I don't. You're forgetting the purpose of patent protection: to encourage innovation.
There's no real cost to innovating in music or art. It doesn't take ten years and three billion dollars to come up with a new melody. So there's little barrier to innovation in music. Anybody can do it, and many people do.
But-- to take a counter-example-- consider engines. We've been using internal combustion engines for a long time. To come up with a better engine-- one that runs on water, or chained hamsters, or the moral power of virginity-- would be a huge effort. Ten years and three billion dollars. Why bother doing it? Because you can patent your invention, and for a period of time you can have the exclusive right to build it, or you can collect royalties from other folks who build it. Without patent protection (so the theory goes) nobody would bother building new kinds of engines.
So ask yourself: is software more like music or more like engineering? It certainly has elements of both: one person, working alone, can churn out page after page of software, just like music. Ninety percent of software is crap, just like music.;-)
But software-- and more importantly innovation in software-- is a really important thing. To a large extent, our society and our economy are powered by software. It's in our best collective interest to encourage innovation in software by whatever means we find appropriate, including granting exclusive rights in the form of patents.
About the only ways in which you could render the GPL invalid would either be to revoke copyright on software (all software is public domain) or revoke licencing of copyright works (if you want your work published you must put it into the public domain.)
Oh, that's not true at all. Just look at the recent Apple situation: contributions from a minor had to be rejected because that minor lacked the legal standing to enter into a contract with Apple. If that person-- I forget his name-- had decided years hence that he had just been a kid and hadn't known what he was doing, then Apple's OS source would have been scattered through with little bits of his intellectual property, and Apple would have been in a heap of trouble.
Are you sure that every line of code in the open source software you use was contributed and GPLd (or whatever) by an adult? Maybe you're certain enough to use open source software personally, but are you willing to bet your business on it?
There are other situations that can spell trouble for open source intellectual property. What about Tilly's recent troubles with his employer? In that case, despite the fact that Tilly was a fully legal adult, he didn't actually own the rights that he was trying to sign away.
All it takes is one company or individual to stand up and say, "You can't GPL that because it isn't yours. It's mine." What if the code in question hadn't been Carp and Exporter, among other things, but rather glibc? Or the Linux kernel itself? The mind reels.
Like I said in my last post, I'm not trying to raise FUD. I'm talking about fear, yeah, but I think it's a reasonable fear. The GPL cannot protect code to which it should never have been applied in the first place, and it's entirely possible-- even likely-- that we'll hear more about this sort of thing in the coming months.
I don't understand why you have a problem with her statement. IP law makes it very easy to protect what you own, and very difficult to surrender the rights to it. And rightly so. If it were possible for the tiniest slip to render your claim to intellectual property invalid, then the law wouldn't really be protecting you at all, would it?
I think there are lots of legal implications of open-source software that just haven't been thought out, or tested in court. It's not hard to imagine a scenario in which some previously unthought-of aspect of IP law renders the GPL invalid. Suddenly everybody who uses open source software must either stop using it, or pay a licensing fee to the license holders.
Don't brand it as FUD; I don't intend to make people afraid of open source software. I'm just trying to say that the lady has a point.
Most University's are adding Windows workstations, but not the servers. You know what students are doing on those Win2k lab PCs? 85%: Microsoft Word (Sure beats tex for the average student) 15%: Telnet to the *nix server to code. 5%: Using in VB for their IS course in GUI design.
Who said $2,000 was pocket change? I have three friends who each wanted to get into the whole digital media thing. One of them is about to have a baby, one of them just did, and one of them is just kind of a gadget freak. Then there's me, of course.
We each decided to buy (new or first) Macs for pretty much the same reasons: iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, et cetera. For my friends the parents, it was to have an easier way to document their kids. For my gadget freak friend, it was so he could listen to MP3s while he rode his bike. (Not the safest thing maybe, but he's a grown-up, so it's not my problem.)
None of us thought $2,000 was pocket change. If we were just throwing money away, we probably would have bought some high-end PC, because depending on your point of view you do get more bang for your buck that way. But the thing we all had in common was this: none of us wanted to waste time or effort. Make it easy, we said, and we'll buy it.
