If you have the intelligence to be a decent engineer, you can make an order of magnitude more money by going into investment banking, creating some fancy new backwards upside down derivative swap, and milking the rest of us dry. The fact that this is centered in NYC makes it a real drain on smart people going into other sectors in the US at the moment...
Adobe is trying to do this with Flashbuilder 4.5+. Write once, compile native for all platforms. They'll even take care of trying to make basic art assets (buttons, etc.) look appropriate.
Does it work yet? Eh...sorta. But it's a good idea in the current mobile environment, and a potentially lucrative niche to be in.
We are rapidly approaching the point at which the phrase "It has necessary secrets" can describe only failures. It is nearly impossible, and getting harder every day, to keep information under wraps. I'm tempted to simply say "Information wants to be free" and go with it, but the truth really is that modern technology makes information dissemination on huge scales so simple that we're just about to the point where any system that isn't 100% secure is never going to be able to prevent the entire world from knowing all its secrets. Shockingly, our military (and every other system constructed by humans) is not 100% secure.
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Point is, the information compartmentalization crowd has already lost this one, they just haven't all admitted it yet. Future military planning needs to assume that the enemy will always know where we are and what we're doing. Success will depend on overwhelming force and perfect planning, not surprise. And yes, this probably does mean that low to medium level occupations, like we have in Iraq and Afghanistan, are doomed to failure.
I would advise against attempting to volunteer counseling outside of the culture in which you grew up and/or received your education and training. It is *very easy* to make things worse instead of better, especially when dealing with cultures that handle grief in a different manner from what you expect. There are a number of studies regarding our ("the West's") attempts to set up emergency counseling services after the tsunami at the end of 2004, and mostly they indicate that we hurt more than we helped. Cultural differences meant that our best efforts simply ended up confusing, frightening, and alienating the victims we were trying to help.
As for networking stuff...I suspect it would be really hard to volunteer those sorts of skills for a week. You'd need to find a group that had a specific and limited problem that you could assess and fix in a very short amount of time.
I'd say that you should stick to standard physical labor ala habitat for humanity, and/or just donate.
I think there's a good argument that a javascript engine isn't "separate" from the browser these days. It's so tightly integrated that the end user certainly can't pry it apart. I see a much better argument for Eolas going after anything that calls on Flash, Quicktime, or WMP, for example. Then again, *everyone* (and their dogs) uses AJAX, so I guess it's worth their money to make the argument.
"Were there any big events that led to the current forms of licensing of medical practitioners, lawyers, engineers, etc., or did those things just develop gradually over the decades/centuries?"
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Speaking for the legal profession (based on my memories of lectures from a respected professor of legal history, so take this with a grain of salt), it was largely a discriminatory desire to maintain a (white male protestant) monopoly on the profession that led to the current manifestation of the state bar associations and their examinations.
Around the turn of the century (1900), large numbers of well educated East European Jews were transplanting to the U.S. Many of them had legal training and practice, and began to set up legal practices in the U.S.
At the time, the state bars generally only required a term of apprenticeship and/or a recommendation from a current attorney in good standing to accept someone into the bar. The fledgling ABA saw a chance to seize a good deal of power by convincing the states that the influx of immigrants was a serious risk, and they should begin following ABA recommendations for accepting new members.
These recommendations initially included graduation from an ABA-accredited law school (which eventually grew to require four years of college before law school) and an examination, including an ABA-approved portion on federal law and general legal principles.
Does this lead to better lawyers? Not really. The exams in many states (all except CA have followed the ABA's recommendations...CA does have the exam, and the multistate portion, but does not require an accredited law school) have become largely pro forma, with pass rates over 80%.
Suffice it to say that there are still plenty of barred attorneys who aren't very good at their jobs.
The realm of software and web design and network management and all the rest should be careful to avoid examinations and requirements designed primarily to produce a monopoly on certain career paths, as these can easily be used to increase the costs of services and keep out unwanted or threatening groups, without ever increasing the quality of services provided.
This is going along with the digital trend of content as service (aided by the ever-present DMCA, at least in the States).
