Slashdot Mirror

See this "Roundtable" on copright, from the archives of The Atlantic Monthly. John Perry Barlow and Lawrence Lessig are among the participants.
--

At least Vannevar was a real visionary, working before networks and desktop computers had existed...

'There is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve teaching and learning, yet school districts are cutting programs-- music, art, physical education-- that enrich children's lives to make room for this dubious nostrum, and the Clinton Administration has embraced the goal of "computers in every classroom" with credulous and costly enthusiasm.'

I've wrestled with this a lot w.r.t. my kids. They both have had access to computers and the web growing up. I buy them "educational" software that they enjoy and use. But I do not think these programs are a substitute for hands-on tactile learning with adult teachers and mentors. Not at all. They are ever so slightly better than watching T.V. but not much better. Not as good as a really big mud puddle, or an any hill in the back yard, or a game of 'go fish' played with a friend...

The adults in their lives, especially the parents and teachers, are what matters. Just like it always has been. I'd much rather have my kids' school spend money to lower the teacher/student ratio than to invest in more computer hardware. No contest.

This isn't relevant to the topic of "Girl Geeks", except for clouding the discussion. Sommers' arguments tend to miss feminist points in a way that looks deliberate to me. Take for instance the that Atlantic Monthly article you linked ...

"today's girls outshine boys" (Sommers' words in my italics) because they "now outnumber boys in student government, in honor societies, on school newspapers, and in debating clubs". The skills practiced here are mostly social, not deeply technical. Actually so are many examples of girls' behavior illustrated in this article -- irrelevant to the subject of math/science education for girls.

Boys as a group probably have a different constellation of needs that aren't being met in the school system (as acknowledged not just by Sommers but by Sommer's feminist whipping girl Carol Gilligan). This doesn't disprove or contradict that girls with potential to excel in technical fields are shortchanged, only that boys are probably shortchanged in different ways.

That Summers chooses to characterize this issue as a "feminist" "War on Boys" strikes me as opportunistic and unnecessary, like she's looking for the big media attention that was given Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe (as opposed to the academics she criticizes but nobody reads). Even her Atlantic Monthly bio lists "tart essays about feminist disingenuousness" as one of her specialties. Nothing wrong with criticism & honest debunking, but she could address this issue without invoking her pet demon.

Sommers makes good points in that there are prejudices against boys, and attention needs to be given in schools to how they socialize, and they have special needs that different from girls. And it's obvious that Sommers care about boys a lot. But I'd be a lot more receptive to what she has to say if she didn't spend so much time vilifying feminism in general, and the American Association of University Women's "fishy" research (not my phrase, or even Sommers' come to think of it) in particular.

Here's a link to an NPR show with Christina Hoff Summers discussing her War Against Boys idea, with RealAudio. The host likes her a lot.
__________

This isn't relevant to the topic of "Girl Geeks", except for clouding the discussion. Sommers' arguments tend to miss feminist points in a way that looks deliberate to me. Take for instance the that Atlantic Monthly article you linked ...

"today's girls outshine boys" (Sommers' words in my italics) because they "now outnumber boys in student government, in honor societies, on school newspapers, and in debating clubs". The skills practiced here are mostly social, not deeply technical. Actually so are many examples of girls' behavior illustrated in this article -- irrelevant to the subject of math/science education for girls.

Boys as a group probably have a different constellation of needs that aren't being met in the school system (as acknowledged not just by Sommers but by Sommer's feminist whipping girl Carol Gilligan). This doesn't disprove or contradict that girls with potential to excel in technical fields are shortchanged, only that boys are probably shortchanged in different ways.

That Summers chooses to characterize this issue as a "feminist" "War on Boys" strikes me as opportunistic and unnecessary, like she's looking for the big media attention that was given Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe (as opposed to the academics she criticizes but nobody reads). Even her Atlantic Monthly bio lists "tart essays about feminist disingenuousness" as one of her specialties. Nothing wrong with criticism & honest debunking, but she could address this issue without invoking her pet demon.

