The main problem is that use does not determine legality. The DMCA says code is a crime, if it is code a content publisher objects to on certain potentially very vague grounds. Protecting code as political speech is central to fighting travesties like the DMCA.
The problem with treating code as if it were "burglarious tools" is that it opens a whole new domain of thought-crime. If I write some "criminal" code, am I now subject to search and/or detention anytime/anyplace because I have demonstrated the ability to embody criminal intent in code? Hey my brain is like a bomb, no?
It is right - it is even crucial - that code in all forms remain legal, otherwise there may be a permanent search warrant out for your thoughts.
You don't think this is a rather prejudiced interpretation of the use of IE components in Windows?
If you had an OS, any OS, with some form of software component technology, and you had a Web browser engine available in component form, you're saying it is fishy to make use of it is a wide variety of programs? It just sounds really wierd for some supposedly avant garde Linux people to argue against using a browser engine in UI. It sounds not credible, and that lack of credibility reflects on other arguments that Microsoft broke the law and should be punished severly. It makes me think this about something other than the law.
Their success may offend you. The way they take advantage of their sucesses may offend you. But that is a long way from justifying what was from the outset a novel and radical reading of anti-trust law, by a highly ideologicaly leftist bunch of prosecutors.
The other point of view is: I'm in this business to make money. Microsoft has never taken any skin off my nose. Why should I be happy if a bunch of old pinko hippies in the DoJ get to write the rules for the business I'm in? You don't have to defend Microsoft to be against the government in this. Instead, just ask "Who do I trust less?"
I suspect that most of the people cheering for the DoJ would be against anyone who succeeded to the same degree, under the same system.
Not OT at all. What if government regs made Linux into contraband? How enforcable would those regs be? They would be a joke.
Crypto is the perfect example of how U.S. regs hurt U.S. software makers. What is to stop entire software companies, even Microsoft, from migrating to where the regs are more comfortable. And if Bermudian Windows had better features than U.S. Windows, just how big a black market would that create?
This, I suspect, is the real reason some of the people on the government side are pushing for breakup. Any judgement would have force only in the U.S. and could easily be made to look foolish if better versions of Windows were available only overseas. Anyone remembered for making the settlement would end up looking like a pretty big ass when people start getting busted for smuggling Windows.
That FDA or Dept. of Agriculture reg has the force of law, because Congress is a bunch of wimps who lack the guts to add the details themselves.
All this regulation of Microsoft is a very ugly camel's nose under the tent. If it happens, you can bet Linux will become contraband because it lacks required interfaces or documentation or facilities for the handicapped.
The reason there are so few car companies is that there is a huge regulatory burden in producing a car. You would think, with all the outsourcing of subsystem manufacturing there would be more car companies, just as there are new PC companies every day. This does not happen, and, in fact, the reverse happens in the form of industry consolidation because of the exteremely high regulatory hurdles placed in front of new entrants.
The example of how, if cars were like PCs they would cost $50 and go a thousand miles per hour, comes not from any technology magic. Cars are plenty technological. Stagnation comes from the dead hand of regulation. Do you feel it on your shoulder yet?
The objections to a free online university have been very interesting. In many ways, they are a mirror image of how the recording and motion picture industry associations and other vested interests in the status quo respond:
1) You would not like the results. Really! All kinds of people that don't have university degrees today would be getting them. Oh the horror. What it really means is that a scarce resource is no scarce, and the gatekeepers of that resource are irrelevant.
2) There would be no sense of community. Nevermind the built-in irony of bruiting that argument on/., one must ask: "What Internet do these guys use?" It is a natural extension of the success of online community that an online university should be tried.
3) That online education "would be of little worth." Subtext: Online education would change the business model of brick-and-ivy education in ways that might be uncomfortable.
All this is very similar to what entrenched interests in other fields that are being cracked open by the Internet say: You won't like it, you'll feel wierd about it, and it takes food out of our mouths. In all other instances these arguments have amounted to nothing of substance. I think education will be very different for my childeren than it was for me. Hopefully, instead of tution, they will have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest either in their own businesses or for savings. That economic change alone could put our so-called "new economy" in the shade of what will be.
I said they has environmental mismanagement which was horrifying. The nastiest environmental disasters in the world are in the former Soviet Union and China. Which is my point: societies where the individual is considered less important than often wrong-headed policy initiatives tend toward both environmental disasters and economic disasters.
Bad example. Some things are not worth optimizing. Specifically, if we could get by with smaller, less powerful computers in many contexts, we would have NCs or something deployed in those situation. It was not for lack of trying these ideas. They just turned out to consume more resources in development, support, etc. than they saved versus overpowered by off-the-shelf commodity systems.
This is the computer version of the recycling fetish. Recycling actually uses more resources if it fails to pay for itself, hence the resort to taxing "waste" and other means of rigging the economy in favor of recycling. Still it often results in neatly baled and sorted stuff getting landfilled because it is uneconomical to store/transport/reprocess. Recycling that fails economically is both and economic and environmental crime.
