Don't they need to reduce the budget or something?
No, increase the budget instead:
As many people have pointed out in other discussions, that appears to be a major cause of the problem. The US Patent Office has had its budget lowered, while the laws were changed to allow many more patents. They responded the only way they could: They laid people off, and encouraged rubber-stamping patent applications without doing a decent analysis of the application. Their approach has been "Approve them all, and let the courts sort it out."
The US courts, of course, take decades to handle new things like this. And, since the courts are full of people with lots of legal training but little technological training, the courts so far have a dismal record of handling the problem sanely, and there's little reason to expect this to improve.
That's what you get when you respond to problems by decreasing the funding of the people who are (or were) paid to solve the problem. If you think that further funding decreases will solve the problem, you're part of the problem, since you're likely voting for the sort of people who will do exactly that.
When science doesn't know the answer to something, science doesn't resort to meaningless cop-outs like "God did it". Instead, science gives the more reasonable answer "Yeah, uh, we don't know what that is, but we're looking into it.
More often, they say "Further research is needed", and they apply for grants. Sorta like what they did in this case.
And then, at some point, science usually comes back and says, hey, we figured it out, and the answer is awesome.
Or, more likely, the answer immediately raises a whole series of other questions, each of which requires further research.
I remember back when the Shared Source Initiative was announced, I looked into in, and found that actually seeing any of the source code required signing an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). I closed those windows and forgot about it.
So are there NDAs required by any of the various CodePlex things? Or are there other equivalent "agreements" that have other euphemistic names? That would tell us a lot about their actual intentions.
I've written a lot of software that's secret, proprietary, whatever. The companies that hired me paid me pretty well for the software. But if I'm to get involved in something that I think is going to be shared publicly among a crowd of developers, and then discover that it's actually owned and controlled by the web site's owners, I'm going to feel rather double-crossed. I'd rather know beforehand, so I can avoid wasting my time just to donate code to such organizations.
Another variant of this problem existed on AT&T's Sys/V. I did some development in which some of the machines that I tested the code on ran Sys/V. I found that the binaries always contained an AT&T copyright notice. This was obviously because the binaries linked in the AT&T libc and other libraries. So I refused to distribute binaries for Sys/V, on the grounds that doing so might legally constitute signing my copyright to AT&T. I know of a number of companies that abandoned Sys/V after I pointed this out to them (and their lawyers agreed).
There a lot of tricky ways to lose control of your code to big corporations, and Microsoft has a bit of a rep for tricks like this. So it'd be nice to know up front whether a new repository holds such threats.
... they'll make sure the only contract available stipulates that you cannot hold them accountable for anything whatsoever.
Hmmm... Most countries have laws that at least make such terms illegal for the primary advertised purpose of what you've bought. Here in the US, it's commonly called "consumer fraud". You might check to see if your laws cover the case of a purchased product failing at what it was labelled and/or advertised for.
It's expected that makers of such things as anti-virus software would disclaim all responsibility for anything, since after-the-fact detection and removal of such stuff is known to be an NP-hard problem. Maybe we should be responding to threats like this one by challenging the software suppliers to live up to their advertising claims or pay damages. It might be interesting to see how the courts deal with the topic.
Actually, had they told anybody, the job would stop. Every employee has the authority to stop a job - any job. There aren't some jobs that some people can stop and some jobs that other people can stop, anybody can stop a job for safety on a BP rig (or any BP facility). That gets pounded into your head day from day 1 - if you see something that you think is unsafe, you stop it, and everybody gets together and double-checks the plan and makes sure they haven't missed anything that would make it unsafe.
Heh; yeah; that's the official policy in lots of companies. But I've worked a number of places where, when I asked around to find the people who had done that, I quickly learned that those people no longer worked there. It doesn't take a genius to make the right inference from this.
It also doesn't take a genius to understand that if something does go wrong, you were present, you'll be one of the people taking the blame for the problem.
The old-timers just grin and say something like "So you've finally figured out how it all works around here."
The problem is when they started maintaining a database of internet id and email addresses cross-referenced to individuals. I know somewhere there is a file with everything I've ever posted under my various ids.
Actually, if it's at all like how such things usually work, that file contains maybe half of what you've written, plus a large number of things written by other people with (personal or host) names similar to yours. There's probably also a lot of stuff from other people on machines with similar IP addresses, or with the same IP address at a different time due to dynamic addressing.
I've occasionally googled my own name, and found lots of things written by others with the same name. (The US Census Bureau says there about 1500 people with my name.;-) I've seen bibliographies that have things that I wrote listed next to things written by several of the others with the same name. I know a few of them, actually, and we all think it's pretty funny.
So far, there don't seem to be any real nut cases with my name, so it's easy to laugh at. But, for example, I have a friend named Colin Ferguson. If you don't recognize the name, just google it. He does like to tell people that he's neither the mass murderer nor the Canadian actor. He sometimes does this with a weird grin on his face.;-)
Anyway, the confusion caused by similar names is an old one in the "national security" business, and they have never been very good at dealing with it. So there probably isn't a file that contains all that you've written and only what you've written. What there is, is a number of files (kept by different agencies) that jumble stuff by and about you with other stuff by and about other people that they can't (be bothered to) distinguish from you.
There is another part of the problem. If you had insurance, not only would you not have to pay $32k, but neither would the insurance company. The insurance company would probably end up paying $4-5k for the procedure and you would probably pay $500. Doctor's bill ridiculous amounts, and then the insurance companies adjudicate it down.
