There is a large group, larger in some countries that others, who simply says "in the absence of credible proof of a god, we will assume there isn't such a creature untill such time the situation should change" ie, there is a closeminded group who thinks "there must be a god" and a closeminded group who think "there can't be a god" and the big group in the middle who thinks "we'll see what develops"
Then there are those of us who concede that the presence or absence of God is something that inherently cannot be described by Science, and who thus realize that we must have faith in something that by definition cannot be measured or quantified.
Most fundamentalists who believe you must either "believe" or "not believe" and who believe that scientists must "not believe" have apparently replaced faith with anger.
I'me a christian, and everytime I have a discussion about things like the Evolution theorem there are people that say "You can never be as open-minded as we are, because the truth is already certain for you, and you will never accept anything that doesn't support that". I partly agree with them, but the forget that as atheists, they do exactly the same. There is always one thing they can rely on, and that's the fact that God doesn't exist, so there has to be a theorem that explains our existence. This shows that nobody is completely objective.
*sigh* I see someone hasn't studied the philosophical underpinnings that make modern science. Okay, let's review.
Science is a special process first outlined in the principles of logical positivism. That is the philosophy of deriving how the universe works around us through the process of observation, deduction and testing through hypothesis. Logical positivism itself is a descendant of logical objectivism, where one derives how the universe works through observation and testing alone--if you can't observe it, you can't talk about it.
My point is that logical positivism is not opposed to theism or a theistic point of view. Logical positivism doesn't say "if you can't deduce it, it doesn't exist"--instead, it says "if you can't observe and deduce it, you can't say anything about it at all with certainty."
Science, as a form of logical positivism, basically inherits this trait. That is, science, being the process of observation, creating hypothesis to explain the observations, and testing those hypothesis to make sure they're true, has nothing to say about the existance or non-existance of God.
That is, Science says "as I cannot test the existance or non-existance of God, I have nothing to say about God." This is not atheism. This is ducking the question, as any good scientist, wearing a science hat, must do.
A second truism of logical positivism is that as searching for the truth is the constant refinement of observation, hypothesis and testing, no single hypothesis can completely explain the universe. In fact, the findings of Godel's incompleteness theorm applies here: no mathematically constructed system can be "complete." So it is an inherent truth of Science that no theory is complete.
However, this does not mean the theories are inherently wrong, or fictions created by a bunch of atheists to deny the existance of God. As I said before, science has nothing to say about God--science has nothing to do with the validity or non-validity of any theological system. (To suggest otherwise is to be an insulting and inconsiderate twit towards the many scientists who are also good Christians, Jews, Muslems and others, but I digress.)
Much of the uncertainty of the theories that scientists work with have more to do with tweaking the fine points when you reach the theoretical limits of what has so far been observed and tested. The article refered to was basically not suggesting that General Relativity was bullshit--actually, it was suggesting that an additional tensor added to the energy equations expressing the warping of space-time by gravity makes the mathematics more elegant. To suggest that we throw out GR because of a debate over the addition or removal of a tensor factor is akin to suggesting I have the IRS lock you up in jail because you forgot to declare finding a $5 bill on the ground, or suggesting you be excommunicated for the $0.90 in taxes that you stole from the government in direct violation of God's commandments and the words of Jesus Christ.
Theism is a wonderful philosophical branch, giving firm roots in both our need to find reason in our lives, as well as finding a firm ethical, moral and spiritual ground on which to stand. And this is totally orthogonal to good science--you cannot put a soul in a mass spectrograph, nor can you weigh morality on a balance beam.
Darwin said in the introduction of a later edition of his "Origin of Species" that it was not his intent to disprove the existance of God. Instead, it was his intention to illustrate the process by which God created us all, and thereby showing us in great detail the hand of God as it moves across creation. It always fascinates me the number of fundamentalist wackos who conveniently forget this fact in their effort to muck-rake, just as it is interesting the number of them who call Catholics "un-Christian" because the Holy See has embrased scientific results of evolution, quantum mechanics and relativity as illustrative of the hand of God in action.
Why is it that everyone thinks that developers don't care about UI issues? Most developers I know, including myself, enjoy coding much more when someone other than themselves finds their code useful for something. Why would I spend all my time pouring my energy into a bit of code that I think is groovy and everyone else thinks sucks?
It's not that developers don't care about UI issues. It's that what a developer thinks is a usable UI differs wildly from what an end user would think as a usable UI.
Personally I'm comfortable with command lines. And honstly if I'm going to use a UI for building code, I wouldn't mind having a "Compile and Debug" menu item which essentially forks make from within the editor, or which forks a batch file that runs a bunch of other programs. Furthermore, I have no problems with dealing with 'ps' and 'ls' and 'fgrep' and other such utilities.
Yet I write software for the Macintosh: command lines for end users is not an option. Expecting my end-users to use a computer the same way I do is sort of like expecting an 18-year old auto driver to fly a 747: yes, it's basically about moving a vehicle from one point to another. But operating a 747 is nothing like driving a car.
Most developers I know don't have the touch of graphics design experience combined with an appreciation of the finer points of UI design to make a really effective user interface without some feedback from a good UI designer, or at least without some pressure from a suit to improve the interface. Most of us have too much experience fiddling with the knobs and dials of the 747, and while it's nice to be able to control which fuel tank the left engine pulls fuel from, most end-users just want to go from point A to point B in some style, and would rather us concentrate on getting the color of the exterior paint the right shade of racing green instead of improving the knob placement of the autopilot controls...
While there are a few science fiction writers who successfully predicted elements of the future, the vast majority of science fiction "visionaries" of the past devised futures that were, er, crap.
Flying cars and bridges which crossed the Atlantic are two of my favorite "visions" of the future which turned out to be bogus. Many other "futures" included inventions which are totally impractical in order to advance the plot line, or disregard the laws of physics in order to do something cool.
I suspect a full survey of all science fiction, rather than focusing on the stuff that was a "hit" in predicting the future, would show that science fiction writers got it right about as often as psychics in predicting the future.
One: the market started increasing before the "net boom" started taking over the Nasdaq. Further, most net companies are invested on Nasdaq, not the Dow Jones. So while you can see the effect of the net boom by looking at the Nasdaq index verses the Dow Jones index, it doesn't explain fully why the Dow Jones has also been increasing in recent years.
I will be the first to argue that there is a speculative bubble going on over the Internet. And I strongly suspect we're going to see a fairly large (20%? 30%?) correction on Nasdaq when that bubble pops.
However, what most people who have been predicting a popping Internet bubble have forgotten is that a second thing is fueling the increase of the Dow Jones: lowered capital gains taxes has made it cheaper to invest in stocks.
When capital gains were high, it was expensive to invest in stocks. Specifically, it was expensive to withdraw your money from a long-term investment and transfer it into another investment, or to withdraw the money and pocket it. In addition to income taxes, you were often hit up with a 30-35% capital gains. That means that if you were seeing a 10% rate of return, that the real rate of return was really 7%--better to put the money in a savings account where the return was maybe a point or two less, but guarenteed by banking insurance laws.
When capital gains dropped, it made it more attractive to put money into stocks: now, the point spread between an insured savings account and a portfolio was much greater, and made the risk of losing your principle worth it--of course assuming a diversified portfolio.
So when long term capital gains were cut in half, more people started putting their money into stocks. This made money on Wall Street "cheap", and increased the average P/E ratio of companies on the Dow Jones. And that drove the average up.
Most people argued for a cut in capital gains because they wanted to see more money invested long term in our economy. What people forgot (and forget even now) is that when you do this, you don't grow the overall economy overnight--instead, you make it easier for companies to get capital. Hense, the increase in the Dow Jones.
This is not "irrational exuberance"; this is a direct result of making it easier for established companies to raise capital in a capital market where money is cheaper to obtain. Expect this to collapse only if congress jacks capital gains up to 35%.
Two: about technology "irrationality": we're already starting to see people figure this one out. A meeting I had with a Venture Capitalist (to help someone I know raise capital for his software development company) told me that he thought that many of the overhyped Internet stocks were incredibly silly, and he refuses to invest in new internet resalers.
His rational was this: before the Internet, mail-order companies were fearcely competitive. The supply chain (that is, the chain of people between the manufacturer and the end consumer) in the United States was one of the most efficient in the world--in part because of a lack of entrenched monopolistic players or government regulations which causes supply chains in countries such as Japan to be enormously inefficient. And before the Internet took off, the supply chain was being made even more efficient--as were manufacturers--by such things as increased delivery efficiencies by players such as UPS or FedEx, as well as better stock management, stock prediction software, and "just in time" manufacturing and delivery of goods.
The only two "inefficiencies" that existed in this supply chain is the 40%-60% markup at the retail outlet (which is required to maintain the store front as well as advertising), and for mail-order catalogs, the 15%-20% markup necessary to pay for advertising costs. And these aren't really inefficiencies: advertising costs are necessary as people who don't know about your product won't find it.
So at best, the only places where you can squeeze cost savings out of the supply chain are in areas where competition amongst the various supply chain venders and other folks are really really good at it.
At best, by computerizing the whole supply chain and fronting it with a web site to reduce advertising costs, the most you can hope to squeeze out of the process is perhaps one or two percent--a margin which makes the margins used by grocery stores seem absolutely outrageous.
And many Internet business plans called for making a living on that 1 or 2%, including paying for extremely technically skilled experts, and paying for all this supply chain infrastructure that they said they were better at performing than people who have been doing it for 50 years.
Already a number of Internet companies are backing off trying to make a living on creating more efficiencies, and emphasizing selection over price. For example, Amazon.com is really emphasizing the whole "best selection on earth" logo--in part because while their prices are good, they're not great: they do not factor in shipping and delivery costs which are traditionally part of the costs factored into buying books from a bookstore.
How this will help the up and comming B2B web sites is beyond me--as these people are in essence saying they can make a living supplying what was originally the job of an MIS department over the web more efficiently, and skim the price differential.
The problem here is much more with the medium than the information. In fact, Roblimo's comment on the front page is inaccurate. Direct mail and print advertisers spend 5-10x more for targeted subjects. You can buy direct mail names for US$5 CPM, but it'll cost you US$80 CPM for a list of mothers who recently gave birth.
I think you missed the point here. While it is true that a mail-order house can often pay up to 16 times more for a targeted mailing list than a shotgun mailing list, the mailing list doesn't represent the bulk of their direct mail advertising dollars. In fact, this represents a rather insignificant cost compared to the color catalog (about $3-$4 in 10K+ quantities), or mailing them (about $.20/$.50 per unit).
