The House of Representatives is currently working on a bill to abolish a 3% telephone tax that was originally imposed in 1898 to help finance the Spanish American War. This "temporary" tax has been in effect for more than a century. Various attempts to repeal it in recent years have met with failure in Congress or Presidential veto. The current attempt (HR1898, coincidentally?) is in committee, but counter-efforts are also underway to expand the tax to cover more modern forms of communication.
This sounds a lot like VWorlds, a virtual world engine developed by a group at Microsoft Research a few years ago when I was a contractor there. In a VWorlds world, all objects and their behaviors were generated by script. Anybody with scripting privileges on a world could pop new objects into existence at any time, upload graphics, etc. You could make objects that could create other objects under user control, for example a vending machine. The project was meant to be a simulation system rather than a game, and it never made it into any product. I have to say the player-scripting feature of Second Life is very impressive. It kind of blows me away that they are allowing players to script their own objects, or so it seems. I don't think the VWorlds designers ever went near there.
Having said all that, could we cut this "real" crap and remember that this is a SIMULATION, not a real world. The "land" in Second Life isn't land, it's a description of fictitious land. The fact that people pay real money for it doesn't make it real. People have been paying real money for paintings of landscapes and people for centuriesn and it hasn't ever made the land or people in those paintings real.
Should virtual property be treated as real? It's moot; what's happened in common law is that it's been determined to be real. Case closed.
I hate when people sum up complex and unresolved issues with flat statements like this. Saying something is worth money and calling "real" are two different things. There's a long legal history of acknowledging that intangibles can have monetary value. It's nothing new, and it's a far cry from a sweeping declaration that virtual property is real. Virtual property is a form of scorekeeping, no more or less real than points in a football game. The main difference is presentation. You could build a football scoreboard that showed each team's score in terms of a furnished house with more or less furniture in it, but that wouldn't make the furniture real. You could even make it legal for players to accept payments outside of the game to score points, like they do in online games. That would make the furniture worth money, but it still wouldn't make it real.
Oh I get it now. They issued patent 6,368,227 for swinging sideways on a swing by pulling alternately on the two chains because it was NOVEL and NON-OBVIOUS.
The largest privately owned supercomputer is the one in my secret underground laboratory. Oops! ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ^H^H^H^H
Semacode involves a square pattern of dots that you aim a camera phone at; special software in the phone reads the dot pattern and can connect you to a website or whatever. These dot pattern would be very hard to reproduce by hand.
But there is another system that uses odd circular maze-like graphics, that I imagine might be possible to hand draw if the image processing software were decent. I can't remember the name of this circular system, but the patterns reminded me of the sockets R2D2 was always plugging into.
I wonder if anyone is considering the possibility of this happening before they decide to shut down UHF/VHF broadcasting in 2007?
Don't worry! I'm sure more prisons are being planned as we speak. Meanwhile, the War On Spectrum Piracy can share the prisons that are being built for the War On Copyright Infringement, because the War On Drugs already filled up the prisons for the War On Crime. The War On Everything marches on!
Maybe not aliens, but I can see some future space salvage operators... Hey what's that over there? It's not on the active sat list, let's grab... HOLY CRAP! IT'S A GUY!!!
It's interesting to me that most of these discussions assume that preserving the making of money in the entertainment business overrides all other considerations. As Doctorow sums up, "The inkers, artists, writers and pencillers should be protected by statute and practice in a way that guarantees them a decent wage and the means to care for their families." This is always taken as a given. The enterteinment business must endure.
Why?
Would a world without professionally produced entertainment be as bad as a world in which you need approval from some central authority every time you access a hard drive or move bytes from one piece of equipment to another? I can live a pretty full life without Madonna, Spiderman or Star Wars. I can't live nearly such a full life if every action I perform electronically is monitored, and everything I personally create and distribute must be checked for possible infringement or I risk losing my house in a lawsuit.
