Running an organisation has a lot in common with hacking. Both are about controlling a complex system to achieve a desired result. Innovation and creativity are admired. The only difference is that the hacker works on something made out of transistors and the MBA works on something made out of people. The latter is a lot more complicated and unpredictable.
An MBA will teach you the basics of how to hack organisations. Little things, like whether the head of development reports to the CTO or CEO, can make a big difference to how the organisation performs. Getting hundreds of people moving in the same direction is a non-trivial challenge.
I'm taking a Masters with my employer. Its labelled an "MSc", but the content has a lot of MBA-type stuff in it as well. I keep coming across senior managers in my work who think in MBA rather than Hacker, and I need to know how to talk to them. If I could talk to the animals, learn their languages, what a neat achievement that would be... (with apologies to Rex Harrison).
A-bomb survivors have been carefully tracked for mutations. AFAIK only a couple have shown up: about what would be expected from that population anyway.
Program source code is expressive. Programming languages have both a functional and an expressive purpose. The functional purpose is to direct a computer. The expressive purpose is to communicate a method or algorithm to other people. Computer languages are carefully designed to fulfil both these purposes. Open any computer science text book and you will see written text interspersed with fragments of source code. If the source code were removed from these books then it would be impossible to learn to program from them. (I'd suggest Numerical Recipes (Press, Flannery et al), Algorithms in C (Sedgewick) or The Art of Computer Programming (Knuth) as good examples.)
So much for source code in general. As for the expressiveness of deCSS in particular, if the deCSS code is inspected, even a layman will be able to see that the code is indented in blocks, so that its operation is made clearer to the reader. This indentation has no functional significance whatsoever: its purpose is entirely expressive. Furthermore both the CSS algorithm and deCSS itself are a proper subject of study by anyone wishing to learn more about encryption: the flaws of CSS provide an excellent case study of the pitfalls in designing an encryption algorithm.
It has been suggested that the First Amendment purposes could be served if distribution of deCSS was restricted to those engaged in "good faith" encryption research. Computer science does not work like this. It is an area where unknown amateurs can and do make significant advances. See for example this BBC story about an encryption algorithm developed by a 16 year old girl. To restrict information about encryption to a self-selected elite of computer scientists would not further the purposes of the First Amendment, it would frustrate them. This theory suggests that anyone providing deCSS source code to anyone else must first establish their good faith, or else become vicariously liable for their future conduct. Such a heavy burden on publication would surely count as prior restraint.
The Feds aren't saying this to try to ban encryption, they just want the budget. The senate committee holds the purse strings, so the Feds are talking up a scare in order to justify a budget to deal with it.
The problem is that it becomes more and more invasive. The authorities can watch you in any public place. Originally this meant a policeman could look at someone, say "thats the guy on the wanted poster", and make an arrest. In the future it could mean that whenever you walk in a public place (including private property which the public has access to) then you are identified and your movements logged.
Which is fine as long as the authorities don't object to anything you do. But maybe one day you want to oppose something. Maybe City Hall is planning a waste incinerator upwind from you, and you suspect that the relationship between the builders and the politicians is a mite closer than it ought to be.
So you start being a nuisance. You write letters, you get articles in the local press, you organise demonstrations. At some point you become sufficiently annoying that someone decides to take some extra-legal action. A list of your comings and goings for the last few months might be very interesting. Have you been in any bars where drugs get traded, for instance? A few examples, taken out of context, could easily be used to get a search warrant to turn your house upside down. A search of computer data could be tacked on to the end of such a warrant, enabling them to take your computer. And so it goes on.
The bottom line is: knowledge is power. If you let them have knowledge about you then you let them have power over you. The danger (and it is a very real danger) is that they will abuse this power.
there are QoS and priority concerns
built in this time (so that your pr0n and spam move at a lower priority than something more important.)
So who decides what is important?
