It's nice to have a reference list, but unless I have some anecdotal evidence as well, I'm always reluctant to set out for uncharted territories and leave behind what's been tried and true.
Does anyone have any realworld experience with these systems? Often, what looks good on paper turns out to be a complete waste of time and money because of some small inconvenience or incompatibility left unspecified in the specs.
I'm an American, but I'll be the first to admit that Canada is leading the information-technology revolution and leaving the US in the dust. Thirty years ago, parts of New Brunswick still didn't have running water. Now they're hotbeds of technological innovation.
Canada is ideal for two reasons: a small disperse population and a friendly regulatory environment. Unlike the US to the south, Canada's governments know how to spur economic and technological innovation by adopting stimulative regulations; a best-of-both-worlds approach where economic competition is suppressed in favor of great horizontal development. Monopolies become numerous, but the market is best served by maintaining control in the hands of the few where it can be best put to use. Take the Canadian health-care system, for example. The government has a monopoly on health care, but access is guaranteed to all. Perhaps the DOJ and its zealous persecution of Microsoft can learn something from this.
The American film industry is moving to Canada, as are giants in the IT industry. Fifty years ago, technology like this would've had to have been developed and deployed in the US if it were to be taken seriously. Now, it can be developed, deployed, and perfected in Canada, where it can then be exported to the rest of the world. Canada is about to replace the US as the world's largest exporter of electronic and devices and will likely supplant the US as the world's biggest superpower within a few decades.
Cellphone-jamming technology, whatever its moral and legal implications, is just another step in Canada's conquest of the twenty-first century. Expect more from Canada.
Shouldn't we be discouraging car use? Just look at all the problems they cause:
Cars are the third largest source of fatalities in the U.S. each year.
Cars are one of the biggest sources of pollution in the modern urban environment, pumping out carbon dioxide, sulphuric acid, and other pollutants.
Cars consume an enormous percentage of household income for large sectors of our society: income that would be better spent on necessities.
Road networks take up millions of acres of arable land in a world of growing food demands.
Oil reserves are fast being depleted, and our continued reliance on oil (as compared with, say, France's reliance on nuclear power) has left us beholden to unstable or hostile political regimes throughout the world.
Et cetera.
If wireless net access allows people to drive who would otherwise be sitting at home or at the office not harming the environment or contributing to the political and economic instability of our nation, then I can't approve. We should be concentrating on getting every classroom connected to the internet and giving laptops to the homeless so they can get the skills necessary to seek proper employment before we concentrate on such a silly endeavor as this.
If the copy-protection scheme is to succeed, it must be as undetectable as possible by the end user. I don't mean that he won't realize he's using a copy-protected format, but that his ears won't be able to tell the difference between a copy-protected one and a non-protected one.
VHS macrovision is popular precisely because it's undetectable in how it alters visual quality. You'll hear lots of complaints by people who are unable to copy videos correctly, but you'll never hear a complaint by anyone about how macrovision has degraded their signal -- it hasn't.
We're almost at the stage where digital watermarks are completely seamless. Ten years ago, inititives like this would've been scoffed at. Now, they're becoming reality.
The real problem is why chip manufacturers are selling mislabeled chips to begin with. In any other industry, that'd be considered fraud. With the chip industry, it's consdidered standard operating practice.
When you're buying a chip, you don't want to know just what the manufacturer is willing to tell you. You want to know all the details. You want to know why it is you should buy one brand and not another. You want to have the resources necessary to make intelligent and informed decisions about your purchasing behavior. That's the only way the free market works, and it's the reason why we have antitrust laws and other government influences to keep the free market lubricated.
If a company is selling you a chip and not telling you its whole story, then they're doing you a disservice. It's more than just an insult. It's an outright lie: a lie of ommission.
Companies should be required to test their chips rigorously and explicitly label them correctly as to their performance capabilities. That's the least the law can require. And until then, we should organize boycotts against mendacious chip manufacturers. That's our right as consumers and it'll help give our legal challenges more oomph and grassroots support.
I realize there's a certain culture in the geek demographic that says functionality is more important than form: just look at how open source software focuses on getting the job done and doesn't pay much attention at all to how ugly it is while doing so.
But it's important not just to behave legally. It's important not to give the appearance that you're behaving illegally. Much of law is based solely on appearances: the whole issue of "probable cause" is based on the police's perception of criminal wrongdoing, not the actuality of those criminal act. Usually the matter gets sorted out eventually, but only after a period of invasion and confiscation.
If you're a little more careful, you can avoid these sorts of surveillance. If you're doing wrong by illegally sharing IP, then why are you doing it out in the open? What kind of example does that set? And what can you possibly expect others to do on your behalf when you finally get caught as these did?
Maybe some education is in order, here. Geeks need to learn from marketers and lawyers that appearances do count for something in this world--maybe it should be a required course in all engineering and computer-science majors. The only alternative is learning it at the hands of the police. And nobody wants that.
