There have been meta tags for a long time, and they were rendered meaningless just about the time someone thought of putting tags designed for who he'd like to attract, rather than the actual page content. That's why you can't win great search engine placement with a few meta tags - as was briefly possible once upon a time. I have one client who still refuses to understand that - rejects my suggestions to actually write up their pages to simply contain the terms they would like, when entered into search engines, to lead to their site.
Point is, tags make great sense in a world where grokking the whole of the page content is expensive; in a Googled world that's not the case, and tags are mostly an invitation to mischief.
It's really wise for the Republican-controlled FCC to encourage this because then we all look at these bills and say, "Wow, we're paying so much in taxes! We need relief." So we end up voting against the political party that "wants to raise taxes" rather than against the party that wants to help corporations get away with anything and everything.
His argument is that America benefits greatly from the diversity of the population - that the constant encounter with difference stimulates new ideas.
Given that, India may have the advantage. India is a mix of a great number of different ethnic groups. They may all look "brown" to Caucasians but the differences are more-than-evident to Indians. There are hundreds of languages (so many that English is the lingua franca), thousands of tribal groups, and diversity (caste division) even among the dominant Hindu culture - itself the world's most diverse religion since many, many different gods are worshipped, each village having a few local favorites. Add to this significant Muslim, Jain, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and Parsi populations.
India is way ahead of the US on diversity, and has been diverse for a lot longer. If this writer is right about the value of diversity, India (not China - 90% Han) should be the dominant country in engineering innovation by mid-century.
Let's remember that Sir Francis Drake was a pirate, as well as the proto-feminists Mary Read and Anne Bonny. In Drake's case, the Spanish were plundering their American conquests for gold to use to arm themselves for invasion of England. Drake not only was instrumental in defeating the Armada directly, but in cutting off the funding for the Spanish terror as a licensed privateer, chartered by the Crown to seize Spanish shipping. The Crown eventually revoked the licenses to Drake and his peers, but the pirates were enabled to continue their careers awhile especially by the free trade policies of New Amsterdam, whose Dutch citizens could still remember the evils of the former Spanish dominion over Holland.
The essential outlines of respectable piracy are these: A group seizing wealth to which it has no real moral claim, and using that wealth to further increase the scope of its power towards absolute monopoly, controlled through a close collusion of centralized wealth, power and religion (e.g. Spain/Inquisition with New World gold, or Clear Channel/Bush with the "public" airwaves) is opposed by independent, free-thinking owners of their own rigs, preserving liberty against the dark designs for ultimate consolidation of power.
Pirates can be good, those opposed to them as evil as the conquistadors. Without pirates, Spain could have taken control of most all of Europe and the Americas, the Inquisition would still be ongoing, and the level of economic development and social justice would be that of a typical South American country at best. The public should find ways to directly charter pirates, in doing so aligning them with the public good as Drake was allied with the good of England. Then the FCC will be as unlikely to act decisively against them as it is to take on Opra.
For those of you who think it's kind of odd that a CIO is offering what's a legal opinion - yes it it. The NRF is the largest retail lobbying association. But it's all just a small office in DC. (Used to have a larger office in NYC but the biggest retailers didn't like that some of their dues where going to the NY office's mainly educational mission, which was of most worth to small retail members who didn't have their own in-house educational arm. So they staged a coup in the early nineties and moved the focus just to the lobbying branch in DC.)
Anyway, the NRF has a handful of people given the same titles as typical top retail executives, including CIO and VP of this and that. Each of these has about one person reporting to them - the title is more so that when they organize conferences in their areas they'll have equivalent rank to the top attendees. Most of the have actual backgrounds elsewhere in the departments they're posing as head of, but they're all basically retired from that and in a second career with the trade association.
So this is not a lawyer saying this, and not even a real, current CIO. The NRF has on retainer some of the biggest names in American law. Might make you wonder why they didn't have one of them make the statement (although it's a sure bet one of them put these words in the CIO's mouth). All a bit odd....
Thank you for contacting me about intellectual property protections. Although we disagree on this issue, it is good to hear from you.
Throughout my career, I have been concerned about the theft of intellectual property and the effect it has on innovation. Protection of digital content is just one aspect of this effort. On March 23, 2004, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on physical piracy, entitled "Counterfeiting and Theft of Tangible Intellectual Property: Challenges and Solutions," at which the Committee examined the harmful effects of stealing another's creation. Reasonable estimates show that the U.S. economy loses between $200 billion and $250 billion annually to piracy and counterfeiting. At that hearing the Committee heard from a representative of Burton Snowboards, which employs 350 people in Vermont. That witness reported that knock-off Burton products have been found in multiple countries, and fake goods often turn up on internet auction sites.
The improper use of Burton's trademarks is illegal, it is unethical, and it robs the company of revenues it should rightfully reap but that others siphon off. In the 104th Congress, I introduced the Anticounterfeiting Consumer Protection Act of 1995, which gave law enforcement additional tools to fight counterfeiting and which became a public law. I am currently looking at additional legislation that would help hard working Vermonters protect the goods they produce.
Likewise, downloading music without paying for it, and without the copyright holder's permission prevents artists, authors, musicians - and those that work behind the scenes to produce creative content - from realizing the benefits they deserve.. In order for the promise of new technologies to be fully realized, high quality digital content needs to be easy to use and portable, and I am glad to see that several companies are now offering legal alternatives that are meeting with success. This is a development I continue to encourage.
