That's true. Taxing based on "assesed worth" is a different plan, similar to the old Henry George single tax on unimproved land, and motivated by the same reasons.
So, what's the assessed value of the linux kernel, and who is responsible for the tax?
If the assessed value is $0, then there are no damages when SCO, Linksys, or other companies infringe the license. If the assessed value is anywhere near the actual value to users, then who's liable for the billions of dollars in taxes?
The easy part first: there are two observables per photon, the horizontal polarization axis and the vertical polarization axis. Alice sends four types of photons: vertical (1,0); horizontal (0,1); diagonal (sqrt(2)/2,sqrt(2)/2); other diagonal (sqrt(2)/2,-sqrt(2)/2). One of the points of QKD is that when Bob chooses an axis to measure on, half the photons line up with that axis and are measured deterministically, but half of the photons are slantwise to the axis that Bob chose for that photon, so they come out as random gunk. For example, Alice sends a diagonal (sqrt(2)/2, sqrt(2)/2) photon, but Bob uses a (1/0) axis. Bob has a 50% chance of seeing a "vertical" and 50% chance of seeing "horizontal".
The hard part: what if Eve takes the photon and sends it through two detectors in parallel? That's really where I don't understand the nitty gritty, either. I suspect that when Eve sends the photon through two detectors in parallel, the two parts of the photon are entangled, so that a measurement on the vertical/horizontal detector ruins (randomizes) the measurement on the diagonal-diagonal detector. But I don't really understand entanglement at all.
Perhaps someone who is fluent and bra and ket notation could tackle this?
There are two dimensions of "original alignment", represented by non-commutative operators. Any attempt to extract precise information about one dimension will fuzz out the other dimension, and vice versa. This includes systems of multiple detectors.
Put it this way: suppose you had a bunch of position detectors, and a bunch of momentum detectors, and you combined them somehow. Do you think you could beat the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that way? I doubt it.
It's like trying to build a perpetual motion machine. The laws of thermodynamics are very general and don't tell us how any specific machine cannot generate energy for free, but they do indicate that every machine must fail to produce free energy. It would require extraordinary evidence from an actual machine to upset those laws.
Similarly, the laws of observables in QM prevent two observables from being measured with high precision if the operators for those observables do not commute. The onus is on a challenger to produce a machine that simultaneously measures two such observables with high precision. It will take a lot more than "hey, let's glue N detectors together" to upset such a well-tested physical theory.
I agree with the general drift of your predictions. Some thoughts:
AFAIK, all the QC machines are point-to-point devices, and I don't see any obvious way to make relays and gateways out of them. So it's not like you can do QC-over-IP tunnels. And with point-to-point devices, the government can do traffic analysis (if you're talking Mohammad Atta's ex-roommate regularly, who cares what you're saying, you get heightened surveillance and maybe disappear without trial for interrogation).
There are already plenty of technological devices which are illegal for citizens to possess or that require stringent licenses to possess: weapons and drugs, for example. QC tranceivers may be regulated this way.
More government-mandated back doors. The NSA comprised a Swiss company, CryptoAG, and placed backdoors in their crypto. Perhaps they've also compromised Microsoft and Apple. On this level, open source operating systems are a radical paradigm shift, as they are much harder to backdoor. I've got a bit of a tinfoil hat streak, and I expect that the government has already backdoored most of the ISP's in the country (DCS-1000 just for starters), which enables them to do traffic analysis even when they can't read the content.
On the political level, remember that NSA has another mission: to provide secure cryptography for American government agencies and companies. It's in American interests if American organizations can communicate securely without eavesdropping by foreign organizations. So they might welcome some forms of QC, just as they distribute SE Linux and help IBM make their crypto more secure.
Lastly, note how fast and smooth and transparently strong crypto got deployed for e-commerce, because there are lots of $$$ to be made; but encrypted e-mail is still a hodge-podge of mailers and standards.
