You are setting up a straw-man argument. I think that the nature of economic relationships will always create a logrithmic curve with a small number of people making a ton of money, and a very large number of people making a mediocre to low amount of money in comparison. I don't think fixing that is possible.
But I do think that the steepness of the log/log line you get when you graph incomes versus number of people has something to say about the health of an economy. A really shallow line in which a small number of people make an enormous amount of money indicates a winner-take-all economy in which things quickly devolve into a monopoly or semi-monopoly situation. I think this is what we have today in the US. I think it's unhealthy because I think class mobility requires that smaller players can eventually take out bigger players by being better.
I'm not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. But neither am I a liberal. I actually find the fact that so many liberatarians seem to think the Republicans are the party to vote for to be quite puzzling and leads me to believe that the libertarian party members don't believe their own rhetoric.
But whenever I talk to a left-winger the attitude I get is that this software stuff just isn't very important compared to the hunger and suffering of everybody. I really wonder at this attitude as it seems that most of them don't seem very pragmatic or even interested in realistic attempts to end this situation. They all seem to think that the rich folks should naturally realize that their gains are ill-gotten and find it in their hearts to give up their money to feed the poor souls who don't have food, clothing, medical care or whatever other thing it is they feel people deserve as a matter of course.
So, truly, software doesn't matter to them. And they see no benefit to free software as they just see it as yet another way for rich people to get richer. The idea that people who don't have money could use the software and perhaps make some doesn't seem to occur to them. They are too wrapped up in their little world in which everybody is taken care of by somebody to think that way.
BTW, if you want to flame me... I think the income distribution in the United States is whacked. I also think we may be the first generation to be giving up the freedoms necessary for class mobility. I think intellectual property is one road by which this might happen. If we ever lose class mobility, we are royally screwed as a nation, especially with the income distribution being so totally whacked.
And I do not think being poor is necessarily the fault of the poor person. But the best way for them to become not poor is by finding something they can do or be that others find valuable. It will do them and everybody else a whole ton of good and is more effective than any handout program anybody ever thought of.
Who knows? Maybe the anonymous poster is part of a massive, well-funded astroturf campaign. Maybe the anonymous poster is a sock-puppet for the guy running against him. I can think of just as many reasons for the person to be anonymous for nefarious reasons as for good ones. IMHO, it's up to the newspaper to make the decision about whether the poster should be outed or not, and if so, how far.
The newspaper can than be criticized or praised depending on the information. For example, posting someone's address is rarely justified. But often posting their affiliation with some well-known group is.
The point is that it should be the newspaper's choice, and they should be able to rise and fall based on that choice. The only problem I would have is if the local politician managed to use the resources of his office to expose who the anonymous poster was. That isn't and shouldn't be a concern of the government, and the government should not be going around exposing anonymous people for any end other than enforcing laws against illegal behavior these anonymous people engaged in.
You take the phrase 'natural rights' out of the intellectual context in which it was used. This is specifically a reference to some ideas tossed around by various enlightenment thinkers. Your opinion is a valid criticism of these ideas, but it is a horrible way to interpret a legal document since the basic premise of the document is that the concept of 'natural rights' has meaning.
You might want to read this reasonably well written Wikipedia entry on Natural rights.
I've been thinking of setting up neighborhood bandwidth co-ops in my city. The startup capital required is pretty hefty though.:-( My plan would be to sell the physical infrastructure to the neighborhood for a fairly small fee after it had been paid for. Then they could contract for maintainence with whoever they wanted.
Those criticisms do nothing to address the part of Richard Dawkins book I was quoting.
And I'm not exactly an atheist, and not exactly not an atheist, but I definitely agreed with his basic premise about the existence of a deity. So it doesn't matter to me whether those arguments hold water or not. It would be nice if they held up better, but as I said, for the things I just quoted it's not important.
I am thoroughly convinced by the existing WiFi infrastructure. Right now if I want complete coverage over the city I either have to spring for some stupid WiMax garbage with awful bandwidth and a highly centralized provider, or I have to pay umpteen million different little fees to get access in this place or that palce. Airports are the absolute worst for this BTW.
This is not a workable situation that will lead anywhere that's good for the consumer in the long run.
I've come to the conclusion that the natural monopoly (basically all the lines in the ground) should be owned by the municipality and it should rent it to whatever providers want to route people's traffic. And it should be rented on a house-by-house basis. Every house should get to decide who routes their traffic.
