This is one of Niven's Laws: There is not cause so just and noble that you can't find total idiots following it.
OK, so let's get this out of the way. Political people have to eat crow on a regular basis when campaign tactics appear to be silly or stupid or craven or whatnot. This is just such a case.
Instead of coming up with innovative reasons why Dean is right or shouldn't be blamed, they should be contacting their man via his volunteer network and getting him to shape up. Every presidential candidate has had to apologize or reform when his campaign does something embarrassing. This is just such a case.
What is your plan to deal with the current budgetary mess in California? To what extent do you plan on raising taxes and/or cutting services? And which programs will be cut and where?
I realize that these are specific and uncomfortable questions to ask, but California is in the midst of a major budgetary crisis, and any Governor will have to make specific and unpleasant choices to deal with it. So far, the answer the current Governor has chosen has been to pick and blame political opponents.
This has been RIAA's problem. For one thing, the industry they represent has been shooting itself in the foot with the way it is handling all this. For another, RIAA's tactics have been seemingly designed to provoke outrage. Finally, the new laws designed to enforce their property rights have been very bad.
So I totally agree with you. My issue was this: is music sharing ethically right or wrong? If it's wrong, even the silliness of the laws and the RIAA's tactics doesn't justify me doing it. If it's right, then why is it right?
So far, I'm coming to the conclusion that RIAA is following an idiotic path, but that the music sharers are guilty of an ethical lapse at least. Which is funny, because I'm inclined to think that there's nothing wrong with it.
I think I can clear this up. (I'm so glad my post brought about such a cool discussion!)
OK, BrainInAJar is right when he says might makes right-- at least in the sense that your legal powers and priviledges do eventually devolve from force (or the threat of force) exercised by government. In a de facto sense, at least.
But there's more to life than what the government policy happens to currently be. Natural Rights is a belief that a certain list of priviledges and powers are inherently just, no matter what current government policies happen to be. So protesters in Iran, for example, have a right of free speech-- a right that's being violated, but still a right. (Of course, saying that rights are inherent to the universe, or to just societies brings about the inevitable argument about just what those rights are... healthcare being an example.)
One of our government's primary working assumptions is that second point (made by MunchMunch). Life, liberty, property are your rights by virtue of you existing-- governments don't give them to you, though just ones guarantee them. This shared ideology (both major parties and the libertarians strongly adhere to it) is far more powerful than any particular administration.
The problem with 'might makes right' is that relativism tends to lead to bullying. If anything can be a right, then you don't really have rights, just an ever-shifting menu of policy choices. If you believe that rights are natural and can only be guaranteed or not, then you run into the 'ok, which rights are natural' question. The answer (so far) has been very satisfactory in the West: a system where we all agree that rights are inherent, but use a deliberative / consensus approach to guaranteeing them.
I largely agree with this... as I said, supporting free file sharing is very much in the interest of the Industry.
However, the thing about a property right is that you have the right to choose to do stupid, counterproductive things with it. Like placing heavy restrictions on file sharing. If I don't want you to wash my car, no matter how good a job you might do, you still shouldn't do it.
People who feel that violating the copyright on music to share it with others can't just argue that it's for the RIAA's own good-- even if it is. What I'm looking for is a good reason to support file sharing, which I emotionally believe should be legal, but which intellectually I haven't heard a defense of yet.
A Democrat signed the DMCA. Hilary Rosen was a democrat. Both parties actually agree on alot... of course we don't hear that in the news because the stuff that there is consensus on isn't newsworthy. On this stuff there's mostly apathy, salted with consensus.
The reality is that so far I haven't seen a very convincing defense of music piracy. That isn't to say I wouldn't be receptive to one (I am) but most of them boil down to a general denial of property rights or good reasons why the artist/label/retailer would benefit if they decided to allow copying. If I haven't heard a satisfactory defense (and I'm looking) it's no surprise that people with more important things to worry about haven't, either.
Fair use provisions in copyright law, shorter lifetimes for copyrights, etc. are all very noble, and well-advocated. But that's different from justifying the sharing of music recordings, when the copyright holder doesn't want this. The tactics used by the RIAA are objectionable-- but again that's a question of means not ends.
So ultimately, lawmakers who have much bigger things to worry about (like war and the economy) see the following facts:
The internet allows people to easily record and trade music.
Nearly everyone is doing this, therefore getting music for free.
The trade group representing the copyright holders for this music are up in arms.
Some computer advocates object to certain technical provisions in the existing legislation, like fair use clarifications.
Large numbers of people want music trading to be legal.
To be honest, I may not like the RIAA, but I can see the problem. Unless there is a good reason why a copyright holder doesn't have to the right to limit copying of his work (hence copyright), then I might limit some of the more odious enforcement provisions, but I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to protect their rights.
Again, I'm receptive to such an argument. I do think that we're foolishly crushing fair use rights. I also think that copyrights (and while we're at it, patents) should be returned to their founding-father era lifespans. And criminalizing a good percentage of the public is a little silly, too. But that isn't the same as removing copyrights entirely.
The music industry (and especially artists) would greatly benefit from circulating free but low-bitrate versions of their music to drive CD and concert sales-- I think that they're shooting their profits in the foot by not embracing the technology (they're already streaming low-bitrate audio wirelessly anyway, aren't they?-- and to great effect). But they have the right to shoot their profits in the foot if that's what they want to do.
Instead of modding me down, post a reply telling me why forcing a copyright holder to allow free sharing of his work is good public policy. I want to believe, I just haven't heard a satisfactory argument yet.
