"Moore's Law" was always more useful in predicting where your business needed to be in 5 years than anything else. If three doublings of hardware would render the service you provide trival and cheaply performable by your customers . ..
. . . then it'll soon be time to sell this company and start another.
Give them credit, their analysis does try to hold suckiness of the movie constant** and analyze the differences in audience statistics over time. (Of course, the economy and thus disposable income are radically different than 5 years ago, but pay to attention to the man behind the curtain.)
What really seems to be teeing them off though, is that their business model is no longer valid. Used to be, if they spent enough on advertising, people wouldn't figure out that a movie sucked until after they'd seen it. But the mob has gotten too smart for them. Economies operate efficiently when all participants have perfect information. Now that movie goers have better information, film distributors can no longer misappropriate utility from movie consumers by flooding the market with false info claiming that a sucky movie is good. Boo hoo.
Did all that utility that the marketers were misappropriating evaporate? No. The consumers still have it. They'll use it to rent a DVD of something that doesn't suck instead. So, like, don't sweat it.
**They'd do better to ensure that the suckiness of movies decreased, rather than holding it constant.;)
The point I'm trying to argue here is that patents and copyrights are basically good, but their terms are just farcically long in today's fast-paced world.
Yep. That's a good point. I'd disagree on exactly how long is long enough, but that's just a matter of degrees.
The other problem with patents, of course, is the apparent corruption (or just plain ignorance) of the patent office granting painfully obvious patents,
Mostly the latter, I think. The PTO is overly-reliant on old patents to know what has already been done. Software didn't have any old patents when the 1990s began, and the PTO had no clue what was either old or obvious. And look at the results... Not that things have improved much today.
But, take screws for example. There's an old art. You can't get a patent on "a screw" today. You probably can't get a patent on "a stainless steel screw with a slotted hexhead cap and a 3:1 thread pitch today." If you want a patent on a screw today, it's got to be very, very specific, like "a stainless steel screw with a slotted hexhead cap with an outer diameter at least double the shaft diameter having a flare around the cap at least four times the shaft diameter, with a thread pitch of 3:1, and with a maximum thread diameter less than ten percent greater than the shaft diameter". (Not that I have any idea why someone would want such a screw.)
By contrast, the PTO is still handing out patents for things like "a computing device with a means for sending signals to another dissimilar computing device to which it is not physically connected". Ridiculous -- that could be anything.
...which brings rise to situations where you've got a small company who patented an obvious idea with no products to show for it suing real companies doing real innovation -- this hurts society as a whole, because some pissant leach of a corporation is stealing money from good companies while simultaneously NOT contributing anything worthwhile to the list of humankind's accomplishments.
PMuse: The guy may be an innovator who sees A and sees B and says, if I used A with B, I could do C.
Feztaa: And where is this guy if A and B are patented and he's not allowed to use them? He's shit out of luck, is where he is.
Yes, for 20 years. If Mr. C-Seer doesn't tell us about C, it could be considerably longer before the rest of us figure C out.
PMuse: the theory behind granting patents is that with patents, we get to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.
Feztaa: The theory, yes. Theory. That's not at all what's happening in practice, though. Software patents are the perfect example here.
How are software patents a perfect example of the practice not matching the theory? (I can think of a couple of ways, but I'm curious about which you have in mind.)
More importantly, if we don't have a problem with the theory, then our problem is that the practice deviates from the theory too far -- so what can we do to make the practice conform to the theory?
I don't know what you mean by saying that a rental store is 'not supposed to' require SSN
So, I went to look it up. And it turns out that I've been mythed. There was a 1974 that said, more or less, that the government couldn't demand your ssn for non-social security purposes. However, more recent laws have added so many exceptions (taxes, dead-beat dads, etc) that the prohibition is pretty empty at this point. In any case, it never applied to anyone other than the govt.
Dadgumnit. I hate it when I fall for one of those.;)
Feztaa wrote: Without patents, you get to stand on their shoulders.
AstroDrabb wrote: There are no innovations. ALL knowledge is based on prior knowlegde. Look in any field of study and you will soon learn that advancement is not possible without prior knowledge.... Now the question we need to ask ourselves, and especially the government is do we really want the advancement of our society to be hindered by monetary interests of the greedy?
There is innovation. The guy may be an innovator who sees A and sees B and says, if I used A with B, I could do C. For instance, take Guttenberg's invention of the printing press. Many parts of it were know: alphabets, paper, ink, carving, screws, etc. We can argue about whether Guttenberg's idea was inventive enough, but that's just a matter of degrees.
