The problem with this is that there are both legitimate and illegitimate reasons to want that info. Sure it's great that you can automatically give people a bogus address and watch them waste their money junkmailing non-existent addresses. Unfortunately, the on-line retailers are going to be asking for the same information, so that book you just bought from Amazon.com is going to be sent to the same bogus address.
I suppose that there are practical solutions to this problem, but it still is a problem. You could, for instance, have two browsers and only fire up the one with genuine info when you actually wanted to buy something. Or, for that matter, a really smart browser could have the option of deliberately feeding bogus info to sites that you don't like the privacy policies of, rather than simply not letting you access them at all. Actually, that last one seems like a great idea for a free software project...
They should have called it "Microsoft Language" to go along with all their other boring product titles!
No, they're saving that for their new version of English with proprietary extensions. They're supposedly working on a new part of speech that will only work on Windows.
I think that by your logic, using Slashdot to get a consensus of the general Hacker opinion is no different that getting it from ESR. IMHO of course.
There's a small amount of truth to that, but not really. The point is that ESR is just one person, so when you listen to him, you're getting the voice of just one person. He may claim to talk for the community, but he's still just one person. If you really want to know what the community as a whole thinks, you should go to a place where you can hear more than one voice. Discussions on Slashdot certainly have more than one voice, so you're at least listening to a breadth of opinions, rather than just one. Does Slashdot necessarily represent an accurate cross-section of the hacker community? I don't know, but I don't see how it could be less accurate than listening to one person who claims to speak for the group as a whole.
Let's see. We have a new product from Microsoft that:
Is very similar to an established product from another company,
Is available only from Microsoft,
Runs only on Windows,
Is offered as an alternative to the look-alike product,
It's the whole Microsoft strategy in a bottle again. I guess that their attempts to embrace and extend Java aren't working, so now their offering their Windows-only clone instead.
No, because chances are very good that what ESR says is what most hackers think. People like ESR and RMS don't get their ability to be heard from their own power, we attribute it to them.
These statements are, at least to some extent, contradictory. It's clear from anyone who's listened to them that ESR and RMS have some very, very different opinions on various matters, particularly WRT the government's anti-trust suit against Microsoft (which ESR made a big issue of in his talk). This, in itself, is evidence that ESR does not necessarily represent what most hackers think.
IMO if you read the general opinion on Slashdot (which is at least an attempt to listen to the whole community, rather than one self-appointed spokesman), it becomes obvious that on at least some issues ESR represents a small minority opinion. The Microsoft breakup is one good example of this. The opinion on Slashdot seems primarily divided between people who have listened to Microsoft's POV (MS has done nothing wrong and should remain atop the heap) and people who think that the anti-trust suit was a great thing. Comparatively few people have expressed Raymond's view that the anit-trust suit is essentially meaningless (because MS is going down to the power of "Open Source" programming) and a bad thing in the abstract (because the government should butt out).
This seems to be business as usual for the media industry, and for lawyers in general. They don't want anything to be made public because they're afraid that it will make them look stupid. They try to claim protection for everything, even stuff that the judge has specifically told them they can't protect, and hope that people won't realize what they're hiding to know to demand that they make it public. I don't think that they actually think that they'll succeed in keeping this stuff secret, but they just want to stall and force the other side's lawyers to fight a bunch of peripheral stuff about geting depositions and the like rather than building a case. It's nasty, low-down, and, unfortunately, it works well enough that it's going to keep happening until lawyers are actually punished for trying it.
Cool. Then all you need to do is to incorporate mp3's of your voice giving commands to the system into your playlists and things can get really interesting.
PETA propoganda literature goes so far as to equate the consumption of poultry in this country with the Nazi holocaus ("six million Jews were killed in Germany but a hundred million chickens will parish in the US this year!" or some such)
This is particularly interesting because Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, loved animals, and couldn't stand to see them hurt. Somehow or other, though, Hitler never makes it onto their list of famous vegetarians that one would wish to emulate. Could this have something to do with it undermining their view that people who treat animals well will necessarily want to treat people well, too?
The big deal is that there isn't a big deal. The reason that wired phones are so cheap in the U.S. and Europe is that the investment in infrastructure is already amortized, so you're only paying a small marginal cost. In many less developed countries, though, there's not this big existing wire network that it's easy to tap into, so in many cases the lower capital cost of wireless makes it cheaper than getting a land line. Since it's cheaper and more convenient, deciding on a celular is a no-brainer.