As the article reminds us, State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, 149 F.3d 1360 reinstated patents for business models, overturning longstanding principles. Maybe it's time to do the same for mathematical formulas.
Back in 1972, Gottschalk v. Benson, 409 U.S. 63 set forth the principle that mathematical formulas are objects of nature, that exist in the ether and can be claimed by no one as proprietary. But is this really the case? One could say that the wheel or the transistor existed in nature as well, and yet both of those inventions were heavily patented in their day. All inventions are the product of human innovation, but they all take notice of environmental phenomena and bend it to human will. Isn't this what mathematics itself does, no less than any other science?
Computer science is itself a branch of mathematics, one valued at hundreds of billions of dollars annually. As the software industry grows in the future, how will these longstanding principles of patent law be brought into question? The trend has been towards granting more patents rather than less, and look where it's got us: our nation and our economies are more prosperous than ever, and the sciences have been advanced just as our founding fathers envisioned when they wrote intellectual property law into Article I of the constitution. Shouldn't we take every pain to help these industries even more?
"One-click"-style patents are the exception in a world of truly innovative patents. As we start to remove the last vestiges of a paternalistic scheme of government that regulates what may be patented, true innovation will again shine through.
Because of claims that shark cartilage is an effective treatment for joint problems, millions of sharks are killed each year in order to make cartilage supplements. Despite no scientific evidence to support these claims or other claims that shark supplements treat cancer, this chondroitic genocide persists.
Maybe now we can concentrate on growing our own cartilage instead of killing other animals for theirs. Everyone wins.
The differences between videogames and movies are being blurred faster and faster these days as computing power is increasing. Live-action videogames are finally starting to appear, and real-time strategy games have been a staple of the industry for the last decade. The trend is definitely heading towards realism.
Trademark law is based on the notion that certain words can be claimed for exclusive use within certain domains -- each domain is mutually exclusive of the others and so there's little overlap. Or at least that's the theory. Now, as games and movies are starting to converge, there's considerable overlap. And so trademark disputes like this aren't as absurd as they'd have seemed forty years ago.
It may be videogames and movies today, but what else will converge tomorrow? Businesses are (justifiably) merging and consolidating, and companies like AOL have their toes in every kiddy pool from here to Tijuana. AOL may own the trademarks for "buddy list" and "you've got mail", but can they extend those trademarks to other media such as movies? Don't laugh; there was a movie called "You've Got Mail" a few years ago. How much do you think AOL could've sued for?
And as this consolidation spreads throughout all industries, will we soon have a situation similar to the one we have with DNS tables where a single global registry of trademarks is enforced in all contexts? I'm not sure there's even a problem with that, but you have to admit, it'll take some getting used to.
In this analysis, Blizzard legitimately owns "Diablo". The movie companies will just have to pick a different name. It's the same problem they've had with not treading on each other's movie names for the last hundred years. Have you seen any other movies named "Dinosaur" since Disney came out with that movie? How about "American" since "American Beauty" won its oscar? This is just business as usual.
The last MUD shell I downloaded from a 1337 warez site had "xyzzy" linked to "rm -rf".
No, you're wrong. That's exactly the point
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Anticryptography
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· Score: 2
If you are celebrating while others are suffering, then are you responsible for ther suffering? Yes.
If you have the resources to help another person who has none, and yet you choose not to, are you responsible for that person's penury? Yes.
If you see others wasting resources that you know could be better spent elsewhere, then do you have a moral obligation to commandeer those resources and put them to their proper purpose? I submit the answer is: YES!
To do otherwise would be to to be complicit in evil.
It sounds like a good idea to show people what to expect so they can learn to avoid it in advance instead of getting hooked themselves. That much is clear.
Most frauds aren't perpetrated by large-time crooks. The myth of the traveling trickster coming into town and selling the townsfolk on the idea of a highschool marching band hasn't been true since well before the days of Seventy-Six Trombones. Most frauds are perpetrated by small-time crooks who see an opportunity and take it. They're usually not so clever, but they're effective in their sheer numbers.
If you put all the effective crime schemes in one central repository, won't that make it easier for small-time crooks to find them and start inflicting suffering on society's weak and feeble? Won't this also increase the number of copycat crimes?
There's a common misconception about fraud victims: that they somewhow deserved what they got, because they were themselves greedy and bought an idea that was too good to be true. But that's just false. No victim is responsible for his own suffering. We all owe each other a duty to prevent victimhood whenever and wherever we find it.
Fraud victims are usually poor and hopeless. They're the same type who play state-sanctioned lotteries (why we tolerate those, I'll never understand) because they have no other source of hope. They're trying to scrape themselves a living, and along comes a wolf who fleeces them. That's a bad thing. That much is clear.
Anything that increases the frequency of fraud is a bad thing in my book. Whatever else the benefits may be, I don't think we should tolerate it.
