In a society whose most fundamental principal is the free exchange of ideas, the existence of any instituationalized restriction on that exchange is problematic. Copyrights clearly limit free speech and free expression by restricting who is allowed to say or write what, and who must be paid for it.
At the same time, however, copyrights can encourage free speech by allowing authors the exclusive right to derive income from their works for a limited time. The legitimate purpose of copyright in a free society is to provide just this kind of encouragement. Any extension of copyright beyond the term needed to encourage free expression begins to act in restraint of such expression.
You make the argument that ownership is itself an intellectual idea, and that intellectual property is no different from physical property. Do you believe somehow that owning a pair of shoes is the same as owning the story of Romeo and Juliet?
When I buy a pair of shoes, I own that one pair of shoes. I don't own the rights to charge money to everyone who makes a pair of shoes that look like my shoes.
Patents, and trademarks may give me the right to restrict who can make shoes that look like mine, but these concepts restrict free trade in the same way as copyrights restrict free speech. They have value in that they encourage innovation, but beyond that, if someone buys the materials and builds a pair of shoes exactly like mine, they should be permitted to keep all the fruits of their labor.
Similarly, if someone wishes to write a new story based on Romeo and Juliet, they should not have to track down any living heirs to Shakespeare and negotiate intellectual property rights. Shakespeare had no expectation that he would own the rights to his works beyond his lifetime, and probably expected to be copied within a few years, if not months, of producing his work. A long copyright period would not have encouraged him to write more or better works.
Similarly, do you think any film or music company woould refrain from making CD or motion picture simply because they'd lose the rights in 20 years instead of 75? They make most of the money in the first couple of years anyway, and additional time is just a nice bonus in the rare cases where a work has lasting value.
I think the best way to grab a "sucks" name, or something similar, is to abuse the name of the original company. I came across an interesting one the other day when I went to www.wizardsofthecoast.com. I did not get the home page for "Wizards of the Coast" as expected. That site is www.wizards.com. The other site was "Wizardsoft Headquarters - East Coast".
The site has no link to the www.wizards.com, but it does have banners for places to buy their products, along with a message in big letters that they don't sell those products. In all, it's a reprehensible but fiendishly clever instance of cybersquatting. They have a legitimate claim to a domain name that's an abbreviation of their "real" name. Is it their fault you can parse it to be another company's name?
Re:Yeah, but how do they power these things?
on
DIY Railgun Projects
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· Score: 1
Responding to my own post... Here are some links. The UT Railgun Pulsed Power Project can be reached here (clcik on Research Projects). I got the numbers wrong, but they're still impressive (40 MJ spread out over 15 pulses, and that was in 1988). Here's another good railgun site.
While rail guns are cool, what really impressed me about the projects I've read about in the past are the power storage systems. About 3 years ago, there was a SDI-funded project at UT (their site is gone now) that built railguns capable of firing projectiles somewhere between 5 and 10 km/sec.
The really cool thing, though, was the way they stored and delivered power. They built these things called "compulsators" which were basically flywheels that could spin obscenely fast and rapidly convert their kinetic energy back into electricity. They had units that couild store something like 30MJ and release it in 6-5MJ bursts over the space of a second. Very impressive.
Of course, I'd hate to be standing near a tank that had a couple of those things when the bearings gave out. With that much energy, a 5 ton tank could do a pretty impressive tumbling routine.
The design of the Tacoma Narrows bridge wasn't as flawed as many believe. As built, the sides of the bridge consisted of railing that allowed the wind to pass freely across the bridge. A local politician thought it would be more attractive to have solid wood on the sides of the bridge, and had plywood attached over the railing after the bridge was built.
That change caused the bridge to "catch" the wind, allowing the harmonic oscillations in the structure to develop and destroy the bridge.
I am also not terribly impressed, but for different reasons. While I like having lots of desk space, I don't want the desk in fron of me. I want the monitors in front of me. I want my keyboard in front of me. Desks belong somewhere off to the side for use during the 10% of the time that I need them.