I totally agree with this. I just got out of two and a half years spent working at a mobile application platform company, and so have seen the belly of the beast. Yes, the slow economy is the major reason for slow adoption, but there is another, deeper reason.
For one thing, a key piece of the industry, the wireless WAN providers, are simply not ready for prime time. It is very difficult to deploy an application over the air, and mostly this is for bureaucratic reasons. Carriers require long expensive certification processes for virtually any application, and often won't talk to you if you're looking at less than 10,000 installed users per app (not per platform or even per installation). Expenses are all out of whack-- bandwidth that isn't being used right now is inordinately expensive; the time to jack up prices is after the technology has proven itself.
The devices themselves leave something to be desired. I'm something of a device iconoclast; experience has taught me that frills sell a device but make it unusable in the field. Battery life, durability and ease of data entry are the three things that make the world go around in my experience. The RIM Blackberry, for example, is black and white, very hard to code against (I haven't played with the Java version yet) has no useful sound and barely usable graphics. It doesn't integrate with anything except Notes and Outlook. It is also my all time favorite. It lasts 2-3 weeks between charges, the text is clearly readable (if unsexy), the keyboard and thumbwheel are extremely usable (not as much with gloves on, but better than the touchscreens), and durable as anything. A coworker once dropped his out of a car, then pulled over and found it by the side of the road. It still was fine.
I'm multifunction device agnostic, too. Architecture groups at major enterprises go crazy for phone/pda combos, but I've found in practice that they do neither well.
OK, so all that aside, what does the world need in the way of PDA's and wireless to get mobile off and running? Glad you asked.;)
The carriers have to drop the bureaucratic crap and offer clear pricing for wireless as if they were a wired ISP. Maybe that means per byte, maybe it means per month, but it has to be clear and flexible enough that if I pay or my company pays or their vendor pays, there isn't a 'technical' limitation.
The carriers need to get with the OS developers and build a remote kill switch library that every application must use. That clears up their legitimate concerns about bandwidth and bugs. With that, easy, outsourceable app certification needs to happen-- so you can kill apps that fail rather than holding every app at the gate waiting for them to be perfect. Ever wonder why BREW failed?
Device manufacturers need to recognize that devices are not 'small computers' but products with their own unique requirements. Look at what Symbol or Intermec are doing. Then stop putting MP3 players into your devices and start adding easy barcode scanning. Cut the color and extend battery life to a full working day at least. Handwriting recognition is 'cool', easy entry of data (possibly with gloves on) is critical. People will adopt these devices at home, but the consumer market is already more than adequately served.
Don't worry about standards. OK, let me ammend that. Don't worry about standards except for communications. The hardware is not yet a commodity; it is changing brutally fast. A company that commissions an app on a device buys 500-1000 of that device. When two years later they want to upgrade or change devices, they'll rewrite the program anyway, to take advantage of the new hardware. If the communications is standard, at least that won't change. Much. But give up for now on front end platforms-- worry about communications.
Software companies need to think about how people really work in the field. When you're in line for a plane reading your email, you don't wan
Of course, the rubber meets the road on election day. I'd be interested in seeing just how the slashdot crowd votes overall; my suspicion based on the computer enthusiasts I've met is that they don't actually vote based on these issues. But I could be wrong. A mature, organized effort as you describe would be very refreshing and surprisingly effective.
It's also our big chance. Take the time to write a polite letter, encouraging your Senators and Congressman to support this bill. Then print it out, sign it and MAIL it (that's right, snail mail!).
Things are still very early. There's plenty of time for it to die in committee, or be riddled with amendments (some irrelevant, some helpful, some counterproductive). Your job, if you care, is to express your support for this bill-- and those who support it.
If you're from Kansas, you should be especially supportive of Senator Brownback's position in this-- even if you disagree with him on other issues, you should take the time to publicly agree with him on IP reform.
This is a great first step. We need to remember that it isn't the only step, and there's work in here for us to do, too.
The random dig was a reference to the tenure and peer review problems the cultural studies community faces. Full disclosure: the social sciences faces similar problems right now. It was an irrelevant throwaway line, but I'll cheerfully stand by it.
Minsky only has himself to blame.
on
AI Going Nowhere?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If Marvin wants to know why AI hasn't made major strides in the past 30 years (and, by the way, I would say that it has) he should look no further than his own bullying, arrogant approach.
Promising subfields like perceptrons were intentionally quashed by him... he went out of his way to strangle investment and research in areas he considered to be a dead end. We're not literature majors: we can't just all say the same thing in a party over wine and cheese and call it progress.
Even bad ideas, when well explored, can give new meaning and better approaches to a field. And since this is research, noone knows the correct answer: even a dumb-seeming idea may turn out to be the right one-- or give us clues about features the right answer needs to have.
Of course we've had major advances in AI. One of the challenges of AI, as the article points out, is that once something is well understood, it is defined as being outside the AI field. Computer vision, face recognition, voice and speech recognition. Conversation engines like SmarterChild. No, this isn't HAL, but they are good, positive steps in the right direction.
Where is Science fiction going?
on
Ask Larry Niven
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I've been a fan since I was 10... and it took me years to realize one of your major contributions: returning real science to science fiction, which had gone down a less rigorous path when you came on the scene and was slowly turning into fantasy.
Where would you say that science fiction as a genre is going? In the direction of more science, or less? More galactic epics, or more personal stories? And, of course, more mainstream acceptance?
NASA should save money by disbanding and reforming as an accreditation agency, like the FAA.
