Okay, let's assume for the sake of argument what many have claimed: that the patent is only going to be used for defensive purposes. There are two orthogonal interests that might be protected. First, IBM's interests. Second, the interests of open source developers at large.
Now, I think it's pretty safe to say that IBM isn't going to go after anyone just for using some variant on their reward system. But say you're a company that does some open source work as a (not necessarily large) part of its business. Now say you get into it with IBM's Demon Lawyer Horde over some unrelated patent dispute. IBM might not hesitate to use this as leverage.
So I don't buy the "defensive use only" defense, even if that is IBM's true intent. It's not a guarantee that it will always be to the benefit of OSS developers. I would be happy to see a universal, royalty-free license to any and all who desired it.
As previous posters have noted, IBM rewards people for coming up with patents, so maybe somebody is simply padding their in-house resume.
I have a tendency to make off with minor office supplies. You know, desks, computers, fifty pound boxes of paper, good looking secretaries. But I've never stolen anything major like a Range Rover, or the CEO's secretary, or a mainframe... okay, maybe a little one that one time. But they wouldn't pay me for overtime.
But I guess in the interests of completeness, I also tend to be overly honest. On a related note, what were you smoking when you picked out that tie? I want the name of your supplier.
I once got an interview after putting "Will work for food" as one of my qualifications. So depending on the position, showing a sense of humor may not be a bad idea.
I totally blew the interview itself. I did okay with the "just be friendly and promise never to steal office supplies" portion. But then I got handed off to one of their code gurus.
He asked me if I had any experience with testing frameworks. I hadn't. He asked me to rate my Perl and C++ skills on a scale of 1-10, which I considered excessively subjective (especially since there were no follow-ups).
I know I suck as an interviewee. I stumble over words, and have a hard time claiming "I have m4d 5k1ll504zz." It's a self-confidence thing, I guess. But I also feel the guy sucked as an interviewer. For the most part, I didn't see how the questions related to my experiences, the qualifications for the job as I understood it, or generalized technical knowledge or problem solving. The whole experience was just... odd.
I left feeling like a total poser, even though I'm approximately as qualified as two of the people who did end up getting the job (we all go to school together). So, two questions:
First, what can an applicant do to improve his interviewing skills?
Second, should an interviewer try and compensate for an interviewee's subpar skills in an attempt to draw out the fact that he/she would actually be a good fit for the company. If so, what would be some ways to do that?
I ask because (God forbid) I might be on the other side of the desk--okay, that time it was a cubicle--and I'd like to do it well.
An order of what magnitude, precisely? According to a previous post (quoting Wikipedia), they've tried to knight John Cleese, David Bowie, and Kenneth Branagh. Not that they're bad people, mind you. But my impression is the only real qualifications for knighthood are fame and no felony convictions.
Personally, I don't see this as a huge deal. Just another example of powerful people doing each other favors. Knight Gates. Give him the Key to the London Tower, and the Boiled Sausage of Heroism, or whatever you Brits do. In the grand scheme of things, it's irrelevant.
I can accept that, with the enormous effects that Microsoft has had on the computer industry, that those effects can't be entirely negative. But I think that, on the balance, the general sentiment of Slashdot is correct: Microsoft has ridiculous amounts of power, which it uses first and foremost to maintain and increase that power. For the good of society, it needs to be hurt.
By what stretch of the imagination is plagarism legal? Even if it is perfectly legal for me, as a copyright holder, to let another person claim my work as their own original creation (which isn't even close to the same thing as merely assigning copyright), it is illegal for that person to try and pull off the subterfuge in an academic setting. It's part of the contract between you and the university: Do your own damned work (paraphrased). [and before you go off on your "I never signed no steenkin' contract" spiel, read my other response]
I guess that, by "companies", you mean "three former grad students running a cash-only business from a small apartment just off campus. You're right, the illegal and immoral persecution of these upstanding entrepreneurs is decimating our economy. Sorry, but what plagarists do is not a noble expression of capitalistic innovation; it's an attempt at subverting the educational process by helping others receiving credit for work they did not do.
I have no idea how anything I said could be construed as support for Microsoft's antitrust violations. Perhaps you're simply... what's the word... trolling? Perish the thought.
You're saying that, at no point in your college education, were you told that attending the school required you to follow the rules in the student handbook? You were. Repeatedly. I'm sure you were also given rudimentary instruction on what constituted plagarism, and the punishments that would be meted out if you did so.