While illegally downloading music is wrong, I do not think that handcuffs for copyright infringers should be the government's only option. That is why, on March 25, 2004, I introduced the "Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation (PIRATE) Act." I do not believe in a "one size fits all" system of justice, and the PIRATE Act will provide needed flexibility by allowing the Justice Department to pursue civil penalties for copyright infringement when criminal penalties are not appropriate.
Thank you again for contacting me about this important issue, and please keep in touch.
Patrick Leahy United States Senator
http://leahy.senate.gov/
Since counterfeit snowboards seemed totally off the wall to me, here was my reply:
Dear Senator Leahy:
Thank you for your response. It does not, however, show consideration of many of the most pressing issues in "intellectual property." Please detail what you are doing to:
- Roll back copyright terms to the reasonable period envisioned by the
writers of the Constitution
- Allow Web "radio" to have the same rights to broadcast music as
over-the-air stations, without the additional fees for using the music
which are currently assessed, which only serve to enforce the broadcast
monopolies while restricting artist access to the public
- Preserve the "fair use" rights that have long been in copyright law
against the large corporations working to remove or negate them through
using encryption technologies
- Undo the chilling effects of the DCMA on free technological development,
where it prevents normal testing and reverse-engineering of encryption
schemes
- Restore restrictions on the number of radio or television stations that
may be owned by any single corporation (surely you are aware of the
political disaster that results f
Penrose in recent years isn't saying "consciousness isn't a computer." Rather in collaboration with Stuart Hameroff and a number of physicists is saying that "consciousness is a quantum computer."
So for all you/.'ers whose first reaction is: "He says we're not computers. Uncool!" consider the contrary reaction: "He says we're quantum computers. Way cool!" Also note that, as all/.'ers should know, quantum computers don't have the same limitations as conventional computers on capacity, thus the well-known threat they pose to encryption, being able to break it (in theory) in trivially short time periods.
How much of a compelling reason does it take to motivate someone to download and install Moz? 40% of Net connections are broadband now. Two years from now it will be something like 60-70%. Many of us can remember when "Almost nobody runs Word." People had to pay for Word, but it gained dominance in less than a year over well-entrenched WordPerfect. Mozilla will do the same thing if there are a few major - or many minor - sites that require it for cool new stuff. People will download Moz just out of curiousity about those sites. Once they use it many won't go back.
And if businesses can develop rich apps for their employees that leverage it, and it's free, and it runs on a free OS just as well as on Windows... adjust the gain on your imagination.
Henry Ford realized that by paying his employees far more than the going rate he'd have, as he put it, people who could afford to buy his cars. He also had, as it turned out, people who built him much better cars more efficiently than most of the literally hundreds of automobile startups he was competing with at the time. He also pissed off most of his contemporary industrialists who believed it was immoral to pay anyone a cent more than you absolutely had to to fill the job.
The folks running most of our corporations now are like Ford's peers, not like Ford. (Ford also was a Hitler sympathizer later on - so we might guess he wasn't exactly paying his employees so well out of some sort of utopian idealism.) But when it comes to programming, Ford's approach may make even more sense than it did with cars.
An excellent programmer is worth 10 average ones - this is well-known. What makes for excellence is in part understanding deeply the situation and the users for whom one is programming. To the extent that the situations and users are here in the States or Europe, programmers here who are excellent are worth 10 times what even excellent programmers in India are worth, if those Indian programmers don't know the persons and situations intimately where the software will be applied.
But programmers here only have this advantage if we go out and really learn the details of the myriad local niches which great software can help optimize, and stop hanging out within the confines of techie communities.
Let's say we have this little thing called "science" that enables us to approach real truth - not just culturally-relative beliefs about something we call "true." Let's say with science we begin to have an informed vision about how people can live better than the beliefs of their local culture would allow. For instance, we can teach them how to dig latrines instead of shitting upstream of their water supply. We can also teach them how their local leaders are lying to them about what's true, in the scientific sense, when they persist in foisting culturally-relative beliefs about, say, the supposed inherent inferiority of women (perhaps they are the variety of Muslims who justify this with a claim that women "don't have souls").
If you are a post-modern simpleton, who believes that everything is constituted by belief, that one belief is as well-founded as another (because none are founded at all except in social practice), and that suffering from ignorance should be the accepted plight of children born into particularly ignorant and anti-scientific cultures... well, please get out of the way while those of us who know the power of science to actually discover and share real, useful, even salvational facts about the world give those children the chance to benefit from these truths, and perhaps - if those facts are about ways to establish human liberty and not just about how to build munitions - even encourage them to make their cultures less dangerous to our own.
Because the only other alternative is to wipe out the ignorant, religious savages as they get better at coming after us to enforce their own anti-scientific, anti-human (as we know it) belief sets. And as much satisfaction as some of us might take in battles fairly won against truly evil (because ignorant) populations, surely the satisfaction is sweeter if we can transform them to something approaching civilization (even as we are only approaching civilization, and have not reached it yet - witness the Bush anti-science agenda).
Saw an academic's analysis of Sun lately along the lines of "Sun is spending massively on R&D. Why is Sun doing this instead of copying the successful strategies of HP and IBM? Sun should pull the money out of R&D and immediately better its bottom line while lowering the costs of its products."