They should only be allowed to approve launches, manage space Right of Way issues, man-rate craft, etc. Launches by Lockheed and the Pegasus people would be fine by me, and actually accomplish something.
As long as NASA both regulates and competes with the private sector, nothing interesting will happen in space.
I've used both quite extensively, and after about a week, you can do alot with either. But I still feel that the thumb keyboard is infinitely better.. I can type long letters with it, and while running to catch a plane, etc. Now if they add the power usage to a Zaurus, it would be perfect.
I don't think that the issues of identity and communication that are central to the work could have been raised without the love story. This isn't a story about automata: it is about people with powerful emotions.
Anyway, I loved this movie. I think it was a little slow and stately, but that this is entirely appropriate. Perhaps it is a little strange when we're used to the tight pacing of modern action movies and commercial-laden TV shows, but I really valued that care that was placed into the movie.
Big budget film makers always seem to be trashed whether their piece is intended to be artistic or not. In this case, the argument is that they're trying too hard. I think that the same movie with names other than Cameron, Soderberg and Clooney would receive rave reviews from many of its current critics. Yes it's slow, yes it's prickley and strange.
But I took those to be more grownup than doddering. My $.02, of course.
I've seen this, but I think it has more to do with the device than with the notion of using PDA's. With Palm and M$ equivalents, you have to use graffiti. Any handwriting is a fairly onerous chore. Also, you have to poke around on the screen to do searches and app navigation.
With the Blackberry you don't. So with that said, I am a major RIM fan (I'd imagine that the Good Technologies or Danger devices ought to be about the same). People get addicted to the Blackberry: they call them Crack-berries.
When I had a RIM for my last job, I used it constantly. I responded to important emails as soon as they came in, religiously added people to my address book, and kept my entire personal and work schedule in the calendar (which meant, it popped into Exchange at work, too.)
For all its flaws, the one test of how useful it is is "Do I use it?" Hell, yeah. Constantly. Without having it now, I feel more than ever how my schedule, dinners with friends, my dragonlance game, birthdays, etc. was always at my fingertips and accessable.
OK, so what made blackberry different? The little minikeyboard was a better data entry system than a touchscreen. A jog dial means that everything has the same UI and you control it all from your thumb. The built-in wireless was slow, but communicated in the background constantly, so you didn't have to cradle except for recharges (once per week or two: I've had mine last for three weeks). The wireless coverage footprint is incredible, but the device continues to work fine withotu coverage... it just catches up when you pop back in. It is a durable device that you keep on your belt: it turns on when you take it out of its holster, then turns the screen off when you put it back in. No frills: no color, no music, no filesystem, nothing that drains power, makes the device more complicated, and adds 'coolness'.
That's the message. The more cool the device is, the more it trades away essentials. If you want an MP3 player, buy a dedicated device. If you want a phone, buy a phone. If you want a PDA, decide what you want to run. For me it was email, schedule, address book, and a memo to jot stuff down in. RIM was perfect. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Running Linux would seem to be required if you want to take full advantage of the processor... AFAIK, PPC2002 apps and certainly the OS aren't optimized to make use of anything past the SA1110 chip. Tom's Hardware did a review of the new chips and how well they deliver versus the old ones.
I think that the big thing missing from this device is integrated 802.11b. So you can't connect to anything without cradling. Though it does tack alot onto the old pricepoint. The Toshiba e740 is a better PocketPC system, though pricy. Of course, if all you want is the basic email / calendar / address book, you can't beat the Blackberry.
I'm surprised that noone other than Sharp has really pushed a linux device. If you make all communications TCP/IP, then you can handle connections over USB, firewire, 802.11*, WLAN cards, etc. Network stuff and data entry still seems to be the key stumbling blocks.
Yeah, Linux lacks a consumer-oriented front end, but you'd have to reimplement that for the form factor anyway. All the libraries and components would still be there.
Both of the above links are good ones. Take Back Your Government was the one I had in mind. Despite Jerry Pournelle's rushed, incomplete and (to my mind) poorly thought out footnotes, it is an excellent book that still applies today.
Heinlein had a poor opinion of third parties-- he was very intent on pushing for candidates who shared his beliefs in the primaries of a major party. He was a strong believer in the two party system, and very much influenced my thinking on the subject.
This is yet another in a long line of 'physical science rules misapplied to the social sciences.' A mathematical analysis designed to produce the guy who is everyone's best friend is all fine and good, but that's at best tangential to the real business of elections. Most people seem to have this vision that an election is a beauty pageant where a bunch of leaders are picked who then get to make all the decisions based on sweet reason. The real business of elections is to form mandate, consensus and acceptance.
Mandate: The winner points to a large number of votes as a justification for his / her agenda.
Consensus: The process of elections is designed to determine what kind of compromises among winners (remember that there are hundreds of elections at once) must be made to govern. Dozens of factions have to work together, and this is how the horse-trading happens that lets the hippies work with the union workers work with the trial lawyers.
Acceptance: OK, you disagree with the results of the elections, and you can't find other factions that you are willing to work with. You want to be ideologically pure and go your own way, and you don't have the popularity to make it on your own. You at very least have to accept the process that got you there. Acceptance is what keeps us from breaking into violence after the election.
OK, so how does our system fare?
Well, that article addresses the question, "what is the best way to measure my Mandate" to the exclusion of all else. In other words, it measures elections as if they were opinion polls. I'll come back to it.
