Consider the target audience...
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PS2 As PC
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This article seems to be aiming (as it explicitly stated a couple times) at helping the Grandma and the family dog be able to send email and surf the Web via the PS2, and giving average users a cheap alternative to M$ extortion and expensive hardware - does the dog really need gcc? I would imagine that any sort of apps they're going to install would likely be precompiled (remember, this is going to be uniform hardware: every unit identical, so you don't need to compile everything on the machine, you can just grab binary.rpm,.deb, etc). And, well, Grandma and Fido aren't known for logging into SourceForge (I can see it now - "Play dead, roll over, check out CVS..."), though I suppose these days they could probably get someone's password...
You have a good point, it's just terribly obvious - the PS2 implementation won't be for developers, it'll be for end users. But what kind of developer is going to use the PS2 as his platform anyway, except for testing apps designed to run on it?
Aimster's real problem was in "branching out" - I remember when Aimster was first making news, and how the pundits speculated on whether or not it was legal...a decent case can be made for (the original) Aimster being allowed under the Audio Home Recording Act, which essentially allows you to make copies of copyrighted stuff and share with your friends, but also has some stern language about digital copies - in all likelihood, it would be something for an appeals court to decide. But it would be interesting.
And, of course, if it's found that Aimster is breaking the law, then I'll have to record something, copyright it, share via Aimster or AIM file transfer, then send AOL/Time Warner nasty cease-and-desist letters - after all, that would make AIM an infringer, an aid to hackers and pirates, and (worst of all) a circumvention device...and guess who distributes it?
And oddly enough, AIM's "Get File" operation is exactly the sort of thing you do with Napster - you view files on someone els'es computer that they've agreed to share, and download what you want...sounds clear-cut, who's bringing suit?
Well, you might have wanted to note before you posted that that the people here DID go nuts...a lot of these posts (granted I'm reading at a threshold of 2) are bashing this license as an affront to the idea of "free software" (which it is, unless, as someone has already explained, it's a move to protect the interests of distribution in propriety formats like Windows).
We have one at my school (Roanoke College) too...affectionately known as "the Rock," it's a pillar that mysteriously appreared one night after the school (temporarily) banned alcohol on campus...a lot of enterprising students showed up, dug a hole, put a keg in it, filled it with concrete, and put a huge slab of stone upright on top, decreeing that there would ALWAYS be alcohol on the Roanoke campus.
Over the years, the Rock has had quite a lot painted onto it, and now every few years people scrape off the accumulated paint to make way for new generations, and while it's usually nothing more than a big stone bulletin board, you occasionally see something interesting painted up there (like the paraphernalia for Duck Day, where a group of fun-loving students go out every year and stick rubber ducks on every tree, bush, and building in sight...can't imagine who would do such a thing...). Overall, it's a pretty nice thing. But this is a liberal arts college campus...doing it in the middle of a town is gutsy and I'm surprised it got approved.
Amateur filmmakers - put your work on DVD, then sue the MPAA...by enforcing the use of CSS and other encryption techniques, they are distributing "circumvention devices" (give me a DVD, you've given me the information to crack the DVD) and are in violation of the DMCA.
Ditto SDMI and suing the RIAA - if you distribute such a crappy encryption scheme, you're really distributing a circumvention device.
Or at least I'd be willing to bet Kaplan would rule that way...
Powell acted quickly to bring the site down and in a lucky turn received a tip from an informant who knew the site's administrative password, allowing Powell to download the e-mail addresses of all the registered users.
Doesn't this make him one of those morally degenerate hackers Kaplan railed against in the 2600 decision? Someone ought to bring charges against dear old Dave...
Spam email goes through an outgoing mail server. Spammer has most likely paid for server time, so it's not that big.
Repeat process for several servers, depending on where the message is going. Spammer is no longer paying for server time or transmission costs...but somebody somewhere is.
End user receives message through incoming mail server. End user is paying for service, and getting that spam email costs him money. You pay for the service that receives your mail, you pay for the time you spend online checking your mail, and you pay for the time you spend reading/deleting/blocking/forwarding to abuse@[spammer's ISP].
Since in the end you the email recipient are paying to see the message, it's almost as if a credit-card company started sending you "pre-approved" card offers every day...postage due. Add to that the servers in between, which cost money to operate, and the number of servers and networks that get clogged by the occasional spammer who emails a couple million people at a time, and the cost mounts up very very quickly.
And you fall into the fallacy that I'm trying to expose here, namely the thinking that "If it's not a biological thing (see definition in another post on this thread), what else can it be but socially determined?"
Well, how about an instinctive, or instinct-level behavior produced in a species by selection pressure? Beware the eithor/or fallacy, for third (and fourth, and fifth) options abound...
Ah yes, so when [random animal species]'s males and females mate, it's because of socially-imposed standard in [random species]'s societal structure, right?
Women have the right to mate or not mate with whomever they choose. Women claim that they want (and, on some levels I think they do want) stability in a partner, so promiscuity is a bad thing. And note that this is not anything to do with society. Species that have no "society" whatsoever have this same problem - from the male's point of view, many mates=good. From the female's point of view, promiscuous mates can be a bad thing, because you want that male devoting his resources to you and helping you raise your offspring. We species that have language skills call it the "battle of the sexes". This is a reason why societal structures may develop (arrangements like marriage in complex human societies or like males who have "harems" in some types of social species, or other arrangements as well...let's not forget about bees, ants, and termites with their queen-oriented female-dominated societies), but it is not by its nature a social phenomenon.
