Law enforcement is expected to exercise a great deal of restraint and judgement. Failure to do so, like, for example, allowing law enforcement resources to get pimped out to Adobe, is rightly a failure about which one should complain.
"Choice." That is what you get when you have the choie between Windows, Macintosh, Sun, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. Microsoft, however dominant, can't (yet anyway) force you to pay them anything. Wheras a failed public school system can and does compel both payment and attendance.
Many theories have been buited here about how to fix things. But it all begins with choice. As the poster I am responding to points out, even the public funding issue is orthogonal to the matter of choice. If you are not able to take the funding for education (or keep it in the first place, for you more-radical libertarians) and use it as you see fit, how are any of the fixes proposed here going to happen?
We have more freedom to choose a phone company than we have to shoose a school. Only the Post Office has as strong a government backed monopoly, and even the Post Office cannot compel you to pay for both a stamp and an alternative delivery service.
Open schools to choice and watch how fast things will improve. The best ideas will win. One size will no longer be made to fit all. And the answer for people unsatisfied with their school, for whatever reason, will be simple: try another school that caters to your needs.
The whole answer isn't "Choice." But no other answer works without it.
Oh ya, now light is "pollution." Maybe we'll have conferences on how astronomers in third world counties should be compensated (funny how it all comes down to writing a check) for this light pollution. Or how we should all retrofit out stree lights (again, qui bono?).
Light means prosperity. And prosperity generally means taking better care of the environment. When China is lit up like the U.S., you can bet it will be easier to breath there, too.
Sorry but that all sounds like whistling past the graveyard, and isn't one of the points of open source to obtain those same qualities without resort to minicomputer-era support contract prices? It might be an argument for some telecom applications, but outside of telco COs and a few narrow verticals, cheaper is cheaper, no matter how you look at it. As for parts availability, it is hard to beat standard PCs. Anything you make millions of each month is unlikely to ever wind up lacking for parts, no matter how old the installation.
Neither do the FBI and DoJ have to play Step'n Fetchit for Adobe, who have already gone home with their tail between their legs. Nothing wrong with busting the prosecutor's chops till he figures it is a bad career move.
This needs a serious open source library
on
Books on Demand
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· Score: 2
The irony is that makers of e-books and this kind of technology miss a very obvious point: There are literally more than 20 centuries worth of literary works that are firmly, totally, completely and irrevocably out of copyright, and they could feed machines like this (and e-books) with out of copyright material pretty much forever.
They are making an unforgivable marketing mistake: for the sake of "partnering" with publishers, they are stunting the size of their own market. All the failed e-books, the tepid reception to Microsoft Reader, and a huge untapped opportunity for Adobe all can be attributed to the fact they did not emphasize free perfectly legal and legitimate content.
Microsoft links (rather shyly, burying the link under all the paid content links) to the University of Virginia Library Etext Center but this source has only 1600 books. That's less than 1% of well-known books, and a tiny fraction of all books that have no copyright coverage. There is a lot of free (speech, beer) text out there but very little is formatted for an acceptable online (or print-on-demand) reading experience. And e-books take up a tiny fraction of the space of MP3s.
If you really want to throw a bomb into the IPR world, get the Library of Congress or whatever your nation's corresponding institution is to provide a high-quality e-text of all materials that are no longer under copyright.
Show me a cop, in the U.S., who lost his job for breaking any privacy or confidentiality rule, ever, in any jurisdiction, at any level from Pond Patrol to FBI.
Waiting...
Waiting...
Thought so.
Re:But you PROMISED me...
on
Review: A.I.
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· Score: 2
AGHHHHHHHHH!
I checked the f--king box and that means no Jon Katz! Ever! Not even when that commie pinhead michael sneaks in on weekends! Got it?
No pinko whining about technology.
No global warming sky is falling rubbish.