Preservation of copyright in the modern world creates these consequences. Like the War On Drugs, which currently accounts for 65% of our prison system, the War On Infringement will entail greater and greater enforcement costs. I don't want to pay those costs to preserve an industry that contributes only a few percent to the economy. I also don't want to further entrench the modern notion that ideas and property are one and the same, or that rights and property are one and the same. Given a choice between preserving the profitability of entertainment for the few people who earn a living that way, and perserving the personal freedoms that the other 99.999% of the population will lose -- and it IS a binary choice -- give me the latter.
when your beloved GPL application turns up in a Brazilian program designed to create and share child pornography you won't exactly be laughing
This has to be one of the most ridiculous comments and worst modding I've ever seen on Slashdot. In what conceivable way is child porn connected to GPL software any more than paid licensed software? Even Rush Limbaugh would have trouble making a statement like this with a straight face.
Re:Dumbest thing I've read all week...
on
The Evil in E-Mail
·
· Score: 1
The Enron part had me laughing.
"Enron employees seemed to have no compunction about what they were doing."
And why should they? They probably knew that if their accounting scam didn't work, their friends in Congress would write a special law to set them up in their next venture. Buried in the 700-plus page energy bill currently under debate in the U.S. Senate is a provision that provides hundreds of millions of dollars worth of federal loan guarantees for a power project apparently to be built by four former Enron executives. Their company name is not mentioned; the legislation only describes what it does and where it's located.
It's an old trick used by our elected representatives to give tax breaks to cronies without identifying them; they write a law whose provisions only apply to one person or company. So you see, it really doesn't matter what the Enron emails said, or if the guys got caught, because when you control the lawmakers you're above the law.
Since "intellectual property" is being treated by the law more and more as if it were physical property, then perhaps it should be taxed like physical property (real estate tax, etc.) too.
Good time to slip in a few words about taxation in general. Another way of looking at it is since our maze of tax laws is already so complex and expensive to maintain, then perhaps we shouldn't continue making it even worse by adding yet another ownership tax. In fact, maybe we should eliminate taxes on income and ownership and tax consumption instead with a national sales tax, combined with a flat refund to make it non-regressive.
My personal favorite national sales tax plan would apply to all first-use, end-user sales, but not to business transactions or the resale of used items. The refund would be a fixed amount paid to every wage-earner, equal to the sales tax rate times whatever the government defines as poverty level income. People who have to spend all their income to survive would get 100% of their sales tax back, in some cases even more. Wealthier people spend more money and would get less of their sales tax back with the fixed refund. It's an infinitely graduated tax scale with no complex rules and no forms, which would automatically tax wealthier people at a higher rate than poorer people, and would make it extremely difficult for legislators to inject special rules to exempt their friends. Collected at the cash register and handed from the states to the feds, it would eliminate nearly all of the 100,000+ IRS employees, not to mention the army of clerks, accountants, lawyers, consultants, assessors, investigators and others whose careers are currently dedicated entirely to collecting taxes.
Treating ideas like property is a mistake for lots of reasons. Taxing it like property would be an even bigger one.
The 100 years of legal precedent should be on the side of the copyright opponents. Copyrights have always been granted under the condition that they will expire on a definite date. That's part of the contract between copyright holders and the public, whose taxes finance the institutions that enforce the copyrights. In exchange for doing that, the public is supposed to get full use of the material at a specified time. When Congress extends existing copyrights they dissolve that contract. They might as well decree that all 30-year mortgages are now 60-year mortgages, and the people who have already been making payments 29 years are just out of luck.
But if you condense the top list to one item: billions of dollars, then that's pretty much the end of the story right there.
Most people know the Bono Act extended copyright, but few know the specifics. In most of the world all recordings made before 1954 are in the public domain. But thanks to the Bono Act, in the U.S. all sound recordings made before 1972 are now copyrighted until 2067. This applies even to the earliest recordings on wax cylinders and discs made in the 1890s, which Sony now claims the rights to. That's more than 170 years of copyright protection for those items.