Sommers makes good points in that there are prejudices against boys, and attention needs to be given in schools to how they socialize, and they have special needs that different from girls. And it's obvious that Sommers care about boys a lot. But I'd be a lot more receptive to what she has to say if she didn't spend so much time vilifying feminism in general, and the American Association of University Women's "fishy" research (not my phrase, or even Sommers' come to think of it) in particular.

Here's a link to an NPR show with Christina Hoff Summers discussing her War Against Boys idea, with RealAudio. The host likes her a lot.
__________

Ok. As most hypermedia people will know the notion of hyperlinks (Ted Nelsons term from the 60's?) has been around since 1945 when Vannevar Bush described the memex. See:

http://www.theatlantic.c om/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm

Now the question is since it was just described and not built does it count as prior art?

Ah... but even if not, then we only need to look to the Stanford Research Institute from the 60's when Englebart et al. showed off their system that included the mouse, and the "gui" with features that were very hypertext like. Now if I could only find the damn link to a description of it. Anyone?

dave

Have a look and see if your computer and monitor are together playing a diminshed second at you, and thus encouraging you to feel "active anguish in a context of flux".

Other segments were about Cyrano Science's Electronic Nose; a woman who, as frequently as Several dozen times a day, checks her breasts for cancerous lumps; a guy who has systematically gone to every restaurant on Pico Blvd. in LA (starting with Mr. Coleslaw Burger; and the fellow who has mapped the pumpkins, streetlights, overhead wires, street signs, newspaper mentions of addresses, and numerous other aspects of his neighborhood.

There was an extensive critique of university funding and its sources in the March 2000 Atlantic Monthly; it is online here. I agree with timholman, universities have been on the take for years. The university budgets and priorities are driven by research needs and not by some idealistic devotion to learning and tutelage.

I don't like Intel's actions here, but the guy holding the pursestrings gets to call the shots. It seems like they could have been more discreet about it, though.

Too late. Our respective governments have had such a monopoly on that for so long that there is already a huge number of objects up there in orbit. In 1963 the U.S. Air Force launched into orbit 400 million tiny needle-sized objects in a single experiment! Maybe that's why we see so few UFO's these days... ;)

Vannevar Bush's device he described in his article "As We May Think" from 1945.

Read about it here

Firstly the crucial case was heard in 1911. (Although the order to dissolve the trust - actually a deal with the railroad owners - was made in 1892)

In fact, consumers didn't benefit from the Standard breakup.

Considering that the charge they were found guilty of was price fixing, this statement is a little odd. The whole set up of Standard Oil was to use its monopoly in oil (90%+) to gain a stranglehold on the railways which prevented his competitors from being able to sustain margins.

Do not be mislead by the price of oil - the key in the price kerosene (in 1890 few people had cars). To quote from the Atlantic Monthly of 1881

To-day, in every part of the United States, people who burn kerosene are paying the Standard Oil Company a tax on every gallon amounting to several times its original cost to that concern.

Incidently, The Atlantic Monthly article is a good read, mainly because something 119 years old is still so relevent. Here is the closing paragraph

In less than the ordinary span of a life-time, our railroads have brought upon us the worst labor disturbance, the greatest of monopolies, and the most formidable combination of money and brains that ever overshadowed a state. The time has come to face the fact that the forces of capital and industry have outgrown the forces of our government. The corporation and the trades-union have forgotten that they are the creatures of the state. Our strong men are engaged in a headlong fight for fortune, power, precedence, success. Americans as they are, they ride over the people like Juggernaut to gain their ends. The moralists have preached to them since the world began, and have failed. The common people, the nation, must take them in hand. The people can be successful only when they are right. When monopolies succeed, the people fail; when a rich criminal escapes justice, the people are punished; when a legislature is bribed, the people are cheated. There is nobody richer than Vanderbilt except the body of citizens; no corporation more powerful than the transcontinental railroad except the corporate sovereign at Washington. The nation is the engine of the people. They must use it for their industrial life, as they used it in 1861 for their political life. The States have failed. The United States must succeed, or the people will perish.

If nothing else, it may help get the Microsoft thing into perspective.

Jamie McCarthy

There will always be trolls, as long as people keep taking themselves too seriously. Outside of the cold, hard concrete sequential world of C and UNIX type languages and operating systems, there are other kinds of fun to be had, and this is the realm of the troll.