The reason that the priority bits in IP4 are universally ignored is that there is no "price signalling mechanism" (as economists term it). In other words it costs nothing more to set the priority bits than to clear them, so people will set them and everything becomes high priority.
So what it comes down to is that if QoS is going to work effectively on the Internet in IPv6 you are going to have to pay for it by the byte, or by the second for guaranteed bandwidth (as in RSVP). And on top of that there will have to be the accounting overhead by which your ISP bills you and then pays the carriers further along, and some system for finding the cheapest route at the moment, given the huge number of possible routes through various administrative domains.
And when we have done all this, are people actually going to pay for it? I rather doubt it. People really like the unmetered aspect of Internet use. It means you don't have that nasty itchy feeling that the clock is ticking, so you can take your time. Anyway, if the Net was sufficiently loaded that QoS mechanisms would help an individual, it would probably be so loaded that any request for guaranteed bandwidth would be rejected.
Where QoS does come into its own is in planning converged networks where voice and data both flow over IP. In the future the separate voice and data lines that companies use for internal phone systems, and which the phone companies themselves use, are likely to be merged into single IP networks. This reduces costs because you only have one network to maintain instead of two. But to make this work you need QoS so that your voice telephone traffic gets the bandwidth it needs.
The government have just announced plans to roll all the broadcast and telecom regulatory bodies into one giant "Ofcom". Hopefully this will mean an end to the increasingly cosy relationship between BT and Oftel.
I gather that the BT-Oftel situation is actually fairly common: government regulators often end up being "captured" by the industry they are supposed to be regulating, and wind up becoming little more than the PR front for the main industry players. The basic reason is tied to the bureacratic nature of the regulator: in a bureacracy you don't get rewarded for doing a good job, you get rewarded for not rocking the boat.
The regulated monopoly model is better than the nationalised industry model, but nowhere near as good as true capitalism.
1. In apparatus of the type for encoding a signal by means of spectral analysis of overlapping time segments of such signal, and including apparatus for processing respective said time
segments according to a window function for imparting a characteristic amplitude function to said respective time segments prior to such analysis of said signal, an improvement comprising:
"In an apparatus of the type for..." means that this paragraph describes the state of the art. "an improvement comprising:" means that the following paragraphs describe something new.
The state of the art in this case means breaking the sampled signal into blocks and doing an FFT or something similar to get its frequencies. The "overlapping windows" bit refers to the fact that sudden changes between blocks are audible, so you have the blocks overlap and fade one into the next gradually.
means for detecting occurrences of instantaneous frequency changes in said signal exceeding a predetermined frequency change, and generating control signals indicating occurrences of said
frequency changes; and
In other words, detecting something that the existing system doesn't code for well. The word "means" here means a mechanism or system or something like that. Its the same sense as in the phrase "by any means possible".
means, responsive to said control signals, for adaptively providing said window functions such that respective time segments of signal which exhibit said instantaneous frequency changes are
subjected to a significantly narrowed window function relative to window functions applied to time segments of signal which do not exhibit said instantaneous frequency changes, and wherein
window functions of overlapping time segments overlap.
When we detect this problem within one of the data blocks ("windows"), we reduce the block size to compensate.
So, any audio codec which uses the overlapping window system, detects sudden frequency shifts and reduces the window size to compensate will infringe on Claim 1 of this patent. If there is any published work using this system which predates this patent then the claim won't hold up.
If you decide that this claim would hold up then you can try to evade it, perhaps by:
Doing something other than spectral analysis. Wavelet encoding would probably do it. In fact almost all the patents I've looked at seem to assume that encoding will be done in the frequency domain. Hence almost any other transform would probably not infringe.
Attack the "control signal" bit: find a mechanism of narrowing the window which does not have separate detection and window-narrowing means.
The window narrowing mechanism here is a boolean function: its applied only if the instantaneous frequency change exceeds a certain value. So a system of variable window sizes where the window size grows until some threshold is reached would probably not infringe.
