to get more fiber and micronutrients: In practice, it is what we're eating. Exercise just makes us want to eat more afterwards. Enough fiber and micronutrients shuts off our "appestat" and we feel full on less calories. See, for one example, Dr. Fuhrman's approach, which suggests people aspire to one pound cooked and one pound raw veggies every day (hard to do, but even getting close yields great benefits): http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra... http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
That said, exercise is generally *great* for your overall health, including boosting immune function by getting the lymph moving. And outdoors exercise in sunlight under the right conditions can help with vitamin D deficiency.
See also: http://fuhrmaneattolivereview.... "Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, MediFast and Weightwatchers offer only traditional foods from the Standard American Diet that are known to be the root cause of obesity and other common diseases. The portions may be smaller in size and in the number of calories but their nutrition is negligible and too low as confirmed by the Aggregate Nutrition Density Index."
Getting back to the main topic, in the same way, if we were producing power locally-to-the-neighborhood like via Solar PV or maybe someday hot/cold fusion, we would be less likely to have unpaid-up-front external costs like cross-country pollution, economic risks, or maintaining the US military in the middle east. Then our economy and society would be a lot healthier. Energy efficiency also works like local energy production and so generally is a great thing. Consuming foreign il is an invitation to disaster, like the USA has not learned its lesson from the 1970s! http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ... "We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny."
Sadly, the USA took the wrong path to the feel-good-in-the-short-term Reagan years back then... But thankfully some people did not give up, and the cost of solar PV continues to fall and energy efficiency improvement continue to be made despite it not being a level playing field because the price of fossil fuels and nukes don't account for many negative externalities. But we could have been there in the 1980s, and saved decades of military costs and health costs and pollution remediation costs incurred since then.
Good points. How is copyright for any computer software then justified, at least for most software that is intended to be a "useful" tool, like Microsoft Word?
From what I read here, systemd is a lot less modular by bundling in a lot of services. Linux has had the virtue of modularity at is core, as exemplified by narrow-focus command line tools piped together to get work done. Modularity is something like cleanliness. If you leave crumbs all over your kitchen all the time, it generally isn't itself the problem. The problem is when roaches and mice move in and you can't get rid of them due to the crumbs you still leave everywhere. Granted, cleanliness (and modularity) can perhaps go too far (the person who scrubs the kitchen flour every five minutes). So, what is a healthy balance here? I don't know enough about the details to weigh in on that. You ask for specific problems, and while a reasonable sounding request, that is also a bit like asking people to send pictures in of specific roaches and mice. The specific problems are important of course, but what is at stake is the bigger picture, not stamping out each individual roach. What matters is increased risk. The more general issue is the management of risks from complexity, whereas modularity is one of the best (but not the only) approach for doing that.
I've seen how lack of modularity can damage other software communities -- particularly the early Squeak community, like I wrote about here http://lists.squeakfoundation.... "I sympathize. I think the biggest issue of Squeak is issues with modularity and managing complexity. These issues translate to frustration for maintainers (and users:-). Anyway, I had related frustrations to yours many years ago and they are why I ended up doing a lot in Python and Jython on the JVM in the last decade, even to the point of working on PataPata.... I think the most important single issue in maintaining any large system is managing complexity (documenting intent maybe comes next, including well-named variables and methods and functions). This has never been a priority for Squeak IMHO....
There are several ways to manage complexity, which include: * modularity (namespaces, packages like Java or GNU Smalltalk or Debian, letting someone else do that hard work by leveraging libraries or VMs or languages, like Squeak does by using a C compiler to generate the VM) * cleverness (brilliant redesign, like traits was hopefully going to be) * laissez faire, and also to each his or her own image (that is what we have now, and it is not that bad an idea, if the *core* is small and well thought out, like Spoon, so the *image* instance becomes the *module*. But alas, it is not, witness how confusing Morphic is to unravel).
Modularity is the one way to manage complexity which seems to work best in practice, although the others have their role. However, if Squeak images could easily talk to each other and share some state, and we had Spoon-like remote debugging and development, then we could have just one application per image, and that would be easier to maintain (it would be modular to a degree but in an unusual way). But I would still suggest such a system built on well-though out (clever) modules would be more powerful and easier to use than a mess of spaghetti code, even if we had only one application per image."
With roots back to here in 2000: http://lists.squeakfoundation.... "Squeak complexity in 2.8 has become a complex cat from the simple kitten complexity of 1.13(?) in 1996. Back then, Dan Ingalls wrote on 10 Nov 1996 those prescient words: "The Squeak team has an interest in doing the world's simplest application construction framework, but I suspect that we will get sucked up with enough other things that this won't happen in the next two months (but who knows...)."
Squeak 2.8's complexity is now quiet (in terms of walkbacks) and stealthy (in terms of growing between
Granted from 2005: http://www.rense.com/general65... "I had been stationed in Germany for two years while in the military, so I lit up, and commented about how beautiful the country was, and inquired if he was going back because he missed it.
"No," he answered me. "I'm going back because I've seen this before." He then commenced to explain that when he was a kid, he watched with his family in fear as Hitler's government committed atrocity after atrocity, and no one was willing to say anything. He said the news refused to question the government, and the ones who did were not in the newspaper business much longer. He said good neighbors, people he had known all his life, turned against his family and other Jews, grabbing on to the hate and superiority "as if they were starved for it" (his words).
He said he was too old to see it happen right in front of his eyes again, and too old to do anything about it, so he was taking his family back to Europe on Thursday where they would be safe from George W. Bush and his neocons. He seemed resolute, but troubled, nonetheless, as if being too young on one end and too old on the other to fight what he saw happening was wearing on him....
I have related this event to you in the hopes it will serve as a cautionary anecdote about the state of our Union, and to illustrate the path we Americans are being led down by a group of fanatics bent on global economic and military dominion. When a man who survived the fruits of fascism decides its time to leave THIS country because he's seeing the same patterns that led to the Holocaust and other Nazi horrors beginning to form here, it is time for us to recognize the underlying evil inherent in the actions of those who claim they work for all Americans, and for all mankind. And it is incumbent upon all Americans, Red and Blue, Republican and Democrat, to stop them."
What has really changed from the Bush years of great significance in that regard?
See also: "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" http://www.press.uchicago.edu/... ""What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."
Jews who moved to Israel seem to me overall to have interpreted "never again" in terms of who has the most guns. But there is another perspective on that, which is to think that "never again" should be about militaristic bureaucracy getting out of control. A culture like the USA (or Israel for that matter) can be full of guns and people who know how to use them, but still infested with militarist bureaucracy infesting every aspect of life (including via perpetual full-surveillance "schooling"). Like bureaucracy, humans have had a long association with fire, and fire is useful to warm our homes and cook our meals, but it is a terrible thing when it rages out of control.
That said, how should we behave when we are essentially t
Great points!!! I've made similar ones on scope, suggesting the Java API is derivative of Smalltalk's class libraries. Also, one can look at the FSF's claim the calling GPL'd code even via dynamic linking creates a derived work.
Copyright has many absurdities built into it when applied to programs, and this is one of them. I agree that in practice, if APIs were extensively protected, then people would gravitate towards freely licensed ones. And people might go back decades to find the origins of various software expressions related to interfaces in decades old code (independent invention wold be the only defense, and might be hard to prove). Although, the freely licensed APIs would probably be used by everyone else who argued they copied something from it... One can hope that the SC ruling for Oracle might push copyright for software to the point where copyright for software is show to be so absurd it is abandoned, but somehow I doubt even that would get copyright for software repealed.
Reminds me of the same kind of nonsense as is now happening with patents and smartphones. It's one thing when you are producing machinery in the 1800s and devices are covered by at most a handful of patents. But a Smartphone may be covered by literally thousands of patents (both hardware and software). How do you begin to keep track of that when designing something, let alone negotiate rights to each patent? How are patents then promoting the useful arts when in practice all they do is get in the way? Contrast with the US Fashion industry which in general is not covered by copyrights or patents.
My main point is not to argue for more copyright; it is to say that, like Rodney Dangerfield, API designers "no respect".:-) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R...
Granted, so many APIs suck for all the reasons the Google engineer said they were hard to make that it's understandable why people don't respect them. It's like how general tankers in World of Tank have so little respect for Artillery (another hard job).:-) http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/i... "Arty seems like the best choice to blame at for some idiot players who have no idea where to go in battle and cock up the whole battle. Arty is not air strike, it takes time to aim and reload, most importantly, i cant shoot at target that i cant even see on my map. For those noobs who always blame at other player in order to feel good abt their own IQ, stop pissing ppl off and learn how to play."
I get the feeling you perhaps have not designed any complex software more than one, especially software libraries intended to be supported for years? Otherwise you might not so easily dismiss the creative challenge of creating good APIs. Sure, implementations may require hard work up front, but a sucky API generally creates massive amounts of hard work for everyone else for years to come. A bad API in that sense is much, much worse than a bad implementation, which as Linux shows, can be fairly easily replaced eventually. While it may look trivial, creating a good API demands immense amounts of understanding of the problem space, the limits of computers, the user community, and so on, including imagining future needs. And choosing the right simplification can be the hardest, most creative act of all -- which is just as true for programmers as it is for painters, novelists, architects, screenwriters, illustrators, actors, and so on.
Actually, it is more and more rare that someone can get anyone to pay something for what want to get paid for in the USA. See for example, from the 1990s by the then Vice Provost of Caltech https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d... "The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it.... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically...."
Sure, you can always point to funding successes, but as a successful percentage of aspirants, the odds get longer and longer with more qualified people and less global-scale opportunities as big winners dominate the landscape.
BTW, people did get funding for creating triple stores and similar thing, just not me (not that I ever tried to raise funding for the Pointrel System, in part because I wanted it to be free and open source). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Besides, in a world of so much potential plenty, why make people justify what they want to do based on the possibility that "investors" who are already financially obese can monopolize it for a profit? Also, in a supposed democracy, why should a system like "Freedombox" get the left-overs while phones and tablets full of essentially spyware get vast amounts of money poured into them? http://freedomboxfoundation.or...
