Be careful not to reach too far into what quantum probability and chaos theory imply. Certainly they demonstrate that completely deterministic descriptions are not always possible - even knowing all initial conditions, you can't know what all the final conditions will be in detail.
However, they do not at all preclude knowing in complete detail the mechanisms that bring one from initial to final conditions.
What Einstein and other detractors of quantum theory remind us is that we can understand the equations that model nature, and break them down into first principles, even if the equations themselves have non-deterministic solutions. Einstein's general relativity does this, by generating an understandable "thought model" for spacetime. Quantum mechanics does not yet do this, and won't until superstrings/manifolds/whatever results in a similar "thought model" to explain the probabilities we see.
It's like this: chaos theory has provided us with the mathematics to explain why a dripping faucet may have chaotic rhythms. Quantum mechanics has so far only told us exactly what to expect of the dripping.
The earlier example of due diligence applies here: oddly enough, if Ford's Pinto commercials had said "Save money by buying the car with the exploding gas tank", they would have been more safe from the lawsuits, as any customer who had performed due diligence would be aware of the problem.
This extreme example does bring up the harder question: is there a point at which disclosure and diligence fail to cover? There are certainly examples of this (McDonald's coffee cup -- customer should know that hot coffee can burn).
Interesting that McDonnell Douglas let him go his merry way with the patent. They apparently weren't interested in fighting the other 499 of the Fortune 500.
This is really the best answer, as they've done all the legwork already. Here's what I'd like to see:
1. Make the online filing site OS-neutral (easy) 2. Port Quicken, TurboTax, QuickBooks to Linux (a little harder.) 3. Consider opening the source! (Expecting a bit much from Intuit here)
Seriously, with everyone worried about what it would take to compete with MS, I don't know why anyone didn't mention Quicken on Linux earlier.
Does anyone know why Intuit _wouldn't_ want to port to Linux?
Although what he's suggesting has some good elements, if you look at the potential uses, they all have to do with a low-barrier-to-entry, easy-to-use, remote, distributable means of sending and gathering information. Hmmm, that sounds familiar. Could it be...
the Internet?
It's no accident that many (if not all) of his specific ideas have been done or considered on the net:
census voting direct mail ad plus order-taking (You can go see that Victoria's Secret poster on the web right now, and place the order, too.)
And of course, the internet has even lower costs (by orders of magnitude) than his disposable e-paper. The only advantages he has are authentication: one could mark the paper forms with some unique watermark or holograph or whatever (but ultimately, paper docs are forgeable, too); and market size: not everyone has the internet (yet).
Now, if he had thought of this before the internet...
You've made the first leap: profit (by itself) is potentially a force for good. Profit is just money efficiency, which should translate into resource efficiency. Thus profit can actually encourage conservation, worker education, satisfaction, and autonomy, and technological improvement.
The rest of the story is that our economy also (maybe usually) rewards SIZE, not profit. While size can be a force for good, (economies of scale, gathering of resources for investments that benefit all, stability, etc.) it inherently subverts the efficiency-motivation of profit: while I can be profitable if I use 1 acre to produce 100 bushels, rather than 10 acres, I can be BIG if I use those 10 acres to produce 1000 bushels! And if I don't care to figure out how to be more efficient, I can still be BIG if I use 100 acres of the rainforest next door to produce the 1000 bushels. And, if I concentrate on burning my competitor's crops, or buying his land, I can charge 10 times the price, and be more profitable, too (which will help me get BIGGER!).
The good news is that free software encourages the profitable efficiency (share your code, and you'll have less work to do to fix it, upgrade it, or find other code); but EXPLICITLY discourages (bans, even) consolidation, market-cornering, and hoarding.
Indeed, what's interesting about the free software movement is that it achieves the good of economic consolidation (economies of scale, etc.) without needing the evils (concentration of power, growth for growth's sake.) It achieves this by enforcing cooperative creation and use of the infrastructure of production (general-use software), while allowing competition over providing the products (support of the software, the services the software provides, special-use software).
Profits are a good measure of value, but, unfortunately, it's size that usually gets measured in today's economy: witness the use of GDP growth as the measure of economic health. Shouldn't we use worker productivity and resource-conversion, instead?
That is the question, isn't it? Once upon a time, stocks were valued on the idea that the company profits would grow, and would be paid out as dividends, which have the great feature that they allow you to make money without selling the stock. (These stocks are "income stocks")
But today, almost all valuations are based on the expected future value of the stock: an investor is going to buy stock that finds the right balance between being likely to go up in price a lot, and unlikely to go down. Here the payoff is made when the stock is sold. Note that companies that want to maximize this approach to valuations do not ever pay dividends (e.g. Microsoft), so that they can put the profit into additional growth of the company. (These stocks are "growth stocks".)