This is exactly the kind of think that could be very useful in impeaching his credibility as a witness if and when this thing goes to trial. Just having him read one version of the truth as from the editorial and then the other version from his deposition can make a guy like this look very stupid and dishonest. Will it be vital for the success of the case? Probably not. Will it be one more element that will help? Maybe so.
Now, the first thing that leaps to mind is that they would be able to recognize the DNA of the microbes as being either common to Earth or not. OTOH, how fast could Earth microbes mutate to adapt to Mars?
This might be harder than you think. There's some reason to think that Martian and Earth life developed once and was transported between planets, so there should be some similarity. OTOH, that's going to be pretty slight, since it happened billions of years ago, while even rapidly mutating bacteria couldn't change that much in less than a century.
For that matter, how do they sterilize probes anyway? Is it really safe to assume that the cold vacuum of space kills all microbes?
Actually, sterilizing a space probe is pretty tough, but being really sure that it's been completely sterlized is much harder. To sterilize it, you just sterilize each piece independently and assemble them in a sterile environment. To detect any bacteria that are living on the things can be quite difficult. A couple of people in my group at work are actually collaborating with the people at JPL on approaches to confirming that the spacecraft are actually sterilized. The head of the group over at JPL has a cool title (I can't remember it exactly) like "Chief of Planetary Protection". They just got done presenting on the topic at the meeting of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry.
It is possible that the building blocks of life are seeded in every solar system by comets that have passed through some of those organic/sugar cloud things mentioned in the other/. article.
It's certainly possible. There's been a fair bit of serious discussion that part of the reason that life started as rapidly as it did on Earth (basically about as soon as it could survive at all) because it was seeded with amino acids and stuff from comets. Those comets obviously coalesced from the same nebula that the solar system did, and thus the material in them antedates the solar system.
But there's a big difference between picking up organic matter from outer space and actually picking up living organisms! That organic matter was probably randomly distributed between the handedness of various asymetrical biomolecules. That means that the "choices" made by Earth life (i.e. left handed amino acids and right handed sugars) were just random. Deeper details, like the number and identity of DNA bases, amino acids, etc. could be radically different and still support viable life.
In contrast, life transported from one planet to another would not just retain its choices about which handedness of molecules to use, but also a host of other things. Some of those things include the basic structure of the cell, translation tables to convert DNA sequences to protein sequences, and even some amount of the sequence of highly conserved portions of the genome. Believe it or not, you could probably find actual genetic links between the Human genome and the genome of Martian bacteria if, in fact, they came from a common origin!
Anything found in the pits of Mars would be completely isolated from Earth's biosphere. Not a couple dozen miles of ocean - completely isolated.
Actually, this is not correct. We know that the Earth and Mars are capable of exchanging meteorites; we've found Martian ones here on Earth. It also turns out that such meteorites would not necessarily be sterilized by the heat involved in blasting them out of one planet and re-entering the atomosphere of another(!) and that bacteria could very easily survive being freeze dried and floating through interplanetary space for a few thousand years.
That means that the early Earth and early Mars were not biologically isolated. In fact, if we find life on Mars (or traces of extinct life) it's quite likely to be similar to life on Earth, at least to the extent of having the basic biological features (i.e. DNA, proteins, sugars, cell membranes, etc.) in common. This is because it's actually more likely that life started once on one of the two planets and was transported to the other than that it developed independently on both planets.
I'd like to see someone suggest a real solution of balance which would 1) Not be Draconian to legal consumers 2)be fair to the Companies' rights and 3) somehow prevent the pirates from illegally stealing software.
There is such a solution. It's called letting the company that thinks its copyright has been infringed go after the people who are infringing. This is the solution that worked for generations before digital copying became possible, and it's actually the approach that seems to be having a decent degree of success in stopping digital copyright infringement today.
Take a look, for instance, at the Metallica vs. Napster affair; Metallica asks Napster to shut down people who are infringing copyright, Napster does so, and now a lawsuit decides whether the shut down has to continue. This works. In order for a group to infringe enough to do serious damage to a a big software company like Microsoft, they need a large organization that can be tracked down and gone after legally. In fact, when Microsoft complains about the cost of "pirating" of their software, it's almost always complaining about well organized groups that are stamping their own CD's, making bogus Microsoft holograms, and the whole works.
