Why does Mr. McCain think that children are even remotely interested in "shocking pornography"?
I recall a couple of years ago my wife and I visited the new Amsterdam science museum (sorry, can't recall its proper name). They had a number of public access internet terminals. While we waited in line we watched a couple of 10 year old boys competing to see who could find the hardest porn. It wasn't too easy: the museum home page had no links to general search engines and no way to type in a URL. Also the boys English was obviously not too brilliant. But they persevered, and eventually managed to navigate to Alta-Vista and type in some relevant keywords in English.
Actually I suspect that the net effect on them was benficial, since it required them to practice their English and the pictures they found could be seen by wandering down an Amsterdam street. But Mr McCain is on pretty solid ground when he says that children (which can reasonably include anyone up to 16, or even older if you pin it down to legal definitions) will go out of their way to access the most shocking pornography they can find.
Hmmm. I've just looked at my.sig again. I wrote it with technical standards in mind, but it has an interesting double meaning in this context.
the ones the companies really have to worry about, the larger pirates with the resources to buy or hack a DVD mastering drive
I can't say I buy this. Sure the commercial pirates are a problem, but widespread copy sharing is also capable of taking a big bite out of sales. We all know people who will clone a CD for a friend at the drop of a hat. Each individual instance doesn't cost the producer that much, but these costs do add up.
The film companies are fighting a battle on two fronts here. They know that technical restrictions will not stop well-financed pirates, but they have other ways of going after them, often involving SWAT teams and trade treaties. On the other front they are trying to minimise informal copying as well, which in practice has to mean going after DeCSS and related software.
What the right wing really wants to censor is women's rights and gay rights. This is why all the censorware programs censor these types of sites too.
Something we keep on seeing here in the UK is a kind of unholy alliance between right wing religion and left wing feminism. Both want to censor porn, but have different reasons for doing so. The right wants to censor it because Sex Is Bad, while the left wants to censor it because Porn Exploits Women.
The way to break up this alliance is to ask about things that they disagree about. Abortion, sex education and gay rights are good places to start. Then point out to the Left that the Right has always used them and then ignored their particular goals. Then you can make the point that while almost everyone wants to censor something, there are very few things that almost everyone wants to censor.
It sounds like it would make an excellent title sequence -- problem solved. Begin in the eye of the turtle...
In fact this has been done. Some of the DW books (Wyrd Systers & Soul Music, IIRC) have been done as animations and shown on UK TV. The opening titles are much as you suggest, although I think that they may have followed the intro to one of the early books (Equal Rites?) which contained just such a script. And yes, they used CGI.
Awesome geek entertainment, and the delectable miss Philippa Forrester just makes it a perfect evening.
Right on (although I would prefer to see more of the robots, personally). The BBC version also has added interest in the "House Robots" which lurk in the corners of the arena and then come out to shred the loser, or any robot that gets too close. They also occasionally move in to unjam things if a robot gets stuck
Every so often a robot is entered which is a realistic challenge for the house robots. I think Chaos 2 last week could handle any single one except Sir Killalot (which is about four feet high and probably weighs twice the weight limit for the competitors).
The really cool thing about Chaos 2 is that it could use its flipper to right itself. This made it pretty unbeatable.
A few years ago Geller was caught by Noel Edmonds on the BBC "Late Late Breakfast Show" (it went out at 6pm, geddit?). The show had a regular spot called the "Gotcha Oscar" in which a celebrity was set up for a practical joke. Geller was filmed in a restraunt by hidden cameras. He did a few of his tricks, and the cameras caught him bending the spoons by decidedly non-psychic means.
After a few minutes he seems to have smelt a rat, and stopped. Geller's supporters claimed that he had obviously detected the cameras by psychic powers.
IIRC, one of those suits was in Japan. Geller won because the truth is not a defence against a charge of libel in Japan: its actually more about whether you have insulted the plaintiff than whether what you said was true.
See here for details. This looks like Compaq just want to keep their options open, especially with Embedded Linux being on the cards, and also devices like the TiVo coming out.
This assumes that Moore's Law applies [...]. In fact, screens improve rather slower than Moore's Law. 5+ yrs ago, I had a screen that could do 800x600.
Moore's Law applys to transistors on a chip, not pixels on a screen.