But regardless of funding issues, this whole case shows how valuable the Java API had become, given Google took such pains to use it exactly... Part of the value of that API was the immense amounts of marketing put into Java by IBM and Sun for a decade (given Java sucked at the start, and is not that great even now although it has become OK-ish after vast investments). For good or bad, Oracle bought that Java asset, including communit
Loved the first half of your comment; the second half I have issues with. Dan Pink's talk on motivation and creativity cited research done by the federal Reserve which included experiments in a poor country which agreed with the general findings. So it is not just white middle class -- it is human. As for Bill Gates, he bought DOS from someone who had according to some sources essentially stolen it from his employer. http://www.businessweek.com/st... http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu...
Bill Gates was born a multimillionaire in today's dollars and could have spent his life working on free software if he wished. http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
Emacs is essentially a word processor, especially when coupled with tools like LaTex,
I was using a word processor (in ROM) on a Commodore PET around 1980. Many other word processors were created, along with drawing programs, and so on. PLATO preceded pretty much of of that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... "PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations)[1][2] was the first generalized computer assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games."
Or with Forth, funded in part by federal dollars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... "Forth was first exposed to other programmers in the early 1970s, starting with Elizabeth Rather at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory.[6] After their work at NRAO, Charles Moore and Elizabeth Rather formed FORTH, Inc. in 1973, refining and porting Forth systems to dozens of other platforms in the next decade."
And don't forget "The Mother of All Demos" by Doug Engelbart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... ""The Mother of All Demos" is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, computer demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s."
The reason we use what we use may relate to "capitalism", but it has more to do with the rich getting richer and market position and advertising and (sometimes illegal as with Microsoft antitrust) wheeling and dealing with supplier contracts and press and such, funding alliances, sweat heart deals with governments, and a bunch of similar things.
Rewards, in the presence of artificial scarcity, can control people. But people don't do their most creative work in such a regime. Under such a
Quoting a small snippet from a larger work with attribution in the USA is generally fair use. But in any case, how can the Free Software Foundation claim that code that links to GPL libraries even *dynamically* is a derived work if APIs are not copyrightable? As much as I am against excessive copyright, people can't have it both ways.
Others disagree though, although I think they are probably wrong (but its up to the courts etc...): https://www.publicknowledge.or... "There's a dangerous meme going around that if Oracle loses its novel copyright claims against Google that suddenly the GPL will become unenforceable. This idea hinges on a misunderstanding about the difference between linking to a code library and merely using an API.... Florian Mueller, who provides indispensable analysis of various intellectual property issues in the mobile industry, believes that whether an API is copyrightable can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. He is certainly right that the overall design of a system of APIs can show "creativity," in the same sense that a brilliant mechanical invention is creative. But that does not mean that copyright is the proper way to protect that creativity, if at all. Copyright extends only to "original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression," and a system of API calls does not meet that test. It is not a "fixed" work in the same way that an actual computer program is. I will not address whether a system of APIs is patentable, but certainly the creativity that a well-designed API scheme might show is closer to the creativity that a concise mathematical statement (not patentable) or a new design for an engine (patentable) might show. In any event, simply because something is "creative" in some sense does not mean that it deserves legal protection, unless it can be shown that some desired level of creativity would not happen without such protection. I do not see any evidence that the dynamic and innovative software industry requires copyright protection for APIs to maintain its current high level of creativity...."
Some people also suggest the dynamic linking issue for the GPL would not hold up in the Supreme Court...
To add to the confusion, from Richard Stallman: http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/... "Someone recently made the claim that including a header file always makes a derivative work. That's not the FSF's view. Our view is that just using structure definitions, typedefs, enumeration constants, macros with simple bodies, etc., is NOT enough to make a derivative work. It would take a substantial amount of code (coming from inline functions or macros with substantial bodies) to do that."
How can he say that and still argue that dynamic linking to a GPL's library makes something fall under the GPL? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... "This key dispute is whether or not non-GPL software can legally statically link or dynamically link to GPL libraries. Different opinions exist on this issue. The GPL is clear in requiring that all derivative works of code under the GPL must themselves be under the GPL. Ambiguity arises with regards to using GPL libraries, and bundling GPL software into a larger package (perhaps mixed into a binary via static linking). This is ultimately a question not of the GPL per se, but of how copyright law defines derivative works. The following points of view exist:... The Free Software Foundation (which holds the copyright of several notable GPL-licensed software products and of the license text itself) asserts that an executable which uses a dynamically linked library is indeed a derivative work...."
So, while they are at it, why not get the Supreme Court to rule on that dy
Top down programming is a recognized form of design. With a bigger initial team, you could imagine Linus might have never written any implementations of APIs as other team member could have filled that in, but he still have made an enormous creative contribution by good design. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... "A top-down approach (also known as stepwise design and in some cases used as a synonym of decomposition) is essentially the breaking down of a system to gain insight into its compositional sub-systems. In a top-down approach an overview of the system is formulated, specifying but not detailing any first-level subsystems. Each subsystem is then refined in yet greater detail, sometimes in many additional subsystem levels, until the entire specification is reduced to base elements. A top-down model is often specified with the assistance of "black boxes", these make it easier to manipulate. However, black boxes may fail to elucidate elementary mechanisms or be detailed enough to realistically validate the model. Top down approach starts with the big picture. It breaks down from there into smaller segments."
What seems to me to be going on in the discussion here which disturbs me greatly as a software developer is that, in order to try to help win a political argument about interoperability, people are dismissing the creative aspect of naming things well and making good choices about module partitions. That is really really sad. It has taken me *decades* to get better at those tasks, and they remain hard, and I can still see how much I could improve on them. One pet project (the Pointrel system) I've been thinking about APIs for for thirty+ years trying to simplify and clarify the design. Maybe that is to excess:-) but in any case, an essential part of a good design is good names and good abstraction layers, and that can IMHO take a lot of effort and creativity.
But rather than, as I do, people here saying, yes good APIs demand effort and creative understanding of the problem domain, and the issue is that copyright is (or has become) a bad idea because it would restrict interoperability, people here tend to be saying, no, APIs aren't creative because it would be inconvenient if they were given how broad copyright now is. I think the end result of that is going to be: 1. Pissing off software designers 2. Losing the Supreme Court case too. 3. ??? 4. Profit for those purveying artificial scarcity (my half-ironic site on that: http://artificialscarcity.com/ )
Personally, I'm coming around just now to the thought that maybe most people on Slashdot really have never tried very hard to design great software API interfaces? Which fits the facts that most APIs I've ever had to deal with were fll of gotchas and confusing aspects. Contrast with, say, ObjectWorks Smalltalk, which in general had great APIs for streaming and such.
The "solution" here (implied by Oracle) is that APIs are controllable by the copyright owner, and the problem is that APIs take a lot of hard creative work to get right? I propose other solutions, like a basic income and rolling back copyright.
If APIs were not hard to write and required creativity to do well, why are their articles giving advice on how to do it better? Example: http://piwik.org/blog/2008/01/... "Here are the main concepts I tried to apply when designing the API:
Easy to learn ; the documentation provides simple examples, complete documentation
Easy to use ; single
Correlation does not prove causation, but interesting paper none-the-less reading the summary: "Copyright and Creativity -- Evidence from Italian Operas" http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
But even if it was true, should most of humanity be denied access to most of human knowledge via the internet that could otherwise be available right now (like via Google Books) so we might get a few more operas and other such thing?
Beside, current research (even by the US Federal Reserve) shows reward is not motivator for creative works (or sometimes even has a negative correlation of causing artists to just rehash more of the same old thing). Lot of studies are cited in these works by Alfie Kohn and Dan Pink to support my point: "Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes" http://www.alfiekohn.org/books... "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Also: "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
A better answer to the issue of people having enough time to do quality work (including learning to do it) is to have a "basic income" for everyone (so, for example, monthly Social Security payments in the USA from birth, not just for those 65 and older). http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
There are plenty of reasons copyrights stifle creativity these days, because artists can't easily remix. https://gigaom.com/2011/12/12/...
Most, as in 99%+ (my guess), of artistic people are only held back by copyright, because very, very few people can make a living at licensing creative works as authors or composers or whatever, but they instead generally have to pay for access to contemporary novels and music and such. Some of that is discussed here: http://www.thepublicdomain.org...
Consider: http://www.kroah.com/log/linux... "For Linux, we don't have a stable internal api, and for people to wish that we would have one is just foolish.... Here's an example that shows how this all works. The Linux USB code has been rewritten at least three times. We've done this over time in order to handle things that we didn't originally need to handle, like high speed devices, and just because we learned the problems of our first design, and to fix bugs and security issues. Each time we made changes in our api, we updated all of the kernel drivers that used the apis, so nothing would break. And we deleted the old functions as they were no longer needed, and did things wrong. Because of this, Linux now has the fastest USB bus speeds when you test out all of the different operating systems. We max out the hardware as fast as it can go, and you can do this from simple userspace programs, no fancy kernel driver work is needed."
And: http://www.helixsoft.nl/blog/?... "Linux pioneered that model: they call a stable API nonsense. The interface between drivers and the kernel changes all the time. If the Linux developers think of a better, more consistent or more efficient way to interface with the drivers they go ahead and make that change."
Thinking up "a better, more consistent or more efficient way" to interface sounds like creative work to me.
I had a similar disagreement with Alan Kay who argued that programs are mathematical. Given that for our Garden Simulator my wife spent over a year full time translating badly-named spaghetti Fortran code from EPIC to well-structured Delphi code that did essentially *exactly* the same thing, but now was understandable and maintainable, I see *enormous* benefit in naming functions, parameters, and structures well and know how long it may take to do that. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
If you don't believe well-named APIs have great value, try, say, reverse engineering compacted JavaScript code. It's possible, but it takes an enormous amount of time. From another angle, most of what is written in fiction is about the same old thing -- human conflicts, human emotions, human behavior, and so on; what differs is often mainly the nuances of how things are described or the sequence they are described in. Why should Disney get a copyright on "Snow White" (the movie) just because it attached some specific names and faces to seven dwarfs when the story itself was public domain at that point? What difference is there in that case from giving names to functions and parameters for Java when the general notion of calling into a virtual machine is also effectively in the public domain?