A detector is a physical object that interacts with the target object. For example, if you want to measure how long something is, you lay it next to a ruler and look at it. However, to see the object next to the ruler, light must be coming off it, which means that light must be interacting with it.
Think of how you would measure the speed of a bullet: with a series of cameras, maybe. The only way the cameras can see the bullet is if photons are bouncing off the bullet, knocking the bullet around.
If you want to measure properties of a photon, the photon has to interact with the detector. The more precisely that you measure a property, the more interaction you have to do, and the more effect on the target object you have.
At this point you can try: "well I'll just build a more ingenious detector that has less and less disturbance on the target particle", but it turns out there are limits. The Uncertainty Principles are all about those limits. If you have a target system of a given mass, and want to measure its velocity to X% or better, then you must disturb its position for Y% or more. You can't ever measure both properties with arbitrarily good precision.
In C++ terms, there are no detectors which are really const methods.
Here's how I think about it as a computer programmer. Newtonian+Maxwell physics are like C data structures, where every member is public, and an experimenter can 'get' and 'set' arbitrary values. But quantum objects are like O-O objects: the internals are private; the objects have methods; and you can only use the methods; and there are no raw "set" and "get" methods!
So consider an electron with a 'measure_position' method and a 'measure_momentum' method. Calling e1.measure_position() affects the internal state of the electron (there are no const methods in nature -- everything you do to measure an object affects the object).
QC is based on the construction of quantum objects where there is no set of method calls that are sufficient to create a second object which is indistinguishable from the first one. In the Newtonian universe, you just memcpy() more objects, but in the quantum world, there is no memcpy() -- there are only the object methods found in nature.
The proposed tax is on the activity of selling copies of copyrighted works. When a publisher sells a copyrighted work, they will pay more tax than they do now. When a publisher leaves their work in the vault, they will not pay any more tax than they do now.
This will cause publishers to release less material, because the expenses of each release will be higher. Some releases will no longer be profitable, so they will not happen.
The same situation already happened in the American book industry in the 1980's. The tax law changed so that publishers could not deduct their expenses for books that they had printed but not yet sold. As a result, they published fewer titles, and printed less copies of the titles that they did publish.
As for removing copyright protection from works which are no longer being sold by the original owner: that's SCO's argument. Really. "Those guys aren't selling their product, so it's public domain now, and we should be able to do whatever we want with it, without obeying any license."
The fees for different types of business activities (and non-business activities) are indeed different.
However, we're talking about an income tax based on income from different activities, not business license fees. If you want to change the copyright license fee structure (say, $20 per decade per copyrighted work), that's okay by me. But if you want to make the fee a percentage of the income from the work, then you run into fairness problems and accounting problems, treating different kinds of income differently.
Plus, as I've pointed out, if the fee is based on net income from the copyrighted property, that gives LESS incentive, not more, for copyright owners to open up the vaults and re-issue old work.
That's true, you did say 'non-profit'. I missed that part. That does weaken my counter-argument.
But still, non-profit GPL violations would become 'decriminalised'. So if Microsoft picks up big hunks of code from Open Office and incorporates them in some free-as-in-beer software, without offering source, that would be decriminalized.
And the SCO Group could freely offer samba, perl, and gcc on their web site without offering source code. As long as they are giving away binaries for free, that would still be a non-profit activity. If you want to say that no profit-making company can engage in non-profit activities -- no problem, SCO simply contributes money and engineering talent to the SCO Skunkworks Foundation, whose charter is to publish useful programs for SCO UnixWare. SCO Skunkworks Foundation would be a legitimate non-profit organization that runs a free-as-in-beer web site, and they would NOT be bound by the GPL or any other license, as long as they republish software such as samba, gcc, and perl.
I choose the GPL for my work and that's why I'm so strongly opposed to people who want to strip the copyright protection from MY work. Anyone that uses my work is legally bound by the (very generous) license, and I want to keep it that way.