The old world aristocracy claimed that it had the divine right to own and control everything, because God in his wisdom determined everyone's place in life. That was the rationalization, but the plain and simple reason was that they had armed soldiers working for them to enforce their decrees. And in spite of the modern rhetoric that's exactly the way it still is today.
Probably no other big corporation has profited from using works from the public domain than Disney. Things would be different if the modern American copyright system had been in place all along. Currently every sound recording made in the United States before 1972 is copyrighted until 2067. This includes even Edison's original wax cylinder recordings from the 1890s.
There's no reason to think similar copyright terms won't eventually apply to written works as well. If such terms had been in the force in the 1930s when Walt Disney was starting his movie business, the Disney empire as we know it would not exist. Mickey Mouse notwithstanding, Walt's early animated features made free use of public domain work from the likes of Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the brothers Grimm. All of it would still have been under copyright in the 1930s, even the original Grimm's fairy tales, published in 1814. It's pretty tough to argue against the economic benefits that the Disney empire has spread far and wide. It wouldn't have happened if Walt's government had forbidden him to use his own cultural legacy.
NASA actually is investing money in researching the space elevator concept. A number of companies besides Carbon Designs Inc. are working on it. For example Liftport Group also plans to locate their base station in the South Pacific because of the lack of storms and lightning, and has a similar timetable. It's really exciting and even a little spooky to me to be seeing serious, business-minded people not just brainstorming this but actually doing it, for real, right now. If I had the qualifications I would be camping on their doorstep for a job.
Interesting technology, but a bit overhyped in this case. The photo labelled "self-replicating robot" shows a robot that can't replicate itself. On the reprap.org website they define "self-replicating" as the merely ability to make parts for other machines:...a machine that is capable of building three-dimensional objects from both an electrically insulating material and a conductor, like our robot in the picture. After the components have been made, it is quite acceptable for a person to assemble the machine from those components and the standard parts listed above, and to copy the firmware from the parent machine's microcontroller into that of the child.
Speaking of small-screen gadgets running Unix variants, I can't resist putting in a word about the 3-Com Audrey, a $85 (EBay) solid-state touch-screen gadget that runs an embedded Unix called QNX. The Audrey is a failed Internet appliance that was made by 3Com a few years ago. When they didn't sell for $499, 3Com dumped them. They soon showed up on EBay and an Audrey hacking community sprang up (see AudreyHacking.com). Hacked memory images are available with all sorts of free goodies like mp3 players and home automation software.
The Audrey has a 7-inch 640x480 color touch screen built into a 2-inch-thick package that looks like like a Jetson's version of an Etch-a-Sketch. It was made to sit on the kitchen table so you could read the news, send email and look up recipes. Several dedicated buttons on the front, intended to start the pre-packaged apps, can be reprogrammed to do other things. There's even a "channel changer" knob that switches among favorite websites.
Inside is about a P200, 32Mb ROM and a 32 Mb flashcard for RAM. The original built-in software included a telephony app. There is a built-in 56K modem, microphone and two tiny speakers, also 2 USB ports and an audio output jack, and a no-frills wireless IR keyboard. Most of the ones sold on EBay include a USB LAN interface.
I bought 5 of them and put them around the house to stream mp3 to different rooms. Beats having to go to the computer to select files, and the touch screen and retro look make a really cool UI.
Wow, thanks for those links, especially the hypograpy.com one. Zeroes right in on the details and gives a clear explanation of how and why the therapy works. That article should be the link posted; the one submitted tells almost nothing.
