You mention that there are genetic pressures towards pro-social behavior (or, to satisfy the purists, genetic pressures towards biological features that in turn encourage pro-social behavior).
However, you neglect the other side of that coin: a society (or genetic population) where pro-social behavior is the norm is itself an environment with genetic pressures towards anti-social behavior. A big network of bonds of trust is a network of opportunity for one willing to abuse those bonds.
It's just as inevitable as evolution itself, I'm afraid: if genetic pressures can and do push for cooperation, they can push back for defection. As Jack Handey said: "I can imagine a world without war, a world without fighting, a world without weapons. Then I can imagine us attacking that world, cause they'd never see it coming."
This is rather like saying "The lawyers hit upon an ingenuous strategy to win the lawsuit for the company without realizing that forging evidence and lying about it in court is illegal." If they don't realize something like this, 'the problem' is not that they don't realize it, it's that they're stupid enough to not realize it.
As I'm hardly the only one to point out, no one would have the slightest sympathy for Cisco if they had chosen to rip off Microsoft software, 'not realizing' that they had obligations to fulfill if they used the code. No one would pretend that anyone reasonably competent at their job could make that 'mistake' as an actual mistake.
You mean "narcotics" like Ritalin? Adderall? Dexedrine? Sorry, but none of those are narcotics; like nearly all ADD/ADHD medication, they are stimulants.
As an ADD sufferer, I get pretty sick of hearing from people who think they know how the medical establishment (in conjunction with The Forces of Darkness and The New World Order and probably The Blue Meanies as well) is salivating over their glorious dream of finding individualistic kids, slapping the ADD/ADHD label on them, and drugging them into submission. I've never heard one of these oh-so-sure pundits explain just how it is that children are being "drugged into submission" by stimulants, how any medically normal child would be more likely to sit down quietly and "behave himself" when he's being dosed with substances that make others act out.
I would think that at the very least SCO could be slapped with a BIG, FAT injunction. It's become the popular meme among nattering tech writers without clues to ask, gravely, "What if SCO's claims are true?" and claim that the Linux community is tremendously short-sighted to not be running around like decapitated chickens.
But let's turn it around. Can SCO license anything that doesn't belong to it? No. So it's made a lot of noise claiming that something in the Linux kernel is its intellectual property, but those claims have been in no way proven; if its claims are unsupported then they are trying to take money to license someone else's intellectual property. Ironic, that.
Now that doesn't mean the kid would necessarily consider acting it out in real life, but is that the first step on a slippery slope towards real violence?
Um, you're aware that the slippery slope is a fallacy, not a legitimate arguing technique, right? It's fallacious because it extrapolates without support, going something like this:
Step A could very easily lead to Step B.
A straight line drawn from Step A through Step B will eventually lead to undesirable Step Omega.
Therefore, Step A could very easily lead to Step Omega.
That's fallacious because it depends on not just one, but two unstated premises:
Things would proceed in a straight line,
and
Each step along the way would be just as easy as the one from Step A to Step B.
Neither premise usually turns out anywhere near true for the sorts of issues that get people invoking the slippery slope fallacy. If someone grows up in a nudist family, they are likely to be comfortable with the idea of not wearing clothes. Does this make them extremely likely to show up to their workplace stark naked? No, because they are also introduced to the idea of wearing clothes.
Similarly, if kids are exposed to violent movies and violent video games, the only way you can assume that this will progress in a straight line towards violent behavior is to assume that the kids will never be exposed to any memes influencing them against that course of action, like "human life has value". And the minute we assume that, isn't that the real problem? After all, it doesn't take violent movies and video games to teach us violence, we're quite capable of discovering its visceral satisfactions ourselves.
Interesting reading from Lt. Col Dave Grossman [killology.com], a West Point psychology and Military Science professor. (I disagree with his proposed solutions, which involve legislation and litigation, but his data on the problem is pretty solid):
Dave Grossman's "data on the problem" is "pretty solid" like Microsoft is "a world leader in security" and "a source of innovation in the computer world."
Do you believe his assertion that "every major medical and scientific body in the world has identified the fact that at least 50 percent of the responsibility for violent crime lies on [television]"? That's a claim worthy of the Scientology flyers I tear up on my way to work every day. You should really look at just how his data has been grossly distorted to support his thesis. Which he makes a very good living going around speaking about, by the way; I wonder exactly how you make a career making speeches on what any educated person already knows, which would be the case if "every major medical and scientific body in the world" actually supported his allegations.
Actually, if the subject line had space and I'd found the right term to complete the metaphor, I'd have put something like "When all you have is a pre-programmed party line, every question sounds like a (something that triggers a pre-programmed party line, except that with the RIAA, it might as well be 'question'.)"
Why did Lawrence Lessig come off as so much more intelligent than Oppenheim? Because Lessig responded in detail, and with attention to detail, to each question. Whereas Oppenheim just recited whichever canned phrase seemed vaguely relevant.
An example:
Now that the copyright term is lengthened from the founder's original 14 years to seventy years, how does this extension better serve the public interest? Does the advent of new media and technologies, like digital and the Internet, change the interpretation of the copyright laws in the constitution and how U.S. copyright laws should work?