But what can you measure to know that a "growth" stock will go up? Nothing! It is the ultimate example of "perception is reality." Whether a company is or will be big or profitable does not matter, all that matters is whether investors think the stock price will rise.
So, could you make a hot stock in an inherently money-losing activity? Yes, as long as, by some means, you convince investors that the price will go up. However, this bubble must eventually burst, as the only way investors can take home this profit is by selling, so you'll have to keep convincing new buyers that the price will rise, at a faster rate than current stockholders become convinced it is time to sell.
Of course, some companies (Microsoft, again) have been able to keep this game up consistently, with great success, for an astonishingly long time...
BTW, for those who wish for a stock market based on income rather than growth, the following policies could work:
Make capital gains taxes high, as they discourage selling.
Make the capital gains tax even higher for those that sell quickly (currently, after a stock is held for a year, the lower rate kicks in.)
Require a certain percentage of profit be paid out as dividends, or tax the post-dividend profit higher than the paid-out profit. Even if this were small, it would reward profit over growth, and give investors a reason to seek out profitable companies.
An interesting take, but I think the fact that his influence ends with the century makes him a fitting choice: the century thus tracks well his rise, reign, legacy, and oblivion.
It also is interesting to note that Marshall, Mao, and Lenin's ultimate influence were all shaped (before or after the fact) by Stalin.
Now I ask you, what influence did Lenin have on Marshall, or Marshall on Mao? To make the link, Stalin or Stalinism has to be in the chain. It's that interesting pervasiveness of Stalin, and the impact of his myth, ideology, symbolism, rather than action, that is both source and proof of his profound influence.
In support of this, one could make the argument that between his development of the Army into a professional military and his non-confrontational policies as Secretary of State, Marshall may have prevented the US from suffering a military coup in the postwar period. Given the power and prestige of the military, the anti-communist paranoia, and the public's fear of nuclear war, it wouldn't have been at all unlikely.
Brin's choice of an unassuming figure is interesting in that it demonstrates that good is done by the cooperation of many; Marshall's good works would have been empty if others had not carried them out or followed through.
The flip side of this is that one person can take advantage of the timidity of others to do great evil. Thus, tyrants are better suited to lists of single-most-influential because to them can be personally ascribed havoc and suffering. After all, geopolitics would be wonderfully boring if world leaders acted like responsible adults.
So, I would nominate Stalin as the most influential man of the century. His actions and legacy influenced, and usually dominated, the foreign policy of virtually every country on Earth from 1924 until 1989. In the 30's, his was the feared regime that helped bring fascists to power in Europe and kept America focused on its own shores. In the 40's, he stepped aside to let Hitler conquer most of Europe, then led the Soviets in halting the Nazi advance well before Normandy, then swallowed up Eastern Europe and supported the rise of Mao in China. From the 50's until '89, from Cuba to Africa to the Middle East to Vietnam to Korea, the conflict between his ideology and the West dominated the world stage.
It's telling that today, the remains of Communism smolder only in his pet revolutionary projects: Cuba, North Korea, and China.
Even Hitler doesn't compare as someone who brought sustained hardship to so many for so long, and his impact outside of Europe was so much less than Stalin's.
Unquestionably, the Evil Bastard of the Century would have to be Stalin.
Really. The end of the millennium has clearly guided events and attention to an overwhelming degree: Y2K bug, millennialists, terrorists, media outlets looking for something safe to talk about instead of real news, etc. Also witness the fact that I am just plain sick of it, and can't wait for it to be over.
This thing of coming up with straw men for these situations is harder than I thought. Here's why:
1) The internet itself is the original and best straw man for free speech, as demonstrated by the proliferation of cases like this.
2) Much of the uniqueness of the internet from a legal perspective is the lack of both editorial and viewer control. This means that good straw man cases would require an ISP that will take the case as far as necessary if its rights are challenged, PLUS a separate publisher that can also fight all the way, PLUS an also-separate readership that can fight all the way. Why separate? Because otherwise, the court might place editorial/viewership control responsibility on the defendants (i.e. they'd say: If ISP X put up the page, it is liable, and can't be considered an infrastructure provider only, and if Publisher Y is recruiting a community of readers into an activity, it is liable, and can't be considered merely a conduit of illegally-obtained information.)
3) The unfair-competition aspects of IP abuse can only be challenged by an entity with a real financial stake in the outcome of the case, and no one wants to take that risk.
Nonetheless, there are some actions that could be taken:
A brave, well-heeled, liberty-loving organization could set up a perfectly-anonymous ISP. It would explicitly refuse to track identity, usage or cross-references of publishers or readers, and refuse to control content or access. It would also not profit in any way from its use or access.
