Fire departments are a bad analogy, they are required by law to maintain a certain level of service because fire spreads.
In my experience, information also spreads, often faster than fire.
After all, fire is dependent on the availability of combustible material, which can only be used once. Information can spread at the speed of light (or electrons) through all sorts of physical media that is unaffected by the passage of information and can be immediately reused to spread more information.
Of course, one could use this to argue for private control of channels of communication. Private corporations are exempt from silly restrictions such as free speech, the right to publish, etc. So in the coming digital age, they can easily provide filters to slow or block the spread of information that they don't like such as ads for competitors or politicians that they don't support. Government agencies are seriously impeded by such things as the Bill of Rights (here in the US), make it materially more difficult for them to effectively control information flow. About all a government can do (legally) is to record the flow of information, but that's merely a threat of future action, not a way of stopping the spread of undesirable information.
It would be nice if government comm agencies were required to maintain a minimum level of service for all citizens, as happens with at least some other government agencies.
Show me someone who NEVER breaks ANY laws during their normal, day-to-day activities...
There have been a number of things written about the logical impossibility of obeying all the laws in most jurisdictions. It might be fun to make a collection of examples.
One that was publicised in a state where I once lived (name omitted to make you suspect that it might be where you live;-) was a pair of laws with "reasonable" interpretations. One was an anti-vagrancy law, in which one of the acceptable kinds of evidence was not being in possession of any money. The other law forbid the possession of unspecified "gambling devices".
It turned out the the police could (and did) charge people with vagrancy if they had no currency on their person. Credit cards weren't accepted; the police couldn't (legally) verify that they were valid. But if you had a few bills, or even a few coins in your pocket, well, you know any of the "coin/bill matching" games? A simple one is: One of us picks "same", the other "different". We both set down a coin at the same time; if they're both heads or both tails, the "same" guy gets both; otherwise the "different" guy gets both.
So coins are legally "gambling devices". Similar gambling games exist for bills, usually based on the serial numbers. It follows that in this state, anyone can be arrested at any time, and depending on the contents of their pockets, they can be either charged with vagrancy or with possession of gambling devices.
What's your favorite set of laws where you live, that can't all be obeyed at the same time, so that you can be arrested at any time and charged with violating one of the set?
(In another place I once lived - Florida - there was a well-known law against "nude bathing". The wording made it illegal to take a bath in the privacy of your own bathroom without wearing clothes. But I liked to reply to this example by saying that I always took showers, and the law obviously didn't cover them, so it was possible to obey this law and stay clean. We never actually found a way to use this law to guarantee that anyone could be arrested. But a lot of people confessed to being nude-bathing criminals.;-)
I don't think the whole touch thing is likely to work that well when you move from the few-pixels precision of the stylus on the DS to a big fat finger on the iPhone.
Hmmm... I do know a few people who keep a couple of fingernails filed to a point for use with their touch-sensitive PDA.
Also, if you go into any store that sells guitars, you can buy finger picks. The plastic ones would be easy to file to a point, if they're not already fine enough for your screen.
The limitation here is the resolution of the touch screen. Putting something on the end of your finger with a point diameter less than that is cheap and easy, and so low tech that just about anyone with a finger can do it.
A couple hours ago, NPR had an article about the practice of US government agencies intercepting communications between people in various other countries. Part of the explanation was that communications (both Internet and phone) in a lot of the rest of the world go via the US because in so many countries, the connections to/from the US and internal US connections are so much faster than the internal comm systems within the country, and the comm stuff generally picks the fastest available routes.
During the article, I kept wondering why we Americans can't use that high-speed comm gear.
One obvious theory is that the high-speed stuff was installed explicitly for espionage purposes, with no intention of letting mere citizens use it. Is this too cynical? How else can you explain all the "dark" fibre that has been installed, at great expense, and then (supposedly) not used? What other theories, in addition to sheer stupidity, can explain it?
Is it tinfoil hat time here? Is it true that, whatever your country, your local government and commercial comm traffic is mostly being relayed through American routers, for the purpose of intercepting and analyzing the content? Maybe you should ask your local ISP and phone suppliers about their routing...
If that happens, then the documents are not "freely available", at least by any meaning of the word "freely" I intended in my previous post!
Well, I'd agree with you, but I suspect that the people running most government agencies wouldn't. Note again the growing practice of giving discounts for doing government things (e.g., license renewal) online. This is clearly a discrimination against poor people, and in some cases they also discriminate against non-IE users. To my knowledge, this hasn't been challenged at all, so it's "legal by default" (and it's not easy to sue the government;-).
The Massachusetts decision does make it rather clear that "freely available" isn't important to the leaders of that government. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.
The important thing is that the information is freely available to the public.
This is clearly not important to the government of Massachusetts, nor to most other US states.
This could be an interesting precedent. The important point is that there are government documents that citizens are legally required to understand and obey. In the past, the most "encoding" of such documents was in microfilm, which is just an image that can be viewed or printed with cheap, commodity hardware. Government agencies would generally do this for you, often without even asking.
But now we're seeing a lot of government agencies move online, with extra charges if you want readable hard copy. For example, there are a number of states that charge less for things like licenses if you renew online. But this decision takes this change a step farther: It holds the prospect that, to read the document that you are legally required to read and obey, you must pay a specific corporation (Microsoft) for the software to read it. Alternatively, you will have to pay the surcharge for hard copy, which already an established practice. Also, without licensed Microsoft software, you may not be able to reply electronically, and again you'll have to pay a surcharge to someone who has such software. The safest would be to take time off from work and visit the government agency to handle whatever is in the document.