I take Pinker with a grain of salt, but he makes some good points on gender differences. He does not, however, come close to telling us how the mind works, just as Daniel Dennett didn't explain consciousness in Consiousness Explained. The Language Instinct is bad, I know, but it's an amusing read and at the very least you glean the knowledge that the Eskimos really don't have that many words for snow (four being the substantiated count, I believe). And Pinker isn't the whole field, either. The only point I was trying to make was that there *are* gender differences beyond the obvious reproductive system constructions, something which Andrea Dworkin and her supporter don't agree with (and they're wrong)...referencing evolutionary psych was the first thing that popped into my head to use as a refutation.
By "non-biological" I mean something other than "men have penises and testosterone, women have breasts, vaginas, and estrogen", which is what (sadly) some people think is the only difference between men and women and that every other gender difference (literally *every* difference) is attributable to society "imposing" "gender roles" on people. I think some things are social, but others are not inherent in the way the sexes are hard-wired reproductively and are also not social.
OK, you are approaching the brick wall of reality at speed...prepare for impact...
There are a couple of problems with the reasoning here. First of all, there are non-biological differences between the sexes. I know that doesn't fit with some people's ideologies, but it's true. There's a fascinating field called evolutionary psychology that does nothing but look at stuff like this, and it sure looks like there's more difference between a man and a woman than one has a penis, one has a vagina and breasts, and hormone ratios are different. Men and women display different social behaviors and mating instincts, not because it's "artificial" or imposed on them by society, but because in evolutionary terms it is to their advantage to do so. These behaviors exist in other species that do not have societies and they have existed in humans since before we had societies. Why are women on average more picky about who they'll have sex with? Because in physical terms sex is a huge risk for a woman. It involves nine months of carrying the fetus, the near-death experience that is childbirth, and then nurturing the child with her milk (yes, Dad can help raise the kid, but his nipples aren't functional. Sorry.). Why are men generally "easier" and more promiscuous? Because sex isn't that much of an investment and propagates their genetic material. These are behaviors that split neatly on gender lines and are not "artificial"; they always have existed and always will exist in Homo sapiens. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Many many many behaviors that people of certain ideologies are fond of attributing to "society" or throwing around words like "artificial" and "imposed" can be explained just as simply, if not more so, in terms of evolutionary advantage.
Allow me to recommend a book by Steven Pinker: How the Mind Works. Yes, the title is rather presumptuous, but it's a good read, and it'll give you a new view of just what ideas are "outmoded" and "prenicious".
They're a form of protectionism, yes. They're also a necessary form of protectionism, because a true free market involves Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (in the words of George Carlin) holding up an extended middle finger to a lot of people. So I think certain "protections", though not so great by themselves, are necessary within the context of the free-market system. Sorry if that doesn't fit with your ideology.
I took the date from the article a couple days ago on copy protection and the CPRM standard, where John Gilmore made the claim
"For example, nothing that was created after 1910 has entered the public domain"
. I'm inclined to agree with him because that's the nature of copyright law such as it exists today. I'm not sure about It's a Wonderful Life, but I believe it's a special case. Somebody got generous or something, but I don't really know. I do know the extent of copyright because I had to deal with it recently in copyrighting website content.
I think most of us (I mean Americans; flame me if you like, but Napster is American, the copyright and patent stupidness of the present day is mostly American, and I'm American...all you foreigners who think that talking about American issues is evil can just let us wallow in the consequences of our lawmakers' stupidity, and that should satisfy you) recognize that patents and copyrights are necessary in a free-market, capitalistic system. Otherwise, incentive to introduce a new idea goes down drastically and takes the rate of innovation down with it. So I don't think that the total abolition of copyright and patents is called for, no matter what kind of arguments Canadian (who do NOT live in a capitalistic economy, they have something called "democratic socialism" up there, and it doesn't work like our system does, no matter what they may claim) newspapers put forth about how copyright infringes your right to use your video camera.
The problem is when copyrights and patents are taken to ridiculous levels, such as the present situation in the United States, and it is not a problem with the idea of copyrights and patents. Copyrights and patents are supposed to be temporary, fleeting things that grant you a benefit for coming up with something on the assurance that it'll become public domain.
But nothing becomes public domain anymore.
Anybody remember the article a couple days ago from the EFF? No movie produced since 1910 has entered public domain. Now, it used to be that copyrights and patents lasted a reasonable amount of time, say 14 or 20 years. This is enough time for you to make some money off your idea, but not so long that it never makes it into public domain. Today, however, I can slap a copyright symbol onto any website I design or any music I record, and it doesn't become public domain until at least fifty years after I die...given that I'm not gettingo n in my years yet, we're talking well into the next century before anybody could do anything worthwhile with my work without my permission. That's just plain stupid, and that's one of the things that's wrong with copyright law as it exists in the United States today.
Then of course there's the DMCA and anti-circumvention and all that bullsh*t, and attempts to undermine fair use. That's even worse, because fair use is one of the few ways of dealing with the sheer stupidity of current copyright limitations - cut into fair use and it'll be the year 4056 or so before we can use copyrighted works for even academic pursuits. That's idiotic.
Bottom line: copyrights and patents are a necessary evil of capitalism and free markets. Abolishing them would be sheer stupidity. What needs to be abolished are the obscene terms for which copyrights last and the numerous attempts at undermining fair use which are being written into our law.