This is the "elephant in the corner" that is usually missed in American discussions of medical pricing. With almost any other commercial "product", you can easily price shop, and people do. But with most American medicine, the medical system does something to you, and then writes down a number, and that's the price you have to pay. You can't learn the price beforehand, and you can't dispute it afterwards. Well, maybe you can, if you have a few million dollars for the decade or so of court expenses. But for the other 99% of the population, the "customer" has essentially no negotiating power.
It's easy to see what would happen if other purchases happened this way. Consider the canonical/. auto analogy: You'd take your car into the auto hospital, where the mechanics will tell you what they're doing to the car, and at the end, they'll tell you how much you have to pay. After the car is in their hands, you'd have no further say in what's done to it, or what it costs. They might decide you need a new car, in which case they'll decide what model you should get, and you'll be legally responsible for whatever price the dealer writes on the invoice.
We have the sense not to allow the auto repair business to work that way. But that's how our medical system works.
It turns out that the American insurance system does have a function in all this mess: The insurance companies are a (not very good) way for the system's "customers" to build up negotiation strength. An individual can't negotiate with the medical system, but an insurance company can. This is why insured medical aid is cheaper than what uninsured people pay. But this is a "perverse" situation, because the insurance companies aren't motivated to minimize their customers' costs. They are motivated to minimize what the company pays to the medical system, while maximizing what they receive from their insured customers.
(My wife has worked for some years at a local "non-profit" medical finance agency. She likes to tell people that in reality, nobody in the medical system can actually explain how they come up with their prices. It clearly has little if anything to do with actual costs. But even the system's insiders can't usually figure out how the prices are computed. They "just look it up", and it's turtles all the way down.;-)
My only concerns are privacy and censorship. It's not like they were protected before by having private telecoms, but what happens when the government runs the entire network?
That's a problem.
It does somewhat depend on which country you're in. Here in the US, for example, we do have some rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Granted, they're not always followed, but in theory at least (and in practice if you have enough money), you can get them enforced, or the violations can mean that the courts will dismiss any charges against you.
But this only applies to government agencies. As many people have explained here, the US Constitution doesn't apply to private corporations. They can intercept your communications all they like, and use the information for any purposes (or at least any profitable purposes;-), without fear of legal repercussions. When the government does that, it's illegal. So in the US, we'd probably be better off with a government-owned Internet infrastructure.
Of course, things may be entirely different where you live. Some countries put legal controls on what private corporations can do to you, but allow the government free rein to abuse their citizens. In such countries, you should probably push for a private comm system if you want legal protections.
That said, in many ways this isn't practical from today's business perspective, where resources are so thin, that you can barely get one fully staffed team.
Hey, where do live, that has such a problem? Where I live (the Boston area), most of the software people I know are only semi-employed or unemployed. Around here, it'd be pretty easy to get together a good-size team, and put them to work coming up with multiple solutions to software problems, then testing them to learn which ones are good for what part of the parameters' ranges.
Of course, part of the problem is that hiring usually has to go through the HR staff, who write up long lists of requirements that typically include several products that haven't been on the market as long as HR requires. This does make it look like it's hard to get a fully staffed team, but it's because your HR folks have filtered out the honest applicants.;-)
That's often true, but there's also another common reason: The managers of software projects often don't have a clue about how to judge the "value" of a piece of software. This can be true even for managers who used to be programmers, if the tools (languages, libraries, etc.) are different that what they were trained on.
You can see symptoms of this in a lot of companies that try to measure their software. It's how you get such things as "lines of code" as a measure of programmer productivity. It's hard to think of a more counter-productive way to quantify software, but it's what you get when there's an official demand for metrics for quantities that nobody knows how to measure.
I'm a customer. I have ample reason to decide what we deserve. Or else I'll be taking my business elsewhere. Or building a competing service....
No, you won't. Sure, you can pull up your roots and move elsewhere. But you'll find that the local comm service there is controlled and regulated in the same way. There will be only one or two legal comm suppliers, and unless you have the money to "persuade" a majority of the legislature there, you won't break into the business.
It's been like this since the days of the first (telegraph, telephone) comm services. What makes you think you can change it? Do you actually have enough money to buy into the regulatory structure? If so, what are you doing reading slashdot? Get busy. Buy out the regulatory system and change things. We'll all know when you succeed.
Can someone please put an end to this constant stream of approval diarrhea pouring out of the USPTO?
No.
(The proof is trivial: This situation is a gold mine for lawyers. Most members of the US Congress are lawyers. They may not understand technology, but they do understand the effect of patent law on lawyers' income. Ergo, the current mess that is US patent and copyright law won't be ended.;-)
Yeah; I forgot to mention that I have flashblock, too. Though I'm a bit fuzzy on its interaction with NoScript. Their functionality seems to overlap quite a bit.
Practically none. In Chinese, usually two (the most common case), three, or more characters form a word,
Actually, a more accurate comparison would be the creation of new syllables. Chinese characters are a "syllabary", i.e., each represents a single syllable. As noted, in Mandarin the most common word length is two characters, i.e., two syllables. New characters aren't being created, because new syllables aren't being created.
English has seen a lot of new words in recent years, but how many new syllables have appeared? Probably very few, if any, just as with the Chinese languages.
