That study sounds interesting. Do you know where it could be found?
One problem for me is that the Windows Explorer has no direct shortcuts. (Just that alt-f then m for rename type shortcut, which isn't much of a shortcut at all.) Coming from a Mac background as I do, this seems silly -- because it unnecessarily slows users down.
I end up using my mouse mostly to swap between various apps and files, because the alt-tab in windows doesn't tell me which of the three SSH windows or four Netscape windows I'll be jumping into, given their little icons. If I could swap between windows based on their order on my taskbar (like alt-f1, alt-f2, like swapping between shells in Linux), that would make life easier. Has this already been implemented and I'm just ignorant of it? Any way to do it?
What I want to know is: Why a mouse? It is the most absurd piece of equipment ever invented. Why?
Until recently, it was always off to the side of the keyboard, requiring a user to take their hand off the keyboard in order to move the pointer. Most mice are still constructed in this fashion -- and people have no idea how much time they waste moving their hand between the keyboard and the mouse!
It provides the joys of carpal tunnel (at least for me) in a way that a keyboard never will.
I always liked IBM's trackpoint eraser mouse in the middle of the keyboard. You can type and mouse at the same time and I have no carpal tunnel problems with it, as my hands stay in the same place whether I'm typing or mousing. However, the movement was too sluggish and so I was damaging my pointer finger by using it.
Any have any good ideas for pointing devices built into a keyboard? It's pretty pathetic that we're still using the same equiptment to access our GUIs after all these years.
More guns, less crime. It's a documented fact (and the name of John Lott's book). Reason has an interview with Lott available on their website, for anyone interested in the stats.
On an unrelated issue, anyone know what's up with the DOS attacks on/.? Are they over with? Wired has had a few stories on it that I've covered on geekpress. (There's been lots of news about Slashdot lately, including a profile of Malda and Bates.)
Also on the list was "works consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship." HTML code would seem to fall into that category as well.
I'd say that there is no standing to claim HTML as copyrightable, but who knows what silliness the courts will engage in this time.
According to an article in Salon the Metallica fans kicked off of Napster have some interesting recourse with the DMCA.
The article says:
"Under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, if an Internet service provider receives a complaint about a user who is allegedly violating a copyright, the ISP is supposed to immediately remove that user from its service. But if that user thinks he has been misidentified and submits a legal counternotification, then the copyright holder has 10 days to decide whether to take legal action. If the copyright holder doesn't initiate legal action against the user, the ISP must reinstate the user.
"Now, Napster, identifying with the ISPs, is using this law to force Metallica to take up its piracy concerns with individual Napster users. On a page on its Web site, Napster explains this. "The Napster software will direct all users barred as a result of Metallica's allegations to an infringement notification page. That page explains the notice that Metallica has given us, explains who Metallica has stated to us it intends to block, and gives the user an opportunity to submit a counter notification if the user has been misidentified. If the user has been misidentified, and requests to be reinstated by submitting a counter notification under penalty of perjury, then, unless Metallica chooses to pursue legal action against that user within 10 working days of being notified of that user's counter notification, the user is entitled to be reinstated."
***
So, what would happen if all those Metallica fans who own all the CDs for the MP3's they were trading stepped forward and gave counternotification?
There's really no fighting the majority on English usage. If the bulk of people use "hacker" to mean people who break into computers, then hackers who don't break into computers will either have to pick another term or use a distinction like white hat hacker vs black hat hacker. (Personally, I'd like a blue hat.)
There are, as Ayn Rand pointed out, some words that have two meanings illegitimately packed into one. People routinely, for example, equate ethic with altruism on a fairly regular basis, assuming that ethical behavior is necessesarily other-regarding.
"Hacker" may well be one of those terms, given the majority's use of it, but it's hard to fight a word that has been so entrenched. Perhaps the most that can be done is make people aware that hacker has other, more benevolent, meanings.
I'm just laughing at all those silly people (and companies) running the Windows/Outlook combo. I wonder why MS and/or end users didn't do something different after Melissa. It should have been clear then that such self-replicating viruses could pose a serious threat.
