India, I'm afraid, is currently rattling ICMB shaped sabres with Pakistan. Their government may be stable, but their situation isn't. They (like us) have high tech. They (like us) speak English (well, some do, anyway). If they're truly like us they'll come perilously close to exchanging a few with Pakistan.
You may want to read that article again. Nowhere did it say geostationary orbit is 50km. The proposed cable would be attached to a 50km tower (which is fairly amazing in itself, if it happens). Geostationary orbit is somewhere around 22,300 miles.
"Diamond fiber" is a nice science fiction device. Maybe there will be such a material, maybe not, but it's largely irrelevant. You need something with an insanely high tensile strength, or a cable which tapers a lot more. Basically, at any point along the cable it needs to be wide enough to support the material below it. Higher points carry more weight, so must be thicker. As mentioned, you could build it from steel, if the taper weren't prohibitively high.
That said, most of what we've accomplished today probably looked fairly ridiculous from a 1950s vantage point. As technological advance continues to accelerate, predicting the world 50 years from now becomes that much more error prone. We landed on the moon 30 years ago, and I would have thought in the intervening 30 we'd at least make it to Mars. Technologically we can, we just lost interest along the way.
This isn't about anonymity. This is reducing the risk to giving out your credit card to online vendors by insuring that it can only be used once. If the vendor stores your CC number and it is later stolen, you aren't inconvenienced by having to dispute the charges. There won't be charges since the card number was only valid for that first purchase.
Anonymity would be nice, but I don't think that's what they're trying to build here.
That is a misconception. The US is a strong country specifically because our origins aren't that diverse. Our origins are, in fact, from one rather small group of people. These are the ones daring enough to leave their homes, family, and security behind to come here, where they traditionally aren't welcomed by us "natives".
"Diversity" is nothing more than another load of PC garbage. The fact that the people who built this country into what it is today (in the economic sense, anyway) has nothing to do with the fact that they came from different countries, had different skin pigmentation, or spoke different languages. It has to do with the fact that people who will discard their security, leave their (extended) family and friends, and travel to a new country which largely wishes they'd stay home, are inherently strong people. These are the people who build strong nations, and we're damn lucky they're coming here rather than going somewhere else.
I couldn't care less whether your skin is white, yellow, black or brown, to quote the original poster. The fact you'll leave your life behind to try to make a better one here impresses me.
"The libertarian"? I'm sure there's more than one.:)
This libertarian values the rights of people, period. I look at it from the other side. Does the government have the right to deny you that specific right? I don't believe the government has a right to bar collective bargaining. This should not be interpreted to mean that I think unions are generally beneficial. They've served an important role, historically, in forcing exploitive employers to act responsibly. They've also exploited employers. The "I want a big raise and you can't fire me without union approval, not because I'm more productive, not because I have new skills, not because the company is doing well, but just because I have a big club!" is no more responsible than the employer saying "You'll work 80 hours a week for peanuts, not because you're unskilled or irresponsible, just because I have a big club!"
I have deep respect for our recent immigrants. I think it takes a lot of courage to pick up and leave your country, family, and friends to make a better future for yourself. I'm willing to compete with foreign born workers. If they can do a better job than I can, they deserve the better paying jobs.
This is not what is happening. The H1B visa ties you to the company you're working for. You're here specifically to work for them. When they're finished with you, they send you home. When you decide you want to be paid the prevailing wage, or want to look for a better job, they no longer have a reason to keep you and you're shipped off back home.
Sure, I'll compete on skills. I'd rather not compete on price when it's legal to force workers to work for well below the prevailing wage. Really, think about this. If you work for me and I can deport you whenever I choose, you'll work for whatever rate I tell you to if you want to stay. Fix the H1B so it's not a license to screw the visa holder and restore *their* freedom and the system will be better off.
And I'd like to see more of us doing it. Recognize that the solution to these problems isn't necessarily more heavy handed government intervention or calling in the lawyers who, after all, gave us our present excuse for a legal system. The solution is an educated and informed consumer population who can and will demand that the companies they choose to do business treat them appropriately.
There are a select few instances where this doesn't work (monopolies, price fixing), but if you're selling something in a competitive market or selling something I can do without (like that DVD player I still haven't purchased), you'll do so responsibly or you won't see my money.
