It's worth noting, I think, that until a couple of releases ago, ClarisWorks/AppleWorks had some of the best file format compatibility around -- you could write to and read from an astonishing variety of formats with great accuracy. They stopped doing that in, IIRC, the last-but-one release of AppleWorks, presumably since at the time they were buddy-buddy with M$ and wanted to encourage everyone to switch to Office. Now... well, we'll see. I'd be willing to shell out some decent money for a copy of AppleWorks that could read and write Office-and-everything-else documents accurately.
M$ does donations and low-cost setups for schools all the time. (Usually it's software, not hardware, of course, since software actually costs them next to nothing to produce. They recently gave a "$500,000" software donation to my school that, based on the number of CD's and software boxes, probably cost them something in the neighborhood of $25 -- but it's still a half-million-dollar tax writeoff.) Actually, plenty of other software companies do too, though I'm not sure anyone else is as aggressive about it as M$.
Why do they do this? Simple: it's a long-term marketing trick (and a cheap writeoff.) Train the students with Windows, Office, Visual Studio, MSSQL Server, IIS, et bloody cetera, and that's what they'll know when they get out into the working world. Companies that already use M$ shit will have an easier time hiring new people. Companies that are deciding on new systems will have people in their IT dept. who say, "Well, I don't know anything about Linux/Solaris/gcc/Apache/whatever, but I know all about NT and VC++ and IIS," and may well make multimillion-dollar purchasing decisions on that basis. It's not hard to figure out.
I have a nine-year-old daughter. If someone tried to have sex with her now, sure, I'd happily see the perp thrown in maximum security. When she's fifteen, it may be a different story.
I think that's a false analogy. Imagine if the Roman Empire (and/or any of the other great empires of history -- British, Spanish, Chinese, etc.) had been operating under the authority of an even larger government, a super-empire that was structured for the maintenance of the imperial system. That's the situation with the US government and large corporations. Now, you may argue that this super-empire itself would inevitably fall... but in the absence of something really drastic happening, I don't expect the US government to go away in my lifetime.
Degree degree degree. Forcible rape and statutory rape are two different (though obviously related) crimes, and are (appropriately) punished differently.
I got curious enough about this that I looked it up. In Pennsylvania, forcible rape is a first degree felony, with an additional ten year prison penalty above and beyond that normally provided for first degree felonies (if I read the statute right) while "statutory sexual assault" is a second degree felony with no additional penalties.
That still seemed a little harsh to me, so I decided to compare it to my home state. In Colorado, as far as I can tell from reading the not-terribly-clearly-worded statutes, forcible rape is a Class 3 or Class 4 felony depending on the degree of force and/or coercion used, while sexual assault of the sort the perpetrator in this case apparently intended to commit is a Class 1 misdemeanor. That seems a little more reasonable.
BTW, the jumping-off point for this information is here, a service of Cornell Law. It seems to be an excellent resource for legal research of this sort.
OK. Unlike the perp in this case, a shoplifter didn't demonstrate intent to rape anyone.:).
My point, in case I haven't made it clear enough already, is that in this case the guy didn't intend to rape anyone either -- not in the sense most people use the word "rape," i.e. forcible rape. I maintain that propositioning a 15-year-old for sex, while sleazy and distasteful, is in no way comparable to forcible rape. AFAIK, as I said above, the law in most states agrees with me, though I don't know about PA specifically.
Novel, non-obvious, and not over-broad. Another way of putting this is that implementations should be patentable, not ideas. "Cotton gin," "automobile," and "spreadsheet" are all ideas, with many possible implementations.
One of the major problems in the US, and I suspect the EU will have this problem as well, is a lack of patent inspectors who know enough about the details of esoteric technical fields -- e.g., software. It's not a high-paying job, and there aren't enough of them, with the result that there are very, very few patent inspectors with both the time and the knowledge to determine whether a patent application for something like "one-click" or "hyperlink" makes any sense at all in terms of idea vs. implementation, prior art, etc.
It's a matter of severity, of the punishment fitting the crime. I don't know if PA law regards an adult having sex with a teenager as being as severe as forcible rape (in most states, there are several degrees of rape and sexual assault, and sex with 15-year-olds is not punished nearly as harshly as either forcible rape or sex with very young children) but I think most reasonable people would agree that there's really no comparison between the two. Saying that someone should be forcibly raped for propositioning a 15-year-old is like saying that jaywalkers should have their legs broken.