Mind you, I'm not any kind of lawyer. But computer programmers, of all people, should be able to handle dense complicated documents written in strange languages.
When looking for patent infringement you look at the Claims rather than the specific Embodiment. The idea is that the claims stake out the intellectual territory covered by the patent and the Embodiment tells you how to build a specific example. You aren't interested in the Embodiment in the patent, you are interested in some other Embodiment (in this case Ogg/Vorbis) and whether it sits on territory staked out by the Claims.
The Claims are a series of mostly concentric circles. The outer ones are going to be very broad and will almost always have prior art against them. Inner ones will be progressively more specific. So the first thing is to look at the published state of the art before the patents were applied for and decide which of the Claims are actually real. Then you can look at Ogg/Vorbis and see if any of those Claims cover their work.
Its here. It is truly excellent. Not just regulatory stuff, but lots of general info. The Environment Agency provides clickable maps of environmental problems in your area, for instance (currently running a limited service due to load from people afraid of flooding).
As for how to present regulatory info, the main thing is to think from the user's point of view. E.g. "I'm running a photographic processing shop with 10 employees. What do I need to do to comply with waste management/employment/tax laws?". Then present information in that kind of format.
Oh, and put a good site search engine on the front end, and if you have any database system for accessing data then see if you can figure out how to let outside search engines see the data as well.
They're all around you, wearing suits, having power lunches,
Nahh. To get ahead you need either brains or social skills. We are the people with the brains. The people with the social skills are over in marketing, and the people in suits at the exclusive health club generally have both. None of these people felt the need to take out their frustrations on others at school.
The people who made our lives a misery at school have neither brains nor social skills. And yes, their place in society really is to say "Do you want fries with that?". At least until they get married, after which they say "Doh".
[When copyright was abolished] the reason publishing ground to a halt was that it was expensive to publish something, and you couldn't justify the investment without a guaranteed monopoly. Now, publishing is potentially free.
Its not publishing that is the deterrent cost, its creating the information in the first place.
I've been following this debate for many years now. I have great sympathy with the idea that IP laws stifle innovation. But I have yet to see any explanation of how we pay people for creating information without them.
Answers to this question generally fall into two categories:
Business models in which a service is sold alongside the free information, such as your Galileo model. This can solve special cases, but not the general case. Suppose there is no service capable of generating sufficient profit margin to support the information-generating activity?
Assertions that people will carry on generating information regardless. Again this is true in special cases (e.g. software), but does not cover the general case. Seen any open-source maps recently? The only ones I know of are generated by governments for other purposes. A good map is expensive to produce, and people do not generally make them for fun.
One of the big answers to the "retention after training" problem is simply more training.
Training in technology only has a short term value: as an investment it depreciates just as fast as any other piece of computer technology. A company who poaches trained employees instead of doing its own training will leave those employees with outdated skills. Better to work for less in a company that makes a credible promise to keep your skills up to date. And the first step in making that promise is... provide training.
The second step is to put together a career development program which shows people how they will progress if they stay with you, and then make it real.
The wierdest thing in SiaSL is Heinlein's send-up of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. The portrait is dead accurate, even down to the semi-official Astrologer to the President's Wife. But it was written back in the 60s when Reagan was still struggling to look like John Wayne on screen.
For a potential future in which these tags are ubiquitous, see "Distraction" by Bruce Sterling. Sterling stuff.
Briefly, in Sterling's world there is no such thing as privacy once someone cares enough to try tapping you. But this technology is so cheap and ubiquitous that anyone can use it to tag anyone else and trace them around. There is lots else besides. Strongly recommended.
Open source projects happen because someone has an "itch to scratch". But often that itch pretty much defines the requirements for the project. Take Apache as an example: you want a web server. That immediately rolls the HTTP standard into your requirements document. Its going to have to be configured somehow, so that implies some kind of configuration system.
When people read these high level requirements they can immediately see a range of low level requirements. Different people will come up with slightly different versions of these requirements, but that is OK as long as the high level requirement is fulfilled. Analysis and design can proceed in an orderly fashion.