I can understand my MS got this patented. Without it another company could have gotten the patent and then sued MS for patent infringement. They might not have had a good case, but who wants to go through that legal hassle?
The real test will be whether MS starts extracting royalties from people who use this "method and system for installing and updating program module component."
More globally, the problem of reforming the patent system is one of public choice. The people with an interest in keeping the system would lose millions if the patent system was reformed. And the people with an incentive to have it reformed don't have so much money at stake. (Or at least it's potential, possible, might-exist-later money, not right-here-being deposited money.)
And, if copyright law is any guide, most companies are totally committed to making intellectual property as much like tangible property as possible by extending rights over it indefinitely.
Yes, yes, the shame of it: I still run Win98 as my desktop machine.
One of the cool features of Win98 was the ability to have more than one monitor. (It was about time they added that feature.) So I got an extra network card and another 17" monitor, and I had more desktop space than I knew what to do with.
However, there was a serious problem: my mouse wasn't responding quickly enough. It was taking too long to get between the monitors.
Now, being a former Mac person, I immediately went to go find something like "TurboMouse" for Windows, which would speed up my mouse past the MS speed limit. No such luck. (Anyone know of such a utility?)
This speed limit problem was made all the more difficult by my IBM trackpoint keyboard. That keyboard was wonderful for my carpal tunnel (no more braces), but the movement is pretty sluggish. My right-hand pointer finger was now in pain most of the time.
Anyway, so now I'm back to one monitor and a Cirque keyboard that has a trackpad underneath the arrow keys. It's okay, but I'd give anything for a really responsive trackpoint keyboard and two monitors again.
At least your company is giving you fair warning about the monitoring. Its scary the number of US businesses that are monitoring employee e-mail, voice mail, keystrokes, without any notice at all.
I do think that companies should have to tell employees that they are being monitored. There is no good reason that workers should have to give up all of their privacy -- perhaps without even knowing it -- because they step into an office.
Two related stories ran on GeekPress a few weeks ago:
My husband and I added this story to GeekPress at the same time. (His stayed up and mine got deleted since his write-up was more interesting.) Since he's busy doing an arthrogram, I'm posting his comments here.
He said:
This is an interesting way for the internet community to police itself with respect to behaviour that people find objectionable. As anonymous digital transactions become more commonplace, one's reputation may be one's most valuable asset, just as it is in the world of on-line auctions. Systems which tie one's actions back to one's online identity help maintain the strength of these sorts of reputation effects.
And in a separate comment:
As Tim May once pointed out, it's always easier to shed a bad online reputation than to build a good reputation. Someone with a bad rep can just change his or her online handle and start with a clean slate. This is one of the major weaknesses of using reputation effects to punish bad behaviour (as opposed to reward good behaviour.)
If, as many commenters (probably rightly) opined, this original ZDNet anti-OSS article was something of a troll, why devote so much space on Slashdot to it?
After reading the Slashdot comments, I dedided not to run the story on GeekPress because I didn't want to give such silliness any more readers.
Nevertheless, the rebuttal was good, a worthwhile article in its own right.
Slashdot is, in fact, whatever its owners want it to be. If they wish to announce every beta release of every open source project, that's up to them! (If readers don't like it they won't come back. Well, the smart readers will customize their homepages, actually.)
Actually, I wonder what you read Slashdot for, given that you are unLinuxed. Just curious...
My mother, up until this winter, endured one of the earliest PowerPCs. It was something like 66mHz. It was so slow that you had to type at about 20 words a minute, lest it skip about every other letter. I never knew how hard it was to slow down my typing (normally about 80 wpm)!
But not to worry, I gave her an 4 year old Mac Clone of my husband's to update it. Now she's zipping along at 150 mHz!:-)
I still have a working Mac Classic, just B&W, as color wasn't available when my parents bought it. It has 80 MB of disk space and 4 MB of RAM, if I recall correctly. I can't manage to throw it away though. I'm still hoping to get some use out of it.:-)
(My sister, on the other hand, still uses the first family computer, a Mac SE, to do her finances in Quicken.)