And I think, didn't Sun get to be where it once was by catching the front of the wave of network computing (become Internet)? Isn't their core skillset being able to ride such a wave well? Isn't their future in getting out ahead of the next one so they can apply that skill again?
R&D is always risky, but as a long-term investor, shouldn't you be buying R&D? As corporations put less and less into it (as most are) what's left becomes potentially even more valuable when and if it pays off. Of course, you don't want to go into the equivalent of the old Xerox or AT&T which never properly capitalized on their best inventions... but Sun's record is a bit better than theirs in this.
Why would a spammer need to register a website to send out their spam?
Very good question. Most spams track back to cable IPs, others to dial-in - in these cases it's clear who the provider is, while the return address is usually totally false anyhow. Just set the laws up so the ISP gets shut down cold if they're beyond a certain threshold of verified complaints.
The exception is domains which are spammed for - spams that contain a url to go to. Here the registration record should mean something. But again it's even more certain to track who the provider is. Again, just shut them down cold - total confiscation of assets - if they don't within on day of any documented complaint shut down the offending site. The only problem here is the fake spam I'll send out from the Republican National Committee referring folks to their site... but is this really a problem?
Check the list at this article about where people are moving to more than moving away from. Turns out the top states as measured by Allied Van Lines moving truck trips are Vermont, Alaska and Montana. Now, I'm in Vermont and can tell you that the population total's pretty stable. What those Allied stats really reflect is that the people coming into Vermont can afford a full-service commercial mover, while those leaving are packing it all into the back of their pickup or renting a U-Haul.
What does this have to do with future tech jobs? Aside from IBM's big facility in Burlington (the biggest single employer in the state) it means there's a lot of fresh money here brought in by the folks who have afforded the moving vans. So how entrepreneurial are you? Plus the weather isn't much different than Boston's - a few degrees cooler traded off against a beautiful landscape you can actually live in. In homes that cost 1/3 as much. Don't tell anyone....
Montana would be my second choice. Those winter days are just too short in Alaska.
Leahy's dismal stand on this may be influenced by Michael Eisner (of Disney) being from Vermont. His father co-owned a failed apple orchard in Westminster and his mother, until her recent death, lived on a large estate outside Saxtons River, which Michael still maintains - and which a large part of the Disney stockholdership would like to retire him to soon.
Southeast Vermont has lately become a hotbed of independent music production. There's an active indie movie scene too. These are now making a real economic difference to the small towns in the region as traditional manufacturing industries continue to decline - so our economic interests here, to put it mildly, are not at all allied with Disney's.
I read that you are promoting a bill to create additional penalties for (wrongly-named) "piracy," so as to favor the increased stranglehold on American creative culture by large media conglomerates. Since Vermont has a vibrant, grass-roots creative culture most of which receives no benefit from the current near-monopolies headquartered in Gutersloh, London, Los Angeles and New York -- and which largely thrives despite them -- are you doing this just for the campaign funds from this slick and decadent industry? Let's be straight: these guys are as crooked as the oil industry and there is equal shame in cozying up to them as they attempt to prevent the transformation of the marketplace by new technology into a space much more conducive to the sort of healthy, spontaneous and integral creative culture which is particularly on the forefront in our home state.
The Soviet Union fell apart in part because its subjects caught enough images of the West as a rich and happy place from movies, magazines, video tapes of TV... and then they tried to instantly become America (with big advice from Harvard) and ended up being gangster heaven. Now countries under dictatorship have a much more mixed view of the Wonders of the West available to them and, guess what, the West isn't such a shining example when seen in wider scope, so it leaves the locals more likely to base their utopian dreams on the silly fantasies in old "religious" books - much like many of the more desparate (Republican) Americans today down in the Old South (apologies to the excellent poster who's a Southern Patriot - I'm proud my relatives shot at his and won - although ashamed that we returned the vote to white Southerners too soon by a couple centuries).
Anyhow, the point is we need to remake some of the West so that it can again - under the increased scrutiny the Net allows - be a shining, almost irrestible example. The way to topple tyrants is to offer a believable vision of Utopia - as Lenin and Mao both knew, but as the American Founders also took advantage of in the idealization of ancient "Saxon liberties" that was prevalent in the history books that they all were avid readers of at the time. See Trevor Colbourn's The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution to learn how this worked. Our liberties are partly from our ancestors (those of us who are of English blood especially) but more fundamentally the product of the particular Utopian dream they mistook for the real, proven prospects of the best way to live - and in large part lucked out on (although there was also a current philosophical basis - particularly in the works of Francis Hutcheson). Hey, it worked. Oh, also note that the "Saxon liberties" that were taken by the American Revolutionaries to be the inherent rights of Englishmen were pre-Christian - and so those current idiots who claim that the Bible is behind it all are being even more wishful in their history than Jefferson and crew were.
I host a few domains for people who have their e-mail forwarded to AOL. Despite my running some elaborate spam filtering, AOL reacted to their reporting of spams forwarded to them through their domains here by blocking my IP, since my IP had been the last to touch the spam before sending it on. AOL did not even have the courtesy to send a notice to the standard "postmaster@domain" address that anyone seriously running a mail server monitors. To AOL's credit, I was able to immediately get through by phone once I saw what was happening. But for AOL to block communications without notification goes against the whole idea of taking responsibility for the quality of the Net.