I would like to see some kind of system where the chair, monitors, and keyboard are all mounted on a gimbal so that I can position the monitor and chair in an ideal relative position and then recline freely.
The Kung Fu Keyboard would be cool, too, though.
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Of course, if you sell your TiVo, whoever buys it will have to get their own subscription. It's the subscription revenue they care about. If you really want to show them how important your privacy is, blow the thing up and post a video of it on the web.
From the article:... four micro-miniature single-chip video cameras, each smaller than a 2 pence (50 cent) piece!
Amazing! It's even able to change the US/British exchange rates by an order of magnitude! Not bad for a sattelite that small.
I want to see the software they used to make 2 pence worth 50 cents. It's probably some kind of IIS hack they're not willing to reveal.
Premise is not completely impossible
on
The Satori Effect
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· Score: 1
When I read the idea of monitors blowing up and killing people, it reminded me of an actual problem with the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 2 (the all-in one "business" computers with the 8" floppy dirves).
On that system, it was possible to cause the monitor to "blow" using software by sending a 255 to one of the OUT ports (33, I think - it's been a while). It wasn't usually an explosion, but smoke was definitely involved.
I never did it myself, since I depended on the kindness of the Radio Shack people to let me use their computers before I got my own, but I had a friend who used to love to blow up the demo units in the store.
The particular vulnerability on those machines had to do with poor voltage regulation, I think, but still, it was a cool trick.
Even with the problem with hydrogen's explosiveness
Most people forget you drive around in a moltov cocktail every day; Your gas tank is just as likely to get smashed, and could possibly be even MORE dangerous because gasoline will pour and stick around on the pavement for some time, and this is nasty if it's on you and it's burning.
Yeah, and if you're carrying Orange Juice home from the grocery store and it mixes with the gasoline, you'd have napalm!
[That's a Fight Club reference, not an actual recipe. Everybody knows it takes Jell-O and gasoline to make napalm:-]
If you're willing to upgrade to Win2K, you can just use the standard EFS ; ; ; encrypted file system.
It's transparent, easy to use, and as secure as your user password (however secure that is in Win2K:-).
The downside of that approach is that it uses a "protective key store" to store keys per-user, rather than asking for a separate encryption pass phrase. It also encrypts using a second "recovery agent" key, so that you can have a central administrator able to access all encrypted data. That's a selling point in a large corporation (so if a worker quits or dies, you can still access their work), but it may be a disadvantage for your situation.
Actually, this approach makes it so you could configure your system to use keys that live on your customer's servers, so that you could only access the data relating to their project while connected to their network. It might be a pain for you, but I'm sure your customers would love it. ---------------
Until about 6 months ago, I was using RoadRunner at my old house. I had it for about 10 months. The bandwidth was all over the map, and the latency was terrible, but it was cheap ($40/mo. including ISP, paid for by my employer) and easy. When I moved, RoadRunner wasn't available in my new neighborhood, so I looked into DSL.
By some miracle, it turns out my house is close enough to the local Alltel office that I could go as high as 1.5 Mb, if I were willing to pay. I ended up going with the 768/256 service, and they set me up in less than a week. The performance is at least as good and consistent as the T1 at work.
The down side is, the base service at that speed is around $60, and I have to pay $50 for my ISP (it's around $30 at the basic speed). Also, they required that I buy a Cisco DSL router with built-in NAT. They even specified the model number I had to use. The standard hardware configuration simplifies things from the support standpoint, and it does avoid the problem of having lots of completely unprotected computers on their network, though NAT is not quite as good as a real firewall.
I didn't have to sign a long-term contract on the ISP, though, so I'm shopping around. I suspect the easy time I had has to do with the fact that I now live in the only "city" in Texas where Alltel is offering DSL, and also the fact that they charge a fortune and make you buy a $400 router. Of course, my company is subsidizing everything, so that makes it a lot less painful.