Now, Oppenheim gave an answer to the first part of the question that was, if not factual (I highly doubt the factuality of it, given that he also invoked the "our sales are down and filesharing is the one and only culprit" canard) at least vaguely responsive: he claimed that an "increased cost to produce and distribute copyrighted works" accounted for why Congress kept extending copyright terms. In some cases this is clearly untenable (have books become more expensive to write?) and in others highly suspect (I think we're all aware that CDs are less expensive to produce than cassettes or vinyl) but hell, I'm willing to concede that maybe there are some new media that really do cost significantly more to produce, and that if Congress wants to see more works in these media produced, they cannot increase the profit margins or change the public's demand curve, but they can give the producers more time in which to try to recoup their costs. That follows at least somewhat logically from those premises, even if I question the factual basis of those premises.
But when it comes to answering the guy's question, how does the advent of new media and technologies change the copyright situation, what's Oppenheim's answer?
Last but not least, the answer your question about the intersection of copyright and the Internet is: no, the copyright law does not differ whether the alleged infringement is online or physical.
Infringement is infringement. There is no special rule that says it's okay to engage in theft if it is on the Internet.
Agghh! What a blockhead! He's just argued exactly what this guy is asking about but all he can hear in it is another opportunity to demolish the RIAA's favorite straw man! He even makes it sound as if the guy asked specifically "duh, it's okay fer me to copy songs now dat we gots that Internet stuff, ain't it?" To me, that's one of the key indicators that you're dealing with sleaze: you ask them a question, and they give you an answer -- to a different question from the one you asked.
"We haven't evaluated the new recommendation for PNG, and it remains to be seen whether the new version will have an effect on the use of GIF images," said Unisys representative Kristine Grow. "If so, the patent situation will have achieved its purpose, which is to advance technological innovation. So we applaud that."
You have to admire this woman's chutzpah. At least, once you clean up whatever you spit out on the keyboard when you read this.
A well-known witticism about the meaning of "chutzpah" is that it's the quality exhibited by a man who murders his mother and his father and then pleads the court for mercy because he's an orphan.
This isn't much different here. She's correct that the patent system is intended to advance technological innovation, but it was intended to do so by giving innovators a short-term head start in profiting off their innovation and ensuring that within reasonable time, that innovation would enter the public domain and become foundation for further progress. Only the second part is of more than marginal good to the public, and that's the part that Unisys hasn't gotten to yet.
What she's really claiming here could be restated as "Everybody wins when the wheel gets reinvented! Technological innovation is always good, whether it's innovation to accomplish something new and useful, or whether its effect is to fracture the market and deny the public a uniform standard!"
Please don't get me wrong on that last point; I'm not sorry that the PNG format got created, and even if the LZW patent hadn't made it necessary, I would have liked to see PNG get created, as a technically superior format (not to mention one whose elegance delights me as a geek.)
All that I object to is this Kristine Grow claiming that Unisys's submarine patent, by being the problem, deserves any sort of credit for the solution! It reminds me unpleasantly of what happened when the Innocence Project brought to public attention that so far it had found 109 inmates on Death Row who had been convicted falsely by the courts. Most of the district attorneys whose flawed prosecutions had sentenced innocent men to death responded that this didn't point to any need for change in the system; the fact that those 109 had been proven innocent before they were executed 'proved' that the system worked.
That maybe SCO are telling the truth - that maybe there is ripped off code? Undoubtedly if the claim was that MS had included GNU code in their apps, people would automatically presume guilt; why the immediate defensiveness now?
I don't know how "still not believing their claims" translates to "immediate defensiveness".
To be frank, one major mistake that SCO made -- or maybe it wasn't a mistake -- is what keeps me from putting stock in their claims now. Namely, when asked why they weren't showing proof right away, they claimed that if they let anyone know where the duplicated code was, the Linux community would "launder" it away. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt and presuming they didn't mean that the actual code would get laundered off of millions of Linux CDs, the distributed nature of Linux development still means that any evidence of wrongdoing is out there in too many places to be hidden. Of course, any refutation of SCO's claims is also out there in too many places to be hidden, but the Linux community can't start presenting its defense until SCO actually gives details on which code is supposedly copied. As Miles Vorkosigan says in one of the most recent books in the Vorkosigan Saga, "Correction: I am not charged, I am slandered. There is an unsubtle legal difference." If this goes to court, then SCO will have to detail its accusations and IBM and Linux will get a chance to argue the charges. As it is, however, SCO gets to parade these accusations throughout worldwide news -- we've already seen the damages being done, with Linux deployments being re-thought -- and IBM and Linux are put in the impossible position of having to prove a negative, with the information of what they supposed to have actually done -- which code is supposed to have come from SCO -- withheld from them. Don't you think that calls for defensiveness, when we've been under this attack for a month and the opportunity to answer the charges and clear ourselves withheld on such a flimsy pretext?
Even though the ludicrous claim of "laundering" has hurt SCO's credibility, I wonder if it wasn't actually a successful strategic move. Because it has drawn people's attention to the truth or falsity of whether there's common code between SCO and Linux, and that's not the key point at issue here. The key point at issue is not whether 80 lines of code including comments are identical. The key point -- the one I think SCO doesn't want people to be looking at -- is whether that code is SCO's.