Lack of focus on effecting results-producing activity in all endeavors is roughly equivalent in wastefulness. Energy, money, and natural resources are interchangable representations of one another. Waste one, waste 'em all.
"it is just malignantly stupid to try to maintain that human activity--deforestation, fossil fuel burning, etc--will have no effect on global climate" is a sentence that gets 85% of the way through before running off the rails. Humans are capable of creating nasty environmental disasters, but these have been, so far, local in their effect and temporary in their duration. Avoiding these disasters is a shibboleth. Nobody is against such careful avoidance.
But adopting causes as semireligious dogmas is also harmful. Human misery resulting from hobbled economies is just as real as drought and flood. Indeed most famine is caused by bad policy and corruption, not bad weather. Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao killed far more people by screwing up food distribution than they did through environmental mismanagement which, in the Soviet Union and China was horrifying enough. Environmental policy based on ideology, especially collectivist ideology, is not only repugnant for its associations with past tyranny, but for the completely utilitarian reason that it is a known and proven killer of millions of innocents. So when environmental collectivist alarmists have their backs to the wall and bring up the "better safe (in agreeing with their positions) than sorry" one should not be lulled into thinking that it is in fact safe.
He bought the domain, so it isn't squatting exactly, more like having to keep a property you were hoping to arbitrage. Not that it was a bad ride.
I was shocked to discover a colleague of mine at work squats on a number of domain names. But it was less disturbing and annoying than other situations where coworkers have tried to sell me vitamins or package tours.
The bottom line is that Michael Robertson has turned out to be a capable leader of a significant and influential commercial venture. He didn't flame out or allow the situation to get away from him. I think he stands a good chance to end up in the Gates/Dell/Chambers category rather than the Kahn/Woz/Andreesen pile. It isn't an easy road, And it isn't as if he paid for "MP3.com" with bags of money form Chinese spys or bogus profits from futures contract straddles.
Amazon is worth $23Billion because one would have to spend X billion to catch them with Y chance of success. X * Y = $23Billion. Microsoft and Cisco are worth more than GE because Microsoft's and Cisco's businesses will grow a lot faster than GE's. Not only is market cap equal to what a company is worth, it usually is somewhat less than what one would have to pay to buy the entire company, since the price would go up on that basis. Now if nathanm has some insight into value the rest of us lack, he's definitely buying the beer next time, because he will be able to buy (or short) Microsoft, Cisco, and GE based on what us dummies will only come to realize at some point in the future.
Did you look before posting? The top servers are big Compaq ProLiants running Win2k. They, neck and neck with Dells, are also the cheapest per transaction. Fastest, cheapest, no matter how you slice it, the knock on x86-based Win2k servers seems undeserved.
Further, it isn't just Sun that is charging a premium for Unix-based servers. HP, Compaq, and IBM all sell Unix servers for substantially less favorable price/performance ratios than Compaq and Dell's x86/Win2k servers. I'm certain the Oracle vs. SQL Server price difference is a factor, too.
I could see an advantage for a small site strapped for cash using Linux as a server, but big expensive RISC servers running commercial *NIX and Oracle look uncompetitive.
Slashdot has probably never experienced a visit from a politician.
Newspaper editorial boards, their publishers, and the media conglomerates are variously spun, pressured (i.e. your merger will go through quicker if you don't look under that rock) threatened, and bribed all the time, every day, by every government agency and interest group in existence.
It would be very hard to silence Slashdot: No union controls the presses, no regulators control the Internet feed, at least not nearly as directly as they do broadcast licenses. Despite the fact that Slashdot has a near monopoly stranglehold on Linux news and commentary, the DoJ has not yet formed an antitrust theory under which they could prosecute Slashdot.
The ad sales structure is also very different on the Internet. It is harder to put pressure on a Web site through advertizers, which can more-easily be replaced.
Not to mention all the usual things like getting wire stories directly, better investigative journalism from Antiwar.com, Newsmax.com, NandoTimes, etc. Except for a small and getting-smaller elite set of writers worth reading, the newspapers have no advantages, all the costs, and all the disadvantages.
Which all adds up to: old media is toast. There is no fix. It is as unstoppable as cars replacing horses. Have a nice day.
Getting into space in a big way is a very long term project. We are best off collecting information and trying some simple experiements for now.
As for overpopulation, there are some places on Earth that are overpopulated, but the Earth is still pretty empty. This is not counting any technological changes that might let us live under/on the seas in large numbers. In a thousand years, our ability to house and feed people might seem as relatively primitive as medieval agriculture and fishing is to us.
So it won;t be to get elbow room that we go to space. Space colonization will have to have its own rewards that outweigh the challenges, costs, and inconveniences. This balance may not be reached for quite a long time, like thousands of years. A good supprting project would be to make sure we have clean elections, personal and economic liberties, and good educational opprtunities all over the Earth so we don't end up resetting the Human Progress register to zero at some point between now and when we are ready for really going to space.