Now, we all agree that the world is best off if Guttenberg tells the world about his idea and how to do it, right? How do we get him to do that? After all, he could just hide his presses in a monestary somewhere and only show the public the books.
Answer: we give him a patent in exchange for publically revealing how to build and operate a printing press. Guttenberg gains a few years of monopoly and we gain his idea.
We can haggle over details like how many years to give him or how strong a monopoly to grant. That, again, is a matter of degree. The point is this: the theory behind granting patents is that with patents, we get to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Without patents, there is less incentive for people who come up with good ideas to explain to the rest of us how to do them.
It's 2003. Is there really no reliable way to electronically identify oneself, so that you can prove you are a person with the name and age given?
There is a dilemma here. It would be useful if there were a way for us to verifiably identify ourselves when we wanted to. However, any such system is easily perverted by others to require us to verify ourselves to them when they want us to. How do we solve this?
E.g., A video store that demands a social security number and two phone numbers before allowing rentals. Sure, sure, they're not supposed to. But some of them do anyway.
After all, isn't a search engine supposed to be for finding relevant data, not as an indirect and sometimes slimy method of advertising
True enough -- a search engine that gives you results based on how much entrants paid for placement is good only for finding companies who paid a lot for placement.
Of course, sometimes that's what you're looking for -- ever notice that large, full-service businesses often have large, full-color ads in the print yellow pages, while use of a cheap basic listing correlates well to smaller company size? You can use the bias of a search engine to your advantage if you know what that bias is.
there's an obvious need for an unbiased search engine
Umm, all search engines are biased. That is, each must choose a way to present results. Not to mention a way to acquire data and a way to compare criteria to the data. Trying to "eliminate" bias is futile. What searchers need is to know what the bias of a search engine is. Then they can decide whether that engine will serve for their task. Then they can know what "the results" mean.
A program that calculates "averages" might return median, mode, midrange, mean, etc. All are "accurate" in a sense and all are useful for different purposes. Similarly, users of "search engines" must have disclosure of the program's method before they can make use of its results.
What we want to do is increase the quality of the elections by assisting the voters in filling out the ballot correctly. With the automated UI the voting results can be checked against business rules...
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Electronically, we can present a much better User Interface than the black-and-white paper ballots that have been used for years.
Apply business rules, e.g. "vote for not more than two"
Show summary to voter at end of session
Unlike punchcards, mistakes can be revised without obtaining new a ballot.
A paper receipt can be given to the voter.
A printed vote is more durable than a punch-card during recount.
A printed vote can be made more human-readable than a punch-card for recounting.
Present candidate photographs so that english literacy can finally be eliminated as a requirement for voting. (Whether this is a good or bad thing can be debated, but at least now the capability is there and we can have a real debate about whether to use it.)
The UI will readily lends itself to adapataion for use by the blind.
Touch screens are physically easier to use than push-pin systems, especially for arthritis sufferers and others with low manual deterity. For instance, they do not require grasping a small object.
Surely, there are other benefits possible.
With electronic systems, we can achieve (1) faster count, (2) more accurate recount, and (3) better UI. Now, we just need to find people to build good systems.
There are lots of receipt printers that are both fast and silent. They are quite capable of printing a timestamped receipt that lists every issue, the name of each candidate selected, and a corresponding bar code for machine-assisted recount purposes.
For instance, you could give one copy to the voter, put a second copy in a ballot box in case the results need checking, and use the electronic data for fast reporting of election results.
The data mentioned in the article is all data that the schools already have. (attendance, test scores, etc.) It is all data that it is proper and necessary for the school to have. What we're talking about in this initiative is analyzing that data fast enough to do something useful with it -- intervene -- instead of waiting for the end-of-year reporting to know what went wrong.
Don't be dicouraged that nearly^H^H^H^H^H^H everything you'll teach will be something that a savvy user could look up online. -- Your students will be the people who either (a) don't know how to look it up online or (b) prefer a live human teacher.
May I also suggest "Intro to Digital Photography: How to Get Great Prints Without Having to Learn How Anything Works."
Granted. In fact, if the amount of difficulty you're willing to undertake is unlimited, you may be able to get an exact answer.
Calendars can project weekdays/weekends into the future and the government probably plots the floating holidays several years in advance. Of course, the number of working days varies by country and also varies slightly by state. Days lost due to bad weather and other unscheduled losses would be harder to predict, but perhaps a statistical analysis of historical data would provide some estimates.