No false maudlin techno worry-warting that implies that if we don't have pseuds like Katz fretting about it it will soon destroy the ecology, all public schools, Salon (whoops)... and we'll all be eating red meat and GM fries served by a single large MicroMcDonaldsLockheedSoft conglomerate run by Newt Gingrich.
Sounds like a recipe for a lower court to say: "Yes they monopolized X (some combination of software that was once commercially relevant) when the complaint was filed, but due to issues with tying, innovation, etc., X no longer exists, nor do the plaintifs' products, nor did Jackson ever scope out what X was very well, nor is there any way of putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Therefore: reveal some source, document your APIs, and never darken the court's door again."
Same goes for ignorant eco-extremism. If you don't count the dead malaria victims in adding up what DDT costs the environment, it isn't an honest assesment.
Clearly you are not entirely kidding, rather you are a visionary and futurist, even if you don't yet know it. Dutchwater (See what happens when you legaize pot? You get a burst of innovation... followed by the munchies.) has already taken this idea to the Internet infrastructure business, so CPE cannot be far behind. (Or would that be CPP, for customer premises plumbing?)
The Constitution is addressed to the government, and specifies what the government may not do. The government does not have the same rights as the people, by design. Everything the government is not allowed to regulate is allowed. (Hahaha! Which shows how far we have strayed.)
This is called the "King George Test" and is one of the ways, including reading the Federalist and Anti-federalist papers, of knowing what the people who wrote the Constitution meant. In other words, you do not have to get on any slippery slopes just to deal with new technology.
This is a good first step, but the future hinges on whether GPRS will deliver ISDN-like performance in general purpose Web access, or whether, due to crufty handsets or crufty network engineering, it will be, essentially, WAP+. GPRS has the potential to be pretty good always-on Internet at reasonable prices. It is is built out that way, it will be very successful.
The fabric dopant contained iron particles. Result: the envelope, not the gas, burned. The hydrogen would escape too quickly, and it would not be mixed with air enough to burn efficiently.
Comparing the sales of companies, or even their profits, with GNP is bogus. You can't even compare Cisco's sales to Sysco's in any meaningful way. Market cap is more accurate: What would it cost to buy this thing called Exxon/Mobil? What would it cost to buy Peru? Which number is larger. You will find that even poor dinky countries would cost more to buy than the biggest oil company. Land, people, minerals, the power to tax, are all very very valuable.
Another more useful measure is employment: how many people work for Wal-Mart vs. how many people work for the government of a nation? Again you will find even tiny countries have far bigger government workforces than the largest multinationals.
This is not to defend corporations vs. governments. Both can be really bad. But the measurement being used is as bad as confusing mass with weight. It's just bad science.
1. The messy jumble of cash, keys, and credit cards will be distilled into a single smart card that can be carried in a pocket.
Implication: A robber will gain full and total access to every aspect of your life, ruining it in one fell swoop, and police/government forces in many nations will destroy their opponents just as easily. And this will happen, because human's have both good and evil impulses.
This is why the real revolution will be in money. Perfectly secure, perfectly anonymous stored value is the only alternative to this orwellian vision. The implications of that are truly enourmous: nobody knows how much you have, how you got it, who you give it to, or why. Gosh, we might actually have to prune back our laws to the ones that prevent us from killing or maiming each other. Moreover, we will probably have a choice of which authorities back which banking systems we choose. In other words, money may become de-coupled from nations (nations and money are concepts that arose separately, and they can go their separate ways once again), and not in the Euro model. The future will be stranger than most people can imagine.
This is basically correct. It isn't impossible to supply DSL to customers on a network that uses fiber (or copper, it doesn't matter) digital loop carriers (DLCs - a kind of remote concentrator for phone lines). You just have to put the right equipment in the right place. In this case, you have to put the DSLAM in the "street furniture" where the DLC lives, and you have to modify the backhaul to the central office (CO) to handle data as well as voice traffic. No problem if there is fiber to the CO.
