Does that mean there's going to be a city in China where you can breathe the air and drink the tap water?
That's exactly what it means. Like Gothamites can drink the tap water because the government of the Empire State flooded Dutchess Country one and a half centuries ago so there'd be a water supply.
I don't mind subsidizing the safety of the supply of the petroleum products that power the automobiles in Houston even though I live in New York, but someone who thinks blood for oil is a poor trade might resent it.
City planning like this is about trying to engineer human behavior.
Nonsense. It's like architecture plus materials science plus earth and environmental engineering plus traffic management.
Milton Keynes is a new city begun in 1967 and built to accomodate 150,000 incoming Londoners for an eventual population of 250,000. Does that sound like a lot of people for a single project? It's not.
The World Trade Center in New York employed 50,000 people and 430 businesses in just seven buildings.
Battery Park City houses 9,000 in a one-mile stretch along the Hudson river.
In 1958, Levittown housed 70,000 in 5,500 acres.
It is difficult to build green if you are the first in your neighborhood with the desire. You can demonstrate the superiority of a sod roof (for instance), but your contractor will have no experience with it; he will have to either subcontract to experienced craftsmen from outside the region or do the work himself as a complete beginner. He will be understandably reluctant to run the risk that you may sue him in a few years for dandelion roots in your bedroom. You will also be denied the economies of scale if you are (for example) composting at your own expense while your neighbors are dumping and burning through non-green facilities supported by property taxes (including taxes on your property). An investor with government-sized pockets can order an entire division with Cradle-to-Cradle sustainable design. In addition to the direct payoff of housing for your citizens, the potential payoff to your economy of developing the necessary technologies deliverable in industrial quantities are as good or better than the United State's space program.
A theory is lousy if the predictions it makes prove fruitless. The "Beneficent Creator" theory inspired the founders of Organon Pharmaceuticals to research the food-animal organs discarded at the slaughterhouses on the grounds that a Creator would not have made useless parts, and thus discovered a plenitude of medically useful compounds. That the "Beneficent Creator" theory in its simplest forms appears to fail to account for the suffering of innocents or the relative abundance of the elements does not render it useless as a framework in the areas where it has proven successful. "The Beneficent Creator has a wonderful plan for your life" may lead to better outcomes that "Natural Selection is essentially finished with you the moment you reproduce."
Then you agree that building four large cities as proving grounds is prudent, and withdraw your invidious comparison to the movie-set sham Potemkin villages?
It didn't work because they were stupid. Surely it'll work this time -- we're not stupid, are we?
Have you never seen the films of early attempts at heavier-than-air flight? There are lots of ways to construct a plausible looking aircraft, but the few that are actually flightworthy are in fact the result of less-stupid designs.
You propose implementing nationally technologies claimed to be sustainable prior to testing the truth of those claims with four pilot cities. How reckless!
How can [the operating system] be "essential" and irrelevant at the same time?
Do you know much about computers? Are you under the impression that the browser can operate the hard drives, collect keystrokes, maintain a clock, drive monitors, maintain a network connection, configure printers, and adjudicate multiple threads and processes? These services and others like them are essential, and are referred to collectively as "the operating system."
When the operating system is provided by a monopolist under terms of trade secrecy, attaching devices requires the consent of the monopolist; extending the character set to support additional languages requires the consent of the monopilist; fixing security failures requires the consent of the monopolist; correcting programming errors in the operating system's code requires the consent of the monopolist; providing access to the indigent requires the consent of the monopolist; adapting the system for military use requires the consent of the monopolist; ad-hoc usage while recovering from natural disasters (where a particular licensed device may have been destroyed and licensing records lost) requires the consent of the monopolist; etc.
If Microsoft offered to license everyone in America for twenty eight million dollars (ten cents per person, same as Linspire's offer) and include complete access to the source code so there would be no question of vendor lockin (same as Linspire's offer), I would applaud.
The notion that something as essential to a 21st century economy as the operating system of the most common general purpose computers should be the property and trade secret of a single corporation boggles the mind.
With this bill, the government criminalizes the manufacture of devices with user-accessible drivers. Do you want to connect that monitor to any system other than the one the monitor's maker licensed at the time of your original purpose, such as a new computer? You must now seek the permission of the monitor's manufacturer to do so.