But transistors, or at least devices, on a chip are exactly what we are talking about. CRTs have not followed Moore's Law because the costs are dominated by the physical manufacture of high-precision glass bottles. Projectors use either LCD or digital mirror shutters, and these have been improving much faster than glass. Not as fast as pure silicon: I'd put the Moore Constant for them at around 24 months instead of 18.
Duping umpteen gigabytes of data is not that trivial. Duping a film might actually be easier. To copy the data you need to get hold of the storage medium for long enough to read all the data off it. To copy the film you need to get hold of it for long enough to run it though a duplicator (which is basically four reels and a gizmo to hold the original and print together as they run under a light). Both can be done faster than "real time". Developing the copy can be done later of course.
And on top of this you can encrypt the digital version, so it only gets decrypted in the projector. Its actually fairly simple to produce a tamper-proof box that won't project the film if the seal is broken. This isn't totally secure of course, but it does increase the cost and difficulty of making an illegal copy.
The best way for our putative copying mafia to proceed would be to pay for a private showing in front of some cameras. Alternatively I can imagine some fairly simple optics that would redirect a small fraction of the light from the projector and focus it onto a conventional CCD. It wouldn't be cinema standard, but it would do just fine for an illegal DVD master.
What counts is not the dot pitch, but the angular resolution of the system as seen by the audience.
What I know of this comes from still photography, but its also at 35mm (i.e. a negative 24x36mm), so I can say something intelligent.
If you do the sums for a 35mm still, it is considered "sharp" if a single point on the object maps to a cirlce of diameter less than 0.004 inches on the negative (known as the "circle of confusion"). That corresponds to a digital resolution of around 3000x2000. Of course you can go finer. But that is roughly the best performance you can expect from a 35mm film.
Now, whether this makes any difference depends on whether you can see such a small object. The question is: given two small dots in the scene, can you see whether there is one dot or two in the projected image? The point at which the two dots merge into one is the resolution, and the angle subtended by the two dots is the angular resolution. I'll dodge the difference between angle for the camera and angle for the viewer: projection systems are designed so that the middle seats get the right perspective.
The angular resolution of a good human eye is 1/60th of a degree (1 arc minute). So an ideal cinema screen would need to match that with around 60 pixels per degree. Right now I'm wearing spectacles, and without moving my head they put a frame on my vision about 80 degrees wide. I haven't measured a cinema screen from the centre seat, but I'd expect something nearer 40 degrees. 40 degrees times 60 pixels per degree gives 2400 pixels. Which is not too far off what 35mm film gives (at its theoretical best).
So current XVGA systems are not up to the job of replacing film, but give us a 3000x2000 pixel screen and it will look better. And Moore's Law suggests that we will be able to do that fairly soon.
Of course there are other issues. As others have noted you have the problems of physical wear and dirt getting onto film, and the costs of printing, versus the 100% reproducability of digital and the costs of piping all that data around. But you can bet that the studios have looked at these numbers and figured that the lifecycle costs look interesting. And no doubt someone has told them of Moore's Law too.
I remember the same argument in the early days of digital audio. The first CD players sounded harsh in the high treble thanks to the steep filters required. Analogue purists declared that digital would never replace analogue. But where is analogue now? A niche split between rich die-hards and poor elderly people who can't afford to replace their existing LPs. Physical analogue film will go the same way.
I've actually read some of the FOI documents. You can download them from here.
They are heavily censored, but reading between the lines and into the black bits it sounds like the story goes something like this.
At an IETF meeting in Mexico in 1992 the PPP sig discussed encryption. Simpson was present and said something which made someone else at the meeting suspect he was selling encryption products to a foreign power, in violation of ITAR. They informed the FBI, who investigated and found no evidence to support such an allegation. The investigation was then dropped.
Bear in mind this was back in 92-93. The Internet was an obscure academic toy in those days, and cyber-liberties mostly centered around hacker issues (check out The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling). I don't think this is a big thing.
The company had no intention of paying the native Indians, who presumably had prior art and would be made unemployed by the action of the company.
Thats a pretty big presumption.
First of all, the company in question has added value by identifying the active ingredient. This took research. Getting it approved as a medicine will have taken lots of money on top of that. The active ingredient, is more valuable when purified than when in the plant. Even more valuable is the knowledge of its side effects and contra-indications. I, at least, am unwilling to trust my health to approximate doses of a drug with unknown side effects brewed up in an ad-hoc manner from stored herbs when instead I can take a tablet with exactly 100mg in it and read a leaflet warning me that long term use has been linked to liver failure.
