The difference is that computer geeks don't usually use their grasp of arcana to fleece people
You may rest assured that computer geeks use their grasp of arcana to fleece people all the time. I see it all the time, from BOFH-types I'd encounter on the job to Bill Gates.
whereas many lawyers will use their knowledge of the law to harrass enemies of wealthy clients,
Yep. Unfortunately, this does happen, though wealthy clients who want to harrass enemies, real or imagined, will do so regardless of whether they hire a lawyer or a layperson to prepare the paperwork.
fleece defendents with deep pockets
A lawyer who takes his deep-pocketed clients' money without winning cases will very soon have no deep-pocketed clients to fleece. Again, this behaviour (not to excuse it) is hardly unique to lawyers; as a contract UNIX admin, I'd spend 4 gigs out of 5 cleaning up after some previous geek who had fleeced my client in the past and stuck them with broken or unmanageable systems and networks.
needlessly complicate otherwise simple transactions with legal nitpicking,
Like what? Wherever you see "nitpicking" in an agreement, you should know that means every one of the nits being picked has, at some point in the past, hatched and bitten someone in the ass who didn't expect it.
and otherwise make our lives more complex, more legalistic, and more adversarial.
Well, I don't think life would be any less complex or adversarial without lawyers, but I realize this is a point on which reasonable people can differ. I agree with you on "more legalistic" but that the existence of lawyers makes life "more legalistic" isn't a stretch, it's tautology. Computer geeks make life more complex and "more technologistic," but I don't count this against them.
There are estimates that every lawyers who enters the profession costs the US economy more than his salary in dead-weight costs.
I'd love to see a reputable source for this. It sounds pretty difficult to quantify, given that money that goes to lawyers doesn't vanish out of the economy. I won't argue that there aren't overpaid lawyers (or overpaid computer geeks), but that money doesn't just disappear.
Few people are unfamiliar with the phrase The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Rueful, mocking, it often expresses the ordinary person's frustration with the arcana and complexity of law.
As someone wrapping up his first year of law school, I can relate to frustration with the arcana and complexity of law. However, as a hard-core (and until recently, professional) computer geek, I can also relate to frustration with the arcana and complexity of hardware and software. That doesn't mean I think "First thing we do, let's kill all the geeks" is a positive sentiment.
The law is complex and computers are complex -- frankly, everything in life is complex. There are things that don't seem complex because we have evolved to be capable of doing them unconsciously - breathing, for example, or walking. Agriculture is phenomenally complex, and in our society there are relatively few who understand it. (I, personally, can't keep a houseplant alive without instructions. In another era, this would make me dead.)
Compared to agriculture, legal systems are spring chickens - the common law tradition dates back (in recognizable form) less than a millennium, to the aftermath of the Norman conquest. In that time, the range of possible human conduct has vastly expanded, mores have changed, whole religious doctrines have arisen (Martin Luther wasn't even born 600 years ago), etc. etc. and the law has tracked these changes. Admittedly, it lags behind, and tends to accumulate cruft (ask me about fee tail estates or the rule against perpetuities sometime!), but by and large it does the job we ask of it, which is to (A) provide a binding forum for resolving disputes between private parties and (B) provide a check on arbitrary exercise of state power.
Now, I would not suggest that the legal system is perfect, nor that it accomplishes even these two basic functions perfectly or even with competence in all circumstances. I would, however, suggest that "let's kill all the lawyers" is not a good idea. Yes, access to the courts is an old and enormous problem, SLAPP suits are a problem, volumes of statutes that always grow and never shrink are a problem, judges who don't understand modern technology have always been a problem, etc. etc. "[K]ill all the lawyers" is not the solution to any of these problems. To those who would replace our legal system wholesale, I pose the question - what replacement, then? The Chinese system? Hey, no lawyers, just arbitrary judicial authority unchecked by anything but familial and political alliances. Is that preferable? Or maybe we just do away with vast chunks of legal code? Sounds good to me - less to read. Which chunks? Who gets to decide? Legislatures? We've got those already. Appellate courts? I thought we were getting rid of the lawyers. An all-powerful executive? There are plenty of places in the world where the executive makes all law - none are particularly pleasant places.
Anyways, I'm rambling. The point is, simply, that just because a field of human activity is arcane and complex and touches your life doesn't mean that exterminating the practitioners of said profession will necessarily improve your life.
-Isaac
Newsflash: LOTR was not the best picture of 2001!
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LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sorry, guys, but no way in hell was LOTR:FOTR the best picture of 2001. I saw 5 films in 2001: Shrek, Amelie, LOTR, Waking Life, and The Royal Tenenbaums. LOTR wasn't even the third best film out of that limited selection.
I like Peter Jackson, too (Meet the Feebles is something else) but he wasn't the best director of the year, either.
And now, even though it has nothing to do with LOTR, I would like to once again razz the Oscars for not even nominating Waking Life for best animated film, instead picking 2 blockbusters (Shrek, Monsters Inc.) and a glorified Nickelodeon pilot (Jimmy Neutron).
Of course, this is to be expected - the Oscars are a crock of shit anyhow. Figure skating is a more objective contest with less corrupt judging. Basically, the winner in each category is decided by bloc voting and horse-trading by the studios who control the bulk of academy members - so says a former professor of mine who's a member of the academy and actually has an Oscar under his belt, whom I'm inclined to believe. Most Oscar voters haven't even seen all the films in the categories for which they're voting - there's just too damn many films up for consideration for anyone to watch and still have time to do anything else.
