Reading the Russian memos, it's clear
they have this naïve idea that software
should do what it says in the spec. They're
clearly hankering after an ordered society
with goals, and resisting the ferment of
the free market where one sells whatever
the hell one can get away with. Their aesthetic
distaste at the concept of workarounds,
to deal with the fact that the actual spec
is whatever the hell was delivered, fairly
blares out.
<flamebait<looking at their comments
on strings, I bet they think in Pascal (or another Wirth-flavoured language that tries to
stop you doing stupid things).</flamebait<
The average computer user doesn't know the
difference between the categories "computer"
and "operating system". Geeks not understanding
that is the reason normal folks can't understand
a damn thing geeks say.
And who can blame them? The difference is as
subtle as that between langue, parole and discours, or more exactly between "phonem" and "seme". And if you,
dear/. reader, understand those, I bet you use
a file-system metaphor to remember which is
what.
Secondsun, your idea's great for high-volume stuff.
But I have a Cynic's Law of Content Pricing:
the perceived value to the user is a sort of
reversed-J shape curve, plotted against size of
audience. Can't do graphs here, so:
Audience= 6 Men in Suits who know the subject is Important but not what it is: $100 a word (and upward)
600 Men in Suits: $10
6000 of about anybody: $0
60,000: $1
600,000: $3
Soo... we're back to some kind of payment
based on samples offered at your minimal rate,
to cope with some audience sizes... no?
rknop said way back while I was in the restaurant:
Even with a good tool like Google, most of the time (in my experience) one wades through a lot of "crap"...
And almost everything in the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque Nationale
is is total crap - which bit isn't depends on what question you have in mind right now.
Haven't you noticed: very few of the trusted
sources show up on Google. Some CNN, no BBC,
among first-rank national newspapers only
the Hindustan Times that I can think of... and that, translated to India's politics, is a bit Washington-Times-ish.
Why not? because they're planning for subscription access. (If you want
to develop the argument about why this blocks
spiders, obviously you can do it yourself. And
figure why tightly-targeted advertizing using
all those damn questions about your inside leg
measurement is pretty much the same thing.)
Why subscriptions? Because, I strongly suspect, they're worried that if they go for micropayments the argument for sharing revenue with actual authors - writers and photographers and artists and musicians - will get a lot stronger. And they hate that, because they're wedded to a Steel Age model of what they own. See the Tasini -v- Times case and (same URL) the
Times' dog-in-the-manger response.
But if they did opt for micropayment,
all that selected and reviewed content would be
available to all researchers without the hassle
of remembering whether it's cypherpunx2 or cypherpunks666 that still works as
a login on the Times.
With micropayment, information would be a lot more free, in the "speech" sense.
Everything would be indexed. Everything would provide source info and
a couple of paragraphs (thumbnail photo, musical intro) for free. You like the sample, you click,
you pay your $0.02, the aggregator gets $0.01,
I get my $0.01.
Yes, I declare an interest. I make my living writing stuff. I give a lot away. But not the best
stuff, not the thoroughly-researched stuff.
Obviously, not the stuff that I invested days
rather than minutes in.
If you want free stuff, there'll always be plenty of free stuff. You'll just have to invest the time to weed it out from among the crap for yourself. Another way of saying what I do for a living is: I develop an understanding of the story and cut the crap for you. You want to do it yourself, fine: but how much an hour do you charge yourself for sieving shit?
For all those asking basic questions about
copyright: the basics in 600 words. It's
UK-based but so simple that the only major
difference from the US is the near-total
absence of "moral rights" over there./. contributors who can't be bothered to follow
the link: there is no copyright in facts,
just in expressions. And today's
ruling quite clearly has nothing to do with
linking.
That quote about the SCOTUS decision affecting
only articles before "modern" contracts were
introduced is from the NY Times and begs the
whole issue. The NY Times company is pressing
freelances to sign away all rights in their
work for the same amount they used to pay for
a one-edition license. Then they plan to license
the work to individual archive readers for $2 a
shot. Not surprisingly, freelance writers and
photgraphers are objecting - not
signing. As a freelance writer, I'd be happier to negotiate that I got half a 10-cent charge. What SCOTUS has done is to say to the corporations: yes, you do have to negotiate with freelances.