However, I still think you have missed my point because you say I desire copyrighted APIs. I'd rather see copyright rolled back entirely or at least greatly restricted like along the lines Richard Stallman proposes. What I am saying is that as long as one supports copyright as it is now, and as it is being expanded, then you have to accept APIs should be copyrightable. In that sense, if you believe in the value of copyrighting computer software, Linux should *not* have been legally made ignoring that copyright violation sued to be mostly just a civil matter until recently it became criminal, and that the UNIX copyright holders would have had to chosen to purse Linux in court).
I think we probably agree on the moral an economic aspects of FOSS. My point is that we should not be trying to carve out special exemptions for APIs when the whole copyright edifice is maki
I've read that Linus Torvald's brilliance (aside from management) has been mostly in creating good APIs for the Linux Kernel. His initial implementations of those APIs was not too good and was replaced by the community, but the APIs live on. It takes a lot of effort to imagine, design, and redesign good APIs. It is overall often much easier to implement an API than to design an API because the design of the API is a creative act of deciding how to partition the problem space and prioritize aspects of it. Naming things well and creating elegant structure are often creative acts, and those are core tasks in creating a good API. A good API may seem so obvious we take it for granted, but that ease-of-use may be the product of years of hard-won experience. As in: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)"
See my other post questioning the value of copyright to society, but if copyright is about creativity, then IMHO APIs are often creative, and sometimes much more creative than implementations.
However, by the same argument fashion can't be copyrighted because it is "useful", likewise *no* software should be copyrightable. http://www.npr.org/2012/09/10/... http://www.mttlrblog.org/2013/... "Fashion design in the U.S. currently lacks copyright protection. Section 101 of the Copyright Act states that "pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works" are only protected if the design can be separated from and exists independently of the usefulness of the article. In the U.S., fashion designs are not seen as having creative value, but are rather seen solely as utilitarian."
Really, why can someone copyright "Microsoft Office", which is essentially just a bunch of instructions when they can't copyright a Gucci purse? It makes no sense, but that is so true about so much of copyright.
Short of repealing copyright (a good thing to consider IMHO), and because copyright is now effectively infinite and the bargain with the community has been broken by copyright holders by extending copyright, another approach is to tax it, as I suggested a decade ago based on an idea in someone slashdot sig: "Copyright Tax for the Privilege of the Monopoly" http://journalism.berkeley.edu...
Personally, I'd rather see copyright replaced with a basic income so all would-be authors had the time needed to create. That is based on this idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception."
A lot of work goes into creating a good API. Copyright should be greatly reduced or eliminated if we care about human progress, but bad law passed by Congress is still law. The Supreme Court will probably rule against these computer scientists, and that may make things worse than ambiguity. "For a limited time" has already been deemed by the Supreme Court to be effectively equal to infinity minus one in the "Eldred v. Ashcroft" decision instead of the Supreme Court ruling copyright longer than a few years was now defeating "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" which IMHO would have been a better ruling. Given that, what should happen is that either Congress should change the copyright laws or we should change the Constitution and withdraw from various copyright treaties. But that would interfere with the Constitutional right for existing big businesses and long dead authors to make a profit.... Of course, it's also been shown that profit is no motivation for creativity, but that is conveniently ignored in a capitalist society: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
See also: http://www.neurope.eu/article/... "Ignoring these exclusive rights - the copyright monopoly - allowed Eastern Europe to leapfrog 20 years of development. This is a consistent pattern through economic history: it is only the countries that are geopolitically dominant at a particular time that seek to impose their exclusive rights upon others, as a means of kicking away the ladder to the top. When the United States was in its infancy, those who illegally copied science, production plans, and useful arts from Great Britain were proclaimed national heroes. It was only recently - the 1980s - that the United States began aggressively pushing its exclusive rights regime as part of being a superpower, and as an integral means of maintaining that superpower."
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/... ""There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the launch of CCIndia in early 2007, but there seems to be little activity there... I think CC is a bit too conservative and too respectful of copyright issues. Copyright has not worked for us (in the developing world) for generations. Generally speaking, copyright in any form, including CC, doesn't fit in too well with Asian ideas of knowledge, since it enables those controlling knowledge and information over the rest, and we find it impossible to emerge winners in this game. It is a colonial law, not meant to serve the interest of the people of those parts of the globe that are not ahead in the information race! Why should we be as respectful to it, as, say, Lawrence Lessig is?" "
"I'd like to find a person that adheres to a strict vegan diet devoid of GMOs (corn being the primary offender) that suffers from diabetes. I doubt such a person exists, but I'm willing to entertain the idea of a 300+ lb. diabetic vegan if anyone can provide evidence to the contrary."
BTW, a lot of vegans eat terrible. Too much processed vegan junk foods, too many carbs, not enough vegetables, nutritional deficiencies relating to B, D, Iodine, Omega 3s/DHA, etc.. Dr. Fuhrman talks about this. https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra... "What You Need to Know About Vegetarian or Vegan Diets; Following a strict vegetarian diet is not as important as eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables.... A vegetarian whose diet is mainly refined grains, cold breakfast cereals, processed health food store products, vegetarian fast foods, white rice, and pasta will be worse off than a person who eats a little turkey, chicken, fish, or eggs but consumes large volumes of fruits, vegetables, and beans. That combination of little or no animal products with a higher consumption of fresh produce is the crucial factor that makes a vegetarian diet healthful."
Personally, considering even Gorillas get about 5% of their calories from termites and such, I don't think any primate is adapted to be totally vegan. Maybe it is possible, but it is really pushing it. In the West, we just don't eat many insects or enough dirt (yes, I mean that, about gut bacteria and vitamin B12, although dirt today is probably not what it used to be like with lead and mercury contamination and e coli contamination and such).
However, there are lots of people for whom turning vegan improved their health for a couple years until various deficiencies set in. And I think those deficiencies could be managed for people who are aware of them or do various tests. A big thing is to eat a larger variety of foods than most people in Western society on a SAD diet are used to eating. I'd guess iodine deficiency is a big issue for many Western vegans, since some soils are depleted and sea vegetables are not common in a Western diet, and now that much bread has bromine in it instead of iodine as a dough conditioner, the situation is even worse. I also think there may be vitamins in various animal fats that we may not get enough of easily on a vegan diet for some people, especially those whose genetics are more adapted to some situations (same as lactose intolerance, but in reverse, like they are not as good at making vitamin A from plants compared to absorbing it from animal products...)
Still, in general, vegans tend to be more health conscious, so: http://www.veganhealth.org/art... "The only prospective study measuring rates of diabetes in vegans, the Adventist Health Study 2, found them to have a 60% less chance of developing the disease than non-vegetarians after two years of follow-up. Previously, a cross-sectional report from the Adventist Health Study-2 showed vegans to have a 68% lower rate of diabetes than non-vegetarians. A number of clinical trials have now shown that a vegan, or mostly vegan, diet can lower body weight, reduce blood sugar, and improve other parameters for type 2 diabetes."
Corn syrup manufacturers used to (maybe some still do?) clean their equipment with a mercury-based cleaning agent, and so some batches of high fructose corn syrup were contaminated with higher levels of mercury that would have contributed to ill health. Also, in any society with a dominant food (like corn in the USA) more people tend to get allergic to it. An undiagnosed food allergy is going to cause all sorts of problems including stress, which might contribute to obesity. Few people in the USA are probably allergic to rice since the US does not eat so much of it, but a rice or soy allerg
Slashdot may usually be progressive technologically (sometimes even too progressive in some ways), but it can be backward/conservative in other ways (especially regurgitating mainstream medicine's party line, which is why your amusing-to-me over-generalization got modded flamebait). Obviously, there is still a lot of variety here, so this is just an observation on trends...
A couple things on that tangent: http://www.disciplined-minds.c... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09... "They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn't bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don't be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, "a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs."
They are engineers.
Farrell, of course, was kidding. He posted that comment on a blog shortly after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (confessed Al Qaeda operative and engineering student) tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit last winter. But the satire was rooted in a statistical fact: in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented. Maybe that's a numerological accident. The sociologist Diego Gambetta and the political scientist Steffen Hertog don't think so....
Gambetta and Hertog found engineers only in right-wing groups -- the ones that claim to fight for the pious past of Islamic fundamentalists or the white-supremacy America of the Aryan Nations (founder: Richard Butler, engineer) or the minimal pre-modern U.S. government that Stack and Bedell extolled.
Among Communists, anarchists and other groups whose shining ideal lies in the future, the researchers found almost no engineers. Yet these organizations mastered the same technical skills as the right-wingers. Between 1970 and 1978, for instance, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany staged kidnappings, assassinations, bank robberies and bombings. Seventeen of its members had college or graduate degrees, mostly in law or the humanities. Not one studied engineering.
The engineer mind-set, Gambetta and Hertog suggest, might be a mix of emotional conservatism and intellectual habits that prefers clear answers to ambiguous questions -- "the combination of a sharp mind with a loyal acceptance of authority." Do people become engineers because they are this way? Or does engineering work shape them? Itâ(TM)s probably a feedback loop of both, Gambetta says...."