In terms of Consensus, we have the best system in the world, which is why our government has only broken down into fighting once. In a parliamentary system, you get elected and then (as is happening in Israel) you form a coalition government by compromising with other parties to form a majority. So the people's will is measured, then a compromise is formed in a back room by elites.
In our system, the 'spoiler' factor that the article describes as a bad thing actually helps. In the end, you pretty much have to be in one of the two major parties, or your vote is useless. That means you have to compromise with the religiously orthodox, small businessmen, and engineers on one side (broadly) and lawyers, teachers, union officials, and students on the other (again, very broadly). You have to do the compromising, so you decide exactly what kind of deal to cut in the primaries. The two parties meanwhile have to be as inclusive of compatible points of view as possible. So our system rocks at building consensus. People who hate compromising, of course, love parliamentary systems, which are more entertaining in academia or on TV, but are notoriously unstable.
Finally, acceptance. Well, I think that our system has that, too, though it was strained in 2000 with the election fiasco, and events in NJ more recently.
Anyway, that's what the point of our election system is. Remember, even in physics, examining a system is reflexive: it changes what you're looking at. Our system isn't a measurement, it is a way to arrive at solutions that get the most popular viewpoints across, a good compromise if your faction didn't win the primary but won the general, and at least confidence in the process if you didn't even win the general. I'd say our system is the best I've seen, compared to either paper plans or real life.
Why do we stick to base ten while we're at it? I mean, if we're going to surrender to the French and pick up Systemme Internationale, and surrender to the clock-making industry by changing all our clocks, why not throw out a system based, after all, only on the number of fingers we happen to have.
I'd much rather ping the foundation of my numerical reality to something different, something more pure than our greasy, meaty physical bodies.
So I propose now that we switch our number systems to base 8. It is easy to read, unlike binary, but can be easily changed into binary. This way, we'd have 555 days in the year, and 30 hours in a day. Or then we could go an make a newer, better system of hours, minutes and seconds to measure our moments, instances and durations.
Let say America withdraws from the Outer Space Treaty. In 20 years, 95% of mars is controlled by America. The only way that this can be seen as good is if you are looking at it with the view that america is superior to every other nation there is. We may be richer, but it is a far cry to call us superior. Then lets look at another provision of the treaty, no Weapons of Mass destruction in outer space. Under Bush's National Missile defense system, he never ruled out using a space based system, including some sort of laser platforms. So then we have weapons of mass destruction in outer space. Wonderful.
Well, first, that can only be seen as good if you are superior to all possible competitors. Right? So that means the US is superior to Russia (a good country with a lot of severe economic and social problems right now), China (a dictatorship whose foreign policy is mainly centered around conquering Taiwan), the European Union (where they are burning synagogues and where the government still suffers racism at home and mass killings in their back yard), and well, that's it. Interestingly, the nations most able to acquire territory in space are the ones who most deserve it. But if Syria wants to claim Ganymede, I say more power to them. If we want to stop them, we can launch an intercept from our Bush Naval Base on Ceres. (Your call if it stands for George W. Bush or Vannevar Bush);)
Anyway, the UN is an organization where every country has a vote. Most of them are dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, Cuba and North Korea. So how the UN is supposed to be representative of the interests of the people of the world is beyond me. Moreover, the reason you are allowed by the treaty to withdraw at any time with a year's notice is so that nations (say, ours) can decide that it is no longer in our interest to be signatories.
Since when is a laser a Weapon of Mass Destruction? It is not chemical, biological or nuclear, and does not do damage on the scale of any of these. It is in fact an exotic, but still conventional, weapon. In fact, the only military use you mention is in destroying nuclear weapons before they can detonate. How this is a tragedy if it is deployed is beyond me.
It doesn't matter why or for what reasons the treaty was accepted by AMERICANS. What matters is what it does. The outer space treaty is basis for the outer space policy of the United Nations, and therefore of the 189 member states of the United Nations. But obviosly we know better than all of them.
Yeah, actually we do. Or at least most of them. That's like saying that Iraq and North Korea outweigh the US because they are two nations and we are one. Neither are democracies, their total voting populations (let's see, the two nations put together have, TWO voters, while we have 300 million) are a fraction of ours.
As far as I'm concerned, Bush has a horrible record as far as treaties go (KYOTO anyone?), and I would not trust him to withdraw from the outerspace treaty and then be responsible.
Kyoto is another post, though it was the Senate that nearly unanimously voted it down, and as it stood it exempted most of the world except us and Europe. Bush's record is excellent; he just signed a treaty to integrate Russia with NATO (not membership, of course) so that the two can cooperate on security. He also withdrew from the ABM treaty so that we could work with Russia to build missile defense systems (they weren't happy of course because they can't expect to deploy a defense as fast as we can). How is it in our interest to put nukes in space if we abrogate the treaty? We can already destroy any nation in the world already... the only countries which would benefit don't have space programs.
Bottom line: we have every reason to withdraw and few not to. And those few can be fixed by policies (such as "no nuclear weapons in space" treaties) which can be signed in the year it takes to formally withdraw.
I'll bet you. I working in a Congressional office, and I've signed for mail.;)
This article is, excuse my french, total bullshit. Congressional office mailrooms have a staff of between two and five people to read through all that mail, sort it, and get a response. To say that they are unresponsive because they don't favor people who they don't represent over their constituents is just trolling.
Note that ZDNet didn't say "Congressional offices ignore their constituent email" because that would be untrue. However, due to the volume of mail received (typically spammed to all congressmen, often included on a mailing list), offices often don't respond to email that didn't come from constituents.