Re:Libraries are terrible, terrible institutions.
on
Reining in Google
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· Score: 1
a search engine that shows A an ad when it returns a pointer to B.'s work based on inferences it has drawn of A's preferences is deriving income from its own efforts, not from the efforts of B. Map sellers owe nothing to the owners of properties that someone wishes to locate. Property owners who want to farm revenue from guiding the lost are welcome to publish their own maps but they may not forbid other cartographers from listing the facts.
Healthetech's BalanceLog works nicely on the cheapest Palm and has calorie counts for both food and exercise. You can also get your basal metabolic rate measured with their Metabolic Fingerprint service.
You write a book. A library buys it. The library scans it using Google as its agent. The library adds it to their catalog. Someone looking for books like yours consults the catalog. The catalog shows your book's title and author and a snippet of text (about a sentence) and increments its per user view count so it won't show too many snippets to the same user (three is the limit). The person decides your book is probably worth owning and goes to a store and buys it. The person reads your book and decides to not return it and get his money back. You get paid by your publisher.
The one who charges another with wrongdoing may rightly withdraw the charges or rest his case; he may not rightly accuse and flee. Since I believe you have a decent respect for the duties of a prosecutor to the accused, I will interpret your previous post as your summation and resting of case.
The prosecutor does not get the last word. The accused has the right to answer.
It is more likely that your view of the situation is mistaken than that five independent libraries have "gone rogue." The libraries have the right to catalog the works they own. Producing a catalog is an essential part of the libraries' mission. Without a catalog, they would be little more than warehouses. They are not warehouses. They are institutions of scholarship, with a positive responsibility to preserve civilization's written works and make these works available. That is two duties: preserve and make available.
The libraries have the right to use what they judge to be the best available practice.s to carry out these duties and to undertake them with who they judge to be the best qualified agents.
Libraries have made their catalogs available for remote searching since the earliest days of the internet, and even before, when extensive listings were circulated on paper or microfiche.
Paper degrades, and so do microfiche and all other known recording media. By purchasing a work, the libraries acquire the right to preserve the contents of that work in perpetuity. They are under on obligation to secure the consent of any other party to carry out preservative measures.
The works preserved do not become the property of the agent performing the preservation.
Google's machines scan works owned by the library at the library's behest for the library's dual purposes of preservation and access. No violation of the copyright holders' rights occurs and there is no just reason to interfere with the libraries' undertaking.
Why do you find it so hard to admit that Google has made copies of books with out permission?
Because it is not the case.
The libraries purchased from the authors the right to catalog the authors' works when the libraries purchased the authors' books. The libraries exercise that right through an agency with Google. The libraries are completely within their rights.
They have copied the books and are selling advertising based on searches for those books.
You are mistaken. Your research is faulty. Read this FAQ:
Do you display advertisements on library book pages in Google Print?
No. We currently have no advertisements on books we've scanned through our Library Project.
Copyright owners may elect to allow Google to display advertisements and share the revenue. For the massive number of works with unknown copyright holders, there shall be no advertising.
The libraries are allowing Google to copy the books.
You are mistaken. The libraries have partnered with Google to scan the libraries' books in order to produce a subject-index catalog of the libraries' collections that they, the libraries, believe will be of substantial value. The libraries acquired the right to prepare such derivitive works (subject-index catalogs) from the copyright holders when they purchased (or acquired from a lawful purchaser) the books. The copyright holders do not have the right to impose post-hoc restrictions on the quality of the subject-index catalogs the libraries may prepare, nor do the copyright holders have any sort of veto power over the intelligence and capability of anyone the libraries may appoint to assist in preparing these catalogs. As a good will gesture, the libraries have offered to strike from their catalogs any works whose copyright holders would prefer said works to be undiscoverable via the library's catalog; a gesture which decreases the value of the libraries' holdings, without compensating the libraries for the loss of utility.
Libraries who do not believe that a subject-index catalog preopared with electromechanical assistance would be of substantially greater value than the ones they currently have are free to continue their current practices.
Google is making a copy of the entire work in digital format.
You may be right, but I believe you are mistaken, on both technical and substantive grounds.