The contract exists, even if you never signed a piece of paper saying that you agreed to follow the rules. You agreed to the terms by attending classes, and if it is discovered that you violated the rules, they have every right to impose academic penalties. All you have to do to avoid those penalties is leave the school and never come back.
According to your farfetched interpretation of contract law, if I run a business, I cannot remove a person from my place of business unless I had them sign a contract before coming in.
Most likely you're just being a whiny little troll, but for just one moment try to think of the poor young Slashdotters who are entering college right now. If they swallow your crap advice, they're going to do something very stupid that may destroy their academic future.
The only "marketable value" being destroyed is the money that next semester's panicked students would have been willing to pay to turn it in as their own? That's not a valid objection. If an assignment ends up having legitimate value, a service designed solely to keep others from claiming your work as their own does nothing to harm that value. In fact, it protects the author. [Note: I don't understand the system in question, and therefore cannot say whether it was designed solely to avert plagarism.]
Nor is it right to say that you shouldn't be required to give up any rights to your work to receive academic credit. It's part of the agreement. Now, the fact is that turnitin.com is a third party, so you may not have contractual obligations with them. But such a broad, sweeping statement is a sign of immaturity.
The problems I have with this:
1) As I said, it's a third party. 2) Depending on how turnitin.com works, it may amount to republication of student papers, which may or may not be actionable under copyright law. 3) Keeping student papers on file increases the value of their service, and therefore constitutes using their work for a commercial purpose.
Technically, you don't need to give the modifications back to the original copyright holders. The GPL only requires that you give the source and modifications to anyone who receives the code from you (or make it clear that the source is available upon request).
What I'm looking forward to is having to apply weekly firewall updates to my friggin' toaster.
NAT is a good idea for certain limited applications. Internet-enabled dishwasher? No problem*. Web browsing cell phone? Perfect. But for a general purpose computer running arbitrary applications, it's very constraining. Just look at the discussion surrounding Speakfreely and you can see some of the problems that happen when you turn on NAT. Basically, you turn a computer into a consumer of Internet services rather than a participant.
Depending on where the NAT translation is being done, there are ways around it. I have a static address with a good wireless provider, so the NAT is being done by my own router. I've told it to forward requests to ports 80 and 22 to my Linux box, so I can serve web pages and SSH into it.
But if the NAT is being done by the ISP directly, they have full control over who can make requests to your computer from the outside. Nobody can make requests of your computer from the outside, which eliminates both intrusions and ordinary requests for services.
* Though I'm still curious why my appliances need to surf the web. How can we not see that we're handing them the tools they need to organize and revolt against us?
Contrary to assertion, I do not have a low opinion of humanity.
It's kind of odd to say humanity would "lose the concept of trust." Think about what "trust" means: I believe that you behave in a given way, and will continue to do so, even though I have no means of verifying it. If, suddenly, it becomes trivial to verify a given behavior, then it is true that my opinion of you is no longer based on "trust," but on mutually verifiable facts.
Trust is simply what happens when people either don't have the time to double check things, or don't believe that double-checking is necessary. When the verification process becomes extremely easy, the first sort of trust will disappear, but the second sort of trust may actually increase. After a few checks, it becomes clear that a person really is doing what she said she would do, and overall confidence increases.
I didn't mean to say that anyone who wanted privacy had "something to hide." What I was trying to say was that a system like this might require us to let go of the irrational fear that somebody might discover what you or I had for breakfast. There are a great many details about our lives that could be broadcasted to the world at large without doing us any real harm. All it requires is a mindset shift.
Then there are the other facts about us, the ones we really don't want people to know. The things we lie about. Lies and secrets aren't always bad things, but in a world of augmented reality, it becomes very difficult to keep secrets. I think it's a fascinating intellectual exercise to imagine a world where secrets simply cannot exist.
I think it's hyperbolic to say that the era of complete self-censorship is already upon us. Sure, there are often times and places where people feel that it is unwise to speak their mind. I can't imagine that you believe that all of world history up to the Patriot Act was a long string of unfettered free speech. All presidential pressure to the contrary, the US still has a vibrant and free-wheeling public discourse, and I think that the Patriot Act will get sorted out in time.
In fact, I'm pretty confident of the alternative: if everything is being monitored, there will be no reason to self-censor, because everyone is pretty much bound to find out your opinions anyways.