Oh, for God's sake. Look up "science", "engineering," and "technology" in the dictionary. Reda the definitions until you understand the difference. Then read up on the research that's been going on into solar sails and skyhooks. This is not something a bunch of aluminum-foil-beanie wearing crackpots dreamed up. This is serious research which is getting substantial investment from NASA, the ESA, and the aerospace industry. They wouldn't be putting that money into it if there weren't something there.
Um, no. Von Braun's dreams were within reach of the science of his time, but not the technology. He (and a great many other brilliant people) worked long and hard to use the science they had to create the technology they needed to realize their dreams. The analogy with solar sails and skyhooks is quite exact. We understand the basic science needed, and have in fact built small demonstration projects using well-understood principles, in the same way as early pioneers of rocketry such as Goddard had built vehicles which were the direct technological predecessors of the V-2 and ultimately the Saturn V. With an effort of national (or international) will similar to that which landed men on the Moon, we can produce the technology, just as Von Braun et al did.
Whether or not this will actually happen, of course, remains to be seen. But people with attitudes like yours really add nothing meaningful to the debate.
Gates' personal political beliefs are, or used to be, fairly liberal, yes. But he's more than willing to put his principles aside when it comes to protecting his own ass. Check out the history of Microsoft donations over the last few electon cycles: since the start of the antitrust trial, they've tilted more and more toward the Republicans.
Except that it's obvious to anyone with a brain that Y (collecting should-be-private user information) doesn't contribute in any way to X (providing faster, more reliable service.) If you're collecting my private information, the burden of proof is on you to show me why such collection is beneficial, not on me to show why it isn't.
So who gets to decide what information is "obviously harmful" and "has no redeeming value?" You? Pardon me for not trusting your judgement. Caplan? Ditto. Dubya Bush? Ditto again. In point of fact, no one is wise enough to make that decision for everyone -- which is why the only solution is to make information, in general, and let people decide for themselves.
There are some statements that are indefensible regradless of context. "Let's kill all the Jews and take over Europe" is not made more palatable by preceding it with "I had a horrible time on the Western Front;" similarly, "Public availability of information is a bad thing" is no less terrifying just because you follow it with "It might be used by terrorists."
Says the math geek, I think this is as much of a mathematical problem as an astronomical one -- i.e., we really don't have a good grasp of the dynamics of galaxy formation, and we won't until the math is there. Classical Newtonian orbital mechanics doesn't do it, of course, since it's an n-body problem with a very, very large value of n. Some new kind of analytical technique needs to be invented before we can say we know much about why galaxies look and move the way they do.
A couple of misconceptions need to be cleared up here:
1) It's not the scientists who are filing these patents. It's the suits who run the biotech corporations (and, increasingly, university research labs) who are doing it. Scientists, by and large, want to do science -- if they'd wanted to spend time in court, they'd have become lawyers or MBA's.
2) The human genome project, in its original form, was about sequencing human DNA. Gene discovery from sequence data is an almost entirely different process, and a much lengthier one. Raw sequence data is like a map of the world that shows only the outlines of the continents -- interesting, and potentially useful, but not much practical good to anyone until you've filled in all the rivers and mountain ranges and political boundaries.
The point is that if patent laws had been as absurdly broad in Newton's day as they are now (actually, I'm not even sure that patent laws existed back then -- anyone know?) he could, in fact, have patented his laws of motion, and then successfully sued and collected damages from anyone who built any kind of device that operated according to those laws, or any university that did research on the applications or implications of those laws, or... Which would have made Newton a very rich man for a while, but from a historical perspective it's hard to argue that the world would be better off.
A little OT here, but I've just got to comment on this...
One thing I would advise you--use visualization aggressively. There was a tendency in mathematics for a long time to de-emphasize the geometrical/physical aspects of systems as being sort of extraneous--i.e., it doesn't matter what the parabola looks like, just what its mathematical properties are. Well, in short, this is stupid. Your visual cortex is an amazingly powerful processor, and it's dumb to tie one of your brain's hands behind its back just because someone a few centuries back had a theoretical axe to grind.
