Professors, and the institutions, are asserting an intellectual property right to a student's notes on the content of lectures. They're dreaming. No such right exists.
Intellectual property rights only apply to ideas that have been reduced to fixed form. Fixed form means "written down" or "recorded"--only the fixed form of an idea is protected by copyright, the idea itself is not. Until the idea is reduced to fixed form it is just so much hot air.
For example, suppose I get up on stage and present a hilarious, moving expression--in rap--of the tribal customs of my ancestors (Scots) entitled "Getting Naked and Painting My Body Blue". If I have written those rap lyrics down beforehand, I can assert an intellectual property right. If you copy them down and repeat them, I can sue. But if I just start shouting extemporaneously, I have no rights--the words have not been reduced to fixed form.
An excellent example of this was Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. Consider how many times you have heard that speech. Now ask yourself--why don't Dr. King's children collect royalties on that speech? They can't--King spoke extemporaneously. The written copies of the speech were made from film footage of the event.
In the case of classroom notes the situation is made even easier--the written notes reflect the creative work of the note-taker. Suppose that you and I attend a lecture by Prof. Chris Berman at the University of Bristol. My notes might include lots of information about what Berman wore, what the lecture hall looked like, whether he looked smaller or larger than he appears on TV, and what the general reaction of the audience was. Your notes might indicate what Berman actually said. The difference between my notes and yours is the creative content that you and I add. And what each of us reduces to fixed form is our intellectual property.
But wait, there's more... The university isn't just wrong in asserting that it owns the rights to the notes--it is wrong to assert in its code of conduct that students do not. Unless a student surrenders his intellectual property rights to all creative work when he enrolls, the university is infringing upon his rights to dispense with his property (his creative work) for however much he can make.
This coming interview has been puffed all week by SlashDot--the promos hinting broadly that a real fight was brewing. There was a certain prize-fight atmosphere about the promos, and about RobLimo's introduction. In the one corner we have a tag team of really rude dudes trash-talking and waving; in the center of the ring we have Rob and RobLimo taunting the crowd to even-more-frenzied fits of outrage, and in the other corner, swaggering through the crowd, comes the Evil Villain, dressed in a black mask and cape, to do battle with the Rude D00dz.
It seems to me that, cast in the role of the Villain of this little drama, JP had the grace to enjoy the part.
He was calm, he was reasonably dispassionate, he was irenic, and he basically whupped the Rude D00dz. He thanked the promoters for inviting him, and he proceeded to out-rude the Rude D00dz by essentially blowing them off. He then proceeds to employ a brilliant bit of pro wrestling showmanship--he takes on the crowd. He insults them by calling them stupid, he taunts them by daring them to hack his site, he flaunts his Bad Boy bona fides by repeatedly emphasizing his FBI connections, and he flirts with them by suggesting that attempting to hack his site only makes him more successful. About the only thing he didn't do was sell "I Hate JP" t-shirts. Epic stuff.
The really good villains in pro wrestling know how to play the game. They know--and the promoters know--that the crowd doesn't pay to see the good guys. The crowd pays to see the bad guys. And Rob went and found a terrific bad guy for this week's Friday Night Fights. JP gets more notoriety (which only enhances his reputation with his clientele), JP gets tons of new attacks on his servers (which he sells to his clientele), and RobM gets hundreds of thousands of banner ad impressions. Each of 'em makes out like a bandit.
And the Rude D00dz? They're left standing there, in the corner, wondering what happened to them. Maybe JP will have some sympathy, and send each of 'em a t-shirt.
Yahoo's patent seems to be the work of, well, some dumb yahoo. The concept of caching content locally to cut down on server load (and network traffic) has been around for decades.
Slashdot, yesterday, carried an item about Hotmail joining the spam Black Hole list. It seems to me that one way to put an end to this patent silliness is to do the same thing: block email from known patent abusers. Block unisys.com, yahoo.com, etc.--and give the software patent enthusiasts the option of continuing to abuse the system or be able to connect to the rest of the world.
I have already blocked unisys.com from my network, due to the GIF nonsense. (Not without pain--a major client uses Unisys A-series and Clearpath servers.) I'll block yahoo.com too if it turns out that they have any dream of enforcing this.
As Arlo Guthrie once pointed out, if just one person does this they'll think he's crazy. And if two people do it they'll think they're both [well, we'll just skip what he said, since it ain't considered genteel these days]. But imagine, my friends, imagine if dozens of people, hundreds of people block domains that use software patents. Why, they'll think its a movement....
Write an HTML page that explains why you won't permit connects to Yahoo, post it, and redirect any Yahoo links to that page. The power of the boycott is the most effective weapon you have.
Hasn't anybody here studied the history of technology? Nobody--none of us--have the slightest clue what the next twenty, or ten, years of technology will bring. Will every toaster and waffle iron have its own IPv6 address? Will every clueless end user have to remember the gateway IP address, and how to connect a new appliance to the household DHCP server?
Well, let's back up a hundred years. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone he did not have the faintest notion of "phone tag", let alone "phone sex." The telephone instrument was placed in the front room of any house wealthy enough to own one. When exchange interconnection happened (so you could call from one exchange to another) newspapers worried that women wouldn't be able to deal with the complexity of remembering the exchange name and the phone number--chaos would reign. When long distance service began people used to dress in their best clothes before placing a long distance phone call.
The great-grandchildren of these people have no trouble with cell phones, digital cell phones, pagers, and fax machines. Many of them are capable of direct-dialing international calls (particularly if there is phone sex involved.) Several of them are capable of dealing with modems.
The same is true of automobiles, airplanes, trucks, and electricity.
Where we'd headed, IMHO, is a world with (from our perspective) infinite MIPS and infinite bandwidth. Where software is much more a product of interaction among agents, rather than the result of a single monolithic program. Those agents will give all the devices we use a dramatically different level of sophistication than we can fathom--and it will be relatively easy for those agents to establish trust relationships with other agents.
In less than 100 years we have gone from an era of hand-cranked phones to a time when people put you on hold because their other cell phone line needs to connect to the in-car fax machine. In the next 10 years we'll see business and home appliances go from X.10 to a world we simply can't imagine today.
Will there be bumps on the road? Yup. Will some script kiddies scare the daylights out of Gary North, Mike Hyatt, Ed Yourdon, and the rest of the Year 2000 Chicken Littles? Undoubtedly--they'll be wringing their hands in public about that by January (they've already started--all the Y2K remediation has just given foreign agents the ability to plant time bombs in our computer code!) Maybe you or I will make a fortune solving the problem.
But when we get there, we'll shake our heads in wonder at how much 2000 will seem to be just like the Stone Age. We'll tell our kids (or in my case, my grandchildren) about life today--and they won't believe a word we say.
Uh, let's not get too excited by this. Compaq in Australia (as elsewhere in the Pacific Rim) is an amalgam of Compaq, Digital, and Tandem. Digital and Tandem might easily be a bigger portion of the customer base in a lot of parts of the area than Compaq has been. (Compaq Japan is firmly established--but Digital has been solid in Asia for a long time.)
That 50% of Compaq customers have done pilots with Linux probably says more about those customers' perception of the future of Digital Unix than it does about NT.
I find the whole blind-bashing thing simply discouraging. A lot of SlashDot readers are youngsters, and kids tend to think of themselves as immortal. But kids also tend to seize the mantle of compassion and respect and decency--they just presume to hold the moral high ground in any conversation.
And what do we see here? Hundreds--hundreds of the best and brightest on the Internet flaming away at the notion that blind people might want to participate on the Internet.
Extremely discouraging to read. I really thought these people were better than that....
