I liked the article. The guy is passionate about his beliefs and he likes computers. He likes to mess with them, modify them, tweak them, etc. etc. And then he assumes other people are (or should be) like him. Oops.
Computers used to be and to most intelligent computer people (=nerds) still are a "thing in itself". You install a system for the pleasure of installing a system. You tweak the parameters because you can get it exactly right. You write a Perl script to automate some stuff because it's boring to do it by hand and it feels good to do a clever hack in Perl.
But the great majority of people aren't like that at all. For them the computer is a black box that performs certain functions. This is a perfectly viable worldview that has all rights to exist. Let's say I want to write a letter. A computer is a thing that I will use to do this. All I want is to write a letter, I don't care about configuration, amount of memory, space on my hard drive, etc. Why should I be computer-literate to write a letter?
The article author's answer is that everybody should be smart enough to understand computers and those who do not should die out, or at least be banished to using pens and paper. Why? I don't know... -- because they are not worthy?
Think about the car analogy. 60 years ago you had to be (or had to employ) a decent mechanic to own and operate a car. I bet there were people around who said that unless you can disassemble and reassemble an engine, you have no business driving a car. Fortunately, they turned out to be wrong. There are still people who disassemble engines for fun, and sometimes profit, but the normal user doesn't care about all the mechanics under the car's hood. I am sure that the same thing will happen to computers. People who want to write letters will be able to do so without knowing anything about RAM and interrupts. And people who enjoy messing around with computers will still write optimized device drivers. And again, as I said, this is a GOOD thing.
The article argues for Linux to remain the domain of hard-core hackers (=hobbyists). I think that this will be the death of Linux. Without mainstream acceptance it will go to the great write-only memory in the sky and will be remembered just as a curious hack at the dawn of computing.
Of course, nothing that I said should be constituted as doubt in the wisdom of the KB law:
"In any sufficiently large group most people will be idiots."
The whitehouse.gov servers are run by a federal bureacracy for essentially public relation purposes. No national or presidential security issues are relevant here, so the people running the servers are, most likely, not very-highly-super-duper security conscious.
Of course, if the server was hacked, it's a major loss of face for the White House, but it should be used to it by now, shouldn't it?;)
When reading articles in the nested mode, and filtering by score, I'm getting only the threads where the toplevel post passes the filter. Let's say my score threshold is 2. A toplevel post has a score of 1 and one of the followups to it has a score of 4. I will never see the followup.
Is this a bug, a feature or a misfeature? I, for my own part, would like to see highly scored posts even if they reply to some junk and are thus down a level or two.
The new highlight feature (all posts = 1 line except for those which pass the threshold and are full-text) sounds *very* useful. Could we get it as one of the standard display choices? (I understand I can set my spillover to 1, but that would be a kludge:))
Academia encourages people to write AND Rare people can write well ERGO Academia encourage people to write badly
But really, I agree that if someone cannot think and/or write well, the academic environment would encourage that person to write in a intentionally obfuscating, seemingly-meaningful-but-content-free fashion.
I have a bit more letters after my name and would like to point out that in academia, just as in all other the KB law applies:
In any group of people, most are idiots.
The Thieme's article is *bad* writing and while you'll find a lot of it in academia it is not encouraged there. The problem is that in academia people are supposed to write and publish, even people who have nothing to say and/or cannot thing clearly. Thus you do meet your share of texts like the above. Their existence, and maybe even prevalency in some areas, doesn't make them good writing anyway and intellegent people recognize it.
It is hard to write well, and even harder to think clearly and then write well. Good writing can be complicated (and in fact has to be if it discusses interesting things), but is has to be *clear* and to the point. Generally obfuscated writing is a sign that the person doesn't know what he is talking about -- whether he is in academia or not.
I think that a girlfriend (I'll stick to my male chauvinist view here for syntactical simplicity) is a much better way to maintain your connection to reality. You will have to talk to her, take her out and see other real people. She probably won't be so deep into computers and she'll demand much more than a certain percentage of your attention.
And she will periodically remind you of your biological roots in a much better way than any dog will ever be able to!
People will and do mark up their sites in ways that they think will attract eyeballs to them, regardless of whether this has anything to do with the site's actual content. This is true by abundant empirical evidence.
On the other hand, metatags make a lot of sense for huge commercial empires (Amazon, eBay, Buy.com, etc.) which will be willing to maintain reasonably accurate markings. I have a suspicion that in the not-so-distant future we will have a situation when the big search engines will accept (=believe) metatags from big commercial sites, but will ignore them from small fry. There may develop a "club" whose metatags Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, etc. will believe.