There are plenty of plausible explanations for how large sections of common code could be in both products; SCO's theory that a major industry leader, IBM, ripped off a major industry loser, SCO, and wasn't even smart enough to cover its tracks, is only one of them, and not the most likely. The most likely is that the code in question is in the BSD codebase that has already been ruled freely redistributable, and SCO's draconian NDA really cleared the field of anyone with the qualifications to recognize that code. Another is that SCO ripped off Linux, not the other way around. Comparing the dates that the disputed code was added to the kernel codebase in each case would answer that question in a hurry -- but note that Linux can not defend itself against such charges until SCO actually answers what code is supposedly theirs. Once SCO reveals that, of course, then IBM and Linux can start searching to provide proof of prior development or prior art -- months after SCO has started this whole smearing campaign.
As far as I can see, the only scenario that doesn't require somebody, somewhere being really grotesquely stupid is that SCO was hoping for a buyout all along, and counted on that buyout happening before they were ever forced to make their slanderous accusations into actual charges. Once they made actual charges, the game would be up; once it was known what the code in question was, the truth about who actually owns that code might come out. And trying to keep people from realizing that that was the real question -- that's the only reason I can think of for a ridiculous delaying tactic such as "we can't provide any details on what IBM supposedly did because then the evidence might get 'laundered'."
IBM Guy: Well, Mr. McBride. You claimed that you had an offer to make, of a way to settle this amicably.
Darl McBride: That's true, and that's what I've wanted from the beginning. I've always hoped that we could find a way to resolve this peacefully and positively.
IBM Guy: Which is why your first attempt to 'resolve' this matter was to make loud, splashy public allegations.
Darl: What? Oh. Well, yeah, I suppose that maybe this meeting might have gone smoother if I hadn't done that. I'm sorry, it was a heat-of-the-moment sort of thing --
IBM: And why you further upped the ante by mailing those same allegations to our corporate customers, telling them that they could be sued if they continued to use a product which, at that time, you were still selling yourself.
Darl: Um... Well, yes.... the heat of several moments? No. Ah, well, you see, it was just that I was mad that no one was taking me seriously, after all the time and care I put into manufact-- er, documenting the grievous wrongs done to my company.
IBM: Which company? The one that sold goods and services or the one that exists to extort money through allegations that your 'intellectual property' has been violated?
Darl: Ah... that would be the latter.
IBM: Yes. I've read your "documented" complaints. Very intriguing, I must say.
Darl: Why, thank you, I --
IBM: I especially like the part where you lied.
Darl: Excuse me?
IBM: Where you claimed that Linux could only have gotten so good if IBM took secrets that we learned from you and illegally shared them with the Linux developers. For instance, the secret of making the operating system run on 32 processors at a time.
Darl: Oh, well. That.
IBM: When in fact Linux was doing that back before you were working with us on Project Monterey, and before we began supporting Linux.
Darl: Um. Well, yes, but that's not exactly a lie, you see. Cause, um... well, our low opinion of the ability of anyone who isn't employed by SCO is just positive proof that anything good must have been ripped off from us!
IBM: Like 32-way scaling?
Darl: Yes! Like that!
IBM: Even though your own products don't have that?
Darl:... Um.
IBM: But nevertheless, you're pressing ahead with the court case.
Darl: Well, not unless we have to; you know we've always wanted to settle this amicably --
IBM: Insults on the competence of Linux developers and the ethics of IBM?
Darl: Well, not "amicably", maybe, more like "peacefully" --
IBM: Not to mention that it's also an insult to IBM's practicality. We are still one of the biggest and oldest computer companies in the world. We have a huge intellectual property portfolio ourselves, and millions in yearly revenue. We can afford to hire the best people to create whatever intellectual property we need to stay competitive, but you instead claim we lowered ourselves -- and endangered ourselves -- by stealing from you. It's like accusing a millionaire of stealing a wooden nickel from a beggar.
Darl: Hey! Are you comparing SCO's intellectual property to a wooden nickel?
IBM: Yes.
Darl: Oh.... well, that's not very nice.
IBM: Is it inaccurate?
Darl: Well, making it a wooden nickel implies... I dunno, some sort of doubt that our claims are genuine.
IBM: Which is why you refused to clarify them, claiming that if you identified which code it was that was stolen from you, the Linux community could "launder" away the evidence?
Darl: Well, they could!
IBM: The evidence is available to anyone with an Internet connection from a few hundred different commercial vendors and academic institutions and non-profit foundations. Th
We all know that BitTorrent is most effective on larger files, both because the overhead is more effectively amortized over a larger file and because larger file still = longer download time = longer time on network = more time spent as a seed.
Have you thought of any ways in which the basic technologies of BitTorrent might be applied to increase download speeds for smaller files than those for which it is currently efficient? My best idea on the subject is to package several small, related files in archives whose format would allow you to see *where* in the archive the files you actually want would be located. There would be considerably many people out there who would want the whole archive's contents, who would act as seeds, and those who only wanted certain files could get the archive directory and download the file portions that contained the files of interest to them.
Is this an area which interests you at all, and if so, what are your own plans on the matter?
Or, that's what it would be called if it had actually been news. So I guess it's a slow humor day.