I have patented "a method of bringing about legal action, in the form of lawsuits or otherwise, for the enforcement of patent law and recouping damages due to patent infringement." You can't sue without violating my patent. I have also patented "A method of protecting the ideas and inventions of a person or corporation for a limited time so as to encourage them to make said idea or invention available ot the public." By having patents, you have violated my patent.
Though that was sarcasm, I wonder if (in this day and age) I could couch the patent in enough lnaguage to secure patents on patents and patent lawsuits.
I think it might have potential - after all, you can copyright a database and all kinds of other stupid shtuff, so why not copyright your entries on somebody's form? I might just have to patent that idea...
You can likely find out the agency that reported you had bad credit. Then, a simple form letter (thirty-odd cents per major bank) teaches them a lesson:
Dear Sir:
I represent the credit information collection and reporting agency of Fuckem, Over, and Howe. It has recently come to our attention in a database we purchased that employees and agents of "Random CRA" have in the past willfully sold fraudulent databases of credit information, defrauded banks for sums of up to $500,000, incurred massive credit-card debts viewing pornographic material at http://goatse.cx, and are all drunk drivers and child molesters. Incidentally, they have all also fucked your wife.
We thought you might be interested in this information.
Sincerely,
NOTE: FUCKEM, OVER, AND HOWE DOES NOT MAKE ANY CLAIM OR GUARANTEE AS TO THE VALIDITY OF INFORMATION CONTAINED WITHIN THIS REPORT, AND ASSUMES NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ACTIONS YOU MAY TAKE AS A RESULT OF ACQUIRING THIS INFORMATION.
Lift is produced by differential in pressure between the upper and lower surfaces of the wing - it's shaped so that air meets more resistance on the underside of the wing than on the top of the wing. This means the air flows faster over the top, creating lower pressure there. Higher pressure underneath than above means the wing rises and takes whatever's attached up with it. That's Bernoulli's Principle (I think), and we all probably remember it from high-school science classes.
BUT - that relies on resistance (friction). If you have a frictionless wing surface, then logically won't you lose the pressure differential that generates lift? And by consequence, won't you be stuck with an ice-proof plane that CAN'T FLY?
Like I said, I'm not an engineer, but this seems to be a problem...
As worded, they're not doing anythiing illegal (though IANAL...just one in training). Look at the message again:
"Many of your Notification Preference defaults were set to "no" rather than to "yes", which means that unlike other eBay members, you're not receiving these types of communications."
This is saying that when you registered, their registration form was screwed up, and the default settings on items was "no". Then they realize the error, and notice that, oddly enough, everything is set to "no". So they wonder (in pure self-interest, but if you expect anything more of them you're an idiot) if maybe you did accept the defaults blindly, in which case you'd be saying "yes" to everything. So they change the settings and send you an email, because if you really want everything set to "no", you can go reset everything how you want it.
And I know that this may seem an invasion of your privacy here, or a violation of their policies, but it really isn't; there was an error in the defaults, and you chose settings that were remarkably in line with what those erroneous defaults were. They can't find out if you wanted it some other way, because as the settings stand, they can't send you an email to find out. So they err on the side of finding out what really happened, change your settings so they can email you, and then email you.
Is this legal? Probably. Does it violate any policies anywhere? Probably not. Is it rife with possibilities for abuse? Yeah, and that sucks. Is it simply an act of blatant self-interest? Yeah, but they're a corporation and we're a capitalistic society. If you want them to do something else, become a business ethics consultant.
OK, I was with him through the first couple of paragraphs - I'm a big one for the principle of charity, and giving someone the benefit of the doubt to see where they're going with their argument. And at the beginning, Carr makes a lot of sense; he throws in our faces the most glaring possible indictment of how the so-called "information revolution" may be a harmful thing:
"It is my belief, for which I offer no apology, that most of that technology is making people dumber: It is teaching them how to assemble massive amounts of information, of arcane minutia, without simultaneously teaching them how to assemble those bits of information into integrated bodies of knowledge -- such integration being the only function that distinguishes the human brain from a mechanical computer."
I agree with this wholeheartedly - I haven't been too long out of America's public education system, and I've seen the kind of folks we're cranking out these days...it's scary to think that they're going to be running the country in fifty years. What we have right now is a population which, though confronted with more information than any other group in the history of the human race, consists mostly of people who have neither the skills nor the inclination to make use of that information. People expect anything relevant and important to either have a neon sign flashing over it and nicely numbered how-to steps, or to be "self-installing", like "Saving Private Ryan's" message of why we should be grateful to veterans.
This is something which media sources have traditionally been very good at - the six o'clock news gives you relevant issues in the form of human interest stories rather than statistics and op-ed pieces. Hollywood delivers mediated experiences that can lead you to believe or think a certain way without any visible effort on your part, other than watching the movie. Neal Stephenson pointed out once that Disneyland is a great example of this - you go to say, the nature-themed part of the park, and you walk away with an impressed idea of the importance of ecological issues, conservation, etc. - but without having read or processed anything.
"Traditional" media have been doing this for so long now that it's second nature to them, and while they may skim over a lot of details, they don't openly lie and most of the time they're not trying to deceive us (when they do, it's usually in very subtle ways having to do with promoting an image of America that makes the end receiver feel good about himself/herself), and you don't find too many genuinely harmful or volatile things in the papers, on TV, etc. (I'm not going to get into the sex and violence argument here).
So as long as we have traditional media, it's OK that most of our population can't think for themselves, because they don't have to. They're going to be all right because they're getting fairly accurate information in precompiled form. And while we all know that "pre-compiled" means "you lost some options along the way", it's better than handing over root access to someone who thinks smaller fonts take up less disk space, and it works out better for everyone in the end.