AFAIK Castaneda did admit to inventing the whole thing. I don't believe that stopped any of his followers, though.
And Castaneda did pay a great deal of attention to "alternate reality" which underlies and overlaps the common world. I think Don Juan was able to do his own "remote viewing" as well, but I might be mistaken. It all was fairly long ago...
Well, it has an abundance of fluff and bluster, but have you tried to extract any *meaning* out of this article? This is a collection of "deep" words strung together in meaningless sequences. The guy doesn't actually say anything!
I think that this article has the potential to impress technical people (especially if they feel somewhat "inferior" to the post-modern intellectuals of the world who can talk in so much more sophisticated words), but to anyone who has done research or serious thinking about symbols, representations, and, heck, even alternate states of consciousness -- this is pure content-free handwaving.
I myself (having a fair amount of humanities background) can write pages of text like this with very little effort. And more, I bet I can write a Perl script that will generate similar texts which, with very little editing, would be of comparable quality.
What does the fact that our brain is mostly geared towards processing visual information has to do with symbolic reality? and both with computer networks? and with Castaneda-ish psychics?
Here we have a very muddled text, trying hard to pretend that something meaningful is being said. But it's no more than a collection of unrelated symbols and concepts floating in the void of the author's mind.
This piece comes as close to being a content-free text as I've seen for a long time.
Heh. You start by saying I live in the future (CE future, at least) and end by saying I live in the past. Oh well.
First, Compaq Aero, etc. are the present. The new generation of WinCE PDAs has arrived and the direction of their evolution is pretty clear. Palm, OTOH, made a lot of sounds at their winter conference, but all it came down to was Palm V and Palm VII, both of which, IMHO are too little too late.
Second, Apple IS dead. Maybe it doesn't know it yet, although the signs were there for a long time. Apple probably will end up being bought by AOL or somebody like that. And Apple having a UNIX OS??? (a) I don't think so; (b) who cares?
Third, WinCE machines do lose on battery life, but the gap with Palm will close quite fast. This is not a sustainable advantage. WinCE software sucks, true, but with every next release it sucks less. Besides, with StrongARM processors and loads of memory being bloatware becomes tolerable...
Again, the problem with Palm is lack of movement. WinCE machines are developing, evolving. They change and every quarter they suck less. Palm stands in place. Unless it starts moving, it's going the way of the Mac: a niche player.
Keep in mind two things. First, we're talking about what's possible/expected in 1999. Second, as usual, everything is IMHO and YMMV.
Gripe 1: screen. Screen real estate is precious. The bigger the better, no questions here. Why can't Palm move the writing area onto the screen and use this space for other stuff when necessary? All other PDAs which do handwriting do this. I definitely feel that the screen is too small. And while I am at it, I also would like much better resolution, as in pixels per inch. Not all that hard to do. And more, I personally like grayscale screens, but the world out there likes color. See Palm kicked repeatedly because of this.
Gripe 2: memory. Sure, if you use it as a phonebook / appointment book, what's available is enough. But there ain't no such thing as too much memory. Why there are no Palms with 16Mb of memory? Why do I have to go through ridiculous contortions (expensive 3d party boards, etc.) to get a decent amount of memory? I know that Palm OS doesn't need as much memory as CE, but I want memory for data!
Gripe 3: pricing. I look at current Palm prices and feel that the company is trying to rip me off using its (rapidly fading) unique position in the market. Sure, it's all subjective perceptions, but I just feel corporate greed emanations...
Gripe 4: innovations. The world changes. Come on, guys, you've basically invented the pack-of-cigarettes PDA, now do something with it! I am bored with Palm already. What is there I haven't seen two years ago? More durable? Yawn...
Gripe 5: target market. Palm is more and more oriented towards the perpetually-travelling corporate suits. I am not it. I would like very much to see different (significantly different) version oriented toward different markets. Where are they?
I can continue about Palm's CPU, etc. etc. but I probably bored everybody already. I persist in my belief that Aeros, Ninos and Cassiopeias of the world will eat Palm for "normal" people market, and Symbian, as soon as it produces and debugs its PDA/cell phone combo, will eat Palm for "executive traveller" market.
"Platform" usually means the hardware end. These two are definitely not working on the basis of current Palm hardware. They are developing PDAs, maybe even with Palm OS, but they ain't PalmPilots.