That's why the whole prior restaint (i.e. access controls) aspect of the DMCA is so odious. People are essentially assumed to be infringers before they ever lay hands on the product, and are denied their fair use rights because it's the easiest way of keeping them from non-fair use copying.
Think about it a little...before the industrial revolution, most people were farmers. A few lived in towns and, say, ran a general store, but not many. Then comes industrialization. Suddenly, there are cities everywhere. People spend their lives doing things that no one had ever dreamed of before - working in gigantic factories, assemblying machinery. Things people use every day, like clothing, can suddenly be produced at astonishing rates. Now that is a transformation for humanity.
Except that it didn't really happen quite that way. It wasn't for about 100 years after the Industrial Revolution started that as much as 50% of the population moved to cities. In fact it wasn't the 1810's and 1820's when people were really building towns, as you'd expect if the Industrial Revolution were as rapid as you present it. The big surge in town building (in both America and Europe) came in the 1880's, which is why so many American towns and cities have a downtown with Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield Streets.
As this post pointed out, thanks to computers and the internet that industrial life is speeding up. But have things changed on the same scale as when we industrialized? Neither I nor Paul Krugman are saying the digital world isn't different. But we still live in downtown high-rises or white two-stories in suburbs just like we did 20 years ago. We still go to the local grocery store or mall when we need things - mostly the same things we needed 20 years ago.
Sure, but the timescale you're talking about is still too short. The time it took to truly industrialize was significantly longer than an average lifespan. Even considering that, the changes in our lifestyle are fairly significant; things like ubiquitous mobile communications, telecommuting, and internet shopping are having a significant social impact. Then there's the extent to which digital media are already redefining the concept of intellectual property, viz Napster, the GPL, and the DMCA. Not to mention the ongoing overthrow of conventional fixed format news and entertainment media. None of these things are complete yet, by any means, but they have the potential to create as broad a social change, if not such an upheaval in actual living arrangements, as the Industrial Revolution.
Even more importantly, most of the social problems we face are the same as 20 years ago as well.
I think that's a bit of an overstatement. In the US, for instance, issues of racial justice are less significant than they were 20 years ago (though they're still important) and economic justice is much more significant. The environment is drastically more important than it was, and people have come much close to a consensus on the idea that it really is an issue. Ronald Reagan and his gang genuinely didn't believe that environmental harm on a global scale was possible, but today even the strongest opponents of environmentalism have to couch their arguments in economic terms rather than denying the existence of the problem. Globalization is clearly a much bigger topic than it was, too.
Those of us rich enough to reap the benefits can see a difference in our lives, but for the vast majority of humanity the digital age hasn't changed a thing (think Africa, India, and China...that's half the world's population right there). Industrialization did.
This is significantly wrong. For many of those people in China, India, Africa, etc., Industrialization has yet to make a big impact. They're still farming in much the same way that their ancestors did, with little benefit from industrialization.
With a DOC file the output medium is known, and it basically comes down to the page size. Its fixed - it doesn't change for each user - and therefore it should be pretty easy to render. In my experience DOC file converters (for WordPerfect etc) work pretty well, except where the documents contains fancy features like Word's "frames" or "text boxes".
Well, that depends on what you're asking for. If you just want to preserve the structure of the document (i.e. alignment, line spacing, margins, etc.) then my impression is that current converters do pretty well. The problem is that some people expect for the document to look exactly the same, as it would if it were being rendered by PageMaker or Acrobat.
In fact, though, to do that would essentially require that the renderer be bug compatible with Word. This is A) undesirable because it means rendering bugs correctly, B) impossible because there are several versions of Word with subtle and not-so-subtle differences, and C) impossible because it is observed fact that the same version of Word renders documents slightly differently on different computers, etc. In short, the problem that most people are complaining about isn't with the difficulty of dealing with niggling problems with fancy features, but with unreasonable expectations for what the program can and should be doing.
If you listen, you frequently hear voices asking whether the USA's multi-trillion dollar IT investment has actually led to any tangible productivity increases.
