I'm not sure what you think I'm implying, but it's not that there's some sort of conspiracy. I'm just saying that things like this implant, which have some positive, peace of mind enhancing uses, but also great potential negative uses, have a way of creeping in. I don't think that there are a group of villains sitting around a table in a smoke filled room planning to implant tracking devices in all citizens.
Also the V-chip concept is far from dead, if that's what you're implying. Content filtering of some kind is making its way to virtually everyone's tv at some point. Of course, most people can't even program their vcr's, so it's quite possible that no-one will use it.
Did you look at the picture on the companies web site? How about the company name? They're trying to push this into the mainstream as a way for parents to protect their children from being kidnapped, lost, what have you. The fact is that there are positive uses for this. There are also some quite evil uses for this sort of thing. People can start to get pretty irrational once they start to "think of the children". This is one of those things that will happen, society just has to watch to make sure that no-one tries to abuse such devices.
I don't have a problem with genetically engineered crops in general terms. On the other hand, I also think that any such crops should get at least a half century of testing before being used anywhere. However wonderful mankinds ability to control the DNA of living things may be, we're fooling ourselves if we think that the technology is even in its infancy. I've worked for a company that produces drugs through recombinant techniques, but our product was several grams of one particular kind of molecule strained out of thousands of liters of goo. And this was all done in clean manufacturing suites in a series of jars and vats with E. Coli or Chinese Hamster Ovary cells, not in open fields with complex plants. Even with complex plants, what genetic researchers do, by and large, is find a gene they like and shove it in somewhere. Great, they just invented a crop that produces a natural pesticide or glows in the dark when it's healthy (or is that when it's sick? Maybe both). Fine and dandy, but what are the side effects of all this magic?
Well first there's the hysteria generating stuff, here's some hypotheticals, some of them may already have real world analogues: Maybe this fantastic new lettuce that restores phosphates to the soil as it grows won't be so healthy for people with allergies to nuts since peanut DNA was used to produce it. Maybe that natural pesticide engineered into every type of crop - the one that's so safe for human beings - isn't so safe after all when it's coming in massive doses from every vegetable you eat. For the most part, these probably aren't big problems, except maybe to the people with food allergies. Anything that's actually dangerous will probably be picked up on quickly.
The more important problem is actually a symptom of a larger problem: the increasing convergance of food suppliers into monopolies and hegemonies. Price fixing issues aside, monolithic entities mean that a mistake is a VERY big mistake. Potentially a "we have to decide which countries get to eat this year" kind of mistake. First off, there's biodiversity issues. This can already be a problem with large seed suppliers, but it becomes even more acute with genetically modified crops. This is what caused the Irish Potato Famine (well, tremendous arrogance and opportunism on the part of those who should have been fixing the problem is what turned it into a horrific disaster, but it was the lack of biodiversity that touched it off); the potato people who were the victims of the famine were all essentially growing the same potato and many lives would have been saved if that species of potato had been switched out for a more fungus-resistant variety. The same thing could potentially happen to the world's crops - swept by a blight. If we aren't prepared with different varieties of seeds in quantity, it might take multiple growing seasons to recover. The quite possible existance of duplicate DNA accross different species of crops increases the possibility of an affliction that will destroy virtually any crop. Then there's the problem of crops with built-in pest control again. What happens when natural selection fills in the niche for resistant vermin? It will happen. Penicillin is already becoming obsolete for the same reason. I seem to recall something that happened fairly recently where the heavy use of a particular pesticide killed off a type of caterpillar that it was intended to, but it also killed off the birds that preyed on them. As a result, the _other_ species of insect pest that the birds preyed on - some sort of Boll worm or something - came out in record numbers and pretty much destroyed everything. So now we get to have this kind of stupidity built-in to our plants. Oh joy.
As for our friend, the terminator gene, there's lots to say about that. Overall, I suppose it's a good idea as far as preventing the escape of unwanted plant deviants. I can't help thinking of the ridiculous bit in Jurassic Park where it turns out that the dinosaurs can breed because the use of frog DNA to patch holes in the dinosaur DNA has allowed some of the females to turn into males (it probably would have been a better idea to make them all males to prevent breeding, or, better yet, sterilize them all at birth). It may be stupid in the context of dinosaurs, but it's easy to imagine in genetically flexible things like plants (most of which can survive being haploid, diploid, triploid, tetraploid, whatever). That terminator gene, or any other inserted gene could play all sorts of tricks we don't know about yet. What most people are worried about, of course, is that the pollen, which can travel vast distances, will end up causing a mysteriously dismal growing season for farmer Jones, who lives fifty miles away, in three years time.
What everyone is worried about is that these sorts of things take many, many years of trial and error. That is, after all, how progress happens. People are worried that the trial and error is going to happen with the worlds food supply. They might not be so worried if it were not for the fact that GM crops have a long history of biological and environmental disasters (like all the "there was an old lady who swallowed a fly" attempts to control one species by introducing another) to live up to.
You don't have to be a "greenie" to understand the need for caution in this sort of thing. On the other hand, when we understand more about what we're doing, we can probably make all sorts of neat organisms. I don't need donut trees or anything like that, but I do think that, barring the existance of nano-machines to do it instead, things like genetically modified bacteria or maybe even slime molds might be great for cleaning up certain kinds of pollution. There might be all sorts of things we can do, but we have to think them through before we try them, because there might be no turning back.
You seem to be suffering from a misapprehension. And I don't mean the one about capital letters being unneccessary. You seem to be under the impression that a copyright must be protected or it will be lost to the public domain. This is not in fact correct. Patents must be defended against claims of prior art and trademarks must in theory be protected against any likeness that appears anywhere in the world lest the trademark become generic and be lost. Also, trade secrets must be protected from slipping out otherwise you don't own them and it's your own stupid fault for not patenting and if it's not patentable then who are you to think that you have a claim on it anyway? Copyright, however, does not require protection of that kind. The only thing you might have to protect it from is claims of plagiarism. True, it's still the copyright holder's responsibility to regulate the use of the copyrighted material. But no judge is likely to say "hey, they got away with using your stuff and you didn't do anything about it, hence everyone has a right to use it.
Now, the abandonware people probably think that should be the case to some degree. That copyright holders who try to hoard things pointlessly shouldn't be allowed to complain if people aren't buying what they aren't selling.
To be fair, there are a number of angles to look at this issue from. For example, a copyright holder may take a few, or twenty, years off selling a particular copyrighted property. Maybe if, in the meantime, someone has been distributing it for free, when they bring it back they won't get as many sales. This was, in fact, Disneys motivation for objecting to the vcr when it was emerging. Disney's traditional model for release of its movies was to create scarcity through periodic, brief theatrical releases with occaisional, must see, tv releases. The scarcity greatly increased ad revenue. Disney was worried that, if people could copy the movies off tv, their artificial stranglehold would be destroyed. What actually happened was the emergence of the incredibly lucrative home video market which made Disney money in heaps beyond the dreams of avarice. So maybe there aren't that many ways to look at this after all. Maybe artificial scarcity is just a bad model. Still, one of the reasons that people buy videos rather than recording them (aside from the fact that the video comes out long before the tv release) is that the quality is a lot better. With software, the quality doesn't actually change. It's a perfect digital copy. None of that actually changes the fact that most of these companies don't intend to ever release this stuff again. Microsoft would probably be sued if they tried to sell Windows 3.1 again without any support. So, the model they seem to have chosen: distribute old stuff until someone tells you not to, seems to be a fairly good balance.
In a more perfect world it would be impossible to actually save money copying an entire book in a coin operated photocopier. As it is, the vast majority of scholars who create these works recieve a pittance as far as royalties are concerned. Many of them create these books more for their academic reputations than for money, although the money probably helps too.
I'm looking cautiously forward to the dawn of electronic books. I think that students in general would be a lot better off with free textbook downloads more in line with the free software model. Not just because they wouldn't have to pay so much money, but I think the quality of the texts might improve as well. Errata could be corrected on the fly, for one thing. For another the publishing companies seem to like coming out with lots of new editions, pointlessly re-organised and often not as good as older editions, to combat the used versions of the older edition that are cutting into their profits. The very large expense of the publishing process could be taken out of the production of schoolbooks altogether. Peer editing could replace the traditional editor at the publishing company, or freelance editors or companies devoted solely to providing book-editing services could also work. As for monetary compensation for authors, there could be a grant system under the dept. of education. Perhaps private educational institutions could also charge a small book fee as part of tuition.
The last thing I want to see is the current publishers continuing to gouge students by charging half a million of them five dollars for a book file that cost them fifty thousand dollars to create. Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the way things go. Until, of course, some academics start to release texts for free. Of course, by then, legislation may have been bought making it illegal to sell electronic books without copy protection built in and also making it illegal for even a non-profit to just give away intellectual property. Once you have laws like the DMCA and UCITA I can see it being argued, further down the slippery slope, that people who give away their intellectual property for free aren't competing fairly in the marketplace. It's a dire view of the future, but I can see the big media companies pushing for that sort of thing if it's the only way they can hope to survive. After all, if you push the "intellectual property is no different from physical property" argument far enough, you can throw out the public domain altogether because, like land, if it exists, someone must own it.
Ok, that's enough of that rant. I also wanted to point out that I've always bought my text books. However, I've photocopied sections from books in the school library in the interest of having a copy I could read later while still leaving the book in the library for the fifty other students in the class. I've also photocopied entire workbooks that I own so that I could do the exercises on the photocopies and turn them in while keeping the workbooks pages intact so that I could do the exercises again later if I chose to. Like most people I consider myself morally clean photocopying if I know for a fact that I wouldn't have bought what I copied, even if I couldn't have copied it. I simply would have read the books in the library rather than taking home the photocopy, or I would have done the exercises on the original workbook pages, handed them in, gotten them back, then used lots of white out if I wanted to re-do them. Many people find the "copying is always theft" argument as idiotic as you probably find the "copying is never theft" argument to be.