Frankly, the discount you can get from the US postal service for presorting the mail by delivery route is often greater than the cost of the mailing list. So even paying $0.08 per name (which is what $80/CPM works out to) is nothing compared to sending out a $3-$4 catalog, and could potentially be saved by properly presorting the mail anyways.
My point is this: if you work in mail order, the cost per person to advertise between a "shotgun" mailing list and a "specialized" mailing list is something like $3.58/person for a specialized mailing list verses $3.51/person for a shotgun mailing list. If the specialized mailing list yields a 10% increase in market effectiveness, then you're talking about a 10% increase with a 2% increase in marketing costs.
The on-line model, however, is quite different. The $/CPM model is the total advertising costs, and not one (rather insignificant component) in the total advertising campaign costs. (Yes, you need a web site to redirect traffic to. But most companies already have a web site, and unlike a color catalog, doesn't cost twice as much if you have twice the viewers. So the incremental costs of additional eyeballs on a corporate web site is insignificant.)
So if you're talking about charging $80/CPM to target an audience by which you have little (if any) evidence that they are well targeted as your statistical profile is incomplete, verses $5/CPM for a shotgun list--you're basically asking advertisers to pay 1500% more for advertising that may or may not yield an additional 10% in results.
If I were an advertiser, I'd happily pay an additional 2% to get an additional 10% yield. I'd call you bloody f-cking insane if you asked me to pay a 1500% premium for the same incremental yield.
Yet that's the direct marketing internet advertisement model in a nutshell. Worse: because the statistics are incomplete, you cannot even show that I'd get a 10% additional yield for my additional 1500% investment!
Magazine interstitials (the full and half pages in the midst of your articles) must always be at least glanced at so you can discern whether or not it is part of the article).
Magazine interstitials also serve the purpose of providing more information when a person goes back to the magazine to find more information about a product he is interested in. That is, advertising in a magazine serves two purposes: first, to encourage someone who hasn't thought about buying something to think about it. Second, to provide more information to someone who is interested in buying something how he may go about it.
For example, I advertise a product in a magazine for a bug tracking program I developed and sell under my own banner. People who search out and buy my product use the ad to know the URL of the web site they should visit to purchase the product. I'd say the vast majority of the people who visit my web site and purchase my product don't immediately see the ad and go "I must have Bug Tracking Software!!!" Instead, they save the magazine on the shelf for a few months, and then when someone says "we're starting a new product, and we need bug tracking software"--they pull the magazine off the shelf, flip through it, find my ad, and visit my site for a demo.
Banner ads don't work because they are not persistant. That is, while I'm paying approximately $15 per 1000 readers of that magazine per month for the advertising, the advertising is persistant--they can view the ad again and again, and go back to that ad months later, even after I stop the campaign. Banner ads, on the other hand, cost just as much (if not more) than a quarter page magazine ad, yet are not persistant, have less are to provide information, and for a product like mine, do not drive traffic effectively.
Television is not persistant--but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a banner ad per view. My brother ran a series of television ads for a local political campaign. One way he ran his 30 second spots was to run them "shotgunned" through the day on several major local television stations: for about $20 per insertion. Per viewer, that worked out to be less than $1/CPM--and on some news programs, a hell of a lot less.
Banner advertisements don't work because (a) you can ignore them more readily than television ads, (b) they cost a hell of a lot more than magazine ads which are persistant. So basically banner ads take the worse of television (lack of persistance), add a terrible feature (making them easy to ignore), and jacks the price up by about 8000% per view, on the theory that their interactivity (that is, the ability to instantly click on the ad and get more information) is somehow worth it--dispite a less than 1% clickthrough rate.
This is why the email firms (yesmail and MyPoints jump to mind) are going for so much. It costs US$60-80 CPM for emails to MyPoints members (volume discounts), a factor of 100x over banners, and I believe they just had price hikes. The fact is, if you belong to those lists, those are ads you must read. This just points to the medium is what makes the difference, not the targeting/data.
I skim my e-mail. Yes, the advertising is interstitial, but the mail is only as persistant as my delete key--it's not like a magazine which I may store for a couple of months in the magazine rack out in my living room, in part because I paid real money for the rag, and in part because I subscribed to the rag for about a month or two worth of "spare time" reading. So at best we have something with the same properties as a television ad: zip for persistance, but still costs a factor of 80 more per view.
Great.
Sometimes I think Silicon Valley is full of people who couldn't balance a checkbook if they used all the fingers on both hands and all the toes on both feet.
Because I think demanding an 8000% increase in advertising costs over a basic advertising model with questionable effectiveness in the first place, in order to get (maybe!) a 10% increase in eyeballs is beyond silly.
That's the thing about this directed marketing stuff: if you gathered all the information in the world about me, how can you know what kind of car I (or my wife) may buy in the future?
And further, if you already know what kind of car I'm going to buy based on my past history, socio-economic status, and other purchasing habits, then why bother to advertise to me in the first place?
Advertising is about influencing the buyer, not about telling the buyer about what he already wants. If I want to purchase a Miata, I don't need a Mazda advertisement to tell me how wonderful a Miata is; I'll probably just go down to a Mazda dealership and test drive the thing. That is, if I want a thing (an MP3 player, say, or a new computer), I'll probably search it out. At that point, all the advertisements in the world won't matter to me.
So targeting me based on my past statistical information is close to worthless. If I'm inclined to do something, I'll go out and kick the tires--advertising won't change my mind. Targeting me with ads which I'm statistically inclined to do--even if it's statistically correct--won't change my mind because I'm already past the "get my interest" stage where advertising generally appeals.
(The example in the article--that of showing you your stock portfolio in an ad to encourage you to trade: it won't work. If I have an account, I'm already past the "get my interest" stage, and I have the account. No amount of reminding me of what I already own is going to encourage me to manage my money differently.)
Further, based on my and my wife's past statistical information, you could probably guess that I'd want a small sports car. (Male, 34, married but no children nor plans to have one, upper-middle class neighborhood, professonal, college graduate.) But you'd probably never guess in a million years that my wife would fall in love with an S-class Jaguar.
She fell in love with the Jags, by the way, because of a rather effective television commercial starring Sting--which, frankly, was a shot-gun ad and not targeted in any way.
Shotgun ads are great because they get you thinking about things you'd never normally think about--such as wanting to check out a large luxury car when you're used to driving inexpensive subcompacts. If Jaguar would have used nothing but targeted ads, they'd overlook us--and probably lose a potental sale.
I'd happily "drop my shorts" so to speak and provide advertisers all the information about me they want, including my tax returns if they're so inclined. It's worthless crap. My wife and I have no kids; we don't plan to have any--but it doesn't preclude me from shopping in Zany Brainy for Legos, Beany Babies, and little toys for my relative's kids. And we have never owned a luxury car ever, and we're not even in the right target age range--but that doesn't preclude us from kicking the tires on a Jag...
No actually. It is the machine, the system, the model which creates tyranny. Do you think business managers get to choose daily whether to be "evil" or "nice" or philanthropic?
Actually, they kinda do get to choose their own actions. It's only a weak person who blaims the system or society or other people on their own actions.
Granted, when you run a company it may be harder to see the consequences of your actions. And as your actions affect more people when you run a multinational, it may be more difficult to act without pissing off (or hurting) someone. However, ultimately the choices you make as a human being are yours--and so are the responsibilities of your actions. That applies to pointy-haired bosses too.
You complain about how companies such as Wal-Mart can overpower small-business ownership as if it is a terrible thing. You know what? Individuals are making money from that Wal-Mart. Just because some ma and pa store can't succeed doesn't mean that the system is unfair. Just because large corporations such as Wal-Mart are successful doesn't mean they don't also have the right to compete in the market and be as successful as possible.
And here is my major bitch about the canonical Wal-Mart example that Katz blows the dust off of and throws up about once a week.
The reason why Wal-Mart succeeds and the small Ma and Pop shops fails is because by having better buying power, Wal-Mart is capable of selling the same goods as those Ma and Pop shops at a cheaper price.
And people want cheaper prices over the service and intimacy of a Ma and Pop shop.
This is, as a matter of fact, the invisible hand of economics that people like Katz is totally oblivious to. Wal-Mart succeeds not because corporate america sprinkes pixie dust into the water supply, turning middle America into a bunch of mindless zomboids from planet Consumer. Wal-Mart succeeds because people want cheaper goods. And Wal-Mart can sell them cheaper goods.
I don't believe anyone here cried when Egghead stores all disappeared into the electronic void of the World Wide Web. Perhaps that's because people here disliked the poor selection offered by the small Egghead retail outlets, and prefered the cheaper prices and better selection offered via mail order and over the Internet?
Well, it's the same damn thing.
Two to one that Katz buys his computers, hardware and software over the 'net, or at the very least shops around for the best price. Just as Katz would be unwilling to pay $80-$90 for a polo style shirt he could buy for $15-$20. Just as Katz would be unwilling to pay $18 for a CD he could buy for $12-$14.
If this is true, then I would call Katz one hypocritical idiot.
Actually, one of the things that annoies the hell out of me about this whole "GNU/Linux" thing is the fact that a substantial core of the Linux operating system utilities are actually licensed under the BSD (and derivitive) licenses.
And unless I've missed something terribly obvious, BSD is not a subset of GNU.
There are a number of important utilities on Linux which are licensed under GNU. And I would even argue that the whole thing wouldn't have been possible without the C compiler that Stallman wrote. But there are also substantial contributions which were made under other open source licenses.
I always find it interesting when people point out the lack of "morals" in our society, usually referring to those who are poor and or do "bad things". It's interesting because this lack extends from the top all the way to the bottom, which most people don't realize. A wealthy businessman can do nearly infinitly more damage with his pen and a contract than can any number of drug dealers with a gun. It's simply much harder to see. A contract is just a piece of paper, it's effects aren't immediatly obvious. A child laying dead in a pool of blood from a driveby shooting is a clear source of anger and disgust.
While you have a good point (that the crooks of our society extend from the poor to the rich in equal proportions), the reason why most of us complain about the poor being crooked is because there are more poor people than rich people--and most of us don't have experience with rich crooks.
Well, my parents design custom homes. And so they (and I) have a lot of experience with rich people.
And frankly your example of a "business man with a pen doing more damage with a poor person with a gun" is a really crappy example. Especially given the fact that rich people are as likely to also use a gun (on partners or spouces), or beat their wives (or husbands) or take hits out or cheat the government or do crack or do all those other sordid things that we normally only associate with the poor.
