No. As is true in most free markets, we have only ourselves (writ large) to blame. We have changed our culture gradually (or not so gradually) and are reaping both the benefits of connectivity and the penalties of short attention spans.
Our media is already too easy on our government... how would this change if the government ran it directly?
Now, a privately run charity would perhaps do better in most instances. This is what the Wall St. Journal was in part until the family that owned it rolled on to the next generation who realized they wanted money more than to keep providing the service.
IMHO the main obstacle to such a charity emerging is the same shift in our culture. If you read the writings of the wealthy and powerful from previous generations, there remained a feeling of obligation to use that power wisely and in general for the greater good. See Thomas Jefferson, Franklin, or Paine. There were several reasons for an individual to pursue noble ends, and some of those were in fact ignoble (wanting to look like a good person, etc.) But there were other motivations, most rooted in the Judeo-Christian / medieval notions of social responsibilities of lords to those who owed them fealty. For today's wealthy there isn't even social pressure to be high-school educated. Just keep having flings and vapid press interactions.
Yes, these relationships were imperfect and uneven, but they provided our society with something we have destroyed while rooting out other things. Something we are just now coming to understand we've lost. The last major establishment of charitable organizations happened just before 1900 because of the robber-barons. Sure, we've seen one or two in the interim, but not on the same scale. The MacArthur Foundation, some of the work being done with Buffet and Gates' money.
-- Much that I sought, I could not find. Much that I found, I could not bind. Much that I bound, I could not free. Much that I freed, returned to me.
Correct, code quality is not the question, but functional requirements analysis and traceability to technical requirements and implementation are, at least in the complaint. Essentially the argument Sony will form is:
"We shopped around for a DRMish solution to our sales bleed caused by copyright violations. So we found this company MediaMax who claimed to understand our problem and said they had a solution. Now we're media execs and scarcely understand the CD or email, much less what goes on between. In fact our secretaries print our email which we mark up and have them transcribe into their computer to reply. This vendor is a group of professionals whose professional judgment we trusted with this issue. Therefore we expect them to bear responsibility for their product."
Most view this as scapegoating MediaMax to dodge blame, and it probably is. I however am occasionally driven to optimism by the law of unintended consequences.
Their likely argument is closely related to that employed in applications which for safety or by contract require a professional engineer. Personally, I think it would be a good thing if software vendors were more often held to account for the behavior of their software (intentional and unwanted/illegal or bug driven.)
So out of 535 elected legislators, there are two people with a chance to understand technical issues. I'm far from encouraged. Small wonder the Federation of American Scientists and other groups of socially responsible technologists have such a hard time injecting realism into the legislative debate, much less *CORRECT* realism.
I did not intend to slight the author of the bill, but merely to allude to a whole background of information in our common experience with our government. We as a culture have had a hard time adjusting to the increasingly rushing advance of technology in our lives. It took several decades for law and case law to strike a balance on privacy vs. public good in telephony, a balance which is now threatened by both executive fiat and data convergence and transport amalgamation. Computer ethics and law are far from settled, and even the least technical can see that intellectual property law is a shambles.
I can't help but think that we as a culture would adjust to new technologies easier if the people making and interpreting the laws were well versed in related technology. It currently takes far too long to get to legal stability on an issue and there is always risk that the stability point will be nonsensical or overtly harmful (like the status quo in election technology.)
For example, late 90s legislation (the Child Online Protection Act [COPA]) made it a felony to possess three or more child pornographic images. One or two were "okay" (not illegal at all) but the third made you a felon... Oh, and the definition of possession was weak. Say you had a news client download comp.sci.java automatically and some idiot had posted with violating images... You were technically a felon as soon as the images hit your machine.
(I learned a lot of this by studying under Jacques Catudal. He is something of an expert in the field, having testified before Congress on some of these issues amongst other contributions.)
(As an aside, I believe that with the increasing breadth of technology and other factors that it would be appropriate to return to the 1:20,000 congress:citizen ratio the Constitution originally prescribed.)
In a free (for various definitions of free) market we will only get well developed software when the majority of consumers quit accepting the current state of software quality.
Maybe this kind of lawsuit will help set precedents for software maker fear of litigation for poor quality software.
Aknot: You asked for a case. We brought you a case.
Zorg: A case with four stones in it. Not one! Not two or three! But four!!! Four stones!!! What the fuck am I supposed to do with an EMPTY case?!!
Aknot:...We are warriors, not merchants!
