Sure, it does happen, but it's only the minority of cases. And for every bad moderator, there's several good ones who'll mod you back up. The/. mod guidelines are that you mod up more than down, so that signal-to-noise is improved by selectively boosting rather than attenuating.
Maybe you have the specs to make the apps fast, but how's that going to help? Check the article - max speed (theoretical max for the target FPGA, they've still not hit it yet) is 100MHz. Not that there's anything wrong with this - for mobile phones and other apps this is absolutely brilliant news. But the guys in here who say "Hey, I can run my PC on open-source hardware" are demonstrating that they don't know much about hardware.
So what's the score? Well, it'll be great for embedded processing stuff. Mobile phones, car (and aeroplane) engine controllers, and, yes, space flight stuff - all these can benefit from it. In these applications, the complete reliability of the core, the implementation of a known-good maths processor (Sparc) and the easy access to documentation makes it great. So what's the downside? Simply that it's nowhere near as powerful as any PC less than 5 years old. If you want to use this to run your PC, you're back to 486-land. An FPGA is a general-purpose chip, which means that it can't by definition match the speed of a designed-for-purpose PC chip.
Quite a lot. All your communications satellites didn't get up there on the Space Shuttle, they went up on Ariane or similar rockets. Why? Bcos the Space Shuttle is hugely expensive to run - deliberately so, since it was designed to look attractive to voters and to Air Force generals who are used to aircraft, not to provide the most efficient satellite delivery service.
Yep. Good film. VERY good film. Should certainly be required viewing for/.ers.
Classic line: "A robot becomes human when you can't tell the difference any more". I first heard that about 15 years back, and it still sends chills down me.
There's been any number of dodgy films about robots wanting to become human - usually they go mad and kill ppl. DARYL is the only film I can remember which assumed the robot would be able to fit in, and the implications of it (the boy/cyborg in question was part of a super-soldier research program, and that part of the plot was fairly standard stuff, but the way it was all handled was just great).
An NP problem is one where, given a program, you can only find the result by running the program. This is usually the case with algorithms which can't be solved arithmetically and have to be solved by iteration.
For instance, an iterative loop counting numbers from 1 to some limit is not NP - you know the maths to work it out, so given the loop count, you can bypass the whole iteration process (eg. counting the numbers 1 to 10: the total is (1 + 10) * (10/2) = 55).
But an iterative loop to find the value for which x = sin(x) _is_ NP (as far I can remember from my fairly basic maths) - you can't solve this any way other than iteratively. The only way to solve it is to take the sine of a value, see what the error is (either side), add on a correction factor and try again, and repeat this process until you've got the result to the accuracy you want. And there isn't any equation you can use to short-cut this process - if you want the result, you just have to keep working through it.
You missed the crucial paragraph explaining yourself properly...
As you say, some porn is legal in Western countries, but what's considered mild (or even completely innocent here, eg. a woman with an unveiled face) is considered otherwise in other countries. Or other countries (eg. Japan) may be more lax on the porn allowed (particularly in manga/cartoon form) than the West generally is.
But there are some universal standards out there. Sexual abuse of children is one - pix showing this are universally out. And fraud is always bad (no nation I know uses the Ferengi laws!:-) So it's a matter of establishing these base standards which are globally enforced.
After that, if one country allows its net users to display kinky sex on their homepage, and another won't allow unveiled women on your pages, so be it. That's national jurisdiction for you. The fact that you can see pages with these pix from anywhere in the world is immaterial for national laws, and cutting those would require filtering by the more oppressive countries. The issue here isn't that they want to impose a standard from above which conflicts with other countries, but that they want to get a global statement of what's legal as a baseline - the intersection of every legal system.
Not necessarily. Some certainly do have that problem - Burkina Faso would be a good example. These are the worst hit of all.
But most have the capacity to feed their populations, but either: (a) piss it away on pretending to be a super-power, eg. Russia; (b) piss it away in civil wars and border disputes, eg. Ethiopia; or (c) piss it away in government back-handers and slush-funds for politicians, eg. too many to mention. Or there's a fourth category, achieved by the USSR - piss it away by chronic mismanagement.
Most could be solved by the government of the countries concerned, but human nature says it won't be. And it's these places where you really feel sorry for the ppl - they could be living quite comfortably, but instead they're just getting screwed over by the tribal/army/religious/political leaders.
...the state of this revolution, the Net Revolution, can't ultimately be judged by... the hysterical judgments of the popular media, by the revenue it generates, by the narrow perspectives of techo-elites who created it, or the people who misuse, abuse or exploit it.
So since you fit into all these categories, you're the worst person to judge how it's going?
The hackers brought joy, freedom, exploration and enterprise back to work...
I've always enjoyed my work - I work in embedded software engineering, which is what I've always wanted to do. There's enough software jobs that anyone who is really keen on it doesn't have to take a job in McD's instead - only if they want to. And if you choose to take a dead-end job instead of doing what you really enjoy, that's your choice! If you can't live with the choices you've made, don't expect too much sympathy.
Open Source and it's offspring, open media and an open society...They're both intensely political...
Where did these come from? "Open media"? What's that? And how do you get a more open society from hackers writing C code? Sorry, this is pure hype. In addition open-source is completely apolitical. From the user side it doesn't care about your convictions or your use for it, it merely provides a known-good base structure. From the programmer side, it's all about fun, as you say later, and doing something bcos you enjoy doing it, and sharing that interest with other ppl, is completely natural to everyone. Politics doesn't come into it.