Now AOL's also backing up mail to these several users in my mail queue whenever it contains a URL that any AOL user has associated with spam. Granted, these are largely really spam - but why make a legitimate (not open) relaying server take the load from this? It ends up with my server trying to send a notice back up the line to what's usually the spammer's false From address, when AOL could easily enough receive the mail and then/dev/null it or whatever else they like. They're basically using this as a way to act aggressively against small, legitimate Net businesses.
Since my clients aren't always able to figure out which of the spams they've received on AOL was relayed from here, I've had to tell them that if they report any spam at all to AOL so as to get me blocked again I'll have to block their mail forwarding. I have to be hardass because AOL is being AsshOLe.
i wonder how secure the old paper based systems were
That's the center of the legal case. DOI systematically lost records which - if kept and honored - would have resulted in billions of dollars in lease payments to Indian tribes for natural resources (mining and oil) extracted from their reservations by corporations contracted with DOI. The judge may be less concered with security from outside hackers, than with the likelihood of DOI insiders continuing to corrupt and alter the records by setting up the systems so that they themselves can continue to engage in behaviors which have already resulted in judges holding DOI in contempt of court.
It's not enough that we took most of the Indians' land; we've been continuing (through our kindly federal government) to steal from under what little land they have left. Even under Clinton DOI wasn't playing straight on this; you can imagine how much better it's been under Bush. The problem is that under any reasonable estimate there are enough billions involved to qualify as a serious budget item. Of course, the Indians have oil and other natural resources, and in the past behaved as "terrorists," so if anything we're consistent....
Surely there are differences between cultural cognitive style that are larger than the differences between men and women of the same culture. So we have for instance pickup trucks designed for cowboys and cowgirls - same trucks, different color schemes - which are different from the SUVs designed for suburban breeders, etc.
So, printers designed for women. How about marketing printers designed for blacks with their special cognitive needs (and if they aren't special, why are blacks so disproportionately in special ed?*). After all, if the (woman) Secretary of Education in Georgia can take the word "evolution" out of textbooks to suit the special cognitive needs of Southerners* (although she more recently bowed to pressure and allowed the word back in) - which is kind of like welding that car's hood shut so the women won't be bothered by all those things inside - why don't we just pander to every stereotype (especially the ones supported by survey data) that correspond to cultural groups? Why limit it to sex?
*Disclaimer: This is humor. I neither believe that blacks have special cognitive needs, nor that more than a few percent of any population should be in special ed (it's approaching 30% in my mostly-white town - ridiculous). I do however believe most Southerners need remedial education in evolution (which is borne out by surveys).
This may sound weird but... what cultures are you each from? What is the prevalence of family-based businesses in the generations just before you? If you both happened to be Taiwanese, for instance... well then family ties is the only way to do business, because the local cultural ethic is that then you don't screw other family members over with the sort of business practices which are standard when you aren't related. But if you are Japanese, the ethical bond between fellow workers doesn't depend so much on blood family, but instead on recognition of each other as a sort of artificial family... so bringing real family ties into it would just muddle things. As a result, Taiwan has thousands of family firms where Japan has a few large keiretsu. Yet both cultures end up conducting very successful business.
Or perhaps you're both Sicilian, or Jewish, or WASP, or.... The point is, do you share between yourselves common cultural wisdom on a business within the family, so that you'll know what each other is expecting and what you can expect of them? And if it's a cross-cultural thing, are your family-business models compatible?
Paper is used for more infringement than any other media. Each piece of blank paper could be taxed, with those taxes going to the rights-holders of published works which may be xeroxed, printed from the Web, hand copied, or otherwise imparted to the paper without permission or payment to the content creators.
If it makes sense for other blank media, it certainly makes sense for blank paper. As for the relative value, look at what we devote educational resources to: 'literacy' and 'numeracy' - activities largely on paper - are viewed as crucial, whereas there is no requirement at all to be able to write pop music to graduate high school. So we should have special taxes on blank media which might be used for pop songs, but none on blank media which might be used for depriving investigative journalists and great short-story writers of income? Are pop musicians more deserving of special income from special taxes than writers? Why?
Read the NY Times and then check the network newscasts that night - the networks will more often than not pick up on whatever the Times puts on the frong page, even when there's no necessary tie of the story to the particular day it's told. Then check the concensus of the talking heads on all those TV panels, and watch them move like square dancers between shows teaching each other the newly fashionable steps. It's enough to make you scream like Dean.
Or look at academic journals, and notice that most of the articles just recycle accepted variants on ideas. The exception is professors from just a few top schools - Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton, Berkeley, MIT - who have enough faith in their individual minds to actually follow ideas into new terrain. This is similar to why the NY Times reporters sometimes lead, too: their institution lends them the status to assume their instincts are good, while most of us are too insecure to be other than sheep.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been meta tags for a long time, and they were rendered meaningless just about the time someone thought of putting tags designed for who he'd like to attract, rather than the actual page content. That's why you can't win great search engine placement with a few meta tags - as was briefly possible once upon a time. I have one client who still refuses to understand that - rejects my suggestions to actually write up their pages to simply contain the terms they would like, when entered into search engines, to lead to their site.