Much of medicine is filled with ambiguity (if you ignore nutritional missteps being at the root of much chronic disease that plays out in a variety of different symptoms). Much of the rest of disease is related to lifestyle or environment (e.g. leaded gas causing the past few decades of increasing crime, now dropping as leaded gas has been banned). As Dr. Fuhrman says, genes may give us weak links, but whether they get pulled on to the breaking point is a function of diet and lifestyle and environment. That is not the sort of thing engineers are going to like to here... They want a quick answer prescribed by an authority like a drug. Dr. Fuhrman calls prescriptions for drugs like blood pressure medicine or diabetes-related medicines for type II diabetics as "permission slips" by authority to continue with current bad behavior regarding diet, lifestyle, and environment. Likewise, getting the label of "bad genes" is another permission slip for misbehavior... Not saying some people don't get dealt a much worse hand of cards in terms of genes, family habits, and environment than others... Still, consider how so much of life is what we make of it: "An Afternoon with comedian Brett Leake '82"
"Get rid of corn subsidies and watch your obesity/diabestes epidemic grind to a halt."
http://www.seriouseats.com/200... "The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
https://www.drfuhrman.com/dise... https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... "Treating Type 1, Type 2, and Gestational Diabetes with Superior Nutrition... With proper care, a type 1 diabetic can live a long and healthy life, with almost no risk of heart attack, stroke, or complications. Type 1 diabetics need not feel doomed to a life of medical disasters and a possible early death. With a truly health-supporting Nutritarian lifestyle, even the Type 1 diabetic can have the potential for a disease-free life and a better than average life expectancy. I find that when Type 1 diabetics adopt my high-nutrient dietary approach, they reduce their insulin requirements by at least one half. They protect their body against the heart attack promoting effects of the American diet style. They no longer have swings of highs and lows, their weight remains stable, and their glucose levels and lipids stay under excellent control. Even though the Type 1 diabetic will still require exogenous (external) insulin, they will no longer need excessive amounts of it. Remember, it is not the Type 1 diabetes that is so damaging, it is the SAD, the typical dietary advice given to Type 1s and the excessive amounts of insulin required by the SAD that are so harmful. It is simply essential for all Type 1 diabetics to learn and adopt nutritional excellence; they can use much less insulin, achieve a normal, healthy lifespan and dramatically reduce their risk of complications later in life."
An important aspect is getting enough micronutrients and fiber, which were not mentioned in your post (but you may well do).
He also has a book out on it: http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/... "This New York Times best seller offers a scientifically proven, practical program to prevent and reverse [type 2] diabetes -- without drugs. Diabetes does not have to shorten your life span or result in high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney failure, blindness or other life-threatening ailments. In fact, most type 2 diabetics can get off medication and become 100 percent healthy in just a few simple steps. This book offers no compromises, it is the most aggressive and effective approach to reverse obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart disease; which typically accompany type 2 diabetes. The information about Type 1 diabetes is simply life saving. It is a must read for every diabetic, as well as any nutritionally-aware person wanting to understand the failure of conventional medical care for diabetic treatments and the "no-brainer" of using nutritional excellence, not drugs."
BTW, in general, I've heard that exercise, while good for our health, does not help with weight loss because we just eat more afterwards to make up for it. What controls weight in the long term is what we eat, especially micronutrients and fiber, but also good fats and some other things.
Anyway, thanks for the informative post! Glad you found an approach that works for you. Good luck. I helped manage my mother's diabetes for a time (including for a time after my father died giving her injections three times a day and monitoring blood glucose with finger sticks four times a day) and it was not easy (she had dementia and could not do it herself, and even denied she had diabetes sometimes). As you point ou
As the video suggests, "incentives" don't really make much of a difference to motivation. However, you make some good points about value to a company of an experienced employee (whether motivated much or not), and it is true, if you want to hang onto mostly unmotivated employees a little longer, then incentives may help keep them from being unmotivated elsewhere. And it is true that a lot can get done by a lot of unmotivated employees -- just not stuff that is generally that creative or innovative. But that sort of advice is kind of like giving advice on what orders the Captian should give while the Titanic is sinking -- it is not advice about how to keep the Titanic from sinking or build a ship that is truly unsinkable.
It is true though that you have to, as Dan Pink says, "take money off the table" by paying your staff enough that money is not an issue. Related (though no doubt there are nuances, like $75K in Silicon Valley is generally poverty wages requiring long commutes): http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/20... "The study, which analyzed Gallup surveys of 450,000 Americans in 2008 and 2009, suggested that there were two forms of happiness: day-to-day contentment (emotional well-being) and overall "life assessment," which means broader satisfaction with one's place in the world. While a higher income didn't have much impact on day-to-day contentment, it did boost people's "life assessment." Now we have more details from the study, conducted by the Princeton economist Angus Deaton and famed psychologist Daniel Kahneman. It turns out there is a specific dollar number, or income plateau, after which more money has no measurable effect on day-to-day contentment. The magic income: $75,000 a year. As people earn more money, their day-to-day happiness rises. Until you hit $75,000. After that, it is just more stuff, with no gain in happiness."
There are some other practical things, like onsite day care or extended maternity leave that could make a big difference for working parents, especially working mothers.
See also: " Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes" http://www.alfiekohn.org/books... " Our basic strategy for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: Do this and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way that we train the family pet.
In this groundbreaking book, Alfie Kohn shows that while manipulating people with incentives seems to work in the short run, it is a strategy that ultimately fails and even does lasting harm. Our workplaces and classrooms will continue to decline, he argues, until we begin to question our reliance on a theory of motivation derived from laboratory animals.
Drawing from hundreds of studies, Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives. Programs that use rewards to change people's behavior are similarly ineffective over the long run. Promising goodies to children for good behavior can never produce anything more than temporary obedience. In fact, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we're bribing them to do. Rewards turn play into work, and work into drudgery.
Step by step, Kohn marshals research and logic to prove that pay-for-performance plans cannot work; the more an organization relies on incentives, the worse things get. Parents and teachers who care about helping students to learn, meanwhile, should be doing everything possible to help them forget that grades exist. Even praise can become a verbal bribe that gets kids hooked on our approval.
Rewards and punishments are just two sides of the same coin -- and the coin doe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... "This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace."
Agreed. If it did not spy, it might be a neat gadget, but you just can't be sure, especially as it is networked connected and apparently always updating itself. I worked on the IBM Personal Speech Assistant, a small handheld device that did speech recognition for command-and-control, in the late 1990s, but it had a push-to-talk button. Of course, we are so surrounded these days with devices with microphones and cameras which auto-update (cell phones, laptops, tablets) that it is becoming harder to know what any of them are doing. But I'm assuming this system explicitly sends audio over the network to Amazon. Maybe it has special hardware to not send audio unless you say the keyword? When I was musing about building speech recognition into a physical keyboard, we talked about that idea at IBM as a way to save power, with special low-power hardware to listen for just one keyword without needing to wake up the entire system. Anyway, this privacy issue needs thinking through...
Also, there is some other social aspect of it that feels weird somehow. The video about it with the white Yuppi couple with three kids (or was one a babysitter?) was a little creepy in some ways, since Echo is made to look almost like a new person joining the family, taking the role of an unmarried aunt or uncle, say. Perhaps this device subconsciously addresses a need unfulfilled by the USA's lack of an extended family living together (which has been the historic norm during human history, like in longhouses)? Is there an implication that this device might end up pushing real people out of the home, like when the dad has to ask how to spell "cantaloupe", displaced by a device... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
It's also strange how the video shows it in several rooms, like either people move it or they bought several? Somehow a physical robot might not feel as weird -- although it would have the same privacy and social issues or more because a robot could move things. From a top Google match or robots and privacy: "Robots and Privacy - American University Washington College of Law" https://www.wcl.american.edu/p... "M. Ryan Calo, "Robots and Privacy," in Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics (Patrick Lin, George Bekey, and Keith Abney, eds.) (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming)... It is not hard to imagine why robots raise privacy concerns. Practically by definition, robots are equipped with the ability to sense, process, and record the world around them (Denning et al 2008; Singer 2009, 67). Robots can go places humans cannot go, see things humans cannot see. Robots are, first and foremost, a human instrument. And after industrial manufacturing, the principle use to which we've put that instrument has been surveillance.... There are a number of different ways one might categorize or group the impact of robotics on privacy. This chapter breaks the effects into three categories--direct surveillance, access, and social meaning--with the goal of introducing the reader to a wide variety of issues. Where possible, the chapter points toward ways in which we might mitigate or redress the potential impact of robots on privacy, but acknowledges that in some cases redress will be difficult under the current state of privacy law...."
Anyway, we'll see how this plays out with Echo as a sort of robot without hands...
There are a lot of things I like about Amazon (ignoring employment conditions for packers), even its Kindle hardware, but the Fire phone and now this seem like overreach. That is not because they are not interesting products, but more because, as
"After all, that's what happened to virtually everybody else on Earth. Do you ever wonder why you have to work five days a week, until you're 67, and then you die within a few years of retirement? Who claims to own all the land in your country? When somebody sells a piece of land, how did they claim to own it in the first place? The people of the rainforest are being forced off their OWN land, where they have lived for tens of thousands of years, to be turned into wage slaves, working in factories. Wake up."
Insightful. It has been suggested the "Garden of Eden" story is really about the painful transition from hunting/gathering by tribes to agriculture managed by militaristic bureaucracies. Several groups of people have similar stories, some fairly recently as they were forced to convert to agriculture by being pushed off their native lands. This happened also in England with the "Enclosure acts". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Various pushed to "privatization" in the USA are the same old thing... And it is expanding to water rights, spectrum rights, endless copyrights, overly broad patents, and so on...
And the amazing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sle... "A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Piraha, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil. Daniel Everett arrived among the Piraha with his wife and three young children hoping to convert the tribe to Christianity. Everett quickly became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications. The Piraha have no counting system, no fixed terms for color, no concept of war, and no personal property. Everett was so impressed with their peaceful way of life that he eventually lost faith in the God he'd hoped to introduce to them, and instead devoted his life to the science of linguistics. Part passionate memoir, part scientific exploration, Everett's life-changing tale is riveting look into the nature of language, thought, and life itself."
Howard Zinn wrote about what parts of America were like before Columbus began the conquest (backed by profiteering organizations run for "the love of money"): http://www.historyisaweapon.co... "The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need... and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities." Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim
"...How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff... "In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all."
By Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me... "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
Slashdot Mirror
to get more fiber and micronutrients: In practice, it is what we're eating. Exercise just makes us want to eat more afterwards. Enough fiber and micronutrients shuts off our "appestat" and we feel full on less calories. See, for one example, Dr. Fuhrman's approach, which suggests people aspire to one pound cooked and one pound raw veggies every day (hard to do, but even getting close yields great benefits):
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
That said, exercise is generally *great* for your overall health, including boosting immune function by getting the lymph moving. And outdoors exercise in sunlight under the right conditions can help with vitamin D deficiency.