Not 'impossible' then, just 'more difficult.' And a waste of effort.
And yet, it's such a common practice. This is where the phrase "pour encourager les autres" came from.
"Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un admiral pour encourager les autres." -- Voltaire, Candide (ch. XXIII) (" In this country it is found necessary now and then to put an admiral to death in order to encourage the others.")
Voltaire was commenting on England's execution of Admiral Byng in 1757 for the "heinous crime" of, get this, not attacking hard enough in battle. They executed the man not because he disobeyed an order, but because he didn't obey quite well enough to suit them.
Part 1: There are (roughly) 260 days per year. Working days, when the courts are open. Greater precision is impossible, as the number of weekdays per year and the number of court holidays per year vary slightly.
Part 2: The number of file sharers is given in the article with only one significant figure. While we might perhaps assume that the number of file sharers is precise to the millions or hundred thousands, that's as good as it gets. Using more than 3 significant figures in this calculation is pointless.
Part 3: The RIAA's suit-filing process will not scale linearly because the number of available courts and the number of available lawyers are rate-limiting. There were fewer than 10000 intellectual property suits filed in federal court in all of 2002. The system probably can't handle even a couple of thousand extra copyright cases.
Conclusion: while amusing, the article's method of analysis is faulty and useless.
Immoral laws can never be tolerated by an educated population, and there is nothing as immoral as claiming to own others, whether in physical or intellectual slavery. The mis-application of copyright as if property is as such immoral. Oh, my blue bu^H^Hfoot it is!
Slavery is when you cannot act freely.** Intellectual slavery is when you cannot think freely. The existence of some one else's copyright does not prevent you from thinking freely. You can still write your own novel or sing your own song.
Copyright is not immoral in concept. Copyright laws represent us haggling among ourselves about what you can do with something some one else created. Can you perform it? Can you modify it? Can you duplicate it? And for how long? At what price?
Sure, copyright terms are too long right now. Sure, a rich public domain is a really good idea. Sure, current copyright law is not the result of any pure consensus vote, but has come about by a haggling process that is corrupted by money. But that only makes it wrong, not immoral. That only makes it restrictive, not slavery.
--Muse
**A better definition would have been, "Slavery is when some one else, without your consent, prevents you from acting freely," but the additional complexity is peripheral to the point here.
1. Lawyers provide a service that is not, in itself, a bad thing, but which is often conducted in a way that many people find distasteful. They charge money for this service, generally collecting from multiple clients, often billing by the hour. 2. So do prostitutes 3. Lawyers and prostitutes are anologous 4. Lawyers ARE prostitutes. Actually I was trying to ridicule their argument, but I suspect many people won't see anything wrong with my reasoning:/
Which flaw were you thinking of? Personally, I'd start with "the argument proves too much", though I'm sure there's a formal name for the logical fallacy between steps three and four. Working in reverse, the argument is only true if everyone is a prostitute who (a) provides a service that some people find distasteful; (b) charges money by the hour; and (c) has more than one customer. For those who are just catching up, what the argument does is find three characteristics that lawyers and prostitutes share and then conclude that lawyers therefore have ALL the characteristics of prostitutes. (Very slickly done, by the way. Bravo.) In the same vein, one could say:
1. People have sex; 2. Prostitutes have sex; 3. People who have sex are like prostitues; 4. ALL people who have sex are prostitutes. OR 1. Men are mamals; 2. Mice are mamals; 3. Men are like mice; 4. Men ARE mice.
Come on! Some one help me out here with the formal name. (whacks head with hand) This is killing me. Now, if you're looking for some guys who are analogous to prostitutes, did anyone catch Nip/Tuck?
Do not allow private corporations and their lawyers to simply invade one's electronic home and communications at will, bypassing the entire intent and letter of the reasonable search and seizure clause of the constitution, and accountable only to their own shareholders. Or, if you do advocate such obscenely undemocratic violations of people's basic civil rights to due process and privacy, do not expect any legitimacy or sympathy from the rest of us, regardless of how despicable the actions were of those you are trampling over the constitution to get.
This portion of the DMCA -- heck, the whole DMCA -- is a bad law, but:
There is a difference between a subpoena and a search warrant. With a search warrant, the police show up at your door and take what they want. With a subpoena, the person claiming a copyright sends you a notice asking for the information they want. If you don't want to give it to them, you can go to court and explain why you shouldn't have to. If the court agrees with you, then you don't have to give the information up. This is due process.
