The licensing terms aren't that bad, and getting better for newer versions. For example, the forthcoming AVC MPEG-4 codec will be free to implement in all no-cost software. Even now, you get a pass on the first 50,000 distributed players. MPEG-4 is less difficult do deal with than MP3 licensing, and there are certainly lots of stuff in the Free Software community that can author and play back MP3 files!
Free to implement in no-cost software is better than per-seat licenses.... It does mean that Linux users (for example) can get something that will work. Still, that kind of limitation prevents a true open source implementation.
Re: all the free software things that author and play back MP3 files, my understanding is that they are all black sheep-- not really legal given the current MP3 licencing requirements. Which practically may not be that big a deal, but it is a worry out there.
Your point about the MPEG-4 standards being published is good, though. It's more open-- or at least far less closed-- than WM9, I would fully agree with that. It's just not completely an open standard:)
As for Ogg Theora: vaporware, yes, but I predict we'll see it "for real" in 2003. (Come make fun of me if my prediction is wrong.) As for the technical quality, I don't know enough to comment intelligently. How does the efficiency really compare to MPEG-4? What are the efficiency drawbacks? (I.e. is it a speed thing, a size thing, etc.?) How does the quality compare? (Although that latter one, from watching some of the early Vorbis/MP3 debates, is necessarily subjective. I know from my point of view Ogg Vorbis is great and it's what I use for encoding audio.)
From a free software purists point of view, does it matter who wins? Neither format is an "open" format.... MPEG-4 may be developed by an industry consortium, but as with so-called RAND licencing, unless I misunderstand something their licencing fees make it impossible to implement the code legally in free software. (Is this the case? I'm guessing that MPlayer's mpeg4 support is dubious legally.)
What would be best is that if they make it contentions and messy enough fighting each other that both standards are weakend. That will make Ogg Theora look even that much more attractive to companies and the world at large once it comes out, and hasten the support of Ogg Theora. With some luck, that will become the standard, or at least a standard, that is so widely supported that those of us who care about and pay attention to these things can just use it.
They're only 95% sure. I'm 100% sure the universe is over 1000 years old. I'm only 5% away from the top scientists!
That raises a good point. When the hell did scientists start spouting off about how sure they were of anything?...
...My high school physics teacher would not have approved.
Your dissapproval is based on misunderstanding To be fair, almost certainly the misunderstanding is not yours, but in the space.com article.
"95% sure" doesn't mean that they're really 95% sure that they have absolute revealed truth. What it means is that, given the data and an understanding of the uncertainties in the data, and given the models and the uncertainties in the models, if we reproduced the experiment many times (i.e. we had many universes each of which produced stars that we could make the same measurements on), 95% of the time our data would give an age between 11.2 and 20 billion years old.
That's what a confidence interval means. That's what 95% sure means. Unfortunately, the Space.com article makes it sound the way you've interpreted it. Obviously, yes, it means that this is under the assumption that our theories are correct-- of course, some of the theories in question are pretty well tested and well believed. But you are right that you can't prove anything, you can only disprove them.
If you've ever heard Lawrence Krauss (the physicist quoted in the article) give a popular science lecture (he lectures a lot on the conflict between science and pseudoscience), he does emphasize this point. We do *know* some things from science. Even if it's a theory, we are pretty sure that some theories are right.
But "sure" is not really "we have revealed truth". It is a misunderstanding of the term "confidence" used in scientific papers, which really means "the data are consistent with...", and quantifies how consistent the data are.
The folks at the Kroger closest to where I live are very unfriendly and frequently downright nasty. I hate to think what the work environment must be like for everybody there to want to lash out at anybody who comes into the store... as a result, usually my wife and I drive a bit further to go to a different store.
But, if given the option of using my finger to pay, I might go back to the mean Kroger, if I had the option of choosing which finger I got to stick out at them when paying....
I don't want it to be in the park. I don't want it to be where the creative people work. I want it to be in the Disney legal department, and where the managers who pay Fritz Hollings hang out.
The author was of the opinion that the life sciences are not as rigorous in testing the veracity of research results.
Very true. But biology is where physics was at the time of Newton. Each big science domain is doing what it can with what it has. I don't think that applying a physics point of view to just life sciences or any other scientific domain is right.
I suspect the author of the article would agree with you. I think the argument isn't so much "let's be very rigorous to prove that we are better than the biologists." It's more that physicis is no longer the premiere cutting edge technological science as it was in the 20th century; increasingly, biology is taking up that mantle. Instead of continuing as an also-ran has-been, the author seems to be proposing that physicists change their attitude to try and distinguish themselves as useful and productive in a different philosophical area, an area that much of the biological sciences probably won't really be strongly pushing into for at least a few decades.
Mind you, I personally think that applying a (fill in the blank scientific) point of view is right, almost always. However, you then need to evaluate how useful that exercise was. Not performing the excercise out of some sense of "not right" is just as harmful as refusing to make progress in biology because the field can't currently live up to physics standards of rigor. Keep an open mind in both directions; apply as many reasonable scientific perspectives as you can to see if you learn anything in the process.
DNA
genetic engineering
tissue engineering
anyone want to add some more?