See also:
http://fuhrmaneattolivereview....
"Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, MediFast and Weightwatchers offer only traditional foods from the Standard American Diet that are known to be the root cause of obesity and other common diseases. The portions may be smaller in size and in the number of calories but their nutrition is negligible and too low as confirmed by the Aggregate Nutrition Density Index."
Getting back to the main topic, in the same way, if we were producing power locally-to-the-neighborhood like via Solar PV or maybe someday hot/cold fusion, we would be less likely to have unpaid-up-front external costs like cross-country pollution, economic risks, or maintaining the US military in the middle east. Then our economy and society would be a lot healthier. Energy efficiency also works like local energy production and so generally is a great thing. Consuming foreign il is an invitation to disaster, like the USA has not learned its lesson from the 1970s!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny."
Sadly, the USA took the wrong path to the feel-good-in-the-short-term Reagan years back then... But thankfully some people did not give up, and the cost of solar PV continues to fall and energy efficiency improvement continue to be made despite it not being a level playing field because the price of fossil fuels and nukes don't account for many negative externalities. But we could have been there in the 1980s, and saved decades of military costs and health costs and pollution remediation costs incurred since then.
Good points. How is copyright for any computer software then justified, at least for most software that is intended to be a "useful" tool, like Microsoft Word?
From what I read here, systemd is a lot less modular by bundling in a lot of services. Linux has had the virtue of modularity at is core, as exemplified by narrow-focus command line tools piped together to get work done. Modularity is something like cleanliness. If you leave crumbs all over your kitchen all the time, it generally isn't itself the problem. The problem is when roaches and mice move in and you can't get rid of them due to the crumbs you still leave everywhere. Granted, cleanliness (and modularity) can perhaps go too far (the person who scrubs the kitchen flour every five minutes). So, what is a healthy balance here? I don't know enough about the details to weigh in on that. You ask for specific problems, and while a reasonable sounding request, that is also a bit like asking people to send pictures in of specific roaches and mice. The specific problems are important of course, but what is at stake is the bigger picture, not stamping out each individual roach. What matters is increased risk. The more general issue is the management of risks from complexity, whereas modularity is one of the best (but not the only) approach for doing that.
I've seen how lack of modularity can damage other software communities -- particularly the early Squeak community, like I wrote about here :-). Anyway, I had related frustrations to yours many years ago and they are why I ended up doing a lot in Python and Jython on the JVM in the last decade, even to the point of working on PataPata. ... I think the most important single issue in maintaining any large system is managing complexity (documenting intent maybe comes next, including well-named variables and methods and functions). This has never been a priority for Squeak IMHO. ...
http://lists.squeakfoundation....
"I sympathize. I think the biggest issue of Squeak is issues with modularity and managing complexity. These issues translate to frustration for maintainers (and users
There are several ways to manage complexity, which include:
* modularity (namespaces, packages like Java or GNU Smalltalk or Debian, letting someone else do that hard work by leveraging libraries or VMs or languages, like Squeak does by using a C compiler to generate the VM)
* cleverness (brilliant redesign, like traits was hopefully going to be)
* laissez faire, and also to each his or her own image (that is what we have now, and it is not that bad an idea, if the *core* is small and well thought out, like Spoon, so the *image* instance becomes the *module*. But alas, it is not, witness how confusing Morphic is to unravel).
Modularity is the one way to manage complexity which seems to work best in practice, although the others have their role. However, if Squeak images could easily talk to each other and share some state, and we had Spoon-like remote debugging and development, then we could have just one application per image, and that would be easier to maintain (it would be modular to a degree but in an unusual way). But I would still suggest such a system built on well-though out (clever) modules would be more powerful and easier to use than a mess of spaghetti code, even if we had only one application per image."
With roots back to here in 2000:
http://lists.squeakfoundation....
"Squeak complexity in 2.8 has become a complex cat from the simple kitten complexity of 1.13(?) in 1996. Back then, Dan Ingalls wrote on 10 Nov 1996 those prescient words: "The Squeak team has an interest in doing the world's simplest application construction framework, but I suspect that we will get sucked up with enough other things that this won't happen in the next two months (but who knows...)."
Squeak 2.8's complexity is now quiet (in terms of walkbacks) and stealthy (in terms of growing between
Granted from 2005: http://www.rense.com/general65... ...
"I had been stationed in Germany for two years while in the military, so I lit up, and commented about how beautiful the country was, and inquired if he was going back because he missed it.
"No," he answered me. "I'm going back because I've seen this before." He then commenced to explain that when he was a kid, he watched with his family in fear as Hitler's government committed atrocity after atrocity, and no one was willing to say anything. He said the news refused to question the government, and the ones who did were not in the newspaper business much longer. He said good neighbors, people he had known all his life, turned against his family and other Jews, grabbing on to the hate and superiority "as if they were starved for it" (his words).
He said he was too old to see it happen right in front of his eyes again, and too old to do anything about it, so he was taking his family back to Europe on Thursday where they would be safe from George W. Bush and his neocons. He seemed resolute, but troubled, nonetheless, as if being too young on one end and too old on the other to fight what he saw happening was wearing on him.
I have related this event to you in the hopes it will serve as a cautionary anecdote about the state of our Union, and to illustrate the path we Americans are being led down by a group of fanatics bent on global economic and military dominion. When a man who survived the fruits of fascism decides its time to leave THIS country because he's seeing the same patterns that led to the Holocaust and other Nazi horrors beginning to form here, it is time for us to recognize the underlying evil inherent in the actions of those who claim they work for all Americans, and for all mankind. And it is incumbent upon all Americans, Red and Blue, Republican and Democrat, to stop them."
What has really changed from the Bush years of great significance in that regard?
See also:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/...
""What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."
Jews who moved to Israel seem to me overall to have interpreted "never again" in terms of who has the most guns. But there is another perspective on that, which is to think that "never again" should be about militaristic bureaucracy getting out of control. A culture like the USA (or Israel for that matter) can be full of guns and people who know how to use them, but still infested with militarist bureaucracy infesting every aspect of life (including via perpetual full-surveillance "schooling"). Like bureaucracy, humans have had a long association with fire, and fire is useful to warm our homes and cook our meals, but it is a terrible thing when it rages out of control.
That said, how should we behave when we are essentially t
AC, thanks for the insightful reply! Indeed several Nobel-prize winning economists have supported the basic income for some of these sorts of reasons.
Great points!!! I've made similar ones on scope, suggesting the Java API is derivative of Smalltalk's class libraries. Also, one can look at the FSF's claim the calling GPL'd code even via dynamic linking creates a derived work.
Copyright has many absurdities built into it when applied to programs, and this is one of them. I agree that in practice, if APIs were extensively protected, then people would gravitate towards freely licensed ones. And people might go back decades to find the origins of various software expressions related to interfaces in decades old code (independent invention wold be the only defense, and might be hard to prove). Although, the freely licensed APIs would probably be used by everyone else who argued they copied something from it... One can hope that the SC ruling for Oracle might push copyright for software to the point where copyright for software is show to be so absurd it is abandoned, but somehow I doubt even that would get copyright for software repealed.
Reminds me of the same kind of nonsense as is now happening with patents and smartphones. It's one thing when you are producing machinery in the 1800s and devices are covered by at most a handful of patents. But a Smartphone may be covered by literally thousands of patents (both hardware and software). How do you begin to keep track of that when designing something, let alone negotiate rights to each patent? How are patents then promoting the useful arts when in practice all they do is get in the way? Contrast with the US Fashion industry which in general is not covered by copyrights or patents.
My main point is not to argue for more copyright; it is to say that, like Rodney Dangerfield, API designers "no respect". :-)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R...
Granted, so many APIs suck for all the reasons the Google engineer said they were hard to make that it's understandable why people don't respect them. It's like how general tankers in World of Tank have so little respect for Artillery (another hard job). :-)
http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/i...
"Arty seems like the best choice to blame at for some idiot players who have no idea where to go in battle and cock up the whole battle. Arty is not air strike, it takes time to aim and reload, most importantly, i cant shoot at target that i cant even see on my map. For those noobs who always blame at other player in order to feel good abt their own IQ, stop pissing ppl off and learn how to play."
I get the feeling you perhaps have not designed any complex software more than one, especially software libraries intended to be supported for years? Otherwise you might not so easily dismiss the creative challenge of creating good APIs. Sure, implementations may require hard work up front, but a sucky API generally creates massive amounts of hard work for everyone else for years to come. A bad API in that sense is much, much worse than a bad implementation, which as Linux shows, can be fairly easily replaced eventually. While it may look trivial, creating a good API demands immense amounts of understanding of the problem space, the limits of computers, the user community, and so on, including imagining future needs. And choosing the right simplification can be the hardest, most creative act of all -- which is just as true for programmers as it is for painters, novelists, architects, screenwriters, illustrators, actors, and so on.
Actually, it is more and more rare that someone can get anyone to pay something for what want to get paid for in the USA. See for example, from the 1990s by the then Vice Provost of Caltech ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. ..."
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it.
Sure, you can always point to funding successes, but as a successful percentage of aspirants, the odds get longer and longer with more qualified people and less global-scale opportunities as big winners dominate the landscape.
BTW, people did get funding for creating triple stores and similar thing, just not me (not that I ever tried to raise funding for the Pointrel System, in part because I wanted it to be free and open source).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Besides, in a world of so much potential plenty, why make people justify what they want to do based on the possibility that "investors" who are already financially obese can monopolize it for a profit? Also, in a supposed democracy, why should a system like "Freedombox" get the left-overs while phones and tablets full of essentially spyware get vast amounts of money poured into them?
http://freedomboxfoundation.or...
