For instance, I don't know where you get your figures about ground level UV levels, but australians and new zealanders are getting skin cancer at vastly increased rates.
Is this because of ozone levels or because Australians and New Zealanders are spending more time in the sun? Here in Los Angeles, where the golden brown tan look is definitely out, skin cancer rates are dropping dramatically.
BTW, according to the TOMS graphs on-line at U Cambridge, while ozone layers have definitely thinned over antartica, there appears to be no thinning north of the antartic continent.
First, the banning of CFCs has only just started taking effect, and only in a handful of countries. Old systems full of CFCs (such as old refrigerators) didn't simply cease to exist--they're still out there, leaking. As is any automobile manufactured before the mid 1990's. Further, the CFC ban does not apply to many organizations such as the US military.
Second, even if all CFCs simply ceased to exist today (as if by magic), the model NASA developed on how CFCs move up into the atmosphere and destroyed the ozone layer suggested that it took something like 20 years before a ground-based CFC gas would migrate up into the stratosphere to interact chemically with the ozone layer there. Thus, even if we caused all old refrigerators, automobiles, and other CFC sources were to simply disappear, it would still take something like 20 years before the CFCs that had already leaked into the atmosphere would finish their damage.
Thus, if CFCs were causing the ozone layer, we should continue to see ozone damage for another 20 to 30 years, regardless of the currently in-place CFC bans.
(1) If anyone here remembers their history, the'd remember that the environmental problem du'joir in the 1970's was global cooling, not global warming. The truth of the matter is that the evidence is still out about global warming--the best we can say is that we have some interesting localized weather patterns, but there is no evidence of any sea levels rising or any non-natural weather patterns changing. (And those who provide "statistical evidence"--if you look closely enough, they're cooking the books combined with weather simulations which they believe will predict the weather beyond the normal 7-14 days most simulations actually work.)
My point is that if you listen real carefully, even global warming is in the "disaster which will wipe us out in 10-20 years" category--far enough away that it seems possible (especially on warmer spring days), yet close enough to actively fear.
By the way, you forgot the ozone hole--though there are those who are starting to think it ain't the problem it once was, only because ground-level UV levels have not changed one iota. But there are those who still believe that in 10-20 years we're going to have to go out in the sun with SPF 5000 or die.
That's okay; I still remember when I was growing up in the 1970's that we were to run out of oil by 1990. That is, we would deplete all of the world's oil reserves by 1990, and because of it, civilization would collapse, causing wars a'la "Mad Max" to break out throughout the world as people struggle to find the last little caches of horded gasoline.
I have a real hard time believing in any disaster that will kill us in 10-20 years unless someone comes up with some really hard facts--like perhaps a photograph and orbital plot of the asteroid that is suppost to kill us all. I just remember too many disasters that were to wipe us out in 10-20 years while growing up (oil depletion, population explosion, global cooling, etc)--and we're still alive.
You could always combine the best of the lunar and solar calendars and switch to the Hebrew calendar. Or switch to the Chinese calendar--they use a lunar/solar system, and bypass all of those wierd exceptions that the Hebrew calendar uses to keep certain Jewish holidays on certain days of the week.
Of course figuring out when the leap months are is a bit of a pain in the neck--no regular rules like the Gregorian that any idiot (even many programmers) can keep track of.
Or we could scrap the idea of keeping up with seasons and switch to the Islamic calendar. Of course it's a pain in the neck to program--as the start of the month in most Islamic countries is called by some religious dude looking up and seeing the new moon. ("Hey, it looks like the new moon today! I declare today the start of Muharram!")
Hard to program, unless we equip these old guys with a T1...:-)
Either something was missed or ignored... As an earlier poster pointed out, North America is a pretty poor place to live, for the most part.
I don't inhabit/. that regularly. The posts about North America being a relatively poor place to live was posted after I visited here, and I have only just seen them.
You may have noted that humans did not develop as a species in a climate that in any way resembles even the relatively hospitable climate of the West Coast.
Of course. However, the reasons why this is so is still being debated by anthropologists.
The theory I personally tend to stick to is that we are "aquatic" apes. That is, we evolved from apes in Africa who were forced to spend a lot of time in the water (hense, our strong "diving reflex" which is not shared by many simians).
As to the west coast environment--the Spanards who first discovered Alta California noted that the environment was quite pleasent. They further noted that many of the native inhabitants seemed relatively "lazy", given how idealic things were. In fact, it has been suggested that one of the reasons why a high technological civilization was not created in California was because things were so ideal (relatively speaking) that there was little pressure on California Indians to create infrastructures Europeans did in order to improve their chances of survival. (That is, things like agriculture and cities were invented to promote mutual survival in harsh environments.)
Ironically, given the fear many people have of this environment, humans come from the jungles of Africa, in which region the societies the original poster is referring to lived.
First, the original poster had nothing to say about Africa. He only commented that hunter-gatherers only hunted and gathered about 5 hours a day, 3 days a week, though he hadn't read that much on the subject.
Second, it's unclear that ancient man in Africa had all that good a time of it. In fact, had things been ideal in Africa, some anthropologists I've read have suggested that there would have been little (if any) pressure for ancient homo-sapiens to expand outward and into Europe.
I'm also wondering which tribal group you're referring to when you say "California Indians."
Salinan. Our range was (and largly still is) the area around the Hunter-Liggot Military Reservation, ranging to Morro Bay in the south and Atascadero to the east. Most of my family still lives in that area, by the way--the last time I checked with an elder, most of the folks in my tribe (or the "families") still live around Morro Bay or Atascadero, with a few having migrated as far south as San Luis Obispo.
A bit of quick research on my part shows a number of different tribes that inhabited this region, and I'm wondering if this is perhaps not so much a "natural" tribal grouping as one forced upon them when the Europeans came through looking for land.
I could blather on for a few gigabytes on this topic. However, the short answer is that there was little interest by the Spanard Conquistatores (and the 49'ers who later showed up) to do any form of forced migration. Most of the tribal groups along the coast of California were defined largely by natural boundaries--that is, the border between the Salinans and the Chumash to the south was the southernmost range of the Salinas Valley. The Chumash were separated from the Gabrillienos in the Los Angeles basin area by the San Fernando moutain range. The Oholones from the Salinans in the north by the northernmost range defining the Salinas Valley. And so forth. (Note that this is all off the top of my head, and I reserve the right to have screwed up the names.)
Part of this comes from the fact that none of my data indicates that any of the coastal dwellers relied mainly on acorns, perhaps they had been displaced at least once before?
Acorns were a staple of costal California Indian tribes, especially those who inhabited areas where a lot of oak trees dwell. Unfortunately, the Spanards considered acorns "pig slop"--one of the reasons why California Indians were slopped in large hog slops in the missions. When the Spanards attempted to convert California Indians, one of the first things they did was to abolish acorn consumption by burning a number of trees down, or destructively harvesting oak trees for mission construction.
The upshot of this is that when the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided to do a survey of the California Indians, the first extensive survey they did was in the 1910's--and is largly inaccurate due to the way they gathered information. (For example, the Salinas Tribe is marked as "extinct" because the surveyers would ride around on horseback, go into various bars, and ask "are there any Indians here?" Given the fact that up until about the depression it was virtually impossible to prosecute a white man for murdering an indian, and given the fact that a popular white sport was murdering indians, by and large my relatives would answer "fuck no; nobody but us mexicans here.")
And once a few would amit to being Indian, the surveys would ask them what they personally ate. And by then, given that most of the oak trees in the Salinas Valley were destroyed a few years before, most of them would answer "wheat flour" instead of "acorn flour."
I'm interested to hear about the history of this group, especially because the time period you describe was one during which life became increasingly demanding on the Native Americans, as they were forcibly assimilated into our 'civilized' society.
Let me recommend a few books.
Brusa, Betty War, "Salinan Indians of California and their neighbors," NatureGraph.
(This book discusses what evidence for the Salinan people (my ancestors) exists from pre-contact times, and what that evidence suggests.)
Kroeber, A.L., "Handbook of the Indians of California." Dover.
(This is the resarch paper that I mentioned before which was gathered largly by asking who was Indian in the local bars. While parts of it are inaccurate, it does paint an interesting picture of the area in the 1920's, when the research was completed.)
Heizer, Robert F., "The Destruction of California Indians", U. Nebraska Press.
(This is an interesting book in that it paints a picture of the treatment of California Indians from the 1840's through to the 1870's that is quite different from the stuff they normally teach in school. It's an interesting book in that there is no commentary; just reprints of old letters, newspaper articles and eyewitness accounts, gathered in chronological order.)
