"Denying Federal funding has been the U.S. Government's preferred method of enacting local change..."
Yep - and I wish the court would take the opportunity to strike down THAT practice.
Denying funds to states that don't go by their rules, where those rules cover powers reserved to the states and the people and NOT the federal government, should be considered a violation of the U.S Constitution.
Unfortunately, there is almost no chance that this will happen - both liberals and conservatives love to use the federal government to impose their ideas uniformly on all states. They only fight over whose ideas to impose. It'd take a pretty radical court to overturn this practice.
To convince the conspiracy theorists, NASA only needs to give them a better theory.
The moon landing was real alright - they released faked photos and such because they actually established a nuclear missile base on the moon, in complete violation of international treaties.
But a few very perceptive people noticed some small discrepancies, so it was necessary to "guide" them into believing the moon shots were faked, so they would be dismissed as kooks.
Work this right, and we might get financing for some more trips to the moon, well equipped for an extended search for the hidden automated missile bases.
I would recommend that anyone going on any diet start off with at least 2 weeks on Atkins. It really brings home how pervasive "junk carbs" have become in your personal diet. So much food is made of or coated or stuffed with starch and sugar.
Until I went on Atkins, I didn't think I was eating all that bad, blamed my "metabolism" for my weight problem, and so on - but now I know better. I could probably even stick to a "rabbit food diet" now - though it would not be as easy as low-carb.
It is bogus that "they" won't study Atkins properly. It isn't like they would have trouble finding volunteers. I only know it has to be better for me than being massively overweight - even with the risk of kidney stones.
But not because it's sensible - but because it'd break the artificial scarcity of music that allows them to make big money by hyping a few new songs.
The real problem is not the record industry - they are dinosaurs lumbering toward the tar pits, you can't really expect them to change their ways. The real problem is that the internet does not yet have any real means to pay for the production of quality music. Until that is available, internet music will be parasitic on the dinosaur industry.
Since we can't rely on the dinosaurs to provide "one huge site" with all that music, the internet music system will have to get rolling on new music from unsigned artists.
Since we can't afford one huge server, it'll have to be P2P based - lots and lots of volunteered servers.
And since we can't rely on one huge site, we need an alternate mode of music promotion to get people to the music they like. The most natural mode for the net is multiple web sites that voluntarily promote (or pan) music, with unique identifiers that allow accurate P2P file location.
That leaves the question of payment - how to finance the artists and sound engineers and producers and so forth to keep making good music for us? A system of donations might work - except tipping requires some means to apply social pressure to keep it up, which the internet really lacks.
So - we need a way to apply social pressure to pay for music downloaded. The most natural way to do that is for the person providing the download to insist that the downloader pay the nickle or quarter a song before they will start the download. That can be built into the P2P software - able to be disabled, but on by default.
So where does the donated money go? The independent artists would need to set up a secure "tipping" site where people could keep a running tab. When it gets to $20, they either pay their tab, or the next time a P2P server asks if they have agreed to pay for a song, it will be told that the downloader's account is not paid up - so the P2P server will (by default) deny requests to download. The tipping sites would also assign the unique identifiers for every piece of music.
And if a few dinosaurs wake up and want in on the action, they can set up their own "tipping server" to cash in on their huge libraries.
In order to own your hardware, either plan to give up use of commercially produced digital content (and maybe analog content).
Or - figure out why we can trust music stores not to pirate digital music (mostly) but can't trust people to distribute digital content only after the recipient has paid for it.
Focus on the supply side (the P2P file server) instead of trying to push a wet noodle from the demand side (DRM attempts to surround content with an iron pipe to keep the noodle straight). Invent incentives - carrots and sticks - sufficient to overcome the small benefits to the file-sharer of free P2P file sharing.
Carrot: a payment to the file server for making sure the file downloader first pays the file owner. There are ways to do this anonymously.
Stick: bounties on pirates, so file servers can't be sure that stranger downloading a file is not a bounty hunter
Carrot: make it as easy as clicking on a link on a web page - which directs some money to the web sites' file server, making them into advocates.
Stick: banning from the legal distribution system and high profile legal action for pirates
Carrot: P2P 'preferred server' lists - so you can direct the file service and fee to friends, family, charities, favorite web site, etc. A web of relationships supporting honest payment for content.