E-gold has a common problem among web sites today: a user agreement that they can change when they want to. There's a provision that you can object within 10 days, but that isn't sufficient. I don't want to do business with people who put me in a position where I have to check every n days to make sure they haven't modified our agreement.
Give me a payment system, preferably anonymous, which doesn't claim the right to change the terms I've "agreed" to (using that term loosely) whenever they wish to, and I'm interested. Alternatively, how about I make the agreement subject to modifications documented on my web site and e-gold gets 10 days to dispute them.
My intent isn't to pick on e-gold, but on this practice in general. "I agree to $foo, $bar, and $baz, but you can change them any time you want." Why do you accept this?
I've read that article three times now and still disagree. The premise, apparently, is that technology will destroy privacy in the form of increasingly undetectible surveilance, so we'd better get used to it and embrace it. Whether we do or not, it will be used against us.
I don't buy it. The premise that privacy and anonymity are a necessary casualty of technological advance is not necessarily true. It has been true thus far largely because privacy wasn't a design consideration in many of the systems we used. Most internet protocols were not designed to support privacy. HTTP is certainly in that category. The message is going out that privacy should be a design consideration. Zero Knowledge, for example, offers an service which reportedly encrypts your traffic and passes it through a series of servers to hide content and origin. Common cleartext protocols like telnet and ftp are being replaced by encrypted alternatives. Mr. Brin discusses privacy degrading technologies but doesn't concern himself with privacy preserving technologies which will grow in parallel.
Realize too that concern about loss of privacy is well founded. If and when privacy evaporates there will be consequences, and not just decreased crime, which isn't necessarily true either. How many convenience store robberies have you seen on the local news, committed right in front of the obvious cameras? Criminals aren't known for their intelligence. Recall the story of the gentleman who fell in the supermarket and was confronted with his purchase record, which included regular purchases of alcohol, and the threat that this record would be used in any lawsuit brought against the store. Just because you've done nothing wrong, but rather something "everyone" does now and again, doesn't mean that information (which, quite frankly, is none of their concern) won't be misrepresented and turned against you.
I've honored your request and read the article (again). Please do something useful as well: read Database Nation and understand the consequence of burning the privacy bridge. It's not an easy one to rebuild.
When I can't sit down in front of my computer and write a program without worrying that my independent creation infringes on someone's patent, we have a very serious problem. That should not be an issue with truly patent worthy ideas. They're not at risk of casual rediscovery. They were difficult to discover with requiring substantial investments in time and R&D capital, which is why we grant them protection. Patent protection exists to encourage inventions which might otherwise not be created. Let me be clear. Patents were created to protect this:
Alex has an idea. It may not be an original idea, but no one has been able to make it work before.
Alex spends a significant amount of time and/or money making it work.
Alex worries that as soon as he puts his product on the market, everyone will copy it and undersell him as he has R&D costs to recoup.
Alex patents his invention, puts it on the market, and reaps the rewards.
Patents were NOT created to protect this:
Bob finds himself in a rapidly advancing industry where nearly every day someone confronts a new problem they've never seen before, and solves it. Many of these solutions are of the form "Do process $FOO on a computer, where previously it was done by people."
Knowing it's a virtual certaintly that others will have the same idea, Bob seeks patent protection for his "invention". In fact, other people are already doing the very same thing, and there's no reason to believe they got the idea from Bob.
An understaffed and ignorant USPO grants the patent, thereby giving Bob leverage to legally extort money from people who aren't using his idea at all, but rather thought up the very same idea themselves.
Bob becomes wildly rich by forcing others to pay for the priviledge of using their own work.
Do you really not understand the problem here? Patents should protect you from having me steal your ideas. I can't buy your widget, take it apart, and build one just like it. They should not protect you from independent reinvention especially where everyone in the field can be reasonably expected to independently come up with the *same* invention (tabbed widgets, anyone?).
Patents aren't (or shouldn't be, anyway) about rewarding the first guy clever enough to document an idea and run off to his lawyer. Patents should be about encouraging innovation by assuring inventors that their legitimate hard work won't be stolen. Maybe your acquaintences are these hard working inventors. Maybe they're yet another instance of patenting "Do $foo on a computer."