My congratulations on your post--a splendid example of shooting off your mouth without pausing to think first.
I'm a whole whopping 21 years old, and do you see me sue-crazy like the rest of the damned upper class schmucks who don't know what else to do with they're money other than smoke crack and shoot heroin? Fuck all of them. Grow up, and get on with it. Stop impeding the progress of one of the greatest technologically advenced nations in the world with this same old bullshit. The masses have had enough. Give it up you dumb schmucks.
That you're 21 doesn't surprise me in the slightest. That you have absolutely zero sympathy for people with disabilities suggests strongly that you are white, male, American, and healthy. You don't have any form of disability, and you don't know anybody (or care about anybody) that does.
Someday, possibly, you will grow up.... ...and when you do, you may discover yourself falling "through the Looking Glass" as we say, into the world of the disabled. Maybe you'll get married, and your wife will have a car accident when she's pregnant. Maybe you and she will get stupid and do the Natural Childbirth thing--eschewing hospitals for a whole wheat birth experience at home. A swell idea, right up until the baby can't get oxygen. Or maybe you'll have a "normal" birth, only to visit the next morning and hear your pediatrician ask the most ominous question you'll ever hear:
By any chance...did your wife have amniocentesis before the baby was born?
And then you might discover that it's your child that doesn't qualify for heart surgery--because she doesn't fit the Aryan profile. And it's your child that doesn't get to go to school, because she doesn't fit the Aryan profile. And it's your child that doesn't get to play at the park, or attend multiple-story schools, or event use the toilet on an airplane. And then maybe you might discover that there are people out there don't have all the advantages you have.
I have my own reservations about the ADA. It drives me crazy when people who ought to know better use the ADA as a means of extorting money--and frankly, that's what I think this NFB suit is. Should AOL use ALT tags? Yup. Does Shockwave make a website unreadable to the blind? Yup--and companies that make their sites unreadable deserve to have their contempt publicized. But what is happening here is simple extortion: AOL will settle this by becoming a corporate sponsor of the NFB, the NFB will reap thousands (millions?) and AOL will write off the expense as Danegeld. (Coastal villages in Britain used to pay the Vikings off so they wouldn't ransack the town.)
But what really scares me about the ADA is the knee-jerk reaction of reactionary jerks like you. I worry all the time about the eventual backlash against Special Ed funding and Mental Health/Mental Retardation programs, and I wonder when people will start thinking publicly about saving public funds by "euthanizing" these poor, suffering little victims. People like Peter Singer (at Princeton) and the L.A. chapter of MENSA are already saying it. And all they need is the unwitting assistance of a lot of healthy, white, male 21-year-olds with no sense of social responsibility....
Great--they've apologized. And they're issuing a patch so people can prevent data from being transmitted. And they've updated their privacy statement (presumably to "you have no privacy.")
They've explained that they needed to know what CD you were playing in order to get playlist data from a third-party database. I don't seem to see any explanation of why the program scanned your hard drive for personal information, and the number and names of any MP3s you had.
And consider how many users of RealJukebox don't read SlashDot (or don't read, period). How many people will install the patch? How many people will read the new privacy statement?
RealNetworks did not say, "oops. We'll stop doing that, and we'll never do it again." What they said, instead, was:
Nonetheless the company will cease the collection of the type of data that led to the privacy concerns raised until such time as the company enhances how it provides for clear informed consent."
Which is manifestly not the same thing.
What they should do is build new server components that are not compatible with existing installs in the field. Serve a page indicating that "to download a version of RealJukebox that doesn't invade your privacy, click here", and ship a version that specifically warns the user of the privacy risks and requires the user to specifically opt IN--not out--in order to use the Trojan Horse features.
Internet voting is just as dumb an idea as Oregon's experiment with vote-by-mail.
Lovely concept. Stupid idea. Permit me to explain.
I'm a geek. But I'm also involved in politics. The first election I volunteered for was an election for mayor of Boston in 1967. My (widowed) mother used to date Mike Dukakis. I worked for the McGovern National Campaign Committee in 1972, and have worked on political campaigns every year since 1977. I have spent 6 years as an elected official.
Elections, by their very nature, must be a public process. Each and every voter must personally appear in the polling place--or place his or her signed ballot on a public bulletin board in that polling place (absentee ballots) or the system is open to fraud. When you go to vote tomorrow (today!) you will step up to a poll worker. That worker will announce your name out loud--ideally so everyone in the room can hear it. One or more other people will check your name off lists of registered voters. And somebody might--possibly ask if you're the Joe Schlibozel who lives downstairs from that nice Hispanic couple, the Rodriguezes?
The first pollworker is a member of one party. The second pollworker at the table is a member of the opposite party. The person who asks a question may have noticed that you haven't voted before, and it is unusual for new voters to turn up in a general election when no federal offices are at stake. What all of them are doing is keeping the system honest.
Internet voting (and vote-by-mail) make cheating so easy it will take all the fun out of stealing elections. One of the interesting facts of politics is that you can go down the voter rolls (sometimes called "street lists") and you'll discover that there are 200 registered Republicans at one address; and there are 325 registered Democrats at another address. What gives? Both addresses are nursing homes--and there's either a resident or an employee who has signed every single resident up. They come around with the form all filled out, possibly after medications are dispensed, and ask for a signature. "We need this to help you vote, Mr. Schlibozel...." So the addled Mr. Schlibozel signs the form.
It's a registration form, plus a request for an absentee ballot. When the ballots come in the mail the helpful person visits Mr. Schlibozel and asks him who he wants for president. And most probably *will* punch the block for Mr. Schlibozel's choice. But Mr. Schlibozel almost certainly will not have an opinion on the ballot questions, or the judicial candidates, or the local municipality candidates--"so we'll just leave those blank, okay, Mr. Schlibozel?"
Later, after all 325 absentee ballots have been filled out and signed, the helpful volunteer goes back through the stack. And punches the blocks for all the "right" judicial candidates and municipal candidates, and ballot questions, etc.
Take it from me--if you see an election with thousands of absentee ballots in a single congressional district, there is vote fraud.
You can catch that kind of fraud. But vote-by-mail and Internet voting make it too easy to cheat. Suppose you run a flophouse (nowadays we call them SRO--single room occupancy hotels). You have the flotsam and jetsam of life--and chances are several are behind on their rent. You offer a choice--sign this blank ballot, or pay up on your rent. Or sign this blank ballot, and I'll turn your water back on.
And suddenly we're back in the Victorian era, when wealthy landlords in England "owned" seats of Parliament because they effectively controlled enough of the voters to guarantee the results of any election.
The problem of "voter apathy" is bogus--there is no such problem. We do have a similar problem: "motor voter" registration laws. It is now practically impossible to renew your driver's license without also registering to vote. That doesn't mean that you actually show up to be involved--you just got your license renewed, and the DMV handed you the form. The same people as always still show up to vote--but the motor voters stay home. The "turnout rate" is lower--but in fact the same number of voters as always has come to the polls. Bag motor voter, stop wasting money at the county registrar's, and keep the public voting system intact.
John Murdoch (In point of fact, I am aware of a number of methods to steal elections--but I have never actually used any of them.)
I installed a set of printers in a client's office in Tokyo, and named them after Disney characters. The Japanese staff simply couldn't believe that their printers were named Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. I went to Tokyo Disneyland that weekend, bought little dolls, and attached them to each printer with Velcro. The office ladies loved the idea--and conspired to never explain to the president (ancient, honorable Japanese stuffed shirt) how the printers were named.