It's basically a surcharge on poor people, of course. To us middle-class and geek types, it's mostly an annoyance, that we have to keep a Windows box on hand and up to date, to prove that we have the legal right to read any OOXML doc that the government tosses our way.
What I think would be interesting would be not to challenge the use of such proprietary encodings, but rather to ask the courts to make the government refund to us the price of the machine and software we must buy to read such documents.
Remember that in the US, under current law, unauthorized decoding of protected (via patent or copyright) documents is a $500,000 fine and five years in a federal prison. And Microsoft's XML encodings are being patented. If it were legal for me to decode and read any document that anyone sent me, I wouldn't be worried. Most proprietary formats get cracked soon after they're released. But with the law imposing such a draconian punishment for merely attempting to read a document that a government agency sends me, I'd feel a lot better if they were required to protect me from prosecution for decoding and reading such documents. Probably the cheapest way would be to require that they pay for my Windows box.
Given a document, and a description of the document format, you should be able to retrieve all information stored in that document...
Note that we've had discussions here in/. over the fact that Microsoft has applied for patents for some of their XML encodings. One of the implications of such patents is that anyone attempting to decode their contents may find themselves in violation of MS's patents. In the US, such decoding can be a crime that can get you a $500,000 fine and five years in a federal prison.
Part of the discussions have commented that this mostly seems to cover the encoding of embedded images in MS XML docs. But you learn something interesting if you try digging around in various government online archives. In many, if not most cases, old docs are "digitizes" and put online by scanning them in and putting the image online. Look at the Library of Congress archives, for example, and you'll see a lot of this. There's a lot of good historic stuff there, but if your software won't display an image, you can't read the document's contents, only the meta-data that someone typed in during the scanning.
So even if you're a good enough programmer to decode government documents in any proprietary format, you may find yourself spending a lot of time decoding an old image format and extracting the text, and your reward may be a huge fine and a stretch in a federal pen if you do it with anything but licensed Microsoft software.
Yeah, you can challenge it in court. Then, ten or more years and a few million dollars later, you might lose anyway. Do you want to be the test case?
Corporate/government copies of Office don't go through activation.
So you mean that, when a government agency sends me a doc and I can't read it on my machine, they'll happily send me a copy of an appropriate release MS Office and I'll be automatically licensed to install and run it on my machine?
Somehow, I don't quite believe this.
(Note that I didn't say what sort of machine(s) I have at home, because this shouldn't matter for government docs. And I can't tell you what I'll have 10 years from now, when I receive that important government document and it comes up gibberish on my screen.;-)
This can hardly be called FUD. They destroyed at least one man's career in government -- probably two mens'.
Indeed, and there's a history of this. From at least the mid-60s, there was a saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying (or recommending) IBM." Nowadays, you mostly hear "Microsoft" substituted for "IBM", of course.
Both companies have maintained this situation by occasionally staging demos that they can, in fact, have you fired if you recommend a competitors' product. It doesn't take a lot of demos like this. What's important is that the demos get the right publicity, in places where managers are likely to get the message. You can bet that nearly everyone in a decision-making capacity in the Massachusetts state government is aware of this story and understands what it means for their career.
This is especially important in government agencies. If government documents can be "standardized" to Microsoft's proprietary formats, this goes a long way to ensuring that every citizen will have Microsoft software to communicate with their government. Let's face it, whether we like it or not, we will all need to be able to communicate with random, unpredictable government agencies in the future.
It could be productive to think of situations which would cause us to say the thing is broken. Some ideas come to mind:...
. If whole industries, scientific progress, or the productivity and well-being of a society can be held up by a patent
Various historians have written about how this has been true since the early days of the patent system. Using our current terminology, the patent system was broken by design. Its supporters always claim that patents encourage improved technology, but history says that patents primarily impede advances. In many cases, this doesn't even benefit the patent holders. Thus, in Levine's first example, James Watt spent most of his life in court, suing people. He made very little money from his big invention, until after his patents ran out, and only then did he settle down to building and selling the steam engines that eventually made him rather wealthy. His patents effectively set back the development of steam transport by several decades.
How can we improve our current system or build a new one which won't have these problems?
Considering that we've had this sort of problem with patents from the start, it doesn't seem likely that we can fix the problems. If we could, you'd think that some country would have stumbled onto the solution by now.
The only approach that seems to have helped at all is the compulsory licensing system that many countries use with copyright. This involves taking control of the "invention" away from the patent/copyright owner, and decreeing that anyone can use it for a standard, fixed license fee. Needless to say, the owners of such "Intellectual Property Rights" don't agree with this, though history shows that it seems to be about the only thing that takes the profits away from the lawyers and gives them to someone else. Of course, the "someone else" is usually a corporation, not the actual inventor, but that's another topic that we could flame to death in another thread.;-)
This simple fact is the main evidence of how broken the system is. Current patents, at least in the US, are unreadable by the engineers that they are ostensibly written for. Even if you read one and think you understand it, fact is that if you aren't an experienced patent lawyer, you do not understand it. In Legalese, there are a lot of English-like words whose meanings are rather different than in normal English, and there are many more words whose meanings are very different from Engineering English. In the case of computer-related patents, many of the patents deal with new concepts that the legal system hasn't yet adjudicate, so the legal meaning of much of the text hasn't yet been decided in court. Google can't know what patents they are infringing, any more than Apple can.
Considering all the new stuff they're involved in, Google can be reasonably sure that they're violating some of Apple's (and Microsoft's and IBM's and...) patents. They just can't know which ones, until the courts tell them.