Because different people have different requirements the project isn't going to fulfil everybody's exact requirements. But thats OK, because anyone who wants the extra functionality can either add it themselves or get someone else to add it.
In contrast, in Cathedral projects the requirements document effectively becomes the contract you work to (and of course it frequently gets renegotiated). Whether you are producing the software for an independent customer on contract, or an internal customer as part of product development, your success as a software engineer is defined in terms of meeting the requirements. Open source projects do not have a need to determine whether the developers have "succeeded" or not, so they have less need of an exhaustive requirements document.
This kind of advert is known as "knocking copy", at least over here. The advertising industry is of the opinion that it doesn't work. People automatically discount the intended message of "buy our product" because all adverts say that. But the advert carries another message as well, which is "we have a major competitor: check them out before you buy". This is actually a very good advert for Linux because it tells people that Linux is a major competitor to MS.
If you turn off paranoia mode and actually think about what this treaty says it starts to look a lot less frightening.
The US and UK (and probably other countries) already have laws banning trade in devices used for hacking and other criminal purposes. AIUI in the US the usual test is lack of "substantial lawful purpose" or something along those lines. The treaty doesn't set down detailed rules for this, it just commits the countries in question to have some law on the books which covers that subject.
Similarly for the provision of information. The treaty doesn't set out criteria for warrants: that is a domestic matter. It merely requires the signatory countries to have some kind of law on the books which enables the police to get at computer data.
Recall the problem with the virus author in the Phillipines who couldn't be prosecuted because the Phillipines didn't happen to have an anti-virus law on the books? This treaty is intended to avoid that kind of situation.
Paul.
(BTW "Mainwaring" is pronounced "Mannering", as every Dad's Army fan will know)
Anyone capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, series 2.
In the meantime, I recall the occasion when the Greens polled 5% in European elections in the UK. The result was a sharp shift greenward in all the party platforms. A vote for an unpopular party isn't "wasted" because both the mainstream parties will immediately steal any idea that looks like attracting votes.
It seems that the myth of the "noble savage" has
been replaced by the myth of the "ecological savage". But this myth has no basis in fact.
Mammoths were hunted to extinction by my stone-age ancestors. American Indians used to drive whole herds of buffalo off cliffs merely to save the bother of isolating and killing the one they needed. They also wiped out a lot of the native american megafauna when they first arrived. The moa (large flightless New Zealand bird) was hunted to extinction in around 160 years after the first humans arrived. Tell me your ethnic origin, and I'll find a list of the species your stone-age ancestors drove to extinction.
Oh, and that beautiful speech by Chief Seattle which starts "How can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us..." was never said by him. It was actually written by a film scriptwriter named Ted Perry for a 1972 documentary. Type their names into Google for more info.
To be sure, many stone age peoples have lived in "harmony" (i.e. rough equilbrium) for many thousands of years. But this is not due to any special wisdom on their part, merely the fact that the ones who didn't went extinct so we don't see them. And my 19th century ancestors who destroyed the dodo and introduced rats and rabbits to Austrailia are no better. We in the 20th century can claim exactly one point of superiority over any of them, which is that we have finally figured out what we are doing. Those who would have us forget that and go back to the stone age have seriously missed the point.
Misquoting the previous poster:
I think wires and electricity should be developed and used to assist us and make our lives easier, however at no point should we become so reliant on electricity that we would not be able to function without it...
The fact is that we are already highly reliant on technology in general. Over here in the UK the last few days have just taught us an object lesson in that, when a few people decided to blockade fuel supplies.
Anyone remember "Connections" by James Burke? The first programme opened with a description of a nationwide power cut in the US in the 60s, and the way in which people just assumed that power and civilisation would be restored RSN. Then he went on to discuss survival options if it had not been restored. 1: get out of the city. 2: find a farm, take and hold it by force. 3: learn to plough. Face it: if the electricity grid goes down and stays down then 90+% of the population of an industrial nation is toast.