We name both servers and machines here. Servers are named for Canadian provinces, machines are named for U.S. states (ideally the state where the user was born). The PDC is BC, the secondary domain controller is AB, etc. User machines are MA, GA, PA, NY, NJ, etc. We can refer to machines by meaningful names, but we don't have to type long strings.
The only problem with naming servers after Canadian provinces is that some of the staff are, um, geographically challenged. Not that any of us are heroes--we're still wondering what the postal abbreviation for Nunavit is. (Anybody know? We got a couple of new boxes coming, and it'd make things interesting.)
I agree with Jon Katz that the development and distribution of software to "vet" students for violent propensities is cause for alarm. I think the participation of a federal Commerce Department agency (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms--a bunch of tax collectors in search of a more exciting mission) is particularly alarming.
But I don't agree with Jon's assumption that this is tantamount to open season on Goths. I think this, instead, is something even more sinister.
This is profiling.
If you're an American you've seen the TV show. Breathless blonde babe bumbles across crime scenes developing "profiles" of serial killers. She's pretty, TV cops are always heros, isn't profiling a wonderful tool that the police can use to protect us from bad guys?
The profiling technique used by technologies like Mosaic depends upon the premise that answers to certain questions can be good (or even absolute) predictors of specific tendencies or behaviors. For example, consider the question I just asked: "Isn't profiling a wonderful tool that the police can use to protect us from the bad guys?" Your answer to the question is almost an absolute predictor of whether you are white or not.
Police departments across the U.S. have begun to use computers and statistics packages to study patterns of crime. In some instances it has been a tremendous boon to fighting crime. In other instances it has been a particularly heinous tool of racial oppression. Here's how:
Several years ago the Pennsylvania State Police noted a big increase in drug shipments through northeastern Pennsylvania. They examined their arrest records to identify common patterns--and from those common patterns they identified a "criminal profile" of a likely drug smuggler. Based on that profile, state troopers started stopping cars on I-80 that met the profile--and obtaining search warrants to search vehicles based on no other evidence than that the vehicle and the driver met the profile.
What was the profile?
The driver was a black male
The driver was alone in the car
The driver had an air freshener hanging from the mirror
That, argued the police, was sufficient probable cause to stop any and every single black man with an air freshener on I-80.
In recent months the New Jersey State Police have also admitted to specifically targeting black men on the New Jersey Turnpike. The crime of "DWB"--Driving While Black--has been a joke in the black community for many years. Based on discovery from a civil rights suit, the New Jersey State Police, and Gov. Christie Whitman, admitted that the cops were specifically targeting blacks.
In theory profiling can help identify potential suspects. In practice, profiling has become a synonym for leaping to conclusions based on scant evidence. And the ability of many police departments today to filter database lists makes the potential for baseless profiling positively scary.
For example, let's do a little profiling. Let's identify common characteristics of dangerous personalities, and see who fits. Here are some common characteristics of mass murderers:
White
Male
Late 30s to early 50s
Access to firearms
Owns multiple firearms, multiple calibers
Recent enthusiast for firearms
Often described by acquaintances as a "gun nut"
Highly educated, but generally below national average in income
Frequently has multiple, but meager, sources of income.
Cannot seem to keep one steady job for any length of time.
Experienced with computers.
Fancies himself an expert at role-playing games, especially computer role-playing games that glorify violence
Spends an inordinate amount of time online
Develops many relationships online--sees online acquaintances as true friends.
May even have traveled long distances to meet online acquaintances
May marry--but usually does not have chidren.
Now--who might fit that profile? How about a white, male, 41-year-old man with a wife and no kids. He's a graduate of an Ivy League university, where he majored in Philosophy. He has not found work in his field, but instead has dabbled in several businesses. He runs a very small ISP (mostly as a labor of love) but depends upon his wife's income. He spends an inordinate amount of time online, playing games and emailing friends on the Internet. He is widely known on the Internet, and is viewed as a leading figure in an underground Internet community. He is regarded as a "hacker" and in his online writings he is proud of the term. He has recently become interested in guns, and right-to-bear-arms politics, and cheerfully characterizes himself as a "gun nut."
We're talking, of course, about that dangerous criminal monster, Eric S. Raymond.
In Pennsylvania you register with the county sheriff to get a license to carry a concealed weapon. (I do not own guns, but I am told by a gun-owning friend/employee that a "carry" permit and a handgun permit are the same price--so everybody gets the carry permit.) In Pennsylvania you also pay an income tax to your local municipality and/or your local school district. And, in Pennsylvania, utilities have to provide all sorts of information to the government about who they serve, in what counties, and so forth.
I don't think it would be much of a stretch for the Chester County District Attorney to get a list of gun owners, and cross-ref that list with a list of people with multiple phone lines. And it wouldn't take much effort after that to establish which of those multiple-phone line gun owners had web sites. And you can't spend much time on ESR's web site without noticing "Eric's Gun Nut Page". Given the profile, the DA would be justified (or so he might think) in telling the township police where ESR lives that a potential maniac is living nearby.
And since we're putting up posters about sex offenders (even one-timers convicted forty years ago) on every telephone pole, why not notify the community of gun-totin', Web-usin', multiple-phone-line-ringin' threats to society?
Or maybe--just maybe--we should conclude that computer profiling is not just bad, not just unconstitutional, but evil. And stop it, before we lose what "inalienable" rights we have left.
We've already seen the comment that "if Linux wasn't Open Source, it wouldn't be Linux." The argument is that a key part of the success to date of Linux is the enthusiastic participation of lots of people working very hard--for free. Now let's look at it from a slightly different perspective: so long as Linux is "open source" (in the sense that the user *can* view the source and alter it) it isn't going to be that much more successful. Or perhaps I can put it in slightly less inflammatory words: so long as Linux projects the ability to re-compile the kernel as one of the key features of the OS, Linux will only succeed to the point of being the most popular version of Unix. (Yes, Linux isn't GNU isn't Unix. Spare me.) Key point: Linux, like Unix, appeals to the computerphile--people who are intrinsically interested in how computers work. Even when KDE or another environment is bolted on the top, everybody likes to demonstrate how easy it is to do the low-level pedal-to-the-metal stuff from the command line. Not to push anybody's hot buttons, but that's the way Microsoft used to demo Windows 2.1. There was tons of power on the DOS command line--but there was color! and a mouse! and cool stuff! and it almost, kinda, sorta worked like a Mac! When Windows exploded was when Microsoft made the DOS command line go away. Sure--its still there. But the OS wars ended when Win95 made computing reliable *enough* (which is not to say absolutely reliable), and the UI simple enough (which is not to say simple) so that most users found the experience worth the cost of the learning curve. You didn't need to be an experienced computer pro to use Windows. That happened because of the UI. And the "bloatware" that we all talk about is due to the UI. And the obvious speed hit you see is because of that UI. Most Linux users today aren't beholden to the UI--they're using the command line when they need to, and taking advantage of the GUI when it suits them. But to make broad inroads into the commercial (let alone the consumer) marketplace the command line has to go away. Give the Pointy-Haired Boss the perception that doing something odd on the command line will recompile the kernel (which, to him, is indistinguishable from issuing a launch order to the Air Force) and he won't touch that computer. Till Linux can't be recompiled by the end user, it won't be competition for Windows.
I find it extremely discouraging that this article has been posted on SlashDot for several hours, but only a handful of people have responded. And of the responses that have been posted, practically none indicate that the writer actually read the proposed criteria.