"Every single person working in the media today who experienced the dot-com bubble in 1999 to 2000 believes that we are going through the exact same process and can expect the exact same results -- a bust...."
Comparing the "dot-com bubble" to some purported "Web 2.0 bubble" is quite bogus, for a simple reason. The concept of "dot-com" was well defined. Basically, you could look on the end of a web site's name, and if it ended with the four characters ".com", it was a "dot-com". There was a bit of bogosity present, in that some ".com" sites weren't in fact commercial, while some sites ending with a different top-level domain were commercial. But the fundamental idea was fairly clear, and it was easy to determine whether a site was or wasn't a commercial site.
With "Web 2.0", however, this isn't true. If you go looking for definitions, you'll find thousands, and you'll have problems finding any two that are the same. Thus, many definitions include the idea that the downloaded pages contain client-side code (aka "scripts"), but this isn't always true. Some people call anything with non-HTML inside HTML "Web 2.0". I've seen sites claim to be "Web 2.0" because they contain CSS. Really.
Fact is, "Web 2.0" is nothing more than a vague, fuzzy marketing buzz-phrase that means whatever the writer wanted it to mean. It tells you little or nothing about the actual content of any site.
So there isn't a "Web 2.0 bubble". Rather, there's a lot of hype around that uses the phrase "Web 2.0" to mean "Our site is cooler than those others." And there are other sites using very similar techniques that don't hype themselves as "Web 2.0". Often this is because they don't need to hype themselves. See maps.google.com for a good example, and try finding "Web 2.0" anywhere at that site. (Actually, I suppose it is there somewhere; can anyone find it?;-)
Rather than a "Web 2.0 bubble", what we've got is zillions of little, each bursting individually and splattering their neighbors. So what'll happen is that the marketers will slowly, one by one, realize that this buzz phrase has outlived its usefulness, and they'll move on to other words to hype their stuff.
And that's something that's gonna be with us for the long run. Once commerce successfully took the first successful steps onto the Internet, it was inevitable that marketing in all its glory and sleaze would move there, too. Dvorak is merely propagating the typical marketing process. Part of that is that old words become, well, old, and need to be replaced. But that doesn't mean that any bubble has burst. It's just the ongoing process of finding new ways of shouting "New! Improved!" at the marks. That's been going on for centuries, and isn't going to stop in our lifetimes.
... suicide bombers often repeat their attacks OVER AND OVER.
Back in WWII (that's World War Two for the gen-X and -Y folks), one of the standard jokes was about the champion Italian kamikaze pilot who flew 23 missions. The number changed with the retelling, of course, like any good joke. Anyway, maybe we need a series of ethnic Iraqi/al-Qaeda/Arab/Kurd/Afghan jokes, starting with the one about the champion suicide bomber who carried out N missions. Hmmm... Maybe that guy was Palestinian?
6 minutes? 20 seconds? Is that true? I use Thunderbird (on Kubuntu), and it starts up in a second. I can't imagine waiting that long for an email client to load up. What is it doing that takes so long? Is this typical behavior for Evolution?
Well, I've experimented with Evolution off and on for some years, on various chunks of hardware, and I'd say it is typical. Whenever you tell Evolution to do something, you can go to the kitchen, make coffee, and be back with a cup before the results are on the screen. After a while, you're really wired...
Maybe there's some config problem that's wrong everywhere I've tried it, but I haven't seen enough clues to diagnose the problem. If anyone knows, especially if you have some fixes, you might try contacting the Evolution folks and tell them that this is a major barrier to getting their toy widely adopted.
It's not just me, either; I've mentioned this to a number of people who've tried Evolution a few times, and they report the same molasses-like slowness.
|It's not the CIA's job to do psyops or spy on a website housed and run by an American.
But is it the Pentagon's job? Pentagon Boosts Media War Unit
Maybe not legally, anyone who thinks that has ever stopped either of them may be classified as a hopeless dreamer. The rational assumption would be that they investigate anyone they want to. The fact that both are pretty much outside the purvey of any legal organization (as is also true in every other government's spy and military branches) should explain the situation.
Of course, Americans do have somewhat of a history of casually ignoring such things, exercising their rights openly, etc. For instance, unlike in many other countries, few Americans would have any real fear of responding openly in this forum. Since spy and military agencies have a great deal of interest in computers and communication, we would expect that a lot of their people are reading/., but I sorta doubt that many people are going to be intimidated by that thought.
In any case, what does it really mean to "spy on a website"? Aren't web sites where you put stuff that you want to publish openly for anyone to read? If you think otherwise, you are really unclear on the concept.
Wikipedia has had a few problems with sabotage, but so far they seem to be pretty decent about fixing the problems when they arise. I wonder how many print encyclopedias have been as good at resisting "outside pressure" concerning the text of some of their articles?
So it was good old favoritism. Buy a can of politicians, get one nation free!
Well, of course it was! Back in 2000, Microsoft finally faced the facts about what it takes to maintain their position. That was when they suddenly became one of the largest "campaign contributors" to the US elections. And right after the election, the US government caved in their anti-trust suit against Microsoft, "settling" for an agreement that effectively promised a hands-off approach to all further Microsoft business methods.
Remember back in the 70s, when IBM was successfully sued for their long-standing practice of providing IBM equipment and software to educational institutions at extremely low prices? Well, part of TFA is explaining that MS is doing the same thing in China now, and you can bet that there will never be any legal challenges to the practice.