The same thing is now happening to software: its becomging ubiquitous to the extent that things don't work without it. Fortunately we have the opportunity to ensure that systemic failures that bring down civilisation are not possible. The question is, will we have the wisdom to take advantage of this?
[MS could claim that] The Microsoft Word document format is access-control, and anyone caught trying to read it is in violation of the DMCA.
Not so. First of all, if MS format was protecting something (say, if Word supported an encrypted read-only format) then it would be protecting the Word document rather than interoperability with Word.
Second, reverse engineering to allow compatibility is explicitly allowed under the DMCA. So it would still be illegal.
I've watched a lot of the Robot Wars programs over here. Here is what I've learned:
Don't go up against the house robots. Well, I gather that actually there aren't any on Battlebots. This is silly. The house robots were what made RW UK work so well. Everybody loved watching the best competitors go up against a house robot and win! Also when two competitors got stuck together a house robot could move in and unjam things a bit.
Bet on wedge shaped robots with a flipper on the upper surface. The flipper will invert the opponent, and can also act as a self-righting mechanism.
Read the rules carefully. One team got disqualified for a saw blade that shattered.
Saws in general don't work: you need a target that will hold still for a while. By that time you've won anyway.
Pickaxes that come over the top can be effective, but they need to hit very hard, and often do little more than punch a small hole. They are also surprisingly difficult to aim accurately.
Tracks and chains often come off in combat. Avoid them. Also any tank-type steering mechanism is a tradeoff between traction and turning ability.
Car starter motors are cheap and powerful, but tend to burn out. Wheelchair motors are more expensive but have the necessary longevity.
You need a zero turning circle, high speed and high acceleration, but you also need fine control. Pay attention to your control circuit design.
After you have built your robot, pick it up and drop it a few times at various angles. Anything that breaks wasn't combat ready.
Big budgets matter less than ingenuity and good engineering.
Although deliberate RFI is banned, the studio is a noisy environment. Lots of robots turn out to be uncontrolable once they are in the arena.
Take a look at Advogato. It uses a "trust metric" to judge how much people are contributing to its community. This idea stems pretty directly from ESR's writing on how hacking free software is rewarded by kudos in the community: Advogato is an attempt to make this kudos visible.
This in turn gets around the "tragedy of the commons" in large populations. In small communities one's reputation with the neigbours is important, but in large ones you don't often meet the same people twice, and hence have no incentive to be nice to those you do meet, or to let them see how civic you are.
The Advogato metric has its problems, but its still pretty interesting.
For that matter, Slashdot has its +1 bonus for those with over 20 karma. If you consistently post nice things, your postings get more attention. Same principle.
Can we build a trust metric which can help us identify and reward civic-minded people? What would such a system look like? Any ideas?
Incidentally, "Distraction" by Bruce Sterling includes a rough outline of just such a system.
Slashdot Mirror
An MBA will teach you the basics of how to hack organisations. Little things, like whether the head of development reports to the CTO or CEO, can make a big difference to how the organisation performs. Getting hundreds of people moving in the same direction is a non-trivial challenge.
I'm taking a Masters with my employer. Its labelled an "MSc", but the content has a lot of MBA-type stuff in it as well. I keep coming across senior managers in my work who think in MBA rather than Hacker, and I need to know how to talk to them. If I could talk to the animals, learn their languages, what a neat achievement that would be... (with apologies to Rex Harrison).
Paul.
Paul
So much for source code in general. As for the expressiveness of deCSS in particular, if the deCSS code is inspected, even a layman will be able to see that the code is indented in blocks, so that its operation is made clearer to the reader. This indentation has no functional significance whatsoever: its purpose is entirely expressive. Furthermore both the CSS algorithm and deCSS itself are a proper subject of study by anyone wishing to learn more about encryption: the flaws of CSS provide an excellent case study of the pitfalls in designing an encryption algorithm.
