"And once there are 1000 companies pulling the same trick you suddenly find it is a disproportionate amount of effort, you might as well scrap copyright at that point."
And civilisation would breathe a sigh of relief at having averted a 1000-year Copyright Dark Age.
"Moreover, the scarcity of a book is not a reason to make free copies. "
Yes it is, morally and ethically, if you value the preservation of information (a REAL good) rather than "rights-holding" (an artificial "good" which imposes scarcity).
How many pieces of orphaned media, like early Doctor Who tapes, have been rescued for posterity and even commercial resale because of the actions of fans who "broke the law" to do the right thing and preserve data?
Data is real. Copyright is a convenient fiction. When the fiction gets in the way of reality, we have a problem that needs to be fixed.
"It's not reasonable because it places an enormous burden on the rights holder to police the use of his creation"
Yes.
It SHOULD be a big, heavy thing to "police the use" of OTHER PEOPLE'S SPEECH.
Authors SHOULD think twice before dropping the heavy hammer of the law on people making reference to their work.
Does an author have the moral right to automatically prevent everyone, everywhere from even discussing their works? I don't think so, no. I'm with Google on this.
There are some physical theories that speculate that all particles are in fact already black holes... so creating a micro-one might not be all that extraordinary.
"So that even if you create an itty bitty one it will just evaporate due to starvation and the effects of other gravitational and molecular forces..."
Hello! I'm collecting for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Singularities.
Did you know that today in America, over 5,000 black holes a day will be abandoned by their creators, and left to suffer the effects of mass starvation and a miserable death at the hands of Hawking Radiation? Some of them can't even afford a rudimentary Kerr Metric to clothe themselves and are infested with closed timelike curves. You can protect this atrocity by contributing to our Mass Sanctuary Program. $10 billion will purchase an accelerator to fling these unwanted, unloved, naked singularities to the warm core of our Earth where they can live out the rest of their relativistically lengthened lifetimes in happiness, converting our planet's nickel-iron to unthinkable warpings of the spacetime metric, eventually rising to stand proudly on their own event horizons and devour us all.
It's a hand up, not a hand out. All we're asking is that we give apocalyptic screaming doom a healthy chance.
"it's unreasonable to expect an amoral organization to willingly take any action that would result in less money and power for that organization. Government is unfortunately no exception. "
Neither is business. So it's not government's fault, per se - it's a human failing.
To be more precise, no organisation is per se moral or amoral, but rather any organisation is either moral or amoral to the extent that the people who have moral sensitivities (in its realm of business) are more in charge of its destiny than the people who lack those moral sensitivities.
If a business is run primarily by people whose only concern is the financial bottom line, then the decisions made by those people will be amoral - and that business as a whole - will act in an amoral way.
If a government is run by people whose only concern is power, then the same thing.
But neither case is necessarily the only way of doing business or doing government, or doing any other kind of human endeavour. UNLESS WE CHOOSE TO MAKE IT SO by propagating the idea that "an organization CAN NEVER BE moral" and thus excuse ourselves for our amoral choices.
Governments are moral if moral people control them. Businesses are moral if moral people control them.
The fundamental idea of democracy is that the mass of people are more likely to have their innate human moral sensitivities intact than the elite, who have burned them out in pursuit of power and privilege. The fundamental idea of elitism is that morality is not something intrinsic to humanity but something that must be learned or taught or inherited, and the brute amoral masses ignored.
Me, I cast my vote for morality being innate and for elitist training being something that teaches us to extinguish our moral common sense in favour of clever sophistry (often taught in business school) - so for that reason, I'm more in favour of governments than businesses, if those governments are open, transparent and controlled by honest democratic process. Which admittedly is not always the case - but if it's not, that's because we the people have abdicated our responsibility to get involved in the hard work of self-government, and have abandoned rational moral choice for the fantasy of an 'invisible hand' which will somehow magically produce moral behaviour out of competitive self-interest.
"Only teleologists and the mentally ill"/me pulls out his teleoscope and stares at you through it. Yes, I predict you will fall wildly in love on the nearest possible Thursday. And then be hit by a meteorite.
Okay, what's good on teleovision? Aw man, just reruns of Star Wars VII-IX again?
Ah, those would be the bands which only visit our country once every five years?
Yes, I know I should be supporting local bands who nobody has ever heard of who play genres like 'mathgazer shoerock', but my hipster card got revoked.
"Most fossil fuels and hydrogen sources are not petroleum. These distinctions matter in some areas like a consideration of the effects of radical oil supply drops (commonly called "peak oil")."