Some see open source as an art form, but trolling is an art of an even higher level. I, for one, find nothing more satisfying than reading a JonKatz tirade, see the pathetic souls show the least bit of interest of said rant, then to browse further down, where "moo fuckaz", "MEEPT", or "first post" lurk. With the exception of the /. poll, the trolls rule the discussion board. Whether OSS truly is an art form/ant farm or not, trolling is. At its lowest levels, it's the agitating comedy of a stand-up hack. At its finest, the masters of Dadaism itself would stand back and admire it.

As trolling day comes to an end in CDT, I hope you have all enjoyed the production, and if not, you're the reason we're here. If you'd like to learn more about the trolls, or perhaps even join, you can visit our private thread. Thank you.

spiralx writes: Yes, but it's still incredibly difficult for an unknown artist to gain serious exposure or make more than a pittence on the net.

To be practical, I'd suggest that the artist should not depend only on the 'net for income, but use both old and new media at the same time.

I'm an unknown artist, a minor author of a well-known nerd book. I'm gaining serious exposure via the publisher making the book available on the net, and this is increasing the revenue from the "dead-tree" edition. Conventional books, you see, still have great value, so people happily buy them even though they can refer to them online as well.

And why did I and my publisher take this track? Because we know that the historical origin of copyright is really quite different from what some people would have you believe. A good article, and a sustained debate, lives here, at my favorite tree-based mag.

It starts with Charles C. Mann on Emmanuel Kant: "Every artistic work, he said, consists of a physical object and a piece of its creator's spirit. People can buy the object but not the spirit, for soul cannot be purchased. Thus readers can freely copy books, but only in ways that respect the writer's integrity".

Also check out the comments by Lawrence Lessig, of "Code" fame...

To be blunt, there is no theft taking place so long as the use is that which the author wanted. The contrary opinions of interested third parties does not change this.

The ambitious goal we should set for ourselfs is: Unlocking the knowledge of humanity.

A far more sophisticated system is need then napster to acomplish this. Such a system was first discussed by V.Bush in 1945. Napster is only about sharing standard mp3 files. UseNET is also all about distribution of information. Napster is dedicated for MP3, where UseNET allows distribution of text, audio, CDROM images, etc in all forms. The current traffic volumes are around 1 GByte / day ! Compared to this volume Napster is small, yett Napster is more usefull then the special news clients that gather all MP3s from a binairy newsgroup.

A very important feature lacking in both Napster and UseNET is advanced review and moderation. Slashdot is an example of how review should work: by the people and for the people. When the produkt is becoming more diverse the need for distingtion increases. The MP3 files of Napster are fairly standard. Only the quality of the encoder matters if you rip directly of the CD. For images things become more tricky. The resolution can be checked by simple scripts, but the overall image quality must always be rated by the users. The description, quality and content of video can be entered by the user colectively. Shashdot proves that a review mechnisms on text work effectively and gems of information can be distinghished. This information is the greatest challange. Currently there are tutotials for mastering the art of C, C++, java, perl, php3, etc. programming. It would be a great leap if such writings could evolve from the work of several people on the Internet, each contributing the unique piece of knowledge and experience they own.

We therefore need to add rating and review mechanisms to the open source Napsters that distribute the knowledge and information of humanity. The mechanism of karma, and score's for the content need to be refined for the various types of information.

With such a mechanism copyright issues are no longer relevant and information can flow and evolve freely. To pay the people for their work it must be possible to send small amount of money directly to the people, instead of the big amount of money that is currently asked by the media industry. This small transfer of money should be optional.

Just my 5 eurocents,
Johan.

Actually, Office and Windows are both huge cash cows for Microsoft. For an inside perspective on Microsoft read this: Inside the Leviathan

Here's a quote:

"Financial analysts have long recognized that Microsoft's profit really comes from two sources. One is operating systems (Windows, in all its varieties), and the other is the Office suite of programs. Everything else -- Flight Simulator, Slate, MSNBC, mice and keyboards -- is financially meaningless."

