I bet it won't even notice whatever content protection scheme they put in!
Unless your digital TV descrambler happens to have analog RCA outputs, that won't matter, because there will be nowhere to hook up your VCR. I assume that outputs compatible with non-DRM-compliant technologies will be the first to go, replaced by a patented interface.
All I can say to the media giants is this: I double dog dare you to give me one more reason to cancel my cable subscription and buy a bigger bookshelf.
Honestly, and not trying to troll. What will everyone here do if microsoft ceases being the evil empire? What if they can pull this off, and find some middle ground with the government? I said before, in a much earlier post, that most religions have an antagonist; What happens if we lose ours? Will/. topics get more sensational?
Microsoft isn't the Evil Empire because it makes bad software. It has earned this monicker because of the way it systematically and inexorably crushes alternatives, restricts choice, invades privacy, treats its own customers as borderline kleptomaniacs, and makes pronouncements about what is good for us, rather than taking the time to find out what we really want. When the day comes that Microsoft gives us more *meaningful* choices than it takes away, then it will stop being the Empire.
The fact that its software is usually (though not always) significantly behind the state of the art just rubs salt in the wound.
Well, after all the ribbing, we have to give Microsoft [microsoft.com] some credit. There was no reason to believe that Windows XP actually was designed to be secure. Certainly, recent events have shown otherwise. But this really could be a change for the better.
Microsoft gets no credit for making promises or stating intentions. If they actually deliver something, then we can credit them.
Microsoft touted XP as its most secure Windows ever, and it has at least strongly implied that NT4's security was superior to that of Unix, especially Linux. Microsoft has always claimed to take security very seriously, and has always claimed that the current incarnation of Windows features state-of-the-art security and stability. Whether you call this marketing spin, telling the public what they want to hear, or lying, it doesn't bode well for Microsoft's latest claim.
Microsoft's general solution to security problems is to tell people not to use a particular feature (like opening email attachments) rather than change its applications to reduce security threats. This way, it tries to eat its cake and have it. It says, "Windows is full of great features. It's also very secure, provided you don't use any of those great features."
Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, MS WIndows and a bunch of other products have holes in them that SANS tells others about. Has there ever been a piece of software with no security holes?
No reasonable law would make it illegal to sell or distribute imperfect software. That's like making it illegal for a doctor to make a mistake in a diagnosis or for a lawyer to offer less-than-perfect legal advice.
Yet, doctors and lawyers are legally responsible for malpractice: for mistakes made during the course of their practice due to recklessness, carelessness, or failure to adhere to the best practices of their profession.
A similar standard should hold, at least for commercial developers. A commercially-motivated software developer (as opposed to amateurs and hobbyists engaging in essentially nonprofit projects) should be held to a reasonable standard of care in the products they produce. This should be true whether the source is open or closed, or whether a license fee is charged or not. The standard should be that reasonable care was taken, given the capacity in which the software was produced. For personal or commuity projects, liability should be limited to outright malicious design. For commerical development, liability should be stricter. The real test should be to what degree failure to observe best practices was motivated by commercial gain.
Niether large nor small developers should be hung out to dry for every little security flaw that someone finds in their software. But sometimes, developers release code they know is inherently risky, even if no particular exploits have been discovered. For example, Microsoft ought to have known that the architecture of Outlook-IE-Windows Scripting was dangerous, especially in the hands of its target audience: non-technical users. It wasn't some obscure buffer overflow that made Outlook a problem virus propagator, it was the basic design. The developer community as a whole was aware of this; Microsoft cannot claim that the possibility that Outlook could be so abused didn't occur to them. Certainly a case can be made in an instance such as this that the developer should bear some liability for the damage caused by the product.
I had an ATM crash on me about a month ago. The "please wait" screen sat there for far longer than usual, then the whole machine seemed to turn off. A few seconds later, it powered back up and spit out my card. I checked with the teller inside the branch to make sure it hadn't taken any money from my account, and it hadn't, but it did leave me wondering whether the transaciton is committed before or after all of the cash has been dispensed.
I don't see how having a strong economy can be incompatible with social welfare. I've always kind of thought they are the same thing.
I never suggested that having a strong economy was incompatible with social welfare, though they are definitely not the same thing. (This is why, for example, that in the West over the last decade, job security has worsened, living standards have fallen, working conditions have worsened, working hours have increased, personal debt has increased, the distribution of wealth has become more skewed, but the economy has done very well, thank you.) A strong economy is one in which lots of money changes hands and nothing more. The effects of a strong economy may or may not benefit human welfare, depending on the circumstances, but the simple movement of money and exchange of goods and services is of no inherent benefit to human beings.
What I did say is that a strong economy and profits for business ought not be an end in and of themselves. If and when a strong economy serves human welfare, it should be pursued, to the extent that it does not cause more harm than good to human well-being. But to suggest that one should refrain from charitable or community-minded acts which are clearly beneficial to human welfare simply on the grounds that it might be bad for business and the economy is to argue for the abomination of flesh and blood humans existing to serve the economy, rather than the other way around.
Even if we were to accept Glass's argument about free software threatening for-profit business is true, one ought to question the assumption that this is a bad thing.
It seems to me that people giving away something in a not-for-profit or community-oriented manner (as opposed to dumping in order to gain a for-profit advantage in the market, which is a different matter altogether) is always a good thing. The argument that it is bad because it hurts for-profit businesses trying to sell the same thing is based on the twisted notion that making money, and not satisfying human need, is the pre-emminent goal. Or perhaps it is the business model in which business speculates on potential demand rather than contracting to produce for existing demand that is the problem.
It can be argued that community or family-based child care puts commercial daycare out of business. It can be argued that community or one-on-one educational activities hurts the business of trade schools that would like to charge money for teaching the same skills. It can be argued that cleaning one's own house and cooking one's own meals depresses the market for housekeepers and threatens the well-being of restaurants and the frozen food industry, but it would be ludicrous to argue that one should not cook one's own dinners, care for one's grandchildren, or teach one's neighbour how to install Windows (well...) because it's bad for the economy, unless one assumes that a strong economy is an end in itself, more important than the welfare of the people some of us thought the economy was supposed to serve.
The bottom line being, if you are in business trying to sell something that someone else is willing to give away out of some sort of civic-mindedness, you should be looking for a new business to be in. If you are investing R&D money in a speculative venture, you should be prepared to lose big if demand for your product does not materialize, as well as win big if it does.
But to those who believe in the right to bear arms up here - we can't. To those who believe that we have freedom of speech? Freedom of the press? Not in Canada. The government can censor you if they so choose.
Um, Canada does have a constitutionally enshrined Charter of Rights and Freedoms that is very similar to the American charter in scope and strength. There is no constitutional guarantee of any right to bear arms, but even in the U.S., this provision is anachronistic and is kept alive for entirely the wrong reasons.
Both governments censor speech to some extent, but both are among the freest countries in the world with respect to protecting the legal right to free expression.
There are serious impediments to free speech for most residents of both countries, but this is largely the result of speech costing money combined with the decision to extend the right of free speech to nonhuman corporate entities with vast resources that can easily be used to overwhelm all other voices. (Coca Cola has billions to spend each year to get out its message; how much can you afford to spend?)