Proprietary instititions, from education to media, will have no choice but to open up the processes by which they operate.
Let me know when it happens. Most of the options I can see for proprietary institutions involve staying profitable, and opening up to anyone who comes along, for free, can be summed up as "killing your profit stream".
Cancer - why not? if all research facilities required open source, then we wouldn't waste a lot of effort duplicating methods that don't work
But they do. Or they do when they've found something definitely does or doesn't work. "Publish or be damned" makes certain of that.
World Hunger - again, it would be a good thing if all the ways to harvest, bring water, etc were open sourced, then even the poorest countries would be able to afford the details and could figure out how to make it happen.
Poor countries aren't suffering from lack of information, they're suffering from lack of money. If you can't afford access to a computer, it doesn't matter how many O'Reilly books you buy, you'll never get a program running...
See, the Congressman for your state is your representative. That means that if you want stuff doing, you talk to him, and he passes it on. Talking to someone from another state - if they're interested/pleasant/not busy, then you may get an answer, but there's nothing that says they have to. They're not there to represent you, they're there to represent the ppl in their state.
That's the theory, anyway. So if you send out emails to every Congressman about something, you've just wasted 49 of the 50 emails. And these 49 are going to obscure those ppl who genuinely do want to make themselves heard. You can probably except the chair of a committee - he/she takes on extra responsibilities with that. But the rest is pure spam.
And "barrage" sounds a bit strong. If lots of ppl are sending in multiple messages just to put pressure on, basically you're DDOS-ing them. And that makes it likely that, as with any other messaging system, they'll just shut it down until the "attack" goes away.
Personally anyway, my reply to ppl complaining about Napster is to shut up, stop whining, and grow up. But that's just my opinion...
Which further begs the question: When did Stephen King become a Scottish girl from Glasgow? He doesn't look much like a lass on the book-covers I've seen. Or does he call himself Stephanie at weekends?;-)
We don't have paperless offices, mainly bcos there's some stuff that works better on paper. For example, reading paper is much easier on the eyes than reading screen. But a lot of stuff _does_ work better on PC. Every time someone says they don't see the advantages of a PC, I point them at a word processor. For the investment of a few hours learning basic commands (which is all you'll mostly need), you can write your own documents, format them correctly and proof-read them yourself. Compare to the manual system where you'd write something long-hand (or typed if you were lucky), redraft it to reorder stuff, pass it to a secretary to be retyped and formatted, proof-read it, send it back to have errors corrected, where the non-technical secretary has misread your technical formulae, etc, etc.. And now tell me this isn't saving us time, and I'll laugh in your face.
The latest innovations in software may well be filtering systems, etc., and I've no doubt that this wasn't what Jefferson had in mind. But then he never planned on freeing the slaves either (him and Lincoln were both quite fond of having an oppressed minority). Certainly great historical politicians can be useful to learn from, but don't pretend they know everything - they were just as screwed up as our politicians.
Whether the anti-Napster ppl are the good guys or the bad guys depends on (a) whether you're on the payer or payee side of the music coin, and (b) whether you regard downloading of music you don't already own (and have no intentions of buying) as wrong. Make up your own mind, but don't expect us all to blindly fall in behind you. The argument Napster had was "we've got lots of free music", not "we're trying to make the record companies see sense and charge reasonable prices". The latter may well come to pass, but Napster's initial aim (as shown quite clearly in testimony) was piracy, pure and simple.
Jon's argument in this article is, "the revolution hasn't done what I thought it would". Wise up. Every revolution promises to solve all your problems, and it's only after the revolution that you find whether it actually worked. And the answer is usually "sort of". Maybe the Net hasn't promised everything that all the wild-eyed boosterism promised, but only suckers fall for that. The rest of us think, "Do we need that?" or "Will that work?" and get a glimpse of reality. If you can't tell real life from an advertising campaign, you've been watching TV too much!
Does making more information available make life easier? It certainly does for me when I'm designing electronics - today, I can download a datasheet in a minute or two, where a few years ago I'd have to order it and wait several days for it to arrive. I'm willing to trade that increase in productivity off against deleting the odd bit of spam and the occasional Microsoft crash - I think it's worth it. If Jon and his mate Michael Dertouzos, whose book he's plugging, don't think so, he's entirely free to return to his typewriter. We're not stopping you, Jon, it's a free world. But realise that doing this will impinge on your ability to email in articles like this. Make your choice.
And much of the article (roughly the last fifth) is a rail against buggy software. Sure, there's plenty of it about, so why not use something more stable? Win2k is more stable than its predecessors, and Linux is apparently more stable than any Windows. Applications-wise, some are good, some aren't. There's plenty of feedback on how NOT to build a user interface (the Interface Hall of Shame is just one), so all you need to do is keep your eye on the ball and you're away. And whilst there's many reports on buggy and unhelpful applications, you never hear much about the ones which quietly get on with the job, the same way that it's only the inaccurate weather forecasts that ppl remember.
Bottom line is that we're all happier we've got these cameras. OK, they're not perfect - ppl watching get bored or whatever. But there's a good chance they can spot stuff going down, especially at night when there aren't large crowds on the streets to make it difficult to spot it. And they can then get a police car to the spot as quickly as possible. Also, with a large network of connected cameras, they can track someone through the range of the cameras if they leg it after mugging someone.
