From what I heard, you're on the right track. Jepsen contributed her display patents to OLPC. She did a lot of important work for them. Criticizing her for going into business seems completely unfair. OLPC is a charitable organization, and is not permitted to compete in the market. For these technologies to take advantage of the market, they need to be developed by a business. This could be very good for them.
How much stronger it looks when in a single week 10,000 people organize themselves in protest based on incomplete information. You can always contact your MP twice - once to say you are concerned about the bill, the second time to oppose it. I'm sure those of us who did write fully intend to follow up when necessary.
And we did know something about the bill. We knew a ban on DRM circumvention technology was in it because the government announced it would implement the WIPO treaty. That in itself is bad enough.
Apparently in the United States it's much more common to control behavior through tort law (lawsuits), while in Canada it's more common to do this through regulation (I am not a lawyer so don't know the correct terms).
As a hypothetical example I'll take food safety. With tort law, victims could sue for contaminated food; the regulatory approach might use inspections and licensing to stop the food from being distributed in the first place.
Each approach has its advantages. Tort law is more flexible and doesn't require enforcement and regulatory bodies. But it requires lots of lawyers, and it's more uncertain: because it's not 100% clear what is permitted and what isn't until a case comes to trial, it can result in people and organizations avoiding activities that might be perfectly legal for fear that they might lose a judgment. An example of this is filmmakers, who won't risk using any derivative material without permission for fear it might fail to quality for Fair Use if sued. Regulation, on the other hand, is more predictable - everyone always knows exactly what the situation is, and it can prevent problems before they happen.
As a Canadian, my instinct is that judicious regulation would be entirely appropriate in this case.
the Japanese people focused on the basics: building the infrastructure (e.g., railroads and public schools), acquiring industrial technology (e.g., transistors from the Americans) to expand its industrial base, etc. . . . Forget laptops.
I believe the proponents of OLPC see aren't thinking in terms of laptops. They see them as a way to provide education, communication infrastructure, and the basis for participating in the world economy - in other words, a means to achieve what Japan did. Maybe they're wrong. But in today's economy, it's much cheaper to build economic capacity through computers than it is through capital investments in machinery. The same may be true of education and technology. In addition, it's much easier for corrupt governments and companies to control expensive equipment and factories than it is to influence large numbers of (relatively) cheap computers.
In order to stop ordinary people from violating copyright, companies have encoded content (particularly music and film) so that it requires special software to access. The software embeds rules determining what access is permitted and what access is not. Unlike copyright, which is interpreted by human beings, these rules are enforced by a machine. This law makes it illegal to circumvent the machine's determination.
But the machine is inflexible. It doesn't know whether it's ok for a student to copy a journal article, for a researcher to look for security or privacy flaws, for a Microsoft customer to play music on an iPod. So the software prevents activities which are otherwise perfectly legitimate and legal. Where copyright grants control over some uses of a work, this technology (DRM) grants control over all uses. And the U.S. version of this law, the DMCA, by banning all circumvention regardless of the purpose, makes that control inviolable.
That's the first problem.
The second problem is that to decode the content, this software must be present in every device that plays it back. It's in your cell phone. It's in your DVD player. It's in your computer. In order for the law to be effective, it forbids you to interfere with the operation of the devices you own. It becomes illegal to unlock your cell phone to use it with a different wireless provider. It becomes illegal to play DVDs on operating systems other than those made by Apple and Microsoft. The only one who can determine what your devices can and can't do is someone else. You lose control of your own property.
But that's not all.
Access must only be given to the right people (companies that make the technology - DVD players, operating systems, etc.) but not to the wrong people (you and me). Who decides? The answer must be a single company or organization. They make the rules about who can play back content - and who can encode content too. You can't publish protected music for the iPod without Apple's permission. You can't make a device to play it back without Apple's permission either. These companies and organizations have tremendous monopoly power. Control of the content requires control of the technology (and of our property), which becomes control of the market.
That control does not lie with artists, authors or musicians. In fact, because the technology is primarily American, it doesn't lie with Canadians at all. This law would place Canadian innovation and Canadian culture in a position of dependency relative to the United States.
That's only the part of the law we know about. There will be more.
Oh yes, I should mention - the copy prevention mechanisms don't work. They might stop you and me from making legitimate use of material, but they don't stop the serious pirates from profiting off someone else's work - after which ordinary folks can use those pirated copies, which, because they are digital, are perfect. This raises the question: are these technologies and laws really meant to stop piracy - are they really meant to benefit creators - or are they intended to consolidate the power of the monopoly and cartel positions of certain publishers and technology companies?