Face it; the computer industry has always had two distinct markets. There's the tech-savvy market, which has always had a flock of small companies selling high-quality goods. And there is the "mass" (business first, and now retail) market, where people are incapable of judging quality, and that market has always been controlled by one company.
There was the curious development back in the 80s, when IBM faced the fact that they couldn't get into the small-computer market without losing their shirt, so they farmed it out to that upstart, Microsoft, and funded the ad campaign. Bill Gates & co. were savvy enough to keep control of their software, and IBM seems to be happy to keep things this way. To see this, go to ibm.com and try to find a desktop or laptop that has anything but Windows Professional installed. Yeah, you can get linux from IBM, if you're determined enough, but it takes a lot of searching to find a way to order it, but most IBM customers will never suspect that anything but Windows Pro is available on any of IBM's small computers.
So the retail/business small-computer market is monopolized by one company with a huge ad budget and mostly crappy products, like the retail/business markets has always been since it arose in the late 50s. The tech-savvy market has lots of companies that have tiny ad budgets in comparison, but mostly good products, as has also been true for half a century. And we're here in a tech forum lamenting the fact that we still haven't taken over the retail/business (i.e., tech-averse) market.
The linux crowd will never sell their stuff well anywhere except to tech-savvy customers. The most applicable phrase I can think of is the old taunt "Get over it!" Along with "It ain't gonna happen!" And maybe a few other taunts.
(Anyone got any other favorite taunts that are applicable here?;-)
>>nobody imagined that a company might patent a genetically modified seed and then sue farmers for saving some from last years' crop for this year
This has nothing to do with a patent; it's a licensing issue. Farmers want to continue doing business in the "old ways" while reaping the benefits of new tech.
Actually, it's a combination of patent and licensing. And the issue has farmers around the world somewhat nervous. Google for "Monsanto Percy Schmeiser". Mr. Schmeiser claims (and such evidence as exists supports him) that he didn't buy Monsanto's GM canola seed; he had been breeding his own local varieties. But his neighbors grew Monsanto seed, and Roundup-resistant canola plants were found in his fields, so he was sued by Monsanto for patent infringement.
He has spent part of his time since then talking to people around the world about the issue. What scares people is that it's not possible to prevent cross pollination of most crops, so if your neighbor grows a crop that contains patented DNA, you can be sued into bankruptcy by a giant foreign-owned corporation. There's a serious threat that such corporations could end up owning much of the farmland in any country where DNA patents are upheld by local courts.
This is why, for example, a number of countries in Africa have stopped accepting any whole GM grains as food aid. They only accept ground grain, which can't be grown. If they allow GM grain into their country, it may alleviate current hunger problems, but the long-term cost will be foreign ownership of much of their farmland.
You may not take this seriously, but a lot of people around the world do.
So if I have an iPhone, install apache on it, and copy over a few files (is rsync available yet?), what sort of URL to I email around to friends so they can reach the phone?
This isn't a hypothetical problem. Here at home, we have a Mac Powerbook for a few years, and I've had apache running on it from the start. I can access the web site with http://localhost/, and when I'm at home, I can access it from my linux box or my wife's Windoze box (for job-related reasons only;-), but I've never found a way to access it from the Internet. Yes, I've asked on several fora, but nobody ever answers. Well, OK, I did get a few RTFM replies, but without a clue as to what FM to R, that's not too helpful.
Can an iPhone really run a web server (or any other server) that's accessible via wifi as I wander about the landscape? If so, where's the HOWTO explaining how to do it and figure out what its URL looks like? Without that, it's just a waste of cpu cycles.
(And I'm still trying to find out how to make my PB's web server accessible by friends who aren't on my home LAN.;-)
It is made very clear that the EDGE access is only for "email and web browsing".
OK, so I fire up an SMTP server on my iPhone's port 25, and apache on port 80. That's using it for email and web browsing. What's the problem?
Next you gonna tell me that the phone part can only make outgoing calls, and can't accept incoming calls. Hmmm... Better keep quiet about that; Apple and AT&T might get ideas about yet another way to cripple your new toy. Or charge you extra for the capability that you thought you had already paid for.
since when is your MAC transmitted in an IP packet?
Um, since they started using ARP?
Well, technically the MAC address is outside the IP packet, in the MAC-level header that precedes the IP header.
But, of course, it is in the packet. Just not in the IP part of the packet.
Yeah, I know; picky, picky, picky...
(And the MAC address doesn't survive the passage through the first bridge or gateway, so anyone who wants it has to get it from your immediate neighbor.)
In reality, all the students are doing is providing the RIAA with personal and private information which can conceivably be used against them...'"
Hey, I get one or two dozen phishing messages per day. What's one more? If the email filters don't catch it, I can flag it as "spam" (and wish they had a separate "phish" category;-), and I never hear from them again. My gmail account gets about 1200 messages per month in its "Spam" folder, and roughly half of them are now phishing attempts.
So what's the big deal here? Don't these college students know how to recognize a phishing message when they see it?
Someone should explain to them that if they reply, their info will just be added to an "easy marks" database that's sold to other companies, resulting in a flood of other such messages from shady companies looking for naive victims.
We really should be teaching kids to defend themselves on the Net. The first lesson should be not to reply to such solicitations, ever.
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Fire departments are a bad analogy, they are required by law to maintain a certain level of service because fire spreads.
In my experience, information also spreads, often faster than fire.
After all, fire is dependent on the availability of combustible material, which can only be used once. Information can spread at the speed of light (or electrons) through all sorts of physical media that is unaffected by the passage of information and can be immediately reused to spread more information.
