Jim is exactly right. This isn't a ruling against so-called "deep-linking". It's a ruling (okay, a potential ruling) against linking. Specifically, the owner of the destination of a URL can specify how that URL can and can't be used.
I have to disagree. While it's true that it's technologically possible to prevent deep linking, that technology is arguably not really WWW technology. It's a different technology. Before the WWW there were AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and other walled-off online spaces. The WWW was a radical change, in that the walls were taken down. So, to prevent deep linking, a technological solution (in fact, a new technology) is necessary, inefficiency be damned.
What's really disturbing about the ruling is that it sided with big business at the expense of individuals. It's a step toward allowing big business to hijack the WWW and take it away from the people.
The Pledge is about creating a national culture -- that is, a body of common knowledge that we all share. It certainly is true that we don't care so much about these things when we are in the midst of peace and prosperity. (And in most people's minds, we are still enjoying peace and prosperity. Last I knew, there have been no shortages or rationing, or a large-scale call-to-arms.) When peace and prosperity leave us, those unifying elements do a lot to unite us. I'm not just talking about the Pledge, but also our National Anthem and other patriot songs. Shortly after 9/11, many groups around the country sang 'God Bless America', including members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Imagine a future generation that doesn't know the tune or the words to that patriotic song, or any other patriot song.
How about sitting down to watch the movie Red Dawn to get an idea of what conditions can be like when we aren't enjoying peace and prosperity. (I'm sure there are better movies than Red Dawn, but that one comes to mind.)
Palladium is fatally flawed, and it will never succeed. Why? The current situation of our computers and the Internet demands mutual distrust. That's a very good thing. It's true that newbies tend to be trusting, but it's part of one's computer and Internet education to learn to be suspicious. Palladium is a radical change; it departs from mutual distrust to complete trust. A world of complete trust is an entirely new world. Anything that would have an impact on trust must be carefully controlled. It's that need for control that will cause the technology to be rejected.
Re:What's wrong with HTTP?
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 2, Informative
HTTP works for simple request/response interactions only. Not every interaction fits into that pattern. For example, you may want to control a interactive voice response (IVR) unit. You ask the IVR to play a prompt, then collect digits entered by the user (on his telephone keypad). If the user is entering a card number, you may allow a couple of minutes before the IVR times out, or before the number is completely entered. Once the IVR has the number, it must get that number back to the requestor. The requestor may also want feedback, say, to get the digits as they are entered. Because of the long timeout allowed, and the need to get feedback, this just doesn't work with HTTP.
As an even more extreme case, consider the situation where you want to start a lengthy computation on a computational server. Your HTTP request starts the action and the HTTP response indicates that the computation has started successfully. However, when the computation finishes, perhaps hours later, HTTP may not work to report the completion event. Constant polling isn't a good idea, either. Sure, HTTP communication could happen the other way. But HTTP traversal through a firewall or NAT is usually asymmetric, so the reverse HTTP connection may not be a possibility.
Re:CORBA is too heavy & EJB is too RMI/IIOP de
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
SOAP is supported by Microsoft and IBM, Sun, BEA, and so on. That observation alone seems to suggest that SOAP will go much further than either DCOM or CORBA.
A few years back, I used to wonder what the world of distributed computing would be like if Microsoft decided to support CORBA. Maybe with SOAP, we will get a chance to find out.
BTW, I think Microsoft has no choice but to play along with open standards in web services. If they were to choose otherwise to push their own proprietary web services "standards", their proprietary standards would probably be adopted no more than DCOM.
Re:narrow-minded, earth-centric foolishness
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 1
It's not foolishness. It's sample bias. If there were only one instance of an ecosystem anywhere in the universe, that ecosystem is on planet Earth. It's sample bias, because you didn't pick a random sample, you picked the one sample that is known to have life.