Check out The Economist's excellent article, "Patent Nonsense" for a good primer. Sorry, you'll have to pay to view it, but here's a germane excerpt:
Todd Dickinson, the PTO's director, admits that there is a problem
here. "In software, in particular, we need to develop our sources of
prior art. We've been talking about reaching out to the software
industry to get access to more databases," he says. Still, he argues,
the problem should self-correct as more software is patented.
What will not correct itself, though, is the bias in favour of issuing
patents. This arises partly because America does not have the
"opposition" system that Europe has, where the competition can put its
case against a proposed patent.
What is more, the way patent examiners are paid encourages the issue
of patents. They are paid partly through bonuses for "disposals" of
patent cases. But as Robert Merges, professor of law at the University
of California at Berkeley, points out in a paper called "Six Impossible
Patents Before Breakfast", while a patent issued is always a case
disposed of, a rejection may not be, because the inventor can amend his
application and try again. Quality, sticking-power and morale among
patent examiners is also a problem. The PTO's intake is largely made up
of law graduates. Starting salaries are around Dollars 40,000. In
east-coast law firms, they are commonly Dollars 140,000.
Here is an anonymous patent examiner on Mr Aharonian's site:
You know what? I'm sick of finding ridiculous patents every time I
look [in my files]. Part of the blame goes to the patent corps. We don't
fight hard enough against the bull - being shovelled by upper
management. And of course, that is where the rest of the blame goes.
It's a system that's burning up, and management just keeps adding fuel
to the fire. And why should you care? Hey, management pays you for good
patents or bad, right? In fact, why should you fight with management?
Why reject?
Also check out this article on patent strategies of japanese companies. I do not claim to be a scholar here and freely concede that mmy posts are not scholarly works. That said, they do derive from the cumulative impact of articles I have read in a variety of sources over the years. I invite you to do some more research yourself to dispute my view - indeed, a quick google search reveals plenty of B-school theses fawning over the Japanese tendency towards cross-licensing to the extent that it permits more than one company to extract monopoly rents from a market, though I would dispute (again, admittedly without my own body of scholarly work) the assumption that this is a good thing from a macroeconomic perspective. If anything, I think this would reinforce my point, but since nobody (that I've found) has directly studied the impact of cross-licensing on companies excluded from the "club," as it were, I cannot provide you with an online reference directly supporting my proposition wrt stifling of innovation.
The US Patent & Trademark Office is basically a rubber-stamp operation these days because there is no incentive for an examiner to deny an invalid patent. Conversely, patent examiners have every incentive to grant patents without serious review and simply let the bad patents be litigated by private parties. If memory serves, neither the examiner nor the USPTO can be held liable for granting bogus patents without proof that the examiner or USPTO acted with actual malice towards the plaintiff in granting the patent - practically speaking, an impossible standard to meet.
I'm not anti-patent per se - I believe they serve their constitutional purpose in certain circumstances - but I do think that if left unchecked, the current US patent regime will ultimately lead to the same sort of industrial consolidation and resultant economic stagnation that Japan has been experiencing for over a decade. Patents aren't the only or even the main factor that has led Japan to its current situation, of course, but their patent system coupled with incestuous cross-licensing relationships within and among Japan's keiretsu has all but eliminated start-ups and smaller enterprises, particularly in high-tech industry, while the larger IT firms have become moribund from lack of competition (see NEC, Hitachi).
The soviets could still build some more protons if they wanted, the designs are still current.
The proton is still in service - but it can't lift anything close to 30 tons. My point was that the highest-capacity version of the proton replacement (the angara) will supposedly lift 30 tons to LEO or 6 tons to GEO (naturally the latter spec is the important one).
The other end of the spectrum is information that's clearly private, and protected by law. My medical records and the contents of my communications with my lawyer are explicitly private. If a court wanted to know what my doctor said to me last week, they couldn't ask. It's private.
Some rights you can't waive - you can't sell yourself into slavery, for instance. Privacy can be waived, and is, frequently. Got medical insurance? If you've used it, you've waived all your legal medical privacy protections, as your insurer can sell or give away the information to whoever they damn well please, and you can't do a damn thing about it. Sorry. The court wouldn't need to talk to you or your doctor - they would only need to talk to your insurer. If the insurer cooperated, a court order wouldn't even be necessary for a prosecutor to get that info.
Whether or not evidence gleaned from your medical records would be admissable is another question, not addressed here. My point is simply that even in the few areas where one does have some privacy, (medical, video rental records), many if not most people have already waived their privacy by using health insurance or video rental incentive cards (e.g. "Blockbuster Rewards") etc. And student records, which were once sort-of protected, are no longer private from the gov't - see the USA PATRIOT act.
I don't know much about shuttle payload space constraints, but IIRC the shuttle is still the only way to lift 30+ tons into orbit; the soviet replacement for the proton is supposed to be good for 30 metric tons, but hasn't yet entered service.
Agreed on your other points though. Expendable, non-man-rated rockets in mass production is the way to go - see the success of the ESA with Arianne.
The Russians built a "doomsday device" as a deterrent to nuclear aggression - but they kept it secret. Dr. Strangelove points out (as it becomes apparent that the world is, well, f*cked) that "the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!"
Same principle here. The message is being sent through an orchestrated leak.
I'm not surprised that the internet has reached 10% of the world's population - it's the richest 10%. I'll be more (pleasantly) surprised when the internet reaches 30% of the world's population - because then it will truly have made inroads into currently unserved or underserved populations - i.e. the 85% of the world that lives in what people in the US, EU, Japan, S. Korea, etc. would call abject poverty. (People in the 80th or 70th percentile, though, are themselves significantly wealthier than the 60% of the world's population that could truly be described as economically poor.)