This is misleading for a large number of reasons. One is that the questions about productivity are primarily aimed at whether or not investment in desktop computers has improved office productivity. This is both a much narrower question than the impact of computers in general (which is clearly positive; take a look at automation in manufacturing) and a harder question to answer because office productivity is very hard to measure. If computer technology allows me to create better written reports (because I can edit more easily) with easier to understand figures (because of graphics software) in the same length of time it used to take to do things the old way, has my productivity increased? I think it has, because my product is more valuable, but that's not going to show up in any conventional measure of productivity.
The issue of quality is actually a deep problem with many measures of productivity. A car today costs a lot more than a car did 10 years ago (even taking the CPI into account) but they're not directly comprable. The modern car is quieter, safer, more comfortable, less poluting, and has better performance and more features- and a lot of that is attributable to increased use of digital computers both directly and in the design and construction of the car. Without taking that qualitative factor into account, though, it looks as though cars production hasn't gained much in productivity. In fact, manufacturers today could build a car to the standards of a decade ago for a lot less, indicating a big jump in productivity- much of it computer driven.
The same will happen now. The digital revolution alone will not make big waves in our dayly lives. But combine it with new revolutions in bio (gene) tech and nano-tech and the start of the corperate republic and it will make at least as much waves as the last big revolution.
The big thing to consider is the extent to which the digital revolution is necessary for those other revolutions. Sequencing the Human Genome is going to have a huge impact on biology and medicine, and it would be completely impossible without digital computers. It's just not possible to deal with as much data as is a genome any other way, much less the much large ammount of data that is generated in producing that genome. Lincoln Stein, a leading bioinformaticist and Perl hacker, has estimated that it will require about 1 TB of total data to generate the roughly 1 GB human genome.
The same thing is obviously true of a lot of other potential revolutions. If the first practical nanotech devices (if there ever is such a thing) aren't designed on digital computers, I'll eat my hat. An it's not just future developments that depend on digital media. A lot of those older technologies that have been so revolutionary, like cars, trains, the electrical grid, mass-media, modern medicine, etc., may not have depended on computers originally but they do today and it would be almost impossible to go back.
Just to pick cars as an example, every mass-market car being designed and built today was designed, at least in part, on a computer. All modern cars are built on assembly lines that make heavy use of computer driven robotics. They depend on parts that are delivered by computer dependent just-in-time delivery systems, and they rely on so many on-board computers that they have to be extensively tested for negative effects caused by RF interference. Almost nobody would be willing to buy the best car that could be made without any use of computers because it would be so much more expensive and much lower quality than those that make extensive use of computers.
The problem isn't that the digital revolution isn't that great, it's that genuine revolutions take a lot longer than most people appreciate. It's easy to look at how much difference things like electricity and running water make in our lives and describe them as revolutionary, but they probably seemed pretty weak to the people who experienced the change. That's because it took a long time for the real imact to be felt.
Take cars as an example. The first primitive automobiles were built in the late 19th century, but didn't have much impact because they were just rich mens' playthings. It wasn't until the 1920's that even the most forward thinking communities really started planning themselves around the revolutionary changes in lifestyle that the automobile made possible, and most cities didn't really start to reorganize until after WWII. That's something like 70 years between first invention and really dramatic public impact.
The same thing is true of just about every big invention/discovery. It took 40+ years between Relativity and its first practical application (unfortunately a nasty one). It's almost 50 years since the structure of DNA was discovered, and the big changes that's going to bring us are clearly still in the future. It shouldn't be surprising that nearly 60 years after the first computer we're still not really fully into the computer age.
That being said, I think that it's easy to underestimate the importance of computers, particularly for older people who didn't grow up with them. People in the Slashdot generation, though, use computers very differently from the older generation, and they play a much bigger role in our lives. Why? Because we grew up with them and the radical things that they can do. That's the way it is with a lot of revolutions; the older generation never fully adopts the changes, and it isn't until they die off that the full impact is felt.
The tough part comes when you actually want to display the document. Now all sorts of little details that aren't in the file format but are idiosyncrancies of MS Word pop up. And, as anyone who's used Office extensively knows, Word will display the document differently depending on which version you're using, what printer you have connected, phases of the moon, etc.
And arguably in both cases this is because people are asking the program/format to do more than it was ever intended to. Both html browsers and word processors were originally intended to format documents dynamically and squish them into shape using some fairly general parameters of window/page size, font, etc. The problem is that people are now turning around and trying to use both as detailed page description formats that place each letter or object precisely on the screen. Given the underlying assumptions of the renderer, it shouldn't be surprising that this doesn't work right. If you really want to fix the words onto the page, use a desktop publishing program or convert to PDF.