The future SHOULD hold easy to use P2P network distribution of professionally produced, unencrypted digital content to large content servers (PC or consumer box) in homes. It should include fair compensation to artists, yet low prices to consumers - so there will be far less money made "in the middle". It means the end of music stores and eventually of video rental stores and maybe even the end of broadcast radio and TV as we know them.
To get to that future, you need to solve a simple puzzle:
Why can the people who own music and video rental stores be trusted to hold and distribute thousands of digital titles with no encryption, and only very rarely turn "pirate" (giving away free copies or selling cheap copies for a higher profit)?
Once you solve that, figure out how to apply the same principle to P2P distribution. You may need to enhance some elements, and provide some technological support to make it easy to use, since the situations are different - but the same basic principle applies.
(Hints: carrot, stick, supply side vs demand side)
Probably want to make it out of tangled "spider silk" threads - so it tends not to add to the debris problem after something passes through it. Also, it would be somewhat "springy" - giving more time to absorb the kinetic energy of an impact.
Maybe add technology to quickly spot threads that do get blown loose from the main mass, and charge them up with an electron gun so they'll be pulled back into the main mass before they can get very far.
Why not encourage an alternative social model that relies on profit and honor (and greed and paranoia) instead of "security and trust"?
Let anyone sell any content to anyone else (at a low official price, having eliminated multiple layers of profit-taking distribution and manufacturing).
Set up a secure internet service to let the buyer pay easily and directly to the content owner, who would in turn pay half that amount to the person who distributed (file-shared) the content.
An association of content owners would offer a well advertised bounty and immunity to prosecution to anyone who honestly informs on someone for giving away or selling their content without paying. (False reports wouldn't earn the bounty and may cause future reports to be disregarded.)
The vast majority of people will go along with the system and believe they're doing it because they're basically honest and the 50% payment is just icing on the cake and that bounty isn't a threat to them because they're always honest. Self-delusion perhaps, but if it works...
Then we could do away with all this nonsense of encrypting content and crippling content players.
Imagine a van driving slowly down the streets of a neighborhood every 10 minutes, monitoring the blue TV glow coming out of windows.
Not reconstructing the actual image - just watching the gross flicker patterns, and matching them against all TV stations in real time.
If it finds someone that's not on a known TV station, it pauses for a minute and logs a longer sequence of flickers to match against the flicker patterns of a large library of videos.
Talk about precise marketing info!
Talk about potential blackmail material - ("Did you enjoy your viewing of 'Under-age Girls' last night Mr. Politician? Doing a bit of research, were you?" What about the previous 15 nights?")
Maybe we need to extend "peeping tom" laws to cover any deliberate use of EM radiation coming out of our homes...
Actually, if Bill Joy hasn't changed his opinions, he IS a Luddite - he wants to stop developing new technologies that threaten to change things. Just because Luddite now has a negative connotation associated with it doesn't mean that someone can't be thoughtful and a Luddite. Being thoughtful doesn't make them right or wrong.
Interesting. Can you say more? Was it some sort of inflatable structure? I read somewhere that such structures could actually be safer against micro-collisions.
So was this article pulled because it pointed out that anyone with the ability to launch a big enough rocket could potentially eliminate a large portion of the US military's advantage?
Just get an idea of the rough trajectory of LEO spy satellites, shoot up a rocket at the right moment, and blow up a modest charge to spray BB's into a wide swath of space.
Figure if you could launch just 1 million BB's and spread them out with a velocity of maybe just 60km/hr - creating a sphere 2km across in one minute, with a surface area of 12MsqMeter, you've got 1 BB for every 12sq meters, and if the satellite goes through both sides of the sphere and has a profile of just 4sq meters, you've got a 2/3 chance of holing it, maybe a 1/3 chance of severe damage via internal spray of debris over sensitive components.
And if you're a bit more sophisticated, you could launch those BB's into orbit. It might take days or weeks - but with that much new debris added to the same rough orbital altitude as a spy-sat, the chances of an encounter are pretty good.
Yep, I'd be worried about Iraq getting this bright idea - except after they analyzed their last war and the sort of tricks that the Yugoslavians played on us, I'd bet they've already come up with it.
I'd also hope the US is busily launching hardened spy satellites with enough internal armor and redundancy to take a couple of hits.