I wonder if it's too late to patent getting a "Do $foo on a computer." patent as a business practice. Too much prior art, no doubt.
Congratulations on your fine grasp of the obvious.
Please realize that policy makers, whether corporate or governmental, don't always have the background to recognize what you see as obvious. There's been a deluge of "Just do $FOO!" solutions of late, most of which are obviously flawed. These range from adding a "V chip" to consumer electronics to remedy deficient parenting, attempts to regulate internet content (again, to remedy deficient parenting), suing person A because person B used A's service to commit a crime (hi, MPAA & RIAA!), to making it more difficult for law abiding citizens to protect themselves (you DO have a right to do this, you know) while failing to prosecute and adequately punish criminals. Web "privacy" is addressed by privacy policies which nearly always say "This policy grants you no rights, and we can change it whenever we want anyway." None of these solve the underlying problem, but are used in spite of "obvious" flaws because it was easier than fixing the problem correctly or has good PR value.
There are quite a few out there who don't understand that system complexity correlates negatively with system security. Yes, it's obvious, but say it often and to anyone who will listen. When *everyone* notices the obvious statements, then you can stop.
This is exactly what they should have done. Go after those who are actually committing the crime, not a technology which supposedly facilitates it. As so many others have aptly pointed out, Napster and Gnutella are hardly the only and definitely not the first file transfer methods.
If you have a problem with current IP law, you should contact your representative in Congress and make them understand your vote goes to the candidate who protects your rights. There's plenty of blame to pass around, and any who do nothing more than rant on Slashdot bear part of it. Sony has an understandable motivation: money. What's yours for doing nothing?
Whether Macromedia would have thought of it is irrelevant. Whether someone well versed in the field (user interface design, presumably) would think of it is the test.
Let's see, how great a leap is a tabbed widget? Wait a minute, all my life I've seen tabbed widgets! Prime example? Your personal phone book is probably a tabbed widget with little tabs indicating the beginning letter of the names on the associated page. Come on, how great a leap is it to apply that to a computer interface? How great a leap is one click shopping? It's as simple as someone saying, "Hey, it takes two clicks to do this. Wouldn't it be good to do it with one?" These *ARE* obvious.
Transistors are both elegant and simple, but by no means obvious. The internal combustion engine, conceptually, is both elegant and simple, but not obvious. A user interface design that mirrors a real world object can be elegant and simple, but is likely to be reinvented if you put a class of undergraduate computer science students on the task, let alone a talented and well versed professional. A user interface design that mirrors a real world object will NEVER be innovative. A patent that basically says "I do $COMMON_THING_IN_THE_REAL_WORLD, but I did it on a computer!" should never be granted. That's imitation, not innovation.
I'm continually dismayed by the way so many here fundamentally misunderstand this issue.
Censorship, the government declaring that you can't publish or read information on $SUBJECT, is bad. Adults have the inherent right and responsibility to make their own determinations on what information to expose themselves to.
Filtering software is ENTIRELY different. As a parent, I want some assurance that my tax dollars aren't supplying my children with porn through the library or public school system. You are not being censored! If you want to download porn, go ahead. Just don't think the government, through schools and libraries, has any obligation to assist.
It also seems that you have a choice. One of the following will happen:
Filtering in all forms will fail and those who don't want to be exposed or shouldn't be will withdraw from the internet.
Filtering will succeed somehow as software technology improves to make it possible.
A reactionary legislature will make it illegal.
The first isn't bloody likely with our ludicrous demand that every school be wired. (WHY?)
Most here are arguing vehemently against the second.
You're left with the third, which is what you're going to get. Real censorship, not the voluntary filtering which is being offered now. Be careful what you wish for. You *WILL* get it.
Slashdot Mirror
India, I'm afraid, is currently rattling ICMB shaped sabres with Pakistan. Their government may be stable, but their situation isn't. They (like us) have high tech. They (like us) speak English (well, some do, anyway). If they're truly like us they'll come perilously close to exchanging a few with Pakistan.
"Diamond fiber" is a nice science fiction device. Maybe there will be such a material, maybe not, but it's largely irrelevant. You need something with an insanely high tensile strength, or a cable which tapers a lot more. Basically, at any point along the cable it needs to be wide enough to support the material below it. Higher points carry more weight, so must be thicker. As mentioned, you could build it from steel, if the taper weren't prohibitively high.