Well, sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not. The fact is, some people are more visually oriented and some people are more numerically and symbolically oriented -- the way one of my Dad's professors (back when he was a math student, they had to draw their graphs, by God!) was that there are two types of people in the world, geometers and algebraists. Me, I'm an algebraist: sometimes it's useful for me to see a visual representation of a problem, but more often than not, not only don't I care what it looks like, trying to think about it visually makes it harder for me to solve.
Ultimately, what matters is solving the problem (or proving the theorem, or whatever.) In most branches of mathematics, there are both algebraic and geometric ways to get a solution. Neither one is "better" in some abstract sense, but one or the other will generally work better for an individual.
Although the majority of new drugs are indeed invented by drug companies looking for a profit, most of the basic science that goes into drug discovery is still done by university research laboratories that get their money from government grants.
... is the aluminum-foil-covered hat to keep out the CIA mind control rays. There has never been a single piece of hard evidence for low-intensity radio waves causing the symptoms he and others describe. Considering how long radio-based devices have been in common use (just over a century) it's very hard to believe that this is real.
In fact, it sounds to me like classic mass hysteria, which (unfortunately) is a well-documented medical phenomenon. If this guy and his buddies are looking for a place to live that will satisfy their needs, may I suggest Salem, Mass.?
"In God we Trust" first appeared on U.S. currency in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, IIRC. The Pledge of Allegiance itself is also about a century old, but the "under God" was added in the 1950's. So yes, both represent relatively new "entanglements." Certainly neither appears in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution...
Like I said before, the Founders had graphic examples, in their own recent history, of the horrors of theocracy. Since to modern Americans, religious wars and persecution are things that happen to poor people far away (N. Ireland, Israel, Afghanistan, et bloody cetera) we tend to forget the dangers inherent in mingling church and state. You'd think Sept. 11 would have changed that, at least to a degree, but our own home-grown theocrats (one of whom occupies the White House) co-opted it for their own loony beliefs instead.
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It's worth noting, I think, that until a couple of releases ago, ClarisWorks/AppleWorks had some of the best file format compatibility around -- you could write to and read from an astonishing variety of formats with great accuracy. They stopped doing that in, IIRC, the last-but-one release of AppleWorks, presumably since at the time they were buddy-buddy with M$ and wanted to encourage everyone to switch to Office. Now ... well, we'll see. I'd be willing to shell out some decent money for a copy of AppleWorks that could read and write Office-and-everything-else documents accurately.
M$ does donations and low-cost setups for schools all the time. (Usually it's software, not hardware, of course, since software actually costs them next to nothing to produce. They recently gave a "$500,000" software donation to my school that, based on the number of CD's and software boxes, probably cost them something in the neighborhood of $25 -- but it's still a half-million-dollar tax writeoff.) Actually, plenty of other software companies do too, though I'm not sure anyone else is as aggressive about it as M$.
Why do they do this? Simple: it's a long-term marketing trick (and a cheap writeoff.) Train the students with Windows, Office, Visual Studio, MSSQL Server, IIS, et bloody cetera, and that's what they'll know when they get out into the working world. Companies that already use M$ shit will have an easier time hiring new people. Companies that are deciding on new systems will have people in their IT dept. who say, "Well, I don't know anything about Linux/Solaris/gcc/Apache/whatever, but I know all about NT and VC++ and IIS," and may well make multimillion-dollar purchasing decisions on that basis. It's not hard to figure out.
I have a nine-year-old daughter. If someone tried to have sex with her now, sure, I'd happily see the perp thrown in maximum security. When she's fifteen, it may be a different story.
I think that's a false analogy. Imagine if the Roman Empire (and/or any of the other great empires of history -- British, Spanish, Chinese, etc.) had been operating under the authority of an even larger government, a super-empire that was structured for the maintenance of the imperial system. That's the situation with the US government and large corporations. Now, you may argue that this super-empire itself would inevitably fall ... but in the absence of something really drastic happening, I don't expect the US government to go away in my lifetime.
Degree degree degree. Forcible rape and statutory rape are two different (though obviously related) crimes, and are (appropriately) punished differently.