Of course, a writing system based on phoneme-level "letters" doesn't need as many characters as a syllabary does. Thus, Mandarin is estimated to have around 1,200 distinct syllables in use, plus several hundred that aren't used. So their writing system needs around 1,200 characters. English has around 35 or 36 phonemes, so a true phonetic alphabet would have that many letters. We use fewer because we use a lot of digraphs, and because we don't have a phonetic spelling.
Anti-trust laws are never written to apply only to monopolies. There are good reasons to restict anti-market activities by large companies, especially those that control a large part of the "infrastructure".
This isn't materially different than, for example, the laws that outlaw restrictive contracts in many jurisdictions. Thus, Coca Cola and Pepsi both like to have contracts with their vendors that forbid selling the competitors' products. This is illegal in many places, for obvious reasons. Among other things, it's a good way for an oligopoly to block the entry of startups.
Apple is clearly attempting a similar sort of contract, which restricts the companies that are allowed to advertise on Apple platforms. But they're not just restricting ads on Apple-owned machines; they're restricting ads on machines owned by millions of private individuals. Their motives for doing this are obvious, and they're profoundly anti-competitive. There is plenty of precedent for outlawing such restraints of trade.
Unless we're talking about phones. Then Flash is a must-have and any (i)phone that doesn't have it is a completely useless piece of garbage.
Hmmm... I see that this comment got two "insightful" mods, and one "funny". This is added data to support the widespread belief that/. mods generally lack a sense of humor.
Of course, I can say that because I'm not at the moment a moderator. But recently I've had mod status more than I haven't, so I suppose any hour now I'll have to change my tune.
Actually, I have an Android G1 phone, and I don't miss Flash on it. At least I think it doesn't have it, because I don't see any annoying moving ads, which is most of what Flash is used for. I'm typing this on my Macbook Pro, where I do most of my browsing using firefox, and that's mostly because it supports NoScript, which is quite good at blocking Flash ads. In the rare case that I actually want to see a Flash video, I usually start up Safari and copy the URL to it, because that's faster than trying to figure out how to get FF to show just the one Flash thingy without accidentally enabling it for the ads.
I do hope that when we've all moved to HTML5, it'll be as easy to block video ads as it is with the current FF. If not, it'll be a step backwards.
But still, this whole idea that anyone should have to pay to read scientific publications just seems to fly in the face of what science is about, and it only fuels the general public's view that science is a walled garden,...
This came about because until recently, journals had to be published on paper, and paper costs money. The rest of it, especially the review process, is a "free/open" operation in which little money changes hands. But you've gotta pay for paper.
The advent of electronic publishing is right now shaking up the entire field of scientific publishing. Scientific publishers have the same confusion as the media in general, and so far have been only a little better at dealing with the change. I'd guess that this is part of the ongoing shift.
There are widespread predictions that in the scientific arena, print publication won't last past this decade (where decades start in years ending with a zero;-). This belief is encouraged by the recent significant rises in the price of print publication. Paper is getting more expensive, and the machinery to do the printing is getting more expensive.
We'll see how it all works out. At least the scientific world isn't (yet) facing the sort of rabid attacks from its publishers that the music and video worlds are. This may be in part because scientists routinely respond to IP-based threats by pointing out that the publishers are on borrowed time as it is, and attacking their customers will only accelerate the change.
That the creation of easily reproducable art (I use that word loosly here) has to become a non profit activity,...
Actually, the production of the reproducible art called "music" became a nonprofit activity to musicians roughly a century ago, when the recording industry arose. They developed a controlled distribution system that required that artists sign "industry standard" contracts that handed the copyright and almost all the profits to the corporations. Before that, there was a large population of professional musicians making a living from music. Since then, most musicians have been unable to make a living from music.
When you "pirate" music or videos, you are hardly ever "stealing" anything from the artists, because the artists rarely made any money at all from the product. What you are doing is joining the effort, applauded by most "artists" who understand the economics of their field, to kill off the recording and publishing corporations that have long had a stranglehold over the means of distribution.
The claim that copyright gives income to artists is bogus. Copyright is part of the system that delivers the profits to the controlling corporations and denies income to the artists. This was done by the "standard" contracts that required signing over copyright in exchange for distribution. When the artist signs, the copyright belongs to the corporations, and the artist can no longer legally make copies and sell them.
The only way to end this is to kill off the corporations that have had this stranglehold over distribution. Of course, the end result may be that neither the artists nor the corporations will profit from artistic creation. But that will be no worse for the artists than the current system, which encourages them to create, and then denies them the income from their creations.
Heh; yeah, I know. But in the political discussions, what you hear is 25%. I think the distinction is beyond the math abilities of the people in such arenas. Either that, or they just cynically use the smallest of the two numbers as the denominator, to get the biggest percentage.
As political abuse of statistics goes, this is a minor error.
Man, they've really handed one to the comedians with that one.
Some time ago, I saw a quote from some old sage to the effect that libraries contain the summary of all human wisdom -- and much of its foolishness. It occurs to me that the same situation has developed on the Internet, but several orders of magnitude greater. Of course, since the Internet took off, the sum total of human wisdom probably hasn't grown all that much. So we should conclude that that, while the Internet may now contain a summary of all human wisdom, that summary is buried deeply in many orders of magnitude more foolishness.
