In India, you don't need hard drives to run a gigabyte mail service. You just get a billion peasants and pay them 50 cents a month to remember a single character.
Steve Mann's idea of inverse surveillance (or "sousveillance") is that constantly recording everything around you is your defence against being recorded by autorities. It allows you to defend yourself by presenting your side of the events, using cameras that you control.
Recording everything, everywhere, may produce some odd societal consequences, but like cell phones, we will probably just absorb it into our daily activities.
Disclaimer: I think Steve Mann is a bit of a kook, but he has some interesting ideas.
That quotation is almost a cliche, and I wish it weren't a free ticket to a +5 mod. I guess Benjamin Franklin would have been opposed to the security checkpoint at the airport. Why interfere with the liberty to board a plane without search, when it only buys you a "little" security?
You will notice that "Life" comes before "Liberty in "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness".
I'm not trolling. But I think the software patent issue is more complicated than you think.
Let me start by saying that I think submarine patents are a gross abuse of the system and should be abolished. And I agree that, in general, intellectual property law needs to be reformed. Both these ideas are beyond the scope of this post.
Now, you ask the average open source advocate what s/he thinks about software patents, and s/he will be opposed to them, on the grounds that they stifle innovation. I can buy that to some extent. However, if you ask the same advocate why s/he wants a particular patent invalidated, it's usually to copy a patented algorithm and incorporate it into an open source product. That doesn't seem like innovation to me. It's true that open source would let others learn about the algorithm and improve on it, but there's nothing preventing you from studying a patent -- in fact that's the whole point of the patent process. If you're keen enough, you can take the ideas in the patent and implement a free work-alike (like png, gzip, or the free equivalent to rsa), and innovate away.
Looking deeper, I don't see that it's consistent to be in favor of patents but opposed to software patents. This is because software blurs the line between a device and a description. For example, consider an integrated circuit. This is clearly a device, and hence patentable, right? But it can be described using a language, such as VHDL. In fact the VHDL can be used with a programmable chip to instantly implement a work-alike to the device. Hence, if the chip is patentable, the VHDL should be patentable too.
It's as though you had a description of a tool (a drill, say), which could be instantly implemented on some universal machine. The description is only trivially different from the tool. (This may sound ridiculous, but with 3-d printers and related technology, the day may not be far off when we see such a thing.)
To take a Touretzkian view, this means that either all patents are valid (including software), or none are... though I would prefer a middle view that recognizes software as a distinct hybrid of an "idea" and a "device". Such a legal status would also resolve the question of "is code speech?" with the answer "yes and no". (Can you tell I'm Canadian?).
There was a promotion a few years ago involving an Ontario dairy. A few personal-sized cartons of milk were wired with a speaker and electronics, that were supposed to make a "moo" sound when opened (thereby indicating that you had won a prize).
Somebody apparently got one of these at a food court in downtown Toronto, and left it behind (I guess the prize wasn't that impressive). Somebody else saw this carton of milk with wires and electronics and called the bomb squad. The building was evacuated, much to the amusement of the local news media (once they found out what happened).
This is the same country where a NYT reporter was threatened with deportation after he said (backed by sources) that President Lula da Silva was an alcoholic? link
Re:In case of emergency... break IP rights.
on
Open Source Life?
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· Score: 1
"Intellectual Property" is not real property. It's a set of rights granted by law that can be taken back by another law.
Isn't "property" merely a set of rights granted by law that can also be repealed?
Furthermore, intellectual property is not special in that regular property rights can also be revoked by the government. For example, they take your land to build a highway under eminent domain laws.
Britain has the oldest democracy in the world and it has functioned more or less acceptably for 800 years without a National Identity Register for all of that.
The UK has had national identity cards in its history. They were instituted during World War 2 for security reasons (to prevent Nazi spies from being parachuted in to the country), and were retained after the war. In the early fifties, they were challenged in court, when a grocer refused to present his card on request to a police officer. Although the government prevailed in the challenge, the negative publicity caused the government to abolish them in 1952.