It has been suggested that the First Amendment purposes could be served if distribution of deCSS was restricted to those engaged in "good faith" encryption research. Computer science does not work like this. It is an area where unknown amateurs can and do make significant advances. See for example this BBC story about an encryption algorithm developed by a 16 year old girl. To restrict information about encryption to a self-selected elite of computer scientists would not further the purposes of the First Amendment, it would frustrate them. This theory suggests that anyone providing deCSS source code to anyone else must first establish their good faith, or else become vicariously liable for their future conduct. Such a heavy burden on publication would surely count as prior restraint.
Paul.
This happens every year at about this time.
Paul.
Which is fine as long as the authorities don't object to anything you do. But maybe one day you want to oppose something. Maybe City Hall is planning a waste incinerator upwind from you, and you suspect that the relationship between the builders and the politicians is a mite closer than it ought to be.
So you start being a nuisance. You write letters, you get articles in the local press, you organise demonstrations. At some point you become sufficiently annoying that someone decides to take some extra-legal action. A list of your comings and goings for the last few months might be very interesting. Have you been in any bars where drugs get traded, for instance? A few examples, taken out of context, could easily be used to get a search warrant to turn your house upside down. A search of computer data could be tacked on to the end of such a warrant, enabling them to take your computer. And so it goes on.
The bottom line is: knowledge is power. If you let them have knowledge about you then you let them have power over you. The danger (and it is a very real danger) is that they will abuse this power.
Paul.
Keep up the good postings.
Paul.
So who decides what is important?
The reason that the priority bits in IP4 are universally ignored is that there is no "price signalling mechanism" (as economists term it). In other words it costs nothing more to set the priority bits than to clear them, so people will set them and everything becomes high priority.
So what it comes down to is that if QoS is going to work effectively on the Internet in IPv6 you are going to have to pay for it by the byte, or by the second for guaranteed bandwidth (as in RSVP). And on top of that there will have to be the accounting overhead by which your ISP bills you and then pays the carriers further along, and some system for finding the cheapest route at the moment, given the huge number of possible routes through various administrative domains.
And when we have done all this, are people actually going to pay for it? I rather doubt it. People really like the unmetered aspect of Internet use. It means you don't have that nasty itchy feeling that the clock is ticking, so you can take your time. Anyway, if the Net was sufficiently loaded that QoS mechanisms would help an individual, it would probably be so loaded that any request for guaranteed bandwidth would be rejected.
Where QoS does come into its own is in planning converged networks where voice and data both flow over IP. In the future the separate voice and data lines that companies use for internal phone systems, and which the phone companies themselves use, are likely to be merged into single IP networks. This reduces costs because you only have one network to maintain instead of two. But to make this work you need QoS so that your voice telephone traffic gets the bandwidth it needs.
Paul.
The government have just announced plans to roll all the broadcast and telecom regulatory bodies into one giant "Ofcom". Hopefully this will mean an end to the increasingly cosy relationship between BT and Oftel.
I gather that the BT-Oftel situation is actually fairly common: government regulators often end up being "captured" by the industry they are supposed to be regulating, and wind up becoming little more than the PR front for the main industry players. The basic reason is tied to the bureacratic nature of the regulator: in a bureacracy you don't get rewarded for doing a good job, you get rewarded for not rocking the boat.
The regulated monopoly model is better than the nationalised industry model, but nowhere near as good as true capitalism.
Paul.
1. In apparatus of the type for encoding a signal by means of spectral analysis of overlapping time segments of such signal, and including apparatus for processing respective said time segments according to a window function for imparting a characteristic amplitude function to said respective time segments prior to such analysis of said signal, an improvement comprising:
"In an apparatus of the type for..." means that this paragraph describes the state of the art. "an improvement comprising:" means that the following paragraphs describe something new.