Again, I have nothing against Palm OS. My point is that current Palm hardware sucks and unless 3COM does something about it pronto (and it shows absolutely no signs of having its head above the sand) the PalmPilot will go the way of the Mac -- nice niche product, say 5% of the market. Multiple vendors with nice, cheap machines (color! oodles of memory! compatible-with-everything! etc, etc.) will eat Palm's lunch.
People (that is, computer-clueful young people) start to think of music as a computer file and not a track -- anybody remembers the vinyl LPs with their physical tracks? -- on a CD or tape. This is doom for the music industry in it's current form. Once they get through the 'sue everybody in sight' stage I'm sure the CD prices will drop from their current ridiculous levels. There are just too many parasites feeding off the music distribution chain. Some, hopefully most, of them will have to die.
I do not think much will come out of this. The histories of Apple and Palm are very similar. Both came out with a great product, miles ahead of anything else available at that time. Both then sat on their laurels twiddling their thumbs (and probably other body parts as well), while the competition led by Microsoft huffed, puffed, and pulled up. Compare DOS and Mac OS -- no comparison. Now compare Windows 95/98 and Mac OS -- very similar and unless you are a Mac fanatic you have to agree that Mac is not significantly better. It's now a matter of personal preference, not overwhelming superiority. Apple lost.
Now consider Palm. Palm technology is *old* now and all 3COM does is make cosmetic changes and raise the price. Palm users have been screaming for more memory and larger screen for ages and what does Palm announce this winter as its future product line (besides saying that Palm OS kill Windows -- that's true, they did say that!)? One Palm with a designer case and another one with a sucky wireless link (and again, notice the prices). While Palm tries to extract as much money out of the users as it can, other machines start to catch up. Compaq Aero, Nino, Cassiopeia, etc. are better machines, hardware-wise, than the Palm. As soon as the battery life improves (it will) and as soon as Microsoft slowly works through Windows CE (it also will -- Windows 95/98 sucks so much less than Windows 1.0/2.0/3.0) -- then Palm is dead. All because it didn't move, but sat on a successful product hoping that it will stay successful forever. And did I mention that the original designers of Palm left 3COM long time ago?
To summarise: Apple and Palm both suffer from inability to maintain/develop/evolve a highly successful product. Apple buying Palm is not likely to improve things (unless you you consider a Palm in fruity colors a major technical advance).
I know I don't own my medical records (unfortunately). The doctor/hospital/HMO/whatever owns them. The point is that they are still owned.
And if I can't sell you some data under contract because I don't own it, then why should I give it to you? Let's say I wrote a piece of useful software. You are saying I don't own it. If so and providided I am not motivated by reputation considerations, well-being of mankind, etc. why in the world should I tell anybody I wrote it? If it is not my property, then I don't have control over it, and if I want control, I will attempt to hide it. What's my motivation to give information to you if I can't do it under contract?
Do you get an e-mail, or there is something in your user prefs?
And, what abour people who would generate a new nick/password pair, post one comment, get a +1 rating by default, get moderator priviledges and then abuse the hell out of them? Can even be done by a bot...
Well, let's see. So if anybody shared information with you, he should not force you not to share it or copy it. Well, isn't it his choice? Free adults can (or should be able to) make any contracts they want. I wrote the software, I am willing to sell/share it with you, but I want to be able to negotiate my contract with you about that. As part of that contract I would like to impose obligations upon you, similar to current copyright law. Can I do this? Sure I can, unless you want to limit my liberty of entering into any contracts I want. Is it amoral on my part? I don't see why, it's a matter of my own choice.
The notion of property is based on the idea that you can prevent others from doing certain things. Either you claim that there can be no property on information at all (and what about your medical records?), or I as the owner can impose any conditions in the contract. If you don't like the contract, don't sign it!
The issue of what is socially desirable and the proper public policy is, of course, a completely different discussion.
As to the ring example falling under the copyright -- the author makes a much stronger point. The author claims that if it were possible to use a physical object simultaneously by everybody everywhere, there would be no concept of property. This is way more fundamental than the expression vs. idea distinction made in copyright.
And the example does NOT depend on the concept of ownership. Change 'my wife' to 'a girl I like'. Nothing changes. Liking somebody does not imply ownership. However I, being an individual person, would like a choice of exclusivity in some matters.