True story: When the first Space Shuttle was launched, I was working in Austria at a U.N. econometrics institute - which is to say a boondoggle and nest of spies. About half the East Bloc contingent there worked for various security and spy agencies. Mostly they were there to keep an eye on the legit researchers - when they were not filching BSD Unix to run on their stolen VAXes.
It was by no means certain the Shuttle would work: tremendously complex, solid fuel boosters, lots could go wrong. And the Russians were working on "Buran" - their own shuttle. Everyone at my workplace was watching TV when the shuttle went up. At the moment it cleared the launchpad structure, one of the Russian KGB men whispered to me "It's over, you have won." I looked at him and he repeated his statement. I could tell he meant much more than that the race to build a space shuttle was over.
Lesson: There are bigger purposes than space exploration that drove development of craft like the Shuttle. Look at Hubble and compare it to 70's era spy sats, like the one in the Smithsonian. A strong family resemblance. On can only wonder, for now, what the Shuttle was really meant to carry. Someday it will probably come out that the Shuttle was something like the "deap sea mining" ships Hughes built to raise a russian sub, or the "deap sea rescue subs" that did who-knows-what. Remember Reagan's "Orient Express" hypersonic plance announcements? Wonder what black program that quietly slipped into?
Any buffs out there have a chronology of classified shuttle flights? Anyone have a good conspiracy theory about classified space planes?
Bias aside, mainstream (lamestream) media accuracy stinks. Bias included, it stinks worse. The bias does negatively affect accuracy.
Why do we go to Slashdot and not ZDNet for tech news? Why DrudgeReport and not CNN? Drudge and Slashdot are at least as likely to get it right, are more likely to get it now, and less likely to impose a bias (other than that Bill Gates and Janet Reno deserve one another in some karmic balance of justice).
The trappings of fact-checking and "professionalism" do not, in practical terms, make CNN more reliable. Big companies like CNN are so vulnerable to political pressure that it more than negates whatever level of professionalism is permitted to survive.
Just a brief list of sacred cows the mainstream media don't go after: protected minorities, other media companies (or the RIAA and other industry associations), big advertizers, the tort bar, organized labor (the Mob), etc. The mainstream press also seldom names names in the bureuacracy: Who DID hire Craig Livinstone, of FBI files fame? Who writes the reports reccomending more Internet surveillence? Wouldn't you rather know who the responsible party is rather than see some doofus "spokesman" yet again? You won't see that in the mainstream press.
Check out Slashdot's valuation. That's a pretty plush "fringe" compared to some old media stalwarts.
The problem for the RIAA is that I have a fair-use right to CDs I own, and MP3's service looks very much like a legit tool that would enable me to listen to CDs I own at work, for example.
Add to this the fact that MP3 has opened a breach in the dam that cannot be plugged. MP3 remote access like this is just one aspect of a generalized ability to upload and synch, retieve, steam, and otherwise use one's stuff on the Web. Take a look at fusionOne. They will upload a wide variety of files, and synch them to a wide variety of apps, databases, systems, and gizmos. Music will not be very special in this context.
Have you considered that if the Supremes shift two digits right and decide to whack every law and regulation that sticks out too far past the commerce clause it might be a civil right bonanza? I could deal with continuing to wear my hair short and saying "Yes sir! Wasn't watching my speed, sir! Thank you, sir, for the warning, sir!" to the cops in exchange for that.
MS C++ portable? Standard? Not in any practical way. Any non-trivial Windows app, in any language, be it the very Windows-specific VB or in C++, will use so many Windows-specific components, APIs, macros, and class libraries that it ain't going anywhere but Windows.
Microsoft clearly thought they had the right to make a Windows-specific variant of Java. Sun's internal documents lament that its contract with Microsoft enable Microsoft to change Java. Now that the copyright issue is off the table, it appears that the contract might not be a sufficient leg for Sun to stand on.
Hopefully the result will be a situation where Java programmers have the same choice as other programmers: do I steer clear of Windows-specific contructs because I'm building a portable program of module, or an I coding to a specific platform? Java programmera are adults, too.
This is very very bad. The reason it is so bad is that it sets an evil precedent: If you can lock someone up for writing a small software program, all our liberty is in danger. This is not an exaggeration.
The reason this is no overstatement is that laws about burglarious tools, cracking, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in particular, are vague. The boundary between test tools and crime is one that can be drawn by private organizations like the MPA. In other words, you can get thrown in jail for pissing off a cartel, or even an single corporation. This is very very bad.
To correct this situation, the response must be in depth and comprehensive. Be creative. Sure, write to your legislator, but more effective means might be to: Find out the individuals involved in action against the DeCSS authors and make them object of controversy. If the lawyers find their other clients abandoning them because they do not want to do business with controversial lawyers, that is a concrete consequence.