For a little perspective, check out the brochure from the ITU World Telecommunication Development Conference 2002. A hopeful note, according to that link: "Africa now has more than twice as many main telephone connections as Tokyo and 85 percent of today's world population share 45 percent of all telephone lines (see Figure 1). In comparison, in 1984, 90 percent of the world's people used only ten percent of all telephone lines."
I'd just like to point out that lawyers are essentially agents of parties petitioning a court. Here, the management of company X wanted to file suit against a cranky poster to a message board - It's not like some lawyer decided to file suit and then sold the idea later to company X (lawyers get disbarred over tactics like that). I don't see where it's inappropriate to blame the corporate entity of company X for the lawsuit, seeing as it's the plaintiff.
You don't have a bogus lawsuit (or any lawsuit) without a plaintiff.
Before everyone goes off half-cocked here about how political spam should be illegal, I'd like to gently remind people to think of the potential consequences to our society of banning any form of political speech, regardless of how tacky it might be.
I think the "market" (i.e. voters) will take care of political spam just fine by reacting negatively to its use. Remember that spam works for scammers and hucksters because a tiny portion of those targeted will send money to the sender; ergo there's no disincentive to pissing off all the other recipients. Political elections, however, don't quite work that way...
> That is interesting - I wonder if Msft is pestering WalMart for the customer list?
Considering Walmart's ruthlessly efficient business practices, I wouldn't be surprised if Walmart were selling this information to Microsoft. Not many people pay cash for any $400 purchase, so they probably have good data.
Sony is a pissant company compared to, say, Microsoft or IBM.
Sony's market cap = ~$42 billion AOL Time Warner's market cap = ~$100 billion
Microsoft's market cap = ~$319 billion IBM's market cap = ~$169 billion
I know market cap is not the only or even the best measure of a company's size, but it's a decent measure of the leverage a company can wield. To put things in perspective, the total value of all Sony's floated stock (i.e. market cap) is a bit more than the amount of *real, liquid cash* that Microsoft has on hand (~$36 billion as of their last filing).
Media giants like AOLTW are small fry compared to the giants of tech or many other industries. They just have disproportionate influence with politicians and the public. Why? For one, they have a long, long, long history of brutally effective lobbying and tight political connections. Jack Valenti was riding in the car behind JFK in Dallas, and was the first advisor to LBJ to be sworn in. The main reason, though, is that they have enormous influence over the public. Politicians don't get elected without the media. Elections are won and lost by media coverage. Popular entertainment media like movies and TV can shape public opinion.
That's why politicians get on their knees for media companies - nobody who cares about reelection wants to piss off the owners of CNN (AOL Time Warner), FoxNews (NewsCorp), ABC (Disney), CBS (Viacom), etc.
I don't think Matsushita is an MPAA member. It is certainly party to some of the DVD licensing organizations, but it is not part of the MPAA. Sony is, of course.
I still think you have an incomplete understanding of the Ricochet network. ATS=304 sets the DTE rate between the radio and the computer. The 128k poletops were not the same as the old poletops. Hence, network upgrade.
I'm sorry you feel you have an axe to grind with Ricochet - I do too, being a former customer who lost service (though I no longer live in a service area). I also think they should have gone for volume with their pricing model, instead of catering to the overpaid-techie set.
Last time I questioned your assertion that the 128k upgrade was no more than "changing an S register on the poletops", you corrected me on a few points - namely that the old modems used frequency hopping to avoid collisions with the old poletops. I haven't tested this, but let's stipulate it.
You did not address my (correct) assertion that the newer poletops did use a different band for backhaul (2.3 GHz WCS/2.4GHz ISM), where the old poletops used the same 900 MHz band as the modems. (This information came not from "marketing drivvel" [sic] but from a paper presented at interop by Metricom engineers). (As to my other assertion - that the 128k modems used 4FSK vs. FSK, I admit that I don't remember where I read that.) So why do you claim that the new service was no different than the old?
No, I didn't work for Metricom. You worked tech support for Metricom. Based on my experience with Metricom's tech support, this explains alot about your attitude and (mis)understanding of the network. The upgrade was more than just "changing an S register on the poletop." Why do you insist on claiming otherwise?
Latency with Ricochet (at least the 128k version) was pretty low - I typically got 200-300msec, sometimes a little lower, occasionally a lot higher. This is fine for ssh connections (and I used ssh constantly with mine), but Counterstrike is right out. (Believe me, I tried! Latency goes up when you're transmitting a lot of packets in both directions.)
However, it worked great for tetrinet, which I was hooked on at the time.
I used the service in the Bay Area, Phoenix, New York, and DC, and the performance stayed within the same ranges across all cities (the main determinant of speed and latency was how many repeater hops one had from one's location, but I found the service generally delivered 128k as promised and 256k+ on occasion.
Microsoft is in the business of making Mac software because it is profitable. Having Apple around to keep the DOJ away is nice, but Microsoft wouldn't stick around if they weren't making cash off of Mac users - but they are. A greater percentage of total Mac users buy (as in pay for) MS Office than do PC users (and Office is Microsoft's real cash cow), generating revenue disproportionate to platform market share.
If making MS Office for Mac ceases to be profitable, I do not doubt for an instant that Microsoft will cease to develop it. I don't really expect that to happen for a long time, though.
-Isaac
Peter Wright makes his money from MS
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.NETly News
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Read the bio blurb at the end of the article - the author has written a pair of books on programming in VisualBasic and has 2 books on.Net coming out this year. Hmmm... might he have some stake in.Net's widespread adoption?
I noticed that Richard Linkater's "Waking Life" didn't snag an animated feature nomination, even though as a film it kicks the snot out of the other nominees. But of course, as Oscar nominations and voting are entirely studio-driven, I'm not surprised. (An FYI for those who believe Oscar votes are somehow objective - thoe voters are members of the academy, most of whom are associated with a particular studio or other, and as a result large blocs of essentially "party-line" votes are controlled by the major studios/distribution houses. This is how a movie like "Gladiator" wins "Best Picture".