As to the chairmaker, once you make a better saw for him, we are off to a barter economy and the concept of property rears its lovely head. If we are exchanging a chair for a saw, what rights do I have to what I am exchanging? And I will not even talk about the inherent free rider problem...
The guy can neither write, nor think clearly. I advise him to read any good legal philosophy book on property. This whole essay is gross oversimplification. Just two issues that came to my mind immediately:
Let's say that a physical object is usable by everybody simultaneously in all places, etc. I just made a ring for my wife. I do NOT want anybody else to use it. Is it my property? (privacy / uniqueness issues)
I am a very good chairmaker. I made an excellent chair for myself and everybody else can/does use it simultaneously with me. A guy comes to me and says that his butt is differently shaped and he wants a different chair, but he is not a chairmaker. How can he persuade me to make a chair for him? (stimulus issues)
Yeah, now I know what this issue reminded me of: classic XIX century socialist/marxist writings: Property is theft!
But supermodels are highly decorative, not necessarily functional. Sex is good, but making rounds with a supermodel on your arm has its own intrinsic merits.
Yes, I know that geeks of yesteryear are enterpreneurs of today. But not all of them made the switch, plus there is a new generation growing up. I understand why Wired's target audience is changing, but I don't have to like it.
You don't want to marry supermodels, ...
on
Wired on Kipling
·
· Score: 1
you want to (successfully) date them.
But really, Wired's target audience noticeably changed from 2-3 years ago. It used to be geeks/hackers/programmers/etc. Now they are heavily oriented towards the Silicon Valley start-up crowd. The key terms now are stock options, media attention, buzz and fluff.
But not necessarily for these particular reasons...
In any case, the crucial test for compatability is: can you run 99.9% of the binaries on different platforms without recompilation/major option tweaking? If you can, then the differences between, say, Red Hat and Debian do not matter. If you need to recompile or do deep options voodoo, then the whole thing will crash around our ears. To succeed prepackaged binaries have to run on *Linux*, not Red Hat Linux version 5.0 or greater with kernel patch v2.........
Slashdot Mirror
I liked the article. The guy is passionate about his beliefs and he likes computers. He likes to mess with them, modify them, tweak them, etc. etc. And then he assumes other people are (or should be) like him. Oops.
Computers used to be and to most intelligent computer people (=nerds) still are a "thing in itself". You install a system for the pleasure of installing a system. You tweak the parameters because you can get it exactly right. You write a Perl script to automate some stuff because it's boring to do it by hand and it feels good to do a clever hack in Perl.
But the great majority of people aren't like that at all. For them the computer is a black box that performs certain functions. This is a perfectly viable worldview that has all rights to exist. Let's say I want to write a letter. A computer is a thing that I will use to do this. All I want is to write a letter, I don't care about configuration, amount of memory, space on my hard drive, etc. Why should I be computer-literate to write a letter?
The article author's answer is that everybody should be smart enough to understand computers and those who do not should die out, or at least be banished to using pens and paper. Why? I don't know... -- because they are not worthy?
Think about the car analogy. 60 years ago you had to be (or had to employ) a decent mechanic to own and operate a car. I bet there were people around who said that unless you can disassemble and reassemble an engine, you have no business driving a car. Fortunately, they turned out to be wrong. There are still people who disassemble engines for fun, and sometimes profit, but the normal user doesn't care about all the mechanics under the car's hood. I am sure that the same thing will happen to computers. People who want to write letters will be able to do so without knowing anything about RAM and interrupts. And people who enjoy messing around with computers will still write optimized device drivers. And again, as I said, this is a GOOD thing.
The article argues for Linux to remain the domain of hard-core hackers (=hobbyists). I think that this will be the death of Linux. Without mainstream acceptance it will go to the great write-only memory in the sky and will be remembered just as a curious hack at the dawn of computing.
Of course, nothing that I said should be constituted as doubt in the wisdom of the KB law:
"In any sufficiently large group most people will be idiots."
Kaa
The whitehouse.gov servers are run by a federal bureacracy for essentially public relation purposes. No national or presidential security issues are relevant here, so the people running the servers are, most likely, not very-highly-super-duper security conscious.
;)
Of course, if the server was hacked, it's a major loss of face for the White House, but it should be used to it by now, shouldn't it?
Kaa
When reading articles in the nested mode, and filtering by score, I'm getting only the threads where the toplevel post passes the filter. Let's say my score threshold is 2. A toplevel post has a score of 1 and one of the followups to it has a score of 4. I will never see the followup.