What was the competition? "America's Funniest Surgical Malpractice Bloopers"? Sorry, guys -- no, on second thought, Slashdot editors, YOU should be sorry. "It's Funny. Laugh" indeed -- it's a hugely overworn idea which is NOT rescued by anything new in the execution. This is the sort of article the Onion churns out in its sleep, and when the Onion churns it out, it sucks, and when they churn it out and it sucks it's STILL better than this.
Oh, and the references to AIDS just sorta capped things. Was there some connection I'm missing why it's especially ironic for Q*bert to contract AIDS or to leave blood everywhere he hops or for Coily to refuse to work with him because of it? Or is AIDS just considered automatically funny?
Although the files are easy to play and listen to, they are not the "source" of the music, but rather its end result. Even in electronically composed music, where it is easier to distribute the "source" files from which the listenable end product is derived, there are relatively few musicians making those "source" files available.
I couldn't quite figure out how to work in the phraseology about "source" being the form preferred for modification of the work.
Also, there is at least one open-source musician who does make his source files available: Void Main.
This is true. I never would have seen this story if the "YRO" box hadn't randomly been thrown up on my front page days after the story ran, with this story happening to still be in it.
I believe that Deborah Tannen pointed this up as a key problem in our society, as the fallacy of "false duality", the notion that because there are two differing points of view that they are both worthy of attention.
You say that "at best, this is revolutionary" but this is like saying "I have a great plan! Everyone takes off their shoes, switches them around, and somehow everyone winds up with a bigger pair! *At best*, everyone gets bigger shoes!" Well, no, just because someone's floated the fantasy doesn't mean it's even a vague possibility. These people are selling snake oil; it can be proved at home. To entertain their fradulent notions simply because they bring them up is a mistake.
Now this gives me an idea for something that we can do. You've put it in an excellent form: 30-second sound bites are the major weapon that non-corporations have available today.
So let's organize a Sound Bite For Freedom contest. Everyone tries to come up with the 30-second sound bite that can most forcefully and memorably explain what is wrong with the DMCA, the DeCSS case, et cetera.
I'll try to start by adapting a salient point of Professor Lessig's:
Congress sold thousands of years of ownership to the corporations, of works that belonged to the public. Now -- who got paid, in exchange for that? It wasn't the public!
And here's where we put the contentious nature of Slashdot to work for us. Don't like my sound bite? Do better!
I mean, if you can't get all the benefits of Linux in one distribution, what's the point? I might as well switch to WinXP, where I know that the entire company is focused on one version of the OS, not dozens of competing distros.
I recently started driving, and I'm apalled that there seem to be all sorts of motor vehicles out there. There are compact cars, electric cars, buses, semis with trailers -- what gives? If I can't get a single vehicle that combines all the advantages of every other motor vehicle put together, what good are these motor vehicles anyways? Maybe I should go back to horses! -- if I could decide between the Morgan and the Shetland pony.
Where the worthwhile portion of the parent comment was plagiarized from.
Neither are you Re:Torvalds isn't a philosopher
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I'm sorry, that's just utter bunkum.
Your assertion amounts to the following: "If someone thinks an issue is significant, it automatically is significant. They are then, because they are correct about that significance, smarter than anyone who does not award it the same significance.
This means that bigots are the smartest people of all, because they attach so much importance to the color of a person's skin, to the religion they follow, to the activities they pursue with other consenting adults behind closed bedroom doors. According to you, this makes bigots smarter than the rest of us, who don't share the bigoted view that a person's entire value hangs upon these factors.
Actual philosophers do not make the same mistake you do, of thinking that whatever someone else chooses to frame as the crux of the issue must actually be crucial.
When properly conducted (and yes, I am aware that that could not not sound like an oxymoron) the purpose of war is to lead the way, as quickly and effectively as possible, to the optimum conditions for a long-lasting peace.
Using weapons that hose the environment does not exactly set the stage for the long-lasting periods of peace and prosperity that we hope the wars are fought to achieve.
Well, I know one thing this will mean...
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And that is a pain in the neck for everyone in comp.compression.
There is a frequent fallacy among those who almost understand how compression works, that works like this:
"Wait a minute! I bet that every set of digits that someone could be trying to encode can be found somewhere in the digits of pi! Therefore, we can compress any sequence by simply reducing it to the number of digits in the sequence, and the offset in the digits of pi where an identical sequence begins!
The assumption, of course, is that the number of digits and the offset can be encoded in a form that will be smaller than the original sequence. There is nothing to warrant that assumption. The fact is that the number of possible inputs that a lossless compression method can handle places lower bounds on the average length of its outputs. This means that no lossless compression method can achieve a lower average length for its outputs than would be achieved by simply numbering them all with the non-negative integers.
In fact, 'compressing' a sequence of digits into a (length, offset) pair will do substantially worse, since there are multiple (length, offset) pairs that will correspond to a given digit sequence; for instance, "1" could be encoded as (1,0) or (1,2). This duplication means that (1,2) is essentially wasted, since it could be representing a sequence that currently has a longer representation.
Lossless compression methods need to be used in conjunction with models: some criteria that separates the data we will want to compress from the vast majority of files, about which we do not care. The accuracy of this model affects how many of our inputs we can actually compress, and its precision affects the average compression ratio.
So they make a comparisson about compression formats, get together several "experts" in the field and the writer sums up the conclusions in a few oversimplified statements for the lazy reader.