You're right. I've never lived in a socialistic society. However, I have heard a number of first-hand accounts of those who have. The picture they paint is not a pretty one. Every one of those people would regard the power of big business as negligible compared to the power of the secret police. Every one is happy to have escaped the poverty and repression that necessarily comes with socialism. (Or are you unfamiliar with Hayek?)
(The countries that are not so bad, like Sweeden, are that way because they are not fully socialistic. They allow private enterprise. State-run monopolies are only a portion of the economy.)
I find it puzzling that people always want to make exceptions for socialist nations. They say exactly what you did: that the Soviet Union, East Germany, et al were not socialist. Well, the results (millions of dead people) might not be the socialist utopia you wished for, but their methods were socialistic. Government planners ran the economy. People were not permitted to make basic decisions like: where will I work? where will I live? how much bread will I buy? After all, how can you have a planned economy if people are to make economic decisions for themselves?
Do you make similar exceptions for fascism and Nazi Germany? Were all the people killed under Hitler just some epiphenomenon? Or is it the case that when governments are given virtually unlimited power, as with fascism and socialism, terrible things will result?
Working on GeekPress has been depressing in one way: the absurdity of the legal decisions over technical and internet issues. The judges sitting on the bench are often too ignorant of how the internet works to render any good decisions.
I remember trying to explain to my grandmother the real basics of how a computer works: just the file-folder analogy. She couldn't get it, not matter how many ways I tried to explain it. It was pathetic. With each bad decision, I think: that judge must be just like my grandmother!
Perhaps all judges who are to sit in judgment of an internet or computer-related case should have to show that they can at least use a mouse.
Stallman summarized his method of moral reasoning as: I think of right and wrong as based on how what we could do affects other people--the implications of imagining ourselves in the situation of the people our actions affect.
This, of course, is Christianity. Think of others, not yourself; walk a mile in another man's shoes, blah blah blah. But Stallman is also an atheist.
This really shouldn't come as a surprise. Socialism relies upon a watered-down form of Christianity for it's moral foundation. What's pathetic is that Stallman probably has no idea that he's really a Christian at heart.
It's always an eye opener to see socialism in action. Let's talk about how unfree business makes us, but forget that Lenin and Stalin killed more people than Hitler. Were the people living under the glories of socialism in the Soviet death camps free? Is the bounteous freedom and prosperity of socialism the reason why every socialist country has had to shoot people who try to leave to prevent a mass exodus?
Stallman should go back to what he's good at: writing software. He obviously sucks at political philosophy.
Playing Devil's Advocate here: What does it matter if dmoz gets sold off to AOL/TimeWarner? Is it that you don't want to be donating your time and then not reaping the rewards? Or is the problem just that it would be used for commercial purposes?
A more general question: Should people care who their startups/web sites get sold to? Is it moral to sell to just anyone?
When I started GeekPress, I wasn't opposed to at some later point selling to the highest bidder, whoever that would be. But as the site has grown, I've gotten fairly attached to it. I'm not sure under what circumstances and to whom I would be willing to sell it at this point.
The meat of the question: How much would Microsoft have to pay for your web site?
The real battle with privacy, as the article points out, is getting people to realize that they really don't have enough. People presume that their e-mail is "secure enough" without really thinking who could intercept it or how embarassing it might be for their boss to read the joke they just forwarded about the transgender trapeze artists.
(The company my father works for has said to its employees: "Don't do anything that you wouldn't want to see printed on the front page of the newspaper." Perhaps people should apply that same principle to their e-mail.)
The article doesn't touch upon another future possibility: that if no one has privacy (including government, corporations, and the rich), then privacy itself loses much of its value. In a world like in Halprin's The Truth Machine, I would not care if all my secrets were out, because everyone else's secrets would be similarly exposed. (That would be the death of the tabloids, and not a moment too soon!)
What would happen if Napster moved to Russia or some other country that didn't care about the copyright violations? Is this not so much an option because Napster is looking to stay "legit"?