This complicates competition. DSL CLECs can rent space from the incumbent in the CO to put in their own DLSAMs, but space in the street furniture is too tight to house several competitors' equipment. One answer is to open the data networks in the ATM network that carries the data back to the ISPs' routers, but that was not in the Telecom Act of 1996, which was written before the commercialization of the Internet.
VDSL will have to be deployed this way, since it can only reach 4000 feet. So either DSL competition goes away at that point, or we need a new Telecom Act.
Re:The DMCA in the dead-tree world...
on
Digital Copyright
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· Score: 2
Trouble is, even with some glimmer of rights activism on the left, and strict constructionist activism on the right, the Supremes are reluctant to take an axe to the vast body of laws that trample 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 9th amendments, plus the whole whopping overhang of Commerce Clause abuse that stuff our Federal Government with laws of dubious legality.
In this context, what chance do relatively fine points, like the meaning of "limited" in the Copyright clause, have of evoking some respect for what was meant when it was written?
Remember, the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee your rights. You have natural rights that need no guarantee. The U.S. Constitution is a document that explicitly addresses the government and tells it what it may not do. Sadly, it seems like 90% of government activity is directed toward getting around these restrictions. When you vote, vote for people who care about the constitutionality of what they are doing! Next, we could get NBA referees to start calling traveling.
You do not have to wait for 3G. GPRS will deliver pretty good always-on general-purpose Internet access for GSM and IS136 (used by AT&T in the U.S.). This will drive replacement of existing handsets, for, probably, at least two subsequent product generations. Mix in EDGE, which doubles GSM and IS136 capacity, and you can wait quite a while before needing 3G. And this type of mobile access has the potential to support mobile gaming quite well, especially if they can figure out how to do bandwidth prioritization such that low-value apps can be priced flat-rate.
All this green stuff is very nice and trendy, but what Joe serf in the third world really needs is clear title to his land so he can mortgage it and buy a tractor. Then he needs simple tax laws and a non-corrupt government that let him keep most of what he makes so his kids can go to school and get better lives. All this angst about relatively clean and efficent first world economies (compare energy consumption to value-add) is a waste of time.
Thank you for the explanation. I was begining to think it might be becuase the media jump on anything 'radioactive' or 'chemical' and start fearmongering, especially if it fits the agenda.
What this really says is that taxpayers are getting ripped off by TV broadcasters. It obviously costs money to get access to subscriber lines and hook up the equipment, but spectrum is not inherently "free" either. It is free to broadcasters due to some quaint ideas about public service, but the reality is that a valuable publicly owned resource was given away to the politically connected.
The good news is that it was not given away irrevocably, and we can change the law regarding broadcast licenses and start collecting some of the revenue we are due from this resource. Broadcast licenses should be a limited term lease or a revenue-sharing license.
The correct analogy would be a situation where many doors had keypad locks and someone came across a universal combination. Would it be a crime to posses that combination? To discuss it? To discuss a general weakness in that type of lock? It is a serious problem to have "burglarious tools" in your head. Short of removing your head, you are now constantly comitting a crime.
What makes it evil is that Podesta is neither stupid nor incompetent. He knows the flaws in his analogy, and intentionally blurrs what should be a strong distinction between the physical and the intellectual (or ephemeral) for the purpose of enacting laws which are unprecedented in the way they operate, and not in a good way.
Slashdot Mirror
Law enforcement is expected to exercise a great deal of restraint and judgement. Failure to do so, like, for example, allowing law enforcement resources to get pimped out to Adobe, is rightly a failure about which one should complain.
"Choice." That is what you get when you have the choie between Windows, Macintosh, Sun, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. Microsoft, however dominant, can't (yet anyway) force you to pay them anything. Wheras a failed public school system can and does compel both payment and attendance.
Many theories have been buited here about how to fix things. But it all begins with choice. As the poster I am responding to points out, even the public funding issue is orthogonal to the matter of choice. If you are not able to take the funding for education (or keep it in the first place, for you more-radical libertarians) and use it as you see fit, how are any of the fixes proposed here going to happen?