This is exactly what MIT has done. They got a subpoena; they thought there were reasons they shouldn't have to answer; and they went to court before answering and asked to be excused. Unfortunately, it sounds like MIT's objections are procedural. Even if MIT wins this round, the RIAA will probably fill out a new subpoena, doing it right this time, and MIT will have to answer that one.
Let's try an analogy. Say that your neighbor throws a big party while you're away for the weekend and his guests park their cars in your lawn, smashing your roses. You want to sue someone because your roses are smashed, but your neighbor won't tell you the names of his guests, and everyone agrees that he didn't do it because his cars were in his garage. What do you do? Well, you may have to sue the guests (names unknown) for smashing your roses, then issue a subpoena to your neighbor, demanding that he tell you who the guests were. He will then have to explain to a court why he thinks he shouldn't have to answer. That's how a subpoena works.
(Yes, yes, there are big gaping holes in that analogy. For instance, the DMCA copyright holder can demand some ridiculous sum like $150000 per song, while you can only ask for the replacement cost of your roses, more or less. But that wasn't the point of the analogy.)
Don't tell me no one caught actress Sally Field telling Jay Leno last night that she has to strictly limit her time playing Zelda to keep it from getting out of hand. She went on to say that she'd played Zelda first on the "Nintendo" and now on "the Cube".
This is a GREAT example of broken IP laws. Before patenting the compression technology they placed it into the public domain. After that IBM patented it AND THEN Unisys filed a patent. Unisys got to keep it's patent becouse they can prove they had it first. But that proof comes in the form of publishing it.
OK, no. There were shenanigans here, but it wasn't a broken law problem that made this particular mess.
IBM filed a patent application on June 1, 1983 (that eventually became U.S. Pat. 4,814,746) on some stuff that included compression like LZW.
Unisys filed its application on June 20, 1983 (now U.S. Pat. 4,558,302) listing Welch as the inventor of what we all now know as LZW.
As the story goes, Welch described the LZW algorithm in IEEE Computer in June 1984.
Unisys's patent issued on December 10, 1985.
CompuServe didn't release the GIF specification until 1987.
What ticked everybody off was when Unisys figured out in 1994 that it had had a patent on LZW the whole time and started charging royalties on all GIF software developed thereafter.
software IP is getting so vague that your patent would be for A Mouse Catching Device, rather than your specific implementation of it, which is already covered by copyright. Nobody could produce "a better mousetrap" without infriging on your IP. No argument here. Bad patents are a terrible thing, and the computer art has seen a lot of ridiculous patents granted in the last few years. These darned things are a plague and they are darned expensive to kill.
Of course, sometimes there are valid patents that are pretty hard to design around without loosing an important feature. Those really can keep you out of an area for the whole term.
You know, in one way, gettting around a patent can be easier than getting around a copyright. You're allowed to study a patented system and be inspired by it -- as long as you find a different way to do it, you don't have a notion of "derivative works" to worry about like with copyright. No need for clean room code here.
Example. I look at the standard spring-clamp mousetrap. I invent and patent a box-imprisonment mousetrap with a spring-loaded door. You examine my trap and come up with a box-imprisonment trap with a gravity-driven door. If the Patent Office gave me only the patent I deserved, then your mousetrap is free and clear. So are the three other guys who come up with adhesive, sonic, and electrical mousetraps. At least, that's how it's supposed to work . ..
unless the patent expires, there's no economic incentive for an inventor to invent anything new. Just to be clear, U.S. patents expire 20 years after filing. Patents, unlike copyrights, have been holding the line against term expansion pretty well over the years. Copyrights (though theoretically limited to life of the author + about 70 years) keep getting extended so as to be effectively perpetual. Trademarks are yours as long as you use and protect them.
Also, there is _always_ an economic incentive to invent something better. If I invent a better mouse trap, people will buy it over your old-but-still-patented mousetrap.
A corporation and bunch of lawyers won't ever invent anything and shouldn't be allowed to own a patent Some fields of research require a $5M or a $50M laboratory and a team of twenty. There are some inventions that will not and cannot be made with a chemistry set in someone's basement. (Of course, software generally is not such a field.)
the patents should be non-transferable and with a relatively short patent period.
We already have a relatively short patent period: 20 years. Formerly patented material continues to pour into the public domain every single week, unlike copyright.
Patents already have periodic maintenance fees that must be paid every few years during the 20-year term.
These fees increase in size in the later years and they are higher for large companies than for small ones. (Both notions that might help with the copyright problem.)