For us, that $2,000 or so was a sort of investment. The proposition was basically that I gave Apple an extra $600 to promise me that managing my MP3s and movies and pictures and whatever else would be as simple and foolproof as humanly possible. So far, they've kept up their end of the bargain.
Re:Apple will buy Xplay
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· Score: 4, Informative
I predict that Apple will not buy XPlay. Why should they? They're already selling iPods faster than they can make 'em, so there's no benefit to Apple to release and support iPod software for Windows. Apple is really good at writing Mac software, either from scratch or acquired from somebody else. iTunes and Final Cut Pro were acquired; as far as I know, iPhoto was written from scratch.
Right now, Apple's in the best possible situation. While they don't sell XPlay, or officially support it, they don't discourage it in any way, either. Those people who would buy an iPod but won't buy a Mac have an option, albeit not a great one. And all the while Apple gets to point at the iTunes/iPod combo, with all of its functionality, and say, "Only on Mac."
Buying and releasing XPlay would be a waste of effort.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but the answer is yes. Sort of. I know several people personally who wanted to get into the whole digital media thing: MP3s instead of portable CD players, digital cameras instead of film, digital camcorders and DVDs instead of plain old videotape. The combination of OS X plus iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, and iPod won them over. About $2,000 bucks later-- counting the iMac and the camera and iPod and whatnot-- they were in business.
I've seen it happen more than once among my little circle of friends.
Tragedy shouldn't take away from comedy, at least not in the long term. Something horrible happens, and it takes time to get over it. During that time, one's sense of humor is seriously impaired. Hell, nothing was funny on September 12th. But eventually you have to go back to laughing at things. It's the only way to get through a life otherwise filled with pain, fear, and grief.
I forget who said it, but it resonates nonetheless: I laugh only that I may not weep.
A Palm development kit release for Linux is news. Mac client software that was due six months ago is NOT newsworthy pudge.
Oh, so Slashdot is a Linux-only club now? Pfeh. The folks that run the site found it worthy to create an Apple section. Posting news of new software releases-- especially long-awaited ones-- is entirely justified.
It's a common misconception that there isn't enough food in the world to go around. According to a recently published book the name of which I've forgotten (sorry), world food output averages out to something like 4 pounds of food per day per person, worldwide. That statement is grossly oversimplified, of course, but the point is that the world, on average, has a pretty significant food surplus.
The problem with hunger is that there are places in the world where one of two things is true: either the place is so far from arable lands that getting food to the people there is expensive and difficult, or the people who live there are so poor that they can't acquire the food that's already available to them.
So finding new ways to produce food isn't really going to help the problem much, unless we reach a point where food production is so cheap that you can literally give food away to anybody that asks for it. (If you look at the segment of the world's population that is directly engaged in food production activities, it sinks in what an unthinkable economic disaster it would be to make food production that cheap. Something like three billion people would be immediately without income.)
The real solution to the world's hunger problem is going to be one of distribution. If we can get food from Buttwad, Iowa, to Mogadishu, Somalia, for fractions of a cent per pound, the hunger problem suddenly gets a lot easier to solve.
I don't believe it works exactly like that. The stuff that ends up going out over the various PBS stations is finished programming. Somebody had to produce that programming. I live in Dallas, and the local PBS station, KERA, has been doing a lot of production lately, shooting and finishing various shows.
When a production company or station makes a program, they turn over only the finished piece to the distributor or broadcaster. The production company or station keeps ownership of and rights to the stuff that went into making the program. Sometimes there are agreements between the distributor and the production company, like the production company promising not to turn around and use the same footage to make a different cut of the same program and sell it to somebody else for instance.
So what PBS gets is actually just the finished programs, not the raw footage or anything like that. It's not theirs to release.
Both of you are right; it only sounds like you disagree because you've got different agendas.
The first poster said that developers have to listen to their users in order to make and keep their users happy. I.e., if you want your software to be widely accepted and used by millions of loving fans, you really ought to implement the users' requests.
The second poster said that he has no responsibility to the user because he's writing the software for his own reasons. I.e., there's no reason to spend time and trouble on somebody else's requests because you're not getting anything out of it.
Depending on your agenda, either of these points of view can be valid. Hell, in my case both of them are. I'm not working on my current project because I'm getting paid to do it. I'm doing it for the fun and experience of it. But I just love the approval and adoration of my coworkers and friends, so I'm throwing them a few bones to keep 'em interested.
