Sorry, I didn't clarify properly: I didn't mean flat-rate per month, I meant flat-rate per call. You're right: flat-rate per month would hurt the majority of consumers, much the same way flat-rate per month cell phone bills (plus the overuse surcharge, of course) hurt the majority of consumers (myself included).
You're entirely right. Cell phone pricing is silly, and I'm sure the vaunted 3G wireless will be underpowered and overpriced.
But changing that starts at the bottom of the communications industry, not the top. Why do cell phones have minute-based plans? Because land-line long distance does. They cost more because the consumer perceives greater value in the cell phone service (which is accurate), and therefore not only is willing, but demands to pay more. It's no secret that most people equate "more expensive" with "better."
Why does long distance charge per minute? Because local calls are flat-fee. Again, greater perceived value requires higher cost.
The same will be true of 3G connectivity. The only way to change that is to start at the bottom--why aren't local calls included gratis with the cost to have a phone line to a building?Why aren't long-distance calls flat-rate?
If that changed, everything above it would shift downwards. Either that, or someone has to hammer home to the public at large that cost and value don't necessarily have anything to do with each other.
Of course, if Windows hasn't done that already, I don't know that there's much hope...
Yeah, but think about what most of those users are going to be doing with the connection: looking at web pages, reading email, and instant messaging people.
None of those are terribly bandwidth-intensive...the average user will probably feel pretty much exactly like they were sitting on a consumer broadband line.
Of course, if you mean to use it for downloading a DivX;-) version of LotR, you might run into (and cause) some problems...
A bit of Devil's Advocacy, here, but I think it's warranted.
It's easy to toss off sentences like "It looks like science suffers at the hands of the Morality police" when you've decided that the thing being prevented isn't immoral. If China were to start harvesting organs from political prisoners, would you criticize US health care for not "keeping up" with Chinese health care?
We all feel fine criticizing China and other countries housing sweatshops...why don't we say "It's US business suffering at the hands of the Morality police?"
Is the difference because we respect scientific research, but don't respect Nike's desire for profits? This may be a perfectly valid personal opinion, but it makes a poor foundation for moral decision making.
I seriously wonder what people (the nine states included) would do if MS stripped Windows down until it was just the OS itself. Bye-bye, calc, notepad, wordpad, solitaire, ftp, telnet, minesweeper, icons, windows, menus...
This could be a classic case of "be careful what you wish for."
Not to pick nits, but MS isn't even close to being the richest company in the world. At least, not in terms of revenues...and a judgement of wealth based on stock value vs. stock outstanding is, in MS's case, grossly inaccurate due to their "stock options as salary" scam.
The real problem is that governments don't need to control the Internet if they can control your access to it. Independent though the 'net may be, you still have to physically be somewhere with a computer and a data line, and they can set rules on your behavior while in their country,
"Of course we don't have any jurisdiction over the Internet! And while you're on our soil, your free software is in violation of the Millenial Intellectual Property Profiteering Guarantee Act!"
That is one of the most cogent, lucid, and insightful posts I've seen on/. yet.
I like it so much I'm going to pirate it, using the analysis when talking to people. You should probably lobby congress to make/. illegal, since it allowed me to steal your intellectual property.
How often does public outcry actually get something changed?
Pretty often, really. But only when it's based on fear, ignorance, or spite. When the public outcry is based on a rational reason, it almost never gets heard. Probably because so many people don't take the time to think rationally, preferring to simply accept whatever is spoon-fed them by [RIAA|MPAA|Government|etc.] right up until it nails them personally.
Pretty much everyone, however, has an emotional response to inflammatory rhetoric. Just look at how people respond on everyone's favorite site whenever some sort of pro-[Windows|MS|Proprietary software|etc.] comment gets posted.
Poul Anderson is, in fact, the correct spelling, but he's a different author.
The Heechee Saga was written by Frederick Pohl, and is, IMHO, both his best work and better than anything I've read by Poul Anderson. Although I haven't read Anderson's future history, which is supposed to be his best, so my opinion may not be real valuable, here.