But regardless of funding issues, this whole case shows how valuable the Java API had become, given Google took such pains to use it exactly... Part of the value of that API was the immense amounts of marketing put into Java by IBM and Sun for a decade (given Java sucked at the start, and is not that great even now although it has become OK-ish after vast investments). For good or bad, Oracle bought that Java asset, including communit
Loved the first half of your comment; the second half I have issues with. Dan Pink's talk on motivation and creativity cited research done by the federal Reserve which included experiments in a poor country which agreed with the general findings. So it is not just white middle class -- it is human. As for Bill Gates, he bought DOS from someone who had according to some sources essentially stolen it from his employer.
http://www.businessweek.com/st...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu...
Bill Gates was born a multimillionaire in today's dollars and could have spent his life working on free software if he wished.
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
Emacs is essentially a word processor, especially when coupled with tools like LaTex,
I was using a word processor (in ROM) on a Commodore PET around 1980. Many other word processors were created, along with drawing programs, and so on. PLATO preceded pretty much of of that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations)[1][2] was the first generalized computer assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games."
Or with Forth, funded in part by federal dollars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"Forth was first exposed to other programmers in the early 1970s, starting with Elizabeth Rather at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory.[6] After their work at NRAO, Charles Moore and Elizabeth Rather formed FORTH, Inc. in 1973, refining and porting Forth systems to dozens of other platforms in the next decade."
And don't forget "The Mother of All Demos" by Doug Engelbart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
""The Mother of All Demos" is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, computer demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s."
The reason we use what we use may relate to "capitalism", but it has more to do with the rich getting richer and market position and advertising and (sometimes illegal as with Microsoft antitrust) wheeling and dealing with supplier contracts and press and such, funding alliances, sweat heart deals with governments, and a bunch of similar things.
Rewards, in the presence of artificial scarcity, can control people. But people don't do their most creative work in such a regime. Under such a
Quoting a small snippet from a larger work with attribution in the USA is generally fair use. But in any case, how can the Free Software Foundation claim that code that links to GPL libraries even *dynamically* is a derived work if APIs are not copyrightable? As much as I am against excessive copyright, people can't have it both ways.
Others disagree though, although I think they are probably wrong (but its up to the courts etc...): ... Florian Mueller, who provides indispensable analysis of various intellectual property issues in the mobile industry, believes that whether an API is copyrightable can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. He is certainly right that the overall design of a system of APIs can show "creativity," in the same sense that a brilliant mechanical invention is creative. But that does not mean that copyright is the proper way to protect that creativity, if at all. Copyright extends only to "original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression," and a system of API calls does not meet that test. It is not a "fixed" work in the same way that an actual computer program is. I will not address whether a system of APIs is patentable, but certainly the creativity that a well-designed API scheme might show is closer to the creativity that a concise mathematical statement (not patentable) or a new design for an engine (patentable) might show. In any event, simply because something is "creative" in some sense does not mean that it deserves legal protection, unless it can be shown that some desired level of creativity would not happen without such protection. I do not see any evidence that the dynamic and innovative software industry requires copyright protection for APIs to maintain its current high level of creativity. ..."
https://www.publicknowledge.or...
"There's a dangerous meme going around that if Oracle loses its novel copyright claims against Google that suddenly the GPL will become unenforceable. This idea hinges on a misunderstanding about the difference between linking to a code library and merely using an API.
Some people also suggest the dynamic linking issue for the GPL would not hold up in the Supreme Court...
To add to the confusion, from Richard Stallman:
http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/...
"Someone recently made the claim that including a header file always
makes a derivative work.
That's not the FSF's view. Our view is that just using structure
definitions, typedefs, enumeration constants, macros with simple
bodies, etc., is NOT enough to make a derivative work. It would take
a substantial amount of code (coming from inline functions or macros
with substantial bodies) to do that."
How can he say that and still argue that dynamic linking to a GPL's library makes something fall under the GPL? ... The Free Software Foundation (which holds the copyright of several notable GPL-licensed software products and of the license text itself) asserts that an executable which uses a dynamically linked library is indeed a derivative work. ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
"This key dispute is whether or not non-GPL software can legally statically link or dynamically link to GPL libraries. Different opinions exist on this issue. The GPL is clear in requiring that all derivative works of code under the GPL must themselves be under the GPL. Ambiguity arises with regards to using GPL libraries, and bundling GPL software into a larger package (perhaps mixed into a binary via static linking). This is ultimately a question not of the GPL per se, but of how copyright law defines derivative works. The following points of view exist:
So, while they are at it, why not get the Supreme Court to rule on that dy
See my other comments here clarification about it being hard "creative" work.
Top down programming is a recognized form of design. With a bigger initial team, you could imagine Linus might have never written any implementations of APIs as other team member could have filled that in, but he still have made an enormous creative contribution by good design. Example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"A top-down approach (also known as stepwise design and in some cases used as a synonym of decomposition) is essentially the breaking down of a system to gain insight into its compositional sub-systems. In a top-down approach an overview of the system is formulated, specifying but not detailing any first-level subsystems. Each subsystem is then refined in yet greater detail, sometimes in many additional subsystem levels, until the entire specification is reduced to base elements. A top-down model is often specified with the assistance of "black boxes", these make it easier to manipulate. However, black boxes may fail to elucidate elementary mechanisms or be detailed enough to realistically validate the model. Top down approach starts with the big picture. It breaks down from there into smaller segments."
What seems to me to be going on in the discussion here which disturbs me greatly as a software developer is that, in order to try to help win a political argument about interoperability, people are dismissing the creative aspect of naming things well and making good choices about module partitions. That is really really sad. It has taken me *decades* to get better at those tasks, and they remain hard, and I can still see how much I could improve on them. One pet project (the Pointrel system) I've been thinking about APIs for for thirty+ years trying to simplify and clarify the design. Maybe that is to excess :-) but in any case, an essential part of a good design is good names and good abstraction layers, and that can IMHO take a lot of effort and creativity.
But rather than, as I do, people here saying, yes good APIs demand effort and creative understanding of the problem domain, and the issue is that copyright is (or has become) a bad idea because it would restrict interoperability, people here tend to be saying, no, APIs aren't creative because it would be inconvenient if they were given how broad copyright now is. I think the end result of that is going to be:
1. Pissing off software designers
2. Losing the Supreme Court case too.
3. ???
4. Profit for those purveying artificial scarcity
(my half-ironic site on that: http://artificialscarcity.com/ )
Personally, I'm coming around just now to the thought that maybe most people on Slashdot really have never tried very hard to design great software API interfaces? Which fits the facts that most APIs I've ever had to deal with were fll of gotchas and confusing aspects. Contrast with, say, ObjectWorks Smalltalk, which in general had great APIs for streaming and such.
Maybe this discussion is an example of?
"When We Don't Like the Solution, We Deny the Problem"
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
The "solution" here (implied by Oracle) is that APIs are controllable by the copyright owner, and the problem is that APIs take a lot of hard creative work to get right? I propose other solutions, like a basic income and rolling back copyright.
If APIs were not hard to write and required creativity to do well, why are their articles giving advice on how to do it better? Example:
http://piwik.org/blog/2008/01/...
"Here are the main concepts I tried to apply when designing the API:
Easy to learn ; the documentation provides simple examples, complete documentation
Easy to use ; single
Correlation does not prove causation, but interesting paper none-the-less reading the summary: "Copyright and Creativity -- Evidence from Italian Operas"
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
But even if it was true, should most of humanity be denied access to most of human knowledge via the internet that could otherwise be available right now (like via Google Books) so we might get a few more operas and other such thing?
Beside, current research (even by the US Federal Reserve) shows reward is not motivator for creative works (or sometimes even has a negative correlation of causing artists to just rehash more of the same old thing). Lot of studies are cited in these works by Alfie Kohn and Dan Pink to support my point:
"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books...
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Also: "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
A better answer to the issue of people having enough time to do quality work (including learning to do it) is to have a "basic income" for everyone (so, for example, monthly Social Security payments in the USA from birth, not just for those 65 and older).
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
There are plenty of reasons copyrights stifle creativity these days, because artists can't easily remix.
https://gigaom.com/2011/12/12/...
Most, as in 99%+ (my guess), of artistic people are only held back by copyright, because very, very few people can make a living at licensing creative works as authors or composers or whatever, but they instead generally have to pay for access to contemporary novels and music and such. Some of that is discussed here:
http://www.thepublicdomain.org...
There are a few different types of APIs involved with Linux, so it is more than the public API:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Consider: ... Here's an example that shows how this all works. The Linux USB code has been rewritten at least three times. We've done this over time in order to handle things that we didn't originally need to handle, like high speed devices, and just because we learned the problems of our first design, and to fix bugs and security issues. Each time we made changes in our api, we updated all of the kernel drivers that used the apis, so nothing would break. And we deleted the old functions as they were no longer needed, and did things wrong. Because of this, Linux now has the fastest USB bus speeds when you test out all of the different operating systems. We max out the hardware as fast as it can go, and you can do this from simple userspace programs, no fancy kernel driver work is needed."
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux...
"For Linux, we don't have a stable internal api, and for people to wish that we would have one is just foolish.
And:
http://www.helixsoft.nl/blog/?...
"Linux pioneered that model: they call a stable API nonsense. The interface between drivers and the kernel changes all the time. If the Linux developers think of a better, more consistent or more efficient way to interface with the drivers they go ahead and make that change."
Thinking up "a better, more consistent or more efficient way" to interface sounds like creative work to me.
I had a similar disagreement with Alan Kay who argued that programs are mathematical. Given that for our Garden Simulator my wife spent over a year full time translating badly-named spaghetti Fortran code from EPIC to well-structured Delphi code that did essentially *exactly* the same thing, but now was understandable and maintainable, I see *enormous* benefit in naming functions, parameters, and structures well and know how long it may take to do that.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
If you don't believe well-named APIs have great value, try, say, reverse engineering compacted JavaScript code. It's possible, but it takes an enormous amount of time. From another angle, most of what is written in fiction is about the same old thing -- human conflicts, human emotions, human behavior, and so on; what differs is often mainly the nuances of how things are described or the sequence they are described in. Why should Disney get a copyright on "Snow White" (the movie) just because it attached some specific names and faces to seven dwarfs when the story itself was public domain at that point? What difference is there in that case from giving names to functions and parameters for Java when the general notion of calling into a virtual machine is also effectively in the public domain?