God forbid they actually told you ALL the aspects of the story, the complete facts: what're the compression rates? which one compresses more? is there a relation between file size vs. quality (well, of course there is, but is some form of compression significan enough to justify lower quality? or the other way around?)
We live in a time when a crackpot claims that God helped him invent the perpetual motion engine, of which he will have a prototype that actually works Real Soon Now, and a national prime-time news program on a major network will actually send reporters out and cover, and provide, at best, just one or two sound bites from actual scientists pointing out that such a thing is impossible.
And given this, a reporter doing a listening test without proper methodology is a surprise?
Have there been any efforts to change the laws that allow this system of vigilantism-for-profit? I sure hope there have been; cases like this illustrate its flaws clearly.
It's called buying stock in them. That's how companies get funding. Sure, many people bought stock purely because they believed it would return money for them, but you could also buy stock because you believe in what the company was doing and want to see the work continue.
Unfortunately, that's the way it used to work. That's been ruined by the new 'day-trading' mentality, where so-called "investors" buy stocks not because they have any interest in, faith in, or even comprehension of, the long-term plans of the company, but simply as playing cards that they can hope to rack up points for dumping into another player's hand at the right time.
I find it hard to feel sorry for these day-traders, but what I really feel sorry for is the good companies they've managed to raise up and send hurtling down to destruction.
Slashdot Mirror
You mention that there are genetic pressures towards pro-social behavior (or, to satisfy the purists, genetic pressures towards biological features that in turn encourage pro-social behavior).
However, you neglect the other side of that coin: a society (or genetic population) where pro-social behavior is the norm is itself an environment with genetic pressures towards anti-social behavior. A big network of bonds of trust is a network of opportunity for one willing to abuse those bonds.
It's just as inevitable as evolution itself, I'm afraid: if genetic pressures can and do push for cooperation, they can push back for defection. As Jack Handey said: "I can imagine a world without war, a world without fighting, a world without weapons. Then I can imagine us attacking that world, cause they'd never see it coming."
This is rather like saying "The lawyers hit upon an ingenuous strategy to win the lawsuit for the company without realizing that forging evidence and lying about it in court is illegal." If they don't realize something like this, 'the problem' is not that they don't realize it, it's that they're stupid enough to not realize it.
As I'm hardly the only one to point out, no one would have the slightest sympathy for Cisco if they had chosen to rip off Microsoft software, 'not realizing' that they had obligations to fulfill if they used the code. No one would pretend that anyone reasonably competent at their job could make that 'mistake' as an actual mistake.
You mean "narcotics" like Ritalin? Adderall? Dexedrine? Sorry, but none of those are narcotics; like nearly all ADD/ADHD medication, they are stimulants.
As an ADD sufferer, I get pretty sick of hearing from people who think they know how the medical establishment (in conjunction with The Forces of Darkness and The New World Order and probably The Blue Meanies as well) is salivating over their glorious dream of finding individualistic kids, slapping the ADD/ADHD label on them, and drugging them into submission. I've never heard one of these oh-so-sure pundits explain just how it is that children are being "drugged into submission" by stimulants, how any medically normal child would be more likely to sit down quietly and "behave himself" when he's being dosed with substances that make others act out.
I would think that at the very least SCO could be slapped with a BIG, FAT injunction. It's become the popular meme among nattering tech writers without clues to ask, gravely, "What if SCO's claims are true?" and claim that the Linux community is tremendously short-sighted to not be running around like decapitated chickens.
But let's turn it around. Can SCO license anything that doesn't belong to it? No. So it's made a lot of noise claiming that something in the Linux kernel is its intellectual property, but those claims have been in no way proven; if its claims are unsupported then they are trying to take money to license someone else's intellectual property. Ironic, that.
Um, you're aware that the slippery slope is a fallacy, not a legitimate arguing technique, right? It's fallacious because it extrapolates without support, going something like this:
That's fallacious because it depends on not just one, but two unstated premises:
Neither premise usually turns out anywhere near true for the sorts of issues that get people invoking the slippery slope fallacy. If someone grows up in a nudist family, they are likely to be comfortable with the idea of not wearing clothes. Does this make them extremely likely to show up to their workplace stark naked? No, because they are also introduced to the idea of wearing clothes.
Similarly, if kids are exposed to violent movies and violent video games, the only way you can assume that this will progress in a straight line towards violent behavior is to assume that the kids will never be exposed to any memes influencing them against that course of action, like "human life has value". And the minute we assume that, isn't that the real problem? After all, it doesn't take violent movies and video games to teach us violence, we're quite capable of discovering its visceral satisfactions ourselves.
Dave Grossman's "data on the problem" is "pretty solid" like Microsoft is "a world leader in security" and "a source of innovation in the computer world."
Do you believe his assertion that "every major medical and scientific body in the world has identified the fact that at least 50 percent of the responsibility for violent crime lies on [television]"? That's a claim worthy of the Scientology flyers I tear up on my way to work every day. You should really look at just how his data has been grossly distorted to support his thesis. Which he makes a very good living going around speaking about, by the way; I wonder exactly how you make a career making speeches on what any educated person already knows, which would be the case if "every major medical and scientific body in the world" actually supported his allegations.
