:) I'd love to see the politics/penis graph if you ever get round to it!
I think we're on the same page now, and I'm glad the misunderstandings are cleared up. I'll be interested to see whether this same graph appears in Zittrain's book, and whether it makes more sense when it's explained by the author himself. I've pointed out elsewhere here that Zittrain's biog shows him to be a key member of the Open Net Initiative and Chilling Effects, as well as having done other interesting stuff relating to freedom and anti-censorship movements. This being the case, I find it really hard to believe that his views on Libertarianism are what people are assuming from this article.
Me too. I'd also be interested to know whether these quantities, even if they're far below therapeutic doses, could make drugs less effective when people take them. For example, are antibiotics getting into the water and, if so, might we start to develop immunity even if we've never taken them directly?
I'm getting tired of saying this, but you're trash-talking someone who is well-respected and well-qualified, based on what someone else thinks he said! Look at Zittrain's biog - he's a principal investigator for the Open Net Initiative and closely involved with Chilling Effects. Do you really think that he's arguing against internet accessibility and freedom? Or is it more likely that the article's author has misinterpreted him?
Okay. I'm sorry I've pissed you off so much. I take your points, though I disagree with them, and I see why you're annoyed with the what the article says. I'm not deliberately playing word games, but I guess I'm having trouble getting what I mean across.
My final point isn't wrong. I'm not saying that the comparison isn't in the article, but that this article isn't written by Zittrain. It's written by an audience member. Zittrain's own diagram doesn't put anarchists and libertarians together. It doesn't mention anarchists at all. It's the author of the article who does that, and we have no way of knowing whether those are Zittrain's words or not. So all I'm asking is that we wait and see what Zittrain himself has to say before deciding whether to criticise him for it. If you want to disagree with this article, fine - I can see why you would. Just don't claim that it's Zittrain you're disagreeing with.
s/his big words and big ideas/the article author's big words and big ideas/
There, fixed that for ya.
This isn't some grumpy obsessive compulsive guy with a stick up his ass. This is someone who's involved in the Open Net Initiative and Chilling Effects, amongst others. Why not take a look at what he, himself, personally has to say?
"Oh? You would like to be ruled by any crackpot who manages to get an idea modded +5 Insightful? Riiight.:)"
Well, no I wouldn't. But I'm not saying that model would work for every community, only that it works pretty well for this community. That, as I understand it, is one of the things the article is saying - that communities can self-govern in a way that's appropriate for them.
I can't agree with you about "rule by experts" in the medical system, at least in the UK. As I understand it, UK dentists and opticians have their own qualifications, not medical degrees. The people with medical degrees are general practitioners, surgeons, climical specialists - and I wouldn't want to see one who didn't have an MD. If your system's different, I suggest that's just another reason why the US system isn't particularly enviable.
And on that point, I wasn't talking about your academic research capabilities. I have no doubt that they're excellent. But that doesn't help the people on low incomes who can't get cancer treatment because they're uninsured. Yes, the British system sometimes has unacceptable delays, but the majority of people still get the lifesaving treatment they need in time for it to make a difference, and without bankrupting themselves and their families.
Okay, people. I'm getting a bit annoyed. I can understand a lot of the controversy over what's said in the article, but can we please remember one important point: Zittrain didn't write this article, and this is just one person's interpretation of what he said.
When I give lectures, I'm generally shocked at the distortions of my words that turn up in my students' papers.
From previous knowledge of Zittrain's works, I'd be more than surprised if he said some of the stuff that's attributed to him here. I'd ask everyone to take a step back, and wait until you've read the book to judge what Zittrain (as opposed to the article's author) has to say on this.
I did read your post, and I stand by what I said. Claiming that two types of person, though otherwise very different, share a particular way of interacting with the internet is not "lumping them together". It isn't saying they "belong in the same place". As far as I can see, it's like a lot of graphical representations of socio-political phenomena. They are a rough guide to certain types of ideology or behaviour. This, for example, places the Democratic Party in the same quadrant as Totalitarian Socialism. That isn't an argument that the Democrats should be lumped together with Mao and Stalin, but that their orientation on these particular axes is somewhat similar.
Note that the references to anarchists are part of the author's notes on the talk, not part of Zittrain's diagram. If the "lumping together" that you're seeing is really part of his argument (and I guess we'll be able to find that out when the book's published), I'll happily review my attitude towards this issue.
"Who decides who gets elevated above everyone else and installed as an 'expert?'"