This is a pretty low thing for ZD to be writing. Most congressmen are strapped just to read all their constituent mail-- those are the people they should be responsible for communicating with. We responded to everything we received from constituents.
Actually, my experience with Paideia is that it is (like many private schools) a combination of the gifted and rich. It is a good school that always came in force to the science and math competitions.
The girls I've met who went there were liberated and sexually adventurous.;) Josh, take note: this is one of the few schools where an accomplishment like this can be translated into romantic success.
Paideia, in the sciences, is very good. They encourage creativity and hard work. It pays off in college, where you start maybe a year or two ahead of everyone else. In the social sciences and humanities, though, they are as bad as my (public) high school, maybe worse. They are very dogmatic-- do it their way or you're ignorant-- and they tend to be worse in that the students get to college thinking that they are way ahead of their peers. Until first semester's literature grades come in....
Paideia is very expensive, but worth it if you're looking for a good education. Be careful about dating their alums, though.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of Niven's Laws: There is not cause so just and noble that you can't find total idiots following it.
OK, so let's get this out of the way. Political people have to eat crow on a regular basis when campaign tactics appear to be silly or stupid or craven or whatnot. This is just such a case.
Instead of coming up with innovative reasons why Dean is right or shouldn't be blamed, they should be contacting their man via his volunteer network and getting him to shape up. Every presidential candidate has had to apologize or reform when his campaign does something embarrassing. This is just such a case.
What is your plan to deal with the current budgetary mess in California? To what extent do you plan on raising taxes and/or cutting services? And which programs will be cut and where?
I realize that these are specific and uncomfortable questions to ask, but California is in the midst of a major budgetary crisis, and any Governor will have to make specific and unpleasant choices to deal with it. So far, the answer the current Governor has chosen has been to pick and blame political opponents.
I agree with this.
This has been RIAA's problem. For one thing, the industry they represent has been shooting itself in the foot with the way it is handling all this. For another, RIAA's tactics have been seemingly designed to provoke outrage. Finally, the new laws designed to enforce their property rights have been very bad.
So I totally agree with you. My issue was this: is music sharing ethically right or wrong? If it's wrong, even the silliness of the laws and the RIAA's tactics doesn't justify me doing it. If it's right, then why is it right?
So far, I'm coming to the conclusion that RIAA is following an idiotic path, but that the music sharers are guilty of an ethical lapse at least. Which is funny, because I'm inclined to think that there's nothing wrong with it.
Oh well....
I totally agree with all of this.
I think I can clear this up. (I'm so glad my post brought about such a cool discussion!)
OK, BrainInAJar is right when he says might makes right-- at least in the sense that your legal powers and priviledges do eventually devolve from force (or the threat of force) exercised by government. In a de facto sense, at least.
But there's more to life than what the government policy happens to currently be. Natural Rights is a belief that a certain list of priviledges and powers are inherently just, no matter what current government policies happen to be. So protesters in Iran, for example, have a right of free speech-- a right that's being violated, but still a right. (Of course, saying that rights are inherent to the universe, or to just societies brings about the inevitable argument about just what those rights are... healthcare being an example.)
One of our government's primary working assumptions is that second point (made by MunchMunch). Life, liberty, property are your rights by virtue of you existing-- governments don't give them to you, though just ones guarantee them. This shared ideology (both major parties and the libertarians strongly adhere to it) is far more powerful than any particular administration.
The problem with 'might makes right' is that relativism tends to lead to bullying. If anything can be a right, then you don't really have rights, just an ever-shifting menu of policy choices. If you believe that rights are natural and can only be guaranteed or not, then you run into the 'ok, which rights are natural' question. The answer (so far) has been very satisfactory in the West: a system where we all agree that rights are inherent, but use a deliberative / consensus approach to guaranteeing them.
I largely agree with this... as I said, supporting free file sharing is very much in the interest of the Industry.
However, the thing about a property right is that you have the right to choose to do stupid, counterproductive things with it. Like placing heavy restrictions on file sharing. If I don't want you to wash my car, no matter how good a job you might do, you still shouldn't do it.
People who feel that violating the copyright on music to share it with others can't just argue that it's for the RIAA's own good-- even if it is. What I'm looking for is a good reason to support file sharing, which I emotionally believe should be legal, but which intellectually I haven't heard a defense of yet.
The reality is that so far I haven't seen a very convincing defense of music piracy. That isn't to say I wouldn't be receptive to one (I am) but most of them boil down to a general denial of property rights or good reasons why the artist/label/retailer would benefit if they decided to allow copying. If I haven't heard a satisfactory defense (and I'm looking) it's no surprise that people with more important things to worry about haven't, either.
Fair use provisions in copyright law, shorter lifetimes for copyrights, etc. are all very noble, and well-advocated. But that's different from justifying the sharing of music recordings, when the copyright holder doesn't want this. The tactics used by the RIAA are objectionable-- but again that's a question of means not ends.
So ultimately, lawmakers who have much bigger things to worry about (like war and the economy) see the following facts:
To be honest, I may not like the RIAA, but I can see the problem. Unless there is a good reason why a copyright holder doesn't have to the right to limit copying of his work (hence copyright), then I might limit some of the more odious enforcement provisions, but I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to protect their rights.
Again, I'm receptive to such an argument. I do think that we're foolishly crushing fair use rights. I also think that copyrights (and while we're at it, patents) should be returned to their founding-father era lifespans. And criminalizing a good percentage of the public is a little silly, too. But that isn't the same as removing copyrights entirely.