But now we have the Internet, and it is not like the traditional media. Carr is insightful in noticing this, and also in pointing out that with the Internet we have a problem. The Internet is not precompiled. It is not user-friendly. It does not give you what you want without needing to be told or asked. The Internet is, quite simply, whatever you can manage to do with it, and nothing more. This is terrible news for all those people who are just fine with Dan Rather or Peter Jennings telling them how things are every night, and Julia Roberts films giving them a warm fuzzy moral sense.
So what does Carr suggest we do? Regulate for the protection of the people. If you don't know how to use the information in your hands, you're a danger to yourself and others, because as we all know, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This would be a good idea, if not for two objections:
1) That's an enormous responsibility to put on an agency, and an enormous amount of power to just hand over. We (ostensibly) have that kind of regulation already in the FCC, but the FCC isn't perfect, and I think we owe most of the good in media today to the fact that the people running the media companies aren't stupid and know what's in their best interest. They need trusting, docile populations who receive information as piped into them. Start lying to people, or ripping them off, and those docile people get very ugly very quickly. So they've learned over time to be the mostly trustworthy, friendly outlets we know today. New, internet-based media companies don't necessarily know this; they haven't been around long enough. That means they're going to do a lot of stupid things, and a lot of them are going to pay the price for being companies that did stupid things. If we involve government regulatory power, then we're asking for more trouble, because the government regulators almost certainly won't know this, and they'll regulate like crazy in the name of the public good. Then we end up with heavily censored and absolutely useless (at best) or devious puppet (at worst) media, and that's a Very Bad Thing (TM).
2) Not everybody is a blithering incompetent. Start introducing government regulation designed to protect people from themselves, and you're going to restrict the people who actually know what they're doing. The Supreme Court ruling mentioned in another article today on/. is a splendid example of this: in order to protect people from obscene material, we have to take it out of the hands of people who have legitimate uses for it. So we end up with regulations that protect us from things but at the same time keep us from being able to function, and that's also a Very Bad Thing (TM).
Yet Carr is right - there is a significant problem in the fact that staggering numbers of people now living aren't capable of processing information or performing certain critical thinking tasks. What do we do?
Ideally, we'd start teaching people how to think again, rather than using schools as a convenient eighteen-year daycare center between the day you're born and the day you get a job. Ideally we'd give up on "career tracks" in public schools (known as "school-to-work" where I grew up) and instead teach people to figure out what they want to do with their lives and how to plan to accomplish it, because then when life tries to throw a wrench in the works, they can deal with it and move on. When they're confronted with choices, rather than have an automatic "I'm an [insert career here], so I do X" response, they could consider options, reason about them, and reach an informed decision.
But that would be one hell of a project, and I have no idea how to accomplish it, so there needs to be a better solution. As it turns out, there is a workable (if trollish) way to do it: KEEP THE INTERNET FOR THE GEEKS UNTIL NORMAL PEOPLE CAN HANDLE IT!
Let's face it, the Internet was never intended for some of the things it does today; originally it was a novel and powerful tool for performing certain highly nerdy tasks. I say we should let it stay that way...it doesn't need to be too user-friendly just yet, because that'll scare off people who don't need to be forced to think at this stage in their lives. Then, when they're ready, the Internet will still be there, pure and in all its glory, and they won't need to be protected from it.
Not too long ago, the Internet was in just such a state. Then the "new economy" and the "Internet boom" came along and it all got corrupted in the name of the Almighty Dollar. That's a shame, because the Internet was coming along just fine at the time, progressing quite naturally toward being accessible to everyone - academics knew how to use it, geeks and tech folks knew how to use it, it was there if you needed to do research, and recreationally AOL or Compuserve would let you have a novel way to talk to your friends and play games. You didn't have trillions of bits of unfiltered data thrown at your head, like a sandblaster turned on a soup cracker (credit to Scott Adams for that metaphor), and the average person could get what he/she wanted and the knowledgeable person could get what he/she wanted. It all worked very nicely.
So how about if instead of throwing regulation at the Internet and making it useless or even more dangerous in the name of protecting people, we just quietly let it scale it back down to what it used to be a few years ago? Dot-com businesses are already dropping like flies, and that's one of the big issues out of the way. Plenty of people still find computers and "that Internet thing" confusing as hell, so they're taken care of, too. In the meantime, our culture and our educational system can adapt to helping people deal with huge quantities of information in preparation for the day when they'll strike out onto the Net on their own. In fact, if we let it go on its own for a while, this solution may just implement itself. If not, well, maybe the Internet media providers will learn a thing or two and scale back on their own - it's in their best interest, anyway. The Internet isn't quite ready to be what they want from it just yet, and anybody with sound business planning skills (I say that sarcastically, having watched the "dot-com" revolution fly past) ought to be able to understand that and act on it.
Besides, do you really want the Bush administration controlling the Internet? "Error 404: I was unableable to locatify the page you requesterated"...
then give spammers a list of folks on standards commissions, hard drive manufacturers, and of course the RIAA and MPAA...
"The email you just received contains copy-protected material, and may not be moved to the folder "Trash" without the appropriate key. Please contact spammer@spam.org for instructions on purchasing a key to copy this email."
When they have to make 500GB hard drives or shell out major $$$ just to check their mail each morning, they'll listen.