Your analysis indicating that the average lawmaker is not stupid may be valid, but you apparently have never been taught the proper way to calculate the intelligence of a group of people:
In order to determine the effective intelligence of a group, divide the average intelligence of a member of that group by the number of people in the group.
Given that there are 100 Senators and 435 Representatives in Congress, that would make the Congress function at about the level of ants. Why do you think it's called the Hill?
It is therefore not surprising that laws are often stupid and usually serve some small group's agenda. Just as ants follow chemical trails to food, so do the Senate and the House follow the trails of contributions and propaganda left for them by lobbyists and pollsters on their path to making bad laws.
Personally, I prefer "Machinime", because it has a cool sort of Japanese-y quality to it.
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Not suitable for kids with fine motor issues?
on
Video Games and ADD
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· Score: 1
If I understand the article correctly, they make the controller more responsive when you're calm, and less responsive when you're not. I may be atypical, but I am generally calm while playing a video game unless something comes up that requires precise motor control to avoid being killed.
I have lousy fine motor skills to begin with, so I get killed a lot in video games because of a simple lack of coordination, resulting in increased tension. The increased tension would reduce the responsiveness of the game controller in this context, compounding my already poor control, resulting in increased frustration, resulting in further reduced responsiveness.
It may be that children with ADD exhibit different patterns during the less stressful parts of gameplay, making the tool more effective for them.
I know many here may consider me insane, but I generally prefer the look and feel of Windows to anything I used before.
I must say, though, that I find some of the omissions of the API confusing. In particular, the X toolkit has supported size negotiation for most if not all of its existence, and Motif's form widgets take that ability even further. I've also seen several other implementations of the "attach" model (struts, springs, etc.) that do an excellent job of producing a nice layout at any size.
Windows, on the other hand, makes resizing anything with more than one control a major chore. One reason for the "laziness" of app writers is that the DevStudio wizards generate pixel-based code, meaning that Microsoft's own tools encourage the "wrong" approach.
Another point on the size of the screen: I don't know about other people, but I view my desktop monitor from 4-5'. I view my laptop from at most 3', since I need to keep the keyboard in easy reach. Also, at 1600x1200, most 21" CRTs do not focus perfectly. It's good enough to be usable, but I recently traded out my monitor, and I can really tell the difference on small print. A TFT display won't have any focus issues.
DISCLAIMER: I mostly write server code. I've never developed a product-quality GUI.
You say PCI is not dead... And this is supposed to be good news? While I admit that PCi is a big improvement over the old days of fiddling with jumpers to try to avoid interrupt conflicts, I've run into too many problems with shared interrupts to believe PCI is well-designed.
If I could stop putting expansion cards into my PCI slots and start plugging in cheap external sound, network, and disk devices, I'd be much happier. I don't care whether it's USB, FireWire, or both, just as long as I can get the peripherals I want at consumer prices and plug them in where I want them.
In many jurisdictions (including Texas and Louisiana), it is legal for a person to shoot in defense of his or her property. Certainly around here, Grand Juries are rarely likely to file charges in such cases. That fact, however, has nothing to do with armed robots. An armed robot pretty clearly constitutes a man trap. Man traps are illegal in most if not all jurisdictions, and the person who set the trap is responsible for the effects of the trap.
Now that I've got the on-topic part of my post out of the way, I would like to note that the Japanese teenager was shot in Louisiana. In texas, we shoot drunken Scotsmen. Get your shootings straight, people.:-)
To drift a bit further afield, I'd like to relate this story of just how far you can go with killing trespassers in Texas:
The CTO of my company is proud of the time he killed an intruder. His house was broken into one night, after he and his family had moved out, but before they'd removed their belongings. The next night, he camped out in the house with an assault rifle. When the two teenagers broke in again, he shot both, killing one and severely injuring the other. Not only was he not charged with murder, but when the family of the boy he killed tried to sue him for wrongful death, they lost.
"Loyalty cards", "discount cards", and the like are my current hot button where stores are concerned. Randall's, one of the larger local chains in Texas, adopted what they call "Remarkable Cards" to provide "discounts" on various items in the store.