It's not that Microsoft will be going out of their way to make sure things break on Win95; they just won't pay any attention to Win95 anymore. Stuff might even work, especially since MS will still be testing against Win98, which is similar to Win95.
Many newer MS Apps (The latest Media Player comes to mind, and I believe recent versions of IE as well) will refuse to install on a Win95 system. The installer checks and tells you that you cannot install the software on 95, period. It does not simply warn you that the software has not been tested on 95, so install at your own peril.
I can't think of any reason why, apart from deliberate design, media player couldn't easily run on 95 if it could run on 98. Maybe there is a reason, but it certainly seems that Microsoft is, in fact, deliberately breaking its newer releases so they won't run on 95.
There are still a lot of people, from home users to major corporate users, who still run Windows 95 because there is little justification for upgrading. It doesn't seem at all unlikely that Microsoft is deliberately making several core applications break on Windows 95 in order to get these people back into their revenue stream.
Maybe software isn't the same as documentation, but Debian is still Debian. One of the ideas behind Debian is to produce a core distribution that meets certain license criteria, so that anyone can take an official Debian release and know that they can do certain things with the distribution as a whole and with each component of the distribution. I know, for example, that I can freely reproduce and distribute verbatim copies of the official Debian distribution (which doesn't include the non-free tree) because I know that everything that appears in the official release meets the Debian open source criteria which
If some of the documentation in the distribution didn't necessarily conform to these standards, I would have to check the license of each document in the distribution before redistributing it, making derivative works, and so forth.
Maybe they should use their skills for a noble purpose, like pounding SPAMMERS.
They did this back in late 1997 or early 1998. Massive DoS attacks against Aegis.net finally caused them to reverse their spam-friendly stance and caused the demise of Stanford "Spamford" Wallace's Cyberpromotions, then responsible for probably half of all spam being sent. (Or, at least, received by me.) Walt Rhines' (I think) spam company (I forget the name now), probably the second largest spammer, also disappeared after that.
After that, the volume of spam slowed to a trickle. Without Cyberpromo and other companies willing to send spam, hide the sender's identity, and absorb the reprisals and complaints, spammers resorted to either clumsy attacks from Hotmail or other throwaway accounts, or to finding and exploiting open relays. It has, unfortunately, picked up again, though perhaps not quite to 1997/98 levels. I am guessing that spam filtering makes a significant difference.
The real problem is that spammers actually make money off of spamming us. There are enough dumb people out there that actually buy crap from the spammers. Just quietly delete all of you spam, and when spammers stop making money then they will eventually stop.
Your second point explains why your idea won't work.
If you can send out email to 50,000 people for, say, $200, and if you make $10 profit per sale, then you only need 20 out of 50,000 recipients to buy and you've made a profit. You and 49,979 other people -- 99.96% of all recipients -- can delete the email in disgust, but as long as those 0.04% others respond, the spammer breaks even. If an additional 0.01% respond, the spammer has made a $100 profit on an investment of $200 for marketing and whatever their fake product costs to make and ship.
Okay, these numbers are fabricated, but they're illustrative of the kinds of volume and margins that we're dealing with. A spammer doesn't care if 99.9% of recipients don't want the email and would never, ever buy their pyramid scheme/bulk mail software/penis enlargement pill; as long as one out of every thousand or so recipients are suckers, spamming is money well-spent for the spammer. It's certainly cheaper to carpet bomb everyone than it is to try to selectively market to idiots. I don't know how many people are suckers, but more than 1 in 1000 seems a safe bet.
Making spam a net money loser would effectively get rid of it, at least domestically. The most effective, least invasive way to do this would seem to be to provide civil and/or criminal penalties for spamming.
Most of the content on the Web is not worth paying for. But there is some that is. For example, I would be willing to pay between $5 and $15 per week for a news source that covered politics, science, technology, and other serious news with the kind of depth and professionalism that serious newspapers used to be famous for (before tabloid journalism began to creep into even the most respected of papers). I would pay a few dollars a month for The Register, if they would stop running ads and use some of the money to hire a proofreader. I would pay a dollar or two a month for some clever humour and satire, like the Brunching Shuttlecocks. Hell, I would even pay a few bucks for Slashdot.
A penny per page, any page, is flawed because it encourages lots of content as opposed to a manageable amount of high-quality content. It would encourage spamming the Web with lots and lots of interesting-sounding but cheaply assembled documents under as many different aliases and domains as possible (to thwart the eventual domain filtering that would take place). The result would be an even smaller signal to noise ration, something that is already well out of hand.
I said that I would be willing to pay for content. But, currently, there isn't a payment system that offers me the things I need in order to feel comfortable doing so: simplicity, anonymity, privacy, security, and limited liability. Credit cards are bad because they provide none of these. In particular, I'm not going to hand over my credit card and personal information to someone when I cannot in turn verify with any certainty who that someone really is. Debit systems are better, but still suffer most of these limitations.
Cash payments have the advantage of being completely anonymous and they limit your liability to exactly what you pay. A no-questions, no-refunds transaction is fine when dealing with small amounts of cash. But even here, the Web presents new problems. If I have a bad experience with a real-life small-time merchant, I can fairly easily take my business elsewhere. The ratio of respectable businesses to shysters operating out of the backw of their trucks is reasonably high. On the Web, it's harder to tell the shysters from legitimate small-time operators without trying and possibly getting burned in the process. And it's hard to tell if the site you're visiting today is operated by the same shyster who sold you crappy content yesterday at a different site.
Established, respected sites that can easily be traced to established, respected proprietors could get away with charging for content--if they offer something better than what is being offered for free. They can get away with either accepting online payments or the traditional paper invoice method. For less well-known sites, the ability to charge for content will probably have to wait for the arrival of the Web equivalent of cash, and some sort of reasonably strong identification scheme to establish who is behind the Web site you're offerint to pay for.
The majority of the world has essentially no labor protection whatsoever. That's because they are too poor to be able to afford that protection. When companies move jobs to places where there is no labor protection, they are moving jobs to poor countries. That helps the poor people there. Preventing corporations from moving the jobs hurts those people.
There was an interesting documentary on PBS about a month or two ago about globalization and its effect on Jamaica. While the arrival of foreign factories does indeed mean new jobs, the writer's argument went that trade between the devleoping world and the industrialized world is essentually turning the developing world into a ghetto of slave-wage labourers.
A country like Jamaica doesn't have the same level of social or industrial infrastructure as the United States. It lacks the capital and expertise required to produce goods competitively. As a result, local industries are being forced under, as imported American goods are actually cheaper than domestic goods. This is, in the short run, better for the consumer because they now have access to goods at lower costs. But in the long term, it stifles the economy because money that could be going to local industries and be reinvested in improving efficiency and competitiveness instead leaves the country and enriches foreign companies. Countries with natural resources can't exploit them cheaply enough to sell them competitively; they can only sell the rights to foreigners, which further impedes development of local industries and economies. As a result, all that the people in these countries are left with is their labour, which they can sell very competitively because they don't ask for things like 10-hour work days, health benefits, workplace safety measures, or what we would call a "comfortable" standard of living.
The point seems to be that free trade between two countries with very different levels of industrial infrastructure may well exaggerate that imbalance. Perhaps the developing world either needs to be left alone to develop some more or, better yet, needs assistance in developing locally-owned and run industries. In other words, we have to give them money so that they can compete against us more effectively. While this would ultimately be good for both them and us, it doesn't sound like the kind of thing that most large corporations on a 5-year (or 6-month) fiscal plan would be interested in doing.