Astrobiology
That's good for NASA funding. Perversely, finding extrasolar planets is called "astrobiology", even though no organic molecules are necessarily involved.... Astronomers who work on other things and who can figure out how what they do is related to young solar systems would do well to mention that connection in their proposal, in the title if at all possible.
A couple of months ago, I read something simlar. TV advertisers were bemoaning the fact that individual TV ads no longer have the effect they once did. Viewers are tuning out-- wether by fast-forwarding, or just by not really paying attention. Some of them went on to say that the problem partly was saturation. The fraction of the hour that has ads on a typical TV broadcast has grown, to the point that there are so many ads that no one ad stands out very much any more.
(My reaction to this, and to the surprise that came through in the article about this, was: well, duh!)
Then they go on to suggest the solution: in-programming advertising. Popups, effectively, in TV programs, more obvious and blatant than product placement.
So, the logic is: advertising has become so prevalent and overwhelming that the common consumer is starting to get desensitized to it. To solve this "problem", we need to make advertising even more prevalent and overwhelming.
Hello?
We're so in love with our marketing-driven society that we've become incapable of thinking any other way.
I predict that "popup-ads" during TV shows whould just drive more and more people away from broadcast TV and to watching either premium channels, renting movies, or (horrors) reading books. Broadcast TV will be shooting itself in the foot.
Similarly for web sites that don't think their ads are annoying enough right now. If they think that the solution is to make them more annoying, then users will either avoid their sites, or just use browsers that, in the increasing arms race, filter out the annoying ads. (Until the Fed. government outlaws those browsers, at which point the laws will become irrelevant since they are in conflict with what most of the population wants and does. Maybe eventually they will realize the short-sightedness of their current campaign finance model.)
I just shake my head when people seem to think that the solution to oversaturation of advertising is more in-your-face advertising. Don't they get it? Can't they take a lesson from Google, who subsists on advertising? Yeah, sure, Google is the #1 destination on the site, so they have it easy. Perhaps, though, nobody has considered that part of the reason Google is the #1 destination may be that their advertising is very minimally annoying....
I think you are forgetting that there is somebody named Dmitry involved here- I highly doubt he wants to lose his criminal trial just on the off chance that the law gets repealed afterwards. Its easy for you to say that because you are not the person on trial here. "Come on Dmitry- take one for the team!"
Dmitry is not on trial -- Elmcosoft is. Dmitry got off on a plea bargain. (He got to go away if he agreed to testify.) Probably it was a case of the prosecution finally realizing that Dmitry was a pretty sympathetic dependent, from a media/public point of view. In any event, the company is who's on trial, and as such it's probably fines and so forth (not jail time) that we're talking about. There is no personal harm that Dmitry will be taking.
Where is the page to order and download a $5 version in order to pay their bandwidth and server upkeep costs? I don't see it. Where is the page to order just the CDs for $10/$15? I don't see it.
The GPL doesn't require them to provide it. They're perfectly fine under the GPL only selling it for $299.
What they can't do is stop you from giving away (or selling for $5) the copy you bought from them for $299. The GPL doesn't say anything about you having to give away your software, or about charging only what it costs to physically transfer the copy. It just says that you cannot then place any restrictions on further distribution of that GPLed software.
The one thing I'd like to see is a set standard GUI services on top of the core drawing engine. Different widget toolkits would be a thin wrapper on top of these standard services, and different widget toolkits would exist to customize the standard services to each language and development model.
Isn't that something similar (with slightly different goals) to what Java tried with the original AWT? The idea was that the Java interface was a thin layer, but the underlying widgets were each implemented by the OS.
Needless to say, it failed pretty miserably, which is why Java later came up with Swing and the realization that to actually work everywhere, you have to implement your own code everywhere. It's all very nice to say you want a thin layer on top of standard services, until you realize that the "standard" services are not very standard from one OS to the next (in the case of Java) or from one window manager/widget toolkit/windowing system to the next (in this case). Those differences make it very challenging-- and, more to the point, messy and crufty-- to try to write a "thin" layer that can somehow interact with all of them.
It's nice in theory, but it doesn't really meet well with the real world.
The contradiction comes from the fact that our government-- especially Congress-- is not a single-headed entity, but a multi-headed entitiy pulling in lots of different directions. As a result, lots of contradictory noises will get made.
Indeed, the more often it acts like a single-headed entity pulling in one direction, the scarier it is. We come in danger of "groupthink", and worrying things like expression divergent opinions become labelled as "unpatriotic", and scary laws like the DMCA (which passed without dissent) or parts of the US PATRIOT act (I'm thinking the library stuff here) getting passed.
You create no value of any kind, and would be of more service to humanity shoveling shit.
Or, to quote a certain Klingon, being shoveled AS shit.
Folks like these PanIP folks should be locked away for the rest of eternity. They are a clear and present threat to the USA. Of course, so is the patent office, which should just be closed down. I'm sure they do some good, but at this point it's overwhelmed by the harm they do. I mean, heck, the DC sniper probably helped an old lady across the street once in his life, but it hardly makes him a boon to society.
The record companies don't care about "free downloading" per se. They care about free downloading of content owned by their members.
