My university had a policy that if an engineering student's GPA dropped below 2.25 for two semesters, they got booted out. (Most of the ones I knew who met this fate later reemerged as actuaries; one or two of these went on to become well paid, golf playing insurance company vice presidents.)
If we assume a roughly symmetrical bell curve starting there, that would put the actual average GPA of the surviving engineers at about 3.1; mabye a bit lower if the bell curve is skewed by the discontinuity at 2.25.
Your argument is simply the open vs. closed software debate; but you're confusing it with copyright.
Maybe the two issues should be more closely coupled. Historically, patents and copyrights granted the inventors and authors monopoly over some of their works in exchange for disclosing the works to the public. The public can then use the works and learn from them (possibly for a fee).
Providing copyright protection on binary-only software does not fit into this original model. The public can use the work, but there is very little that can be learned from it. The copyright in this case does not serve to advance knowledge, which negates one of the main reasons copyright was created in the first place.
Perhaps copyright protection should be reduced or eliminated on binary-only software.
Remember, copyright concerns publication of works; it is not supposed to be a vehicle that helps you keep your trade secrets secret. Keeping trade secrets would be more appropriately done by negotiating (and actually signing with ink) contracts with your customers before giving them possession of your secret binaries.
They highlight a quote from the original white paper:
"reverse engineering harbors very close to IP infringement because and has staggering economic implications."
That is utterly bogus. I spent the first 5 years of my career reverse engineering IBM's PCs (back in the days when IBM was the "bad guy" and Microsoft supplied a fun little OS that freed users from sysadmin tyranny). Due to the efforts of hundreds of engineers like myself at PC "clone" manufacurers, we now enjoy a utopia of cheap, fast, interchangeable PCs supplied by numerous competitors in the marketplace.
Decades of continued reverse engineering between manufacturers as they added improvements has maintained compatibility as the architecture has scaled in performance by over 1000X. The affordable computing power made possible by reverse engineering has provided immeasurably huge benefits to the world's economy.
Unfortunately, the software market has not seen nearly as much reverse engineering and cloning as the hardware market. If it did, we'd all get to keep more of our money to spend as we wish, and we'd have fewer headaches managing and sharing our data.
Sending your money to someone just because they've erected a barrier of obscurity and secrets around the tools you need to use your data does not help the economy or spur innovation. It's more like being taxed to pay for an entitlement program.
eXtreme Programming is yesterday's buzzword. The pendulum is swinging the other way, and the hot new fad is TM (Timid Programming). Here's an example from my upcoming tutorial:
// import java.util.*; // TODO (6/5/02): Is it really a good idea to import the whole // package? Needs research
// TODO (6/8/02): Maybe consider using a different language altogether.
// public class XXX { // TODO (6/12/02): What is best main class name? // TODO (6/13/02): consider putting opening braces on their own line
// public static void main(XXX) { // TODO (6/25/02): are the standard parameter names ok? // TODO (6/30/02): need to design implementation here // } // }
// TODO (7/11/02): Not sure I understand the project requirements at all. // Need to have an all-hands meeting to discuss the preferred // word processor template because I'm thinking of writing a // white paper before I do any more coding here.
// TODO (7/27/02): This program is stressing me out too much. I'm going to // leave early today to see my gastroenterologist about my nervous // stomach. Maybe I'll resign one day soon, but I'm not sure if // that's the best decision.
Windows (tm) XP 2003 edition U.S. Full Edition price list:
$199*
----
* Prices may vary in Alaska, Hawaii, and Iowa**.
** Iowa price $239.***
*** Special Iowa settlement offer: for a limited time, get $40 off
of the standard list price. To qualify, fill in the following form and send to iowa-special-discount@microsoft.com
Name________________________
Address______________________
Age_________________________
Daytime Phone________________
Occupation___________________
SSN__________________________
Mother's Maiden Name________________
Your CPUs Unique ID Number___________________
Credit Card (MC/Visa/Discover) Number__________________ Exp Date_____
Really? The Israelis and Palestinians are happy killing the hell out of each other and it's televised.