Why did Lawrence Lessig come off as so much more intelligent than Oppenheim? Because Lessig responded in detail, and with attention to detail, to each question. Whereas Oppenheim just recited whichever canned phrase seemed vaguely relevant.
An example:
Now, Oppenheim gave an answer to the first part of the question that was, if not factual (I highly doubt the factuality of it, given that he also invoked the "our sales are down and filesharing is the one and only culprit" canard) at least vaguely responsive: he claimed that an "increased cost to produce and distribute copyrighted works" accounted for why Congress kept extending copyright terms. In some cases this is clearly untenable (have books become more expensive to write?) and in others highly suspect (I think we're all aware that CDs are less expensive to produce than cassettes or vinyl) but hell, I'm willing to concede that maybe there are some new media that really do cost significantly more to produce, and that if Congress wants to see more works in these media produced, they cannot increase the profit margins or change the public's demand curve, but they can give the producers more time in which to try to recoup their costs. That follows at least somewhat logically from those premises, even if I question the factual basis of those premises.
But when it comes to answering the guy's question, how does the advent of new media and technologies change the copyright situation, what's Oppenheim's answer?
Agghh! What a blockhead! He's just argued exactly what this guy is asking about but all he can hear in it is another opportunity to demolish the RIAA's favorite straw man! He even makes it sound as if the guy asked specifically "duh, it's okay fer me to copy songs now dat we gots that Internet stuff, ain't it?" To me, that's one of the key indicators that you're dealing with sleaze: you ask them a question, and they give you an answer -- to a different question from the one you asked.
You have to admire this woman's chutzpah. At least, once you clean up whatever you spit out on the keyboard when you read this.
A well-known witticism about the meaning of "chutzpah" is that it's the quality exhibited by a man who murders his mother and his father and then pleads the court for mercy because he's an orphan.
This isn't much different here. She's correct that the patent system is intended to advance technological innovation, but it was intended to do so by giving innovators a short-term head start in profiting off their innovation and ensuring that within reasonable time, that innovation would enter the public domain and become foundation for further progress. Only the second part is of more than marginal good to the public, and that's the part that Unisys hasn't gotten to yet.
What she's really claiming here could be restated as "Everybody wins when the wheel gets reinvented! Technological innovation is always good, whether it's innovation to accomplish something new and useful, or whether its effect is to fracture the market and deny the public a uniform standard!"
Please don't get me wrong on that last point; I'm not sorry that the PNG format got created, and even if the LZW patent hadn't made it necessary, I would have liked to see PNG get created, as a technically superior format (not to mention one whose elegance delights me as a geek.)
All that I object to is this Kristine Grow claiming that Unisys's submarine patent, by being the problem, deserves any sort of credit for the solution! It reminds me unpleasantly of what happened when the Innocence Project brought to public attention that so far it had found 109 inmates on Death Row who had been convicted falsely by the courts. Most of the district attorneys whose flawed prosecutions had sentenced innocent men to death responded that this didn't point to any need for change in the system; the fact that those 109 had been proven innocent before they were executed 'proved' that the system worked.
I don't know how "still not believing their claims" translates to "immediate defensiveness".
To be frank, one major mistake that SCO made -- or maybe it wasn't a mistake -- is what keeps me from putting stock in their claims now. Namely, when asked why they weren't showing proof right away, they claimed that if they let anyone know where the duplicated code was, the Linux community would "launder" it away. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt and presuming they didn't mean that the actual code would get laundered off of millions of Linux CDs, the distributed nature of Linux development still means that any evidence of wrongdoing is out there in too many places to be hidden. Of course, any refutation of SCO's claims is also out there in too many places to be hidden, but the Linux community can't start presenting its defense until SCO actually gives details on which code is supposedly copied. As Miles Vorkosigan says in one of the most recent books in the Vorkosigan Saga, "Correction: I am not charged, I am slandered. There is an unsubtle legal difference." If this goes to court, then SCO will have to detail its accusations and IBM and Linux will get a chance to argue the charges. As it is, however, SCO gets to parade these accusations throughout worldwide news -- we've already seen the damages being done, with Linux deployments being re-thought -- and IBM and Linux are put in the impossible position of having to prove a negative, with the information of what they supposed to have actually done -- which code is supposed to have come from SCO -- withheld from them. Don't you think that calls for defensiveness, when we've been under this attack for a month and the opportunity to answer the charges and clear ourselves withheld on such a flimsy pretext?
Even though the ludicrous claim of "laundering" has hurt SCO's credibility, I wonder if it wasn't actually a successful strategic move. Because it has drawn people's attention to the truth or falsity of whether there's common code between SCO and Linux, and that's not the key point at issue here. The key point at issue is not whether 80 lines of code including comments are identical. The key point -- the one I think SCO doesn't want people to be looking at -- is whether that code is SCO's.
There are plenty of plausible explanations for how large sections of common code could be in both products; SCO's theory that a major industry leader, IBM, ripped off a major industry loser, SCO, and wasn't even smart enough to cover its tracks, is only one of them, and not the most likely. The most likely is that the code in question is in the BSD codebase that has already been ruled freely redistributable, and SCO's draconian NDA really cleared the field of anyone with the qualifications to recognize that code. Another is that SCO ripped off Linux, not the other way around. Comparing the dates that the disputed code was added to the kernel codebase in each case would answer that question in a hurry -- but note that Linux can not defend itself against such charges until SCO actually answers what code is supposedly theirs. Once SCO reveals that, of course, then IBM and Linux can start searching to provide proof of prior development or prior art -- months after SCO has started this whole smearing campaign.