You can find a list of the main actors, plus contact information for members of Parliament and news organizations here (scroll down).
The most important person to contact is your MP. I've heard it's better to get him or her to forward your letter to the minister responsible (Jim Prentice) than it is to send it to Prentice directly. Doing both can't hurt. Paper mail and faxes are the best, though phone calls are good too. Don't forget to contact newspapers big and small. In all cases, be polite and to the point.
You can find your MP's contact information by typing in your postal code here.
If you need sample letters, check out the Facebook group's list. My non-technical explanation of why this is a terrible law is here. I'll quote it in a reply to this post.
I agree with most of what you say, but I believe you are mistaken about payment, and I think FOSS provides a good illustration of why.
what I conclude from this is that the only real answer is to pay people and have competition. Payment offers rewards to people who do not care about power or exclusivity. Competition means that disgruntled customers and competitors go elsewhere, i.e. they can escape from an abusive in group.
Once necessities have been taken care of, social status is probably the greatest motivation for people to make money. Paying contributors doesn't really change that. You are right that not all people crave power or exclusivity. But power is not the only social reward - there are other alternatives besides money. (Exclusivity is itself not a reword, only a way to achieve status.) Reputation does not have to be exclusive. Indeed it requires inclusion - you can't have a reputation all by your lonesome. And it doesn't have to involve negative power dynamics.
Many well-regarded FOSS developers achieved their reputations without power tripping. In this they are constrained, as you suggest, by the choices of participants (the competition you cite is a particular way of achieving this) - in the case of FOSS, forking or the threat of forking constrains projects from degenerating too much. Many projects aren't exclusive either: the whole point of the exercise is to draw in participants. Linus's reputation is largely built on the number of participants in Linux, and on his ability to manage based on consent (which I believe contributes to his reputation).
There are two kinds of gift-giving in cultures in which it is important. In both cases, people try to incur debts by giving gifts. One kind of giving is agonistic (competitive): the objective is to give gifts to people unable to return them, thereby demonstrating dominance over them. The second kind of giving also incurs debts, but it involves exchange. Even though a return gift is given, the slate is not wiped clean - both parties remain somewhat in debt. Social bonds are formed, giving rise to community. I believe most successful FOSS involves the second kind of giving.
Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.
Does that sound like the DMCA to you? Because it doesn't to me. There is tremendous flexibility in how a government might enact such protections. An "adequate" law might simply forbid circumvention of "effective" DRM (is any DRM effective?) for the purpose of copyright infringement. Circumvention for fair use, fair dealing, watching DVDs on Linux, etc. could still be permitted.
But the DMCA went far, far beyond this. We are hearing reports the Canadian law will do likewise. Why? Because the US Amabassador, the US trade representative, the RIAA and Hollywood - all American organizations - have been placing tremendous pressure on Canadian politicians.
If the US ignored an international treaty like this you'd be on here jumping up & down about how evil America & Bush are because they ignore "international law" (a pure BS term by the way). At the same time when Canada just complies with an international treaty you don't like... all of the sudden it's "American Imperialism".
Get a grip. The Berne Convention, mentioned above, was signed in 1886. The United States waited until 1989 to implement it. That's an interval of 103 years, in case you think I made a typo.
Furthermore, it's utterly dishonest to put words in someone's mouth. The person you are responding to criticized Canada for "mirroring American political issues". Not a word about imperialism, international law, or the evil of Bush - not one criticism of the United States. Yet you fabricate a scenario - "If the US ignored an international treaty", and then accuse someone else of whatever response you have concocted for them: "you'd be on here jumping up and down about how evil American & Bush are"). Utterly dishonest.
One of the few bright spots have been the original Curious George books
Hehe. It's interesting you should pick that example. Here's one person's interpretation, which pretty much matches what went through my mind when I reread it as an adult:
A black man, living happily in his African homeland, is tricked by a white man dressed like an English lord. Without asking about his family or his preferences, the white man shackles the black man and takes him on a slave ship to America. In the city, the black man causes a minor bit of trouble and is thrown in prison, where he gets no lawyer and has no rights (think: Guantanamo). At book's end, he is uncaged, but hardly free --- he's the very cliche of the black entertainer, a minstrel who will always grin and shuffle for his white "massuh."