I think something similar is appropriate for municipal WiFi. I want to pay only one fee for the stupid service, and I want it to work everywhere. The current situation will never devolve into that. Instead it will become increasingly balkanized as every provider tries harder and harder to capture ever tiny last drop of revenue that can be extracted.
Richard Dawkins addresses this in The God Delusion. He comes up with some fairly interesting ideas.
He strongly feels that this tendency on our part must be a by-product or accident of some other trait that actually is a survival trait. He posits several possibilities:
As children we're hard-wired to accept things our parents tell us without question. I would imagine this would extend to beliefs prevalent in the surrounding cultural matrix.
We are hard-wired to look for causes for things. When things have no cause, we tend to make one up.
Religion is a meme that rides along like a parasite with other beneficial memes about altruistic behavior, what foods are safe or harmful, or other such useful ideas.
I think this whole line of thought is really fascinating. To me an answer to this question would be a very useful antidote for people who think I should adopt some particular version of Christianity or other religion that places mysticism and faith above the evidence of my senses and measuring equipment.
At least, not most of the time. I don't want to have to learn several different toolkits in order to make the program work OK on several different platforms. So a nice CGI fits the bill.
And in Python, it doesn't really matter that I don't have a web server running. I just use the pure Python web-server that ships as part of Python's standard library. It's not really up to a load of more than a few requests per second, but if things ever get that busy it should be easy to convince someone to give me the time to upgrade things to a structure that will work. And with WSGI I won't have to change any of my web app.
I do not 'consume' media. I read books. The books are there after I've read them. They are not 'consumed'. Additionally, I write things about books, and I write things in general. Relegating me to the passive role of 'consumer' is demeaning. I am a customer, not a consumer. The important relationship I have with Harper Collins is that I buy the books they produce. This makes me a customer.
When approaching a problem, I often avoid learning too much about how others have done it before I try to think of a way to solve it. Sometimes I come up with the same thing as widely accepted practice, and sometimes I come up with something that's significantly worse than widely accepted practice, and sometimes I come up with something better. That latter is much less likely to happen if I fully educate myself on other people's solutions first.
I do not think education is bad, and I'm not anti-intellectual. After I figure something out I go and learn how other people have done it. But I do think that education can easily untintentionally create dogma and that people should guard against this.
After hearing that story about the boat from the guy on YouTube awhile ago and knowing how most commercial companies treat software, there is no software bug that would surprise me in deployed military equipment. The military contractors and the military have a nasty incestuous relationship going on that's no good for anybody.
As long as it's Open Source. That way I'm not locked into paying a particular company to use my software for some arbitrary period of time. With Open Source I'm clearly paying a 'rental' fee for continued work by the company that makes the software.
Microsoft has two major problems. First, I'm locked into their software by the data. And that's never going away no matter how much people talk about 'open' formats. The only way it will go away is if Microsoft abandons its current Office product line because those products are intimately tied to their development histories and it's quite clear from the OpenXML spec that they can't actually make an open spec without releasing all the source code to all the older versions.
Secondly, why even have copyrights on the binaries if you're charging a rental fee? If Microsoft really wants a rental model, they should just tell people they can give away copies so it's easy for new renters to get a copy of the software. The only reason I can see for restricting copying of the binaries themselves is if they intend to charge some kind of up-front 'ownership' fee. And if I'm doing that, why am I renting again?
I agree with you to an extent. I still think 5 years is reasonable for software, if software is to be patentable at all. But for other things it should probably be longer.
I believe that you completely misread and misunderstood my post. I do know that the pope has said this. And that only strengthens my point.
My point was that natural selection is not synonymous with atheism. Therefore, even if you take the dubious position that natural selection is the basis for eugenics, it doesn't follow that atheism is responsible for eugenics. I pointed out that many Christians think that natural selection is a good theory, and so that was one indicator that natural selection and atheism are not synonymous.
That's a good point. But there needs to be some feedback system that punishes the patent office for issuing bogus patents. It needs to be a feedback system that's hard to tamper with both from an exploitation of loopholes standpoint (which is what you pointed out), and from a political pressure standpoint.
The working model requirement should be re-instituted. If you can't make a working device that demonstrates the patent, you shouldn't get the patent.
Also, a patent that can't be easily understood by a competent practitioner in the field in which the patent is granted should be consider void. Patents are there to spread knowledge, and ones that don't are useless. They should not be written in a special patent version of legalese like they are now. They should be written in the technical jargon of the field they concern.
