapse.

Not sure about that. Check David D. Friedman's site... he's perhaps the most prominent contemporary individualist anarchist (aka anarcho-capitalist). There are some good writings on his site, in which he explores various voluntary private institutions as replacements for coercive government ones. (private neighboorhood associations instead of county housing boards, for example)

It may have been coined originally by occasional Slashdot poster Leo Schwab for his Amiga demo of same name. It certainly helped to further popularize the term. The demo was a clever Robotron spoof.

As Bill Hicks said, "If you are in marketing or advertising... kill yourself."

If I were asked to answer the following question: WHAT IS SLAVERY? and I should answer in one word, IT IS MURDER, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: WHAT IS PROPERTY! may I not likewise answer, IT IS ROBBERY, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?

- Pierre Joseph Proudon, "What Is Property?"

Thus, the anarchists proclaim, "Property is theft," because the ownership of property by institutions (corporations, non-profits, governments, etc) deprives humanity of utilizing that property to their best ability.


Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a bogus news story about taxing blank digital media. It was born out of my blinding frustration that, in what should be a conspicuous, informed public debate, all the wrong people are being listened to.

I had no idea I was predicting the future.

Schwab

I've seen endless amounts of complaining on slashdot about the 'click here to agree' licenses that come with most commercial software. Some say they aren't binding and shouldn't be taken seriously. Why, then, should anybody take a license included with an open-source package seriously?

Shrinkwrap licenses attempt to tell you what you can do with a work, and draw their force from... er... nowhere in particular.

About all I can think of is working in a museum of some kind. If anyone out there just wants a nice reference site regarding the history of computers, the best one I have found is A Chronology of Digital Computing Machines. It stops at 1952, but the wealth of information regarding the predecessors to today's machines is very interesting.

Back when the CDA was passed (another execrable piece of legislation), there was a call to submit essays to a project called, "24 Hours of Democracy."

The keynote of my essay was that we, as human beings, failed in our duty to educate our fellow human about what it was we've created. Now it seems our isolationism -- nee elitism -- is coming back to bite us.

I made a promise at the end of my essay; I still stand by it. I invite others to make the pledge as well: Teach!!

Schwab

On the other hand, detailed, comprehensive, and well-thought-out arguments against the arguments on that Web site can be found on this Web site or perhaps this other one.
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I meant no disrepsect. I literally meant I'd rather use Dylan (even though it's noi longer supported).

Actually, the best language I've ever programmed in is NewtonScript created by Walter Smith who, ironically, later left Apple to work on Windows CE (now he works on Windows Update).

It's worth checking out (NewtonScript, that is. Not Windows Update).

Kevin Fox