Ditto for the ESRB (the guys that handle videogames). Completely voluntary, but it helps parents make a decision. I'd rather have 'M' slapped on the front of some Zombie game than Congress telling me there will be no zombie game.
Rating systems like the ESRB are dumb because they simply make a blanket statement about what age groups the title is suitable for. (The MPAA ratings are dumb for the same reason.) The board applies all of its own values and assumptions and somehow comes to the conclusion that the title is suitable for everyone 13 and over, but not under 13. The parents don't get to exercise their own judgement over and above trust the ESRB or don't.
The RSAC rating system was a much more intelligent system. It didn't make any recommendations about who the game was suitable for. Instead, it rated different content areas (violence, nudity, sexuality, language, and so forth) on a scale of 0 to 4, with a descritpion of each. For example, violence ratings went something like 0: none, 1: cartoon violence, 2: damage to realistic objects, 3: humans killed, 4: blood and gore. Instead of being told "this game depicts violence so don't let your 12-year-old play it," the parent is instead given some basic information about the level and type of violence, which can be used as a basis for making an intelligent decision about whether the material is suitable for their kids.
MPAA/ESRB-style ratings are no different from filtering; they effectively put the decision-making about what is suitable for kids in the hands of a third party. Giving the parent a choice between trusting the ESRB and not trusting the ESRB is no different that giving the parent a choice between trusting NetNanny and not trusting NetNanny.
Privacy advocates are up in arms about this kind of research
I don't know of any privacy advocates who suggest a complete prohibition on the collection of personal and marketing data. It seems to me that privacy advocates typically object to the tactics used to collect such information. They are upset that comapnies collect information surreptitiously, collaborate with one another to exchange information that was collected under the presumption that it would be kept confidential, and sometimes even go to great lengths to defeat measures deliberately enacted to preserve privacy.
Market research is fine. Asking for personal information is fine. Collecting this information without the informed consent--or over the explicit objection--of the individual in question is not. Sharing this information or using for purposes other than those to which the individual has agreed is not.
This is true enough; the real issue seems to be that one of the greatest allies of OSS and an open Web appears to have defected to the other side.
It seems to me that for-profit software developers like Netscape and Microsoft never had much use for the W3C. They made sure their products would be as compatible as necessary (and as incompatible as possible) with whatever else was in use, but they never paid more than lip service to real standards. The real supporters of the W3C mandate have always been the very people who stand to lose the most from this turn of events.
It's disheartening to see the W3C shift from a defender of open access to a proponent of the 'building a wall makes you owner of whatever happens to be inside' mentality that really represents some of the most opportunistic, antisocial, and basest traits of humanity.
The W3C's endorsement of this won't suddenly and fundamentally change the Web -- patented, pay-to-play technologies are already here and there is no shortage of those who seek to subvert and control the gifts that were given to everyone for their own selfish ends -- but it does mean that an important voice in advocating a free and open Web will now be shilling for those who believe that social conscience and responsibility aren't virtues but rather weaknesses to be exploited.
I think that you have hit the nail on the head here. Microsoft is simply a high profile target, but it is also despised for it's arrogant, "our software is superior and everyone else sucks" attitide. Basically, their arrogance inspires people to try to take them down.
According to all security reports I have seen, you are far more vulnerable to being cracked or exploited if you run IIS than if you run another random Web server. I believe that the Netcraft numbers imply that your chances of being hit are about double. Whatever the case, the clear implication is this: run IIS and you are significantly more at risk than if you run Apache or any other HTTPD server.
Spin doctors will try to explain why this is the case, but the bottom line is that it doesn't really matter; under typical conditions, you are more at risk running IIS than any other HTTPD server. Microsoft can offer all the explanations they want as to why it's not their fault that running their software puts you at greater risk, but it doesn't change the fact that running their software does just that.
If your case is not typical, IIS may not be the riskiest choice. Maybe IIS really is less secure because, on average, IIS admins are less well-trained than Apache admins or because IIS is harder to configure than is commonly supposed. If this is the case, Microsoft should be upfront about the fact that running IIS on NT is just as hard and requires just as much skill as running Apache on Unix; they can't eat their cake and have it by claiming their software is better because it is easy to administer and then blaming every problem on the lack of properly trained admins.
At any rate, the implication for the average business operation is clear: for whatever reason, non-IIS systems tend to be more secure than IIS systems. That is a significant factor to consider in choosing your kit, regardless of why.
A very interesting take on Copyright reform, but just to play Devil's Advocate for a moment -- what makes you so sure that just because some content "is the most needed in the public doamin" automatically means it should be turned over at no cost?
That's not quite the message I meant to convey. What I am suggesting is that the proposed system whereby rights holders would pay a fee for monopoly power instead of being automatically granted it is likely to only allow relatively uninteresting and un-useful works into the public domain early. That's better than the current situation, where it looks like nothing published after 1920 or so will ever enter the public domain, but it still means that the most interesting, popular, and important material will still remain unfree. It will still be the case that all of the central elements of popular culture and, increasingly, the langauges and protocols by which we communicate, will remain private property leased to the public, and that participating in the development of one's own culture (by building upon what has come before) will still be by invitation only.
Disney would continue to hold on to Mickey Mouse with an iron claw, because it's way more profitable for them to leverage an 80-year old idea for even more money than it is to come up with something original for the first time in the better part of a century. Microsoft has long since stopped making a profit from Office 95, but there is no way they would willingly hand over the keys to it, or even to Word for Windows 2.0, becuase there's not enough value in their new products for most people to justify spending hundreds or thousands of dollars if older versions are in the public domain. Microsoft counts on lack of availablility and incompatibility between versions to force upgrades and make more money. It uses copyright to restrict availability of products it no longer wants people to have. It does this not only to protect its investment in R&D, but to protect its future revenue stream by ensuring that it can effectively unpublish software once it becomes a liability.
It's also not fair to equate no copyright with people working for free. Most people don't work for free, including those who write software, compose music, or write copy. Copyright is not a cornerstone of the free market either. Copyright is a state-granted monopoly. Last time I checked, that was the complete opposite of the free market ideology. Because several industries have developed business models based on strong copyright monopolies, weakening or eliminating the monopoly power would adversely affect these businesses, at least in the short term. But that doesn't mean that copyright is sacrosanct. Neither BMG nor Disney have a right to continue operating under the current rules indefinitely (or under the even more favourable rules they lobby for); the market is supposed to be for the enrichment of the public as a whole. Everyone has the right to earn a living, but nobody has a right to demand a set of rules that allows them to make as much money as they want in the manner that they want, regardless of its effect on society as a whole.
Precisely because the most valuable content is what is most needed in the public domain. Not too many people care anymore if DOS 1 is made PD, nor would very many people be all that excited to learn that the copyright on Milli Vanilli's greatest hits had expired prematurely.
Copyright is not actually necessary in a free market society. Interestingly, the trend in the United States seems to have been towards the deregulation of monopolies in almost every sector, except for the copyright monopolies, which have been consistently strengthened. Moreover, all other state-granted monopolies faced some kind of regulations.