Slashdot Mirror
This article seems to be aiming (as it explicitly stated a couple times) at helping the Grandma and the family dog be able to send email and surf the Web via the PS2, and giving average users a cheap alternative to M$ extortion and expensive hardware - does the dog really need gcc? I would imagine that any sort of apps they're going to install would likely be precompiled (remember, this is going to be uniform hardware: every unit identical, so you don't need to compile everything on the machine, you can just grab binary .rpm, .deb, etc). And, well, Grandma and Fido aren't known for logging into SourceForge (I can see it now - "Play dead, roll over, check out CVS..."), though I suppose these days they could probably get someone's password...
You have a good point, it's just terribly obvious - the PS2 implementation won't be for developers, it'll be for end users. But what kind of developer is going to use the PS2 as his platform anyway, except for testing apps designed to run on it?
I'm surfing in Opera, identifying as IE 5.0, and I couldn't get into the site when I clicked the link.
Aimster's real problem was in "branching out" - I remember when Aimster was first making news, and how the pundits speculated on whether or not it was legal...a decent case can be made for (the original) Aimster being allowed under the Audio Home Recording Act, which essentially allows you to make copies of copyrighted stuff and share with your friends, but also has some stern language about digital copies - in all likelihood, it would be something for an appeals court to decide. But it would be interesting.
And, of course, if it's found that Aimster is breaking the law, then I'll have to record something, copyright it, share via Aimster or AIM file transfer, then send AOL/Time Warner nasty cease-and-desist letters - after all, that would make AIM an infringer, an aid to hackers and pirates, and (worst of all) a circumvention device...and guess who distributes it?
And oddly enough, AIM's "Get File" operation is exactly the sort of thing you do with Napster - you view files on someone els'es computer that they've agreed to share, and download what you want...sounds clear-cut, who's bringing suit?
Well, you might have wanted to note before you posted that that the people here DID go nuts...a lot of these posts (granted I'm reading at a threshold of 2) are bashing this license as an affront to the idea of "free software" (which it is, unless, as someone has already explained, it's a move to protect the interests of distribution in propriety formats like Windows).
We have one at my school (Roanoke College) too...affectionately known as "the Rock," it's a pillar that mysteriously appreared one night after the school (temporarily) banned alcohol on campus...a lot of enterprising students showed up, dug a hole, put a keg in it, filled it with concrete, and put a huge slab of stone upright on top, decreeing that there would ALWAYS be alcohol on the Roanoke campus.
Over the years, the Rock has had quite a lot painted onto it, and now every few years people scrape off the accumulated paint to make way for new generations, and while it's usually nothing more than a big stone bulletin board, you occasionally see something interesting painted up there (like the paraphernalia for Duck Day, where a group of fun-loving students go out every year and stick rubber ducks on every tree, bush, and building in sight...can't imagine who would do such a thing...). Overall, it's a pretty nice thing. But this is a liberal arts college campus...doing it in the middle of a town is gutsy and I'm surprised it got approved.
Amateur filmmakers - put your work on DVD, then sue the MPAA...by enforcing the use of CSS and other encryption techniques, they are distributing "circumvention devices" (give me a DVD, you've given me the information to crack the DVD) and are in violation of the DMCA.
Ditto SDMI and suing the RIAA - if you distribute such a crappy encryption scheme, you're really distributing a circumvention device.
Or at least I'd be willing to bet Kaplan would rule that way...
- Pray UCITA passes everywhere.
- Create a shrink-wrap license that signs away all of the clicker's (clickee's? I don't know what word to use) copyrights to you.
- Send license (embedded in an email) to CEO's of MPAA and RIAA companies.
- They're now violating your intellectual property and your copyrights. Sue the f**k out of the Nazi bastards.
- Either
- You settle with them to give them back their copyrights in exchange for some serious changes in how they behave, or
- They have to fight UCITA, DMCA, etc., get them struck down, and do it out of their own wallets.
I like it.In order:
- Spam email goes through an outgoing mail server. Spammer has most likely paid for server time, so it's not that big.
- Repeat process for several servers, depending on where the message is going. Spammer is no longer paying for server time or transmission costs...but somebody somewhere is.
- End user receives message through incoming mail server. End user is paying for service, and getting that spam email costs him money. You pay for the service that receives your mail, you pay for the time you spend online checking your mail, and you pay for the time you spend reading/deleting/blocking/forwarding to abuse@[spammer's ISP].
Since in the end you the email recipient are paying to see the message, it's almost as if a credit-card company started sending you "pre-approved" card offers every day...postage due. Add to that the servers in between, which cost money to operate, and the number of servers and networks that get clogged by the occasional spammer who emails a couple million people at a time, and the cost mounts up very very quickly.Did I say it was genetic? Nope. It seems your attachment to defining everything as "social reality" is slightly less than rational...
And you fall into the fallacy that I'm trying to expose here, namely the thinking that "If it's not a biological thing (see definition in another post on this thread), what else can it be but socially determined?"
Well, how about an instinctive, or instinct-level behavior produced in a species by selection pressure? Beware the eithor/or fallacy, for third (and fourth, and fifth) options abound...
Ah yes, so when [random animal species]'s males and females mate, it's because of socially-imposed standard in [random species]'s societal structure, right?
Women have the right to mate or not mate with whomever they choose. Women claim that they want (and, on some levels I think they do want) stability in a partner, so promiscuity is a bad thing. And note that this is not anything to do with society. Species that have no "society" whatsoever have this same problem - from the male's point of view, many mates=good. From the female's point of view, promiscuous mates can be a bad thing, because you want that male devoting his resources to you and helping you raise your offspring. We species that have language skills call it the "battle of the sexes". This is a reason why societal structures may develop (arrangements like marriage in complex human societies or like males who have "harems" in some types of social species, or other arrangements as well...let's not forget about bees, ants, and termites with their queen-oriented female-dominated societies), but it is not by its nature a social phenomenon.