You're right that there are significant R&D costs in most industries. I disagree that progress would stop without intellectual property. New ways would need to be found to pay for the research, certainly, and the article explicitly states that intellectual property can't vanish without some changes to the economic system. Encasement of technologies in a solid brick wouldn't work. Unless it's something amazingly new, the functionality of almost anything that can be hidden that way can be reverse-engineered or simply recreated by people of reasonable intelligence and skill. Also, many industries already try their hardest to avoid innovating, and use obstructive patents for that reason. For example, an oil company has little incentive to change the way they do things considering all the money they've spent on oil rigs, tankers, pipelines, refineries, gas stations, etc. but might research and patent alternative energy technologies. As for medicine... You're obviously confused about how the FDA actually works. It has absolutely zilch to do with intellectual property. No one, to my knowledge, has a patent on deadly nightshade, but the FDA still will not let you sell it as a salad vegetable. The FDA was created partly in response to an incident where someone thought it might be a good idea to use ethylene glycol as a sweetener in childrens medication. The FDA is all about making sure that foods and drugs are tested properly and safely, prepared properly and safely, and distributed properly and safely with all appropriate warnings and indications. Yes, they are an enourmous beurocracy. Yes, FDA paperwork needs to be moved around with forklifts (well, not exactly, it generally comes in boxes that a human can carry, it's just that it comes in _many_ such boxes). Yes, the FDA are pretty much the ones who _require_ all that animal testing which, understandably, makes many people upset. Despite all that, the FDA is _very_ neccessary and valuable to anyone who likes to live with reasonable confidence that their food and medications are safe. So, if you produce food or drugs/medical devices the FDA _owns_ you. Try to sell your yellow, viscous liquid for the treatment of ailment X and tell the FDA that since it isn't patented you don't have to reveal to them what it is/how it's made/what your iron-clad standard operating procedures are/how you tested it and see how long it takes you to end up in federal prison. That's the problem with intellectual property disputes, so many dittos and so few who really know what's actually involved. It's frightening how many of the people I know don't even really know what the various kinds of intellectual property are let alone the differences between them and yet still harbor strong opinions.
Remember that Linus adamantly defends "Linux," which he has not invested nearly as much energy building. What is fair for Linus is fair for Mattel.
I don't really see how the "Linux" trademark and Linus' defense of that trademark are similar to the "Barbie" doll trademark. To begin with, Linus didn't even register a trademark for Linux at first. He made what, in a rational world, would have been a correct assumption: that it wasn't a big deal, since he was going to let anyone use it anyway. Naturally, the patent and trademark office gave the trademark on am operating system called "Linux" to an individual named William Della Croce sometime around 1995(this is just another example of all the fine research the folks at the Patent and Trademark office put in. Honestly, does anyone else think that it's just about time for a class action suit?) This fine, upstanding citizen, shocked to witness the number of flagrant abuses of his valuable trademark, and began sending out letters demanding 10% royalties. So, several organizations got together and filed a petition to cancel the trademark. It took at least a year and I don't know how much money and effort to actually get the trademark transferred over to Linus. Can you imagine how much effort it must take when the case isn't absolutely cut and dried like this one was?
Anyway, the reason that there even is a "Linux" trademark is obvious. It's a protective measure. And any adamant defense Linus performs on behalf of the "Linux" trademark is for the purpose of keeping it free for everyone. Linus might, for example, use the trademark to prevent someone else from trademarking a generic term like "Linux Expert", but would not try to prevent someone from using it in a legitimate service mark like "S.U.S.E. Linux" or "Red Hat Linux" or what have you.
So, Linus' defense of the "Linux" trademark seems to be almost the opposite of what Mattel is trying to do with their "Barbie" doll trademark.
The whole charade where companies have to make a show that they're defending their mark is kind of ridiculous. It almost seems like a welfare system for IP lawyers (personal note: My big sister just graduated law school. I'm very proud of her, but I'm still going to torment her with lawyer jokes for years). "Hey, look at me boss, I'm doing my job, look at all of these trademark violators I've caught stealing from the company!" Let's face it, you can't really have a very famous product without it diluting its own trademark. I'm pretty sure that most people are like me in thinking of most plastic dress up dolls as Barbies in a vague sort of way. Due to the doll's fame, most people in this country have a mental image of Barbie, the unrealistic, "realistic" plastic doll who lives in a perfect pink and purple plastic world, has gobs of money, and whose apparant source of opportunities and happiness is her enourmous wardrobe. Barbie is a phenomonal business success, and, as such, has entered into our collective consciousness. They can't just say: "Buy the dolls, but don't you dare _think_ about them".
In this case, I'm sure that the name of this clan is in some way inspired by Barbie the doll. So what. They're not selling plastic dolls as far as I can tell. Maybe they're planning to distribute customized models or skins or whatever for Tribes (If you can modify the game in that way, I'm assuming you can, since to not be able to would be stupid) that look like plastic dolls. Aside from the fact that the models look like plastic dolls anyway, that still doesn't feel like infringement. It just doesn't feel right for Mattel to act this way, since they aren't hurting Mattel.
You can't trademark "the smell of pizza" for a pizza, because smelling of pizza is a general feature of pizza, not a distinctive feature of Fred's Pizza.
Of course, some might say that the smell of fresh cut grass is a general feature of tennis balls. Maybe not new ones, but, if they're used on a grass court, they end up smelling that way after a short time. The article makes it pretty clear that the other scents that the company has tried are all tennis court scents. So, they're making tennis balls that smell as if they've already been used on a tennis court. That doesn't seem like such a stretch from trademarking the smell of pizza. In fact, it seems a lot like, for example, developing a scent that makes frozen pizza smell cooked even while it's still frozen and trademarking frozen pizza that smells like cooked pizza. I would also like to note that the original poster did bring up this perfectly valid point with the question about the smell of pizza in a can.
There are clearly many legitimate uses for the mp3 file format, so it can't simply be declared illegal because it can be used to violate copyright.
On the other hand, a tax is already collected and paid to the RIAA (is that enough A's?) for certain types of recording media under the assumption that they will be used for piracy. So, although mp3's probably can't be declared illegal (and I agree that it's ridiculous to single out any single file format), there is precedent for pro-active fines on the media that may carry them. So, it may not be all that far fetched that part of the cost of hard drives, floppies, cd-r's, etc. will be a direct payment to the RIAA (again, is it "...Artists Association of America", or just "...AA"?), MPAA (same problem), etc.
This may be far-fetched, but lots of laws that I once would have considered beyond the pale of sanity seem to have been passed. I am most certainly not a lawyer, nor do I have any training in ethics (do lawyers have to take any courses on ethics?), but, as an amateur, I have to say that it seems wrong for a tax to be enforced whose proceeds go to an organisation which counts lobbying as one of its activities. That's just me though.
Most on-board computers are still about 20-25 years behind today's bleeding edge simply because NASA (and its sister agencies elsewhere) is really hesitant to bring in anything but the old, "tried and true" technology.
"If it isn't broken, don't fix it" seems like pretty sound reasoning to me. I've always understood that the reason the shuttle's computers were so "behind" is because the itty bitty details used in recent chips can be taken out pretty easily by a single cosmic ray. There's really no practical way at present (possibly ever) to block the radiation you get in orbit without bringing along more shielding than the shuttle can lift. So, computer systems have to be fault tolerant, redundant, and have components that can take a beating at the microscopic scale. I've heard that most laptops that do long duty in space end up failing after a few months.
Unisys may have the right to profit from their patent, but they can't profit from it in any way they feel like. For example, once upon a time, algorithms were explicitly prohibited in patents. The only way around this was to patent a specific hardware implementation of an algorithm. Then, somewhere along the line, it was decided that a patent could be granted on _any_ hardware implementation of an algorithm, which essentially granted a patent on the algorithm itself. So, it is a relatively recent development in the history of patent law that an algorithm patent holder can demand royalties for software that uses the algorithm. Also, most of the articles I've read have been a little fuzzy on the details, but the way I understand it, Unisys is demanding that any web site that uses gifs, regardless of where they come from, pay them royalties. I can't understand how this is even legal for them to do. They own a patent on LZW encoding, which means that any software or hardware implementation of LZW requires a license. That does _not_ cover the finished product of LZW encoding such as a GIF image. So, unless this is based on a different patent altogether, such as "method of embedding lzw compressed images in a web page", this doesn't make any sense. The only explanation that I can come up with is that they are actually demanding, in addition to the license fee the maker of gif-generation software may have paid, a per-use fee on the LZW algorithm. Anyone with even a shred of a sense of proportion can see how completely insane that is.
With the possible exception of contract killers, right?:)
Although, from what I've seen in movies lately, contract killers are often all around decent guys. And we all know that Hollywood is never wrong about anything.:P
I'm pretty sure that wasn't a death threat. It was just a dead lawyer joke. It's the difference between saying, for example, "I wish you were dead" and "I am going to kill you." One of them is a threat while the other is merely a statement of preference. In fact, the statement "I am going to kill you" is not even neccessarily a threat. I've had plenty of people say "I'm going to kill you" to me and, to the best of my knowledge, not only have none of them meant it, most of them weren't even really angry. It's language, it gets used playfully a lot. Context changes meaning and sometimes you have to figure out which is which (for those who have seen the movie "My Cousin Vinnie", remember "I shot the clerk(?)"?) Text-only forums like Usenet or Slashdot usually make this task more difficult than it is with face to face contact, especially when neither the poster nor the reader understand the established text based conventions to replace things like body language. Given enough time using such forums, you'll learn to understand people's intended meaning better, or to at least give people the benefit of the doubt.
You make a good point. On the other hand, fan fiction is, believe it or not, usually written by fans. In a lot of cases, fans will respect the wishes of an author or other creator they greatly admire when it comes to fan fiction. However, a huge chunk of the fanfic out there is based on "properties" owned by impersonal corporations that don't care about the characters at all. The various works about those characters and settings are often written by committee or by whichever creator the company has hired this week. The original creators have usually already sold away their right to control the characters. I suppose that I think that there is something wrong with people creating fanfic based on Anne Rice books since she is apparantly vehemently against it. It seems incredibly disrespectful to defy those wishes, since her reasons are personal. On the other hand, I have much less of a problem with people writing Batman fanfic. The Batman character and mythos have been passed between so many different hands that there's no way anyone could complain on personal grounds. Warner Brothers has an interest in Batman, but it's purely financial. So, who really cares about an emotionless entity like Warner Brothers? P.S. The law about 90% of anything, including fanfic, being crap seems to hold true. On the other hand, I'd have to say that only about 10% of Batman fanfic is worse than, for example, the movie "Batman and Robin". Arnold as Mr. Freeze!?!? He wasn't a very good choice. Still, we've all seen him pull off an emotionless, cold-blooded performance in "The Terminator" but he completely failed to pull that off for Mr Freeze. And... ruber nipples? RUBBER NIPPLES?!?!?! Gah! How could they possibly allow someone to direct a batman movie whose only knowledge of the character is the 50's TV series and the other batman movies? Can you see why the fanfic author's loyalties are to the characters first, the creator(s) second and the intellectual property owners (if these are different from the creator(s)) somewhere in one zillionth place.