If properly advertised and organized, it wouldn't take long for this ISP to contain all sorts of material that would *scream* to the courts its need for protection and access-- whistleblowers' internal docs from corps and govs, anonymous testimonials of wrongdoing, independent investigative journalism, political screeds on various topics, non-mainstream art and literature, etc. And it would also be sure to attract lawsuits by those who didn't like what was being said.
If the brave organization takes these suits all the way to the Supreme Court, a hopeful conclusion would go something like: "If this ISP is restricted in any one of the requested ways, the whole capability to provide and access the protected material is seriously impinged. If any of this stuff deserves to be protected, it all does. If any of the means of disseminating this speech need to be protected, they all do."
Other related actions could include encouragement to publish material of the type most commonly challenged. A "Worldwide Blow the Whistle on Your Company Day", or some such thing, to centralize, and provide a safe harbor for, challenged material. Again, a brave organization could sponsor or host.
The ban on copying devices in DMCA could easily be straw-manned by using such a device as the only/simplest/best means of distribution for some protected speech. Anyone care to cut a "Repeal the DMCA" album on MP3?:-) It would have to require strong decryption to be heard, of course.
I'm not sure how to deal with software patents other than one at a time (again, our brave organization could make a living out of taking these down, as NAACP did with Jim Crow laws). Somewhere in that morass, we may find a patent whose result is that previously-protected speech or competition is curtailed in a way that implies all software patents could do the same.
Finally, to cut off the "we'll just scare others off by getting an injunction against these poor saps" suit, the above safe-harbor strategy could help: create a site or ISP with mixed political expression and challenged material, and create a way that they depend on each other for readership, and the courts would be hard-pressed to create rules that remove one without suppressing the other.
Now to find some brave organizations... ACLU, EFF, Public Citizen, who else?
Actually, this leaves me concluding that their suit is (even more of) an unnecessary harassment. The standards for accessing their site protect them fairly, but they want to impose an unfair burden on their competition anyway?
In my next post, I will try to list some good "straw man" scenarios for bringing the desired results. Right now, since no one reads postings after the first hour, I encourage others to toss in ideas.
Background: Assuming the current wording of the Constitution re copyright, trademark, patent, etc., notably limited time frames, and the intent to create a situation where the public benefits from creative/inventive work, will suffice to create the interpretation we desire, we need to generate "straw man" cases to ensure that the Constitution is upheld.
"Straw man" suits are situations manufactured specifically to create a case that will test the constitutionality of a law. They were used effectively by Civil Rights advocates to ensure enforcement of the 14th amendment (others please provide references), most famously in Brown v. Board (IIRC), where a special effort was made to enroll a black child in an all-white school in order to create the conflict eventually resolved by the Supreme Court in favor of integration.
Similar "straw man" tactics could aim at recent legislation like Sonny Bono and DMCA, and would also aim to clarify precedents such as fair use and prior restraint as they pertain to the internet.
Possible targets for straw men:
DMCA prior restraint by letters to ISP's for "suspicion" of copyright violation, (previous whistleblower cases effective here, but a good straw man should be able to even stop most ill-advised injunctions)
DMCA fair use restriction by banning "devices" that could be used to copy,
Fair use restriction by likes of eBay, trying to pick and choose who can link their site.
Patent hoarding, plus attempts to enforce overbroad patents
Software licensing that violates fair use by trying to claim licensees have no ownership-like rights
Software patents as not per the intent of patent provisions of Constitution
Attempts to claim databases of public information as copyrighted data (eBay vulnerable here, Westlaw the worst perpetrator)
The monopolization of broadcast channels by a few large providers
etc, etc, etc
Real killer straw men would take down several in one swath, by demonstrating new principles, such as:
Speech that is easily published and accessed deserves at least the same level of protection, perhaps more;
The power/resource imbalance of corporations and institutions vs. individuals is similar to that of the government, and thus even the possibility of unfair restraint on use of IP can be held as prior restraint;
The ability to make high-quality or exact replicas does not equate with intended or actual violation of copyright;
I don't know about illegal, but I think if you wanted to make a stink about someone crawling despite robots.txt, you should (and currently, probably do) have a pretty slam-dunk case to keep unwanted indexers away.
But let me speculate about WHY eBay has no robots.txt: they want to have it both ways, with appearances on AltaVista or Yahoo! or other non-auction-specific search engines (to eBay, free advertisers), but not links on auction-specific search engines (to eBay, the competition's free advertisers).
If that's their motivation, I say tough shit: you either let your info be indexed freely, or you license the privilege -- no inbetweeners.
If you make it legal to restrict anonymity in any medium (internet), you open the door to restrictions in other media (pay phone).