Hinton, Leanne, "Flutes Of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages." Heydey Books.
(This is an interesting cultural and linguistic survey.)
Of course nothing here really quite replaces listening to my grandfather bitch about whites, or listening to my mother's stories about how my grandfather used to bitch about whites....:-)
I understand that a lot of people become annoyed when asked to cite information, so if it's not readily at hand, don't bother, but I'm wondering what your source is when you state that archeologists believe that the CIs had an idyllic lifestyle?
Oh, no problem. I have about a dozen other books on native americans in general, as well as a couple of other surveys on California Indians. I gathered them largly because I wanted to learn more about my tribe that wasn't learned from family members with huge chips on their shoulders and an outright hatred of anything higher-tech than a couple of rocks ground down into a mortar and pestle.
Of course I had little luck; ever since Kroeber declared me and my family "extinct", it's hard to find anyone who has bothered to do one whit of archaeological research.
(If you like, I can dig up the list from a box under my bed sometime.)
Anyways, this is largly based on the first book mentioned above, as well as the handbook survey. Also keep in mind that "idyllic" is a relative term--that is, it's "idyllic" in the sense that folks seldom starved to death, and actually had enough leasure time to tell stories, throw the occassional party, and play gambling games.
And, personally, I don't mind a trek of 50 to 100 miles. Sounds like about two weeks of light hiking.
Yeah, but it's a bitch when you haven't had anything to eat in a week except knawing on some leaves and some old jerky. And it's even more of a pain when you realize the hike is across a 5,000 foot gain...
The research that the earlier poster was referring to was referring to much earlier civilizations than the Native American tribe your grandfather belonged to.
WHAT RESEARCH?!?
He just started making assertions about how ancient cavemen had better lives than us "moderns." Then he goes on and says I haven't read enough about this to say with certainty,.... Doesn't sound like state-of-the-art anthropological research to me.
Frankly, I started with anecdotal information because it's more personal to me that way. And it's more personal to the couple of anthropologists who've wanted to poke and prod me as an example of a native american who has gone from cave-man status to a high-level of integration into our technologically sophisticated society. (That is, if you read the anthropological research, you'll find that it boils down to either researching artifacts, or statistical analysis of stories from folks like me.)
It's much more accurate than those idiot deconstructionist feminist "archaeologists" who keep pointing to those chubby little fetishes from 20,000 years ago and proclaiming that ancient cavemen must have been exclusively goddess worshippers, when for all we know those little fetishes were the cavemen equivalent of pornography.
As to acorn flower: you have to leach it a *lot* to get rid of the bitter taste. That bitter taste is tannic acid--and in large amounts it can make you really sick. Once the flower has been leached properly, the result is something a little hardier than whole wheat flower. Quite tasty if done right.
California Indians (who lived in "hunter-gatherer" mode until roughly the 1920's when developers ran them off the costal lands they inhabited) would often starve to death when the local acorn-producing trees would stop producing acorns for a season.
Acorns were the staple of California Indians. And they only keep for about a year, best. In the event when acorns would dry up in one area, you would have two choices (according to my Grandfather, who lived in hunter-gatherer mode until he was run off his village by greedy developers): you either starve, or you had to walk to the San Joaquin Valley from where they lived (along the coast near Morro Bay), a trek of 50 to 100 miles, all on foot.
Archaeologists consider the California Indians as having lead a relatively "idealic" life compared to most primitive people in that they didn't starve to death all that often.
The ancient nomads had much more leisurely lives than us. They worked something like 5 hours a day, and only 3 days a week at that. I haven't read enough about this to say with certainty, but I'm willing to bet that the number of hunter-gatherers that starved to death doesn't even compare to the number of poor and homeless that starve to death in our society.
*sigh*
As a native american whose grandfather grew up as a hunter-gatherer in the hills above what is now Fort Liggot along the coast in California, I know that anything could be farther from the truth.
My grandfather and his family lived largely on harvested acorns from nearby trees, along with the occassional root they could dig up, and the occassional deer they could fall. They would also gather wood for fires (it gets cold at night), along with gathering wood and grasses for building huts. From the furs of the deer they would catch they would make shoes and blankets for sleeping at night. And they would spend hours carving stone mortar and pestles for grinding acorns. (You just don't gather a few acorns and pop them in your mouth--unless you spend an hour or two grinding down lunch and washing the toxins from the mash, they're poisonous.)
What my grandparents were, was poor in a sense that someone on welfare in our society cannot begin to appreciate.
If you think they could live by gathering for only five hours a day, three days a week, I have a simple challenge for you.
Buy some dried beans from the store. Buy a mortar and pestle. Grind the beans down into a flour, soak it in water, then press them out into patties, and fry them up on a griddle.
Takes a while to cook this mess, doesn't it?
Now factor in the fact that you had to make the mortar and pestle from a couple of rocks you found by the river. Factor in the fact that you had to make the griddle. And factor in the fact that you had to gather the wood to make the fire, along with making the fire by twirling a couple of twigs. Ah, hell; and factor in the fact that you had to gather a bunch of twigs and tie them together in order to make a basket so that you could allow your flour to soak.
My grandfather and my mother and I are Salinan Indians. And there is no way in hell that I would trade my fast-food/car/computerized/grocery store/Gap life for my grandfather's constant battle against starvation and freezing cold.
The above link points to the recent employment statistics in the United States for the entire economy. Unless he defines "knowledge workers" as including people like legal secretaries, the entire motion picture industry, and people who work behind the front desk at various hotels across the country, and if he narrows the "service sector" down to "services/miscellaneous" (or 'services2' in the table), we don't even come close to that 50% mark.
The fact of the matter is that people who do software development or work for IT departments, or other "knowledge workers" who work in the computer industry comprises of slightly more than 10% of the entire service-producing economy. (That's the total of all engineering-related services and all business related services, verses the entire service-producing economy, which employs around 104 million people. And that significantly overestimates "knowledge workers", as the statistics I added up in the above categories also include secretarial support and the like--as the statistics are compiled by looking at employment at various companies verses it's NAICS category.)
The long and the short of it is that Katz's second-hand hearing about 50% of the people in the service sector are "knowledge workers" is a crock, and not supported by the statistics from the US Department of Labor Statistics.
The government maintains that the average work week in the service sector is 32.9 hours; no different than a decade ago, and five hours shorter than in l964.
I've got a newsflash for Mr. Katz. The "service sector" is not just computer-related jobs. In fact, computer-related jobs, such as IT jobs, are an insignificant percentage of those jobs.
Other jobs which bring the average down include part-time hamburger-flippers at McDonalds (which are considered service sector jobs), the plumber who comes over and fixes your drain (another service sector job), and the woman you hire to sit your pets when you go on vacation.
Basically, the "service sector" is jobs which involve providing a non-tangable "service", as opposed to manufacturing (where you make concrete things like cars), or retail (where you sell things like clothing to people).
Because the "service sector" includes part-time fast-food hamburger flippers and self-employed pet sitters and the like, I would be highly supprised if the average for the entire service sector of our economy was much above 40 hours a week. The number 32.9 sounds just about right.
The 60+ hours I worked last week, not including the time I spent last week working on free software stuff (another 10 or so), multipled by everyone on/. who work similar hours, won't make a dent in that aggrigate number, just as the self-employed people in the 1960's who worked their ass off in marketing consulting or similar highly-paid, high hour count jobs in the 1960's didn't make a dent back then. In fact, the decline in this number from the 1960's can be attributed to the rise of fast-food restaurants and their use of part-time workers.
What makes this misunderstanding spectacularly sad is that it formed the keystone of Mr. Katz' article. Without the fact that the number '32.9' is the average number of hours worked across the entire service sector, including part-time fast-food hamburger flippers and the like, Mr. Katz appears not to have an article at all.
You're equating a potential redistribution with an actual violation of intellectual property rights.
Actually, I'm just parroting the other side of the argument. But you're right--just because I can potentially copy something doesn't mean that I will.
In any event, plain reading of the DMCA would seem to indicate that fair use is dead, and that if you view a DVD on a non-sanctioned player of any kind, you are "circumventing an access control device" without the authorization of the copyright holder. Distributing the tools to others is a separate offense. This is clearly insane, but that's the way it is.
And I hope the DMCA is eventually rulled unconstitutional.
Look, I don't agree with the MPAA; said something to that effect in my original post. But the MPAA does have a problem--within our lifetimes we'll be able to download the data to play back a movie at full DVD resolution off the 'net in the same way we download MP3s now.
I know that. However, it is the argument that is given by various manufacturers to include region codes into their products.
That is, they do it because it's cheaper for a manufacturer to include region code technology and keep the distributers in a particular country happy than it is to try to bypass those distributors.