I take Pinker with a grain of salt, but he makes some good points on gender differences. He does not, however, come close to telling us how the mind works, just as Daniel Dennett didn't explain consciousness in Consiousness Explained. The Language Instinct is bad, I know, but it's an amusing read and at the very least you glean the knowledge that the Eskimos really don't have that many words for snow (four being the substantiated count, I believe). And Pinker isn't the whole field, either. The only point I was trying to make was that there *are* gender differences beyond the obvious reproductive system constructions, something which Andrea Dworkin and her supporter don't agree with (and they're wrong)...referencing evolutionary psych was the first thing that popped into my head to use as a refutation.
By "non-biological" I mean something other than "men have penises and testosterone, women have breasts, vaginas, and estrogen", which is what (sadly) some people think is the only difference between men and women and that every other gender difference (literally *every* difference) is attributable to society "imposing" "gender roles" on people. I think some things are social, but others are not inherent in the way the sexes are hard-wired reproductively and are also not social.
OK, you are approaching the brick wall of reality at speed...prepare for impact...
There are a couple of problems with the reasoning here. First of all, there are non-biological differences between the sexes. I know that doesn't fit with some people's ideologies, but it's true. There's a fascinating field called evolutionary psychology that does nothing but look at stuff like this, and it sure looks like there's more difference between a man and a woman than one has a penis, one has a vagina and breasts, and hormone ratios are different. Men and women display different social behaviors and mating instincts, not because it's "artificial" or imposed on them by society, but because in evolutionary terms it is to their advantage to do so. These behaviors exist in other species that do not have societies and they have existed in humans since before we had societies. Why are women on average more picky about who they'll have sex with? Because in physical terms sex is a huge risk for a woman. It involves nine months of carrying the fetus, the near-death experience that is childbirth, and then nurturing the child with her milk (yes, Dad can help raise the kid, but his nipples aren't functional. Sorry.). Why are men generally "easier" and more promiscuous? Because sex isn't that much of an investment and propagates their genetic material. These are behaviors that split neatly on gender lines and are not "artificial"; they always have existed and always will exist in Homo sapiens. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Many many many behaviors that people of certain ideologies are fond of attributing to "society" or throwing around words like "artificial" and "imposed" can be explained just as simply, if not more so, in terms of evolutionary advantage.
Allow me to recommend a book by Steven Pinker: How the Mind Works. Yes, the title is rather presumptuous, but it's a good read, and it'll give you a new view of just what ideas are "outmoded" and "prenicious".
They're a form of protectionism, yes. They're also a necessary form of protectionism, because a true free market involves Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (in the words of George Carlin) holding up an extended middle finger to a lot of people. So I think certain "protections", though not so great by themselves, are necessary within the context of the free-market system. Sorry if that doesn't fit with your ideology.
I took the date from the article a couple days ago on copy protection and the CPRM standard, where John Gilmore made the claim
. I'm inclined to agree with him because that's the nature of copyright law such as it exists today. I'm not sure about It's a Wonderful Life, but I believe it's a special case. Somebody got generous or something, but I don't really know. I do know the extent of copyright because I had to deal with it recently in copyrighting website content.I think most of us (I mean Americans; flame me if you like, but Napster is American, the copyright and patent stupidness of the present day is mostly American, and I'm American...all you foreigners who think that talking about American issues is evil can just let us wallow in the consequences of our lawmakers' stupidity, and that should satisfy you) recognize that patents and copyrights are necessary in a free-market, capitalistic system. Otherwise, incentive to introduce a new idea goes down drastically and takes the rate of innovation down with it. So I don't think that the total abolition of copyright and patents is called for, no matter what kind of arguments Canadian (who do NOT live in a capitalistic economy, they have something called "democratic socialism" up there, and it doesn't work like our system does, no matter what they may claim) newspapers put forth about how copyright infringes your right to use your video camera.
The problem is when copyrights and patents are taken to ridiculous levels, such as the present situation in the United States, and it is not a problem with the idea of copyrights and patents. Copyrights and patents are supposed to be temporary, fleeting things that grant you a benefit for coming up with something on the assurance that it'll become public domain.
But nothing becomes public domain anymore.
Anybody remember the article a couple days ago from the EFF? No movie produced since 1910 has entered public domain. Now, it used to be that copyrights and patents lasted a reasonable amount of time, say 14 or 20 years. This is enough time for you to make some money off your idea, but not so long that it never makes it into public domain. Today, however, I can slap a copyright symbol onto any website I design or any music I record, and it doesn't become public domain until at least fifty years after I die...given that I'm not gettingo n in my years yet, we're talking well into the next century before anybody could do anything worthwhile with my work without my permission. That's just plain stupid, and that's one of the things that's wrong with copyright law as it exists in the United States today.
Then of course there's the DMCA and anti-circumvention and all that bullsh*t, and attempts to undermine fair use. That's even worse, because fair use is one of the few ways of dealing with the sheer stupidity of current copyright limitations - cut into fair use and it'll be the year 4056 or so before we can use copyrighted works for even academic pursuits. That's idiotic.
Bottom line: copyrights and patents are a necessary evil of capitalism and free markets. Abolishing them would be sheer stupidity. What needs to be abolished are the obscene terms for which copyrights last and the numerous attempts at undermining fair use which are being written into our law.