This isn't an argument, simply a point of confusion for me. As I understand it, the spontaneous creation/destruction of virtual particle pairs exists in the margin that Heisenberg uncertainty allows--that is, as you stated, the creation of energy/mass is allowed as long as it's immeasurable. Fine. After all, if something is immeasurable, then it doesn't matter (no pun intended)...however: in both the case of the black hole, as well as the Casimir effect, and (possibly) "dark energy" (although the SF article, at least, does indicate that vacuum energy fluctuations aren't the source of dark energy, since there would be far more than observed if they were), it seems to me that we're measuring the effect of virtual particle creation. Isn't this a contradiction?
Note that I'm not claiming to have just invalidated an entire branch of modern physics, I'd just like someone to explain to me how I'm wrong...preferably in terms someone with only one semester of college physics can understand.;)
...to get people away from doling out Ritalin pills by the mole. I'm no doctor, but it really strikes me that there's something wrong when the number of kids on Ritalin is on the order of a third...and when teachers with no medical training whatsoever can force parents to use Ritalin or else kick the kid out of school.
Maybe if parents can point to other treatments, they wouldn't be as susceptible to strong-arming by teachers who think that the slightest hint of "hyperactivity" (I think we used to call this "fun") is something they shouldn't have to deal with.
Besides, it'd be great to see teachers give homework assignments like "2 hours of Smash Bro.'s."
I don't think removing data storage/retrieval necessarily equates to removing brain activity. After all, the information is only useful if you can do something with it, which requires thought.
Actually, I think the boss' calculator is a lot more threatening to human thought than such immense storage capacity would be. The calculator frees the boss from thinking about the problem, the storage medium would simply be able to tell him/her the right algorithm for doing the problem.
Of course, someone still has to program the calculator, so someone, somewhere, has to be able to conceptualize and solve the problems, then translate them into logic gates...the burden of the processing has just shifted from all the people who want to divide to the one person who provides them the solutions (indirectly).
So I'm all about massive data storage capacity. The data itself doesn't remove the need for thought.
Why do people think we became coders? We don't have to spell right, we just have to spell consistently.
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The New Mediascape
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The generational divide (to use a too-cute term with "buzzword" written all over it) may be obvious, but that doesn't make it unimportant. Gravity's obvious too, but it dictates quite a lot of what we get to do. Saying this difference in generations is irrelevant is like saying that it's not worth commenting on how the hippie movement differed from their parents' generation. That's ludicrous. The fact is, there is a difference, and it is important, since it's going to dictate the way information is disseminated, products are sold, and communication happens for the next 20 years.
Ignoring the content just because you don't like Katz using the hallowed term "open source" is both petty and short sighted.
Assuming AOL operates like every other company that employs coders (or even relates to them, I had to do this when I had a bit on a MOO), the nullsoft boys signed all proprietary rights to their code over to AOL when they accepted employment. I think it'd be a riot if that means AOL is liable for Gnutella.
Mostly because I'm sure they'll pour the equivalent of Taiwan's GNP into the defense if necessary...might be nice having one of the megacorps fighting for the side of right for once.
...is sue all the record companies for years of product tying. Sound ridiculous? Well, it is, but consider the way the law works right now:
They've determined that downloading one song you don't already own on a CD is theft. It can only be theft if it's something they could have sold. That means that each song on a CD is a product they could have sold. Now, how do I go about buying just one obscure, say, Metallica (to pick a name out of a hat) track, without buying the album? If I have to buy the album, I've been forced to buy all the other products on the album that I didn't want: all the other tracks.
Seems to me that IE is a lot more integral to Windows than "The God That Failed" is to Metallica's black album.
Double-checking your results often isn't feasible. It's one thing to look at 5+3=9 and say, "My my, that doesn't look right, I'll check it again," and perform the mental gymnastics to discover that, surprise!, it's wrong.
However, more complex problems do not lend themselves to easy double checking--except with the very software you're trying to check. Even something as relatively simple as a multiple regression is more than I can look at and say, "Hey, that doesn't look right!" Expand that to truly complex problems (airflow over a wing surface, statistical meteorological models, analysis of SETI@home data), and double checking becomes just flat-out impossible. Not to mention that such double checking rather defeats the purpose of the software in the first place--if I have to actually build every wing design I model just to check and see if the software came up with the right lift:weight, why did I bother buying the software??