Of course, one could use this to argue for private control of channels of communication. Private corporations are exempt from silly restrictions such as free speech, the right to publish, etc. So in the coming digital age, they can easily provide filters to slow or block the spread of information that they don't like such as ads for competitors or politicians that they don't support. Government agencies are seriously impeded by such things as the Bill of Rights (here in the US), make it materially more difficult for them to effectively control information flow. About all a government can do (legally) is to record the flow of information, but that's merely a threat of future action, not a way of stopping the spread of undesirable information.
It would be nice if government comm agencies were required to maintain a minimum level of service for all citizens, as happens with at least some other government agencies.
Show me someone who NEVER breaks ANY laws during their normal, day-to-day activities ...
;-) was a pair of laws with "reasonable" interpretations. One was an anti-vagrancy law, in which one of the acceptable kinds of evidence was not being in possession of any money. The other law forbid the possession of unspecified "gambling devices".
;-)
There have been a number of things written about the logical impossibility of obeying all the laws in most jurisdictions. It might be fun to make a collection of examples.
One that was publicised in a state where I once lived (name omitted to make you suspect that it might be where you live
It turned out the the police could (and did) charge people with vagrancy if they had no currency on their person. Credit cards weren't accepted; the police couldn't (legally) verify that they were valid. But if you had a few bills, or even a few coins in your pocket, well, you know any of the "coin/bill matching" games? A simple one is: One of us picks "same", the other "different". We both set down a coin at the same time; if they're both heads or both tails, the "same" guy gets both; otherwise the "different" guy gets both.
So coins are legally "gambling devices". Similar gambling games exist for bills, usually based on the serial numbers. It follows that in this state, anyone can be arrested at any time, and depending on the contents of their pockets, they can be either charged with vagrancy or with possession of gambling devices.
What's your favorite set of laws where you live, that can't all be obeyed at the same time, so that you can be arrested at any time and charged with violating one of the set?
(In another place I once lived - Florida - there was a well-known law against "nude bathing". The wording made it illegal to take a bath in the privacy of your own bathroom without wearing clothes. But I liked to reply to this example by saying that I always took showers, and the law obviously didn't cover them, so it was possible to obey this law and stay clean. We never actually found a way to use this law to guarantee that anyone could be arrested. But a lot of people confessed to being nude-bathing criminals.
I don't think the whole touch thing is likely to work that well when you move from the few-pixels precision of the stylus on the DS to a big fat finger on the iPhone.
... I do know a few people who keep a couple of fingernails filed to a point for use with their touch-sensitive PDA.
Hmmm
Also, if you go into any store that sells guitars, you can buy finger picks. The plastic ones would be easy to file to a point, if they're not already fine enough for your screen.
The limitation here is the resolution of the touch screen. Putting something on the end of your finger with a point diameter less than that is cheap and easy, and so low tech that just about anyone with a finger can do it.
Because people in the civilised world don't pay for inbound calls?
But I'm in the US, you insensitive clod! (I spell "civilized" with a 'z'.)
A couple hours ago, NPR had an article about the practice of US government agencies intercepting communications between people in various other countries. Part of the explanation was that communications (both Internet and phone) in a lot of the rest of the world go via the US because in so many countries, the connections to/from the US and internal US connections are so much faster than the internal comm systems within the country, and the comm stuff generally picks the fastest available routes.
...
During the article, I kept wondering why we Americans can't use that high-speed comm gear.
One obvious theory is that the high-speed stuff was installed explicitly for espionage purposes, with no intention of letting mere citizens use it. Is this too cynical? How else can you explain all the "dark" fibre that has been installed, at great expense, and then (supposedly) not used? What other theories, in addition to sheer stupidity, can explain it?
Is it tinfoil hat time here? Is it true that, whatever your country, your local government and commercial comm traffic is mostly being relayed through American routers, for the purpose of intercepting and analyzing the content? Maybe you should ask your local ISP and phone suppliers about their routing
If that happens, then the documents are not "freely available", at least by any meaning of the word "freely" I intended in my previous post!
;-).
Well, I'd agree with you, but I suspect that the people running most government agencies wouldn't. Note again the growing practice of giving discounts for doing government things (e.g., license renewal) online. This is clearly a discrimination against poor people, and in some cases they also discriminate against non-IE users. To my knowledge, this hasn't been challenged at all, so it's "legal by default" (and it's not easy to sue the government
The Massachusetts decision does make it rather clear that "freely available" isn't important to the leaders of that government. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.
The important thing is that the information is freely available to the public.
This is clearly not important to the government of Massachusetts, nor to most other US states.
This could be an interesting precedent. The important point is that there are government documents that citizens are legally required to understand and obey. In the past, the most "encoding" of such documents was in microfilm, which is just an image that can be viewed or printed with cheap, commodity hardware. Government agencies would generally do this for you, often without even asking.
But now we're seeing a lot of government agencies move online, with extra charges if you want readable hard copy. For example, there are a number of states that charge less for things like licenses if you renew online. But this decision takes this change a step farther: It holds the prospect that, to read the document that you are legally required to read and obey, you must pay a specific corporation (Microsoft) for the software to read it. Alternatively, you will have to pay the surcharge for hard copy, which already an established practice. Also, without licensed Microsoft software, you may not be able to reply electronically, and again you'll have to pay a surcharge to someone who has such software. The safest would be to take time off from work and visit the government agency to handle whatever is in the document.
It's basically a surcharge on poor people, of course. To us middle-class and geek types, it's mostly an annoyance, that we have to keep a Windows box on hand and up to date, to prove that we have the legal right to read any OOXML doc that the government tosses our way.