Non-transferrability, now, there is an interesting idea. Let's talk about that.
Slashdot Mirror
"Moore's Law" was always more useful in predicting where your business needed to be in 5 years than anything else. If three doublings of hardware would render the service you provide trival and cheaply performable by your customers . . .
. . . then it'll soon be time to sell this company and start another.
Give them credit, their analysis does try to hold suckiness of the movie constant** and analyze the differences in audience statistics over time. (Of course, the economy and thus disposable income are radically different than 5 years ago, but pay to attention to the man behind the curtain.)
;)
What really seems to be teeing them off though, is that their business model is no longer valid. Used to be, if they spent enough on advertising, people wouldn't figure out that a movie sucked until after they'd seen it. But the mob has gotten too smart for them. Economies operate efficiently when all participants have perfect information. Now that movie goers have better information, film distributors can no longer misappropriate utility from movie consumers by flooding the market with false info claiming that a sucky movie is good. Boo hoo.
Did all that utility that the marketers were misappropriating evaporate? No. The consumers still have it. They'll use it to rent a DVD of something that doesn't suck instead. So, like, don't sweat it.
**They'd do better to ensure that the suckiness of movies decreased, rather than holding it constant.
The point I'm trying to argue here is that patents and copyrights are basically good, but their terms are just farcically long in today's fast-paced world.
...which brings rise to situations where you've got a small company who patented an obvious idea with no products to show for it suing real companies doing real innovation -- this hurts society as a whole, because some pissant leach of a corporation is stealing money from good companies while simultaneously NOT contributing anything worthwhile to the list of humankind's accomplishments.
Yep. That's a good point. I'd disagree on exactly how long is long enough, but that's just a matter of degrees.
The other problem with patents, of course, is the apparent corruption (or just plain ignorance) of the patent office granting painfully obvious patents,
Mostly the latter, I think. The PTO is overly-reliant on old patents to know what has already been done. Software didn't have any old patents when the 1990s began, and the PTO had no clue what was either old or obvious. And look at the results... Not that things have improved much today.
But, take screws for example. There's an old art. You can't get a patent on "a screw" today. You probably can't get a patent on "a stainless steel screw with a slotted hexhead cap and a 3:1 thread pitch today." If you want a patent on a screw today, it's got to be very, very specific, like "a stainless steel screw with a slotted hexhead cap with an outer diameter at least double the shaft diameter having a flare around the cap at least four times the shaft diameter, with a thread pitch of 3:1, and with a maximum thread diameter less than ten percent greater than the shaft diameter". (Not that I have any idea why someone would want such a screw.)
By contrast, the PTO is still handing out patents for things like "a computing device with a means for sending signals to another dissimilar computing device to which it is not physically connected". Ridiculous -- that could be anything.
Oh are you preaching to the choir there!
PMuse: The guy may be an innovator who sees A and sees B and says, if I used A with B, I could do C.
Feztaa: And where is this guy if A and B are patented and he's not allowed to use them? He's shit out of luck, is where he is.
Yes, for 20 years. If Mr. C-Seer doesn't tell us about C, it could be considerably longer before the rest of us figure C out.
PMuse: the theory behind granting patents is that with patents, we get to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.
Feztaa: The theory, yes. Theory. That's not at all what's happening in practice, though. Software patents are the perfect example here.
How are software patents a perfect example of the practice not matching the theory? (I can think of a couple of ways, but I'm curious about which you have in mind.)
More importantly, if we don't have a problem with the theory, then our problem is that the practice deviates from the theory too far -- so what can we do to make the practice conform to the theory?
I don't know what you mean by saying that a rental store is 'not supposed to' require SSN
;)
So, I went to look it up. And it turns out that I've been mythed. There was a 1974 that said, more or less, that the government couldn't demand your ssn for non-social security purposes. However, more recent laws have added so many exceptions (taxes, dead-beat dads, etc) that the prohibition is pretty empty at this point. In any case, it never applied to anyone other than the govt.
Dadgumnit. I hate it when I fall for one of those.
Feztaa wrote: Without patents, you get to stand on their shoulders.
... Now the question we need to ask ourselves, and especially the government is do we really want the advancement of our society to be hindered by monetary interests of the greedy?
AstroDrabb wrote: There are no innovations. ALL knowledge is based on prior knowlegde. Look in any field of study and you will soon learn that advancement is not possible without prior knowledge.