I'm amazed the US hasn't done more like this. Is it constitutionally OK to have daily drive-by shootings, but it's wrong to have cameras which would catch the ppl responsible?
The standard argument about cameras is that they can't actually do anything at the time. That's a fair enough point. But they can get help there as quickly as possible. Otherwise, the police won't find out about the mugging/rape/whatever unless (a) they happen to be around the corner, (b) someone rings them to report it, or (c) they come that way later on as part of a patrol. (a) is unlikely, (b) is only an option for the victim _after_ the attack (assuming they're conscious), and (c) involves a delay during which time the attackers have run away.
Incidentally, anyone reckon the US military's "heat gun" would be a useful addition to a camera system, to provide some real control? Full-on weaponry is a bit extreme, and bullets have a nasty habit of riccocheting into bystanders and property, but a non-lethal "laser" weapon would be superb for immobilising attackers until the police arrive.
The quality of AI you can get (for non-trivial tasks) is proportional to the processing power available. So running it in Java is like attaching a trailer to an F1 car...
When one guy working on his own could produce a world-class game, then yeah, it was fine. Adrian Braybrook (sp?) wrote several superb games for the C-64 on his own, and many other games were written by single ppl, or a single person with a keyboard guy to do the sound and an artist to do the graphics, at most - there wasn't room to store more in memory or on the tape.
Then we got faster machines. Amiga and Atari ST games typically had teams of a dozen or so (the good ones anyway). Only a very few now (Starglider) were done by individuals. But lone-wolf programmers or small groups could still crack stuff out, and nearly everything had to fit on a single DSDD floppy disk, so that put a natural limit on what anyone could do with sound and graphics.
Then we got _serious_ power on PCs/consoles, and serious graphics and sound capabilities, and some serious storage capacity on CDs. Now it takes an enormous team of sound ppl, graphics artists - hell, even architects and choreographers if you need them. Or real actors for cut-scenes and for Rotoscoping the character's movements, at which point you get into movie directors and set-designers too.
Bottom line is that there is NO way anyone can produce a game today that is of the same standard as other modern games. A single person could produce something like Starglider quite easily these days, since 3-D graphics support now is built into DirectX and is mostly done by the graphics card, instead of the programmer having to write their own. But there's still no way any open-source team could produce something like 7th Guest or 11th Hour in their spare time - there's just too much to do. And those are _old_ games, several years old. Really up-to-date games, you can forget it.
OK, let's fight my corner.;-) Sure, there's no inherent copyright law built into the universe, just as there's no natural law to stop us killing each other. It's all an artificial construct to formalise "fair play", ie. ppl get rewarded for what they've done, and don't get screwed over. Similarly, the right to "free speech" is an artificial construction to try to prevent the powerful from abusing their power. You do not actually have a right to "free speech" under law; there are very definite limits to what you are allowed to say, so it's only free _so_long_as_ you don't say certain things. And penalising ppl who infringe copyright is one of those limits.
And this comes on to Jefferson. Maybe making the flame freely available doesn't help others, but it damn sure keeps you warm. And if you've sweated blood for years whilst those around you have looked down on you, are you to be deprived of the rewards? Can you charge for rental on your flame, or are your neighbours allowed to make any number of copies of your flame, so that the one you spent that time working on becomes worthless now everyone's got one? Stretching the analogy, I know.:-) But if there's only so many sci-fi readers out there, and some of them read free copies of the book off the web instead of buying their own, that's a loss for the author. Sure, the author often gets screwed by the publisher, but that's no reason to screw him over still further.
Copyright does NOT work as you say. Currently, anyone who writes _anything_ in a tangible form (including computer formats as a tangible form) gets copyright on it under US law. Automatically. You can sign copyright over (as we all do with our posts on/.) or you can relinquish it if you want, but by default, every writer, musician and website designer gets copyright protection. I'd agree that the duration allowed is too long, but that there is a time during which you have absolute rights to your work, I think is essential for ppl to continue investing time in inventing, making music or writing books. Don't forget that book-writing is a business for many - it's something they're good at, so they work at it. Maybe they'd do it in their free time if they didn't get paid, but they damn sure wouldn't be producing as much, and some of the most prolific and famous writers (eg. Asimov and King) turned out their stuff more to meet bills than to produce timeless fiction. That they did produce real quality under those pressures remains astounding.
H.E. isn't asking for other authors' rights to be infringed - if they've granted public domain rights to their work, then so be it. If Courtney Love wants to release her songs on Napster, fine, but Metallica have the absolute right to refuse to allow their songs to be made public domain without their approval. It's the rights of existing authors not to be ripped off that H.E. is concerned with.
Grab.
PS. If you invent a word then you are allowed to trademark it, and by god you can sue anyone who uses it without your approval!:-)
Unfortunately, doubtless ppl said "In my 10 years of net access, I've never played a song on my computer". By the time it's damaging authors' incomes to the point where it's more cost-effective for them to work at McD's instead of writing, at which point we're all losing out, then it's a bit too late. After years of ripping free music off message boards, and lately off Napster (it's not swapping - no-one I know maintains a server to distribute their music, they just take), everyone's convinced that it's right and fair, just bcos "everyone else does it, so it must be".
Sure, if you own the book and you get a copy of it for your own personal use, that's fine. But if you give the copy to someone else when they would otherwise have bought their own, that's one less sale.