What's private and not depends on the situation. Going into a bar, all they need to know is whether you are of legal age or not.
You seem to define what's private as that which does not need to be known. I'm not sure I agree with that, when I take off my "principle" hat and put on my "practical" hat.
Let's say I go to a bar and order a gin gimlet. It's not strictly necessary for anybody to know that, unless my drink contained the last of the gin. In that case, the bar would need to know to restock.
So the bar might reasonably expect to keep track of which drinks are consumed. They need to know this so they know how to stock their wares. (There are a couple of ways to track that. You don't have to make a note every time a drink is ordered. You just have to inventory your stock every night, or something.)
The bar might also reasonably expect to be allowed to keep track of how many people enter and leave. Fire code requires this: you can't have more than N people in your establishment at any time, so you have to keep a count to be in compliance with the rules. So it's reasonable to expect the guy at the door to make a mark on a clipboard every time a person comes in.
What about other information that the bar has a case for collecting? What about whether or not I, as a patron of the bar, smoke? If a significant number of patrons don't smoke, then the owner of the bar might want to set up a "smoking on the patio only" rule.
It's not much of a stretch to come up with lots of examples in which the owners of the bar, just by making observations, can improve their business.
So "need to know" is fuzzy. Some things are clearly silly-- you don't need to know my political preferences. Some are clearly reasonable-- keeping track of how many people are in your bar at once is important, and mandated by law. Other things are in the fuzzy middle.
Re:Black Water?
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Black Water
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Note: to get a song out of your head, think about the Barney Miller theme.
Bastard! Now I've got the Barney Miller theme stuck in my head! Damn you!
If you watch that episode carefully you'll notice that the equation P=NP floating around.
There was a Futurama on a few weeks ago-- I think it was the one where Fry and Amy hooked up in the closet-- that had two books sitting on a shelf. The titles were "P" and "NP."
I think this raises an interesting question. What information about me is legitimately private, and what isn't?
The knee-jerk reaction, of course, is to say that everything is private unless I choose to release it. But that approach doesn't work in practice. There are too many instances in which information about me needs to be publicly available. To pick a silly example, it's important that it be public knowledge that somebody lives in my home, because if the building catches on fire I want people to let me know and help me get out.
So some information really should be explicitly public knowledge, and it's important that everybody accept that, especially privacy advocates. We can then have a reasoned discourse about where to draw that line.
Think about your phone number. The phone company publishes your name and phone number in their directory unless you pay an additional fee for an unlisted number. This has been the status quo for my entire life-- 30 years-- and certainly much longer. So it's got a pretty good precedent going. So is my phone number private information by default? Not really. Should it be? Hmm... maybe. If I express no preference at all, should the phone company publish my name, address, and phone number or not?
The other end of the spectrum is information that's clearly private, and protected by law. My medical records and the contents of my communications with my lawyer are explicitly private. If a court wanted to know what my doctor said to me last week, they couldn't ask. It's private.
Everything else is in the middle. Is my street address private? No, by the phone book argument. What about the number of people who live in my house? Maybe. How about their ages, genders, and sexual preferences? Hmm.
I guess what I'm trying to say is this: our society seems to accept as a given that we should each have the right to keep stuff private. The slippery slope argument, though often specious at best, implies that the right to keep stuff private must only be abridged when there's no alternative. But everywhere you look there's ambiguity about this principle. Go back to the phone book example; the phone company assumes you want to publish your name, address, and phone number unless you explicitly tell them-- and pay them!-- not to. Likewise, the bar mentioned in the article assumes that it's okay for them to collect demographic information from you.
Where is the line between stuff that is assumed to be private unless explicitly waived, and stuff that's assumed to be public unless explicitly withheld? Like I said before, in principle the line is all the way over to one side: everything is private unless waived. But in the real world, that line will have to be moved a little bit so that some things are public information by default.
"...women were real women, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Spirits were brave, men boldly split infinitives that no man had split before. Thus was the Empire forged."
Sure, if you want to start talking about multiuser systems, you can really eat up the real estate. Hell, ASCI Blue Mountain is over 6,000 processors, and it occupies a whole floor!