They're different commodities, yes. But correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't natural gas usually accompany petroleum deposits and track its depletion very closely?
Nitpick: It's netbook, not notebook. "Notebook" has been the term for "full sized laptop" since the mid 1990s.
Since I've got a netbook, I've found that I really enjoy it. The size is just right for carrying in a backpack, and it lets me focus and concentrate on work (reading ebooks and writing) that I wouldn't otherwise get done at my desktop due to distractions. So I don't think it will be going away for me anytime soon.
In this interview he says he's using an off-the shelf body motion capture rig, but the innovation was in the helmet-cam facial recognition system and software and the goal of 'zero artist touchups' on the facial rendering.
"Never in a town hall meeting is it considered productive to shout that your opponents are "F~ING STUPID" and yet this tactic works exceedingly well on the internet."
I assume you've never watched the Australian parliament in session.
"OSS doesn't mean we have the right to demand all content be free or are justified in pirating media and software. OSS means that we can, together, make free content which complements the for-pay content out there."
Which, applied to news, would suggest that something like Wikinews or Indymedia or Youtube ought to arise to fill the reporting gap.
I don't think either of those channels work as such - but, well. I'm watching, eg, Alison Kruse because it's interesting first-person reporting on a topic which intrigues me. Obviously others disagree about the value of her material, but I like that I have the choice to evaluate it for myself, and this would not be possible without Youtube as an open upload or 'feed' site.
So there must be lots of first-person reporting we can feed into an open-source news grid. The problem is how to somehow establish bona fides and how to fund the indepth analysis which SOME newspapers give.
Unfortunately, the Iraq War really was the last nail in the coffin of traditional media for me. Almost to a man, all the big US papers lined up behind an utterly manipulated agenda. The best news source I found in early 2003 was the libertarian news aggregator site antiwar.com, which ferreted out all the international and local-paper stories which didn't filter up to the NYT or Washington Post front page.
Scoop.co.nz is another example of a new-media news play. One of their distinctives is that they show live unfiltered political party announcements rather than just doing commentary - and I think this is the direction that online news has to go. Stop trying to be a one-way "processed news product" where you package news plus commentary in one chunk, and split the two out. Then realise that your readers can also become your reporters if you give them a little trust. It's a hard thing to realise that "value-added content" actually means "value-subtracted" in many cases, but it's true.
There are attribution and funding systems which still need to emerge. But the OSS model is already working for news, in the social network grid, where 'what my friends are doing' IS always relevant local news to someone. If you have enough micro-news sources then analysis can emerge on top of that, and if we each do a little bit of feed and analysis we can potentially build a much more robust news ecosystem than one dominated by big heroic superstars - who may not turn out to be all that superheroic - certainly Iraq proved that the superstars had feet of clay, not an Edward Morrow among them.
Mind you I remember watching a Scott Adams with graphics on the Apple II and daydreaming about "what if you did that in a persistent online world with 3D graphics... that'd be AWESOME". And now we have that and it's... sorta awesome, sorta boring.
From my perspective as an IT person - who has to spend a scary amount of time writing scripts and reverse-engineering various black-box 'off the shelf' software packages just to figure out how to install them, let alone get logs off them and get them to communicate with the rest of our IT infrastructure - I think most 'software developers' could really benefit by spending a few years in the IT trenches.
Software development really suffers from living in its own little bubble - a bubble where the developer thinks nothing of wiping and installing a whole new machine just to put their new package on, nobody ever needs to install patches, and there's no infrastructure. Software developers often seem to believe that their program is the world, a unique beautiful snowflake. Which is fine, it's their baby, they have some pride in their work. But a program is not a standalone thing, and a developer's job really isn't even started until they've worked out how their program integrates with everything else in a corporate infrastructure: how it gets deployed, how it gets configuration settings, how it gets updates (no, having an 'update now' window pop up to the user is THE WRONG ANSWER in the corporate world), where it emits logs to and in what format, how it talks to the Web server, how it talks to file and print, how it works on multiple OSes, etc.
And yes, this also applies to the new world of 'web applications'. Just because you've made a flashy new web service doesn't mean you've achieved anything - how do the users export their data, how do you send real-time updates to all the other web services on the planet, how do you track evolving standards, etc.
There's only one discipline in computing which is *all about* integrating the diverse systems that we all use every day - and that's IT! Hi there. You write the stuff - but we have to *make it work for us*. Sometimes that's amazingly difficult, and we just have to wonder what you development guys are smoking, and if you've ever tried to use your tools - or at least, use them in conjunction with anyone else's.
'IT' shouldn't be a separate thing. It should be called something like 'integration science' perhaps and analyzed like computer science.