Point is, tags make great sense in a world where grokking the whole of the page content is expensive; in a Googled world that's not the case, and tags are mostly an invitation to mischief.
It's really wise for the Republican-controlled FCC to encourage this because then we all look at these bills and say, "Wow, we're paying so much in taxes! We need relief." So we end up voting against the political party that "wants to raise taxes" rather than against the party that wants to help corporations get away with anything and everything.
His argument is that America benefits greatly from the diversity of the population - that the constant encounter with difference stimulates new ideas.
Given that, India may have the advantage. India is a mix of a great number of different ethnic groups. They may all look "brown" to Caucasians but the differences are more-than-evident to Indians. There are hundreds of languages (so many that English is the lingua franca), thousands of tribal groups, and diversity (caste division) even among the dominant Hindu culture - itself the world's most diverse religion since many, many different gods are worshipped, each village having a few local favorites. Add to this significant Muslim, Jain, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and Parsi populations.
India is way ahead of the US on diversity, and has been diverse for a lot longer. If this writer is right about the value of diversity, India (not China - 90% Han) should be the dominant country in engineering innovation by mid-century.
"A pedophile and a young boy are walking into the woods at dusk.
'This is spooky,' says the boy.
'Yes, isn't it?' says the man.
Then as night truly begins to fall:
'Now I'm really getting scared,' says the boy.
'How do you thing I feel? I going to have to walk out of here alone.'"
Let's remember that Sir Francis Drake was a pirate, as well as the proto-feminists Mary Read and Anne Bonny. In Drake's case, the Spanish were plundering their American conquests for gold to use to arm themselves for invasion of England. Drake not only was instrumental in defeating the Armada directly, but in cutting off the funding for the Spanish terror as a licensed privateer, chartered by the Crown to seize Spanish shipping. The Crown eventually revoked the licenses to Drake and his peers, but the pirates were enabled to continue their careers awhile especially by the free trade policies of New Amsterdam, whose Dutch citizens could still remember the evils of the former Spanish dominion over Holland.
/Inquisition with New World gold, or Clear Channel/Bush with the "public" airwaves) is opposed by independent, free-thinking owners of their own rigs, preserving liberty against the dark designs for ultimate consolidation of power.
The essential outlines of respectable piracy are these: A group seizing wealth to which it has no real moral claim, and using that wealth to further increase the scope of its power towards absolute monopoly, controlled through a close collusion of centralized wealth, power and religion (e.g. Spain
Pirates can be good, those opposed to them as evil as the conquistadors. Without pirates, Spain could have taken control of most all of Europe and the Americas, the Inquisition would still be ongoing, and the level of economic development and social justice would be that of a typical South American country at best. The public should find ways to directly charter pirates, in doing so aligning them with the public good as Drake was allied with the good of England. Then the FCC will be as unlikely to act decisively against them as it is to take on Opra.
For those of you who think it's kind of odd that a CIO is offering what's a legal opinion - yes it it. The NRF is the largest retail lobbying association. But it's all just a small office in DC. (Used to have a larger office in NYC but the biggest retailers didn't like that some of their dues where going to the NY office's mainly educational mission, which was of most worth to small retail members who didn't have their own in-house educational arm. So they staged a coup in the early nineties and moved the focus just to the lobbying branch in DC.)
Anyway, the NRF has a handful of people given the same titles as typical top retail executives, including CIO and VP of this and that. Each of these has about one person reporting to them - the title is more so that when they organize conferences in their areas they'll have equivalent rank to the top attendees. Most of the have actual backgrounds elsewhere in the departments they're posing as head of, but they're all basically retired from that and in a second career with the trade association.
So this is not a lawyer saying this, and not even a real, current CIO. The NRF has on retainer some of the biggest names in American law. Might make you wonder why they didn't have one of them make the statement (although it's a sure bet one of them put these words in the CIO's mouth). All a bit odd....
Eisner's family owns a large estate in SE Vermont for many years.
So, see how Eisner has rewarded Leahy for his work on the Mickey Mouse copyright extension and other acts of kindness.
Dear Mr. [me]:
/
Thank you for contacting me about intellectual property protections. Although we disagree on this issue, it is good to
hear from you.
Throughout my career, I have been concerned about the theft of intellectual property and the effect it has on
innovation. Protection of digital content is just one aspect of this effort. On March 23, 2004, the Senate Judiciary
Committee held a hearing on physical piracy, entitled "Counterfeiting and Theft of Tangible Intellectual Property:
Challenges and Solutions," at which the Committee examined the harmful effects of stealing another's creation.
Reasonable estimates show that the U.S. economy loses between $200 billion and $250 billion annually to piracy and
counterfeiting. At that hearing the Committee heard from a representative of Burton Snowboards, which employs 350
people in Vermont. That witness reported that knock-off Burton products have been found in multiple countries, and
fake goods often turn up on internet auction sites.
The improper use of Burton's trademarks is illegal, it is unethical, and it robs the company of revenues it should
rightfully reap but that others siphon off. In the 104th Congress, I introduced the Anticounterfeiting Consumer
Protection Act of 1995, which gave law enforcement additional tools to fight counterfeiting and which became a public
law. I am currently looking at additional legislation that would help hard working Vermonters protect the goods they
produce.