This is extremely serious--it will affect the livelihood of every SlashDot reader, and it will have a major impact on the continued growth of the Internet. Why? Because these criteria, and the proposals that will be evaluated, will determine how the Internet will be taxed. And if the Internet is taxed there will be significant shifts in the E-conomy (to coin a phrase) as Internet businesses position themselves to avoid collecting sales taxes. If the state of California, for instance, enacts stiff sales taxes on e-commerce transactions, businesses will leave the state of California. If you're a network support tech in California, that affects your job prospects.
What is also discouraging is the complete cluelessness of the government officials involved. They have not yet, evidently, realized the complications of what they're trying to do. I seriously question whether any of these people have done any kind of empirical study of their existing sales tax collections to determine if they have any glimmer of hope of collecting a dime. The rise of e-commerce seriously challenges the basis for sales tax--since sales tax has always been assessed on tangible, physical assets at the point those assets are transferred to the end user. Non-tangible purchases aren't taxed by practically anybody--only a very few states have tried to tax services (such as attorney's fees, software consulting, and other professional fees) and they generally have discovered that the cost of administration and collection exceeded the new tax revenue. (Pennsylvania, for instance, abandoned the services tax in 1998.) You can tax an e-commerce sale when it is essentially identical to mail order: place the order online, deliver the goods via UPS. In that circumstance the seller can identify the destination, and generally can identify the taxing jurisdictions (although not always). But what nobody is considering is the exploding business in software that is delivered across the Internet.
Yes--SlashDot is heavily tied to the Open Source movement, so suggesting that software should be anything but free is a heretical viewpoint. Call me a heretic, but commercial software will only exist over the long term if there is money to be made creating it.
As we have all discovered, there is no reason in the world to create a tangible product in order to ship software. Want to buy Microsoft Office 2002? Just enter your credit card information online and download the install set from Microsoft (a mere 2.3 GB of code!). It may seem a stretch today, but lots of software companies are embracing that model. My own company will move to download-only distribution shortly: we sell a couple of small applications for specialized markets (horse show management, and graphics for special ed teachers), and the time and expense necessary to burn CDs, package them, box them, and take them to UPS eats a considerable portion of a day.
So somebody gives me a credit card number, and an address in the Cayman Islands. How am I supposed to know that the individual, in fact, is in Bowie, Maryland? Or what's to prevent some entrepreneur from setting up an "anonymous download" site, where you can use the site as a proxy to purchase software from another site?
"The Internet changes everything" has been repeated so many times in the past year that it is already a tired cliche. But it is true here--the Internet effectively has to mean the end of sales taxes. It will cause upheaval in government--but it is inevitable. Any other conclusion requires driving e-business offshore.
It's discouraging that the tax authorities don't realize this. And it's discouraging that nobody on SlashDot seems to care.
In this splendid review (of a very intriguing book) there is a brief comment about how odd it seems that a book published in 1998 has so little to say about the Internet. Let me contribute a little understanding from years in the publishing business.
Publishing is a time-consuming process--it is typical for a book manuscript to take 18 months or more to go from "manuscript to bound books." With some publishers the cycle takes even longer--and many commercial publishers will also time the release dates of books in order to make sure that they bring out new titles every month. They will sequence the books so that the titles they expect to be blockbusters appear in late fall (as Illiad's UserFriendly: The Comic Strip is appearing on O'Reilly's October list), and position the weaker titles in the early spring (the kiss of death in publishing is a February pub date).
Most books don't happen overnight--in this case the author is working full time as an historian at the Smithsonian. So he didn't write this in three months or even six--it more likely is the result of two or three years of work.
All of which means that the original outline for the book could very easily have been done as early as 1994 or 1995--when practically nobody, certainly nobody in a "general market audience," would have heard of the Web.
If you're wondering how all those third-party manuals seem to hit the shelves in no time, rest assured that computers have revolutionized some publishers as well. Computer books aren't the same thing as traditional nonfiction--they are much more like products. The publisher lines up a series of writers, assembles a bunch of chapters together, and packages the product for sale. Having been through the process a couple of times, as well as having done real books, I can tell you that there's little comparison.
I'll buy the book.
The Writer is Evidently Clueless...
on
One for the Kids
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It might be that the insurance companies want the data to be open, so they can easily read it as it goes from Internet site to Internet site, medical data traveling across the Internet, just as carefree as can be. The insurance companies want to make it easy for themselves, so they can keep track of all the medical records.
The writer doesn't know what he's talking about. The insurance industry has absolutely no reason to want to intercept medical information sent over the Internet. They wouldn't to spend a nickel to get the information, and any insurance industry IT manager will tell you that the very notion is laughable.
They already have all of your medical information.
Every time you submit a medical claim to an insurance company, or visit an HMO doctor, data on the claim is sent to an insurance industry clearing house called the Medical Information Bureau (MIB). (The unknown, unseen, all-powerful agency in Will Smith's Men In Black was certainly suggested by the real MIB.)
The MIB maintains detailed medical records on every insured person in the U.S. The bureau was created to prevent insurance fraud--particularly to prevent claims against multiple insurance companies for the same injury. The MIB has been in existence for decades, and has an incredible amount of data.
How can this information be used? For example, if you apply for a job with an insurance company, they can examine your medical records to determine whether you're a poor health risk. There are lots of public policy issues about privacy--and medical information is at the heart of them. That the writer doesn't know about it, and doesn't know about how insurance companies track medical information, suggests that he isn't as much of an authority as he'd like to think.
Can someone please explain the American obsession with privacy? I cannot recall any enlightenment thinkers who explicit mention privacy as a natural right of man.
The American system of government was not based on the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers. Jefferson was a student of Locke--but any student of American history will tell you that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Alexander Hamilton (and others) wrote the U.S. Constitution. They were most emphatically not students of Locke, and rejected the Enlightenment ideals as utopian absurdity. The French Revolution, borrowing heavily from the rhetoric of the American Revolution, embraced the Enlightenment. And collapsed into the abyss of chaos.
The American concept of privacy is codified in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The amendment restrains the government--it is prohibited from invading one's privacy unless the officials have made a specific, plausible case (supported by evidence) to a magistrate.
In short, we Americans most emphatically do regard privacy as a natural right.
Jon Katz is asserting that the hue and cry over Peter Singer's theories is an example of how America is not free. Jon further points to criticism of Pat Buchanan as evidence that America is not free. And criticism of Jesse Ventura is evidence that America is not free. And, of course, criticism (and the threat to end the government subsidy gravy train) of the Brooklyn Museum of Art by Rudy Guiliani is evidence that America is not free. Um, except....
Peter Singer and Princeton University issued press releases when he got the fellowship. That didn't generate enough publicity, so they did another round of press releases when his class started.
Pat Buchanan and his publisher have conducted an extensive PR tour in support of his book.
Jesse Ventura and Playboy publicized the interview--emphasizing the outrageous comments.
The Brooklyn Museum has filled the NY subway with ads stressing how controversial the exhibit will be.