That said, most of what we've accomplished today probably looked fairly ridiculous from a 1950s vantage point. As technological advance continues to accelerate, predicting the world 50 years from now becomes that much more error prone. We landed on the moon 30 years ago, and I would have thought in the intervening 30 we'd at least make it to Mars. Technologically we can, we just lost interest along the way.
Anonymity would be nice, but I don't think that's what they're trying to build here.
"Diversity" is nothing more than another load of PC garbage. The fact that the people who built this country into what it is today (in the economic sense, anyway) has nothing to do with the fact that they came from different countries, had different skin pigmentation, or spoke different languages. It has to do with the fact that people who will discard their security, leave their (extended) family and friends, and travel to a new country which largely wishes they'd stay home, are inherently strong people. These are the people who build strong nations, and we're damn lucky they're coming here rather than going somewhere else.
I couldn't care less whether your skin is white, yellow, black or brown, to quote the original poster. The fact you'll leave your life behind to try to make a better one here impresses me.
This libertarian values the rights of people, period. I look at it from the other side. Does the government have the right to deny you that specific right? I don't believe the government has a right to bar collective bargaining. This should not be interpreted to mean that I think unions are generally beneficial. They've served an important role, historically, in forcing exploitive employers to act responsibly. They've also exploited employers. The "I want a big raise and you can't fire me without union approval, not because I'm more productive, not because I have new skills, not because the company is doing well, but just because I have a big club!" is no more responsible than the employer saying "You'll work 80 hours a week for peanuts, not because you're unskilled or irresponsible, just because I have a big club!"
This is not what is happening. The H1B visa ties you to the company you're working for. You're here specifically to work for them. When they're finished with you, they send you home. When you decide you want to be paid the prevailing wage, or want to look for a better job, they no longer have a reason to keep you and you're shipped off back home.
Sure, I'll compete on skills. I'd rather not compete on price when it's legal to force workers to work for well below the prevailing wage. Really, think about this. If you work for me and I can deport you whenever I choose, you'll work for whatever rate I tell you to if you want to stay. Fix the H1B so it's not a license to screw the visa holder and restore *their* freedom and the system will be better off.
There are a select few instances where this doesn't work (monopolies, price fixing), but if you're selling something in a competitive market or selling something I can do without (like that DVD player I still haven't purchased), you'll do so responsibly or you won't see my money.
Give me a payment system, preferably anonymous, which doesn't claim the right to change the terms I've "agreed" to (using that term loosely) whenever they wish to, and I'm interested. Alternatively, how about I make the agreement subject to modifications documented on my web site and e-gold gets 10 days to dispute them.
My intent isn't to pick on e-gold, but on this practice in general. "I agree to $foo, $bar, and $baz, but you can change them any time you want." Why do you accept this?
I don't buy it. The premise that privacy and anonymity are a necessary casualty of technological advance is not necessarily true. It has been true thus far largely because privacy wasn't a design consideration in many of the systems we used. Most internet protocols were not designed to support privacy. HTTP is certainly in that category. The message is going out that privacy should be a design consideration. Zero Knowledge, for example, offers an service which reportedly encrypts your traffic and passes it through a series of servers to hide content and origin. Common cleartext protocols like telnet and ftp are being replaced by encrypted alternatives. Mr. Brin discusses privacy degrading technologies but doesn't concern himself with privacy preserving technologies which will grow in parallel.
Realize too that concern about loss of privacy is well founded. If and when privacy evaporates there will be consequences, and not just decreased crime, which isn't necessarily true either. How many convenience store robberies have you seen on the local news, committed right in front of the obvious cameras? Criminals aren't known for their intelligence. Recall the story of the gentleman who fell in the supermarket and was confronted with his purchase record, which included regular purchases of alcohol, and the threat that this record would be used in any lawsuit brought against the store. Just because you've done nothing wrong, but rather something "everyone" does now and again, doesn't mean that information (which, quite frankly, is none of their concern) won't be misrepresented and turned against you.
I've honored your request and read the article (again). Please do something useful as well: read Database Nation and understand the consequence of burning the privacy bridge. It's not an easy one to rebuild.