Why the preoccupation with "intelligent" animals?
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Uplifting Dolphins
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· Score: 5
Why are humans so preoccupied with intelligence as a measure of species worth? Because we're narcissistic to think that we possess it as a defining characteristic and that therefore other animals are valuable in so far as they approximate our own species?
Intelligence isn't even an evolutionarily important characteristic: just look at how few species possess it -- if it were more valuable, then it would be selected for, and more species would have it. Which species do have it? Squids, spiders, and other predators. Intelligence has evolved at each stage in animal evolution (cephalopods, arachnids, mammalia, etc.) but only as a means of furthering predation. Where's the morality in that?
If any animal has worth, then they all have worth. If we're squeamish about killing any one kind of animal (a "higher-order" "intelligent" animal), then we should be squeamish about killing all animals, since intelligence is just another characteristic and not a particularly important one at that. This absurdity is well illustrated by the author's final point:
The ultimate goal of Marten's research is to illustrate to the world the high intelligence of dolphins and the need to protect the species.
"Dolphins are being killed by the millions so we can get our tuna. It's like what people used to say about the American buffalo -- 'Gee there used to be buffalo up on those hills.' The same will be true of the dolphins if we do not act," Marten said.
It's been said before, but it needs repeating: what about the tuna? Why worry about killing all those dolphins when we're so intent on killing the damn tuna? If you cut tuna, do they not bleed?
I can only think of one really good reason why we should be studying dolphin communication and that's so we can learn from their experience with other sea creatures. We've been to the moon and back, but there are parts of our own ocean that we've never explored, depths we've never plumbed. If we could communicate with dolphins and ask them what they've seen of our aquatic universe, then maybe we'd know a lot more about what goes on beneath the surfaces of our placid lagoons. Dolphins provide a perfect solution to the dangers and expenses of manned and unmanned submarine exploration -- let's not reinvent the wheel by reinventing the dolphin.
Online Journals are asking for TROUBLE
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Online Journals
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· Score: 2
I'll never understand why people keep journals of any sort, and putting them up online is just asking for trouble. Big trouble.
Why would you want every lamer in the world to have access to your innermost secrets? Why would you want to expose yourself to that sort of voyeurism? At least when you keep a deadtree journal, you know who has access to it (at least until you die). When it's online, even access logs aren't much help.
You're opening youself up to cries of plagiarism, either by others or by you yourself (as you discover how others have plagiarized your work).
You're leaving an enormous e-papertrail for police and criminals alike to hunt you down and cause you anguish.
You're opening yourself up to pangs of self delusion and false pursuit of grandeur. Journals are an inherently narcissistic endeavor, labeling anyone who keeps one as a fool who cannot keep his mouth shut or who insists that others might find his experiences somehow relevant or helpful.
Ultimately, journals are an ill-advised use of resources and bandwidth. How many more enlightened endeavors could we pursue with all the diskspace and bandwidth that is currently devoted to online journals? Sites like kuro5hin.org waste far more space on users' diaries then they'll ever spend on actual useful articles and discussions.
If it's worth doing, then it's worth doing right. If it's worth saying, then it's worth writing up using principles of correct grammar and elegant prose. Private journals are a haven for miscreants and illiterates in a world properly dominated by real journalists (such as our own Jon Katz). If you must insist on keeping one, then keep it offline where it belongs. Don't subject the rest of the world to your silly musings about anime or your latest unrequited teen crush.
However, and here's the interesting part for the Amiga community, there is no reason why it can't run anything else - Ideas2Reality will even provide open documentation on the platform for third-party developers. In fact, when I asked them if something like MorphOS might be seen on the platform, "We're looking into it!" came the excitable reply. Good news indeed if it goes ahead.
Hey, I can play the what-if game too!
If it gets funded
If it gets built and
If it's affordable and
If it's implemented well and
If developers rally around it and
If consumers buy it and
If it gets a strong application base and
If it doesn't get bought out and quashed by current heavyweight, then
Missed legal suits are actionable in shareholder lawsuits.
Our combatative accusatorial system of justice requires that each side zealously play its cards, in the hope that the truth will be found somewhere in between.
If Napster has lost, then blame Napster for screwing up. Don't blame the RIAA just because they fought a better fight and prevailed.
What were you expecting Napster to do? This is prudent corporate strategy and par for the course.
It all makes perfect sense. Why own shares in a competitor to your imminent product? They'd have to divest, and that's what they've done.
Antitrust law discourages companies in the same market from owning stakes in each other, but Microsoft and Corel could previously claim they're not actually in the same market, since their underlying software was different and they were aimed at ostensibly different audiences.
The only explanation for why Microsoft would dump its Corel shares (which have been doing well, lately) is to clear the field for them to bring MSLinux out. It makes perfect sense.
The big question now is whether anyone will buy a Linux distribution from Microsoft.