Fine, but under your definition, an ID card is not a license to walk down the street, either. I was simply trying to show that you already need a certain legal status to be legally present in your country of birth (or any country).
I don't see why a single number matters, because there is no reason why it could not all be indexed by your name (and address, if there is more than one person with your name).
So I think the ID card is a red herring. Any government dedicated to abusing civil rights could do everything you're worried about, and the addition of a new "single" identifier makes it only trivially more complex.
I'll bet the government might already do this in its databases... you might have a universal ID number and not know it. The only role of the ID card would be to formalize the process. But if the same database can be indexed by any of your identifiers, what difference does it make, really.
And as for you shopping at the halal shop, I suspect an anti-Islamic government wouldn't make those kind of fine distinctions.
You seem to be falling into the same trap that catches most people who oppose ID cards: the notion that ID cards, by themselves, will lead to an erosion of civil liberties, and even dictatorship (as you suggest). The fact is that we already live in this world.
A large fraction of the adult population carries a driver's license, or some other form of government-issued photo ID. An equally large fraction carries a credit card. Various organizations either keep records, or could keep records, on your telephone activity, your internet activity, your banking, and so forth. In many cases it is illegal to give these people false identifying information. If you use a discount card at the supermarket, they could keep records on everything you buy.
It's not hard to imagine that one could round up Jews (for example) based on credit card activity -- say, whoever has made purchases at the local kosher deli. Such methods would be basically as efficient and as thorough as marking a card with a "J".
So what I'm arguing is two things: firstly, don't think that opposing ID cards will make us safe (because it won't, we are already at risk); and secondly, because we are already at risk, we should be working within the system to protect our privacy and liberty from infringement from the government that we have, rather than worrying about what might happen if the shit hits the fan.
The UK is essentially still a monarchic state, however, and therefore there's no nonsense about "needing a license".
If that is true, then why do they issue one kind of passport for those born in the UK itself, and an "overseas" passport for those born in the colonies?
You are also confusing two different definitions of the word "citizen". Every nation on Earth recognizes a legal status known as citizenship. The idea of "citizen" as a member of society has little to do with the meaning in the sense of immigration. For example, you can have committed heinous crimes and yet the government cannot revoke your citizenship, if you are a citizen by birth.
But I refuse to accept I need a license to walk down the street in the country where I was born.
You already do need a license. It's called "citizenship" and you get it when you are born. You can surrender this license if, for example, you become a citizen of a different country that doesn't recognize dual citizenship. In this case your country of birth is well within its rights to refuse you entry and prevent you from walk down the street in your native country.
The only difference is, before you only had to prove your citizenship when you crossed a border. And given the many forms of ID that the average person carries, and the multitude of ways in which the government (or any private agency) can track your movements, I don't see why this is such a massive attack on privacy, other than its symbolic value.
Much better that we should insist on privacy rights associated with the ID card, rather than resisting it altogether, for reasons which are mostly speculative or implausably apocalyptic.
Actually I am a scientist, and I have to say that there are plenty of good, compassionate people in my field, but also plenty of people with huge egos. Perhaps not so different from any other human endeavour.
As for my appeal to an axiom, I don't think you can have it any other way with God. God is by nature untestable; maybe it's lazy to give up, but it's more productive than banging one's head against the wall trying to prove (either affirmatively or negatively) what is unprovable.
In any case, my comment of laziness was directed at the great-grandparent(?), who seemed ironically keen to argue against what he wished I had said rather than what I had actually said. In that sense the poster is not much different from most other scientists who are armchair critics of religion, arguing against what they think it's about rather than what it is actually about.
OK, I'm sorry I don't have a lot of time to debate this. But I will say the following. What Dawkins writes is typical of the intellectually lazy attacks that science has for religion, because he is dismissing the discipline out of hand. He may as well say that we should ask the gardener or the chef about questions of sociology rather than a faculty member of the sociology department.