But the thing about the SGI system I mentioned is that it's a single-user workstation that just happens to occupy one (or more!) six-foot-high purple racks. For a while, a few months back in 1998, I was lucky enough to have a six-rack, 24-processor system all to myself. "Only" 24 CPUs, but eight InfiniteReality-series graphics pipes. With eight 1920x1200 displays. One mouse and keyboard. All for me. Oooof.
Tidal power notwithstanding, this article talks about harnessing the kinetic energy of waves crashing to the shore. So instead of sending all of their energy into the beach, some of it will go into power generating devices and the rest will go into the beach.
If anything, this scheme would help *save* eroding coastlines by diverting some small fraction of the force of the waves.
It's even better than solar power that way. While solar power isn't totally free-- every joule you get from the sun is one joule that won't go into growing plants, which can ultimately have an impact on the planet's ecosystems-- the kinetic energy of waves is just going to get smeared across the beach. Some of it will become kinetic energy in the sand and rocks and whatnot, but the rest will just be conducted into the ground in the form of heat, slightly warming the sand that's already too freakin' hot to walk on.
I say bring on the wave motion generators! And while you're at it, figure out how to build a gun out of one of them, so we can use that cool name!
It's not really a huge freaking tower unless it's at least six feet tall. My all-time favorite workstation is the SGI Onyx 2 rack*. Six feet tall, bright purple, noisy as can be. The Onyx 3000 systems are okay, but there's just something inherently cool about the Onyx 2. It's what the French call, "I don't know what."
And the shipping crate is big enough for two people to stand up in. Well, for me anyway. I'm about 5'6".
* Scroll down a bit to find Onyx 2 pics. I didn't think anybody would appreciate it if I linked directly to an 11 MB TIFF.
Remember those little check boxes on some pages that say "E-Mail me with news about foo" that are checked by default? Some people never get around to unchecking them. This is them constued as an "opt-in".
I've got one even better than that. An acquaintence of mine recently signed up for Intuit's QuickBase service, which is kind of like simple web database hosting. Neat, in principle.
When you sign up, there's a form to fill out, including a blank for a user name, and one of those ubiquitous checkboxes, checked of course. My friend filled in the form and chose his own name as his user name. His name has three letters. He unchecked the "please spam me" box, and hit "Submit."
An error message appeared. Evidently your username has to be between 4 and 8 letters. Use your "back" button and try again, it said.
He used the back button, added a letter to his name to meet the 4-letter minimum, and clicked "Submit." Then came that flash of a second, after he had irrevocably clicked the button but before the window had refreshed.
The "spam me" box was checked again.
The only thing we could figure was that there must have been an "onload" JavaScript that set the checked state of the box when the page opened. When he hit his back button, the JavaScript ran again and checked the "spam me" box for him.
Why are you buying IBM storage products? Don't you know their drives suck?:)
Heh. Good one. The real answer is that I'm not; one of my company's partners is using the IBM FAStT700 (Worst. Name. Ever.) in their lab, and I was trying to figure out why. It's got 2 Gb FC on the back, that's the only thing I can think of so far.
Okay, fine. Setting aside the arguable point that Google is a what and not a who, you got me on that one.
My point, though, was that in a lot of ways the URL, for my purposes anyway, is going the way of the IP address. It's a part of the Internet infrastructure that I'm passingly aware of, but that I only have to encounter on rare occasions.
For an explanation of why you can't "buy" an opt-in list, ask Google about "Nadine mailing".
Yes, this is off-topic. Mod me down if you must.
Am I the only one who forsees a day when URLs and hyperlinks as we know them are superceded by Google search strings?
The Google database changes dynamically, of course, but that's currently a small problem. If I'm looking for info on the IBM FAStT700 disk array, as I was this morning, I'm a lot more likely to type "ibm fast700" into Google than I am to navigate through IBM's maze of a web site.
If I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, Google can usually help me find it, or at least something sufficiently close to it to get by.
But if I know exactly what I'm looking for, but don't know where to find it, Google is even more helpful.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the music analogy
;-)
I don't. You're forgetting the purpose of patent protection: to encourage innovation.