Consider Disney and Pinnichio. Right now, stipulate that it's sitting in a vault, earning $0 in income. (If not the case for Pinocchio, then consider another film).
If Disney gets it out of the vault, they can make $X million in gross revenue, with $C million in costs. It's the judgement of Disney's management that $X is less than $C. If $X were more than $C then Disney, profit-maximizing corporation that they are, would distribute Pinocchio and make a profit of ($X-$C) that way.
Your proposal is to increase $C by adding another tax to income from copyrighted materials. That makes Disney MORE likely to keep Pinocchio in the vault (no revenue, no expenses), rather than take it out of the vault (same revenue, increased expenses).
Oh, and what is the "fair market value" of 20 million copies of the Linux kernel which contain my copyrighted material? Do you want me to pay tax on that every year? It's a tiny amount of material, to be sure, but I do own the copyright on it.
And then the next time a company such as Linksys ships a product based on GPL'd software in violation of the license, all they have to do is prove that the "I" was low, and all those GPL'd works become public domain.
The original poster's proposal is to increase the tax on income from copyrighted works. An additional income tax would have no effect on properties that are not producing any income. So there would be no incentive for the owner of such a copyright to release it to the public domain.
If you want to increase the copyright registration fee, or require renewals at more frequent intervals, that is different. But that's not what the original poster proposed, is it?
So if you make $1000 by selling copies of your music, and I make $1000 by running a restaurant, do you think your $1000 of income should be taxed differently than mine?
I wrote an omniscient debugger for Linux programs in 1995 (I wish I had thought of a cool name like 'omniscient', though).
The debugger works by capturing all the system calls in the inferior program. When you think about it, most of the instructions in the inferior program are deterministic -- given the same machine state on input, they produce the same machine state on output. These instructions can be replayed with no overhead.
The major interesting instructions are system calls. A system call will produce different changes in inferior state each time it is run. (Think of the results of gettimeofday(), or read()). So I wrote something like strace that hooked all the system calls and recorded all of their memory effects and return values.
So with a copy of the original program and a copy of the log file, one could replay the execution of the inferior program, on the same machine or on a *different* machine. Trace on the end-user's machine; mail the files to the developer; replay on the developer's machine!
The next step is to connect a debugger to the replay'ing program. I did this by running a debugger (gdb) in another sandbox where I filtered all of its system calls. When gdb calls ptrace(), I feed it appropriate values from the replay-inferior process. So gdb (or any other debugger) thinks it is interacting with the replay'ing process, without any changes needed to gdb. Things I never implemented: ELF shared libraries; signals; shared memory; non-deterministic instructions such as the cpu-id instruction and hardware random number generator.
At this point the project is pretty defunct, but I may retun to it someday. It might have some value as 'prior art' in case anyone tries to patent this technique. The code is available at mec-0.3.tar.gz.
I think the idea "understanding God's creation is an act of respect for God" is a 17th century idea, not a Renaissance idea. I read a book about the history of science -- damn, can't remember the author or title at all -- which talked about this idea quite a bit.
I do agree that educated people in Columbus's time knew that the earth was round. For evidence, see Dante's "Purgatoria", published about 100 years before Columbus. Dante liked to put big lumps of astronomy into his work sometimes, and he has the narrator and Virgil emerge from the Earth at an antipodal point from where the narrator lives before ascending the mountain of Purgatory.
The question about Columbus's journey was how big the earth was. My recollection is that Columbus claimed a circumference of 15,000 miles or so, which meant he could get to India pretty easily. Columbus turned out to be wrong about that (and the ancient Greeks were much more accurate).
Lastly, the author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was Washington Irving. I didn't know he had anything to do with the "middle ages == stupid" meme.
Open source is based on colloboration and sharing, like western science.
500 years of colloboration and sharing in chemistry and physics didn't stop military engineers from using scientific knowledge to create bigger and better weapons.