WWII: average of approx 13,000 people dead per day, every day, for six straight years
Current Middle East Crisis: average of approx 6 people dead per day for 1 year so far
That's a little bit of a difference. Witness the global consternation over 3 orders of magnitude less bloodshed; it just goes to prove my point.
When three thousand Americans and persons from 80 other countries were murdered live on TV, alot of people thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread.
That's not an example of conventional warfare. Almost none of the actual bloodshed was televised. The people who thought it was "cool" weren't citizens of a government who perpetrated the act. This act was not deterrable by the threat of escalation to a nuclear war. Your example doesn't apply to my arguments at all.
I'll say that the A-bomb stopped more killings than it created.
Your point was probably valid until the 1990's. The situation is a little different today, however.
Avoiding conflicts: Right now, conventional wars in developed countries are probably suppressed primarily by the advent of cheap handheld video cameras, satellite uplinks and cable news networks. The public just won't stomach live carnage on their TVs perpetrated by traditional governments, so the pressure to avoid or end old-fashioned wars is enormous (at least when the corpses appear to be middle-class or higher).
A-bombs: As in any aspect of life, you have to multiply the risks by the expected benefits to determine the utility. Until the last decade, nuclear weapons were tightly controlled by less than ten powerful governments. Risky, but you could at least hope that all of the players were somewhat rational. Today, additional players and potential players are on the field, some of whom may not respond to the traditional concept of deterrence.
At least these new players don't have very much megatonnage (yet). For now, this means that while the risk of worldwide nuclear destruction has decreased with the end of the Cold War, the risk of millions being killed in a terrorist attack or a nuclear exchange between smaller countries is much greater than ever before.
With nuclear weapons, wouldn't take much of a mistake to invalidate your assertion.
No, the article notes that Afghanistan is taking up all the secure communications bandwidth, and operations in the Balkans are getting kicked over to unencrypted channels.
Surely they could buy a $1000 PC at each end and do:
cat/dev/video_capture | mpeg_encode | unexportable_munition_software <secret-key> |/dev/satellite_modem
Most PDAs depend on the touch screen, whereas calcs have buttons to achieve the specific task. I'd rather be pushing buttons then using a stylus to navigate the screen. Plus, you have to use HP with RPN!;)
How is a PDA going to recreate the classic TI-30
key bounce effect without buttons? Sure, you could reprogram the
character recognizer to occasionally insert '33333' sometimes when you
scribble a single '3', but software can only create pseudorandom
events, not truly random glitches. How are today's students going
to learn about real randomness?
IHMO, schools should stick with
tried and true educational tools; they shouldn't be wasting time trying to emulate them with software.
Crutchfield is especially good if you are into heavy glossy catalogs. I ordered one item from them over a dozen years ago, and I've been getting a couple of catalogs per year from them ever since.
If I'd known at the time that I would be saddled with this waste management problem, I probably would have bought elsewhere.
However, that doesn't address the more interesting question: Why should owning something mean that nobody else can make a copy of it? After all, you still have it after it's been copied.
The answer, of course, is that copyright is intended to create an artificial scarcity of the work, inducing members of society to create more works via a convoluted economic process. The implementation of copyright is very complex, arbitrary and flawed, but unfortunately, nobody has come up with a better alternative.
So, copyright attempts to fill a worthwhile macroeconomic goal, but it's not a sufficient reason to cast the same moral indignation on those who violate copyright laws as if they had stolen your car. The idea is not to give every creator new inalienable rights, but rather to create an overall system where creators can generally make a living off of their works. Violating copyrights should be thought of as an infraction against the system as a whole more than as an infraction against the individual author.
Too many people forget people and corporations were granted artificial property rights over thoughts and ideas as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.
Taxes are not necessary. If the
government were limited to it's constitutional
roles, it could easily be funded with tarrifs.
First, a tariff is a tax. In your terminology, it's
"stealing" stuff from people trying to import
goods.