Let's not forget that it is the _GNU_ Network Object Model Environment (I've never completely figured out what this means in relation to what GNOME actually is). So, looking at it from Miguel's point of view, calling it a GNU/Linux system makes sense. In fact, if you consider that the general populace considers the GUI to be the same as the OS, a lot of people would consider it fair to call the OS Gnome instead (of course, the opinions of most people who would think that don't count since they don't really understand the concepts involved). Gnome is also not exclusive to Linux. It's supposed to be portable to other operating systems or, at least, to other Unixes (Unices? Unii?). It might not run on other OS's right now (I haven't checked, I assume it probably runs on FreeBSD), but, like most free software projects, assuming that it's just a Linux project is a mistake. P.S. Please disregard what I just said if it turns out that Miguel has, in fact, stated somewhere that Gnome is an exclusively Linux-based environment. Thankyou.
How do you perform a "valid" cancel of someone elses post on Usenet? Even though it's entirely possible to cancel someone elses message (well, not really, you can send a cancel message, but a lot of servers won't honor it), that's not the way it's supposed to be done. You're supposed to cancel your own messages and merely _reply_ to the messages of others. It seems a little odd that someone would do this. I'm not sure what the defamatory statements made against this man in his own name were, but a similar sort of thing has been done on bathroom walls for many years now (for a good time, call....). That sort of thing has been done on Usenet a lot too. And it's wrong. And it makes people very angry. Not just those people who are being attacked, but also those of us who spot what's actually happen as well-meaning if misguided people post things like "I just mailbombed this scumbag". All that said, I don't think that you should be able to sue any ISP whose news server that stores or forwards such messages. Even if they have a policy which says that they don't automatically cancel messages at other peoples request. No-one has the resources to monitor that kind of volume. And, they shouldn't be monitoring it anyway. Sure, I understand that libel is not free speech, but most of what's on Usenet is free speech (ok, technically, most of what's on Usenet at the moment is spam, but if you ignore the spam then what's left is mostly free speech) and treating everyone who posts on Usenet as a potential "speech criminal" is a very bad thing. I don't know what's going on; I thought that there was a general concensus among people that Fascism is bad.
I think that the poster may have been talking about the American Home Recording Act, which imposed a tax(I'm not sure if"tax" is technically correct, but that's what it amounts to) on various forms of blank recording media. The money is collected under the assumption that anyone who wants blank media intends to use it for purposes of piracy. The money goes to the RIAA and other, similar organizations.
I don't know if latency would need to be a problem. As it is, nerve signals travel through your body at relatively slow speeds. The actual speed is somewhere around 240 mph (not for all nerve cells) but it can vary depending on temperature and the prescence of certain chemicals, etc. So, let's say 300 mph just to have a nice round number. At that speed, a nerve signal travels from the end of the typical person's fingertips to the brain in about two hundredths of a second. Most forms of electronic transmission function at speeds close to the absolute speed of light. Let's just say about half the speed of light in a vacuum to be conservative. So, about 335,000,000 mph. So, if the teleprescence operator is in a bunker 1,000 miles from the teleprescence unit, then a signal from the unit will take about 1 hundredth of a second to arrive. This is all just rough calculation, and I'm sure I've made lots of mistakes, but I'm pretty sure that my point that teleprescence can work just as fast as the human nervous system at great distances is fairly accurate. After all, unlike a game of quake, I don't think anyone is going to be trying to run anything like this over the internet. Rather, they'd use some sort of fairly direct connection with very low latency and very few stops along the way. Of course, there are lots of other problems to overcome, like the probability of enemy signal jamming, etc.
There's also the question of how directly this system interfaces with the nervous system of the operator. Does it only interact indirectly, with all stimuli being fed to the user via some sort body glove and output being generated by tracking the user's movements? Or does it interact by patching into the nervous system at key points and overriding other nerve signals? Or does it go right to the source and get its input and output directly from the brain? All of these approaches have benefits and drawbacks. The body glove idea has the disadvantage of the latency that the poster I'm replying to was concerned about, simply because, no matter how fast the communication with the teleprescence unit is, it has to be slower than the nervous system because the nervous system hasn't been removed from the equation. There's also the huge engineering problem of how to map the movements of the operator to the teleprescence unit and the sensations of the TU to the body glove. The direct brain connection has the problem that the human brain doesn't control the body as effectively as we think it does. In other words, a huge amount of our movement is controlled by reflexes remembered by parts of our nervous system entirely outside the brain. To compensate, the TU would need to have its own neural net for its own rexflexes and the operator would probably need to spend thousands of hours training with the unit to be able to operate it well. Effectively switching off between two entirely different bodies could cause thus far unknown psychological problems in the operator. The idea of patching into the nervous system at select points, but well away from the brain doesn't fully avoid the latency problem, but it could provide a much more immersive experience than the body glove while avoiding its engineering challenges (not that there aren't huge challenges in patching into the nervous system in a workable manner). The dual body problems would probably be less than with a direct brain connection, though not eliminated, and a long period of adjusting and training would still be required. This solution would probably require a lot more surgery(though probably much safer surgery) than the direct brain connection, as it would require patch-ins at hundreds or thousands of locations throughout the body. With any of these solutions, of course, the frequently used sci-fi plot device of destruction/extreme damage to the remote unit causing neurological damage to the operator is probably a non-issue. Sure, it makes cyperpunk stories a lot more exciting, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be too difficult (compared to everything else involved) to filter out any dangerous levels of feedback. Obviously epileptics and the like probably wouldn't make very good operators, of course.
The trouble with all of this is that, if you're going to make a remote controlled fighting machine, why make it anthropomorphic? It makes sense if you're making personal armor that it be shaped like the occupant, but not when you're making a remote controlled device. Admitting the fact that human beings, or at least animals with legs are better on varied terrain than just about any machine that exists today (maybe not if we're talking about small vertical take off/landing hovering devices), machines with wheels or treads beat humans for most practical military purposes. Maybe several classes of remote controlled or even semi-autonomous vehicles could be developed. Warfare would end up being like Command and Conquer or Total Annihilation without the resource gathering or unit manufacturing.
On the other hand, it would obviously be better if we could just get rid of warfare completely. Despite the coolness factor of all this, I'd be much happier with augmentation exosuits and remote robots being used in space or undersea exploration or even plain old terrestrial construction than being used to kill more people faster. I mean, I hear the "it will save [your nationality here] lives" argument, and it's all well and good, but that's usually at the cost of the other guys lives. I would personally love to be able to work on this sort of technology, but not if it's going to be used to kill people.
One little question. Weren't most of those countries more or less following the model of the USSR? And didn't the USSR abandon Communism "temporarily" quite early on in favor of State Capitalism? I really don't see where all this talk about the evils of communism comes from. It's just another system. Now fascism, that's evil. And, if you think about it, all of the examples people generally give of evil communist countries are examples of fascism. These are all countries that have basically been run by militaristic leaders. There have been plenty of capitalist fascist regimes as well. Oh, also, it seems silly to me that people keep on talking about the general misery and starvation, etc. suffered by people in the USSR. Read _any_ pre-soviet russian novel and tell me that Russians were any happier before the USSR came into being. I'm certainly not saying that there are no problems with communism. But there are plenty of problems with capitalism as well. The "free market" of capitalism seems to be a sort of Platonic ideal that doesn't have a true incarnation in this world. The systems that are actually used are heavily propped up as well as intentionally held in check in many ways. That really is a good thing because truly unfettered capitalism would probably eat lots of people alive and then start gnawing on its own tail. My really big worry with capitalism is, I suppose, based on where advancing technology will lead us. It's completely concievable and, I think, quite probable that someday, maybe not so far ahead in the future, it will be possible for all neccessities of life to be produced by machines with little or no human work required. Farms will be able to farm themselves. Factories will churn out processed foods by themselves, and the supermarkets will stock themselves or a person's grocery order will simply be delivered directly without need for human drivers or deliverymen. The same will hold true for clothing and other manufactured goods. It's surely possible to develop factories that not only operate by themselves but also quality check and maintain themselves. Same thing for power generation and construction. Some human supervision might be required, but we would be talking about a small percentage of the population. The trouble is that this model is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism. Aside from the teachers and doctors and policemen and lawyers, etc. what would the vast bulk of the population do for work. Would we all be working in service jobs of one kind or another just to keep a farce of an economic system running? How would things work? What could Capitalism possibly do for us in that situation? Not that Communism would really apply either. Communism was designed with the working class in mind, but the future I envision doesn't really have a working class. There would have to be an entirely new system. Whatever the new system will be, it will be an extremely bumpy road to get there from Capitalism. Maybe we won't get there, maybe we'll just end up total slaves to a fraction of the population who own the machines (built by other machines with material harvested by machines) and the land. Maybe not, who knows. But Capitalism is not the only answer, it's just one system of many, that more or less works at the present time, but it may be outdated some day.
Would Thomas Edison have existed if it weren't for patent protection? I doubt it. Or he would of but he would not have become the almost legend he is today
Well, unless we're talking about the timeline diverging before his conception, in which case there's an extremely good chance that he would not have existed if patent laws had never come to exist, then of course Thomas Edison would have existed. As you say, he might well not have been the near-legend he is today. Is that a bad thing?
From my point of view, that just means that he wouldn't be credited with inventing so many things that he didn't actually invent. I'm sure he was an intelligent man, and quite probably enthusiastic about invention, but most of his inventions were actually made by people who worked for him. When you get right down to it, he was just a business man in the right place at the right time.
Let's not forget also that the invention he is most famous for - the filament electric lightbulb (other forms of electric lightbulbs like arc lamps already existed) - was already a well understood idea. Everyone knew it could be done, it was just a matter of developing a filament that would survive long enough to make it worth it. As it happens, the carbon-filament solution that Edison's researchers came up with was an identical solution to that of Joseph Swan who had invented the same thing the previous year.
In light of that, I can't think of why it's a good thing that Thomas Edison is a legendary figure today. It actually seems like a bit of a tragedy that so many people who did valuable work have to be overlooked so that we can focus on a single "hero". I usually don't feel so bad about this when the one "hero" is someone who does, in fact, deserve a lot of credit even if they don't deserve all of it. Personally, I think that Edison gets more credit than he deserves.