Another, related issue that I have been pondering since I posted this article on the longevity of MP3 to GeekPress is how much the music industry has contributed to the rise of Napster by not giving people other options. Currently, the music industry makes people pay exorbitant amounts for a block of music, even when the consumer only wants a single song. And if the CD sucks, too bad, you can't return it.
Napster isn't just about getting free music. It's about being able to acquire a single song at a time. It's about getting it in a format where it's easy to play 20 of your favorite songs. The music industry just hasn't been willing to provide these last two features. And the danger in that for the music industry, of course, is that people will continue to download songs from Napster and quickly get used to getting music for free.
One more thought: One big benefit of nominal privacy would be in the sending of passwords by e-mail. Like Slashdot, my site GeekPress sends users reminders of their passwords in e-mail. It gives me the willies to have to send such data in plain sight, but there really is no other option at the present time.
Nominal privacy would offer some protection for such mildly sensitive data.
Slashdot said: Though governments will always be several steps behind determined privacy seekers, this bodes ill for anyone who'd prefer to keep the contents of their e-mail even nominally secret.
Part of the problem is that there is no method for achieving low-cost "nominal privacy." I have two basic options: (1) I can send e-mail as plain text. I don't get privacy, but there's no extra overhead in either sending or receiving messages. (2) I can PGP encrypt my e-mail. I get boatloads of privacy, but it's no small task to set up PGP for either the user or recipient. (I've done this before for Eudora and it was a big pain.)
I want a third option, where my messages are lightly encrypted (so as to prevent keyword fishing) and the recipients of my mail can decrypt those messages without any hassle. My e-mails aren't secrets, so I don't really care if someone decrypts them. I just want it to be a bit more difficult for them to do so.
This third option would be "nominal privacy." It would be equivalent to putting a letter in an envelope, where someone can read it if they want to, but it's just a bit harder. (Current e-mail, as I recall Zimmerman pointing out, is like sending a postcard that anyone can read. PGP, in my view, is more like sending a letter via armed courier than sending it in an envelope.)
This nominal privacy of option 3 is not something that exists at the present time. Why not?
I was writing philosophy long before I was coding (PERL mostly), so it doesn't come as much of a surprise to me that I code using the same method that I use to write.
When I write, I go along a line of argumentation until something starts feeling wrong, like I've strayed too far. That's when I go back, read all that I have written, fix it up, and then continue writing until I have to stop again.
When I code, I do exactly the same thing: code until it feels too messy, go back, rework, continue to code anew, get stuck, etc.
The result has been fairly decent code that isn't too bad to alter over time. However, sometimes I get tempted to overhaul code when it really isn't necessary, because some minor issues are bothering me. (This happened with GeekPress when I was just a few days of programming away from launch, but thankfully my husband helped me get over my fussiness!)
Since I've always completely coded my own projects (even when working within a company), I have no idea whether others code in a similar fashion or not. (I'm sure that my situation is greatly simplified by the fact that I don't have co-programmers. That seems like a nightmare to me!)
English is, as many have already pointed out, currently the de facto language. I expect that trend to continue, largely because English is so "promiscious" -- most English speakers are totally willing to incorporate good words from any other language, as well as create words as needed.
It's not just a matter of government contol of the sort that France exercises; it's cultural. English speakers (at least Americans) see the evolution of the language as good and necessary. I would even go so far as to say that Americans love new words: remember the "bobbit" craze a few years back? People were dying to use that word wherever they could!
As a side note, I remember an Indian friend of mine telling me that English is the common language in India, largely because it's viewed as neutral to the various ethic groups. (I'm not sure how the language of the colonist oppressors could be viewed as neutral, but it was!) Anyone else know of this happening in other culturally-charged areas?
(Of course, in places were people really hate America, e.g. Iran, it is unlikely that English will ever dominate.)
I have been thinking about the precents this case could set ever since I posted the story this morning to GeekPress.
As far as I understand, the judge has made the ruling, but has not explained it. Perhaps others who have followed the trial can answer this question:
Was the judge's ruling based on (1) the idea that MP3.com didn't provide adequate safeguards to prevent piracy or (2) that owners of a CD do not have the right to download the songs?