This may sound like something solely aimed at fattening corporate profits, but there's more than one benefit to consumers as well.
Think of how much harder it will be for someone to profit from stealing you physical belongings if they only work within your authorised location.
Think of how much harder it will be for someone to fraudulently sell you stolen goods or illicit goods if those goods won't function outside their original location.
This is just an appropriate application of the sort of paternalism our governments have been engaging in for years.
People are sedentary creatures by nature. Most people live in the same town all their lives -- the same town their parents and their parents' parents lived in. If you're never going to move, then you're never going to be negatively affected by this safety mechanism.
And if the majority of people won't be negatively impacted, whereas the minority of criminals will, then where's the harm? It's the same reason why we outlaw weapons of mass (and minor) destruction -- no law-abiding citizen has the need for a weapon, so it does no harm to deny that right to everyone in the aim of preventing criminals from using them.
It's an exciting future where software and hardware meld together and blur the lines. Soon we'll have sentient furniture, and the rest of these problems will pale by comparison.
If steps like these are necessary on the path to artificial intelligence and other exciting developments, then I'm all for them. We have to support companies now in the hope that they'll generate good later. That's what corporatism is all about and why it's enshrined in the US Codes and Constitution.
This isn't about freedom and it isn't about personal autonomy. It's about money for both sides, plain and simple. And for this reason, I consider the whole debate to be intellectually dishonest.
Intellectual-property owners don't have a fundamental natural-law right to restrict the copying of their intellectual property. That right exists merely because of government fiat, protecting moneyed interests. As such, IP-owners will go to any length to ensure maximized profit realization, regardless of which individuals get the shaft.
Similarly, the individuals who are fighting the IP owners are acting out of their own selfish economic motives. They are too lazy or too narcissistic to pay for others' work, and therefore they try to cloak their economic motives in the florid language of freedom and liberty. It's a disgrace to proper civil liberties to lump socially sanctioned stealing in with freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, the right to bear arms, and all the other fundamental rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights. There is no right to steal others' IP.
With that said, where do we go from here? Both sides will continue duking it out in court or in the realm of public criticism, and no amount of wishing will make them shut up. Both sides will continue to waive their banners of zealotry, and both will try to recruit innocent bystanders to their side, either through coercive acts of Congress or through media blitzes.
I'm not suggesting we should regulate what sort of discourse we should allow on the airwaves so as to exclude these tired rehashings of pro/anti-IP and pro/anti-stealing, but it would go a long ways towards getting this debate off the front pages where it doesn't belong.
At the end of the day, it still comes down to the difference between the haves and the havenots. I don't see much room for discussion, anymore.
Not once has a popular website been bought out by a big corporation without losing its soul, and not once has a corporation managed such a site successfully without losing its shirt.
Slashdot? We just haven't seen the end of the road, yet. But it's coming.
It's the classic problem of vertical consolidation in the industry: VaLinux makes the hardware that people run when reading VaLinux's web content (via Andover). They control each stage of the production, and they ought to be able to do so financially successfully, right?
Wrong.
The disparate parts of VaLinux's farflung online empire were never well-suited to furthering VaLinux's corporate goals. VaLinux was and probably always will be a company that builds expensive linux machines for elite linux users (unlike Dell and other companies targetting the low-end linux crowd). Slashdot, Freshmeat, and now Kuro5hin were never aimed at this same audience.
The average Slashdot reader can't be bothered to load OSDN's ads. What made VaLinux think they could convince those same users to buy VaLinux-branded hardware?
Either the Andover division is going down in flames with VaLinux, or it will be jettisoned.
I only wish I could see the smirk melting from ESR's face. What's his portfolio worth now?
Linux may be new to the PDA scene, but some background principles must still be abided by. Julie Hinds of the San Francisco Examiner had an interesting article on the "Do's and Don'ts of PDAs" that holds just as true today as it did when it was first published four years ago.
When I heard the news that Symantec had filed for its patent, I was impressed. Here was a company that knew the business inside and out, one that had consistently performed above expectations and held the public eye. So what did I do? I went and bought a couple hundred shares of SYMC at about $47 1/8 per share. That was a bit more than a week ago. (February 9th.)
Since then, it's done well. Last closed at 50 11/16. It's gone consistently up over this period. A really sweet deal.
But now? Now they've squandered the crown jewel in their collection: the patent that distinguishes them from other companies in their field. Anyone can sell virus updates (though few have done as well as Symantec). Not everyone could have done so if Symantec had kept its wits about it and enforced the damn patent.
Who cares if it would've been unpopular?! That's what business is all about. That's what capitalism is all about: getting a limited monopoly from the government (a patent) in order to restrict the trade of your competitors in reward for a brilliant insight or idea. That's what patents are for. They're not something you play with in kindergarten. They're not like shuffleboard or parchesi. They're important stuff.