But consider what was predicted for television back in its early days, and what it developed into, I suppose this should have been expected for the Internet, too. The main difference here is that with television, the concentration of control into a corporate heirarchy was able to effectively eject most of the wisdom stuff, since that has never been as profitable as foolishness. This never worked with libraries, because they couldn't be organized into a controlled heirarchy. The Internet is even more impossible to control, since any person or small group able to set up a few links (wired or wireless) can establish their own small Internet playground outside the control of anyone. This allows for the aggregation of wisdom by the small crowds interested in such arcanae. It also allows the aggregation of anything else by other crowds interested in them.
But anyway, we should make sure the phrase "crystallization of human wisdom" reaches the attention of all the comedians we can send it to. It has a great potential, especially coming from a Chinese government committee.
I've actually been rather disappointed with trying that on several different news stories recently. They all seemed to be very slightly changed version of the same text, if not just cut and paste of the AP or Reuters copy.
Yeah; I've seen a lot of that. It does somewhat depend on where the story originated, and who might be interested.
Just a bit ago, I was perusing a few of the recent Yemen stories, for example, and found that in addition to all the usual UPI/Reuters/BBC/... stories, news.google.com had a number of links to stories (sometimes in poor English) that were obviously somewhat local Middle-Eastern sources. This happens quite a lot now. A few years ago, it was news when aljazeera.com became part of the "normal" newsfeed pool. But people all around that part of the world have figured out that the Internet gives them a way around the choke points of the big news corporations, and have been putting English translations of their material online.
My wife, who reads Arabic, has had some fun looking at the flood of Arabic/English sites. Some of them (including aljazeera) have quite good (i.e., honest;-) translations, and any bias is mostly in the form of what they think English-speaking readers might find interesting. Others are quite obviously intended as propaganda. Just about what you'd expect. But the useful part of this is that they are getting online, and aren't being "filtered" any more, at least not in this part of the world (Massachusetts).
Of course, if a story happens in Paris or London, you'd sorta expect that most of the reports would be from the major news feeds there. To find other reports, you probably have to dig past the "news" sites.
I have seen that google news is now explicitly listing news and blog sites, FWIW. All the anti-blog propaganda aside, the blog format is becoming a standard approach for non-professional news aggregation. Slashdot is one obvious example, of course, and they're now around by the millions, in all levels of quality. This might be a sign that the "news" industry is working on new ways of classifying their operation. The big news feeds are your standard heirarchical corporate approach, which works for some things and fails badly for others.
Find me a report that says increases in speed limits increase actual speeds.
Actually, there have been quite a lot of studies of this topic, and most of them have said that there is rarely a (statistically significant) speed change when a speed limit is changed. People mostly drive at a speed that's determined by the road and other driving conditions. If you want them to drive slower than the "natural" speed of a road, you have to post police cars along the road. Alternatively, of course, you can post hidden police cars along a stretch with a lower-than-natural speed limit, as sa revenue enhancement measure.
There was a funny speed-vs-accidents statistic published here in Massachusetts years ago that is still appearing in discussions. It's from back in the 70s, when they lowered the speed on major highways to 55 mph. The claim you hear is that in the year after the lowering of the speed limit on the Mass Pike (I90), there were 25% fewer traffic fatalities. This was brought up in all sorts of "discussions". Finally, some news guys told us that they'd decided to investigate, and found that the figures was exactly right: The year before the change had 5 fatalities, and the year after had 4. So the decrease was exactly 25%. But it was pretty obvious to most people that the numbers were trivial, and the 25% figure was being used to mask the fact that the actual numbers weren't significant.
Some people had fun with the numbers by pointing out that they could be read another way: The number of fatal accidents didn't change at all. There were 4 in each year.
Years later, when the speed was upped to 65 mph, there was a lot of data collected during the adjacent years. The number of fatalities didn't change, and it also turned out that the mean speed of traffic didn't change. This is a toll road that uses tickets stamped with the time, so they had exact travel times and mileage for all trips on the road. The changes were insignificant, lending strong support to the claim that people drive according to conditions, not to the speed-limit signs.
Of course, this is only one 100-mile stretch of (super-)highway, with only a few million cars per year. But there is data around from other highways, too.
Funny thing about the above story: In a recent local political discussion, I once again heard that claim that lowering the speed limit to 55 MPH on the Pike had produced a 25% decrease in traffic fatalities. I do suspect that the speaker knew that the claim was bogus, but used it anyway. The current media term for such misuse of statistics is "cherry picking", and it's a good example.
I think you might be right. Also, I've noticed that it can be very difficult to figure out where a lot of "local news" web sites are located. I frequently see pointers to local news stories, in places like Dave Barry's blog, where the readers send in local stories that they think are relevant to the blog. In his case, these are usually funny/twisted stories, of course, but this happens with a lot of blogs. When I follow a link, I often find myself wondering where in the world this happened - and I often can't tell. The web site will just identify itself as "The Whoville Tribune", and not bother mentioning state or province or country. A "whois whovilletribune.com" request can take a long time, and then doesn't help, because the owner of the domain name may be an organization with headquarters distant from the place covered by the web site.
So one possibility is that google can't tell where a lot of local news sites, either. I don't know if there's a workable solution to this, other than to keep sending messages to the site saying that it would help if they at least identified the country that they're in. But that can be difficult, because it's also often hard to find a working email address in such sites.
Slashdot Mirror
As many people have pointed out in other discussions, that appears to be a major cause of the problem. The US Patent Office has had its budget lowered, while the laws were changed to allow many more patents. They responded the only way they could: They laid people off, and encouraged rubber-stamping patent applications without doing a decent analysis of the application. Their approach has been "Approve them all, and let the courts sort it out."
