I think Anonymous Coward is right, actually. Amazon and Netflick are all about building communities around a commercial service (shopping or renting). The gravity centers of those sites hinge on consumption. This seems to be more of just a place just to keep virtual track of the films you've seen and build connections to others based on your shared experiences with those films.
I actually agree with a lot of the parent posts that this sort of thing is not necessarily that difficult to create. And if this guy wants the site to scale he is going to need SOME sort of revenue model and building business models online is NOT easy without capital. But it is a cool idea and power to him for trying. I'll create an account anyway.
Sherry Turkle is great. I've read both her books and particularly like the first one (The Second Self), which must have come out in the 1980s because it talked a lot about Pac Man and Space Invaders.
I think I can answer your question, anyway. In her two earlier books Turkle wasn't really making any political points. What she was doing was writing about how exposure to computers changed the way people thought about themselves and their own consciousness. I actually think that in a lot of cases she simply took the human penchant for metaphor too seriously ("I've got to switch off for a while"), but she has some very interesting things to say about how interacting with machines changed the way children (and adults) came to think about their own consciousness. The significant bits were the questions on how quickly children come to grasp the notion of a private self (you are different from others) as well as their own mortality (do computers die if you turn them off?).
That was the point of the title. Turkle argued that computers are "second selves" because the fact that they emulate consciousness invites us to project our understanding of ourselves onto them. Somewhat like the human tendency towards anthromorphism, only with machines.
The point of this all is that Turkle comes from a field with a very specific view of what constitutes a "normal" growth process for children and consequently what we should consider mature human behavior. It should be possible to think about whether she is right or wrong in her description of changes in human behavior without buying into her judgment about whether the changes are socially and individually positive or negative.
If the market supports a note-taking service that is wonderful. But neither the professor nor his teaching assistants should profit from providing supplementary educational materials to courses they are grading. There is a genuine conflict of interest.
Students are right to expect fair access. If this professor wishes to treat recordings of his lectures as essential course materials he should put them on the required reading/listening list. This is the normal way of structuring courses. As soon as materials are on the syllabus professors typically work with various libraries on campus to arrange lending access. I have never taken a university course where the necessary materials were not available free of charge to those willing to visit the library.
My issue is with someone putting themselves in a position to profit from turning their classroom into a two-tier system. This is a clear conflict of interest, and the fact that there isn't a lot of money at stake makes this issue even more absurd. This guy could easily find a student willing to record his lectures and put them online.
Students paying tuition are paying for fair access to course materials. Providing these materials selectively and at extra cost to privileged students is unfair and exploitative. It skews the bell curve towards wealthier students and thus obviates the level playing ground provided by a lecture-centric educational system.
If this good professor wishes to charge for his knowledge, he should abandon tenure and leave the university. Once the university is no longer pushing students into his course he can charge what he will for his pontifications. Any bets on whether that will reach $2.50 per download?
It's never been blocked on the IP level, but that isn't the only form of filtering that is done. I've had keywords on the page trigger connection drops and some articles will just fail to load the page.
We should be carefully scaling back the extent of copyright law because it is less important and less necessary than it was in previous times when publishing was expensive, not increasing its scope.
Easier copying enables people to spread existing materials more widely, so that more people can benefit from them at low cost. But there is a downside. It also drastically reduces the ability of anyone in the market to fund the development of these sorts of compilations. Why should I develop something that will take a huge investment if it will be copied?
This is not an issue of petty rent-seeking. Tell me where can I can download the human genome sequence? Really high quality GIS maps? Drug databases?
There are enormous economic interests tied up with creating databases at present. And the companies which rely on them are forced into business models which control access to the underlying data. Not only is the vast majority of this information simply not being shared, but the kinds of innovation which can happen around these products are sharply limited because access to the materials are limited.
Compare this to something like an open source product released under a non-commercial license. Third parties can access and use the product, and then -- if they do something innovative with it -- can either negotiate to make whatever they have developed commercially available, or redevelop proprietary versions of the open source components they relied upon when prototyping.
As is, the public benefits little from the existence of these materials, while policy is encouraging business models which lock off access to information. Any policy change which would would enable these materials to be distributed more freely would be an enormous social boon.