...and then Tim went ahead and got the work
done: it's called PICS, the
Platform for Internet Content Selection. And
yes, I talked with him about it <A NAME="thud!"> (waay back
when, when he had time...) and yes, we agreed
that a proper filtering system must ba able,
for example, to allow blocking sanctimonious
religious BS as easily as the left-handed mouse
stuff.
The W3C folk
being who they are, PICS is a full-blown metadata
schema. It'll do mysterious things, as soon as I
get my head round the spec. Another language to
learn...
Don't forget dead trees. Your students - and
everyone who's serious about programming - should
read the history of numbers, and that's in books.
There were a spate around the Millennithingy, due
to wierdnesses in publishers' conceptions of the
world.
Probably the better of these is Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. Charles Seife's Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea will give
students a hand up in understanding how journalists misunderstand the issues. Your students should read both. And definitely John D Barrow'sThe Book of Nothing : Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe.
Even better, throw them in the deep end with Barrow's Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits (1999).
Interesting to see Michael's take on individual creators and corporations. Quoth your Constitution, with his response:
"to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8).
Hmm, do you notice it doesn't say to publisher or manufacturers. ..I wonder if there would be a possible lawsuit for the cases in which the publishers get the first copyright. ..even on "works for hire". . . ?
Indeedy. For the benefit of US-based readers:
the mainstream of international law doesn't have
a "work for hire" concept. The mainstream isn't
copyright at all, it's Authors' Rights, and they
are personal rights: principally the
right to be identified as the author, and the
right to defend the integrity of your work.
Economic rights flow from these, which are akin
to human rights - the opposite of the case in English-speaking countries where
copyright is a commodity.
In the USofA, no author has either of these badly-named "moral rights"
(except an artist who creates a work in a
signed and numbered edition of less than 200).
There's a current of opinion that this puts
the USA in flagrant breach of international
law - that Berne Convention.
Except that when it came to writing
laws covering authors of software, all the people
who understood the law didn't understand software.
So the software companies snuck "work made for hire" into Authors' Rights countries.
/.ers shouldn't have too much trouble
imagining a parallel universe in which software
authors have the right to a byline and the right
to stop marketdroids interfering with the poetry
of their code. Hell, in this world it would
probably be compulsory for every error message
to have a personal by-line. Which would be nice.
Summary: there's a world of difference
between laws which protect individual
rights of authorship, and those which protect
the Moloch Media Corp. Unfortunately, the US and the UK have the wrong kind. I'm trying to work
out how to change that. See this paper on moral rights and the
Tasini -v- Times case about to go before the
Supremes.
Like Nielsen, I've been saying
for years that eventually micropayment
will be the way - at least for users
who fall in the mid-range between couch potato
and expert for the information in question.
For example see here from 1997 (it shows) and the
capsule version here.
The key points, it seems to me, are:
What you pay your connection provider is
a utility bill - like the lighting by which you
read that book, the heating for your TV womb.
Quite different from the payment for the book
or the video, an (inadequate) portion of which
goes to the humans who made the words and
pictures.
Micropayments offer the chance for wider
diversity of content. With micropayments,
if I want the scoop on CPRM I'll have these
choices:
Going to an advertiser-supported site for a
really quick view, with the added effort of
reading through the commercial bias;
Paying $0.05 to an independent for their
analysis and summary of what's going on; or
Doing the research myself from free sources,
FoI requests, etc. Set aside a day or three...
Corollary of the above: in your own area
of expertise free stuff is fine. The areas where
you want to pay an independent are those where you
want proper information but to avoid expanding your
expertise more than absolutely necessary, e.g. avoid
learning statistical mechanics or Russian.
To understand the argument between advertiser-supported
and otherwise-supported media, it helps a lot
to have spent time outside the USofA. Public-service
media rock.
Micropayments are linked to the battle
between independents (like me) and the
copyright-grabbing corporations. See
Tasini -v- Times.
Corporations don't like the idea because it
increases pressure on them to hand over a share
to the humans who make the content. How would
you feel about a paid-for Napster if half the
$1 went to the artists? Or 80%?