"False comments damaging someone's livelihood" involves a response to those comments by law enforcement, vigilantes, crusaders, paranoiacs, or the like. Such responses can only be carried so far if speech, due process, and liberty are well-protected. Cite me an example of any speech causing harm, and I can probably explain it away as indicative of loss of liberty or breakdown in the rule of law.
Limiting free speech, and the ability to get the truth out, makes lies by those who have the power to speak more dangerous.
"The GPL basically turns the traditional license on its head - it protects the users instead of the producers. So long as they don't break the license, there is nothing to stop anyone that gets hold of something GPLd from doing something the author doesn't like. Because it provides some safety for users, it is attractive to developers who want to gain users."
With this, you've refuted the rest of your points. The paramount concern for commercial viability is user base, not the hoops you can make users jump through to use your code.
GPL is a defense against the *common abuses* of commercial software vendors, not against commercial software itself.
For those not familiar, Planck introduced his constant to resolve the "ultraviolet catastrophe", the fact that thermal radiation intensity drops off at high frequencies.
Why is it a hack? Well, Planck had no conception of wave-particle duality, or quanta, or any of that stuff. He just knew his calculus, and that integration over discrete energy values, rather than a true continuum, would give the radiation curve like that observed. He just crunched the numbers to come up with the value that fit, and voila! It worked, so maybe it's right.
When Einstein showed that he just happened to be right, it set off quantum mechanics, thus allowing us to figure out lasers, nuclear energy, and semiconductors.
IANMOAAP (I am not much of an astrophysicist), but here are three possibilities, all of which may be at work:
1) The extremely strong hydrogen signal from the star itself may make it hard to discern any noise-like hydrogen signal from the planet
2) The stellar wind/radiation pressure (this thing is close enough to Tau Bootes(.05 AU?) to orbit every three days) may make it unlikely that the planet's atmosphere holds on to light elements.
3) The star's magnetic field may ionize the higher (lighter) part of the planet's atmosphere, preventing a spectral signal (remember, spectra result from electronic excitations IN atoms.)
Of course, they may also have not considered hydrogen newsworthy.
Assuming people really wanted to do this, what I'd love to see in a standard is a means for me to control my own information. It would go something like this:
1) One of these "anonymizing sites", or even my own server, would be recognized as the authoritative source of personal information about me.
2) I could establish my own rules for access to my information: how much, by whom, when it's available, and how it could be used.
3) There has to be a mechanism for one-time access to certain info -- I'll give my address to company X to ship me something, but the mechanism kicks in and erases my address once they've printed the label.
4) All information that might persist on someone's database would be date-stamped, so that it would be clear that the info may no longer be accurate.
Even a limited version of this system would sure stop a lot of the credit-bureau misidentification nonsense -- the credit bureaus would have a place to go to verify changes to data, and data that had long since been identified as inaccurate wouldn't come creeping back in, as happens today.
If you think this would be impossible to enforce, ask yourself: who but you knows your new phone number, or a new address, or when your child is born, or what your blood tests said? Lots of people know each item individually, most of them already are or could easily be bound by law to keep it secret, and virtually no one but you knows all of these things, until you let them.
Of course, if we all just paid in cash (need digital cash!), much of this would be unnecessary.
The Attorneys General of 15 states filed a lawsuit today against Anabaena in an attempt to reclaim damages from fires caused by the firm's flagship product, Oxygen. "Oxygen is the only product that, when used as intended, burns," claimed the AG for Illinois. "Anabaena's PR machine would have us believe that a cow was responsible for the Chicago fire, but really, what percentage of the atmosphere is methane? Without Oxygen, the fire, and millions like it, would never have ignited." In addition, Anabaena is charged with ignoring Oxygen's clearly addictive nature. Numerous studies have found the withdrawal symptoms to involve lightheadness, shortness of breath, severe brain damage, and even death. Anabaena, in a tersely-worded response, called the accusations slanderous: "Calling us slime may gain political points, but it doesn't hide this attempt to deny Americans the right to breathe."
Re:Artists should go open! Free art now!
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Copyright!
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Ok, I'll lay off on Stephen King. How 'bout Danielle Steele?
As for the need to eat, open source programmers hope to make their money providing services to complement their code, sort of cashing in on their notoriety. The artistic equivalent of this would be work on commission or retainer.
I don't know whether this would work, but the net at least makes it plausible. In fact, I'm hoping to convince my own mother, sister, and nephew, two of whom have art as their only paycheck, to do as I implore.
Slashdot Mirror
Be careful not to reach too far into what quantum probability and chaos theory imply. Certainly they demonstrate that completely deterministic descriptions are not always possible - even knowing all initial conditions, you can't know what all the final conditions will be in detail.