If copyright is allowed to stand, it should be treated like any other state-granted monopoly. Copyright holders should be considered common carriers, so to speak; a copyright holder would be obligated to license the rights to copy or make derivatives from their copyrights to anyone who paid the fees and complied with the regulations that would be set by law. Refusal would result in the forfeiture of the copyright. Regulations and maximum profits that could be derived from copyright would be fixed by law. (Which brings in the possibility that a copyright holder might decide that releasing their work into the public domain might actually be more profitable, in some cases, than holding on to the copyright.) Furthermore, the copyright holder should be required to provide a physical copy at a reasonable rate (fixed by law). in order to avoid the degenerate situation where a license to copy could be granted, but copy protection measures prevented exercising that right. If the copyright holder ceased publication of the material, it would fall into the public domain.
Thus, for example, I could insist that I be able to purchase a copy of Windows 3.0 from Microsoft. If it couldn't or wouldn't sell me a copy, it would void its copyright over that particular item, at which point I could do whatever I wanted with it, providing I could find a copy.
Copyright is really just another form of state-granted monopoly, so there's no reason that it shouldn't be treated similar to a telephone, electricity, transportation, or other government-granted exclusive jurisdiction.
Face recognition as a technology is not problematic. But you have to explain how face recognition can be used as part of a security system in a way which is both effective in combatting terrorism and doesn't trample the civil liberties of the public at large. Offhand, it seems to me that it would be difficult to accomplish either goal.
In the wake of catastrophes like last week's attacks, people are often tempted to look for quick and easy solutions. The problem is that these solutions usually do not even address what happened, let alone what may happen in the future. But it makes people feel better to know that they are doing something.
From what I have learned about the events of Tuesday, the most sensible solution that I have heard involves a change in procedure and, perhaps, the addition of two pieces of technology in aircraft: control lockout and a locking, steel door to the cockpit. Changing two elements of standard procedure seem to make sense. First, the cockpit door should be locked before the first passangers board, and it should remain locked for the duration. (This may mean rearranging things so that the pilots have their own bathroom within the secure permimeter.) Second, at the first sign of danger, the pilot would lock out the cockpit controls and put the plane on remote control. (This could be circumvented, of course, but there would then be two separate security systems that would have to fail.) If would-be hijackers knew that any trouble would put the aircraft on an immediate auto-land sequence, there would be little point in trying to commandeer an aircraft.
The real long-term solution is to eliminate the cause of terrorism, but that's a long, hard battle that will probably require a surprising amount of change in the way that we in the West behave towards the rest of the world.
Get a grip on things people - the future of Linux as a mainstream OS depends on the desktop Windows work-a-like model.
But the Windows model is fundamentally bad for novice and expert users alike. If the only way to make Linux go mainstream is to copy Windows, what's the point? The Unix Way may not be one that is inherently appealing to most users, but the Windows Way betrays users by diverting their attention from their real goals and instead occupying their time with irrelevancies.
If you look at the default configuration of Word, for example, about half the visible controls relate to formatting and typesetting. The application is set up to give people who most likely don't understand the first thing about typesetting the ability to make a complete mess out of their document. In other words, it enables users to do what they aren't very good at doing, rather than trying to automate those tasks so that the user can concentrate on what they are good at doing, which is providing content.
The ability to choose unreadable fonts and bad justification may be sexy and appealing to the user, but it typically doesn't mesh well with the reason the user fired up Word in the first place. There should be buttons like "write a letter", "write a report", and "write an academic paper". These should prompt the user to provide the information that they can expertly supply -- the content -- and take care of formatting, page breaks, spell checking, and so forth, automatically. The user shouldn't have to worry about how to format the report, it should be formatted to whatever the organization's standard style for reports is, and it should be done automatically. (Or, for home users, to one of a selection of standard formats developed by people who know a thing or two about document formatting.)
This is technically feasible in Word, but this functionality is hidden and not nearly as convenient to use as the haphazard mess-making capabilities that are emphasized. My experience is that most Word users aren't even aware of the existence of Word's (primitive) style sheet capabililties, much less know how to use them. Fewer still are aware of templates and macros. But everyone knows how to change font sizes and how to create page breaks using a series of hard returns.
This doesn't mean that users shouldn't be allowed more control, but low-level control (e.g. creating the style sheets and macros that are used to format the document) should be kept under the surface, while the less sexy but more useful high-level features should be kept on the surface.
The whole point of using a computer is to have it assist the user by doing things that the user cannot do well or efficiently hiself or herself. Suites like MS Office do at best a mediocre job of this.
I think it's just a sign of the times. Just as people here would rather use Napster to get songs than find a way to ensure the artist gets paid fairly, people will always go for the free option, even when it leads to the end of the product they were after. Such is today's culture - firmly short-sighted and selfish.
I think that's an unfair generalization. Before Napster, you only had one option: pay too much. After Napster, you had two: pay too much or pay too little. Given only those alternatives, it's only natural to choose the second.
Suppose I have $500 to spend on music, and you have $500 to spend on music. If we each buy 20 CDs, the music industry has made $1,000. Since we've both spent our budget, the record companies aren't going to get another cent out of us, but if we make copies of our music and give them to one another, they aren't losing any money either. There is only so much money that is available to be spent on content, but at current prices and practices, that amount allows for very limited distribution. For only a small amount more, we could have universal distribution of all content.
The big question is how to find the balance between paying too much (e.g. at HMV) or paying too little (e.g. at Napster). Personally, I think that the eventual development of online micropayments and e-cash could make this practical: each purchaser pays for a copy of the content, as usual, but as the number of purchasers increases, each purchaser gets a rebate, sharing both the production costs and profits among all purchasers. Since it costs the provider very litte to ship additional copies when all that is being shipped is data, once all fixed costs are paid for, nearly 100% of the price paid by purchasers is profit. Some of that could, instead, go back to rebating the price paid by earlier purchasers.
For example: 100 people buy some content for $10, for a net income of $1,000. When the 200th purchaser buys in, everyone gets a $4 rebate. Everyone pays $6, and the vendor takes in $1,200. When the 400th purchaser buys in, everyone gets a rebate totalling $6 (when combined with any earlier rebates). Everyone pays $4, and the vendor takes in $1,600. The vendor's profits still grow as sales increase, but more in proportion to the extra work and value being provided. At the same time, the price continues to fall, making it more accessible. With the right numerical tweaking, the vendor can end up making just as much money, but the price per user will be much lower. This was impractical when physical media had to be shipped and payment was by cash or credit card, but is is becoming practical to do this now that physical media and face-to-face transactions are no longer necessary.
Known item searching is dead easy using any search engine, so long as the item is in the database. It's also easy to find something about anything, so people who just want some information without being overly concerned with how accurate or complete that information is can also easily find something to keep them happy.
Serious research, on the other hand, requires a more quality-conscious search. A researcher will want all of the most relevant information about a topic, and Web search engines do not provide this very well at all. Weighted keyword searching is no substitute for professionally catalogued and classified documents in cases like this. In some cases, researchers will want an exhaustive search: everything relevant about the topic. For example, a Ph.D. candidate would almost certainly begin their thesis by locating everything academic published in their field of study. This is downright impossible with Web search engines: even if their databases were complete, relevancy is so bad that you would probably have to wade through thousands upon thousands of hits to find a hundred or so truly relevant sites. This is especially true of any subject that is susceptible to search engine spamming.