Ah, the BSA. I love these guys - their tactics help free (libre) software more than they may realize.
In my former life as a contract sysadmin I had several clients who specifically requested free software be used to build new systems or to replace licensed commmercial software with equivalent functionality. One major reason I got, especially in the latter case, was the desire to be rid of licensing hassles. The lower upfront cost helped, but this was usually less significant as they were already paying $$$ to contract me to implement whatever.
License compliance creates not just paperwork hassles but can shut down a business when, e.g. a license server fails/license key is accidentally deleted by clueless admin/clueless admin forgets to renew licenses/vendor goes under without a way to extend licenses or purchase additional keys. And this doesn't even cover security problems - did you hear the one about MS Office for Mac OS X? By spoofing product keys one can shut down every copy on the network, blocking use and causing unsaved work to be lost.
Now I'm a law student who salivates at the thought of the BSA getting its comeuppance - one of these days, I would not be surprised to learn that the BSA had organized a raid that shut down business at a company that turned out to be fully compliant. (Yes, I know full compliance with commercial licenses is virtually impossible in a large organization, but let me dream!) I can imagine hefty lawsuits arising... actually, this might have already happened. The BSA could have settled such a case with a settlement agreement that required confidentiality. I wonder, though, if one day a BSA raid will cause sufficient monetary damages (or a sufficiently cranky CEO) to make settlement impossible and allow a messy and public trial to go forward.
God, that would be sweet!
And yes, I have proof of valid license/purchase for every shred of commercial software on my machines. (Which is not much - just Win98SE, MS Office 2000, and Half-life/CS on my windows partition.)
-Isaac
A little perspective on Palm's market share...
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Palm OS 5.0 Preview
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Palm's market share has dropped from ~71% last year to 58% this year. Handspring's share grew from 14% to 15%, and Sony's share grew from 1% to 6%. Note that this we are talking about the entire handheld market in unit sales, not just PalmOS handhelds. By my figuring, the 3 major PalmOS vendors have about 80% of the market.
Let's put this in perspective, shall we? All PocketPC manufacturers together sell fewer handhelds than Handspring and Sony together. Palm's own handhelds outsell all PocketPC devices combined by almost a factor of 3.
I do think that Palm needs to split off the OS unit into an entirely separate company, to avoid the problem of competing with one's licensees, and I do think Sony (much as I hate their DMCA-loving guts) makes much slicker PalmOS handhelds these days than Palm or Handspring (though my m505 meets my needs).
That said, I don't think Palm is doomed, and I do think there's a real astroturf campaign being waged by Microsoft across the net. Here's a clue - wherever you see "Palm's unit share down 44%! PocketPC revenue share increases by 73%!" someone has an agenda to make Palm look bad - if they weren't trying deliberately to do so, they wouldn't compare apples (unit share of a single PalmOS manufacturer) to oranges (revenue share, i.e. share of total dollars spent, of all PocketPC licensees).
Yes, the number of dollars being spent on PocketPC devices is increasing (still only 26% of total dollars spent on PDAs). This statistic itself is misleading given the much higher prices (and manufacturing costs) of PocketPC devices. Those PocketPC 2002 devices cost a bundle to make; wake me up when a PocketPC manufacturer claims margins close to those of any PalmOS manufacturer.
I'm not saying Palm couldn't lose their lead in market share to PocketPC handhelds. I'm just saying they haven't lost it yet, nor are they doomed to lose it barring some extraordinarily shady tactic from Microsoft (e.g. deliberately breaking all PalmOS hotsync capabilities in their next OS - something that won't happen unless MS greases enough palms to repeal all the antitrust legislation we've got).
Others have made the adequately made the points that PocketPC devices are still usability nightmares compared to Palms, and so are really only selling to extreme gearheads who "need" that colorful battery-sucking brick to impress the neighbors/vendors/clients/ladies. "But look! You can watch the Matrix on it! All I had to do was hook my VCR to my computer, encode the video into a 15fps MPEG file, which I stored on my $300 microdrive, which fits into the CompactFlash expansion sleeve, which fits on my iPaq like so! Of course, I can't watch the whole movie on a single battery charge unless I use the PCMCIA sleeve which has an extra battery and more than doubles the thickness, but look!! Keanu!!"
If I was Linus Torvalds, I'd be really interested in finding out whether this device sucks or not - because if it does, I wouldn't want a name so similar to Linux(TM) on it.
90% of PDA platforms suck, just like 90% of anything else, so there's a pretty good chance this thing is just going to be another high-profile PDA flop. At least G.Mate (Yopy), VTech (Helio), and Agenda had the decency not to try and use the Linux name to brand their products. If I were Linus, I might encourage Royal to do the same. And I'd royally smack up those LinuxDA fools.
At least a government agency providing the service would bound by the U.S. and state Constitutions, as well as other laws limiting the power of the state.
For example, a public network probably couldn't boot you for badmouthing city officials on a web page. Most private ISPs, on the other hand, have terms in their TOS that reserves their right to cut your connection for using it to post "inappropriate content" - where "inappropriate" may be defined arbitrarily as whatever the ISP doesn't like. (I recently got Comcast@Home service, and its TOS definitely has a term like this.)
On the privacy tip, a public network would have to follow the 4th Amendment, where a private ISP need not. (of course, both would probably make you explicitly consent to arbitrary monitoring as a condition of service - this is another term every private ISP I've ever dealt with has included.)