Zorg: But you can still count. Look... my fingers... Four stones, four crates... Zero stones... Zero Crates!!!
>>if there is ONE thing that needs to be transparent in government, it is the election process.
Actually, if as much as possible regarding the critical issues of the day aren't publicly available, then having an open election process does not matter. How does one differentiate the candidates in an information vacuum?
--"It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from there."
>>if there is ONE thing that needs to be transparent in government, it is the election process.
Actually, if as much as possible regarding the critical issues of the day aren't publicly available, then having an open election process does not matter. How does one differentiate the candidates in an information vacuum?
On top of the usual politicking and industry appeasement, there is the fact that there is only one engineer in congress now, and he's a civil.
If as our fearless leaders say "the future of America is the knowledge worker and innovator" then we must start electing a few (or more) people with technical backgrounds.
For this to happen, some of us introverted technical folks are going to have to swallow that and run for office.
First, I am a tremendous supporter of OSS, but historically there has been a learning curve for OSS development as the early developers were breaking new ground in terms of organizing contributions in a completely asynchronous manner.
Until recently, open source development practices have been umm... lacking somewhat in coherence... The folks at UC Davis, Berkeley, and UMD-College Park used their constraint-based, context-aware program call flow graph analysis package to uncover what they refer to as bug churn within the Linux kernel over several successive versions... I.e. they observed previously quashed bugs resurface in later versions.
Link to pdf preso:
http://cents.cs.berkeley.edu/retreats/winter_2005/ cukwip.pdf
So, not to be too much of an apologist for the FCC, but in the past there was significant justification for the OSS==insecure perspective and as we all know, government is always the first to identify new trends.
This is a tool because it advertises its functionality... How many game/"productivity"/other third party software packages for the BB have extra program content along these lines? It only costs $100 (http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/downloads /api.jsp) to get a program signed by RIM for distribution... And if you provide some bit of useful functionality, pretty soon your SW gets distributed by the cellular providers...
oh, and in answer to the question below about pushing the content from a BES, yes this can be done, but it has to be developed for. You'd have to ask the application provider in question whether their app supports this.
Slashdot Mirror
No. As is true in most free markets, we have only ourselves (writ large) to blame. We have changed our culture gradually (or not so gradually) and are reaping both the benefits of connectivity and the penalties of short attention spans.
Our media is already too easy on our government... how would this change if the government ran it directly?
Now, a privately run charity would perhaps do better in most instances. This is what the Wall St. Journal was in part until the family that owned it rolled on to the next generation who realized they wanted money more than to keep providing the service.
IMHO the main obstacle to such a charity emerging is the same shift in our culture. If you read the writings of the wealthy and powerful from previous generations, there remained a feeling of obligation to use that power wisely and in general for the greater good. See Thomas Jefferson, Franklin, or Paine. There were several reasons for an individual to pursue noble ends, and some of those were in fact ignoble (wanting to look like a good person, etc.) But there were other motivations, most rooted in the Judeo-Christian / medieval notions of social responsibilities of lords to those who owed them fealty. For today's wealthy there isn't even social pressure to be high-school educated. Just keep having flings and vapid press interactions.
Yes, these relationships were imperfect and uneven, but they provided our society with something we have destroyed while rooting out other things. Something we are just now coming to understand we've lost. The last major establishment of charitable organizations happened just before 1900 because of the robber-barons. Sure, we've seen one or two in the interim, but not on the same scale. The MacArthur Foundation, some of the work being done with Buffet and Gates' money.
--
Much that I sought, I could not find.
Much that I found, I could not bind.
Much that I bound, I could not free.
Much that I freed, returned to me.
for certain enterprise solutions. They also make a switch for their fiber kvm extenders...
http://www.thinklogical.com/products/dcs.php
Again, it would be nice if they made consumer product, but it is a niche.
Correct, code quality is not the question, but functional requirements analysis and traceability to technical requirements and implementation are, at least in the complaint. Essentially the argument Sony will form is:
"We shopped around for a DRMish solution to our sales bleed caused by copyright violations. So we found this company MediaMax who claimed to understand our problem and said they had a solution. Now we're media execs and scarcely understand the CD or email, much less what goes on between. In fact our secretaries print our email which we mark up and have them transcribe into their computer to reply. This vendor is a group of professionals whose professional judgment we trusted with this issue. Therefore we expect them to bear responsibility for their product."