It's interesting that the key is to stimulate immune cells to exert mechanical pressure on the tumor cells to inhibit their growth.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I read the headline as, "Research Grant Money Really Does Grow On Trees Now"
The House of Representatives is currently working on a bill to abolish a 3% telephone tax that was originally imposed in 1898 to help finance the Spanish American War. This "temporary" tax has been in effect for more than a century. Various attempts to repeal it in recent years have met with failure in Congress or Presidential veto. The current attempt (HR1898, coincidentally?) is in committee, but counter-efforts are also underway to expand the tax to cover more modern forms of communication.
This sounds a lot like VWorlds, a virtual world engine developed by a group at Microsoft Research a few years ago when I was a contractor there. In a VWorlds world, all objects and their behaviors were generated by script. Anybody with scripting privileges on a world could pop new objects into existence at any time, upload graphics, etc. You could make objects that could create other objects under user control, for example a vending machine. The project was meant to be a simulation system rather than a game, and it never made it into any product. I have to say the player-scripting feature of Second Life is very impressive. It kind of blows me away that they are allowing players to script their own objects, or so it seems. I don't think the VWorlds designers ever went near there.
Having said all that, could we cut this "real" crap and remember that this is a SIMULATION, not a real world. The "land" in Second Life isn't land, it's a description of fictitious land. The fact that people pay real money for it doesn't make it real. People have been paying real money for paintings of landscapes and people for centuriesn and it hasn't ever made the land or people in those paintings real.
Should virtual property be treated as real? It's moot; what's happened in common law is that it's been determined to be real. Case closed.
I hate when people sum up complex and unresolved issues with flat statements like this. Saying something is worth money and calling "real" are two different things. There's a long legal history of acknowledging that intangibles can have monetary value. It's nothing new, and it's a far cry from a sweeping declaration that virtual property is real. Virtual property is a form of scorekeeping, no more or less real than points in a football game. The main difference is presentation. You could build a football scoreboard that showed each team's score in terms of a furnished house with more or less furniture in it, but that wouldn't make the furniture real. You could even make it legal for players to accept payments outside of the game to score points, like they do in online games. That would make the furniture worth money, but it still wouldn't make it real.
Oh I get it now. They issued patent 6,368,227 for swinging sideways on a swing by pulling alternately on the two chains because it was NOVEL and NON-OBVIOUS.
The largest privately owned supercomputer is the one in my secret underground laboratory.H ^H^H^H^H
Oops! ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^
Semacode involves a square pattern of dots that you aim a camera phone at; special software in the phone reads the dot pattern and can connect you to a website or whatever. These dot pattern would be very hard to reproduce by hand.
But there is another system that uses odd circular maze-like graphics, that I imagine might be possible to hand draw if the image processing software were decent. I can't remember the name of this circular system, but the patterns reminded me of the sockets R2D2 was always plugging into.
I wonder if anyone is considering the possibility of this happening before they decide to shut down UHF/VHF broadcasting in 2007?
Don't worry! I'm sure more prisons are being planned as we speak. Meanwhile, the War On Spectrum Piracy can share the prisons that are being built for the War On Copyright Infringement, because the War On Drugs already filled up the prisons for the War On Crime. The War On Everything marches on!
Maybe not aliens, but I can see some future space salvage operators... Hey what's that over there? It's not on the active sat list, let's grab ... HOLY CRAP! IT'S A GUY!!!
In space, no one can hear you chuck.
It's interesting to me that most of these discussions assume that preserving the making of money in the entertainment business overrides all other considerations. As Doctorow sums up, "The inkers, artists, writers and pencillers should be protected by statute and practice in a way that guarantees them a decent wage and the means to care for their families." This is always taken as a given. The enterteinment business must endure.
Why?
Would a world without professionally produced entertainment be as bad as a world in which you need approval from some central authority every time you access a hard drive or move bytes from one piece of equipment to another? I can live a pretty full life without Madonna, Spiderman or Star Wars. I can't live nearly such a full life if every action I perform electronically is monitored, and everything I personally create and distribute must be checked for possible infringement or I risk losing my house in a lawsuit.