I'm not sure how a public network would be worse than a private one. (As for Carnivore, etc. forget it - private ISPs are typically coopted voluntarily, and if they aren't, their upstream providers probably are. Besides, you don't have anything to hide, do you?;))
On a side note, I can't wait for the next Watergate, where the sitting party gets caught using the surveillance apparatus to spy on its real enemy - its political opponents. It's just a matter of time, IMO. But this apparatus functions just as well on private networks today as it does on the public ones.
These types of information are all protected because there was a perceived need to protect them. So, what makes you think that the powers that be are going to finance a giant system to allow everyone to access video archives of John Q.'s every move? Do you really believe that this could happen, that it is politically possible?
Well, I'm not necessarily talking about enormous video archives - that's probably not practical or especially marketable. But I suspect there is probably a sizable commercial market for databases of condensed location information collated from many sources, just one of which may be cctv/face-recognition systems (another might be cell-phone tracking, which unlike face ). Just the rather mundane direct marketing possibilities would be lucrative - Think of a store buying a list of shoppers who frequent a competitor, for the purpose of pitching offers to these persons. I'd wager that such information is much more salable than video rental records or student records. (Medical records, while nominally protected, are freely traded if you use health insurance.) The likelihood that there's large sums to be made selling such information suggests that such information will eventually be collected and sold.
Furthermore, TransUnion, Experian, Equifax, the Direct Marketing Association and others have been very active in lobbying against privacy legislation precisely because they make money by trading personal data. I do not believe they are likely to stop, nor do I believe there are others with similar financial interests lobbying on the other side of this issue.
While this map may be a silly exercise, it is a thought-provoking one. My original post on the matter has little to do with this exercise and a lot to do with addressing the "who cares if we're always on camera?" argument.
Slashdot Mirror
You may rest assured that computer geeks use their grasp of arcana to fleece people all the time. I see it all the time, from BOFH-types I'd encounter on the job to Bill Gates.
Yep. Unfortunately, this does happen, though wealthy clients who want to harrass enemies, real or imagined, will do so regardless of whether they hire a lawyer or a layperson to prepare the paperwork.
A lawyer who takes his deep-pocketed clients' money without winning cases will very soon have no deep-pocketed clients to fleece. Again, this behaviour (not to excuse it) is hardly unique to lawyers; as a contract UNIX admin, I'd spend 4 gigs out of 5 cleaning up after some previous geek who had fleeced my client in the past and stuck them with broken or unmanageable systems and networks.
Like what? Wherever you see "nitpicking" in an agreement, you should know that means every one of the nits being picked has, at some point in the past, hatched and bitten someone in the ass who didn't expect it.
Well, I don't think life would be any less complex or adversarial without lawyers, but I realize this is a point on which reasonable people can differ. I agree with you on "more legalistic" but that the existence of lawyers makes life "more legalistic" isn't a stretch, it's tautology. Computer geeks make life more complex and "more technologistic," but I don't count this against them.
I'd love to see a reputable source for this. It sounds pretty difficult to quantify, given that money that goes to lawyers doesn't vanish out of the economy. I won't argue that there aren't overpaid lawyers (or overpaid computer geeks), but that money doesn't just disappear.
-Isaac
As someone wrapping up his first year of law school, I can relate to frustration with the arcana and complexity of law. However, as a hard-core (and until recently, professional) computer geek, I can also relate to frustration with the arcana and complexity of hardware and software. That doesn't mean I think "First thing we do, let's kill all the geeks" is a positive sentiment.
The law is complex and computers are complex -- frankly, everything in life is complex. There are things that don't seem complex because we have evolved to be capable of doing them unconsciously - breathing, for example, or walking. Agriculture is phenomenally complex, and in our society there are relatively few who understand it. (I, personally, can't keep a houseplant alive without instructions. In another era, this would make me dead.)
Compared to agriculture, legal systems are spring chickens - the common law tradition dates back (in recognizable form) less than a millennium, to the aftermath of the Norman conquest. In that time, the range of possible human conduct has vastly expanded, mores have changed, whole religious doctrines have arisen (Martin Luther wasn't even born 600 years ago), etc. etc. and the law has tracked these changes. Admittedly, it lags behind, and tends to accumulate cruft (ask me about fee tail estates or the rule against perpetuities sometime!), but by and large it does the job we ask of it, which is to (A) provide a binding forum for resolving disputes between private parties and (B) provide a check on arbitrary exercise of state power.
Now, I would not suggest that the legal system is perfect, nor that it accomplishes even these two basic functions perfectly or even with competence in all circumstances. I would, however, suggest that "let's kill all the lawyers" is not a good idea. Yes, access to the courts is an old and enormous problem, SLAPP suits are a problem, volumes of statutes that always grow and never shrink are a problem, judges who don't understand modern technology have always been a problem, etc. etc. "[K]ill all the lawyers" is not the solution to any of these problems. To those who would replace our legal system wholesale, I pose the question - what replacement, then? The Chinese system? Hey, no lawyers, just arbitrary judicial authority unchecked by anything but familial and political alliances. Is that preferable? Or maybe we just do away with vast chunks of legal code? Sounds good to me - less to read. Which chunks? Who gets to decide? Legislatures? We've got those already. Appellate courts? I thought we were getting rid of the lawyers. An all-powerful executive? There are plenty of places in the world where the executive makes all law - none are particularly pleasant places.
Anyways, I'm rambling. The point is, simply, that just because a field of human activity is arcane and complex and touches your life doesn't mean that exterminating the practitioners of said profession will necessarily improve your life.
-Isaac
Sorry, guys, but no way in hell was LOTR:FOTR the best picture of 2001. I saw 5 films in 2001: Shrek, Amelie, LOTR, Waking Life, and The Royal Tenenbaums. LOTR wasn't even the third best film out of that limited selection.