If a retailer can legally get the product for lower cost than the distributor will sell it, then the cost that they pay is the distribution cost.
And the distributor that store front bypassed will never do business with that store again, causing that store's supply of products to effectively dry up.
To an American like me this sounds shocking, surreal, and extremely anti-competitive. However, it is the current reality through most of the world, where anti-trust laws are totally non-existant.
Closer to the truth is the fact that US filmakers release films overseas later than the US release to be able to recycle film and save on marketing costs. They don't want to compete with DVDs of their own movies.
While it may be true, it doesn't completely track with "region code" technology that is used in other tech products such as video games. The reality is the manufacturers are trying to play nice with the regional distributors rather than bypassing them. By the way, this is extremely important if you are trying to export to Asia, where established distribution channels can effectively make or break your product--because of a tightly interwoven distribution channel.
While this is true, the fact of the matter is, if I can view a file in any way on a PC, I can copy it (with potentially reduced quality). Are you going to insist that CSS be put in every video card and that frame capture cards should obey Macrovision? (I wouldn't be surprised).
Actually, if you bothered to read the bottom of my original post, you would have found where I said that I don't agree with much of the arguments I'm echoing. What I am doing is presenting the other side of the argument; that's all.
Personally, what I think the MPAA needs to do is to figure out a value-added proposition which adds value to a DVD movie in much the same way the software industry adds value by providing printed manuals and other things to software products. That is, make it so that even if you *could* pirate a DVD movie, you probably won't, simply because you'd rather have the non-digital value-added materials that accompany the DVD movie.
You can't win by fighting the ability to copy, only by stopping mass distribution. One of the best ways to stop mass distibution is with reasonable pricing. Copying inevitably costs more in time, materials and/or bandwidth than the initial production.
The problem is that this is changing. There are companies who are trying to figure out a way to put fiber into your home, with T3 speeds, in about a dozen years. I tried ripping my South Park DVD with DeCSS; it resulted in about 10 gig of data. If we have fiber at T3 running into your house, I could send you the South Park movie in about 30 minutes--a lot less time than it takes me to drive to the local shopping mall, and a hell of a lot less time than it takes to wait for a shipment from DVDExpress.com.
There's the problem. A dozen years ago 1200 baud was considered fast, and 100 megabytes was considered a lot of hard disk space. Today, MP3.com succeeds, and an 18 gig HD can be bought from Frys for about $200. In a dozen years? If you could store 3Tb on your disk, you could download 10 movies in an afternoon and stick them in your "Movie Warez" directory in the same way I can download MP3s today.
The simple fact that 99% of the 'net using world cannot download a dvd movie from the net due to bandwidth and/or time constraints would seem to signify that the primary use of the DeCSS software is, in fact, something other than just ripping copies of dvds to trade with friends.
Today that's 99.9% or some such.
Tomorrow, that's 90%.
And the next day, it's 50%.
I think I'm going to show my age. However, when I first started serious programming, the idea of storing more than a couple of pages of > on a computer seemed like an outrageous problem. (I remember sitting around with my friends discussing how cool the future will be when we can store an entire 100+ page book on our computer.)
When I first started college, the notion of storing an entire track of a song at resolutions high enough to compete with the audio fidelity of an album was unthinkable. (Hell, such a creature would completely fill up that $800 20 megabyte hard disk I bought to hang off my MacPlus.) And the idea of *downloading* such a file was just completely outrageous--given the fact that if you were even on a BBS, you probably were hooked up at 300 baud. The same goes for pictures--the idea of digitizing a picture and storing it on-line sounded completely outrageous.
Today, we connect fast enough that pictures are routinely inserted into web sites because they look cool as icons. (Borg Bill, anyone?)
And sites like MP3 are doing quite well. And people are storing *hundreds* of songs on their hard disks.
The worry of the MPAA is not that people *today* can pirate movies freely. The worry is that *tomorrow*, there will be so much bandwidth that downloading an entire movie at DVD video quality will just take a few minutes.
And don't tell me that it sounds completely outrageous that someone will be able to download an entire movie off the 'net in a few minutes. It's just a matter of time.
Therefore, I believe that DeCSS's use (and distribution) should be allowed under fair use guidelines.
That's the small picture view. Is using DeCSS within fair use guidelines? I would personally agree. However, the big picture is one where just about everything movie ever produced can be reproduced and downloaded in the same way we download a tarball today--and pirated just as easily.
Why then, do you charge different prices in different countries?
Because of different distribution costs in those countries. Different markets have different markups because each market has it's own distribution system which requires different markups so that the people along that distribution chain can be paid for their work.
(This is the standard reason given by most hardware manufacturers as to why PCs cost about 50% more in certain parts of the world than in others.)
Region codes exist on DVDs in order to prevent retail marketers from circumventing their own internal distribution model. That is, the distributors that the studios deal with to distribute materials around the world pretty much demanded that some sort of region code be added so that the distributors can maintain their effective market position, rather than be bypassed by the store fronts who could otherwise buy the materials from a distributor in another country and save money.
And the total number of arrests in Hong Kong would be?
They're working with the PRC in order to raise awareness of copyright issues in Hong Kong. However, the MPAA does not control China, and so negotiations are necessarly on-going.
And your reply to the prosecutor who said they did it at your request would be?
The prosecutor was made aware of the violation of copyright law. But the MPAA doesn't control the Noregian government or their prosecutors; they can only lodge a complaint.
So you do agree that once you've bought the DVD drive and the DVD disk, you have the right to use whatever tools you want to view it on a Linux computer?
Of course. However, you do not have the right to distribute those tools, or to repurpose those tools to violate studio's intellectual property rights by copying the tracks off the DVD for potential redistribution across the 'net.
One thing that Mr. Valenti does get is the explosive nature of bandwidth over the Internet. That is, while now it is impractical to download a 10gb movie file, tomorrow better compression technology and higher bandwidths will make it trivial to do. Just as 10 years ago, the thought of storing one record album for playback on your computer was seen as completely impractical--while now, people are routinely storing dozens of CDs on their hard disk for convenient playback.
I personally see a time in the near future where downloading a movie over the net will be nearly as fast as downloading a picture is today. And when that happens--when it is possible to download "Star Wars" off the 'net in a few minutes--either some form of infrastructure needs to be in place to protect the intellectual property rights of studios, or "Star Wars" will make the top "MPEGWAREZ.COM" download for 30 weeks running.
So I personally suspect if you ask the MPAA the above question about Linux, that they'd respond that as soon as they get a request from a closed-source developer who will develop a DVD player for Linux gives them a viable request to build such a beast, they'll gladly license the CSS algorithms. And I suspect given the flap over Linux, they'll even do it at a discount, just so they can prevent the open-source community from producing tools that could be easily repurposed for piracy.
And don't give me the "we won't repurpose the code" bit--remember, the biggest strength in the open source community is it's biggest weakness: that when source is open and free, programmers are able to reuse the code for whatever purpose strikes their fancy.
Final Question: You can even ask the audience or call a friend. Has anyone ever sucessfully used DeCSS to copy a DVD movie to another PC and then play it back?
You know, if you are going to ask hardball questions, try to ask questions that are more hardball than this. Because most of these questions have already been asked and answered elsewhere.
Personally I think that the MPAA has a problem. And I personally think their approach to solving this problem is the wrong approach. Alienating the very technical community they will need in the future to help them maximize the value of their properties is not a good thing to do.
And personally I don't agree with some of the answers I gave above: using technology to protect monopolies is just plain wrong IMHO. But in industries where technology can be used to protect distribution monopolies, it's being used. And that includes country codes in digital media such as Sega games and DVD movies.
I tend to think of the Internet as broken up into different regions depending on the primary intent of the people involved. Given that, there seems to be four types:
People trying to get rich
People who are trying to convert us
People who are having fun
People who are trying to express themselves
In the "people trying to get rich" I would place all corporate activitity and many X-rated sites. That's because the thing that motivates them is to make money. Since they are motivated to make money, their activities will eventually devolve into either becomming an "exclusive" hookup (VPNs), advertising like crazy (/.), or sell-sell-sell (Amazon).
In the "people trying to convert us" we have things like the "God" sites, as well as the racist sites.
In the "people having fun" category we have gamers, some technical folks (who apparently have fun writing code, though some of them are more "express yourself types"), and some X-rated sites where some guy with a digital camera is posting nudes of his wife on the 'net.
And in the "people expressing themselves" we have the whole art scene, as well as a lot of GPLed software sites and the like.