Technical: Although the libraries are scanning entire works, it is doubtful that the scans will be stored as digital copies of the works. Think about it. There are likely an order of magnitude more works than words. The primary entry in the index would, at first approximation, be words, not works. When a user's query is "Lincoln," the index ought not start with "AA Great Britain Road Atlas" and work through "ZY Calculus" looking for "Lincoln." Instead, it will start with "Lincoln" (or the hash value), and follow the links on "Lincoln" to the names of works where "Lincoln" appears most frequently, and then pull up the (maximum of) three fragments where "Lincoln" occurs. There is no requirement there for the entire work to be stored, only sufficient fragments to satisfy the maximum complexity of search the interface supports. As each work is scanned, it is broken up into its component words, and the index entry for its words are updated with counts and pointers. The work in its entirety need never reside in the system.
Substantive: The libraries have partnered with Google to, on their behalf, read the works they own and prepare, electromechanically, a more thorough version of the subject catalogs the libraries already have the right to maintain. That Google is (perhaps) supplying the equipment and (perhaps) hosting the catalogs does not somehow convey the contents of that catalog from the library's ownership to Google's. The libraries use electric power from the untility and bulbs from General Electric; by means of the light generated, the libraries' patrons are able to find (in a room that would otherwise be dark) the libraries' books, but this does not mean that the libraries have somehow ceded control of the books to the utility or Generl Electric. Similarly, patrons are able to find (in a collection that would otherwise be opaque) the libraries' books by means of the correlations revealed by the libraries' catalog (prepared with Google's assistance), and likewise, this does not mean the libraries have ceded control of their collections to Google.
It is entirely possible that he could appoint me as an agent to put together an index, even a searchable index, of the books in the library. It is not, however, in his power to tell me that I can then keep a copy of all the library's books and use them for my own business.
Google is neither keeping nor even receiving a copy of the works the libraries' own and have the right to make discoverable. Google simply provides the expertise and equipment. The works never become Google's property. In terms of your example, once you cease being the librarian's agent, you lose access to the works. This is unlike the Google Library project, because the Google Library project is perpetual. If a library were to terminate Google's agency, Google would lose access to that library's works. There is no transfer.
Discoverable has nothing to do with allowing Google to copy entire works, store them, and use them for their own business.
The libraries are not granting Google the right to use their collections for Google's own business. Google is the libraries' expert agent for indexing the volumes the libraries own in order for the libraries to carry out the libraries' business. That business is just, legitimate, and lawful.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mind subsidizing the safety of the supply of the petroleum products that power the automobiles in Houston even though I live in New York, but someone who thinks blood for oil is a poor trade might resent it.
Nonsense. It's like architecture plus materials science plus earth and environmental engineering plus traffic management.
It is difficult to build green if you are the first in your neighborhood with the desire. You can demonstrate the superiority of a sod roof (for instance), but your contractor will have no experience with it; he will have to either subcontract to experienced craftsmen from outside the region or do the work himself as a complete beginner. He will be understandably reluctant to run the risk that you may sue him in a few years for dandelion roots in your bedroom. You will also be denied the economies of scale if you are (for example) composting at your own expense while your neighbors are dumping and burning through non-green facilities supported by property taxes (including taxes on your property). An investor with government-sized pockets can order an entire division with Cradle-to-Cradle sustainable design. In addition to the direct payoff of housing for your citizens, the potential payoff to your economy of developing the necessary technologies deliverable in industrial quantities are as good or better than the United State's space program.
A theory is lousy if the predictions it makes prove fruitless. The "Beneficent Creator" theory inspired the founders of Organon Pharmaceuticals to research the food-animal organs discarded at the slaughterhouses on the grounds that a Creator would not have made useless parts, and thus discovered a plenitude of medically useful compounds. That the "Beneficent Creator" theory in its simplest forms appears to fail to account for the suffering of innocents or the relative abundance of the elements does not render it useless as a framework in the areas where it has proven successful. "The Beneficent Creator has a wonderful plan for your life" may lead to better outcomes that "Natural Selection is essentially finished with you the moment you reproduce."
Then you agree that building four large cities as proving grounds is prudent, and withdraw your invidious comparison to the movie-set sham Potemkin villages?
This is a common conceit.
It didn't work because they were stupid. Surely it'll work this time -- we're not stupid, are we?
Have you never seen the films of early attempts at heavier-than-air flight? There are lots of ways to construct a plausible looking aircraft, but the few that are actually flightworthy are in fact the result of less-stupid designs.