Can you make a difference against "media giants?" Yes. Compare what a movie grosses to a high-tech IPO. These media giants no longer look so tall. The record industry establishment is in real danger of extinction from MP3s. In two or three years it will be possible to store digital movies at full fidelity on hard disks, and perhaps on removable media. It will be possible to transcode them into general purpose and unprotected multimedia formats. It will be the MP3 story again. It is very important that this future prevail, because the alternative is very very bad.
The only way that establishment media companies can maintain their lock on distribution of content is to make certain activities with your PC illegal. In other words, they must criminalize certain software, which they have already done with the DMCA, and they must make your private activities with your PC subject to their interpretation of the law and they must make law enforcement agencies into their private police force for this purpose. Bad! And of you think, that once this camel's nose is under the tent, such infringements on rights will end there, well...
Such antique sentiments that one should be secure in one's documents are not the obsolete thoughts of dead white men. They are a very applicable warning to us all that, in the name of protecting a movie, our fundamental human rights are endangered. Fight back. Fight hard.
The number of cell phones shipped each year outnumbers PCs by around 10X. If 10% of them were Web enabled with WAP or similar technology, it would not be outrageous to say that Internet apps would become driven by cell phone users' needs rather than PC owners' needs. PCs are too narrow a market these days, as is amply demonstrated by Phone.com's valuation and other indicators. Game consoles have also joined the party. Windows does not wag the Web dog, not technolgically, not economically.
It's not in the Constitution, and we both know it. However, the Sherman Anti-trust act(s) have been found to be in accordance with the U.S. Constitution
That's the point. There is a huge overhang of dubious law, cantilevered out from a foundation of the commerce clause. You, and I, can form our own opinion on it, tempered by the practical issue of challenging constitutionality, of course. But in this case even the interpretation of the law is quite novel, by the admission of the DoJ themselves. If we want to see where the edges of a fuzzy law are, it's a good idea to look at the Constitution.
Specifically, Microsoft is neither an electric utility nor a railroad. You can go around them. Other people who have an ambition to sell OSs can go around them. There is no physical impediment to doing so. IBM tried, and screwed it up. Apple tried, and screwed it up after being on the road to success, and may take another run at it. Be is trying. Linux is succeeding. All these examples are as unlike as possible to the situation where electric transmission lines, rails, pipelines or other physical impediments get in the way of competition (and if you want to relate it back to the Constitution, commerce across state lines).
Microsoft's behavior relative to competitors is natural. What was Apple's behavior w.r.t. Mac cloners? Brutal, but effective, and within their rights as owners of Mac OS.
Microsoft is alleged to have broken a novel interpretation of a complex law with qustionable applicability and a dubious constitutional foundation. The rest of my post highlights the downside of allowing this to proceed: Everyone's rights are diminished in measurable ways and where the effects are much the subject of Slashdot postings.
but if it's not the general educated public that decides what is and isn't law, then something is horribly wrong
Well now. This educated person thinks this about the law in question: Where, in the Constitution, is the government permitted to sieze or otherwise modify the property shareholders in Microsoft own? Maybe if Microsoft were a railroad, Microsoft could inhibit interstate commerce (a clause which has been stretched far, far beyond the breaking point). But, I ask of all you educated Slashdotters, take a step away from the details and ask: "Who is Janet Reno to decide what a private and voluntary association of owners, employees, customers, and other contractually bound participants can do with their time and effort?"
This is software after all - the most insubstantial and ephemeral product in existence. Literally nobody is coerced to or prevented from doing anything with software. And to act otherwise invites the kind of intervention against DVD software, reverse-engineering of multi-player game hosting, etc. that has been oft recounted and lamented at this site.
Keep crime in the phsyical domain for your own good. Letting the notion of crime seep into what can be expressed in software has already wrought tragedies in the form of miscarriages of justice against minor hackers, novel thought-crimes, and the supression of legitimate businesses that work against the goals of really bad monopolists in established media companies that use the government as a club with which to beat new-technology competitors.
Much has been said here about how cars are not like surfing, and so surfing should remain license-free. Agreed, so let's go back and look at driving:
Why not have a private authority test drivers? And why not have anonymous car tags? In fact, privledged state employees in Massachusetts get tags that cannot be traced easily. This might be needed for the governor's daughter, but mostly this is used to avoid speeding tickets. A private licensing authority would be less susceptible to such abuse. (One could expect similar preferences for members of the apparat in Web licensing, but that is beside the point). So why not have an encrypted identity on one's license plate? You can prove you are you. Others cannot, unless they convince a judge there is "probable cause" (leaving aside for a moment the debasement of the concept of probably cause) to know. Just because an infringement of privacy has become customary does not mean it is permanent.
So it is sad to see an inventor of the Web pushing for less privacy when a mind like his could be turned to, for example, creating a system of medical records-keeping where an individual would have complete control over release of his medical information, enforced by a cryptosystem. Instead we get the result of some rather narrow thinking.