In fact, I would suggest that it is very prejudiced of us to think that rich people only commit crimes by using a pen.
Furthermore, most of the "damage" done by rich people with their pens, when you really look at it, is not as clear cut as shooting someone with a gun. That is, while we may say it's a "crime" when someone moves a factory to China, is it a crime for those people in China, whose lifestyle previous to that factory was substantially worse? We think a "sweat shop" is bad because we compare the working conditions in that sweat shop to our own living conditions in the United States--but we forget that most of the world, a "sweat shop" is a welcome relief.
Of course it would still be bad if those sweat shop conditions persisted for a generation--but that doesn't appear to be the case, at least in China, where the next generation expects better working conditions than the last.
I'm not saying sweat shops are completely good--though you've (and others) have been feed a line by those in the US who would rather allow the people in China to continue to pull oxen through mosquito-infested rice paddies so we can keep jobs at home (and preserve our own lifestyle). It's just that exporting jobs to third world countries is not as clear-cut as blowing someone's brains out all over.
Trust me: poor people aren't the only ones blowing people's brains out.
If putting people and their rights over corporate profit makes you "far-left", then RMS certainly seems to qualify.
In fact, it sorta does.
Especially when you realize that "corporations" are basically groups of people working together under a legal umbrella. Then, "putting people's rights over corporate profit" really reduces down to a question of pitting the rich (corporate managers) against the poor (non-corporate managers). That is, it reduces down to a question of class warfare, and siding with the poor--a traditionally leftist thing to do.
The only problem I have with RMS's view of this (and why I tend to think of him as an Ivory Tower academic with little real-world experience) is the fact that as an academic, he is able to live in a middle-class environment without having to deal with the "real world" of corporations and putting food on the table except in the abstract.
I don't think either of these are a problem; just one of a number of perfectly good ways of looking at things.
I sincerely hope this is a troll. The dated idea that "women like pretty colourful things" just because of their sex is an idea that I find to be offensive in the extreme.
It was not.
It was, however, a recognition that perhaps men (and the geeks here on/.) don't have any asthetic taste to speak of. (I mean, come on: do we all really want computers that look like they were ripped off the bridge of the Death Star?)
Oh, and by the way: I upgraded my Palm (an old 512K model) to a Visor. In green...:-)
And that's the thing about this article: it's apparent that the FishPC is not an "all-in-one" design; the PC itself resides in the fish-shaped case next to the monitor in the pictures off their web site. (Hense, the name.)
The only thing it has in common with the iMac is the translucent plastics. I suspect that even Apple wouldn't waste the lawyer's time on going after something which clearly cannot be confused with an iMac.
My take, by the way, is that it's reasonable to go after imitators if their products seem similar enough to the iMac that average consumers are confused. Frankly, one of the clones Apple went after (forgot which one) was about to release an all-in-one computer which looked so much like the iMac that the only way you could tell was by booting the thing. (And the silk screened label under the screen, of course.)
But it would take a complete moron to confuse a fish-shaped box up on it's tail with an all-in-one design.
The Handspring Visor now comes in translucent plastics, in five colors. My wife, who once considered my Palm Pilot a useless little geek gadget, saw the review for the Visor, and absolutely had to have one, in translucent orange, of course.
Yes, I know the Visor is basically a Pilot in translucent plastics. But she bought one anyways, solely because it comes in translucent orange. She also wants an iBook, again in translucent orange. And she is disappointed that we bought the original iMac--not because the newer ones are more powerful and feature DVD and the iMovie software package, but because the new ones also come in (you guessed it) translucent orange.
Colored plastics appeal to folks like my wife. And people like my wife potentially have hundreds of millions (collectively) that they are more likely to spend on a translucent orange (or blue, or green, or whatever) computer than they are on one which only comes in drab beage, or worse: looks like it was designed by the same people who designed the Death Star or Darth Vader's helmet.
Or, you could get a Palm or WinCE device. My understanding is that the WinCE's larger color screen would be ideal for this sort of thing. (And I think you can get a PDF reader for WinCE.)
Disclamer: I have never used thier service, only heard about it.
However, FatBrain (www.fatbrain.com) offers what they call "Print On Demand" services which permit authors of software (amongst others) to provide electronic manuals, and give them an option to buy the printed manual from FatBrain. What makes this system interesting is that there is no risk to you: they literally print the book on demand just before shipping. That way, there isn't excess inventory, and you could even set the print costs to just above the cost to print the manual--that way, your company saves on printing costs and inventory costs, and for those (like myself) who want printed manuals, they have a low-cost alternative to printing the whole thing out.
My understanding is that print-on-demand services is also provided by Barnes and Nobel, though I couldn't find any information on their web site.
Programming remains at the heart of all IT work and it is not going to disappear as a profession. Demand for IT specialists is so strong that growth is still forecast for programmers despite effects of outsourcing and automation. Needs for "worker bees" may be diminishing, but interest in the queens and kings of programming is as great as ever. At the top of the field are the gifted practitioners described by Randall E. Stross: "The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order of magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability." 6 At this level, programming is an elite profession.
That is, the report acknowledges what you and I and most others here already know--and that is, there is no shortage of morons out there who want to rake in money by bullsh-tting themselves into a well-paying tech job that is way over their head. However, there is a very big shortage of what you call "competent, well-trained ones", and which the report refers to as the "queens and kings" of programming.
Programming has always been a somewhat "elite" job, where the best programmers can outcode by as much as a factor of 25 or more. (Hell, the book "The Mythical Man Month" aludes to this, and it was written in the IBM OS360 days.) And as more and more complex web sites, applications and embedded operating systems arise out there, the demand for the competent, well trained professionals there will become a "make or break" situation: if you have one on your project, you will ship. If you don't, you will piss several millions of your investor's dollars down the drain real quick.
What strikes me as very interesting is that (1) the success or failure of a project is directly linked to having a gifted programmer on your staff, and that (2) management's failure to recognize the huge disparity between a qualified programmer and an unqualified programmer means that the chances that a qualified programmer works for a particular manager is largely luck.
This is a sad situation, but there you go.
I guess what pisses me off the most is the fact that most managers don't recognize this fact.
Don't that just make the questions harder?
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Laptop Exams?
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At Caltech we had open book take-home exams in some classes--but that didn't mean that things were any easier. In fact, in those classes the questions would be corrispondingly harder.
One math class I had, an abstract algaebra class, our midterms was open-book, take home, and was handed to us four weeks before the test was due. And it had only one question.
Simple? HAH!
"Classify all simple rings of size less than or equal to order 60 up to isomorphism. Show all work."
If someone can creat a GPL'ed patch to a non-GPL'ed source code, why can't someone else creat a, say, artistic license patch that patches the GPL'ed patch? Although GPL virtually prohibits people from adding code that isn't GPL'ed itself, what gives LAME the right to apply GPL to the ISO Dist10 mp3 encoder source code?
If the GPL says it can, and if the other license permits it, there is no reason why a derived work of an opensourced work cannot be "closed" into a GPL lock.
For example, if someone releases a piece of code under the BSD license, there is nothing in the BSD license that prevents you from placing the derived code under a different license, so long as you continue to give Berkeley it's due on all your printed matter. (I think Berkeley has changed their license, but I haven't looked it up lately.) That's what allows people to take BSD licensed code and close it up as a proprietary system: they're free to relicense their derivitive works any way they see fit.
The BSD license (and other, similar licenses) permit you to relicense derivitive works under any system you wish, including the GPL.
The GPL is different, however: it's designed to keep the software open by forcing all derived works to be licensed under the GPL as one of the terms of the license itself. That is, in exchange for the right to review GPLed code, you must GPL your changes as well. That's why you cannot release a patch of GPLed code under BSD.
Some people may whine about how the GPL prevents them from doing this or that. I also wouldn't trust those people to house-sit as they may steal your china and silverware.
It seemed to me that if I created a patch to a piece of software (which can be viewed as an algorithm which modifies some source code in a particular way) then I would have the right to put this patch under whatever license I liked.
What hogwash. A "patch" is not "an algorithm for changing code." A patch is derived work.
Derived work comes from the fact that you had access to the original code, and you changed the original code to do something new, or to fix something that was a problem. The "patch" itself is derived work because you derived how the patch worked from examining and mulling over the existing code--that's what is ment by a "derivitive" work.
Now if you built a tool like diff or patch--that's a new algorithm. But you didn't build diff or patch, did you?
I contacted RMS about this and predictably he claimed that the patch would fall under the GPL -- yet this view implies that software licenses are much more powerful than many people instinctively might think -- and if true, has some frightening implications."
Frightening to who? Someone who wants to steal someone else's hard work and misappropriate it?
As much as I disagree with rms on a number of basic issues, on this it's pretty clear that the intellectual property behind a particular piece of code often represents months or years of work--and is a very valuable thing. The author has the right to see that his code and hard work is used in a way which is consistant with his goals--be it to give back to the community through the GPL or to make money.
To think that you "instinctively" believe that the restrictions of the GPL is counter to how you believe you should be able to rip off someone else's IP (and hard work) is to instinctively believe that there is no intrinsic value in the software you received under the GPL license. That is, it's to instinctively believe the hard work the other programmers put into this product are worthless.
Just because you get the source code does not immediately mean you get to "disrespect" the programmer who, through his good graces, allowed you to see his/her code on his/her terms.
Clearly not -- but where is the line drawn here? Surely this is a Pandora's Box of problems, and it concerns the GPL at a fundamental level."
It's only a "pandora's box" to someone who doesn't have a clear grasp of IP issues, or to someone who doesn't have any respect for the hundreds or thousands of man-hours that went into a piece of code.
If you examine someone else's code and make changes to it, the patches make a derived work. And unless you are a friggen' psychic, the patches themselves were derived by comparing the derived work you built against the original GPL'ed code, so are themselves inherently GPL'ed. (I have never seen a patch that wasn't derived by running 'diff' against the modified (GPLed) and unmodified (GPLed) code.)
A program that automatically makes changes to a program does not have to be GPLed. However, it's results against a GPLed program is GPLed. And unless your program is psychic and able to create diffs without even receiving a GPLed program as input, the patches are again GPLed as the patches were undoubtedly created by running 'diff' (or the equivalent) against the program's input (GPLed) and output (GPLed), and thus is also GPLed as well.