I have patented "a method of bringing about legal action, in the form of lawsuits or otherwise, for the enforcement of patent law and recouping damages due to patent infringement." You can't sue without violating my patent. I have also patented "A method of protecting the ideas and inventions of a person or corporation for a limited time so as to encourage them to make said idea or invention available ot the public." By having patents, you have violated my patent.
Though that was sarcasm, I wonder if (in this day and age) I could couch the patent in enough lnaguage to secure patents on patents and patent lawsuits.
I think it might have potential - after all, you can copyright a database and all kinds of other stupid shtuff, so why not copyright your entries on somebody's form? I might just have to patent that idea...
Dear Sir:
I represent the credit information collection and reporting agency of Fuckem, Over, and Howe. It has recently come to our attention in a database we purchased that employees and agents of "Random CRA" have in the past willfully sold fraudulent databases of credit information, defrauded banks for sums of up to $500,000, incurred massive credit-card debts viewing pornographic material at http://goatse.cx, and are all drunk drivers and child molesters. Incidentally, they have all also fucked your wife.
We thought you might be interested in this information.
Sincerely,
NOTE: FUCKEM, OVER, AND HOWE DOES NOT MAKE ANY CLAIM OR GUARANTEE AS TO THE VALIDITY OF INFORMATION CONTAINED WITHIN THIS REPORT, AND ASSUMES NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ACTIONS YOU MAY TAKE AS A RESULT OF ACQUIRING THIS INFORMATION.
That'll solve the problem real fast.IANAAE (I am not an aeronautical engineer) but...
Lift is produced by differential in pressure between the upper and lower surfaces of the wing - it's shaped so that air meets more resistance on the underside of the wing than on the top of the wing. This means the air flows faster over the top, creating lower pressure there. Higher pressure underneath than above means the wing rises and takes whatever's attached up with it. That's Bernoulli's Principle (I think), and we all probably remember it from high-school science classes.
BUT - that relies on resistance (friction). If you have a frictionless wing surface, then logically won't you lose the pressure differential that generates lift? And by consequence, won't you be stuck with an ice-proof plane that CAN'T FLY?
Like I said, I'm not an engineer, but this seems to be a problem...
As worded, they're not doing anythiing illegal (though IANAL...just one in training). Look at the message again:
"Many of your Notification Preference defaults were set to "no" rather than to "yes", which means that unlike other eBay members, you're not receiving these types of communications."
This is saying that when you registered, their registration form was screwed up, and the default settings on items was "no". Then they realize the error, and notice that, oddly enough, everything is set to "no". So they wonder (in pure self-interest, but if you expect anything more of them you're an idiot) if maybe you did accept the defaults blindly, in which case you'd be saying "yes" to everything. So they change the settings and send you an email, because if you really want everything set to "no", you can go reset everything how you want it.
And I know that this may seem an invasion of your privacy here, or a violation of their policies, but it really isn't; there was an error in the defaults, and you chose settings that were remarkably in line with what those erroneous defaults were. They can't find out if you wanted it some other way, because as the settings stand, they can't send you an email to find out. So they err on the side of finding out what really happened, change your settings so they can email you, and then email you.
Is this legal? Probably. Does it violate any policies anywhere? Probably not. Is it rife with possibilities for abuse? Yeah, and that sucks. Is it simply an act of blatant self-interest? Yeah, but they're a corporation and we're a capitalistic society. If you want them to do something else, become a business ethics consultant.
OK, I was with him through the first couple of paragraphs - I'm a big one for the principle of charity, and giving someone the benefit of the doubt to see where they're going with their argument. And at the beginning, Carr makes a lot of sense; he throws in our faces the most glaring possible indictment of how the so-called "information revolution" may be a harmful thing:
"It is my belief, for which I offer no apology, that most of that technology is making people dumber: It is teaching them how to assemble massive amounts of information, of arcane minutia, without simultaneously teaching them how to assemble those bits of information into integrated bodies of knowledge -- such integration being the only function that distinguishes the human brain from a mechanical computer."
I agree with this wholeheartedly - I haven't been too long out of America's public education system, and I've seen the kind of folks we're cranking out these days...it's scary to think that they're going to be running the country in fifty years. What we have right now is a population which, though confronted with more information than any other group in the history of the human race, consists mostly of people who have neither the skills nor the inclination to make use of that information. People expect anything relevant and important to either have a neon sign flashing over it and nicely numbered how-to steps, or to be "self-installing", like "Saving Private Ryan's" message of why we should be grateful to veterans.
This is something which media sources have traditionally been very good at - the six o'clock news gives you relevant issues in the form of human interest stories rather than statistics and op-ed pieces. Hollywood delivers mediated experiences that can lead you to believe or think a certain way without any visible effort on your part, other than watching the movie. Neal Stephenson pointed out once that Disneyland is a great example of this - you go to say, the nature-themed part of the park, and you walk away with an impressed idea of the importance of ecological issues, conservation, etc. - but without having read or processed anything.