Linux, as part of OSS... definitely has a sort of liberal global peace vibe infusing it...
Yeah, and Mendeleev invented the periodic table. And the Germans were the powerhouse of organic chemistry. But that didn't affect the foreign policies of their respective nations.
Many, many systems exhibit complex behavior from simple rules.
For instance, a computer program follows its programming. And yet, we programmers spend a lot of time debugging.
Check out John Horton Conway's game of "Life", a simple cellular automaton. Then think about simple questions, such as: is there an initial "life" pattern whose population grows without bounds, or not?
For a more pure example, look up the Collatz problem (the "3n+1" problem), which is still unsolved. For a more real-world example, start with these laws: newton's laws + maxwell's laws + schroedinger's equation; add in the simple elementary particles (protons neutrons electrons photons); and build a self-replicating system (a unicellular organism).
An Asimov-style robot might have billions of lines of code in its head. Just because you have a copy of all those lines of code doesn't mean that you can predict what the robot will do.
The only reason the call centers make money handling calls is that the government taxes every legitimate phone user to pay for this service.
So I'm paying taxes on my landline and my cell phone to run call centers where 80% of the volume is Nigerian scammers. And so are you.
Repeal the taxes and let the deaf people pay to access the IP call center. Or, if that's too free-market for you, then repeal *half* the taxes and let the deaf pay for *half* the service. Also add some authentication so that nobody can use this service that *we* pay for unless (a) they are a US resident and (b) they have a doctor's note that they are, in fact, deaf.
Man, I'm getting a lot of mileage out of this information today.
Competing companies can already sue for anti-trust violations. In fact, one company did. This company bought the rights to DR-DOS, then sued Microsoft for anti-competitive actions against DR-DOS (such as making Windows beta releases refuse to run on DR-DOS). The little company won a settlement of $150 million from Microsoft.
Google for "Microsoft Caldera Settlement", I'm too lazy to type in another link.
First there are resource allocation problems. The OS has to provide a sandbox with strict limits on all resources: memory, filesystem, and networking, as well as CPU time. It's fine with me if the "background compute demon" takes 25% of my processor but I don't want to take more than 10% of my memory.
Then there's the security issue.
But I see another problem which is even harder to solve: the tragedy of the commons. Consider a university campus, and suppose that anyone on campus can submit jobs to the Campus Grid. You come in the next morning and see that there are 10000 jobs in your grid queue, and 9800 of them are encoding random people's MP3's.
The problem is that if you give free resources to a large anonymous community, it takes only a few of those people to suck up all the resources. So you need some way of identifying everyone who submits a job, and some way of charging for the jobs.
(1) Open source software. How much was available in 1979? Could you run a small business on it? (2) Cell phones, obviously. (3) Digital music, digital photographs, and the tools so that nearly anyone can make more copies of their own or other people's work. (4) Overnight package delivery. (5) E-mail, fax, and cheap long distance phones.
At this point, someone pipes up and says that a few elite people in 1979 had limited access to primitive versions of these things (such as e-mail). There's a big difference between Eric Allman and Vint Cerf having e-mail connectivity and 100,000,000 people having routine, cheap e-mail connectivity. In other words, you have to use the same criteria for 1979 and 2004.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true. Taxing based on "assesed worth" is a different plan, similar to the old Henry George single tax on unimproved land, and motivated by the same reasons.
So, what's the assessed value of the linux kernel, and who is responsible for the tax?
If the assessed value is $0, then there are no damages when SCO, Linksys, or other companies infringe the license. If the assessed value is anywhere near the actual value to users, then who's liable for the billions of dollars in taxes?