As this article states, MS doesn't really care about the individual desktop, but rather the large volume customers. When computer distributors, such as Dell, look for a standard office suite to include with their Windows AND Linux computers, MS will be in a better position since the can support both platforms. When a large Fortune 500 customer is looking for an office suite, MS will be in a better position because they support Windows, Mac and now Linux.

If Linux starts to make large gains in the desktop market, you can bet that Microsoft will be there with their own distribution as well. Why not start hedging their bets with Office now. Of course, I would also expect that their dist would have proprietary additions and that MS apps would work better or have additional features with MS Linux.

The poster didn't make me angry, just made me feel the strong need to point out that he or she had a misconception as to what liberal thinkers think- a misconception that I think you might share. That people are all identical with respect to ability- that every single person has the same abilities as every other person- is obviously false. If you're born with no arms you clearly got a worse deal than your two-armed brothers and sisters. I am a fairly liberal guy (where "fairly liberal" means that I'm the sort of person Rush Limbaugh would want to burn at the stake), and I've heard a lot of liberal intellectuals argue, and I've never heard anyone seriously argue that all children are born identical with respect to abilities. What I have heard many times is that there's a very strong social component to success that often gets ignored by people who benefit from unfair social systems. It is easier to imagine, as The Bell Curve did, that black people are inferior as a race than to imagine that there could be a big invisible system that all of us participate in that is reflected even in IQ tests. But being easier to imagine doesn't make it true- for a plausible and very interesting alternative, read this article by a noted psychologist (I've posted the same link elsewhere on this topic, but it's really interesting and therefore worth repeating).

Of course I can't quote you as saying "women are dumb"- that's why my post is a parody of yours rather than a quotation of it. My point in parodying you was to to illustrate that the thinking behind your post was tacitly sexist.

To address your objection to my post- you say that I want you to "[go] along with the claim that women are at a disadvantage in education," but I think you'll find if you reread my posting that I made no such suggestion. All I did was point out the claim that you yourself made that women were unfairly being helped in academia- specifically that their grades were being boosted. In your words: "I suspect that the reason women do better in academia while men do better at standardized tests and in real-world jobs is that it's easier to rig the academic system to favor a preferred sex."

Incidentally, there are many reasons why one might believe that rather than the academic system being unfairly stacked towards women, standardized tests and the work force are unfairly stacked towards men (though I'm sure that you know that, considering that you are such an expert on feminism). For an idea of how standardized tests like the SAT might be stacked against a particular group, read this article which appeared in Atlantic Monthly a while back- a rather famous stereotype psychologist's discussion of that issue, explaining why white students do better than black students in higher education (hint: he takes a different stance than The Bell Curve did). As for jobs- that women hold nearly none of the uppermost positions in business (despite, as you point out, their educational levels) is widely known. Reasons? Amply documented. Women are promoted less often than men of the same ability levels, are frequently kept out of the social groups that form upper-level power networks ("good old boys' networks"), have to do "two jobs" (housework, which is still done mostly by women, even though those same women work the same hours that their husbands do), and are in general thought of as less competent than their male counterparts.

I volunteer time in my kids K-5 school and have helped develop and use the school's computer network -- so I am no Luddite or anti-tecnologist myself. But I do believe that both Stohl and Oppenhiemer are right on the money when they talk about how computers in schools are oversold and that good schools will continue to require good teachers -- indefinitely.

Some in this audience may have benefited greatly from computers in school, but I would bet that even those individuals would not have succeeded in their educations without direct, face to face, interactions with caring educators in a school building. These are very bacis human needs that cannot be fulfilled by any computing machinery or software -- especially in early education.

Both Atlantic Monthly and U.S. News have had thought-provoking articles on this topic recently.

However, this is predicated upon a number of factors, chief among them that world-wide trends will follow the path laid out by us in the first world.

Here's how it has worked here: at around the turn of the century, our life spans here started to go way up; then we all started to get better educated and most of us started putting off having kids til later in life. Then in the middle of the century, women all of a sudden got sick of hanging out at home cleaning up and cooking. So they all went off to college and got jobs, and all of a sudden first-worlders stopped having kids, cause we were all too busy getting smart, getting rich, and having protected sex.