Your closing paragraph is interesting, but I would turn the question back on you: In a society where everyone lives their lives shrouded in a cloak of maximum secrecy, who will be best equipped to pierce those shrouds? Again, the "mega-rich individuals, corporations, or governments." Few people have the savvy or the resources to win an information standoff against them, and freedom shouldn't require it. That's why I'm toying with the idea that complete transparency may be a much more stable solution.
For an interesting read, try David Brin's "The Transparent Society." According to him, privacy is not a fundamental right, like freedom of speech. Privacy is a possible benefit of living in a free society, but if it is elevated to a "right," then at best it is a derivative one. It is easy to imagine a world of free speech but no privacy, but impossible to imagine it the other way around.
Try to think of Mr. Mann's contribution as stemming from merely being a social outlier. Even if his behavior doesn't seem to be doing anyone any good, he's helping by making a lot of very weird people seem normal in comparison. Thus, he paves the path by which oddness becomes mainstream and accepted, and makes our conception of "normal" broader and more flexible.
Just as a population thrives due to genetic diversity, a society will stagnate without an influx of diversity. And this guy, I have to admit, is pretty diverse.
I'm not too worried about the privacy implications, because I don't think anyone could do a deep study into my life without dying of terminal boredom. I think that a lot of privacy loss is inevitable, and won't really be missed. Trying to hide your day to day activities may someday seem as pointless as trying to hide the color of your pants.
What people won't want to give up is the ability to lie: To say they're going to work when they're really going to a sports bar or a beatnik poetry lounge, or that they're going someplace other than to cheat on their spouse. But it's getting harder and harder to cover your tracks anyways. Caller ID, cell phone bills, and any of a thousand other clues can reveal the truth, while few are savvy enough to cover their tracks.
What would happen if everyone could know almost everything there was to know about anyone else? I'm not sure, but on average I think that people will stop caring. All the things we think we need to keep secret from everyone else will be revealed as fairly common and trivial. The other extreme is that people may self-censor to the point that nobody ever does anything that would hint of idiosyncrasy.
I figure these big databases are going to be built anyways, so it may be best if they're simply made public, so that I can know what it's saying about me. Perhaps it could even tell me who has been browsing my information and for what reason. That might cut down somewhat on the overall nosiness of the human race.
Ninety percent of my concern over these databases is that I won't know how they're being used to manipulate my buying habits. Maybe some sort of "truth in advertising" law would require any advertiser to reveal, upon request, how they came to decide to deliver a given ad to you.
I have to agree, if ubiquitous connectivity means that I can't walk down the sidewalk without finding out every insipid piece of information about everyone around me, this system will collapse under its own obnoxiousness. I don't see that happening. Instead, I figure that your personal system will intelligently sift through these clouds of information, deciding which things you might want brought to your attention.
Try to imagine a system that would present the information you wanted, and only when you wanted it. "Computer, please inform me of the presence of any persons of the opposite gender with similar tastes in music. Also, if any slashdotter with a lower UID than me comes around, warn me so that I might pay homage. Finally, I'm looking for something to do this evening, so start collecting suggestions and give me your top ten when I get off work."
If somebody wants to use the system to publish a detailed explanation of their adventures in stamp collecting, let them. I don't have to see it, and I'm sure there are at least a handful of stamp collectors out there who would love it. Meanwhile, I'll be looking out for people who thoroughly enjoyed "Godel, Escher, Bach" and are willing to give advice on locking down a Linux box. And in the event that "I know CPR" suddenly becomes extremely interesting information, the system is in place to direct me to the interested party.
As the technology itself gets better, its utility will become directly proportional to how much these systems know about us. It will bring power that everyone will want to wield, often to the detriment of others. We're going to run into all sorts of unexpected problems with this sort of technology. Some problems will require a technological solution, others will require a legal solution. Some may be utterly intractable. I can't claim to know which problems are which.
The eventual coolness of wearable computers shouldn't be underestimated. Sure, it will start out with bleeding edgers being able to fire off posts to Slashdot using nothing but an elaborate series of eye movements. Early adopters tend to look silly to the rest of us. No shame in that.
But start combining technologies like mesh networks, cryptographic authentication schemes, GPS, and the like, and imagine where they're going. How cool would it be to walk down any street in the country, and be able to call up the name, location, and menu of every Chinese restaurant within seven blocks? Or pinpoint all the "single and looking" girls at a rock concert who don't identify themselves as cat lovers.
Imagine walking through a dark parking lot. If someone tries to attack you, one press of a button could notify the police and everyone within a two mile radius of your location.