It'll probably mean the end of Commercial use of Space if they really go at it - the insurance rates for launches will be too high. Another good thing brought to you by the fine foreign entanglement folks in Washington. I sure wouldn't want to be on the sitting station - I mean space duck - I mean space station if/when Bush decides to go into Iraq.
Penrose's lawn mower robot doesn't mow his lawn properly because he forgot to design it to WANT to mow his lawn properly.
Seriously! To properly want something, you need a means to know that that desire is or is not satisfied, and a means to move closer to achieving your desire - just like Genghis' leg muscles.
His mower robot needs a laser scanner to light up stalks that stick up too high, a sensor to detect stalks being lit up within maybe 10 feet, a desire to go to spots where that light is seen, and a desire to wander and seek out lit spots if it doesn't see any nearby.
A bit more is needed to handle edge conditions (literally the edges of the lawn and objects in it). It needs the ability to learn where it can't go, and the ability to slowly forget that learning so if it makes a mistake about not being able to get somewhere it can eventually correct itself.
I have to admire a corporation as large as Sony that will invest so much and so long in a dream. They've come a long way in their anthropomorphic robots. The key to making a useful robot is as much or more in mechanical engineering as in computer science.
What they really need is an affordable non-biological equivalent of muscles. No pulleys or gears, totally silent, quick and strong and reasonably accurate and energy efficient.
Probability = small chance human action is having significant impact on global climate
Consequence = unknown
Risk = a small chance that something unknown will happen as a result of human action.
Human nature is far more predictable than the climate. Humans want things to stay the same, out of fear that things may get worse, so they tend to emphasize the bad things that might happen. But the consequences are not known - and could be an improvement.
For example, what if the earth had been about to slip into another ice age (as was thought by climate scientists in the 80's), and greenhouse gases have prevented that so far? Humanity would fare much better with a hot planet than a cold one.
Microsoft will probably simply claim that it was simply exercising it's government granted monopoly - i.e. its copyright - including the right to control the creation of derivative works.
They didn't tell the OEMs they could not sell BeOS, or couldn't put a BeOS installer on the same drive, nor (in this case) say that they'd charge more or hold back Windows if the OEM tried to sell BeOS systems. They just refused to allow BeOs (and Linux) a free ride on Windows' popularity. (Harsh, but true.)
I'd guess that a way around the specific terms of the Microsoft license would be to have OEMs partition the drive, and pre-load Linux on there - but NOT enable it to boot. Note that Hitachi got away with that, for BeOS.
Arrange to put a couple of popular games or something equally popular on that 2nd partition as well, so people need to activate Linux in order to get to the games.
Provide an "enable Linux and games" floppy that makes the Linux partition primary with the option to boot Windows (so there's no need to disable Linux to get to Windows). And include a very visible option to un-do this change - counter-productive as that sounds - so consumers feel safe doing it in the first place.
True, Microsoft would probably soon change their license to prevent it - but only after a burst of Linux dual-boot systems got out there.
Re:Total transparency for us; total privacy for po
on
David Brin on Privacy
·
· Score: 1
Most "legitimate national security" issues would be un-necessary if we would avoid foreign entanglements and stop trying to right all the wrongs of the world.
No need to have secret agents spying on other countries or have top secret weapons if no other country has motives to attack us. No need to worry about spies in our country if we have no intention of doing harm to others.
Even if you say "but this or that exception!" you should recognize that at minimum it's a matter of degree - with less foreign entanglements, we'll have far less "legitimate" need for secrecy.
The only purpose for existence of the patent system is to encourage the invention of novel inventions and methods and publish them to make them available for the use of the nation.
Ask yourself: was there a lack of innovation before software became patentable? Has innovation in software increased since software became patentable?
Are software inventions more or less available for use once they are patented?
Corporate patent lawyers actually DISCOURAGE engineers from seeking solutions to technical problems in the patent system - it would open the corporation up for patent law suits. It's much safer to re-invent the wheel.
Brin is right - privacy need not matter - it's what can be done with information about you that matters.
Brin is wrong - we won't get transparency into government without some sort of revolution - whether political or by force of arms.
And if one-way transparency goes too far in favor of government, revolution of any kind may become nearly impossible. As soon as that ultimate form of accountability appears to be gone, those in power will quickly decide that they deserve to stay in power permanently.
Already the Democrats and Republicans have collaborated to make the US a "two-party nation" - and every election they get more and more alike.