An interesting question then is _why_ ppl don't find Napster morally wrong. OK, we desperately need a try-b4-you-buy system for music. OK, CDs are way too expensive. OK, the record companies make obscene profits and give too little back. Those are the usual reasons given for using Napster. But there's systems out there (the MP3.com "tip jar" for one) which allow ppl to pay for recordings they think are worth it, and these are giving so little returns, it's hardly worth it. So how are musicians supposed to make money off their recordings?
All these music places are going to subscription rates. This is quite reasonable - if you want to listen to a single song off an album, download it and pay a small fee for it. Or if you want a lot of stuff, pay a flat fee and get all you can eat. When there wasn't an alternative to Napster, maybe it made sense. But now there's alternatives coming up (eMusic, etc), should we continue with it? Will it get community support?
As a matter of interest, back on topic, there is try-b4-you-buy on books. You walk into a bookshop, pick up a book and open it. If the first few lines/pages grab you, you can buy it. If not, you put it back and walk away. The only purpose in downloading the whole story is to avoid paying for it altogether.
Grab.
PS. "Community standards" can be altered by pointing out the effects of ppl's actions. Drink-driving and safe sex are the obvious examples.
Nope, information is absolutely ownable. Say you invent a new type of car engine that'll do 100mpg at 200mph with zero emissions. Do you want Ford to say, "Sorry, you don't own that, so we're going to take this design and not pay you a cent"? Especially if this is your life's work, and you've spent the last 20 years perfecting it? Would you like to spend the rest of your life poor while your invention lines the pockets of the corporations?
That's why there's a patent system. It's been hugely abused over the last few years, but the theory behind it, stopping ppl with bright ideas from being ripped off, remains as relevant as ever. And it's why there's a copyright system - your life's work may not be an invention, it may be a book, or a screenplay, or a piece of music.
If the author/inventor wants what they've produced to be freely distributed, then they have the choice to release it into the public domain, but only they can decide that - it's not the right of every kid in a bedroom to scan books and give copies away for free, or to do the same with music. If you're relying on your invention/music/writing to provide you with an income in retirement, as Harlan is, you're going to be pretty pissed. Wouldn't you be unhappy if you found some kid was stealing your pension fund?
As far as I can see, the only ppl saying that information isn't ownable (or "information wants to be free") are either: (a) ppl who produce new concepts but distribute them for higher motives (eg. Salk); (b) ppl who produce new concepts but distribute them free for the kudos involved (eg. much open-source, see ESR's essays); or (c) ppl who don't have the intelligence to product anything innovative themselves. And (c) far outnumbers the rest.
So the fact that it's easy to flout a law means the law shouldn't exist?
I could go into any small out-of-the-way town in the US with a couple of heavy machine-guns mounted on a truck, kill everyone, and leave undetected. Come to that, Bill Bryson quotes a figure of a dozen or so serial killers wandering around America, killing at random - no-on knows who they are, their victims never survive, and they're careful, so they're unlikely to be caught. So should we dump laws against murder?
Sorry to take it to extremes like that, but the law works to say "This is what is right". If it becomes easy to do something illegal, there's no magic that suddenly makes something illegal become all right, it just means that it's easier for ppl to do stuff that's wrong. Adults are presumed to know the difference between right and wrong - it's only kids who are assumed to need someone standing over them all the time to keep them from doing stuff they shouldn't. Maybe this illustrates the intellectual level of those engaged in copying over newsgroups...
Time/space shifting applies to streaming media - basically, radio and TV can be recorded on some medium and replayed. Recording tapes off a CD is illegal, although everyone does it. In the front cover of every book is the copyright agreement for the book. It says very clearly that it may not be reproduced by any means, INCLUDING ELECTRONIC. Same for CDs.
"Fair use" means you can use your CD in any CD-player anywhere you like, and you're free to sell it on second-hand. Same applies to books. You do NOT get a free license to copy it, EVER. No court has ever said this - it's completely in violation of copyright law. And if your original copy wears out, you have to buy a new one. Software licensing usually makes an exception to this, allowing you to make a backup for recovery purposes. Copyright on books and music has no such exception.
A library buys copies of the books. The original owner of a book sold in a used book store bought the book. What happens after that is moot, but the author has at least got some money off it.
Say 100 ppl can read a $5 paperback b4 it falls apart (and that's quite a high estimate - I used to work in a library, paperbacks are fairly flimsy and ppl don't treat them well). Then every person who downloads a copy instead of going to the library or going to a second-hand bookshop is costing 5 cents. Now if someone's uploading 1000 stories, and multiply _that_ up by the number of downloads of each story, that's a serious number of 5 cents.
His problem is that (a) after alerting ISPs that their users are doing something illegal, they're not shutting down accounts, and (b) that the ppl maintaining newsgroups aren't removing the infringing content after being told it's on there. If they won't fulfill those responsibilities, he has the right to sue them for losses caused by them not doing their jobs. Sure, there may be a delay while they check the facts, but that's it - if they don't do anything about it, they're at fault.
As for all caps, it's likely been transcribed from Ellison's original hardcopy. And don't presume he knows netiquette - lots of ppl still don't. He may even type that way bcos he finds it easier to read. Basically, don't disregard the contents bcos of the user interface...
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it does happen, but it's only the minority of cases. And for every bad moderator, there's several good ones who'll mod you back up. The /. mod guidelines are that you mod up more than down, so that signal-to-noise is improved by selectively boosting rather than attenuating.
Grab.