I got curious enough about this that I looked it up. In Pennsylvania, forcible rape is a first degree felony, with an additional ten year prison penalty above and beyond that normally provided for first degree felonies (if I read the statute right) while "statutory sexual assault" is a second degree felony with no additional penalties.
That still seemed a little harsh to me, so I decided to compare it to my home state. In Colorado, as far as I can tell from reading the not-terribly-clearly-worded statutes, forcible rape is a Class 3 or Class 4 felony depending on the degree of force and/or coercion used, while sexual assault of the sort the perpetrator in this case apparently intended to commit is a Class 1 misdemeanor. That seems a little more reasonable.
BTW, the jumping-off point for this information is here, a service of Cornell Law. It seems to be an excellent resource for legal research of this sort.
My point, in case I haven't made it clear enough already, is that in this case the guy didn't intend to rape anyone either -- not in the sense most people use the word "rape," i.e. forcible rape. I maintain that propositioning a 15-year-old for sex, while sleazy and distasteful, is in no way comparable to forcible rape. AFAIK, as I said above, the law in most states agrees with me, though I don't know about PA specifically.
Except that jaywalking is illegal because, the idea goes, it might cause drivers to swerve to avoid you and have an accident.
But okay, you've got a point. Subsitute "shoplifters should have their hands chopped off" above.
Novel, non-obvious, and not over-broad. Another way of putting this is that implementations should be patentable, not ideas. "Cotton gin," "automobile," and "spreadsheet" are all ideas, with many possible implementations.
One of the major problems in the US, and I suspect the EU will have this problem as well, is a lack of patent inspectors who know enough about the details of esoteric technical fields -- e.g., software. It's not a high-paying job, and there aren't enough of them, with the result that there are very, very few patent inspectors with both the time and the knowledge to determine whether a patent application for something like "one-click" or "hyperlink" makes any sense at all in terms of idea vs. implementation, prior art, etc.
It's a matter of severity, of the punishment fitting the crime. I don't know if PA law regards an adult having sex with a teenager as being as severe as forcible rape (in most states, there are several degrees of rape and sexual assault, and sex with 15-year-olds is not punished nearly as harshly as either forcible rape or sex with very young children) but I think most reasonable people would agree that there's really no comparison between the two. Saying that someone should be forcibly raped for propositioning a 15-year-old is like saying that jaywalkers should have their legs broken.
Oh, for God's sake. Look up "science", "engineering," and "technology" in the dictionary. Reda the definitions until you understand the difference. Then read up on the research that's been going on into solar sails and skyhooks. This is not something a bunch of aluminum-foil-beanie wearing crackpots dreamed up. This is serious research which is getting substantial investment from NASA, the ESA, and the aerospace industry. They wouldn't be putting that money into it if there weren't something there.
Um, no. Von Braun's dreams were within reach of the science of his time, but not the technology. He (and a great many other brilliant people) worked long and hard to use the science they had to create the technology they needed to realize their dreams. The analogy with solar sails and skyhooks is quite exact. We understand the basic science needed, and have in fact built small demonstration projects using well-understood principles, in the same way as early pioneers of rocketry such as Goddard had built vehicles which were the direct technological predecessors of the V-2 and ultimately the Saturn V. With an effort of national (or international) will similar to that which landed men on the Moon, we can produce the technology, just as Von Braun et al did.
Whether or not this will actually happen, of course, remains to be seen. But people with attitudes like yours really add nothing meaningful to the debate.
Gates' personal political beliefs are, or used to be, fairly liberal, yes. But he's more than willing to put his principles aside when it comes to protecting his own ass. Check out the history of Microsoft donations over the last few electon cycles: since the start of the antitrust trial, they've tilted more and more toward the Republicans.
Well, we could try using it to fight the forces of evil, like this:
Hey, guys, did you hear that there's a company that wants to take over the world? And uses all kinds of dirty tricks to do it, destroying innovation and competition? Better got to their Web site and read up, so you can know your enemy!
Do you also oppose regular pet breeding, then? Should we stop producing domestic animals by any deliberate method until all the strays are adopted?
Except that it's obvious to anyone with a brain that Y (collecting should-be-private user information) doesn't contribute in any way to X (providing faster, more reliable service.) If you're collecting my private information, the burden of proof is on you to show me why such collection is beneficial, not on me to show why it isn't.