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I bet it won't even notice whatever content protection scheme they put in!
Unless your digital TV descrambler happens to have analog RCA outputs, that won't matter, because there will be nowhere to hook up your VCR. I assume that outputs compatible with non-DRM-compliant technologies will be the first to go, replaced by a patented interface.
All I can say to the media giants is this: I double dog dare you to give me one more reason to cancel my cable subscription and buy a bigger bookshelf.
Honestly, and not trying to troll. What will everyone here do if microsoft ceases being the evil empire? What if they can pull this off, and find some middle ground with the government? I said before, in a much earlier post, that most religions have an antagonist; What happens if we lose ours? Will /. topics get more sensational?
Microsoft isn't the Evil Empire because it makes bad software. It has earned this monicker because of the way it systematically and inexorably crushes alternatives, restricts choice, invades privacy, treats its own customers as borderline kleptomaniacs, and makes pronouncements about what is good for us, rather than taking the time to find out what we really want. When the day comes that Microsoft gives us more *meaningful* choices than it takes away, then it will stop being the Empire.
The fact that its software is usually (though not always) significantly behind the state of the art just rubs salt in the wound.
Well, after all the ribbing, we have to give Microsoft [microsoft.com] some credit. There was no reason to believe that Windows XP actually was designed to be secure. Certainly, recent events have shown otherwise. But this really could be a change for the better.
Microsoft gets no credit for making promises or stating intentions. If they actually deliver something, then we can credit them.
Microsoft touted XP as its most secure Windows ever, and it has at least strongly implied that NT4's security was superior to that of Unix, especially Linux. Microsoft has always claimed to take security very seriously, and has always claimed that the current incarnation of Windows features state-of-the-art security and stability. Whether you call this marketing spin, telling the public what they want to hear, or lying, it doesn't bode well for Microsoft's latest claim.
Microsoft's general solution to security problems is to tell people not to use a particular feature (like opening email attachments) rather than change its applications to reduce security threats. This way, it tries to eat its cake and have it. It says, "Windows is full of great features. It's also very secure, provided you don't use any of those great features."
Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, MS WIndows and a bunch of other products have holes in them that SANS tells others about. Has there ever been a piece of software with no security holes?
No reasonable law would make it illegal to sell or distribute imperfect software. That's like making it illegal for a doctor to make a mistake in a diagnosis or for a lawyer to offer less-than-perfect legal advice.
Yet, doctors and lawyers are legally responsible for malpractice: for mistakes made during the course of their practice due to recklessness, carelessness, or failure to adhere to the best practices of their profession.
A similar standard should hold, at least for commercial developers. A commercially-motivated software developer (as opposed to amateurs and hobbyists engaging in essentially nonprofit projects) should be held to a reasonable standard of care in the products they produce. This should be true whether the source is open or closed, or whether a license fee is charged or not. The standard should be that reasonable care was taken, given the capacity in which the software was produced. For personal or commuity projects, liability should be limited to outright malicious design. For commerical development, liability should be stricter. The real test should be to what degree failure to observe best practices was motivated by commercial gain.
Niether large nor small developers should be hung out to dry for every little security flaw that someone finds in their software. But sometimes, developers release code they know is inherently risky, even if no particular exploits have been discovered. For example, Microsoft ought to have known that the architecture of Outlook-IE-Windows Scripting was dangerous, especially in the hands of its target audience: non-technical users. It wasn't some obscure buffer overflow that made Outlook a problem virus propagator, it was the basic design. The developer community as a whole was aware of this; Microsoft cannot claim that the possibility that Outlook could be so abused didn't occur to them. Certainly a case can be made in an instance such as this that the developer should bear some liability for the damage caused by the product.
I had an ATM crash on me about a month ago. The "please wait" screen sat there for far longer than usual, then the whole machine seemed to turn off. A few seconds later, it powered back up and spit out my card. I checked with the teller inside the branch to make sure it hadn't taken any money from my account, and it hadn't, but it did leave me wondering whether the transaciton is committed before or after all of the cash has been dispensed.
Incidentally, this particular ATM ran OS/2.
I don't see how having a strong economy can be incompatible with social welfare. I've always kind of thought they are the same thing.
I never suggested that having a strong economy was incompatible with social welfare, though they are definitely not the same thing. (This is why, for example, that in the West over the last decade, job security has worsened, living standards have fallen, working conditions have worsened, working hours have increased, personal debt has increased, the distribution of wealth has become more skewed, but the economy has done very well, thank you.) A strong economy is one in which lots of money changes hands and nothing more. The effects of a strong economy may or may not benefit human welfare, depending on the circumstances, but the simple movement of money and exchange of goods and services is of no inherent benefit to human beings.
What I did say is that a strong economy and profits for business ought not be an end in and of themselves. If and when a strong economy serves human welfare, it should be pursued, to the extent that it does not cause more harm than good to human well-being. But to suggest that one should refrain from charitable or community-minded acts which are clearly beneficial to human welfare simply on the grounds that it might be bad for business and the economy is to argue for the abomination of flesh and blood humans existing to serve the economy, rather than the other way around.
Even if we were to accept Glass's argument about free software threatening for-profit business is true, one ought to question the assumption that this is a bad thing.
It seems to me that people giving away something in a not-for-profit or community-oriented manner (as opposed to dumping in order to gain a for-profit advantage in the market, which is a different matter altogether) is always a good thing. The argument that it is bad because it hurts for-profit businesses trying to sell the same thing is based on the twisted notion that making money, and not satisfying human need, is the pre-emminent goal. Or perhaps it is the business model in which business speculates on potential demand rather than contracting to produce for existing demand that is the problem.
It can be argued that community or family-based child care puts commercial daycare out of business. It can be argued that community or one-on-one educational activities hurts the business of trade schools that would like to charge money for teaching the same skills. It can be argued that cleaning one's own house and cooking one's own meals depresses the market for housekeepers and threatens the well-being of restaurants and the frozen food industry, but it would be ludicrous to argue that one should not cook one's own dinners, care for one's grandchildren, or teach one's neighbour how to install Windows (well...) because it's bad for the economy, unless one assumes that a strong economy is an end in itself, more important than the welfare of the people some of us thought the economy was supposed to serve.
The bottom line being, if you are in business trying to sell something that someone else is willing to give away out of some sort of civic-mindedness, you should be looking for a new business to be in. If you are investing R&D money in a speculative venture, you should be prepared to lose big if demand for your product does not materialize, as well as win big if it does.
But to those who believe in the right to bear arms up here - we can't. To those who believe that we have freedom of speech? Freedom of the press? Not in Canada. The government can censor you if they so choose.
Um, Canada does have a constitutionally enshrined Charter of Rights and Freedoms that is very similar to the American charter in scope and strength. There is no constitutional guarantee of any right to bear arms, but even in the U.S., this provision is anachronistic and is kept alive for entirely the wrong reasons.
Both governments censor speech to some extent, but both are among the freest countries in the world with respect to protecting the legal right to free expression.
There are serious impediments to free speech for most residents of both countries, but this is largely the result of speech costing money combined with the decision to extend the right of free speech to nonhuman corporate entities with vast resources that can easily be used to overwhelm all other voices. (Coca Cola has billions to spend each year to get out its message; how much can you afford to spend?)