For instance: making a very complex network configuration change is just like programming, but it gets no respect or tool support. 'Code' gets all sorts of IDEs, version-control systems - but can you version-control all the changes you make to your VMware images, Cisco switch configs, Active Directory schemas, databases, DNS entries, backups scripts? Can you manage all of these with a unified tool, as if they were all vital parts of the unified computing machine which in fact they are? No of course you can't. Why? What's stopping you?
The sheer diversity of incompatible tools, the lack of integration or standards, but mainly, the deep-seated attitude that 'IT is just janitor work' and that 'the real interesting challenges are in software development, not installation/support/deployment'. Sorry, but not from where I'm standing.
The network IS the computer now - so how about we get the tools we need to program that computer with a unified language? and save and load programs from it?
"do you really care how a pizza place makes your pizza?"
Yes, very much so!
I don't want it to be made out of rat droppings, bovine brain matter, or carcinogenic chemicals. I want the food to be clean and healthy all the way back to the farm, I want it to have been grown sustainably and in an ethical manner, and in fact I want to be able to check and verify that ALL STAGES of the supply chain care about their workers, their communities and the environment, and as far as humanly possible aren't part of the rape machine that's killing the Earth but are doing good and investing in good outcomes.
Even if none of these externalities affect the amazingly superficial measure of 'how good it tastes', I know they're real, and I want to support the companies who are doing the right thing.
Is this what everyone does? Dunno, but if thinking like this - thinking just a little further ahead than the three-second taste bud tingle and the quarterly return - DOESN'T become the norm in both our business and personal life, then we're not going to survive this century.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm not real happy with opt-out models, myself."
Would you prefer a non-opt-out compulsory license, as with music covers?
"And once there are 1000 companies pulling the same trick you suddenly find it is a disproportionate amount of effort, you might as well scrap copyright at that point."
And civilisation would breathe a sigh of relief at having averted a 1000-year Copyright Dark Age.
"Moreover, the scarcity of a book is not a reason to make free copies. "
Yes it is, morally and ethically, if you value the preservation of information (a REAL good) rather than "rights-holding" (an artificial "good" which imposes scarcity).
How many pieces of orphaned media, like early Doctor Who tapes, have been rescued for posterity and even commercial resale because of the actions of fans who "broke the law" to do the right thing and preserve data?
Data is real. Copyright is a convenient fiction. When the fiction gets in the way of reality, we have a problem that needs to be fixed.
"It's not reasonable because it places an enormous burden on the rights holder to police the use of his creation"
Yes.
It SHOULD be a big, heavy thing to "police the use" of OTHER PEOPLE'S SPEECH.
Authors SHOULD think twice before dropping the heavy hammer of the law on people making reference to their work.
Does an author have the moral right to automatically prevent everyone, everywhere from even discussing their works? I don't think so, no. I'm with Google on this.
There are some physical theories that speculate that all particles are in fact already black holes... so creating a micro-one might not be all that extraordinary.
"So that even if you create an itty bitty one it will just evaporate due to starvation and the effects of other gravitational and molecular forces..."
Hello! I'm collecting for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Singularities.
Did you know that today in America, over 5,000 black holes a day will be abandoned by their creators, and left to suffer the effects of mass starvation and a miserable death at the hands of Hawking Radiation? Some of them can't even afford a rudimentary Kerr Metric to clothe themselves and are infested with closed timelike curves. You can protect this atrocity by contributing to our Mass Sanctuary Program. $10 billion will purchase an accelerator to fling these unwanted, unloved, naked singularities to the warm core of our Earth where they can live out the rest of their relativistically lengthened lifetimes in happiness, converting our planet's nickel-iron to unthinkable warpings of the spacetime metric, eventually rising to stand proudly on their own event horizons and devour us all.
It's a hand up, not a hand out. All we're asking is that we give apocalyptic screaming doom a healthy chance.
Please give generously.
"it's unreasonable to expect an amoral organization to willingly take any action that would result in less money and power for that organization. Government is unfortunately no exception. "
Neither is business. So it's not government's fault, per se - it's a human failing.
To be more precise, no organisation is per se moral or amoral, but rather any organisation is either moral or amoral to the extent that the people who have moral sensitivities (in its realm of business) are more in charge of its destiny than the people who lack those moral sensitivities.
If a business is run primarily by people whose only concern is the financial bottom line, then the decisions made by those people will be amoral - and that business as a whole - will act in an amoral way.
If a government is run by people whose only concern is power, then the same thing.