Likewise, downloading music without paying for it, and without the copyright holder's permission prevents artists,
authors, musicians - and those that work behind the scenes to produce creative content - from realizing the benefits
they deserve.. In order for the promise of new technologies to be fully realized, high quality digital content needs
to be easy to use and portable, and I am glad to see that several companies are now offering legal alternatives that
are meeting with success. This is a development I continue to encourage.
While illegally downloading music is wrong, I do not think that handcuffs for copyright infringers should be the
government's only option. That is why, on March 25, 2004, I introduced the "Protecting Intellectual Rights Against
Theft and Expropriation (PIRATE) Act." I do not believe in a "one size fits all" system of justice, and the PIRATE Act
will provide needed flexibility by allowing the Justice Department to pursue civil penalties for copyright infringement
when criminal penalties are not appropriate.
Thank you again for contacting me about this important issue, and please keep in touch.
Patrick Leahy
United States Senator
http://leahy.senate.gov
Since counterfeit snowboards seemed totally off the wall to me, here was my reply:
Dear Senator Leahy:
Thank you for your response. It does not, however, show consideration of
many of the most pressing issues in "intellectual property." Please detail
what you are doing to:
- Roll back copyright terms to the reasonable period envisioned by the
writers of the Constitution
- Allow Web "radio" to have the same rights to broadcast music as
over-the-air stations, without the additional fees for using the music
which are currently assessed, which only serve to enforce the broadcast
monopolies while restricting artist access to the public
- Preserve the "fair use" rights that have long been in copyright law
against the large corporations working to remove or negate them through
using encryption technologies
- Undo the chilling effects of the DCMA on free technological development,
where it prevents normal testing and reverse-engineering of encryption
schemes
- Restore restrictions on the number of radio or television stations that
may be owned by any single corporation (surely you are aware of the
political disaster that results f
Penrose in recent years isn't saying "consciousness isn't a computer." Rather in collaboration with Stuart Hameroff and a number of physicists is saying that "consciousness is a quantum computer."
/.'ers whose first reaction is: "He says we're not computers. Uncool!" consider the contrary reaction: "He says we're quantum computers. Way cool!" Also note that, as all /.'ers should know, quantum computers don't have the same limitations as conventional computers on capacity, thus the well-known threat they pose to encryption, being able to break it (in theory) in trivially short time periods.
So for all you
How much of a compelling reason does it take to motivate someone to download and install Moz? 40% of Net connections are broadband now. Two years from now it will be something like 60-70%. Many of us can remember when "Almost nobody runs Word." People had to pay for Word, but it gained dominance in less than a year over well-entrenched WordPerfect. Mozilla will do the same thing if there are a few major - or many minor - sites that require it for cool new stuff. People will download Moz just out of curiousity about those sites. Once they use it many won't go back.
... adjust the gain on your imagination.
And if businesses can develop rich apps for their employees that leverage it, and it's free, and it runs on a free OS just as well as on Windows
Henry Ford realized that by paying his employees far more than the going rate he'd have, as he put it, people who could afford to buy his cars. He also had, as it turned out, people who built him much better cars more efficiently than most of the literally hundreds of automobile startups he was competing with at the time. He also pissed off most of his contemporary industrialists who believed it was immoral to pay anyone a cent more than you absolutely had to to fill the job.
The folks running most of our corporations now are like Ford's peers, not like Ford. (Ford also was a Hitler sympathizer later on - so we might guess he wasn't exactly paying his employees so well out of some sort of utopian idealism.) But when it comes to programming, Ford's approach may make even more sense than it did with cars.
An excellent programmer is worth 10 average ones - this is well-known. What makes for excellence is in part understanding deeply the situation and the users for whom one is programming. To the extent that the situations and users are here in the States or Europe, programmers here who are excellent are worth 10 times what even excellent programmers in India are worth, if those Indian programmers don't know the persons and situations intimately where the software will be applied.
But programmers here only have this advantage if we go out and really learn the details of the myriad local niches which great software can help optimize, and stop hanging out within the confines of techie communities.
Let's say we have this little thing called "science" that enables us to approach real truth - not just culturally-relative beliefs about something we call "true." Let's say with science we begin to have an informed vision about how people can live better than the beliefs of their local culture would allow. For instance, we can teach them how to dig latrines instead of shitting upstream of their water supply. We can also teach them how their local leaders are lying to them about what's true, in the scientific sense, when they persist in foisting culturally-relative beliefs about, say, the supposed inherent inferiority of women (perhaps they are the variety of Muslims who justify this with a claim that women "don't have souls").
... well, please get out of the way while those of us who know the power of science to actually discover and share real, useful, even salvational facts about the world give those children the chance to benefit from these truths, and perhaps - if those facts are about ways to establish human liberty and not just about how to build munitions - even encourage them to make their cultures less dangerous to our own.
If you are a post-modern simpleton, who believes that everything is constituted by belief, that one belief is as well-founded as another (because none are founded at all except in social practice), and that suffering from ignorance should be the accepted plight of children born into particularly ignorant and anti-scientific cultures
Because the only other alternative is to wipe out the ignorant, religious savages as they get better at coming after us to enforce their own anti-scientific, anti-human (as we know it) belief sets. And as much satisfaction as some of us might take in battles fairly won against truly evil (because ignorant) populations, surely the satisfaction is sweeter if we can transform them to something approaching civilization (even as we are only approaching civilization, and have not reached it yet - witness the Bush anti-science agenda).
here
Saw an academic's analysis of Sun lately along the lines of "Sun is spending massively on R&D. Why is Sun doing this instead of copying the successful strategies of HP and IBM? Sun should pull the money out of R&D and immediately better its bottom line while lowering the costs of its products."