Now don't go criticizing this (or me) without reading context, which makes the whole thing a lot more interesting. Here, for comparison, is that same person's precis of the story itself:
A monkey playing happily in a tree in his African homeland is spotted by a white man in a large yellow hat. The man puts the hat on the ground; George comes down from the tree to try it on. It's too big --- so he doesn't see the white man approach, Next thing George knows, he's been popped in a bag and on a ship bound for America. A few adventures later and the monkey is in New York. At the white man's apartment, he drinks wine, smokes a pipe and wears pajamas. The next morning, he accidentally calls the fire department --- and is put in prison for phoning in a false alarm. He escapes, is reunited with the white man and --- at last --- is brought to the zoo, where he lives happily with other African animals.
That Babar link explains that the children surveyed don't care about whatever deeper significance may or may not be linking in the tales - they simply enjoy the stories. Scholarship has moved a long way from the time when it was believed that the messages people take away from a story are the exact same ones that we put in. It's a pity so many people still think that other people are mindless robots and run around trying to protect children from Alistair Cookie. Instead of protecting them from being checked in and out of the TV as though it were a daycare, and a society that in so many ways encourages this kind of parenting and makes it difficult to do otherwise.
Forking - and even just the threat of forking - can be powerful forces for coordination. Reducing the freedom to fork tends to centralize control and reduce the size of the community for a project, while also restricting potential innovation. From Stephen Weber's The Success of Open Source (pp. 169-170):
Forking, like speciation, is an essential source of variation and ultimately of radical innovation. Too much forking would undermine the open source process in the obvious ways that people worry about all the time - scattered efforts, duplication of work, incompatibilities, and so on. But to _little_ forking (in other words, too much successful coordination) be as dysfunctional in a different way.
Forking helps distribute influence and the freedom to make choices about development (pp. 180-181):
by creating the right to fork code, the open source process transfers a very important source of power from the leader to the followers. The privileges that come with leadership then depend on the continuous renewal of a contingent grant from the community.
So by preventing forking, Google maintains control. The relationship seems to go the other way too - open communities may tend to fork less (p. 160, 227):
The more open a project is and the larger the existing community of developers working on it, the harder it is to attract potential followers to a fork.
One interesting difference between the Linux and BSD worlds is that the Linux kernel (and associated OS core utilities) have never forked, but BSD's has, at least three times. What makes this interesting is that the social structure of the BSD groups is centralized in a way intended to define clear lines of authority and to prevent forking, while the decentralized and amorphous Linux community takes no such measures. It appears that the projects that open up development the most actually have the least tendency to fork!
We have trade agreements with clauses to protect investors. Why can't we add protections for consumers? When something like this happens, the country should be required to take action against those responsible or to provide effective measures for those harmed to do so. Failing such action, the country would be open to retaliation under the agreement. That's just my first thought so it may not be the best approach, but the current situation in which investors are protected and consumers (and others) are not is definitely out of whack. Fat chance it'll be fixed though.
Your criticisms seem to be aimed at HTML and CSS, and at attempts to make up for their failings with Javascript toolkits. What Mozilla is pushing here is significant enhancement to Javascript in order to remedy many of its failings while maintaining backward compatibility. Microsoft, on the other hand, is trying to limit changes to the language. According to Eich, Microsoft is criticizing the ES4 proposal without offering concrete alternatives. Instead, he says, they are developing their own language in secret.
I think Javascript's a pretty good language. Certainly it's not perfect - few languages are. PHP, C++ and Perl spring to mind as being particularly flawed, but they have been indispensable nonetheless. Javascript has a huge installed base of runtimes and many programmers are familiar with it (so there's lots of bad code, which may be why JS has such a bad rep). We know how conservative most developers are about learning new languages (especially ones that don't look like C or BASIC), so there would be a significant cost and risk to trying to switch horses from Javascript to something else. Browser compatibility is another matter altogether - but we know who is causing the trouble there.
Javascript is practical and flexible; the main problems I have encountered are weak support for OO and larger projects - problems the ES4 effort appears to be trying to address. Microsoft's argument is for making minimal changes in favor of some unknown future language. If they really are working on that language in secret, and are able to complete it while Javascript is mired in controversy, the outcome is unlikely to be good for the rest of us.