There is innovation. The guy may be an innovator who sees A and sees B and says, if I used A with B, I could do C. For instance, take Guttenberg's invention of the printing press. Many parts of it were know: alphabets, paper, ink, carving, screws, etc. We can argue about whether Guttenberg's idea was inventive enough, but that's just a matter of degrees.
Now, we all agree that the world is best off if Guttenberg tells the world about his idea and how to do it, right? How do we get him to do that? After all, he could just hide his presses in a monestary somewhere and only show the public the books.
Answer: we give him a patent in exchange for publically revealing how to build and operate a printing press. Guttenberg gains a few years of monopoly and we gain his idea.
We can haggle over details like how many years to give him or how strong a monopoly to grant. That, again, is a matter of degree. The point is this: the theory behind granting patents is that with patents, we get to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Without patents, there is less incentive for people who come up with good ideas to explain to the rest of us how to do them.
It's 2003. Is there really no reliable way to electronically identify oneself, so that you can prove you are a person with the name and age given?
There is a dilemma here. It would be useful if there were a way for us to verifiably identify ourselves when we wanted to. However, any such system is easily perverted by others to require us to verify ourselves to them when they want us to. How do we solve this?
E.g., A video store that demands a social security number and two phone numbers before allowing rentals. Sure, sure, they're not supposed to. But some of them do anyway.
After all, isn't a search engine supposed to be for finding relevant data, not as an indirect and sometimes slimy method of advertising
True enough -- a search engine that gives you results based on how much entrants paid for placement is good only for finding companies who paid a lot for placement.
Of course, sometimes that's what you're looking for -- ever notice that large, full-service businesses often have large, full-color ads in the print yellow pages, while use of a cheap basic listing correlates well to smaller company size? You can use the bias of a search engine to your advantage if you know what that bias is.
there's an obvious need for an unbiased search engine
Umm, all search engines are biased. That is, each must choose a way to present results. Not to mention a way to acquire data and a way to compare criteria to the data. Trying to "eliminate" bias is futile. What searchers need is to know what the bias of a search engine is. Then they can decide whether that engine will serve for their task. Then they can know what "the results" mean.
A program that calculates "averages" might return median, mode, midrange, mean, etc. All are "accurate" in a sense and all are useful for different purposes. Similarly, users of "search engines" must have disclosure of the program's method before they can make use of its results.
Job security.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Electronically, we can present a much better User Interface than the black-and-white paper ballots that have been used for years.
Apply business rules, e.g. "vote for not more than two"
Show summary to voter at end of session
Unlike punchcards, mistakes can be revised without obtaining new a ballot.
A paper receipt can be given to the voter.
A printed vote is more durable than a punch-card during recount.
A printed vote can be made more human-readable than a punch-card for recounting.
Present candidate photographs so that english literacy can finally be eliminated as a requirement for voting. (Whether this is a good or bad thing can be debated, but at least now the capability is there and we can have a real debate about whether to use it.)
The UI will readily lends itself to adapataion for use by the blind.
Touch screens are physically easier to use than push-pin systems, especially for arthritis sufferers and others with low manual deterity. For instance, they do not require grasping a small object.
Surely, there are other benefits possible.
With electronic systems, we can achieve (1) faster count, (2) more accurate recount, and (3) better UI. Now, we just need to find people to build good systems.
There are lots of receipt printers that are both fast and silent. They are quite capable of printing a timestamped receipt that lists every issue, the name of each candidate selected, and a corresponding bar code for machine-assisted recount purposes.
For instance, you could give one copy to the voter, put a second copy in a ballot box in case the results need checking, and use the electronic data for fast reporting of election results.
The data mentioned in the article is all data that the schools already have. (attendance, test scores, etc.) It is all data that it is proper and necessary for the school to have. What we're talking about in this initiative is analyzing that data fast enough to do something useful with it -- intervene -- instead of waiting for the end-of-year reporting to know what went wrong.
Don't be dicouraged that nearly^H^H^H^H^H^H everything you'll teach will be something that a savvy user could look up online. -- Your students will be the people who either (a) don't know how to look it up online or (b) prefer a live human teacher.
May I also suggest "Intro to Digital Photography: How to Get Great Prints Without Having to Learn How Anything Works."
Granted. In fact, if the amount of difficulty you're willing to undertake is unlimited, you may be able to get an exact answer.
Calendars can project weekdays/weekends into the future and the government probably plots the floating holidays several years in advance. Of course, the number of working days varies by country and also varies slightly by state. Days lost due to bad weather and other unscheduled losses would be harder to predict, but perhaps a statistical analysis of historical data would provide some estimates.