We have more freedom to choose a phone company than we have to shoose a school. Only the Post Office has as strong a government backed monopoly, and even the Post Office cannot compel you to pay for both a stamp and an alternative delivery service.
Open schools to choice and watch how fast things will improve. The best ideas will win. One size will no longer be made to fit all. And the answer for people unsatisfied with their school, for whatever reason, will be simple: try another school that caters to your needs.
The whole answer isn't "Choice." But no other answer works without it.
Doh! That should be "cui bono?"
Light means prosperity. And prosperity generally means taking better care of the environment. When China is lit up like the U.S., you can bet it will be easier to breath there, too.
Sorry but that all sounds like whistling past the graveyard, and isn't one of the points of open source to obtain those same qualities without resort to minicomputer-era support contract prices? It might be an argument for some telecom applications, but outside of telco COs and a few narrow verticals, cheaper is cheaper, no matter how you look at it. As for parts availability, it is hard to beat standard PCs. Anything you make millions of each month is unlikely to ever wind up lacking for parts, no matter how old the installation.
Neither do the FBI and DoJ have to play Step'n Fetchit for Adobe, who have already gone home with their tail between their legs. Nothing wrong with busting the prosecutor's chops till he figures it is a bad career move.
They are making an unforgivable marketing mistake: for the sake of "partnering" with publishers, they are stunting the size of their own market. All the failed e-books, the tepid reception to Microsoft Reader, and a huge untapped opportunity for Adobe all can be attributed to the fact they did not emphasize free perfectly legal and legitimate content.
Microsoft links (rather shyly, burying the link under all the paid content links) to the University of Virginia Library Etext Center but this source has only 1600 books. That's less than 1% of well-known books, and a tiny fraction of all books that have no copyright coverage. There is a lot of free (speech, beer) text out there but very little is formatted for an acceptable online (or print-on-demand) reading experience. And e-books take up a tiny fraction of the space of MP3s.
If you really want to throw a bomb into the IPR world, get the Library of Congress or whatever your nation's corresponding institution is to provide a high-quality e-text of all materials that are no longer under copyright.
Waiting...
Waiting...
Thought so.
I checked the f--king box and that means no Jon Katz! Ever! Not even when that commie pinhead michael sneaks in on weekends! Got it?
No pinko whining about technology.
No global warming sky is falling rubbish.
No false maudlin techno worry-warting that implies that if we don't have pseuds like Katz fretting about it it will soon destroy the ecology, all public schools, Salon (whoops)... and we'll all be eating red meat and GM fries served by a single large MicroMcDonaldsLockheedSoft conglomerate run by Newt Gingrich.
Sounds like a recipe for a lower court to say: "Yes they monopolized X (some combination of software that was once commercially relevant) when the complaint was filed, but due to issues with tying, innovation, etc., X no longer exists, nor do the plaintifs' products, nor did Jackson ever scope out what X was very well, nor is there any way of putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Therefore: reveal some source, document your APIs, and never darken the court's door again."
Same goes for ignorant eco-extremism. If you don't count the dead malaria victims in adding up what DDT costs the environment, it isn't an honest assesment.
Clearly you are not entirely kidding, rather you are a visionary and futurist, even if you don't yet know it. Dutchwater (See what happens when you legaize pot? You get a burst of innovation... followed by the munchies.) has already taken this idea to the Internet infrastructure business, so CPE cannot be far behind. (Or would that be CPP, for customer premises plumbing?)
The Constitution is addressed to the government, and specifies what the government may not do. The government does not have the same rights as the people, by design. Everything the government is not allowed to regulate is allowed. (Hahaha! Which shows how far we have strayed.)
This is called the "King George Test" and is one of the ways, including reading the Federalist and Anti-federalist papers, of knowing what the people who wrote the Constitution meant. In other words, you do not have to get on any slippery slopes just to deal with new technology.