Imagine you tracked down the one person who won the lottery and asked him what he thinks the odds are of winning the lottery. Without any other information available to him, he would think that the odds are pretty good. If it were his first time to play the lottery, he might even think that the odds are somewhere around 50/50 or better. The problem, of course, is the sample bias -- namely, that you tracked down and inquired of the lottery winner.
Guess what, if the universe held a lottery to decide the one and only planet that would contain life, planet Earth is the lottery winner.
Personally, I think that microbiology argues for the extremely small odds of the sponaneous generation of life. Perhaps the odds are on the order of 1:X, where X is on the order of the number of entities in the universe. That would argue, statistically, for our planet being the only one that contains an ecosystem.
In truth, with a sample size of 1, all statistical arguments are moot, including the Drake argument.
If the U.S. Congress eventually passes the bill and it becomes law, there is still no guarantee that the studios will publish their digital content. Remember, the government only gets to decide what the technology will be. They can't force the producers to publish their content in digital form. If the producers decide that the copy protection mandated by the government is not sufficient to protect their content, then they can maintain the status quo of not publishing their content in digital form.
Note that this suggests that the content producers will be in the drivers seat. They get what they want, or they refuse to publish. Of course this makes sense, since it's their bill, not the technology companies' bill.
There may be problems with yEnc. But there are so many more problems with uuencode. For crying out loud, uudecode is hopelessly broken! There is no "uuencode" standard. There are many variants of uuencode. One would have to wonder how uuencode could become the de facto standard for Usenet binary newsgroups. To put it another way, MIME is infinitely better than uuencode, which was a pure hack from the beginning. MIME has been around for 10 years, but it has not been adopted by Usenet.
I can't believe that Nixon is advocating that we stick with uuencode.
Here are the advantages of yEnc:
Contains a CRC, so you can detect corruption.
It is a more efficient encoding.
Clearly indicates the parts of a file
Even if you don't think the first advantage is a big deal, the second and third ones are.
Nixon's out of his mind if he thinks we should stick with uuencode. He's also out of his mind if he thinks we will ever adopt something better that is based on MIME. MIME has been around for 10 years, and still has not been widely adopted in Usenet, despite the fact that it's widely deployed for email. I don't think it ever will catch on in Usenet. You can sing MIME's praises all day long, but you can't force users to adopt it. That's why I think if there is momentum in favor of something that is significantly better than uuencode, let's go for it.
This whole situation reminds me of the difference between TCP/IP and the OSI standards. On the one hand (OSI) you had bureaucratic committees designing extremely advanced (read: complex) protocols that are designed first, then implemented second. On the other hand, you had a chaotic situation (TCP/IP at the IETF) where the guys who implemented a protocol started talking to get it standardized. My point is, that maybe MIME is just to complex for Usenet, which likes things simple, although maybe a bit chaotic.
BTW, considering that uuencode is almost never used in email, and that MIME is almost never used in Usenet (specifically, the binary newsgroups), I think there is no chance yEnc will cross over into email.
Personally I can't see why we can't just send the data as 8-bit binary. uuencode and similar encoding formats should have died out with UUCP years ago, since there is no physical reason why 8bits can't be sent over the wire anymore.
Because many of the protocols we use, like SMTP, IMAP4, POP3, and (yes!) NNTP, use "lines" (of text) as the "framing" method. As you probably know, TCP doesn't provide any kind of framing, so framing has to be handled at a higher layer in the protocol stack. If you use "lines" to define framing, then you search through the content to find CR LF, which marks the end of a line. The alternative is to provide a length at the beginning of segment. There is an extension to SMTP to allow that, but there is no similar extension to NNTP. But, as long as framing is done by breaking content into lines, you won't be able to transfer unencoded binary data using NNTP or similar protocols.
You've obviously not spent much time in the "binaries" newsgroups. These groups are very popular. I have personally downloaded over 1000 MP3 files from the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* newsgroups. I hate to break the news to you, but Usenet is not just for text discussions any more. When Napster and all of its clones are taken down by lawsuits, we all be getting our music from Usenet.