Now what am I supposed to do? Clearly, the only choice is to file a shareholder lawsuit against Symantec's board to overturn this situation. I'm a part owner now (albeit a small-time one) and thus have a say in deciding what sort of beaten path to bankruptcy the company shall trod.
Are there other like-minded Symantec-share owners in the audience who'd care to join me? Most shareholder lawsuits are settled out of court, and it's a great way to earn a quick buck from a bumbling company. Symantec has to learn that you shouldn't give away all your intellectual property for free like that. It just isn't profitable. They have to hang onto their brand image and they have to maintain their IP portfolios.
Slashdot Mirror
It's nice to have a reference list, but unless I have some anecdotal evidence as well, I'm always reluctant to set out for uncharted territories and leave behind what's been tried and true.
Does anyone have any realworld experience with these systems? Often, what looks good on paper turns out to be a complete waste of time and money because of some small inconvenience or incompatibility left unspecified in the specs.
I'd love to hear what anyone has to say.
I'm an American, but I'll be the first to admit that Canada is leading the information-technology revolution and leaving the US in the dust. Thirty years ago, parts of New Brunswick still didn't have running water. Now they're hotbeds of technological innovation.
Canada is ideal for two reasons: a small disperse population and a friendly regulatory environment. Unlike the US to the south, Canada's governments know how to spur economic and technological innovation by adopting stimulative regulations; a best-of-both-worlds approach where economic competition is suppressed in favor of great horizontal development. Monopolies become numerous, but the market is best served by maintaining control in the hands of the few where it can be best put to use. Take the Canadian health-care system, for example. The government has a monopoly on health care, but access is guaranteed to all. Perhaps the DOJ and its zealous persecution of Microsoft can learn something from this.
The American film industry is moving to Canada, as are giants in the IT industry. Fifty years ago, technology like this would've had to have been developed and deployed in the US if it were to be taken seriously. Now, it can be developed, deployed, and perfected in Canada, where it can then be exported to the rest of the world. Canada is about to replace the US as the world's largest exporter of electronic and devices and will likely supplant the US as the world's biggest superpower within a few decades.
Cellphone-jamming technology, whatever its moral and legal implications, is just another step in Canada's conquest of the twenty-first century. Expect more from Canada.
- Cars are the third largest source of fatalities in the U.S. each year.
- Cars are one of the biggest sources of pollution in the modern urban environment, pumping out carbon dioxide, sulphuric acid, and other pollutants.
- Cars consume an enormous percentage of household income for large sectors of our society: income that would be better spent on necessities.
- Road networks take up millions of acres of arable land in a world of growing food demands.
- Oil reserves are fast being depleted, and our continued reliance on oil (as compared with, say, France's reliance on nuclear power) has left us beholden to unstable or hostile political regimes throughout the world.
- Et cetera.
If wireless net access allows people to drive who would otherwise be sitting at home or at the office not harming the environment or contributing to the political and economic instability of our nation, then I can't approve. We should be concentrating on getting every classroom connected to the internet and giving laptops to the homeless so they can get the skills necessary to seek proper employment before we concentrate on such a silly endeavor as this.If the copy-protection scheme is to succeed, it must be as undetectable as possible by the end user. I don't mean that he won't realize he's using a copy-protected format, but that his ears won't be able to tell the difference between a copy-protected one and a non-protected one.
VHS macrovision is popular precisely because it's undetectable in how it alters visual quality. You'll hear lots of complaints by people who are unable to copy videos correctly, but you'll never hear a complaint by anyone about how macrovision has degraded their signal -- it hasn't.
We're almost at the stage where digital watermarks are completely seamless. Ten years ago, inititives like this would've been scoffed at. Now, they're becoming reality.
Anyone who knows Russian will instantly recognize the inanity of naming an antarctic lake "East".
The real problem is why chip manufacturers are selling mislabeled chips to begin with. In any other industry, that'd be considered fraud. With the chip industry, it's consdidered standard operating practice.
When you're buying a chip, you don't want to know just what the manufacturer is willing to tell you. You want to know all the details. You want to know why it is you should buy one brand and not another. You want to have the resources necessary to make intelligent and informed decisions about your purchasing behavior. That's the only way the free market works, and it's the reason why we have antitrust laws and other government influences to keep the free market lubricated.
If a company is selling you a chip and not telling you its whole story, then they're doing you a disservice. It's more than just an insult. It's an outright lie: a lie of ommission.
Companies should be required to test their chips rigorously and explicitly label them correctly as to their performance capabilities. That's the least the law can require. And until then, we should organize boycotts against mendacious chip manufacturers. That's our right as consumers and it'll help give our legal challenges more oomph and grassroots support.
I realize there's a certain culture in the geek demographic that says functionality is more important than form: just look at how open source software focuses on getting the job done and doesn't pay much attention at all to how ugly it is while doing so.