The US courts, of course, take decades to handle new things like this. And, since the courts are full of people with lots of legal training but little technological training, the courts so far have a dismal record of handling the problem sanely, and there's little reason to expect this to improve.
That's what you get when you respond to problems by decreasing the funding of the people who are (or were) paid to solve the problem. If you think that further funding decreases will solve the problem, you're part of the problem, since you're likely voting for the sort of people who will do exactly that.
When science doesn't know the answer to something, science doesn't resort to meaningless cop-outs like "God did it". Instead, science gives the more reasonable answer "Yeah, uh, we don't know what that is, but we're looking into it.
More often, they say "Further research is needed", and they apply for grants. Sorta like what they did in this case.
And then, at some point, science usually comes back and says, hey, we figured it out, and the answer is awesome.
Or, more likely, the answer immediately raises a whole series of other questions, each of which requires further research.
I remember back when the Shared Source Initiative was announced, I looked into in, and found that actually seeing any of the source code required signing an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). I closed those windows and forgot about it.
So are there NDAs required by any of the various CodePlex things? Or are there other equivalent "agreements" that have other euphemistic names? That would tell us a lot about their actual intentions.
I've written a lot of software that's secret, proprietary, whatever. The companies that hired me paid me pretty well for the software. But if I'm to get involved in something that I think is going to be shared publicly among a crowd of developers, and then discover that it's actually owned and controlled by the web site's owners, I'm going to feel rather double-crossed. I'd rather know beforehand, so I can avoid wasting my time just to donate code to such organizations.
Another variant of this problem existed on AT&T's Sys/V. I did some development in which some of the machines that I tested the code on ran Sys/V. I found that the binaries always contained an AT&T copyright notice. This was obviously because the binaries linked in the AT&T libc and other libraries. So I refused to distribute binaries for Sys/V, on the grounds that doing so might legally constitute signing my copyright to AT&T. I know of a number of companies that abandoned Sys/V after I pointed this out to them (and their lawyers agreed).
There a lot of tricky ways to lose control of your code to big corporations, and Microsoft has a bit of a rep for tricks like this. So it'd be nice to know up front whether a new repository holds such threats.
... they'll make sure the only contract available stipulates that you cannot hold them accountable for anything whatsoever.
Hmmm ... Most countries have laws that at least make such terms illegal for the primary advertised purpose of what you've bought. Here in the US, it's commonly called "consumer fraud". You might check to see if your laws cover the case of a purchased product failing at what it was labelled and/or advertised for.
It's expected that makers of such things as anti-virus software would disclaim all responsibility for anything, since after-the-fact detection and removal of such stuff is known to be an NP-hard problem. Maybe we should be responding to threats like this one by challenging the software suppliers to live up to their advertising claims or pay damages. It might be interesting to see how the courts deal with the topic.
Actually, had they told anybody, the job would stop. Every employee has the authority to stop a job - any job. There aren't some jobs that some people can stop and some jobs that other people can stop, anybody can stop a job for safety on a BP rig (or any BP facility). That gets pounded into your head day from day 1 - if you see something that you think is unsafe, you stop it, and everybody gets together and double-checks the plan and makes sure they haven't missed anything that would make it unsafe.
Heh; yeah; that's the official policy in lots of companies. But I've worked a number of places where, when I asked around to find the people who had done that, I quickly learned that those people no longer worked there. It doesn't take a genius to make the right inference from this.
It also doesn't take a genius to understand that if something does go wrong, you were present, you'll be one of the people taking the blame for the problem.
The old-timers just grin and say something like "So you've finally figured out how it all works around here."
Wait no, scratch that. He rolled forward a bit. New plate number Charlie-One-Alpha-One-Sierra."
More likely Charlie-One-Alpha-Lambda-One-Sierra.
The problem is when they started maintaining a database of internet id and email addresses cross-referenced to individuals. I know somewhere there is a file with everything I've ever posted under my various ids.
Actually, if it's at all like how such things usually work, that file contains maybe half of what you've written, plus a large number of things written by other people with (personal or host) names similar to yours. There's probably also a lot of stuff from other people on machines with similar IP addresses, or with the same IP address at a different time due to dynamic addressing.
I've occasionally googled my own name, and found lots of things written by others with the same name. (The US Census Bureau says there about 1500 people with my name. ;-) I've seen bibliographies that have things that I wrote listed next to things written by several of the others with the same name. I know a few of them, actually, and we all think it's pretty funny.
So far, there don't seem to be any real nut cases with my name, so it's easy to laugh at. But, for example, I have a friend named Colin Ferguson. If you don't recognize the name, just google it. He does like to tell people that he's neither the mass murderer nor the Canadian actor. He sometimes does this with a weird grin on his face. ;-)
Anyway, the confusion caused by similar names is an old one in the "national security" business, and they have never been very good at dealing with it. So there probably isn't a file that contains all that you've written and only what you've written. What there is, is a number of files (kept by different agencies) that jumble stuff by and about you with other stuff by and about other people that they can't (be bothered to) distinguish from you.
There is another part of the problem. If you had insurance, not only would you not have to pay $32k, but neither would the insurance company. The insurance company would probably end up paying $4-5k for the procedure and you would probably pay $500. Doctor's bill ridiculous amounts, and then the insurance companies adjudicate it down.