Actually, I doubt this.
That's all they can legitimately worry about. So, that's all they will make obvious noise about. But think about it: free downloading in general is a threat to their business model. If enough artists realized that they could make an end-run around the RIAA recording companies and survive, the RIAA would be in trouble. Far better to push for laws to protect "your" members which will also incidentally outlaw or at least severely inhibit any competition to your dominance.
because the book store would be forced to build a ramp, not do so because it chose to.
taking your point to its logical conclusion, my physical limitations, i.e. too small, too slow, should not preclude me from playing in the NFL.
I don't see why this is so hard for everybody.
Being parapalegic would preclude you from playing in the NFL, yes.
It does not necessarily preclude you from buying and reading books. You have eyes; you know to read; you can buy and read books. Therefore, why should you artifically be prevented from reading books? Is that fair? There's absolutely no comparison between a parapalegic playing in the NFL and being able to go into a bookstore, and people who insist that one is the logical extention of the other are way off base.
Freedom is our being able to choose whatever doctor (Thank you St. John's Cleft Lip/Palate Center, Santa Monica, CA) we wanted, whatever hospital we wanted, etc. If we were told what doctor or hospital, or prohibitied from surgery, THAT would be denial of freedom.
Uh huh. Now take your argument to its logical conclusion. If your son had been born a parapalegic, but was prohibited from going into (say) the bookstore he wanted to go into due to a lack of a ramp, then that would be a denial of freedom. I don't see how that is any different from you wanting to chose the doctor you wish.
Should it matter what it would cost to fix that problem for a webmaster? No. Why? It's discrimination, plain and simple. It sends the message 'We don't want you deaf people coming in here.'
Another point specifically with regard to the issue in question: it's not that hard. Anybody who raises a cost issue is a blowhard. You make the point that cost shouldn't be an issue. I want to make the point whether or not it should be an issue, it just isn't. If you write standards compliant web code with clean design, text based readers can handle it. The amount of adapting necessary is really quite small. Yeah, sure, you will probably be able to name some tool that somebody wants to use that doesn't do it right-- I say that's a bad tool and shouldn't be used. It just isn't that hard to write decent standards compliant web code that works in all browsers, including text based ones.
It's not a cost issue. It's a laziness issue (wanting to use whatever bad tool you have or not wanting to bother writing good code) and a "must use new shiny fluff" issue (i.e. thinking, somehow, insanely, that Flash is a good idea).
(Retrofitting old buildings for ADA compliance does have cost issues. Building new buildings-- there's just no excuse not to build them right now.)
If web pages required sound in order to function rather than sight, I'd be in quite a fix.
This is an excellent point.
I would note that if, say, you were on a site that had previews of music, a deaf person shouldn't be surprised if he weren't able to listen to the samples.... Nor would it make any sense to outlaw putting such samples online. If the point is sound, then somebody who can't do sound just must miss out. But that's OK. (There are lots of sites on the web which either don't interest me, or which are inaccessible to me due to, for instance, a lack of proper advanced education. I don't begrudge those pages to the folks who are interested, however. I do begrudge it, however, when a bank or other "general access" site requires specific software; that's an entirely gratuitous limitation.)
Where it's a travesty is when the information doesn't intrinsically require sound, but then it is coded in such a way that it becomes inaccessible without sound. Similarly, if the information on a webpage is textual, it is a travesty not to code it in such a way that those who require text-based readers can cope (including blind folks who use some sort of text-to-speech device).
now that i have your attention, look, most/. readers, myself included despise the DMCA because precisely it infringes upon our freedom. and that is the problem. the ada specifically takes away freedom from some, to give "access" or in other words, privileges to others. how so.
Bad, bad, bad comparison.
The philosophy behind freedom in a society such as ours is that one should only limit freedom once it begins to harm the health or freedom of others. Hence, at least according to the philosophy, we have freedom of speech, unless we create a clear and present danger, or unless we commit slander/libel. We have freedom of assembly, but that doesn't give us the freedom to assemble on somebody else's private property.
The DMCA limits freedom of expression in completely nonsensical ways. It outlaws tools which can be used for entirely legal purposes, and outlaws even telling people where to find those tools. It limits freedom in the name of preserving certain others' abilities to-- limit freedom! It's completely contrary to the philosophy of freedom in our country.
On the other hand, the ADA is one case where your freedoms to design your building are being limited precisely because without those limits, you can infringe upon the freedoms of others. If you're building a place accessible to the public, then the public, theoretically, has the freedom to come and go. But, unless you make your building accessible for the disabled, certain folks don't have that freedom. So, the ADA limits your freedoms to prevent you from exercising those freedoms in a manner that infringes upon the freedoms of others.
Don't try to compare the ADA and the DMCA. If anything, that will only lend credence to the DMCA. The last thing we want is a whole set of people concerned with a different issue thinking that supporting the DMCA might help their issue.
(By the way: those keys at the lower left and lower right of your keyboard that say "Shift" on them: they are for making capital letters. Thought you might be interested to know about them.)
Aren't you the guy I saw this morning, driving his Ford Model T on the highway, doing 30 mph?