I think the confusion comes when some twit thinks that he has the inherent god-given right to look at anyone's source code. That ain't true. You receive permission to examine the code through the GPL license. And according to the GPL, in exchange for permission, you must keep all derived works to the original work GPLed as well.
Once you understand that, and understand as well that just because you have someone's source code doesn't mean you inherently have the right to disrespect him by doing whatever you feel like to the code (in essense, ripping off the original programmers), then perhaps you'll grasp the fact that it's intellectually dishonest to claim that your patch is not GPLed because you ran 'diff' against your (necessarly GPLed) derived work.
Again, unless you happen to be bloody psychic and are able to create a derived work of the original work without ever examining the original.
The fact that a product of the mind has cost its producer money and labor, and has a value for which others are willing to pay, is not sufficient to ensure to it this legal attribute of property.
What Brandise was refering to here is all categories of items that are considered a "product of the mind." This includes the relm of ideas, as well as the relm of expressions for those ideas. And this is a valid notion: just because someone expresses the idea of an obscessed captain hunting a white whale doesn't therefore make that idea off limits, or make that idea "property"--even if coming up with the idea took time and effort.
However, you will notice that this particular sentence refers to all categories of products of the mind: everything from the idea of "blue flying whales" to the words I'm typing are products of the mind--even though the latter (what I'm typing) is an expression, while the former (the idea of blue flying whales) is not protectable, though arguably the phrase "blue flying whales" may be, depending on the context.
This is entirely compatable with the notion that I brought up--that of the founding father's notion of the hunt for a metaphysical "truth" which they believed can only be achieved with the free flow of ideas.
However, Brandise does not confuse "ideas" from "expression", as witnessed by the latter part of the quote:
The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas -- become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.
What he is refering to is not as you suggest: "'a product of the mind' is strictly equivalent in this passage to 'the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas', which is strictly equivalent to 'these incorporeal productions'".
In this case, "a product of the mind" is a superset of "the nobelest of human productions...". To suggest otherwise is to suggest that Brandise is suggesting that all products of the mind are "the nobelest of human productions"--including the idea floating in my mind about the cold-blooded murder of my boss by disemboweling him over his BMW. I'm sure that both you and he would agree that this idea is not exactly "nobel" in any sense of the word--except perhaps by others who work for my boss.:-)
All joking aside, not only are ideas products of the mind, but so are expressions--such as the words I'm writing, or an order of notes into a musical composition, or the specific statements I use to implement bubble sort on a computer. Each of these expressions are products of the mind as well--used to embody ideas, but are not the ideas themselves.
At any rate, the interpretation that you suggest, that these are being used in the aformentioned phrase as "equivalent" flies against any reasonable interpretation of the 8th clause of the Constitution which permits Congress to define certain intellectual property rights in order to promote the useful arts and sciences. Further, to suggest that these are equivalent would mean that Justice Brantise is both simultaneously suggesting that the products of human mind be both "free as the air to common use" and yet to also have "the attribute of property... continued."
This is absurd.
Upon these incorporeal productions the attribute of property is continued after such communication only in certain classes of cases where public policy has seemed to demand it.
The "public policy" that Justice Brandise is refering to is the Article I, section 8, clause 8. That public policy is to grant the attribute of property onto certain expressions in order to permit the sale of those expressions. Otherwise, there would be no need to pay authors, as the moment they write what they do, those expressions become "free as the air"--an absurd notion which flies in the face of 200 years of legal thought on the matter.
Besides, I cannot decide if you are for or against the notion of expression as protectable, or if you believe Justice Brandice is for or against the idea.
Equally it is a mistake to assume that every use by John Katz of the word "idea" must be held to this technical, infringement-analysis sense.
Well, of course, but only because Katz can't seem to make up his mind on the matter. That is, sometimes he uses the word "idea" to refer to abstract notions conveyed by expressions (as he does when he quotes Thomas Jefferson), and sometimes he uses the word "idea" to refer to specific expressions (as he does when he talks about downloading MP3s).
He is, or should be, saying that creating ever more complex and draconian laws is not be the correct approach to these challenges.
"Should be?" Doesn't that mean that Katz ain't saying what you think he is?
Look, I do agree with you that there are better solutions to dealing with the protection of expression in an era where the duplication and transmission of expressions is essentially zero than the DMCA. DMCA is absurd as it essentially strangles the free flow of ideas in one area (R&D in interchangability and data transmission) in order to keep the cost of data transmission in other areas (movies, music, television) artifically high. These sorts of artificial barriers are at best a stop-gap measure, and at worse totally strangle the very notion of the free market of ideas that our founding fathers strove to set up in the first place.
But that's not what Katz appears to be saying, as far as I can figure. He seems to be discussing essentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater when he starts "Unenforceable laws like traditional copyright restrictions don't promote morality or lawfulness; they undermine them." and goes on to "Still, it seems increasingly clear that conventional notions about ideas and ownership are doomed. The issue is no longer whether 'piracy' is right or wrong, but how long our backwards-looking corporations and politicians will persist in believing they can stop it."
That is, Katz is essentially saying about copyright law in the era of the Internet what many pro-drug advocates are saying in an era of increased intercity gang violence: legalize it now because we're wasting our time and resources trying to keep it illegal.
But I think he made his point reasonably well without introducing these points.
Yes, he did:
Even as more and more people ask the question "Who Owns [Expressions]?," the answer becomes obvious: We all do.
I've deliberately substituted "Expressions" for "Ideas", as Katz has hopelessly muddled the two throughout his essay, as is clear by the quotes (and the article surrounding it) that I've given above.
Of course Katz didn't discuss copyright duration. He's advocating that the duration is meaningless, and should be set to 0.
Sorry, no; your interpretation of Justice Brandeis's words is incorrect.
The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas -- become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.
The clause in the US Constitution that empowers congress to establish copyright and patent law is Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The philosophers of the time of the Constitution believed in the notion that the highest purpose of intelligent people was the search for a metaphysical "Truth". They believed that as we debated and discussed such subjects as philosophy, law, metaphysics, mathematics and all that high-falutin' stuff, we would inevitably move towards a higher "Truth", and hopefully even gain insight into the face of God.
Little did these folks know we'd go off and invent B-movies and sitcoms...;-)
Anyways, our founding fathers realized that producing things like books and newspapers and other "expressions of ideas" would cost time, effort and money. And they knew they wanted to promote the useful sciences by protecting people's ability to make money producing expressions. Thus, they defined a dichotomy between "expression" and "idea", and granted congress the power to protect "expression" for a limited time so that an author can make money writing books and plays and newspaper articles.
Justice Brandeis's words must be interpreted within this framework. That is, he was expressing a general idea, outlined in the Federalist Papers and other sources, that the purpose of the First Amendment and of Clause 8 was to promote the free exchange of ideas, yet protect author's expressions so that an author can make a living. The balancing point is at what point can we maximize people's ability to express their ideas. And that necessarly means we must guarentee that an author (or writer or musician or computer programmer) is able to make some sort of a living--otherwise, expressions can only be produced by the independantly wealthy and by amateurs on their spare time.
His specific point is that as a point of law, our founding fathers have required that "ideas" themselves must be free. He did not suggest that expressions of those ideas can be free in any way. That is, he was very clear, as is the law on the subject and as are all previous ruling by the courts and all political philosophers, that there is a very clear line between an abstract idea, and the expression used to convey that idea. That is, just because someone wrote Moby Dick doesn't preclude me from writing an essay about white wales and obscessed ship captains. Nor does it preclude me from talking about Moby Dick.
Just because you cannot see the difference between the two doesn't mean Justice Brandise made the same mistake.
You should always be wary of arguments that tell you that what you want to do is not only OK, but moral. Such arguments can be created for nearly everything, and have been used by any number of groups to justify everything from true moral good to atrocities that those committing them thought were not only OK to do, but morally obligated for them to do.
What also troubles me about Katz's essay is that he starts with the presumption that because kids are doing it, it must be right, and concludes that kids ought to be able to do it because they are.
The kids in the poorer neighborhoods of Los Angeles form gangs and sell drugs; to them it's also as natural as downloading MP3s is to college students. If we apply Katzian reasoning to this situation, the problem is not gangs, but the police who try to stop gang warfare and the sales of drugs. After all, being a gang banger and blowing away a crip is "natural"... was that the sound of a bullshit detector going off?
Look, I have no problems with limiting the duration of copyright on the theory that ideas embedded in expression ought to be shared freely after the copyright owner is able to get it's fair reward for creating that expression; this was the original idea behind copyright limits and patent limits. However, to simply suggest that it's harder to codify reasonable limits on the distribution of digitial materials now that the internet has made the cost of distribution essentially free, so we should scrap any pretence at copyright or patent--that's like suggesting we should scrap anti-gang efforts by the police because of LAPD corruption.
* I'm in no way suggesting pirating MP3s is as violent or deadly as gang warfare, nor do I mean to belittle gang warfare by suggesting it's as painless as sharing MP3s. However, they are both illegal activities, hurt third parties, and hurt third parties in ways which both the students sharing MP3s and the gangs shooting at each other refuse to acknowledge. And both are subjects of essayists like Katz who suggest that as we are unable to control their activities, we should legalize them instead.
Considering the likelihood that climate change will accelerate once begun, it should be clear that the prudent choice would be to moderate our contribution to warming factors and to curb global population growth as fast as ethically permissable (without resorting to warfare and the artificial famines it creates).
Here is the problem in a nutshell, at least from my perspective.
While it is true that mankind needs to curb it's waste output, and to manage it's output and recycle and do all those other things that would reduce how much crap we put out there, I believe we should do these things for a simple reason. You don't piss upstream of your drinking water, and you don't swim in a pool you just dumped a turd into.
However, the debate is not about cleaning up the local environment. That just goes without saying. The debate is about how much do we need to restructure the very fabric of our technological existance in order to midigate a global crisis which may or may not be happening, and may or may not be our fault.
There are those on the radical left who advocate everything short of genocide in order to reduce the planet's population to a few million people, and who advocate reducing or destroying altogether our reliance on anything more technologically sophisticated than a bow and arrow, because our high technology society is destroying "Gaia". And there are those on the radical right who would completely destroy any efforts on our part to clean up the local environment (and allow corporations to shit in our swimming hole, so to speak) because they think the whole "Gaia" thing is bull.
I think it's prudent to be right in the middle. And rather than worrying about if we're destroying the ozone layer or causing global warming or cooling or depleting the oil or creating killer nanobots or whatever disaster looms 10 to 20 years out, we should instead worry about real problems. Like if the local dump is leaking into our drinking water.