There is an IETF proposed standard for message submission. (See RFC2476) It would use TCP port 587. The idea of message submission is that a message submission agent (MSA) accepts messages from client software, while a message transfer agent (MTA) accepts messages from other MTAs. There could be a white list of valid MTA hosts, allowing only whitelisted MTAs to connect to other MTAs. The result of this would be that entry to the mail "network" would be guarded at the MSAs. Well, I don't think the IETF had exactly this situation in mind, but the idea of message submission could be adapted to work with this "guarding" at the network edge. The only change required would be to require the MTA to listen at a TCP port other than port 25, since many old client software will use port 25 for message submission. (Come to think of it, many ISPs are already blocking TCP port 25 to client software, so this might be a moot point.) In addition to guarding entry into the mail network, an MSA could also perform such actions as setting a valid return path. Perhaps if this ran in parallel to the current mail system, users would have a choice, with the new system being much better for business use.
No doubt ISPs and corporations can filter some mail, but it seems to me that the most effective filters will be at the final destination -- the mail client. The biggest difference is that the client software can filter the messages into a folder for the human user to review before deleting. This means the danger of false positives is lower for client filters. The client software can use many of the strategies that ISPs use. Plus, they can use many more strategies that ISPs can't use. For example, you could check for a HIGH priority in the mail header. Then if it's not from a sender you recognize, you put it into your spam folder. (Spammers love to set their messages to a HIGH priority.) An ISP could not implement that kind of filter, because it doesn't know which senders you recognize. Another example: if the message is not from a mail client you recognize (Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, plus whatever you add), it goes into your spam folder unless overridden by another rule. The "another rule" would be one that recognizes mail from mailing lists you subscribe to.
I think it would be interesting to start a standard whereby ISP spam filters and client filters work together. They could do this by having the ISP spam filter to add message headers that indicate the progress it has made. The client filter could then continue taking advantage of the work accomplished by the ISP filter.
I am convinced there is a technological solution to spam. If we are ever able to do even the most basic tasks with artificial intelligence, we ought to be able to use AI to filter spam. Imagine, AI that is advanced to the point that a chess playing computer can beat the world champion human player, yet AI can't yet effectively filter spam. (!) Using AI to filter spam can't be rocket science. Every spam message asks you to do something. It shouldn't be hard to distinguish between "use your credit card to order" and "Aunt Sarah will be visiting next week".
I recently downloaded an Open Source program, which I won't name, to evaluate. One of the authors (or maybe just a "promoter") had counted the lines of code, which came out to 96,000. The author then indicated how many developer years were required to write that many lines of code, using common estimating techniques. He was obviously quite proud of the fact that they had accomplished so much. As I noticed that the project had still not reached version 1.0, I just considered this to be an indication of how much time was required before they reached version 1.0, assuming that the code still contained very many bugs, and assuming that they weren't planning to add any additional lines of code.
In my small company, our need is not destroying email, but archiving it. Much of our email is with customers, and there's much value in preserving it as part of our corporate memory. For example, the sales team needs corporate memory because the saleperson dealing with a customer this year may not be the same salesperson dealing with the same customer next year. The previous email correspondence with that customer is very useful to a new salesperson. I'm sure there are other examples of the need for preserving email. How about engineering discussions about the design of a product that eventually changes the world. I'm sure that kind of information is gold to historians.
Use XHTML and then validate your document. XML is becoming very popular, but I am surprised at how many people never validate their XML. This is one of the big advantages of XHTML over HTML: you can use a validating parser to validate your document against a DTD.
If you don't want to use XHTML, then use HTML 4.0 and tidy. Using the -e option will report errors. Again, I am surprised by how many people don't use a tool like tidy, which is available for free from the W3C.
Tidy doesn't catch all HTML violations. However, you can also use the W3C's validator, which will validate your HTML against a DTD.