I think this is a better way of breaking up the regions of the 'net, partly because by knowing what motivates the people doing the site, you can sort of see in which direction they will "pimp" themselves to achieve their objectives. For example, we have 'www.fresnobee.com', a local newspaper site, with a "shop online" button. That's because the people running the Fresno Bee aren't interested in reporting the news; they're interested in making money reporting the news. And if they can make some additional money allowing people to shop online, why not? They're making money, after all.
Now of course people evolve and change over time, so sometimes these boundaries can be blurred. For example, the husband and wife posting nudes on the 'net for fun may suddenly realize they could make money charging for those pictures. Or the hacker who was having fun tinkering with stuff suddenly finding himself doing it as a form of expression because his 9 to 5 job doesn't allow him the luxury.
In building a political campaign web site for my brother who is running for a city council race, I find that the web site itself generates very little traffic. Even though we've placed his web site on all of the campaign materials (fliers, bumper stickers, hats, etc), and even though the web site is an easy to remember name, very few members of the community have hit his web site.
Do you see the web as an effective way for local candidates to get the message out? Or do you see the web more as a way to impress the local political "elite" and press in a region?
Further, given the nature of a presidential campaign (where the candidate's message is often "tuned" to a geographic area or interest group), do you tune the message on the web to fit all geographical regions? Or are you tuning the message to fit a sort of "Internet special interest group?"
Xilinx makes a field programmable gate array which allows you to wire the thing on the fly. That is, they'll sell you a chip which contains anywhere from 100,000 gates to 1,000,000 gates which can be dynamically wired to provide all sorts of functionality, from microprocessor cores to UARTs to RAM cells. You don't need millions in fab equipment. Just one of these chips and an EEPROM programmer and some freeware software (links here) will do the trick.
It's not the same as editing masks using a VLSI design tool, but it does the trick.
Further, most people who design chips don't have or need millions in fab equipment. When I was at Caltech about a dozen years ago, I took a class on VLSI design where we simulated the results, and for the final, sent our design to a fab house which specializes in one-off fabrication for testing. One-off fabrication costs a few hundred to a few thousand per chip, but gives you a way to test your designs in hardware once your prototype checks on the simulator software.
Beyond that, you don't really even need to do this if you simply want to translate your FPGA design into an ASIC core for mass production. There are several fab houses who will take your FPGA data and turn it into an ASIC core for you by automatically laying out the chip-level logic from the FPGA data.
So no, you don't need "tens of millions of dollars worth of fab equipment." Far from it; just a couple of FPGA samples from Xilinx, and some software, and some descrete components for building prototype circuitry that uses your FPGA circuit from a company such as Electronix Express will do the trick.
And hell, just poke around the Free IP site; they've got two processor cores available for download, including one of which simulates the 6502 very well on several FPGA vendor's products.
As others pointed out, Hardware open source is a completely different beast than that of software. I can't just build the crusoe in my spare time as a recreation. I have to devote serious resources.
Same has been said about operating systems. So don't expect an open source operating system any time soon...
And speaking of FGPAs, Xilinx has a whole page of IP for downloading and burning into their FGPAs here. What makes this super-spiffy is that you can write logic for these things and program them yourself--they download the gate configuration logic from an external ROM (or EPROM) or other source. In fact, many people are using these things by downloading the gate configuration from other sources, such as a data file.
The Open Source Hardware community apparently is thinking along the lines of using FGPAs to experiement with creating a various open source microprocessor cores in order to get the bugs out. Once the bugs are out, you can then create an ASIC core from the same data files and burn chips for production. What makes this strategy interesting is that probably for around $500 (or less) in hardware, you can build your own test bed. In fact, I could see building an FGPA "loader" which is basically a 6502 and a UART chip connected to your serial port which contains all the logic necessary to boot and download logic into an FGPA from your desktop as a sort of "in-circuit" emulator.
But my hardware days are behind me, at least for now...
Simple: if hardware is not proprietary, someone with an existing chip factory will make it cheaper than you can and sell their value-added package (motherboard) for less and put you out of business; hardware and true physical-domain engineering (EE, MechE, CivE, EnvE) and invention need to be proprietary so the inventors can be compensated for their work.
Um, actually the same thing can be said about software. The cost of most proprietary software packages is *not* the cost to reproduce, but to pay for the software engineering and software invention--that is, so that the software programmers can be compensated for their work.
In fact, your argument (about paying for the R&D rather than giving the R&D away for free so that a fab company without R&D overhead can reproduce it and sell it for less than you) is better suited for software, where the R&D overhead is substantially larger than the cost of reproduction. Frankly what you have described (about companies taking R&D and adding value and undercutting the market) exactly describes RedHat's business model.
Further, there are a number of companies who are experimenting with the open source model for hardware. http://cera2.com/micr/opensrc.htm The reason why it hasn't taken off quite as quickly is because there is more overhead in reproduction. However, if you read through a copy of the EE Times, Open Source Intellectual Property is becomming a fairly big deal in the chip design and fabrication arenas. And Open Source Intellectual Property has always been in the hardware arena, at least in the form of "reference hardware designs" for using various chip sets.
I'm not saying Open Source is a bad thing--to the contrary, it benefits the both the hardware and software community to learn from each other and to have more eyes looking at the IP to verify it's correctness. But Open Source is not just for software.
Yet it looks like you missed the point; it wasn't an attempt to bash MS, it was a description of the reality of many projects -- specifically retail products.
Actually, I didn't read it as a bash, nor was I trying to bash Microsoft myself. Mine was comments based on some time I spent working at Microsoft (actually, DreamWorks Interactive, who is 50% owned by Microsoft--but the work was done at the Microsoft campus).
The two don't mix. While you can have a project that has elements of both, you can't call a system that relies heavily on ad-hoc testing a formal system.
That's not what I was trying to describe. What I was trying to describe was a process which has a formal test plan and formal testers who run through a formal script, combined with automation which can perform certain elements of a formal test plan in an automated environment, combined with testers who were also encouraged to "bang on it" within certain parameters. (Read: "Charles, you're in charge of banging on the ODBC Control Panel as well as performing pages 303-306 of the scripted test plan.")
That is, they use a formal test plan written at the start based on the formal specification of the product, but they also encourage their testers to "play with the project" as well as executing the formal test plan.
As to "beta testers", Microsoft calls them "customers." (Okay, I know--cheap shot...)
Integration has nothing to do with it. Complete specifications with the time to execute tests based on them is the whole issue -- it always has been.
Normally I'd agree. However, it seems to me that once a project reaches a certain level of complexity, due to the O(N**2) nature of certain types of interactions inside a "black box", the amount of time required to execute tests based on a complete test specification may grow to be in the dozens or even hundreds of years.
With Microsoft's Windows 2000 product, a number of the "modules" inside the black box are coded as.DLL files. Unless the test plan includes programmers on the test team who can validate the binary API interfaces of all of those DLLs, and who can produce automation which can completely test each of those.DLL components and their interaction with the specified interface, you're stuck trying to build a test plan that takes all O(N**2) (or worse) interactions between those.DLLs in order to completely test the product.
So integration *does* have something to do with it: it defines how complex the product's possible behaviors will be, and that ultimately defines how complex the test plan will have to be to completely test the product.
Now if they built this thing in a fault-tolerant fashion, in the way firmware is built for an airplane, they'd build it as a collection of independant modules which use well-defined protocols to communicate with each other. Then the testing reduces to an O(N) problem of testing each module and testing to make sure it communicates correctly with the established protocol.
My guess: Most of the formal group gets dragged into ad-hoc testing --or-- they have incomplete tests based on incomplete specifications that they 'sign off' on when marketing, production, upper-management-in-other-areas, decides that there has been enough testing.
Based on my experience, it'll likely be the latter: an incomplete specification (that is incomplete because of the nature of the product), combined with testers who will close bugs more on pressure from management than anything else.
I'm not disagreeing with you about the nature of the ad-hoc element of all of this. I just wanted to clarify my comments, to make sure that folks here understood that I'm not denouncing Microsoft for not having a formal test plan--I'm quite sure they have one.
I just believe that, due to the way Microsoft elected to build the Windows 2000 product, that the specification and test plan is necessarly incomplete due to how huge the entire product is.
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, I don't know where you get your figures about ground level UV levels, but australians and new zealanders are getting skin cancer at vastly increased rates.
Is this because of ozone levels or because Australians and New Zealanders are spending more time in the sun? Here in Los Angeles, where the golden brown tan look is definitely out, skin cancer rates are dropping dramatically.
BTW, according to the TOMS graphs on-line at U Cambridge, while ozone layers have definitely thinned over antartica, there appears to be no thinning north of the antartic continent.
They haven't.