In reality, they mark selected items up by 50-100%, then if you have the card, you can get the item for about what you'd pay at any other grocery store. They're not even a little bit subtle about it. They'll have corn for $1/ear without the card, or 3 for $1 with the card. The store a block down the street will be selling the same kind of corn at 4 ears for $1 with no cards required.
I stopped shopping at Randall's when they instituted the program, but now the chain I was using (Kroger's) has started doing the exact same thing. I ended up going back to Randall's simply because they're the only store in my area that carries some items, but it feels like extortion every time they ask me for my card.
Slashdot Mirror
At the same time, however, copyrights can encourage free speech by allowing authors the exclusive right to derive income from their works for a limited time. The legitimate purpose of copyright in a free society is to provide just this kind of encouragement. Any extension of copyright beyond the term needed to encourage free expression begins to act in restraint of such expression.
You make the argument that ownership is itself an intellectual idea, and that intellectual property is no different from physical property. Do you believe somehow that owning a pair of shoes is the same as owning the story of Romeo and Juliet?
When I buy a pair of shoes, I own that one pair of shoes. I don't own the rights to charge money to everyone who makes a pair of shoes that look like my shoes.
Patents, and trademarks may give me the right to restrict who can make shoes that look like mine, but these concepts restrict free trade in the same way as copyrights restrict free speech. They have value in that they encourage innovation, but beyond that, if someone buys the materials and builds a pair of shoes exactly like mine, they should be permitted to keep all the fruits of their labor.
Similarly, if someone wishes to write a new story based on Romeo and Juliet, they should not have to track down any living heirs to Shakespeare and negotiate intellectual property rights. Shakespeare had no expectation that he would own the rights to his works beyond his lifetime, and probably expected to be copied within a few years, if not months, of producing his work. A long copyright period would not have encouraged him to write more or better works.
Similarly, do you think any film or music company woould refrain from making CD or motion picture simply because they'd lose the rights in 20 years instead of 75? They make most of the money in the first couple of years anyway, and additional time is just a nice bonus in the rare cases where a work has lasting value.
The site has no link to the www.wizards.com, but it does have banners for places to buy their products, along with a message in big letters that they don't sell those products. In all, it's a reprehensible but fiendishly clever instance of cybersquatting. They have a legitimate claim to a domain name that's an abbreviation of their "real" name. Is it their fault you can parse it to be another company's name?
Responding to my own post... Here are some links. The UT Railgun Pulsed Power Project can be reached here (clcik on Research Projects). I got the numbers wrong, but they're still impressive (40 MJ spread out over 15 pulses, and that was in 1988). Here's another good railgun site.
While rail guns are cool, what really impressed me about the projects I've read about in the past are the power storage systems. About 3 years ago, there was a SDI-funded project at UT (their site is gone now) that built railguns capable of firing projectiles somewhere between 5 and 10 km/sec.
The really cool thing, though, was the way they stored and delivered power. They built these things called "compulsators" which were basically flywheels that could spin obscenely fast and rapidly convert their kinetic energy back into electricity. They had units that couild store something like 30MJ and release it in 6-5MJ bursts over the space of a second. Very impressive.
Of course, I'd hate to be standing near a tank that had a couple of those things when the bearings gave out. With that much energy, a 5 ton tank could do a pretty impressive tumbling routine.
The design of the Tacoma Narrows bridge wasn't as flawed as many believe. As built, the sides of the bridge consisted of railing that allowed the wind to pass freely across the bridge. A local politician thought it would be more attractive to have solid wood on the sides of the bridge, and had plywood attached over the railing after the bridge was built.
That change caused the bridge to "catch" the wind, allowing the harmonic oscillations in the structure to develop and destroy the bridge.
Remember New Coke?
I am also not terribly impressed, but for different reasons. While I like having lots of desk space, I don't want the desk in fron of me. I want the monitors in front of me. I want my keyboard in front of me. Desks belong somewhere off to the side for use during the 10% of the time that I need them.