Well, I guess the kind of models that work here are those that create sites such as Slashdot, for example. I'm not saying that's the only model, but it seems to be a relatively effective one for this community. Beyond that, we look for people who have actual qualifications - in whichever necessary area. This is how society works, and I don't imagine you complain about it... "How come you get to be the surgeon? I want to try..." I take your point about paid-for bias, but Zittrain seems to me to be arguing against corporate control as much as he argues against governmental control or arachism.
Which brings me to my second point.
"a medical system that is the envy of the world currently"
O rly? You'd find one heck of a lot of people in Britain who don't see it that way. A huge number of American citizens have no health insurance, causing them to miss out on essential (though not emergency) health care that they would receive in Britain for free. Sure, British people may have to wait some time if they can't afford to pay, but the treatment will be there for them. Social models that take into account the needs of all can work, and they make a better world. Not a great one, perhaps, but certainly a better.
Oh, come on! He's not saying that Libertarians = Anarchists, but that they have a similar place on the top-down/bottom-down and Hierarchical/Polyarchical system which he is using to analyse this issue. The types of Libertarians he's talking about are specifically those who live their cyber-lives outside communities. Some FOSS developers, for example, who prefer not to be associated with particular projects or communities. He's not saying that "quadrant" in his model is necessarily a bad thing, but that it doesn't have the same power as the communitarian model to help resist the shutting down of the internet by top-down governmental regulation.
If you read TFA, you might see the author's final comments on communitarianism - that it is a model which is built more on micro-institutions than hippy communes. This isn't a communist model, but one which asks for community expertise to be allowed to police net freedom rather than a totalising imposition of "solutions" from above.
I don't think that was his argument - or, at least, not exactly in those terms. If I read the article correctly, what Zittrain is saying is that a communitarian approach to the internet is the best one to take, because communities (like Wikipedia, DNS, or Slashdot, to name but a few) have their own strongly-policed rules, but do not claim a totalising power. So Wikipedia's rules apply to Wikipedia, Slashdot's rules apply to Slashdot, and so on. The "expertise" that Zittrain is talking about isn't necessarily having a PhD from MIT, but the kind of expertise that allows Slashdot to be run so effectively, including the expertise of its users who act as moderators and meta-moderators. He's asking us to stop accepting "top-down" regulation of the internet (from governmental authority, on the whole). Instead, we should build communities which self-regulate and, from there, create a moral internet which can fulfil its true potential whilst resisting the shut-down pressures coming from business, government, and anarchist forces.
This is my understanding of the article which, in its turn, is someone else's understanding of what Zittrain has said. I'll be interested to read the book and see whether I've got it right!
Because it's little and I couldn't find a case to fit it, my Eee lives in one of those fold-out washbags you can get. It has three zip compartments that wrap round one another. The laptop itself is in the innermost, and accessories in the outer ones, so when folded out flat the laptop doesn't have anything in front of or behind it. I wonder whether a modification of that design could work for larger machines too?
I guess this is a place where running studies on a broad sample of the population - different ages, ethnicities, genders, backgrounds, and - most importantly - tastes in games/movies/whatever - would be beneficial. "People who like violent movies are more likely to commit violent crimes" could be rewritten as "People who commit violent crimes are more likely to like violent movies." It's difficult to show any kind of causality there. But if your sample shows that people, whether they actually like violent movies or not, are nonetheless more violent after watching them, that might be more meaningful. This is presumably more difficult with testing games, since you would have to have a certain degree of skill - and therefore be the type of person who would play those games - in order to play them effectively enough to be included in the study.
Personally, I find that I only get more aggressive when playing frustrating games - the crappy arcade-style stuff where it's almost impossible not to get pwned every 30 seconds because the controls aren't responsive enough. It's annoying, and it pisses me off, and I'll sometimes shout a bit or throw things. On the other hand, Unreal Tournament (my favourite "violent" game) never made me even a tiny bit more aggressive. If anything, I would just get a little nauseated occasionally when I'd seen too many heads blow up.
There are still some things that I do exclusively on Windows - Photoshop being an obvious one. You should consider dual-booting. You can get to know Linux at your own pace, and not lose the convenience of your favourite Windows programs. Although of course, if you don't have much spare time on your hands, it's understandable that you'd stick with what works for you.
My post was not a statement of belief, merely a response to the assertion that there is no biblical text that denies heliocentricity. I agree with you that these verses are mis-read by people who take them as evidence that the earth is fixed and that the sun orbits it. No rational person would disagree with that. The point is, though, that clergy and other Christians of the era of Galileo did disagree with it, and had what they saw as biblical precedent for their beliefs.