If the answer is #1 (inadequate safegaurds), that seems absurd, as MP3.com (from what I understand from other posters) sampled bits from the whole CD, essentially making it difficult to illegally download without having already illegally copied the CD.
If the answer is #2 (no right to download what already own), I'm even more concerned. Such a precendent would put Napster et al in legal quicksand, for then there would be very little legal activity ocurring through Napster at all. (I, for example, have used Napster to download a number of songs that I already own on CD. But if the judge ruled based on #2, then those downloads were just as illegal as my (theoretical, of course) downloads from albums that I don't own.)
There is another possibility, (3) that it is okay for users to download songs they already own from third parties, but illegal for third parties to offer such downloads without permission from the owner of the song.
This third possibility strikes me as strange, for if a consumer has a right to a good, then it should not be illegal for someone (who cares who) to provide that good to them! (Such legal twisting reminds me of cases where it is legal to buy drugs but not legal to sell them or legal to buy sex, but not legal to sell it.)
I'll be very interested to see this ruling when it comes out. The precedents that it sets could have a huge impact on other pending and future lawsuits.
Slashdot Mirror
One problem for me is that the Windows Explorer has no direct shortcuts. (Just that alt-f then m for rename type shortcut, which isn't much of a shortcut at all.) Coming from a Mac background as I do, this seems silly -- because it unnecessarily slows users down.
I end up using my mouse mostly to swap between various apps and files, because the alt-tab in windows doesn't tell me which of the three SSH windows or four Netscape windows I'll be jumping into, given their little icons. If I could swap between windows based on their order on my taskbar (like alt-f1, alt-f2, like swapping between shells in Linux), that would make life easier. Has this already been implemented and I'm just ignorant of it? Any way to do it?
-- Diana Hsieh
Until recently, it was always off to the side of the keyboard, requiring a user to take their hand off the keyboard in order to move the pointer. Most mice are still constructed in this fashion -- and people have no idea how much time they waste moving their hand between the keyboard and the mouse!
It provides the joys of carpal tunnel (at least for me) in a way that a keyboard never will.
I always liked IBM's trackpoint eraser mouse in the middle of the keyboard. You can type and mouse at the same time and I have no carpal tunnel problems with it, as my hands stay in the same place whether I'm typing or mousing. However, the movement was too sluggish and so I was damaging my pointer finger by using it.
Any have any good ideas for pointing devices built into a keyboard? It's pretty pathetic that we're still using the same equiptment to access our GUIs after all these years.
-- Diana Hsieh
On an unrelated issue, anyone know what's up with the DOS attacks on /.? Are they over with? Wired has had a few stories on it that I've covered on geekpress. (There's been lots of news about Slashdot lately, including a profile of Malda and Bates.)
-- Diana Hsieh
I checked the copyright office's web site for the list of things that couldn't be copyrighted. Included on that list was "mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring." That's a pretty good description of what HTML does.
Also on the list was "works consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship." HTML code would seem to fall into that category as well.
I'd say that there is no standing to claim HTML as copyrightable, but who knows what silliness the courts will engage in this time.
-- Diana Hsieh
The article says:
"Under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, if an Internet service provider receives a complaint about a user who is allegedly violating a copyright, the ISP is supposed to immediately remove that user from its service. But if that user thinks he has been misidentified and submits a legal counternotification, then the copyright holder has 10 days to decide whether to take legal action. If the copyright holder doesn't initiate legal action against the user, the ISP must reinstate the user.
"Now, Napster, identifying with the ISPs, is using this law to force Metallica to take up its piracy concerns with individual Napster users. On a page on its Web site, Napster explains this. "The Napster software will direct all users barred as a result of Metallica's allegations to an infringement notification page. That page explains the notice that Metallica has given us, explains who Metallica has stated to us it intends to block, and gives the user an opportunity to submit a counter notification if the user has been misidentified. If the user has been misidentified, and requests to be reinstated by submitting a counter notification under penalty of perjury, then, unless Metallica chooses to pursue legal action against that user within 10 working days of being notified of that user's counter notification, the user is entitled to be reinstated."