One lockup a day due to radiation? Damn, and there was me thinking my PC kept crashing bcos of the shite code it was running! :-)
Grab.
Maybe you have the specs to make the apps fast, but how's that going to help? Check the article - max speed (theoretical max for the target FPGA, they've still not hit it yet) is 100MHz. Not that there's anything wrong with this - for mobile phones and other apps this is absolutely brilliant news. But the guys in here who say "Hey, I can run my PC on open-source hardware" are demonstrating that they don't know much about hardware.
So what's the score? Well, it'll be great for embedded processing stuff. Mobile phones, car (and aeroplane) engine controllers, and, yes, space flight stuff - all these can benefit from it. In these applications, the complete reliability of the core, the implementation of a known-good maths processor (Sparc) and the easy access to documentation makes it great. So what's the downside? Simply that it's nowhere near as powerful as any PC less than 5 years old. If you want to use this to run your PC, you're back to 486-land. An FPGA is a general-purpose chip, which means that it can't by definition match the speed of a designed-for-purpose PC chip.
Grab.
Quite a lot. All your communications satellites didn't get up there on the Space Shuttle, they went up on Ariane or similar rockets. Why? Bcos the Space Shuttle is hugely expensive to run - deliberately so, since it was designed to look attractive to voters and to Air Force generals who are used to aircraft, not to provide the most efficient satellite delivery service.
Grab.
Yep. Good film. VERY good film. Should certainly be required viewing for /.ers.
Classic line: "A robot becomes human when you can't tell the difference any more". I first heard that about 15 years back, and it still sends chills down me.
There's been any number of dodgy films about robots wanting to become human - usually they go mad and kill ppl. DARYL is the only film I can remember which assumed the robot would be able to fit in, and the implications of it (the boy/cyborg in question was part of a super-soldier research program, and that part of the plot was fairly standard stuff, but the way it was all handled was just great).
Grab.
An NP problem is one where, given a program, you can only find the result by running the program. This is usually the case with algorithms which can't be solved arithmetically and have to be solved by iteration.
For instance, an iterative loop counting numbers from 1 to some limit is not NP - you know the maths to work it out, so given the loop count, you can bypass the whole iteration process (eg. counting the numbers 1 to 10: the total is (1 + 10) * (10/2) = 55).
But an iterative loop to find the value for which x = sin(x) _is_ NP (as far I can remember from my fairly basic maths) - you can't solve this any way other than iteratively. The only way to solve it is to take the sine of a value, see what the error is (either side), add on a correction factor and try again, and repeat this process until you've got the result to the accuracy you want. And there isn't any equation you can use to short-cut this process - if you want the result, you just have to keep working through it.
Grab.
You missed the crucial paragraph explaining yourself properly...
:-) So it's a matter of establishing these base standards which are globally enforced.
As you say, some porn is legal in Western countries, but what's considered mild (or even completely innocent here, eg. a woman with an unveiled face) is considered otherwise in other countries. Or other countries (eg. Japan) may be more lax on the porn allowed (particularly in manga/cartoon form) than the West generally is.
But there are some universal standards out there. Sexual abuse of children is one - pix showing this are universally out. And fraud is always bad (no nation I know uses the Ferengi laws!
After that, if one country allows its net users to display kinky sex on their homepage, and another won't allow unveiled women on your pages, so be it. That's national jurisdiction for you. The fact that you can see pages with these pix from anywhere in the world is immaterial for national laws, and cutting those would require filtering by the more oppressive countries. The issue here isn't that they want to impose a standard from above which conflicts with other countries, but that they want to get a global statement of what's legal as a baseline - the intersection of every legal system.
Grab.
Not necessarily. Some certainly do have that problem - Burkina Faso would be a good example. These are the worst hit of all.
But most have the capacity to feed their populations, but either: (a) piss it away on pretending to be a super-power, eg. Russia; (b) piss it away in civil wars and border disputes, eg. Ethiopia; or (c) piss it away in government back-handers and slush-funds for politicians, eg. too many to mention. Or there's a fourth category, achieved by the USSR - piss it away by chronic mismanagement.
Most could be solved by the government of the countries concerned, but human nature says it won't be. And it's these places where you really feel sorry for the ppl - they could be living quite comfortably, but instead they're just getting screwed over by the tribal/army/religious/political leaders.
Grab.
...the state of this revolution, the Net Revolution, can't ultimately be judged by ... the hysterical judgments of the popular media, by the revenue it generates, by the narrow perspectives of techo-elites who created it, or the people who misuse, abuse or exploit it.
So since you fit into all these categories, you're the worst person to judge how it's going?
The hackers brought joy, freedom, exploration and enterprise back to work...
I've always enjoyed my work - I work in embedded software engineering, which is what I've always wanted to do. There's enough software jobs that anyone who is really keen on it doesn't have to take a job in McD's instead - only if they want to. And if you choose to take a dead-end job instead of doing what you really enjoy, that's your choice! If you can't live with the choices you've made, don't expect too much sympathy.
Open Source and it's offspring, open media and an open society...They're both intensely political...
Where did these come from? "Open media"? What's that? And how do you get a more open society from hackers writing C code? Sorry, this is pure hype. In addition open-source is completely apolitical. From the user side it doesn't care about your convictions or your use for it, it merely provides a known-good base structure. From the programmer side, it's all about fun, as you say later, and doing something bcos you enjoy doing it, and sharing that interest with other ppl, is completely natural to everyone. Politics doesn't come into it.