The state of the art in this case means breaking the sampled signal into blocks and doing an FFT or something similar to get its frequencies. The "overlapping windows" bit refers to the fact that sudden changes between blocks are audible, so you have the blocks overlap and fade one into the next gradually.
means for detecting occurrences of instantaneous frequency changes in said signal exceeding a predetermined frequency change, and generating control signals indicating occurrences of said frequency changes; and
In other words, detecting something that the existing system doesn't code for well. The word "means" here means a mechanism or system or something like that. Its the same sense as in the phrase "by any means possible".
means, responsive to said control signals, for adaptively providing said window functions such that respective time segments of signal which exhibit said instantaneous frequency changes are subjected to a significantly narrowed window function relative to window functions applied to time segments of signal which do not exhibit said instantaneous frequency changes, and wherein window functions of overlapping time segments overlap.
When we detect this problem within one of the data blocks ("windows"), we reduce the block size to compensate.
So, any audio codec which uses the overlapping window system, detects sudden frequency shifts and reduces the window size to compensate will infringe on Claim 1 of this patent. If there is any published work using this system which predates this patent then the claim won't hold up.
If you decide that this claim would hold up then you can try to evade it, perhaps by:
Mind you, I'm not any kind of lawyer. But computer programmers, of all people, should be able to handle dense complicated documents written in strange languages.
Paul.
The Claims are a series of mostly concentric circles. The outer ones are going to be very broad and will almost always have prior art against them. Inner ones will be progressively more specific. So the first thing is to look at the published state of the art before the patents were applied for and decide which of the Claims are actually real. Then you can look at Ogg/Vorbis and see if any of those Claims cover their work.
Paul.
As for how to present regulatory info, the main thing is to think from the user's point of view. E.g. "I'm running a photographic processing shop with 10 employees. What do I need to do to comply with waste management/employment/tax laws?". Then present information in that kind of format.
Oh, and put a good site search engine on the front end, and if you have any database system for accessing data then see if you can figure out how to let outside search engines see the data as well.
Paul.
Nahh. To get ahead you need either brains or social skills. We are the people with the brains. The people with the social skills are over in marketing, and the people in suits at the exclusive health club generally have both. None of these people felt the need to take out their frustrations on others at school.
The people who made our lives a misery at school have neither brains nor social skills. And yes, their place in society really is to say "Do you want fries with that?". At least until they get married, after which they say "Doh".
Paul.
Its not publishing that is the deterrent cost, its creating the information in the first place.
I've been following this debate for many years now. I have great sympathy with the idea that IP laws stifle innovation. But I have yet to see any explanation of how we pay people for creating information without them.
Answers to this question generally fall into two categories:
Paul.
Training in technology only has a short term value: as an investment it depreciates just as fast as any other piece of computer technology. A company who poaches trained employees instead of doing its own training will leave those employees with outdated skills. Better to work for less in a company that makes a credible promise to keep your skills up to date. And the first step in making that promise is... provide training.
The second step is to put together a career development program which shows people how they will progress if they stay with you, and then make it real.
Paul.
Wierd, or what?
Paul.
Briefly, in Sterling's world there is no such thing as privacy once someone cares enough to try tapping you. But this technology is so cheap and ubiquitous that anyone can use it to tag anyone else and trace them around. There is lots else besides. Strongly recommended.
Paul.
When people read these high level requirements they can immediately see a range of low level requirements. Different people will come up with slightly different versions of these requirements, but that is OK as long as the high level requirement is fulfilled. Analysis and design can proceed in an orderly fashion.
Because different people have different requirements the project isn't going to fulfil everybody's exact requirements. But thats OK, because anyone who wants the extra functionality can either add it themselves or get someone else to add it.
In contrast, in Cathedral projects the requirements document effectively becomes the contract you work to (and of course it frequently gets renegotiated). Whether you are producing the software for an independent customer on contract, or an internal customer as part of product development, your success as a software engineer is defined in terms of meeting the requirements. Open source projects do not have a need to determine whether the developers have "succeeded" or not, so they have less need of an exhaustive requirements document.