Second, you must be smoking heavy crack
if you think that there is any way to eliminate
taxes. Every non-primitive society in human history has had some form of taxation. What makes you think that you've figured out some magical way to avoid taxes when nobody else has ever achieved this?
Have you ever really sat down to account for the all of the benefits you personally receive from the gov't via tax-financed means?
Have you ever thought about how much more it would cost you in time and money to individually arrange replacements for all of those services? I doubt it. You could hire your own private police force (you'll really need a good one one if the majority of the population gets no education because public schools are abolished), you could negotiate the rights to pass through each person's land instead of using roads, you could hire a private detective to hunt down terrorists who threaten your safety.
You could hire private services for the thousands of other things the government now does with better efficiency of scale.
But you probably haven't thought through the implications of any of that. Basically, you're just a selfish, myopic cheapass skinflint whiner who thinks that they can get the benefits of being a citizen of this country without paying anything for them.
No one works alone, period. No one ever has and no one ever will. It's against human nature. We don't like to be alone and we don't trust our selves. We bounce ideas off of our friends, families and even complete strangers. We want feed back, we want to know that we aren't crazy. No one works alone.
Let me guess... you must be one of those annoying
extrovert types who are always coming around
to interrupt me while I'm trying to work.
Why can't 3rd parties create their own material instead of profiting from someone else's ideas and hard work?
Under copyright, profiting from your ideas and
hard work is not and end in itself, it is a
means to an end.
Let me repeat that: Under copyright, profiting from your ideas and
hard work is not and end in itself, it is a
means to an end.
The primary goal is
not to reward individuals with profit
for their ideas and hard work. It is to increase
the overall output of ideas and hard work
throughout the nation.
It just happens that restricting copying is the
easiest way to acieve this goal.
So the question is, what's wrong with 3rd parties
profiting from someone else's ideas an hard
work? Answer: Nothing, until you prove that
such activity is suppressing the overall production
of ideas and hard work in society. Lately,
very little effort has been done to prove that
output is suffering before each expansion of
the copyright statutes.
Patents have nothing to do with free, open or closedness licencing. They are merely to do with a system whose intention is to prove who invented what first.
You're missing the key feature of patents here.
The one "proven" to invent first by virtue of
a patent gets the privilege of setting arbitrary
license terms for any use of the covered invention.
Thus, a patent has everything to do with
licensing, and it may be "closed" at the whim
of the patent holder at any time.
If it was only about proving who invented first,
a system like that used for acedemic publishing would fit the
bill just fine. As a matter of fact, such a system
would probably do more to "promote useful arts
and sciences" for software than patents will. (Remember,
promoting arts and sciences
was the whole motivator for patents in the
first place. Patents were *not* created just to
institute a new form of "ownership" so that
people can bask in additional property rights.)
Patents were originally intended to encourage
people to not keep machines and manufacturing
methods locked up as trade secrets, so everyone
would benefit (initially from the shared
knowledge, and using the invention directly
after a few years). This does not match
software development. Copyrights allow people
to keep the actual implementation details secret
for a century, so the patent disclosure doesn't
do much good. Anything disclosed in the patent
document can be trivially reverse engineered from the
software product anyway, since all of the secrets
are shipped with the product. The patent provides
little if any additional knowledge to the general public. Therefore, due
to the nature of software, a software
patent provides essentially no value to the public in return
for the monopoly granted to the patent holder.
According to the laws at the time, those empowered to vote did so, and CHOSE to leave the union.....
... And then those in the rest of the union CHOSE
to come down and soundly kick the rebels' asses.
Better luck next time.
Oh wait, there's no reason
to secede again now that the South no longer
has a feudal economy incompatible with modern
civilization. I guess old Abe had the right
vision after all.
However, since we're a service based organization, our salaries and bonuses are based on user satisfaction of our performance. Guess what our number one gripe is? You bet. Password enforcement.
I wonder if holding something like a "password
cracker demo meeting" would help. Set up
a test machine, let everyone enter a password
of their choice, then run crack or similar on the
password file. Let people watch as the
program guesses their passwords and spits
them out. Maybe give a prize to the best/worst
passwords. It might get people to understand
the problem and help them become more
interested in solving it.