Laws banning tools, and there are such laws, are dangerous because they, in effect, create thought crimes. You are "thinking of" cracking because you have the tools, and therefore should be thrown in jail. It also creates opportunities for people to place themselves above the law and bend the law because of their positions. I design telephone systems. So if I have information and/or tools for cracking into telephone systems I can quite validly claim I have to know these things and be familiar with these tools in order to create secure systems. Some pimply teenager, however, is presumed guilty of intending to crack based on the possesion of information and/or tools that enable cracking.
I don't want to be cracked. I don't want to burglarized. And there is worse, as well, I would prefer to avoid. But I want a society where people have to prove their willingness to commit a crime before they are thrown in jail. That does not mean comitting the crime. I am not objecting to conspiracy laws. But simply possesing information and tools, which, by the way, are irretrievably blurred together when it comes to software, should not be a crime because it leads to making unprovable projections of what someone is thinking. It leads to people getting arrested for their presumed thoughts. Places where that happens are not free places.
Much has been made of the link between software tools and guns. This link is made explicit in laws banning the export of crypto tools as if they are munitions. However, this link, in terms of the intentions of the gun owner, has not been sufficiently explored.
Guns do have a defensive purpose. The most reviled guns - the ones that look like they are for shooting people - are in fact the most beneficial in the hands of owners intending to defend themselves. Mistaking the evil look of a military gun for evil intent in the owner is the worst possible error in connecting the tool to the owner's intentions. Shooting Bambi with a beautiful muzzle-loader might well be more reprehesible in than shooting a home invader with a nasty looking piece of metal with a laser sight and loaded with particularly deadly ammunition.
In all cases, software or guns or cars or books, knowing the intention of the owner and inscribing that presumption into law is dangerous. You may be next to fall under suspicion, or under arrest, for what someone thinks you are thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with treating code as if it were "burglarious tools" is that it opens a whole new domain of thought-crime. If I write some "criminal" code, am I now subject to search and/or detention anytime/anyplace because I have demonstrated the ability to embody criminal intent in code? Hey my brain is like a bomb, no?
It is right - it is even crucial - that code in all forms remain legal, otherwise there may be a permanent search warrant out for your thoughts.
If you had an OS, any OS, with some form of software component technology, and you had a Web browser engine available in component form, you're saying it is fishy to make use of it is a wide variety of programs? It just sounds really wierd for some supposedly avant garde Linux people to argue against using a browser engine in UI. It sounds not credible, and that lack of credibility reflects on other arguments that Microsoft broke the law and should be punished severly. It makes me think this about something other than the law.
Their success may offend you. The way they take advantage of their sucesses may offend you. But that is a long way from justifying what was from the outset a novel and radical reading of anti-trust law, by a highly ideologicaly leftist bunch of prosecutors.
The other point of view is: I'm in this business to make money. Microsoft has never taken any skin off my nose. Why should I be happy if a bunch of old pinko hippies in the DoJ get to write the rules for the business I'm in? You don't have to defend Microsoft to be against the government in this. Instead, just ask "Who do I trust less?"
I suspect that most of the people cheering for the DoJ would be against anyone who succeeded to the same degree, under the same system.
Crypto is the perfect example of how U.S. regs hurt U.S. software makers. What is to stop entire software companies, even Microsoft, from migrating to where the regs are more comfortable. And if Bermudian Windows had better features than U.S. Windows, just how big a black market would that create?
This, I suspect, is the real reason some of the people on the government side are pushing for breakup. Any judgement would have force only in the U.S. and could easily be made to look foolish if better versions of Windows were available only overseas. Anyone remembered for making the settlement would end up looking like a pretty big ass when people start getting busted for smuggling Windows.
All this regulation of Microsoft is a very ugly camel's nose under the tent. If it happens, you can bet Linux will become contraband because it lacks required interfaces or documentation or facilities for the handicapped.
The reason there are so few car companies is that there is a huge regulatory burden in producing a car. You would think, with all the outsourcing of subsystem manufacturing there would be more car companies, just as there are new PC companies every day. This does not happen, and, in fact, the reverse happens in the form of industry consolidation because of the exteremely high regulatory hurdles placed in front of new entrants.
The example of how, if cars were like PCs they would cost $50 and go a thousand miles per hour, comes not from any technology magic. Cars are plenty technological. Stagnation comes from the dead hand of regulation. Do you feel it on your shoulder yet?
Under Windows, man exploits man. Under Linux, it is exactly the opposite.
1) You would not like the results. Really! All kinds of people that don't have university degrees today would be getting them. Oh the horror. What it really means is that a scarce resource is no scarce, and the gatekeepers of that resource are irrelevant.
2) There would be no sense of community. Nevermind the built-in irony of bruiting that argument on /., one must ask: "What Internet do these guys use?" It is a natural extension of the success of online community that an online university should be tried.
3) That online education "would be of little worth." Subtext: Online education would change the business model of brick-and-ivy education in ways that might be uncomfortable.