:))
Is this a bug, a feature or a misfeature? I, for my own part, would like to see highly scored posts even if they reply to some junk and are thus down a level or two.
The new highlight feature (all posts = 1 line except for those which pass the threshold and are full-text) sounds *very* useful. Could we get it as one of the standard display choices? (I understand I can set my spillover to 1, but that would be a kludge
Academia encourages people to write
AND
Rare people can write well
ERGO
Academia encourage people to write badly
But really, I agree that if someone cannot think and/or write well, the academic environment would encourage that person to write in a intentionally obfuscating, seemingly-meaningful-but-content-free fashion.
I have a bit more letters after my name and would like to point out that in academia, just as in all other the KB law applies:
In any group of people, most are idiots.
The Thieme's article is *bad* writing and while you'll find a lot of it in academia it is not encouraged there. The problem is that in academia people are supposed to write and publish, even people who have nothing to say and/or cannot thing clearly. Thus you do meet your share of texts like the above. Their existence, and maybe even prevalency in some areas, doesn't make them good writing anyway and intellegent people recognize it.
It is hard to write well, and even harder to think clearly and then write well. Good writing can be complicated (and in fact has to be if it discusses interesting things), but is has to be *clear* and to the point. Generally obfuscated writing is a sign that the person doesn't know what he is talking about -- whether he is in academia or not.
OK. I'll explain to you. He didn't say anything.
Behold a prime example of a content-free text!
I think that a girlfriend (I'll stick to my male chauvinist view here for syntactical simplicity) is a much better way to maintain your connection to reality. You will have to talk to her, take her out and see other real people. She probably won't be so deep into computers and she'll demand much more than a certain percentage of your attention.
And she will periodically remind you of your biological roots in a much better way than any dog will ever be able to!
People will and do mark up their sites in ways that they think will attract eyeballs to them, regardless of whether this has anything to do with the site's actual content. This is true by abundant empirical evidence.
On the other hand, metatags make a lot of sense for huge commercial empires (Amazon, eBay, Buy.com, etc.) which will be willing to maintain reasonably accurate markings. I have a suspicion that in the not-so-distant future we will have a situation when the big search engines will accept (=believe) metatags from big commercial sites, but will ignore them from small fry. There may develop a "club" whose metatags Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, etc. will believe.
AFAIK Castaneda did admit to inventing the whole thing. I don't believe that stopped any of his followers, though.
And Castaneda did pay a great deal of attention to "alternate reality" which underlies and overlaps the common world. I think Don Juan was able to do his own "remote viewing" as well, but I might be mistaken. It all was fairly long ago...
"very good writing"?? "very deep"?????
Well, it has an abundance of fluff and bluster, but have you tried to extract any *meaning* out of this article? This is a collection of "deep" words strung together in meaningless sequences. The guy doesn't actually say anything!
I think that this article has the potential to impress technical people (especially if they feel somewhat "inferior" to the post-modern intellectuals of the world who can talk in so much more sophisticated words), but to anyone who has done research or serious thinking about symbols, representations, and, heck, even alternate states of consciousness -- this is pure content-free handwaving.
I myself (having a fair amount of humanities background) can write pages of text like this with very little effort. And more, I bet I can write a Perl script that will generate similar texts which, with very little editing, would be of comparable quality.
And what was the point again?
What does the fact that our brain is mostly geared towards processing visual information has to do with symbolic reality? and both with computer networks? and with Castaneda-ish psychics?
Here we have a very muddled text, trying hard to pretend that something meaningful is being said. But it's no more than a collection of unrelated symbols and concepts floating in the void of the author's mind.
This piece comes as close to being a content-free text as I've seen for a long time.
Ugh.
Heh. You start by saying I live in the future (CE future, at least) and end by saying I live in the past. Oh well.
First, Compaq Aero, etc. are the present. The new generation of WinCE PDAs has arrived and the direction of their evolution is pretty clear. Palm, OTOH, made a lot of sounds at their winter conference, but all it came down to was Palm V and Palm VII, both of which, IMHO are too little too late.
Second, Apple IS dead. Maybe it doesn't know it yet, although the signs were there for a long time. Apple probably will end up being bought by AOL or somebody like that. And Apple having a UNIX OS??? (a) I don't think so; (b) who cares?