However, they do not at all preclude knowing in complete detail the mechanisms that bring one from initial to final conditions.
What Einstein and other detractors of quantum theory remind us is that we can understand the equations that model nature, and break them down into first principles, even if the equations themselves have non-deterministic solutions. Einstein's general relativity does this, by generating an understandable "thought model" for spacetime. Quantum mechanics does not yet do this, and won't until superstrings/manifolds/whatever results in a similar "thought model" to explain the probabilities we see.
It's like this: chaos theory has provided us with the mathematics to explain why a dripping faucet may have chaotic rhythms. Quantum mechanics has so far only told us exactly what to expect of the dripping.
Hear, hear.
The earlier example of due diligence applies here: oddly enough, if Ford's Pinto commercials had said "Save money by buying the car with the exploding gas tank", they would have been more safe from the lawsuits, as any customer who had performed due diligence would be aware of the problem.
This extreme example does bring up the harder question: is there a point at which disclosure and diligence fail to cover? There are certainly examples of this (McDonald's coffee cup -- customer should know that hot coffee can burn).
Interesting that McDonnell Douglas let him go his merry way with the patent. They apparently weren't interested in fighting the other 499 of the Fortune 500.
"I'll cast my magic spell and rain you with a blizzard of lawyers"
The problem is in banishing them back to the 99th plane before they turn on you.
This is really the best answer, as they've done all the legwork already. Here's what I'd like to see:
1. Make the online filing site OS-neutral (easy)
2. Port Quicken, TurboTax, QuickBooks to Linux (a little harder.)
3. Consider opening the source! (Expecting a bit much from Intuit here)
Seriously, with everyone worried about what it would take to compete with MS, I don't know why anyone didn't mention Quicken on Linux earlier.
Does anyone know why Intuit _wouldn't_ want to port to Linux?
Although what he's suggesting has some good elements, if you look at the potential uses, they all have to do with a low-barrier-to-entry, easy-to-use, remote, distributable means of sending and gathering information. Hmmm, that sounds familiar. Could it be...
the Internet?
It's no accident that many (if not all) of his specific ideas have been done or considered on the net:
census
voting
direct mail
ad plus order-taking (You can go see that Victoria's Secret poster on the web right now, and place the order, too.)
And of course, the internet has even lower costs (by orders of magnitude) than his disposable e-paper. The only advantages he has are authentication: one could mark the paper forms with some unique watermark or holograph or whatever (but ultimately, paper docs are forgeable, too); and market size: not everyone has the internet (yet).
Now, if he had thought of this before the internet...
You've made the first leap: profit (by itself) is potentially a force for good. Profit is just money efficiency, which should translate into resource efficiency. Thus profit can actually encourage conservation, worker education, satisfaction, and autonomy, and technological improvement.
The rest of the story is that our economy also (maybe usually) rewards SIZE, not profit. While size can be a force for good, (economies of scale, gathering of resources for investments that benefit all, stability, etc.) it inherently subverts the efficiency-motivation of profit: while I can be profitable if I use 1 acre to produce 100 bushels, rather than 10 acres, I can be BIG if I use those 10 acres to produce 1000 bushels! And if I don't care to figure out how to be more efficient, I can still be BIG if I use 100 acres of the rainforest next door to produce the 1000 bushels. And, if I concentrate on burning my competitor's crops, or buying his land, I can charge 10 times the price, and be more profitable, too (which will help me get BIGGER!).
The good news is that free software encourages the profitable efficiency (share your code, and you'll have less work to do to fix it, upgrade it, or find other code); but EXPLICITLY discourages (bans, even) consolidation, market-cornering, and hoarding.
Indeed, what's interesting about the free software movement is that it achieves the good of economic consolidation (economies of scale, etc.) without needing the evils (concentration of power, growth for growth's sake.) It achieves this by enforcing cooperative creation and use of the infrastructure of production (general-use software), while allowing competition over providing the products (support of the software, the services the software provides, special-use software).
Profits are a good measure of value, but, unfortunately, it's size that usually gets measured in today's economy: witness the use of GDP growth as the measure of economic health. Shouldn't we use worker productivity and resource-conversion, instead?
That is the question, isn't it? Once upon a time, stocks were valued on the idea that the company profits would grow, and would be paid out as dividends, which have the great feature that they allow you to make money without selling the stock. (These stocks are "income stocks")
But today, almost all valuations are based on the expected future value of the stock: an investor is going to buy stock that finds the right balance between being likely to go up in price a lot, and unlikely to go down. Here the payoff is made when the stock is sold. Note that companies that want to maximize this approach to valuations do not ever pay dividends (e.g. Microsoft), so that they can put the profit into additional growth of the company. (These stocks are "growth stocks".)