I'm sure many readers remember the comments of the Roxio CEO that CDs would eventually disappear from retail stores. Consumers would download music from the Internet and make their own CDs. Considering that possibility, why do you think the recording companies want so desperately to put copy protection on all new CDs? Seems to me that that would just hasten the demise of retail CDs. I mean, retail CDs would have two things working against them: (1) the convenience of downloading music and making your own CDs, and (2) copy protection on retail CDs.
No, the real problem is that the recording companies just don't know how to adapt to a changing business environment.
These companies are floundering. I imagine there are very heated debates among their top executives.
If they put out copy protected CDs, then consumers will look more to the Internet to get MP3 files to listen to and to burn into CD-Rs for their cars. So, while the RIAA claims that the copy protection is intended to stop the trading of MP3 files on the Internet, the real effect might be the exact opposite, as they force consumers to stop buying CDs and look to the Internet to get MP3s. I just can't imagine why they want to screw consumers who like to store digital audio on their PCs or in their portable music players. Well, actually I do know why. They tend to think that you can squeeze money out of consumers.
Really, though, they are going to have to fight an escalating battle against the transfer of MP3 files over the Internet. I would think they (the RIAA) stand a much lesser chance of winning the Internet battle than they do winning the copy protection battle.
These companies seem to be just focused on consumer electronics products. Those are the sealed boxes that might be difficult to tap into at all. I don't see any real battles to be fought there, because they are appliances, not computers. Computers are the real, general-purpose devices that present the biggest threat to DRM. As long as we can keep the Big Companies from putting ridiculous restrictions on our computers, we should enjoy a certain amount of digital freedom.
Some of this stuff really does sound funny, though, doesn't it. Like this one:
"We are dying to lobby Hollywood studios on this issue," Husson said in an interview here.
Boy, he'll sure have to lobby long and hard, won't he! Kind of reminds you of the little runt in your third grade class who couldn't wait to tell the teacher on your bad behavior, doesn't it? BTW, why does he need to lobby Hollywood? What does Hollywood have to do with consumer electronics devices? Or the wireless transmission technologies used within a home?
If it turns out that it consumers just buy silver disks, without first considering whether or not they are audio CDs, then Philips has lost a major asset. At a time when silver disks come in so many varieties -- CD-Rs, CD-RWs, audio silver disks with a large variety of proprietary copy protection schemes, DVDs, DVD-Rs, and more still to come -- true CDs will represent real value to the consumer, and therefore the CD-DA trademark and logo will be a valuable asset to Philips that is well worth defending. If consumers start referring to any silver disk that contains music and works in a CD player as a CD or as a compact disk, then Philips could lose the right to the trademark. If they choose to defend the trademark, they could force retailers to make a clear distinction between audio CDs and other audio silver disks. That could be as simple as changing the sign hanging overhead to read "Audio Disks" instead of "Compact Disks", or could involve putting audio CDs in one section and putting audio silver disks in another section. At some point the consumer will care, and Philips is wise to make sure that they will profit from consumers' discernment. It's possible that in the near future the term "compact disk" will truly mean something again.
...as science is neither innately evil, nor is it innately beneficial. It is only the way that the science is applied that it turns to be one or the other.
I think "creating" constitutes "how science is applied". We could justify practically anything by calling it scientific research which is "neither evil, nor is it innately beneficial".
The cloning of humans is filled with perils, but not allowing science to progress down a particular avenue is a much more serious problem.
Conducting "scientific" experiments on political prisoners is filled with perils, too, but could have many benefits. There are good reasons why some research is banned.
I am opposed to the idea that scientific progress must be pursued at any cost. Starting with abortion, and moving on to stem cell research and cloning, we are headed toward a world where not all human life is valued equally. Obviously, that is not a problem for most of us whose life will be unquestionably valuable for many years to come. But for others, who are on the margin, the thought is not very comforting. And, of course, there is the scary thought that through forces beyond our control, any one of us could find ourselves on the margin (that is, the margin between valuable human life and not-so-valuable human life).