If you want to make a car analogy, from your arguments I'd say that you're the guy driving his huge SUV down the road, where the four-wheel drive and extra power of an SUV are entirely unnecessary, and the added gas consumption and safety concerns all in all make it a bad choice. (And an extremely common choice that many will defend to their last breath.) Yet you choose it because you think your selfish desires are more important, and because somehow you think it's more "advanced" than something that makes sense.
The web can and does work well with a text browser. I don't use one (mostly I use Mozilla), but I should be able to. Honestly, how can you justify not supporting a text browser unless your content is intrinsically graphical? And, words are not intrinsically graphical, I don't care how beautiful you think your design is. I'm not even saying that you have to make all pages nothing but single column white on black text. Just use decent web design and standards, and Lynx can adapt. Make it as beautiful as you want, just don't insist on using brain-dead tools that don't understand standards and clean layout. It's not such a big deal, or at least it wouldn't be if folks like you didn't feel so justified in grabbing on to whatever is new and shiny at the expense of what really makes sense given the situation.
I'm not defending outdated browsers. Indeed I wish Netscape 4 would go away, and I wish that none of us would have to go through the annoyance of supporting it's horribly buggy CSS implementation. It's obselete, and has been passed by. That to me is the Model T. Lynx, and text-based browsers, on the other hand, are a different story. They're not just old; they are an implementation of the web for a completely different platform. There's no reason why the text content of the web shouldn't be available on the "text" platform, unless the "new and shiny fluff" critereon is really so important.
I find it very interesting that the majority of people posting here who are saying "I should be able to visit the entire web using a 1980's, text-only browser" are kids.
I suspect you don't know my age. I also suspect it is at least 10 years greater than yours. Maybe you should grow up a bit and attain some perspective before going around calling others "kids".
All the ADA would have required is "good" web design. I.e., don't do something brain-dead like using image maps for text links just because you want to make sure your favorite beutiful font is what get's seen... just use bloody text links. Not only does that help the blind, but it helps those who choose lynx, it helps those on modems (text downloads faster than graphics), it probably helps your page be cross-browser (unless you do something else stupid like absolutely place text elements assuming everybody uses the same font you do).
A tenet of good web design is that unless your page is fundamentally graphical-- i.e. the whole point of the page is an image-- it should render well and work from a text-based browser. Things like login screens: there is simply no good excuse for writing something that doesn't work from a text-based browser. Sure, some people will haul out graphic design and art design. Fooey on you; if your art designer can't make a good looking page that also works with a text based browser, it's time to find a more creative art designer. Think of it as part of the constraints; arcitects still manage to design attractive buildings even though they must have certain features (e.g. ramps) nowadays.
Even aside from the ADA issue, these considerations could lead to getting rid of some of the truly stupid web pages out there, at least from the larger businesses. Oh well.
From one perspective, this test wasn't available a few years ago. A company spent the money and time to make it available, and now they want a return on their investment.
The question I'd want to ask is: how much of that research was funded by grants, federal, governmental or otherwise? I don't really know, but I'd like to know. If any significant fraction was funded by grants, then the patent is "corporate welfare" in its most evil form.
I've heard the assertion made that some large fraction of the "important" drugs have been developed partially or largely under grant support. (I.e., not the latest wrinkle on an effective allergy medicine, but the new breakthroughs, AIDS drugs, etc.) I'd like to see some documentation of this. If it is true, then it really is a crime that patents are being given out to the companies that took these grants to help do the research that pays for the patents.
I know I will get flamed by a lot of people saying that I'm trying to kill the spirit of Amercian innovation and squelch off just the thing that allowed all these drugs to be developed in the first place-- because I've been flamed for that before. I don't know that I do have the answers. But I also reject the flat-out assertion that under no system than the current patent system would we be able to have a vigorous program of innovation in pharmaceutical research. It is plain that the current system is horribly broken (unless you're heavily invested in pharmaceutical companies and are more concerned with your portfolio than with what the research is really supposed to be for). It is downright foolish to refuse to ask how we might be able to fix that system simply because we're afraid that we could end up breaking it worse.
I don't understand the belief that copyright should be extended past the creater's death.
This will sound extremist, but let's remember just how amoral some corporations are in their pursuit of profits. "It doesn't happen here," but our corporations do participate in flagrant human rights violations overseas.
Disclaimers aside, I think it reasonable that copyright extend either a fixed amount of time independent of the creator's death, or a fixed amount of time past his death, so that freeing a copyright would never be a motive for murder. Yes, it really does sound alarmist, but there you have it.
I personally would love to see us go back to a 28 year copyright (or, perhaps, a 14 year copyright, the first one automatic without registration, but then renewable for one or two more 14-year terms for a nominal registration fee). That would still allow creators ample time to get recompence for their work, but would also clearly be "limited". (Right now, even if Eldred v. Ashcroft wins, copyright terms are not "limited" on the timescale relevant to most of us, i.e. an adult human's life span.)
Slashdot Mirror
The licensing terms aren't that bad, and getting better for newer versions. For example, the forthcoming AVC MPEG-4 codec will be free to implement in all no-cost software. Even now, you get a pass on the first 50,000 distributed players. MPEG-4 is less difficult do deal with than MP3 licensing, and there are certainly lots of stuff in the Free Software community that can author and play back MP3 files!