This is a good first step, but the future hinges on whether GPRS will deliver ISDN-like performance in general purpose Web access, or whether, due to crufty handsets or crufty network engineering, it will be, essentially, WAP+. GPRS has the potential to be pretty good always-on Internet at reasonable prices. It is is built out that way, it will be very successful.
The fabric dopant contained iron particles. Result: the envelope, not the gas, burned. The hydrogen would escape too quickly, and it would not be mixed with air enough to burn efficiently.
Another more useful measure is employment: how many people work for Wal-Mart vs. how many people work for the government of a nation? Again you will find even tiny countries have far bigger government workforces than the largest multinationals.
This is not to defend corporations vs. governments. Both can be really bad. But the measurement being used is as bad as confusing mass with weight. It's just bad science.
Implication: A robber will gain full and total access to every aspect of your life, ruining it in one fell swoop, and police/government forces in many nations will destroy their opponents just as easily. And this will happen, because human's have both good and evil impulses.
This is why the real revolution will be in money. Perfectly secure, perfectly anonymous stored value is the only alternative to this orwellian vision. The implications of that are truly enourmous: nobody knows how much you have, how you got it, who you give it to, or why. Gosh, we might actually have to prune back our laws to the ones that prevent us from killing or maiming each other. Moreover, we will probably have a choice of which authorities back which banking systems we choose. In other words, money may become de-coupled from nations (nations and money are concepts that arose separately, and they can go their separate ways once again), and not in the Euro model. The future will be stranger than most people can imagine.
This complicates competition. DSL CLECs can rent space from the incumbent in the CO to put in their own DLSAMs, but space in the street furniture is too tight to house several competitors' equipment. One answer is to open the data networks in the ATM network that carries the data back to the ISPs' routers, but that was not in the Telecom Act of 1996, which was written before the commercialization of the Internet.
VDSL will have to be deployed this way, since it can only reach 4000 feet. So either DSL competition goes away at that point, or we need a new Telecom Act.
In this context, what chance do relatively fine points, like the meaning of "limited" in the Copyright clause, have of evoking some respect for what was meant when it was written?
Remember, the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee your rights. You have natural rights that need no guarantee. The U.S. Constitution is a document that explicitly addresses the government and tells it what it may not do. Sadly, it seems like 90% of government activity is directed toward getting around these restrictions. When you vote, vote for people who care about the constitutionality of what they are doing! Next, we could get NBA referees to start calling traveling.
You do not have to wait for 3G. GPRS will deliver pretty good always-on general-purpose Internet access for GSM and IS136 (used by AT&T in the U.S.). This will drive replacement of existing handsets, for, probably, at least two subsequent product generations. Mix in EDGE, which doubles GSM and IS136 capacity, and you can wait quite a while before needing 3G. And this type of mobile access has the potential to support mobile gaming quite well, especially if they can figure out how to do bandwidth prioritization such that low-value apps can be priced flat-rate.
All this green stuff is very nice and trendy, but what Joe serf in the third world really needs is clear title to his land so he can mortgage it and buy a tractor. Then he needs simple tax laws and a non-corrupt government that let him keep most of what he makes so his kids can go to school and get better lives. All this angst about relatively clean and efficent first world economies (compare energy consumption to value-add) is a waste of time.
Thank you for the explanation. I was begining to think it might be becuase the media jump on anything 'radioactive' or 'chemical' and start fearmongering, especially if it fits the agenda.
The good news is that it was not given away irrevocably, and we can change the law regarding broadcast licenses and start collecting some of the revenue we are due from this resource. Broadcast licenses should be a limited term lease or a revenue-sharing license.
What makes it evil is that Podesta is neither stupid nor incompetent. He knows the flaws in his analogy, and intentionally blurrs what should be a strong distinction between the physical and the intellectual (or ephemeral) for the purpose of enacting laws which are unprecedented in the way they operate, and not in a good way.