But it's important not just to behave legally. It's important not to give the appearance that you're behaving illegally. Much of law is based solely on appearances: the whole issue of "probable cause" is based on the police's perception of criminal wrongdoing, not the actuality of those criminal act. Usually the matter gets sorted out eventually, but only after a period of invasion and confiscation.
If you're a little more careful, you can avoid these sorts of surveillance. If you're doing wrong by illegally sharing IP, then why are you doing it out in the open? What kind of example does that set? And what can you possibly expect others to do on your behalf when you finally get caught as these did?
Maybe some education is in order, here. Geeks need to learn from marketers and lawyers that appearances do count for something in this world--maybe it should be a required course in all engineering and computer-science majors. The only alternative is learning it at the hands of the police. And nobody wants that.
As the article reminds us, State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, 149 F.3d 1360 reinstated patents for business models, overturning longstanding principles. Maybe it's time to do the same for mathematical formulas.
Back in 1972, Gottschalk v. Benson, 409 U.S. 63 set forth the principle that mathematical formulas are objects of nature, that exist in the ether and can be claimed by no one as proprietary. But is this really the case? One could say that the wheel or the transistor existed in nature as well, and yet both of those inventions were heavily patented in their day. All inventions are the product of human innovation, but they all take notice of environmental phenomena and bend it to human will. Isn't this what mathematics itself does, no less than any other science?
Computer science is itself a branch of mathematics, one valued at hundreds of billions of dollars annually. As the software industry grows in the future, how will these longstanding principles of patent law be brought into question? The trend has been towards granting more patents rather than less, and look where it's got us: our nation and our economies are more prosperous than ever, and the sciences have been advanced just as our founding fathers envisioned when they wrote intellectual property law into Article I of the constitution. Shouldn't we take every pain to help these industries even more?
"One-click"-style patents are the exception in a world of truly innovative patents. As we start to remove the last vestiges of a paternalistic scheme of government that regulates what may be patented, true innovation will again shine through.
Because of claims that shark cartilage is an effective treatment for joint problems, millions of sharks are killed each year in order to make cartilage supplements. Despite no scientific evidence to support these claims or other claims that shark supplements treat cancer, this chondroitic genocide persists.
Maybe now we can concentrate on growing our own cartilage instead of killing other animals for theirs. Everyone wins.
The differences between videogames and movies are being blurred faster and faster these days as computing power is increasing. Live-action videogames are finally starting to appear, and real-time strategy games have been a staple of the industry for the last decade. The trend is definitely heading towards realism.
Trademark law is based on the notion that certain words can be claimed for exclusive use within certain domains -- each domain is mutually exclusive of the others and so there's little overlap. Or at least that's the theory. Now, as games and movies are starting to converge, there's considerable overlap. And so trademark disputes like this aren't as absurd as they'd have seemed forty years ago.
It may be videogames and movies today, but what else will converge tomorrow? Businesses are (justifiably) merging and consolidating, and companies like AOL have their toes in every kiddy pool from here to Tijuana. AOL may own the trademarks for "buddy list" and "you've got mail", but can they extend those trademarks to other media such as movies? Don't laugh; there was a movie called "You've Got Mail" a few years ago. How much do you think AOL could've sued for?
And as this consolidation spreads throughout all industries, will we soon have a situation similar to the one we have with DNS tables where a single global registry of trademarks is enforced in all contexts? I'm not sure there's even a problem with that, but you have to admit, it'll take some getting used to.
In this analysis, Blizzard legitimately owns "Diablo". The movie companies will just have to pick a different name. It's the same problem they've had with not treading on each other's movie names for the last hundred years. Have you seen any other movies named "Dinosaur" since Disney came out with that movie? How about "American" since "American Beauty" won its oscar? This is just business as usual.
The last MUD shell I downloaded from a 1337 warez site had "xyzzy" linked to "rm -rf".
If you are celebrating while others are suffering, then are you responsible for ther suffering? Yes.
If you have the resources to help another person who has none, and yet you choose not to, are you responsible for that person's penury? Yes.
If you see others wasting resources that you know could be better spent elsewhere, then do you have a moral obligation to commandeer those resources and put them to their proper purpose? I submit the answer is: YES!
To do otherwise would be to to be complicit in evil.
It sounds like a good idea to show people what to expect so they can learn to avoid it in advance instead of getting hooked themselves. That much is clear.
Most frauds aren't perpetrated by large-time crooks. The myth of the traveling trickster coming into town and selling the townsfolk on the idea of a highschool marching band hasn't been true since well before the days of Seventy-Six Trombones. Most frauds are perpetrated by small-time crooks who see an opportunity and take it. They're usually not so clever, but they're effective in their sheer numbers.
If you put all the effective crime schemes in one central repository, won't that make it easier for small-time crooks to find them and start inflicting suffering on society's weak and feeble? Won't this also increase the number of copycat crimes?
There's a common misconception about fraud victims: that they somewhow deserved what they got, because they were themselves greedy and bought an idea that was too good to be true. But that's just false. No victim is responsible for his own suffering. We all owe each other a duty to prevent victimhood whenever and wherever we find it.