Let them experiment in first "training" an automated universal translation system, then evolve a consensual grammar, and use it to communicate.
Build in a cheap line scanner or camera for them to scan small pictures in, apply hand-written labels to them (initially just nouns, later adjectives, finally verbs), and transmit them to a database.
They also view a database of all entered pictures and apply labels to them - so a multi-language database of labels is created, and validated by multiple users.
They also view the database of pictures and link together ones they THINK might mean the same thing. With multiple inputs this begins to line the words written in different languages, allowing translation.
Let anyone enter a correction if they think someone has mislabelled a picture - first seeing if anyone else gave an alternative label and "voting" for that, or entering their own alternative label if not or if they disagree with all the other labels.
Hand writing recognition translates their writing to the closest matching picture(s) by matching to all labels and knowledge of which language they are writing in. That should allow them to write messages that get pictures added along with the best translation so far.
See how far they can get toward developing a universal translator and using it to converse and tell stories about themselves.
You might want to bootstrap it by initializing the database with lots of pictures and having two groups get a lot of words entered. That way when you go out to many languages, they won't have to spend as much time entering pictures, and focus on the labelling of pictures in their own language.
After labelling noun objects, they could do adjectives by labelling sets of objects shown together for contrast - different colored objects, different shaped objects, etc.
Same idea for verbs - label action pictures like "Boy throws ball", "girl chases chicken".
Obviously they'll need some sort of forum to "chat" in - perhaps a simplistic 2D "world" that they can fill with pictures (as part of the labelling process) and areas where they can chat are just special rooms where 2 to 4 kids can enter at a time, each with a few lines to display the text (or graphic when no translation is available). All screens would have a picture dictionary available.
After the experiment, roll the software out to anyone with a communicating computer or hand-held (open-source Java for most of it, so any company can translate it for their device), and let it continue to evolve.
Well, that's pretty crazy, but it might work. I wonder if the original poster will see it way down here?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm - you want a NEW principle?
How about a wing that causes air atoms to quantum tunnel from the top to the bottom?
The little gray men told me that was how their flying saucer worked.
"Denying Federal funding has been the U.S. Government's preferred method of enacting local change..."
Yep - and I wish the court would take the opportunity to strike down THAT practice.
Denying funds to states that don't go by their rules, where those rules cover powers reserved to the states and the people and NOT the federal government, should be considered a violation of the U.S Constitution.
Unfortunately, there is almost no chance that this will happen - both liberals and conservatives love to use the federal government to impose their ideas uniformly on all states. They only fight over whose ideas to impose. It'd take a pretty radical court to overturn this practice.
To convince the conspiracy theorists, NASA only needs to give them a better theory.
The moon landing was real alright - they released faked photos and such because they actually established a nuclear missile base on the moon, in complete violation of international treaties.
But a few very perceptive people noticed some small discrepancies, so it was necessary to "guide" them into believing the moon shots were faked, so they would be dismissed as kooks.
Work this right, and we might get financing for some more trips to the moon, well equipped for an extended search for the hidden automated missile bases.
So how will corporate customers be convinced to trust sending their data to and processing their data on IBM's grid of computers?
But it'd be nice for running multiplayer gaming servers.
I would recommend that anyone going on any diet start off with at least 2 weeks on Atkins. It really brings home how pervasive "junk carbs" have become in your personal diet. So much food is made of or coated or stuffed with starch and sugar.
Until I went on Atkins, I didn't think I was eating all that bad, blamed my "metabolism" for my weight problem, and so on - but now I know better. I could probably even stick to a "rabbit food diet" now - though it would not be as easy as low-carb.
It is bogus that "they" won't study Atkins properly. It isn't like they would have trouble finding volunteers. I only know it has to be better for me than being massively overweight - even with the risk of kidney stones.
But not because it's sensible - but because it'd break the artificial scarcity of music that allows them to make big money by hyping a few new songs.
The real problem is not the record industry - they are dinosaurs lumbering toward the tar pits, you can't really expect them to change their ways. The real problem is that the internet does not yet have any real means to pay for the production of quality music. Until that is available, internet music will be parasitic on the dinosaur industry.
Since we can't rely on the dinosaurs to provide "one huge site" with all that music, the internet music system will have to get rolling on new music from unsigned artists.
Since we can't afford one huge server, it'll have to be P2P based - lots and lots of volunteered servers.