I like Peter Jackson, too (Meet the Feebles is something else) but he wasn't the best director of the year, either.
And now, even though it has nothing to do with LOTR, I would like to once again razz the Oscars for not even nominating Waking Life for best animated film, instead picking 2 blockbusters (Shrek, Monsters Inc.) and a glorified Nickelodeon pilot (Jimmy Neutron).
Of course, this is to be expected - the Oscars are a crock of shit anyhow. Figure skating is a more objective contest with less corrupt judging. Basically, the winner in each category is decided by bloc voting and horse-trading by the studios who control the bulk of academy members - so says a former professor of mine who's a member of the academy and actually has an Oscar under his belt, whom I'm inclined to believe. Most Oscar voters haven't even seen all the films in the categories for which they're voting - there's just too damn many films up for consideration for anyone to watch and still have time to do anything else.
-Isaac
Also check out this article on patent strategies of japanese companies. I do not claim to be a scholar here and freely concede that mmy posts are not scholarly works. That said, they do derive from the cumulative impact of articles I have read in a variety of sources over the years. I invite you to do some more research yourself to dispute my view - indeed, a quick google search reveals plenty of B-school theses fawning over the Japanese tendency towards cross-licensing to the extent that it permits more than one company to extract monopoly rents from a market, though I would dispute (again, admittedly without my own body of scholarly work) the assumption that this is a good thing from a macroeconomic perspective. If anything, I think this would reinforce my point, but since nobody (that I've found) has directly studied the impact of cross-licensing on companies excluded from the "club," as it were, I cannot provide you with an online reference directly supporting my proposition wrt stifling of innovation.
-Isaac
The US Patent & Trademark Office is basically a rubber-stamp operation these days because there is no incentive for an examiner to deny an invalid patent. Conversely, patent examiners have every incentive to grant patents without serious review and simply let the bad patents be litigated by private parties. If memory serves, neither the examiner nor the USPTO can be held liable for granting bogus patents without proof that the examiner or USPTO acted with actual malice towards the plaintiff in granting the patent - practically speaking, an impossible standard to meet.
I'm not anti-patent per se - I believe they serve their constitutional purpose in certain circumstances - but I do think that if left unchecked, the current US patent regime will ultimately lead to the same sort of industrial consolidation and resultant economic stagnation that Japan has been experiencing for over a decade. Patents aren't the only or even the main factor that has led Japan to its current situation, of course, but their patent system coupled with incestuous cross-licensing relationships within and among Japan's keiretsu has all but eliminated start-ups and smaller enterprises, particularly in high-tech industry, while the larger IT firms have become moribund from lack of competition (see NEC, Hitachi).
Just my opinions, of course.
-Isaac
The proton is still in service - but it can't lift anything close to 30 tons. My point was that the highest-capacity version of the proton replacement (the angara) will supposedly lift 30 tons to LEO or 6 tons to GEO (naturally the latter spec is the important one).
-Isaac
Some rights you can't waive - you can't sell yourself into slavery, for instance. Privacy can be waived, and is, frequently. Got medical insurance? If you've used it, you've waived all your legal medical privacy protections, as your insurer can sell or give away the information to whoever they damn well please, and you can't do a damn thing about it. Sorry. The court wouldn't need to talk to you or your doctor - they would only need to talk to your insurer. If the insurer cooperated, a court order wouldn't even be necessary for a prosecutor to get that info.
Whether or not evidence gleaned from your medical records would be admissable is another question, not addressed here. My point is simply that even in the few areas where one does have some privacy, (medical, video rental records), many if not most people have already waived their privacy by using health insurance or video rental incentive cards (e.g. "Blockbuster Rewards") etc. And student records, which were once sort-of protected, are no longer private from the gov't - see the USA PATRIOT act.
-Isaac
I don't know much about shuttle payload space constraints, but IIRC the shuttle is still the only way to lift 30+ tons into orbit; the soviet replacement for the proton is supposed to be good for 30 metric tons, but hasn't yet entered service.
Agreed on your other points though. Expendable, non-man-rated rockets in mass production is the way to go - see the success of the ESA with Arianne.
-Isaac
The Russians built a "doomsday device" as a deterrent to nuclear aggression - but they kept it secret. Dr. Strangelove points out (as it becomes apparent that the world is, well, f*cked) that "the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!"
Same principle here. The message is being sent through an orchestrated leak.
-Isaac
For a little perspective, check out the brochure from the ITU World Telecommunication Development Conference 2002. A hopeful note, according to that link: "Africa now has more than twice as many main telephone connections as Tokyo and 85 percent of today's world population share 45 percent of all telephone lines (see Figure 1). In comparison, in 1984, 90 percent of the world's people used only ten percent of all telephone lines."
-Isaac
I'd just like to point out that lawyers are essentially agents of parties petitioning a court. Here, the management of company X wanted to file suit against a cranky poster to a message board - It's not like some lawyer decided to file suit and then sold the idea later to company X (lawyers get disbarred over tactics like that). I don't see where it's inappropriate to blame the corporate entity of company X for the lawsuit, seeing as it's the plaintiff.
You don't have a bogus lawsuit (or any lawsuit) without a plaintiff.
-Isaac
I think the "market" (i.e. voters) will take care of political spam just fine by reacting negatively to its use. Remember that spam works for scammers and hucksters because a tiny portion of those targeted will send money to the sender; ergo there's no disincentive to pissing off all the other recipients. Political elections, however, don't quite work that way...
-Isaac
Considering Walmart's ruthlessly efficient business practices, I wouldn't be surprised if Walmart were selling this information to Microsoft. Not many people pay cash for any $400 purchase, so they probably have good data.