You propose implementing nationally technologies claimed to be sustainable prior to testing the truth of those claims with four pilot cities. How reckless!
Since filing a patent is evil
You are mistaken. Filing a patent is defensive. The five categories of behavior are:- Mandatory
- Praiseworthy
- Neutral
- Discouraged
- Forbidden
Filing a patent is no worse than "Discouraged."A lot more than 20,000 programmers are employed writing and supporting software they're trying to phase out.
It would be better for the economy to employ them to write different software.
Do we really want the government to actively go about picking winners and losers in entire areas of the worldwide economy?
No, Simplicius Simplicissimus, we really want the government to eliminate deadweight costs. Read the article or find someone to read it to you.
Do you know much about computers? Are you under the impression that the browser can operate the hard drives, collect keystrokes, maintain a clock, drive monitors, maintain a network connection, configure printers, and adjudicate multiple threads and processes? These services and others like them are essential, and are referred to collectively as "the operating system."
When the operating system is provided by a monopolist under terms of trade secrecy, attaching devices requires the consent of the monopolist; extending the character set to support additional languages requires the consent of the monopilist; fixing security failures requires the consent of the monopolist; correcting programming errors in the operating system's code requires the consent of the monopolist; providing access to the indigent requires the consent of the monopolist; adapting the system for military use requires the consent of the monopolist; ad-hoc usage while recovering from natural disasters (where a particular licensed device may have been destroyed and licensing records lost) requires the consent of the monopolist; etc.
It is an invitation to failure.
If Microsoft offered to license everyone in America for twenty eight million dollars (ten cents per person, same as Linspire's offer) and include complete access to the source code so there would be no question of vendor lockin (same as Linspire's offer), I would applaud.
The notion that something as essential to a 21st century economy as the operating system of the most common general purpose computers should be the property and trade secret of a single corporation boggles the mind.
your claim that licensing an operating system is akin to making it mandatory is preposterous.
With this bill, the government criminalizes the manufacture of devices with user-accessible drivers. Do you want to connect that monitor to any system other than the one the monitor's maker licensed at the time of your original purpose, such as a new computer? You must now seek the permission of the monitor's manufacturer to do so.
a search engine that shows A an ad when it returns a pointer to B.'s work based on inferences it has drawn of A's preferences is deriving income from its own efforts, not from the efforts of B. Map sellers owe nothing to the owners of properties that someone wishes to locate. Property owners who want to farm revenue from guiding the lost are welcome to publish their own maps but they may not forbid other cartographers from listing the facts.
Healthetech's BalanceLog works nicely on the cheapest Palm and has calorie counts for both food and exercise. You can also get your basal metabolic rate measured with their Metabolic Fingerprint service.
You write a book. A library buys it. The library scans it using Google as its agent. The library adds it to their catalog. Someone looking for books like yours consults the catalog. The catalog shows your book's title and author and a snippet of text (about a sentence) and increments its per user view count so it won't show too many snippets to the same user (three is the limit). The person decides your book is probably worth owning and goes to a store and buys it. The person reads your book and decides to not return it and get his money back. You get paid by your publisher.
The one who charges another with wrongdoing may rightly withdraw the charges or rest his case; he may not rightly accuse and flee. Since I believe you have a decent respect for the duties of a prosecutor to the accused, I will interpret your previous post as your summation and resting of case.
The prosecutor does not get the last word. The accused has the right to answer.
It is more likely that your view of the situation is mistaken than that five independent libraries have "gone rogue." The libraries have the right to catalog the works they own. Producing a catalog is an essential part of the libraries' mission. Without a catalog, they would be little more than warehouses. They are not warehouses. They are institutions of scholarship, with a positive responsibility to preserve civilization's written works and make these works available. That
is two duties: preserve and make available.
The libraries have the right to use what they judge to be the best available practice.s to carry out these duties and to undertake them with who they judge to be the best qualified agents.
Libraries have made their catalogs available for remote searching since the earliest days of the internet, and even before, when extensive listings were circulated on paper or microfiche.
Paper degrades, and so do microfiche and all other known recording media. By purchasing a work, the libraries acquire the right to preserve the contents of that work in perpetuity. They are under on obligation to secure the consent of any other party to carry out preservative measures.
The works preserved do not become the property of the agent performing the preservation.