The music industry (and especially artists) would greatly benefit from circulating free but low-bitrate versions of their music to drive CD and concert sales-- I think that they're shooting their profits in the foot by not embracing the technology (they're already streaming low-bitrate audio wirelessly anyway, aren't they?-- and to great effect). But they have the right to shoot their profits in the foot if that's what they want to do.
Instead of modding me down, post a reply telling me why forcing a copyright holder to allow free sharing of his work is good public policy. I want to believe, I just haven't heard a satisfactory argument yet.
For one thing, a key piece of the industry, the wireless WAN providers, are simply not ready for prime time. It is very difficult to deploy an application over the air, and mostly this is for bureaucratic reasons. Carriers require long expensive certification processes for virtually any application, and often won't talk to you if you're looking at less than 10,000 installed users per app (not per platform or even per installation). Expenses are all out of whack-- bandwidth that isn't being used right now is inordinately expensive; the time to jack up prices is after the technology has proven itself.
The devices themselves leave something to be desired. I'm something of a device iconoclast; experience has taught me that frills sell a device but make it unusable in the field. Battery life, durability and ease of data entry are the three things that make the world go around in my experience. The RIM Blackberry, for example, is black and white, very hard to code against (I haven't played with the Java version yet) has no useful sound and barely usable graphics. It doesn't integrate with anything except Notes and Outlook. It is also my all time favorite. It lasts 2-3 weeks between charges, the text is clearly readable (if unsexy), the keyboard and thumbwheel are extremely usable (not as much with gloves on, but better than the touchscreens), and durable as anything. A coworker once dropped his out of a car, then pulled over and found it by the side of the road. It still was fine.
I'm multifunction device agnostic, too. Architecture groups at major enterprises go crazy for phone/pda combos, but I've found in practice that they do neither well.
OK, so all that aside, what does the world need in the way of PDA's and wireless to get mobile off and running? Glad you asked.
Excellent post... you hit the mark perfectly.
Of course, the rubber meets the road on election day. I'd be interested in seeing just how the slashdot crowd votes overall; my suspicion based on the computer enthusiasts I've met is that they don't actually vote based on these issues. But I could be wrong. A mature, organized effort as you describe would be very refreshing and surprisingly effective.
This is extremely good news....
It's also our big chance. Take the time to write a polite letter, encouraging your Senators and Congressman to support this bill. Then print it out, sign it and MAIL it (that's right, snail mail!).
Things are still very early. There's plenty of time for it to die in committee, or be riddled with amendments (some irrelevant, some helpful, some counterproductive). Your job, if you care, is to express your support for this bill-- and those who support it.
If you're from Kansas, you should be especially supportive of Senator Brownback's position in this-- even if you disagree with him on other issues, you should take the time to publicly agree with him on IP reform.
This is a great first step. We need to remember that it isn't the only step, and there's work in here for us to do, too.
Actually, my education is in the social sciences.
The random dig was a reference to the tenure and peer review problems the cultural studies community faces. Full disclosure: the social sciences faces similar problems right now. It was an irrelevant throwaway line, but I'll cheerfully stand by it.
If Marvin wants to know why AI hasn't made major strides in the past 30 years (and, by the way, I would say that it has) he should look no further than his own bullying, arrogant approach.
Promising subfields like perceptrons were intentionally quashed by him... he went out of his way to strangle investment and research in areas he considered to be a dead end. We're not literature majors: we can't just all say the same thing in a party over wine and cheese and call it progress.
Even bad ideas, when well explored, can give new meaning and better approaches to a field. And since this is research, noone knows the correct answer: even a dumb-seeming idea may turn out to be the right one-- or give us clues about features the right answer needs to have.
Of course we've had major advances in AI. One of the challenges of AI, as the article points out, is that once something is well understood, it is defined as being outside the AI field. Computer vision, face recognition, voice and speech recognition. Conversation engines like SmarterChild. No, this isn't HAL, but they are good, positive steps in the right direction.
I've been a fan since I was 10... and it took me years to realize one of your major contributions: returning real science to science fiction, which had gone down a less rigorous path when you came on the scene and was slowly turning into fantasy.
Where would you say that science fiction as a genre is going? In the direction of more science, or less? More galactic epics, or more personal stories? And, of course, more mainstream acceptance?
NASA should save money by disbanding and reforming as an accreditation agency, like the FAA.
They should only be allowed to approve launches, manage space Right of Way issues, man-rate craft, etc. Launches by Lockheed and the Pegasus people would be fine by me, and actually accomplish something.
As long as NASA both regulates and competes with the private sector, nothing interesting will happen in space.
I've used both quite extensively, and after about a week, you can do alot with either. But I still feel that the thumb keyboard is infinitely better.. I can type long letters with it, and while running to catch a plane, etc. Now if they add the power usage to a Zaurus, it would be perfect.
I don't think that the issues of identity and communication that are central to the work could have been raised without the love story. This isn't a story about automata: it is about people with powerful emotions.
Anyway, I loved this movie. I think it was a little slow and stately, but that this is entirely appropriate. Perhaps it is a little strange when we're used to the tight pacing of modern action movies and commercial-laden TV shows, but I really valued that care that was placed into the movie.
Big budget film makers always seem to be trashed whether their piece is intended to be artistic or not. In this case, the argument is that they're trying too hard. I think that the same movie with names other than Cameron, Soderberg and Clooney would receive rave reviews from many of its current critics. Yes it's slow, yes it's prickley and strange.