My biggest concern isn't anything specific (though this could easily lead to unplayable games when the company goes under, and is frankly just a pain for real customers and probably quite easy to circumvent for the rest). Generally, content producers are beginning to feel like it is their right to control their content at all times, from product birth to death. They want total control, and in the digital world, the consumer generally doesn't own anything. If you check the TOS and EULA, you'll find that all your software is really a service. Pay $500 for Windows Vista? No you didn't, you paid $500 to *subscribe* to Windows Vista, and they'll cancel you any time they want.
I'm all for the possibilities of low power and low cost laptops, and with more and more processing being shifted to web servers (or the cloud, whatever that is), I think the time is now.
My problem is that I want a full sized screen. Checking email and going through pdf's, doc's, and spreadsheets, I find I do a lot better with a big screen (or two) than even a normal laptop screen.
Do we think this is going to be taken care of by having docking stations all over the place, or will I need to wait for roll-out, flexible screens?
I believe we (the United States) are burning around 7.5 billion barrels per year at the moment. I'm not a mathematician, but that gives us around 13 years per every 100 billion barrels we're able to extract.
Unless, of course, our usage keeps going up (as recently as 1990, it was around 6 billion barrels per year).
All in all, it would be optimistic to assume we'd get a decade out of each 100 billion barrels we get to the surface. A decade is a long time, but I wouldn't call it "energy independence." I could easily live long enough to see these reserves disappear, even if we do have 500 billion barrels, and my kids certainly will.
This is actually a good idea, not an **AA scam as some have suggested. But it would have to be everyone paying it (at least for now...deep packet inspection is getting easier every day) because otherwise it's impossible to weed out the cheaters.
The RIAA and other groups are starting to come around to the idea that a blanket license may be the best way to get some money out of it. It's cheaper for them (they don't need to run an iTunes-esque service, nor sue thousands of people to try and scare the rest) and easier for the public. The idea would be a negotiated license, probably with rates overseen by the DoC, between the ISPs and the rights-holders of digital media, at least music and video. They would agree not to sue for anything, and the ISPs collect extra money and hand it over.
The big hold up thus far has been how to divide the money that the ISPs collect. You want to do it on a pro rata basis in order to encourage people to be new and inventive to gain popularity, but it's hard to measure. You would sample content available and content being downloaded on a variety of networks, possibly do user surveys, and need to come up with an exchange rate (e.g. a movie is worth more than a song).
If you haven't downloaded music or movies before and feel like this would just be a way to cheat you out of $5, remember that you could now start downloading, safe in the knowledge that it is going to the artists (assuming we get it divided up and delivered properly, which will be nontrivial).
Possibly you could opt-out, but to do that you would need to have a way of blocking transfers to those users who haven't paid the license fee. Right now, we can't do it (and given current internet architecture, it's hard to imagine how we ever could, even with DPI, unless we block all encrypted traffic or impose harsh bandwidth limits).
A group (couldn't find a link now, still looking) has been trying this in China, figuring that the Chinese IP system is still developing and open to new ideas, and that a good example there could lead to change in Europe and the U.S., but the sticking point of how to divide up the collected monies has stalled it for now.
I voluntarily put my computer out there by hooking up to the internet. Insofar as it's easy for people wishing to grab things like my credit card info to try it with thousands of systems and connections in a short amount of time, I realize that I could easily be a target and I am responsible for my own security.
With my house, I'm far less concerned. It's harder to break into a house because you actually need to go there. I'm not concerned about the Russian mob trying to break into everything house in the city one night. Also, my taxes pay for things like the police and the entire justice system. It's far from perfect, but we already have pretty significant deterants against physical breaking and entering and theft.
Does that mean I shouldn't be worried at all? No, but there is a very high chance that someone's going to probe my firewall for weaknesses (or rather, someone's script is), and a relatively low chance that someone will break into my house and then attempt to access my computer locally. They may take jewelry, but they probably won't spend much time looking in my system in hopes of finding a credit card number or an Amazon.com login.
If I had something really really important on my computer, and someone knew about, then sure, they'd probably try to break in. Banks and embassies know this, and generally don't rely solely on deadbolts. In my home, I think I can be fairly content that the deadbolt will stop the neighborhood kids from taking off with cat, and I know that I don't have anything valuable enough to warrant truly expensive security. I'm never going to hire armed guards to patrol my yard...it's much cheaper just to replace the occasional stolen bicycle.