What I think would be interesting would be not to challenge the use of such proprietary encodings, but rather to ask the courts to make the government refund to us the price of the machine and software we must buy to read such documents.
Remember that in the US, under current law, unauthorized decoding of protected (via patent or copyright) documents is a $500,000 fine and five years in a federal prison. And Microsoft's XML encodings are being patented. If it were legal for me to decode and read any document that anyone sent me, I wouldn't be worried. Most proprietary formats get cracked soon after they're released. But with the law imposing such a draconian punishment for merely attempting to read a document that a government agency sends me, I'd feel a lot better if they were required to protect me from prosecution for decoding and reading such documents. Probably the cheapest way would be to require that they pay for my Windows box.
Given a document, and a description of the document format, you should be able to retrieve all information stored in that document ...
/. over the fact that Microsoft has applied for patents for some of their XML encodings. One of the implications of such patents is that anyone attempting to decode their contents may find themselves in violation of MS's patents. In the US, such decoding can be a crime that can get you a $500,000 fine and five years in a federal prison.
Note that we've had discussions here in
Part of the discussions have commented that this mostly seems to cover the encoding of embedded images in MS XML docs. But you learn something interesting if you try digging around in various government online archives. In many, if not most cases, old docs are "digitizes" and put online by scanning them in and putting the image online. Look at the Library of Congress archives, for example, and you'll see a lot of this. There's a lot of good historic stuff there, but if your software won't display an image, you can't read the document's contents, only the meta-data that someone typed in during the scanning.
So even if you're a good enough programmer to decode government documents in any proprietary format, you may find yourself spending a lot of time decoding an old image format and extracting the text, and your reward may be a huge fine and a stretch in a federal pen if you do it with anything but licensed Microsoft software.
Yeah, you can challenge it in court. Then, ten or more years and a few million dollars later, you might lose anyway. Do you want to be the test case?
Corporate/government copies of Office don't go through activation.
;-)
So you mean that, when a government agency sends me a doc and I can't read it on my machine, they'll happily send me a copy of an appropriate release MS Office and I'll be automatically licensed to install and run it on my machine?
Somehow, I don't quite believe this.
(Note that I didn't say what sort of machine(s) I have at home, because this shouldn't matter for government docs. And I can't tell you what I'll have 10 years from now, when I receive that important government document and it comes up gibberish on my screen.
This can hardly be called FUD. They destroyed at least one man's career in government -- probably two mens'.
Indeed, and there's a history of this. From at least the mid-60s, there was a saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying (or recommending) IBM." Nowadays, you mostly hear "Microsoft" substituted for "IBM", of course.
Both companies have maintained this situation by occasionally staging demos that they can, in fact, have you fired if you recommend a competitors' product. It doesn't take a lot of demos like this. What's important is that the demos get the right publicity, in places where managers are likely to get the message. You can bet that nearly everyone in a decision-making capacity in the Massachusetts state government is aware of this story and understands what it means for their career.
This is especially important in government agencies. If government documents can be "standardized" to Microsoft's proprietary formats, this goes a long way to ensuring that every citizen will have Microsoft software to communicate with their government. Let's face it, whether we like it or not, we will all need to be able to communicate with random, unpredictable government agencies in the future.
It could be productive to think of situations which would cause us to say the thing is broken. Some ideas come to mind: ...
;-)
. If whole industries, scientific progress, or the productivity and well-being of a society can be held up by a patent
Various historians have written about how this has been true since the early days of the patent system. Using our current terminology, the patent system was broken by design. Its supporters always claim that patents encourage improved technology, but history says that patents primarily impede advances. In many cases, this doesn't even benefit the patent holders. Thus, in Levine's first example, James Watt spent most of his life in court, suing people. He made very little money from his big invention, until after his patents ran out, and only then did he settle down to building and selling the steam engines that eventually made him rather wealthy. His patents effectively set back the development of steam transport by several decades.
How can we improve our current system or build a new one which won't have these problems?
Considering that we've had this sort of problem with patents from the start, it doesn't seem likely that we can fix the problems. If we could, you'd think that some country would have stumbled onto the solution by now.
The only approach that seems to have helped at all is the compulsory licensing system that many countries use with copyright. This involves taking control of the "invention" away from the patent/copyright owner, and decreeing that anyone can use it for a standard, fixed license fee. Needless to say, the owners of such "Intellectual Property Rights" don't agree with this, though history shows that it seems to be about the only thing that takes the profits away from the lawyers and gives them to someone else. Of course, the "someone else" is usually a corporation, not the actual inventor, but that's another topic that we could flame to death in another thread.
What patent of Apple's is Google infringing on?
...) patents. They just can't know which ones, until the courts tell them.
We can't know that until the courts decide.
This simple fact is the main evidence of how broken the system is. Current patents, at least in the US, are unreadable by the engineers that they are ostensibly written for. Even if you read one and think you understand it, fact is that if you aren't an experienced patent lawyer, you do not understand it. In Legalese, there are a lot of English-like words whose meanings are rather different than in normal English, and there are many more words whose meanings are very different from Engineering English. In the case of computer-related patents, many of the patents deal with new concepts that the legal system hasn't yet adjudicate, so the legal meaning of much of the text hasn't yet been decided in court. Google can't know what patents they are infringing, any more than Apple can.
Considering all the new stuff they're involved in, Google can be reasonably sure that they're violating some of Apple's (and Microsoft's and IBM's and
"Every single person working in the media today who experienced the dot-com bubble in 1999 to 2000 believes that we are going through the exact same process and can expect the exact same results -- a bust. ..."