The easy part first: there are two observables per photon, the horizontal polarization axis and the vertical polarization axis. Alice sends four types of photons: vertical (1,0); horizontal (0,1); diagonal (sqrt(2)/2,sqrt(2)/2); other diagonal (sqrt(2)/2,-sqrt(2)/2). One of the points of QKD is that when Bob chooses an axis to measure on, half the photons line up with that axis and are measured deterministically, but half of the photons are slantwise to the axis that Bob chose for that photon, so they come out as random gunk.
For example, Alice sends a diagonal (sqrt(2)/2, sqrt(2)/2) photon, but Bob uses a (1/0) axis. Bob has a 50% chance of seeing a "vertical" and 50% chance of seeing "horizontal".
The hard part: what if Eve takes the photon and sends it through two detectors in parallel? That's really where I don't understand the nitty gritty, either. I suspect that when Eve sends the photon through two detectors in parallel, the two parts of the photon are entangled, so that a measurement on the vertical/horizontal detector ruins (randomizes) the measurement on the diagonal-diagonal detector. But I don't really understand entanglement at all.
Perhaps someone who is fluent and bra and ket notation could tackle this?
There are two dimensions of "original alignment", represented by non-commutative operators. Any attempt to extract precise information about one dimension will fuzz out the other dimension, and vice versa. This includes systems of multiple detectors.
Put it this way: suppose you had a bunch of position detectors, and a bunch of momentum detectors, and you combined them somehow. Do you think you could beat the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that way? I doubt it.
It's like trying to build a perpetual motion machine. The laws of thermodynamics are very general and don't tell us how any specific machine cannot generate energy for free, but they do indicate that every machine must fail to produce free energy. It would require extraordinary evidence from an actual machine to upset those laws.
Similarly, the laws of observables in QM prevent two observables from being measured with high precision if the operators for those observables do not commute. The onus is on a challenger to produce a machine that simultaneously measures two such observables with high precision. It will take a lot more than "hey, let's glue N detectors together" to upset such a well-tested physical theory.
I agree with the general drift of your predictions. Some thoughts:
AFAIK, all the QC machines are point-to-point devices, and I don't see any obvious way to make relays and gateways out of them. So it's not like you can do QC-over-IP tunnels. And with point-to-point devices, the government can do traffic analysis (if you're talking Mohammad Atta's ex-roommate regularly, who cares what you're saying, you get heightened surveillance and maybe disappear without trial for interrogation).
There are already plenty of technological devices which are illegal for citizens to possess or that require stringent licenses to possess: weapons and drugs, for example. QC tranceivers may be regulated this way.
More government-mandated back doors. The NSA comprised a Swiss company, CryptoAG, and placed backdoors in their crypto. Perhaps they've also compromised Microsoft and Apple. On this level, open source operating systems are a radical paradigm shift, as they are much harder to backdoor. I've got a bit of a tinfoil hat streak, and I expect that the government has already backdoored most of the ISP's in the country (DCS-1000 just for starters), which enables them to do traffic analysis even when they can't read the content.
On the political level, remember that NSA has another mission: to provide secure cryptography for American government agencies and companies. It's in American interests if American organizations can communicate securely without eavesdropping by foreign organizations. So they might welcome some forms of QC, just as they distribute SE Linux and help IBM make their crypto more secure.
Lastly, note how fast and smooth and transparently strong crypto got deployed for e-commerce, because there are lots of $$$ to be made; but encrypted e-mail is still a hodge-podge of mailers and standards.
What is a detector?
A detector is a physical object that interacts with the target object. For example, if you want to measure how long something is, you lay it next to a ruler and look at it. However, to see the object next to the ruler, light must be coming off it, which means that light must be interacting with it.
Think of how you would measure the speed of a bullet: with a series of cameras, maybe. The only way the cameras can see the bullet is if photons are bouncing off the bullet, knocking the bullet around.
If you want to measure properties of a photon, the photon has to interact with the detector. The more precisely that you measure a property, the more interaction you have to do, and the more effect on the target object you have.