As far as I can see, the only scenario that doesn't require somebody, somewhere being really grotesquely stupid is that SCO was hoping for a buyout all along, and counted on that buyout happening before they were ever forced to make their slanderous accusations into actual charges. Once they made actual charges, the game would be up; once it was known what the code in question was, the truth about who actually owns that code might come out. And trying to keep people from realizing that that was the real question -- that's the only reason I can think of for a ridiculous delaying tactic such as "we can't provide any details on what IBM supposedly did because then the evidence might get 'laundered'."
I can just see the closed-doors conference now.
IBM Guy: Well, Mr. McBride. You claimed that you had an offer to make, of a way to settle this amicably.
Darl McBride: That's true, and that's what I've wanted from the beginning. I've always hoped that we could find a way to resolve this peacefully and positively.
IBM Guy: Which is why your first attempt to 'resolve' this matter was to make loud, splashy public allegations.
Darl: What? Oh. Well, yeah, I suppose that maybe this meeting might have gone smoother if I hadn't done that. I'm sorry, it was a heat-of-the-moment sort of thing --
IBM: And why you further upped the ante by mailing those same allegations to our corporate customers, telling them that they could be sued if they continued to use a product which, at that time, you were still selling yourself.
Darl: Um... Well, yes. ... the heat of several moments? No. Ah, well, you see, it was just that I was mad that no one was taking me seriously, after all the time and care I put into manufact-- er, documenting the grievous wrongs done to my company.
IBM: Which company? The one that sold goods and services or the one that exists to extort money through allegations that your 'intellectual property' has been violated?
Darl: Ah... that would be the latter.
IBM: Yes. I've read your "documented" complaints. Very intriguing, I must say.
Darl: Why, thank you, I --
IBM: I especially like the part where you lied.
Darl: Excuse me?
IBM: Where you claimed that Linux could only have gotten so good if IBM took secrets that we learned from you and illegally shared them with the Linux developers. For instance, the secret of making the operating system run on 32 processors at a time.
Darl: Oh, well. That.
IBM: When in fact Linux was doing that back before you were working with us on Project Monterey, and before we began supporting Linux.
Darl: Um. Well, yes, but that's not exactly a lie, you see. Cause, um... well, our low opinion of the ability of anyone who isn't employed by SCO is just positive proof that anything good must have been ripped off from us!
IBM: Like 32-way scaling?
Darl: Yes! Like that!
IBM: Even though your own products don't have that?
Darl: ... Um.
IBM: But nevertheless, you're pressing ahead with the court case.
Darl: Well, not unless we have to; you know we've always wanted to settle this amicably --
IBM: Insults on the competence of Linux developers and the ethics of IBM?
Darl: Well, not "amicably", maybe, more like "peacefully" --
IBM: Not to mention that it's also an insult to IBM's practicality. We are still one of the biggest and oldest computer companies in the world. We have a huge intellectual property portfolio ourselves, and millions in yearly revenue. We can afford to hire the best people to create whatever intellectual property we need to stay competitive, but you instead claim we lowered ourselves -- and endangered ourselves -- by stealing from you. It's like accusing a millionaire of stealing a wooden nickel from a beggar.
Darl: Hey! Are you comparing SCO's intellectual property to a wooden nickel?
IBM: Yes.
Darl: Oh. ... well, that's not very nice.
IBM: Is it inaccurate?
Darl: Well, making it a wooden nickel implies ... I dunno, some sort of doubt that our claims are genuine.
IBM: Which is why you refused to clarify them, claiming that if you identified which code it was that was stolen from you, the Linux community could "launder" away the evidence?
Darl: Well, they could!
IBM: The evidence is available to anyone with an Internet connection from a few hundred different commercial vendors and academic institutions and non-profit foundations. Th
We all know that BitTorrent is most effective on larger files, both because the overhead is more effectively amortized over a larger file and because larger file still = longer download time = longer time on network = more time spent as a seed.
Have you thought of any ways in which the basic technologies of BitTorrent might be applied to increase download speeds for smaller files than those for which it is currently efficient? My best idea on the subject is to package several small, related files in archives whose format would allow you to see *where* in the archive the files you actually want would be located. There would be considerably many people out there who would want the whole archive's contents, who would act as seeds, and those who only wanted certain files could get the archive directory and download the file portions that contained the files of interest to them.
Is this an area which interests you at all, and if so, what are your own plans on the matter?
It doesn't get better.
Or, that's what it would be called if it had actually been news. So I guess it's a slow humor day.
What was the competition? "America's Funniest Surgical Malpractice Bloopers"? Sorry, guys -- no, on second thought, Slashdot editors, YOU should be sorry. "It's Funny. Laugh" indeed -- it's a hugely overworn idea which is NOT rescued by anything new in the execution. This is the sort of article the Onion churns out in its sleep, and when the Onion churns it out, it sucks, and when they churn it out and it sucks it's STILL better than this.