This is nice in theory, but there's a practicality issue, here, that you're not addressing. It simply isn't practical for me to search every detail of every one of the products I buy to ensure that it isn't imprinted with toxins. Consider how many different items people buy--everything from coffee filters and paper towels to videotapes to lightbulbs and so forth. If everyone had to take the time to ensure that his life wasn't threatened by items he purchased, no one would buy anything.
Not to mention that, under this system, I have to do unknown amounts of additional research every time I see an ingredient name I don't recognize. From a theoretical libertarian viewpoint, this is all justifiable, but it would bring the economy to a grinding halt.
And before anyone says, "yes, but why would a company put botulin in a can of soup," consider the outset of Coca-Cola: including cocaine, in order to addict people to the soda and get them to buy more.
An awful lot of our high-speed, high-volume economy depends upon rapid purchase decisions, which would be impossible without some basic guarantees of reliability on the part of a vendor/manufacturer.
Not to be obnoxious, but 9.8N is not G...that's Earth's gravity. Big G is a universal constant, which was (before this article, anyhow) accepted to be:
6.672 x 10^-11 Nm^2/kg^2
Between that and the error information in the article, you could probably figure out what the new number is...which I would do if I wasn't already wasting time better spent studying for tomorrow's exam reading slashdot...
An excellent point, but one I think ought to be taken one step further. The current drive for AI is (naturally) to put it in a role where it can benefit people--an excellent example of which is the taxi-routing software. Assume that the software can eventually replace the human decision maker. Assume further that this happens across the board, in all fields (logical endpoint). Ultimately, why does the taxi router need to exist? People no longer need to take taxis anywhere.
The question then becomes, does goal-oriented AI (that is, AI designed for a specific purpose) obviate the need for itself to exist?
Which I've seen crop up in one form or another in the responses on this thread, but which I think ought to be put out simply and clearly. There's a fundamental shift in thought implicit in the DCMA. When you come right down to it, the intent is simple--it's not just so mega-corps can maintain a stranglehold on the recording industry (though that is certainly its effect), the intent is to prevent the piracy of music/movies. No one argues that piracy is legitimate, and preventing it is a worthwhile goal.
The problem is the method. It used to be in this country (the US, that is) that as little restriction as possible was involved to get something done. It's basically like "innocent until proven guilty"...we assume what you're doing is legit, because we respect your rights. If it can be shown that you're breaking the law, we'll penalize you. The DMCA, however, has turned that upside down. It's just that in this case, the thing on trial is the format and the medium, not a person.
All it comes down to is whether you're allowed to do things until you demonstrate they're wrong, or whether you're not allowed to do things until you demonstrate that they're right. That's the real evil of the DMCA--it's inverting completely the old American outlook. Since MP3 has the potential to be abused, it's banned until someone can demonstrate that it's not being abused. Since that demonstration can never be made (it's impossible to prove a negative), MP3 is just plain banned.
Looks like we'd rather see 100 innocent formats be banned than 1 guilty format go free...
Yes, let's start with broadband access. I'm glad you revised your earlier post to allow for taxation on Internet usage. Fine, $10/person. (Actually $20, in your scheme, since military funding comes from taxation, too, regardless of why they want it. Hence, tax dollars support the Interstate system, along with tolls in some areas...no one pays for anything except John Q. Public. Government money is -my- money reallocated). Allow me also to point out that there are only $260 million people in the US, but even so that amounts to over $5 billion dollars. Yes, one certainly can build a nationwide network of broadband access for that. Let's further assume that every other country in the world decides that they have the money and are willing to spend it on this broadband access (a necessity for a truly global Internet). So, you've got your cabling in place, and you set up routers. Do you begin to claim that you think we can build a computer system that exists without maintenance? I'll assume you don't mean that, because it's ludicrous on its face, and I don't care if you're running VMS, some flavor of Unix, Windows NT, or system 7. Nothing is maintenance free.
Let's also not forget that he who pays for network controls the network--personally, I don't trust government to get it right all the time. If it did, Communism would have worked out great. There would never have been a revolution in any country. We wouldn't have the patent ludicrosity that exists now (DeCSS, anyone?). Institutions like the MPAA and the RIAA write the laws to suit their whims, effectively. I don't want to give the government control of anything.