Most view this as scapegoating MediaMax to dodge blame, and it probably is. I however am occasionally driven to optimism by the law of unintended consequences.
Their likely argument is closely related to that employed in applications which for safety or by contract require a professional engineer. Personally, I think it would be a good thing if software vendors were more often held to account for the behavior of their software (intentional and unwanted/illegal or bug driven.)
Pax?
So out of 535 elected legislators, there are two people with a chance to understand technical issues. I'm far from encouraged. Small wonder the Federation of American Scientists and other groups of socially responsible technologists have such a hard time injecting realism into the legislative debate, much less *CORRECT* realism.
I did not intend to slight the author of the bill, but merely to allude to a whole background of information in our common experience with our government. We as a culture have had a hard time adjusting to the increasingly rushing advance of technology in our lives. It took several decades for law and case law to strike a balance on privacy vs. public good in telephony, a balance which is now threatened by both executive fiat and data convergence and transport amalgamation. Computer ethics and law are far from settled, and even the least technical can see that intellectual property law is a shambles.
I can't help but think that we as a culture would adjust to new technologies easier if the people making and interpreting the laws were well versed in related technology. It currently takes far too long to get to legal stability on an issue and there is always risk that the stability point will be nonsensical or overtly harmful (like the status quo in election technology.)
For example, late 90s legislation (the Child Online Protection Act [COPA]) made it a felony to possess three or more child pornographic images. One or two were "okay" (not illegal at all) but the third made you a felon... Oh, and the definition of possession was weak. Say you had a news client download comp.sci.java automatically and some idiot had posted with violating images... You were technically a felon as soon as the images hit your machine.
(I learned a lot of this by studying under Jacques Catudal. He is something of an expert in the field, having testified before Congress on some of these issues amongst other contributions.)
(As an aside, I believe that with the increasing breadth of technology and other factors that it would be appropriate to return to the 1:20,000 congress:citizen ratio the Constitution originally prescribed.)
In a free (for various definitions of free) market we will only get well developed software when the majority of consumers quit accepting the current state of software quality.
Maybe this kind of lawsuit will help set precedents for software maker fear of litigation for poor quality software.
I know this is tangential, but so is case law.
Aknot: You asked for a case. We brought you a case. Zorg: A case with four stones in it. Not one! Not two or three! But four!!! Four stones!!! What the fuck am I supposed to do with an EMPTY case?!! Aknot: ...We are warriors, not merchants!
Zorg: But you can still count. Look... my fingers... Four stones, four crates... Zero stones... Zero Crates!!!
>>if there is ONE thing that needs to be transparent in government, it is the election process.
Actually, if as much as possible regarding the critical issues of the day aren't publicly available, then having an open election process does not matter. How does one differentiate the candidates in an information vacuum?
--"It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from there."
>>if there is ONE thing that needs to be transparent in government, it is the election process. Actually, if as much as possible regarding the critical issues of the day aren't publicly available, then having an open election process does not matter. How does one differentiate the candidates in an information vacuum?
On top of the usual politicking and industry appeasement, there is the fact that there is only one engineer in congress now, and he's a civil.
If as our fearless leaders say "the future of America is the knowledge worker and innovator" then we must start electing a few (or more) people with technical backgrounds.
For this to happen, some of us introverted technical folks are going to have to swallow that and run for office.
First, I am a tremendous supporter of OSS, but historically there has been a learning curve for OSS development as the early developers were breaking new ground in terms of organizing contributions in a completely asynchronous manner. Until recently, open source development practices have been umm... lacking somewhat in coherence... The folks at UC Davis, Berkeley, and UMD-College Park used their constraint-based, context-aware program call flow graph analysis package to uncover what they refer to as bug churn within the Linux kernel over several successive versions... I.e. they observed previously quashed bugs resurface in later versions. Link to pdf preso: http://cents.cs.berkeley.edu/retreats/winter_2005/ cukwip.pdf
So, not to be too much of an apologist for the FCC, but in the past there was significant justification for the OSS==insecure perspective and as we all know, government is always the first to identify new trends.
This is a tool because it advertises its functionality... How many game/"productivity"/other third party software packages for the BB have extra program content along these lines? It only costs $100 (http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/downloads /api.jsp) to get a program signed by RIM for distribution... And if you provide some bit of useful functionality, pretty soon your SW gets distributed by the cellular providers...
oh, and in answer to the question below about pushing the content from a BES, yes this can be done, but it has to be developed for. You'd have to ask the application provider in question whether their app supports this.