But I took those to be more grownup than doddering. My $.02, of course.
I've seen this, but I think it has more to do with the device than with the notion of using PDA's. With Palm and M$ equivalents, you have to use graffiti. Any handwriting is a fairly onerous chore. Also, you have to poke around on the screen to do searches and app navigation.
With the Blackberry you don't. So with that said, I am a major RIM fan (I'd imagine that the Good Technologies or Danger devices ought to be about the same). People get addicted to the Blackberry: they call them Crack-berries.
When I had a RIM for my last job, I used it constantly. I responded to important emails as soon as they came in, religiously added people to my address book, and kept my entire personal and work schedule in the calendar (which meant, it popped into Exchange at work, too.)
For all its flaws, the one test of how useful it is is "Do I use it?" Hell, yeah. Constantly. Without having it now, I feel more than ever how my schedule, dinners with friends, my dragonlance game, birthdays, etc. was always at my fingertips and accessable.
OK, so what made blackberry different? The little minikeyboard was a better data entry system than a touchscreen. A jog dial means that everything has the same UI and you control it all from your thumb. The built-in wireless was slow, but communicated in the background constantly, so you didn't have to cradle except for recharges (once per week or two: I've had mine last for three weeks). The wireless coverage footprint is incredible, but the device continues to work fine withotu coverage... it just catches up when you pop back in. It is a durable device that you keep on your belt: it turns on when you take it out of its holster, then turns the screen off when you put it back in. No frills: no color, no music, no filesystem, nothing that drains power, makes the device more complicated, and adds 'coolness'.
That's the message. The more cool the device is, the more it trades away essentials. If you want an MP3 player, buy a dedicated device. If you want a phone, buy a phone. If you want a PDA, decide what you want to run. For me it was email, schedule, address book, and a memo to jot stuff down in. RIM was perfect. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Running Linux would seem to be required if you want to take full advantage of the processor... AFAIK, PPC2002 apps and certainly the OS aren't optimized to make use of anything past the SA1110 chip. Tom's Hardware did a review of the new chips and how well they deliver versus the old ones.
I think that the big thing missing from this device is integrated 802.11b. So you can't connect to anything without cradling. Though it does tack alot onto the old pricepoint. The Toshiba e740 is a better PocketPC system, though pricy. Of course, if all you want is the basic email / calendar / address book, you can't beat the Blackberry.
I'm surprised that noone other than Sharp has really pushed a linux device. If you make all communications TCP/IP, then you can handle connections over USB, firewire, 802.11*, WLAN cards, etc. Network stuff and data entry still seems to be the key stumbling blocks.
Yeah, Linux lacks a consumer-oriented front end, but you'd have to reimplement that for the form factor anyway. All the libraries and components would still be there.
Both of the above links are good ones. Take Back Your Government was the one I had in mind. Despite Jerry Pournelle's rushed, incomplete and (to my mind) poorly thought out footnotes, it is an excellent book that still applies today.
Heinlein had a poor opinion of third parties-- he was very intent on pushing for candidates who shared his beliefs in the primaries of a major party. He was a strong believer in the two party system, and very much influenced my thinking on the subject.
Nice Heinlein quote in your .sig.
You should read what Heinlein had to say about third parties and the value of the two-party system during his political career in Los Angeles.
This is yet another in a long line of 'physical science rules misapplied to the social sciences.' A mathematical analysis designed to produce the guy who is everyone's best friend is all fine and good, but that's at best tangential to the real business of elections. Most people seem to have this vision that an election is a beauty pageant where a bunch of leaders are picked who then get to make all the decisions based on sweet reason. The real business of elections is to form mandate, consensus and acceptance.
Mandate: The winner points to a large number of votes as a justification for his / her agenda.
Consensus: The process of elections is designed to determine what kind of compromises among winners (remember that there are hundreds of elections at once) must be made to govern. Dozens of factions have to work together, and this is how the horse-trading happens that lets the hippies work with the union workers work with the trial lawyers.
Acceptance: OK, you disagree with the results of the elections, and you can't find other factions that you are willing to work with. You want to be ideologically pure and go your own way, and you don't have the popularity to make it on your own. You at very least have to accept the process that got you there. Acceptance is what keeps us from breaking into violence after the election.
OK, so how does our system fare?
Well, that article addresses the question, "what is the best way to measure my Mandate" to the exclusion of all else. In other words, it measures elections as if they were opinion polls. I'll come back to it.
In terms of Consensus, we have the best system in the world, which is why our government has only broken down into fighting once. In a parliamentary system, you get elected and then (as is happening in Israel) you form a coalition government by compromising with other parties to form a majority. So the people's will is measured, then a compromise is formed in a back room by elites.
In our system, the 'spoiler' factor that the article describes as a bad thing actually helps. In the end, you pretty much have to be in one of the two major parties, or your vote is useless. That means you have to compromise with the religiously orthodox, small businessmen, and engineers on one side (broadly) and lawyers, teachers, union officials, and students on the other (again, very broadly). You have to do the compromising, so you decide exactly what kind of deal to cut in the primaries. The two parties meanwhile have to be as inclusive of compatible points of view as possible. So our system rocks at building consensus. People who hate compromising, of course, love parliamentary systems, which are more entertaining in academia or on TV, but are notoriously unstable.
Finally, acceptance. Well, I think that our system has that, too, though it was strained in 2000 with the election fiasco, and events in NJ more recently.