And since we can't rely on one huge site, we need an alternate mode of music promotion to get people to the music they like. The most natural mode for the net is multiple web sites that voluntarily promote (or pan) music, with unique identifiers that allow accurate P2P file location.
That leaves the question of payment - how to finance the artists and sound engineers and producers and so forth to keep making good music for us? A system of donations might work - except tipping requires some means to apply social pressure to keep it up, which the internet really lacks.
So - we need a way to apply social pressure to pay for music downloaded. The most natural way to do that is for the person providing the download to insist that the downloader pay the nickle or quarter a song before they will start the download. That can be built into the P2P software - able to be disabled, but on by default.
So where does the donated money go? The independent artists would need to set up a secure "tipping" site where people could keep a running tab. When it gets to $20, they either pay their tab, or the next time a P2P server asks if they have agreed to pay for a song, it will be told that the downloader's account is not paid up - so the P2P server will (by default) deny requests to download. The tipping sites would also assign the unique identifiers for every piece of music.
And if a few dinosaurs wake up and want in on the action, they can set up their own "tipping server" to cash in on their huge libraries.
In order to own your hardware, either plan to give up use of commercially produced digital content (and maybe analog content).
Or - figure out why we can trust music stores not to pirate digital music (mostly) but can't trust people to distribute digital content only after the recipient has paid for it.
Focus on the supply side (the P2P file server) instead of trying to push a wet noodle from the demand side (DRM attempts to surround content with an iron pipe to keep the noodle straight). Invent incentives - carrots and sticks - sufficient to overcome the small benefits to the file-sharer of free P2P file sharing.
Carrot: a payment to the file server for making sure the file downloader first pays the file owner. There are ways to do this anonymously.
Stick: bounties on pirates, so file servers can't be sure that stranger downloading a file is not a bounty hunter
Carrot: make it as easy as clicking on a link on a web page - which directs some money to the web sites' file server, making them into advocates.
Stick: banning from the legal distribution system and high profile legal action for pirates
Carrot: P2P 'preferred server' lists - so you can direct the file service and fee to friends, family, charities, favorite web site, etc. A web of relationships supporting honest payment for content.
The future SHOULD hold easy to use P2P network distribution of professionally produced, unencrypted digital content to large content servers (PC or consumer box) in homes. It should include fair compensation to artists, yet low prices to consumers - so there will be far less money made "in the middle". It means the end of music stores and eventually of video rental stores and maybe even the end of broadcast radio and TV as we know them.
To get to that future, you need to solve a simple puzzle:
Why can the people who own music and video rental stores be trusted to hold and distribute thousands of digital titles with no encryption, and only very rarely turn "pirate" (giving away free copies or selling cheap copies for a higher profit)?
Once you solve that, figure out how to apply the same principle to P2P distribution. You may need to enhance some elements, and provide some technological support to make it easy to use, since the situations are different - but the same basic principle applies.
(Hints: carrot, stick, supply side vs demand side)
Probably want to make it out of tangled "spider silk" threads - so it tends not to add to the debris problem after something passes through it. Also, it would be somewhat "springy" - giving more time to absorb the kinetic energy of an impact.
Maybe add technology to quickly spot threads that do get blown loose from the main mass, and charge them up with an electron gun so they'll be pulled back into the main mass before they can get very far.
NEWS = NEWS, Entertainment, Weather, Sports
I.e, all news is entertainment, weather or sports.
Why not encourage an alternative social model that relies on profit and honor (and greed and paranoia) instead of "security and trust"?
Let anyone sell any content to anyone else (at a low official price, having eliminated multiple layers of profit-taking distribution and manufacturing).
Set up a secure internet service to let the buyer pay easily and directly to the content owner, who would in turn pay half that amount to the person who distributed (file-shared) the content.
An association of content owners would offer a well advertised bounty and immunity to prosecution to anyone who honestly informs on someone for giving away or selling their content without paying. (False reports wouldn't earn the bounty and may cause future reports to be disregarded.)
The vast majority of people will go along with the system and believe they're doing it because they're basically honest and the 50% payment is just icing on the cake and that bounty isn't a threat to them because they're always honest. Self-delusion perhaps, but if it works...
Then we could do away with all this nonsense of encrypting content and crippling content players.