I am fun at dinner parties. Partly because I'm not a pedantic, intolerant idiot ready to flame anyone who tries to balance out a discussion with views I don't happen to like.
I would argue that you're utterly wrong on this. Some of my DRMd music wouldn't play on Linux until I sorted it out, but that's a problem with iTunes and not with Linux. MP3s were never a problem.
More than that, I installed Ubuntu from scratch myself, knowing nothing about Linux beyond what I could find on Google and had picked up from using the Eee for a week or so. The only thing that gave me significant trouble was the wireless card, but that's working fine after a bit of tweaking. I'm now using egrep, shell scripts and a bit of perl to do some great stuff which has advanced my PhD research (into medieval literature) astronomically.
The problem is not that Linux is in any way "unusable", but that many people are scared of learning to use new tools. I have genuinely come across a lot of people who think they will "break" their computer if they do anything beyond what Windows easily allows. Downloading codecs for MP3s or using the command line to move or rename a file would be terrifying for them because they fear the kind of hissy fits that Windows tends to throw if you tinker with it. We need to encourage people to understand that customising your OS, playing with it, trying things out, should be the norm - and that you really have to be quite clever to "break" a computer!
I disagree, from personal experience. The only thing I do on my regular laptop that I wouldn't do on the Eee is use photoshop/gimp. Word processing, web browsing, email, coding/programming, etc can all be done just as easily. More importantly, it'll fit in my purse and I don't worry about losing it or having it stolen. I also have it to thank for introducing me to Linux, which I would probably never have come around to if I hadn't tried it out on the Eee.
Doesn't clog up the roads either while travelling or parked for delivery (big problem in smaller countries like the UK). Doesn't create much pollution, since it's electric (which surface transport mainly can't be at the moment). Can run faster because it's not competing with other road traffic whose speed is limited by the needs of human drivers.
There are probably more reasons, but those spring immediately to mind.
How frightened are you of being scammed out of $10? What would that do to your life? How frightened are you of being attacked, raped, beaten, or murdered? The answers you would get to those questions from most people should tell you why they may react less strongly to someone who has stolen little amounts of money from millions of people.
"Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and I Chronicles 16:30 state that "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." Psalm 104:5 says, "[the Lord] set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "the sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.""
Yup, sorry - I realised I'd screwed that bit up about five seconds after I posted! Shoulda "used the preview button" AND checked my facts:) The rest of what I said stands.
It's one thing for the Vatican to apologise for its past mistreatment of a figure like Galileo, but erecting a statue of him? I don't know - it seems almost sensationalist. If I'd been tortured and mistreated by an institution, I wouldn't want them to have a statue of me as a tourist attraction! Faith will always be against certain types of scientific enquiry, and I think the Vatican should be honest enough to admit so rather than making an almost-martyr of this one famous figure in order to garner public approval.
You're right that full disclosure is the only way, I think. After all, the problem of disclosing methods leading to better defence against them doesn't mean that forensic scientists can refuse to publish their methods. The fact that criminals know about the latest forensic techniques of course means that they will be a lot more careful about their behaviour. Imagine, for example, that you could identify someone by DNA but never had to reveal how you did so. DNA could remain a proprietary law-enforcement tool, and criminals might never work out that it was a root from a fallen hair, or sloughed skin cells, or semen that led to their identification. But equally, law enforcement could then say "we identified that person but we don't have to tell you how" and it turns out that they did it because the suspect smelled the same as an aftershave lingering at the crime scene. Visible methodology cuts down on the possibility of unsafe conviction.
If you can't hide methods in criminal cases where the stakes are life and death, you certainly shouldn't be able to do so in civil cases involving intellectual property.
I would disagree. I use an Eee for a lot of stuff because it's small and portable. It's obviously not good for graphics programmes, but I would never use anything smaller than a regular laptop for that anyway (and I wouldn't even think of using it for gaming!) It's fine for actually viewing photos. Word processing is perfectly good, especially if you're prepared to play with the settings to allow the text to fill the screen. Ditto email and web. I code on it too, and again the size doesn't cause a problem.
I'm sure some people who've used an Eee haven't had as good an experience, and that's fair enough. But I would say don't write it off until you've actually tried it for a while. It takes some getting used to, but a month down the line I think it's one of the best purchases I've ever made.
Slashdot Mirror
:) I'd love to see the politics/penis graph if you ever get round to it!