It's not that Microsoft will be going out of their way to make sure things break on Win95; they just won't pay any attention to Win95 anymore. Stuff might even work, especially since MS will still be testing against Win98, which is similar to Win95.
Many newer MS Apps (The latest Media Player comes to mind, and I believe recent versions of IE as well) will refuse to install on a Win95 system. The installer checks and tells you that you cannot install the software on 95, period. It does not simply warn you that the software has not been tested on 95, so install at your own peril.
I can't think of any reason why, apart from deliberate design, media player couldn't easily run on 95 if it could run on 98. Maybe there is a reason, but it certainly seems that Microsoft is, in fact, deliberately breaking its newer releases so they won't run on 95.
There are still a lot of people, from home users to major corporate users, who still run Windows 95 because there is little justification for upgrading. It doesn't seem at all unlikely that Microsoft is deliberately making several core applications break on Windows 95 in order to get these people back into their revenue stream.
Maybe software isn't the same as documentation, but Debian is still Debian. One of the ideas behind Debian is to produce a core distribution that meets certain license criteria, so that anyone can take an official Debian release and know that they can do certain things with the distribution as a whole and with each component of the distribution. I know, for example, that I can freely reproduce and distribute verbatim copies of the official Debian distribution (which doesn't include the non-free tree) because I know that everything that appears in the official release meets the Debian open source criteria which
If some of the documentation in the distribution didn't necessarily conform to these standards, I would have to check the license of each document in the distribution before redistributing it, making derivative works, and so forth.
Maybe they should use their skills for a noble purpose, like pounding SPAMMERS.
They did this back in late 1997 or early 1998. Massive DoS attacks against Aegis.net finally caused them to reverse their spam-friendly stance and caused the demise of Stanford "Spamford" Wallace's Cyberpromotions, then responsible for probably half of all spam being sent. (Or, at least, received by me.) Walt Rhines' (I think) spam company (I forget the name now), probably the second largest spammer, also disappeared after that.
After that, the volume of spam slowed to a trickle. Without Cyberpromo and other companies willing to send spam, hide the sender's identity, and absorb the reprisals and complaints, spammers resorted to either clumsy attacks from Hotmail or other throwaway accounts, or to finding and exploiting open relays. It has, unfortunately, picked up again, though perhaps not quite to 1997/98 levels. I am guessing that spam filtering makes a significant difference.
The real problem is that spammers actually make money off of spamming us. There are enough dumb people out there that actually buy crap from the spammers. Just quietly delete all of you spam, and when spammers stop making money then they will eventually stop.
Your second point explains why your idea won't work.
If you can send out email to 50,000 people for, say, $200, and if you make $10 profit per sale, then you only need 20 out of 50,000 recipients to buy and you've made a profit. You and 49,979 other people -- 99.96% of all recipients -- can delete the email in disgust, but as long as those 0.04% others respond, the spammer breaks even. If an additional 0.01% respond, the spammer has made a $100 profit on an investment of $200 for marketing and whatever their fake product costs to make and ship.
Okay, these numbers are fabricated, but they're illustrative of the kinds of volume and margins that we're dealing with. A spammer doesn't care if 99.9% of recipients don't want the email and would never, ever buy their pyramid scheme/bulk mail software/penis enlargement pill; as long as one out of every thousand or so recipients are suckers, spamming is money well-spent for the spammer. It's certainly cheaper to carpet bomb everyone than it is to try to selectively market to idiots. I don't know how many people are suckers, but more than 1 in 1000 seems a safe bet.
Making spam a net money loser would effectively get rid of it, at least domestically. The most effective, least invasive way to do this would seem to be to provide civil and/or criminal penalties for spamming.
Most of the content on the Web is not worth paying for. But there is some that is. For example, I would be willing to pay between $5 and $15 per week for a news source that covered politics, science, technology, and other serious news with the kind of depth and professionalism that serious newspapers used to be famous for (before tabloid journalism began to creep into even the most respected of papers). I would pay a few dollars a month for The Register, if they would stop running ads and use some of the money to hire a proofreader. I would pay a dollar or two a month for some clever humour and satire, like the Brunching Shuttlecocks. Hell, I would even pay a few bucks for Slashdot.
A penny per page, any page, is flawed because it encourages lots of content as opposed to a manageable amount of high-quality content. It would encourage spamming the Web with lots and lots of interesting-sounding but cheaply assembled documents under as many different aliases and domains as possible (to thwart the eventual domain filtering that would take place). The result would be an even smaller signal to noise ration, something that is already well out of hand.
I said that I would be willing to pay for content. But, currently, there isn't a payment system that offers me the things I need in order to feel comfortable doing so: simplicity, anonymity, privacy, security, and limited liability. Credit cards are bad because they provide none of these. In particular, I'm not going to hand over my credit card and personal information to someone when I cannot in turn verify with any certainty who that someone really is. Debit systems are better, but still suffer most of these limitations.
Cash payments have the advantage of being completely anonymous and they limit your liability to exactly what you pay. A no-questions, no-refunds transaction is fine when dealing with small amounts of cash. But even here, the Web presents new problems. If I have a bad experience with a real-life small-time merchant, I can fairly easily take my business elsewhere. The ratio of respectable businesses to shysters operating out of the backw of their trucks is reasonably high. On the Web, it's harder to tell the shysters from legitimate small-time operators without trying and possibly getting burned in the process. And it's hard to tell if the site you're visiting today is operated by the same shyster who sold you crappy content yesterday at a different site.
Established, respected sites that can easily be traced to established, respected proprietors could get away with charging for content--if they offer something better than what is being offered for free. They can get away with either accepting online payments or the traditional paper invoice method. For less well-known sites, the ability to charge for content will probably have to wait for the arrival of the Web equivalent of cash, and some sort of reasonably strong identification scheme to establish who is behind the Web site you're offerint to pay for.
The majority of the world has essentially no labor protection whatsoever. That's because they are too poor to be able to afford that protection. When companies move jobs to places where there is no labor protection, they are moving jobs to poor countries. That helps the poor people there. Preventing corporations from moving the jobs hurts those people.
There was an interesting documentary on PBS about a month or two ago about globalization and its effect on Jamaica. While the arrival of foreign factories does indeed mean new jobs, the writer's argument went that trade between the devleoping world and the industrialized world is essentually turning the developing world into a ghetto of slave-wage labourers.
A country like Jamaica doesn't have the same level of social or industrial infrastructure as the United States. It lacks the capital and expertise required to produce goods competitively. As a result, local industries are being forced under, as imported American goods are actually cheaper than domestic goods. This is, in the short run, better for the consumer because they now have access to goods at lower costs. But in the long term, it stifles the economy because money that could be going to local industries and be reinvested in improving efficiency and competitiveness instead leaves the country and enriches foreign companies. Countries with natural resources can't exploit them cheaply enough to sell them competitively; they can only sell the rights to foreigners, which further impedes development of local industries and economies. As a result, all that the people in these countries are left with is their labour, which they can sell very competitively because they don't ask for things like 10-hour work days, health benefits, workplace safety measures, or what we would call a "comfortable" standard of living.