These global disasters do us a great disservice: they distract us from the real problems of dirty drinking water and local polution turning the air over Los Angeles brown, by concentrating us on problems which even today, most respectable scientists think may not be of our own doing anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
Then there are those of us who concede that the presence or absence of God is something that inherently cannot be described by Science, and who thus realize that we must have faith in something that by definition cannot be measured or quantified.
Most fundamentalists who believe you must either "believe" or "not believe" and who believe that scientists must "not believe" have apparently replaced faith with anger.
It's rather sad, really.
*sigh* I see someone hasn't studied the philosophical underpinnings that make modern science. Okay, let's review.
Science is a special process first outlined in the principles of logical positivism. That is the philosophy of deriving how the universe works around us through the process of observation, deduction and testing through hypothesis. Logical positivism itself is a descendant of logical objectivism, where one derives how the universe works through observation and testing alone--if you can't observe it, you can't talk about it.
My point is that logical positivism is not opposed to theism or a theistic point of view. Logical positivism doesn't say "if you can't deduce it, it doesn't exist"--instead, it says "if you can't observe and deduce it, you can't say anything about it at all with certainty."
Science, as a form of logical positivism, basically inherits this trait. That is, science, being the process of observation, creating hypothesis to explain the observations, and testing those hypothesis to make sure they're true, has nothing to say about the existance or non-existance of God.
That is, Science says "as I cannot test the existance or non-existance of God, I have nothing to say about God." This is not atheism. This is ducking the question, as any good scientist, wearing a science hat, must do.
A second truism of logical positivism is that as searching for the truth is the constant refinement of observation, hypothesis and testing, no single hypothesis can completely explain the universe. In fact, the findings of Godel's incompleteness theorm applies here: no mathematically constructed system can be "complete." So it is an inherent truth of Science that no theory is complete.
However, this does not mean the theories are inherently wrong, or fictions created by a bunch of atheists to deny the existance of God. As I said before, science has nothing to say about God--science has nothing to do with the validity or non-validity of any theological system. (To suggest otherwise is to be an insulting and inconsiderate twit towards the many scientists who are also good Christians, Jews, Muslems and others, but I digress.)
Much of the uncertainty of the theories that scientists work with have more to do with tweaking the fine points when you reach the theoretical limits of what has so far been observed and tested. The article refered to was basically not suggesting that General Relativity was bullshit--actually, it was suggesting that an additional tensor added to the energy equations expressing the warping of space-time by gravity makes the mathematics more elegant. To suggest that we throw out GR because of a debate over the addition or removal of a tensor factor is akin to suggesting I have the IRS lock you up in jail because you forgot to declare finding a $5 bill on the ground, or suggesting you be excommunicated for the $0.90 in taxes that you stole from the government in direct violation of God's commandments and the words of Jesus Christ.
Theism is a wonderful philosophical branch, giving firm roots in both our need to find reason in our lives, as well as finding a firm ethical, moral and spiritual ground on which to stand. And this is totally orthogonal to good science--you cannot put a soul in a mass spectrograph, nor can you weigh morality on a balance beam.
Darwin said in the introduction of a later edition of his "Origin of Species" that it was not his intent to disprove the existance of God. Instead, it was his intention to illustrate the process by which God created us all, and thereby showing us in great detail the hand of God as it moves across creation. It always fascinates me the number of fundamentalist wackos who conveniently forget this fact in their effort to muck-rake, just as it is interesting the number of them who call Catholics "un-Christian" because the Holy See has embrased scientific results of evolution, quantum mechanics and relativity as illustrative of the hand of God in action.
It's not that developers don't care about UI issues. It's that what a developer thinks is a usable UI differs wildly from what an end user would think as a usable UI.
Personally I'm comfortable with command lines. And honstly if I'm going to use a UI for building code, I wouldn't mind having a "Compile and Debug" menu item which essentially forks make from within the editor, or which forks a batch file that runs a bunch of other programs. Furthermore, I have no problems with dealing with 'ps' and 'ls' and 'fgrep' and other such utilities.
Yet I write software for the Macintosh: command lines for end users is not an option. Expecting my end-users to use a computer the same way I do is sort of like expecting an 18-year old auto driver to fly a 747: yes, it's basically about moving a vehicle from one point to another. But operating a 747 is nothing like driving a car.
Most developers I know don't have the touch of graphics design experience combined with an appreciation of the finer points of UI design to make a really effective user interface without some feedback from a good UI designer, or at least without some pressure from a suit to improve the interface. Most of us have too much experience fiddling with the knobs and dials of the 747, and while it's nice to be able to control which fuel tank the left engine pulls fuel from, most end-users just want to go from point A to point B in some style, and would rather us concentrate on getting the color of the exterior paint the right shade of racing green instead of improving the knob placement of the autopilot controls...
While there are a few science fiction writers who successfully predicted elements of the future, the vast majority of science fiction "visionaries" of the past devised futures that were, er, crap.
Flying cars and bridges which crossed the Atlantic are two of my favorite "visions" of the future which turned out to be bogus. Many other "futures" included inventions which are totally impractical in order to advance the plot line, or disregard the laws of physics in order to do something cool.
I suspect a full survey of all science fiction, rather than focusing on the stuff that was a "hit" in predicting the future, would show that science fiction writers got it right about as often as psychics in predicting the future.
One: the market started increasing before the "net boom" started taking over the Nasdaq. Further, most net companies are invested on Nasdaq, not the Dow Jones. So while you can see the effect of the net boom by looking at the Nasdaq index verses the Dow Jones index, it doesn't explain fully why the Dow Jones has also been increasing in recent years.
I will be the first to argue that there is a speculative bubble going on over the Internet. And I strongly suspect we're going to see a fairly large (20%? 30%?) correction on Nasdaq when that bubble pops.
However, what most people who have been predicting a popping Internet bubble have forgotten is that a second thing is fueling the increase of the Dow Jones: lowered capital gains taxes has made it cheaper to invest in stocks.
When capital gains were high, it was expensive to invest in stocks. Specifically, it was expensive to withdraw your money from a long-term investment and transfer it into another investment, or to withdraw the money and pocket it. In addition to income taxes, you were often hit up with a 30-35% capital gains. That means that if you were seeing a 10% rate of return, that the real rate of return was really 7%--better to put the money in a savings account where the return was maybe a point or two less, but guarenteed by banking insurance laws.
When capital gains dropped, it made it more attractive to put money into stocks: now, the point spread between an insured savings account and a portfolio was much greater, and made the risk of losing your principle worth it--of course assuming a diversified portfolio.
So when long term capital gains were cut in half, more people started putting their money into stocks. This made money on Wall Street "cheap", and increased the average P/E ratio of companies on the Dow Jones. And that drove the average up.
Most people argued for a cut in capital gains because they wanted to see more money invested long term in our economy. What people forgot (and forget even now) is that when you do this, you don't grow the overall economy overnight--instead, you make it easier for companies to get capital. Hense, the increase in the Dow Jones.
This is not "irrational exuberance"; this is a direct result of making it easier for established companies to raise capital in a capital market where money is cheaper to obtain. Expect this to collapse only if congress jacks capital gains up to 35%.
Two: about technology "irrationality": we're already starting to see people figure this one out. A meeting I had with a Venture Capitalist (to help someone I know raise capital for his software development company) told me that he thought that many of the overhyped Internet stocks were incredibly silly, and he refuses to invest in new internet resalers.
His rational was this: before the Internet, mail-order companies were fearcely competitive. The supply chain (that is, the chain of people between the manufacturer and the end consumer) in the United States was one of the most efficient in the world--in part because of a lack of entrenched monopolistic players or government regulations which causes supply chains in countries such as Japan to be enormously inefficient. And before the Internet took off, the supply chain was being made even more efficient--as were manufacturers--by such things as increased delivery efficiencies by players such as UPS or FedEx, as well as better stock management, stock prediction software, and "just in time" manufacturing and delivery of goods.
The only two "inefficiencies" that existed in this supply chain is the 40%-60% markup at the retail outlet (which is required to maintain the store front as well as advertising), and for mail-order catalogs, the 15%-20% markup necessary to pay for advertising costs. And these aren't really inefficiencies: advertising costs are necessary as people who don't know about your product won't find it.
So at best, the only places where you can squeeze cost savings out of the supply chain are in areas where competition amongst the various supply chain venders and other folks are really really good at it.
At best, by computerizing the whole supply chain and fronting it with a web site to reduce advertising costs, the most you can hope to squeeze out of the process is perhaps one or two percent--a margin which makes the margins used by grocery stores seem absolutely outrageous.
And many Internet business plans called for making a living on that 1 or 2%, including paying for extremely technically skilled experts, and paying for all this supply chain infrastructure that they said they were better at performing than people who have been doing it for 50 years.
Already a number of Internet companies are backing off trying to make a living on creating more efficiencies, and emphasizing selection over price. For example, Amazon.com is really emphasizing the whole "best selection on earth" logo--in part because while their prices are good, they're not great: they do not factor in shipping and delivery costs which are traditionally part of the costs factored into buying books from a bookstore.
How this will help the up and comming B2B web sites is beyond me--as these people are in essence saying they can make a living supplying what was originally the job of an MIS department over the web more efficiently, and skim the price differential.
Yeah, right.
This is what I'd call "irrational exhuberance."
The problem here is much more with the medium than the information. In fact, Roblimo's comment on the front page is inaccurate. Direct mail and print advertisers spend 5-10x more for targeted subjects. You can buy direct mail names for US$5 CPM, but it'll cost you US$80 CPM for a list of mothers who recently gave birth.
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I think you missed the point here. While it is true that a mail-order house can often pay up to 16 times more for a targeted mailing list than a shotgun mailing list, the mailing list doesn't represent the bulk of their direct mail advertising dollars. In fact, this represents a rather insignificant cost compared to the color catalog (about $3-$4 in 10K+ quantities), or mailing them (about $.20/$.50 per unit).
Frankly, the discount you can get from the US postal service for presorting the mail by delivery route is often greater than the cost of the mailing list. So even paying $0.08 per name (which is what $80/CPM works out to) is nothing compared to sending out a $3-$4 catalog, and could potentially be saved by properly presorting the mail anyways.
My point is this: if you work in mail order, the cost per person to advertise between a "shotgun" mailing list and a "specialized" mailing list is something like $3.58/person for a specialized mailing list verses $3.51/person for a shotgun mailing list. If the specialized mailing list yields a 10% increase in market effectiveness, then you're talking about a 10% increase with a 2% increase in marketing costs.