Ahh. My CoCo. I truly loved that machine. Anyone else here a former CoCo addict?
Absolutely. I actually started using the thing back when it was new, and I was so much cooler than any of the other second graders because I knew how to use a computer and they didn't. It wasn't a CoCo1, because nobody had thought that there was going to be a CoCo2 yet. I remember how exciting it was when we upgraded from 4 kB and Color Basic to 16 kB and Extended Color Basic.
The old CoCo tape "drive" also taught me the importance of backing up vital data. For those who don't know, the CoCo had a very cheesy interface that let you use your regular home tape player and audio casettes as a storage medium. Unfortunately, the results were (as you'd expect) really poor. Whenever you wrote a program that you wanted to keep, you always had to make at least 10 copies onto the damn tape because you knew that they were going to degrade like anyting and that way you had a chance to recover one copy and make 10 more.
If you actually read the article instead of just the headline, it turns out that this is much less sinister than it sounds. The proposal is actually that goods manufactured outside the EU that are ordered over the web should be charged VAT, which is perfectly reasonable. Otherwise, non-EU manufacturers selling over the web would have a substantial advantage over all EU manufacturers and non-EU people selling through every other channel. This is not some special tax that applies only to web users; it's applying a tax that everyone else already has to pay to web users, who weren't paying it already. IOW it's just leveling the playing field.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this is that there are both legitimate and illegitimate reasons to want that info. Sure it's great that you can automatically give people a bogus address and watch them waste their money junkmailing non-existent addresses. Unfortunately, the on-line retailers are going to be asking for the same information, so that book you just bought from Amazon.com is going to be sent to the same bogus address.
I suppose that there are practical solutions to this problem, but it still is a problem. You could, for instance, have two browsers and only fire up the one with genuine info when you actually wanted to buy something. Or, for that matter, a really smart browser could have the option of deliberately feeding bogus info to sites that you don't like the privacy policies of, rather than simply not letting you access them at all. Actually, that last one seems like a great idea for a free software project ...
No, they're saving that for their new version of English with proprietary extensions. They're supposedly working on a new part of speech that will only work on Windows.
There's a small amount of truth to that, but not really. The point is that ESR is just one person, so when you listen to him, you're getting the voice of just one person. He may claim to talk for the community, but he's still just one person. If you really want to know what the community as a whole thinks, you should go to a place where you can hear more than one voice. Discussions on Slashdot certainly have more than one voice, so you're at least listening to a breadth of opinions, rather than just one. Does Slashdot necessarily represent an accurate cross-section of the hacker community? I don't know, but I don't see how it could be less accurate than listening to one person who claims to speak for the group as a whole.
Let's see. We have a new product from Microsoft that:
It's the whole Microsoft strategy in a bottle again. I guess that their attempts to embrace and extend Java aren't working, so now their offering their Windows-only clone instead.
These statements are, at least to some extent, contradictory. It's clear from anyone who's listened to them that ESR and RMS have some very, very different opinions on various matters, particularly WRT the government's anti-trust suit against Microsoft (which ESR made a big issue of in his talk). This, in itself, is evidence that ESR does not necessarily represent what most hackers think.
IMO if you read the general opinion on Slashdot (which is at least an attempt to listen to the whole community, rather than one self-appointed spokesman), it becomes obvious that on at least some issues ESR represents a small minority opinion. The Microsoft breakup is one good example of this. The opinion on Slashdot seems primarily divided between people who have listened to Microsoft's POV (MS has done nothing wrong and should remain atop the heap) and people who think that the anti-trust suit was a great thing. Comparatively few people have expressed Raymond's view that the anit-trust suit is essentially meaningless (because MS is going down to the power of "Open Source" programming) and a bad thing in the abstract (because the government should butt out).
This seems to be business as usual for the media industry, and for lawyers in general. They don't want anything to be made public because they're afraid that it will make them look stupid. They try to claim protection for everything, even stuff that the judge has specifically told them they can't protect, and hope that people won't realize what they're hiding to know to demand that they make it public. I don't think that they actually think that they'll succeed in keeping this stuff secret, but they just want to stall and force the other side's lawyers to fight a bunch of peripheral stuff about geting depositions and the like rather than building a case. It's nasty, low-down, and, unfortunately, it works well enough that it's going to keep happening until lawyers are actually punished for trying it.