Also, it's not too difficult to find sticky notes with obscure strings a la "h0tgr1tz99" stuck on people's monitors. Hmmmm, wonder what that could mean?
It's too bad these researchers are meeting
so much skepticism. I'm sure they could
prove their results if they would just pull out
their single-molecule transistors and show
them in action. Unfortunately, I bet that somebody
just dumped the molecules into a desk drawer,
and now they're hopelessly lost amongs the
crumbs, dust and fuzzies at the bottom of the
drawer...
Slashdot Mirror
If we assume a roughly symmetrical bell curve starting there, that would put the actual average GPA of the surviving engineers at about 3.1; mabye a bit lower if the bell curve is skewed by the discontinuity at 2.25.
Maybe the two issues should be more closely coupled. Historically, patents and copyrights granted the inventors and authors monopoly over some of their works in exchange for disclosing the works to the public. The public can then use the works and learn from them (possibly for a fee).
Providing copyright protection on binary-only software does not fit into this original model. The public can use the work, but there is very little that can be learned from it. The copyright in this case does not serve to advance knowledge, which negates one of the main reasons copyright was created in the first place.
Perhaps copyright protection should be reduced or eliminated on binary-only software.
Remember, copyright concerns publication of works; it is not supposed to be a vehicle that helps you keep your trade secrets secret. Keeping trade secrets would be more appropriately done by negotiating (and actually signing with ink) contracts with your customers before giving them possession of your secret binaries.
So I assume your girlfriend charges you for her time. Does that make her a prudent resource scheduler, or just a whore?
"reverse engineering harbors very close to IP infringement because and has staggering economic implications."
That is utterly bogus. I spent the first 5 years of my career reverse engineering IBM's PCs (back in the days when IBM was the "bad guy" and Microsoft supplied a fun little OS that freed users from sysadmin tyranny). Due to the efforts of hundreds of engineers like myself at PC "clone" manufacurers, we now enjoy a utopia of cheap, fast, interchangeable PCs supplied by numerous competitors in the marketplace.
Decades of continued reverse engineering between manufacturers as they added improvements has maintained compatibility as the architecture has scaled in performance by over 1000X. The affordable computing power made possible by reverse engineering has provided immeasurably huge benefits to the world's economy.
Unfortunately, the software market has not seen nearly as much reverse engineering and cloning as the hardware market. If it did, we'd all get to keep more of our money to spend as we wish, and we'd have fewer headaches managing and sharing our data.
Sending your money to someone just because they've erected a barrier of obscurity and secrets around the tools you need to use your data does not help the economy or spur innovation. It's more like being taxed to pay for an entitlement program.
No, that tax is to pay for your chemotherapy after you lose your job and health insurance due to smoking related health problems.
eXtreme Programming is yesterday's buzzword. The pendulum is swinging the other way, and the hot new fad is TM (Timid Programming). Here's an example from my upcoming tutorial:
// import java.util.*;
// TODO (6/5/02): Is it really a good idea to import the whole
// package? Needs research
// TODO (6/8/02): Maybe consider using a different language altogether.
// public class XXX {
// TODO (6/12/02): What is best main class name?
// TODO (6/13/02): consider putting opening braces on their own line
// public static void main(XXX) {
// TODO (6/25/02): are the standard parameter names ok?
// TODO (6/30/02): need to design implementation here
// }
// }
// TODO (7/11/02): Not sure I understand the project requirements at all.
// Need to have an all-hands meeting to discuss the preferred
// word processor template because I'm thinking of writing a
// white paper before I do any more coding here.
// TODO (7/27/02): This program is stressing me out too much. I'm going to
// leave early today to see my gastroenterologist about my nervous
// stomach. Maybe I'll resign one day soon, but I'm not sure if
// that's the best decision.
How about "broken"?
Here's how it might work:
Windows (tm) XP 2003 edition U.S. Full Edition price list:
$199*
----
* Prices may vary in Alaska, Hawaii, and Iowa**.