All this is very similar to what entrenched interests in other fields that are being cracked open by the Internet say: You won't like it, you'll feel wierd about it, and it takes food out of our mouths. In all other instances these arguments have amounted to nothing of substance. I think education will be very different for my childeren than it was for me. Hopefully, instead of tution, they will have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest either in their own businesses or for savings. That economic change alone could put our so-called "new economy" in the shade of what will be.
I said they has environmental mismanagement which was horrifying. The nastiest environmental disasters in the world are in the former Soviet Union and China. Which is my point: societies where the individual is considered less important than often wrong-headed policy initiatives tend toward both environmental disasters and economic disasters.
This is the computer version of the recycling fetish. Recycling actually uses more resources if it fails to pay for itself, hence the resort to taxing "waste" and other means of rigging the economy in favor of recycling. Still it often results in neatly baled and sorted stuff getting landfilled because it is uneconomical to store/transport/reprocess. Recycling that fails economically is both and economic and environmental crime.
Lack of focus on effecting results-producing activity in all endeavors is roughly equivalent in wastefulness. Energy, money, and natural resources are interchangable representations of one another. Waste one, waste 'em all.
But adopting causes as semireligious dogmas is also harmful. Human misery resulting from hobbled economies is just as real as drought and flood. Indeed most famine is caused by bad policy and corruption, not bad weather. Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao killed far more people by screwing up food distribution than they did through environmental mismanagement which, in the Soviet Union and China was horrifying enough. Environmental policy based on ideology, especially collectivist ideology, is not only repugnant for its associations with past tyranny, but for the completely utilitarian reason that it is a known and proven killer of millions of innocents. So when environmental collectivist alarmists have their backs to the wall and bring up the "better safe (in agreeing with their positions) than sorry" one should not be lulled into thinking that it is in fact safe.
I was shocked to discover a colleague of mine at work squats on a number of domain names. But it was less disturbing and annoying than other situations where coworkers have tried to sell me vitamins or package tours.
The bottom line is that Michael Robertson has turned out to be a capable leader of a significant and influential commercial venture. He didn't flame out or allow the situation to get away from him. I think he stands a good chance to end up in the Gates/Dell/Chambers category rather than the Kahn/Woz/Andreesen pile. It isn't an easy road, And it isn't as if he paid for "MP3.com" with bags of money form Chinese spys or bogus profits from futures contract straddles.
Amazon is worth $23Billion because one would have to spend X billion to catch them with Y chance of success. X * Y = $23Billion. Microsoft and Cisco are worth more than GE because Microsoft's and Cisco's businesses will grow a lot faster than GE's. Not only is market cap equal to what a company is worth, it usually is somewhat less than what one would have to pay to buy the entire company, since the price would go up on that basis. Now if nathanm has some insight into value the rest of us lack, he's definitely buying the beer next time, because he will be able to buy (or short) Microsoft, Cisco, and GE based on what us dummies will only come to realize at some point in the future.
Further, it isn't just Sun that is charging a premium for Unix-based servers. HP, Compaq, and IBM all sell Unix servers for substantially less favorable price/performance ratios than Compaq and Dell's x86/Win2k servers. I'm certain the Oracle vs. SQL Server price difference is a factor, too.
I could see an advantage for a small site strapped for cash using Linux as a server, but big expensive RISC servers running commercial *NIX and Oracle look uncompetitive.
Newspaper editorial boards, their publishers, and the media conglomerates are variously spun, pressured (i.e. your merger will go through quicker if you don't look under that rock) threatened, and bribed all the time, every day, by every government agency and interest group in existence.
It would be very hard to silence Slashdot: No union controls the presses, no regulators control the Internet feed, at least not nearly as directly as they do broadcast licenses. Despite the fact that Slashdot has a near monopoly stranglehold on Linux news and commentary, the DoJ has not yet formed an antitrust theory under which they could prosecute Slashdot.
The ad sales structure is also very different on the Internet. It is harder to put pressure on a Web site through advertizers, which can more-easily be replaced.
Not to mention all the usual things like getting wire stories directly, better investigative journalism from Antiwar.com, Newsmax.com, NandoTimes, etc. Except for a small and getting-smaller elite set of writers worth reading, the newspapers have no advantages, all the costs, and all the disadvantages.
Which all adds up to: old media is toast. There is no fix. It is as unstoppable as cars replacing horses. Have a nice day.
Getting into space in a big way is a very long term project. We are best off collecting information and trying some simple experiements for now.
As for overpopulation, there are some places on Earth that are overpopulated, but the Earth is still pretty empty. This is not counting any technological changes that might let us live under/on the seas in large numbers. In a thousand years, our ability to house and feed people might seem as relatively primitive as medieval agriculture and fishing is to us.
So it won;t be to get elbow room that we go to space. Space colonization will have to have its own rewards that outweigh the challenges, costs, and inconveniences. This balance may not be reached for quite a long time, like thousands of years. A good supprting project would be to make sure we have clean elections, personal and economic liberties, and good educational opprtunities all over the Earth so we don't end up resetting the Human Progress register to zero at some point between now and when we are ready for really going to space.