The same sort of thing happened with Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell. Bell submitted (actually his father in law did it) his patent application before Gray. Later on, Gray sued unsuccessfully, partly because Bell had submitted his patent application without any working model, and partly because it looked a lot as if a lot of Bell's stuff had been more or less copied from Gray's.
It's actually kind of interesting to note that both Bell and Gray (and Edison's group too I think) were all working on the idea of a telegraph multiplexer (multiple messages along the same wire was a holy grail of technology at the time) first and those projects developed into a quest for voice transmission (which had also actually been demonstrated in crude form by an italian named Meucci years earlier). This seems to suggest that they were all more or less copying each others work as they developed their own. In the scientific world, this is a good thing and is expected, although pointless replication of effort can often be avoided through cooperation. However, with patents thrown into the mix, things turn nasty pretty quickly and the idea of scientific community dissolves because all researchers are seen as potential theives rather than kindred spirits. Soon, we get to the point where we are now where groups of scientists and researchers aren't supposed to communicate ideas to one another without an intervening layer of lawyers. And all of this is a good thing?
I understand the "financial motivator" idea behind the patent system. But I find the concept that human curiousity and inventiveness is driven by greed to be completely ridiculous. I also understand the argument that, without patents, certain types of costly research wouldn't bring sufficient returns to justify the research since the company that did the research would be beaten in the marketplace by another company that just copied the product. That argument is somewhat compelling, especially in the pharmeceutical field where research is so expensive. The trouble with that argument though, is that it points to the single evil of not having patents without really weighing it against the evils of having them. Let's not forget that a successful drug product for a pharm company is often an enormous cash cow. Those are sick people paying all that money. I think it's kind of sad that a different model isn't explored.
I'm in favor of tax money being used to fund most research. After all, we all ultimately pay for pretty much all research somehow, we might as well do it directly with fewer middle men. That way, there wouldn't really be a reason for patents on the technologies developed. I know a lot of people have ideological complaints to do with free markets and so forth, but there are large flaws in that model as well. To go back to the pharmecuetical industry, orphan drugs are a good example of the problems with a pure free market. An orphan drug is a drug to treat a disease that doesn't afflict enough people for a treatment to be a big money-maker or even to pay for the research involved. So, the government provides subsidies for such drugs to pharm companies. Now, some people don't like this idea and think that it would be better just to let these people die, but let's not forget that we're talking about a government that will wage quite expensive wars for the sake of maybe a few hundred of its citizens, and is occaisionally willing to spend a fraction of that to save thousands of its citizens. Is there actually anything wrong with that.
Actually, there's quite a lot of government money already spent on research which is then patented by the company or university that does the research. Maybe we would be better off if government money meant that the results belong to all of us rather than the lucky recipients of the funding.
Realistically of course, they're not going to drop the patent system any time soon and decide that scientific research is benificial to all and should be open and free. I hope that it is obvious to just about everyone that the system as it stands now just isn't working well enough, however. Some sort of reform is going to have to come about before things get worse and we have to wait 17 years (ignoring the fact that patents can be renewed) for them to get better.
The argument that others have made that I haven't seen directly addressed yet is what happens when two companies or individuals both have valid trademark claims. I don't know what businesses your pseudonymous Fooco and Fooco inc. are in, and you haven't actually made it clear if they have a trademark on their company name. These are pretty important bits of information. If your companies aren't in competition (some of the tone of your story indicates that you might be, but I can't assume that), then, as I understand trademark law, it's perfectly acceptable for them to be called Fooco inc. I think the only exceptions to that are if your company happens to be heavily established and very well known. That is to say that startup companies International Ballista Makers and Irma's Boutique for Marriages wouldn't be able to trademark IBM, although they would be able to if International Business Machines were a five year old company operating only in one state. This so partly because IBM is so well known that the standard claim that the other companies are taking a free ride on IBM's fame would actually have some validity in this case, although how that would hurt IBM in any way I have no idea. The other obvious reason is that IBM has a zillion lawyers (Note: slight exaggeration, I'm not actually trying to claim that IBM actually has... how much is a Zillion anyway?) whose job is to protect the IBM trademark and who do so zealously, even when it isn't really what the courts would normally consider infringement. Anyway, I'm sure nothing I've written is news to you, but it's important to be clear on this point: multiple individuals (companies are legally people in most ways) can own a trademark on the same arrangement of latin characters (Logos are outside the scope of this discussion). By definition, all domain names are unique. It doesn't take a genius to spot the obvious problem with trying to apply the trademark laws to that. Add to that the fact that, even though companies do have as much of a right to be on the internet as the rest of us, the rest of us also have as much of a right to be on the internet as companies. In other words, the internet and the WWW are not exclusively commercial media. In Real Life (TM and Pat. Pending) companies can't get away with telling people that their names interfere with their trademark. You could even, in theory, name your child IBM and I don't think they could legally touch you (I'm not aware of any actual legal precedent on this one, does anyone know if a case like this has ever been tried?) There might be a bit of a problem, however, if this child grows up and then tries to start a company with his/her own name; especially a computer company. More realistically, Colgate-Palmolive couldn't sue anyone for naming their child Ajax, since it is a person's name, with thousands of years of prior use. Colgate-Palmolive's lawyers did, however, try to force ajax.org to give up their domain name. Ajax.org, of course, has nothing to do with cleaning products. They don't have a trademark, but they have no reason to need one. And, who can forget the attempt by the makers of Archie comics to shut down Veronica.org. Obviously trying to enforce trademark on url's doesn't work very well. The legal basis for it is a little fuzzy also. People are allowed to use trademarks in spoken and written language, what isn't allowed is use of someone elses trademark to misrepresent your relationship with that company. So, you can't try to pretend that you are that company, that you have a relationship with that company, that they endorse you in some way, or try to use their fame to steer people to your own goods and services. The reason given for why companies often go well out of bounds and go after those who aren't really infringing is that if they don't defend their trademark, they could lose it. In other words, it's a big gray area, but it gives the lawyers something to do to justify their jobs. As you can see, I think the whole thing is ridiculous. Trademark laws have no place in domain names. Obviously though, something has to be done. This is really a technology problem: a new technology has arisen and people are trying to apply law that was never designed with such things in mind to it. The solution should not be via the law or new policies, it should be technological. I remember when I first heard about the company that was offering a single keyword internet address system. I thought it was a stupid idea. I still think the idea of a single company implementing it is a stupid idea, and there are obvious huge flaws in the idea of trying to create an internet where all adresses can be mapped to single words. On the other hand, I think a similar idea might be the solution to the current problem. Not using keywords, but company or product names. There could be a registration process with stringent criteria so that no registered company would be misrepresenting itself in any way with its name. In the case of multiple ip addresses mapped to the same name, the browser could present the user with a list of available sites, perhaps accompanied with small abstracts and company logo, etc. It shouldn't be too hard to build that into future web browsers. It would be a bit like using a search engine to try to find a companies address, but simpler. I've tried to find the websites of companies that don't fit into the www.foo.com pattern before using search engines, and it can be done, and it usually doesn't take more than ten minutes, but it really should not be a research project. Lots of search engines will arrange things so that if someone is searching using a companies name then their web page will come up early in the listings, but they usually demand money from the company to do this. Even with a stiff registration fee, having this sort of thing done at one central location will save a company a lot of money over paying every search engine. If this was implemented, then all of the arguments against people using trademarked words in their addresses would lose any validity. So, instead of forcing everyone who uses the internet playground to play by the rules of a small group, give them a sandbox that's still part of the playground, but set aside just for them. Those are my thoughts anyway.
You're right, what this article talks about is not _just_ a symlink. What it really is is a system to make sure that all duplicate files are actually symlinks to a single copy of the file, all done automagically. I couldn't really tell from the article, but I think this process may be pretty opaque from the users point of view. I don't know about you, but I can think of a whole host of ways that this can go wrong. Especially over a network. When I'm working with files on a network, I always make copies of important files to keep locally for times when the network is down. I don't think I would like it very much if I discovered that my local copies of files weren't copies after all. Anyway, the usefulness of this is beside the point. The point of this discussion is that the MS article/abstract/whatever heavily implied, or even outright stated that all of the concepts involved were developed by MS employees "from the ground up". Most of this article is just so much hyperbole, marketspeak and self-congratulation.
And, you have the freedom to write your own code that functions just like it.
That's actually one of the things that people are worried about with the UCITA. I admit that I have not read the full text of this bill, but from what I've heard, it strengthens the legal power of shrinkwrap software licenses considerably. Now, picture a software license which prohibits the use of the software for the purpose of creating a workalike and similarly prohibits passing on details to someone else so that they can create a workalike. So, anyone who wanted to make a true workalike wouldn't be able to without opening themselves or an "accomplice" up to the possibility of legal action.
Not that all free software has to be a copy of a piece of proprietary software. Free software creators are perfectly capable of doing their own design work. But, on the other hand, people often want bits and pieces in free software to be like a package they're already familiar with. Also, there's the matter of convergent evolution, often two people will choose the same solution to the same problem because it's a good solution. So, what happens when lawyer X for company Y says: "This feature in your software is exactly like ours, you must have violated our license agreement to copy it."
Ok, sure, my example is somewhat beyond the pale, but things like the UCITA lay the groundwork for just such situations. That's why people object to them. Because it _is_ possible to see the future. Or, at least, it's possible to see the future that some people and organizations would like to create. So, we object now rather than wait until the UCITA is used to set precedent to create even more laws that we feel tread on our rights.
Um most GPL'd software has and probably always will be commercial software. Perhaps you've blocked out of your memory the time when RMS charged 150USD for a copy of Emacs on tape? In fact the FSF is still charging quite a bit for software -- 70USD for the latest GNU Source Code CD-ROM set (for individuals).
That's an interesting perspective on things. Of course, you're essentially ignoring the fact that, since it's GPL'd, the same software can be obtained from another source at any price all the way down to completely free of charge. Or just obtained via ftp or what have you. The only reason anyone buys this stuff from the FSF is if they happen to want to financially support the FSF. In many other cases where GPL'd software is sold, it's usually sold value-added. This means that what you pay for is the price of media/distribution/etc. plus the price for the value-added part. You are right that GPL'd software can be commercial software, but it's one of those things where you have to be very narrow in your definition of what commercial software encompasses. Anyway, your argument has been seen before, usually in conjunction with personal or philosophical attacks against RMS himself. It doesn't seem all that relevant here.