-Isaac
Sony is a pissant company compared to, say, Microsoft or IBM.
Sony's market cap = ~$42 billion
AOL Time Warner's market cap = ~$100 billion
Microsoft's market cap = ~$319 billion
IBM's market cap = ~$169 billion
I know market cap is not the only or even the best measure of a company's size, but it's a decent measure of the leverage a company can wield. To put things in perspective, the total value of all Sony's floated stock (i.e. market cap) is a bit more than the amount of *real, liquid cash* that Microsoft has on hand (~$36 billion as of their last filing).
Media giants like AOLTW are small fry compared to the giants of tech or many other industries. They just have disproportionate influence with politicians and the public. Why? For one, they have a long, long, long history of brutally effective lobbying and tight political connections. Jack Valenti was riding in the car behind JFK in Dallas, and was the first advisor to LBJ to be sworn in. The main reason, though, is that they have enormous influence over the public. Politicians don't get elected without the media. Elections are won and lost by media coverage. Popular entertainment media like movies and TV can shape public opinion.
That's why politicians get on their knees for media companies - nobody who cares about reelection wants to piss off the owners of CNN (AOL Time Warner), FoxNews (NewsCorp), ABC (Disney), CBS (Viacom), etc.
-Isaac
I don't think Matsushita is an MPAA member. It is certainly party to some of the DVD licensing organizations, but it is not part of the MPAA. Sony is, of course.
-Isaac
I'm sorry you feel you have an axe to grind with Ricochet - I do too, being a former customer who lost service (though I no longer live in a service area). I also think they should have gone for volume with their pricing model, instead of catering to the overpaid-techie set.
Last time I questioned your assertion that the 128k upgrade was no more than "changing an S register on the poletops", you corrected me on a few points - namely that the old modems used frequency hopping to avoid collisions with the old poletops. I haven't tested this, but let's stipulate it.
You did not address my (correct) assertion that the newer poletops did use a different band for backhaul (2.3 GHz WCS/2.4GHz ISM), where the old poletops used the same 900 MHz band as the modems. (This information came not from "marketing drivvel" [sic] but from a paper presented at interop by Metricom engineers). (As to my other assertion - that the 128k modems used 4FSK vs. FSK, I admit that I don't remember where I read that.) So why do you claim that the new service was no different than the old?
No, I didn't work for Metricom. You worked tech support for Metricom. Based on my experience with Metricom's tech support, this explains alot about your attitude and (mis)understanding of the network. The upgrade was more than just "changing an S register on the poletop." Why do you insist on claiming otherwise?
-Isaac
Latency with Ricochet (at least the 128k version) was pretty low - I typically got 200-300msec, sometimes a little lower, occasionally a lot higher. This is fine for ssh connections (and I used ssh constantly with mine), but Counterstrike is right out. (Believe me, I tried! Latency goes up when you're transmitting a lot of packets in both directions.)
However, it worked great for tetrinet, which I was hooked on at the time.
I used the service in the Bay Area, Phoenix, New York, and DC, and the performance stayed within the same ranges across all cities (the main determinant of speed and latency was how many repeater hops one had from one's location, but I found the service generally delivered 128k as promised and 256k+ on occasion.
-Isaac
Microsoft is in the business of making Mac software because it is profitable. Having Apple around to keep the DOJ away is nice, but Microsoft wouldn't stick around if they weren't making cash off of Mac users - but they are. A greater percentage of total Mac users buy (as in pay for) MS Office than do PC users (and Office is Microsoft's real cash cow), generating revenue disproportionate to platform market share.
If making MS Office for Mac ceases to be profitable, I do not doubt for an instant that Microsoft will cease to develop it. I don't really expect that to happen for a long time, though.
-Isaac
Read the bio blurb at the end of the article - the author has written a pair of books on programming in VisualBasic and has 2 books on .Net coming out this year. Hmmm... might he have some stake in .Net's widespread adoption?
-Isaac
I noticed that Richard Linkater's "Waking Life" didn't snag an animated feature nomination, even though as a film it kicks the snot out of the other nominees. But of course, as Oscar nominations and voting are entirely studio-driven, I'm not surprised. (An FYI for those who believe Oscar votes are somehow objective - thoe voters are members of the academy, most of whom are associated with a particular studio or other, and as a result large blocs of essentially "party-line" votes are controlled by the major studios/distribution houses. This is how a movie like "Gladiator" wins "Best Picture".
-Isaac
Ah, the BSA. I love these guys - their tactics help free (libre) software more than they may realize.
In my former life as a contract sysadmin I had several clients who specifically requested free software be used to build new systems or to replace licensed commmercial software with equivalent functionality. One major reason I got, especially in the latter case, was the desire to be rid of licensing hassles. The lower upfront cost helped, but this was usually less significant as they were already paying $$$ to contract me to implement whatever.
License compliance creates not just paperwork hassles but can shut down a business when, e.g. a license server fails/license key is accidentally deleted by clueless admin/clueless admin forgets to renew licenses/vendor goes under without a way to extend licenses or purchase additional keys. And this doesn't even cover security problems - did you hear the one about MS Office for Mac OS X? By spoofing product keys one can shut down every copy on the network, blocking use and causing unsaved work to be lost.
Now I'm a law student who salivates at the thought of the BSA getting its comeuppance - one of these days, I would not be surprised to learn that the BSA had organized a raid that shut down business at a company that turned out to be fully compliant. (Yes, I know full compliance with commercial licenses is virtually impossible in a large organization, but let me dream!) I can imagine hefty lawsuits arising... actually, this might have already happened. The BSA could have settled such a case with a settlement agreement that required confidentiality. I wonder, though, if one day a BSA raid will cause sufficient monetary damages (or a sufficiently cranky CEO) to make settlement impossible and allow a messy and public trial to go forward.