There are techniques to take some account of these factors. According to the NYT article, the study's author "uses small variations in the lead content of gasoline from state to state to strengthen her argument." So we have: 1) a correlation between violent crime and presence of lead in the environment, 2) support from state-by-state comparisons, 3) lead poisoning is linked to brain damage resulting in violent behaviors. Is that enough? Probably not - but it's suggestive, and with such sensational claims I expect there will be plenty of peer review.
You're also accusing the result of being a "pet theory". It may be. It may be that many or most scientists cheat. But we shouldn't assume - with no evidence whatsoever - that any particular scientist is acting in bad faith. Do that, and we'll find scientists living down to our expectations.
You may find the study "hard to believe", that it could "prove anything you like". If you don't examine the method, your complaint could also be leveled at any study you like. If you want better science, make specific criticisms - unless of course you don't want science at all.
Allow me to quote someone named Carolus on the IMSLP site's forums:
Canada's judicial system is generally very sympathetic to rulings issued by EU magistrates. Ironically, the USA is considerably more resistant (at least in places) to such meddling by judicial ideologues and corporatist cronies who like to impose their rules on people halfway around the world. Other countries with life-plus-50 terms, like South Korea, are not at all likely to abide by EU pontifications. IMSLP has a strong case, but it was by no means guaranteed that Canadian courts would be sympathetic.
The UE threat was probably just the leading edge for a series of legal threats from a consortium of large European publishers. IMSLP has been under discussion as a major threat in the newsletter of a EU publishers' asscoiation - which has been reported in the American Music Publishers Assocation newsletter. (Curiously, most US publishers are either unaware of IMSLP or don't care.)
IMSLP has grown so huge that its administration and management are really beyond the capabilities of a single person plus several trusty and reliable helpers. The time has really come for IMSLP to be re-constituted in a more institutional form, like Gutenberg or Wikipedia, or perhaps taken over by a consortium of music libraries.
Life-plus-70 is no guarantee. As you can see from the list, there are no less than four composers listed in the C & D letter who have been dead for over 70 years. This could have been sheer stupidity and arrogance on UE's part, or these composers could still be protected in Austria by some sort of special provision in that country's copyright law.
This was just one person providing a public service... uh, sorry, competing unfairly with the copyright cartel.
Isn't the problem here that these experts are used to people taking their word, while on wikipedia, they always need a source for every statement?
On the one hand I agree with you: we often give experts more credit than they're worth. But on the other, many experts (certainly most academic ones) are surely quite used to providing citations - more so than most people.
There's a risk that this kind of stereotype about experts turns into a bias against expertise, of the "We're not that stupid up here in Duluth" kind. I've run across a number of claims that there's an anti-expert sentiment on Wikipedia, and while I have no personal experience, many of the anecdotes on in this discussion point in the same direction.
The Internet2 project found that the costs and complexities of implementing quality of service guarantees exceeded the benefits. It was more practical to add sufficient bandwidth than it was to prioritize packets. They also predicted - and other research supports - that QoS would encourage ISPs to deliberately downgrade service in order to charge more.
I'm inclined to agree that we will no more be able to tell what a person is thinking than a computer can understand what they've written. That may not matter: if we think we can know what a person is thinking, then we may act on it anyway. We already are: Ohio Court Admits Lie Detector Tests As Evidence.
No other MMORPG has captured the audience that WoW has. This alone is a reason to study this MMORPG over all others. . . . So yes, WoW deserves to be studied to understand how they could capture and maintain an audience many times over any of the previous MMORPG's.
Although the focus of whoever wrote the article is on the Next Big Thing, this isn't necessarily the top priority for scholars. The study of games is more about people than it is about games themselves. Here's Florence Chee from the article:
I don't believe we are at the point yet where we're going to have 'one game to rule them all,' because we're only beginning to understand the realities of local contexts that may or may not work with the mechanics of certain games culturally, or otherwise. In other words, the game itself cannot do it alone. It must be strongly integrated with a person's 'lifeworld' as a whole.
The connection between the game and the rest of a player's life is important. Are game players better problem solvers? Do they connect more or less with people outside their "tribe"? Do they work well with others? Do they cluster according to social class? Does this have an impact on their participation in the wider society? Are they more likely to be left wing, right wing, extreme, moderate, (un)critical thinkers, politically active or inactive? Does the game reflect their values, or does it influence what they believe and how they see their place in society?
Think of the old question of whether television viewing encourages violence. You probably wouldn't research that by focusing on the most popular show.