Not 'impossible' then, just 'more difficult.' And a waste of effort.
And yet, it's such a common practice. This is where the phrase "pour encourager les autres" came from.
"Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un admiral pour encourager les autres." -- Voltaire, Candide (ch. XXIII) (" In this country it is found necessary now and then to put an admiral to death in order to encourage the others.")
Voltaire was commenting on England's execution of Admiral Byng in 1757 for the "heinous crime" of, get this, not attacking hard enough in battle. They executed the man not because he disobeyed an order, but because he didn't obey quite well enough to suit them.
Part 1: There are (roughly) 260 days per year. Working days, when the courts are open. Greater precision is impossible, as the number of weekdays per year and the number of court holidays per year vary slightly.
Part 2: The number of file sharers is given in the article with only one significant figure. While we might perhaps assume that the number of file sharers is precise to the millions or hundred thousands, that's as good as it gets. Using more than 3 significant figures in this calculation is pointless.
Part 3: The RIAA's suit-filing process will not scale linearly because the number of available courts and the number of available lawyers are rate-limiting. There were fewer than 10000 intellectual property suits filed in federal court in all of 2002. The system probably can't handle even a couple of thousand extra copyright cases.
Conclusion: while amusing, the article's method of analysis is faulty and useless.
Immoral laws can never be tolerated by an educated population, and there is nothing as immoral as claiming to own others, whether in physical or intellectual slavery. The mis-application of copyright as if property is as such immoral.
Oh, my blue bu^H^Hfoot it is!
Slavery is when you cannot act freely.** Intellectual slavery is when you cannot think freely. The existence of some one else's copyright does not prevent you from thinking freely. You can still write your own novel or sing your own song.
Copyright is not immoral in concept. Copyright laws represent us haggling among ourselves about what you can do with something some one else created. Can you perform it? Can you modify it? Can you duplicate it? And for how long? At what price?
Sure, copyright terms are too long right now. Sure, a rich public domain is a really good idea. Sure, current copyright law is not the result of any pure consensus vote, but has come about by a haggling process that is corrupted by money. But that only makes it wrong, not immoral. That only makes it restrictive, not slavery.
--Muse
**A better definition would have been, "Slavery is when some one else, without your consent, prevents you from acting freely," but the additional complexity is peripheral to the point here.
1. Lawyers provide a service that is not, in itself, a bad thing, but which is often conducted in a way that many people find distasteful. They charge money for this service, generally collecting from multiple clients, often billing by the hour. :/
2. So do prostitutes
3. Lawyers and prostitutes are anologous
4. Lawyers ARE prostitutes.
Actually I was trying to ridicule their argument, but I suspect many people won't see anything wrong with my reasoning
Which flaw were you thinking of? Personally, I'd start with "the argument proves too much", though I'm sure there's a formal name for the logical fallacy between steps three and four. Working in reverse, the argument is only true if everyone is a prostitute who (a) provides a service that some people find distasteful; (b) charges money by the hour; and (c) has more than one customer. For those who are just catching up, what the argument does is find three characteristics that lawyers and prostitutes share and then conclude that lawyers therefore have ALL the characteristics of prostitutes. (Very slickly done, by the way. Bravo.) In the same vein, one could say:
1. People have sex; 2. Prostitutes have sex; 3. People who have sex are like prostitues; 4. ALL people who have sex are prostitutes.
OR
1. Men are mamals; 2. Mice are mamals; 3. Men are like mice; 4. Men ARE mice.
Come on! Some one help me out here with the formal name. (whacks head with hand) This is killing me. Now, if you're looking for some guys who are analogous to prostitutes, did anyone catch Nip/Tuck?
Do not allow private corporations and their lawyers to simply invade one's electronic home and communications at will, bypassing the entire intent and letter of the reasonable search and seizure clause of the constitution, and accountable only to their own shareholders. Or, if you do advocate such obscenely undemocratic violations of people's basic civil rights to due process and privacy, do not expect any legitimacy or sympathy from the rest of us, regardless of how despicable the actions were of those you are trampling over the constitution to get.
This portion of the DMCA -- heck, the whole DMCA -- is a bad law, but:
There is a difference between a subpoena and a search warrant. With a search warrant, the police show up at your door and take what they want. With a subpoena, the person claiming a copyright sends you a notice asking for the information they want. If you don't want to give it to them, you can go to court and explain why you shouldn't have to. If the court agrees with you, then you don't have to give the information up. This is due process.