In a lot of ways, this means giving up a certain amount of privacy. For example, the distress signal from the last paragraph isn't going to work if anyone, anywhere can hit the panic button anonymously. That's where the cryptographic authentication comes in. There needs to be a way to verify the originator and trustworthiness of a given piece of information, whether it be, "Yes, officer, I'm authorized to drive a motor vehicle," or "Chin Wan's has great stir fry." The infrastructure doesn't exist yet, and it doubtless will never be perfect, but someday it will be at least as trustworthy as asking to see someone's ID.
Some information will be automatically broadcasted, whether the user likes it or not (wanted for armed robbery). Some of it will be available to cashiers and law enforcement (too young to buy beer). Some of it will be voluntarily made available to the world (likes long walks, sunsets, and jiu-jitsu).
It's going to be fun to watch these technologies come together. Possibly in a train-wreck fashion.
Technically, a Ponzi scheme is any scheme where you promise a bunch of people a huge return on an investment, and use later investors' money to pay off earlier investors.
Ponzi schemes aren't always pyramidal, though the two techniques often overlap. Ponzi schemes may or may not involve an actual product, but are most definitely illegal.
If I recall, it is possible for a MLM to have a product and still be classified as an illegal pyramid scheme. However, I don't remember the criteria.
The reason the original plan came in at a whopping $500B? Everyone and their dog wanted their pet technologies on the mission. Nuclear-powered propulsion? Check. A comprehensive suite of scientific experiments? Check. Ants to sort tiny screws? Check.
There have been plenty of links to Zubrin's "The Case for Mars." His estimated cost for getting a person there and back was about $20B. If we could find someone who didn't care about getting back, we could probably knock another 5B off that.:)
If you don't think you have any use for the extra 11 gigs, then the baby iPod would be the better deal. Personally, 4GB would hold about half of my collection (the good half, obviously).
Or to put it another way, if you can get 95% of the functionality for 83% of the price...
Nevertheless, I would have eagerly bought a 2GB player for $99-$149 (and if you know me, I don't buy stuff). Now I'm hesitant.
Not necessarily. It depends entirely on the value of the stock at the time IBM would purchase SCO. At the current valuation, it would certainly be a huge victory for SCO.
Now, if IBM succeeds in slamming them back down to $0.05 per share, then buys them out and releases Sys V UNIX into the public domain, that would be a pretty strong, "Don't screw with IBM" message.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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"Natural activity" is a highly loaded description. While it technically should be interpreted as "rape is something which occurs in nature"--hardly a heretical statement--it also implies that it is wrong to make negative value judgments about rape, which would simply be incorrect. If you want anything resembling a fair society, there are very strict limits to what a person can be allowed to do to another person without their consent.
I've seen a couple of spectacular, relationship-ending arguments over whether rape is about sex or about power. Personally, I believe that it is wrong to believe either position exclusively; it's about both.
One of your respondents mentioned that some rape victims were too old or too ugly to be the object of sexual desire, and therefore rape must be about power. But the statistics clearly show that as you get older, the likelihood of being a rape victim falls exponentially (something on the order of 75% per decade).
So my personal opinion--which I find "unsayable" within many circles--is that there are elements of sexual gratification and power tripping in every rape, and that the ratio varies widely from situation to situation.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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Your challenge is an impossible one. There is no "matters" in an objective sense. "Mattering" is what happens when something is important to some sentient being. Nothing can matter to a rock.
When you say "nothing matters," you really mean "nothing matters to the Universe in general." You are most likely correct. Even if one posits that the Universe is somehow self-aware, with desires and preferences, it is unlikely that it considers us meaningful in the same, personal way that we would like to be appreciated.
No, the solar system wouldn't fly apart, nor would the sun extinguish itself in mourning if there was no life on Earth. But a huge amount of history is encoded in us: in our books, in our brains, in our genes. That history would be fascinating to any other sentient species.
I agree with the other poster, who said to brush up on existentialism. In a nutshell, it's, "Nothing matters to the Universe. Everything can matter to us."
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, let's assume for the sake of argument what many have claimed: that the patent is only going to be used for defensive purposes. There are two orthogonal interests that might be protected. First, IBM's interests. Second, the interests of open source developers at large.
Now, I think it's pretty safe to say that IBM isn't going to go after anyone just for using some variant on their reward system. But say you're a company that does some open source work as a (not necessarily large) part of its business. Now say you get into it with IBM's Demon Lawyer Horde over some unrelated patent dispute. IBM might not hesitate to use this as leverage.