Alternatively, the legal costs could be split between the patent enforcer and the government with the government picking up the tab if the enforcer went bankrupt. Though, that change risks the strong danger of the government not wanting to grant patents to people who didn't have the resources to defend them.
For someone to enforce a patent, they should either be an individual who filed the patent or a company that makes a product that uses (or is strongly related to) the patent
Make the lifetime of any software patent be 5 years. (I would prefer software patents be abolished entirely, but if they're going to exist at all, they need a much shorter lifetime to account for the pace of change in the software world)
Make the government liable for up to $500000 (and peg the amount to the consumer price index) in legal costs for anybody who sucessfully defends a patent on the grounds of prior art or obviousness.
Yes, you have to really watch out for those rouge nations. You never know what those people with the bright red cheeks are going to do next. I mean, they put colored stuff on their faces! What kind of insane bizarro thing is that?
If you think fundamentalist religion is a cause of suffering and atheism isn't, eugenics must not be in your vocabulary.
I'm not aware of any link between atheism and eugenics. Between the idea of natural selection and eugenics sure. But atheism and natural selection are not synonymous. I know many people who say they are Christian who think that evolution is a reasonable explanation for the origins of humanity.
Do you know of a link? I don't think it's a widespread opinion or I'd be able to dredge it up out of my memory.
I think this is a really tricky gray area, but I think you have a point. I think I prefer a different solution. Require that the person doing the criticizing point out that the doctor is unable to effectively rebut due to privacy laws, or publicly state what sort of information it would be OK for the doctor to disclose in defending h(er/im)self.
This lets people know that they may not be getting the whole story, or allows the patient to trade privacy for the perceived integrity of the story on h(er/is) own terms. It allows for some kind of balance without giving the hospital carte blanche to reveal (for example) the patients STD history despite its complete lack of relevance.
He did not 'disclose a vulnerability'. He wrote a script that exploited it. It wasn't a script that was designed as a proof of concept that did nothing. It was a script added him to tons of people's friends list and put a phrase in their profile.
Banning someone from the Internet is a stupid punishment. And perhaps the whole thing was a bit harsh. IMHO, this was a prank that deserved the equivalent of the punishment you get for disorderly conduct or vandalism, not for a really serious crime.
But, this is not punishing someone for exposing a vulnerability. This is punishing someone for exploiting it. Those are different things. The wording of the article really annoys me because there are people who are punished merely for exposing a vulnerability and this makes it seem like when they complain about this they're just crying wolf.
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You are setting up a straw-man argument. I think that the nature of economic relationships will always create a logrithmic curve with a small number of people making a ton of money, and a very large number of people making a mediocre to low amount of money in comparison. I don't think fixing that is possible.
But I do think that the steepness of the log/log line you get when you graph incomes versus number of people has something to say about the health of an economy. A really shallow line in which a small number of people make an enormous amount of money indicates a winner-take-all economy in which things quickly devolve into a monopoly or semi-monopoly situation. I think this is what we have today in the US. I think it's unhealthy because I think class mobility requires that smaller players can eventually take out bigger players by being better.
I'm not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. But neither am I a liberal. I actually find the fact that so many liberatarians seem to think the Republicans are the party to vote for to be quite puzzling and leads me to believe that the libertarian party members don't believe their own rhetoric.
But whenever I talk to a left-winger the attitude I get is that this software stuff just isn't very important compared to the hunger and suffering of everybody. I really wonder at this attitude as it seems that most of them don't seem very pragmatic or even interested in realistic attempts to end this situation. They all seem to think that the rich folks should naturally realize that their gains are ill-gotten and find it in their hearts to give up their money to feed the poor souls who don't have food, clothing, medical care or whatever other thing it is they feel people deserve as a matter of course.
So, truly, software doesn't matter to them. And they see no benefit to free software as they just see it as yet another way for rich people to get richer. The idea that people who don't have money could use the software and perhaps make some doesn't seem to occur to them. They are too wrapped up in their little world in which everybody is taken care of by somebody to think that way.
BTW, if you want to flame me... I think the income distribution in the United States is whacked. I also think we may be the first generation to be giving up the freedoms necessary for class mobility. I think intellectual property is one road by which this might happen. If we ever lose class mobility, we are royally screwed as a nation, especially with the income distribution being so totally whacked.