This is exactly what MIT has done. They got a subpoena; they thought there were reasons they shouldn't have to answer; and they went to court before answering and asked to be excused. Unfortunately, it sounds like MIT's objections are procedural. Even if MIT wins this round, the RIAA will probably fill out a new subpoena, doing it right this time, and MIT will have to answer that one.
Let's try an analogy. Say that your neighbor throws a big party while you're away for the weekend and his guests park their cars in your lawn, smashing your roses. You want to sue someone because your roses are smashed, but your neighbor won't tell you the names of his guests, and everyone agrees that he didn't do it because his cars were in his garage. What do you do? Well, you may have to sue the guests (names unknown) for smashing your roses, then issue a subpoena to your neighbor, demanding that he tell you who the guests were. He will then have to explain to a court why he thinks he shouldn't have to answer. That's how a subpoena works.
(Yes, yes, there are big gaping holes in that analogy. For instance, the DMCA copyright holder can demand some ridiculous sum like $150000 per song, while you can only ask for the replacement cost of your roses, more or less. But that wasn't the point of the analogy.)
Don't tell me no one caught actress Sally Field telling Jay Leno last night that she has to strictly limit her time playing Zelda to keep it from getting out of hand. She went on to say that she'd played Zelda first on the "Nintendo" and now on "the Cube".
All geeks, indeed! Hrmmph!
Thank you for pointing this out. I was dreading reading the 37 knee-jerk submarine-patents-outta-be-illegal responses. ;)
OK, no. There were shenanigans here, but it wasn't a broken law problem that made this particular mess.
IBM filed a patent application on June 1, 1983 (that eventually became U.S. Pat. 4,814,746) on some stuff that included compression like LZW.
Unisys filed its application on June 20, 1983 (now U.S. Pat. 4,558,302) listing Welch as the inventor of what we all now know as LZW.
As the story goes, Welch described the LZW algorithm in IEEE Computer in June 1984.
Unisys's patent issued on December 10, 1985.
CompuServe didn't release the GIF specification until 1987.
What ticked everybody off was when Unisys figured out in 1994 that it had had a patent on LZW the whole time and started charging royalties on all GIF software developed thereafter.
Thanks are due to mcb, who documented his sources.
software IP is getting so vague that your patent would be for A Mouse Catching Device, rather than your specific implementation of it, which is already covered by copyright. Nobody could produce "a better mousetrap" without infriging on your IP.
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No argument here. Bad patents are a terrible thing, and the computer art has seen a lot of ridiculous patents granted in the last few years. These darned things are a plague and they are darned expensive to kill.
Of course, sometimes there are valid patents that are pretty hard to design around without loosing an important feature. Those really can keep you out of an area for the whole term.
You know, in one way, gettting around a patent can be easier than getting around a copyright. You're allowed to study a patented system and be inspired by it -- as long as you find a different way to do it, you don't have a notion of "derivative works" to worry about like with copyright. No need for clean room code here.
Example. I look at the standard spring-clamp mousetrap. I invent and patent a box-imprisonment mousetrap with a spring-loaded door. You examine my trap and come up with a box-imprisonment trap with a gravity-driven door. If the Patent Office gave me only the patent I deserved, then your mousetrap is free and clear. So are the three other guys who come up with adhesive, sonic, and electrical mousetraps. At least, that's how it's supposed to work . .
Just to be clear, U.S. patents expire 20 years after filing. Patents, unlike copyrights, have been holding the line against term expansion pretty well over the years. Copyrights (though theoretically limited to life of the author + about 70 years) keep getting extended so as to be effectively perpetual. Trademarks are yours as long as you use and protect them.
Also, there is _always_ an economic incentive to invent something better. If I invent a better mouse trap, people will buy it over your old-but-still-patented mousetrap.
A corporation and bunch of lawyers won't ever invent anything and shouldn't be allowed to own a patent
Some fields of research require a $5M or a $50M laboratory and a team of twenty. There are some inventions that will not and cannot be made with a chemistry set in someone's basement. (Of course, software generally is not such a field.)
the patents should be non-transferable and with a relatively short patent period.
We already have a relatively short patent period: 20 years. Formerly patented material continues to pour into the public domain every single week, unlike copyright.
Patents already have periodic maintenance fees that must be paid every few years during the 20-year term.
These fees increase in size in the later years and they are higher for large companies than for small ones. (Both notions that might help with the copyright problem.)
Non-transferrability, now, there is an interesting idea. Let's talk about that.