In each case, somebody went to a lot of time and trouble (and expense, in the case of the Brooklyn Museum) to make absolutely certain that they would invite the kind of criticism that they have received. It is an old axiom in the Public Relations business that the best way to sell books in New York is to make sure that the book is banned in Boston. [Digression: ever wonder how the Shiite theological faculty at Qom knew to condemn Salman Rushdie for "defaming the imam" before the book got published? The guy had a death sentence on him, had gone into hiding, and had celebrities staging rallies on his behalf before the book ever hit the streets. Why? Because the publisher sent advance copies of the manuscript to them, in the hope that they'd go ballistic.] Jon's argument is bogus--none of the "victims" here is the slightest bit unhappy. But his argument is also bogus for being circular--if I am restricting Peter Singer's freedom by criticizing him and his dangerous, insane, lethal ideas; isn't Jon Katz, by his own reasoning, restricting my freedom by criticizing me? Criticizing one another's ideas is called "debate," not "censorship." And declaring that an opponents ideas are so dangerous, so contrary to common decency that they may not be uttered, is not "censorship." It is the expression of an opinion. I am an old fogie--I grew up in a family atmosphere that emphasized correct manners. I am morally offended every time I see a couple (by which I mean a man and a woman) walking down the street--and the man is on the wrong side! It disgusts me--I sometimes have to turn away to keep from expressing the rising gorge in my throat. If I display dour disapproval I am being censorious--but I am not engaging in censorship. Only if I am a police officer and arrest the man for walking down the wrong side of a sidewalk then I am being oppressive. (P.S. I'm really not that disapproving of people on the sidewalk. But yes, there is a proper side to walk upon--the man always walks on the curb side to keep mud [that is, horse manure] from splashing on the woman's skirts. JM)
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Professors, and the institutions, are asserting an intellectual property right to a student's notes on the content of lectures. They're dreaming. No such right exists.
Intellectual property rights only apply to ideas that have been reduced to fixed form. Fixed form means "written down" or "recorded"--only the fixed form of an idea is protected by copyright, the idea itself is not. Until the idea is reduced to fixed form it is just so much hot air.
For example, suppose I get up on stage and present a hilarious, moving expression--in rap--of the tribal customs of my ancestors (Scots) entitled "Getting Naked and Painting My Body Blue". If I have written those rap lyrics down beforehand, I can assert an intellectual property right. If you copy them down and repeat them, I can sue. But if I just start shouting extemporaneously, I have no rights--the words have not been reduced to fixed form.
An excellent example of this was Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. Consider how many times you have heard that speech. Now ask yourself--why don't Dr. King's children collect royalties on that speech? They can't--King spoke extemporaneously. The written copies of the speech were made from film footage of the event.
In the case of classroom notes the situation is made even easier--the written notes reflect the creative work of the note-taker. Suppose that you and I attend a lecture by Prof. Chris Berman at the University of Bristol. My notes might include lots of information about what Berman wore, what the lecture hall looked like, whether he looked smaller or larger than he appears on TV, and what the general reaction of the audience was. Your notes might indicate what Berman actually said. The difference between my notes and yours is the creative content that you and I add. And what each of us reduces to fixed form is our intellectual property.
But wait, there's more...
The university isn't just wrong in asserting that it owns the rights to the notes--it is wrong to assert in its code of conduct that students do not. Unless a student surrenders his intellectual property rights to all creative work when he enrolls, the university is infringing upon his rights to dispense with his property (his creative work) for however much he can make.
The university is blowing smoke.
This coming interview has been puffed all week by SlashDot--the promos hinting broadly that a real fight was brewing. There was a certain prize-fight atmosphere about the promos, and about RobLimo's introduction. In the one corner we have a tag team of really rude dudes trash-talking and waving; in the center of the ring we have Rob and RobLimo taunting the crowd to even-more-frenzied fits of outrage, and in the other corner, swaggering through the crowd, comes the Evil Villain, dressed in a black mask and cape, to do battle with the Rude D00dz.
It seems to me that, cast in the role of the Villain of this little drama, JP had the grace to enjoy the part.
He was calm, he was reasonably dispassionate, he was irenic, and he basically whupped the Rude D00dz. He thanked the promoters for inviting him, and he proceeded to out-rude the Rude D00dz by essentially blowing them off. He then proceeds to employ a brilliant bit of pro wrestling showmanship--he takes on the crowd. He insults them by calling them stupid, he taunts them by daring them to hack his site, he flaunts his Bad Boy bona fides by repeatedly emphasizing his FBI connections, and he flirts with them by suggesting that attempting to hack his site only makes him more successful. About the only thing he didn't do was sell "I Hate JP" t-shirts. Epic stuff.
The really good villains in pro wrestling know how to play the game. They know--and the promoters know--that the crowd doesn't pay to see the good guys. The crowd pays to see the bad guys. And Rob went and found a terrific bad guy for this week's Friday Night Fights. JP gets more notoriety (which only enhances his reputation with his clientele), JP gets tons of new attacks on his servers (which he sells to his clientele), and RobM gets hundreds of thousands of banner ad impressions. Each of 'em makes out like a bandit.
And the Rude D00dz? They're left standing there, in the corner, wondering what happened to them. Maybe JP will have some sympathy, and send each of 'em a t-shirt.
Fellas--ya got played.
Yahoo's patent seems to be the work of, well, some dumb yahoo. The concept of caching content locally to cut down on server load (and network traffic) has been around for decades.
Slashdot, yesterday, carried an item about Hotmail joining the spam Black Hole list. It seems to me that one way to put an end to this patent silliness is to do the same thing: block email from known patent abusers. Block unisys.com, yahoo.com, etc.--and give the software patent enthusiasts the option of continuing to abuse the system or be able to connect to the rest of the world.
I have already blocked unisys.com from my network, due to the GIF nonsense. (Not without pain--a major client uses Unisys A-series and Clearpath servers.) I'll block yahoo.com too if it turns out that they have any dream of enforcing this.
As Arlo Guthrie once pointed out, if just one person does this they'll think he's crazy. And if two people do it they'll think they're both [well, we'll just skip what he said, since it ain't considered genteel these days]. But imagine, my friends, imagine if dozens of people, hundreds of people block domains that use software patents. Why, they'll think its a movement....
Write an HTML page that explains why you won't permit connects to Yahoo, post it, and redirect any Yahoo links to that page. The power of the boycott is the most effective weapon you have.
Hi!
Hasn't anybody here studied the history of technology? Nobody--none of us--have the slightest clue what the next twenty, or ten, years of technology will bring. Will every toaster and waffle iron have its own IPv6 address? Will every clueless end user have to remember the gateway IP address, and how to connect a new appliance to the household DHCP server?
Well, let's back up a hundred years. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone he did not have the faintest notion of "phone tag", let alone "phone sex." The telephone instrument was placed in the front room of any house wealthy enough to own one. When exchange interconnection happened (so you could call from one exchange to another) newspapers worried that women wouldn't be able to deal with the complexity of remembering the exchange name and the phone number--chaos would reign. When long distance service began people used to dress in their best clothes before placing a long distance phone call.
The great-grandchildren of these people have no trouble with cell phones, digital cell phones, pagers, and fax machines. Many of them are capable of direct-dialing international calls (particularly if there is phone sex involved.) Several of them are capable of dealing with modems.
The same is true of automobiles, airplanes, trucks, and electricity.
Where we'd headed, IMHO, is a world with (from our perspective) infinite MIPS and infinite bandwidth. Where software is much more a product of interaction among agents, rather than the result of a single monolithic program. Those agents will give all the devices we use a dramatically different level of sophistication than we can fathom--and it will be relatively easy for those agents to establish trust relationships with other agents.
In less than 100 years we have gone from an era of hand-cranked phones to a time when people put you on hold because their other cell phone line needs to connect to the in-car fax machine. In the next 10 years we'll see business and home appliances go from X.10 to a world we simply can't imagine today.
Will there be bumps on the road? Yup. Will some script kiddies scare the daylights out of Gary North, Mike Hyatt, Ed Yourdon, and the rest of the Year 2000 Chicken Littles? Undoubtedly--they'll be wringing their hands in public about that by January (they've already started--all the Y2K remediation has just given foreign agents the ability to plant time bombs in our computer code!) Maybe you or I will make a fortune solving the problem.
But when we get there, we'll shake our heads in wonder at how much 2000 will seem to be just like the Stone Age. We'll tell our kids (or in my case, my grandchildren) about life today--and they won't believe a word we say.