This may result in loss to the native Indians who previously traded in the plant. But set against that must be the benefits to many other people (not all of them rich) who can now get the pure form, plus associated knowledge, where before was only folklore.
And anyway, just where do you think the nasty western drug company gets its raw materials? Yes, right where they always did: the native Indians.
A key issue here is that trade increases the wealth of both parties. If it didn't then one of them would refuse to trade. Therefore anything which increases the freedom to trade is a Good Thing. Those who would deny poor peasants the right to trade what they have in return for what they want or need should consider this before issuing blanket condemnations of the WTO.
Also, take another look at India. At the end of WW2 it was comparitively wealthy, especially compared to China, Hong Kong, and even Japan (which had, after all, just lost the war). The reason it did not become more wealthy was the belief of its leaders, especially Ghandi and Nheru, that competition was a bad thing, especially when it caused a company to lose market share and hence lay off employees. The result was a long period when a factory owner wishing to increase production had to apply for government permission, which was likely to be refused if the government thought that the increased sales would be at the cost of one of his competitors. This in turn led to the "Hindu rate of growth", which was as close to zero after allowing for population growth as made no effective difference. That, and not the WTO, is the reason you see children employed in building sites in India.
This is a denial of service attack. Plain and simple.
Its also censorship. These people are explicitly attempting to prevent others from reading the WTO's point of view because they happen to disagree with it.
When colored folks sat down in a diner and refused the leave, the diner was the only business that was affected.
Also unaffected was the ability of the owner to argue his own case. Here, however, the aim is to deny the WTO its ability to speak.
... in "The Light Fantastic" the anti-hero Rincewind is talking to the anthropomorphic personification Death about some religious fanatics:
"Its horrible," said Rincewind.
"I'M INCLINED TO AGREE" said Death.
"I would have thought you'd be all for it!"
"NOT LIKE THIS. THE DEATH OF THE WARRIOR OR THE OLD MAN OR THE LITTLE CHILD, THIS I UNDERSTAND, AND I TAKE AWAY THE PAIN AND END THE SUFFERING. I DO NOT UNDERSTNAND THIS DEATH-OF-THE-MIND".
I think the most important factor has to be what the lawyers (at least over here in the UK) call "mens rea", which I think translates as "guilty mind". Its the intent that counts.
Take a couple of examples: the recent DVD crack, and credit card number generators (the latter generate syntactically valid random credit card numbers). For the purpose of discussion I'll assume that copyright violation is unethical.
In the case of the DVD crack the purpose of the crack was honest: to let Linux users legitimately watch films without having to pay for Windows just to run the DVD drive. This is a perfectly legitimate goal, and there is nothing unethical about doing it. Of course it is possible to use the same software for unethical purposes, but the author of the software is not responsible for such a decision.
On the other hand the author of a credit card number generator has produced a piece of software which exists for only one purpose: to facilitate theft. The author set out to aid theft, and is therefore morally an accessory to the thefts which are carried out using the software.
Of course there is a big grey area in between these to extremes. What do we say about software which has some minor or marginal use, but which is almost entirely used for some bad and foreseeable purpose? Back Orifice might come into this area: it has some legitimate use for remote admin, but its primary purpose is to break Windows NT security.
Here ethics moves away from the legal domain: lawyers are concerned with proof. However ethics is more about formalising matters of conscience (although some ethical codes do carry penalties for gross violation). If you believe that cracking is wrong then it follows that the CDC acted unethically in releasing a tool which had, as its primary purpose, cracking NT.
A program for Linux which was designed to facilitate DVD copying would be an interesting case. It may be ethical to copy a DVD for backup purposes, but the vast majority of copies made would be illegal pirate copies for sale or just given away. Would it be ethical to write such a program?
The classic hardware scenario for this kind of ethical debate is the shopkeeper who sells a knife which is subsequently used in a murder. If the knife is a cooking knife brought in the normal course of business then obviously the shopkeeper shares no guilt. At the other extreme if the customer comes in and says "Give me a knife so I can kill my wife with it" and this statement appears believable then equally obviously the shopkeeper is an accessory to the murder. But in the middle is a large grey area. What about combat knives? They are specifically designed to kill. Any individual purchaser might plead a desire for honest self defence, but the fact remains that most of the time that such knives are used it is not in self defence. The vendors must therefore share to some extent in the guilt of the users of these knives.