However, I still think you have missed my point because you say I desire copyrighted APIs. I'd rather see copyright rolled back entirely or at least greatly restricted like along the lines Richard Stallman proposes. What I am saying is that as long as one supports copyright as it is now, and as it is being expanded, then you have to accept APIs should be copyrightable. In that sense, if you believe in the value of copyrighting computer software, Linux should *not* have been legally made ignoring that copyright violation sued to be mostly just a civil matter until recently it became criminal, and that the UNIX copyright holders would have had to chosen to purse Linux in court).
I think we probably agree on the moral an economic aspects of FOSS. My point is that we should not be trying to carve out special exemptions for APIs when the whole copyright edifice is maki
I've read that Linus Torvald's brilliance (aside from management) has been mostly in creating good APIs for the Linux Kernel. His initial implementations of those APIs was not too good and was replaced by the community, but the APIs live on. It takes a lot of effort to imagine, design, and redesign good APIs. It is overall often much easier to implement an API than to design an API because the design of the API is a creative act of deciding how to partition the problem space and prioritize aspects of it. Naming things well and creating elegant structure are often creative acts, and those are core tasks in creating a good API. A good API may seem so obvious we take it for granted, but that ease-of-use may be the product of years of hard-won experience. As in: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)"
See my other post questioning the value of copyright to society, but if copyright is about creativity, then IMHO APIs are often creative, and sometimes much more creative than implementations.
Copyright expansion is continually being pushed, most lately for fashion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
However, by the same argument fashion can't be copyrighted because it is "useful", likewise *no* software should be copyrightable.
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/10/...
http://www.mttlrblog.org/2013/...
"Fashion design in the U.S. currently lacks copyright protection. Section 101 of the Copyright Act states that "pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works" are only protected if the design can be separated from and exists independently of the usefulness of the article. In the U.S., fashion designs are not seen as having creative value, but are rather seen solely as utilitarian."
Really, why can someone copyright "Microsoft Office", which is essentially just a bunch of instructions when they can't copyright a Gucci purse? It makes no sense, but that is so true about so much of copyright.
Short of repealing copyright (a good thing to consider IMHO), and because copyright is now effectively infinite and the bargain with the community has been broken by copyright holders by extending copyright, another approach is to tax it, as I suggested a decade ago based on an idea in someone slashdot sig:
"Copyright Tax for the Privilege of the Monopoly"
http://journalism.berkeley.edu...
Personally, I'd rather see copyright replaced with a basic income so all would-be authors had the time needed to create. That is based on this idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception."
A lot of work goes into creating a good API. Copyright should be greatly reduced or eliminated if we care about human progress, but bad law passed by Congress is still law. The Supreme Court will probably rule against these computer scientists, and that may make things worse than ambiguity. "For a limited time" has already been deemed by the Supreme Court to be effectively equal to infinity minus one in the "Eldred v. Ashcroft" decision instead of the Supreme Court ruling copyright longer than a few years was now defeating "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" which IMHO would have been a better ruling. Given that, what should happen is that either Congress should change the copyright laws or we should change the Constitution and withdraw from various copyright treaties. But that would interfere with the Constitutional right for existing big businesses and long dead authors to make a profit.... Of course, it's also been shown that profit is no motivation for creativity, but that is conveniently ignored in a capitalist society:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
See also:
http://www.neurope.eu/article/...
"Ignoring these exclusive rights - the copyright monopoly - allowed Eastern Europe to leapfrog 20 years of development. This is a consistent pattern through economic history: it is only the countries that are geopolitically dominant at a particular time that seek to impose their exclusive rights upon others, as a means of kicking away the ladder to the top. When the United States was in its infancy, those who illegally copied science, production plans, and useful arts from Great Britain were proclaimed national heroes. It was only recently - the 1980s - that the United States began aggressively pushing its exclusive rights regime as part of being a superpower, and as an integral means of maintaining that superpower."
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/...
""There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the launch of CCIndia in early 2007, but there seems to be little activity there... I think CC is a bit too conservative and too respectful of copyright issues. Copyright has not worked for us (in the developing world) for generations. Generally speaking, copyright in any form, including CC, doesn't fit in too well with Asian ideas of knowledge, since it enables those controlling knowledge and information over the rest, and we find it impossible to emerge winners in this game. It is a colonial law, not meant to serve the interest of the people of those parts of the globe that are not ahead in the information race! Why should we be as respectful to it, as, say, Lawrence Lessig is?" "
"I'd like to find a person that adheres to a strict vegan diet devoid of GMOs (corn being the primary offender) that suffers from diabetes. I doubt such a person exists, but I'm willing to entertain the idea of a 300+ lb. diabetic vegan if anyone can provide evidence to the contrary."
BTW, a lot of vegans eat terrible. Too much processed vegan junk foods, too many carbs, not enough vegetables, nutritional deficiencies relating to B, D, Iodine, Omega 3s/DHA, etc.. Dr. Fuhrman talks about this. ... A vegetarian whose diet is mainly refined grains, cold breakfast cereals, processed health food store products, vegetarian fast foods, white rice, and pasta will be worse off than a person who eats a little turkey, chicken, fish, or eggs but consumes large volumes of fruits, vegetables, and beans. That combination of little or no animal products with a higher consumption of fresh produce is the crucial factor that makes a vegetarian diet healthful."
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"What You Need to Know About Vegetarian or Vegan Diets; Following a strict vegetarian diet is not as important as eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables.
Personally, considering even Gorillas get about 5% of their calories from termites and such, I don't think any primate is adapted to be totally vegan. Maybe it is possible, but it is really pushing it. In the West, we just don't eat many insects or enough dirt (yes, I mean that, about gut bacteria and vitamin B12, although dirt today is probably not what it used to be like with lead and mercury contamination and e coli contamination and such).
However, there are lots of people for whom turning vegan improved their health for a couple years until various deficiencies set in. And I think those deficiencies could be managed for people who are aware of them or do various tests. A big thing is to eat a larger variety of foods than most people in Western society on a SAD diet are used to eating. I'd guess iodine deficiency is a big issue for many Western vegans, since some soils are depleted and sea vegetables are not common in a Western diet, and now that much bread has bromine in it instead of iodine as a dough conditioner, the situation is even worse. I also think there may be vitamins in various animal fats that we may not get enough of easily on a vegan diet for some people, especially those whose genetics are more adapted to some situations (same as lactose intolerance, but in reverse, like they are not as good at making vitamin A from plants compared to absorbing it from animal products...)
Still, in general, vegans tend to be more health conscious, so:
http://www.veganhealth.org/art...
"The only prospective study measuring rates of diabetes in vegans, the Adventist Health Study 2, found them to have a 60% less chance of developing the disease than non-vegetarians after two years of follow-up. Previously, a cross-sectional report from the Adventist Health Study-2 showed vegans to have a 68% lower rate of diabetes than non-vegetarians. A number of clinical trials have now shown that a vegan, or mostly vegan, diet can lower body weight, reduce blood sugar, and improve other parameters for type 2 diabetes."
Corn syrup manufacturers used to (maybe some still do?) clean their equipment with a mercury-based cleaning agent, and so some batches of high fructose corn syrup were contaminated with higher levels of mercury that would have contributed to ill health. Also, in any society with a dominant food (like corn in the USA) more people tend to get allergic to it. An undiagnosed food allergy is going to cause all sorts of problems including stress, which might contribute to obesity. Few people in the USA are probably allergic to rice since the US does not eat so much of it, but a rice or soy allerg
Slashdot may usually be progressive technologically (sometimes even too progressive in some ways), but it can be backward/conservative in other ways (especially regurgitating mainstream medicine's party line, which is why your amusing-to-me over-generalization got modded flamebait). Obviously, there is still a lot of variety here, so this is just an observation on trends...
A couple things on that tangent: ... ..."
http://www.disciplined-minds.c...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09...
"They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn't bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don't be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, "a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs."
They are engineers.
Farrell, of course, was kidding. He posted that comment on a blog shortly after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (confessed Al Qaeda operative and engineering student) tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit last winter. But the satire was rooted in a statistical fact: in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented. Maybe that's a numerological accident. The sociologist Diego Gambetta and the political scientist Steffen Hertog don't think so.
Gambetta and Hertog found engineers only in right-wing groups -- the ones that claim to fight for the pious past of Islamic fundamentalists or the white-supremacy America of the Aryan Nations (founder: Richard Butler, engineer) or the minimal pre-modern U.S. government that Stack and Bedell extolled.
Among Communists, anarchists and other groups whose shining ideal lies in the future, the researchers found almost no engineers. Yet these organizations mastered the same technical skills as the right-wingers. Between 1970 and 1978, for instance, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany staged kidnappings, assassinations, bank robberies and bombings. Seventeen of its members had college or graduate degrees, mostly in law or the humanities. Not one studied engineering.
The engineer mind-set, Gambetta and Hertog suggest, might be a mix of emotional conservatism and intellectual habits that prefers clear answers to ambiguous questions -- "the combination of a sharp mind with a loyal acceptance of authority." Do people become engineers because they are this way? Or does engineering work shape them? Itâ(TM)s probably a feedback loop of both, Gambetta says.
Much of medicine is filled with ambiguity (if you ignore nutritional missteps being at the root of much chronic disease that plays out in a variety of different symptoms). Much of the rest of disease is related to lifestyle or environment (e.g. leaded gas causing the past few decades of increasing crime, now dropping as leaded gas has been banned). As Dr. Fuhrman says, genes may give us weak links, but whether they get pulled on to the breaking point is a function of diet and lifestyle and environment. That is not the sort of thing engineers are going to like to here... They want a quick answer prescribed by an authority like a drug. Dr. Fuhrman calls prescriptions for drugs like blood pressure medicine or diabetes-related medicines for type II diabetics as "permission slips" by authority to continue with current bad behavior regarding diet, lifestyle, and environment. Likewise, getting the label of "bad genes" is another permission slip for misbehavior... Not saying some people don't get dealt a much worse hand of cards in terms of genes, family habits, and environment than others... Still, consider how so much of life is what we make of it:
"An Afternoon with comedian Brett Leake '82"
"Get rid of corn subsidies and watch your obesity/diabestes epidemic grind to a halt."
http://www.seriouseats.com/200...