You claim that in 1969, they could have predicted the demand for bandwidth enough to play streaming video? They should have assumed Napster would be written? As they design their punchcards in racks to run through the mainframe, they can predict Java, object orientation, SQL, distributed.net and the World Wide Web? Do you really think they should even have predicted gopher? I think you should sit down and figure out what people will be demanding from their service providers (an institution which, in itself, did not exist in 1969) in 2030. Then look at it in 30 years and see how accurate you were.
Let's also take a brief look at physical possibility. Even if someone in 1969 could begin to predict the volume of dataflow that would be demanded in 2000, even if they had the money to spend on setting it up, where are they going to get the advanced fiberoptic cable to do it? Where are they going to get the physical plant to crank out the numbers of routers, bridges and brouters demanded? Where are they going to get the chip speed necessary to process millions of DNS lookups? NOT TO MENTION that the communication protocol has changed completely since then. Unless you want to go back further, and say they should have started out with TCP/IP for the old mainframe systems to the dumb terminals.
The corporate CEO is more beholden to his/her stockholders than any government is to its citizens--the corporation must turn a profit (over a long enough timeframe), or the CEO gets booted in a matter of days. Look at good old Apple Computers, for a beautiful example of being beholden to the shareholders. The 'citizens,' as it were, of the corporations. There is a reason why Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School claims that the modern corporation makes the nation-state obsolete. (I apologize for not having the reference to hand...I read this article a couple weeks ago).
I don't know what you mean by matching freedoms in terms of a trail, so I'm hard-pressed to respond to this point. If you simply mean the ability to wander through pastoral countryside, you're absolutely right. But that's a function of the country having these trails since the Romans owned it in the first century. If you meant something else, I apologize for misconstruing.
Great Britain. London, in particular. Quite frankly, the idea of having a government camera on damn near every corner horrifies me, and is a flagrant violation of civil liberties. (I assume you were only looking for an example out of free, Western Europe, not chaotic ex-"fraternal socialist allies" of the USSR). I'd also be curious to hear what you mean by the "abolishment of Miranda Rights" (which are based on a single court case, I might add, and only secondarily due to the Constituion. Amendment 5, IIRC)
I have no examples of marches in England, so I can't come up with an immediate comparison. However, I'm fairly certain that if an out-and-out riot breaks out in the streets of London, the police would do something about it. And I don't know what to call a march that involves throwing bricks and setting things on fire anything other than a riot...
In concept, freedom of speech is as old as the Magna Carta. But are you familiar with the term lese majeste? Punishable by death in feudal law, it's the crime of speaking against the crown. America's claim is that it, unlike anyone else, guarantees the right to freedom of speech in its Constitution. If you'd like to find me the passage in English 'common law' which claims that the right can never be abridged, feel free to do so. And I'll come right back with how easily common law is changed. There is value in having a government based around a central document which specifically details the powers and limitations of government. The closest England ever came to such a document was the "Instruments of Government," drawn up during the reign of Oliver Cromwell (1653-1660), and never enacted.
If you're going to argue that, I suggest rapid apologies to the Scots and the Irish, and any number of other aboriginal tribes kicked out of England by the Romans. Apologize to the Anglo-Saxons slaughtered wholesale at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 by the Normans. Just because it's longer ago doesn't make it more justified. And native American tribes (rather, members thereof) enjoy all the same rights any other American citizens do. Was the behavior right? No, but that's judging history by modern standards. In point of fact, it happened, and there's nothing that can change that.
Greyhound. Amtrak. Checker cabs. American Airlines. TWA. Would you like more privately-owned public transportation services? If you demand -free- transportation, I challenge you to find a government-provided free transportation. (I always pay a fare to get on a bus). And if you do find one, I'll point to the people paying for it. I.E., you, and your friends, and everyone on your block, et cetera. Again, the government's money is your money redistributed. Of course, so is a corporation's money--but I have a choice what corporation gets my money.
In privately-owned schools, you do. Only in government-run schools do students get suspended or expelled for saying a prayer in the morning.
My freedom is no more illusory than anyone else's, and less so than most. If you claim that all freedom is illusory, then why worry about the Internet at all?