Preservation of copyright in the modern world creates these consequences. Like the War On Drugs, which currently accounts for 65% of our prison system, the War On Infringement will entail greater and greater enforcement costs. I don't want to pay those costs to preserve an industry that contributes only a few percent to the economy. I also don't want to further entrench the modern notion that ideas and property are one and the same, or that rights and property are one and the same. Given a choice between preserving the profitability of entertainment for the few people who earn a living that way, and perserving the personal freedoms that the other 99.999% of the population will lose -- and it IS a binary choice -- give me the latter.
when your beloved GPL application turns up in a Brazilian program designed to create and share child pornography you won't exactly be laughing
This has to be one of the most ridiculous comments and worst modding I've ever seen on Slashdot. In what conceivable way is child porn connected to GPL software any more than paid licensed software? Even Rush Limbaugh would have trouble making a statement like this with a straight face.
http://www.geocities.com/email_theguy/newportweb/
The Enron part had me laughing.
"Enron employees seemed to have no compunction about what they were doing."
And why should they? They probably knew that if their accounting scam didn't work, their friends in Congress would write a special law to set them up in their next venture. Buried in the 700-plus page energy bill currently under debate in the U.S. Senate is a provision that provides hundreds of millions of dollars worth of federal loan guarantees for a power project apparently to be built by four former Enron executives. Their company name is not mentioned; the legislation only describes what it does and where it's located.
It's an old trick used by our elected representatives to give tax breaks to cronies without identifying them; they write a law whose provisions only apply to one person or company. So you see, it really doesn't matter what the Enron emails said, or if the guys got caught, because when you control the lawmakers you're above the law.
Dude, Slashdot is a discussion forum, not a news service. The whole point is to bring stories from other sites together in one handy spot.
6 cents per machine? Hah! Our outsourcing group could get it done for 4 cents.
when the bench keeps asking you if you'd like some toast.
Since "intellectual property" is being treated by the law more and more as if it were physical property, then perhaps it should be taxed like physical property (real estate tax, etc.) too.
Good time to slip in a few words about taxation in general. Another way of looking at it is since our maze of tax laws is already so complex and expensive to maintain, then perhaps we shouldn't continue making it even worse by adding yet another ownership tax. In fact, maybe we should eliminate taxes on income and ownership and tax consumption instead with a national sales tax, combined with a flat refund to make it non-regressive.
My personal favorite national sales tax plan would apply to all first-use, end-user sales, but not to business transactions or the resale of used items. The refund would be a fixed amount paid to every wage-earner, equal to the sales tax rate times whatever the government defines as poverty level income. People who have to spend all their income to survive would get 100% of their sales tax back, in some cases even more. Wealthier people spend more money and would get less of their sales tax back with the fixed refund. It's an infinitely graduated tax scale with no complex rules and no forms, which would automatically tax wealthier people at a higher rate than poorer people, and would make it extremely difficult for legislators to inject special rules to exempt their friends. Collected at the cash register and handed from the states to the feds, it would eliminate nearly all of the 100,000+ IRS employees, not to mention the army of clerks, accountants, lawyers, consultants, assessors, investigators and others whose careers are currently dedicated entirely to collecting taxes.
Treating ideas like property is a mistake for lots of reasons. Taxing it like property would be an even bigger one.
The 100 years of legal precedent should be on the side of the copyright opponents. Copyrights have always been granted under the condition that they will expire on a definite date. That's part of the contract between copyright holders and the public, whose taxes finance the institutions that enforce the copyrights. In exchange for doing that, the public is supposed to get full use of the material at a specified time. When Congress extends existing copyrights they dissolve that contract. They might as well decree that all 30-year mortgages are now 60-year mortgages, and the people who have already been making payments 29 years are just out of luck.
But if you condense the top list to one item: billions of dollars, then that's pretty much the end of the story right there.