This is the "elephant in the corner" that is usually missed in American discussions of medical pricing. With almost any other commercial "product", you can easily price shop, and people do. But with most American medicine, the medical system does something to you, and then writes down a number, and that's the price you have to pay. You can't learn the price beforehand, and you can't dispute it afterwards. Well, maybe you can, if you have a few million dollars for the decade or so of court expenses. But for the other 99% of the population, the "customer" has essentially no negotiating power.
It's easy to see what would happen if other purchases happened this way. Consider the canonical /. auto analogy: You'd take your car into the auto hospital, where the mechanics will tell you what they're doing to the car, and at the end, they'll tell you how much you have to pay. After the car is in their hands, you'd have no further say in what's done to it, or what it costs. They might decide you need a new car, in which case they'll decide what model you should get, and you'll be legally responsible for whatever price the dealer writes on the invoice.
We have the sense not to allow the auto repair business to work that way. But that's how our medical system works.
It turns out that the American insurance system does have a function in all this mess: The insurance companies are a (not very good) way for the system's "customers" to build up negotiation strength. An individual can't negotiate with the medical system, but an insurance company can. This is why insured medical aid is cheaper than what uninsured people pay. But this is a "perverse" situation, because the insurance companies aren't motivated to minimize their customers' costs. They are motivated to minimize what the company pays to the medical system, while maximizing what they receive from their insured customers.
(My wife has worked for some years at a local "non-profit" medical finance agency. She likes to tell people that in reality, nobody in the medical system can actually explain how they come up with their prices. It clearly has little if anything to do with actual costs. But even the system's insiders can't usually figure out how the prices are computed. They "just look it up", and it's turtles all the way down. ;-)
My only concerns are privacy and censorship. It's not like they were protected before by having private telecoms, but what happens when the government runs the entire network?
That's a problem.
It does somewhat depend on which country you're in. Here in the US, for example, we do have some rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Granted, they're not always followed, but in theory at least (and in practice if you have enough money), you can get them enforced, or the violations can mean that the courts will dismiss any charges against you.
But this only applies to government agencies. As many people have explained here, the US Constitution doesn't apply to private corporations. They can intercept your communications all they like, and use the information for any purposes (or at least any profitable purposes ;-), without fear of legal repercussions. When the government does that, it's illegal. So in the US, we'd probably be better off with a government-owned Internet infrastructure.
Of course, things may be entirely different where you live. Some countries put legal controls on what private corporations can do to you, but allow the government free rein to abuse their citizens. In such countries, you should probably push for a private comm system if you want legal protections.
That said, in many ways this isn't practical from today's business perspective, where resources are so thin, that you can barely get one fully staffed team.
Hey, where do live, that has such a problem? Where I live (the Boston area), most of the software people I know are only semi-employed or unemployed. Around here, it'd be pretty easy to get together a good-size team, and put them to work coming up with multiple solutions to software problems, then testing them to learn which ones are good for what part of the parameters' ranges.
Of course, part of the problem is that hiring usually has to go through the HR staff, who write up long lists of requirements that typically include several products that haven't been on the market as long as HR requires. This does make it look like it's hard to get a fully staffed team, but it's because your HR folks have filtered out the honest applicants. ;-)
That's often true, but there's also another common reason: The managers of software projects often don't have a clue about how to judge the "value" of a piece of software. This can be true even for managers who used to be programmers, if the tools (languages, libraries, etc.) are different that what they were trained on.
You can see symptoms of this in a lot of companies that try to measure their software. It's how you get such things as "lines of code" as a measure of programmer productivity. It's hard to think of a more counter-productive way to quantify software, but it's what you get when there's an official demand for metrics for quantities that nobody knows how to measure.
I'm a customer. I have ample reason to decide what we deserve. Or else I'll be taking my business elsewhere. Or building a competing service....
No, you won't. Sure, you can pull up your roots and move elsewhere. But you'll find that the local comm service there is controlled and regulated in the same way. There will be only one or two legal comm suppliers, and unless you have the money to "persuade" a majority of the legislature there, you won't break into the business.
It's been like this since the days of the first (telegraph, telephone) comm services. What makes you think you can change it? Do you actually have enough money to buy into the regulatory structure? If so, what are you doing reading slashdot? Get busy. Buy out the regulatory system and change things. We'll all know when you succeed.
Can someone please put an end to this constant stream of approval diarrhea pouring out of the USPTO?
No.
(The proof is trivial: This situation is a gold mine for lawyers. Most members of the US Congress are lawyers. They may not understand technology, but they do understand the effect of patent law on lawyers' income. Ergo, the current mess that is US patent and copyright law won't be ended. ;-)
Yeah; I forgot to mention that I have flashblock, too. Though I'm a bit fuzzy on its interaction with NoScript. Their functionality seems to overlap quite a bit.
Actually, a more accurate comparison would be the creation of new syllables. Chinese characters are a "syllabary", i.e., each represents a single syllable. As noted, in Mandarin the most common word length is two characters, i.e., two syllables. New characters aren't being created, because new syllables aren't being created.
English has seen a lot of new words in recent years, but how many new syllables have appeared? Probably very few, if any, just as with the Chinese languages.