Fraud victims are usually poor and hopeless. They're the same type who play state-sanctioned lotteries (why we tolerate those, I'll never understand) because they have no other source of hope. They're trying to scrape themselves a living, and along comes a wolf who fleeces them. That's a bad thing. That much is clear.
Anything that increases the frequency of fraud is a bad thing in my book. Whatever else the benefits may be, I don't think we should tolerate it.
Intelligence isn't even an evolutionarily important characteristic: just look at how few species possess it -- if it were more valuable, then it would be selected for, and more species would have it. Which species do have it? Squids, spiders, and other predators. Intelligence has evolved at each stage in animal evolution (cephalopods, arachnids, mammalia, etc.) but only as a means of furthering predation. Where's the morality in that?
If any animal has worth, then they all have worth. If we're squeamish about killing any one kind of animal (a "higher-order" "intelligent" animal), then we should be squeamish about killing all animals, since intelligence is just another characteristic and not a particularly important one at that. This absurdity is well illustrated by the author's final point: It's been said before, but it needs repeating: what about the tuna? Why worry about killing all those dolphins when we're so intent on killing the damn tuna? If you cut tuna, do they not bleed?
I can only think of one really good reason why we should be studying dolphin communication and that's so we can learn from their experience with other sea creatures. We've been to the moon and back, but there are parts of our own ocean that we've never explored, depths we've never plumbed. If we could communicate with dolphins and ask them what they've seen of our aquatic universe, then maybe we'd know a lot more about what goes on beneath the surfaces of our placid lagoons. Dolphins provide a perfect solution to the dangers and expenses of manned and unmanned submarine exploration -- let's not reinvent the wheel by reinventing the dolphin.
- Why would you want every lamer in the world to have access to your innermost secrets? Why would you want to expose yourself to that sort of voyeurism? At least when you keep a deadtree journal, you know who has access to it (at least until you die). When it's online, even access logs aren't much help.
- You're opening youself up to cries of plagiarism, either by others or by you yourself (as you discover how others have plagiarized your work).
- You're leaving an enormous e-papertrail for police and criminals alike to hunt you down and cause you anguish.
- You're opening yourself up to pangs of self delusion and false pursuit of grandeur. Journals are an inherently narcissistic endeavor, labeling anyone who keeps one as a fool who cannot keep his mouth shut or who insists that others might find his experiences somehow relevant or helpful.
- Ultimately, journals are an ill-advised use of resources and bandwidth. How many more enlightened endeavors could we pursue with all the diskspace and bandwidth that is currently devoted to online journals? Sites like kuro5hin.org waste far more space on users' diaries then they'll ever spend on actual useful articles and discussions.
If it's worth doing, then it's worth doing right. If it's worth saying, then it's worth writing up using principles of correct grammar and elegant prose. Private journals are a haven for miscreants and illiterates in a world properly dominated by real journalists (such as our own Jon Katz). If you must insist on keeping one, then keep it offline where it belongs. Don't subject the rest of the world to your silly musings about anime or your latest unrequited teen crush.- If it gets funded
- If it gets built and
- If it's affordable and
- If it's implemented well and
- If developers rally around it and
- If consumers buy it and
- If it gets a strong application base and
- If it doesn't get bought out and quashed by current heavyweight, then
It could be the platform for you!- Unenforced legal rights are lost.
- Missed legal suits are actionable in shareholder lawsuits.
- Our combatative accusatorial system of justice requires that each side zealously play its cards, in the hope that the truth will be found somewhere in between.
- If Napster has lost, then blame Napster for screwing up. Don't blame the RIAA just because they fought a better fight and prevailed.
What were you expecting Napster to do? This is prudent corporate strategy and par for the course.It all makes perfect sense. Why own shares in a competitor to your imminent product? They'd have to divest, and that's what they've done.
Antitrust law discourages companies in the same market from owning stakes in each other, but Microsoft and Corel could previously claim they're not actually in the same market, since their underlying software was different and they were aimed at ostensibly different audiences.
The only explanation for why Microsoft would dump its Corel shares (which have been doing well, lately) is to clear the field for them to bring MSLinux out. It makes perfect sense.
The big question now is whether anyone will buy a Linux distribution from Microsoft.
- Think of how much harder it will be for someone to profit from stealing you physical belongings if they only work within your authorised location.
- Think of how much harder it will be for someone to fraudulently sell you stolen goods or illicit goods if those goods won't function outside their original location.
This is just an appropriate application of the sort of paternalism our governments have been engaging in for years.People are sedentary creatures by nature. Most people live in the same town all their lives -- the same town their parents and their parents' parents lived in. If you're never going to move, then you're never going to be negatively affected by this safety mechanism.