Usenet doesn't have the eyecandy, or the moderated control of Slashdot.
Well, you're right about the eye-candy, although, quite frankly, I don't read Slashdot for the eye candy. You're wrong about moderation of course. There is such a beast as a moderated newsgroup. Many purists hate the idea of moderated newsgroups, and have usually protested the implementation of moderation on a previously unmoderated newsgroup, but, sometimes, it's the only way to stop the newsgroup from dying.
Someone in another post mentioned how they used to think that it would be really cool if everyone had internet access, but now they take it back. I used to think the same way. Wouldn't it be terrific if everyone could share in these wonderful communities. We used to have trouble in September when all the college newbies stumbled onto Usenet and proceeded to break all the rules and make pains of themselves. Of course, the rules would be explained, and the newbies would calm down and things would settle back from chaos somewhat. But now there's a constant stream of newbies, and they never seem to learn. Half of them seem to think that Usenet is a service provided to the world by AOL. And they never seem to learn!
Usenet is by no means dead, however. We just have to adapt. Moderation is now a neccessary evil. We have to keep signal up, even if we can't keep noise down. Wears down the spirit a bit though.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what you think I'm implying, but it's not that there's some sort of conspiracy. I'm just saying that things like this implant, which have some positive, peace of mind enhancing uses, but also great potential negative uses, have a way of creeping in. I don't think that there are a group of villains sitting around a table in a smoke filled room planning to implant tracking devices in all citizens.
Also the V-chip concept is far from dead, if that's what you're implying. Content filtering of some kind is making its way to virtually everyone's tv at some point. Of course, most people can't even program their vcr's, so it's quite possible that no-one will use it.
Did you look at the picture on the companies web site? How about the company name? They're trying to push this into the mainstream as a way for parents to protect their children from being kidnapped, lost, what have you. The fact is that there are positive uses for this. There are also some quite evil uses for this sort of thing. People can start to get pretty irrational once they start to "think of the children". This is one of those things that will happen, society just has to watch to make sure that no-one tries to abuse such devices.
I don't have a problem with genetically engineered crops in general terms. On the other hand, I also think that any such crops should get at least a half century of testing before being used anywhere. However wonderful mankinds ability to control the DNA of living things may be, we're fooling ourselves if we think that the technology is even in its infancy. I've worked for a company that produces drugs through recombinant techniques, but our product was several grams of one particular kind of molecule strained out of thousands of liters of goo. And this was all done in clean manufacturing suites in a series of jars and vats with E. Coli or Chinese Hamster Ovary cells, not in open fields with complex plants. Even with complex plants, what genetic researchers do, by and large, is find a gene they like and shove it in somewhere. Great, they just invented a crop that produces a natural pesticide or glows in the dark when it's healthy (or is that when it's sick? Maybe both). Fine and dandy, but what are the side effects of all this magic?
Well first there's the hysteria generating stuff, here's some hypotheticals, some of them may already have real world analogues: Maybe this fantastic new lettuce that restores phosphates to the soil as it grows won't be so healthy for people with allergies to nuts since peanut DNA was used to produce it. Maybe that natural pesticide engineered into every type of crop - the one that's so safe for human beings - isn't so safe after all when it's coming in massive doses from every vegetable you eat. For the most part, these probably aren't big problems, except maybe to the people with food allergies. Anything that's actually dangerous will probably be picked up on quickly.
The more important problem is actually a symptom of a larger problem: the increasing convergance of food suppliers into monopolies and hegemonies. Price fixing issues aside, monolithic entities mean that a mistake is a VERY big mistake. Potentially a "we have to decide which countries get to eat this year" kind of mistake. First off, there's biodiversity issues. This can already be a problem with large seed suppliers, but it becomes even more acute with genetically modified crops. This is what caused the Irish Potato Famine (well, tremendous arrogance and opportunism on the part of those who should have been fixing the problem is what turned it into a horrific disaster, but it was the lack of biodiversity that touched it off); the potato people who were the victims of the famine were all essentially growing the same potato and many lives would have been saved if that species of potato had been switched out for a more fungus-resistant variety. The same thing could potentially happen to the world's crops - swept by a blight. If we aren't prepared with different varieties of seeds in quantity, it might take multiple growing seasons to recover. The quite possible existance of duplicate DNA accross different species of crops increases the possibility of an affliction that will destroy virtually any crop. Then there's the problem of crops with built-in pest control again. What happens when natural selection fills in the niche for resistant vermin? It will happen. Penicillin is already becoming obsolete for the same reason. I seem to recall something that happened fairly recently where the heavy use of a particular pesticide killed off a type of caterpillar that it was intended to, but it also killed off the birds that preyed on them. As a result, the _other_ species of insect pest that the birds preyed on - some sort of Boll worm or something - came out in record numbers and pretty much destroyed everything. So now we get to have this kind of stupidity built-in to our plants. Oh joy.
As for our friend, the terminator gene, there's lots to say about that. Overall, I suppose it's a good idea as far as preventing the escape of unwanted plant deviants. I can't help thinking of the ridiculous bit in Jurassic Park where it turns out that the dinosaurs can breed because the use of frog DNA to patch holes in the dinosaur DNA has allowed some of the females to turn into males (it probably would have been a better idea to make them all males to prevent breeding, or, better yet, sterilize them all at birth). It may be stupid in the context of dinosaurs, but it's easy to imagine in genetically flexible things like plants (most of which can survive being haploid, diploid, triploid, tetraploid, whatever). That terminator gene, or any other inserted gene could play all sorts of tricks we don't know about yet. What most people are worried about, of course, is that the pollen, which can travel vast distances, will end up causing a mysteriously dismal growing season for farmer Jones, who lives fifty miles away, in three years time.
What everyone is worried about is that these sorts of things take many, many years of trial and error. That is, after all, how progress happens. People are worried that the trial and error is going to happen with the worlds food supply. They might not be so worried if it were not for the fact that GM crops have a long history of biological and environmental disasters (like all the "there was an old lady who swallowed a fly" attempts to control one species by introducing another) to live up to.
You don't have to be a "greenie" to understand the need for caution in this sort of thing. On the other hand, when we understand more about what we're doing, we can probably make all sorts of neat organisms. I don't need donut trees or anything like that, but I do think that, barring the existance of nano-machines to do it instead, things like genetically modified bacteria or maybe even slime molds might be great for cleaning up certain kinds of pollution. There might be all sorts of things we can do, but we have to think them through before we try them, because there might be no turning back.
You seem to be suffering from a misapprehension. And I don't mean the one about capital letters being unneccessary. You seem to be under the impression that a copyright must be protected or it will be lost to the public domain. This is not in fact correct. Patents must be defended against claims of prior art and trademarks must in theory be protected against any likeness that appears anywhere in the world lest the trademark become generic and be lost. Also, trade secrets must be protected from slipping out otherwise you don't own them and it's your own stupid fault for not patenting and if it's not patentable then who are you to think that you have a claim on it anyway? Copyright, however, does not require protection of that kind. The only thing you might have to protect it from is claims of plagiarism. True, it's still the copyright holder's responsibility to regulate the use of the copyrighted material. But no judge is likely to say "hey, they got away with using your stuff and you didn't do anything about it, hence everyone has a right to use it.
Now, the abandonware people probably think that should be the case to some degree. That copyright holders who try to hoard things pointlessly shouldn't be allowed to complain if people aren't buying what they aren't selling.
To be fair, there are a number of angles to look at this issue from. For example, a copyright holder may take a few, or twenty, years off selling a particular copyrighted property. Maybe if, in the meantime, someone has been distributing it for free, when they bring it back they won't get as many sales. This was, in fact, Disneys motivation for objecting to the vcr when it was emerging. Disney's traditional model for release of its movies was to create scarcity through periodic, brief theatrical releases with occaisional, must see, tv releases. The scarcity greatly increased ad revenue. Disney was worried that, if people could copy the movies off tv, their artificial stranglehold would be destroyed. What actually happened was the emergence of the incredibly lucrative home video market which made Disney money in heaps beyond the dreams of avarice. So maybe there aren't that many ways to look at this after all. Maybe artificial scarcity is just a bad model. Still, one of the reasons that people buy videos rather than recording them (aside from the fact that the video comes out long before the tv release) is that the quality is a lot better. With software, the quality doesn't actually change. It's a perfect digital copy. None of that actually changes the fact that most of these companies don't intend to ever release this stuff again. Microsoft would probably be sued if they tried to sell Windows 3.1 again without any support. So, the model they seem to have chosen: distribute old stuff until someone tells you not to, seems to be a fairly good balance.
In a more perfect world it would be impossible to actually save money copying an entire book in a coin operated photocopier. As it is, the vast majority of scholars who create these works recieve a pittance as far as royalties are concerned. Many of them create these books more for their academic reputations than for money, although the money probably helps too.
I'm looking cautiously forward to the dawn of electronic books. I think that students in general would be a lot better off with free textbook downloads more in line with the free software model. Not just because they wouldn't have to pay so much money, but I think the quality of the texts might improve as well. Errata could be corrected on the fly, for one thing. For another the publishing companies seem to like coming out with lots of new editions, pointlessly re-organised and often not as good as older editions, to combat the used versions of the older edition that are cutting into their profits. The very large expense of the publishing process could be taken out of the production of schoolbooks altogether. Peer editing could replace the traditional editor at the publishing company, or freelance editors or companies devoted solely to providing book-editing services could also work. As for monetary compensation for authors, there could be a grant system under the dept. of education. Perhaps private educational institutions could also charge a small book fee as part of tuition.
The last thing I want to see is the current publishers continuing to gouge students by charging half a million of them five dollars for a book file that cost them fifty thousand dollars to create. Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the way things go. Until, of course, some academics start to release texts for free. Of course, by then, legislation may have been bought making it illegal to sell electronic books without copy protection built in and also making it illegal for even a non-profit to just give away intellectual property. Once you have laws like the DMCA and UCITA I can see it being argued, further down the slippery slope, that people who give away their intellectual property for free aren't competing fairly in the marketplace. It's a dire view of the future, but I can see the big media companies pushing for that sort of thing if it's the only way they can hope to survive. After all, if you push the "intellectual property is no different from physical property" argument far enough, you can throw out the public domain altogether because, like land, if it exists, someone must own it.