... but Sun's record is a bit better than theirs in this.
And I think, didn't Sun get to be where it once was by catching the front of the wave of network computing (become Internet)? Isn't their core skillset being able to ride such a wave well? Isn't their future in getting out ahead of the next one so they can apply that skill again?
R&D is always risky, but as a long-term investor, shouldn't you be buying R&D? As corporations put less and less into it (as most are) what's left becomes potentially even more valuable when and if it pays off. Of course, you don't want to go into the equivalent of the old Xerox or AT&T which never properly capitalized on their best inventions
Why would a spammer need to register a website to send out their spam?
... but is this really a problem?
Very good question. Most spams track back to cable IPs, others to dial-in - in these cases it's clear who the provider is, while the return address is usually totally false anyhow. Just set the laws up so the ISP gets shut down cold if they're beyond a certain threshold of verified complaints.
The exception is domains which are spammed for - spams that contain a url to go to. Here the registration record should mean something. But again it's even more certain to track who the provider is. Again, just shut them down cold - total confiscation of assets - if they don't within on day of any documented complaint shut down the offending site. The only problem here is the fake spam I'll send out from the Republican National Committee referring folks to their site
Check the list at this article about where people are moving to more than moving away from. Turns out the top states as measured by Allied Van Lines moving truck trips are Vermont, Alaska and Montana. Now, I'm in Vermont and can tell you that the population total's pretty stable. What those Allied stats really reflect is that the people coming into Vermont can afford a full-service commercial mover, while those leaving are packing it all into the back of their pickup or renting a U-Haul.
What does this have to do with future tech jobs? Aside from IBM's big facility in Burlington (the biggest single employer in the state) it means there's a lot of fresh money here brought in by the folks who have afforded the moving vans. So how entrepreneurial are you? Plus the weather isn't much different than Boston's - a few degrees cooler traded off against a beautiful landscape you can actually live in. In homes that cost 1/3 as much. Don't tell anyone....
Montana would be my second choice. Those winter days are just too short in Alaska.
Leahy's dismal stand on this may be influenced by Michael Eisner (of Disney) being from Vermont. His father co-owned a failed apple orchard in Westminster and his mother, until her recent death, lived on a large estate outside Saxtons River, which Michael still maintains - and which a large part of the Disney stockholdership would like to retire him to soon.
Southeast Vermont has lately become a hotbed of independent music production. There's an active indie movie scene too. These are now making a real economic difference to the small towns in the region as traditional manufacturing industries continue to decline - so our economic interests here, to put it mildly, are not at all allied with Disney's.
Thanks for the link. Sent this:
Dear Senator Leahy:
I read that you are promoting a bill to create additional penalties for (wrongly-named) "piracy," so as to favor the increased stranglehold on American creative culture by large media conglomerates. Since Vermont has a vibrant, grass-roots creative culture most of which receives no benefit from the current near-monopolies headquartered in Gutersloh, London, Los Angeles and New York -- and which largely thrives despite them -- are you doing this just for the campaign funds from this slick and decadent industry? Let's be straight: these guys are as crooked as the oil industry and there is equal shame in cozying up to them as they attempt to prevent the transformation of the marketplace by new technology into a space much more conducive to the sort of healthy, spontaneous and integral creative culture which is particularly on the forefront in our home state.
Regards,
The Soviet Union fell apart in part because its subjects caught enough images of the West as a rich and happy place from movies, magazines, video tapes of TV ... and then they tried to instantly become America (with big advice from Harvard) and ended up being gangster heaven. Now countries under dictatorship have a much more mixed view of the Wonders of the West available to them and, guess what, the West isn't such a shining example when seen in wider scope, so it leaves the locals more likely to base their utopian dreams on the silly fantasies in old "religious" books - much like many of the more desparate (Republican) Americans today down in the Old South (apologies to the excellent poster who's a Southern Patriot - I'm proud my relatives shot at his and won - although ashamed that we returned the vote to white Southerners too soon by a couple centuries).
Anyhow, the point is we need to remake some of the West so that it can again - under the increased scrutiny the Net allows - be a shining, almost irrestible example. The way to topple tyrants is to offer a believable vision of Utopia - as Lenin and Mao both knew, but as the American Founders also took advantage of in the idealization of ancient "Saxon liberties" that was prevalent in the history books that they all were avid readers of at the time. See Trevor Colbourn's The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution to learn how this worked. Our liberties are partly from our ancestors (those of us who are of English blood especially) but more fundamentally the product of the particular Utopian dream they mistook for the real, proven prospects of the best way to live - and in large part lucked out on (although there was also a current philosophical basis - particularly in the works of Francis Hutcheson). Hey, it worked. Oh, also note that the "Saxon liberties" that were taken by the American Revolutionaries to be the inherent rights of Englishmen were pre-Christian - and so those current idiots who claim that the Bible is behind it all are being even more wishful in their history than Jefferson and crew were.