** Iowa price $239.***
*** Special Iowa settlement offer: for a limited time, get $40 off of the standard list price. To qualify, fill in the following form and send to iowa-special-discount@microsoft.com
Name________________________
Address______________________
Age_________________________
Daytime Phone________________
Occupation___________________
SSN__________________________
Mother's Maiden Name________________
Your CPUs Unique ID Number___________________
Credit Card (MC/Visa/Discover) Number__________________ Exp Date_____
WWII: average of approx 13,000 people dead per day, every day, for six straight years
Current Middle East Crisis: average of approx 6 people dead per day for 1 year so far
That's a little bit of a difference. Witness the global consternation over 3 orders of magnitude less bloodshed; it just goes to prove my point.
When three thousand Americans and persons from 80 other countries were murdered live on TV, alot of people thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread.
That's not an example of conventional warfare. Almost none of the actual bloodshed was televised. The people who thought it was "cool" weren't citizens of a government who perpetrated the act. This act was not deterrable by the threat of escalation to a nuclear war. Your example doesn't apply to my arguments at all.
Your point was probably valid until the 1990's. The situation is a little different today, however.
Avoiding conflicts: Right now, conventional wars in developed countries are probably suppressed primarily by the advent of cheap handheld video cameras, satellite uplinks and cable news networks. The public just won't stomach live carnage on their TVs perpetrated by traditional governments, so the pressure to avoid or end old-fashioned wars is enormous (at least when the corpses appear to be middle-class or higher).
A-bombs: As in any aspect of life, you have to multiply the risks by the expected benefits to determine the utility. Until the last decade, nuclear weapons were tightly controlled by less than ten powerful governments. Risky, but you could at least hope that all of the players were somewhat rational. Today, additional players and potential players are on the field, some of whom may not respond to the traditional concept of deterrence.
At least these new players don't have very much megatonnage (yet). For now, this means that while the risk of worldwide nuclear destruction has decreased with the end of the Cold War, the risk of millions being killed in a terrorist attack or a nuclear exchange between smaller countries is much greater than ever before.
With nuclear weapons, wouldn't take much of a mistake to invalidate your assertion.
Surely they could buy a $1000 PC at each end and do: /dev/video_capture | mpeg_encode | unexportable_munition_software <secret-key> | /dev/satellite_modem
cat
and: /dev/satellite_modem | unexportable_munition_software <secret-key> | mpeg_decode | /dev/video_out
cat
How is a PDA going to recreate the classic TI-30 key bounce effect without buttons? Sure, you could reprogram the character recognizer to occasionally insert '33333' sometimes when you scribble a single '3', but software can only create pseudorandom events, not truly random glitches. How are today's students going to learn about real randomness?
IHMO, schools should stick with tried and true educational tools; they shouldn't be wasting time trying to emulate them with software.
If I'd known at the time that I would be saddled with this waste management problem, I probably would have bought elsewhere.
Ok, if you create something, you should own it.
However, that doesn't address the more interesting question: Why should owning something mean that nobody else can make a copy of it? After all, you still have it after it's been copied.
The answer, of course, is that copyright is intended to create an artificial scarcity of the work, inducing members of society to create more works via a convoluted economic process. The implementation of copyright is very complex, arbitrary and flawed, but unfortunately, nobody has come up with a better alternative.
So, copyright attempts to fill a worthwhile macroeconomic goal, but it's not a sufficient reason to cast the same moral indignation on those who violate copyright laws as if they had stolen your car. The idea is not to give every creator new inalienable rights, but rather to create an overall system where creators can generally make a living off of their works. Violating copyrights should be thought of as an infraction against the system as a whole more than as an infraction against the individual author.
Too many people forget people and corporations were granted artificial property rights over thoughts and ideas as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.
First, a tariff is a tax. In your terminology, it's "stealing" stuff from people trying to import goods.
Second, you must be smoking heavy crack if you think that there is any way to eliminate taxes. Every non-primitive society in human history has had some form of taxation. What makes you think that you've figured out some magical way to avoid taxes when nobody else has ever achieved this?