For example, let's start with the following axioms: God exists, God created the universe, God loves all humans. I should point out that none of these contradict anything that science knows. From these three simple axioms you can use logic to basically "derive" much of western philosophical thought. In much the same way, only three axioms lead us to the entirety of Euclidean geometry.
Education has the highest correlation coefficient to lack of belief in a personal god. By most surveys, more than 90% of professional scientists don't believe in a personal god.
I can buy the second statement, but not necessarily the first. There are plenty of people with higher education who are not scientists.
In fact in most churches a prerequisite to joining the clergy is an advanced degree. Furthermore, the "professional degree" that you need to be a priest or pastor is a Master of Divinity, which normally requires an undergraduate degree, much like a law degree. There are noshortageoftopuniversities that have excellent theology or divinity departments. Some of the world's most influential and interesting thinkers have been theologians.
As for the "90% of scientists" claim, I think that's a nasty prejudice on the part of scientists, rather than something to be proud of. Think about it: science and religion explore orthogonal aspects of life, neither of which is any less real than the other. Science tells us about what we can observe and test; religion illuminates things that are by nature untestable, like morality, ethics, compassion, and love for our fellow man.
In spite of what some might say, science can't really illuminate our understanding of God very much, because by nature you can't perform an experiment on God. Furthermore God can easily escape whatever assumptions a scientist may make (or, as one Vatican astronomer put it, "God is not a boundary condition"). By the same token our understanding of God can't do much to illuminate science, because when (for example) the bible contradicts a scientific observation, the observation must win. Fortunately most mainline religions acknowledge this, it's just the loudmouth conservative wackos who perpetuate the stereotype that a Christian believes the world is four thousand years old.
In fact my opinion is that the existence of God is an axiom. This fits because axioms are initial assumptions that cannot be tested, and as yet nobody has even developed a convincing test for the existence of God. One either believes that God exists or doesn't exist, and that belief affects the remaining propositions in one's life as any other axiom might. In no way is this incompatible with a career in science. In fact, if one believes (as I do) that God exists, what we know about the universe contributes to a sense of awe concerning the greatness of God. And, as one theologian suggests, this is one important aspect of religion: the "fear" of God puts you and your petty problems into perspective.
Religion really isn't about heaven, or hell, or converting as many atheists as possible, or strapping a bomb to yourself and blowing up a cafe. Religion is about suppressing your own ego and having compassion for those around you, which is something that a lot of scientists could sorely use.
Speak up, sonny. Us 38 year olds can't hear too well, what with your rap music and carousing...
You see, the kids, they listen to the rap music which gives them the brain damage. With their hippin' and the hoppin', and the bippin' and the boppin'.
I'm not a materials scientist, but I would imagine that carbon fibre can burn. A huge advantage of steel is that it may weaken under heat stress, but it will never contribute to a fire, which is one of the gravest threats to a warship in combat.
The British learned this lesson the hard way in the Falklands. In that case the new building material was aluminum, which can actually burn when it gets hot enough. This contributed to the loss of several ships which suffered massive fires after being hit by Argentinian aircraft. As a result, not only in the UK but in navies around the world, new naval ships are built entirely out of steel.
Actually, I agree. It is arguably immoral to continue to pester someone once you have been implicitly asked to stop (by disabling popups). The point of the thread was that the entire profession of marketing is immoral, which is an overly broad position that I can't accept.
You missed the point. I was using an extreme example to convey the idea that marketing is not necessarily immoral. I agree that certain kinds of marketing are immoral, such as high-pressure sales tactics with questionable returns. However, there are immoral possibilities associated with any job.
I simply don't believe that causing minor annoyances should be declared immoral. Immorality is a weighty word that should not be overused.
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Don't worry, you can make any statement you like in Canada so long as it insults Americans. Take her for example.
Mainstream journalists work for businesses. Their only incentive to be truthful is business and reputation. For bloggers, it's mostly just reputation.
From your post, we can conclude that bloggers have half as much incentive to be truthful, which sounds about right.
In India, you don't need hard drives to run a gigabyte mail service. You just get a billion peasants and pay them 50 cents a month to remember a single character.