;-)
Comparing the "dot-com bubble" to some purported "Web 2.0 bubble" is quite bogus, for a simple reason. The concept of "dot-com" was well defined. Basically, you could look on the end of a web site's name, and if it ended with the four characters ".com", it was a "dot-com". There was a bit of bogosity present, in that some ".com" sites weren't in fact commercial, while some sites ending with a different top-level domain were commercial. But the fundamental idea was fairly clear, and it was easy to determine whether a site was or wasn't a commercial site.
With "Web 2.0", however, this isn't true. If you go looking for definitions, you'll find thousands, and you'll have problems finding any two that are the same. Thus, many definitions include the idea that the downloaded pages contain client-side code (aka "scripts"), but this isn't always true. Some people call anything with non-HTML inside HTML "Web 2.0". I've seen sites claim to be "Web 2.0" because they contain CSS. Really.
Fact is, "Web 2.0" is nothing more than a vague, fuzzy marketing buzz-phrase that means whatever the writer wanted it to mean. It tells you little or nothing about the actual content of any site.
So there isn't a "Web 2.0 bubble". Rather, there's a lot of hype around that uses the phrase "Web 2.0" to mean "Our site is cooler than those others." And there are other sites using very similar techniques that don't hype themselves as "Web 2.0". Often this is because they don't need to hype themselves. See maps.google.com for a good example, and try finding "Web 2.0" anywhere at that site. (Actually, I suppose it is there somewhere; can anyone find it?
Rather than a "Web 2.0 bubble", what we've got is zillions of little, each bursting individually and splattering their neighbors. So what'll happen is that the marketers will slowly, one by one, realize that this buzz phrase has outlived its usefulness, and they'll move on to other words to hype their stuff.
And that's something that's gonna be with us for the long run. Once commerce successfully took the first successful steps onto the Internet, it was inevitable that marketing in all its glory and sleaze would move there, too. Dvorak is merely propagating the typical marketing process. Part of that is that old words become, well, old, and need to be replaced. But that doesn't mean that any bubble has burst. It's just the ongoing process of finding new ways of shouting "New! Improved!" at the marks. That's been going on for centuries, and isn't going to stop in our lifetimes.
... suicide bombers often repeat their attacks OVER AND OVER.
... Maybe that guy was Palestinian?
Back in WWII (that's World War Two for the gen-X and -Y folks), one of the standard jokes was about the champion Italian kamikaze pilot who flew 23 missions. The number changed with the retelling, of course, like any good joke. Anyway, maybe we need a series of ethnic Iraqi/al-Qaeda/Arab/Kurd/Afghan jokes, starting with the one about the champion suicide bomber who carried out N missions. Hmmm
6 minutes? 20 seconds? Is that true? I use Thunderbird (on Kubuntu), and it starts up in a second. I can't imagine waiting that long for an email client to load up. What is it doing that takes so long? Is this typical behavior for Evolution?
...
Well, I've experimented with Evolution off and on for some years, on various chunks of hardware, and I'd say it is typical. Whenever you tell Evolution to do something, you can go to the kitchen, make coffee, and be back with a cup before the results are on the screen. After a while, you're really wired
Maybe there's some config problem that's wrong everywhere I've tried it, but I haven't seen enough clues to diagnose the problem. If anyone knows, especially if you have some fixes, you might try contacting the Evolution folks and tell them that this is a major barrier to getting their toy widely adopted.
It's not just me, either; I've mentioned this to a number of people who've tried Evolution a few times, and they report the same molasses-like slowness.
|It's not the CIA's job to do psyops or spy on a website housed and run by an American.
/., but I sorta doubt that many people are going to be intimidated by that thought.
But is it the Pentagon's job? Pentagon Boosts Media War Unit
Maybe not legally, anyone who thinks that has ever stopped either of them may be classified as a hopeless dreamer. The rational assumption would be that they investigate anyone they want to. The fact that both are pretty much outside the purvey of any legal organization (as is also true in every other government's spy and military branches) should explain the situation.
Of course, Americans do have somewhat of a history of casually ignoring such things, exercising their rights openly, etc. For instance, unlike in many other countries, few Americans would have any real fear of responding openly in this forum. Since spy and military agencies have a great deal of interest in computers and communication, we would expect that a lot of their people are reading
In any case, what does it really mean to "spy on a website"? Aren't web sites where you put stuff that you want to publish openly for anyone to read? If you think otherwise, you are really unclear on the concept.
Wikipedia has had a few problems with sabotage, but so far they seem to be pretty decent about fixing the problems when they arise. I wonder how many print encyclopedias have been as good at resisting "outside pressure" concerning the text of some of their articles?
isn't most real paper, carbon-based?
;-)
Shhh! They've never heard of cellulose, or if they have, they have no idea what its chemical structure might be.
Let's just be quiet here, and let them all make fools of themselves.
So while it's less likely that your dog may have eaten your homework, it's more likely to get rained out.
"The dog peed on my homework."
So it was good old favoritism. Buy a can of politicians, get one nation free!
;-)
Well, of course it was! Back in 2000, Microsoft finally faced the facts about what it takes to maintain their position. That was when they suddenly became one of the largest "campaign contributors" to the US elections. And right after the election, the US government caved in their anti-trust suit against Microsoft, "settling" for an agreement that effectively promised a hands-off approach to all further Microsoft business methods.