There's no real cost to innovating in music or art. It doesn't take ten years and three billion dollars to come up with a new melody. So there's little barrier to innovation in music. Anybody can do it, and many people do.
But-- to take a counter-example-- consider engines. We've been using internal combustion engines for a long time. To come up with a better engine-- one that runs on water, or chained hamsters, or the moral power of virginity-- would be a huge effort. Ten years and three billion dollars. Why bother doing it? Because you can patent your invention, and for a period of time you can have the exclusive right to build it, or you can collect royalties from other folks who build it. Without patent protection (so the theory goes) nobody would bother building new kinds of engines.
So ask yourself: is software more like music or more like engineering? It certainly has elements of both: one person, working alone, can churn out page after page of software, just like music. Ninety percent of software is crap, just like music.
But software-- and more importantly innovation in software-- is a really important thing. To a large extent, our society and our economy are powered by software. It's in our best collective interest to encourage innovation in software by whatever means we find appropriate, including granting exclusive rights in the form of patents.
About the only ways in which you could render the GPL invalid would either be to revoke copyright on software (all software is public domain) or revoke licencing of copyright works (if you want your work published you must put it into the public domain.)
Oh, that's not true at all. Just look at the recent Apple situation: contributions from a minor had to be rejected because that minor lacked the legal standing to enter into a contract with Apple. If that person-- I forget his name-- had decided years hence that he had just been a kid and hadn't known what he was doing, then Apple's OS source would have been scattered through with little bits of his intellectual property, and Apple would have been in a heap of trouble.
Are you sure that every line of code in the open source software you use was contributed and GPLd (or whatever) by an adult? Maybe you're certain enough to use open source software personally, but are you willing to bet your business on it?
There are other situations that can spell trouble for open source intellectual property. What about Tilly's recent troubles with his employer? In that case, despite the fact that Tilly was a fully legal adult, he didn't actually own the rights that he was trying to sign away.
All it takes is one company or individual to stand up and say, "You can't GPL that because it isn't yours. It's mine." What if the code in question hadn't been Carp and Exporter, among other things, but rather glibc? Or the Linux kernel itself? The mind reels.
Like I said in my last post, I'm not trying to raise FUD. I'm talking about fear, yeah, but I think it's a reasonable fear. The GPL cannot protect code to which it should never have been applied in the first place, and it's entirely possible-- even likely-- that we'll hear more about this sort of thing in the coming months.
I don't understand why you have a problem with her statement. IP law makes it very easy to protect what you own, and very difficult to surrender the rights to it. And rightly so. If it were possible for the tiniest slip to render your claim to intellectual property invalid, then the law wouldn't really be protecting you at all, would it?
I think there are lots of legal implications of open-source software that just haven't been thought out, or tested in court. It's not hard to imagine a scenario in which some previously unthought-of aspect of IP law renders the GPL invalid. Suddenly everybody who uses open source software must either stop using it, or pay a licensing fee to the license holders.
Don't brand it as FUD; I don't intend to make people afraid of open source software. I'm just trying to say that the lady has a point.
Most University's are adding Windows workstations, but not the servers. You know what students are doing on those Win2k lab PCs?
85%: Microsoft Word (Sure beats tex for the average student)
15%: Telnet to the *nix server to code.
5%: Using in VB for their IS course in GUI design.
Who said $2,000 was pocket change? I have three friends who each wanted to get into the whole digital media thing. One of them is about to have a baby, one of them just did, and one of them is just kind of a gadget freak. Then there's me, of course.
We each decided to buy (new or first) Macs for pretty much the same reasons: iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, et cetera. For my friends the parents, it was to have an easier way to document their kids. For my gadget freak friend, it was so he could listen to MP3s while he rode his bike. (Not the safest thing maybe, but he's a grown-up, so it's not my problem.)
None of us thought $2,000 was pocket change. If we were just throwing money away, we probably would have bought some high-end PC, because depending on your point of view you do get more bang for your buck that way. But the thing we all had in common was this: none of us wanted to waste time or effort. Make it easy, we said, and we'll buy it.
For us, that $2,000 or so was a sort of investment. The proposition was basically that I gave Apple an extra $600 to promise me that managing my MP3s and movies and pictures and whatever else would be as simple and foolproof as humanly possible. So far, they've kept up their end of the bargain.