So I don't buy the "defensive use only" defense, even if that is IBM's true intent. It's not a guarantee that it will always be to the benefit of OSS developers. I would be happy to see a universal, royalty-free license to any and all who desired it.
As previous posters have noted, IBM rewards people for coming up with patents, so maybe somebody is simply padding their in-house resume.
Mr. Torvalds,
We don't care about a college software project you did over a decade ago. At a minimum, we require a work history for the last three years.
Regards,
Human resources
"What is your greatest weakness?"
I have a tendency to make off with minor office supplies. You know, desks, computers, fifty pound boxes of paper, good looking secretaries. But I've never stolen anything major like a Range Rover, or the CEO's secretary, or a mainframe... okay, maybe a little one that one time. But they wouldn't pay me for overtime.
But I guess in the interests of completeness, I also tend to be overly honest. On a related note, what were you smoking when you picked out that tie? I want the name of your supplier.
Which brings me to another point...
I once got an interview after putting "Will work for food" as one of my qualifications. So depending on the position, showing a sense of humor may not be a bad idea.
I totally blew the interview itself. I did okay with the "just be friendly and promise never to steal office supplies" portion. But then I got handed off to one of their code gurus.
He asked me if I had any experience with testing frameworks. I hadn't. He asked me to rate my Perl and C++ skills on a scale of 1-10, which I considered excessively subjective (especially since there were no follow-ups).
I know I suck as an interviewee. I stumble over words, and have a hard time claiming "I have m4d 5k1ll504zz." It's a self-confidence thing, I guess. But I also feel the guy sucked as an interviewer. For the most part, I didn't see how the questions related to my experiences, the qualifications for the job as I understood it, or generalized technical knowledge or problem solving. The whole experience was just... odd.
I left feeling like a total poser, even though I'm approximately as qualified as two of the people who did end up getting the job (we all go to school together). So, two questions:
First, what can an applicant do to improve his interviewing skills?
Second, should an interviewer try and compensate for an interviewee's subpar skills in an attempt to draw out the fact that he/she would actually be a good fit for the company. If so, what would be some ways to do that?
I ask because (God forbid) I might be on the other side of the desk--okay, that time it was a cubicle--and I'd like to do it well.
An order of what magnitude, precisely? According to a previous post (quoting Wikipedia),
they've tried to knight John Cleese, David Bowie, and Kenneth Branagh. Not that they're bad people, mind you. But my impression is the only real qualifications for knighthood are fame and no felony convictions.
Personally, I don't see this as a huge deal. Just another example of powerful people doing each other favors. Knight Gates. Give him the Key to the London Tower, and the Boiled Sausage of Heroism, or whatever you Brits do. In the grand scheme of things, it's irrelevant.
I can accept that, with the enormous effects that Microsoft has had on the computer industry, that those effects can't be entirely negative. But I think that, on the balance, the general sentiment of Slashdot is correct: Microsoft has ridiculous amounts of power, which it uses first and foremost to maintain and increase that power. For the good of society, it needs to be hurt.
Boycott Wal-Mart. Peace, out!
Source: GNU Project - Misinterpreting Copyright. Technically, I think the copyright notice was part of the "this notice" that needed to be preserved.
Thanks for making my, "They've taken it to Guantanamo for questioning" crack completely redundant.
By what stretch of the imagination is plagarism legal? Even if it is perfectly legal for me, as a copyright holder, to let another person claim my work as their own original creation (which isn't even close to the same thing as merely assigning copyright), it is illegal for that person to try and pull off the subterfuge in an academic setting. It's part of the contract between you and the university: Do your own damned work (paraphrased). [and before you go off on your "I never signed no steenkin' contract" spiel, read my other response]
I guess that, by "companies", you mean "three former grad students running a cash-only business from a small apartment just off campus. You're right, the illegal and immoral persecution of these upstanding entrepreneurs is decimating our economy. Sorry, but what plagarists do is not a noble expression of capitalistic innovation; it's an attempt at subverting the educational process by helping others receiving credit for work they did not do.
I have no idea how anything I said could be construed as support for Microsoft's antitrust violations. Perhaps you're simply... what's the word... trolling? Perish the thought.
You're saying that, at no point in your college education, were you told that attending the school required you to follow the rules in the student handbook? You were. Repeatedly. I'm sure you were also given rudimentary instruction on what constituted plagarism, and the punishments that would be meted out if you did so.