And I do not think being poor is necessarily the fault of the poor person. But the best way for them to become not poor is by finding something they can do or be that others find valuable. It will do them and everybody else a whole ton of good and is more effective than any handout program anybody ever thought of.
Who knows? Maybe the anonymous poster is part of a massive, well-funded astroturf campaign. Maybe the anonymous poster is a sock-puppet for the guy running against him. I can think of just as many reasons for the person to be anonymous for nefarious reasons as for good ones. IMHO, it's up to the newspaper to make the decision about whether the poster should be outed or not, and if so, how far.
The newspaper can than be criticized or praised depending on the information. For example, posting someone's address is rarely justified. But often posting their affiliation with some well-known group is.
The point is that it should be the newspaper's choice, and they should be able to rise and fall based on that choice. The only problem I would have is if the local politician managed to use the resources of his office to expose who the anonymous poster was. That isn't and shouldn't be a concern of the government, and the government should not be going around exposing anonymous people for any end other than enforcing laws against illegal behavior these anonymous people engaged in.
You take the phrase 'natural rights' out of the intellectual context in which it was used. This is specifically a reference to some ideas tossed around by various enlightenment thinkers. Your opinion is a valid criticism of these ideas, but it is a horrible way to interpret a legal document since the basic premise of the document is that the concept of 'natural rights' has meaning.
You might want to read this reasonably well written Wikipedia entry on Natural rights.
Wow, that's an impressively insane interpretation of that amnedment.
I've been thinking of setting up neighborhood bandwidth co-ops in my city. The startup capital required is pretty hefty though. :-( My plan would be to sell the physical infrastructure to the neighborhood for a fairly small fee after it had been paid for. Then they could contract for maintainence with whoever they wanted.
Those criticisms do nothing to address the part of Richard Dawkins book I was quoting.
And I'm not exactly an atheist, and not exactly not an atheist, but I definitely agreed with his basic premise about the existence of a deity. So it doesn't matter to me whether those arguments hold water or not. It would be nice if they held up better, but as I said, for the things I just quoted it's not important.
I am thoroughly convinced by the existing WiFi infrastructure. Right now if I want complete coverage over the city I either have to spring for some stupid WiMax garbage with awful bandwidth and a highly centralized provider, or I have to pay umpteen million different little fees to get access in this place or that palce. Airports are the absolute worst for this BTW.
This is not a workable situation that will lead anywhere that's good for the consumer in the long run.
I've come to the conclusion that the natural monopoly (basically all the lines in the ground) should be owned by the municipality and it should rent it to whatever providers want to route people's traffic. And it should be rented on a house-by-house basis. Every house should get to decide who routes their traffic.
I think something similar is appropriate for municipal WiFi. I want to pay only one fee for the stupid service, and I want it to work everywhere. The current situation will never devolve into that. Instead it will become increasingly balkanized as every provider tries harder and harder to capture ever tiny last drop of revenue that can be extracted.
Richard Dawkins addresses this in The God Delusion. He comes up with some fairly interesting ideas.
He strongly feels that this tendency on our part must be a by-product or accident of some other trait that actually is a survival trait. He posits several possibilities:
I think this whole line of thought is really fascinating. To me an answer to this question would be a very useful antidote for people who think I should adopt some particular version of Christianity or other religion that places mysticism and faith above the evidence of my senses and measuring equipment.
At least, not most of the time. I don't want to have to learn several different toolkits in order to make the program work OK on several different platforms. So a nice CGI fits the bill.
And in Python, it doesn't really matter that I don't have a web server running. I just use the pure Python web-server that ships as part of Python's standard library. It's not really up to a load of more than a few requests per second, but if things ever get that busy it should be easy to convince someone to give me the time to upgrade things to a structure that will work. And with WSGI I won't have to change any of my web app.
I do not 'consume' media. I read books. The books are there after I've read them. They are not 'consumed'. Additionally, I write things about books, and I write things in general. Relegating me to the passive role of 'consumer' is demeaning. I am a customer, not a consumer. The important relationship I have with Harper Collins is that I buy the books they produce. This makes me a customer.
When approaching a problem, I often avoid learning too much about how others have done it before I try to think of a way to solve it. Sometimes I come up with the same thing as widely accepted practice, and sometimes I come up with something that's significantly worse than widely accepted practice, and sometimes I come up with something better. That latter is much less likely to happen if I fully educate myself on other people's solutions first.