Free to implement in no-cost software is better than per-seat licenses.... It does mean that Linux users (for example) can get something that will work. Still, that kind of limitation prevents a true open source implementation.
Re: all the free software things that author and play back MP3 files, my understanding is that they are all black sheep-- not really legal given the current MP3 licencing requirements. Which practically may not be that big a deal, but it is a worry out there.
Your point about the MPEG-4 standards being published is good, though. It's more open-- or at least far less closed-- than WM9, I would fully agree with that. It's just not completely an open standard :)
As for Ogg Theora: vaporware, yes, but I predict we'll see it "for real" in 2003. (Come make fun of me if my prediction is wrong.) As for the technical quality, I don't know enough to comment intelligently. How does the efficiency really compare to MPEG-4? What are the efficiency drawbacks? (I.e. is it a speed thing, a size thing, etc.?) How does the quality compare? (Although that latter one, from watching some of the early Vorbis/MP3 debates, is necessarily subjective. I know from my point of view Ogg Vorbis is great and it's what I use for encoding audio.)
-Rob
From a free software purists point of view, does it matter who wins? Neither format is an "open" format.... MPEG-4 may be developed by an industry consortium, but as with so-called RAND licencing, unless I misunderstand something their licencing fees make it impossible to implement the code legally in free software. (Is this the case? I'm guessing that MPlayer's mpeg4 support is dubious legally.)
What would be best is that if they make it contentions and messy enough fighting each other that both standards are weakend. That will make Ogg Theora look even that much more attractive to companies and the world at large once it comes out, and hasten the support of Ogg Theora. With some luck, that will become the standard, or at least a standard, that is so widely supported that those of us who care about and pay attention to these things can just use it.
-Rob
They're only 95% sure. I'm 100% sure the universe is over 1000 years old. I'm only 5% away from the top scientists!
That raises a good point. When the hell did scientists start spouting off about how sure they were of anything?...
Your dissapproval is based on misunderstanding To be fair, almost certainly the misunderstanding is not yours, but in the space.com article.
"95% sure" doesn't mean that they're really 95% sure that they have absolute revealed truth. What it means is that, given the data and an understanding of the uncertainties in the data, and given the models and the uncertainties in the models, if we reproduced the experiment many times (i.e. we had many universes each of which produced stars that we could make the same measurements on), 95% of the time our data would give an age between 11.2 and 20 billion years old.
That's what a confidence interval means. That's what 95% sure means. Unfortunately, the Space.com article makes it sound the way you've interpreted it. Obviously, yes, it means that this is under the assumption that our theories are correct-- of course, some of the theories in question are pretty well tested and well believed. But you are right that you can't prove anything, you can only disprove them.
If you've ever heard Lawrence Krauss (the physicist quoted in the article) give a popular science lecture (he lectures a lot on the conflict between science and pseudoscience), he does emphasize this point. We do *know* some things from science. Even if it's a theory, we are pretty sure that some theories are right.
But "sure" is not really "we have revealed truth". It is a misunderstanding of the term "confidence" used in scientific papers, which really means "the data are consistent with...", and quantifies how consistent the data are.
-Rob
The folks at the Kroger closest to where I live are very unfriendly and frequently downright nasty. I hate to think what the work environment must be like for everybody there to want to lash out at anybody who comes into the store... as a result, usually my wife and I drive a bit further to go to a different store.
But, if given the option of using my finger to pay, I might go back to the mean Kroger, if I had the option of choosing which finger I got to stick out at them when paying....
-Rob
I don't want it to be in the park. I don't want it to be where the creative people work. I want it to be in the Disney legal department, and where the managers who pay Fritz Hollings hang out.
-Rob
Does anyone else think that if this happened it would be the absolute worst thing that ever happened to the web?
No. A bunch of worse possibilities immediately leap to mind:
...but most of all....
-Rob
The author was of the opinion that the life sciences are not as rigorous in testing the veracity of research results.
Very true. But biology is where physics was at the time of Newton. Each big science domain is doing what it can with what it has. I don't think that applying a physics point of view to just life sciences or any other scientific domain is right.
I suspect the author of the article would agree with you. I think the argument isn't so much "let's be very rigorous to prove that we are better than the biologists." It's more that physicis is no longer the premiere cutting edge technological science as it was in the 20th century; increasingly, biology is taking up that mantle. Instead of continuing as an also-ran has-been, the author seems to be proposing that physicists change their attitude to try and distinguish themselves as useful and productive in a different philosophical area, an area that much of the biological sciences probably won't really be strongly pushing into for at least a few decades.
Mind you, I personally think that applying a (fill in the blank scientific) point of view is right, almost always. However, you then need to evaluate how useful that exercise was. Not performing the excercise out of some sense of "not right" is just as harmful as refusing to make progress in biology because the field can't currently live up to physics standards of rigor. Keep an open mind in both directions; apply as many reasonable scientific perspectives as you can to see if you learn anything in the process.
-Rob
genetic engineering
tissue engineering
anyone want to add some more?
