Slashdot Mirror

He said:

This is an interesting way for the internet community to police itself with respect to behaviour that people find objectionable. As anonymous digital transactions become more commonplace, one's reputation may be one's most valuable asset, just as it is in the world of on-line auctions. Systems which tie one's actions back to one's online identity help maintain the strength of these sorts of reputation effects.

And in a separate comment:

As Tim May once pointed out, it's always easier to shed a bad online reputation than to build a good reputation. Someone with a bad rep can just change his or her online handle and start with a clean slate. This is one of the major weaknesses of using reputation effects to punish bad behaviour (as opposed to reward good behaviour.)

-- Diana Hsieh

After reading the Slashdot comments, I dedided not to run the story on GeekPress because I didn't want to give such silliness any more readers.

Nevertheless, the rebuttal was good, a worthwhile article in its own right.

-- Diana Hsieh

Working on GeekPress has been depressing in one way: the absurdity of the legal decisions over technical and internet issues. The judges sitting on the bench are often too ignorant of how the internet works to render any good decisions.

I remember trying to explain to my grandmother the real basics of how a computer works: just the file-folder analogy. She couldn't get it, not matter how many ways I tried to explain it. It was pathetic. With each bad decision, I think: that judge must be just like my grandmother!

Perhaps all judges who are to sit in judgment of an internet or computer-related case should have to show that they can at least use a mouse.

-- Diana Hsieh

A more general question: Should people care who their startups/web sites get sold to? Is it moral to sell to just anyone?

When I started GeekPress, I wasn't opposed to at some later point selling to the highest bidder, whoever that would be. But as the site has grown, I've gotten fairly attached to it. I'm not sure under what circumstances and to whom I would be willing to sell it at this point.

The meat of the question: How much would Microsoft have to pay for your web site?

-- Diana Hsieh

Another, related issue that I have been pondering since I posted this article on the longevity of MP3 to GeekPress is how much the music industry has contributed to the rise of Napster by not giving people other options. Currently, the music industry makes people pay exorbitant amounts for a block of music, even when the consumer only wants a single song. And if the CD sucks, too bad, you can't return it.

Napster isn't just about getting free music. It's about being able to acquire a single song at a time. It's about getting it in a format where it's easy to play 20 of your favorite songs. The music industry just hasn't been willing to provide these last two features. And the danger in that for the music industry, of course, is that people will continue to download songs from Napster and quickly get used to getting music for free.

-- Diana Hsieh

Nominal privacy would offer some protection for such mildly sensitive data.

-- Diana Hsieh

As far as I understand, the judge has made the ruling, but has not explained it. Perhaps others who have followed the trial can answer this question:

Was the judge's ruling based on (1) the idea that MP3.com didn't provide adequate safeguards to prevent piracy or (2) that owners of a CD do not have the right to download the songs?

If the answer is #1 (inadequate safegaurds), that seems absurd, as MP3.com (from what I understand from other posters) sampled bits from the whole CD, essentially making it difficult to illegally download without having already illegally copied the CD.

If the answer is #2 (no right to download what already own), I'm even more concerned. Such a precendent would put Napster et al in legal quicksand, for then there would be very little legal activity ocurring through Napster at all. (I, for example, have used Napster to download a number of songs that I already own on CD. But if the judge ruled based on #2, then those downloads were just as illegal as my (theoretical, of course) downloads from albums that I don't own.)

There is another possibility, (3) that it is okay for users to download songs they already own from third parties, but illegal for third parties to offer such downloads without permission from the owner of the song.

This third possibility strikes me as strange, for if a consumer has a right to a good, then it should not be illegal for someone (who cares who) to provide that good to them! (Such legal twisting reminds me of cases where it is legal to buy drugs but not legal to sell them or legal to buy sex, but not legal to sell it.)

I'll be very interested to see this ruling when it comes out. The precedents that it sets could have a huge impact on other pending and future lawsuits.

-- Diana Hsieh

(This comment was also posted to GeekPress.)

Let me first say that I'm not much of an advocate of copyrights. But Stallman's anti-copyright arguments seemed fairly bizarre to me.

(1) Stallman says that the original purpose of copyright was to "encourage the publication of a diversity of written works."

My understanding has been that copyright was designed to encourage the writing of a diversity of works, by rewarding the authors monetarily. With copyright, in fact, fewer writings might be published, because publishers have to pay for the privilege.

(2) Stallman argues that with electronic versions of books, "the publishers realized that by forcing people to use specially designated software to read e-books, they can gain unprecedented power: they can compel readers to pay, and identify themselves, every time they read a book!"