So...in the absence of any kind of corporate presence, who, precisely, is going to PAY for the marvels you so devotely desire? Or do you honestly believe that the academic community which started the Internet can support its current size and bandwidth usage? Have you forgotten that this selfsame academic community made use of the old ARPANET--a US military-owned system? While the signal-to-noise ratio of the Web (NOT the Internet, necessarily) has plummeted (off the face of a cliff, basically), that's a necessary result of opening it up to everyone. Unless you institute a governing body, there CAN BE NO improvement of that ratio. As long as Joe Bloe can put up a web page, he will, and it will be nothing more than a rundown of his wife and kids and some pics of his dog...
I also find your vehement denunciation of the Internet as American absolutely fascinating. Of course the Internet itself isn't American--that is ridiculous, and would defeat the very nature of the entity that is the issue here. Nonetheless, the concepts we are debating are quite American. Freedom of speech and the press, freedom of assembly and religion, freedom of communication and travel, all parts of what makes the Internet great, are all what America is uniquely founded upon. Compare the American Constitution to the founding documents of other countries (and I do mean free countries, not Communist holdouts and semi-monarchies), and see what you find. See which matches the ideals people associate with the Internet.
You're right--the revolution has already happened. It happened in 1215 with the Magna Carta which pretended to help the common man, it happened in 1628 when Parliament attempted to reign in Charles I's absolute rule regarding taxation and billeting, it happened in 1689 when Parliament enacted a bill of rights, it happened in 1776 when the British American Colonies declared independence, and it happened in 1812 when the U.S. finally ousted Britain from its shores forever.
And it is the freedom and system embodied in America which allowed the explosion of technology, upon which the Internet is founded. It's the spirit of competition which drives Moore's law, it's the American ideal of "leave me the hell alone" that worries people about what's happening to the Internet.
I can think of few worse things that could happen to the Internet than to attempt to enact your Utopian ideal. The last thing I want is a governing body, doing what's "best for" my access, what's "best for" my ability to publish. I want standards to evolve the way they have--because they work--not because your Internet "management" wants to get it "right the first time".
Who could possibly have "gotten in right" in 1969? Who could have begun to imagine the immense volume of traffic desired--and possible--31 years later? Remember the days when you would never need a modem faster than 2400 baud, because "no one can read that fast?" What you're preaching is the worst kind of absolutism and oligarchy possible. What makes the Internet great is its freedom. If I come up with a great new way to compress data, if I invent an algorithm which can sort and search for data with greater efficiency than O(log n) (and don't bash me for this, I know that's not possible, it's just an illustration), if I develop a transmission protocol which guarantees privacy, I do it and I release it. It goes from RFC to standard, and not because some magical governing body approves it and says, "Yes! He 'got it right'!" It becomes a standard because it's better.
You want broadband, but you don't want corporate backing. You want public-access computer labs, but you don't want taxation on what they do. So do I--but I see the problem you either don't see or cleverly overlook: that someone has to pay for it. There's no group of "technically-minded volunteers" who can develop an OCx line, and run it across the country. You may be able to find enough of these wondrous people who work without getting paid to run and maintain it, but who put it there? Some wealthy private citizen out of the goodness of his/her heart? No one's wealthy enough to do that on the kind of global scale you want.
Your vision is marvelous, but it is terrifying. It sounds magnificent, but it is a horror. Perhaps in some "ideal" world, it would be possible--but in the world of cash and credit, amps and ohms, bits and bytes, it's preposterous.
Moderate me down for flaming, revile me for being opinionated, but first think about what I'm saying.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I didn't clarify properly: I didn't mean flat-rate per month, I meant flat-rate per call. You're right: flat-rate per month would hurt the majority of consumers, much the same way flat-rate per month cell phone bills (plus the overuse surcharge, of course) hurt the majority of consumers (myself included).
You're entirely right. Cell phone pricing is silly, and I'm sure the vaunted 3G wireless will be underpowered and overpriced.
But changing that starts at the bottom of the communications industry, not the top. Why do cell phones have minute-based plans? Because land-line long distance does. They cost more because the consumer perceives greater value in the cell phone service (which is accurate), and therefore not only is willing, but demands to pay more. It's no secret that most people equate "more expensive" with "better."
Why does long distance charge per minute? Because local calls are flat-fee. Again, greater perceived value requires higher cost.
The same will be true of 3G connectivity. The only way to change that is to start at the bottom--why aren't local calls included gratis with the cost to have a phone line to a building?Why aren't long-distance calls flat-rate?