Imagine a van driving slowly down the streets of a neighborhood every 10 minutes, monitoring the blue TV glow coming out of windows.
Not reconstructing the actual image - just watching the gross flicker patterns, and matching them against all TV stations in real time.
If it finds someone that's not on a known TV station, it pauses for a minute and logs a longer sequence of flickers to match against the flicker patterns of a large library of videos.
Talk about precise marketing info!
Talk about potential blackmail material - ("Did you enjoy your viewing of 'Under-age Girls' last night Mr. Politician? Doing a bit of research, were you?" What about the previous 15 nights?")
Maybe we need to extend "peeping tom" laws to cover any deliberate use of EM radiation coming out of our homes...
Actually, if Bill Joy hasn't changed his opinions, he IS a Luddite - he wants to stop developing new technologies that threaten to change things. Just because Luddite now has a negative connotation associated with it doesn't mean that someone can't be thoughtful and a Luddite. Being thoughtful doesn't make them right or wrong.
A lot like "Rocket Scientist" or "space technology".
Interesting. Can you say more? Was it some sort of inflatable structure? I read somewhere that such structures could actually be safer against micro-collisions.
So was this article pulled because it pointed out that anyone with the ability to launch a big enough rocket could potentially eliminate a large portion of the US military's advantage?
Just get an idea of the rough trajectory of LEO spy satellites, shoot up a rocket at the right moment, and blow up a modest charge to spray BB's into a wide swath of space.
Figure if you could launch just 1 million BB's and spread them out with a velocity of maybe just 60km/hr - creating a sphere 2km across in one minute, with a surface area of 12MsqMeter, you've got 1 BB for every 12sq meters, and if the satellite goes through both sides of the sphere and has a profile of just 4sq meters, you've got a 2/3 chance of holing it, maybe a 1/3 chance of severe damage via internal spray of debris over sensitive components.
And if you're a bit more sophisticated, you could launch those BB's into orbit. It might take days or weeks - but with that much new debris added to the same rough orbital altitude as a spy-sat, the chances of an encounter are pretty good.
Yep, I'd be worried about Iraq getting this bright idea - except after they analyzed their last war and the sort of tricks that the Yugoslavians played on us, I'd bet they've already come up with it.
I'd also hope the US is busily launching hardened spy satellites with enough internal armor and redundancy to take a couple of hits.
It'll probably mean the end of Commercial use of Space if they really go at it - the insurance rates for launches will be too high. Another good thing brought to you by the fine foreign entanglement folks in Washington. I sure wouldn't want to be on the sitting station - I mean space duck - I mean space station if/when Bush decides to go into Iraq.
Oops - I meant Brooks, of course.
Penrose's lawn mower robot doesn't mow his lawn properly because he forgot to design it to WANT to mow his lawn properly.
Seriously! To properly want something, you need a means to know that that desire is or is not satisfied, and a means to move closer to achieving your desire - just like Genghis' leg muscles.
His mower robot needs a laser scanner to light up stalks that stick up too high, a sensor to detect stalks being lit up within maybe 10 feet, a desire to go to spots where that light is seen, and a desire to wander and seek out lit spots if it doesn't see any nearby.
A bit more is needed to handle edge conditions (literally the edges of the lawn and objects in it). It needs the ability to learn where it can't go, and the ability to slowly forget that learning so if it makes a mistake about not being able to get somewhere it can eventually correct itself.
I have to admire a corporation as large as Sony that will invest so much and so long in a dream. They've come a long way in their anthropomorphic robots. The key to making a useful robot is as much or more in mechanical engineering as in computer science.
What they really need is an affordable non-biological equivalent of muscles. No pulleys or gears, totally silent, quick and strong and reasonably accurate and energy efficient.
Risk = Probability x Consequence..."
Probability = small chance human action is having significant impact on global climate
Consequence = unknown
Risk = a small chance that something unknown will happen as a result of human action.
Human nature is far more predictable than the climate. Humans want things to stay the same, out of fear that things may get worse, so they tend to emphasize the bad things that might happen. But the consequences are not known - and could be an improvement.
For example, what if the earth had been about to slip into another ice age (as was thought by climate scientists in the 80's), and greenhouse gases have prevented that so far? Humanity would fare much better with a hot planet than a cold one.
Microsoft will probably simply claim that it was simply exercising it's government granted monopoly - i.e. its copyright - including the right to control the creation of derivative works.