***
So, what would happen if all those Metallica fans who own all the CDs for the MP3's they were trading stepped forward and gave counternotification?
Would Metallica have a legal leg to stand on?
-- Diana Hsieh
There are, as Ayn Rand pointed out, some words that have two meanings illegitimately packed into one. People routinely, for example, equate ethic with altruism on a fairly regular basis, assuming that ethical behavior is necessesarily other-regarding.
"Hacker" may well be one of those terms, given the majority's use of it, but it's hard to fight a word that has been so entrenched. Perhaps the most that can be done is make people aware that hacker has other, more benevolent, meanings.
Recently on GeekPress:
Private eyes in the sky
When (not actually) in Rome
Switches Raise Prospects for Tiny Technology
Honey, the dot-com riches are all mine
Music can be brought to life by humming
Sleeping on the Job Earns Points and Kudos
-- Diana Hsieh
Recent GeekPress
Computers as Clothes
State Dept Missing Two More Laptops
I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee
-- Diana Hsieh
The real test will be whether MS starts extracting royalties from people who use this "method and system for installing and updating program module component."
More globally, the problem of reforming the patent system is one of public choice. The people with an interest in keeping the system would lose millions if the patent system was reformed. And the people with an incentive to have it reformed don't have so much money at stake. (Or at least it's potential, possible, might-exist-later money, not right-here-being deposited money.)
And, if copyright law is any guide, most companies are totally committed to making intellectual property as much like tangible property as possible by extending rights over it indefinitely.
-- Diana Hsieh
One of the cool features of Win98 was the ability to have more than one monitor. (It was about time they added that feature.) So I got an extra network card and another 17" monitor, and I had more desktop space than I knew what to do with.
However, there was a serious problem: my mouse wasn't responding quickly enough. It was taking too long to get between the monitors.
Now, being a former Mac person, I immediately went to go find something like "TurboMouse" for Windows, which would speed up my mouse past the MS speed limit. No such luck. (Anyone know of such a utility?)
This speed limit problem was made all the more difficult by my IBM trackpoint keyboard. That keyboard was wonderful for my carpal tunnel (no more braces), but the movement is pretty sluggish. My right-hand pointer finger was now in pain most of the time.
Anyway, so now I'm back to one monitor and a Cirque keyboard that has a trackpad underneath the arrow keys. It's okay, but I'd give anything for a really responsive trackpoint keyboard and two monitors again.
Okay, okay, not anything, but maybe $200 or so.
-- Diana Hsieh
I do think that companies should have to tell employees that they are being monitored. There is no good reason that workers should have to give up all of their privacy -- perhaps without even knowing it -- because they step into an office.
Two related stories ran on GeekPress a few weeks ago:
Now your boss can read email you didn't send
KeyGhost Security Keyboard Records Keystrokes
-- Diana Hsieh
He said:
This is an interesting way for the internet community to police itself with respect to behaviour that people find objectionable. As anonymous digital transactions become more commonplace, one's reputation may be one's most valuable asset, just as it is in the world of on-line auctions. Systems which tie one's actions back to one's online identity help maintain the strength of these sorts of reputation effects.
And in a separate comment:
As Tim May once pointed out, it's always easier to shed a bad online reputation than to build a good reputation. Someone with a bad rep can just change his or her online handle and start with a clean slate. This is one of the major weaknesses of using reputation effects to punish bad behaviour (as opposed to reward good behaviour.)
-- Diana Hsieh
After reading the Slashdot comments, I dedided not to run the story on GeekPress because I didn't want to give such silliness any more readers.
Nevertheless, the rebuttal was good, a worthwhile article in its own right.
-- Diana Hsieh
Actually, I wonder what you read Slashdot for, given that you are unLinuxed. Just curious...
-- Diana Hsieh
But not to worry, I gave her an 4 year old Mac Clone of my husband's to update it. Now she's zipping along at 150 mHz! :-)
I still have a working Mac Classic, just B&W, as color wasn't available when my parents bought it. It has 80 MB of disk space and 4 MB of RAM, if I recall correctly. I can't manage to throw it away though. I'm still hoping to get some use out of it. :-)
(My sister, on the other hand, still uses the first family computer, a Mac SE, to do her finances in Quicken.)