The on-line model, however, is quite different. The $/CPM model is the total advertising costs, and not one (rather insignificant component) in the total advertising campaign costs. (Yes, you need a web site to redirect traffic to. But most companies already have a web site, and unlike a color catalog, doesn't cost twice as much if you have twice the viewers. So the incremental costs of additional eyeballs on a corporate web site is insignificant.)
So if you're talking about charging $80/CPM to target an audience by which you have little (if any) evidence that they are well targeted as your statistical profile is incomplete, verses $5/CPM for a shotgun list--you're basically asking advertisers to pay 1500% more for advertising that may or may not yield an additional 10% in results.
If I were an advertiser, I'd happily pay an additional 2% to get an additional 10% yield. I'd call you bloody f-cking insane if you asked me to pay a 1500% premium for the same incremental yield.
Yet that's the direct marketing internet advertisement model in a nutshell. Worse: because the statistics are incomplete, you cannot even show that I'd get a 10% additional yield for my additional 1500% investment!
Magazine interstitials (the full and half pages in the midst of your articles) must always be at least glanced at so you can discern whether or not it is part of the article)
Magazine interstitials also serve the purpose of providing more information when a person goes back to the magazine to find more information about a product he is interested in. That is, advertising in a magazine serves two purposes: first, to encourage someone who hasn't thought about buying something to think about it. Second, to provide more information to someone who is interested in buying something how he may go about it.
For example, I advertise a product in a magazine for a bug tracking program I developed and sell under my own banner. People who search out and buy my product use the ad to know the URL of the web site they should visit to purchase the product. I'd say the vast majority of the people who visit my web site and purchase my product don't immediately see the ad and go "I must have Bug Tracking Software!!!" Instead, they save the magazine on the shelf for a few months, and then when someone says "we're starting a new product, and we need bug tracking software"--they pull the magazine off the shelf, flip through it, find my ad, and visit my site for a demo.
Banner ads don't work because they are not persistant. That is, while I'm paying approximately $15 per 1000 readers of that magazine per month for the advertising, the advertising is persistant--they can view the ad again and again, and go back to that ad months later, even after I stop the campaign. Banner ads, on the other hand, cost just as much (if not more) than a quarter page magazine ad, yet are not persistant, have less are to provide information, and for a product like mine, do not drive traffic effectively.
Television is not persistant--but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a banner ad per view. My brother ran a series of television ads for a local political campaign. One way he ran his 30 second spots was to run them "shotgunned" through the day on several major local television stations: for about $20 per insertion. Per viewer, that worked out to be less than $1/CPM--and on some news programs, a hell of a lot less.
Banner advertisements don't work because (a) you can ignore them more readily than television ads, (b) they cost a hell of a lot more than magazine ads which are persistant. So basically banner ads take the worse of television (lack of persistance), add a terrible feature (making them easy to ignore), and jacks the price up by about 8000% per view, on the theory that their interactivity (that is, the ability to instantly click on the ad and get more information) is somehow worth it--dispite a less than 1% clickthrough rate.
This is why the email firms (yesmail and MyPoints jump to mind) are going for so much. It costs US$60-80 CPM for emails to MyPoints members (volume discounts), a factor of 100x over banners, and I believe they just had price hikes. The fact is, if you belong to those lists, those are ads you must read. This just points to the medium is what makes the difference, not the targeting/data.
I skim my e-mail. Yes, the advertising is interstitial, but the mail is only as persistant as my delete key--it's not like a magazine which I may store for a couple of months in the magazine rack out in my living room, in part because I paid real money for the rag, and in part because I subscribed to the rag for about a month or two worth of "spare time" reading. So at best we have something with the same properties as a television ad: zip for persistance, but still costs a factor of 80 more per view.
Great.
Sometimes I think Silicon Valley is full of people who couldn't balance a checkbook if they used all the fingers on both hands and all the toes on both feet.
Because I think demanding an 8000% increase in advertising costs over a basic advertising model with questionable effectiveness in the first place, in order to get (maybe!) a 10% increase in eyeballs is beyond silly.
That's the thing about this directed marketing stuff: if you gathered all the information in the world about me, how can you know what kind of car I (or my wife) may buy in the future?
And further, if you already know what kind of car I'm going to buy based on my past history, socio-economic status, and other purchasing habits, then why bother to advertise to me in the first place?
Advertising is about influencing the buyer, not about telling the buyer about what he already wants. If I want to purchase a Miata, I don't need a Mazda advertisement to tell me how wonderful a Miata is; I'll probably just go down to a Mazda dealership and test drive the thing. That is, if I want a thing (an MP3 player, say, or a new computer), I'll probably search it out. At that point, all the advertisements in the world won't matter to me.
So targeting me based on my past statistical information is close to worthless. If I'm inclined to do something, I'll go out and kick the tires--advertising won't change my mind. Targeting me with ads which I'm statistically inclined to do--even if it's statistically correct--won't change my mind because I'm already past the "get my interest" stage where advertising generally appeals.
(The example in the article--that of showing you your stock portfolio in an ad to encourage you to trade: it won't work. If I have an account, I'm already past the "get my interest" stage, and I have the account. No amount of reminding me of what I already own is going to encourage me to manage my money differently.)
Further, based on my and my wife's past statistical information, you could probably guess that I'd want a small sports car. (Male, 34, married but no children nor plans to have one, upper-middle class neighborhood, professonal, college graduate.) But you'd probably never guess in a million years that my wife would fall in love with an S-class Jaguar.
She fell in love with the Jags, by the way, because of a rather effective television commercial starring Sting--which, frankly, was a shot-gun ad and not targeted in any way.
Shotgun ads are great because they get you thinking about things you'd never normally think about--such as wanting to check out a large luxury car when you're used to driving inexpensive subcompacts. If Jaguar would have used nothing but targeted ads, they'd overlook us--and probably lose a potental sale.
I'd happily "drop my shorts" so to speak and provide advertisers all the information about me they want, including my tax returns if they're so inclined. It's worthless crap. My wife and I have no kids; we don't plan to have any--but it doesn't preclude me from shopping in Zany Brainy for Legos, Beany Babies, and little toys for my relative's kids. And we have never owned a luxury car ever, and we're not even in the right target age range--but that doesn't preclude us from kicking the tires on a Jag...
No actually. It is the machine, the system, the model which creates tyranny. Do you think business managers get to choose daily whether to be "evil" or "nice" or philanthropic?
Actually, they kinda do get to choose their own actions. It's only a weak person who blaims the system or society or other people on their own actions.
Granted, when you run a company it may be harder to see the consequences of your actions. And as your actions affect more people when you run a multinational, it may be more difficult to act without pissing off (or hurting) someone. However, ultimately the choices you make as a human being are yours--and so are the responsibilities of your actions. That applies to pointy-haired bosses too.
You complain about how companies such as Wal-Mart can overpower small-business ownership as if it is a terrible thing. You know what? Individuals are making money from that Wal-Mart. Just because some ma and pa store can't succeed doesn't mean that the system is unfair. Just because large corporations such as Wal-Mart are successful doesn't mean they don't also have the right to compete in the market and be as successful as possible.
And here is my major bitch about the canonical Wal-Mart example that Katz blows the dust off of and throws up about once a week.
The reason why Wal-Mart succeeds and the small Ma and Pop shops fails is because by having better buying power, Wal-Mart is capable of selling the same goods as those Ma and Pop shops at a cheaper price.
And people want cheaper prices over the service and intimacy of a Ma and Pop shop.
This is, as a matter of fact, the invisible hand of economics that people like Katz is totally oblivious to. Wal-Mart succeeds not because corporate america sprinkes pixie dust into the water supply, turning middle America into a bunch of mindless zomboids from planet Consumer. Wal-Mart succeeds because people want cheaper goods. And Wal-Mart can sell them cheaper goods.
I don't believe anyone here cried when Egghead stores all disappeared into the electronic void of the World Wide Web. Perhaps that's because people here disliked the poor selection offered by the small Egghead retail outlets, and prefered the cheaper prices and better selection offered via mail order and over the Internet?
Well, it's the same damn thing.
Two to one that Katz buys his computers, hardware and software over the 'net, or at the very least shops around for the best price. Just as Katz would be unwilling to pay $80-$90 for a polo style shirt he could buy for $15-$20. Just as Katz would be unwilling to pay $18 for a CD he could buy for $12-$14.
If this is true, then I would call Katz one hypocritical idiot.
Actually, one of the things that annoies the hell out of me about this whole "GNU/Linux" thing is the fact that a substantial core of the Linux operating system utilities are actually licensed under the BSD (and derivitive) licenses.
And unless I've missed something terribly obvious, BSD is not a subset of GNU.
There are a number of important utilities on Linux which are licensed under GNU. And I would even argue that the whole thing wouldn't have been possible without the C compiler that Stallman wrote. But there are also substantial contributions which were made under other open source licenses.
I always find it interesting when people point out the lack of "morals" in our society, usually referring to those who are poor and or do "bad things". It's interesting because this lack extends from the top all the way to the bottom, which most people don't realize. A wealthy businessman can do nearly infinitly more damage with his pen and a contract than can any number of drug dealers with a gun. It's simply much harder to see. A contract is just a piece of paper, it's effects aren't immediatly obvious. A child laying dead in a pool of blood from a driveby shooting is a clear source of anger and disgust.
While you have a good point (that the crooks of our society extend from the poor to the rich in equal proportions), the reason why most of us complain about the poor being crooked is because there are more poor people than rich people--and most of us don't have experience with rich crooks.
Well, my parents design custom homes. And so they (and I) have a lot of experience with rich people.
And frankly your example of a "business man with a pen doing more damage with a poor person with a gun" is a really crappy example. Especially given the fact that rich people are as likely to also use a gun (on partners or spouces), or beat their wives (or husbands) or take hits out or cheat the government or do crack or do all those other sordid things that we normally only associate with the poor.
In fact, I would suggest that it is very prejudiced of us to think that rich people only commit crimes by using a pen.
Furthermore, most of the "damage" done by rich people with their pens, when you really look at it, is not as clear cut as shooting someone with a gun. That is, while we may say it's a "crime" when someone moves a factory to China, is it a crime for those people in China, whose lifestyle previous to that factory was substantially worse? We think a "sweat shop" is bad because we compare the working conditions in that sweat shop to our own living conditions in the United States--but we forget that most of the world, a "sweat shop" is a welcome relief.