The term "individual" isn't valid, but legally it may be close enough. IANAL. An IP address where files are available is identified, not an individual. That IP address may represent a single traditional computer system, a series of computers behind a router, or even an open wireless access point. The fact that you can trace activity to an IP address does not mean you can trace activity to an actual real person. You can figure out who pays for access to the internet using that IP address, but that doesn't necessarily mean that much. However, legally, it may, if the duty to ensure that an IP address is not used for illegal activities rests with the person who pays the subscription fee instead of the person who uses the address. This may be reasonable...those who pay for access are probably the least cost avoiders (actually, the ISPs may be the least cost avoiders, but we don't want them shutting down every service they can detect).
Lobbyists really don't buy votes very often, at least not in the corporate context. It's hard to hide large sums of money, so all sides of an issue can usually afford to pay the largest practical sum. No one 'wins' by money alone.
It's actually really unclear exactly why lobbyists are effective, though it is known that they spend most of their time lobbying those who already agree with them and trying to get them to mobilize on the issue. Hall and co do a good job of examining theories, poking holes in a lot of them, and eventually proposing their own in 2006.
Check out Richard L. Hall & Alan V. Deardorff, "Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy," 100 American Political Science Review 69 (2006). They give an overview in that article of a wider survey that's published as Richard L. Hall & Frank W. Wayman, "Buying Time: Moneyed Interests and the Mobilization of Bias in Congressional Committees," 84 AM. POL. SCI. REV. 797 (1990).
Fully agree with Bob. The U.S. is (arguably) still in a hegemonic position, meaning it can exert tons of political and economic pressure to force other nations, e.g. Australia, to hand over citizens for trial in the U.S., should the U.S. decide they've done something objectionable. We're not quite at the level of passing formal laws that only affect foreign nationals, but we're getting frightening close. We're essentially trying to enforce U.S. law throughout the world, and there's no theory of law or justice that provides backing there.
Where you're dealing with a foreign threat, the theory says you either go to war or negotiate a political solution. Simply treating it like a domestic issue because you have the power to compel others to permit you to violate their sovereignty doesn't lead anywhere good. If you keep going down that path, you will really get a revolution of sorts at some point. Not necessarily violent, but you could rapidly find yourself cut out of the world political and economic scene. Not a good result for anyone.
The compulsary license applies to "noninteractive streaming services." Presumably this means that something like Pandora is safe? Could other radio stations add something to their players, the ability to pause the stream and restart at the same location perhaps, in order to sidestep the license by characterizing themselves as interactive services?
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If you have the intelligence to be a decent engineer, you can make an order of magnitude more money by going into investment banking, creating some fancy new backwards upside down derivative swap, and milking the rest of us dry. The fact that this is centered in NYC makes it a real drain on smart people going into other sectors in the US at the moment...
Adobe is trying to do this with Flashbuilder 4.5+. Write once, compile native for all platforms. They'll even take care of trying to make basic art assets (buttons, etc.) look appropriate. Does it work yet? Eh...sorta. But it's a good idea in the current mobile environment, and a potentially lucrative niche to be in.
.
Point is, the information compartmentalization crowd has already lost this one, they just haven't all admitted it yet. Future military planning needs to assume that the enemy will always know where we are and what we're doing. Success will depend on overwhelming force and perfect planning, not surprise. And yes, this probably does mean that low to medium level occupations, like we have in Iraq and Afghanistan, are doomed to failure.
I would advise against attempting to volunteer counseling outside of the culture in which you grew up and/or received your education and training. It is *very easy* to make things worse instead of better, especially when dealing with cultures that handle grief in a different manner from what you expect. There are a number of studies regarding our ("the West's") attempts to set up emergency counseling services after the tsunami at the end of 2004, and mostly they indicate that we hurt more than we helped. Cultural differences meant that our best efforts simply ended up confusing, frightening, and alienating the victims we were trying to help. As for networking stuff...I suspect it would be really hard to volunteer those sorts of skills for a week. You'd need to find a group that had a specific and limited problem that you could assess and fix in a very short amount of time. I'd say that you should stick to standard physical labor ala habitat for humanity, and/or just donate.