But neither case is necessarily the only way of doing business or doing government, or doing any other kind of human endeavour. UNLESS WE CHOOSE TO MAKE IT SO by propagating the idea that "an organization CAN NEVER BE moral" and thus excuse ourselves for our amoral choices.
Governments are moral if moral people control them. Businesses are moral if moral people control them.
The fundamental idea of democracy is that the mass of people are more likely to have their innate human moral sensitivities intact than the elite, who have burned them out in pursuit of power and privilege. The fundamental idea of elitism is that morality is not something intrinsic to humanity but something that must be learned or taught or inherited, and the brute amoral masses ignored.
Me, I cast my vote for morality being innate and for elitist training being something that teaches us to extinguish our moral common sense in favour of clever sophistry (often taught in business school) - so for that reason, I'm more in favour of governments than businesses, if those governments are open, transparent and controlled by honest democratic process. Which admittedly is not always the case - but if it's not, that's because we the people have abdicated our responsibility to get involved in the hard work of self-government, and have abandoned rational moral choice for the fantasy of an 'invisible hand' which will somehow magically produce moral behaviour out of competitive self-interest.
"every large and difficult-to-solve problem was once a small problem that could have been easily solved."
Or alternatively, it was a small problem that could not be easily solved, because all attempted solutions caused other problems.
Just because a problem exists doesn't mean a solution does.
"It's hard to quantify a problem that's years in the future, so preventions tend to be financially wasteful."
And that's why we're facing environmental catastrophe, because 'finance' is more important than life.
"Only teleologists and the mentally ill" /me pulls out his teleoscope and stares at you through it. Yes, I predict you will fall wildly in love on the nearest possible Thursday. And then be hit by a meteorite.
Okay, what's good on teleovision? Aw man, just reruns of Star Wars VII-IX again?
I (d|r)econtextualise the ontological hegemony of YOU, Picachu!
Ah, those would be the bands which only visit our country once every five years?
Yes, I know I should be supporting local bands who nobody has ever heard of who play genres like 'mathgazer shoerock', but my hipster card got revoked.
"Most fossil fuels and hydrogen sources are not petroleum. These distinctions matter in some areas like a consideration of the effects of radical oil supply drops (commonly called "peak oil")."
They're different commodities, yes. But correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't natural gas usually accompany petroleum deposits and track its depletion very closely?
Curmudgeonfest is my favourite holiday, right after linux.conf.au.
'*Notebook computer (2007-?):"
Nitpick: It's netbook, not notebook. "Notebook" has been the term for "full sized laptop" since the mid 1990s.
Since I've got a netbook, I've found that I really enjoy it. The size is just right for carrying in a backpack, and it lets me focus and concentrate on work (reading ebooks and writing) that I wouldn't otherwise get done at my desktop due to distractions. So I don't think it will be going away for me anytime soon.
True Chuck Moore facts:
Chuck Moore wrote his own VLSI chip design system. In Forth.
Your persona so ugly, she warps the curvature of spacetime.
"James Cameron needs to stop saying how he invented mocap, its stupid. "
O rly?
In this interview he says he's using an off-the shelf body motion capture rig, but the innovation was in the helmet-cam facial recognition system and software and the goal of 'zero artist touchups' on the facial rendering.
Seems significant to me.
"Never in a town hall meeting is it considered productive to shout that your opponents are "F~ING STUPID" and yet this tactic works exceedingly well on the internet."
I assume you've never watched the Australian parliament in session.
"OSS doesn't mean we have the right to demand all content be free or are justified in pirating media and software. OSS means that we can, together, make free content which complements the for-pay content out there."
Which, applied to news, would suggest that something like Wikinews or Indymedia or Youtube ought to arise to fill the reporting gap.
I don't think either of those channels work as such - but, well. I'm watching, eg, Alison Kruse because it's interesting first-person reporting on a topic which intrigues me. Obviously others disagree about the value of her material, but I like that I have the choice to evaluate it for myself, and this would not be possible without Youtube as an open upload or 'feed' site.
So there must be lots of first-person reporting we can feed into an open-source news grid. The problem is how to somehow establish bona fides and how to fund the indepth analysis which SOME newspapers give.
Unfortunately, the Iraq War really was the last nail in the coffin of traditional media for me. Almost to a man, all the big US papers lined up behind an utterly manipulated agenda. The best news source I found in early 2003 was the libertarian news aggregator site antiwar.com, which ferreted out all the international and local-paper stories which didn't filter up to the NYT or Washington Post front page.