And if the majority of people won't be negatively impacted, whereas the minority of criminals will, then where's the harm? It's the same reason why we outlaw weapons of mass (and minor) destruction -- no law-abiding citizen has the need for a weapon, so it does no harm to deny that right to everyone in the aim of preventing criminals from using them.
It's an exciting future where software and hardware meld together and blur the lines. Soon we'll have sentient furniture, and the rest of these problems will pale by comparison.
If steps like these are necessary on the path to artificial intelligence and other exciting developments, then I'm all for them. We have to support companies now in the hope that they'll generate good later. That's what corporatism is all about and why it's enshrined in the US Codes and Constitution.
This isn't about freedom and it isn't about personal autonomy. It's about money for both sides, plain and simple. And for this reason, I consider the whole debate to be intellectually dishonest.
Intellectual-property owners don't have a fundamental natural-law right to restrict the copying of their intellectual property. That right exists merely because of government fiat, protecting moneyed interests. As such, IP-owners will go to any length to ensure maximized profit realization, regardless of which individuals get the shaft.
Similarly, the individuals who are fighting the IP owners are acting out of their own selfish economic motives. They are too lazy or too narcissistic to pay for others' work, and therefore they try to cloak their economic motives in the florid language of freedom and liberty. It's a disgrace to proper civil liberties to lump socially sanctioned stealing in with freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, the right to bear arms, and all the other fundamental rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights. There is no right to steal others' IP.
With that said, where do we go from here? Both sides will continue duking it out in court or in the realm of public criticism, and no amount of wishing will make them shut up. Both sides will continue to waive their banners of zealotry, and both will try to recruit innocent bystanders to their side, either through coercive acts of Congress or through media blitzes.
I'm not suggesting we should regulate what sort of discourse we should allow on the airwaves so as to exclude these tired rehashings of pro/anti-IP and pro/anti-stealing, but it would go a long ways towards getting this debate off the front pages where it doesn't belong.
At the end of the day, it still comes down to the difference between the haves and the havenots. I don't see much room for discussion, anymore.
Why are we still talking about this?
Not once has a popular website been bought out by a big corporation without losing its soul, and not once has a corporation managed such a site successfully without losing its shirt.
Slashdot? We just haven't seen the end of the road, yet. But it's coming.
It's the classic problem of vertical consolidation in the industry: VaLinux makes the hardware that people run when reading VaLinux's web content (via Andover). They control each stage of the production, and they ought to be able to do so financially successfully, right?
Wrong.
The disparate parts of VaLinux's farflung online empire were never well-suited to furthering VaLinux's corporate goals. VaLinux was and probably always will be a company that builds expensive linux machines for elite linux users (unlike Dell and other companies targetting the low-end linux crowd). Slashdot, Freshmeat, and now Kuro5hin were never aimed at this same audience.
The average Slashdot reader can't be bothered to load OSDN's ads. What made VaLinux think they could convince those same users to buy VaLinux-branded hardware?
Either the Andover division is going down in flames with VaLinux, or it will be jettisoned.
I only wish I could see the smirk melting from ESR's face. What's his portfolio worth now?
Linux may be new to the PDA scene, but some background principles must still be abided by. Julie Hinds of the San Francisco Examiner had an interesting article on the "Do's and Don'ts of PDAs" that holds just as true today as it did when it was first published four years ago.
When I heard the news that Symantec had filed for its patent, I was impressed. Here was a company that knew the business inside and out, one that had consistently performed above expectations and held the public eye. So what did I do? I went and bought a couple hundred shares of SYMC at about $47 1/8 per share. That was a bit more than a week ago. (February 9th.)
Since then, it's done well. Last closed at 50 11/16. It's gone consistently up over this period. A really sweet deal.
But now? Now they've squandered the crown jewel in their collection: the patent that distinguishes them from other companies in their field. Anyone can sell virus updates (though few have done as well as Symantec). Not everyone could have done so if Symantec had kept its wits about it and enforced the damn patent.
Who cares if it would've been unpopular?! That's what business is all about. That's what capitalism is all about: getting a limited monopoly from the government (a patent) in order to restrict the trade of your competitors in reward for a brilliant insight or idea. That's what patents are for. They're not something you play with in kindergarten. They're not like shuffleboard or parchesi. They're important stuff.
Now what am I supposed to do? Clearly, the only choice is to file a shareholder lawsuit against Symantec's board to overturn this situation. I'm a part owner now (albeit a small-time one) and thus have a say in deciding what sort of beaten path to bankruptcy the company shall trod.
Are there other like-minded Symantec-share owners in the audience who'd care to join me? Most shareholder lawsuits are settled out of court, and it's a great way to earn a quick buck from a bumbling company. Symantec has to learn that you shouldn't give away all your intellectual property for free like that. It just isn't profitable. They have to hang onto their brand image and they have to maintain their IP portfolios.
So are you with me?
- Pokey the Penguin?
- Tux the Penguin?
There can be only one.