Yeah, just about everyone I know who wants it has a broadband connection, too, except me. I live near Washington, D.C., which is supposed to rank high when it comes to connectivity. However, I can't get broadband access. I have been eagerly awaiting it for at least two years. My guess is that it will not be available until 2003. What incentive is there to provide more service?
I guess your perceptions really depend on your own circumstances. If you live in a neighborhood where you have had broadband available for a year or more, you probably disagree with Cringely. But if you live in upper-middle-class neighborhood in the suburbs of a major city, and you just can't get broadband access, then you probably strongly agree with Cringely.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, that won't help the situation. Unless a critical mass of web users use a similar hack, there won't be any "deep-links" to click on.
Jim is exactly right. This isn't a ruling against so-called "deep-linking". It's a ruling (okay, a potential ruling) against linking. Specifically, the owner of the destination of a URL can specify how that URL can and can't be used.
What's really disturbing about the ruling is that it sided with big business at the expense of individuals. It's a step toward allowing big business to hijack the WWW and take it away from the people.
How about sitting down to watch the movie Red Dawn to get an idea of what conditions can be like when we aren't enjoying peace and prosperity. (I'm sure there are better movies than Red Dawn, but that one comes to mind.)
Palladium is fatally flawed, and it will never succeed. Why? The current situation of our computers and the Internet demands mutual distrust. That's a very good thing. It's true that newbies tend to be trusting, but it's part of one's computer and Internet education to learn to be suspicious. Palladium is a radical change; it departs from mutual distrust to complete trust. A world of complete trust is an entirely new world. Anything that would have an impact on trust must be carefully controlled. It's that need for control that will cause the technology to be rejected.
As an even more extreme case, consider the situation where you want to start a lengthy computation on a computational server. Your HTTP request starts the action and the HTTP response indicates that the computation has started successfully. However, when the computation finishes, perhaps hours later, HTTP may not work to report the completion event. Constant polling isn't a good idea, either. Sure, HTTP communication could happen the other way. But HTTP traversal through a firewall or NAT is usually asymmetric, so the reverse HTTP connection may not be a possibility.
A few years back, I used to wonder what the world of distributed computing would be like if Microsoft decided to support CORBA. Maybe with SOAP, we will get a chance to find out.
BTW, I think Microsoft has no choice but to play along with open standards in web services. If they were to choose otherwise to push their own proprietary web services "standards", their proprietary standards would probably be adopted no more than DCOM.
Imagine you tracked down the one person who won the lottery and asked him what he thinks the odds are of winning the lottery. Without any other information available to him, he would think that the odds are pretty good. If it were his first time to play the lottery, he might even think that the odds are somewhere around 50/50 or better. The problem, of course, is the sample bias -- namely, that you tracked down and inquired of the lottery winner.
Guess what, if the universe held a lottery to decide the one and only planet that would contain life, planet Earth is the lottery winner.
Personally, I think that microbiology argues for the extremely small odds of the sponaneous generation of life. Perhaps the odds are on the order of 1:X, where X is on the order of the number of entities in the universe. That would argue, statistically, for our planet being the only one that contains an ecosystem.
In truth, with a sample size of 1, all statistical arguments are moot, including the Drake argument.
Note that this suggests that the content producers will be in the drivers seat. They get what they want, or they refuse to publish. Of course this makes sense, since it's their bill, not the technology companies' bill.
I can't believe that Nixon is advocating that we stick with uuencode.
Here are the advantages of yEnc:
Even if you don't think the first advantage is a big deal, the second and third ones are.
Nixon's out of his mind if he thinks we should stick with uuencode. He's also out of his mind if he thinks we will ever adopt something better that is based on MIME. MIME has been around for 10 years, and still has not been widely adopted in Usenet, despite the fact that it's widely deployed for email. I don't think it ever will catch on in Usenet. You can sing MIME's praises all day long, but you can't force users to adopt it. That's why I think if there is momentum in favor of something that is significantly better than uuencode, let's go for it.