First, the banning of CFCs has only just started taking effect, and only in a handful of countries. Old systems full of CFCs (such as old refrigerators) didn't simply cease to exist--they're still out there, leaking. As is any automobile manufactured before the mid 1990's. Further, the CFC ban does not apply to many organizations such as the US military.
Second, even if all CFCs simply ceased to exist today (as if by magic), the model NASA developed on how CFCs move up into the atmosphere and destroyed the ozone layer suggested that it took something like 20 years before a ground-based CFC gas would migrate up into the stratosphere to interact chemically with the ozone layer there. Thus, even if we caused all old refrigerators, automobiles, and other CFC sources were to simply disappear, it would still take something like 20 years before the CFCs that had already leaked into the atmosphere would finish their damage.
Thus, if CFCs were causing the ozone layer, we should continue to see ozone damage for another 20 to 30 years, regardless of the currently in-place CFC bans.
Two points.
(1) If anyone here remembers their history, the'd remember that the environmental problem du'joir in the 1970's was global cooling, not global warming. The truth of the matter is that the evidence is still out about global warming--the best we can say is that we have some interesting localized weather patterns, but there is no evidence of any sea levels rising or any non-natural weather patterns changing. (And those who provide "statistical evidence"--if you look closely enough, they're cooking the books combined with weather simulations which they believe will predict the weather beyond the normal 7-14 days most simulations actually work.)
My point is that if you listen real carefully, even global warming is in the "disaster which will wipe us out in 10-20 years" category--far enough away that it seems possible (especially on warmer spring days), yet close enough to actively fear.
By the way, you forgot the ozone hole--though there are those who are starting to think it ain't the problem it once was, only because ground-level UV levels have not changed one iota. But there are those who still believe that in 10-20 years we're going to have to go out in the sun with SPF 5000 or die.
That's okay; I still remember when I was growing up in the 1970's that we were to run out of oil by 1990. That is, we would deplete all of the world's oil reserves by 1990, and because of it, civilization would collapse, causing wars a'la "Mad Max" to break out throughout the world as people struggle to find the last little caches of horded gasoline.
I have a real hard time believing in any disaster that will kill us in 10-20 years unless someone comes up with some really hard facts--like perhaps a photograph and orbital plot of the asteroid that is suppost to kill us all. I just remember too many disasters that were to wipe us out in 10-20 years while growing up (oil depletion, population explosion, global cooling, etc)--and we're still alive.
You could always combine the best of the lunar and solar calendars and switch to the Hebrew calendar. Or switch to the Chinese calendar--they use a lunar/solar system, and bypass all of those wierd exceptions that the Hebrew calendar uses to keep certain Jewish holidays on certain days of the week.
:-)
Of course figuring out when the leap months are is a bit of a pain in the neck--no regular rules like the Gregorian that any idiot (even many programmers) can keep track of.
Or we could scrap the idea of keeping up with seasons and switch to the Islamic calendar. Of course it's a pain in the neck to program--as the start of the month in most Islamic countries is called by some religious dude looking up and seeing the new moon. ("Hey, it looks like the new moon today! I declare today the start of Muharram!")
Hard to program, unless we equip these old guys with a T1...
isleap = false; // --- NOT 1000!
if(year%4 == 0) {
isleap=true;
year%100 == 0 ? isleap=false;
year%400 == 0 ? isleap=true;
}
Though this won't bite you until 2400...
Either something was missed or ignored... As an earlier poster pointed out, North America is a pretty poor place to live, for the most part.
/. that regularly. The posts about North America being a relatively poor place to live was posted after I visited here, and I have only just seen them.
:-)
I don't inhabit
You may have noted that humans did not develop as a species in a climate that in any way resembles even the relatively hospitable climate of the West Coast.
Of course. However, the reasons why this is so is still being debated by anthropologists.
The theory I personally tend to stick to is that we are "aquatic" apes. That is, we evolved from apes in Africa who were forced to spend a lot of time in the water (hense, our strong "diving reflex" which is not shared by many simians).
As to the west coast environment--the Spanards who first discovered Alta California noted that the environment was quite pleasent. They further noted that many of the native inhabitants seemed relatively "lazy", given how idealic things were. In fact, it has been suggested that one of the reasons why a high technological civilization was not created in California was because things were so ideal (relatively speaking) that there was little pressure on California Indians to create infrastructures Europeans did in order to improve their chances of survival. (That is, things like agriculture and cities were invented to promote mutual survival in harsh environments.)
Ironically, given the fear many people have of this environment, humans come from the jungles of Africa, in which region the societies the original poster is referring to lived.
First, the original poster had nothing to say about Africa. He only commented that hunter-gatherers only hunted and gathered about 5 hours a day, 3 days a week, though he hadn't read that much on the subject.
Second, it's unclear that ancient man in Africa had all that good a time of it. In fact, had things been ideal in Africa, some anthropologists I've read have suggested that there would have been little (if any) pressure for ancient homo-sapiens to expand outward and into Europe.
I'm also wondering which tribal group you're referring to when you say "California Indians."
Salinan. Our range was (and largly still is) the area around the Hunter-Liggot Military Reservation, ranging to Morro Bay in the south and Atascadero to the east. Most of my family still lives in that area, by the way--the last time I checked with an elder, most of the folks in my tribe (or the "families") still live around Morro Bay or Atascadero, with a few having migrated as far south as San Luis Obispo.
A bit of quick research on my part shows a number of different tribes that inhabited this region, and I'm wondering if this is perhaps not so much a "natural" tribal grouping as one forced upon them when the Europeans came through looking for land.
I could blather on for a few gigabytes on this topic. However, the short answer is that there was little interest by the Spanard Conquistatores (and the 49'ers who later showed up) to do any form of forced migration. Most of the tribal groups along the coast of California were defined largely by natural boundaries--that is, the border between the Salinans and the Chumash to the south was the southernmost range of the Salinas Valley. The Chumash were separated from the Gabrillienos in the Los Angeles basin area by the San Fernando moutain range. The Oholones from the Salinans in the north by the northernmost range defining the Salinas Valley. And so forth. (Note that this is all off the top of my head, and I reserve the right to have screwed up the names.)
Part of this comes from the fact that none of my data indicates that any of the coastal dwellers relied mainly on acorns, perhaps they had been displaced at least once before?
Acorns were a staple of costal California Indian tribes, especially those who inhabited areas where a lot of oak trees dwell. Unfortunately, the Spanards considered acorns "pig slop"--one of the reasons why California Indians were slopped in large hog slops in the missions. When the Spanards attempted to convert California Indians, one of the first things they did was to abolish acorn consumption by burning a number of trees down, or destructively harvesting oak trees for mission construction.
The upshot of this is that when the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided to do a survey of the California Indians, the first extensive survey they did was in the 1910's--and is largly inaccurate due to the way they gathered information. (For example, the Salinas Tribe is marked as "extinct" because the surveyers would ride around on horseback, go into various bars, and ask "are there any Indians here?" Given the fact that up until about the depression it was virtually impossible to prosecute a white man for murdering an indian, and given the fact that a popular white sport was murdering indians, by and large my relatives would answer "fuck no; nobody but us mexicans here.")
And once a few would amit to being Indian, the surveys would ask them what they personally ate. And by then, given that most of the oak trees in the Salinas Valley were destroyed a few years before, most of them would answer "wheat flour" instead of "acorn flour."
I'm interested to hear about the history of this group, especially because the time period you describe was one during which life became increasingly demanding on the Native Americans, as they were forcibly assimilated into our 'civilized' society.
Let me recommend a few books.
Brusa, Betty War, "Salinan Indians of California and their neighbors," NatureGraph.
(This book discusses what evidence for the Salinan people (my ancestors) exists from pre-contact times, and what that evidence suggests.)
Kroeber, A.L., "Handbook of the Indians of California." Dover.
(This is the resarch paper that I mentioned before which was gathered largly by asking who was Indian in the local bars. While parts of it are inaccurate, it does paint an interesting picture of the area in the 1920's, when the research was completed.)
Heizer, Robert F., "The Destruction of California Indians", U. Nebraska Press.
(This is an interesting book in that it paints a picture of the treatment of California Indians from the 1840's through to the 1870's that is quite different from the stuff they normally teach in school. It's an interesting book in that there is no commentary; just reprints of old letters, newspaper articles and eyewitness accounts, gathered in chronological order.)
Hinton, Leanne, "Flutes Of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages." Heydey Books.
(This is an interesting cultural and linguistic survey.)
Of course nothing here really quite replaces listening to my grandfather bitch about whites, or listening to my mother's stories about how my grandfather used to bitch about whites....