I think we're on the same page now, and I'm glad the misunderstandings are cleared up. I'll be interested to see whether this same graph appears in Zittrain's book, and whether it makes more sense when it's explained by the author himself. I've pointed out elsewhere here that Zittrain's biog shows him to be a key member of the Open Net Initiative and Chilling Effects, as well as having done other interesting stuff relating to freedom and anti-censorship movements. This being the case, I find it really hard to believe that his views on Libertarianism are what people are assuming from this article.
Me too. I'd also be interested to know whether these quantities, even if they're far below therapeutic doses, could make drugs less effective when people take them. For example, are antibiotics getting into the water and, if so, might we start to develop immunity even if we've never taken them directly?
I'm getting tired of saying this, but you're trash-talking someone who is well-respected and well-qualified, based on what someone else thinks he said! Look at Zittrain's biog - he's a principal investigator for the Open Net Initiative and closely involved with Chilling Effects. Do you really think that he's arguing against internet accessibility and freedom? Or is it more likely that the article's author has misinterpreted him?
Okay. I'm sorry I've pissed you off so much. I take your points, though I disagree with them, and I see why you're annoyed with the what the article says. I'm not deliberately playing word games, but I guess I'm having trouble getting what I mean across.
My final point isn't wrong. I'm not saying that the comparison isn't in the article, but that this article isn't written by Zittrain. It's written by an audience member. Zittrain's own diagram doesn't put anarchists and libertarians together. It doesn't mention anarchists at all. It's the author of the article who does that, and we have no way of knowing whether those are Zittrain's words or not. So all I'm asking is that we wait and see what Zittrain himself has to say before deciding whether to criticise him for it. If you want to disagree with this article, fine - I can see why you would. Just don't claim that it's Zittrain you're disagreeing with.
s/his big words and big ideas/the article author's big words and big ideas/
There, fixed that for ya.
This isn't some grumpy obsessive compulsive guy with a stick up his ass. This is someone who's involved in the Open Net Initiative and Chilling Effects, amongst others. Why not take a look at what he, himself, personally has to say?
"Oh? You would like to be ruled by any crackpot who manages to get an idea modded +5 Insightful? Riiight. :)"
Well, no I wouldn't. But I'm not saying that model would work for every community, only that it works pretty well for this community. That, as I understand it, is one of the things the article is saying - that communities can self-govern in a way that's appropriate for them.
I can't agree with you about "rule by experts" in the medical system, at least in the UK. As I understand it, UK dentists and opticians have their own qualifications, not medical degrees. The people with medical degrees are general practitioners, surgeons, climical specialists - and I wouldn't want to see one who didn't have an MD. If your system's different, I suggest that's just another reason why the US system isn't particularly enviable.
And on that point, I wasn't talking about your academic research capabilities. I have no doubt that they're excellent. But that doesn't help the people on low incomes who can't get cancer treatment because they're uninsured. Yes, the British system sometimes has unacceptable delays, but the majority of people still get the lifesaving treatment they need in time for it to make a difference, and without bankrupting themselves and their families.
Okay, people. I'm getting a bit annoyed. I can understand a lot of the controversy over what's said in the article, but can we please remember one important point: Zittrain didn't write this article, and this is just one person's interpretation of what he said.
When I give lectures, I'm generally shocked at the distortions of my words that turn up in my students' papers.
From previous knowledge of Zittrain's works, I'd be more than surprised if he said some of the stuff that's attributed to him here. I'd ask everyone to take a step back, and wait until you've read the book to judge what Zittrain (as opposed to the article's author) has to say on this.
I did read your post, and I stand by what I said. Claiming that two types of person, though otherwise very different, share a particular way of interacting with the internet is not "lumping them together". It isn't saying they "belong in the same place". As far as I can see, it's like a lot of graphical representations of socio-political phenomena. They are a rough guide to certain types of ideology or behaviour. This, for example, places the Democratic Party in the same quadrant as Totalitarian Socialism. That isn't an argument that the Democrats should be lumped together with Mao and Stalin, but that their orientation on these particular axes is somewhat similar.
Note that the references to anarchists are part of the author's notes on the talk, not part of Zittrain's diagram. If the "lumping together" that you're seeing is really part of his argument (and I guess we'll be able to find that out when the book's published), I'll happily review my attitude towards this issue.
Two things:
"Who decides who gets elevated above everyone else and installed as an 'expert?'"