I do not think education is bad, and I'm not anti-intellectual. After I figure something out I go and learn how other people have done it. But I do think that education can easily untintentionally create dogma and that people should guard against this.
After hearing that story about the boat from the guy on YouTube awhile ago and knowing how most commercial companies treat software, there is no software bug that would surprise me in deployed military equipment. The military contractors and the military have a nasty incestuous relationship going on that's no good for anybody.
As long as it's Open Source. That way I'm not locked into paying a particular company to use my software for some arbitrary period of time. With Open Source I'm clearly paying a 'rental' fee for continued work by the company that makes the software.
Microsoft has two major problems. First, I'm locked into their software by the data. And that's never going away no matter how much people talk about 'open' formats. The only way it will go away is if Microsoft abandons its current Office product line because those products are intimately tied to their development histories and it's quite clear from the OpenXML spec that they can't actually make an open spec without releasing all the source code to all the older versions.
Secondly, why even have copyrights on the binaries if you're charging a rental fee? If Microsoft really wants a rental model, they should just tell people they can give away copies so it's easy for new renters to get a copy of the software. The only reason I can see for restricting copying of the binaries themselves is if they intend to charge some kind of up-front 'ownership' fee. And if I'm doing that, why am I renting again?
I agree with you to an extent. I still think 5 years is reasonable for software, if software is to be patentable at all. But for other things it should probably be longer.
I believe that you completely misread and misunderstood my post. I do know that the pope has said this. And that only strengthens my point.
My point was that natural selection is not synonymous with atheism. Therefore, even if you take the dubious position that natural selection is the basis for eugenics, it doesn't follow that atheism is responsible for eugenics. I pointed out that many Christians think that natural selection is a good theory, and so that was one indicator that natural selection and atheism are not synonymous.
That's a good point. But there needs to be some feedback system that punishes the patent office for issuing bogus patents. It needs to be a feedback system that's hard to tamper with both from an exploitation of loopholes standpoint (which is what you pointed out), and from a political pressure standpoint.
Oh, and one more thing...
The working model requirement should be re-instituted. If you can't make a working device that demonstrates the patent, you shouldn't get the patent.
Also, a patent that can't be easily understood by a competent practitioner in the field in which the patent is granted should be consider void. Patents are there to spread knowledge, and ones that don't are useless. They should not be written in a special patent version of legalese like they are now. They should be written in the technical jargon of the field they concern.
Alternatively, the legal costs could be split between the patent enforcer and the government with the government picking up the tab if the enforcer went bankrupt. Though, that change risks the strong danger of the government not wanting to grant patents to people who didn't have the resources to defend them.
Yes, you have to really watch out for those rouge nations. You never know what those people with the bright red cheeks are going to do next. I mean, they put colored stuff on their faces! What kind of insane bizarro thing is that?
I'm not aware of any link between atheism and eugenics. Between the idea of natural selection and eugenics sure. But atheism and natural selection are not synonymous. I know many people who say they are Christian who think that evolution is a reasonable explanation for the origins of humanity.
Do you know of a link? I don't think it's a widespread opinion or I'd be able to dredge it up out of my memory.
I think this is a really tricky gray area, but I think you have a point. I think I prefer a different solution. Require that the person doing the criticizing point out that the doctor is unable to effectively rebut due to privacy laws, or publicly state what sort of information it would be OK for the doctor to disclose in defending h(er/im)self.
This lets people know that they may not be getting the whole story, or allows the patient to trade privacy for the perceived integrity of the story on h(er/is) own terms. It allows for some kind of balance without giving the hospital carte blanche to reveal (for example) the patients STD history despite its complete lack of relevance.
I noticed Code Red. The Internet was a lot slower for several hours to a day because of that thing.
He did not 'disclose a vulnerability'. He wrote a script that exploited it. It wasn't a script that was designed as a proof of concept that did nothing. It was a script added him to tons of people's friends list and put a phrase in their profile.
Banning someone from the Internet is a stupid punishment. And perhaps the whole thing was a bit harsh. IMHO, this was a prank that deserved the equivalent of the punishment you get for disorderly conduct or vandalism, not for a really serious crime.
But, this is not punishing someone for exposing a vulnerability. This is punishing someone for exploiting it. Those are different things. The wording of the article really annoys me because there are people who are punished merely for exposing a vulnerability and this makes it seem like when they complain about this they're just crying wolf.