I predict that Apple will not buy XPlay. Why should they? They're already selling iPods faster than they can make 'em, so there's no benefit to Apple to release and support iPod software for Windows. Apple is really good at writing Mac software, either from scratch or acquired from somebody else. iTunes and Final Cut Pro were acquired; as far as I know, iPhoto was written from scratch.
Right now, Apple's in the best possible situation. While they don't sell XPlay, or officially support it, they don't discourage it in any way, either. Those people who would buy an iPod but won't buy a Mac have an option, albeit not a great one. And all the while Apple gets to point at the iTunes/iPod combo, with all of its functionality, and say, "Only on Mac."
Buying and releasing XPlay would be a waste of effort.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but the answer is yes. Sort of. I know several people personally who wanted to get into the whole digital media thing: MP3s instead of portable CD players, digital cameras instead of film, digital camcorders and DVDs instead of plain old videotape. The combination of OS X plus iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, and iPod won them over. About $2,000 bucks later-- counting the iMac and the camera and iPod and whatnot-- they were in business.
I've seen it happen more than once among my little circle of friends.
Tragedy shouldn't take away from comedy, at least not in the long term. Something horrible happens, and it takes time to get over it. During that time, one's sense of humor is seriously impaired. Hell, nothing was funny on September 12th. But eventually you have to go back to laughing at things. It's the only way to get through a life otherwise filled with pain, fear, and grief.
I forget who said it, but it resonates nonetheless: I laugh only that I may not weep.
A Palm development kit release for Linux is news. Mac client software that was due six months ago is NOT newsworthy pudge.
Oh, so Slashdot is a Linux-only club now? Pfeh. The folks that run the site found it worthy to create an Apple section. Posting news of new software releases-- especially long-awaited ones-- is entirely justified.
If you don't like it, don't bloody click on it.
It's a common misconception that there isn't enough food in the world to go around. According to a recently published book the name of which I've forgotten (sorry), world food output averages out to something like 4 pounds of food per day per person, worldwide. That statement is grossly oversimplified, of course, but the point is that the world, on average, has a pretty significant food surplus.
The problem with hunger is that there are places in the world where one of two things is true: either the place is so far from arable lands that getting food to the people there is expensive and difficult, or the people who live there are so poor that they can't acquire the food that's already available to them.
So finding new ways to produce food isn't really going to help the problem much, unless we reach a point where food production is so cheap that you can literally give food away to anybody that asks for it. (If you look at the segment of the world's population that is directly engaged in food production activities, it sinks in what an unthinkable economic disaster it would be to make food production that cheap. Something like three billion people would be immediately without income.)
The real solution to the world's hunger problem is going to be one of distribution. If we can get food from Buttwad, Iowa, to Mogadishu, Somalia, for fractions of a cent per pound, the hunger problem suddenly gets a lot easier to solve.
I don't believe it works exactly like that. The stuff that ends up going out over the various PBS stations is finished programming. Somebody had to produce that programming. I live in Dallas, and the local PBS station, KERA, has been doing a lot of production lately, shooting and finishing various shows.
When a production company or station makes a program, they turn over only the finished piece to the distributor or broadcaster. The production company or station keeps ownership of and rights to the stuff that went into making the program. Sometimes there are agreements between the distributor and the production company, like the production company promising not to turn around and use the same footage to make a different cut of the same program and sell it to somebody else for instance.
So what PBS gets is actually just the finished programs, not the raw footage or anything like that. It's not theirs to release.
Like the man say, "Okay, I'm with you fellas."
Both of you are right; it only sounds like you disagree because you've got different agendas.
The first poster said that developers have to listen to their users in order to make and keep their users happy. I.e., if you want your software to be widely accepted and used by millions of loving fans, you really ought to implement the users' requests.
The second poster said that he has no responsibility to the user because he's writing the software for his own reasons. I.e., there's no reason to spend time and trouble on somebody else's requests because you're not getting anything out of it.
Depending on your agenda, either of these points of view can be valid. Hell, in my case both of them are. I'm not working on my current project because I'm getting paid to do it. I'm doing it for the fun and experience of it. But I just love the approval and adoration of my coworkers and friends, so I'm throwing them a few bones to keep 'em interested.