It was by no means certain the Shuttle would work: tremendously complex, solid fuel boosters, lots could go wrong. And the Russians were working on "Buran" - their own shuttle. Everyone at my workplace was watching TV when the shuttle went up. At the moment it cleared the launchpad structure, one of the Russian KGB men whispered to me "It's over, you have won." I looked at him and he repeated his statement. I could tell he meant much more than that the race to build a space shuttle was over.
Lesson: There are bigger purposes than space exploration that drove development of craft like the Shuttle. Look at Hubble and compare it to 70's era spy sats, like the one in the Smithsonian. A strong family resemblance. On can only wonder, for now, what the Shuttle was really meant to carry. Someday it will probably come out that the Shuttle was something like the "deap sea mining" ships Hughes built to raise a russian sub, or the "deap sea rescue subs" that did who-knows-what. Remember Reagan's "Orient Express" hypersonic plance announcements? Wonder what black program that quietly slipped into?
Any buffs out there have a chronology of classified shuttle flights? Anyone have a good conspiracy theory about classified space planes?
Why do we go to Slashdot and not ZDNet for tech news? Why DrudgeReport and not CNN? Drudge and Slashdot are at least as likely to get it right, are more likely to get it now, and less likely to impose a bias (other than that Bill Gates and Janet Reno deserve one another in some karmic balance of justice).
The trappings of fact-checking and "professionalism" do not, in practical terms, make CNN more reliable. Big companies like CNN are so vulnerable to political pressure that it more than negates whatever level of professionalism is permitted to survive.
Just a brief list of sacred cows the mainstream media don't go after: protected minorities, other media companies (or the RIAA and other industry associations), big advertizers, the tort bar, organized labor (the Mob), etc. The mainstream press also seldom names names in the bureuacracy: Who DID hire Craig Livinstone, of FBI files fame? Who writes the reports reccomending more Internet surveillence? Wouldn't you rather know who the responsible party is rather than see some doofus "spokesman" yet again? You won't see that in the mainstream press.
Check out Slashdot's valuation. That's a pretty plush "fringe" compared to some old media stalwarts.
The problem for the RIAA is that I have a fair-use right to CDs I own, and MP3's service looks very much like a legit tool that would enable me to listen to CDs I own at work, for example.
Add to this the fact that MP3 has opened a breach in the dam that cannot be plugged. MP3 remote access like this is just one aspect of a generalized ability to upload and synch, retieve, steam, and otherwise use one's stuff on the Web. Take a look at fusionOne. They will upload a wide variety of files, and synch them to a wide variety of apps, databases, systems, and gizmos. Music will not be very special in this context.
Have you considered that if the Supremes shift two digits right and decide to whack every law and regulation that sticks out too far past the commerce clause it might be a civil right bonanza? I could deal with continuing to wear my hair short and saying "Yes sir! Wasn't watching my speed, sir! Thank you, sir, for the warning, sir!" to the cops in exchange for that.
Microsoft clearly thought they had the right to make a Windows-specific variant of Java. Sun's internal documents lament that its contract with Microsoft enable Microsoft to change Java. Now that the copyright issue is off the table, it appears that the contract might not be a sufficient leg for Sun to stand on.
Hopefully the result will be a situation where Java programmers have the same choice as other programmers: do I steer clear of Windows-specific contructs because I'm building a portable program of module, or an I coding to a specific platform? Java programmera are adults, too.
The reason this is no overstatement is that laws about burglarious tools, cracking, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in particular, are vague. The boundary between test tools and crime is one that can be drawn by private organizations like the MPA. In other words, you can get thrown in jail for pissing off a cartel, or even an single corporation. This is very very bad.
To correct this situation, the response must be in depth and comprehensive. Be creative. Sure, write to your legislator, but more effective means might be to: Find out the individuals involved in action against the DeCSS authors and make them object of controversy. If the lawyers find their other clients abandoning them because they do not want to do business with controversial lawyers, that is a concrete consequence.
Can you make a difference against "media giants?" Yes. Compare what a movie grosses to a high-tech IPO. These media giants no longer look so tall. The record industry establishment is in real danger of extinction from MP3s. In two or three years it will be possible to store digital movies at full fidelity on hard disks, and perhaps on removable media. It will be possible to transcode them into general purpose and unprotected multimedia formats. It will be the MP3 story again. It is very important that this future prevail, because the alternative is very very bad.
The only way that establishment media companies can maintain their lock on distribution of content is to make certain activities with your PC illegal. In other words, they must criminalize certain software, which they have already done with the DMCA, and they must make your private activities with your PC subject to their interpretation of the law and they must make law enforcement agencies into their private police force for this purpose. Bad! And of you think, that once this camel's nose is under the tent, such infringements on rights will end there, well...
Such antique sentiments that one should be secure in one's documents are not the obsolete thoughts of dead white men. They are a very applicable warning to us all that, in the name of protecting a movie, our fundamental human rights are endangered. Fight back. Fight hard.