So according to Stallman, there are two problematic issues: being forced to pay every time and the lack of anonymity.

As for the first, if publishers charge as much for e-books as they do for paper books, people simply will not buy. The price will have to be dramatically lower to compensate for the (current) inconvenience of an e-book. (Additionally, it would violate people's sense of fairness to have to pay a similar price for an e-book, when the publisher obviously has eliminated the cost of printing.)

The anonymity issue is somewhat trickier. But some publishers (or resellers) will provide people with anonymity if they desire it.

(3) What Stallman ends up advocating is some kind of direct micropayments to the author. In some nagware-like fashion, we will be prompted to give the author a dollar if we like the book.

Well, Stallman might be willing to click the okay button, but I doubt that such a scheme would produce reliable-enough profits for authors (let alone publishers). I do not know of any highly successful businesses that work on this model, although I'd be delighted to hear if some existed.

(4) Overall, it seems that Stallman misses the real revolution that could arrive with e-books: the elimination of large, overbearing publishers altogether. If there is no printing to be done, authors could choose to deal directly with the public, setting whatever terms they liked for the sale of their books. There would be more experimentation, more variety than publishers would ever allow. And authors that adopted terms of sale that were most conducive to the public's palette would sell more books. They could offer anonymity, micropayments, pay-if-you-liked-it schemes, special deals to loyal readers, and all kinds of other goodies that we have yet to even imagine.

One reason why authors might like to bypass publishers is that the interests of authors and the interests of publishers are not always aligned. Publishers want to sell as many books as possible. Authors want to do that too, but they also often want to (a) get their ideas out into the public forum, (b) build a reputation for themselves, and (c) build a loyal fan base. For that reason, we might see great innovation in book selling from authors than we currently see from publishers.

(5) Additionally, e-books could go the way of many internet services: free if you're willing to view targeted advertising, pay if you want the no-ad version. Such selling methods would still have to develop ways to prevent people from copying files, but the incentive to make unauthorized duplicates would be greatly reduced by having free versions available.

I do agree with Stallman that copyrights, at best, are for a prior era. But hopefully nagware e-books aren't the only future.

-- Diana Hsieh

So my question is: Is the web browsing good enough that I could do simple updating of a news review site? Do enough news sites have Palm-friendly versions? Or should I just get a cellular modem for the very portable Sony Viao I already have? Any thoughts?

-- Diana Hsieh

Two interesting passages from the article are included below:

"Stoll rejects the idea that students need to use computers intensively and at an early age to become computer literate. In fact, he says, the computer skills needed by adults in the modern world are relatively few and easily learned. A high school graduate should be able to use a word-processing program, be familiar with spreadsheets and data bases, and be comfortable sending e-mail and browsing the Web. Stoll says these are skills that are easily mastered in a few weeks and hardly require a battery of computers in every classroom from kindergarten through 12th grade."

"Stoll argues that students raised on video games and television need less exposure to image-filled screens, not more, if they are to be engaged in the tough task of meaningful learning. 'The computer promotes the expectation that anything can be made more fun,' he said. 'But many things important in life are, unfortunately, difficult to learn and require a great deal of mental effort. Innovative technology will make it appear to be fun. But try to make school into a fun, entertaining experience and you will gut the very essence of learning.'"

I tend to agree with Stoll on these two points, although I am a computer junkie myself (of course). I have yet to see any computer program that does as well in teaching as a good teacher does. A teacher can interact with the child and address misunderstandings in a way that no compter program currently can.

There are certain aspects of learning that computers may be useful for, such as showing complicated graphs that can't be easily drawn on the board or quizzing students to help them memorize addition tables or French vocabulary. But these tasks require a computer lab and computers available for teachers to "rent" for a given class, not computers for every child.

-- Diana Hsieh

As I posted on GeekPress: According to a BBC article, researchers at the University of Massachusetts have made two major advances towards creating nanomachines from matter: a glue to group particles into highly ordered clusters and the capacity to move single atoms at room temperature. Looks like it's going to be a while before DNA rewriters replace colored contact lenses, though.

-- Diana Hsieh

My site, GeekPress deep links to news on other sites, like slashdot. My hope is simply that those links will be regarded as bringing users into the site that might not have otherwise arrived.

One more thought: Why doesn't ticketmaster block or redirect incoming traffic from tickets.com? Shouldn't technical remedies come before legal ones?

-- Diana Hsieh