Ok, that's enough of that rant. I also wanted to point out that I've always bought my text books. However, I've photocopied sections from books in the school library in the interest of having a copy I could read later while still leaving the book in the library for the fifty other students in the class. I've also photocopied entire workbooks that I own so that I could do the exercises on the photocopies and turn them in while keeping the workbooks pages intact so that I could do the exercises again later if I chose to. Like most people I consider myself morally clean photocopying if I know for a fact that I wouldn't have bought what I copied, even if I couldn't have copied it. I simply would have read the books in the library rather than taking home the photocopy, or I would have done the exercises on the original workbook pages, handed them in, gotten them back, then used lots of white out if I wanted to re-do them. Many people find the "copying is always theft" argument as idiotic as you probably find the "copying is never theft" argument to be.
You're right that there are significant R&D costs in most industries. I disagree that progress would stop without intellectual property. New ways would need to be found to pay for the research, certainly, and the article explicitly states that intellectual property can't vanish without some changes to the economic system.
Encasement of technologies in a solid brick wouldn't work. Unless it's something amazingly new, the functionality of almost anything that can be hidden that way can be reverse-engineered or simply recreated by people of reasonable intelligence and skill. Also, many industries already try their hardest to avoid innovating, and use obstructive patents for that reason. For example, an oil company has little incentive to change the way they do things considering all the money they've spent on oil rigs, tankers, pipelines, refineries, gas stations, etc. but might research and patent alternative energy technologies.
As for medicine... You're obviously confused about how the FDA actually works. It has absolutely zilch to do with intellectual property. No one, to my knowledge, has a patent on deadly nightshade, but the FDA still will not let you sell it as a salad vegetable. The FDA was created partly in response to an incident where someone thought it might be a good idea to use ethylene glycol as a sweetener in childrens medication. The FDA is all about making sure that foods and drugs are tested properly and safely, prepared properly and safely, and distributed properly and safely with all appropriate warnings and indications. Yes, they are an enourmous beurocracy. Yes, FDA paperwork needs to be moved around with forklifts (well, not exactly, it generally comes in boxes that a human can carry, it's just that it comes in _many_ such boxes). Yes, the FDA are pretty much the ones who _require_ all that animal testing which, understandably, makes many people upset. Despite all that, the FDA is _very_ neccessary and valuable to anyone who likes to live with reasonable confidence that their food and medications are safe. So, if you produce food or drugs/medical devices the FDA _owns_ you. Try to sell your yellow, viscous liquid for the treatment of ailment X and tell the FDA that since it isn't patented you don't have to reveal to them what it is/how it's made/what your iron-clad standard operating procedures are/how you tested it and see how long it takes you to end up in federal prison.
That's the problem with intellectual property disputes, so many dittos and so few who really know what's actually involved. It's frightening how many of the people I know don't even really know what the various kinds of intellectual property are let alone the differences between them and yet still harbor strong opinions.
I don't really see how the "Linux" trademark and Linus' defense of that trademark are similar to the "Barbie" doll trademark. To begin with, Linus didn't even register a trademark for Linux at first. He made what, in a rational world, would have been a correct assumption: that it wasn't a big deal, since he was going to let anyone use it anyway. Naturally, the patent and trademark office gave the trademark on am operating system called "Linux" to an individual named William Della Croce sometime around 1995(this is just another example of all the fine research the folks at the Patent and Trademark office put in. Honestly, does anyone else think that it's just about time for a class action suit?) This fine, upstanding citizen, shocked to witness the number of flagrant abuses of his valuable trademark, and began sending out letters demanding 10% royalties. So, several organizations got together and filed a petition to cancel the trademark. It took at least a year and I don't know how much money and effort to actually get the trademark transferred over to Linus. Can you imagine how much effort it must take when the case isn't absolutely cut and dried like this one was?
Anyway, the reason that there even is a "Linux" trademark is obvious. It's a protective measure. And any adamant defense Linus performs on behalf of the "Linux" trademark is for the purpose of keeping it free for everyone. Linus might, for example, use the trademark to prevent someone else from trademarking a generic term like "Linux Expert", but would not try to prevent someone from using it in a legitimate service mark like "S.U.S.E. Linux" or "Red Hat Linux" or what have you.
So, Linus' defense of the "Linux" trademark seems to be almost the opposite of what Mattel is trying to do with their "Barbie" doll trademark.
The whole charade where companies have to make a show that they're defending their mark is kind of ridiculous. It almost seems like a welfare system for IP lawyers (personal note: My big sister just graduated law school. I'm very proud of her, but I'm still going to torment her with lawyer jokes for years). "Hey, look at me boss, I'm doing my job, look at all of these trademark violators I've caught stealing from the company!" Let's face it, you can't really have a very famous product without it diluting its own trademark. I'm pretty sure that most people are like me in thinking of most plastic dress up dolls as Barbies in a vague sort of way. Due to the doll's fame, most people in this country have a mental image of Barbie, the unrealistic, "realistic" plastic doll who lives in a perfect pink and purple plastic world, has gobs of money, and whose apparant source of opportunities and happiness is her enourmous wardrobe. Barbie is a phenomonal business success, and, as such, has entered into our collective consciousness. They can't just say: "Buy the dolls, but don't you dare _think_ about them".
In this case, I'm sure that the name of this clan is in some way inspired by Barbie the doll. So what. They're not selling plastic dolls as far as I can tell. Maybe they're planning to distribute customized models or skins or whatever for Tribes (If you can modify the game in that way, I'm assuming you can, since to not be able to would be stupid) that look like plastic dolls. Aside from the fact that the models look like plastic dolls anyway, that still doesn't feel like infringement. It just doesn't feel right for Mattel to act this way, since they aren't hurting Mattel.
Of course, some might say that the smell of fresh cut grass is a general feature of tennis balls. Maybe not new ones, but, if they're used on a grass court, they end up smelling that way after a short time. The article makes it pretty clear that the other scents that the company has tried are all tennis court scents. So, they're making tennis balls that smell as if they've already been used on a tennis court. That doesn't seem like such a stretch from trademarking the smell of pizza. In fact, it seems a lot like, for example, developing a scent that makes frozen pizza smell cooked even while it's still frozen and trademarking frozen pizza that smells like cooked pizza. I would also like to note that the original poster did bring up this perfectly valid point with the question about the smell of pizza in a can.
On the other hand, a tax is already collected and paid to the RIAA (is that enough A's?) for certain types of recording media under the assumption that they will be used for piracy. So, although mp3's probably can't be declared illegal (and I agree that it's ridiculous to single out any single file format), there is precedent for pro-active fines on the media that may carry them. So, it may not be all that far fetched that part of the cost of hard drives, floppies, cd-r's, etc. will be a direct payment to the RIAA (again, is it "...Artists Association of America", or just "...AA"?), MPAA (same problem), etc.
This may be far-fetched, but lots of laws that I once would have considered beyond the pale of sanity seem to have been passed. I am most certainly not a lawyer, nor do I have any training in ethics (do lawyers have to take any courses on ethics?), but, as an amateur, I have to say that it seems wrong for a tax to be enforced whose proceeds go to an organisation which counts lobbying as one of its activities. That's just me though.
"If it isn't broken, don't fix it" seems like pretty sound reasoning to me. I've always understood that the reason the shuttle's computers were so "behind" is because the itty bitty details used in recent chips can be taken out pretty easily by a single cosmic ray. There's really no practical way at present (possibly ever) to block the radiation you get in orbit without bringing along more shielding than the shuttle can lift. So, computer systems have to be fault tolerant, redundant, and have components that can take a beating at the microscopic scale. I've heard that most laptops that do long duty in space end up failing after a few months.
Unisys may have the right to profit from their patent, but they can't profit from it in any way they feel like. For example, once upon a time, algorithms were explicitly prohibited in patents. The only way around this was to patent a specific hardware implementation of an algorithm. Then, somewhere along the line, it was decided that a patent could be granted on _any_ hardware implementation of an algorithm, which essentially granted a patent on the algorithm itself. So, it is a relatively recent development in the history of patent law that an algorithm patent holder can demand royalties for software that uses the algorithm.
Also, most of the articles I've read have been a little fuzzy on the details, but the way I understand it, Unisys is demanding that any web site that uses gifs, regardless of where they come from, pay them royalties. I can't understand how this is even legal for them to do. They own a patent on LZW encoding, which means that any software or hardware implementation of LZW requires a license. That does _not_ cover the finished product of LZW encoding such as a GIF image. So, unless this is based on a different patent altogether, such as "method of embedding lzw compressed images in a web page", this doesn't make any sense. The only explanation that I can come up with is that they are actually demanding, in addition to the license fee the maker of gif-generation software may have paid, a per-use fee on the LZW algorithm. Anyone with even a shred of a sense of proportion can see how completely insane that is.
With the possible exception of contract killers, right?
Although, from what I've seen in movies lately, contract killers are often all around decent guys. And we all know that Hollywood is never wrong about anything.
I'm pretty sure that wasn't a death threat. It was just a dead lawyer joke. It's the difference between saying, for example, "I wish you were dead" and "I am going to kill you." One of them is a threat while the other is merely a statement of preference. In fact, the statement "I am going to kill you" is not even neccessarily a threat. I've had plenty of people say "I'm going to kill you" to me and, to the best of my knowledge, not only have none of them meant it, most of them weren't even really angry. It's language, it gets used playfully a lot. Context changes meaning and sometimes you have to figure out which is which (for those who have seen the movie "My Cousin Vinnie", remember "I shot the clerk(?)"?) Text-only forums like Usenet or Slashdot usually make this task more difficult than it is with face to face contact, especially when neither the poster nor the reader understand the established text based conventions to replace things like body language. Given enough time using such forums, you'll learn to understand people's intended meaning better, or to at least give people the benefit of the doubt.
You make a good point. On the other hand, fan fiction is, believe it or not, usually written by fans. In a lot of cases, fans will respect the wishes of an author or other creator they greatly admire when it comes to fan fiction. However, a huge chunk of the fanfic out there is based on "properties" owned by impersonal corporations that don't care about the characters at all. The various works about those characters and settings are often written by committee or by whichever creator the company has hired this week. The original creators have usually already sold away their right to control the characters.