Have you ever really sat down to account for the all of the benefits you personally receive from the gov't via tax-financed means? Have you ever thought about how much more it would cost you in time and money to individually arrange replacements for all of those services? I doubt it. You could hire your own private police force (you'll really need a good one one if the majority of the population gets no education because public schools are abolished), you could negotiate the rights to pass through each person's land instead of using roads, you could hire a private detective to hunt down terrorists who threaten your safety. You could hire private services for the thousands of other things the government now does with better efficiency of scale.
But you probably haven't thought through the implications of any of that. Basically, you're just a selfish, myopic cheapass skinflint whiner who thinks that they can get the benefits of being a citizen of this country without paying anything for them.
Hmm. You might want to try cleaning your shift key and period key contacts. They seem to be sticking and bouncing quite a bit.
Let me guess... you must be one of those annoying extrovert types who are always coming around to interrupt me while I'm trying to work.
As explained here, earth bacteria survived on the moon for 2 years.
IIRC, they sterilize some space probes by blasting them with radiation before launch.
Under copyright, profiting from your ideas and hard work is not and end in itself, it is a means to an end.
Let me repeat that: Under copyright, profiting from your ideas and hard work is not and end in itself, it is a means to an end.
The primary goal is not to reward individuals with profit for their ideas and hard work. It is to increase the overall output of ideas and hard work throughout the nation. It just happens that restricting copying is the easiest way to acieve this goal.
So the question is, what's wrong with 3rd parties profiting from someone else's ideas an hard work? Answer: Nothing, until you prove that such activity is suppressing the overall production of ideas and hard work in society. Lately, very little effort has been done to prove that output is suffering before each expansion of the copyright statutes.
You're missing the key feature of patents here. The one "proven" to invent first by virtue of a patent gets the privilege of setting arbitrary license terms for any use of the covered invention. Thus, a patent has everything to do with licensing, and it may be "closed" at the whim of the patent holder at any time.
If it was only about proving who invented first, a system like that used for acedemic publishing would fit the bill just fine. As a matter of fact, such a system would probably do more to "promote useful arts and sciences" for software than patents will. (Remember, promoting arts and sciences was the whole motivator for patents in the first place. Patents were *not* created just to institute a new form of "ownership" so that people can bask in additional property rights.)
Patents were originally intended to encourage people to not keep machines and manufacturing methods locked up as trade secrets, so everyone would benefit (initially from the shared knowledge, and using the invention directly after a few years). This does not match software development. Copyrights allow people to keep the actual implementation details secret for a century, so the patent disclosure doesn't do much good. Anything disclosed in the patent document can be trivially reverse engineered from the software product anyway, since all of the secrets are shipped with the product. The patent provides little if any additional knowledge to the general public. Therefore, due to the nature of software, a software patent provides essentially no value to the public in return for the monopoly granted to the patent holder.
Well, if might doesn't make right, were sure wasting a hell of a lot of our tax money on military spending
in which case democracy is a lie
I don't see how that follows
and Our nation was founded by terrorists,
If that term had been around in the 18th century, I'm sure the British government would have used it to describe some of the colonists' tactics
AND perpetuated by a terrorist
No, just a normal old-fashioned brutal war. A very common occurence for that time.
Oh wait, there's no reason to secede again now that the South no longer has a feudal economy incompatible with modern civilization. I guess old Abe had the right vision after all.
I wonder if holding something like a "password cracker demo meeting" would help. Set up a test machine, let everyone enter a password of their choice, then run crack or similar on the password file. Let people watch as the program guesses their passwords and spits them out. Maybe give a prize to the best/worst passwords. It might get people to understand the problem and help them become more interested in solving it.
It's probably their /. username...
It's too bad these researchers are meeting so much skepticism. I'm sure they could prove their results if they would just pull out their single-molecule transistors and show them in action. Unfortunately, I bet that somebody just dumped the molecules into a desk drawer, and now they're hopelessly lost amongs the crumbs, dust and fuzzies at the bottom of the drawer...