What's private and not depends on the situation. Going into a bar, all they need to know is whether you are of legal age or not.
You seem to define what's private as that which does not need to be known. I'm not sure I agree with that, when I take off my "principle" hat and put on my "practical" hat.
Let's say I go to a bar and order a gin gimlet. It's not strictly necessary for anybody to know that, unless my drink contained the last of the gin. In that case, the bar would need to know to restock.
So the bar might reasonably expect to keep track of which drinks are consumed. They need to know this so they know how to stock their wares. (There are a couple of ways to track that. You don't have to make a note every time a drink is ordered. You just have to inventory your stock every night, or something.)
The bar might also reasonably expect to be allowed to keep track of how many people enter and leave. Fire code requires this: you can't have more than N people in your establishment at any time, so you have to keep a count to be in compliance with the rules. So it's reasonable to expect the guy at the door to make a mark on a clipboard every time a person comes in.
What about other information that the bar has a case for collecting? What about whether or not I, as a patron of the bar, smoke? If a significant number of patrons don't smoke, then the owner of the bar might want to set up a "smoking on the patio only" rule.
It's not much of a stretch to come up with lots of examples in which the owners of the bar, just by making observations, can improve their business.
So "need to know" is fuzzy. Some things are clearly silly-- you don't need to know my political preferences. Some are clearly reasonable-- keeping track of how many people are in your bar at once is important, and mandated by law. Other things are in the fuzzy middle.
Note: to get a song out of your head, think about the Barney Miller theme.
Bastard! Now I've got the Barney Miller theme stuck in my head! Damn you!
If you watch that episode carefully you'll notice that the equation P=NP floating around.
There was a Futurama on a few weeks ago-- I think it was the one where Fry and Amy hooked up in the closet-- that had two books sitting on a shelf. The titles were "P" and "NP."
If you're curious,
6
;-)
fishbulb 9# bc
1782^12 + 1841^12
2541210258614589176288669958142428526657
1922^12
254121025931480141081927864964365156761
So while it's technically wrong, it's still pretty friggin' close. It's only off by 700212234530608691501223040959.
I think this raises an interesting question. What information about me is legitimately private, and what isn't?
The knee-jerk reaction, of course, is to say that everything is private unless I choose to release it. But that approach doesn't work in practice. There are too many instances in which information about me needs to be publicly available. To pick a silly example, it's important that it be public knowledge that somebody lives in my home, because if the building catches on fire I want people to let me know and help me get out.
So some information really should be explicitly public knowledge, and it's important that everybody accept that, especially privacy advocates. We can then have a reasoned discourse about where to draw that line.
Think about your phone number. The phone company publishes your name and phone number in their directory unless you pay an additional fee for an unlisted number. This has been the status quo for my entire life-- 30 years-- and certainly much longer. So it's got a pretty good precedent going. So is my phone number private information by default? Not really. Should it be? Hmm... maybe. If I express no preference at all, should the phone company publish my name, address, and phone number or not?
The other end of the spectrum is information that's clearly private, and protected by law. My medical records and the contents of my communications with my lawyer are explicitly private. If a court wanted to know what my doctor said to me last week, they couldn't ask. It's private.
Everything else is in the middle. Is my street address private? No, by the phone book argument. What about the number of people who live in my house? Maybe. How about their ages, genders, and sexual preferences? Hmm.
I guess what I'm trying to say is this: our society seems to accept as a given that we should each have the right to keep stuff private. The slippery slope argument, though often specious at best, implies that the right to keep stuff private must only be abridged when there's no alternative. But everywhere you look there's ambiguity about this principle. Go back to the phone book example; the phone company assumes you want to publish your name, address, and phone number unless you explicitly tell them-- and pay them!-- not to. Likewise, the bar mentioned in the article assumes that it's okay for them to collect demographic information from you.
Where is the line between stuff that is assumed to be private unless explicitly waived, and stuff that's assumed to be public unless explicitly withheld? Like I said before, in principle the line is all the way over to one side: everything is private unless waived. But in the real world, that line will have to be moved a little bit so that some things are public information by default.
I don't have any answers. Just questions.