Proprietary instititions, from education to media, will have no choice but to open up the processes by which they operate.
Let me know when it happens. Most of the options I can see for proprietary institutions involve staying profitable, and opening up to anyone who comes along, for free, can be summed up as "killing your profit stream".
Grab.
Cancer - why not? if all research facilities required open source, then we wouldn't waste a lot of effort duplicating methods that don't work
But they do. Or they do when they've found something definitely does or doesn't work. "Publish or be damned" makes certain of that.
World Hunger - again, it would be a good thing if all the ways to harvest, bring water, etc were open sourced, then even the poorest countries would be able to afford the details and could figure out how to make it happen.
Poor countries aren't suffering from lack of information, they're suffering from lack of money. If you can't afford access to a computer, it doesn't matter how many O'Reilly books you buy, you'll never get a program running...
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"trough email"? Is that what pigs use? :-)
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Fraid so.
See, the Congressman for your state is your representative. That means that if you want stuff doing, you talk to him, and he passes it on. Talking to someone from another state - if they're interested/pleasant/not busy, then you may get an answer, but there's nothing that says they have to. They're not there to represent you, they're there to represent the ppl in their state.
That's the theory, anyway. So if you send out emails to every Congressman about something, you've just wasted 49 of the 50 emails. And these 49 are going to obscure those ppl who genuinely do want to make themselves heard. You can probably except the chair of a committee - he/she takes on extra responsibilities with that. But the rest is pure spam.
And "barrage" sounds a bit strong. If lots of ppl are sending in multiple messages just to put pressure on, basically you're DDOS-ing them. And that makes it likely that, as with any other messaging system, they'll just shut it down until the "attack" goes away.
Personally anyway, my reply to ppl complaining about Napster is to shut up, stop whining, and grow up. But that's just my opinion...
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Which further begs the question: When did Stephen King become a Scottish girl from Glasgow? He doesn't look much like a lass on the book-covers I've seen. Or does he call himself Stephanie at weekends? ;-)
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From the top...
We don't have paperless offices, mainly bcos there's some stuff that works better on paper. For example, reading paper is much easier on the eyes than reading screen. But a lot of stuff _does_ work better on PC. Every time someone says they don't see the advantages of a PC, I point them at a word processor. For the investment of a few hours learning basic commands (which is all you'll mostly need), you can write your own documents, format them correctly and proof-read them yourself. Compare to the manual system where you'd write something long-hand (or typed if you were lucky), redraft it to reorder stuff, pass it to a secretary to be retyped and formatted, proof-read it, send it back to have errors corrected, where the non-technical secretary has misread your technical formulae, etc, etc.. And now tell me this isn't saving us time, and I'll laugh in your face.
The latest innovations in software may well be filtering systems, etc., and I've no doubt that this wasn't what Jefferson had in mind. But then he never planned on freeing the slaves either (him and Lincoln were both quite fond of having an oppressed minority). Certainly great historical politicians can be useful to learn from, but don't pretend they know everything - they were just as screwed up as our politicians.
Whether the anti-Napster ppl are the good guys or the bad guys depends on (a) whether you're on the payer or payee side of the music coin, and (b) whether you regard downloading of music you don't already own (and have no intentions of buying) as wrong. Make up your own mind, but don't expect us all to blindly fall in behind you. The argument Napster had was "we've got lots of free music", not "we're trying to make the record companies see sense and charge reasonable prices". The latter may well come to pass, but Napster's initial aim (as shown quite clearly in testimony) was piracy, pure and simple.
Jon's argument in this article is, "the revolution hasn't done what I thought it would". Wise up. Every revolution promises to solve all your problems, and it's only after the revolution that you find whether it actually worked. And the answer is usually "sort of". Maybe the Net hasn't promised everything that all the wild-eyed boosterism promised, but only suckers fall for that. The rest of us think, "Do we need that?" or "Will that work?" and get a glimpse of reality. If you can't tell real life from an advertising campaign, you've been watching TV too much!
Does making more information available make life easier? It certainly does for me when I'm designing electronics - today, I can download a datasheet in a minute or two, where a few years ago I'd have to order it and wait several days for it to arrive. I'm willing to trade that increase in productivity off against deleting the odd bit of spam and the occasional Microsoft crash - I think it's worth it. If Jon and his mate Michael Dertouzos, whose book he's plugging, don't think so, he's entirely free to return to his typewriter. We're not stopping you, Jon, it's a free world. But realise that doing this will impinge on your ability to email in articles like this. Make your choice.
And much of the article (roughly the last fifth) is a rail against buggy software. Sure, there's plenty of it about, so why not use something more stable? Win2k is more stable than its predecessors, and Linux is apparently more stable than any Windows. Applications-wise, some are good, some aren't. There's plenty of feedback on how NOT to build a user interface (the Interface Hall of Shame is just one), so all you need to do is keep your eye on the ball and you're away. And whilst there's many reports on buggy and unhelpful applications, you never hear much about the ones which quietly get on with the job, the same way that it's only the inaccurate weather forecasts that ppl remember.
Trolling for karma, man! :-)
Bottom line is that we're all happier we've got these cameras. OK, they're not perfect - ppl watching get bored or whatever. But there's a good chance they can spot stuff going down, especially at night when there aren't large crowds on the streets to make it difficult to spot it. And they can then get a police car to the spot as quickly as possible. Also, with a large network of connected cameras, they can track someone through the range of the cameras if they leg it after mugging someone.