Regardless of whether you're interested in one game in particular, other games can provide important evidence. Florence Chee gives a good example in the article when she cites players who refuse to leave City of Heroes for World of Warcraft because they don't want to leave their friends behind. The strength of this attachment in a game less popular than WoW can help explain phenomena within WoW itself.
Oxford isn't selling his work. It's selling access to his work.
Examine the screenshot more carefully. They are not selling access to the article (the PDF is available for free). They are selling the right to use it. For $48, they say, you can republish it in a coursepack for use by 100 students. In other words, they appear to be sublicensing the work for a fee.
The scientist claims this is a violation of Oxford University Press's license to publish his work. He may be mistaken if he provided it to them under a different license. Even so, OUP's action is still wrong. This is like posting a sign on a public water fountain, demanding 25 cents from anyone who takes a drink - it may not be illegal, but it sure isn't honest. Unfortunately that's par for the course with copyright: publishers regularly copy public domain materials, then claim copyright themselves.
Stick with the chemistry, doc! Understanding the law isn't for you
Here we have a law that affects everyone in their everyday lives. That law is so complex that thoughtful people who care about it, like this university professor and cocky Slashotters (like you, and I'm not exempt either) get confused about routine matters. We have an unjust law that's virtually impossible to respect.
creativity is not a group project. It is about the individual.
First... Um... what makes you assume that encouraging creativity should be the main or sole purpose of politics?
Second, uh, free/open source software development is a group project, and it's one of the most successful scalable ways of developing large systems.
Third, since when are geek pursuits (software, engineering, fandom) the only or particularly creative ones - compared, to, say, artistic endeavors like music, painting, architecture, fashion, graphic design, poetry? These things tend to be done by artsy types, who aren't exactly famed for right wing or libertarian political stances.
Fourth, creative activity is similar to technical and scientific innovation in that it is based on the works of others. In many (probably most) cases is not, in fact, done alone - the myth of the "romantic author" who creates something from nothing notwithstanding. Creative people thrive in environments with other creative people. This has been widely documented - for blues musicians, playwrights in Shakespeare's London, Renaissance Florentine painters. Even the success of Silicon Valley over Route 128 has been attributed to social connections and cooperation.
Just to clarify: I'm not disagreeing that geeks are creative, and I believe that creativity is politically important. But your assertion just doesn't hold water.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I heard, you're on the right track. Jepsen contributed her display patents to OLPC. She did a lot of important work for them. Criticizing her for going into business seems completely unfair. OLPC is a charitable organization, and is not permitted to compete in the market. For these technologies to take advantage of the market, they need to be developed by a business. This could be very good for them.
How much stronger it looks when in a single week 10,000 people organize themselves in protest based on incomplete information. You can always contact your MP twice - once to say you are concerned about the bill, the second time to oppose it. I'm sure those of us who did write fully intend to follow up when necessary.
And we did know something about the bill. We knew a ban on DRM circumvention technology was in it because the government announced it would implement the WIPO treaty. That in itself is bad enough.
As a hypothetical example I'll take food safety. With tort law, victims could sue for contaminated food; the regulatory approach might use inspections and licensing to stop the food from being distributed in the first place.
Each approach has its advantages. Tort law is more flexible and doesn't require enforcement and regulatory bodies. But it requires lots of lawyers, and it's more uncertain: because it's not 100% clear what is permitted and what isn't until a case comes to trial, it can result in people and organizations avoiding activities that might be perfectly legal for fear that they might lose a judgment. An example of this is filmmakers, who won't risk using any derivative material without permission for fear it might fail to quality for Fair Use if sued. Regulation, on the other hand, is more predictable - everyone always knows exactly what the situation is, and it can prevent problems before they happen.
As a Canadian, my instinct is that judicious regulation would be entirely appropriate in this case.
I believe the proponents of OLPC see aren't thinking in terms of laptops. They see them as a way to provide education, communication infrastructure, and the basis for participating in the world economy - in other words, a means to achieve what Japan did. Maybe they're wrong. But in today's economy, it's much cheaper to build economic capacity through computers than it is through capital investments in machinery. The same may be true of education and technology. In addition, it's much easier for corrupt governments and companies to control expensive equipment and factories than it is to influence large numbers of (relatively) cheap computers.
You're welcome to use it, as is anyone else.
In order to stop ordinary people from violating copyright, companies have encoded content (particularly music and film) so that it requires special software to access. The software embeds rules determining what access is permitted and what access is not. Unlike copyright, which is interpreted by human beings, these rules are enforced by a machine. This law makes it illegal to circumvent the machine's determination.