I understand that a lot of people become annoyed when asked to cite information, so if it's not readily at hand, don't bother, but I'm wondering what your source is when you state that archeologists believe that the CIs had an idyllic lifestyle?
Oh, no problem. I have about a dozen other books on native americans in general, as well as a couple of other surveys on California Indians. I gathered them largly because I wanted to learn more about my tribe that wasn't learned from family members with huge chips on their shoulders and an outright hatred of anything higher-tech than a couple of rocks ground down into a mortar and pestle.
Of course I had little luck; ever since Kroeber declared me and my family "extinct", it's hard to find anyone who has bothered to do one whit of archaeological research.
(If you like, I can dig up the list from a box under my bed sometime.)
Anyways, this is largly based on the first book mentioned above, as well as the handbook survey. Also keep in mind that "idyllic" is a relative term--that is, it's "idyllic" in the sense that folks seldom starved to death, and actually had enough leasure time to tell stories, throw the occassional party, and play gambling games.
And, personally, I don't mind a trek of 50 to 100 miles. Sounds like about two weeks of light hiking.
Yeah, but it's a bitch when you haven't had anything to eat in a week except knawing on some leaves and some old jerky. And it's even more of a pain when you realize the hike is across a 5,000 foot gain...
The research that the earlier poster was referring to was referring to much earlier civilizations than the Native American tribe your grandfather belonged to.
WHAT RESEARCH?!?
He just started making assertions about how ancient cavemen had better lives than us "moderns." Then he goes on and says I haven't read enough about this to say with certainty,.... Doesn't sound like state-of-the-art anthropological research to me.
Frankly, I started with anecdotal information because it's more personal to me that way. And it's more personal to the couple of anthropologists who've wanted to poke and prod me as an example of a native american who has gone from cave-man status to a high-level of integration into our technologically sophisticated society. (That is, if you read the anthropological research, you'll find that it boils down to either researching artifacts, or statistical analysis of stories from folks like me.)
It's much more accurate than those idiot deconstructionist feminist "archaeologists" who keep pointing to those chubby little fetishes from 20,000 years ago and proclaiming that ancient cavemen must have been exclusively goddess worshippers, when for all we know those little fetishes were the cavemen equivalent of pornography.
As to acorn flower: you have to leach it a *lot* to get rid of the bitter taste. That bitter taste is tannic acid--and in large amounts it can make you really sick. Once the flower has been leached properly, the result is something a little hardier than whole wheat flower. Quite tasty if done right.
California Indians (who lived in "hunter-gatherer" mode until roughly the 1920's when developers ran them off the costal lands they inhabited) would often starve to death when the local acorn-producing trees would stop producing acorns for a season.
Acorns were the staple of California Indians. And they only keep for about a year, best. In the event when acorns would dry up in one area, you would have two choices (according to my Grandfather, who lived in hunter-gatherer mode until he was run off his village by greedy developers): you either starve, or you had to walk to the San Joaquin Valley from where they lived (along the coast near Morro Bay), a trek of 50 to 100 miles, all on foot.
Archaeologists consider the California Indians as having lead a relatively "idealic" life compared to most primitive people in that they didn't starve to death all that often.
The ancient nomads had much more leisurely lives than us. They worked something like 5 hours a day, and only 3 days a week at that. I haven't read enough about this to say with certainty, but I'm willing to bet that the number of hunter-gatherers that starved to death doesn't even compare to the number of poor and homeless that starve to death in our society.
*sigh*
As a native american whose grandfather grew up as a hunter-gatherer in the hills above what is now Fort Liggot along the coast in California, I know that anything could be farther from the truth.
My grandfather and his family lived largely on harvested acorns from nearby trees, along with the occassional root they could dig up, and the occassional deer they could fall. They would also gather wood for fires (it gets cold at night), along with gathering wood and grasses for building huts. From the furs of the deer they would catch they would make shoes and blankets for sleeping at night. And they would spend hours carving stone mortar and pestles for grinding acorns. (You just don't gather a few acorns and pop them in your mouth--unless you spend an hour or two grinding down lunch and washing the toxins from the mash, they're poisonous.)
What my grandparents were, was poor in a sense that someone on welfare in our society cannot begin to appreciate.
If you think they could live by gathering for only five hours a day, three days a week, I have a simple challenge for you.
Buy some dried beans from the store. Buy a mortar and pestle. Grind the beans down into a flour, soak it in water, then press them out into patties, and fry them up on a griddle.
Takes a while to cook this mess, doesn't it?
Now factor in the fact that you had to make the mortar and pestle from a couple of rocks you found by the river. Factor in the fact that you had to make the griddle. And factor in the fact that you had to gather the wood to make the fire, along with making the fire by twirling a couple of twigs. Ah, hell; and factor in the fact that you had to gather a bunch of twigs and tie them together in order to make a basket so that you could allow your flour to soak.
My grandfather and my mother and I are Salinan Indians. And there is no way in hell that I would trade my fast-food/car/computerized/grocery store/Gap life for my grandfather's constant battle against starvation and freezing cold.
I didn't bother quoting that because I know it's bullshit.
http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/ empsit.t11.htm
The above link points to the recent employment statistics in the United States for the entire economy. Unless he defines "knowledge workers" as including people like legal secretaries, the entire motion picture industry, and people who work behind the front desk at various hotels across the country, and if he narrows the "service sector" down to "services/miscellaneous" (or 'services2' in the table), we don't even come close to that 50% mark.
The fact of the matter is that people who do software development or work for IT departments, or other "knowledge workers" who work in the computer industry comprises of slightly more than 10% of the entire service-producing economy. (That's the total of all engineering-related services and all business related services, verses the entire service-producing economy, which employs around 104 million people. And that significantly overestimates "knowledge workers", as the statistics I added up in the above categories also include secretarial support and the like--as the statistics are compiled by looking at employment at various companies verses it's NAICS category.)
The long and the short of it is that Katz's second-hand hearing about 50% of the people in the service sector are "knowledge workers" is a crock, and not supported by the statistics from the US Department of Labor Statistics.
I was refering to hours plumbers work, not the price they charge.
The government maintains that the average work week in the service sector is 32.9 hours; no different than a decade ago, and five hours shorter than in l964.
/. who work similar hours, won't make a dent in that aggrigate number, just as the self-employed people in the 1960's who worked their ass off in marketing consulting or similar highly-paid, high hour count jobs in the 1960's didn't make a dent back then. In fact, the decline in this number from the 1960's can be attributed to the rise of fast-food restaurants and their use of part-time workers.
I've got a newsflash for Mr. Katz. The "service sector" is not just computer-related jobs. In fact, computer-related jobs, such as IT jobs, are an insignificant percentage of those jobs.
Other jobs which bring the average down include part-time hamburger-flippers at McDonalds (which are considered service sector jobs), the plumber who comes over and fixes your drain (another service sector job), and the woman you hire to sit your pets when you go on vacation.
Basically, the "service sector" is jobs which involve providing a non-tangable "service", as opposed to manufacturing (where you make concrete things like cars), or retail (where you sell things like clothing to people).
Because the "service sector" includes part-time fast-food hamburger flippers and self-employed pet sitters and the like, I would be highly supprised if the average for the entire service sector of our economy was much above 40 hours a week. The number 32.9 sounds just about right.
The 60+ hours I worked last week, not including the time I spent last week working on free software stuff (another 10 or so), multipled by everyone on
What makes this misunderstanding spectacularly sad is that it formed the keystone of Mr. Katz' article. Without the fact that the number '32.9' is the average number of hours worked across the entire service sector, including part-time fast-food hamburger flippers and the like, Mr. Katz appears not to have an article at all.
You're equating a potential redistribution with an actual violation of intellectual property rights.
Actually, I'm just parroting the other side of the argument. But you're right--just because I can potentially copy something doesn't mean that I will.
In any event, plain reading of the DMCA would seem to indicate that fair use is dead, and that if you view a DVD on a non-sanctioned player of any kind, you are "circumventing an access control device" without the authorization of the copyright holder. Distributing the tools to others is a separate offense. This is clearly insane, but that's the way it is.
And I hope the DMCA is eventually rulled unconstitutional.
Look, I don't agree with the MPAA; said something to that effect in my original post. But the MPAA does have a problem--within our lifetimes we'll be able to download the data to play back a movie at full DVD resolution off the 'net in the same way we download MP3s now.
And that has the MPAA worried sick.
This is at best a specious argument.
I know that. However, it is the argument that is given by various manufacturers to include region codes into their products.
That is, they do it because it's cheaper for a manufacturer to include region code technology and keep the distributers in a particular country happy than it is to try to bypass those distributors.