Astrobiology
That's good for NASA funding. Perversely, finding extrasolar planets is called "astrobiology", even though no organic molecules are necessarily involved.... Astronomers who work on other things and who can figure out how what they do is related to young solar systems would do well to mention that connection in their proposal, in the title if at all possible.
-Rob
A couple of months ago, I read something simlar. TV advertisers were bemoaning the fact that individual TV ads no longer have the effect they once did. Viewers are tuning out-- wether by fast-forwarding, or just by not really paying attention. Some of them went on to say that the problem partly was saturation. The fraction of the hour that has ads on a typical TV broadcast has grown, to the point that there are so many ads that no one ad stands out very much any more.
(My reaction to this, and to the surprise that came through in the article about this, was: well, duh!)
Then they go on to suggest the solution: in-programming advertising. Popups, effectively, in TV programs, more obvious and blatant than product placement.
So, the logic is: advertising has become so prevalent and overwhelming that the common consumer is starting to get desensitized to it. To solve this "problem", we need to make advertising even more prevalent and overwhelming.
Hello?
We're so in love with our marketing-driven society that we've become incapable of thinking any other way.
I predict that "popup-ads" during TV shows whould just drive more and more people away from broadcast TV and to watching either premium channels, renting movies, or (horrors) reading books. Broadcast TV will be shooting itself in the foot.
Similarly for web sites that don't think their ads are annoying enough right now. If they think that the solution is to make them more annoying, then users will either avoid their sites, or just use browsers that, in the increasing arms race, filter out the annoying ads. (Until the Fed. government outlaws those browsers, at which point the laws will become irrelevant since they are in conflict with what most of the population wants and does. Maybe eventually they will realize the short-sightedness of their current campaign finance model.)
I just shake my head when people seem to think that the solution to oversaturation of advertising is more in-your-face advertising. Don't they get it? Can't they take a lesson from Google, who subsists on advertising? Yeah, sure, Google is the #1 destination on the site, so they have it easy. Perhaps, though, nobody has considered that part of the reason Google is the #1 destination may be that their advertising is very minimally annoying....
-Rob
Unless you're a high paid executive in the industry or a congressman receiving extreme donations, the cable industry is not your friend!
-Rob
I think you are forgetting that there is somebody named Dmitry involved here- I highly doubt he wants to lose his criminal trial just on the off chance that the law gets repealed afterwards. Its easy for you to say that because you are not the person on trial here. "Come on Dmitry- take one for the team!"
Dmitry is not on trial -- Elmcosoft is. Dmitry got off on a plea bargain. (He got to go away if he agreed to testify.) Probably it was a case of the prosecution finally realizing that Dmitry was a pretty sympathetic dependent, from a media/public point of view. In any event, the company is who's on trial, and as such it's probably fines and so forth (not jail time) that we're talking about. There is no personal harm that Dmitry will be taking.
-Rob
Where is the page to order and download a $5 version in order to pay their bandwidth and server upkeep costs? I don't see it. Where is the page to order just the CDs for $10/$15? I don't see it.
The GPL doesn't require them to provide it. They're perfectly fine under the GPL only selling it for $299.
What they can't do is stop you from giving away (or selling for $5) the copy you bought from them for $299. The GPL doesn't say anything about you having to give away your software, or about charging only what it costs to physically transfer the copy. It just says that you cannot then place any restrictions on further distribution of that GPLed software.
-Rob
The one thing I'd like to see is a set standard GUI services on top of the core drawing engine. Different widget toolkits would be a thin wrapper on top of these standard services, and different widget toolkits would exist to customize the standard services to each language and development model.
Isn't that something similar (with slightly different goals) to what Java tried with the original AWT? The idea was that the Java interface was a thin layer, but the underlying widgets were each implemented by the OS.
Needless to say, it failed pretty miserably, which is why Java later came up with Swing and the realization that to actually work everywhere, you have to implement your own code everywhere. It's all very nice to say you want a thin layer on top of standard services, until you realize that the "standard" services are not very standard from one OS to the next (in the case of Java) or from one window manager/widget toolkit/windowing system to the next (in this case). Those differences make it very challenging-- and, more to the point, messy and crufty-- to try to write a "thin" layer that can somehow interact with all of them.
It's nice in theory, but it doesn't really meet well with the real world.
-Rob
The contradiction comes from the fact that our government-- especially Congress-- is not a single-headed entity, but a multi-headed entitiy pulling in lots of different directions. As a result, lots of contradictory noises will get made.
Indeed, the more often it acts like a single-headed entity pulling in one direction, the scarier it is. We come in danger of "groupthink", and worrying things like expression divergent opinions become labelled as "unpatriotic", and scary laws like the DMCA (which passed without dissent) or parts of the US PATRIOT act (I'm thinking the library stuff here) getting passed.
-Rob
You create no value of any kind, and would be of more service to humanity shoveling shit.
Or, to quote a certain Klingon, being shoveled AS shit.
Folks like these PanIP folks should be locked away for the rest of eternity. They are a clear and present threat to the USA. Of course, so is the patent office, which should just be closed down. I'm sure they do some good, but at this point it's overwhelmed by the harm they do. I mean, heck, the DC sniper probably helped an old lady across the street once in his life, but it hardly makes him a boon to society.