Of course, a writing system based on phoneme-level "letters" doesn't need as many characters as a syllabary does. Thus, Mandarin is estimated to have around 1,200 distinct syllables in use, plus several hundred that aren't used. So their writing system needs around 1,200 characters. English has around 35 or 36 phonemes, so a true phonetic alphabet would have that many letters. We use fewer because we use a lot of digraphs, and because we don't have a phonetic spelling.
Red-Herring alert!
Anti-trust laws are never written to apply only to monopolies. There are good reasons to restict anti-market activities by large companies, especially those that control a large part of the "infrastructure".
This isn't materially different than, for example, the laws that outlaw restrictive contracts in many jurisdictions. Thus, Coca Cola and Pepsi both like to have contracts with their vendors that forbid selling the competitors' products. This is illegal in many places, for obvious reasons. Among other things, it's a good way for an oligopoly to block the entry of startups.
Apple is clearly attempting a similar sort of contract, which restricts the companies that are allowed to advertise on Apple platforms. But they're not just restricting ads on Apple-owned machines; they're restricting ads on machines owned by millions of private individuals. Their motives for doing this are obvious, and they're profoundly anti-competitive. There is plenty of precedent for outlawing such restraints of trade.
Do you really want to live in a world where the legality of your actions depends on the goodwill of a company such as AT&T?
Too late; we're already living in just such a world.
If we weren't, we'd be reading about how the Goatse guys are being commended for their actions that benefit the general welfare.
Unless we're talking about phones. Then Flash is a must-have and any (i)phone that doesn't have it is a completely useless piece of garbage.
Hmmm ... I see that this comment got two "insightful" mods, and one "funny". This is added data to support the widespread belief that /. mods generally lack a sense of humor.
Of course, I can say that because I'm not at the moment a moderator. But recently I've had mod status more than I haven't, so I suppose any hour now I'll have to change my tune.
Actually, I have an Android G1 phone, and I don't miss Flash on it. At least I think it doesn't have it, because I don't see any annoying moving ads, which is most of what Flash is used for. I'm typing this on my Macbook Pro, where I do most of my browsing using firefox, and that's mostly because it supports NoScript, which is quite good at blocking Flash ads. In the rare case that I actually want to see a Flash video, I usually start up Safari and copy the URL to it, because that's faster than trying to figure out how to get FF to show just the one Flash thingy without accidentally enabling it for the ads.
I do hope that when we've all moved to HTML5, it'll be as easy to block video ads as it is with the current FF. If not, it'll be a step backwards.
But still, this whole idea that anyone should have to pay to read scientific publications just seems to fly in the face of what science is about, and it only fuels the general public's view that science is a walled garden, ...
This came about because until recently, journals had to be published on paper, and paper costs money. The rest of it, especially the review process, is a "free/open" operation in which little money changes hands. But you've gotta pay for paper.
The advent of electronic publishing is right now shaking up the entire field of scientific publishing. Scientific publishers have the same confusion as the media in general, and so far have been only a little better at dealing with the change. I'd guess that this is part of the ongoing shift.
There are widespread predictions that in the scientific arena, print publication won't last past this decade (where decades start in years ending with a zero ;-). This belief is encouraged by the recent significant rises in the price of print publication. Paper is getting more expensive, and the machinery to do the printing is getting more expensive.
We'll see how it all works out. At least the scientific world isn't (yet) facing the sort of rabid attacks from its publishers that the music and video worlds are. This may be in part because scientists routinely respond to IP-based threats by pointing out that the publishers are on borrowed time as it is, and attacking their customers will only accelerate the change.
That the creation of easily reproducable art (I use that word loosly here) has to become a non profit activity, ...
Actually, the production of the reproducible art called "music" became a nonprofit activity to musicians roughly a century ago, when the recording industry arose. They developed a controlled distribution system that required that artists sign "industry standard" contracts that handed the copyright and almost all the profits to the corporations. Before that, there was a large population of professional musicians making a living from music. Since then, most musicians have been unable to make a living from music.
When you "pirate" music or videos, you are hardly ever "stealing" anything from the artists, because the artists rarely made any money at all from the product. What you are doing is joining the effort, applauded by most "artists" who understand the economics of their field, to kill off the recording and publishing corporations that have long had a stranglehold over the means of distribution.
The claim that copyright gives income to artists is bogus. Copyright is part of the system that delivers the profits to the controlling corporations and denies income to the artists. This was done by the "standard" contracts that required signing over copyright in exchange for distribution. When the artist signs, the copyright belongs to the corporations, and the artist can no longer legally make copies and sell them.
The only way to end this is to kill off the corporations that have had this stranglehold over distribution. Of course, the end result may be that neither the artists nor the corporations will profit from artistic creation. But that will be no worse for the artists than the current system, which encourages them to create, and then denies them the income from their creations.
Heh; yeah, I know. But in the political discussions, what you hear is 25%. I think the distinction is beyond the math abilities of the people in such arenas. Either that, or they just cynically use the smallest of the two numbers as the denominator, to get the biggest percentage.
As political abuse of statistics goes, this is a minor error.
crystallization of human wisdom???
Man, they've really handed one to the comedians with that one.
Some time ago, I saw a quote from some old sage to the effect that libraries contain the summary of all human wisdom -- and much of its foolishness. It occurs to me that the same situation has developed on the Internet, but several orders of magnitude greater. Of course, since the Internet took off, the sum total of human wisdom probably hasn't grown all that much. So we should conclude that that, while the Internet may now contain a summary of all human wisdom, that summary is buried deeply in many orders of magnitude more foolishness.