Of course it would still be bad if those sweat shop conditions persisted for a generation--but that doesn't appear to be the case, at least in China, where the next generation expects better working conditions than the last.
I'm not saying sweat shops are completely good--though you've (and others) have been feed a line by those in the US who would rather allow the people in China to continue to pull oxen through mosquito-infested rice paddies so we can keep jobs at home (and preserve our own lifestyle). It's just that exporting jobs to third world countries is not as clear-cut as blowing someone's brains out all over.
Trust me: poor people aren't the only ones blowing people's brains out.
If putting people and their rights over corporate profit makes you "far-left", then RMS certainly seems to qualify.
In fact, it sorta does.
Especially when you realize that "corporations" are basically groups of people working together under a legal umbrella. Then, "putting people's rights over corporate profit" really reduces down to a question of pitting the rich (corporate managers) against the poor (non-corporate managers). That is, it reduces down to a question of class warfare, and siding with the poor--a traditionally leftist thing to do.
The only problem I have with RMS's view of this (and why I tend to think of him as an Ivory Tower academic with little real-world experience) is the fact that as an academic, he is able to live in a middle-class environment without having to deal with the "real world" of corporations and putting food on the table except in the abstract.
I don't think either of these are a problem; just one of a number of perfectly good ways of looking at things.
And no, "leftist" is not a swear word.
I sincerely hope this is a troll. The dated idea that "women like pretty colourful things" just because of their sex is an idea that I find to be offensive in the extreme.
/.) don't have any asthetic taste to speak of. (I mean, come on: do we all really want computers that look like they were ripped off the bridge of the Death Star?)
:-)
It was not.
It was, however, a recognition that perhaps men (and the geeks here on
Oh, and by the way: I upgraded my Palm (an old 512K model) to a Visor. In green...
And that's the thing about this article: it's apparent that the FishPC is not an "all-in-one" design; the PC itself resides in the fish-shaped case next to the monitor in the pictures off their web site. (Hense, the name.)
The only thing it has in common with the iMac is the translucent plastics. I suspect that even Apple wouldn't waste the lawyer's time on going after something which clearly cannot be confused with an iMac.
My take, by the way, is that it's reasonable to go after imitators if their products seem similar enough to the iMac that average consumers are confused. Frankly, one of the clones Apple went after (forgot which one) was about to release an all-in-one computer which looked so much like the iMac that the only way you could tell was by booting the thing. (And the silk screened label under the screen, of course.)
But it would take a complete moron to confuse a fish-shaped box up on it's tail with an all-in-one design.
Why is having a translucent PC case good?
Consumer asthetics only.
The Handspring Visor now comes in translucent plastics, in five colors. My wife, who once considered my Palm Pilot a useless little geek gadget, saw the review for the Visor, and absolutely had to have one, in translucent orange, of course.
Yes, I know the Visor is basically a Pilot in translucent plastics. But she bought one anyways, solely because it comes in translucent orange. She also wants an iBook, again in translucent orange. And she is disappointed that we bought the original iMac--not because the newer ones are more powerful and feature DVD and the iMovie software package, but because the new ones also come in (you guessed it) translucent orange.
Colored plastics appeal to folks like my wife. And people like my wife potentially have hundreds of millions (collectively) that they are more likely to spend on a translucent orange (or blue, or green, or whatever) computer than they are on one which only comes in drab beage, or worse: looks like it was designed by the same people who designed the Death Star or Darth Vader's helmet.
It exists, though it doesn't do PDF, and it's still a little expensive:
n quiry.asp?userid=4J8E9GM4QN&srefer=&isbn=0 641046197
http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbni
Or, you could get a Palm or WinCE device. My understanding is that the WinCE's larger color screen would be ideal for this sort of thing. (And I think you can get a PDF reader for WinCE.)
Disclamer: I have never used thier service, only heard about it.
However, FatBrain (www.fatbrain.com) offers what they call "Print On Demand" services which permit authors of software (amongst others) to provide electronic manuals, and give them an option to buy the printed manual from FatBrain. What makes this system interesting is that there is no risk to you: they literally print the book on demand just before shipping. That way, there isn't excess inventory, and you could even set the print costs to just above the cost to print the manual--that way, your company saves on printing costs and inventory costs, and for those (like myself) who want printed manuals, they have a low-cost alternative to printing the whole thing out.
My understanding is that print-on-demand services is also provided by Barnes and Nobel, though I couldn't find any information on their web site.
For more information about FatBrain's print on demand services, visit http://www1.fatbrain.com/inf oexchange/program.asp?vm=c
From the report:
Programming remains at the heart of all IT work and it is not going to disappear as a profession. Demand for IT specialists is so strong that growth is still forecast for programmers despite effects of outsourcing and automation. Needs for "worker bees" may be diminishing, but interest in the queens and kings of programming is as great as ever. At the top of the field are the gifted practitioners described by Randall E. Stross: "The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order of magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability." 6 At this level, programming is an elite profession.
That is, the report acknowledges what you and I and most others here already know--and that is, there is no shortage of morons out there who want to rake in money by bullsh-tting themselves into a well-paying tech job that is way over their head. However, there is a very big shortage of what you call "competent, well-trained ones", and which the report refers to as the "queens and kings" of programming.
Programming has always been a somewhat "elite" job, where the best programmers can outcode by as much as a factor of 25 or more. (Hell, the book "The Mythical Man Month" aludes to this, and it was written in the IBM OS360 days.) And as more and more complex web sites, applications and embedded operating systems arise out there, the demand for the competent, well trained professionals there will become a "make or break" situation: if you have one on your project, you will ship. If you don't, you will piss several millions of your investor's dollars down the drain real quick.
What strikes me as very interesting is that (1) the success or failure of a project is directly linked to having a gifted programmer on your staff, and that (2) management's failure to recognize the huge disparity between a qualified programmer and an unqualified programmer means that the chances that a qualified programmer works for a particular manager is largely luck.
This is a sad situation, but there you go.
I guess what pisses me off the most is the fact that most managers don't recognize this fact.
At Caltech we had open book take-home exams in some classes--but that didn't mean that things were any easier. In fact, in those classes the questions would be corrispondingly harder.
One math class I had, an abstract algaebra class, our midterms was open-book, take home, and was handed to us four weeks before the test was due. And it had only one question.
Simple? HAH!
"Classify all simple rings of size less than or equal to order 60 up to isomorphism. Show all work."
I hated that class.
If someone can creat a GPL'ed patch to a non-GPL'ed source code, why can't someone else creat a, say, artistic license patch that patches the GPL'ed patch? Although GPL virtually prohibits people from adding code that isn't GPL'ed itself, what gives LAME the right to apply GPL to the ISO Dist10 mp3 encoder source code?
If the GPL says it can, and if the other license permits it, there is no reason why a derived work of an opensourced work cannot be "closed" into a GPL lock.
For example, if someone releases a piece of code under the BSD license, there is nothing in the BSD license that prevents you from placing the derived code under a different license, so long as you continue to give Berkeley it's due on all your printed matter. (I think Berkeley has changed their license, but I haven't looked it up lately.) That's what allows people to take BSD licensed code and close it up as a proprietary system: they're free to relicense their derivitive works any way they see fit.
The BSD license (and other, similar licenses) permit you to relicense derivitive works under any system you wish, including the GPL.
The GPL is different, however: it's designed to keep the software open by forcing all derived works to be licensed under the GPL as one of the terms of the license itself. That is, in exchange for the right to review GPLed code, you must GPL your changes as well. That's why you cannot release a patch of GPLed code under BSD.
Some people may whine about how the GPL prevents them from doing this or that. I also wouldn't trust those people to house-sit as they may steal your china and silverware.
It seemed to me that if I created a patch to a piece of software (which can be viewed as an algorithm which modifies some source code in a particular way) then I would have the right to put this patch under whatever license I liked.
What hogwash. A "patch" is not "an algorithm for changing code." A patch is derived work.
Derived work comes from the fact that you had access to the original code, and you changed the original code to do something new, or to fix something that was a problem. The "patch" itself is derived work because you derived how the patch worked from examining and mulling over the existing code--that's what is ment by a "derivitive" work.
Now if you built a tool like diff or patch--that's a new algorithm. But you didn't build diff or patch, did you?
I contacted RMS about this and predictably he claimed that the patch would fall under the GPL -- yet this view implies that software licenses are much more powerful than many people instinctively might think -- and if true, has some frightening implications."
Frightening to who? Someone who wants to steal someone else's hard work and misappropriate it?
As much as I disagree with rms on a number of basic issues, on this it's pretty clear that the intellectual property behind a particular piece of code often represents months or years of work--and is a very valuable thing. The author has the right to see that his code and hard work is used in a way which is consistant with his goals--be it to give back to the community through the GPL or to make money.
To think that you "instinctively" believe that the restrictions of the GPL is counter to how you believe you should be able to rip off someone else's IP (and hard work) is to instinctively believe that there is no intrinsic value in the software you received under the GPL license. That is, it's to instinctively believe the hard work the other programmers put into this product are worthless.
Just because you get the source code does not immediately mean you get to "disrespect" the programmer who, through his good graces, allowed you to see his/her code on his/her terms.
Clearly not -- but where is the line drawn here? Surely this is a Pandora's Box of problems, and it concerns the GPL at a fundamental level."
It's only a "pandora's box" to someone who doesn't have a clear grasp of IP issues, or to someone who doesn't have any respect for the hundreds or thousands of man-hours that went into a piece of code.
If you examine someone else's code and make changes to it, the patches make a derived work. And unless you are a friggen' psychic, the patches themselves were derived by comparing the derived work you built against the original GPL'ed code, so are themselves inherently GPL'ed. (I have never seen a patch that wasn't derived by running 'diff' against the modified (GPLed) and unmodified (GPLed) code.)
A program that automatically makes changes to a program does not have to be GPLed. However, it's results against a GPLed program is GPLed. And unless your program is psychic and able to create diffs without even receiving a GPLed program as input, the patches are again GPLed as the patches were undoubtedly created by running 'diff' (or the equivalent) against the program's input (GPLed) and output (GPLed), and thus is also GPLed as well.
I think the confusion comes when some twit thinks that he has the inherent god-given right to look at anyone's source code. That ain't true. You receive permission to examine the code through the GPL license. And according to the GPL, in exchange for permission, you must keep all derived works to the original work GPLed as well.