Third, WinCE machines do lose on battery life, but the gap with Palm will close quite fast. This is not a sustainable advantage. WinCE software sucks, true, but with every next release it sucks less. Besides, with StrongARM processors and loads of memory being bloatware becomes tolerable...
Again, the problem with Palm is lack of movement. WinCE machines are developing, evolving. They change and every quarter they suck less. Palm stands in place. Unless it starts moving, it's going the way of the Mac: a niche player.
Keep in mind two things. First, we're talking about what's possible/expected in 1999. Second, as usual, everything is IMHO and YMMV.
Gripe 1: screen. Screen real estate is precious. The bigger the better, no questions here. Why can't Palm move the writing area onto the screen and use this space for other stuff when necessary? All other PDAs which do handwriting do this. I definitely feel that the screen is too small. And while I am at it, I also would like much better resolution, as in pixels per inch. Not all that hard to do. And more, I personally like grayscale screens, but the world out there likes color. See Palm kicked repeatedly because of this.
Gripe 2: memory. Sure, if you use it as a phonebook / appointment book, what's available is enough. But there ain't no such thing as too much memory. Why there are no Palms with 16Mb of memory? Why do I have to go through ridiculous contortions (expensive 3d party boards, etc.) to get a decent amount of memory? I know that Palm OS doesn't need as much memory as CE, but I want memory for data!
Gripe 3: pricing. I look at current Palm prices and feel that the company is trying to rip me off using its (rapidly fading) unique position in the market. Sure, it's all subjective perceptions, but I just feel corporate greed emanations...
Gripe 4: innovations. The world changes. Come on, guys, you've basically invented the pack-of-cigarettes PDA, now do something with it! I am bored with Palm already. What is there I haven't seen two years ago? More durable? Yawn...
Gripe 5: target market. Palm is more and more oriented towards the perpetually-travelling corporate suits. I am not it. I would like very much to see different (significantly different) version oriented toward different markets. Where are they?
I can continue about Palm's CPU, etc. etc. but I probably bored everybody already. I persist in my belief that Aeros, Ninos and Cassiopeias of the world will eat Palm for "normal" people market, and Symbian, as soon as it produces and debugs its PDA/cell phone combo, will eat Palm for "executive traveller" market.
"Platform" usually means the hardware end. These two are definitely not working on the basis of current Palm hardware. They are developing PDAs, maybe even with Palm OS, but they ain't PalmPilots.
Again, I have nothing against Palm OS. My point is that current Palm hardware sucks and unless 3COM does something about it pronto (and it shows absolutely no signs of having its head above the sand) the PalmPilot will go the way of the Mac -- nice niche product, say 5% of the market. Multiple vendors with nice, cheap machines (color! oodles of memory! compatible-with-everything! etc, etc.) will eat Palm's lunch.
People (that is, computer-clueful young people) start to think of music as a computer file and not a track -- anybody remembers the vinyl LPs with their physical tracks? -- on a CD or tape. This is doom for the music industry in it's current form. Once they get through the 'sue everybody in sight' stage I'm sure the CD prices will drop from their current ridiculous levels. There are just too many parasites feeding off the music distribution chain. Some, hopefully most, of them will have to die.
I do not think much will come out of this. The histories of Apple and Palm are very similar. Both came out with a great product, miles ahead of anything else available at that time. Both then sat on their laurels twiddling their thumbs (and probably other body parts as well), while the competition led by Microsoft huffed, puffed, and pulled up. Compare DOS and Mac OS -- no comparison. Now compare Windows 95/98 and Mac OS -- very similar and unless you are a Mac fanatic you have to agree that Mac is not significantly better. It's now a matter of personal preference, not overwhelming superiority. Apple lost.
Now consider Palm. Palm technology is *old* now and all 3COM does is make cosmetic changes and raise the price. Palm users have been screaming for more memory and larger screen for ages and what does Palm announce this winter as its future product line (besides saying that Palm OS kill Windows -- that's true, they did say that!)? One Palm with a designer case and another one with a sucky wireless link (and again, notice the prices). While Palm tries to extract as much money out of the users as it can, other machines start to catch up. Compaq Aero, Nino, Cassiopeia, etc. are better machines, hardware-wise, than the Palm. As soon as the battery life improves (it will) and as soon as Microsoft slowly works through Windows CE (it also will -- Windows 95/98 sucks so much less than Windows 1.0/2.0/3.0) -- then Palm is dead. All because it didn't move, but sat on a successful product hoping that it will stay successful forever. And did I mention that the original designers of Palm left 3COM long time ago?