Proper micropayments need to be digital
cash: secure, anonymous and quite separate
from the credit card clearance system. And
if only interoperativity standards can be
put in place they should be economic down
to $0.0001 or less.
"The notion that you can create accessible, standards-compliant sites that are also backward-compatible assumes that older software supported older versions of the same standards. And of course that isn't so," said Todd Fahrner, a member of the WaSP steering committee."
As we say here in London: Bollocks. It is
possible to have fun with over-the-top scripts
at the same time as Lynx-enhancing the
site and making it fully compatible even with
dumb screen-readers. See www.nmd.org.uk
for one example.
"The notion that you can create accessible, standards-compliant sites that are also backward-compatible assumes that older software supported older versions of the same standards. And of course that isn't so," said Todd Fahrner, a member of the WaSP steering committee."
As we say here in London: Bollocks. It is
possible to have fun with over-the-top scripts
at the same time as Lynx-enhancing the
site. See www.nmd.org.uk
for one example.
Not I. And I can't either.
www.theregister.co.uk reports the DNS
screwing up M$ & Yahoo over the weekend...
but that's a looong time ago as these
things go.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading the Russian memos, it's clear they have this naïve idea that software should do what it says in the spec. They're clearly hankering after an ordered society with goals, and resisting the ferment of the free market where one sells whatever the hell one can get away with. Their aesthetic distaste at the concept of workarounds, to deal with the fact that the actual spec is whatever the hell was delivered, fairly blares out.
<flamebait<looking at their comments on strings, I bet they think in Pascal (or another Wirth-flavoured language that tries to stop you doing stupid things).</flamebait<
The average computer user doesn't know the difference between the categories "computer" and "operating system". Geeks not understanding that is the reason normal folks can't understand a damn thing geeks say.
And who can blame them? The difference is as subtle as that between langue, parole and discours, or more exactly between "phonem" and "seme". And if you, dear /. reader, understand those, I bet you use
a file-system metaphor to remember which is
what.
Secondsun, your idea's great for high-volume stuff.
But I have a Cynic's Law of Content Pricing: the perceived value to the user is a sort of reversed-J shape curve, plotted against size of audience. Can't do graphs here, so:
Soo... we're back to some kind of payment based on samples offered at your minimal rate, to cope with some audience sizes... no?
Hey - you just invented David Chaum's DigiCash. I knew it was a good idea.
And the refund idea merits a lot more thought... if I've understood #6 correctly. (Non habeo Latineramumble)
Sounds good to me.
Could you develop the escrow/RPC bit a little more?
rknop said way back while I was in the restaurant:
And almost everything in the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque Nationale is is total crap - which bit isn't depends on what question you have in mind right now.
Haven't you noticed: very few of the trusted sources show up on Google. Some CNN, no BBC, among first-rank national newspapers only the Hindustan Times that I can think of... and that, translated to India's politics, is a bit Washington-Times-ish.
Why not? because they're planning for subscription access. (If you want to develop the argument about why this blocks spiders, obviously you can do it yourself. And figure why tightly-targeted advertizing using all those damn questions about your inside leg measurement is pretty much the same thing.)
Why subscriptions? Because, I strongly suspect, they're worried that if they go for micropayments the argument for sharing revenue with actual authors - writers and photographers and artists and musicians - will get a lot stronger. And they hate that, because they're wedded to a Steel Age model of what they own. See the Tasini -v- Times case and (same URL) the Times' dog-in-the-manger response.
But if they did opt for micropayment, all that selected and reviewed content would be available to all researchers without the hassle of remembering whether it's cypherpunx2 or cypherpunks666 that still works as a login on the Times.
With micropayment, information would be a lot more free, in the "speech" sense. Everything would be indexed. Everything would provide source info and a couple of paragraphs (thumbnail photo, musical intro) for free. You like the sample, you click, you pay your $0.02, the aggregator gets $0.01, I get my $0.01.
Yes, I declare an interest. I make my living writing stuff. I give a lot away. But not the best stuff, not the thoroughly-researched stuff. Obviously, not the stuff that I invested days rather than minutes in.