I have yet to see any report on Echelon that cannot be traced back to Duncan Campbell. Furthermore this one just rehashes some stale news. This Australian "confirmation" of Echelon goes back to last year at least. The BBC should be able to do better than this.
Take another look at the article, and note what is actually said and what is merely implied. The US, UK and Australian governments all monitor radio communications. No surprise there. They might, under certain circumstances, pass on this intelligence to each other. If one of them got wind of a plot to assassinate another's head of state, it would be positively unfriendly not to pass this on.
Somehow Duncan Campbell makes this into an admission of a vast conspiracy. Of course he might be right, but then again he might not.
What is really needed here is the application of the scientific principle: someone else has to go out and try to replicate Campbell's findings. I'll take more notice of this when I see someone else's name on the reports.
Incidentally, Campbell has a rather chequered history here. Last year he "revealed" that the UK ISPs and police were in "secret" talks about handing over subscribers email for fishing expeditions. The truth was considerably more prosaic: the ISPs and police were talking publicly (OK, so you had to pay £60/day to attend) about how to streamline and regularise the existing legal process under which the police can request subscriber information (e.g. snail-mail address) from the ISPs. Campbell forgot to mention that under UK law the ISPs are prohibited from passing over confidential data unless they have good reason to believe that a crime has been committed, and that email contents are dealt with under separate laws. If the ISPs hand over data to the police without good cause then they could be sued and/or prosecuted. This gives them a motive to inspect every request carefully.
So now Campbell has moved on to bigger conspiracies. But having seen his attitude towards the truth on that occasion, I am very skeptical about this one.
We're not philosophers? What the hell are we then?
We are not the kind of philosophers who write books about [social|economic|political] philosophy which then shape the course of debate and policy.
The only counter-example I can think of is Bill Gates, and his books were more of an ego trip than real philosophy: everyone agrees that they were pretty lightweight.
Perhaps its just that The Economist think its perfectly acceptable that politics is only who can buy which politicians and why
I subscribe to The Economist, and I can assure you that this is not its editorial position. A month or two ago it had a large article on US campaign finance, what is wrong with it, and the various proposals to fix it.
Part of the point of this article is that the geeks are not buying politicians because they want to own them, they are buying them to defend themselves against other people's politicians.
Remember the old definition of an honest politician: one who stays bought. (I first read that in Robert Heinlein. Stranger In A Strange Land ISTR).
As an aside, I would say that The Economist is almost the perfect Geek Newspaper. It is intelligent, never emotional, well informed, and has the view that politics is about fixing things rather than ideology. It favours ideas which are free market, "liberal" in the old sense, and meritocratic.
As for syndicalism, I've read the anarcho-syndicalism FAQ and not been impressed. There does not appear to be any real difference between A-S and pure lassaiz-faire capitalism.
Terry Pratchett put it very well in "Interesting Times": no matter how many revolutions you have, the Rulers are still in charge.
Hmmm. I used to spend quite a lot of time on sci.skeptic, and maintained the FAQ for a while. This gave me a good opportunity to study "fringe" ideas. This article has a lot in common with them:
It targets a prominant public figure and alleges that he is at the head of a large scale conspiracy.
Lack of firm evidence to support his position. I tried to read the spreadsheet, but my copy of Excel would not open it. Nothing else in the article gives me any confidence in his position.
Various out-of-context bits and pieces are made to seem more important than they are. Specifically MS has been accused of manipulating its stock price by reserving money from rich quarters and turning it into profit during poor quarters. But this can only smooth out lumps and bumps, not maintain a long-term growth curve.
Lots of references are made to people who don't believe the author, along with elaborate justifications for this. No doubt Alan Greenspan is snowed under by letters from crackpot economists and conspiracy nuts. This guy looks just like another one. Ditto the fund managers and newspaper editors. They know what a price support operation looks like, and this isn't it.
Discussions of how courageous the author is being in revealing this truth.
Predictions of apocolypse RSN.
I think MS is overvalued, but I very much doubt that the situation is this bad.
The problem for the Trek universe is that society has changed, often in ways that were influenced by Trek itself.
When ST:TOS started it was possibly the most radical things on air. It had a half-breed alien first officer, a Russian helmsman and a black, female communications officer. At the time these were almost revolutionary. In the USA Martin Luther King was telling the KKK about his dream, and in the UK Enoch Powell was prophesying "rivers of blood". But Star Trek showed the world what King's dream looked like, and that image profoundly altered our society.