Hi All!
Uh, let's not get too excited by this. Compaq in Australia (as elsewhere in the Pacific Rim) is an amalgam of Compaq, Digital, and Tandem. Digital and Tandem might easily be a bigger portion of the customer base in a lot of parts of the area than Compaq has been. (Compaq Japan is firmly established--but Digital has been solid in Asia for a long time.)
That 50% of Compaq customers have done pilots with Linux probably says more about those customers' perception of the future of Digital Unix than it does about NT.
Hi!
Thanks for your informative post.
I find the whole blind-bashing thing simply discouraging. A lot of SlashDot readers are youngsters, and kids tend to think of themselves as immortal. But kids also tend to seize the mantle of compassion and respect and decency--they just presume to hold the moral high ground in any conversation.
And what do we see here? Hundreds--hundreds of the best and brightest on the Internet flaming away at the notion that blind people might want to participate on the Internet.
Extremely discouraging to read. I really thought these people were better than that....
My congratulations on your post--a splendid example of shooting off your mouth without pausing to think first.
That you're 21 doesn't surprise me in the slightest. That you have absolutely zero sympathy for people with disabilities suggests strongly that you are white, male, American, and healthy. You don't have any form of disability, and you don't know anybody (or care about anybody) that does.
Someday, possibly, you will grow up....
...and when you do, you may discover yourself falling "through the Looking Glass" as we say, into the world of the disabled. Maybe you'll get married, and your wife will have a car accident when she's pregnant. Maybe you and she will get stupid and do the Natural Childbirth thing--eschewing hospitals for a whole wheat birth experience at home. A swell idea, right up until the baby can't get oxygen. Or maybe you'll have a "normal" birth, only to visit the next morning and hear your pediatrician ask the most ominous question you'll ever hear:
And then you might discover that it's your child that doesn't qualify for heart surgery--because she doesn't fit the Aryan profile. And it's your child that doesn't get to go to school, because she doesn't fit the Aryan profile. And it's your child that doesn't get to play at the park, or attend multiple-story schools, or event use the toilet on an airplane. And then maybe you might discover that there are people out there don't have all the advantages you have.
I have my own reservations about the ADA. It drives me crazy when people who ought to know better use the ADA as a means of extorting money--and frankly, that's what I think this NFB suit is. Should AOL use ALT tags? Yup. Does Shockwave make a website unreadable to the blind? Yup--and companies that make their sites unreadable deserve to have their contempt publicized. But what is happening here is simple extortion: AOL will settle this by becoming a corporate sponsor of the NFB, the NFB will reap thousands (millions?) and AOL will write off the expense as Danegeld. (Coastal villages in Britain used to pay the Vikings off so they wouldn't ransack the town.)
But what really scares me about the ADA is the knee-jerk reaction of reactionary jerks like you. I worry all the time about the eventual backlash against Special Ed funding and Mental Health/Mental Retardation programs, and I wonder when people will start thinking publicly about saving public funds by "euthanizing" these poor, suffering little victims. People like Peter Singer (at Princeton) and the L.A. chapter of MENSA are already saying it. And all they need is the unwitting assistance of a lot of healthy, white, male 21-year-olds with no sense of social responsibility....
Perhaps it is you that should grow up.
They've explained that they needed to know what CD you were playing in order to get playlist data from a third-party database. I don't seem to see any explanation of why the program scanned your hard drive for personal information, and the number and names of any MP3s you had.
And consider how many users of RealJukebox don't read SlashDot (or don't read, period). How many people will install the patch? How many people will read the new privacy statement?
RealNetworks did not say, "oops. We'll stop doing that, and we'll never do it again." What they said, instead, was:
Which is manifestly not the same thing.
What they should do is build new server components that are not compatible with existing installs in the field. Serve a page indicating that "to download a version of RealJukebox that doesn't invade your privacy, click here", and ship a version that specifically warns the user of the privacy risks and requires the user to specifically opt IN--not out--in order to use the Trojan Horse features.
Till then, this is still a Trojan Horse.
Hi!
Internet voting is just as dumb an idea as Oregon's experiment with vote-by-mail.
Lovely concept. Stupid idea. Permit me to explain.
I'm a geek. But I'm also involved in politics. The first election I volunteered for was an election for mayor of Boston in 1967. My (widowed) mother used to date Mike Dukakis. I worked for the McGovern National Campaign Committee in 1972, and have worked on political campaigns every year since 1977. I have spent 6 years as an elected official.
Elections, by their very nature, must be a public process. Each and every voter must personally appear in the polling place--or place his or her signed ballot on a public bulletin board in that polling place (absentee ballots) or the system is open to fraud. When you go to vote tomorrow (today!) you will step up to a poll worker. That worker will announce your name out loud--ideally so everyone in the room can hear it. One or more other people will check your name off lists of registered voters. And somebody might--possibly ask if you're the Joe Schlibozel who lives downstairs from that nice Hispanic couple, the Rodriguezes?
The first pollworker is a member of one party. The second pollworker at the table is a member of the opposite party. The person who asks a question may have noticed that you haven't voted before, and it is unusual for new voters to turn up in a general election when no federal offices are at stake. What all of them are doing is keeping the system honest.
Internet voting (and vote-by-mail) make cheating so easy it will take all the fun out of stealing elections. One of the interesting facts of politics is that you can go down the voter rolls (sometimes called "street lists") and you'll discover that there are 200 registered Republicans at one address; and there are 325 registered Democrats at another address. What gives? Both addresses are nursing homes--and there's either a resident or an employee who has signed every single resident up. They come around with the form all filled out, possibly after medications are dispensed, and ask for a signature. "We need this to help you vote, Mr. Schlibozel...." So the addled Mr. Schlibozel signs the form.
It's a registration form, plus a request for an absentee ballot. When the ballots come in the mail the helpful person visits Mr. Schlibozel and asks him who he wants for president. And most probably *will* punch the block for Mr. Schlibozel's choice. But Mr. Schlibozel almost certainly will not have an opinion on the ballot questions, or the judicial candidates, or the local municipality candidates--"so we'll just leave those blank, okay, Mr. Schlibozel?"
Later, after all 325 absentee ballots have been filled out and signed, the helpful volunteer goes back through the stack. And punches the blocks for all the "right" judicial candidates and municipal candidates, and ballot questions, etc.
Take it from me--if you see an election with thousands of absentee ballots in a single congressional district, there is vote fraud.
You can catch that kind of fraud. But vote-by-mail and Internet voting make it too easy to cheat. Suppose you run a flophouse (nowadays we call them SRO--single room occupancy hotels). You have the flotsam and jetsam of life--and chances are several are behind on their rent. You offer a choice--sign this blank ballot, or pay up on your rent. Or sign this blank ballot, and I'll turn your water back on.
And suddenly we're back in the Victorian era, when wealthy landlords in England "owned" seats of Parliament because they effectively controlled enough of the voters to guarantee the results of any election.
The problem of "voter apathy" is bogus--there is no such problem. We do have a similar problem: "motor voter" registration laws. It is now practically impossible to renew your driver's license without also registering to vote. That doesn't mean that you actually show up to be involved--you just got your license renewed, and the DMV handed you the form. The same people as always still show up to vote--but the motor voters stay home. The "turnout rate" is lower--but in fact the same number of voters as always has come to the polls. Bag motor voter, stop wasting money at the county registrar's, and keep the public voting system intact.
John Murdoch
(In point of fact, I am aware of a number of methods to steal elections--but I have never actually used any of them.)
Hi!