They didn't tell the OEMs they could not sell BeOS, or couldn't put a BeOS installer on the same drive, nor (in this case) say that they'd charge more or hold back Windows if the OEM tried to sell BeOS systems. They just refused to allow BeOs (and Linux) a free ride on Windows' popularity. (Harsh, but true.)
I'd guess that a way around the specific terms of the Microsoft license would be to have OEMs partition the drive, and pre-load Linux on there - but NOT enable it to boot. Note that Hitachi got away with that, for BeOS.
Arrange to put a couple of popular games or something equally popular on that 2nd partition as well, so people need to activate Linux in order to get to the games.
Provide an "enable Linux and games" floppy that makes the Linux partition primary with the option to boot Windows (so there's no need to disable Linux to get to Windows). And include a very visible option to un-do this change - counter-productive as that sounds - so consumers feel safe doing it in the first place.
True, Microsoft would probably soon change their license to prevent it - but only after a burst of Linux dual-boot systems got out there.
Most "legitimate national security" issues would be un-necessary if we would avoid foreign entanglements and stop trying to right all the wrongs of the world.
No need to have secret agents spying on other countries or have top secret weapons if no other country has motives to attack us. No need to worry about spies in our country if we have no intention of doing harm to others.
Even if you say "but this or that exception!" you should recognize that at minimum it's a matter of degree - with less foreign entanglements, we'll have far less "legitimate" need for secrecy.
The only purpose for existence of the patent system is to encourage the invention of novel inventions and methods and publish them to make them available for the use of the nation.
Ask yourself: was there a lack of innovation before software became patentable? Has innovation in software increased since software became patentable?
Are software inventions more or less available for use once they are patented?
Corporate patent lawyers actually DISCOURAGE engineers from seeking solutions to technical problems in the patent system - it would open the corporation up for patent law suits. It's much safer to re-invent the wheel.
Brin is right and Brin is wrong.
Brin is right - privacy need not matter - it's what can be done with information about you that matters.
Brin is wrong - we won't get transparency into government without some sort of revolution - whether political or by force of arms.
And if one-way transparency goes too far in favor of government, revolution of any kind may become nearly impossible. As soon as that ultimate form of accountability appears to be gone, those in power will quickly decide that they deserve to stay in power permanently.
Already the Democrats and Republicans have collaborated to make the US a "two-party nation" - and every election they get more and more alike.
Let them experiment in first "training" an automated universal translation system, then evolve a consensual grammar, and use it to communicate.
Build in a cheap line scanner or camera for them to scan small pictures in, apply hand-written labels to them (initially just nouns, later adjectives, finally verbs), and transmit them to a database.
They also view a database of all entered pictures and apply labels to them - so a multi-language database of labels is created, and validated by multiple users.
They also view the database of pictures and link together ones they THINK might mean the same thing. With multiple inputs this begins to line the words written in different languages, allowing translation.
Let anyone enter a correction if they think someone has mislabelled a picture - first seeing if anyone else gave an alternative label and "voting" for that, or entering their own alternative label if not or if they disagree with all the other labels.
Hand writing recognition translates their writing to the closest matching picture(s) by matching to all labels and knowledge of which language they are writing in. That should allow them to write messages that get pictures added along with the best translation so far.
See how far they can get toward developing a universal translator and using it to converse and tell stories about themselves.
You might want to bootstrap it by initializing the database with lots of pictures and having two groups get a lot of words entered. That way when you go out to many languages, they won't have to spend as much time entering pictures, and focus on the labelling of pictures in their own language.
After labelling noun objects, they could do adjectives by labelling sets of objects shown together for contrast - different colored objects, different shaped objects, etc.
Same idea for verbs - label action pictures like "Boy throws ball", "girl chases chicken".
Obviously they'll need some sort of forum to "chat" in - perhaps a simplistic 2D "world" that they can fill with pictures (as part of the labelling process) and areas where they can chat are just special rooms where 2 to 4 kids can enter at a time, each with a few lines to display the text (or graphic when no translation is available). All screens would have a picture dictionary available.
After the experiment, roll the software out to anyone with a communicating computer or hand-held (open-source Java for most of it, so any company can translate it for their device), and let it continue to evolve.
Well, that's pretty crazy, but it might work. I wonder if the original poster will see it way down here?