But what can you measure to know that a "growth" stock will go up? Nothing! It is the ultimate example of "perception is reality." Whether a company is or will be big or profitable does not matter, all that matters is whether investors think the stock price will rise.
So, could you make a hot stock in an inherently money-losing activity? Yes, as long as, by some means, you convince investors that the price will go up. However, this bubble must eventually burst, as the only way investors can take home this profit is by selling, so you'll have to keep convincing new buyers that the price will rise, at a faster rate than current stockholders become convinced it is time to sell.
Of course, some companies (Microsoft, again) have been able to keep this game up consistently, with great success, for an astonishingly long time...
BTW, for those who wish for a stock market based on income rather than growth, the following policies could work:
Make capital gains taxes high, as they discourage selling.
Make the capital gains tax even higher for those that sell quickly (currently, after a stock is held for a year, the lower rate kicks in.)
Require a certain percentage of profit be paid out as dividends, or tax the post-dividend profit higher than the paid-out profit. Even if this were small, it would reward profit over growth, and give investors a reason to seek out profitable companies.
An interesting take, but I think the fact that his influence ends with the century makes him a fitting choice: the century thus tracks well his rise, reign, legacy, and oblivion.
It also is interesting to note that Marshall, Mao, and Lenin's ultimate influence were all shaped (before or after the fact) by Stalin.
Now I ask you, what influence did Lenin have on Marshall, or Marshall on Mao? To make the link, Stalin or Stalinism has to be in the chain. It's that interesting pervasiveness of Stalin, and the impact of his myth, ideology, symbolism, rather than action, that is both source and proof of his profound influence.
In support of this, one could make the argument that between his development of the Army into a professional military and his non-confrontational policies as Secretary of State, Marshall may have prevented the US from suffering a military coup in the postwar period. Given the power and prestige of the military, the anti-communist paranoia, and the public's fear of nuclear war, it wouldn't have been at all unlikely.
Brin's choice of an unassuming figure is interesting in that it demonstrates that good is done by the cooperation of many; Marshall's good works would have been empty if others had not carried them out or followed through.
The flip side of this is that one person can take advantage of the timidity of others to do great evil. Thus, tyrants are better suited to lists of single-most-influential because to them can be personally ascribed havoc and suffering. After all, geopolitics would be wonderfully boring if world leaders acted like responsible adults.
So, I would nominate Stalin as the most influential man of the century. His actions and legacy influenced, and usually dominated, the foreign policy of virtually every country on Earth from 1924 until 1989. In the 30's, his was the feared regime that helped bring fascists to power in Europe and kept America focused on its own shores. In the 40's, he stepped aside to let Hitler conquer most of Europe, then led the Soviets in halting the Nazi advance well before Normandy, then swallowed up Eastern Europe and supported the rise of Mao in China. From the 50's until '89, from Cuba to Africa to the Middle East to Vietnam to Korea, the conflict between his ideology and the West dominated the world stage.
It's telling that today, the remains of Communism smolder only in his pet revolutionary projects: Cuba, North Korea, and China.
Even Hitler doesn't compare as someone who brought sustained hardship to so many for so long, and his impact outside of Europe was so much less than Stalin's.
Unquestionably, the Evil Bastard of the Century would have to be Stalin.
Actually, the people who started counting at zero have done me the favor of getting it over with a year early :-)
Really. The end of the millennium has clearly guided events and attention to an overwhelming degree: Y2K bug, millennialists, terrorists, media outlets looking for something safe to talk about instead of real news, etc. Also witness the fact that I am just plain sick of it, and can't wait for it to be over.
Tick, tick, tick...
This thing of coming up with straw men for these situations is harder than I thought. Here's why:
:-) It would have to require strong decryption to be heard, of course.
1) The internet itself is the original and best straw man for free speech, as demonstrated by the proliferation of cases like this.
2) Much of the uniqueness of the internet from a legal perspective is the lack of both editorial and viewer control. This means that good straw man cases would require an ISP that will take the case as far as necessary if its rights are challenged, PLUS a separate publisher that can also fight all the way, PLUS an also-separate readership that can fight all the way. Why separate? Because otherwise, the court might place editorial/viewership control responsibility on the defendants (i.e. they'd say: If ISP X put up the page, it is liable, and can't be considered an infrastructure provider only, and if Publisher Y is recruiting a community of readers into an activity, it is liable, and can't be considered merely a conduit of illegally-obtained information.)
3) The unfair-competition aspects of IP abuse can only be challenged by an entity with a real financial stake in the outcome of the case, and no one wants to take that risk.
Nonetheless, there are some actions that could be taken:
A brave, well-heeled, liberty-loving organization could set up a perfectly-anonymous ISP. It would explicitly refuse to track identity, usage or cross-references of publishers or readers, and refuse to control content or access. It would also not profit in any way from its use or access.