Remember back in the 70s, when IBM was successfully sued for their long-standing practice of providing IBM equipment and software to educational institutions at extremely low prices? Well, part of TFA is explaining that MS is doing the same thing in China now, and you can bet that there will never be any legal challenges to the practice.
Face it; the computer industry has always had two distinct markets. There's the tech-savvy market, which has always had a flock of small companies selling high-quality goods. And there is the "mass" (business first, and now retail) market, where people are incapable of judging quality, and that market has always been controlled by one company.
There was the curious development back in the 80s, when IBM faced the fact that they couldn't get into the small-computer market without losing their shirt, so they farmed it out to that upstart, Microsoft, and funded the ad campaign. Bill Gates & co. were savvy enough to keep control of their software, and IBM seems to be happy to keep things this way. To see this, go to ibm.com and try to find a desktop or laptop that has anything but Windows Professional installed. Yeah, you can get linux from IBM, if you're determined enough, but it takes a lot of searching to find a way to order it, but most IBM customers will never suspect that anything but Windows Pro is available on any of IBM's small computers.
So the retail/business small-computer market is monopolized by one company with a huge ad budget and mostly crappy products, like the retail/business markets has always been since it arose in the late 50s. The tech-savvy market has lots of companies that have tiny ad budgets in comparison, but mostly good products, as has also been true for half a century. And we're here in a tech forum lamenting the fact that we still haven't taken over the retail/business (i.e., tech-averse) market.
The linux crowd will never sell their stuff well anywhere except to tech-savvy customers. The most applicable phrase I can think of is the old taunt "Get over it!" Along with "It ain't gonna happen!" And maybe a few other taunts.
(Anyone got any other favorite taunts that are applicable here?
I just googled for "sad penguin in snow", but there were no hits.
...
Someone's gotta do the picture
>>nobody imagined that a company might patent a genetically modified seed and then sue farmers for saving some from last years' crop for this year
This has nothing to do with a patent; it's a licensing issue. Farmers want to continue doing business in the "old ways" while reaping the benefits of new tech.
Actually, it's a combination of patent and licensing. And the issue has farmers around the world somewhat nervous. Google for "Monsanto Percy Schmeiser". Mr. Schmeiser claims (and such evidence as exists supports him) that he didn't buy Monsanto's GM canola seed; he had been breeding his own local varieties. But his neighbors grew Monsanto seed, and Roundup-resistant canola plants were found in his fields, so he was sued by Monsanto for patent infringement.
He has spent part of his time since then talking to people around the world about the issue. What scares people is that it's not possible to prevent cross pollination of most crops, so if your neighbor grows a crop that contains patented DNA, you can be sued into bankruptcy by a giant foreign-owned corporation. There's a serious threat that such corporations could end up owning much of the farmland in any country where DNA patents are upheld by local courts.
This is why, for example, a number of countries in Africa have stopped accepting any whole GM grains as food aid. They only accept ground grain, which can't be grown. If they allow GM grain into their country, it may alleviate current hunger problems, but the long-term cost will be foreign ownership of much of their farmland.
You may not take this seriously, but a lot of people around the world do.
So if I have an iPhone, install apache on it, and copy over a few files (is rsync available yet?), what sort of URL to I email around to friends so they can reach the phone?
;-), but I've never found a way to access it from the Internet. Yes, I've asked on several fora, but nobody ever answers. Well, OK, I did get a few RTFM replies, but without a clue as to what FM to R, that's not too helpful.
;-)
This isn't a hypothetical problem. Here at home, we have a Mac Powerbook for a few years, and I've had apache running on it from the start. I can access the web site with http://localhost/, and when I'm at home, I can access it from my linux box or my wife's Windoze box (for job-related reasons only
Can an iPhone really run a web server (or any other server) that's accessible via wifi as I wander about the landscape? If so, where's the HOWTO explaining how to do it and figure out what its URL looks like? Without that, it's just a waste of cpu cycles.
(And I'm still trying to find out how to make my PB's web server accessible by friends who aren't on my home LAN.
It is made very clear that the EDGE access is only for "email and web browsing".
... Better keep quiet about that; Apple and AT&T might get ideas about yet another way to cripple your new toy. Or charge you extra for the capability that you thought you had already paid for.
OK, so I fire up an SMTP server on my iPhone's port 25, and apache on port 80. That's using it for email and web browsing. What's the problem?
Next you gonna tell me that the phone part can only make outgoing calls, and can't accept incoming calls. Hmmm
since when is your MAC transmitted in an IP packet?
...
Um, since they started using ARP?
Well, technically the MAC address is outside the IP packet, in the MAC-level header that precedes the IP header.
But, of course, it is in the packet. Just not in the IP part of the packet.
Yeah, I know; picky, picky, picky
(And the MAC address doesn't survive the passage through the first bridge or gateway, so anyone who wants it has to get it from your immediate neighbor.)
In reality, all the students are doing is providing the RIAA with personal and private information which can conceivably be used against them ...'"
;-), and I never hear from them again. My gmail account gets about 1200 messages per month in its "Spam" folder, and roughly half of them are now phishing attempts.
Hey, I get one or two dozen phishing messages per day. What's one more? If the email filters don't catch it, I can flag it as "spam" (and wish they had a separate "phish" category
So what's the big deal here? Don't these college students know how to recognize a phishing message when they see it?
Someone should explain to them that if they reply, their info will just be added to an "easy marks" database that's sold to other companies, resulting in a flood of other such messages from shady companies looking for naive victims.
We really should be teaching kids to defend themselves on the Net. The first lesson should be not to reply to such solicitations, ever.