I would like to see some kind of system where the chair, monitors, and keyboard are all mounted on a gimbal so that I can position the monitor and chair in an ideal relative position and then recline freely.
The Kung Fu Keyboard would be cool, too, though.
---
Of course, if you sell your TiVo, whoever buys it will have to get their own subscription. It's the subscription revenue they care about. If you really want to show them how important your privacy is, blow the thing up and post a video of it on the web.
Amazing! It's even able to change the US/British exchange rates by an order of magnitude! Not bad for a sattelite that small.
I want to see the software they used to make 2 pence worth 50 cents. It's probably some kind of IIS hack they're not willing to reveal.
On that system, it was possible to cause the monitor to "blow" using software by sending a 255 to one of the OUT ports (33, I think - it's been a while). It wasn't usually an explosion, but smoke was definitely involved.
I never did it myself, since I depended on the kindness of the Radio Shack people to let me use their computers before I got my own, but I had a friend who used to love to blow up the demo units in the store.
The particular vulnerability on those machines had to do with poor voltage regulation, I think, but still, it was a cool trick.
Most people forget you drive around in a moltov cocktail every day; Your gas tank is just as likely to get smashed, and could possibly be even MORE dangerous because gasoline will pour and stick around on the pavement for some time, and this is nasty if it's on you and it's burning. Yeah, and if you're carrying Orange Juice home from the grocery store and it mixes with the gasoline, you'd have napalm!
[That's a Fight Club reference, not an actual recipe. Everybody knows it takes Jell-O and gasoline to make napalm :-]
The downside of that approach is that it uses a "protective key store" to store keys per-user, rather than asking for a separate encryption pass phrase. It also encrypts using a second "recovery agent" key, so that you can have a central administrator able to access all encrypted data. That's a selling point in a large corporation (so if a worker quits or dies, you can still access their work), but it may be a disadvantage for your situation.
Actually, this approach makes it so you could configure your system to use keys that live on your customer's servers, so that you could only access the data relating to their project while connected to their network. It might be a pain for you, but I'm sure your customers would love it.
---------------
Until about 6 months ago, I was using RoadRunner at my old house. I had it for about 10 months. The bandwidth was all over the map, and the latency was terrible, but it was cheap ($40/mo. including ISP, paid for by my employer) and easy. When I moved, RoadRunner wasn't available in my new neighborhood, so I looked into DSL.
By some miracle, it turns out my house is close enough to the local Alltel office that I could go as high as 1.5 Mb, if I were willing to pay. I ended up going with the 768/256 service, and they set me up in less than a week. The performance is at least as good and consistent as the T1 at work.
The down side is, the base service at that speed is around $60, and I have to pay $50 for my ISP (it's around $30 at the basic speed). Also, they required that I buy a Cisco DSL router with built-in NAT. They even specified the model number I had to use. The standard hardware configuration simplifies things from the support standpoint, and it does avoid the problem of having lots of completely unprotected computers on their network, though NAT is not quite as good as a real firewall.
I didn't have to sign a long-term contract on the ISP, though, so I'm shopping around. I suspect the easy time I had has to do with the fact that I now live in the only "city" in Texas where Alltel is offering DSL, and also the fact that they charge a fortune and make you buy a $400 router. Of course, my company is subsidizing everything, so that makes it a lot less painful.
Your analysis indicating that the average lawmaker is not stupid may be valid, but you apparently have never been taught the proper way to calculate the intelligence of a group of people:
In order to determine the effective intelligence of a group, divide the average intelligence of a member of that group by the number of people in the group.
Given that there are 100 Senators and 435 Representatives in Congress, that would make the Congress function at about the level of ants. Why do you think it's called the Hill?
It is therefore not surprising that laws are often stupid and usually serve some small group's agenda. Just as ants follow chemical trails to food, so do the Senate and the House follow the trails of contributions and propaganda left for them by lobbyists and pollsters on their path to making bad laws.