- Alex has an idea. It may not be an original idea, but no one has been able to make it work before.
- Alex spends a significant amount of time and/or money making it work.
- Alex worries that as soon as he puts his product on the market, everyone will copy it and undersell him as he has R&D costs to recoup.
- Alex patents his invention, puts it on the market, and reaps the rewards.
Patents were NOT created to protect this:- Bob finds himself in a rapidly advancing industry where nearly every day someone confronts a new problem they've never seen before, and solves it. Many of these solutions are of the form "Do process $FOO on a computer, where previously it was done by people."
- Knowing it's a virtual certaintly that others will have the same idea, Bob seeks patent protection for his "invention". In fact, other people are already doing the very same thing, and there's no reason to believe they got the idea from Bob.
- An understaffed and ignorant USPO grants the patent, thereby giving Bob leverage to legally extort money from people who aren't using his idea at all, but rather thought up the very same idea themselves.
- Bob becomes wildly rich by forcing others to pay for the priviledge of using their own work.
Do you really not understand the problem here? Patents should protect you from having me steal your ideas. I can't buy your widget, take it apart, and build one just like it. They should not protect you from independent reinvention especially where everyone in the field can be reasonably expected to independently come up with the *same* invention (tabbed widgets, anyone?). Patents aren't (or shouldn't be, anyway) about rewarding the first guy clever enough to document an idea and run off to his lawyer. Patents should be about encouraging innovation by assuring inventors that their legitimate hard work won't be stolen. Maybe your acquaintences are these hard working inventors. Maybe they're yet another instance of patenting "Do $foo on a computer."I wonder if it's too late to patent getting a "Do $foo on a computer." patent as a business practice. Too much prior art, no doubt.
I clicked on that MS link wanting to be a good citizen and help stamp out MicroSoft in any way I can. Oh, *that* MS! :P
There are quite a few out there who don't understand that system complexity correlates negatively with system security. Yes, it's obvious, but say it often and to anyone who will listen. When *everyone* notices the obvious statements, then you can stop.
If you have a problem with current IP law, you should contact your representative in Congress and make them understand your vote goes to the candidate who protects your rights. There's plenty of blame to pass around, and any who do nothing more than rant on Slashdot bear part of it. Sony has an understandable motivation: money. What's yours for doing nothing?
Let's see, how great a leap is a tabbed widget? Wait a minute, all my life I've seen tabbed widgets! Prime example? Your personal phone book is probably a tabbed widget with little tabs indicating the beginning letter of the names on the associated page. Come on, how great a leap is it to apply that to a computer interface? How great a leap is one click shopping? It's as simple as someone saying, "Hey, it takes two clicks to do this. Wouldn't it be good to do it with one?" These *ARE* obvious.
Transistors are both elegant and simple, but by no means obvious. The internal combustion engine, conceptually, is both elegant and simple, but not obvious. A user interface design that mirrors a real world object can be elegant and simple, but is likely to be reinvented if you put a class of undergraduate computer science students on the task, let alone a talented and well versed professional. A user interface design that mirrors a real world object will NEVER be innovative. A patent that basically says "I do $COMMON_THING_IN_THE_REAL_WORLD, but I did it on a computer!" should never be granted. That's imitation, not innovation.
Censorship, the government declaring that you can't publish or read information on $SUBJECT, is bad. Adults have the inherent right and responsibility to make their own determinations on what information to expose themselves to.
Filtering software is ENTIRELY different. As a parent, I want some assurance that my tax dollars aren't supplying my children with porn through the library or public school system. You are not being censored! If you want to download porn, go ahead. Just don't think the government, through schools and libraries, has any obligation to assist.
It also seems that you have a choice. One of the following will happen:
- Filtering in all forms will fail and those who don't want to be exposed or shouldn't be will withdraw from the internet.
- Filtering will succeed somehow as software technology improves to make it possible.
- A reactionary legislature will make it illegal.
The first isn't bloody likely with our ludicrous demand that every school be wired. (WHY?)Most here are arguing vehemently against the second.
You're left with the third, which is what you're going to get. Real censorship, not the voluntary filtering which is being offered now. Be careful what you wish for. You *WILL* get it.