No, he's Zap Branigan. Kiff, I have made it with a woman! Inform the men.
Steve Mann's idea of inverse surveillance (or "sousveillance") is that constantly recording everything around you is your defence against being recorded by autorities. It allows you to defend yourself by presenting your side of the events, using cameras that you control.
Recording everything, everywhere, may produce some odd societal consequences, but like cell phones, we will probably just absorb it into our daily activities.
Disclaimer: I think Steve Mann is a bit of a kook, but he has some interesting ideas.
That quotation is almost a cliche, and I wish it weren't a free ticket to a +5 mod. I guess Benjamin Franklin would have been opposed to the security checkpoint at the airport. Why interfere with the liberty to board a plane without search, when it only buys you a "little" security?
You will notice that "Life" comes before "Liberty in "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness".
I'm not trolling. But I think the software patent issue is more complicated than you think.
... though I would prefer a middle view that recognizes software as a distinct hybrid of an "idea" and a "device". Such a legal status would also resolve the question of "is code speech?" with the answer "yes and no". (Can you tell I'm Canadian?).
Let me start by saying that I think submarine patents are a gross abuse of the system and should be abolished. And I agree that, in general, intellectual property law needs to be reformed. Both these ideas are beyond the scope of this post.
Now, you ask the average open source advocate what s/he thinks about software patents, and s/he will be opposed to them, on the grounds that they stifle innovation. I can buy that to some extent. However, if you ask the same advocate why s/he wants a particular patent invalidated, it's usually to copy a patented algorithm and incorporate it into an open source product. That doesn't seem like innovation to me. It's true that open source would let others learn about the algorithm and improve on it, but there's nothing preventing you from studying a patent -- in fact that's the whole point of the patent process. If you're keen enough, you can take the ideas in the patent and implement a free work-alike (like png, gzip, or the free equivalent to rsa), and innovate away.
Looking deeper, I don't see that it's consistent to be in favor of patents but opposed to software patents. This is because software blurs the line between a device and a description. For example, consider an integrated circuit. This is clearly a device, and hence patentable, right? But it can be described using a language, such as VHDL. In fact the VHDL can be used with a programmable chip to instantly implement a work-alike to the device. Hence, if the chip is patentable, the VHDL should be patentable too.
It's as though you had a description of a tool (a drill, say), which could be instantly implemented on some universal machine. The description is only trivially different from the tool. (This may sound ridiculous, but with 3-d printers and related technology, the day may not be far off when we see such a thing.)
To take a Touretzkian view, this means that either all patents are valid (including software), or none are
There was a promotion a few years ago involving an Ontario dairy. A few personal-sized cartons of milk were wired with a speaker and electronics, that were supposed to make a "moo" sound when opened (thereby indicating that you had won a prize).
Somebody apparently got one of these at a food court in downtown Toronto, and left it behind (I guess the prize wasn't that impressive). Somebody else saw this carton of milk with wires and electronics and called the bomb squad. The building was evacuated, much to the amusement of the local news media (once they found out what happened).
Free, huh?
This is the same country where a NYT reporter was threatened with deportation after he said (backed by sources) that President Lula da Silva was an alcoholic? link
"Intellectual Property" is not real property. It's a set of rights granted by law that can be taken back by another law.
Isn't "property" merely a set of rights granted by law that can also be repealed?
Furthermore, intellectual property is not special in that regular property rights can also be revoked by the government. For example, they take your land to build a highway under eminent domain laws.
The moral of the story is: never try.
Funny, when someone does propose an anti-spam solution, people here can't poke holes in it fast enough.
So you want to hear these lame proposals so you can scoff at them and feel superior? Or what?
Britain has the oldest democracy in the world and it has functioned more or less acceptably for 800 years without a National Identity Register for all of that.
The UK has had national identity cards in its history. They were instituted during World War 2 for security reasons (to prevent Nazi spies from being parachuted in to the country), and were retained after the war. In the early fifties, they were challenged in court, when a grocer refused to present his card on request to a police officer. Although the government prevailed in the challenge, the negative publicity caused the government to abolish them in 1952.