But the machine is inflexible. It doesn't know whether it's ok for a student to copy a journal article, for a researcher to look for security or privacy flaws, for a Microsoft customer to play music on an iPod. So the software prevents activities which are otherwise perfectly legitimate and legal. Where copyright grants control over some uses of a work, this technology (DRM) grants control over all uses. And the U.S. version of this law, the DMCA, by banning all circumvention regardless of the purpose, makes that control inviolable.
That's the first problem.
The second problem is that to decode the content, this software must be present in every device that plays it back. It's in your cell phone. It's in your DVD player. It's in your computer. In order for the law to be effective, it forbids you to interfere with the operation of the devices you own. It becomes illegal to unlock your cell phone to use it with a different wireless provider. It becomes illegal to play DVDs on operating systems other than those made by Apple and Microsoft. The only one who can determine what your devices can and can't do is someone else. You lose control of your own property.
But that's not all.
Access must only be given to the right people (companies that make the technology - DVD players, operating systems, etc.) but not to the wrong people (you and me). Who decides? The answer must be a single company or organization. They make the rules about who can play back content - and who can encode content too. You can't publish protected music for the iPod without Apple's permission. You can't make a device to play it back without Apple's permission either. These companies and organizations have tremendous monopoly power. Control of the content requires control of the technology (and of our property), which becomes control of the market.
That control does not lie with artists, authors or musicians. In fact, because the technology is primarily American, it doesn't lie with Canadians at all. This law would place Canadian innovation and Canadian culture in a position of dependency relative to the United States.
That's only the part of the law we know about. There will be more.
Oh yes, I should mention - the copy prevention mechanisms don't work. They might stop you and me from making legitimate use of material, but they don't stop the serious pirates from profiting off someone else's work - after which ordinary folks can use those pirated copies, which, because they are digital, are perfect. This raises the question: are these technologies and laws really meant to stop piracy - are they really meant to benefit creators - or are they intended to consolidate the power of the monopoly and cartel positions of certain publishers and technology companies?
You can find a list of the main actors, plus contact information for members of Parliament and news organizations here (scroll down).
The most important person to contact is your MP. I've heard it's better to get him or her to forward your letter to the minister responsible (Jim Prentice) than it is to send it to Prentice directly. Doing both can't hurt. Paper mail and faxes are the best, though phone calls are good too. Don't forget to contact newspapers big and small. In all cases, be polite and to the point.
You can find your MP's contact information by typing in your postal code here.
If you need sample letters, check out the Facebook group's list. My non-technical explanation of why this is a terrible law is here. I'll quote it in a reply to this post.
The bill was listed on the Parliamentary notice paper and scheduled to be introduced on Monday, though it may end up on Tuesday:
I agree with most of what you say, but I believe you are mistaken about payment, and I think FOSS provides a good illustration of why.
Once necessities have been taken care of, social status is probably the greatest motivation for people to make money. Paying contributors doesn't really change that. You are right that not all people crave power or exclusivity. But power is not the only social reward - there are other alternatives besides money. (Exclusivity is itself not a reword, only a way to achieve status.) Reputation does not have to be exclusive. Indeed it requires inclusion - you can't have a reputation all by your lonesome. And it doesn't have to involve negative power dynamics.
Many well-regarded FOSS developers achieved their reputations without power tripping. In this they are constrained, as you suggest, by the choices of participants (the competition you cite is a particular way of achieving this) - in the case of FOSS, forking or the threat of forking constrains projects from degenerating too much. Many projects aren't exclusive either: the whole point of the exercise is to draw in participants. Linus's reputation is largely built on the number of participants in Linux, and on his ability to manage based on consent (which I believe contributes to his reputation).
There are two kinds of gift-giving in cultures in which it is important. In both cases, people try to incur debts by giving gifts. One kind of giving is agonistic (competitive): the objective is to give gifts to people unable to return them, thereby demonstrating dominance over them. The second kind of giving also incurs debts, but it involves exchange. Even though a return gift is given, the slate is not wiped clean - both parties remain somewhat in debt. Social bonds are formed, giving rise to community. I believe most successful FOSS involves the second kind of giving.
Let's look at the text of the treaty, shall we?