Try to imagine this scenario in India/China/Malawi/Nigeria.

There is no middle class of any substantial size (>20%/population) in any of these countries, and there won't be anytime soon. Therefore the populations will not start shrinking anytime soon. Therefore, when American population has shrunk to 100m, (which it will, barring unforseen catastrophes), most of the world will still be accelerating into a hell-hole of environmental destruction and continued overpopulation.

Yes, there are positive scenarios out there, but no, they are not realistic unless there is a fundamental shift in the way the first world deals with the third world (i.e. reduces exploitation in favor of assistance).

Also, please note that most of the prophets of a smaller world are working for extreme right-wing foundations. The slashdot cited article was by the American Enterprise Institute (radical free market types) and the article I cited was by somebody from the Hudson Institute (very conservative think tank)

That doesn't mean they are wrong, it just means they are all coming from a similar ideological perspective, which, despite protestations to the contrary, CAN affect how science is interpreted.

James Billington, a Library of Congress librarian and author pointed out in a commencement address at American University that early on, the TV was lauded as having fantastic potential for education. Now it's the babysitter.

A similar thing is happening on the internet -- less information content and more eye candy -- and it's not just because the marketing monkeys are pushing it. Those of the mode want it, or it wouldn't be that way. THAT is capitalism. The means that people employ to make the money (the capitalists) are manifestations not of their own rotting souls, but of the tastes of the general public. In the words of George Carlin (explaining why we have such terrible politicans to choose from) "Maybe it's the public that sucks."

I agree that the internet stands to be better than the TV, as it is not restricted to finite channels controlled by marketers, or governments, appealing to or controlling the majority. It can be this way only if people are free to build any sort of webpage they want, i.e. laissez-faire. I suppose capitalism has become a bad word, but its real meaning is the closer ideology to the spirit of the internet.

It should be kept in mind, however, that such Industrial Age economic/cultural terms will cease to have much meaning in a few decades. We are on the crest of Alvin Toffler's third wave. As Peter Drucker pointed out in a piece in October's Atlantic Monthly, it's likely that we will need to live in the Age of Information for a few decades before life with computers, biotechnology, etc. will have so shaped our thinking that our cultural institutions evolve into those which will be characteristic of the Third Age. Toffler predicts that many of these institutions (economics, government, family, etc) will be more similar to the first Age (the agrarian age) than the second (the Industrial age). Eric Raymond's essays are particularly interesting to me for this reason--he likens many aspects of the evolving culture to forgotten philopsophies. The collection of analyses really suggest a movement towards thinking and acting in ways which transcend "capitalism".

---------
Once in a while you get shown the light,

Internet Overview

• Internet Timeline

Technical History

• Charles Spurgeon's Ethernet Web Site (several Ethernet historical documents here).
• I have a printed copy of an ALOHANET analysis, but can't seem to find one online.

Concept History

• As We May Think
• Project Xanadu ("Computer Lib/Dream Machines")
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar

While kings once granted monopolies to printers, copyright is quite a different beast, and one that is hardly related at all to royal grants to printers.

Copyright is based on the principles that

• once published, information is free
• encouraging broad publication requires a short-term grant of property rights to the publisher

In effect, this means that the originators of copyright like Emmanuel Kant had the same basic belief as Richard Stallman of "copyleft" fame: that information wants to be free. And it's that principle that makes copyleft acheivable, and puts the lie to the "abbreviated" history that Mr. Long has quoted to prejustify his conclusions.

Mr. Long could not legitimately conclude that copyright (freedom of infomation) should be replaced with civil law (perpetual ownership of information) if he knew or cited the real history of copyright.

See also The Atlantic magazine Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Copyright" for a non-revisionist view and a spirited debate on the subject, and Wired magazine, The Copyright Grab for an essay on (Mr. Long's preferred?) initiative to eliminate copyright.

"Serious books, which have ever taken longer to sell, were especially vulnerable ..., and publishers stopped issuing them. Instead they produced gossipy, libelous pamphlets, which flew off the shelves before anyone could counterfeit them. As for the great texts of the Enlightenment, ... once legalized and freed for all to copy and sell, they fell out of print." ( http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/ 98sep/copy.htm)

For more detail, see Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris by Carla Hesse

Freeman Dyson is like a lot of futurists in that most of his ideas are never gonna happen. Still, they're awful fun to think about and open up new doors for the rest of us; allow us to go in direction that we'd never consider otherwise.