If properly advertised and organized, it wouldn't take long for this ISP to contain all sorts of material that would *scream* to the courts its need for protection and access-- whistleblowers' internal docs from corps and govs, anonymous testimonials of wrongdoing, independent investigative journalism, political screeds on various topics, non-mainstream art and literature, etc. And it would also be sure to attract lawsuits by those who didn't like what was being said.
If the brave organization takes these suits all the way to the Supreme Court, a hopeful conclusion would go something like: "If this ISP is restricted in any one of the requested ways, the whole capability to provide and access the protected material is seriously impinged. If any of this stuff deserves to be protected, it all does. If any of the means of disseminating this speech need to be protected, they all do."
Other related actions could include encouragement to publish material of the type most commonly challenged. A "Worldwide Blow the Whistle on Your Company Day", or some such thing, to centralize, and provide a safe harbor for, challenged material. Again, a brave organization could sponsor or host.
The ban on copying devices in DMCA could easily be straw-manned by using such a device as the only/simplest/best means of distribution for some protected speech. Anyone care to cut a "Repeal the DMCA" album on MP3?
I'm not sure how to deal with software patents other than one at a time (again, our brave organization could make a living out of taking these down, as NAACP did with Jim Crow laws). Somewhere in that morass, we may find a patent whose result is that previously-protected speech or competition is curtailed in a way that implies all software patents could do the same.
Finally, to cut off the "we'll just scare others off by getting an injunction against these poor saps" suit, the above safe-harbor strategy could help: create a site or ISP with mixed political expression and challenged material, and create a way that they depend on each other for readership, and the courts would be hard-pressed to create rules that remove one without suppressing the other.
Now to find some brave organizations... ACLU, EFF, Public Citizen, who else?
My ignorance has been exposed! Thanks.
:-)
Actually, this leaves me concluding that their suit is (even more of) an unnecessary harassment. The standards for accessing their site protect them fairly, but they want to impose an unfair burden on their competition anyway?
Of course, I could be wrong again
First, IANAL.
In my next post, I will try to list some good "straw man" scenarios for bringing the desired results. Right now, since no one reads postings after the first hour, I encourage others to toss in ideas.
Background: Assuming the current wording of the Constitution re copyright, trademark, patent, etc., notably limited time frames, and the intent to create a situation where the public benefits from creative/inventive work, will suffice to create the interpretation we desire, we need to generate "straw man" cases to ensure that the Constitution is upheld.
"Straw man" suits are situations manufactured specifically to create a case that will test the constitutionality of a law. They were used effectively by Civil Rights advocates to ensure enforcement of the 14th amendment (others please provide references), most famously in Brown v. Board (IIRC), where a special effort was made to enroll a black child in an all-white school in order to create the conflict eventually resolved by the Supreme Court in favor of integration.
Similar "straw man" tactics could aim at recent legislation like Sonny Bono and DMCA, and would also aim to clarify precedents such as fair use and prior restraint as they pertain to the internet.
Possible targets for straw men:
DMCA prior restraint by letters to ISP's for "suspicion" of copyright violation, (previous whistleblower cases effective here, but a good straw man should be able to even stop most ill-advised injunctions)
DMCA fair use restriction by banning "devices" that could be used to copy,
Fair use restriction by likes of eBay, trying to pick and choose who can link their site.
Patent hoarding, plus attempts to enforce overbroad patents
Software licensing that violates fair use by trying to claim licensees have no ownership-like rights
Software patents as not per the intent of patent provisions of Constitution
Attempts to claim databases of public information as copyrighted data (eBay vulnerable here, Westlaw the worst perpetrator)
The monopolization of broadcast channels by a few large providers
etc, etc, etc
Real killer straw men would take down several in one swath, by demonstrating new principles, such as:
Speech that is easily published and accessed deserves at least the same level of protection, perhaps more;
The power/resource imbalance of corporations and institutions vs. individuals is similar to that of the government, and thus even the possibility of unfair restraint on use of IP can be held as prior restraint;
The ability to make high-quality or exact replicas does not equate with intended or actual violation of copyright;
there are probably others...
So, any ideas?
I don't know about illegal, but I think if you wanted to make a stink about someone crawling despite robots.txt, you should (and currently, probably do) have a pretty slam-dunk case to keep unwanted indexers away.
But let me speculate about WHY eBay has no robots.txt: they want to have it both ways, with appearances on AltaVista or Yahoo! or other non-auction-specific search engines (to eBay, free advertisers), but not links on auction-specific search engines (to eBay, the competition's free advertisers).