The number of cell phones shipped each year outnumbers PCs by around 10X. If 10% of them were Web enabled with WAP or similar technology, it would not be outrageous to say that Internet apps would become driven by cell phone users' needs rather than PC owners' needs. PCs are too narrow a market these days, as is amply demonstrated by Phone.com's valuation and other indicators. Game consoles have also joined the party. Windows does not wag the Web dog, not technolgically, not economically.
That's the point. There is a huge overhang of dubious law, cantilevered out from a foundation of the commerce clause. You, and I, can form our own opinion on it, tempered by the practical issue of challenging constitutionality, of course. But in this case even the interpretation of the law is quite novel, by the admission of the DoJ themselves. If we want to see where the edges of a fuzzy law are, it's a good idea to look at the Constitution.
Specifically, Microsoft is neither an electric utility nor a railroad. You can go around them. Other people who have an ambition to sell OSs can go around them. There is no physical impediment to doing so. IBM tried, and screwed it up. Apple tried, and screwed it up after being on the road to success, and may take another run at it. Be is trying. Linux is succeeding. All these examples are as unlike as possible to the situation where electric transmission lines, rails, pipelines or other physical impediments get in the way of competition (and if you want to relate it back to the Constitution, commerce across state lines).
Microsoft's behavior relative to competitors is natural. What was Apple's behavior w.r.t. Mac cloners? Brutal, but effective, and within their rights as owners of Mac OS.
Microsoft is alleged to have broken a novel interpretation of a complex law with qustionable applicability and a dubious constitutional foundation. The rest of my post highlights the downside of allowing this to proceed: Everyone's rights are diminished in measurable ways and where the effects are much the subject of Slashdot postings.
Well now. This educated person thinks this about the law in question: Where, in the Constitution, is the government permitted to sieze or otherwise modify the property shareholders in Microsoft own? Maybe if Microsoft were a railroad, Microsoft could inhibit interstate commerce (a clause which has been stretched far, far beyond the breaking point). But, I ask of all you educated Slashdotters, take a step away from the details and ask: "Who is Janet Reno to decide what a private and voluntary association of owners, employees, customers, and other contractually bound participants can do with their time and effort?"
This is software after all - the most insubstantial and ephemeral product in existence. Literally nobody is coerced to or prevented from doing anything with software. And to act otherwise invites the kind of intervention against DVD software, reverse-engineering of multi-player game hosting, etc. that has been oft recounted and lamented at this site.
Keep crime in the phsyical domain for your own good. Letting the notion of crime seep into what can be expressed in software has already wrought tragedies in the form of miscarriages of justice against minor hackers, novel thought-crimes, and the supression of legitimate businesses that work against the goals of really bad monopolists in established media companies that use the government as a club with which to beat new-technology competitors.
Why not have a private authority test drivers? And why not have anonymous car tags? In fact, privledged state employees in Massachusetts get tags that cannot be traced easily. This might be needed for the governor's daughter, but mostly this is used to avoid speeding tickets. A private licensing authority would be less susceptible to such abuse. (One could expect similar preferences for members of the apparat in Web licensing, but that is beside the point). So why not have an encrypted identity on one's license plate? You can prove you are you. Others cannot, unless they convince a judge there is "probable cause" (leaving aside for a moment the debasement of the concept of probably cause) to know. Just because an infringement of privacy has become customary does not mean it is permanent.
So it is sad to see an inventor of the Web pushing for less privacy when a mind like his could be turned to, for example, creating a system of medical records-keeping where an individual would have complete control over release of his medical information, enforced by a cryptosystem. Instead we get the result of some rather narrow thinking.
I don't want to be cracked. I don't want to burglarized. And there is worse, as well, I would prefer to avoid. But I want a society where people have to prove their willingness to commit a crime before they are thrown in jail. That does not mean comitting the crime. I am not objecting to conspiracy laws. But simply possesing information and tools, which, by the way, are irretrievably blurred together when it comes to software, should not be a crime because it leads to making unprovable projections of what someone is thinking. It leads to people getting arrested for their presumed thoughts. Places where that happens are not free places.
Much has been made of the link between software tools and guns. This link is made explicit in laws banning the export of crypto tools as if they are munitions. However, this link, in terms of the intentions of the gun owner, has not been sufficiently explored.
Guns do have a defensive purpose. The most reviled guns - the ones that look like they are for shooting people - are in fact the most beneficial in the hands of owners intending to defend themselves. Mistaking the evil look of a military gun for evil intent in the owner is the worst possible error in connecting the tool to the owner's intentions. Shooting Bambi with a beautiful muzzle-loader might well be more reprehesible in than shooting a home invader with a nasty looking piece of metal with a laser sight and loaded with particularly deadly ammunition.
In all cases, software or guns or cars or books, knowing the intention of the owner and inscribing that presumption into law is dangerous. You may be next to fall under suspicion, or under arrest, for what someone thinks you are thinking.