-- Diana Hsieh
(The countries that are not so bad, like Sweeden, are that way because they are not fully socialistic. They allow private enterprise. State-run monopolies are only a portion of the economy.)
I find it puzzling that people always want to make exceptions for socialist nations. They say exactly what you did: that the Soviet Union, East Germany, et al were not socialist. Well, the results (millions of dead people) might not be the socialist utopia you wished for, but their methods were socialistic. Government planners ran the economy. People were not permitted to make basic decisions like: where will I work? where will I live? how much bread will I buy? After all, how can you have a planned economy if people are to make economic decisions for themselves?
Do you make similar exceptions for fascism and Nazi Germany? Were all the people killed under Hitler just some epiphenomenon? Or is it the case that when governments are given virtually unlimited power, as with fascism and socialism, terrible things will result?
-- Diana Hsieh
Working on GeekPress has been depressing in one way: the absurdity of the legal decisions over technical and internet issues. The judges sitting on the bench are often too ignorant of how the internet works to render any good decisions.
I remember trying to explain to my grandmother the real basics of how a computer works: just the file-folder analogy. She couldn't get it, not matter how many ways I tried to explain it. It was pathetic. With each bad decision, I think: that judge must be just like my grandmother!
Perhaps all judges who are to sit in judgment of an internet or computer-related case should have to show that they can at least use a mouse.
-- Diana Hsieh
This, of course, is Christianity. Think of others, not yourself; walk a mile in another man's shoes, blah blah blah. But Stallman is also an atheist.
This really shouldn't come as a surprise. Socialism relies upon a watered-down form of Christianity for it's moral foundation. What's pathetic is that Stallman probably has no idea that he's really a Christian at heart.
It's always an eye opener to see socialism in action. Let's talk about how unfree business makes us, but forget that Lenin and Stalin killed more people than Hitler. Were the people living under the glories of socialism in the Soviet death camps free? Is the bounteous freedom and prosperity of socialism the reason why every socialist country has had to shoot people who try to leave to prevent a mass exodus?
Stallman should go back to what he's good at: writing software. He obviously sucks at political philosophy.
-- Diana Hsieh
A more general question: Should people care who their startups/web sites get sold to? Is it moral to sell to just anyone?
When I started GeekPress, I wasn't opposed to at some later point selling to the highest bidder, whoever that would be. But as the site has grown, I've gotten fairly attached to it. I'm not sure under what circumstances and to whom I would be willing to sell it at this point.
The meat of the question: How much would Microsoft have to pay for your web site?
-- Diana Hsieh
The real battle with privacy, as the article points out, is getting people to realize that they really don't have enough. People presume that their e-mail is "secure enough" without really thinking who could intercept it or how embarassing it might be for their boss to read the joke they just forwarded about the transgender trapeze artists.
(The company my father works for has said to its employees: "Don't do anything that you wouldn't want to see printed on the front page of the newspaper." Perhaps people should apply that same principle to their e-mail.)
The article doesn't touch upon another future possibility: that if no one has privacy (including government, corporations, and the rich), then privacy itself loses much of its value. In a world like in Halprin's The Truth Machine, I would not care if all my secrets were out, because everyone else's secrets would be similarly exposed. (That would be the death of the tabloids, and not a moment too soon!)
-- Diana Hsieh
Another, related issue that I have been pondering since I posted this article on the longevity of MP3 to GeekPress is how much the music industry has contributed to the rise of Napster by not giving people other options. Currently, the music industry makes people pay exorbitant amounts for a block of music, even when the consumer only wants a single song. And if the CD sucks, too bad, you can't return it.
Napster isn't just about getting free music. It's about being able to acquire a single song at a time. It's about getting it in a format where it's easy to play 20 of your favorite songs. The music industry just hasn't been willing to provide these last two features. And the danger in that for the music industry, of course, is that people will continue to download songs from Napster and quickly get used to getting music for free.