Fine, but under your definition, an ID card is not a license to walk down the street, either. I was simply trying to show that you already need a certain legal status to be legally present in your country of birth (or any country).
I don't see why a single number matters, because there is no reason why it could not all be indexed by your name (and address, if there is more than one person with your name).
... you might have a universal ID number and not know it. The only role of the ID card would be to formalize the process. But if the same database can be indexed by any of your identifiers, what difference does it make, really.
So I think the ID card is a red herring. Any government dedicated to abusing civil rights could do everything you're worried about, and the addition of a new "single" identifier makes it only trivially more complex.
I'll bet the government might already do this in its databases
And as for you shopping at the halal shop, I suspect an anti-Islamic government wouldn't make those kind of fine distinctions.
You seem to be falling into the same trap that catches most people who oppose ID cards: the notion that ID cards, by themselves, will lead to an erosion of civil liberties, and even dictatorship (as you suggest). The fact is that we already live in this world.
A large fraction of the adult population carries a driver's license, or some other form of government-issued photo ID. An equally large fraction carries a credit card. Various organizations either keep records, or could keep records, on your telephone activity, your internet activity, your banking, and so forth. In many cases it is illegal to give these people false identifying information. If you use a discount card at the supermarket, they could keep records on everything you buy.
It's not hard to imagine that one could round up Jews (for example) based on credit card activity -- say, whoever has made purchases at the local kosher deli. Such methods would be basically as efficient and as thorough as marking a card with a "J".
So what I'm arguing is two things: firstly, don't think that opposing ID cards will make us safe (because it won't, we are already at risk); and secondly, because we are already at risk, we should be working within the system to protect our privacy and liberty from infringement from the government that we have, rather than worrying about what might happen if the shit hits the fan.
The UK is essentially still a monarchic state, however, and therefore there's no nonsense about "needing a license".
If that is true, then why do they issue one kind of passport for those born in the UK itself, and an "overseas" passport for those born in the colonies?
You are also confusing two different definitions of the word "citizen". Every nation on Earth recognizes a legal status known as citizenship. The idea of "citizen" as a member of society has little to do with the meaning in the sense of immigration. For example, you can have committed heinous crimes and yet the government cannot revoke your citizenship, if you are a citizen by birth.
But I refuse to accept I need a license to walk down the street in the country where I was born.
You already do need a license. It's called "citizenship" and you get it when you are born. You can surrender this license if, for example, you become a citizen of a different country that doesn't recognize dual citizenship. In this case your country of birth is well within its rights to refuse you entry and prevent you from walk down the street in your native country.
The only difference is, before you only had to prove your citizenship when you crossed a border. And given the many forms of ID that the average person carries, and the multitude of ways in which the government (or any private agency) can track your movements, I don't see why this is such a massive attack on privacy, other than its symbolic value.
Much better that we should insist on privacy rights associated with the ID card, rather than resisting it altogether, for reasons which are mostly speculative or implausably apocalyptic.
Actually I am a scientist, and I have to say that there are plenty of good, compassionate people in my field, but also plenty of people with huge egos. Perhaps not so different from any other human endeavour.
As for my appeal to an axiom, I don't think you can have it any other way with God. God is by nature untestable; maybe it's lazy to give up, but it's more productive than banging one's head against the wall trying to prove (either affirmatively or negatively) what is unprovable.
In any case, my comment of laziness was directed at the great-grandparent(?), who seemed ironically keen to argue against what he wished I had said rather than what I had actually said. In that sense the poster is not much different from most other scientists who are armchair critics of religion, arguing against what they think it's about rather than what it is actually about.
You're starting out by assuming the thing you mean to prove or support.
The reason it doesn't work is that you are mistaking burden of proof.
Tell you what. How about you go look up "axiom".
Did someone say "intellectually lazy"?