Sure, if you want to start talking about multiuser systems, you can really eat up the real estate. Hell, ASCI Blue Mountain is over 6,000 processors, and it occupies a whole floor!
But the thing about the SGI system I mentioned is that it's a single-user workstation that just happens to occupy one (or more!) six-foot-high purple racks. For a while, a few months back in 1998, I was lucky enough to have a six-rack, 24-processor system all to myself. "Only" 24 CPUs, but eight InfiniteReality-series graphics pipes. With eight 1920x1200 displays. One mouse and keyboard. All for me. Oooof.
LOL. But...
Tidal power notwithstanding, this article talks about harnessing the kinetic energy of waves crashing to the shore. So instead of sending all of their energy into the beach, some of it will go into power generating devices and the rest will go into the beach.
If anything, this scheme would help *save* eroding coastlines by diverting some small fraction of the force of the waves.
It's even better than solar power that way. While solar power isn't totally free-- every joule you get from the sun is one joule that won't go into growing plants, which can ultimately have an impact on the planet's ecosystems-- the kinetic energy of waves is just going to get smeared across the beach. Some of it will become kinetic energy in the sand and rocks and whatnot, but the rest will just be conducted into the ground in the form of heat, slightly warming the sand that's already too freakin' hot to walk on.
I say bring on the wave motion generators! And while you're at it, figure out how to build a gun out of one of them, so we can use that cool name!
give me a huge freaking tower any day
It's not really a huge freaking tower unless it's at least six feet tall. My all-time favorite workstation is the SGI Onyx 2 rack*. Six feet tall, bright purple, noisy as can be. The Onyx 3000 systems are okay, but there's just something inherently cool about the Onyx 2. It's what the French call, "I don't know what."
And the shipping crate is big enough for two people to stand up in. Well, for me anyway. I'm about 5'6".
* Scroll down a bit to find Onyx 2 pics. I didn't think anybody would appreciate it if I linked directly to an 11 MB TIFF.
Remember those little check boxes on some pages that say "E-Mail me with news about foo" that are checked by default? Some people never get around to unchecking them. This is them constued as an "opt-in".
I've got one even better than that. An acquaintence of mine recently signed up for Intuit's QuickBase service, which is kind of like simple web database hosting. Neat, in principle.
When you sign up, there's a form to fill out, including a blank for a user name, and one of those ubiquitous checkboxes, checked of course. My friend filled in the form and chose his own name as his user name. His name has three letters. He unchecked the "please spam me" box, and hit "Submit."
An error message appeared. Evidently your username has to be between 4 and 8 letters. Use your "back" button and try again, it said.
He used the back button, added a letter to his name to meet the 4-letter minimum, and clicked "Submit." Then came that flash of a second, after he had irrevocably clicked the button but before the window had refreshed.
The "spam me" box was checked again.
The only thing we could figure was that there must have been an "onload" JavaScript that set the checked state of the box when the page opened. When he hit his back button, the JavaScript ran again and checked the "spam me" box for him.
Bastards.
Why are you buying IBM storage products? Don't you know their drives suck? :)
Heh. Good one. The real answer is that I'm not; one of my company's partners is using the IBM FAStT700 (Worst. Name. Ever.) in their lab, and I was trying to figure out why. It's got 2 Gb FC on the back, that's the only thing I can think of so far.
Okay, fine. Setting aside the arguable point that Google is a what and not a who, you got me on that one.
My point, though, was that in a lot of ways the URL, for my purposes anyway, is going the way of the IP address. It's a part of the Internet infrastructure that I'm passingly aware of, but that I only have to encounter on rare occasions.
For an explanation of why you can't "buy" an opt-in list, ask Google about "Nadine mailing".
Yes, this is off-topic. Mod me down if you must.
Am I the only one who forsees a day when URLs and hyperlinks as we know them are superceded by Google search strings?
The Google database changes dynamically, of course, but that's currently a small problem. If I'm looking for info on the IBM FAStT700 disk array, as I was this morning, I'm a lot more likely to type "ibm fast700" into Google than I am to navigate through IBM's maze of a web site.
If I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, Google can usually help me find it, or at least something sufficiently close to it to get by.
But if I know exactly what I'm looking for, but don't know where to find it, Google is even more helpful.
Who needs URLs anymore?