I suppose that I think that there is something wrong with people creating fanfic based on Anne Rice books since she is apparantly vehemently against it. It seems incredibly disrespectful to defy those wishes, since her reasons are personal. On the other hand, I have much less of a problem with people writing Batman fanfic. The Batman character and mythos have been passed between so many different hands that there's no way anyone could complain on personal grounds. Warner Brothers has an interest in Batman, but it's purely financial. So, who really cares about an emotionless entity like Warner Brothers?
P.S. The law about 90% of anything, including fanfic, being crap seems to hold true. On the other hand, I'd have to say that only about 10% of Batman fanfic is worse than, for example, the movie "Batman and Robin". Arnold as Mr. Freeze!?!? He wasn't a very good choice. Still, we've all seen him pull off an emotionless, cold-blooded performance in "The Terminator" but he completely failed to pull that off for Mr Freeze. And... ruber nipples? RUBBER NIPPLES?!?!?! Gah! How could they possibly allow someone to direct a batman movie whose only knowledge of the character is the 50's TV series and the other batman movies? Can you see why the fanfic author's loyalties are to the characters first, the creator(s) second and the intellectual property owners (if these are different from the creator(s)) somewhere in one zillionth place.
Let's not forget that it is the _GNU_ Network Object Model Environment (I've never completely figured out what this means in relation to what GNOME actually is). So, looking at it from Miguel's point of view, calling it a GNU/Linux system makes sense. In fact, if you consider that the general populace considers the GUI to be the same as the OS, a lot of people would consider it fair to call the OS Gnome instead (of course, the opinions of most people who would think that don't count since they don't really understand the concepts involved). Gnome is also not exclusive to Linux. It's supposed to be portable to other operating systems or, at least, to other Unixes (Unices? Unii?). It might not run on other OS's right now (I haven't checked, I assume it probably runs on FreeBSD), but, like most free software projects, assuming that it's just a Linux project is a mistake.
P.S. Please disregard what I just said if it turns out that Miguel has, in fact, stated somewhere that Gnome is an exclusively Linux-based environment. Thankyou.
How do you perform a "valid" cancel of someone elses post on Usenet? Even though it's entirely possible to cancel someone elses message (well, not really, you can send a cancel message, but a lot of servers won't honor it), that's not the way it's supposed to be done. You're supposed to cancel your own messages and merely _reply_ to the messages of others. ....). That sort of thing has been done on Usenet a lot too. And it's wrong. And it makes people very angry. Not just those people who are being attacked, but also those of us who spot what's actually happen as well-meaning if misguided people post things like "I just mailbombed this scumbag". All that said, I don't think that you should be able to sue any ISP whose news server that stores or forwards such messages. Even if they have a policy which says that they don't automatically cancel messages at other peoples request. No-one has the resources to monitor that kind of volume. And, they shouldn't be monitoring it anyway. Sure, I understand that libel is not free speech, but most of what's on Usenet is free speech (ok, technically, most of what's on Usenet at the moment is spam, but if you ignore the spam then what's left is mostly free speech) and treating everyone who posts on Usenet as a potential "speech criminal" is a very bad thing. I don't know what's going on; I thought that there was a general concensus among people that Fascism is bad.
It seems a little odd that someone would do this. I'm not sure what the defamatory statements made against this man in his own name were, but a similar sort of thing has been done on bathroom walls for many years now (for a good time, call
I think that the poster may have been talking about the American Home Recording Act, which imposed a tax(I'm not sure if"tax" is technically correct, but that's what it amounts to) on various forms of blank recording media. The money is collected under the assumption that anyone who wants blank media intends to use it for purposes of piracy. The money goes to the RIAA and other, similar organizations.
There's also the question of how directly this system interfaces with the nervous system of the operator. Does it only interact indirectly, with all stimuli being fed to the user via some sort body glove and output being generated by tracking the user's movements? Or does it interact by patching into the nervous system at key points and overriding other nerve signals? Or does it go right to the source and get its input and output directly from the brain? All of these approaches have benefits and drawbacks. The body glove idea has the disadvantage of the latency that the poster I'm replying to was concerned about, simply because, no matter how fast the communication with the teleprescence unit is, it has to be slower than the nervous system because the nervous system hasn't been removed from the equation. There's also the huge engineering problem of how to map the movements of the operator to the teleprescence unit and the sensations of the TU to the body glove. The direct brain connection has the problem that the human brain doesn't control the body as effectively as we think it does. In other words, a huge amount of our movement is controlled by reflexes remembered by parts of our nervous system entirely outside the brain. To compensate, the TU would need to have its own neural net for its own rexflexes and the operator would probably need to spend thousands of hours training with the unit to be able to operate it well. Effectively switching off between two entirely different bodies could cause thus far unknown psychological problems in the operator. The idea of patching into the nervous system at select points, but well away from the brain doesn't fully avoid the latency problem, but it could provide a much more immersive experience than the body glove while avoiding its engineering challenges (not that there aren't huge challenges in patching into the nervous system in a workable manner). The dual body problems would probably be less than with a direct brain connection, though not eliminated, and a long period of adjusting and training would still be required. This solution would probably require a lot more surgery(though probably much safer surgery) than the direct brain connection, as it would require patch-ins at hundreds or thousands of locations throughout the body. With any of these solutions, of course, the frequently used sci-fi plot device of destruction/extreme damage to the remote unit causing neurological damage to the operator is probably a non-issue. Sure, it makes cyperpunk stories a lot more exciting, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be too difficult (compared to everything else involved) to filter out any dangerous levels of feedback. Obviously epileptics and the like probably wouldn't make very good operators, of course.
The trouble with all of this is that, if you're going to make a remote controlled fighting machine, why make it anthropomorphic? It makes sense if you're making personal armor that it be shaped like the occupant, but not when you're making a remote controlled device. Admitting the fact that human beings, or at least animals with legs are better on varied terrain than just about any machine that exists today (maybe not if we're talking about small vertical take off/landing hovering devices), machines with wheels or treads beat humans for most practical military purposes. Maybe several classes of remote controlled or even semi-autonomous vehicles could be developed. Warfare would end up being like Command and Conquer or Total Annihilation without the resource gathering or unit manufacturing.
On the other hand, it would obviously be better if we could just get rid of warfare completely. Despite the coolness factor of all this, I'd be much happier with augmentation exosuits and remote robots being used in space or undersea exploration or even plain old terrestrial construction than being used to kill more people faster. I mean, I hear the "it will save [your nationality here] lives" argument, and it's all well and good, but that's usually at the cost of the other guys lives. I would personally love to be able to work on this sort of technology, but not if it's going to be used to kill people.
One little question. Weren't most of those countries more or less following the model of the USSR? And didn't the USSR abandon Communism "temporarily" quite early on in favor of State Capitalism?
I really don't see where all this talk about the evils of communism comes from. It's just another system. Now fascism, that's evil. And, if you think about it, all of the examples people generally give of evil communist countries are examples of fascism. These are all countries that have basically been run by militaristic leaders. There have been plenty of capitalist fascist regimes as well.
Oh, also, it seems silly to me that people keep on talking about the general misery and starvation, etc. suffered by people in the USSR. Read _any_ pre-soviet russian novel and tell me that Russians were any happier before the USSR came into being.
I'm certainly not saying that there are no problems with communism. But there are plenty of problems with capitalism as well. The "free market" of capitalism seems to be a sort of Platonic ideal that doesn't have a true incarnation in this world. The systems that are actually used are heavily propped up as well as intentionally held in check in many ways. That really is a good thing because truly unfettered capitalism would probably eat lots of people alive and then start gnawing on its own tail.
My really big worry with capitalism is, I suppose, based on where advancing technology will lead us. It's completely concievable and, I think, quite probable that someday, maybe not so far ahead in the future, it will be possible for all neccessities of life to be produced by machines with little or no human work required. Farms will be able to farm themselves. Factories will churn out processed foods by themselves, and the supermarkets will stock themselves or a person's grocery order will simply be delivered directly without need for human drivers or deliverymen. The same will hold true for clothing and other manufactured goods. It's surely possible to develop factories that not only operate by themselves but also quality check and maintain themselves. Same thing for power generation and construction. Some human supervision might be required, but we would be talking about a small percentage of the population. The trouble is that this model is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism. Aside from the teachers and doctors and policemen and lawyers, etc. what would the vast bulk of the population do for work. Would we all be working in service jobs of one kind or another just to keep a farce of an economic system running? How would things work? What could Capitalism possibly do for us in that situation?
Not that Communism would really apply either. Communism was designed with the working class in mind, but the future I envision doesn't really have a working class. There would have to be an entirely new system. Whatever the new system will be, it will be an extremely bumpy road to get there from Capitalism. Maybe we won't get there, maybe we'll just end up total slaves to a fraction of the population who own the machines (built by other machines with material harvested by machines) and the land. Maybe not, who knows. But Capitalism is not the only answer, it's just one system of many, that more or less works at the present time, but it may be outdated some day.
Well, unless we're talking about the timeline diverging before his conception, in which case there's an extremely good chance that he would not have existed if patent laws had never come to exist, then of course Thomas Edison would have existed. As you say, he might well not have been the near-legend he is today. Is that a bad thing?
From my point of view, that just means that he wouldn't be credited with inventing so many things that he didn't actually invent. I'm sure he was an intelligent man, and quite probably enthusiastic about invention, but most of his inventions were actually made by people who worked for him. When you get right down to it, he was just a business man in the right place at the right time.
Let's not forget also that the invention he is most famous for - the filament electric lightbulb (other forms of electric lightbulbs like arc lamps already existed) - was already a well understood idea. Everyone knew it could be done, it was just a matter of developing a filament that would survive long enough to make it worth it. As it happens, the carbon-filament solution that Edison's researchers came up with was an identical solution to that of Joseph Swan who had invented the same thing the previous year.
In light of that, I can't think of why it's a good thing that Thomas Edison is a legendary figure today. It actually seems like a bit of a tragedy that so many people who did valuable work have to be overlooked so that we can focus on a single "hero". I usually don't feel so bad about this when the one "hero" is someone who does, in fact, deserve a lot of credit even if they don't deserve all of it. Personally, I think that Edison gets more credit than he deserves.
The same sort of thing happened with Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell. Bell submitted (actually his father in law did it) his patent application before Gray. Later on, Gray sued unsuccessfully, partly because Bell had submitted his patent application without any working model, and partly because it looked a lot as if a lot of Bell's stuff had been more or less copied from Gray's.