"Traditional" media have been doing this for so long now that it's second nature to them, and while they may skim over a lot of details, they don't openly lie and most of the time they're not trying to deceive us (when they do, it's usually in very subtle ways having to do with promoting an image of America that makes the end receiver feel good about himself/herself), and you don't find too many genuinely harmful or volatile things in the papers, on TV, etc. (I'm not going to get into the sex and violence argument here). So as long as we have traditional media, it's OK that most of our population can't think for themselves, because they don't have to. They're going to be all right because they're getting fairly accurate information in precompiled form. And while we all know that "pre-compiled" means "you lost some options along the way", it's better than handing over root access to someone who thinks smaller fonts take up less disk space, and it works out better for everyone in the end. But now we have the Internet, and it is not like the traditional media. Carr is insightful in noticing this, and also in pointing out that with the Internet we have a problem. The Internet is not precompiled. It is not user-friendly. It does not give you what you want without needing to be told or asked. The Internet is, quite simply, whatever you can manage to do with it, and nothing more. This is terrible news for all those people who are just fine with Dan Rather or Peter Jennings telling them how things are every night, and Julia Roberts films giving them a warm fuzzy moral sense.
So what does Carr suggest we do? Regulate for the protection of the people. If you don't know how to use the information in your hands, you're a danger to yourself and others, because as we all know, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This would be a good idea, if not for two objections:
/. is a splendid example of this: in order to protect people from obscene material, we have to take it out of the hands of people who have legitimate uses for it. So we end up with regulations that protect us from things but at the same time keep us from being able to function, and that's also a Very Bad Thing (TM).
1) That's an enormous responsibility to put on an agency, and an enormous amount of power to just hand over. We (ostensibly) have that kind of regulation already in the FCC, but the FCC isn't perfect, and I think we owe most of the good in media today to the fact that the people running the media companies aren't stupid and know what's in their best interest. They need trusting, docile populations who receive information as piped into them. Start lying to people, or ripping them off, and those docile people get very ugly very quickly. So they've learned over time to be the mostly trustworthy, friendly outlets we know today. New, internet-based media companies don't necessarily know this; they haven't been around long enough. That means they're going to do a lot of stupid things, and a lot of them are going to pay the price for being companies that did stupid things. If we involve government regulatory power, then we're asking for more trouble, because the government regulators almost certainly won't know this, and they'll regulate like crazy in the name of the public good. Then we end up with heavily censored and absolutely useless (at best) or devious puppet (at worst) media, and that's a Very Bad Thing (TM).
2) Not everybody is a blithering incompetent. Start introducing government regulation designed to protect people from themselves, and you're going to restrict the people who actually know what they're doing. The Supreme Court ruling mentioned in another article today on
Yet Carr is right - there is a significant problem in the fact that staggering numbers of people now living aren't capable of processing information or performing certain critical thinking tasks. What do we do?
Ideally, we'd start teaching people how to think again, rather than using schools as a convenient eighteen-year daycare center between the day you're born and the day you get a job. Ideally we'd give up on "career tracks" in public schools (known as "school-to-work" where I grew up) and instead teach people to figure out what they want to do with their lives and how to plan to accomplish it, because then when life tries to throw a wrench in the works, they can deal with it and move on. When they're confronted with choices, rather than have an automatic "I'm an [insert career here], so I do X" response, they could consider options, reason about them, and reach an informed decision.
But that would be one hell of a project, and I have no idea how to accomplish it, so there needs to be a better solution. As it turns out, there is a workable (if trollish) way to do it: KEEP THE INTERNET FOR THE GEEKS UNTIL NORMAL PEOPLE CAN HANDLE IT!
Let's face it, the Internet was never intended for some of the things it does today; originally it was a novel and powerful tool for performing certain highly nerdy tasks. I say we should let it stay that way...it doesn't need to be too user-friendly just yet, because that'll scare off people who don't need to be forced to think at this stage in their lives. Then, when they're ready, the Internet will still be there, pure and in all its glory, and they won't need to be protected from it.
Not too long ago, the Internet was in just such a state. Then the "new economy" and the "Internet boom" came along and it all got corrupted in the name of the Almighty Dollar. That's a shame, because the Internet was coming along just fine at the time, progressing quite naturally toward being accessible to everyone - academics knew how to use it, geeks and tech folks knew how to use it, it was there if you needed to do research, and recreationally AOL or Compuserve would let you have a novel way to talk to your friends and play games. You didn't have trillions of bits of unfiltered data thrown at your head, like a sandblaster turned on a soup cracker (credit to Scott Adams for that metaphor), and the average person could get what he/she wanted and the knowledgeable person could get what he/she wanted. It all worked very nicely.
So how about if instead of throwing regulation at the Internet and making it useless or even more dangerous in the name of protecting people, we just quietly let it scale it back down to what it used to be a few years ago? Dot-com businesses are already dropping like flies, and that's one of the big issues out of the way. Plenty of people still find computers and "that Internet thing" confusing as hell, so they're taken care of, too. In the meantime, our culture and our educational system can adapt to helping people deal with huge quantities of information in preparation for the day when they'll strike out onto the Net on their own. In fact, if we let it go on its own for a while, this solution may just implement itself. If not, well, maybe the Internet media providers will learn a thing or two and scale back on their own - it's in their best interest, anyway. The Internet isn't quite ready to be what they want from it just yet, and anybody with sound business planning skills (I say that sarcastically, having watched the "dot-com" revolution fly past) ought to be able to understand that and act on it.
Besides, do you really want the Bush administration controlling the Internet? "Error 404: I was unableable to locatify the page you requesterated"...
then give spammers a list of folks on standards commissions, hard drive manufacturers, and of course the RIAA and MPAA... "The email you just received contains copy-protected material, and may not be moved to the folder "Trash" without the appropriate key. Please contact spammer@spam.org for instructions on purchasing a key to copy this email." When they have to make 500GB hard drives or shell out major $$$ just to check their mail each morning, they'll listen.