OK, I'm sorry I don't have a lot of time to debate this. But I will say the following. What Dawkins writes is typical of the intellectually lazy attacks that science has for religion, because he is dismissing the discipline out of hand. He may as well say that we should ask the gardener or the chef about questions of sociology rather than a faculty member of the sociology department.
For example, let's start with the following axioms: God exists, God created the universe, God loves all humans. I should point out that none of these contradict anything that science knows. From these three simple axioms you can use logic to basically "derive" much of western philosophical thought. In much the same way, only three axioms lead us to the entirety of Euclidean geometry.
Education has the highest correlation coefficient to lack of belief in a personal god. By most surveys, more than 90% of professional scientists don't believe in a personal god.
I can buy the second statement, but not necessarily the first. There are plenty of people with higher education who are not scientists.
In fact in most churches a prerequisite to joining the clergy is an advanced degree. Furthermore, the "professional degree" that you need to be a priest or pastor is a Master of Divinity, which normally requires an undergraduate degree, much like a law degree. There are no shortage of top universities that have excellent theology or divinity departments. Some of the world's most influential and interesting thinkers have been theologians.
As for the "90% of scientists" claim, I think that's a nasty prejudice on the part of scientists, rather than something to be proud of. Think about it: science and religion explore orthogonal aspects of life, neither of which is any less real than the other. Science tells us about what we can observe and test; religion illuminates things that are by nature untestable, like morality, ethics, compassion, and love for our fellow man.
In spite of what some might say, science can't really illuminate our understanding of God very much, because by nature you can't perform an experiment on God. Furthermore God can easily escape whatever assumptions a scientist may make (or, as one Vatican astronomer put it, "God is not a boundary condition"). By the same token our understanding of God can't do much to illuminate science, because when (for example) the bible contradicts a scientific observation, the observation must win. Fortunately most mainline religions acknowledge this, it's just the loudmouth conservative wackos who perpetuate the stereotype that a Christian believes the world is four thousand years old.
In fact my opinion is that the existence of God is an axiom. This fits because axioms are initial assumptions that cannot be tested, and as yet nobody has even developed a convincing test for the existence of God. One either believes that God exists or doesn't exist, and that belief affects the remaining propositions in one's life as any other axiom might. In no way is this incompatible with a career in science. In fact, if one believes (as I do) that God exists, what we know about the universe contributes to a sense of awe concerning the greatness of God. And, as one theologian suggests, this is one important aspect of religion: the "fear" of God puts you and your petty problems into perspective.
Religion really isn't about heaven, or hell, or converting as many atheists as possible, or strapping a bomb to yourself and blowing up a cafe. Religion is about suppressing your own ego and having compassion for those around you, which is something that a lot of scientists could sorely use.
Speak up, sonny. Us 38 year olds can't hear too well, what with your rap music and carousing...
... is all about.
You see, the kids, they listen to the rap music which gives them the brain damage. With their hippin' and the hoppin', and the bippin' and the boppin'.
So they don't know what the jazz
I'm not a materials scientist, but I would imagine that carbon fibre can burn. A huge advantage of steel is that it may weaken under heat stress, but it will never contribute to a fire, which is one of the gravest threats to a warship in combat.
The British learned this lesson the hard way in the Falklands. In that case the new building material was aluminum, which can actually burn when it gets hot enough. This contributed to the loss of several ships which suffered massive fires after being hit by Argentinian aircraft. As a result, not only in the UK but in navies around the world, new naval ships are built entirely out of steel.
Actually, I agree. It is arguably immoral to continue to pester someone once you have been implicitly asked to stop (by disabling popups). The point of the thread was that the entire profession of marketing is immoral, which is an overly broad position that I can't accept.
You missed the point. I was using an extreme example to convey the idea that marketing is not necessarily immoral. I agree that certain kinds of marketing are immoral, such as high-pressure sales tactics with questionable returns. However, there are immoral possibilities associated with any job.
I simply don't believe that causing minor annoyances should be declared immoral. Immorality is a weighty word that should not be overused.