Today we have Commander Benjamin Sisko. He has a son and a dead wife. Oh, and by the way, he's black and his best friend is a young alien woman who used to be an old man, and is in a relationship with a Klingon. So whats new?
In many ways we owe this acceptance to Trek. But at the same time that acceptance is the death knell for Trek. We have learned what Trek had to teach us. Like all successful young revolutionaries, Trek has grown up and become part of the new Establishment.
What Science Fiction needs is not more Trek, or even just better Trek, but something new. Something that challenges our assumptions, and especially our contradictions, in the way that Trek challenged those of the 60s and 70s. I don't know what that thing is going to look like, but I don't think it will look much like Trek.
You could point out to your bosses that names like LNXSOX2324 are not compliant with RFC2100. Also the ACM article referenced in it could reasonably be quoted as a summary of best practice in the industry.
Organic semiconductors have been around for a while. On the display angle, Cambridge Display Technologies pioneered the tech, and are the furthest along with it.
The problems appear to be with colour purity and stability. Building a small prototype is one thing, but a mass-market display with a 10,000 hour active life is quite another.
Also, the flexibility is probably being oversold. These things will bend around a limited radius, possibly small enough to roll up, but don't expect animated clothing any time soon.
But yes, once they get the chemistry sorted out this is a good contender for the display technology of the next century.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall a couple of years ago my wife and I visited the new Amsterdam science museum (sorry, can't recall its proper name). They had a number of public access internet terminals. While we waited in line we watched a couple of 10 year old boys competing to see who could find the hardest porn. It wasn't too easy: the museum home page had no links to general search engines and no way to type in a URL. Also the boys English was obviously not too brilliant. But they persevered, and eventually managed to navigate to Alta-Vista and type in some relevant keywords in English.
Actually I suspect that the net effect on them was benficial, since it required them to practice their English and the pictures they found could be seen by wandering down an Amsterdam street. But Mr McCain is on pretty solid ground when he says that children (which can reasonably include anyone up to 16, or even older if you pin it down to legal definitions) will go out of their way to access the most shocking pornography they can find.
Hmmm. I've just looked at my .sig again. I wrote it with technical standards in mind, but it has an interesting double meaning in this context.
Paul.
I can't say I buy this. Sure the commercial pirates are a problem, but widespread copy sharing is also capable of taking a big bite out of sales. We all know people who will clone a CD for a friend at the drop of a hat. Each individual instance doesn't cost the producer that much, but these costs do add up.
The film companies are fighting a battle on two fronts here. They know that technical restrictions will not stop well-financed pirates, but they have other ways of going after them, often involving SWAT teams and trade treaties. On the other front they are trying to minimise informal copying as well, which in practice has to mean going after DeCSS and related software.
Paul.
Something we keep on seeing here in the UK is a kind of unholy alliance between right wing religion and left wing feminism. Both want to censor porn, but have different reasons for doing so. The right wants to censor it because Sex Is Bad, while the left wants to censor it because Porn Exploits Women.
The way to break up this alliance is to ask about things that they disagree about. Abortion, sex education and gay rights are good places to start. Then point out to the Left that the Right has always used them and then ignored their particular goals. Then you can make the point that while almost everyone wants to censor something, there are very few things that almost everyone wants to censor.
Paul.
In fact this has been done. Some of the DW books (Wyrd Systers & Soul Music, IIRC) have been done as animations and shown on UK TV. The opening titles are much as you suggest, although I think that they may have followed the intro to one of the early books (Equal Rites?) which contained just such a script. And yes, they used CGI.
Paul.
Right on (although I would prefer to see more of the robots, personally). The BBC version also has added interest in the "House Robots" which lurk in the corners of the arena and then come out to shred the loser, or any robot that gets too close. They also occasionally move in to unjam things if a robot gets stuck
Every so often a robot is entered which is a realistic challenge for the house robots. I think Chaos 2 last week could handle any single one except Sir Killalot (which is about four feet high and probably weighs twice the weight limit for the competitors).
The really cool thing about Chaos 2 is that it could use its flipper to right itself. This made it pretty unbeatable.
Paul.
I note that the iMac is very USB-centric, so the Apple PalmOS device would logically have the same approach, with a USB-serial device as an option.
Paul.
Paul.
After a few minutes he seems to have smelt a rat, and stopped. Geller's supporters claimed that he had obviously detected the cameras by psychic powers.