God, that would be sweet!
And yes, I have proof of valid license/purchase for every shred of commercial software on my machines. (Which is not much - just Win98SE, MS Office 2000, and Half-life/CS on my windows partition.)
-Isaac
Palm's market share has dropped from ~71% last year to 58% this year. Handspring's share grew from 14% to 15%, and Sony's share grew from 1% to 6%. Note that this we are talking about the entire handheld market in unit sales, not just PalmOS handhelds. By my figuring, the 3 major PalmOS vendors have about 80% of the market.
Let's put this in perspective, shall we? All PocketPC manufacturers together sell fewer handhelds than Handspring and Sony together. Palm's own handhelds outsell all PocketPC devices combined by almost a factor of 3.
I do think that Palm needs to split off the OS unit into an entirely separate company, to avoid the problem of competing with one's licensees, and I do think Sony (much as I hate their DMCA-loving guts) makes much slicker PalmOS handhelds these days than Palm or Handspring (though my m505 meets my needs).
That said, I don't think Palm is doomed, and I do think there's a real astroturf campaign being waged by Microsoft across the net. Here's a clue - wherever you see "Palm's unit share down 44%! PocketPC revenue share increases by 73%!" someone has an agenda to make Palm look bad - if they weren't trying deliberately to do so, they wouldn't compare apples (unit share of a single PalmOS manufacturer) to oranges (revenue share, i.e. share of total dollars spent, of all PocketPC licensees).
Yes, the number of dollars being spent on PocketPC devices is increasing (still only 26% of total dollars spent on PDAs). This statistic itself is misleading given the much higher prices (and manufacturing costs) of PocketPC devices. Those PocketPC 2002 devices cost a bundle to make; wake me up when a PocketPC manufacturer claims margins close to those of any PalmOS manufacturer.
I'm not saying Palm couldn't lose their lead in market share to PocketPC handhelds. I'm just saying they haven't lost it yet, nor are they doomed to lose it barring some extraordinarily shady tactic from Microsoft (e.g. deliberately breaking all PalmOS hotsync capabilities in their next OS - something that won't happen unless MS greases enough palms to repeal all the antitrust legislation we've got).
Others have made the adequately made the points that PocketPC devices are still usability nightmares compared to Palms, and so are really only selling to extreme gearheads who "need" that colorful battery-sucking brick to impress the neighbors/vendors/clients/ladies. "But look! You can watch the Matrix on it! All I had to do was hook my VCR to my computer, encode the video into a 15fps MPEG file, which I stored on my $300 microdrive, which fits into the CompactFlash expansion sleeve, which fits on my iPaq like so! Of course, I can't watch the whole movie on a single battery charge unless I use the PCMCIA sleeve which has an extra battery and more than doubles the thickness, but look!! Keanu!!"
-Isaac
If I was Linus Torvalds, I'd be really interested in finding out whether this device sucks or not - because if it does, I wouldn't want a name so similar to Linux(TM) on it.
90% of PDA platforms suck, just like 90% of anything else, so there's a pretty good chance this thing is just going to be another high-profile PDA flop. At least G.Mate (Yopy), VTech (Helio), and Agenda had the decency not to try and use the Linux name to brand their products. If I were Linus, I might encourage Royal to do the same. And I'd royally smack up those LinuxDA fools.
-Isaac
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Yet.)
;))
At least a government agency providing the service would bound by the U.S. and state Constitutions, as well as other laws limiting the power of the state.
For example, a public network probably couldn't boot you for badmouthing city officials on a web page. Most private ISPs, on the other hand, have terms in their TOS that reserves their right to cut your connection for using it to post "inappropriate content" - where "inappropriate" may be defined arbitrarily as whatever the ISP doesn't like. (I recently got Comcast@Home service, and its TOS definitely has a term like this.)
On the privacy tip, a public network would have to follow the 4th Amendment, where a private ISP need not. (of course, both would probably make you explicitly consent to arbitrary monitoring as a condition of service - this is another term every private ISP I've ever dealt with has included.)
I'm not sure how a public network would be worse than a private one. (As for Carnivore, etc. forget it - private ISPs are typically coopted voluntarily, and if they aren't, their upstream providers probably are. Besides, you don't have anything to hide, do you?
On a side note, I can't wait for the next Watergate, where the sitting party gets caught using the surveillance apparatus to spy on its real enemy - its political opponents. It's just a matter of time, IMO. But this apparatus functions just as well on private networks today as it does on the public ones.
-Isaac
Well, I'm not necessarily talking about enormous video archives - that's probably not practical or especially marketable. But I suspect there is probably a sizable commercial market for databases of condensed location information collated from many sources, just one of which may be cctv/face-recognition systems (another might be cell-phone tracking, which unlike face ). Just the rather mundane direct marketing possibilities would be lucrative - Think of a store buying a list of shoppers who frequent a competitor, for the purpose of pitching offers to these persons. I'd wager that such information is much more salable than video rental records or student records. (Medical records, while nominally protected, are freely traded if you use health insurance.) The likelihood that there's large sums to be made selling such information suggests that such information will eventually be collected and sold.
Furthermore, TransUnion, Experian, Equifax, the Direct Marketing Association and others have been very active in lobbying against privacy legislation precisely because they make money by trading personal data. I do not believe they are likely to stop, nor do I believe there are others with similar financial interests lobbying on the other side of this issue.
While this map may be a silly exercise, it is a thought-provoking one. My original post on the matter has little to do with this exercise and a lot to do with addressing the "who cares if we're always on camera?" argument.
-Isaac