The contract exists, even if you never signed a piece of paper saying that you agreed to follow the rules. You agreed to the terms by attending classes, and if it is discovered that you violated the rules, they have every right to impose academic penalties. All you have to do to avoid those penalties is leave the school and never come back.
According to your farfetched interpretation of contract law, if I run a business, I cannot remove a person from my place of business unless I had them sign a contract before coming in.
Most likely you're just being a whiny little troll, but for just one moment try to think of the poor young Slashdotters who are entering college right now. If they swallow your crap advice, they're going to do something very stupid that may destroy their academic future.
Please, think of the Slashlings.
The only "marketable value" being destroyed is the money that next semester's panicked students would have been willing to pay to turn it in as their own? That's not a valid objection. If an assignment ends up having legitimate value, a service designed solely to keep others from claiming your work as their own does nothing to harm that value. In fact, it protects the author. [Note: I don't understand the system in question, and therefore cannot say whether it was designed solely to avert plagarism.]
Nor is it right to say that you shouldn't be required to give up any rights to your work to receive academic credit. It's part of the agreement. Now, the fact is that turnitin.com is a third party, so you may not have contractual obligations with them. But such a broad, sweeping statement is a sign of immaturity.
The problems I have with this:
1) As I said, it's a third party.
2) Depending on how turnitin.com works, it may amount to republication of student papers, which may or may not be actionable under copyright law.
3) Keeping student papers on file increases the value of their service, and therefore constitutes using their work for a commercial purpose.
Umm... I'm not sure I'm reading this right. Are you saying that, if the astronauts stayed here instead, they wouldn't eat anything?
Technically, you don't need to give the modifications back to the original copyright holders. The GPL only requires that you give the source and modifications to anyone who receives the code from you (or make it clear that the source is available upon request).
What I'm looking forward to is having to apply weekly firewall updates to my friggin' toaster.
NAT is a good idea for certain limited applications. Internet-enabled dishwasher? No problem*. Web browsing cell phone? Perfect. But for a general purpose computer running arbitrary applications, it's very constraining. Just look at the discussion surrounding Speakfreely and you can see some of the problems that happen when you turn on NAT. Basically, you turn a computer into a consumer of Internet services rather than a participant.
Depending on where the NAT translation is being done, there are ways around it. I have a static address with a good wireless provider, so the NAT is being done by my own router. I've told it to forward requests to ports 80 and 22 to my Linux box, so I can serve web pages and SSH into it.
But if the NAT is being done by the ISP directly, they have full control over who can make requests to your computer from the outside. Nobody can make requests of your computer from the outside, which eliminates both intrusions and ordinary requests for services.
* Though I'm still curious why my appliances need to surf the web. How can we not see that we're handing them the tools they need to organize and revolt against us?
Contrary to assertion, I do not have a low opinion of humanity.
It's kind of odd to say humanity would "lose the concept of trust." Think about what "trust" means: I believe that you behave in a given way, and will continue to do so, even though I have no means of verifying it. If, suddenly, it becomes trivial to verify a given behavior, then it is true that my opinion of you is no longer based on "trust," but on mutually verifiable facts.
Trust is simply what happens when people either don't have the time to double check things, or don't believe that double-checking is necessary. When the verification process becomes extremely easy, the first sort of trust will disappear, but the second sort of trust may actually increase. After a few checks, it becomes clear that a person really is doing what she said she would do, and overall confidence increases.
I didn't mean to say that anyone who wanted privacy had "something to hide." What I was trying to say was that a system like this might require us to let go of the irrational fear that somebody might discover what you or I had for breakfast. There are a great many details about our lives that could be broadcasted to the world at large without doing us any real harm. All it requires is a mindset shift.
Then there are the other facts about us, the ones we really don't want people to know. The things we lie about. Lies and secrets aren't always bad things, but in a world of augmented reality, it becomes very difficult to keep secrets. I think it's a fascinating intellectual exercise to imagine a world where secrets simply cannot exist.
I think it's hyperbolic to say that the era of complete self-censorship is already upon us. Sure, there are often times and places where people feel that it is unwise to speak their mind. I can't imagine that you believe that all of world history up to the Patriot Act was a long string of unfettered free speech. All presidential pressure to the contrary, the US still has a vibrant and free-wheeling public discourse, and I think that the Patriot Act will get sorted out in time.