So who gets to decide what information is "obviously harmful" and "has no redeeming value?" You? Pardon me for not trusting your judgement. Caplan? Ditto. Dubya Bush? Ditto again. In point of fact, no one is wise enough to make that decision for everyone -- which is why the only solution is to make information, in general, and let people decide for themselves.
There are some statements that are indefensible regradless of context. "Let's kill all the Jews and take over Europe" is not made more palatable by preceding it with "I had a horrible time on the Western Front;" similarly, "Public availability of information is a bad thing" is no less terrifying just because you follow it with "It might be used by terrorists."
Says the math geek, I think this is as much of a mathematical problem as an astronomical one -- i.e., we really don't have a good grasp of the dynamics of galaxy formation, and we won't until the math is there. Classical Newtonian orbital mechanics doesn't do it, of course, since it's an n-body problem with a very, very large value of n. Some new kind of analytical technique needs to be invented before we can say we know much about why galaxies look and move the way they do.
A couple of misconceptions need to be cleared up here:
1) It's not the scientists who are filing these patents. It's the suits who run the biotech corporations (and, increasingly, university research labs) who are doing it. Scientists, by and large, want to do science -- if they'd wanted to spend time in court, they'd have become lawyers or MBA's.
2) The human genome project, in its original form, was about sequencing human DNA. Gene discovery from sequence data is an almost entirely different process, and a much lengthier one. Raw sequence data is like a map of the world that shows only the outlines of the continents -- interesting, and potentially useful, but not much practical good to anyone until you've filled in all the rivers and mountain ranges and political boundaries.
Wow, you are spectacularly missing the point.
... Which would have made Newton a very rich man for a while, but from a historical perspective it's hard to argue that the world would be better off.
The point is that if patent laws had been as absurdly broad in Newton's day as they are now (actually, I'm not even sure that patent laws existed back then -- anyone know?) he could, in fact, have patented his laws of motion, and then successfully sued and collected damages from anyone who built any kind of device that operated according to those laws, or any university that did research on the applications or implications of those laws, or
A little OT here, but I've just got to comment on this ...
Well, sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not. The fact is, some people are more visually oriented and some people are more numerically and symbolically oriented -- the way one of my Dad's professors (back when he was a math student, they had to draw their graphs, by God!) was that there are two types of people in the world, geometers and algebraists. Me, I'm an algebraist: sometimes it's useful for me to see a visual representation of a problem, but more often than not, not only don't I care what it looks like, trying to think about it visually makes it harder for me to solve.
Ultimately, what matters is solving the problem (or proving the theorem, or whatever.) In most branches of mathematics, there are both algebraic and geometric ways to get a solution. Neither one is "better" in some abstract sense, but one or the other will generally work better for an individual.
Endemic is precisely the right adjective to describe Office documents in the corporate environment. RTFD.
Although the majority of new drugs are indeed invented by drug companies looking for a profit, most of the basic science that goes into drug discovery is still done by university research laboratories that get their money from government grants.
... is the aluminum-foil-covered hat to keep out the CIA mind control rays. There has never been a single piece of hard evidence for low-intensity radio waves causing the symptoms he and others describe. Considering how long radio-based devices have been in common use (just over a century) it's very hard to believe that this is real.
In fact, it sounds to me like classic mass hysteria, which (unfortunately) is a well-documented medical phenomenon. If this guy and his buddies are looking for a place to live that will satisfy their needs, may I suggest Salem, Mass.?
"In God we Trust" first appeared on U.S. currency in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, IIRC. The Pledge of Allegiance itself is also about a century old, but the "under God" was added in the 1950's. So yes, both represent relatively new "entanglements." Certainly neither appears in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution ...
Like I said before, the Founders had graphic examples, in their own recent history, of the horrors of theocracy. Since to modern Americans, religious wars and persecution are things that happen to poor people far away (N. Ireland, Israel, Afghanistan, et bloody cetera) we tend to forget the dangers inherent in mingling church and state. You'd think Sept. 11 would have changed that, at least to a degree, but our own home-grown theocrats (one of whom occupies the White House) co-opted it for their own loony beliefs instead.