Paul.
Geller was awarded $1 in damages.
Paul.
Paul.
Moore's Law applys to transistors on a chip, not pixels on a screen.
But transistors, or at least devices, on a chip are exactly what we are talking about. CRTs have not followed Moore's Law because the costs are dominated by the physical manufacture of high-precision glass bottles. Projectors use either LCD or digital mirror shutters, and these have been improving much faster than glass. Not as fast as pure silicon: I'd put the Moore Constant for them at around 24 months instead of 18.
Paul.
And on top of this you can encrypt the digital version, so it only gets decrypted in the projector. Its actually fairly simple to produce a tamper-proof box that won't project the film if the seal is broken. This isn't totally secure of course, but it does increase the cost and difficulty of making an illegal copy.
The best way for our putative copying mafia to proceed would be to pay for a private showing in front of some cameras. Alternatively I can imagine some fairly simple optics that would redirect a small fraction of the light from the projector and focus it onto a conventional CCD. It wouldn't be cinema standard, but it would do just fine for an illegal DVD master.
Paul.
What I know of this comes from still photography, but its also at 35mm (i.e. a negative 24x36mm), so I can say something intelligent.
If you do the sums for a 35mm still, it is considered "sharp" if a single point on the object maps to a cirlce of diameter less than 0.004 inches on the negative (known as the "circle of confusion"). That corresponds to a digital resolution of around 3000x2000. Of course you can go finer. But that is roughly the best performance you can expect from a 35mm film.
Now, whether this makes any difference depends on whether you can see such a small object. The question is: given two small dots in the scene, can you see whether there is one dot or two in the projected image? The point at which the two dots merge into one is the resolution, and the angle subtended by the two dots is the angular resolution. I'll dodge the difference between angle for the camera and angle for the viewer: projection systems are designed so that the middle seats get the right perspective.
The angular resolution of a good human eye is 1/60th of a degree (1 arc minute). So an ideal cinema screen would need to match that with around 60 pixels per degree. Right now I'm wearing spectacles, and without moving my head they put a frame on my vision about 80 degrees wide. I haven't measured a cinema screen from the centre seat, but I'd expect something nearer 40 degrees. 40 degrees times 60 pixels per degree gives 2400 pixels. Which is not too far off what 35mm film gives (at its theoretical best).
So current XVGA systems are not up to the job of replacing film, but give us a 3000x2000 pixel screen and it will look better. And Moore's Law suggests that we will be able to do that fairly soon.
Of course there are other issues. As others have noted you have the problems of physical wear and dirt getting onto film, and the costs of printing, versus the 100% reproducability of digital and the costs of piping all that data around. But you can bet that the studios have looked at these numbers and figured that the lifecycle costs look interesting. And no doubt someone has told them of Moore's Law too.
I remember the same argument in the early days of digital audio. The first CD players sounded harsh in the high treble thanks to the steep filters required. Analogue purists declared that digital would never replace analogue. But where is analogue now? A niche split between rich die-hards and poor elderly people who can't afford to replace their existing LPs. Physical analogue film will go the same way.
Paul.
They are heavily censored, but reading between the lines and into the black bits it sounds like the story goes something like this.
At an IETF meeting in Mexico in 1992 the PPP sig discussed encryption. Simpson was present and said something which made someone else at the meeting suspect he was selling encryption products to a foreign power, in violation of ITAR. They informed the FBI, who investigated and found no evidence to support such an allegation. The investigation was then dropped.
Bear in mind this was back in 92-93. The Internet was an obscure academic toy in those days, and cyber-liberties mostly centered around hacker issues (check out The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling). I don't think this is a big thing.
Paul.
Thats a pretty big presumption.
First of all, the company in question has added value by identifying the active ingredient. This took research. Getting it approved as a medicine will have taken lots of money on top of that. The active ingredient, is more valuable when purified than when in the plant. Even more valuable is the knowledge of its side effects and contra-indications. I, at least, am unwilling to trust my health to approximate doses of a drug with unknown side effects brewed up in an ad-hoc manner from stored herbs when instead I can take a tablet with exactly 100mg in it and read a leaflet warning me that long term use has been linked to liver failure.
This may result in loss to the native Indians who previously traded in the plant. But set against that must be the benefits to many other people (not all of them rich) who can now get the pure form, plus associated knowledge, where before was only folklore.
And anyway, just where do you think the nasty western drug company gets its raw materials? Yes, right where they always did: the native Indians.