Personally, I prefer "Machinime", because it has a cool sort of Japanese-y quality to it.
---
If I understand the article correctly, they make the controller more responsive when you're calm, and less responsive when you're not. I may be atypical, but I am generally calm while playing a video game unless something comes up that requires precise motor control to avoid being killed.
I have lousy fine motor skills to begin with, so I get killed a lot in video games because of a simple lack of coordination, resulting in increased tension. The increased tension would reduce the responsiveness of the game controller in this context, compounding my already poor control, resulting in increased frustration, resulting in further reduced responsiveness.
It may be that children with ADD exhibit different patterns during the less stressful parts of gameplay, making the tool more effective for them.
I know many here may consider me insane, but I generally prefer the look and feel of Windows to anything I used before.
I must say, though, that I find some of the omissions of the API confusing. In particular, the X toolkit has supported size negotiation for most if not all of its existence, and Motif's form widgets take that ability even further. I've also seen several other implementations of the "attach" model (struts, springs, etc.) that do an excellent job of producing a nice layout at any size.
Windows, on the other hand, makes resizing anything with more than one control a major chore. One reason for the "laziness" of app writers is that the DevStudio wizards generate pixel-based code, meaning that Microsoft's own tools encourage the "wrong" approach.
Another point on the size of the screen: I don't know about other people, but I view my desktop monitor from 4-5'. I view my laptop from at most 3', since I need to keep the keyboard in easy reach. Also, at 1600x1200, most 21" CRTs do not focus perfectly. It's good enough to be usable, but I recently traded out my monitor, and I can really tell the difference on small print. A TFT display won't have any focus issues.
DISCLAIMER: I mostly write server code. I've never developed a product-quality GUI.
You say PCI is not dead... And this is supposed to be good news? While I admit that PCi is a big improvement over the old days of fiddling with jumpers to try to avoid interrupt conflicts, I've run into too many problems with shared interrupts to believe PCI is well-designed.
If I could stop putting expansion cards into my PCI slots and start plugging in cheap external sound, network, and disk devices, I'd be much happier. I don't care whether it's USB, FireWire, or both, just as long as I can get the peripherals I want at consumer prices and plug them in where I want them.
In many jurisdictions (including Texas and Louisiana), it is legal for a person to shoot in defense of his or her property. Certainly around here, Grand Juries are rarely likely to file charges in such cases. That fact, however, has nothing to do with armed robots. An armed robot pretty clearly constitutes a man trap. Man traps are illegal in most if not all jurisdictions, and the person who set the trap is responsible for the effects of the trap. Now that I've got the on-topic part of my post out of the way, I would like to note that the Japanese teenager was shot in Louisiana. In texas, we shoot drunken Scotsmen. Get your shootings straight, people. :-)
To drift a bit further afield, I'd like to relate this story of just how far you can go with killing trespassers in Texas:
The CTO of my company is proud of the time he killed an intruder. His house was broken into one night, after he and his family had moved out, but before they'd removed their belongings. The next night, he camped out in the house with an assault rifle. When the two teenagers broke in again, he shot both, killing one and severely injuring the other. Not only was he not charged with murder, but when the family of the boy he killed tried to sue him for wrongful death, they lost.
"Loyalty cards", "discount cards", and the like are my current hot button where stores are concerned. Randall's, one of the larger local chains in Texas, adopted what they call "Remarkable Cards" to provide "discounts" on various items in the store. In reality, they mark selected items up by 50-100%, then if you have the card, you can get the item for about what you'd pay at any other grocery store. They're not even a little bit subtle about it. They'll have corn for $1/ear without the card, or 3 for $1 with the card. The store a block down the street will be selling the same kind of corn at 4 ears for $1 with no cards required. I stopped shopping at Randall's when they instituted the program, but now the chain I was using (Kroger's) has started doing the exact same thing. I ended up going back to Randall's simply because they're the only store in my area that carries some items, but it feels like extortion every time they ask me for my card.