If you want free stuff, there'll always be plenty of free stuff. You'll just have to invest the time to weed it out from among the crap for yourself. Another way of saying what I do for a living is: I develop an understanding of the story and cut the crap for you. You want to do it yourself, fine: but how much an hour do you charge yourself for sieving shit?
For all those asking basic questions about copyright: the basics in 600 words. It's UK-based but so simple that the only major difference from the US is the near-total absence of "moral rights" over there. /. contributors who can't be bothered to follow
the link: there is no copyright in facts,
just in expressions . And today's
ruling quite clearly has nothing to do with
linking.
That quote about the SCOTUS decision affecting only articles before "modern" contracts were introduced is from the NY Times and begs the whole issue. The NY Times company is pressing freelances to sign away all rights in their work for the same amount they used to pay for a one-edition license. Then they plan to license the work to individual archive readers for $2 a shot. Not surprisingly, freelance writers and photgraphers are objecting - not signing. As a freelance writer, I'd be happier to negotiate that I got half a 10-cent charge. What SCOTUS has done is to say to the corporations: yes, you do have to negotiate with freelances.
...and then Tim went ahead and got the work done: it's called PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection. And yes, I talked with him about it <A NAME="thud!"> (waay back when, when he had time...) and yes, we agreed that a proper filtering system must ba able, for example, to allow blocking sanctimonious religious BS as easily as the left-handed mouse stuff.
The W3C folk being who they are, PICS is a full-blown metadata schema. It'll do mysterious things, as soon as I get my head round the spec. Another language to learn...
Don't forget dead trees. Your students - and everyone who's serious about programming - should read the history of numbers, and that's in books. There were a spate around the Millennithingy, due to wierdnesses in publishers' conceptions of the world.
Probably the better of these is Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. Charles Seife's Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea will give students a hand up in understanding how journalists misunderstand the issues. Your students should read both. And definitely John D Barrow's The Book of Nothing : Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe.
Even better, throw them in the deep end with Barrow's Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits (1999).
Interesting to see Michael's take on individual creators and corporations. Quoth your Constitution, with his response:
Indeedy. For the benefit of US-based readers: the mainstream of international law doesn't have a "work for hire" concept. The mainstream isn't copyright at all, it's Authors' Rights, and they are personal rights: principally the right to be identified as the author, and the right to defend the integrity of your work. Economic rights flow from these, which are akin to human rights - the opposite of the case in English-speaking countries where copyright is a commodity.
In the USofA, no author has either of these badly-named "moral rights" (except an artist who creates a work in a signed and numbered edition of less than 200). There's a current of opinion that this puts the USA in flagrant breach of international law - that Berne Convention.
Except that when it came to writing laws covering authors of software, all the people who understood the law didn't understand software. So the software companies snuck "work made for hire" into Authors' Rights countries.
/.ers shouldn't have too much trouble imagining a parallel universe in which software authors have the right to a byline and the right to stop marketdroids interfering with the poetry of their code. Hell, in this world it would probably be compulsory for every error message to have a personal by-line. Which would be nice.
Summary: there's a world of difference between laws which protect individual rights of authorship, and those which protect the Moloch Media Corp. Unfortunately, the US and the UK have the wrong kind. I'm trying to work out how to change that. See this paper on moral rights and the Tasini -v- Times case about to go before the Supremes.
And this is why to human translators with German trying to deal listening funny is.
MLike Nielsen, I've been saying for years that eventually micropayment will be the way - at least for users who fall in the mid-range between couch potato and expert for the information in question. For example see here from 1997 (it shows) and the capsule version here.
The key points, it seems to me, are:
Mike
Ooops. mods pls delete other response.
From the original referenced article:
As we say here in London: Bollocks. It is possible to have fun with over-the-top scripts at the same time as Lynx-enhancing the site and making it fully compatible even with dumb screen-readers. See www.nmd.org.uk for one example.
From the original article:
As we say here in London: Bollocks. It is possible to have fun with over-the-top scripts at the same time as Lynx-enhancing the site. See www.nmd.org.uk for one example.
I have one thing to say:
Join the Notional Missile Defence initiative!
Not I. And I can't either. www.theregister.co.uk reports the DNS screwing up M$ & Yahoo over the weekend... but that's a looong time ago as these things go.