I installed a set of printers in a client's office in Tokyo, and named them after Disney characters. The Japanese staff simply couldn't believe that their printers were named Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. I went to Tokyo Disneyland that weekend, bought little dolls, and attached them to each printer with Velcro. The office ladies loved the idea--and conspired to never explain to the president (ancient, honorable Japanese stuffed shirt) how the printers were named.
We name both servers and machines here. Servers are named for Canadian provinces, machines are named for U.S. states (ideally the state where the user was born). The PDC is BC, the secondary domain controller is AB, etc. User machines are MA, GA, PA, NY, NJ, etc. We can refer to machines by meaningful names, but we don't have to type long strings.
The only problem with naming servers after Canadian provinces is that some of the staff are, um, geographically challenged. Not that any of us are heroes--we're still wondering what the postal abbreviation for Nunavit is. (Anybody know? We got a couple of new boxes coming, and it'd make things interesting.)
But I don't agree with Jon's assumption that this is tantamount to open season on Goths. I think this, instead, is something even more sinister.
This is profiling.
If you're an American you've seen the TV show. Breathless blonde babe bumbles across crime scenes developing "profiles" of serial killers. She's pretty, TV cops are always heros, isn't profiling a wonderful tool that the police can use to protect us from bad guys?
The profiling technique used by technologies like Mosaic depends upon the premise that answers to certain questions can be good (or even absolute) predictors of specific tendencies or behaviors. For example, consider the question I just asked: "Isn't profiling a wonderful tool that the police can use to protect us from the bad guys?" Your answer to the question is almost an absolute predictor of whether you are white or not.
Police departments across the U.S. have begun to use computers and statistics packages to study patterns of crime. In some instances it has been a tremendous boon to fighting crime. In other instances it has been a particularly heinous tool of racial oppression. Here's how:
Several years ago the Pennsylvania State Police noted a big increase in drug shipments through northeastern Pennsylvania. They examined their arrest records to identify common patterns--and from those common patterns they identified a "criminal profile" of a likely drug smuggler. Based on that profile, state troopers started stopping cars on I-80 that met the profile--and obtaining search warrants to search vehicles based on no other evidence than that the vehicle and the driver met the profile.
What was the profile?
That, argued the police, was sufficient probable cause to stop any and every single black man with an air freshener on I-80.
In recent months the New Jersey State Police have also admitted to specifically targeting black men on the New Jersey Turnpike. The crime of "DWB"--Driving While Black--has been a joke in the black community for many years. Based on discovery from a civil rights suit, the New Jersey State Police, and Gov. Christie Whitman, admitted that the cops were specifically targeting blacks.
In theory profiling can help identify potential suspects. In practice, profiling has become a synonym for leaping to conclusions based on scant evidence. And the ability of many police departments today to filter database lists makes the potential for baseless profiling positively scary.
For example, let's do a little profiling. Let's identify common characteristics of dangerous personalities, and see who fits. Here are some common characteristics of mass murderers:
Now--who might fit that profile? How about a white, male, 41-year-old man with a wife and no kids. He's a graduate of an Ivy League university, where he majored in Philosophy. He has not found work in his field, but instead has dabbled in several businesses. He runs a very small ISP (mostly as a labor of love) but depends upon his wife's income. He spends an inordinate amount of time online, playing games and emailing friends on the Internet. He is widely known on the Internet, and is viewed as a leading figure in an underground Internet community. He is regarded as a "hacker" and in his online writings he is proud of the term. He has recently become interested in guns, and right-to-bear-arms politics, and cheerfully characterizes himself as a "gun nut."
We're talking, of course, about that dangerous criminal monster, Eric S. Raymond.
In Pennsylvania you register with the county sheriff to get a license to carry a concealed weapon. (I do not own guns, but I am told by a gun-owning friend/employee that a "carry" permit and a handgun permit are the same price--so everybody gets the carry permit.) In Pennsylvania you also pay an income tax to your local municipality and/or your local school district. And, in Pennsylvania, utilities have to provide all sorts of information to the government about who they serve, in what counties, and so forth.
I don't think it would be much of a stretch for the Chester County District Attorney to get a list of gun owners, and cross-ref that list with a list of people with multiple phone lines. And it wouldn't take much effort after that to establish which of those multiple-phone line gun owners had web sites. And you can't spend much time on ESR's web site without noticing "Eric's Gun Nut Page". Given the profile, the DA would be justified (or so he might think) in telling the township police where ESR lives that a potential maniac is living nearby.
And since we're putting up posters about sex offenders (even one-timers convicted forty years ago) on every telephone pole, why not notify the community of gun-totin', Web-usin', multiple-phone-line-ringin' threats to society?
Or maybe--just maybe--we should conclude that computer profiling is not just bad, not just unconstitutional, but evil. And stop it, before we lose what "inalienable" rights we have left.
John Murdoch
We've already seen the comment that "if Linux wasn't Open Source, it wouldn't be Linux." The argument is that a key part of the success to date of Linux is the enthusiastic participation of lots of people working very hard--for free. Now let's look at it from a slightly different perspective: so long as Linux is "open source" (in the sense that the user *can* view the source and alter it) it isn't going to be that much more successful. Or perhaps I can put it in slightly less inflammatory words: so long as Linux projects the ability to re-compile the kernel as one of the key features of the OS, Linux will only succeed to the point of being the most popular version of Unix. (Yes, Linux isn't GNU isn't Unix. Spare me.) Key point: Linux, like Unix, appeals to the computerphile--people who are intrinsically interested in how computers work. Even when KDE or another environment is bolted on the top, everybody likes to demonstrate how easy it is to do the low-level pedal-to-the-metal stuff from the command line. Not to push anybody's hot buttons, but that's the way Microsoft used to demo Windows 2.1. There was tons of power on the DOS command line--but there was color! and a mouse! and cool stuff! and it almost, kinda, sorta worked like a Mac! When Windows exploded was when Microsoft made the DOS command line go away. Sure--its still there. But the OS wars ended when Win95 made computing reliable *enough* (which is not to say absolutely reliable), and the UI simple enough (which is not to say simple) so that most users found the experience worth the cost of the learning curve. You didn't need to be an experienced computer pro to use Windows. That happened because of the UI. And the "bloatware" that we all talk about is due to the UI. And the obvious speed hit you see is because of that UI. Most Linux users today aren't beholden to the UI--they're using the command line when they need to, and taking advantage of the GUI when it suits them. But to make broad inroads into the commercial (let alone the consumer) marketplace the command line has to go away. Give the Pointy-Haired Boss the perception that doing something odd on the command line will recompile the kernel (which, to him, is indistinguishable from issuing a launch order to the Air Force) and he won't touch that computer. Till Linux can't be recompiled by the end user, it won't be competition for Windows.
I find it extremely discouraging that this article has been posted on SlashDot for several hours, but only a handful of people have responded. And of the responses that have been posted, practically none indicate that the writer actually read the proposed criteria.
This is extremely serious--it will affect the livelihood of every SlashDot reader, and it will have a major impact on the continued growth of the Internet. Why? Because these criteria, and the proposals that will be evaluated, will determine how the Internet will be taxed. And if the Internet is taxed there will be significant shifts in the E-conomy (to coin a phrase) as Internet businesses position themselves to avoid collecting sales taxes. If the state of California, for instance, enacts stiff sales taxes on e-commerce transactions, businesses will leave the state of California. If you're a network support tech in California, that affects your job prospects.