Most people know the Bono Act extended copyright, but few know the specifics. In most of the world all recordings made before 1954 are in the public domain. But thanks to the Bono Act, in the U.S. all sound recordings made before 1972 are now copyrighted until 2067. This applies even to the earliest recordings on wax cylinders and discs made in the 1890s, which Sony now claims the rights to. That's more than 170 years of copyright protection for those items.
The old world aristocracy claimed that it had the divine right to own and control everything, because God in his wisdom determined everyone's place in life. That was the rationalization, but the plain and simple reason was that they had armed soldiers working for them to enforce their decrees. And in spite of the modern rhetoric that's exactly the way it still is today.
Probably no other big corporation has profited from using works from the public domain than Disney. Things would be different if the modern American copyright system had been in place all along. Currently every sound recording made in the United States before 1972 is copyrighted until 2067. This includes even Edison's original wax cylinder recordings from the 1890s.
There's no reason to think similar copyright terms won't eventually apply to written works as well. If such terms had been in the force in the 1930s when Walt Disney was starting his movie business, the Disney empire as we know it would not exist. Mickey Mouse notwithstanding, Walt's early animated features made free use of public domain work from the likes of Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the brothers Grimm. All of it would still have been under copyright in the 1930s, even the original Grimm's fairy tales, published in 1814. It's pretty tough to argue against the economic benefits that the Disney empire has spread far and wide. It wouldn't have happened if Walt's government had forbidden him to use his own cultural legacy.
NASA actually is investing money in researching the space elevator concept. A number of companies besides Carbon Designs Inc. are working on it. For example Liftport Group also plans to locate their base station in the South Pacific because of the lack of storms and lightning, and has a similar timetable. It's really exciting and even a little spooky to me to be seeing serious, business-minded people not just brainstorming this but actually doing it, for real, right now. If I had the qualifications I would be camping on their doorstep for a job.
Interesting technology, but a bit overhyped in this case. The photo labelled "self-replicating robot" shows a robot that can't replicate itself. On the reprap.org website they define "self-replicating" as the merely ability to make parts for other machines: ...a machine that is capable of building three-dimensional objects from both an electrically insulating material and a conductor, like our robot in the picture. After the components have been made, it is quite acceptable for a person to assemble the machine from those components and the standard parts listed above, and to copy the firmware from the parent machine's microcontroller into that of the child.
Speaking of small-screen gadgets running Unix variants, I can't resist putting in a word about the 3-Com Audrey, a $85 (EBay) solid-state touch-screen gadget that runs an embedded Unix called QNX. The Audrey is a failed Internet appliance that was made by 3Com a few years ago. When they didn't sell for $499, 3Com dumped them. They soon showed up on EBay and an Audrey hacking community sprang up (see AudreyHacking.com). Hacked memory images are available with all sorts of free goodies like mp3 players and home automation software.
The Audrey has a 7-inch 640x480 color touch screen built into a 2-inch-thick package that looks like like a Jetson's version of an Etch-a-Sketch. It was made to sit on the kitchen table so you could read the news, send email and look up recipes. Several dedicated buttons on the front, intended to start the pre-packaged apps, can be reprogrammed to do other things. There's even a "channel changer" knob that switches among favorite websites.
Inside is about a P200, 32Mb ROM and a 32 Mb flashcard for RAM. The original built-in software included a telephony app. There is a built-in 56K modem, microphone and two tiny speakers, also 2 USB ports and an audio output jack, and a no-frills wireless IR keyboard. Most of the ones sold on EBay include a USB LAN interface.
I bought 5 of them and put them around the house to stream mp3 to different rooms. Beats having to go to the computer to select files, and the touch screen and retro look make a really cool UI.
Wow, thanks for those links, especially the hypograpy.com one. Zeroes right in on the details and gives a clear explanation of how and why the therapy works. That article should be the link posted; the one submitted tells almost nothing.
It's interesting that the key is to stimulate immune cells to exert mechanical pressure on the tumor cells to inhibit their growth.