I think there's a good argument that a javascript engine isn't "separate" from the browser these days. It's so tightly integrated that the end user certainly can't pry it apart. I see a much better argument for Eolas going after anything that calls on Flash, Quicktime, or WMP, for example. Then again, *everyone* (and their dogs) uses AJAX, so I guess it's worth their money to make the argument.
-----
Speaking for the legal profession (based on my memories of lectures from a respected professor of legal history, so take this with a grain of salt), it was largely a discriminatory desire to maintain a (white male protestant) monopoly on the profession that led to the current manifestation of the state bar associations and their examinations.
Around the turn of the century (1900), large numbers of well educated East European Jews were transplanting to the U.S. Many of them had legal training and practice, and began to set up legal practices in the U.S.
At the time, the state bars generally only required a term of apprenticeship and/or a recommendation from a current attorney in good standing to accept someone into the bar. The fledgling ABA saw a chance to seize a good deal of power by convincing the states that the influx of immigrants was a serious risk, and they should begin following ABA recommendations for accepting new members.
These recommendations initially included graduation from an ABA-accredited law school (which eventually grew to require four years of college before law school) and an examination, including an ABA-approved portion on federal law and general legal principles.
Does this lead to better lawyers? Not really. The exams in many states (all except CA have followed the ABA's recommendations...CA does have the exam, and the multistate portion, but does not require an accredited law school) have become largely pro forma, with pass rates over 80%.
Suffice it to say that there are still plenty of barred attorneys who aren't very good at their jobs.
The realm of software and web design and network management and all the rest should be careful to avoid examinations and requirements designed primarily to produce a monopoly on certain career paths, as these can easily be used to increase the costs of services and keep out unwanted or threatening groups, without ever increasing the quality of services provided.
Just my two cents.
My biggest concern isn't anything specific (though this could easily lead to unplayable games when the company goes under, and is frankly just a pain for real customers and probably quite easy to circumvent for the rest). Generally, content producers are beginning to feel like it is their right to control their content at all times, from product birth to death. They want total control, and in the digital world, the consumer generally doesn't own anything. If you check the TOS and EULA, you'll find that all your software is really a service. Pay $500 for Windows Vista? No you didn't, you paid $500 to *subscribe* to Windows Vista, and they'll cancel you any time they want.
My problem is that I want a full sized screen. Checking email and going through pdf's, doc's, and spreadsheets, I find I do a lot better with a big screen (or two) than even a normal laptop screen.
Do we think this is going to be taken care of by having docking stations all over the place, or will I need to wait for roll-out, flexible screens?
Unless, of course, our usage keeps going up (as recently as 1990, it was around 6 billion barrels per year).
All in all, it would be optimistic to assume we'd get a decade out of each 100 billion barrels we get to the surface. A decade is a long time, but I wouldn't call it "energy independence." I could easily live long enough to see these reserves disappear, even if we do have 500 billion barrels, and my kids certainly will.
True independence will need something renewable.
This is actually a good idea, not an **AA scam as some have suggested. But it would have to be everyone paying it (at least for now...deep packet inspection is getting easier every day) because otherwise it's impossible to weed out the cheaters. The RIAA and other groups are starting to come around to the idea that a blanket license may be the best way to get some money out of it. It's cheaper for them (they don't need to run an iTunes-esque service, nor sue thousands of people to try and scare the rest) and easier for the public. The idea would be a negotiated license, probably with rates overseen by the DoC, between the ISPs and the rights-holders of digital media, at least music and video. They would agree not to sue for anything, and the ISPs collect extra money and hand it over. The big hold up thus far has been how to divide the money that the ISPs collect. You want to do it on a pro rata basis in order to encourage people to be new and inventive to gain popularity, but it's hard to measure. You would sample content available and content being downloaded on a variety of networks, possibly do user surveys, and need to come up with an exchange rate (e.g. a movie is worth more than a song). If you haven't downloaded music or movies before and feel like this would just be a way to cheat you out of $5, remember that you could now start downloading, safe in the knowledge that it is going to the artists (assuming we get it divided up and delivered properly, which will be nontrivial). Possibly you could opt-out, but to do that you would need to have a way of blocking transfers to those users who haven't paid the license fee. Right now, we can't do it (and given current internet architecture, it's hard to imagine how we ever could, even with DPI, unless we block all encrypted traffic or impose harsh bandwidth limits). A group (couldn't find a link now, still looking) has been trying this in China, figuring that the Chinese IP system is still developing and open to new ideas, and that a good example there could lead to change in Europe and the U.S., but the sticking point of how to divide up the collected monies has stalled it for now.