At this point you can try: "well I'll just build a more ingenious detector that has less and less disturbance on the target particle", but it turns out there are limits. The Uncertainty Principles are all about those limits. If you have a target system of a given mass, and want to measure its velocity to X% or better, then you must disturb its position for Y% or more. You can't ever measure both properties with arbitrarily good precision.
In C++ terms, there are no detectors which are really const methods.
That's essentially correct: there is more information inside a quantum system than anybody can measure.
Quantum Cryptography: Privacy Through Uncertainty
Here's how I think about it as a computer programmer. Newtonian+Maxwell physics are like C data structures, where every member is public, and an experimenter can 'get' and 'set' arbitrary values. But quantum objects are like O-O objects: the internals are private; the objects have methods; and you can only use the methods; and there are no raw "set" and "get" methods!
So consider an electron with a 'measure_position' method and a 'measure_momentum' method. Calling e1.measure_position() affects the internal state of the electron (there are no const methods in nature -- everything you do to measure an object affects the object).
QC is based on the construction of quantum objects where there is no set of method calls that are sufficient to create a second object which is indistinguishable from the first one. In the Newtonian universe, you just memcpy() more objects, but in the quantum world, there is no memcpy() -- there are only the object methods found in nature.
Boy, do you not get it.
The proposed tax is on the activity of selling copies of copyrighted works. When a publisher sells a copyrighted work, they will pay more tax than they do now. When a publisher leaves their work in the vault, they will not pay any more tax than they do now.
This will cause publishers to release less material, because the expenses of each release will be higher. Some releases will no longer be profitable, so they will not happen.
The same situation already happened in the American book industry in the 1980's. The tax law changed so that publishers could not deduct their expenses for books that they had printed but not yet sold. As a result, they published fewer titles, and printed less copies of the titles that they did publish.
As for removing copyright protection from works which are no longer being sold by the original owner: that's SCO's argument. Really. "Those guys aren't selling their product, so it's public domain now, and we should be able to do whatever we want with it, without obeying any license."
The fees for different types of business activities (and non-business activities) are indeed different.
However, we're talking about an income tax based on income from different activities, not business license fees. If you want to change the copyright license fee structure (say, $20 per decade per copyrighted work), that's okay by me. But if you want to make the fee a percentage of the income from the work, then you run into fairness problems and accounting problems, treating different kinds of income differently.
Plus, as I've pointed out, if the fee is based on net income from the copyrighted property, that gives LESS incentive, not more, for copyright owners to open up the vaults and re-issue old work.
That's true, you did say 'non-profit'. I missed that part. That does weaken my counter-argument.
But still, non-profit GPL violations would become 'decriminalised'. So if Microsoft picks up big hunks of code from Open Office and incorporates them in some free-as-in-beer software, without offering source, that would be decriminalized.
And the SCO Group could freely offer samba, perl, and gcc on their web site without offering source code. As long as they are giving away binaries for free, that would still be a non-profit activity. If you want to say that no profit-making company can engage in non-profit activities -- no problem, SCO simply contributes money and engineering talent to the SCO Skunkworks Foundation, whose charter is to publish useful programs for SCO UnixWare. SCO Skunkworks Foundation would be a legitimate non-profit organization that runs a free-as-in-beer web site, and they would NOT be bound by the GPL or any other license, as long as they republish software such as samba, gcc, and perl.
I choose the GPL for my work and that's why I'm so strongly opposed to people who want to strip the copyright protection from MY work. Anyone that uses my work is legally bound by the (very generous) license, and I want to keep it that way.
Consider Disney and Pinnichio. Right now, stipulate that it's sitting in a vault, earning $0 in income. (If not the case for Pinocchio, then consider another film).
If Disney gets it out of the vault, they can make $X million in gross revenue, with $C million in costs. It's the judgement of Disney's management that $X is less than $C. If $X were more than $C then Disney, profit-maximizing corporation that they are, would distribute Pinocchio and make a profit of ($X-$C) that way.