This whole situation reminds me of the difference between TCP/IP and the OSI standards. On the one hand (OSI) you had bureaucratic committees designing extremely advanced (read: complex) protocols that are designed first, then implemented second. On the other hand, you had a chaotic situation (TCP/IP at the IETF) where the guys who implemented a protocol started talking to get it standardized. My point is, that maybe MIME is just to complex for Usenet, which likes things simple, although maybe a bit chaotic.
BTW, considering that uuencode is almost never used in email, and that MIME is almost never used in Usenet (specifically, the binary newsgroups), I think there is no chance yEnc will cross over into email.
Personally I can't see why we can't just send the data as 8-bit binary. uuencode and similar encoding formats should have died out with UUCP years ago, since there is no physical reason why 8bits can't be sent over the wire anymore.
Because many of the protocols we use, like SMTP, IMAP4, POP3, and (yes!) NNTP, use "lines" (of text) as the "framing" method. As you probably know, TCP doesn't provide any kind of framing, so framing has to be handled at a higher layer in the protocol stack. If you use "lines" to define framing, then you search through the content to find CR LF, which marks the end of a line. The alternative is to provide a length at the beginning of segment. There is an extension to SMTP to allow that, but there is no similar extension to NNTP. But, as long as framing is done by breaking content into lines, you won't be able to transfer unencoded binary data using NNTP or similar protocols.
You've obviously not spent much time in the "binaries" newsgroups. These groups are very popular. I have personally downloaded over 1000 MP3 files from the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* newsgroups. I hate to break the news to you, but Usenet is not just for text discussions any more. When Napster and all of its clones are taken down by lawsuits, we all be getting our music from Usenet.
I have an idea. How about everybody use FidoNet?
There is an IETF proposed standard for message submission. (See RFC2476) It would use TCP port 587. The idea of message submission is that a message submission agent (MSA) accepts messages from client software, while a message transfer agent (MTA) accepts messages from other MTAs. There could be a white list of valid MTA hosts, allowing only whitelisted MTAs to connect to other MTAs. The result of this would be that entry to the mail "network" would be guarded at the MSAs. Well, I don't think the IETF had exactly this situation in mind, but the idea of message submission could be adapted to work with this "guarding" at the network edge. The only change required would be to require the MTA to listen at a TCP port other than port 25, since many old client software will use port 25 for message submission. (Come to think of it, many ISPs are already blocking TCP port 25 to client software, so this might be a moot point.) In addition to guarding entry into the mail network, an MSA could also perform such actions as setting a valid return path. Perhaps if this ran in parallel to the current mail system, users would have a choice, with the new system being much better for business use.
I think it would be interesting to start a standard whereby ISP spam filters and client filters work together. They could do this by having the ISP spam filter to add message headers that indicate the progress it has made. The client filter could then continue taking advantage of the work accomplished by the ISP filter.
I am convinced there is a technological solution to spam. If we are ever able to do even the most basic tasks with artificial intelligence, we ought to be able to use AI to filter spam. Imagine, AI that is advanced to the point that a chess playing computer can beat the world champion human player, yet AI can't yet effectively filter spam. (!) Using AI to filter spam can't be rocket science. Every spam message asks you to do something. It shouldn't be hard to distinguish between "use your credit card to order" and "Aunt Sarah will be visiting next week".
I recently downloaded an Open Source program, which I won't name, to evaluate. One of the authors (or maybe just a "promoter") had counted the lines of code, which came out to 96,000. The author then indicated how many developer years were required to write that many lines of code, using common estimating techniques. He was obviously quite proud of the fact that they had accomplished so much. As I noticed that the project had still not reached version 1.0, I just considered this to be an indication of how much time was required before they reached version 1.0, assuming that the code still contained very many bugs, and assuming that they weren't planning to add any additional lines of code.