If that changed, everything above it would shift downwards. Either that, or someone has to hammer home to the public at large that cost and value don't necessarily have anything to do with each other.
Of course, if Windows hasn't done that already, I don't know that there's much hope...
Yeah, but think about what most of those users are going to be doing with the connection: looking at web pages, reading email, and instant messaging people.
None of those are terribly bandwidth-intensive...the average user will probably feel pretty much exactly like they were sitting on a consumer broadband line.
Of course, if you mean to use it for downloading a DivX;-) version of LotR, you might run into (and cause) some problems...
A bit of Devil's Advocacy, here, but I think it's warranted.
It's easy to toss off sentences like "It looks like science suffers at the hands of the Morality police" when you've decided that the thing being prevented isn't immoral. If China were to start harvesting organs from political prisoners, would you criticize US health care for not "keeping up" with Chinese health care?
We all feel fine criticizing China and other countries housing sweatshops...why don't we say "It's US business suffering at the hands of the Morality police?"
Is the difference because we respect scientific research, but don't respect Nike's desire for profits? This may be a perfectly valid personal opinion, but it makes a poor foundation for moral decision making.
I seriously wonder what people (the nine states included) would do if MS stripped Windows down until it was just the OS itself. Bye-bye, calc, notepad, wordpad, solitaire, ftp, telnet, minesweeper, icons, windows, menus...
This could be a classic case of "be careful what you wish for."
Not to pick nits, but MS isn't even close to being the richest company in the world. At least, not in terms of revenues...and a judgement of wealth based on stock value vs. stock outstanding is, in MS's case, grossly inaccurate due to their "stock options as salary" scam.
The real problem is that governments don't need to control the Internet if they can control your access to it. Independent though the 'net may be, you still have to physically be somewhere with a computer and a data line, and they can set rules on your behavior while in their country,
"Of course we don't have any jurisdiction over the Internet! And while you're on our soil, your free software is in violation of the Millenial Intellectual Property Profiteering Guarantee Act!"
Wow.
That is one of the most cogent, lucid, and insightful posts I've seen on /. yet.
I like it so much I'm going to pirate it, using the analysis when talking to people. You should probably lobby congress to make /. illegal, since it allowed me to steal your intellectual property.
viva le DMCA!
Pretty often, really. But only when it's based on fear, ignorance, or spite. When the public outcry is based on a rational reason, it almost never gets heard. Probably because so many people don't take the time to think rationally, preferring to simply accept whatever is spoon-fed them by [RIAA|MPAA|Government|etc.] right up until it nails them personally.
Pretty much everyone, however, has an emotional response to inflammatory rhetoric. Just look at how people respond on everyone's favorite site whenever some sort of pro-[Windows|MS|Proprietary software|etc.] comment gets posted.
The Heechee Saga was written by Frederick Pohl, and is, IMHO, both his best work and better than anything I've read by Poul Anderson. Although I haven't read Anderson's future history, which is supposed to be his best, so my opinion may not be real valuable, here.
Note that I'm not claiming to have just invalidated an entire branch of modern physics, I'd just like someone to explain to me how I'm wrong...preferably in terms someone with only one semester of college physics can understand. ;)
Maybe if parents can point to other treatments, they wouldn't be as susceptible to strong-arming by teachers who think that the slightest hint of "hyperactivity" (I think we used to call this "fun") is something they shouldn't have to deal with.
Besides, it'd be great to see teachers give homework assignments like "2 hours of Smash Bro.'s."
Actually, I think the boss' calculator is a lot more threatening to human thought than such immense storage capacity would be. The calculator frees the boss from thinking about the problem, the storage medium would simply be able to tell him/her the right algorithm for doing the problem.
Of course, someone still has to program the calculator, so someone, somewhere, has to be able to conceptualize and solve the problems, then translate them into logic gates...the burden of the processing has just shifted from all the people who want to divide to the one person who provides them the solutions (indirectly).
So I'm all about massive data storage capacity. The data itself doesn't remove the need for thought.
Why do people think we became coders? We don't have to spell right, we just have to spell consistently.
Ignoring the content just because you don't like Katz using the hallowed term "open source" is both petty and short sighted.