Your proposal is to increase $C by adding another tax to income from copyrighted materials. That makes Disney MORE likely to keep Pinocchio in the vault (no revenue, no expenses), rather than take it out of the vault (same revenue, increased expenses).
Oh, and what is the "fair market value" of 20 million copies of the Linux kernel which contain my copyrighted material? Do you want me to pay tax on that every year? It's a tiny amount of material, to be sure, but I do own the copyright on it.
Just link copyright to "ROI".
And then the next time a company such as Linksys ships a product based on GPL'd software in violation of the license, all they have to do is prove that the "I" was low, and all those GPL'd works become public domain.
The original poster's proposal is to increase the tax on income from copyrighted works. An additional income tax would have no effect on properties that are not producing any income. So there would be no incentive for the owner of such a copyright to release it to the public domain.
If you want to increase the copyright registration fee, or require renewals at more frequent intervals, that is different. But that's not what the original poster proposed, is it?
It's called an 'income tax'.
So if you make $1000 by selling copies of your music, and I make $1000 by running a restaurant, do you think your $1000 of income should be taxed differently than mine?
I wrote an omniscient debugger for Linux programs in 1995 (I wish I had thought of a cool name like 'omniscient', though).
The debugger works by capturing all the system calls in the inferior program. When you think about it, most of the instructions in the inferior program are deterministic -- given the same machine state on input, they produce the same machine state on output. These instructions can be replayed with no overhead.
The major interesting instructions are system calls. A system call will produce different changes in inferior state each time it is run. (Think of the results of gettimeofday(), or read()). So I wrote something like strace that hooked all the system calls and recorded all of their memory effects and return values.
So with a copy of the original program and a copy of the log file, one could replay the execution of the inferior program, on the same machine or on a *different* machine. Trace on the end-user's machine; mail the files to the developer; replay on the developer's machine!
The next step is to connect a debugger to the replay'ing program. I did this by running a debugger (gdb) in another sandbox where I filtered all of its system calls. When gdb calls ptrace(), I feed it appropriate values from the replay-inferior process. So gdb (or any other debugger) thinks it is interacting with the replay'ing process, without any changes needed to gdb.
Things I never implemented: ELF shared libraries; signals; shared memory; non-deterministic instructions such as the cpu-id instruction and hardware random number generator.
At this point the project is pretty defunct, but I may retun to it someday. It might have some value as 'prior art' in case anyone tries to patent this technique. The code is available at mec-0.3.tar.gz.
No, it was something else, not Boorstin. But these Boorstin books look like something I should check out, thanks!
I think the idea "understanding God's creation is an act of respect for God" is a 17th century idea, not a Renaissance idea. I read a book about the history of science -- damn, can't remember the author or title at all -- which talked about this idea quite a bit.
I do agree that educated people in Columbus's time knew that the earth was round. For evidence, see Dante's "Purgatoria", published about 100 years before Columbus. Dante liked to put big lumps of astronomy into his work sometimes, and he has the narrator and Virgil emerge from the Earth at an antipodal point from where the narrator lives before ascending the mountain of Purgatory.
The question about Columbus's journey was how big the earth was. My recollection is that Columbus claimed a circumference of 15,000 miles or so, which meant he could get to India pretty easily. Columbus turned out to be wrong about that (and the ancient Greeks were much more accurate).
Lastly, the author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was Washington Irving. I didn't know he had anything to do with the "middle ages == stupid" meme.
I don't need to present ID when I register, and I don't need to present ID when I vote by absentee ballot.
I also don't need to present ID when I vote. I do have to sign my name on the precinct list, but I don't have to prove that I live in the precinct.
I've heard that that some state elections in the US are now running 50% absentee ballot. The opportunities for fraud amaze me.
Open source is based on colloboration and sharing, like western science.
... definitely has a sort of liberal global peace vibe infusing it ...