In my small company, our need is not destroying email, but archiving it. Much of our email is with customers, and there's much value in preserving it as part of our corporate memory. For example, the sales team needs corporate memory because the saleperson dealing with a customer this year may not be the same salesperson dealing with the same customer next year. The previous email correspondence with that customer is very useful to a new salesperson. I'm sure there are other examples of the need for preserving email. How about engineering discussions about the design of a product that eventually changes the world. I'm sure that kind of information is gold to historians.
If you don't want to use XHTML, then use HTML 4.0 and tidy. Using the -e option will report errors. Again, I am surprised by how many people don't use a tool like tidy, which is available for free from the W3C.
Tidy doesn't catch all HTML violations. However, you can also use the W3C's validator, which will validate your HTML against a DTD.
No, the real problem is that the recording companies just don't know how to adapt to a changing business environment. These companies are floundering. I imagine there are very heated debates among their top executives.
Really, though, they are going to have to fight an escalating battle against the transfer of MP3 files over the Internet. I would think they (the RIAA) stand a much lesser chance of winning the Internet battle than they do winning the copy protection battle.
Some of this stuff really does sound funny, though, doesn't it. Like this one:
"We are dying to lobby Hollywood studios on this issue," Husson said in an interview here.
Boy, he'll sure have to lobby long and hard, won't he! Kind of reminds you of the little runt in your third grade class who couldn't wait to tell the teacher on your bad behavior, doesn't it? BTW, why does he need to lobby Hollywood? What does Hollywood have to do with consumer electronics devices? Or the wireless transmission technologies used within a home?
If it turns out that it consumers just buy silver disks, without first considering whether or not they are audio CDs, then Philips has lost a major asset. At a time when silver disks come in so many varieties -- CD-Rs, CD-RWs, audio silver disks with a large variety of proprietary copy protection schemes, DVDs, DVD-Rs, and more still to come -- true CDs will represent real value to the consumer, and therefore the CD-DA trademark and logo will be a valuable asset to Philips that is well worth defending. If consumers start referring to any silver disk that contains music and works in a CD player as a CD or as a compact disk, then Philips could lose the right to the trademark. If they choose to defend the trademark, they could force retailers to make a clear distinction between audio CDs and other audio silver disks. That could be as simple as changing the sign hanging overhead to read "Audio Disks" instead of "Compact Disks", or could involve putting audio CDs in one section and putting audio silver disks in another section. At some point the consumer will care, and Philips is wise to make sure that they will profit from consumers' discernment. It's possible that in the near future the term "compact disk" will truly mean something again.
I think "creating" constitutes "how science is applied". We could justify practically anything by calling it scientific research which is "neither evil, nor is it innately beneficial".
The cloning of humans is filled with perils, but not allowing science to progress down a particular avenue is a much more serious problem.
Conducting "scientific" experiments on political prisoners is filled with perils, too, but could have many benefits. There are good reasons why some research is banned.
I am opposed to the idea that scientific progress must be pursued at any cost. Starting with abortion, and moving on to stem cell research and cloning, we are headed toward a world where not all human life is valued equally. Obviously, that is not a problem for most of us whose life will be unquestionably valuable for many years to come. But for others, who are on the margin, the thought is not very comforting. And, of course, there is the scary thought that through forces beyond our control, any one of us could find ourselves on the margin (that is, the margin between valuable human life and not-so-valuable human life).
Why should Trolltech give their software away for free? How are they supposed to feed their families?
Yeah, just about everyone I know who wants it has a broadband connection, too, except me. I live near Washington, D.C., which is supposed to rank high when it comes to connectivity. However, I can't get broadband access. I have been eagerly awaiting it for at least two years. My guess is that it will not be available until 2003. What incentive is there to provide more service? I guess your perceptions really depend on your own circumstances. If you live in a neighborhood where you have had broadband available for a year or more, you probably disagree with Cringely. But if you live in upper-middle-class neighborhood in the suburbs of a major city, and you just can't get broadband access, then you probably strongly agree with Cringely.