But consider what was predicted for television back in its early days, and what it developed into, I suppose this should have been expected for the Internet, too. The main difference here is that with television, the concentration of control into a corporate heirarchy was able to effectively eject most of the wisdom stuff, since that has never been as profitable as foolishness. This never worked with libraries, because they couldn't be organized into a controlled heirarchy. The Internet is even more impossible to control, since any person or small group able to set up a few links (wired or wireless) can establish their own small Internet playground outside the control of anyone. This allows for the aggregation of wisdom by the small crowds interested in such arcanae. It also allows the aggregation of anything else by other crowds interested in them.
But anyway, we should make sure the phrase "crystallization of human wisdom" reaches the attention of all the comedians we can send it to. It has a great potential, especially coming from a Chinese government committee.
I've actually been rather disappointed with trying that on several different news stories recently. They all seemed to be very slightly changed version of the same text, if not just cut and paste of the AP or Reuters copy.
Yeah; I've seen a lot of that. It does somewhat depend on where the story originated, and who might be interested.
Just a bit ago, I was perusing a few of the recent Yemen stories, for example, and found that in addition to all the usual UPI/Reuters/BBC/... stories, news.google.com had a number of links to stories (sometimes in poor English) that were obviously somewhat local Middle-Eastern sources. This happens quite a lot now. A few years ago, it was news when aljazeera.com became part of the "normal" newsfeed pool. But people all around that part of the world have figured out that the Internet gives them a way around the choke points of the big news corporations, and have been putting English translations of their material online.
My wife, who reads Arabic, has had some fun looking at the flood of Arabic/English sites. Some of them (including aljazeera) have quite good (i.e., honest ;-) translations, and any bias is mostly in the form of what they think English-speaking readers might find interesting. Others are quite obviously intended as propaganda. Just about what you'd expect. But the useful part of this is that they are getting online, and aren't being "filtered" any more, at least not in this part of the world (Massachusetts).
Of course, if a story happens in Paris or London, you'd sorta expect that most of the reports would be from the major news feeds there. To find other reports, you probably have to dig past the "news" sites.
I have seen that google news is now explicitly listing news and blog sites, FWIW. All the anti-blog propaganda aside, the blog format is becoming a standard approach for non-professional news aggregation. Slashdot is one obvious example, of course, and they're now around by the millions, in all levels of quality. This might be a sign that the "news" industry is working on new ways of classifying their operation. The big news feeds are your standard heirarchical corporate approach, which works for some things and fails badly for others.
Find me a report that says increases in speed limits increase actual speeds.
Actually, there have been quite a lot of studies of this topic, and most of them have said that there is rarely a (statistically significant) speed change when a speed limit is changed. People mostly drive at a speed that's determined by the road and other driving conditions. If you want them to drive slower than the "natural" speed of a road, you have to post police cars along the road. Alternatively, of course, you can post hidden police cars along a stretch with a lower-than-natural speed limit, as sa revenue enhancement measure.
There was a funny speed-vs-accidents statistic published here in Massachusetts years ago that is still appearing in discussions. It's from back in the 70s, when they lowered the speed on major highways to 55 mph. The claim you hear is that in the year after the lowering of the speed limit on the Mass Pike (I90), there were 25% fewer traffic fatalities. This was brought up in all sorts of "discussions". Finally, some news guys told us that they'd decided to investigate, and found that the figures was exactly right: The year before the change had 5 fatalities, and the year after had 4. So the decrease was exactly 25%. But it was pretty obvious to most people that the numbers were trivial, and the 25% figure was being used to mask the fact that the actual numbers weren't significant.
Some people had fun with the numbers by pointing out that they could be read another way: The number of fatal accidents didn't change at all. There were 4 in each year.
Years later, when the speed was upped to 65 mph, there was a lot of data collected during the adjacent years. The number of fatalities didn't change, and it also turned out that the mean speed of traffic didn't change. This is a toll road that uses tickets stamped with the time, so they had exact travel times and mileage for all trips on the road. The changes were insignificant, lending strong support to the claim that people drive according to conditions, not to the speed-limit signs.
Of course, this is only one 100-mile stretch of (super-)highway, with only a few million cars per year. But there is data around from other highways, too.
Funny thing about the above story: In a recent local political discussion, I once again heard that claim that lowering the speed limit to 55 MPH on the Pike had produced a 25% decrease in traffic fatalities. I do suspect that the speaker knew that the claim was bogus, but used it anyway. The current media term for such misuse of statistics is "cherry picking", and it's a good example.
I think you might be right. Also, I've noticed that it can be very difficult to figure out where a lot of "local news" web sites are located. I frequently see pointers to local news stories, in places like Dave Barry's blog, where the readers send in local stories that they think are relevant to the blog. In his case, these are usually funny/twisted stories, of course, but this happens with a lot of blogs. When I follow a link, I often find myself wondering where in the world this happened - and I often can't tell. The web site will just identify itself as "The Whoville Tribune", and not bother mentioning state or province or country. A "whois whovilletribune.com" request can take a long time, and then doesn't help, because the owner of the domain name may be an organization with headquarters distant from the place covered by the web site.
So one possibility is that google can't tell where a lot of local news sites, either. I don't know if there's a workable solution to this, other than to keep sending messages to the site saying that it would help if they at least identified the country that they're in. But that can be difficult, because it's also often hard to find a working email address in such sites.