The point seems to be that free trade between two countries with very different levels of industrial infrastructure may well exaggerate that imbalance. Perhaps the developing world either needs to be left alone to develop some more or, better yet, needs assistance in developing locally-owned and run industries. In other words, we have to give them money so that they can compete against us more effectively. While this would ultimately be good for both them and us, it doesn't sound like the kind of thing that most large corporations on a 5-year (or 6-month) fiscal plan would be interested in doing.
Ditto for the ESRB (the guys that handle videogames). Completely voluntary, but it helps parents make a decision. I'd rather have 'M' slapped on the front of some Zombie game than Congress telling me there will be no zombie game.
Rating systems like the ESRB are dumb because they simply make a blanket statement about what age groups the title is suitable for. (The MPAA ratings are dumb for the same reason.) The board applies all of its own values and assumptions and somehow comes to the conclusion that the title is suitable for everyone 13 and over, but not under 13. The parents don't get to exercise their own judgement over and above trust the ESRB or don't.
The RSAC rating system was a much more intelligent system. It didn't make any recommendations about who the game was suitable for. Instead, it rated different content areas (violence, nudity, sexuality, language, and so forth) on a scale of 0 to 4, with a descritpion of each. For example, violence ratings went something like 0: none, 1: cartoon violence, 2: damage to realistic objects, 3: humans killed, 4: blood and gore. Instead of being told "this game depicts violence so don't let your 12-year-old play it," the parent is instead given some basic information about the level and type of violence, which can be used as a basis for making an intelligent decision about whether the material is suitable for their kids.
MPAA/ESRB-style ratings are no different from filtering; they effectively put the decision-making about what is suitable for kids in the hands of a third party. Giving the parent a choice between trusting the ESRB and not trusting the ESRB is no different that giving the parent a choice between trusting NetNanny and not trusting NetNanny.
Privacy advocates are up in arms about this kind of research
I don't know of any privacy advocates who suggest a complete prohibition on the collection of personal and marketing data. It seems to me that privacy advocates typically object to the tactics used to collect such information. They are upset that comapnies collect information surreptitiously, collaborate with one another to exchange information that was collected under the presumption that it would be kept confidential, and sometimes even go to great lengths to defeat measures deliberately enacted to preserve privacy.
Market research is fine. Asking for personal information is fine. Collecting this information without the informed consent--or over the explicit objection--of the individual in question is not. Sharing this information or using for purposes other than those to which the individual has agreed is not.
This is true enough; the real issue seems to be that one of the greatest allies of OSS and an open Web appears to have defected to the other side.
It seems to me that for-profit software developers like Netscape and Microsoft never had much use for the W3C. They made sure their products would be as compatible as necessary (and as incompatible as possible) with whatever else was in use, but they never paid more than lip service to real standards. The real supporters of the W3C mandate have always been the very people who stand to lose the most from this turn of events.
It's disheartening to see the W3C shift from a defender of open access to a proponent of the 'building a wall makes you owner of whatever happens to be inside' mentality that really represents some of the most opportunistic, antisocial, and basest traits of humanity.
The W3C's endorsement of this won't suddenly and fundamentally change the Web -- patented, pay-to-play technologies are already here and there is no shortage of those who seek to subvert and control the gifts that were given to everyone for their own selfish ends -- but it does mean that an important voice in advocating a free and open Web will now be shilling for those who believe that social conscience and responsibility aren't virtues but rather weaknesses to be exploited.
And then to watch him duck when the throw they gun at him. Why was that?
Because Christopher kept complaining about how much it hurt when the gun hit him.
A better question would be, who throws a gun at someone in the first place? Do we really need Superman to handle someone that dumb?
I think that you have hit the nail on the head here. Microsoft is simply a high profile target, but it is also despised for it's arrogant, "our software is superior and everyone else sucks" attitide. Basically, their arrogance inspires people to try to take them down.
According to all security reports I have seen, you are far more vulnerable to being cracked or exploited if you run IIS than if you run another random Web server. I believe that the Netcraft numbers imply that your chances of being hit are about double. Whatever the case, the clear implication is this: run IIS and you are significantly more at risk than if you run Apache or any other HTTPD server.
Spin doctors will try to explain why this is the case, but the bottom line is that it doesn't really matter; under typical conditions, you are more at risk running IIS than any other HTTPD server. Microsoft can offer all the explanations they want as to why it's not their fault that running their software puts you at greater risk, but it doesn't change the fact that running their software does just that.
If your case is not typical, IIS may not be the riskiest choice. Maybe IIS really is less secure because, on average, IIS admins are less well-trained than Apache admins or because IIS is harder to configure than is commonly supposed. If this is the case, Microsoft should be upfront about the fact that running IIS on NT is just as hard and requires just as much skill as running Apache on Unix; they can't eat their cake and have it by claiming their software is better because it is easy to administer and then blaming every problem on the lack of properly trained admins.
At any rate, the implication for the average business operation is clear: for whatever reason, non-IIS systems tend to be more secure than IIS systems. That is a significant factor to consider in choosing your kit, regardless of why.
A very interesting take on Copyright reform, but just to play Devil's Advocate for a moment -- what makes you so sure that just because some content "is the most needed in the public doamin" automatically means it should be turned over at no cost?
That's not quite the message I meant to convey. What I am suggesting is that the proposed system whereby rights holders would pay a fee for monopoly power instead of being automatically granted it is likely to only allow relatively uninteresting and un-useful works into the public domain early. That's better than the current situation, where it looks like nothing published after 1920 or so will ever enter the public domain, but it still means that the most interesting, popular, and important material will still remain unfree. It will still be the case that all of the central elements of popular culture and, increasingly, the langauges and protocols by which we communicate, will remain private property leased to the public, and that participating in the development of one's own culture (by building upon what has come before) will still be by invitation only.
Disney would continue to hold on to Mickey Mouse with an iron claw, because it's way more profitable for them to leverage an 80-year old idea for even more money than it is to come up with something original for the first time in the better part of a century. Microsoft has long since stopped making a profit from Office 95, but there is no way they would willingly hand over the keys to it, or even to Word for Windows 2.0, becuase there's not enough value in their new products for most people to justify spending hundreds or thousands of dollars if older versions are in the public domain. Microsoft counts on lack of availablility and incompatibility between versions to force upgrades and make more money. It uses copyright to restrict availability of products it no longer wants people to have. It does this not only to protect its investment in R&D, but to protect its future revenue stream by ensuring that it can effectively unpublish software once it becomes a liability.
It's also not fair to equate no copyright with people working for free. Most people don't work for free, including those who write software, compose music, or write copy. Copyright is not a cornerstone of the free market either. Copyright is a state-granted monopoly. Last time I checked, that was the complete opposite of the free market ideology. Because several industries have developed business models based on strong copyright monopolies, weakening or eliminating the monopoly power would adversely affect these businesses, at least in the short term. But that doesn't mean that copyright is sacrosanct. Neither BMG nor Disney have a right to continue operating under the current rules indefinitely (or under the even more favourable rules they lobby for); the market is supposed to be for the enrichment of the public as a whole. Everyone has the right to earn a living, but nobody has a right to demand a set of rules that allows them to make as much money as they want in the manner that they want, regardless of its effect on society as a whole.
Precisely because the most valuable content is what is most needed in the public domain. Not too many people care anymore if DOS 1 is made PD, nor would very many people be all that excited to learn that the copyright on Milli Vanilli's greatest hits had expired prematurely.