Cool. Then all you need to do is to incorporate mp3's of your voice giving commands to the system into your playlists and things can get really interesting.
This is particularly interesting because Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, loved animals, and couldn't stand to see them hurt. Somehow or other, though, Hitler never makes it onto their list of famous vegetarians that one would wish to emulate. Could this have something to do with it undermining their view that people who treat animals well will necessarily want to treat people well, too?
The big deal is that there isn't a big deal. The reason that wired phones are so cheap in the U.S. and Europe is that the investment in infrastructure is already amortized, so you're only paying a small marginal cost. In many less developed countries, though, there's not this big existing wire network that it's easy to tap into, so in many cases the lower capital cost of wireless makes it cheaper than getting a land line. Since it's cheaper and more convenient, deciding on a celular is a no-brainer.
This is exactly the kind of think that could be very useful in impeaching his credibility as a witness if and when this thing goes to trial. Just having him read one version of the truth as from the editorial and then the other version from his deposition can make a guy like this look very stupid and dishonest. Will it be vital for the success of the case? Probably not. Will it be one more element that will help? Maybe so.
This might be harder than you think. There's some reason to think that Martian and Earth life developed once and was transported between planets, so there should be some similarity. OTOH, that's going to be pretty slight, since it happened billions of years ago, while even rapidly mutating bacteria couldn't change that much in less than a century.
Actually, sterilizing a space probe is pretty tough, but being really sure that it's been completely sterlized is much harder. To sterilize it, you just sterilize each piece independently and assemble them in a sterile environment. To detect any bacteria that are living on the things can be quite difficult. A couple of people in my group at work are actually collaborating with the people at JPL on approaches to confirming that the spacecraft are actually sterilized. The head of the group over at JPL has a cool title (I can't remember it exactly) like "Chief of Planetary Protection". They just got done presenting on the topic at the meeting of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry.
It's certainly possible. There's been a fair bit of serious discussion that part of the reason that life started as rapidly as it did on Earth (basically about as soon as it could survive at all) because it was seeded with amino acids and stuff from comets. Those comets obviously coalesced from the same nebula that the solar system did, and thus the material in them antedates the solar system.
But there's a big difference between picking up organic matter from outer space and actually picking up living organisms! That organic matter was probably randomly distributed between the handedness of various asymetrical biomolecules. That means that the "choices" made by Earth life (i.e. left handed amino acids and right handed sugars) were just random. Deeper details, like the number and identity of DNA bases, amino acids, etc. could be radically different and still support viable life.
In contrast, life transported from one planet to another would not just retain its choices about which handedness of molecules to use, but also a host of other things. Some of those things include the basic structure of the cell, translation tables to convert DNA sequences to protein sequences, and even some amount of the sequence of highly conserved portions of the genome. Believe it or not, you could probably find actual genetic links between the Human genome and the genome of Martian bacteria if, in fact, they came from a common origin!
Actually, this is not correct. We know that the Earth and Mars are capable of exchanging meteorites; we've found Martian ones here on Earth. It also turns out that such meteorites would not necessarily be sterilized by the heat involved in blasting them out of one planet and re-entering the atomosphere of another(!) and that bacteria could very easily survive being freeze dried and floating through interplanetary space for a few thousand years.
That means that the early Earth and early Mars were not biologically isolated. In fact, if we find life on Mars (or traces of extinct life) it's quite likely to be similar to life on Earth, at least to the extent of having the basic biological features (i.e. DNA, proteins, sugars, cell membranes, etc.) in common. This is because it's actually more likely that life started once on one of the two planets and was transported to the other than that it developed independently on both planets.
There is such a solution. It's called letting the company that thinks its copyright has been infringed go after the people who are infringing. This is the solution that worked for generations before digital copying became possible, and it's actually the approach that seems to be having a decent degree of success in stopping digital copyright infringement today.