Once you understand that, and understand as well that just because you have someone's source code doesn't mean you inherently have the right to disrespect him by doing whatever you feel like to the code (in essense, ripping off the original programmers), then perhaps you'll grasp the fact that it's intellectually dishonest to claim that your patch is not GPLed because you ran 'diff' against your (necessarly GPLed) derived work.
Again, unless you happen to be bloody psychic and are able to create a derived work of the original work without ever examining the original.
Bare with me.
:-)
... continued."
The fact that a product of the mind has cost its producer money and labor, and has a value for which others are willing to pay, is not sufficient to ensure to it this legal attribute of property.
What Brandise was refering to here is all categories of items that are considered a "product of the mind." This includes the relm of ideas, as well as the relm of expressions for those ideas. And this is a valid notion: just because someone expresses the idea of an obscessed captain hunting a white whale doesn't therefore make that idea off limits, or make that idea "property"--even if coming up with the idea took time and effort.
However, you will notice that this particular sentence refers to all categories of products of the mind: everything from the idea of "blue flying whales" to the words I'm typing are products of the mind--even though the latter (what I'm typing) is an expression, while the former (the idea of blue flying whales) is not protectable, though arguably the phrase "blue flying whales" may be, depending on the context.
This is entirely compatable with the notion that I brought up--that of the founding father's notion of the hunt for a metaphysical "truth" which they believed can only be achieved with the free flow of ideas.
However, Brandise does not confuse "ideas" from "expression", as witnessed by the latter part of the quote:
The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas -- become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.
What he is refering to is not as you suggest: "'a product of the mind' is strictly equivalent in this passage to 'the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas', which is strictly equivalent to 'these incorporeal productions'".
In this case, "a product of the mind" is a superset of "the nobelest of human productions...". To suggest otherwise is to suggest that Brandise is suggesting that all products of the mind are "the nobelest of human productions"--including the idea floating in my mind about the cold-blooded murder of my boss by disemboweling him over his BMW. I'm sure that both you and he would agree that this idea is not exactly "nobel" in any sense of the word--except perhaps by others who work for my boss.
All joking aside, not only are ideas products of the mind, but so are expressions--such as the words I'm writing, or an order of notes into a musical composition, or the specific statements I use to implement bubble sort on a computer. Each of these expressions are products of the mind as well--used to embody ideas, but are not the ideas themselves.
At any rate, the interpretation that you suggest, that these are being used in the aformentioned phrase as "equivalent" flies against any reasonable interpretation of the 8th clause of the Constitution which permits Congress to define certain intellectual property rights in order to promote the useful arts and sciences. Further, to suggest that these are equivalent would mean that Justice Brantise is both simultaneously suggesting that the products of human mind be both "free as the air to common use" and yet to also have "the attribute of property
This is absurd.
Upon these incorporeal productions the attribute of property is continued after such communication only in certain classes of cases where public policy has seemed to demand it.
The "public policy" that Justice Brandise is refering to is the Article I, section 8, clause 8. That public policy is to grant the attribute of property onto certain expressions in order to permit the sale of those expressions. Otherwise, there would be no need to pay authors, as the moment they write what they do, those expressions become "free as the air"--an absurd notion which flies in the face of 200 years of legal thought on the matter.
Besides, I cannot decide if you are for or against the notion of expression as protectable, or if you believe Justice Brandice is for or against the idea.
Equally it is a mistake to assume that every use by John Katz of the word "idea" must be held to this technical, infringement-analysis sense.
Well, of course, but only because Katz can't seem to make up his mind on the matter. That is, sometimes he uses the word "idea" to refer to abstract notions conveyed by expressions (as he does when he quotes Thomas Jefferson), and sometimes he uses the word "idea" to refer to specific expressions (as he does when he talks about downloading MP3s).
He is, or should be, saying that creating ever more complex and draconian laws is not be the correct approach to these challenges.
"Should be?" Doesn't that mean that Katz ain't saying what you think he is?
Look, I do agree with you that there are better solutions to dealing with the protection of expression in an era where the duplication and transmission of expressions is essentially zero than the DMCA. DMCA is absurd as it essentially strangles the free flow of ideas in one area (R&D in interchangability and data transmission) in order to keep the cost of data transmission in other areas (movies, music, television) artifically high. These sorts of artificial barriers are at best a stop-gap measure, and at worse totally strangle the very notion of the free market of ideas that our founding fathers strove to set up in the first place.
But that's not what Katz appears to be saying, as far as I can figure. He seems to be discussing essentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater when he starts "Unenforceable laws like traditional copyright restrictions don't promote morality or lawfulness; they undermine them." and goes on to "Still, it seems increasingly clear that conventional notions about ideas and ownership are doomed. The issue is no longer whether 'piracy' is right or wrong, but how long our backwards-looking corporations and politicians will persist in believing they can stop it."
That is, Katz is essentially saying about copyright law in the era of the Internet what many pro-drug advocates are saying in an era of increased intercity gang violence: legalize it now because we're wasting our time and resources trying to keep it illegal.
But I think he made his point reasonably well without introducing these points.
Yes, he did:
Even as more and more people ask the question "Who Owns [Expressions]?," the answer becomes obvious: We all do.
I've deliberately substituted "Expressions" for "Ideas", as Katz has hopelessly muddled the two throughout his essay, as is clear by the quotes (and the article surrounding it) that I've given above.
Of course Katz didn't discuss copyright duration. He's advocating that the duration is meaningless, and should be set to 0.
Sorry, no; your interpretation of Justice Brandeis's words is incorrect.
;-)
The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas -- become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.
The clause in the US Constitution that empowers congress to establish copyright and patent law is Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and
Discoveries."
The philosophers of the time of the Constitution believed in the notion that the highest purpose of intelligent people was the search for a metaphysical "Truth". They believed that as we debated and discussed such subjects as philosophy, law, metaphysics, mathematics and all that high-falutin' stuff, we would inevitably move towards a higher "Truth", and hopefully even gain insight into the face of God.
Little did these folks know we'd go off and invent B-movies and sitcoms...
Anyways, our founding fathers realized that producing things like books and newspapers and other "expressions of ideas" would cost time, effort and money. And they knew they wanted to promote the useful sciences by protecting people's ability to make money producing expressions. Thus, they defined a dichotomy between "expression" and "idea", and granted congress the power to protect "expression" for a limited time so that an author can make money writing books and plays and newspaper articles.
Justice Brandeis's words must be interpreted within this framework. That is, he was expressing a general idea, outlined in the Federalist Papers and other sources, that the purpose of the First Amendment and of Clause 8 was to promote the free exchange of ideas, yet protect author's expressions so that an author can make a living. The balancing point is at what point can we maximize people's ability to express their ideas. And that necessarly means we must guarentee that an author (or writer or musician or computer programmer) is able to make some sort of a living--otherwise, expressions can only be produced by the independantly wealthy and by amateurs on their spare time.
His specific point is that as a point of law, our founding fathers have required that "ideas" themselves must be free. He did not suggest that expressions of those ideas can be free in any way. That is, he was very clear, as is the law on the subject and as are all previous ruling by the courts and all political philosophers, that there is a very clear line between an abstract idea, and the expression used to convey that idea. That is, just because someone wrote Moby Dick doesn't preclude me from writing an essay about white wales and obscessed ship captains. Nor does it preclude me from talking about Moby Dick.
Just because you cannot see the difference between the two doesn't mean Justice Brandise made the same mistake.
You should always be wary of arguments that tell you that what you want to do is not only OK, but moral. Such arguments can be created for nearly everything, and have been used by any number of groups to justify everything from true moral good to atrocities that those committing them thought were not only OK to do, but morally obligated for them to do.
What also troubles me about Katz's essay is that he starts with the presumption that because kids are doing it, it must be right, and concludes that kids ought to be able to do it because they are.
The kids in the poorer neighborhoods of Los Angeles form gangs and sell drugs; to them it's also as natural as downloading MP3s is to college students. If we apply Katzian reasoning to this situation, the problem is not gangs, but the police who try to stop gang warfare and the sales of drugs. After all, being a gang banger and blowing away a crip is "natural"... was that the sound of a bullshit detector going off?
Look, I have no problems with limiting the duration of copyright on the theory that ideas embedded in expression ought to be shared freely after the copyright owner is able to get it's fair reward for creating that expression; this was the original idea behind copyright limits and patent limits. However, to simply suggest that it's harder to codify reasonable limits on the distribution of digitial materials now that the internet has made the cost of distribution essentially free, so we should scrap any pretence at copyright or patent--that's like suggesting we should scrap anti-gang efforts by the police because of LAPD corruption.
* I'm in no way suggesting pirating MP3s is as violent or deadly as gang warfare, nor do I mean to belittle gang warfare by suggesting it's as painless as sharing MP3s. However, they are both illegal activities, hurt third parties, and hurt third parties in ways which both the students sharing MP3s and the gangs shooting at each other refuse to acknowledge. And both are subjects of essayists like Katz who suggest that as we are unable to control their activities, we should legalize them instead.
Considering the likelihood that climate change will accelerate once begun, it should be clear that the prudent choice would be to moderate our contribution to warming factors and to curb global population growth as fast as ethically permissable (without resorting to warfare and the artificial famines it creates).
Here is the problem in a nutshell, at least from my perspective.
While it is true that mankind needs to curb it's waste output, and to manage it's output and recycle and do all those other things that would reduce how much crap we put out there, I believe we should do these things for a simple reason. You don't piss upstream of your drinking water, and you don't swim in a pool you just dumped a turd into.
However, the debate is not about cleaning up the local environment. That just goes without saying. The debate is about how much do we need to restructure the very fabric of our technological existance in order to midigate a global crisis which may or may not be happening, and may or may not be our fault.
There are those on the radical left who advocate everything short of genocide in order to reduce the planet's population to a few million people, and who advocate reducing or destroying altogether our reliance on anything more technologically sophisticated than a bow and arrow, because our high technology society is destroying "Gaia". And there are those on the radical right who would completely destroy any efforts on our part to clean up the local environment (and allow corporations to shit in our swimming hole, so to speak) because they think the whole "Gaia" thing is bull.
I think it's prudent to be right in the middle. And rather than worrying about if we're destroying the ozone layer or causing global warming or cooling or depleting the oil or creating killer nanobots or whatever disaster looms 10 to 20 years out, we should instead worry about real problems. Like if the local dump is leaking into our drinking water.
These global disasters do us a great disservice: they distract us from the real problems of dirty drinking water and local polution turning the air over Los Angeles brown, by concentrating us on problems which even today, most respectable scientists think may not be of our own doing anyways.