I'm amazed the US hasn't done more like this. Is it constitutionally OK to have daily drive-by shootings, but it's wrong to have cameras which would catch the ppl responsible?
The standard argument about cameras is that they can't actually do anything at the time. That's a fair enough point. But they can get help there as quickly as possible. Otherwise, the police won't find out about the mugging/rape/whatever unless (a) they happen to be around the corner, (b) someone rings them to report it, or (c) they come that way later on as part of a patrol. (a) is unlikely, (b) is only an option for the victim _after_ the attack (assuming they're conscious), and (c) involves a delay during which time the attackers have run away.
Incidentally, anyone reckon the US military's "heat gun" would be a useful addition to a camera system, to provide some real control? Full-on weaponry is a bit extreme, and bullets have a nasty habit of riccocheting into bystanders and property, but a non-lethal "laser" weapon would be superb for immobilising attackers until the police arrive.
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The quality of AI you can get (for non-trivial tasks) is proportional to the processing power available. So running it in Java is like attaching a trailer to an F1 car...
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When one guy working on his own could produce a world-class game, then yeah, it was fine. Adrian Braybrook (sp?) wrote several superb games for the C-64 on his own, and many other games were written by single ppl, or a single person with a keyboard guy to do the sound and an artist to do the graphics, at most - there wasn't room to store more in memory or on the tape.
Then we got faster machines. Amiga and Atari ST games typically had teams of a dozen or so (the good ones anyway). Only a very few now (Starglider) were done by individuals. But lone-wolf programmers or small groups could still crack stuff out, and nearly everything had to fit on a single DSDD floppy disk, so that put a natural limit on what anyone could do with sound and graphics.
Then we got _serious_ power on PCs/consoles, and serious graphics and sound capabilities, and some serious storage capacity on CDs. Now it takes an enormous team of sound ppl, graphics artists - hell, even architects and choreographers if you need them. Or real actors for cut-scenes and for Rotoscoping the character's movements, at which point you get into movie directors and set-designers too.
Bottom line is that there is NO way anyone can produce a game today that is of the same standard as other modern games. A single person could produce something like Starglider quite easily these days, since 3-D graphics support now is built into DirectX and is mostly done by the graphics card, instead of the programmer having to write their own. But there's still no way any open-source team could produce something like 7th Guest or 11th Hour in their spare time - there's just too much to do. And those are _old_ games, several years old. Really up-to-date games, you can forget it.
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Oops, should read "NOT making the flame freely available". I've got a lousy proofreader... :-)
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Good post man.
;-) Sure, there's no inherent copyright law built into the universe, just as there's no natural law to stop us killing each other. It's all an artificial construct to formalise "fair play", ie. ppl get rewarded for what they've done, and don't get screwed over. Similarly, the right to "free speech" is an artificial construction to try to prevent the powerful from abusing their power. You do not actually have a right to "free speech" under law; there are very definite limits to what you are allowed to say, so it's only free _so_long_as_ you don't say certain things. And penalising ppl who infringe copyright is one of those limits.
:-) But if there's only so many sci-fi readers out there, and some of them read free copies of the book off the web instead of buying their own, that's a loss for the author. Sure, the author often gets screwed by the publisher, but that's no reason to screw him over still further.
/.) or you can relinquish it if you want, but by default, every writer, musician and website designer gets copyright protection. I'd agree that the duration allowed is too long, but that there is a time during which you have absolute rights to your work, I think is essential for ppl to continue investing time in inventing, making music or writing books. Don't forget that book-writing is a business for many - it's something they're good at, so they work at it. Maybe they'd do it in their free time if they didn't get paid, but they damn sure wouldn't be producing as much, and some of the most prolific and famous writers (eg. Asimov and King) turned out their stuff more to meet bills than to produce timeless fiction. That they did produce real quality under those pressures remains astounding.
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OK, let's fight my corner.
And this comes on to Jefferson. Maybe making the flame freely available doesn't help others, but it damn sure keeps you warm. And if you've sweated blood for years whilst those around you have looked down on you, are you to be deprived of the rewards? Can you charge for rental on your flame, or are your neighbours allowed to make any number of copies of your flame, so that the one you spent that time working on becomes worthless now everyone's got one? Stretching the analogy, I know.
Copyright does NOT work as you say. Currently, anyone who writes _anything_ in a tangible form (including computer formats as a tangible form) gets copyright on it under US law. Automatically. You can sign copyright over (as we all do with our posts on
H.E. isn't asking for other authors' rights to be infringed - if they've granted public domain rights to their work, then so be it. If Courtney Love wants to release her songs on Napster, fine, but Metallica have the absolute right to refuse to allow their songs to be made public domain without their approval. It's the rights of existing authors not to be ripped off that H.E. is concerned with.
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PS. If you invent a word then you are allowed to trademark it, and by god you can sue anyone who uses it without your approval!
Unfortunately, doubtless ppl said "In my 10 years of net access, I've never played a song on my computer". By the time it's damaging authors' incomes to the point where it's more cost-effective for them to work at McD's instead of writing, at which point we're all losing out, then it's a bit too late. After years of ripping free music off message boards, and lately off Napster (it's not swapping - no-one I know maintains a server to distribute their music, they just take), everyone's convinced that it's right and fair, just bcos "everyone else does it, so it must be".