500 years of colloboration and sharing in chemistry and physics didn't stop military engineers from using scientific knowledge to create bigger and better weapons.
Linux, as part of OSS
Yeah, and Mendeleev invented the periodic table. And the Germans were the powerhouse of organic chemistry. But that didn't affect the foreign policies of their respective nations.
Many, many systems exhibit complex behavior from simple rules.
For instance, a computer program follows its programming. And yet, we programmers spend a lot of time debugging.
Check out John Horton Conway's game of "Life", a simple cellular automaton. Then think about simple questions, such as: is there an initial "life" pattern whose population grows without bounds, or not?
For a more pure example, look up the Collatz problem (the "3n+1" problem), which is still unsolved. For a more real-world example, start with these laws: newton's laws + maxwell's laws + schroedinger's equation; add in the simple elementary particles (protons neutrons electrons photons); and build a self-replicating system (a unicellular organism).
An Asimov-style robot might have billions of lines of code in its head. Just because you have a copy of all those lines of code doesn't mean that you can predict what the robot will do.
The only reason the call centers make money handling calls is that the government taxes every legitimate phone user to pay for this service.
So I'm paying taxes on my landline and my cell phone to run call centers where 80% of the volume is Nigerian scammers. And so are you.
Repeal the taxes and let the deaf people pay to access the IP call center. Or, if that's too free-market for you, then repeal *half* the taxes and let the deaf pay for *half* the service. Also add some authentication so that nobody can use this service that *we* pay for unless (a) they are a US resident and (b) they have a doctor's note that they are, in fact, deaf.
Man, I'm getting a lot of mileage out of this information today.
Competing companies can already sue for anti-trust violations. In fact, one company did. This company bought the rights to DR-DOS, then sued Microsoft for anti-competitive actions against DR-DOS (such as making Windows beta releases refuse to run on DR-DOS). The little company won a settlement of $150 million from Microsoft.
Google for "Microsoft Caldera Settlement", I'm too lazy to type in another link.
I doubt there's a single company that could handle being dragged through the world's courts by Microsoft, let alone a small one like them.
Caldera International purchased the rights to DR-DOS, then sued Microsoft for the damage that Microsoft had done to DR-DOS.
Caldera settled for an estimated $150 million from Microsoft.
Microsoft settles Caldera Antitrust Case
To be sure, Caldera later turned to the dark side in a big way. They are now suing another software giant.
First there are resource allocation problems. The OS has to provide a sandbox with strict limits on all resources: memory, filesystem, and networking, as well as CPU time. It's fine with me if the "background compute demon" takes 25% of my processor but I don't want to take more than 10% of my memory.
Then there's the security issue.
But I see another problem which is even harder to solve: the tragedy of the commons. Consider a university campus, and suppose that anyone on campus can submit jobs to the Campus Grid. You come in the next morning and see that there are 10000 jobs in your grid queue, and 9800 of them are encoding random people's MP3's.
The problem is that if you give free resources to a large anonymous community, it takes only a few of those people to suck up all the resources. So you need some way of identifying everyone who submits a job, and some way of charging for the jobs.
(1) Open source software. How much was available in 1979? Could you run a small business on it?
(2) Cell phones, obviously.
(3) Digital music, digital photographs, and the tools so that nearly anyone can make more copies of their own or other people's work.
(4) Overnight package delivery.
(5) E-mail, fax, and cheap long distance phones.
At this point, someone pipes up and says that a few elite people in 1979 had limited access to primitive versions of these things (such as e-mail). There's a big difference between Eric Allman and Vint Cerf having e-mail connectivity and 100,000,000 people having routine, cheap e-mail connectivity. In other words, you have to use the same criteria for 1979 and 2004.
I can do 5-7 miles on a good day; it will be a while before I hit marathon levels.
I like Gatorade precisely *because* it tastes like sweat. If I'm not exercising, I'm not at all tempted to drink up my stock!