If that's their motivation, I say tough shit: you either let your info be indexed freely, or you license the privilege -- no inbetweeners.
Put down the apple, and step away from the tree.
Okay, back to the garden, people. Nothing to see here.
If you make it legal to restrict anonymity in any medium (internet), you open the door to restrictions in other media (pay phone).
"False comments damaging someone's livelihood" involves a response to those comments by law enforcement, vigilantes, crusaders, paranoiacs, or the like. Such responses can only be carried so far if speech, due process, and liberty are well-protected. Cite me an example of any speech causing harm, and I can probably explain it away as indicative of loss of liberty or breakdown in the rule of law.
Limiting free speech, and the ability to get the truth out, makes lies by those who have the power to speak more dangerous.
"The GPL basically turns the traditional license on its head - it protects the users instead of the producers. So long as they don't break the license, there is nothing to stop anyone that gets hold of something GPLd from doing something the author doesn't like. Because it provides some safety for users, it is attractive to developers who want to gain users."
With this, you've refuted the rest of your points. The paramount concern for commercial viability is user base, not the hoops you can make users jump through to use your code.
GPL is a defense against the *common abuses* of commercial software vendors, not against commercial software itself.
For those not familiar, Planck introduced his constant to resolve the "ultraviolet catastrophe", the fact that thermal radiation intensity drops off at high frequencies.
Why is it a hack? Well, Planck had no conception of wave-particle duality, or quanta, or any of that stuff. He just knew his calculus, and that integration over discrete energy values, rather than a true continuum, would give the radiation curve like that observed. He just crunched the numbers to come up with the value that fit, and voila! It worked, so maybe it's right.
When Einstein showed that he just happened to be right, it set off quantum mechanics, thus allowing us to figure out lasers, nuclear energy, and semiconductors.
A truly righteous hack.
IANMOAAP (I am not much of an astrophysicist), but here are three possibilities, all of which may be at work:
1) The extremely strong hydrogen signal from the star itself may make it hard to discern any noise-like hydrogen signal from the planet
2) The stellar wind/radiation pressure (this thing is close enough to Tau Bootes(.05 AU?) to orbit every three days) may make it unlikely that the planet's atmosphere holds on to light elements.
3) The star's magnetic field may ionize the higher (lighter) part of the planet's atmosphere, preventing a spectral signal (remember, spectra result from electronic excitations IN atoms.)
Of course, they may also have not considered hydrogen newsworthy.
Assuming people really wanted to do this, what I'd love to see in a standard is a means for me to control my own information. It would go something like this:
1) One of these "anonymizing sites", or even my own server, would be recognized as the authoritative source of personal information about me.
2) I could establish my own rules for access to my information: how much, by whom, when it's available, and how it could be used.
3) There has to be a mechanism for one-time access to certain info -- I'll give my address to company X to ship me something, but the mechanism kicks in and erases my address once they've printed the label.
4) All information that might persist on someone's database would be date-stamped, so that it would be clear that the info may no longer be accurate.
Even a limited version of this system would sure stop a lot of the credit-bureau misidentification nonsense -- the credit bureaus would have a place to go to verify changes to data, and data that had long since been identified as inaccurate wouldn't come creeping back in, as happens today.
If you think this would be impossible to enforce, ask yourself: who but you knows your new phone number, or a new address, or when your child is born, or what your blood tests said? Lots of people know each item individually, most of them already are or could easily be bound by law to keep it secret, and virtually no one but you knows all of these things, until you let them.
Of course, if we all just paid in cash (need digital cash!), much of this would be unnecessary.
The Attorneys General of 15 states filed a lawsuit today against Anabaena in an attempt to reclaim damages from fires caused by the firm's flagship product, Oxygen. "Oxygen is the only product that, when used as intended, burns," claimed the AG for Illinois. "Anabaena's PR machine would have us believe that a cow was responsible for the Chicago fire, but really, what percentage of the atmosphere is methane? Without Oxygen, the fire, and millions like it, would never have ignited." In addition, Anabaena is charged with ignoring Oxygen's clearly addictive nature. Numerous studies have found the withdrawal symptoms to involve lightheadness, shortness of breath, severe brain damage, and even death. Anabaena, in a tersely-worded response, called the accusations slanderous: "Calling us slime may gain political points, but it doesn't hide this attempt to deny Americans the right to breathe."
Ok, I'll lay off on Stephen King. How 'bout Danielle Steele?
As for the need to eat, open source programmers hope to make their money providing services to complement their code, sort of cashing in on their notoriety. The artistic equivalent of this would be work on commission or retainer.
I don't know whether this would work, but the net at least makes it plausible. In fact, I'm hoping to convince my own mother, sister, and nephew, two of whom have art as their only paycheck, to do as I implore.