It's actually kind of interesting to note that both Bell and Gray (and Edison's group too I think) were all working on the idea of a telegraph multiplexer (multiple messages along the same wire was a holy grail of technology at the time) first and those projects developed into a quest for voice transmission (which had also actually been demonstrated in crude form by an italian named Meucci years earlier). This seems to suggest that they were all more or less copying each others work as they developed their own. In the scientific world, this is a good thing and is expected, although pointless replication of effort can often be avoided through cooperation. However, with patents thrown into the mix, things turn nasty pretty quickly and the idea of scientific community dissolves because all researchers are seen as potential theives rather than kindred spirits. Soon, we get to the point where we are now where groups of scientists and researchers aren't supposed to communicate ideas to one another without an intervening layer of lawyers. And all of this is a good thing?
I understand the "financial motivator" idea behind the patent system. But I find the concept that human curiousity and inventiveness is driven by greed to be completely ridiculous. I also understand the argument that, without patents, certain types of costly research wouldn't bring sufficient returns to justify the research since the company that did the research would be beaten in the marketplace by another company that just copied the product. That argument is somewhat compelling, especially in the pharmeceutical field where research is so expensive. The trouble with that argument though, is that it points to the single evil of not having patents without really weighing it against the evils of having them. Let's not forget that a successful drug product for a pharm company is often an enormous cash cow. Those are sick people paying all that money. I think it's kind of sad that a different model isn't explored.
I'm in favor of tax money being used to fund most research. After all, we all ultimately pay for pretty much all research somehow, we might as well do it directly with fewer middle men. That way, there wouldn't really be a reason for patents on the technologies developed. I know a lot of people have ideological complaints to do with free markets and so forth, but there are large flaws in that model as well. To go back to the pharmecuetical industry, orphan drugs are a good example of the problems with a pure free market. An orphan drug is a drug to treat a disease that doesn't afflict enough people for a treatment to be a big money-maker or even to pay for the research involved. So, the government provides subsidies for such drugs to pharm companies. Now, some people don't like this idea and think that it would be better just to let these people die, but let's not forget that we're talking about a government that will wage quite expensive wars for the sake of maybe a few hundred of its citizens, and is occaisionally willing to spend a fraction of that to save thousands of its citizens. Is there actually anything wrong with that.
Actually, there's quite a lot of government money already spent on research which is then patented by the company or university that does the research. Maybe we would be better off if government money meant that the results belong to all of us rather than the lucky recipients of the funding.
Realistically of course, they're not going to drop the patent system any time soon and decide that scientific research is benificial to all and should be open and free. I hope that it is obvious to just about everyone that the system as it stands now just isn't working well enough, however. Some sort of reform is going to have to come about before things get worse and we have to wait 17 years (ignoring the fact that patents can be renewed) for them to get better.
The argument that others have made that I haven't seen directly addressed yet is what happens when two companies or individuals both have valid trademark claims. I don't know what businesses your pseudonymous Fooco and Fooco inc. are in, and you haven't actually made it clear if they have a trademark on their company name. These are pretty important bits of information. If your companies aren't in competition (some of the tone of your story indicates that you might be, but I can't assume that), then, as I understand trademark law, it's perfectly acceptable for them to be called Fooco inc. I think the only exceptions to that are if your company happens to be heavily established and very well known. That is to say that startup companies International Ballista Makers and Irma's Boutique for Marriages wouldn't be able to trademark IBM, although they would be able to if International Business Machines were a five year old company operating only in one state. This so partly because IBM is so well known that the standard claim that the other companies are taking a free ride on IBM's fame would actually have some validity in this case, although how that would hurt IBM in any way I have no idea. The other obvious reason is that IBM has a zillion lawyers (Note: slight exaggeration, I'm not actually trying to claim that IBM actually has ... how much is a Zillion anyway?) whose job is to protect the IBM trademark and who do so zealously, even when it isn't really what the courts would normally consider infringement.
Anyway, I'm sure nothing I've written is news to you, but it's important to be clear on this point: multiple individuals (companies are legally people in most ways) can own a trademark on the same arrangement of latin characters (Logos are outside the scope of this discussion). By definition, all domain names are unique. It doesn't take a genius to spot the obvious problem with trying to apply the trademark laws to that. Add to that the fact that, even though companies do have as much of a right to be on the internet as the rest of us, the rest of us also have as much of a right to be on the internet as companies. In other words, the internet and the WWW are not exclusively commercial media. In Real Life (TM and Pat. Pending) companies can't get away with telling people that their names interfere with their trademark. You could even, in theory, name your child IBM and I don't think they could legally touch you (I'm not aware of any actual legal precedent on this one, does anyone know if a case like this has ever been tried?) There might be a bit of a problem, however, if this child grows up and then tries to start a company with his/her own name; especially a computer company. More realistically, Colgate-Palmolive couldn't sue anyone for naming their child Ajax, since it is a person's name, with thousands of years of prior use. Colgate-Palmolive's lawyers did, however, try to force ajax.org to give up their domain name. Ajax.org, of course, has nothing to do with cleaning products. They don't have a trademark, but they have no reason to need one. And, who can forget the attempt by the makers of Archie comics to shut down Veronica.org. Obviously trying to enforce trademark on url's doesn't work very well. The legal basis for it is a little fuzzy also. People are allowed to use trademarks in spoken and written language, what isn't allowed is use of someone elses trademark to misrepresent your relationship with that company. So, you can't try to pretend that you are that company, that you have a relationship with that company, that they endorse you in some way, or try to use their fame to steer people to your own goods and services. The reason given for why companies often go well out of bounds and go after those who aren't really infringing is that if they don't defend their trademark, they could lose it. In other words, it's a big gray area, but it gives the lawyers something to do to justify their jobs.
As you can see, I think the whole thing is ridiculous. Trademark laws have no place in domain names. Obviously though, something has to be done.
This is really a technology problem: a new technology has arisen and people are trying to apply law that was never designed with such things in mind to it. The solution should not be via the law or new policies, it should be technological. I remember when I first heard about the company that was offering a single keyword internet address system. I thought it was a stupid idea. I still think the idea of a single company implementing it is a stupid idea, and there are obvious huge flaws in the idea of trying to create an internet where all adresses can be mapped to single words. On the other hand, I think a similar idea might be the solution to the current problem. Not using keywords, but company or product names. There could be a registration process with stringent criteria so that no registered company would be misrepresenting itself in any way with its name. In the case of multiple ip addresses mapped to the same name, the browser could present the user with a list of available sites, perhaps accompanied with small abstracts and company logo, etc. It shouldn't be too hard to build that into future web browsers.
It would be a bit like using a search engine to try to find a companies address, but simpler. I've tried to find the websites of companies that don't fit into the www.foo.com pattern before using search engines, and it can be done, and it usually doesn't take more than ten minutes, but it really should not be a research project. Lots of search engines will arrange things so that if someone is searching using a companies name then their web page will come up early in the listings, but they usually demand money from the company to do this. Even with a stiff registration fee, having this sort of thing done at one central location will save a company a lot of money over paying every search engine.
If this was implemented, then all of the arguments against people using trademarked words in their addresses would lose any validity. So, instead of forcing everyone who uses the internet playground to play by the rules of a small group, give them a sandbox that's still part of the playground, but set aside just for them. Those are my thoughts anyway.
You're right, what this article talks about is not _just_ a symlink. What it really is is a system to make sure that all duplicate files are actually symlinks to a single copy of the file, all done automagically. I couldn't really tell from the article, but I think this process may be pretty opaque from the users point of view. I don't know about you, but I can think of a whole host of ways that this can go wrong. Especially over a network. When I'm working with files on a network, I always make copies of important files to keep locally for times when the network is down. I don't think I would like it very much if I discovered that my local copies of files weren't copies after all.
Anyway, the usefulness of this is beside the point. The point of this discussion is that the MS article/abstract/whatever heavily implied, or even outright stated that all of the concepts involved were developed by MS employees "from the ground up". Most of this article is just so much hyperbole, marketspeak and self-congratulation.
That's actually one of the things that people are worried about with the UCITA. I admit that I have not read the full text of this bill, but from what I've heard, it strengthens the legal power of shrinkwrap software licenses considerably. Now, picture a software license which prohibits the use of the software for the purpose of creating a workalike and similarly prohibits passing on details to someone else so that they can create a workalike. So, anyone who wanted to make a true workalike wouldn't be able to without opening themselves or an "accomplice" up to the possibility of legal action.
Not that all free software has to be a copy of a piece of proprietary software. Free software creators are perfectly capable of doing their own design work. But, on the other hand, people often want bits and pieces in free software to be like a package they're already familiar with. Also, there's the matter of convergent evolution, often two people will choose the same solution to the same problem because it's a good solution. So, what happens when lawyer X for company Y says: "This feature in your software is exactly like ours, you must have violated our license agreement to copy it."
Ok, sure, my example is somewhat beyond the pale, but things like the UCITA lay the groundwork for just such situations. That's why people object to them. Because it _is_ possible to see the future. Or, at least, it's possible to see the future that some people and organizations would like to create. So, we object now rather than wait until the UCITA is used to set precedent to create even more laws that we feel tread on our rights.
That's an interesting perspective on things. Of course, you're essentially ignoring the fact that, since it's GPL'd, the same software can be obtained from another source at any price all the way down to completely free of charge. Or just obtained via ftp or what have you. The only reason anyone buys this stuff from the FSF is if they happen to want to financially support the FSF. In many other cases where GPL'd software is sold, it's usually sold value-added. This means that what you pay for is the price of media/distribution/etc. plus the price for the value-added part. You are right that GPL'd software can be commercial software, but it's one of those things where you have to be very narrow in your definition of what commercial software encompasses. Anyway, your argument has been seen before, usually in conjunction with personal or philosophical attacks against RMS himself. It doesn't seem all that relevant here.
Someone in another post mentioned how they used to think that it would be really cool if everyone had internet access, but now they take it back. I used to think the same way. Wouldn't it be terrific if everyone could share in these wonderful communities. We used to have trouble in September when all the college newbies stumbled onto Usenet and proceeded to break all the rules and make pains of themselves. Of course, the rules would be explained, and the newbies would calm down and things would settle back from chaos somewhat. But now there's a constant stream of newbies, and they never seem to learn. Half of them seem to think that Usenet is a service provided to the world by AOL. And they never seem to learn!
Usenet is by no means dead, however. We just have to adapt. Moderation is now a neccessary evil. We have to keep signal up, even if we can't keep noise down. Wears down the spirit a bit though.