The last thing I saw from him was an article called " Warm-Blooded Fish and Freeze-Dried Fish", where he talks about using custom-built plants to facilitate human exploration of the Universe.

I think the best thing about him, though, is that he looks far enough ahead that he's escaping talking about the impact of e-commerce or harping on the internet (unlike Ester Dyson, whose book felt like serious review).

----

On the other hand, Bill Gates can only dream of being a technology visionary. The most important quality of such a tech visionary is not the foresight of new technology. Bush's ideas on the implementation of the Memex device are quaint by today's standards, to say the least. Yet his view of the problem and its solution persists. On this basis, I would suggest that the principal quality of the visionary is the ability to clearly isolate important problems.

It is on this last point that I see Gates' greatest failing as visionary. His problems are simply not that profound, which makes his solutions necessarily lackluster. Furthermore, the management figures who read Gates' book should also read RISKS-related writings to temper their image of a rosy digital future.

As a parting shot, I am sorely disappointed in the quality of these two reviews. Would a review of The Artists' Guide to the Gimp have flown that freely admitted to never having read the book?

In my original post to Slashdot, boldly titled I Got News for All of You, I made the following rash, unsubstantiated claim:

Overlapping windows were thought up in the '40s, the mouse in the '50s, and WYSIWYG in the '60s, before PARC existed.

A clever Anonymous Coward noted that I was a dumbass and provided no references to back up my statements. Some might argue that merely saying, "You didn't document your sources so what you say is shit!" fails to constitute stimulating intellecutal discourse. It's nothing more than small-minded heckling.

Some might even suggest that you can provide a counter proposition of your own, and if you then "up the ante" and back your own position with documented sources, you've pretty effectively proven your point and made your opponent look like a hothead besides.

I would like to thank my anonymous benefactor for not doing that to me, because I made several mistakes. Then again, within the context of the discussion, I believe the A.C. was implicitly defending the position that the whole WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers; a shorthand for describing the essential ingredients of a modern GUI) shebang was invented at Xerox PARC, which would be even more wrong than I was.

My primary source of information is the book (please forgive me) Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything, by Steven Levy. Sure, it's about the Mac, but really, how can you have any kind of meaningful discussion of GUI based computing without mentioning the Mac?

Yes, I was wrong. It was not multiple windows that were invented in the 1940s, it was information surfing. Vannevar Bush, in his July 1945 Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think describes the sort of ad-hoc, stream-of-consciousness, associative method that characterizes the way we access information on the Web. Bush envisioned a work station with multiple screens, not multiple windows.

I was also wrong about the mouse being invented in the 1950s. Douglas Englebart didn't invent the mouse until the mid 1960s, when he was at SRI. Here's an interesting Smithsonian Institution interview with Douglas Englebart.

Sometime after 1966, Alan Kay at the University of Utah (later to join PARC) designed a "personal" computer called Flex that featured high-resolution graphics, icons and multiple windows. However, Kay himself admits (in Insanely Great) its interface was "repellent to users." Kay went on to work on the Alto and Macintosh.

In his own words, Jeff Raskin developed an idea for a graphical, multi-font WYSIWYG computer interface based on a bitmapped display in the mid-1960s, which is described in his 1967 Penn State thesis, A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System. I couldn't find a link to the thesis itself, but it is referenced in the database of the Software Patent Institute Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple.

Xerox PARC was founded in the year 1970. According to Levy, the Alto prototype was built at the end of 1972. Here's a nice A HREF="http://www.research.microsoft.com/users/blam pson/38-AltoSoftware/WebPage.html">artic le about the Alto.

Here is another interesting site with a number of links to articles on History of Computing

So, in the end, I was wrong about multiple windows, wrong about the mouse, right about WSIWYG, and right about all of these existing before the creation of PARC. I apologize for not checking my facts before posting.

Finally, to my "small-minded heckler", thank you.