Google's machines scan works owned by the library at the library's behest for the library's dual purposes of preservation and access. No violation of the copyright holders' rights occurs and there is no just reason to interfere with the libraries' undertaking.
Why do you find it so hard to admit that Google has made copies of books with out permission?
Because it is not the case.
The libraries purchased from the authors the right to catalog the authors' works when the libraries purchased the authors' books. The libraries exercise that right through an agency with Google. The libraries are completely within their rights.
You are mistaken. Your research is faulty. Read this FAQ:
Copyright owners may elect to allow Google to display advertisements and share the revenue. For the massive number of works with unknown copyright holders, there shall be no advertising.
I am not saying this is how it will work ...
speculation is needless; read the Google Library Project FAQ and become informed.
The libraries are allowing Google to copy the books.
You are mistaken. The libraries have partnered with Google to scan the libraries' books in order to produce a subject-index catalog of the libraries' collections that they, the libraries, believe will be of substantial value. The libraries acquired the right to prepare such derivitive works (subject-index catalogs) from the copyright holders when they purchased (or acquired from a lawful purchaser) the books. The copyright holders do not have the right to impose post-hoc restrictions on the quality of the subject-index catalogs the libraries may prepare, nor do the copyright holders have any sort of veto power over the intelligence and capability of anyone the libraries may appoint to assist in preparing these catalogs. As a good will gesture, the libraries have offered to strike from their catalogs any works whose copyright holders would prefer said works to be undiscoverable via the library's catalog; a gesture which decreases the value of the libraries' holdings, without compensating the libraries for the loss of utility.
Libraries who do not believe that a subject-index catalog preopared with electromechanical assistance would be of substantially greater value than the ones they currently have are free to continue their current practices.
Google is making a copy of the entire work in digital format.
You may be right, but I believe you are mistaken, on both technical and substantive grounds.
Technical: Although the libraries are scanning entire works, it is doubtful that the scans will be stored as digital copies of the works. Think about it. There are likely an order of magnitude more works than words. The primary entry in the index would, at first approximation, be words, not works. When a user's query is "Lincoln," the index ought not start with "AA Great Britain Road Atlas" and work through "ZY Calculus" looking for "Lincoln." Instead, it will start with "Lincoln" (or the hash value), and follow the links on "Lincoln" to the names of works where "Lincoln" appears most frequently, and then pull up the (maximum of) three fragments where "Lincoln" occurs. There is no requirement there for the entire work to be stored, only sufficient fragments to satisfy the maximum complexity of search the interface supports. As each work is scanned, it is broken up into its component words, and the index entry for its words are updated with counts and pointers. The work in its entirety need never reside in the system.
Substantive: The libraries have partnered with Google to, on their behalf, read the works they own and prepare, electromechanically, a more thorough version of the subject catalogs the libraries already have the right to maintain. That Google is (perhaps) supplying the equipment and (perhaps) hosting the catalogs does not somehow convey the contents of that catalog from the library's ownership to Google's. The libraries use electric power from the untility and bulbs from General Electric; by means of the light generated, the libraries' patrons are able to find (in a room that would otherwise be dark) the libraries' books, but this does not mean that the libraries have somehow ceded control of the books to the utility or Generl Electric. Similarly, patrons are able to find (in a collection that would otherwise be opaque) the libraries' books by means of the correlations revealed by the libraries' catalog (prepared with Google's assistance), and likewise, this does not mean the libraries have ceded control of their collections to Google.
It is entirely possible that he could appoint me as an agent to put together an index, even a searchable index, of the books in the library. It is not, however, in his power to tell me that I can then keep a copy of all the library's books and use them for my own business.
Google is neither keeping nor even receiving a copy of the works the libraries' own and have the right to make discoverable. Google simply provides the expertise and equipment. The works never become Google's property. In terms of your example, once you cease being the librarian's agent, you lose access to the works. This is unlike the Google Library project, because the Google Library project is perpetual. If a library were to terminate Google's agency, Google would lose access to that library's works. There is no transfer.
Discoverable has nothing to do with allowing Google to copy entire works, store them, and use them for their own business.
The libraries are not granting Google the right to use their collections for Google's own business. Google is the libraries' expert agent for indexing the volumes the libraries own in order for the libraries to carry out the libraries' business. That business is just, legitimate, and lawful.