Mostly because I'm sure they'll pour the equivalent of Taiwan's GNP into the defense if necessary...might be nice having one of the megacorps fighting for the side of right for once.
They've determined that downloading one song you don't already own on a CD is theft. It can only be theft if it's something they could have sold. That means that each song on a CD is a product they could have sold. Now, how do I go about buying just one obscure, say, Metallica (to pick a name out of a hat) track, without buying the album? If I have to buy the album, I've been forced to buy all the other products on the album that I didn't want: all the other tracks.
Seems to me that IE is a lot more integral to Windows than "The God That Failed" is to Metallica's black album.
There's money to be made, here!
However, more complex problems do not lend themselves to easy double checking--except with the very software you're trying to check. Even something as relatively simple as a multiple regression is more than I can look at and say, "Hey, that doesn't look right!" Expand that to truly complex problems (airflow over a wing surface, statistical meteorological models, analysis of SETI@home data), and double checking becomes just flat-out impossible. Not to mention that such double checking rather defeats the purpose of the software in the first place--if I have to actually build every wing design I model just to check and see if the software came up with the right lift:weight, why did I bother buying the software??
Not to mention that, under this system, I have to do unknown amounts of additional research every time I see an ingredient name I don't recognize. From a theoretical libertarian viewpoint, this is all justifiable, but it would bring the economy to a grinding halt.
And before anyone says, "yes, but why would a company put botulin in a can of soup," consider the outset of Coca-Cola: including cocaine, in order to addict people to the soda and get them to buy more.
An awful lot of our high-speed, high-volume economy depends upon rapid purchase decisions, which would be impossible without some basic guarantees of reliability on the part of a vendor/manufacturer.
Not to be obnoxious, but 9.8N is not G...that's Earth's gravity. Big G is a universal constant, which was (before this article, anyhow) accepted to be:
6.672 x 10^-11 Nm^2/kg^2
Between that and the error information in the article, you could probably figure out what the new number is...which I would do if I wasn't already wasting time better spent studying for tomorrow's exam reading slashdot...
*sigh*
An excellent point, but one I think ought to be taken one step further. The current drive for AI is (naturally) to put it in a role where it can benefit people--an excellent example of which is the taxi-routing software. Assume that the software can eventually replace the human decision maker. Assume further that this happens across the board, in all fields (logical endpoint). Ultimately, why does the taxi router need to exist? People no longer need to take taxis anywhere.
The question then becomes, does goal-oriented AI (that is, AI designed for a specific purpose) obviate the need for itself to exist?
Which I've seen crop up in one form or another in the responses on this thread, but which I think ought to be put out simply and clearly. There's a fundamental shift in thought implicit in the DCMA. When you come right down to it, the intent is simple--it's not just so mega-corps can maintain a stranglehold on the recording industry (though that is certainly its effect), the intent is to prevent the piracy of music/movies. No one argues that piracy is legitimate, and preventing it is a worthwhile goal.
The problem is the method. It used to be in this country (the US, that is) that as little restriction as possible was involved to get something done. It's basically like "innocent until proven guilty"...we assume what you're doing is legit, because we respect your rights. If it can be shown that you're breaking the law, we'll penalize you. The DMCA, however, has turned that upside down. It's just that in this case, the thing on trial is the format and the medium, not a person.
All it comes down to is whether you're allowed to do things until you demonstrate they're wrong, or whether you're not allowed to do things until you demonstrate that they're right. That's the real evil of the DMCA--it's inverting completely the old American outlook. Since MP3 has the potential to be abused, it's banned until someone can demonstrate that it's not being abused. Since that demonstration can never be made (it's impossible to prove a negative), MP3 is just plain banned.
Looks like we'd rather see 100 innocent formats be banned than 1 guilty format go free...
Let's also not forget that he who pays for network controls the network--personally, I don't trust government to get it right all the time. If it did, Communism would have worked out great. There would never have been a revolution in any country. We wouldn't have the patent ludicrosity that exists now (DeCSS, anyone?). Institutions like the MPAA and the RIAA write the laws to suit their whims, effectively. I don't want to give the government control of anything.