Take a look, for instance, at the Metallica vs. Napster affair; Metallica asks Napster to shut down people who are infringing copyright, Napster does so, and now a lawsuit decides whether the shut down has to continue. This works. In order for a group to infringe enough to do serious damage to a a big software company like Microsoft, they need a large organization that can be tracked down and gone after legally. In fact, when Microsoft complains about the cost of "pirating" of their software, it's almost always complaining about well organized groups that are stamping their own CD's, making bogus Microsoft holograms, and the whole works.
That's why the whole prior restaint (i.e. access controls) aspect of the DMCA is so odious. People are essentially assumed to be infringers before they ever lay hands on the product, and are denied their fair use rights because it's the easiest way of keeping them from non-fair use copying.
Except that it didn't really happen quite that way. It wasn't for about 100 years after the Industrial Revolution started that as much as 50% of the population moved to cities. In fact it wasn't the 1810's and 1820's when people were really building towns, as you'd expect if the Industrial Revolution were as rapid as you present it. The big surge in town building (in both America and Europe) came in the 1880's, which is why so many American towns and cities have a downtown with Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield Streets.
Sure, but the timescale you're talking about is still too short. The time it took to truly industrialize was significantly longer than an average lifespan. Even considering that, the changes in our lifestyle are fairly significant; things like ubiquitous mobile communications, telecommuting, and internet shopping are having a significant social impact. Then there's the extent to which digital media are already redefining the concept of intellectual property, viz Napster, the GPL, and the DMCA. Not to mention the ongoing overthrow of conventional fixed format news and entertainment media. None of these things are complete yet, by any means, but they have the potential to create as broad a social change, if not such an upheaval in actual living arrangements, as the Industrial Revolution.
I think that's a bit of an overstatement. In the US, for instance, issues of racial justice are less significant than they were 20 years ago (though they're still important) and economic justice is much more significant. The environment is drastically more important than it was, and people have come much close to a consensus on the idea that it really is an issue. Ronald Reagan and his gang genuinely didn't believe that environmental harm on a global scale was possible, but today even the strongest opponents of environmentalism have to couch their arguments in economic terms rather than denying the existence of the problem. Globalization is clearly a much bigger topic than it was, too.
This is significantly wrong. For many of those people in China, India, Africa, etc., Industrialization has yet to make a big impact. They're still farming in much the same way that their ancestors did, with little benefit from industrialization.
Well, that depends on what you're asking for. If you just want to preserve the structure of the document (i.e. alignment, line spacing, margins, etc.) then my impression is that current converters do pretty well. The problem is that some people expect for the document to look exactly the same, as it would if it were being rendered by PageMaker or Acrobat.
In fact, though, to do that would essentially require that the renderer be bug compatible with Word. This is A) undesirable because it means rendering bugs correctly, B) impossible because there are several versions of Word with subtle and not-so-subtle differences, and C) impossible because it is observed fact that the same version of Word renders documents slightly differently on different computers, etc. In short, the problem that most people are complaining about isn't with the difficulty of dealing with niggling problems with fancy features, but with unreasonable expectations for what the program can and should be doing.
Do you really think that massive, geographically distributed, tightly integrated megacorps could exist without modern digital communications?
This is misleading for a large number of reasons. One is that the questions about productivity are primarily aimed at whether or not investment in desktop computers has improved office productivity. This is both a much narrower question than the impact of computers in general (which is clearly positive; take a look at automation in manufacturing) and a harder question to answer because office productivity is very hard to measure. If computer technology allows me to create better written reports (because I can edit more easily) with easier to understand figures (because of graphics software) in the same length of time it used to take to do things the old way, has my productivity increased? I think it has, because my product is more valuable, but that's not going to show up in any conventional measure of productivity.
The issue of quality is actually a deep problem with many measures of productivity. A car today costs a lot more than a car did 10 years ago (even taking the CPI into account) but they're not directly comprable. The modern car is quieter, safer, more comfortable, less poluting, and has better performance and more features- and a lot of that is attributable to increased use of digital computers both directly and in the design and construction of the car. Without taking that qualitative factor into account, though, it looks as though cars production hasn't gained much in productivity. In fact, manufacturers today could build a car to the standards of a decade ago for a lot less, indicating a big jump in productivity- much of it computer driven.
The big thing to consider is the extent to which the digital revolution is necessary for those other revolutions. Sequencing the Human Genome is going to have a huge impact on biology and medicine, and it would be completely impossible without digital computers. It's just not possible to deal with as much data as is a genome any other way, much less the much large ammount of data that is generated in producing that genome. Lincoln Stein, a leading bioinformaticist and Perl hacker, has estimated that it will require about 1 TB of total data to generate the roughly 1 GB human genome.