To summarise: Apple and Palm both suffer from inability to maintain/develop/evolve a highly successful product. Apple buying Palm is not likely to improve things (unless you you consider a Palm in fruity colors a major technical advance).
I know I don't own my medical records (unfortunately). The doctor/hospital/HMO/whatever owns them. The point is that they are still owned.
And if I can't sell you some data under contract because I don't own it, then why should I give it to you? Let's say I wrote a piece of useful software. You are saying I don't own it. If so and providided I am not motivated by reputation considerations, well-being of mankind, etc. why in the world should I tell anybody I wrote it? If it is not my property, then I don't have control over it, and if I want control, I will attempt to hide it. What's my motivation to give information to you if I can't do it under contract?
First, why do you need my "REAL NAME"? Are you going to sue me? Why do you even care? Why can't I have multiple identities?
Second, charge me $29 and I'll go away. I'll bet most everybody will go away. Has been tried, doesn't work.
Third, DejaNews makes Usenet quite usable.
Do you get an e-mail, or there is something in your user prefs?
And, what abour people who would generate a new nick/password pair, post one comment, get a +1 rating by default, get moderator priviledges and then abuse the hell out of them? Can even be done by a bot...
Well, let's see. So if anybody shared information with you, he should not force you not to share it or copy it. Well, isn't it his choice? Free adults can (or should be able to) make any contracts they want. I wrote the software, I am willing to sell/share it with you, but I want to be able to negotiate my contract with you about that. As part of that contract I would like to impose obligations upon you, similar to current copyright law. Can I do this? Sure I can, unless you want to limit my liberty of entering into any contracts I want. Is it amoral on my part? I don't see why, it's a matter of my own choice.
The notion of property is based on the idea that you can prevent others from doing certain things. Either you claim that there can be no property on information at all (and what about your medical records?), or I as the owner can impose any conditions in the contract. If you don't like the contract, don't sign it!
The issue of what is socially desirable and the proper public policy is, of course, a completely different discussion.
As to the ring example falling under the copyright -- the author makes a much stronger point. The author claims that if it were possible to use a physical object simultaneously by everybody everywhere, there would be no concept of property. This is way more fundamental than the expression vs. idea distinction made in copyright.
And the example does NOT depend on the concept of ownership. Change 'my wife' to 'a girl I like'. Nothing changes. Liking somebody does not imply ownership. However I, being an individual person, would like a choice of exclusivity in some matters.
As to the chairmaker, once you make a better saw for him, we are off to a barter economy and the concept of property rears its lovely head. If we are exchanging a chair for a saw, what rights do I have to what I am exchanging? And I will not even talk about the inherent free rider problem...
The guy can neither write, nor think clearly. I advise him to read any good legal philosophy book on property. This whole essay is gross oversimplification. Just two issues that came to my mind immediately:
Let's say that a physical object is usable by everybody simultaneously in all places, etc. I just made a ring for my wife. I do NOT want anybody else to use it. Is it my property? (privacy / uniqueness issues)
I am a very good chairmaker. I made an excellent chair for myself and everybody else can/does use it simultaneously with me. A guy comes to me and says that his butt is differently shaped and he wants a different chair, but he is not a chairmaker. How can he persuade me to make a chair for him? (stimulus issues)
Yeah, now I know what this issue reminded me of: classic XIX century socialist/marxist writings: Property is theft!
But supermodels are highly decorative, not necessarily functional. Sex is good, but making rounds with a supermodel on your arm has its own intrinsic merits.
Yes, I know that geeks of yesteryear are enterpreneurs of today. But not all of them made the switch, plus there is a new generation growing up. I understand why Wired's target audience is changing, but I don't have to like it.
you want to (successfully) date them.
But really, Wired's target audience noticeably changed from 2-3 years ago. It used to be geeks/hackers/programmers/etc. Now they are heavily oriented towards the Silicon Valley start-up crowd. The key terms now are stock options, media attention, buzz and fluff.
But not necessarily for these particular reasons...
In any case, the crucial test for compatability is: can you run 99.9% of the binaries on different platforms without recompilation/major option tweaking? If you can, then the differences between, say, Red Hat and Debian do not matter. If you need to recompile or do deep options voodoo, then the whole thing will crash around our ears. To succeed prepackaged binaries have to run on *Linux*, not Red Hat Linux version 5.0 or greater with kernel patch v2.........