Does that sound like the DMCA to you? Because it doesn't to me. There is tremendous flexibility in how a government might enact such protections. An "adequate" law might simply forbid circumvention of "effective" DRM (is any DRM effective?) for the purpose of copyright infringement. Circumvention for fair use, fair dealing, watching DVDs on Linux, etc. could still be permitted.
But the DMCA went far, far beyond this. We are hearing reports the Canadian law will do likewise. Why? Because the US Amabassador, the US trade representative, the RIAA and Hollywood - all American organizations - have been placing tremendous pressure on Canadian politicians.
Get a grip. The Berne Convention, mentioned above, was signed in 1886. The United States waited until 1989 to implement it. That's an interval of 103 years, in case you think I made a typo.
Furthermore, it's utterly dishonest to put words in someone's mouth. The person you are responding to criticized Canada for "mirroring American political issues". Not a word about imperialism, international law, or the evil of Bush - not one criticism of the United States. Yet you fabricate a scenario - "If the US ignored an international treaty", and then accuse someone else of whatever response you have concocted for them: "you'd be on here jumping up and down about how evil American & Bush are"). Utterly dishonest.
Hehe. It's interesting you should pick that example. Here's one person's interpretation, which pretty much matches what went through my mind when I reread it as an adult:
Now don't go criticizing this (or me) without reading context, which makes the whole thing a lot more interesting. Here, for comparison, is that same person's precis of the story itself:
Now go take another look at Babar.
That Babar link explains that the children surveyed don't care about whatever deeper significance may or may not be linking in the tales - they simply enjoy the stories. Scholarship has moved a long way from the time when it was believed that the messages people take away from a story are the exact same ones that we put in. It's a pity so many people still think that other people are mindless robots and run around trying to protect children from Alistair Cookie. Instead of protecting them from being checked in and out of the TV as though it were a daycare, and a society that in so many ways encourages this kind of parenting and makes it difficult to do otherwise.
Forking - and even just the threat of forking - can be powerful forces for coordination. Reducing the freedom to fork tends to centralize control and reduce the size of the community for a project, while also restricting potential innovation. From Stephen Weber's The Success of Open Source (pp. 169-170):
Forking helps distribute influence and the freedom to make choices about development (pp. 180-181):
So by preventing forking, Google maintains control. The relationship seems to go the other way too - open communities may tend to fork less (p. 160, 227):
We have trade agreements with clauses to protect investors. Why can't we add protections for consumers? When something like this happens, the country should be required to take action against those responsible or to provide effective measures for those harmed to do so. Failing such action, the country would be open to retaliation under the agreement. That's just my first thought so it may not be the best approach, but the current situation in which investors are protected and consumers (and others) are not is definitely out of whack. Fat chance it'll be fixed though.
The ECMAScript 4 is backward compatible. Brendan Eich:
Your criticisms seem to be aimed at HTML and CSS, and at attempts to make up for their failings with Javascript toolkits. What Mozilla is pushing here is significant enhancement to Javascript in order to remedy many of its failings while maintaining backward compatibility. Microsoft, on the other hand, is trying to limit changes to the language. According to Eich, Microsoft is criticizing the ES4 proposal without offering concrete alternatives. Instead, he says, they are developing their own language in secret.
I think Javascript's a pretty good language. Certainly it's not perfect - few languages are. PHP, C++ and Perl spring to mind as being particularly flawed, but they have been indispensable nonetheless. Javascript has a huge installed base of runtimes and many programmers are familiar with it (so there's lots of bad code, which may be why JS has such a bad rep). We know how conservative most developers are about learning new languages (especially ones that don't look like C or BASIC), so there would be a significant cost and risk to trying to switch horses from Javascript to something else. Browser compatibility is another matter altogether - but we know who is causing the trouble there.
Javascript is practical and flexible; the main problems I have encountered are weak support for OO and larger projects - problems the ES4 effort appears to be trying to address. Microsoft's argument is for making minimal changes in favor of some unknown future language. If they really are working on that language in secret, and are able to complete it while Javascript is mired in controversy, the outcome is unlikely to be good for the rest of us.
There are techniques to take some account of these factors. According to the NYT article, the study's author "uses small variations in the lead content of gasoline from state to state to strengthen her argument." So we have: 1) a correlation between violent crime and presence of lead in the environment, 2) support from state-by-state comparisons, 3) lead poisoning is linked to brain damage resulting in violent behaviors. Is that enough? Probably not - but it's suggestive, and with such sensational claims I expect there will be plenty of peer review.