What is also discouraging is the complete cluelessness of the government officials involved. They have not yet, evidently, realized the complications of what they're trying to do. I seriously question whether any of these people have done any kind of empirical study of their existing sales tax collections to determine if they have any glimmer of hope of collecting a dime. The rise of e-commerce seriously challenges the basis for sales tax--since sales tax has always been assessed on tangible, physical assets at the point those assets are transferred to the end user. Non-tangible purchases aren't taxed by practically anybody--only a very few states have tried to tax services (such as attorney's fees, software consulting, and other professional fees) and they generally have discovered that the cost of administration and collection exceeded the new tax revenue. (Pennsylvania, for instance, abandoned the services tax in 1998.) You can tax an e-commerce sale when it is essentially identical to mail order: place the order online, deliver the goods via UPS. In that circumstance the seller can identify the destination, and generally can identify the taxing jurisdictions (although not always). But what nobody is considering is the exploding business in software that is delivered across the Internet.
Yes--SlashDot is heavily tied to the Open Source movement, so suggesting that software should be anything but free is a heretical viewpoint. Call me a heretic, but commercial software will only exist over the long term if there is money to be made creating it.
As we have all discovered, there is no reason in the world to create a tangible product in order to ship software. Want to buy Microsoft Office 2002? Just enter your credit card information online and download the install set from Microsoft (a mere 2.3 GB of code!). It may seem a stretch today, but lots of software companies are embracing that model. My own company will move to download-only distribution shortly: we sell a couple of small applications for specialized markets (horse show management, and graphics for special ed teachers), and the time and expense necessary to burn CDs, package them, box them, and take them to UPS eats a considerable portion of a day.
So somebody gives me a credit card number, and an address in the Cayman Islands. How am I supposed to know that the individual, in fact, is in Bowie, Maryland? Or what's to prevent some entrepreneur from setting up an "anonymous download" site, where you can use the site as a proxy to purchase software from another site?
"The Internet changes everything" has been repeated so many times in the past year that it is already a tired cliche. But it is true here--the Internet effectively has to mean the end of sales taxes. It will cause upheaval in government--but it is inevitable. Any other conclusion requires driving e-business offshore.
It's discouraging that the tax authorities don't realize this. And it's discouraging that nobody on SlashDot seems to care.
In this splendid review (of a very intriguing book) there is a brief comment about how odd it seems that a book published in 1998 has so little to say about the Internet. Let me contribute a little understanding from years in the publishing business.
Publishing is a time-consuming process--it is typical for a book manuscript to take 18 months or more to go from "manuscript to bound books." With some publishers the cycle takes even longer--and many commercial publishers will also time the release dates of books in order to make sure that they bring out new titles every month. They will sequence the books so that the titles they expect to be blockbusters appear in late fall (as Illiad's UserFriendly: The Comic Strip is appearing on O'Reilly's October list), and position the weaker titles in the early spring (the kiss of death in publishing is a February pub date).
Most books don't happen overnight--in this case the author is working full time as an historian at the Smithsonian. So he didn't write this in three months or even six--it more likely is the result of two or three years of work.
All of which means that the original outline for the book could very easily have been done as early as 1994 or 1995--when practically nobody, certainly nobody in a "general market audience," would have heard of the Web.
If you're wondering how all those third-party manuals seem to hit the shelves in no time, rest assured that computers have revolutionized some publishers as well. Computer books aren't the same thing as traditional nonfiction--they are much more like products. The publisher lines up a series of writers, assembles a bunch of chapters together, and packages the product for sale. Having been through the process a couple of times, as well as having done real books, I can tell you that there's little comparison.
I'll buy the book.
It might be that the insurance companies want the data to be open, so they can easily read it as it goes from Internet site to Internet site, medical data traveling across the Internet, just as carefree as can be. The insurance companies want to make it easy for themselves, so they can keep track of all the medical records.
The writer doesn't know what he's talking about. The insurance industry has absolutely no reason to want to intercept medical information sent over the Internet. They wouldn't to spend a nickel to get the information, and any insurance industry IT manager will tell you that the very notion is laughable.
They already have all of your medical information.
Every time you submit a medical claim to an insurance company, or visit an HMO doctor, data on the claim is sent to an insurance industry clearing house called the Medical Information Bureau (MIB). (The unknown, unseen, all-powerful agency in Will Smith's Men In Black was certainly suggested by the real MIB.)
The MIB maintains detailed medical records on every insured person in the U.S. The bureau was created to prevent insurance fraud--particularly to prevent claims against multiple insurance companies for the same injury. The MIB has been in existence for decades, and has an incredible amount of data.
Here are some sites with more information:
How can this information be used? For example, if you apply for a job with an insurance company, they can examine your medical records to determine whether you're a poor health risk. There are lots of public policy issues about privacy--and medical information is at the heart of them. That the writer doesn't know about it, and doesn't know about how insurance companies track medical information, suggests that he isn't as much of an authority as he'd like to think.
Can someone please explain the American obsession with privacy? I cannot recall any enlightenment thinkers who explicit mention privacy as a natural right of man.
The American system of government was not based on the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers. Jefferson was a student of Locke--but any student of American history will tell you that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Alexander Hamilton (and others) wrote the U.S. Constitution. They were most emphatically not students of Locke, and rejected the Enlightenment ideals as utopian absurdity. The French Revolution, borrowing heavily from the rhetoric of the American Revolution, embraced the Enlightenment. And collapsed into the abyss of chaos.
The American concept of privacy is codified in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution:
The amendment restrains the government--it is prohibited from invading one's privacy unless the officials have made a specific, plausible case (supported by evidence) to a magistrate.
In short, we Americans most emphatically do regard privacy as a natural right.
- Peter Singer and Princeton University issued press releases when he got the fellowship. That didn't generate enough publicity, so they did another round of press releases when his class started.
- Pat Buchanan and his publisher have conducted an extensive PR tour in support of his book.
- Jesse Ventura and Playboy publicized the interview--emphasizing the outrageous comments.
- The Brooklyn Museum has filled the NY subway with ads stressing how controversial the exhibit will be.
In each case, somebody went to a lot of time and trouble (and expense, in the case of the Brooklyn Museum) to make absolutely certain that they would invite the kind of criticism that they have received. It is an old axiom in the Public Relations business that the best way to sell books in New York is to make sure that the book is banned in Boston. [Digression: ever wonder how the Shiite theological faculty at Qom knew to condemn Salman Rushdie for "defaming the imam" before the book got published? The guy had a death sentence on him, had gone into hiding, and had celebrities staging rallies on his behalf before the book ever hit the streets. Why? Because the publisher sent advance copies of the manuscript to them, in the hope that they'd go ballistic.] Jon's argument is bogus--none of the "victims" here is the slightest bit unhappy. But his argument is also bogus for being circular--if I am restricting Peter Singer's freedom by criticizing him and his dangerous, insane, lethal ideas; isn't Jon Katz, by his own reasoning, restricting my freedom by criticizing me? Criticizing one another's ideas is called "debate," not "censorship." And declaring that an opponents ideas are so dangerous, so contrary to common decency that they may not be uttered, is not "censorship." It is the expression of an opinion. I am an old fogie--I grew up in a family atmosphere that emphasized correct manners. I am morally offended every time I see a couple (by which I mean a man and a woman) walking down the street--and the man is on the wrong side! It disgusts me--I sometimes have to turn away to keep from expressing the rising gorge in my throat. If I display dour disapproval I am being censorious--but I am not engaging in censorship. Only if I am a police officer and arrest the man for walking down the wrong side of a sidewalk then I am being oppressive. (P.S. I'm really not that disapproving of people on the sidewalk. But yes, there is a proper side to walk upon--the man always walks on the curb side to keep mud [that is, horse manure] from splashing on the woman's skirts. JM)