Sure, if you own the book and you get a copy of it for your own personal use, that's fine. But if you give the copy to someone else when they would otherwise have bought their own, that's one less sale.
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An interesting question then is _why_ ppl don't find Napster morally wrong. OK, we desperately need a try-b4-you-buy system for music. OK, CDs are way too expensive. OK, the record companies make obscene profits and give too little back. Those are the usual reasons given for using Napster. But there's systems out there (the MP3.com "tip jar" for one) which allow ppl to pay for recordings they think are worth it, and these are giving so little returns, it's hardly worth it. So how are musicians supposed to make money off their recordings?
All these music places are going to subscription rates. This is quite reasonable - if you want to listen to a single song off an album, download it and pay a small fee for it. Or if you want a lot of stuff, pay a flat fee and get all you can eat. When there wasn't an alternative to Napster, maybe it made sense. But now there's alternatives coming up (eMusic, etc), should we continue with it? Will it get community support?
As a matter of interest, back on topic, there is try-b4-you-buy on books. You walk into a bookshop, pick up a book and open it. If the first few lines/pages grab you, you can buy it. If not, you put it back and walk away. The only purpose in downloading the whole story is to avoid paying for it altogether.
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PS. "Community standards" can be altered by pointing out the effects of ppl's actions. Drink-driving and safe sex are the obvious examples.
Nope, information is absolutely ownable. Say you invent a new type of car engine that'll do 100mpg at 200mph with zero emissions. Do you want Ford to say, "Sorry, you don't own that, so we're going to take this design and not pay you a cent"? Especially if this is your life's work, and you've spent the last 20 years perfecting it? Would you like to spend the rest of your life poor while your invention lines the pockets of the corporations?
That's why there's a patent system. It's been hugely abused over the last few years, but the theory behind it, stopping ppl with bright ideas from being ripped off, remains as relevant as ever. And it's why there's a copyright system - your life's work may not be an invention, it may be a book, or a screenplay, or a piece of music.
If the author/inventor wants what they've produced to be freely distributed, then they have the choice to release it into the public domain, but only they can decide that - it's not the right of every kid in a bedroom to scan books and give copies away for free, or to do the same with music. If you're relying on your invention/music/writing to provide you with an income in retirement, as Harlan is, you're going to be pretty pissed. Wouldn't you be unhappy if you found some kid was stealing your pension fund?
As far as I can see, the only ppl saying that information isn't ownable (or "information wants to be free") are either: (a) ppl who produce new concepts but distribute them for higher motives (eg. Salk); (b) ppl who produce new concepts but distribute them free for the kudos involved (eg. much open-source, see ESR's essays); or (c) ppl who don't have the intelligence to product anything innovative themselves. And (c) far outnumbers the rest.
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So the fact that it's easy to flout a law means the law shouldn't exist?
I could go into any small out-of-the-way town in the US with a couple of heavy machine-guns mounted on a truck, kill everyone, and leave undetected. Come to that, Bill Bryson quotes a figure of a dozen or so serial killers wandering around America, killing at random - no-on knows who they are, their victims never survive, and they're careful, so they're unlikely to be caught. So should we dump laws against murder?
Sorry to take it to extremes like that, but the law works to say "This is what is right". If it becomes easy to do something illegal, there's no magic that suddenly makes something illegal become all right, it just means that it's easier for ppl to do stuff that's wrong. Adults are presumed to know the difference between right and wrong - it's only kids who are assumed to need someone standing over them all the time to keep them from doing stuff they shouldn't. Maybe this illustrates the intellectual level of those engaged in copying over newsgroups...
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Nope.
Time/space shifting applies to streaming media - basically, radio and TV can be recorded on some medium and replayed. Recording tapes off a CD is illegal, although everyone does it. In the front cover of every book is the copyright agreement for the book. It says very clearly that it may not be reproduced by any means, INCLUDING ELECTRONIC. Same for CDs.
"Fair use" means you can use your CD in any CD-player anywhere you like, and you're free to sell it on second-hand. Same applies to books. You do NOT get a free license to copy it, EVER. No court has ever said this - it's completely in violation of copyright law. And if your original copy wears out, you have to buy a new one. Software licensing usually makes an exception to this, allowing you to make a backup for recovery purposes. Copyright on books and music has no such exception.
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"Bullshit, Mr. Han-man".
A library buys copies of the books. The original owner of a book sold in a used book store bought the book. What happens after that is moot, but the author has at least got some money off it.
Say 100 ppl can read a $5 paperback b4 it falls apart (and that's quite a high estimate - I used to work in a library, paperbacks are fairly flimsy and ppl don't treat them well). Then every person who downloads a copy instead of going to the library or going to a second-hand bookshop is costing 5 cents. Now if someone's uploading 1000 stories, and multiply _that_ up by the number of downloads of each story, that's a serious number of 5 cents.
His problem is that (a) after alerting ISPs that their users are doing something illegal, they're not shutting down accounts, and (b) that the ppl maintaining newsgroups aren't removing the infringing content after being told it's on there. If they won't fulfill those responsibilities, he has the right to sue them for losses caused by them not doing their jobs. Sure, there may be a delay while they check the facts, but that's it - if they don't do anything about it, they're at fault.
As for all caps, it's likely been transcribed from Ellison's original hardcopy. And don't presume he knows netiquette - lots of ppl still don't. He may even type that way bcos he finds it easier to read. Basically, don't disregard the contents bcos of the user interface...
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