You're also accusing the result of being a "pet theory". It may be. It may be that many or most scientists cheat. But we shouldn't assume - with no evidence whatsoever - that any particular scientist is acting in bad faith. Do that, and we'll find scientists living down to our expectations.
You may find the study "hard to believe", that it could "prove anything you like". If you don't examine the method, your complaint could also be leveled at any study you like. If you want better science, make specific criticisms - unless of course you don't want science at all.
Allow me to quote someone named Carolus on the IMSLP site's forums:
This was just one person providing a public service... uh, sorry, competing unfairly with the copyright cartel.
On the one hand I agree with you: we often give experts more credit than they're worth. But on the other, many experts (certainly most academic ones) are surely quite used to providing citations - more so than most people.
There's a risk that this kind of stereotype about experts turns into a bias against expertise, of the "We're not that stupid up here in Duluth" kind. I've run across a number of claims that there's an anti-expert sentiment on Wikipedia, and while I have no personal experience, many of the anecdotes on in this discussion point in the same direction.
The Internet2 project found that the costs and complexities of implementing quality of service guarantees exceeded the benefits. It was more practical to add sufficient bandwidth than it was to prioritize packets. They also predicted - and other research supports - that QoS would encourage ISPs to deliberately downgrade service in order to charge more.
Right. In Philip K. Dick's Ubik, the main character is denied access to the apartment he owns until he pays the door:
I'm inclined to agree that we will no more be able to tell what a person is thinking than a computer can understand what they've written. That may not matter: if we think we can know what a person is thinking, then we may act on it anyway. We already are: Ohio Court Admits Lie Detector Tests As Evidence.
Although the focus of whoever wrote the article is on the Next Big Thing, this isn't necessarily the top priority for scholars. The study of games is more about people than it is about games themselves. Here's Florence Chee from the article:
The connection between the game and the rest of a player's life is important. Are game players better problem solvers? Do they connect more or less with people outside their "tribe"? Do they work well with others? Do they cluster according to social class? Does this have an impact on their participation in the wider society? Are they more likely to be left wing, right wing, extreme, moderate, (un)critical thinkers, politically active or inactive? Does the game reflect their values, or does it influence what they believe and how they see their place in society?
Think of the old question of whether television viewing encourages violence. You probably wouldn't research that by focusing on the most popular show.
Regardless of whether you're interested in one game in particular, other games can provide important evidence. Florence Chee gives a good example in the article when she cites players who refuse to leave City of Heroes for World of Warcraft because they don't want to leave their friends behind. The strength of this attachment in a game less popular than WoW can help explain phenomena within WoW itself.
Examine the screenshot more carefully. They are not selling access to the article (the PDF is available for free). They are selling the right to use it. For $48, they say, you can republish it in a coursepack for use by 100 students. In other words, they appear to be sublicensing the work for a fee.
The scientist claims this is a violation of Oxford University Press's license to publish his work. He may be mistaken if he provided it to them under a different license. Even so, OUP's action is still wrong. This is like posting a sign on a public water fountain, demanding 25 cents from anyone who takes a drink - it may not be illegal, but it sure isn't honest. Unfortunately that's par for the course with copyright: publishers regularly copy public domain materials, then claim copyright themselves.
Here we have a law that affects everyone in their everyday lives. That law is so complex that thoughtful people who care about it, like this university professor and cocky Slashotters (like you, and I'm not exempt either) get confused about routine matters. We have an unjust law that's virtually impossible to respect.
First... Um... what makes you assume that encouraging creativity should be the main or sole purpose of politics?
Second, uh, free/open source software development is a group project, and it's one of the most successful scalable ways of developing large systems.
Third, since when are geek pursuits (software, engineering, fandom) the only or particularly creative ones - compared, to, say, artistic endeavors like music, painting, architecture, fashion, graphic design, poetry? These things tend to be done by artsy types, who aren't exactly famed for right wing or libertarian political stances.
Fourth, creative activity is similar to technical and scientific innovation in that it is based on the works of others. In many (probably most) cases is not, in fact, done alone - the myth of the "romantic author" who creates something from nothing notwithstanding. Creative people thrive in environments with other creative people. This has been widely documented - for blues musicians, playwrights in Shakespeare's London, Renaissance Florentine painters. Even the success of Silicon Valley over Route 128 has been attributed to social connections and cooperation.
Just to clarify: I'm not disagreeing that geeks are creative, and I believe that creativity is politically important. But your assertion just doesn't hold water.