-- Diana Hsieh
Nominal privacy would offer some protection for such mildly sensitive data.
-- Diana Hsieh
Part of the problem is that there is no method for achieving low-cost "nominal privacy." I have two basic options: (1) I can send e-mail as plain text. I don't get privacy, but there's no extra overhead in either sending or receiving messages. (2) I can PGP encrypt my e-mail. I get boatloads of privacy, but it's no small task to set up PGP for either the user or recipient. (I've done this before for Eudora and it was a big pain.)
I want a third option, where my messages are lightly encrypted (so as to prevent keyword fishing) and the recipients of my mail can decrypt those messages without any hassle. My e-mails aren't secrets, so I don't really care if someone decrypts them. I just want it to be a bit more difficult for them to do so.
This third option would be "nominal privacy." It would be equivalent to putting a letter in an envelope, where someone can read it if they want to, but it's just a bit harder. (Current e-mail, as I recall Zimmerman pointing out, is like sending a postcard that anyone can read. PGP, in my view, is more like sending a letter via armed courier than sending it in an envelope.)
This nominal privacy of option 3 is not something that exists at the present time. Why not?
-- Diana Hsieh
When I write, I go along a line of argumentation until something starts feeling wrong, like I've strayed too far. That's when I go back, read all that I have written, fix it up, and then continue writing until I have to stop again.
When I code, I do exactly the same thing: code until it feels too messy, go back, rework, continue to code anew, get stuck, etc.
The result has been fairly decent code that isn't too bad to alter over time. However, sometimes I get tempted to overhaul code when it really isn't necessary, because some minor issues are bothering me. (This happened with GeekPress when I was just a few days of programming away from launch, but thankfully my husband helped me get over my fussiness!)
Since I've always completely coded my own projects (even when working within a company), I have no idea whether others code in a similar fashion or not. (I'm sure that my situation is greatly simplified by the fact that I don't have co-programmers. That seems like a nightmare to me!)
-- Diana Hsieh
It's not just a matter of government contol of the sort that France exercises; it's cultural. English speakers (at least Americans) see the evolution of the language as good and necessary. I would even go so far as to say that Americans love new words: remember the "bobbit" craze a few years back? People were dying to use that word wherever they could!
As a side note, I remember an Indian friend of mine telling me that English is the common language in India, largely because it's viewed as neutral to the various ethic groups. (I'm not sure how the language of the colonist oppressors could be viewed as neutral, but it was!) Anyone else know of this happening in other culturally-charged areas?
(Of course, in places were people really hate America, e.g. Iran, it is unlikely that English will ever dominate.)
-- Diana Hsieh
As far as I understand, the judge has made the ruling, but has not explained it. Perhaps others who have followed the trial can answer this question:
Was the judge's ruling based on (1) the idea that MP3.com didn't provide adequate safeguards to prevent piracy or (2) that owners of a CD do not have the right to download the songs?
If the answer is #1 (inadequate safegaurds), that seems absurd, as MP3.com (from what I understand from other posters) sampled bits from the whole CD, essentially making it difficult to illegally download without having already illegally copied the CD.
If the answer is #2 (no right to download what already own), I'm even more concerned. Such a precendent would put Napster et al in legal quicksand, for then there would be very little legal activity ocurring through Napster at all. (I, for example, have used Napster to download a number of songs that I already own on CD. But if the judge ruled based on #2, then those downloads were just as illegal as my (theoretical, of course) downloads from albums that I don't own.)
There is another possibility, (3) that it is okay for users to download songs they already own from third parties, but illegal for third parties to offer such downloads without permission from the owner of the song.
This third possibility strikes me as strange, for if a consumer has a right to a good, then it should not be illegal for someone (who cares who) to provide that good to them! (Such legal twisting reminds me of cases where it is legal to buy drugs but not legal to sell them or legal to buy sex, but not legal to sell it.)
I'll be very interested to see this ruling when it comes out. The precedents that it sets could have a huge impact on other pending and future lawsuits.
-- Diana Hsieh