In fact, I'm pretty confident of the alternative: if everything is being monitored, there will be no reason to self-censor, because everyone is pretty much bound to find out your opinions anyways.
Your closing paragraph is interesting, but I would turn the question back on you: In a society where everyone lives their lives shrouded in a cloak of maximum secrecy, who will be best equipped to pierce those shrouds? Again, the "mega-rich individuals, corporations, or governments." Few people have the savvy or the resources to win an information standoff against them, and freedom shouldn't require it. That's why I'm toying with the idea that complete transparency may be a much more stable solution.
For an interesting read, try David Brin's "The Transparent Society." According to him, privacy is not a fundamental right, like freedom of speech. Privacy is a possible benefit of living in a free society, but if it is elevated to a "right," then at best it is a derivative one. It is easy to imagine a world of free speech but no privacy, but impossible to imagine it the other way around.
Try to think of Mr. Mann's contribution as stemming from merely being a social outlier. Even if his behavior doesn't seem to be doing anyone any good, he's helping by making a lot of very weird people seem normal in comparison. Thus, he paves the path by which oddness becomes mainstream and accepted, and makes our conception of "normal" broader and more flexible.
Just as a population thrives due to genetic diversity, a society will stagnate without an influx of diversity. And this guy, I have to admit, is pretty diverse.
You. Don't. Have. A. . . . what????
But how do you... Where will you... Umm....
I have to run away now.
I'm not too worried about the privacy implications, because I don't think anyone could do a deep study into my life without dying of terminal boredom. I think that a lot of privacy loss is inevitable, and won't really be missed. Trying to hide your day to day activities may someday seem as pointless as trying to hide the color of your pants.
What people won't want to give up is the ability to lie: To say they're going to work when they're really going to a sports bar or a beatnik poetry lounge, or that they're going someplace other than to cheat on their spouse. But it's getting harder and harder to cover your tracks anyways. Caller ID, cell phone bills, and any of a thousand other clues can reveal the truth, while few are savvy enough to cover their tracks.
What would happen if everyone could know almost everything there was to know about anyone else? I'm not sure, but on average I think that people will stop caring. All the things we think we need to keep secret from everyone else will be revealed as fairly common and trivial. The other extreme is that people may self-censor to the point that nobody ever does anything that would hint of idiosyncrasy.
I figure these big databases are going to be built anyways, so it may be best if they're simply made public, so that I can know what it's saying about me. Perhaps it could even tell me who has been browsing my information and for what reason. That might cut down somewhat on the overall nosiness of the human race.
Ninety percent of my concern over these databases is that I won't know how they're being used to manipulate my buying habits. Maybe some sort of "truth in advertising" law would require any advertiser to reveal, upon request, how they came to decide to deliver a given ad to you.
I have to agree, if ubiquitous connectivity means that I can't walk down the sidewalk without finding out every insipid piece of information about everyone around me, this system will collapse under its own obnoxiousness. I don't see that happening. Instead, I figure that your personal system will intelligently sift through these clouds of information, deciding which things you might want brought to your attention.
Try to imagine a system that would present the information you wanted, and only when you wanted it. "Computer, please inform me of the presence of any persons of the opposite gender with similar tastes in music. Also, if any slashdotter with a lower UID than me comes around, warn me so that I might pay homage. Finally, I'm looking for something to do this evening, so start collecting suggestions and give me your top ten when I get off work."
If somebody wants to use the system to publish a detailed explanation of their adventures in stamp collecting, let them. I don't have to see it, and I'm sure there are at least a handful of stamp collectors out there who would love it. Meanwhile, I'll be looking out for people who thoroughly enjoyed "Godel, Escher, Bach" and are willing to give advice on locking down a Linux box. And in the event that "I know CPR" suddenly becomes extremely interesting information, the system is in place to direct me to the interested party.
As the technology itself gets better, its utility will become directly proportional to how much these systems know about us. It will bring power that everyone will want to wield, often to the detriment of others. We're going to run into all sorts of unexpected problems with this sort of technology. Some problems will require a technological solution, others will require a legal solution. Some may be utterly intractable. I can't claim to know which problems are which.
The eventual coolness of wearable computers shouldn't be underestimated. Sure, it will start out with bleeding edgers being able to fire off posts to Slashdot using nothing but an elaborate series of eye movements. Early adopters tend to look silly to the rest of us. No shame in that.