If a retailer can legally get the product for lower cost than the distributor will sell it, then the cost that they pay is the distribution cost.
And the distributor that store front bypassed will never do business with that store again, causing that store's supply of products to effectively dry up.
To an American like me this sounds shocking, surreal, and extremely anti-competitive. However, it is the current reality through most of the world, where anti-trust laws are totally non-existant.
Closer to the truth is the fact that US filmakers release films overseas later than the US release to be able to recycle film and save on marketing costs. They don't want to compete with DVDs of their own movies.
While it may be true, it doesn't completely track with "region code" technology that is used in other tech products such as video games. The reality is the manufacturers are trying to play nice with the regional distributors rather than bypassing them. By the way, this is extremely important if you are trying to export to Asia, where established distribution channels can effectively make or break your product--because of a tightly interwoven distribution channel.
While this is true, the fact of the matter is, if I can view a file in any way on a PC, I can copy it (with potentially reduced quality). Are you going to insist that CSS be put in every video card and that frame capture cards should obey Macrovision? (I wouldn't be surprised).
Actually, if you bothered to read the bottom of my original post, you would have found where I said that I don't agree with much of the arguments I'm echoing. What I am doing is presenting the other side of the argument; that's all.
Personally, what I think the MPAA needs to do is to figure out a value-added proposition which adds value to a DVD movie in much the same way the software industry adds value by providing printed manuals and other things to software products. That is, make it so that even if you *could* pirate a DVD movie, you probably won't, simply because you'd rather have the non-digital value-added materials that accompany the DVD movie.
You can't win by fighting the ability to copy, only by stopping mass distribution. One of the best ways to stop mass distibution is with reasonable pricing. Copying inevitably costs more in time, materials and/or bandwidth than the initial production.
The problem is that this is changing. There are companies who are trying to figure out a way to put fiber into your home, with T3 speeds, in about a dozen years. I tried ripping my South Park DVD with DeCSS; it resulted in about 10 gig of data. If we have fiber at T3 running into your house, I could send you the South Park movie in about 30 minutes--a lot less time than it takes me to drive to the local shopping mall, and a hell of a lot less time than it takes to wait for a shipment from DVDExpress.com.
There's the problem. A dozen years ago 1200 baud was considered fast, and 100 megabytes was considered a lot of hard disk space. Today, MP3.com succeeds, and an 18 gig HD can be bought from Frys for about $200. In a dozen years? If you could store 3Tb on your disk, you could download 10 movies in an afternoon and stick them in your "Movie Warez" directory in the same way I can download MP3s today.
The simple fact that 99% of the 'net using world cannot download a dvd movie from the net due to bandwidth and/or time constraints would seem to signify that the primary use of the DeCSS software is, in fact, something other than just ripping copies of dvds to trade with friends.
Today that's 99.9% or some such.
Tomorrow, that's 90%.
And the next day, it's 50%.
I think I'm going to show my age. However, when I first started serious programming, the idea of storing more than a couple of pages of > on a computer seemed like an outrageous problem. (I remember sitting around with my friends discussing how cool the future will be when we can store an entire 100+ page book on our computer.)
When I first started college, the notion of storing an entire track of a song at resolutions high enough to compete with the audio fidelity of an album was unthinkable. (Hell, such a creature would completely fill up that $800 20 megabyte hard disk I bought to hang off my MacPlus.) And the idea of *downloading* such a file was just completely outrageous--given the fact that if you were even on a BBS, you probably were hooked up at 300 baud. The same goes for pictures--the idea of digitizing a picture and storing it on-line sounded completely outrageous.
Today, we connect fast enough that pictures are routinely inserted into web sites because they look cool as icons. (Borg Bill, anyone?)
And sites like MP3 are doing quite well. And people are storing *hundreds* of songs on their hard disks.
The worry of the MPAA is not that people *today* can pirate movies freely. The worry is that *tomorrow*, there will be so much bandwidth that downloading an entire movie at DVD video quality will just take a few minutes.
And don't tell me that it sounds completely outrageous that someone will be able to download an entire movie off the 'net in a few minutes. It's just a matter of time.
Therefore, I believe that DeCSS's use (and distribution) should be allowed under fair use guidelines.
That's the small picture view. Is using DeCSS within fair use guidelines? I would personally agree. However, the big picture is one where just about everything movie ever produced can be reproduced and downloaded in the same way we download a tarball today--and pirated just as easily.
Why then, do you charge different prices in different countries?
Because of different distribution costs in those countries. Different markets have different markups because each market has it's own distribution system which requires different markups so that the people along that distribution chain can be paid for their work.
(This is the standard reason given by most hardware manufacturers as to why PCs cost about 50% more in certain parts of the world than in others.)
Region codes exist on DVDs in order to prevent retail marketers from circumventing their own internal distribution model. That is, the distributors that the studios deal with to distribute materials around the world pretty much demanded that some sort of region code be added so that the distributors can maintain their effective market position, rather than be bypassed by the store fronts who could otherwise buy the materials from a distributor in another country and save money.
And the total number of arrests in Hong Kong would be?
They're working with the PRC in order to raise awareness of copyright issues in Hong Kong. However, the MPAA does not control China, and so negotiations are necessarly on-going.
And your reply to the prosecutor who said they did it at your request would be?
The prosecutor was made aware of the violation of copyright law. But the MPAA doesn't control the Noregian government or their prosecutors; they can only lodge a complaint.
So you do agree that once you've bought the DVD drive and the DVD disk, you have the right to use whatever tools you want to view it on a Linux computer?
Of course. However, you do not have the right to distribute those tools, or to repurpose those tools to violate studio's intellectual property rights by copying the tracks off the DVD for potential redistribution across the 'net.
One thing that Mr. Valenti does get is the explosive nature of bandwidth over the Internet. That is, while now it is impractical to download a 10gb movie file, tomorrow better compression technology and higher bandwidths will make it trivial to do. Just as 10 years ago, the thought of storing one record album for playback on your computer was seen as completely impractical--while now, people are routinely storing dozens of CDs on their hard disk for convenient playback.
I personally see a time in the near future where downloading a movie over the net will be nearly as fast as downloading a picture is today. And when that happens--when it is possible to download "Star Wars" off the 'net in a few minutes--either some form of infrastructure needs to be in place to protect the intellectual property rights of studios, or "Star Wars" will make the top "MPEGWAREZ.COM" download for 30 weeks running.
So I personally suspect if you ask the MPAA the above question about Linux, that they'd respond that as soon as they get a request from a closed-source developer who will develop a DVD player for Linux gives them a viable request to build such a beast, they'll gladly license the CSS algorithms. And I suspect given the flap over Linux, they'll even do it at a discount, just so they can prevent the open-source community from producing tools that could be easily repurposed for piracy.
And don't give me the "we won't repurpose the code" bit--remember, the biggest strength in the open source community is it's biggest weakness: that when source is open and free, programmers are able to reuse the code for whatever purpose strikes their fancy.
Final Question: You can even ask the audience or call a friend. Has anyone ever sucessfully used DeCSS to copy a DVD movie to another PC and then play it back?
http://www.dvd-copy.com
Duh.
You know, if you are going to ask hardball questions, try to ask questions that are more hardball than this. Because most of these questions have already been asked and answered elsewhere.
Personally I think that the MPAA has a problem. And I personally think their approach to solving this problem is the wrong approach. Alienating the very technical community they will need in the future to help them maximize the value of their properties is not a good thing to do.
And personally I don't agree with some of the answers I gave above: using technology to protect monopolies is just plain wrong IMHO. But in industries where technology can be used to protect distribution monopolies, it's being used. And that includes country codes in digital media such as Sega games and DVD movies.
The baby boom era is called that because people returning from WWII had babies in large numbers. Hense this demographic "boom."
However, Jack Valenti flew a plane in World War II. That means he was born well before the baby boom era, and so is no boomer.
I tend to think of the Internet as broken up into different regions depending on the primary intent of the people involved. Given that, there seems to be four types:
In the "people trying to get rich" I would place all corporate activitity and many X-rated sites. That's because the thing that motivates them is to make money. Since they are motivated to make money, their activities will eventually devolve into either becomming an "exclusive" hookup (VPNs), advertising like crazy (/.), or sell-sell-sell (Amazon).
In the "people trying to convert us" we have things like the "God" sites, as well as the racist sites.
In the "people having fun" category we have gamers, some technical folks (who apparently have fun writing code, though some of them are more "express yourself types"), and some X-rated sites where some guy with a digital camera is posting nudes of his wife on the 'net.
And in the "people expressing themselves" we have the whole art scene, as well as a lot of GPLed software sites and the like.