I host a few domains for people who have their e-mail forwarded to AOL. Despite my running some elaborate spam filtering, AOL reacted to their reporting of spams forwarded to them through their domains here by blocking my IP, since my IP had been the last to touch the spam before sending it on. AOL did not even have the courtesy to send a notice to the standard "postmaster@domain" address that anyone seriously running a mail server monitors. To AOL's credit, I was able to immediately get through by phone once I saw what was happening. But for AOL to block communications without notification goes against the whole idea of taking responsibility for the quality of the Net.
/dev/null it or whatever else they like. They're basically using this as a way to act aggressively against small, legitimate Net businesses.
Now AOL's also backing up mail to these several users in my mail queue whenever it contains a URL that any AOL user has associated with spam. Granted, these are largely really spam - but why make a legitimate (not open) relaying server take the load from this? It ends up with my server trying to send a notice back up the line to what's usually the spammer's false From address, when AOL could easily enough receive the mail and then
Since my clients aren't always able to figure out which of the spams they've received on AOL was relayed from here, I've had to tell them that if they report any spam at all to AOL so as to get me blocked again I'll have to block their mail forwarding. I have to be hardass because AOL is being AsshOLe.
i wonder how secure the old paper based systems were
That's the center of the legal case. DOI systematically lost records which - if kept and honored - would have resulted in billions of dollars in lease payments to Indian tribes for natural resources (mining and oil) extracted from their reservations by corporations contracted with DOI. The judge may be less concered with security from outside hackers, than with the likelihood of DOI insiders continuing to corrupt and alter the records by setting up the systems so that they themselves can continue to engage in behaviors which have already resulted in judges holding DOI in contempt of court.
It's not enough that we took most of the Indians' land; we've been continuing (through our kindly federal government) to steal from under what little land they have left. Even under Clinton DOI wasn't playing straight on this; you can imagine how much better it's been under Bush. The problem is that under any reasonable estimate there are enough billions involved to qualify as a serious budget item. Of course, the Indians have oil and other natural resources, and in the past behaved as "terrorists," so if anything we're consistent....
Surely there are differences between cultural cognitive style that are larger than the differences between men and women of the same culture. So we have for instance pickup trucks designed for cowboys and cowgirls - same trucks, different color schemes - which are different from the SUVs designed for suburban breeders, etc.
So, printers designed for women. How about marketing printers designed for blacks with their special cognitive needs (and if they aren't special, why are blacks so disproportionately in special ed?*). After all, if the (woman) Secretary of Education in Georgia can take the word "evolution" out of textbooks to suit the special cognitive needs of Southerners* (although she more recently bowed to pressure and allowed the word back in) - which is kind of like welding that car's hood shut so the women won't be bothered by all those things inside - why don't we just pander to every stereotype (especially the ones supported by survey data) that correspond to cultural groups? Why limit it to sex?
*Disclaimer: This is humor. I neither believe that blacks have special cognitive needs, nor that more than a few percent of any population should be in special ed (it's approaching 30% in my mostly-white town - ridiculous). I do however believe most Southerners need remedial education in evolution (which is borne out by surveys).
This may sound weird but ... what cultures are you each from? What is the prevalence of family-based businesses in the generations just before you? If you both happened to be Taiwanese, for instance ... well then family ties is the only way to do business, because the local cultural ethic is that then you don't screw other family members over with the sort of business practices which are standard when you aren't related. But if you are Japanese, the ethical bond between fellow workers doesn't depend so much on blood family, but instead on recognition of each other as a sort of artificial family ... so bringing real family ties into it would just muddle things. As a result, Taiwan has thousands of family firms where Japan has a few large keiretsu. Yet both cultures end up conducting very successful business.
Or perhaps you're both Sicilian, or Jewish, or WASP, or.... The point is, do you share between yourselves common cultural wisdom on a business within the family, so that you'll know what each other is expecting and what you can expect of them? And if it's a cross-cultural thing, are your family-business models compatible?
Paper is used for more infringement than any other media. Each piece of blank paper could be taxed, with those taxes going to the rights-holders of published works which may be xeroxed, printed from the Web, hand copied, or otherwise imparted to the paper without permission or payment to the content creators.
If it makes sense for other blank media, it certainly makes sense for blank paper. As for the relative value, look at what we devote educational resources to: 'literacy' and 'numeracy' - activities largely on paper - are viewed as crucial, whereas there is no requirement at all to be able to write pop music to graduate high school. So we should have special taxes on blank media which might be used for pop songs, but none on blank media which might be used for depriving investigative journalists and great short-story writers of income? Are pop musicians more deserving of special income from special taxes than writers? Why?
Read the NY Times and then check the network newscasts that night - the networks will more often than not pick up on whatever the Times puts on the frong page, even when there's no necessary tie of the story to the particular day it's told. Then check the concensus of the talking heads on all those TV panels, and watch them move like square dancers between shows teaching each other the newly fashionable steps. It's enough to make you scream like Dean.
Or look at academic journals, and notice that most of the articles just recycle accepted variants on ideas. The exception is professors from just a few top schools - Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton, Berkeley, MIT - who have enough faith in their individual minds to actually follow ideas into new terrain. This is similar to why the NY Times reporters sometimes lead, too: their institution lends them the status to assume their instincts are good, while most of us are too insecure to be other than sheep.