A key issue here is that trade increases the wealth of both parties. If it didn't then one of them would refuse to trade. Therefore anything which increases the freedom to trade is a Good Thing. Those who would deny poor peasants the right to trade what they have in return for what they want or need should consider this before issuing blanket condemnations of the WTO.
Also, take another look at India. At the end of WW2 it was comparitively wealthy, especially compared to China, Hong Kong, and even Japan (which had, after all, just lost the war). The reason it did not become more wealthy was the belief of its leaders, especially Ghandi and Nheru, that competition was a bad thing, especially when it caused a company to lose market share and hence lay off employees. The result was a long period when a factory owner wishing to increase production had to apply for government permission, which was likely to be refused if the government thought that the increased sales would be at the cost of one of his competitors. This in turn led to the "Hindu rate of growth", which was as close to zero after allowing for population growth as made no effective difference. That, and not the WTO, is the reason you see children employed in building sites in India.
Paul.
Its also censorship. These people are explicitly attempting to prevent others from reading the WTO's point of view because they happen to disagree with it.
When colored folks sat down in a diner and refused the leave, the diner was the only business that was affected.
Also unaffected was the ability of the owner to argue his own case. Here, however, the aim is to deny the WTO its ability to speak.
Paul.
"Its horrible," said Rincewind.
"I'M INCLINED TO AGREE" said Death.
"I would have thought you'd be all for it!"
"NOT LIKE THIS. THE DEATH OF THE WARRIOR OR THE OLD MAN OR THE LITTLE CHILD, THIS I UNDERSTAND, AND I TAKE AWAY THE PAIN AND END THE SUFFERING. I DO NOT UNDERSTNAND THIS DEATH-OF-THE-MIND".
Paul.
Take a couple of examples: the recent DVD crack, and credit card number generators (the latter generate syntactically valid random credit card numbers). For the purpose of discussion I'll assume that copyright violation is unethical.
In the case of the DVD crack the purpose of the crack was honest: to let Linux users legitimately watch films without having to pay for Windows just to run the DVD drive. This is a perfectly legitimate goal, and there is nothing unethical about doing it. Of course it is possible to use the same software for unethical purposes, but the author of the software is not responsible for such a decision.
On the other hand the author of a credit card number generator has produced a piece of software which exists for only one purpose: to facilitate theft. The author set out to aid theft, and is therefore morally an accessory to the thefts which are carried out using the software.
Of course there is a big grey area in between these to extremes. What do we say about software which has some minor or marginal use, but which is almost entirely used for some bad and foreseeable purpose? Back Orifice might come into this area: it has some legitimate use for remote admin, but its primary purpose is to break Windows NT security.
Here ethics moves away from the legal domain: lawyers are concerned with proof. However ethics is more about formalising matters of conscience (although some ethical codes do carry penalties for gross violation). If you believe that cracking is wrong then it follows that the CDC acted unethically in releasing a tool which had, as its primary purpose, cracking NT.
A program for Linux which was designed to facilitate DVD copying would be an interesting case. It may be ethical to copy a DVD for backup purposes, but the vast majority of copies made would be illegal pirate copies for sale or just given away. Would it be ethical to write such a program?
The classic hardware scenario for this kind of ethical debate is the shopkeeper who sells a knife which is subsequently used in a murder. If the knife is a cooking knife brought in the normal course of business then obviously the shopkeeper shares no guilt. At the other extreme if the customer comes in and says "Give me a knife so I can kill my wife with it" and this statement appears believable then equally obviously the shopkeeper is an accessory to the murder. But in the middle is a large grey area. What about combat knives? They are specifically designed to kill. Any individual purchaser might plead a desire for honest self defence, but the fact remains that most of the time that such knives are used it is not in self defence. The vendors must therefore share to some extent in the guilt of the users of these knives.
Paul.
Take another look at the article, and note what is actually said and what is merely implied. The US, UK and Australian governments all monitor radio communications. No surprise there. They might, under certain circumstances, pass on this intelligence to each other. If one of them got wind of a plot to assassinate another's head of state, it would be positively unfriendly not to pass this on.
Somehow Duncan Campbell makes this into an admission of a vast conspiracy. Of course he might be right, but then again he might not.
What is really needed here is the application of the scientific principle: someone else has to go out and try to replicate Campbell's findings. I'll take more notice of this when I see someone else's name on the reports.