-Rob
The record companies don't care about "free downloading" per se. They care about free downloading of content owned by their members.
Actually, I doubt this.
That's all they can legitimately worry about. So, that's all they will make obvious noise about. But think about it: free downloading in general is a threat to their business model. If enough artists realized that they could make an end-run around the RIAA recording companies and survive, the RIAA would be in trouble. Far better to push for laws to protect "your" members which will also incidentally outlaw or at least severely inhibit any competition to your dominance.
-Rob
because the book store would be forced to build a ramp, not do so because it chose to.
taking your point to its logical conclusion, my physical limitations, i.e. too small, too slow, should not preclude me from playing in the NFL.
I don't see why this is so hard for everybody.
Being parapalegic would preclude you from playing in the NFL, yes.
It does not necessarily preclude you from buying and reading books . You have eyes; you know to read; you can buy and read books. Therefore, why should you artifically be prevented from reading books? Is that fair? There's absolutely no comparison between a parapalegic playing in the NFL and being able to go into a bookstore, and people who insist that one is the logical extention of the other are way off base.
-Rob
Freedom is our being able to choose whatever doctor (Thank you St. John's Cleft Lip/Palate Center, Santa Monica, CA) we wanted, whatever hospital we wanted, etc. If we were told what doctor or hospital, or prohibitied from surgery, THAT would be denial of freedom.
Uh huh. Now take your argument to its logical conclusion. If your son had been born a parapalegic, but was prohibited from going into (say) the bookstore he wanted to go into due to a lack of a ramp, then that would be a denial of freedom. I don't see how that is any different from you wanting to chose the doctor you wish.
-Rob
Should it matter what it would cost to fix that problem for a webmaster? No. Why? It's discrimination, plain and simple. It sends the message 'We don't want you deaf people coming in here.'
Another point specifically with regard to the issue in question: it's not that hard. Anybody who raises a cost issue is a blowhard. You make the point that cost shouldn't be an issue. I want to make the point whether or not it should be an issue, it just isn't. If you write standards compliant web code with clean design, text based readers can handle it. The amount of adapting necessary is really quite small. Yeah, sure, you will probably be able to name some tool that somebody wants to use that doesn't do it right-- I say that's a bad tool and shouldn't be used. It just isn't that hard to write decent standards compliant web code that works in all browsers, including text based ones.
It's not a cost issue. It's a laziness issue (wanting to use whatever bad tool you have or not wanting to bother writing good code) and a "must use new shiny fluff" issue (i.e. thinking, somehow, insanely, that Flash is a good idea).
(Retrofitting old buildings for ADA compliance does have cost issues. Building new buildings-- there's just no excuse not to build them right now.)
-Rob
If web pages required sound in order to function rather than sight, I'd be in quite a fix.
This is an excellent point.
I would note that if, say, you were on a site that had previews of music, a deaf person shouldn't be surprised if he weren't able to listen to the samples.... Nor would it make any sense to outlaw putting such samples online. If the point is sound, then somebody who can't do sound just must miss out. But that's OK. (There are lots of sites on the web which either don't interest me, or which are inaccessible to me due to, for instance, a lack of proper advanced education. I don't begrudge those pages to the folks who are interested, however. I do begrudge it, however, when a bank or other "general access" site requires specific software; that's an entirely gratuitous limitation.)
Where it's a travesty is when the information doesn't intrinsically require sound, but then it is coded in such a way that it becomes inaccessible without sound. Similarly, if the information on a webpage is textual, it is a travesty not to code it in such a way that those who require text-based readers can cope (including blind folks who use some sort of text-to-speech device).
-Rob
now that i have your attention, look, most /. readers, myself included despise the DMCA because precisely it infringes upon our freedom. and that is the problem. the ada specifically takes away freedom from some, to give "access" or in other words, privileges to others. how so.
Bad, bad, bad comparison.
The philosophy behind freedom in a society such as ours is that one should only limit freedom once it begins to harm the health or freedom of others. Hence, at least according to the philosophy, we have freedom of speech, unless we create a clear and present danger, or unless we commit slander/libel. We have freedom of assembly, but that doesn't give us the freedom to assemble on somebody else's private property.
The DMCA limits freedom of expression in completely nonsensical ways. It outlaws tools which can be used for entirely legal purposes, and outlaws even telling people where to find those tools. It limits freedom in the name of preserving certain others' abilities to-- limit freedom! It's completely contrary to the philosophy of freedom in our country.
On the other hand, the ADA is one case where your freedoms to design your building are being limited precisely because without those limits, you can infringe upon the freedoms of others. If you're building a place accessible to the public, then the public, theoretically, has the freedom to come and go. But, unless you make your building accessible for the disabled, certain folks don't have that freedom. So, the ADA limits your freedoms to prevent you from exercising those freedoms in a manner that infringes upon the freedoms of others.
Don't try to compare the ADA and the DMCA. If anything, that will only lend credence to the DMCA. The last thing we want is a whole set of people concerned with a different issue thinking that supporting the DMCA might help their issue.
(By the way: those keys at the lower left and lower right of your keyboard that say "Shift" on them: they are for making capital letters. Thought you might be interested to know about them.)