But start combining technologies like mesh networks, cryptographic authentication schemes, GPS, and the like, and imagine where they're going. How cool would it be to walk down any street in the country, and be able to call up the name, location, and menu of every Chinese restaurant within seven blocks? Or pinpoint all the "single and looking" girls at a rock concert who don't identify themselves as cat lovers.
Imagine walking through a dark parking lot. If someone tries to attack you, one press of a button could notify the police and everyone within a two mile radius of your location.
In a lot of ways, this means giving up a certain amount of privacy. For example, the distress signal from the last paragraph isn't going to work if anyone, anywhere can hit the panic button anonymously. That's where the cryptographic authentication comes in. There needs to be a way to verify the originator and trustworthiness of a given piece of information, whether it be, "Yes, officer, I'm authorized to drive a motor vehicle," or "Chin Wan's has great stir fry." The infrastructure doesn't exist yet, and it doubtless will never be perfect, but someday it will be at least as trustworthy as asking to see someone's ID.
Some information will be automatically broadcasted, whether the user likes it or not (wanted for armed robbery). Some of it will be available to cashiers and law enforcement (too young to buy beer). Some of it will be voluntarily made available to the world (likes long walks, sunsets, and jiu-jitsu).
It's going to be fun to watch these technologies come together. Possibly in a train-wreck fashion.
Technically, a Ponzi scheme is any scheme where you promise a bunch of people a huge return on an investment, and use later investors' money to pay off earlier investors.
Ponzi schemes aren't always pyramidal, though the two techniques often overlap. Ponzi schemes may or may not involve an actual product, but are most definitely illegal.
If I recall, it is possible for a MLM to have a product and still be classified as an illegal pyramid scheme. However, I don't remember the criteria.
The reason the original plan came in at a whopping $500B? Everyone and their dog wanted their pet technologies on the mission. Nuclear-powered propulsion? Check. A comprehensive suite of scientific experiments? Check. Ants to sort tiny screws? Check.
:)
There have been plenty of links to Zubrin's "The Case for Mars." His estimated cost for getting a person there and back was about $20B. If we could find someone who didn't care about getting back, we could probably knock another 5B off that.
If you don't think you have any use for the extra 11 gigs, then the baby iPod would be the better deal. Personally, 4GB would hold about half of my collection (the good half, obviously).
Or to put it another way, if you can get 95% of the functionality for 83% of the price...
Nevertheless, I would have eagerly bought a 2GB player for $99-$149 (and if you know me, I don't buy stuff). Now I'm hesitant.
Not necessarily. It depends entirely on the value of the stock at the time IBM would purchase SCO. At the current valuation, it would certainly be a huge victory for SCO.
Now, if IBM succeeds in slamming them back down to $0.05 per share, then buys them out and releases Sys V UNIX into the public domain, that would be a pretty strong, "Don't screw with IBM" message.
"Natural activity" is a highly loaded description. While it technically should be interpreted as "rape is something which occurs in nature"--hardly a heretical statement--it also implies that it is wrong to make negative value judgments about rape, which would simply be incorrect. If you want anything resembling a fair society, there are very strict limits to what a person can be allowed to do to another person without their consent.
I've seen a couple of spectacular, relationship-ending arguments over whether rape is about sex or about power. Personally, I believe that it is wrong to believe either position exclusively; it's about both.
One of your respondents mentioned that some rape victims were too old or too ugly to be the object of sexual desire, and therefore rape must be about power. But the statistics clearly show that as you get older, the likelihood of being a rape victim falls exponentially (something on the order of 75% per decade).
So my personal opinion--which I find "unsayable" within many circles--is that there are elements of sexual gratification and power tripping in every rape, and that the ratio varies widely from situation to situation.
Your challenge is an impossible one. There is no "matters" in an objective sense. "Mattering" is what happens when something is important to some sentient being. Nothing can matter to a rock.
When you say "nothing matters," you really mean "nothing matters to the Universe in general." You are most likely correct. Even if one posits that the Universe is somehow self-aware, with desires and preferences, it is unlikely that it considers us meaningful in the same, personal way that we would like to be appreciated.
No, the solar system wouldn't fly apart, nor would the sun extinguish itself in mourning if there was no life on Earth. But a huge amount of history is encoded in us: in our books, in our brains, in our genes. That history would be fascinating to any other sentient species.
I agree with the other poster, who said to brush up on existentialism. In a nutshell, it's, "Nothing matters to the Universe. Everything can matter to us."