Incidentally, Campbell has a rather chequered history here. Last year he "revealed" that the UK ISPs and police were in "secret" talks about handing over subscribers email for fishing expeditions. The truth was considerably more prosaic: the ISPs and police were talking publicly (OK, so you had to pay £60/day to attend) about how to streamline and regularise the existing legal process under which the police can request subscriber information (e.g. snail-mail address) from the ISPs. Campbell forgot to mention that under UK law the ISPs are prohibited from passing over confidential data unless they have good reason to believe that a crime has been committed, and that email contents are dealt with under separate laws. If the ISPs hand over data to the police without good cause then they could be sued and/or prosecuted. This gives them a motive to inspect every request carefully.
So now Campbell has moved on to bigger conspiracies. But having seen his attitude towards the truth on that occasion, I am very skeptical about this one.
Paul.
We are not the kind of philosophers who write books about [social|economic|political] philosophy which then shape the course of debate and policy.
The only counter-example I can think of is Bill Gates, and his books were more of an ego trip than real philosophy: everyone agrees that they were pretty lightweight.
Paul.
I subscribe to The Economist, and I can assure you that this is not its editorial position. A month or two ago it had a large article on US campaign finance, what is wrong with it, and the various proposals to fix it.
Part of the point of this article is that the geeks are not buying politicians because they want to own them, they are buying them to defend themselves against other people's politicians.
Remember the old definition of an honest politician: one who stays bought. (I first read that in Robert Heinlein. Stranger In A Strange Land ISTR).
As an aside, I would say that The Economist is almost the perfect Geek Newspaper. It is intelligent, never emotional, well informed, and has the view that politics is about fixing things rather than ideology. It favours ideas which are free market, "liberal" in the old sense, and meritocratic.
As for syndicalism, I've read the anarcho-syndicalism FAQ and not been impressed. There does not appear to be any real difference between A-S and pure lassaiz-faire capitalism.
Terry Pratchett put it very well in "Interesting Times": no matter how many revolutions you have, the Rulers are still in charge.
Paul.
- It targets a prominant public figure and alleges that he is at the head of a large scale conspiracy.
- Lack of firm evidence to support his position. I tried to read the spreadsheet, but my copy of Excel would not open it. Nothing else in the article gives me any confidence in his position.
- Various out-of-context bits and pieces are made to seem more important than they are. Specifically MS has been accused of manipulating its stock price by reserving money from rich quarters and turning it into profit during poor quarters. But this can only smooth out lumps and bumps, not maintain a long-term growth curve.
- Lots of references are made to people who don't believe the author, along with elaborate justifications for this. No doubt Alan Greenspan is snowed under by letters from crackpot economists and conspiracy nuts. This guy looks just like another one. Ditto the fund managers and newspaper editors. They know what a price support operation looks like, and this isn't it.
- Discussions of how courageous the author is being in revealing this truth.
- Predictions of apocolypse RSN.
I think MS is overvalued, but I very much doubt that the situation is this bad.Paul.
When ST:TOS started it was possibly the most radical things on air. It had a half-breed alien first officer, a Russian helmsman and a black, female communications officer. At the time these were almost revolutionary. In the USA Martin Luther King was telling the KKK about his dream, and in the UK Enoch Powell was prophesying "rivers of blood". But Star Trek showed the world what King's dream looked like, and that image profoundly altered our society.
Today we have Commander Benjamin Sisko. He has a son and a dead wife. Oh, and by the way, he's black and his best friend is a young alien woman who used to be an old man, and is in a relationship with a Klingon. So whats new?
In many ways we owe this acceptance to Trek. But at the same time that acceptance is the death knell for Trek. We have learned what Trek had to teach us. Like all successful young revolutionaries, Trek has grown up and become part of the new Establishment.
What Science Fiction needs is not more Trek, or even just better Trek, but something new. Something that challenges our assumptions, and especially our contradictions, in the way that Trek challenged those of the 60s and 70s. I don't know what that thing is going to look like, but I don't think it will look much like Trek.
Paul.
Paul.
The problems appear to be with colour purity and stability. Building a small prototype is one thing, but a mass-market display with a 10,000 hour active life is quite another.
Also, the flexibility is probably being oversold. These things will bend around a limited radius, possibly small enough to roll up, but don't expect animated clothing any time soon.
But yes, once they get the chemistry sorted out this is a good contender for the display technology of the next century.
Paul.