I voluntarily put my computer out there by hooking up to the internet. Insofar as it's easy for people wishing to grab things like my credit card info to try it with thousands of systems and connections in a short amount of time, I realize that I could easily be a target and I am responsible for my own security. With my house, I'm far less concerned. It's harder to break into a house because you actually need to go there. I'm not concerned about the Russian mob trying to break into everything house in the city one night. Also, my taxes pay for things like the police and the entire justice system. It's far from perfect, but we already have pretty significant deterants against physical breaking and entering and theft. Does that mean I shouldn't be worried at all? No, but there is a very high chance that someone's going to probe my firewall for weaknesses (or rather, someone's script is), and a relatively low chance that someone will break into my house and then attempt to access my computer locally. They may take jewelry, but they probably won't spend much time looking in my system in hopes of finding a credit card number or an Amazon.com login. If I had something really really important on my computer, and someone knew about, then sure, they'd probably try to break in. Banks and embassies know this, and generally don't rely solely on deadbolts. In my home, I think I can be fairly content that the deadbolt will stop the neighborhood kids from taking off with cat, and I know that I don't have anything valuable enough to warrant truly expensive security. I'm never going to hire armed guards to patrol my yard...it's much cheaper just to replace the occasional stolen bicycle.
The term "individual" isn't valid, but legally it may be close enough. IANAL. An IP address where files are available is identified, not an individual. That IP address may represent a single traditional computer system, a series of computers behind a router, or even an open wireless access point. The fact that you can trace activity to an IP address does not mean you can trace activity to an actual real person. You can figure out who pays for access to the internet using that IP address, but that doesn't necessarily mean that much. However, legally, it may, if the duty to ensure that an IP address is not used for illegal activities rests with the person who pays the subscription fee instead of the person who uses the address. This may be reasonable...those who pay for access are probably the least cost avoiders (actually, the ISPs may be the least cost avoiders, but we don't want them shutting down every service they can detect).
It's actually really unclear exactly why lobbyists are effective, though it is known that they spend most of their time lobbying those who already agree with them and trying to get them to mobilize on the issue. Hall and co do a good job of examining theories, poking holes in a lot of them, and eventually proposing their own in 2006.
Check out Richard L. Hall & Alan V. Deardorff, "Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy," 100 American Political Science Review 69 (2006). They give an overview in that article of a wider survey that's published as Richard L. Hall & Frank W. Wayman, "Buying Time: Moneyed Interests and the Mobilization of Bias in Congressional Committees," 84 AM. POL. SCI. REV. 797 (1990).
Fully agree with Bob. The U.S. is (arguably) still in a hegemonic position, meaning it can exert tons of political and economic pressure to force other nations, e.g. Australia, to hand over citizens for trial in the U.S., should the U.S. decide they've done something objectionable. We're not quite at the level of passing formal laws that only affect foreign nationals, but we're getting frightening close. We're essentially trying to enforce U.S. law throughout the world, and there's no theory of law or justice that provides backing there. Where you're dealing with a foreign threat, the theory says you either go to war or negotiate a political solution. Simply treating it like a domestic issue because you have the power to compel others to permit you to violate their sovereignty doesn't lead anywhere good. If you keep going down that path, you will really get a revolution of sorts at some point. Not necessarily violent, but you could rapidly find yourself cut out of the world political and economic scene. Not a good result for anyone.
The compulsary license applies to "noninteractive streaming services." Presumably this means that something like Pandora is safe? Could other radio stations add something to their players, the ability to pause the stream and restart at the same location perhaps, in order to sidestep the license by characterizing themselves as interactive services?