You claim that in 1969, they could have predicted the demand for bandwidth enough to play streaming video? They should have assumed Napster would be written? As they design their punchcards in racks to run through the mainframe, they can predict Java, object orientation, SQL, distributed.net and the World Wide Web? Do you really think they should even have predicted gopher? I think you should sit down and figure out what people will be demanding from their service providers (an institution which, in itself, did not exist in 1969) in 2030. Then look at it in 30 years and see how accurate you were.
Let's also take a brief look at physical possibility. Even if someone in 1969 could begin to predict the volume of dataflow that would be demanded in 2000, even if they had the money to spend on setting it up, where are they going to get the advanced fiberoptic cable to do it? Where are they going to get the physical plant to crank out the numbers of routers, bridges and brouters demanded? Where are they going to get the chip speed necessary to process millions of DNS lookups? NOT TO MENTION that the communication protocol has changed completely since then. Unless you want to go back further, and say they should have started out with TCP/IP for the old mainframe systems to the dumb terminals.
The corporate CEO is more beholden to his/her stockholders than any government is to its citizens--the corporation must turn a profit (over a long enough timeframe), or the CEO gets booted in a matter of days. Look at good old Apple Computers, for a beautiful example of being beholden to the shareholders. The 'citizens,' as it were, of the corporations. There is a reason why Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School claims that the modern corporation makes the nation-state obsolete. (I apologize for not having the reference to hand...I read this article a couple weeks ago).
My freedom is no more illusory than anyone else's, and less so than most. If you claim that all freedom is illusory, then why worry about the Internet at all?
I also find your vehement denunciation of the Internet as American absolutely fascinating. Of course the Internet itself isn't American--that is ridiculous, and would defeat the very nature of the entity that is the issue here. Nonetheless, the concepts we are debating are quite American. Freedom of speech and the press, freedom of assembly and religion, freedom of communication and travel, all parts of what makes the Internet great, are all what America is uniquely founded upon. Compare the American Constitution to the founding documents of other countries (and I do mean free countries, not Communist holdouts and semi-monarchies), and see what you find. See which matches the ideals people associate with the Internet.
You're right--the revolution has already happened. It happened in 1215 with the Magna Carta which pretended to help the common man, it happened in 1628 when Parliament attempted to reign in Charles I's absolute rule regarding taxation and billeting, it happened in 1689 when Parliament enacted a bill of rights, it happened in 1776 when the British American Colonies declared independence, and it happened in 1812 when the U.S. finally ousted Britain from its shores forever.
And it is the freedom and system embodied in America which allowed the explosion of technology, upon which the Internet is founded. It's the spirit of competition which drives Moore's law, it's the American ideal of "leave me the hell alone" that worries people about what's happening to the Internet.
I can think of few worse things that could happen to the Internet than to attempt to enact your Utopian ideal. The last thing I want is a governing body, doing what's "best for" my access, what's "best for" my ability to publish. I want standards to evolve the way they have--because they work--not because your Internet "management" wants to get it "right the first time".
Who could possibly have "gotten in right" in 1969? Who could have begun to imagine the immense volume of traffic desired--and possible--31 years later? Remember the days when you would never need a modem faster than 2400 baud, because "no one can read that fast?" What you're preaching is the worst kind of absolutism and oligarchy possible. What makes the Internet great is its freedom. If I come up with a great new way to compress data, if I invent an algorithm which can sort and search for data with greater efficiency than O(log n) (and don't bash me for this, I know that's not possible, it's just an illustration), if I develop a transmission protocol which guarantees privacy, I do it and I release it. It goes from RFC to standard, and not because some magical governing body approves it and says, "Yes! He 'got it right'!" It becomes a standard because it's better.
You want broadband, but you don't want corporate backing. You want public-access computer labs, but you don't want taxation on what they do. So do I--but I see the problem you either don't see or cleverly overlook: that someone has to pay for it. There's no group of "technically-minded volunteers" who can develop an OCx line, and run it across the country. You may be able to find enough of these wondrous people who work without getting paid to run and maintain it, but who put it there? Some wealthy private citizen out of the goodness of his/her heart? No one's wealthy enough to do that on the kind of global scale you want.
Your vision is marvelous, but it is terrifying. It sounds magnificent, but it is a horror. Perhaps in some "ideal" world, it would be possible--but in the world of cash and credit, amps and ohms, bits and bytes, it's preposterous.
Moderate me down for flaming, revile me for being opinionated, but first think about what I'm saying.