Well, I guess the kind of models that work here are those that create sites such as Slashdot, for example. I'm not saying that's the only model, but it seems to be a relatively effective one for this community. Beyond that, we look for people who have actual qualifications - in whichever necessary area. This is how society works, and I don't imagine you complain about it... "How come you get to be the surgeon? I want to try..." I take your point about paid-for bias, but Zittrain seems to me to be arguing against corporate control as much as he argues against governmental control or arachism.
Which brings me to my second point.
"a medical system that is the envy of the world currently"
O rly? You'd find one heck of a lot of people in Britain who don't see it that way. A huge number of American citizens have no health insurance, causing them to miss out on essential (though not emergency) health care that they would receive in Britain for free. Sure, British people may have to wait some time if they can't afford to pay, but the treatment will be there for them. Social models that take into account the needs of all can work, and they make a better world. Not a great one, perhaps, but certainly a better.
Oh, come on! He's not saying that Libertarians = Anarchists, but that they have a similar place on the top-down/bottom-down and Hierarchical/Polyarchical system which he is using to analyse this issue. The types of Libertarians he's talking about are specifically those who live their cyber-lives outside communities. Some FOSS developers, for example, who prefer not to be associated with particular projects or communities. He's not saying that "quadrant" in his model is necessarily a bad thing, but that it doesn't have the same power as the communitarian model to help resist the shutting down of the internet by top-down governmental regulation.
If you read TFA, you might see the author's final comments on communitarianism - that it is a model which is built more on micro-institutions than hippy communes. This isn't a communist model, but one which asks for community expertise to be allowed to police net freedom rather than a totalising imposition of "solutions" from above.
I don't think that was his argument - or, at least, not exactly in those terms. If I read the article correctly, what Zittrain is saying is that a communitarian approach to the internet is the best one to take, because communities (like Wikipedia, DNS, or Slashdot, to name but a few) have their own strongly-policed rules, but do not claim a totalising power. So Wikipedia's rules apply to Wikipedia, Slashdot's rules apply to Slashdot, and so on. The "expertise" that Zittrain is talking about isn't necessarily having a PhD from MIT, but the kind of expertise that allows Slashdot to be run so effectively, including the expertise of its users who act as moderators and meta-moderators. He's asking us to stop accepting "top-down" regulation of the internet (from governmental authority, on the whole). Instead, we should build communities which self-regulate and, from there, create a moral internet which can fulfil its true potential whilst resisting the shut-down pressures coming from business, government, and anarchist forces.
This is my understanding of the article which, in its turn, is someone else's understanding of what Zittrain has said. I'll be interested to read the book and see whether I've got it right!
Because it's little and I couldn't find a case to fit it, my Eee lives in one of those fold-out washbags you can get. It has three zip compartments that wrap round one another. The laptop itself is in the innermost, and accessories in the outer ones, so when folded out flat the laptop doesn't have anything in front of or behind it. I wonder whether a modification of that design could work for larger machines too?
I guess this is a place where running studies on a broad sample of the population - different ages, ethnicities, genders, backgrounds, and - most importantly - tastes in games/movies/whatever - would be beneficial. "People who like violent movies are more likely to commit violent crimes" could be rewritten as "People who commit violent crimes are more likely to like violent movies." It's difficult to show any kind of causality there. But if your sample shows that people, whether they actually like violent movies or not, are nonetheless more violent after watching them, that might be more meaningful. This is presumably more difficult with testing games, since you would have to have a certain degree of skill - and therefore be the type of person who would play those games - in order to play them effectively enough to be included in the study.
Personally, I find that I only get more aggressive when playing frustrating games - the crappy arcade-style stuff where it's almost impossible not to get pwned every 30 seconds because the controls aren't responsive enough. It's annoying, and it pisses me off, and I'll sometimes shout a bit or throw things. On the other hand, Unreal Tournament (my favourite "violent" game) never made me even a tiny bit more aggressive. If anything, I would just get a little nauseated occasionally when I'd seen too many heads blow up.
There are still some things that I do exclusively on Windows - Photoshop being an obvious one. You should consider dual-booting. You can get to know Linux at your own pace, and not lose the convenience of your favourite Windows programs. Although of course, if you don't have much spare time on your hands, it's understandable that you'd stick with what works for you.
My post was not a statement of belief, merely a response to the assertion that there is no biblical text that denies heliocentricity. I agree with you that these verses are mis-read by people who take them as evidence that the earth is fixed and that the sun orbits it. No rational person would disagree with that. The point is, though, that clergy and other Christians of the era of Galileo did disagree with it, and had what they saw as biblical precedent for their beliefs.