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
https://www.drfuhrman.com/dise... ... With proper care, a type 1 diabetic can live a long and healthy life, with almost no risk of heart attack, stroke, or complications. Type 1 diabetics need not feel doomed to a life of medical disasters and a possible early death. With a truly health-supporting Nutritarian lifestyle, even the Type 1 diabetic can have the potential for a disease-free life and a better than average life expectancy. I find that when Type 1 diabetics adopt my high-nutrient dietary approach, they reduce their insulin requirements by at least one half. They protect their body against the heart attack promoting effects of the American diet style. They no longer have swings of highs and lows, their weight remains stable, and their glucose levels and lipids stay under excellent control. Even though the Type 1 diabetic will still require exogenous (external) insulin, they will no longer need excessive amounts of it. Remember, it is not the Type 1 diabetes that is so damaging, it is the SAD, the typical dietary advice given to Type 1s and the excessive amounts of insulin required by the SAD that are so harmful. It is simply essential for all Type 1 diabetics to learn and adopt nutritional excellence; they can use much less insulin, achieve a normal, healthy lifespan and dramatically reduce their risk of complications later in life."
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Treating Type 1, Type 2, and Gestational Diabetes with Superior Nutrition
An important aspect is getting enough micronutrients and fiber, which were not mentioned in your post (but you may well do).
He also has a book out on it:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/...
"This New York Times best seller offers a scientifically proven, practical program to prevent and reverse [type 2] diabetes -- without drugs. Diabetes does not have to shorten your life span or result in high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney failure, blindness or other life-threatening ailments. In fact, most type 2 diabetics can get off medication and become 100 percent healthy in just a few simple steps. This book offers no compromises, it is the most aggressive and effective approach to reverse obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart disease; which typically accompany type 2 diabetes. The information about Type 1 diabetes is simply life saving. It is a must read for every diabetic, as well as any nutritionally-aware person wanting to understand the failure of conventional medical care for diabetic treatments and the "no-brainer" of using nutritional excellence, not drugs."
Another aspect of this may be gut bacteria. You don't drink diet soda by any chance?
http://www.prevention.com/heal...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...
Ongoing research on vitamin D deficiency and diabetes:
http://www.nih.gov/news/health...
BTW, in general, I've heard that exercise, while good for our health, does not help with weight loss because we just eat more afterwards to make up for it. What controls weight in the long term is what we eat, especially micronutrients and fiber, but also good fats and some other things.
Anyway, thanks for the informative post! Glad you found an approach that works for you. Good luck. I helped manage my mother's diabetes for a time (including for a time after my father died giving her injections three times a day and monitoring blood glucose with finger sticks four times a day) and it was not easy (she had dementia and could not do it herself, and even denied she had diabetes sometimes). As you point ou
As the video suggests, "incentives" don't really make much of a difference to motivation. However, you make some good points about value to a company of an experienced employee (whether motivated much or not), and it is true, if you want to hang onto mostly unmotivated employees a little longer, then incentives may help keep them from being unmotivated elsewhere. And it is true that a lot can get done by a lot of unmotivated employees -- just not stuff that is generally that creative or innovative. But that sort of advice is kind of like giving advice on what orders the Captian should give while the Titanic is sinking -- it is not advice about how to keep the Titanic from sinking or build a ship that is truly unsinkable.
It is true though that you have to, as Dan Pink says, "take money off the table" by paying your staff enough that money is not an issue. Related (though no doubt there are nuances, like $75K in Silicon Valley is generally poverty wages requiring long commutes):
http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/20...
"The study, which analyzed Gallup surveys of 450,000 Americans in 2008 and 2009, suggested that there were two forms of happiness: day-to-day contentment (emotional well-being) and overall "life assessment," which means broader satisfaction with one's place in the world. While a higher income didn't have much impact on day-to-day contentment, it did boost people's "life assessment." Now we have more details from the study, conducted by the Princeton economist Angus Deaton and famed psychologist Daniel Kahneman. It turns out there is a specific dollar number, or income plateau, after which more money has no measurable effect on day-to-day contentment. The magic income: $75,000 a year. As people earn more money, their day-to-day happiness rises. Until you hit $75,000. After that, it is just more stuff, with no gain in happiness."
There are some other practical things, like onsite day care or extended maternity leave that could make a big difference for working parents, especially working mothers.
See also:
" Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books...
" Our basic strategy for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: Do this and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way that we train the family pet.
In this groundbreaking book, Alfie Kohn shows that while manipulating people with incentives seems to work in the short run, it is a strategy that ultimately fails and even does lasting harm. Our workplaces and classrooms will continue to decline, he argues, until we begin to question our reliance on a theory of motivation derived from laboratory animals.
Drawing from hundreds of studies, Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives. Programs that use rewards to change people's behavior are similarly ineffective over the long run. Promising goodies to children for good behavior can never produce anything more than temporary obedience. In fact, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we're bribing them to do. Rewards turn play into work, and work into drudgery.
Step by step, Kohn marshals research and logic to prove that pay-for-performance plans cannot work; the more an organization relies on incentives, the worse things get. Parents and teachers who care about helping students to learn, meanwhile, should be doing everything possible to help them forget that grades exist. Even praise can become a verbal bribe that gets kids hooked on our approval.
Rewards and punishments are just two sides of the same coin -- and the coin doe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace."
Full lecture here: http://www.thersa.org/events/v...
Don't need a fancy algorithm to tell you that. Fix the cultural setting in a company and retention fixes itself...
Agreed. If it did not spy, it might be a neat gadget, but you just can't be sure, especially as it is networked connected and apparently always updating itself. I worked on the IBM Personal Speech Assistant, a small handheld device that did speech recognition for command-and-control, in the late 1990s, but it had a push-to-talk button. Of course, we are so surrounded these days with devices with microphones and cameras which auto-update (cell phones, laptops, tablets) that it is becoming harder to know what any of them are doing. But I'm assuming this system explicitly sends audio over the network to Amazon. Maybe it has special hardware to not send audio unless you say the keyword? When I was musing about building speech recognition into a physical keyboard, we talked about that idea at IBM as a way to save power, with special low-power hardware to listen for just one keyword without needing to wake up the entire system. Anyway, this privacy issue needs thinking through...
Also, there is some other social aspect of it that feels weird somehow. The video about it with the white Yuppi couple with three kids (or was one a babysitter?) was a little creepy in some ways, since Echo is made to look almost like a new person joining the family, taking the role of an unmarried aunt or uncle, say. Perhaps this device subconsciously addresses a need unfulfilled by the USA's lack of an extended family living together (which has been the historic norm during human history, like in longhouses)? Is there an implication that this device might end up pushing real people out of the home, like when the dad has to ask how to spell "cantaloupe", displaced by a device...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
It's also strange how the video shows it in several rooms, like either people move it or they bought several? Somehow a physical robot might not feel as weird -- although it would have the same privacy and social issues or more because a robot could move things. From a top Google match or robots and privacy: ... It is not hard to imagine why robots raise privacy concerns. Practically by definition, robots are equipped with the ability to sense, process, and record the world around them (Denning et al 2008; Singer 2009, 67). Robots can go places humans cannot go, see things humans cannot see. Robots are, first and foremost, a human instrument. And after industrial manufacturing, the principle use to which we've put that instrument has been surveillance. ... There are a number of different ways one might categorize or group the impact of robotics on privacy. This chapter breaks the effects into three categories--direct surveillance, access, and social meaning--with the goal of introducing the reader to a wide variety of issues. Where possible, the chapter points toward ways in which we might mitigate or redress the potential impact of robots on privacy, but acknowledges that in some cases redress will be difficult under the current state of privacy law. ..."
"Robots and Privacy - American University Washington College of Law"
https://www.wcl.american.edu/p...
"M. Ryan Calo, "Robots and Privacy," in Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics (Patrick Lin, George Bekey, and Keith Abney, eds.) (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming)
Anyway, we'll see how this plays out with Echo as a sort of robot without hands...
There are a lot of things I like about Amazon (ignoring employment conditions for packers), even its Kindle hardware, but the Fire phone and now this seem like overreach. That is not because they are not interesting products, but more because, as
"After all, that's what happened to virtually everybody else on Earth. Do you ever wonder why you have to work five days a week, until you're 67, and then you die within a few years of retirement? Who claims to own all the land in your country? When somebody sells a piece of land, how did they claim to own it in the first place? The people of the rainforest are being forced off their OWN land, where they have lived for tens of thousands of years, to be turned into wage slaves, working in factories. Wake up."
Insightful. It has been suggested the "Garden of Eden" story is really about the painful transition from hunting/gathering by tribes to agriculture managed by militaristic bureaucracies. Several groups of people have similar stories, some fairly recently as they were forced to convert to agriculture by being pushed off their native lands. This happened also in England with the "Enclosure acts".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Various pushed to "privatization" in the USA are the same old thing... And it is expanding to water rights, spectrum rights, endless copyrights, overly broad patents, and so on...
Related:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
http://www.amazon.com/Pandoras...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
And the amazing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sle...
"A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Piraha, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil. Daniel Everett arrived among the Piraha with his wife and three young children hoping to convert the tribe to Christianity. Everett quickly became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications. The Piraha have no counting system, no fixed terms for color, no concept of war, and no personal property. Everett was so impressed with their peaceful way of life that he eventually lost faith in the God he'd hoped to introduce to them, and instead devoted his life to the science of linguistics. Part passionate memoir, part scientific exploration, Everett's life-changing tale is riveting look into the nature of language, thought, and life itself."
Howard Zinn wrote about what parts of America were like before Columbus began the conquest (backed by profiteering organizations run for "the love of money"): ... and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities." Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need
"...How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...
"In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all."
By Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."