Anyway, that's what the point of our election system is. Remember, even in physics, examining a system is reflexive: it changes what you're looking at. Our system isn't a measurement, it is a way to arrive at solutions that get the most popular viewpoints across, a good compromise if your faction didn't win the primary but won the general, and at least confidence in the process if you didn't even win the general. I'd say our system is the best I've seen, compared to either paper plans or real life.
Why do we stick to base ten while we're at it? I mean, if we're going to surrender to the French and pick up Systemme Internationale, and surrender to the clock-making industry by changing all our clocks, why not throw out a system based, after all, only on the number of fingers we happen to have.
I'd much rather ping the foundation of my numerical reality to something different, something more pure than our greasy, meaty physical bodies.
So I propose now that we switch our number systems to base 8. It is easy to read, unlike binary, but can be easily changed into binary. This way, we'd have 555 days in the year, and 30 hours in a day. Or then we could go an make a newer, better system of hours, minutes and seconds to measure our moments, instances and durations.
Metric is old hat. We need something new.
Let say America withdraws from the Outer Space Treaty. In 20 years, 95% of mars is controlled by America. The only way that this can be seen as good is if you are looking at it with the view that america is superior to every other nation there is. We may be richer, but it is a far cry to call us superior. Then lets look at another provision of the treaty, no Weapons of Mass destruction in outer space. Under Bush's National Missile defense system, he never ruled out using a space based system, including some sort of laser platforms. So then we have weapons of mass destruction in outer space. Wonderful.
Well, first, that can only be seen as good if you are superior to all possible competitors. Right? So that means the US is superior to Russia (a good country with a lot of severe economic and social problems right now), China (a dictatorship whose foreign policy is mainly centered around conquering Taiwan), the European Union (where they are burning synagogues and where the government still suffers racism at home and mass killings in their back yard), and well, that's it. Interestingly, the nations most able to acquire territory in space are the ones who most deserve it. But if Syria wants to claim Ganymede, I say more power to them. If we want to stop them, we can launch an intercept from our Bush Naval Base on Ceres. (Your call if it stands for George W. Bush or Vannevar Bush) ;)
Anyway, the UN is an organization where every country has a vote. Most of them are dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, Cuba and North Korea. So how the UN is supposed to be representative of the interests of the people of the world is beyond me. Moreover, the reason you are allowed by the treaty to withdraw at any time with a year's notice is so that nations (say, ours) can decide that it is no longer in our interest to be signatories.
Since when is a laser a Weapon of Mass Destruction? It is not chemical, biological or nuclear, and does not do damage on the scale of any of these. It is in fact an exotic, but still conventional, weapon. In fact, the only military use you mention is in destroying nuclear weapons before they can detonate. How this is a tragedy if it is deployed is beyond me.
It doesn't matter why or for what reasons the treaty was accepted by AMERICANS. What matters is what it does. The outer space treaty is basis for the outer space policy of the United Nations, and therefore of the 189 member states of the United Nations. But obviosly we know better than all of them.
Yeah, actually we do. Or at least most of them. That's like saying that Iraq and North Korea outweigh the US because they are two nations and we are one. Neither are democracies, their total voting populations (let's see, the two nations put together have, TWO voters, while we have 300 million) are a fraction of ours.
As far as I'm concerned, Bush has a horrible record as far as treaties go (KYOTO anyone?), and I would not trust him to withdraw from the outerspace treaty and then be responsible.
Kyoto is another post, though it was the Senate that nearly unanimously voted it down, and as it stood it exempted most of the world except us and Europe. Bush's record is excellent; he just signed a treaty to integrate Russia with NATO (not membership, of course) so that the two can cooperate on security. He also withdrew from the ABM treaty so that we could work with Russia to build missile defense systems (they weren't happy of course because they can't expect to deploy a defense as fast as we can). How is it in our interest to put nukes in space if we abrogate the treaty? We can already destroy any nation in the world already... the only countries which would benefit don't have space programs.
Bottom line: we have every reason to withdraw and few not to. And those few can be fixed by policies (such as "no nuclear weapons in space" treaties) which can be signed in the year it takes to formally withdraw.
I'll bet you. I working in a Congressional office, and I've signed for mail. ;)
This article is, excuse my french, total bullshit. Congressional office mailrooms have a staff of between two and five people to read through all that mail, sort it, and get a response. To say that they are unresponsive because they don't favor people who they don't represent over their constituents is just trolling.
Note that ZDNet didn't say "Congressional offices ignore their constituent email" because that would be untrue. However, due to the volume of mail received (typically spammed to all congressmen, often included on a mailing list), offices often don't respond to email that didn't come from constituents.
This is a pretty low thing for ZD to be writing. Most congressmen are strapped just to read all their constituent mail-- those are the people they should be responsible for communicating with. We responded to everything we received from constituents.
Actually, my experience with Paideia is that it is (like many private schools) a combination of the gifted and rich. It is a good school that always came in force to the science and math competitions.
The girls I've met who went there were liberated and sexually adventurous. ;) Josh, take note: this is one of the few schools where an accomplishment like this can be translated into romantic success.
Paideia, in the sciences, is very good. They encourage creativity and hard work. It pays off in college, where you start maybe a year or two ahead of everyone else. In the social sciences and humanities, though, they are as bad as my (public) high school, maybe worse. They are very dogmatic-- do it their way or you're ignorant-- and they tend to be worse in that the students get to college thinking that they are way ahead of their peers. Until first semester's literature grades come in....
Paideia is very expensive, but worth it if you're looking for a good education. Be careful about dating their alums, though.