Scoop.co.nz is another example of a new-media news play. One of their distinctives is that they show live unfiltered political party announcements rather than just doing commentary - and I think this is the direction that online news has to go. Stop trying to be a one-way "processed news product" where you package news plus commentary in one chunk, and split the two out. Then realise that your readers can also become your reporters if you give them a little trust. It's a hard thing to realise that "value-added content" actually means "value-subtracted" in many cases, but it's true.
There are attribution and funding systems which still need to emerge. But the OSS model is already working for news, in the social network grid, where 'what my friends are doing' IS always relevant local news to someone. If you have enough micro-news sources then analysis can emerge on top of that, and if we each do a little bit of feed and analysis we can potentially build a much more robust news ecosystem than one dominated by big heroic superstars - who may not turn out to be all that superheroic - certainly Iraq proved that the superstars had feet of clay, not an Edward Morrow among them.
"a long way to say the developers are hidebound."
I think the virtue you're looking for is 'lazy'.
Infocom were text bigots and we loved them for it. The Z machine was pretty amazing tech; Cornerstone would have been neat except that it launched right when the age of multiplatform was over and the IBM PC was ascendant.
Mind you I remember watching a Scott Adams with graphics on the Apple II and daydreaming about "what if you did that in a persistent online world with 3D graphics... that'd be AWESOME". And now we have that and it's... sorta awesome, sorta boring.
From my perspective as an IT person - who has to spend a scary amount of time writing scripts and reverse-engineering various black-box 'off the shelf' software packages just to figure out how to install them, let alone get logs off them and get them to communicate with the rest of our IT infrastructure - I think most 'software developers' could really benefit by spending a few years in the IT trenches.
Software development really suffers from living in its own little bubble - a bubble where the developer thinks nothing of wiping and installing a whole new machine just to put their new package on, nobody ever needs to install patches, and there's no infrastructure. Software developers often seem to believe that their program is the world, a unique beautiful snowflake. Which is fine, it's their baby, they have some pride in their work. But a program is not a standalone thing, and a developer's job really isn't even started until they've worked out how their program integrates with everything else in a corporate infrastructure: how it gets deployed, how it gets configuration settings, how it gets updates (no, having an 'update now' window pop up to the user is THE WRONG ANSWER in the corporate world), where it emits logs to and in what format, how it talks to the Web server, how it talks to file and print, how it works on multiple OSes, etc.
And yes, this also applies to the new world of 'web applications'. Just because you've made a flashy new web service doesn't mean you've achieved anything - how do the users export their data, how do you send real-time updates to all the other web services on the planet, how do you track evolving standards, etc.
There's only one discipline in computing which is *all about* integrating the diverse systems that we all use every day - and that's IT! Hi there. You write the stuff - but we have to *make it work for us*. Sometimes that's amazingly difficult, and we just have to wonder what you development guys are smoking, and if you've ever tried to use your tools - or at least, use them in conjunction with anyone else's.
'IT' shouldn't be a separate thing. It should be called something like 'integration science' perhaps and analyzed like computer science.
For instance: making a very complex network configuration change is just like programming, but it gets no respect or tool support. 'Code' gets all sorts of IDEs, version-control systems - but can you version-control all the changes you make to your VMware images, Cisco switch configs, Active Directory schemas, databases, DNS entries, backups scripts? Can you manage all of these with a unified tool, as if they were all vital parts of the unified computing machine which in fact they are? No of course you can't. Why? What's stopping you?
The sheer diversity of incompatible tools, the lack of integration or standards, but mainly, the deep-seated attitude that 'IT is just janitor work' and that 'the real interesting challenges are in software development, not installation/support/deployment'. Sorry, but not from where I'm standing.
The network IS the computer now - so how about we get the tools we need to program that computer with a unified language? and save and load programs from it?
"do you really care how a pizza place makes your pizza?"
Yes, very much so!
I don't want it to be made out of rat droppings, bovine brain matter, or carcinogenic chemicals. I want the food to be clean and healthy all the way back to the farm, I want it to have been grown sustainably and in an ethical manner, and in fact I want to be able to check and verify that ALL STAGES of the supply chain care about their workers, their communities and the environment, and as far as humanly possible aren't part of the rape machine that's killing the Earth but are doing good and investing in good outcomes.
Even if none of these externalities affect the amazingly superficial measure of 'how good it tastes', I know they're real, and I want to support the companies who are doing the right thing.
Is this what everyone does? Dunno, but if thinking like this - thinking just a little further ahead than the three-second taste bud tingle and the quarterly return - DOESN'T become the norm in both our business and personal life, then we're not going to survive this century.
"It's a strongly typed language with real classes"
You say that like it's a compliment. But prototypes are the most interesting thing about Javascript, IMO.