The same thing is obviously true of a lot of other potential revolutions. If the first practical nanotech devices (if there ever is such a thing) aren't designed on digital computers, I'll eat my hat. An it's not just future developments that depend on digital media. A lot of those older technologies that have been so revolutionary, like cars, trains, the electrical grid, mass-media, modern medicine, etc., may not have depended on computers originally but they do today and it would be almost impossible to go back.
Just to pick cars as an example, every mass-market car being designed and built today was designed, at least in part, on a computer. All modern cars are built on assembly lines that make heavy use of computer driven robotics. They depend on parts that are delivered by computer dependent just-in-time delivery systems, and they rely on so many on-board computers that they have to be extensively tested for negative effects caused by RF interference. Almost nobody would be willing to buy the best car that could be made without any use of computers because it would be so much more expensive and much lower quality than those that make extensive use of computers.
The problem isn't that the digital revolution isn't that great, it's that genuine revolutions take a lot longer than most people appreciate. It's easy to look at how much difference things like electricity and running water make in our lives and describe them as revolutionary, but they probably seemed pretty weak to the people who experienced the change. That's because it took a long time for the real imact to be felt.
Take cars as an example. The first primitive automobiles were built in the late 19th century, but didn't have much impact because they were just rich mens' playthings. It wasn't until the 1920's that even the most forward thinking communities really started planning themselves around the revolutionary changes in lifestyle that the automobile made possible, and most cities didn't really start to reorganize until after WWII. That's something like 70 years between first invention and really dramatic public impact.
The same thing is true of just about every big invention/discovery. It took 40+ years between Relativity and its first practical application (unfortunately a nasty one). It's almost 50 years since the structure of DNA was discovered, and the big changes that's going to bring us are clearly still in the future. It shouldn't be surprising that nearly 60 years after the first computer we're still not really fully into the computer age.
That being said, I think that it's easy to underestimate the importance of computers, particularly for older people who didn't grow up with them. People in the Slashdot generation, though, use computers very differently from the older generation, and they play a much bigger role in our lives. Why? Because we grew up with them and the radical things that they can do. That's the way it is with a lot of revolutions; the older generation never fully adopts the changes, and it isn't until they die off that the full impact is felt.
And arguably in both cases this is because people are asking the program/format to do more than it was ever intended to. Both html browsers and word processors were originally intended to format documents dynamically and squish them into shape using some fairly general parameters of window/page size, font, etc. The problem is that people are now turning around and trying to use both as detailed page description formats that place each letter or object precisely on the screen. Given the underlying assumptions of the renderer, it shouldn't be surprising that this doesn't work right. If you really want to fix the words onto the page, use a desktop publishing program or convert to PDF.
I don't know. I find that real comments from real code can be tremendously amusing. One of my all time favorites was:
What person that's worked to modify someone else's code hasn't felt that way at one time or another?
Absolutely. I actually started using the thing back when it was new, and I was so much cooler than any of the other second graders because I knew how to use a computer and they didn't. It wasn't a CoCo1, because nobody had thought that there was going to be a CoCo2 yet. I remember how exciting it was when we upgraded from 4 kB and Color Basic to 16 kB and Extended Color Basic.
The old CoCo tape "drive" also taught me the importance of backing up vital data. For those who don't know, the CoCo had a very cheesy interface that let you use your regular home tape player and audio casettes as a storage medium. Unfortunately, the results were (as you'd expect) really poor. Whenever you wrote a program that you wanted to keep, you always had to make at least 10 copies onto the damn tape because you knew that they were going to degrade like anyting and that way you had a chance to recover one copy and make 10 more.
And that, my friend, is what grep(1) is for.
If you actually read the article instead of just the headline, it turns out that this is much less sinister than it sounds. The proposal is actually that goods manufactured outside the EU that are ordered over the web should be charged VAT, which is perfectly reasonable. Otherwise, non-EU manufacturers selling over the web would have a substantial advantage over all EU manufacturers and non-EU people selling through every other channel. This is not some special tax that applies only to web users; it's applying a tax that everyone else already has to pay to web users, who weren't paying it already. IOW it's just leveling the playing field.