I think this is a better way of breaking up the regions of the 'net, partly because by knowing what motivates the people doing the site, you can sort of see in which direction they will "pimp" themselves to achieve their objectives. For example, we have 'www.fresnobee.com', a local newspaper site, with a "shop online" button. That's because the people running the Fresno Bee aren't interested in reporting the news; they're interested in making money reporting the news. And if they can make some additional money allowing people to shop online, why not? They're making money, after all.
Now of course people evolve and change over time, so sometimes these boundaries can be blurred. For example, the husband and wife posting nudes on the 'net for fun may suddenly realize they could make money charging for those pictures. Or the hacker who was having fun tinkering with stuff suddenly finding himself doing it as a form of expression because his 9 to 5 job doesn't allow him the luxury.
Maybe ever since the web turned into one big commercial marketplace that no-one pays attention to RFC 1591 anymore?
In building a political campaign web site for my brother who is running for a city council race, I find that the web site itself generates very little traffic. Even though we've placed his web site on all of the campaign materials (fliers, bumper stickers, hats, etc), and even though the web site is an easy to remember name, very few members of the community have hit his web site.
Do you see the web as an effective way for local candidates to get the message out? Or do you see the web more as a way to impress the local political "elite" and press in a region?
Further, given the nature of a presidential campaign (where the candidate's message is often "tuned" to a geographic area or interest group), do you tune the message on the web to fit all geographical regions? Or are you tuning the message to fit a sort of "Internet special interest group?"
Xilinx makes a field programmable gate array which allows you to wire the thing on the fly. That is, they'll sell you a chip which contains anywhere from 100,000 gates to 1,000,000 gates which can be dynamically wired to provide all sorts of functionality, from microprocessor cores to UARTs to RAM cells. You don't need millions in fab equipment. Just one of these chips and an EEPROM programmer and some freeware software (links here) will do the trick.
It's not the same as editing masks using a VLSI design tool, but it does the trick.
Further, most people who design chips don't have or need millions in fab equipment. When I was at Caltech about a dozen years ago, I took a class on VLSI design where we simulated the results, and for the final, sent our design to a fab house which specializes in one-off fabrication for testing. One-off fabrication costs a few hundred to a few thousand per chip, but gives you a way to test your designs in hardware once your prototype checks on the simulator software.
Beyond that, you don't really even need to do this if you simply want to translate your FPGA design into an ASIC core for mass production. There are several fab houses who will take your FPGA data and turn it into an ASIC core for you by automatically laying out the chip-level logic from the FPGA data.
So no, you don't need "tens of millions of dollars worth of fab equipment." Far from it; just a couple of FPGA samples from Xilinx, and some software, and some descrete components for building prototype circuitry that uses your FPGA circuit from a company such as Electronix Express will do the trick.
And hell, just poke around the Free IP site; they've got two processor cores available for download, including one of which simulates the 6502 very well on several FPGA vendor's products.
As others pointed out, Hardware open source is a completely different beast than that of software. I can't just build the crusoe in my spare time as a recreation. I have to devote serious resources.
Same has been said about operating systems. So don't expect an open source operating system any time soon...
It's being done by Sun with the picoJava and SPARC cores.
eg3.com has a list of Open Source hardware links.
Tom Coonan has donated a free 8-bit microprocessor core to the Open Source IP community. One interesting aspect of this is that you can "build it yourself" using an FGPA booted from an EEPROM you can burn yourself.
And speaking of FGPAs, Xilinx has a whole page of IP for downloading and burning into their FGPAs here. What makes this super-spiffy is that you can write logic for these things and program them yourself--they download the gate configuration logic from an external ROM (or EPROM) or other source. In fact, many people are using these things by downloading the gate configuration from other sources, such as a data file.
The Open Source Hardware community apparently is thinking along the lines of using FGPAs to experiement with creating a various open source microprocessor cores in order to get the bugs out. Once the bugs are out, you can then create an ASIC core from the same data files and burn chips for production. What makes this strategy interesting is that probably for around $500 (or less) in hardware, you can build your own test bed. In fact, I could see building an FGPA "loader" which is basically a 6502 and a UART chip connected to your serial port which contains all the logic necessary to boot and download logic into an FGPA from your desktop as a sort of "in-circuit" emulator.
But my hardware days are behind me, at least for now...
Simple: if hardware is not proprietary, someone with an existing chip factory will make it cheaper than you can and sell their value-added package (motherboard) for less and put you out of business; hardware and true physical-domain engineering (EE, MechE, CivE, EnvE) and invention need to be proprietary so the inventors can be compensated for their work.
Um, actually the same thing can be said about software. The cost of most proprietary software packages is *not* the cost to reproduce, but to pay for the software engineering and software invention--that is, so that the software programmers can be compensated for their work.
In fact, your argument (about paying for the R&D rather than giving the R&D away for free so that a fab company without R&D overhead can reproduce it and sell it for less than you) is better suited for software, where the R&D overhead is substantially larger than the cost of reproduction. Frankly what you have described (about companies taking R&D and adding value and undercutting the market) exactly describes RedHat's business model.
Further, there are a number of companies who are experimenting with the open source model for hardware. http://cera2.com/micr/opensrc.htm The reason why it hasn't taken off quite as quickly is because there is more overhead in reproduction. However, if you read through a copy of the EE Times, Open Source Intellectual Property is becomming a fairly big deal in the chip design and fabrication arenas. And Open Source Intellectual Property has always been in the hardware arena, at least in the form of "reference hardware designs" for using various chip sets.
I'm not saying Open Source is a bad thing--to the contrary, it benefits the both the hardware and software community to learn from each other and to have more eyes looking at the IP to verify it's correctness. But Open Source is not just for software.
Yet it looks like you missed the point; it wasn't an attempt to bash MS, it was a description of the reality of many projects -- specifically retail products.
.DLL files. Unless the test plan includes programmers on the test team who can validate the binary API interfaces of all of those DLLs, and who can produce automation which can completely test each of those .DLL components and their interaction with the specified interface, you're stuck trying to build a test plan that takes all O(N**2) (or worse) interactions between those .DLLs in order to completely test the product.
Actually, I didn't read it as a bash, nor was I trying to bash Microsoft myself. Mine was comments based on some time I spent working at Microsoft (actually, DreamWorks Interactive, who is 50% owned by Microsoft--but the work was done at the Microsoft campus).
The two don't mix. While you can have a project that has elements of both, you can't call a system that relies heavily on ad-hoc testing a formal system.
That's not what I was trying to describe. What I was trying to describe was a process which has a formal test plan and formal testers who run through a formal script, combined with automation which can perform certain elements of a formal test plan in an automated environment, combined with testers who were also encouraged to "bang on it" within certain parameters. (Read: "Charles, you're in charge of banging on the ODBC Control Panel as well as performing pages 303-306 of the scripted test plan.")
That is, they use a formal test plan written at the start based on the formal specification of the product, but they also encourage their testers to "play with the project" as well as executing the formal test plan.
As to "beta testers", Microsoft calls them "customers." (Okay, I know--cheap shot...)
Integration has nothing to do with it. Complete specifications with the time to execute tests based on them is the whole issue -- it always has been.
Normally I'd agree. However, it seems to me that once a project reaches a certain level of complexity, due to the O(N**2) nature of certain types of interactions inside a "black box", the amount of time required to execute tests based on a complete test specification may grow to be in the dozens or even hundreds of years.
With Microsoft's Windows 2000 product, a number of the "modules" inside the black box are coded as
So integration *does* have something to do with it: it defines how complex the product's possible behaviors will be, and that ultimately defines how complex the test plan will have to be to completely test the product.
Now if they built this thing in a fault-tolerant fashion, in the way firmware is built for an airplane, they'd build it as a collection of independant modules which use well-defined protocols to communicate with each other. Then the testing reduces to an O(N) problem of testing each module and testing to make sure it communicates correctly with the established protocol.
My guess: Most of the formal group gets dragged into ad-hoc testing --or-- they have incomplete tests based on incomplete specifications that they 'sign off' on when marketing, production, upper-management-in-other-areas, decides that there has been enough testing.
Based on my experience, it'll likely be the latter: an incomplete specification (that is incomplete because of the nature of the product), combined with testers who will close bugs more on pressure from management than anything else.
I'm not disagreeing with you about the nature of the ad-hoc element of all of this. I just wanted to clarify my comments, to make sure that folks here understood that I'm not denouncing Microsoft for not having a formal test plan--I'm quite sure they have one.
I just believe that, due to the way Microsoft elected to build the Windows 2000 product, that the specification and test plan is necessarly incomplete due to how huge the entire product is.