-Rob
Aren't you the guy I saw this morning, driving his Ford Model T on the highway, doing 30 mph?
If you want to make a car analogy, from your arguments I'd say that you're the guy driving his huge SUV down the road, where the four-wheel drive and extra power of an SUV are entirely unnecessary, and the added gas consumption and safety concerns all in all make it a bad choice. (And an extremely common choice that many will defend to their last breath.) Yet you choose it because you think your selfish desires are more important, and because somehow you think it's more "advanced" than something that makes sense.
The web can and does work well with a text browser. I don't use one (mostly I use Mozilla), but I should be able to. Honestly, how can you justify not supporting a text browser unless your content is intrinsically graphical? And, words are not intrinsically graphical, I don't care how beautiful you think your design is. I'm not even saying that you have to make all pages nothing but single column white on black text. Just use decent web design and standards, and Lynx can adapt. Make it as beautiful as you want, just don't insist on using brain-dead tools that don't understand standards and clean layout. It's not such a big deal, or at least it wouldn't be if folks like you didn't feel so justified in grabbing on to whatever is new and shiny at the expense of what really makes sense given the situation.
I'm not defending outdated browsers. Indeed I wish Netscape 4 would go away, and I wish that none of us would have to go through the annoyance of supporting it's horribly buggy CSS implementation. It's obselete, and has been passed by. That to me is the Model T. Lynx, and text-based browsers, on the other hand, are a different story. They're not just old; they are an implementation of the web for a completely different platform. There's no reason why the text content of the web shouldn't be available on the "text" platform, unless the "new and shiny fluff" critereon is really so important.
I find it very interesting that the majority of people posting here who are saying "I should be able to visit the entire web using a 1980's, text-only browser" are kids.
I suspect you don't know my age. I also suspect it is at least 10 years greater than yours. Maybe you should grow up a bit and attain some perspective before going around calling others "kids".
-Rob
All the ADA would have required is "good" web design. I.e., don't do something brain-dead like using image maps for text links just because you want to make sure your favorite beutiful font is what get's seen... just use bloody text links. Not only does that help the blind, but it helps those who choose lynx, it helps those on modems (text downloads faster than graphics), it probably helps your page be cross-browser (unless you do something else stupid like absolutely place text elements assuming everybody uses the same font you do).
A tenet of good web design is that unless your page is fundamentally graphical-- i.e. the whole point of the page is an image-- it should render well and work from a text-based browser. Things like login screens: there is simply no good excuse for writing something that doesn't work from a text-based browser. Sure, some people will haul out graphic design and art design. Fooey on you; if your art designer can't make a good looking page that also works with a text based browser, it's time to find a more creative art designer. Think of it as part of the constraints; arcitects still manage to design attractive buildings even though they must have certain features (e.g. ramps) nowadays.
Even aside from the ADA issue, these considerations could lead to getting rid of some of the truly stupid web pages out there, at least from the larger businesses. Oh well.
-Rob
From one perspective, this test wasn't available a few years ago. A company spent the money and time to make it available, and now they want a return on their investment.
The question I'd want to ask is: how much of that research was funded by grants, federal, governmental or otherwise? I don't really know, but I'd like to know. If any significant fraction was funded by grants, then the patent is "corporate welfare" in its most evil form.
I've heard the assertion made that some large fraction of the "important" drugs have been developed partially or largely under grant support. (I.e., not the latest wrinkle on an effective allergy medicine, but the new breakthroughs, AIDS drugs, etc.) I'd like to see some documentation of this. If it is true, then it really is a crime that patents are being given out to the companies that took these grants to help do the research that pays for the patents.
I know I will get flamed by a lot of people saying that I'm trying to kill the spirit of Amercian innovation and squelch off just the thing that allowed all these drugs to be developed in the first place-- because I've been flamed for that before. I don't know that I do have the answers. But I also reject the flat-out assertion that under no system than the current patent system would we be able to have a vigorous program of innovation in pharmaceutical research. It is plain that the current system is horribly broken (unless you're heavily invested in pharmaceutical companies and are more concerned with your portfolio than with what the research is really supposed to be for). It is downright foolish to refuse to ask how we might be able to fix that system simply because we're afraid that we could end up breaking it worse.
-Rob
I don't understand the belief that copyright should be extended past the creater's death.
This will sound extremist, but let's remember just how amoral some corporations are in their pursuit of profits. "It doesn't happen here," but our corporations do participate in flagrant human rights violations overseas.
Disclaimers aside, I think it reasonable that copyright extend either a fixed amount of time independent of the creator's death, or a fixed amount of time past his death, so that freeing a copyright would never be a motive for murder. Yes, it really does sound alarmist, but there you have it.
I personally would love to see us go back to a 28 year copyright (or, perhaps, a 14 year copyright, the first one automatic without registration, but then renewable for one or two more 14-year terms for a nominal registration fee). That would still allow creators ample time to get recompence for their work, but would also clearly be "limited". (Right now, even if Eldred v. Ashcroft wins, copyright terms are not "limited" on the timescale relevant to most of us, i.e. an adult human's life span.)
-Rob