Paul.
Paul.
The US and UK (and probably other countries) already have laws banning trade in devices used for hacking and other criminal purposes. AIUI in the US the usual test is lack of "substantial lawful purpose" or something along those lines. The treaty doesn't set down detailed rules for this, it just commits the countries in question to have some law on the books which covers that subject.
Similarly for the provision of information. The treaty doesn't set out criteria for warrants: that is a domestic matter. It merely requires the signatory countries to have some kind of law on the books which enables the police to get at computer data.
Recall the problem with the virus author in the Phillipines who couldn't be prosecuted because the Phillipines didn't happen to have an anti-virus law on the books? This treaty is intended to avoid that kind of situation.
Paul.
(BTW "Mainwaring" is pronounced "Mannering", as every Dad's Army fan will know)
Anyone capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, series 2.
In the meantime, I recall the occasion when the Greens polled 5% in European elections in the UK. The result was a sharp shift greenward in all the party platforms. A vote for an unpopular party isn't "wasted" because both the mainstream parties will immediately steal any idea that looks like attracting votes.
Paul.
Mammoths were hunted to extinction by my stone-age ancestors. American Indians used to drive whole herds of buffalo off cliffs merely to save the bother of isolating and killing the one they needed. They also wiped out a lot of the native american megafauna when they first arrived. The moa (large flightless New Zealand bird) was hunted to extinction in around 160 years after the first humans arrived. Tell me your ethnic origin, and I'll find a list of the species your stone-age ancestors drove to extinction.
Oh, and that beautiful speech by Chief Seattle which starts "How can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us..." was never said by him. It was actually written by a film scriptwriter named Ted Perry for a 1972 documentary. Type their names into Google for more info.
To be sure, many stone age peoples have lived in "harmony" (i.e. rough equilbrium) for many thousands of years. But this is not due to any special wisdom on their part, merely the fact that the ones who didn't went extinct so we don't see them. And my 19th century ancestors who destroyed the dodo and introduced rats and rabbits to Austrailia are no better. We in the 20th century can claim exactly one point of superiority over any of them, which is that we have finally figured out what we are doing. Those who would have us forget that and go back to the stone age have seriously missed the point.
Paul.
The fact is that we are already highly reliant on technology in general. Over here in the UK the last few days have just taught us an object lesson in that, when a few people decided to blockade fuel supplies.
Anyone remember "Connections" by James Burke? The first programme opened with a description of a nationwide power cut in the US in the 60s, and the way in which people just assumed that power and civilisation would be restored RSN. Then he went on to discuss survival options if it had not been restored. 1: get out of the city. 2: find a farm, take and hold it by force. 3: learn to plough. Face it: if the electricity grid goes down and stays down then 90+% of the population of an industrial nation is toast.
The same thing is now happening to software: its becomging ubiquitous to the extent that things don't work without it. Fortunately we have the opportunity to ensure that systemic failures that bring down civilisation are not possible. The question is, will we have the wisdom to take advantage of this?
Paul.
Not so. First of all, if MS format was protecting something (say, if Word supported an encrypted read-only format) then it would be protecting the Word document rather than interoperability with Word.
Second, reverse engineering to allow compatibility is explicitly allowed under the DMCA. So it would still be illegal.
Paul.
Paul.
This in turn gets around the "tragedy of the commons" in large populations. In small communities one's reputation with the neigbours is important, but in large ones you don't often meet the same people twice, and hence have no incentive to be nice to those you do meet, or to let them see how civic you are.
The Advogato metric has its problems, but its still pretty interesting.
For that matter, Slashdot has its +1 bonus for those with over 20 karma. If you consistently post nice things, your postings get more attention. Same principle.
Can we build a trust metric which can help us identify and reward civic-minded people? What would such a system look like? Any ideas?
Incidentally, "Distraction" by Bruce Sterling includes a rough outline of just such a system.
Paul.