Oh, and the references to AIDS just sorta capped things. Was there some connection I'm missing why it's especially ironic for Q*bert to contract AIDS or to leave blood everywhere he hops or for Coily to refuse to work with him because of it? Or is AIDS just considered automatically funny?
How about:
Although the files are easy to play and listen to, they are not the "source" of the music, but rather its end result. Even in electronically composed music, where it is easier to distribute the "source" files from which the listenable end product is derived, there are relatively few musicians making those "source" files available.
I couldn't quite figure out how to work in the phraseology about "source" being the form preferred for modification of the work.
Also, there is at least one open-source musician who does make his source files available: Void Main.
This is true. I never would have seen this story if the "YRO" box hadn't randomly been thrown up on my front page days after the story ran, with this story happening to still be in it.
I believe that Deborah Tannen pointed this up as a key problem in our society, as the fallacy of "false duality", the notion that because there are two differing points of view that they are both worthy of attention.
You say that "at best, this is revolutionary" but this is like saying "I have a great plan! Everyone takes off their shoes, switches them around, and somehow everyone winds up with a bigger pair! *At best*, everyone gets bigger shoes!" Well, no, just because someone's floated the fantasy doesn't mean it's even a vague possibility. These people are selling snake oil; it can be proved at home. To entertain their fradulent notions simply because they bring them up is a mistake.
Now this gives me an idea for something that we can do. You've put it in an excellent form: 30-second sound bites are the major weapon that non-corporations have available today.
So let's organize a Sound Bite For Freedom contest. Everyone tries to come up with the 30-second sound bite that can most forcefully and memorably explain what is wrong with the DMCA, the DeCSS case, et cetera.
I'll try to start by adapting a salient point of Professor Lessig's:
And here's where we put the contentious nature of Slashdot to work for us. Don't like my sound bite? Do better!
I recently started driving, and I'm apalled that there seem to be all sorts of motor vehicles out there. There are compact cars, electric cars, buses, semis with trailers -- what gives? If I can't get a single vehicle that combines all the advantages of every other motor vehicle put together, what good are these motor vehicles anyways? Maybe I should go back to horses! -- if I could decide between the Morgan and the Shetland pony.
Where the worthwhile portion of the parent comment was plagiarized from.
I'm sorry, that's just utter bunkum.
Your assertion amounts to the following: "If someone thinks an issue is significant, it automatically is significant. They are then, because they are correct about that significance, smarter than anyone who does not award it the same significance.
This means that bigots are the smartest people of all, because they attach so much importance to the color of a person's skin, to the religion they follow, to the activities they pursue with other consenting adults behind closed bedroom doors. According to you, this makes bigots smarter than the rest of us, who don't share the bigoted view that a person's entire value hangs upon these factors.
Actual philosophers do not make the same mistake you do, of thinking that whatever someone else chooses to frame as the crux of the issue must actually be crucial.
When properly conducted (and yes, I am aware that that could not not sound like an oxymoron) the purpose of war is to lead the way, as quickly and effectively as possible, to the optimum conditions for a long-lasting peace.
Using weapons that hose the environment does not exactly set the stage for the long-lasting periods of peace and prosperity that we hope the wars are fought to achieve.
And that is a pain in the neck for everyone in comp.compression.
There is a frequent fallacy among those who almost understand how compression works, that works like this:
The assumption, of course, is that the number of digits and the offset can be encoded in a form that will be smaller than the original sequence. There is nothing to warrant that assumption. The fact is that the number of possible inputs that a lossless compression method can handle places lower bounds on the average length of its outputs. This means that no lossless compression method can achieve a lower average length for its outputs than would be achieved by simply numbering them all with the non-negative integers.
In fact, 'compressing' a sequence of digits into a (length, offset) pair will do substantially worse, since there are multiple (length, offset) pairs that will correspond to a given digit sequence; for instance, "1" could be encoded as (1,0) or (1,2). This duplication means that (1,2) is essentially wasted, since it could be representing a sequence that currently has a longer representation.
Lossless compression methods need to be used in conjunction with models: some criteria that separates the data we will want to compress from the vast majority of files, about which we do not care. The accuracy of this model affects how many of our inputs we can actually compress, and its precision affects the average compression ratio.
We live in a time when a crackpot claims that God helped him invent the perpetual motion engine, of which he will have a prototype that actually works Real Soon Now, and a national prime-time news program on a major network will actually send reporters out and cover, and provide, at best, just one or two sound bites from actual scientists pointing out that such a thing is impossible.
And given this, a reporter doing a listening test without proper methodology is a surprise?
Have there been any efforts to change the laws that allow this system of vigilantism-for-profit? I sure hope there have been; cases like this illustrate its flaws clearly.
It's called buying stock in them. That's how companies get funding. Sure, many people bought stock purely because they believed it would return money for them, but you could also buy stock because you believe in what the company was doing and want to see the work continue.
Unfortunately, that's the way it used to work. That's been ruined by the new 'day-trading' mentality, where so-called "investors" buy stocks not because they have any interest in, faith in, or even comprehension of, the long-term plans of the company, but simply as playing cards that they can hope to rack up points for dumping into another player's hand at the right time.
I find it hard to feel sorry for these day-traders, but what I really feel sorry for is the good companies they've managed to raise up and send hurtling down to destruction.