I am fun at dinner parties. Partly because I'm not a pedantic, intolerant idiot ready to flame anyone who tries to balance out a discussion with views I don't happen to like.
I would argue that you're utterly wrong on this. Some of my DRMd music wouldn't play on Linux until I sorted it out, but that's a problem with iTunes and not with Linux. MP3s were never a problem.
More than that, I installed Ubuntu from scratch myself, knowing nothing about Linux beyond what I could find on Google and had picked up from using the Eee for a week or so. The only thing that gave me significant trouble was the wireless card, but that's working fine after a bit of tweaking. I'm now using egrep, shell scripts and a bit of perl to do some great stuff which has advanced my PhD research (into medieval literature) astronomically.
The problem is not that Linux is in any way "unusable", but that many people are scared of learning to use new tools. I have genuinely come across a lot of people who think they will "break" their computer if they do anything beyond what Windows easily allows. Downloading codecs for MP3s or using the command line to move or rename a file would be terrifying for them because they fear the kind of hissy fits that Windows tends to throw if you tinker with it. We need to encourage people to understand that customising your OS, playing with it, trying things out, should be the norm - and that you really have to be quite clever to "break" a computer!
I disagree, from personal experience. The only thing I do on my regular laptop that I wouldn't do on the Eee is use photoshop/gimp. Word processing, web browsing, email, coding/programming, etc can all be done just as easily. More importantly, it'll fit in my purse and I don't worry about losing it or having it stolen. I also have it to thank for introducing me to Linux, which I would probably never have come around to if I hadn't tried it out on the Eee.
Doesn't clog up the roads either while travelling or parked for delivery (big problem in smaller countries like the UK). Doesn't create much pollution, since it's electric (which surface transport mainly can't be at the moment). Can run faster because it's not competing with other road traffic whose speed is limited by the needs of human drivers.
There are probably more reasons, but those spring immediately to mind.
From the article: "Note that pneumatic systems could deliver physical objects, which is hard to do with email..."
How frightened are you of being scammed out of $10? What would that do to your life? How frightened are you of being attacked, raped, beaten, or murdered? The answers you would get to those questions from most people should tell you why they may react less strongly to someone who has stolen little amounts of money from millions of people.
Not so, I'm afraid. From Wikipedia:
"Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and I Chronicles 16:30 state that "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." Psalm 104:5 says, "[the Lord] set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "the sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.""
Yup, sorry - I realised I'd screwed that bit up about five seconds after I posted! Shoulda "used the preview button" AND checked my facts :) The rest of what I said stands.
It's one thing for the Vatican to apologise for its past mistreatment of a figure like Galileo, but erecting a statue of him? I don't know - it seems almost sensationalist. If I'd been tortured and mistreated by an institution, I wouldn't want them to have a statue of me as a tourist attraction! Faith will always be against certain types of scientific enquiry, and I think the Vatican should be honest enough to admit so rather than making an almost-martyr of this one famous figure in order to garner public approval.
You're right that full disclosure is the only way, I think. After all, the problem of disclosing methods leading to better defence against them doesn't mean that forensic scientists can refuse to publish their methods. The fact that criminals know about the latest forensic techniques of course means that they will be a lot more careful about their behaviour. Imagine, for example, that you could identify someone by DNA but never had to reveal how you did so. DNA could remain a proprietary law-enforcement tool, and criminals might never work out that it was a root from a fallen hair, or sloughed skin cells, or semen that led to their identification. But equally, law enforcement could then say "we identified that person but we don't have to tell you how" and it turns out that they did it because the suspect smelled the same as an aftershave lingering at the crime scene. Visible methodology cuts down on the possibility of unsafe conviction.
If you can't hide methods in criminal cases where the stakes are life and death, you certainly shouldn't be able to do so in civil cases involving intellectual property.
I would disagree. I use an Eee for a lot of stuff because it's small and portable. It's obviously not good for graphics programmes, but I would never use anything smaller than a regular laptop for that anyway (and I wouldn't even think of using it for gaming!) It's fine for actually viewing photos. Word processing is perfectly good, especially if you're prepared to play with the settings to allow the text to fill the screen. Ditto email and web. I code on it too, and again the size doesn't cause a problem.
I'm sure some people who've used an Eee haven't had as good an experience, and that's fair enough. But I would say don't write it off until you've actually tried it for a while. It takes some getting used to, but a month down the line I think it's one of the best purchases I've ever made.