Copyright is not actually necessary in a free market society. Interestingly, the trend in the United States seems to have been towards the deregulation of monopolies in almost every sector, except for the copyright monopolies, which have been consistently strengthened. Moreover, all other state-granted monopolies faced some kind of regulations.
If copyright is allowed to stand, it should be treated like any other state-granted monopoly. Copyright holders should be considered common carriers, so to speak; a copyright holder would be obligated to license the rights to copy or make derivatives from their copyrights to anyone who paid the fees and complied with the regulations that would be set by law. Refusal would result in the forfeiture of the copyright. Regulations and maximum profits that could be derived from copyright would be fixed by law. (Which brings in the possibility that a copyright holder might decide that releasing their work into the public domain might actually be more profitable, in some cases, than holding on to the copyright.) Furthermore, the copyright holder should be required to provide a physical copy at a reasonable rate (fixed by law). in order to avoid the degenerate situation where a license to copy could be granted, but copy protection measures prevented exercising that right. If the copyright holder ceased publication of the material, it would fall into the public domain.
Thus, for example, I could insist that I be able to purchase a copy of Windows 3.0 from Microsoft. If it couldn't or wouldn't sell me a copy, it would void its copyright over that particular item, at which point I could do whatever I wanted with it, providing I could find a copy.
Copyright is really just another form of state-granted monopoly, so there's no reason that it shouldn't be treated similar to a telephone, electricity, transportation, or other government-granted exclusive jurisdiction.
Face recognition as a technology is not problematic. But you have to explain how face recognition can be used as part of a security system in a way which is both effective in combatting terrorism and doesn't trample the civil liberties of the public at large. Offhand, it seems to me that it would be difficult to accomplish either goal.
In the wake of catastrophes like last week's attacks, people are often tempted to look for quick and easy solutions. The problem is that these solutions usually do not even address what happened, let alone what may happen in the future. But it makes people feel better to know that they are doing something.
From what I have learned about the events of Tuesday, the most sensible solution that I have heard involves a change in procedure and, perhaps, the addition of two pieces of technology in aircraft: control lockout and a locking, steel door to the cockpit. Changing two elements of standard procedure seem to make sense. First, the cockpit door should be locked before the first passangers board, and it should remain locked for the duration. (This may mean rearranging things so that the pilots have their own bathroom within the secure permimeter.) Second, at the first sign of danger, the pilot would lock out the cockpit controls and put the plane on remote control. (This could be circumvented, of course, but there would then be two separate security systems that would have to fail.) If would-be hijackers knew that any trouble would put the aircraft on an immediate auto-land sequence, there would be little point in trying to commandeer an aircraft.
The real long-term solution is to eliminate the cause of terrorism, but that's a long, hard battle that will probably require a surprising amount of change in the way that we in the West behave towards the rest of the world.
But the Windows model is fundamentally bad for novice and expert users alike. If the only way to make Linux go mainstream is to copy Windows, what's the point? The Unix Way may not be one that is inherently appealing to most users, but the Windows Way betrays users by diverting their attention from their real goals and instead occupying their time with irrelevancies.
If you look at the default configuration of Word, for example, about half the visible controls relate to formatting and typesetting. The application is set up to give people who most likely don't understand the first thing about typesetting the ability to make a complete mess out of their document. In other words, it enables users to do what they aren't very good at doing, rather than trying to automate those tasks so that the user can concentrate on what they are good at doing, which is providing content.
The ability to choose unreadable fonts and bad justification may be sexy and appealing to the user, but it typically doesn't mesh well with the reason the user fired up Word in the first place. There should be buttons like "write a letter", "write a report", and "write an academic paper". These should prompt the user to provide the information that they can expertly supply -- the content -- and take care of formatting, page breaks, spell checking, and so forth, automatically. The user shouldn't have to worry about how to format the report, it should be formatted to whatever the organization's standard style for reports is, and it should be done automatically. (Or, for home users, to one of a selection of standard formats developed by people who know a thing or two about document formatting.)
This is technically feasible in Word, but this functionality is hidden and not nearly as convenient to use as the haphazard mess-making capabilities that are emphasized. My experience is that most Word users aren't even aware of the existence of Word's (primitive) style sheet capabililties, much less know how to use them. Fewer still are aware of templates and macros. But everyone knows how to change font sizes and how to create page breaks using a series of hard returns.
This doesn't mean that users shouldn't be allowed more control, but low-level control (e.g. creating the style sheets and macros that are used to format the document) should be kept under the surface, while the less sexy but more useful high-level features should be kept on the surface.
The whole point of using a computer is to have it assist the user by doing things that the user cannot do well or efficiently hiself or herself. Suites like MS Office do at best a mediocre job of this.
I think that's an unfair generalization. Before Napster, you only had one option: pay too much. After Napster, you had two: pay too much or pay too little. Given only those alternatives, it's only natural to choose the second.
Suppose I have $500 to spend on music, and you have $500 to spend on music. If we each buy 20 CDs, the music industry has made $1,000. Since we've both spent our budget, the record companies aren't going to get another cent out of us, but if we make copies of our music and give them to one another, they aren't losing any money either. There is only so much money that is available to be spent on content, but at current prices and practices, that amount allows for very limited distribution. For only a small amount more, we could have universal distribution of all content.
The big question is how to find the balance between paying too much (e.g. at HMV) or paying too little (e.g. at Napster). Personally, I think that the eventual development of online micropayments and e-cash could make this practical: each purchaser pays for a copy of the content, as usual, but as the number of purchasers increases, each purchaser gets a rebate, sharing both the production costs and profits among all purchasers. Since it costs the provider very litte to ship additional copies when all that is being shipped is data, once all fixed costs are paid for, nearly 100% of the price paid by purchasers is profit. Some of that could, instead, go back to rebating the price paid by earlier purchasers.
For example: 100 people buy some content for $10, for a net income of $1,000. When the 200th purchaser buys in, everyone gets a $4 rebate. Everyone pays $6, and the vendor takes in $1,200. When the 400th purchaser buys in, everyone gets a rebate totalling $6 (when combined with any earlier rebates). Everyone pays $4, and the vendor takes in $1,600. The vendor's profits still grow as sales increase, but more in proportion to the extra work and value being provided. At the same time, the price continues to fall, making it more accessible. With the right numerical tweaking, the vendor can end up making just as much money, but the price per user will be much lower. This was impractical when physical media had to be shipped and payment was by cash or credit card, but is is becoming practical to do this now that physical media and face-to-face transactions are no longer necessary.
Known item searching is dead easy using any search engine, so long as the item is in the database. It's also easy to find something about anything, so people who just want some information without being overly concerned with how accurate or complete that information is can also easily find something to keep them happy.
Serious research, on the other hand, requires a more quality-conscious search. A researcher will want all of the most relevant information about a topic, and Web search engines do not provide this very well at all. Weighted keyword searching is no substitute for professionally catalogued and classified documents in cases like this. In some cases, researchers will want an exhaustive search: everything relevant about the topic. For example, a Ph.D. candidate would almost certainly begin their thesis by locating everything academic published in their field of study. This is downright impossible with Web search engines: even if their databases were complete, relevancy is so bad that you would probably have to wade through thousands upon thousands of hits to find a hundred or so truly relevant sites. This is especially true of any subject that is susceptible to search engine spamming.