The focus of copyright should be on crafting law that carefully balances the cost to the public of the copyright-imposed limitations against the long-term enrichment of the public domain.
Of course. The duration of copyright at present is ridiculous and makes mockery of the avowed purpose of having copyright in the first place. But this isn't the point under discussion. If your stance against fairer and more balanced copyright essentially boils down to "well, we can't protect all human effort equally because that means expanding ridiculous forms of protection over all aspects of creative effort rather than just some of them" then you aren't really talking about "balance" at all.
Why?... Why not? And just so you know, these are honest questions.
There are two answers. You provided the first when you cited the legal argument about social utility. Maximing it requires content to be produced in the first place. And that requires measures to protect creators from unfair competition. The second is a moral argument about the selectivity of protecting the fruits of only certain types of labour. Why should someone who takes an afternoon to write a short story have their works protected but someone who spends a month compiling a business directory?
We live in a world with a tremendous flow in published novels and films, and very few publicly available lists of geneome sequences. This is far from an ideal situation.
Protecting sweat of the brow labour does not adversely affect market competition if the protection does not inhibit the creation of other equal works assuming that such creation is made without unfair reliance on the copyrighted materials.
If someone goes to the work of building a compilation of materials that is expensive to build and maintain, their efforts should be protected. Tough luck if you want to use their game data in a new commercial game YOU are putting out. The law shouldn't protect freeloaders like this. If you want to use their data either license it or go out and collect it yourself.
Assuming you can create an equivalent compilation without stealing the data then your rights should be protected as well. It is not difficult to demonstrate originality in creation when enormous amounts of energy are expended in the process of doing so.
You're prescriptivist grammar pedanticism are really making my blood boils. It is rise my hackles to a new levels of!
Actually, I thought at first you were arguing over whether the past participle is "risen" or "rose". So I went back and read the parent post.... Yup. Pretty amazing display of illiteracy, that....
As for fudd about 3rd party software corrupting Windows I'll just say that you should join the new millenium. Reinstalling Windows to fix a problem is a thing of the past. Worst case is a simple sfc command.
It's not FUDD when third party applications actually *do* corrupt Windows and destabilize the main kernel. I have no idea what sfc stands for ("stupid fucking computer"?) but it is a riot that you're bringing it up in a post praising Windows for being intuitive and usable. Linux is messy in its own way, but I've NEVER have a software application in Linux take down the kernel or stop the machine from booting or shutting down. And I've never had the kernel break itself when installing something.
As for China, he was in a small village and the kids had never used computers before. China is also one of the largest users of Linux. Windows definitely has a presence there but it is no where near as prevalent as here in the U.S.
Look man, I live and work in Beijing and have been all over this country. And I have NEVER EVER seen Linux on a Chinese computer. I have arranged purchases of multiple budget servers for open source and corporate development. I have dealt with Chinese IT shops. And guess what? No-one uses Linux. Even arranging for linux on a server involves jumping through hoops. About the best Linux support you can expect is having a vendor reluctantly install a desktop version of Red Hat 9.0 and tell you to harden it yourself. Don't believe me? Do some online searches for tech problems with Red Hat 9.0 and look at the languages the search results come out in. If you want linux here you either have to DIY or pay much more than you would pay for Microsoft support.
China is four times the size of the United States so there are doubtless users out there, but saying that Windows is not as prevalent in China as in the United States is just ignorant. It is more prevalent. I'm not sure what the situation with your professor was, but I've worked with various Chinese versions of Linux, and they almost universally suffer from atrocious design and lack basic software. It is like the Heisenberg priciple of Linux internationalization: you can have quality localization or concurrency and usability, but not both.
I'd imagine the conversation in the room went something like this:
Student A: (using Windows) This sucks. I want World of Warcraft!
Student B: (using Windows) Fuck. Where is the cart racing game?
Student A: Fine, I'll just boot up one of those dancing games? Where it is....
Student C: (using Linux) I just found the Chinese-English dictionary!
Student B: No dancing game? At least they have Solitaire.
Student A: Solitaire is soooo 2002.
Student C: Why are there no software applications on this machine?
Student B: Lets hum the music to Kart-Racer while we play.
Student C: (crying) Where is Solitaire? Why are there no games on this machine?
Please feel free to come up with a real answer rather than griping about what OEMs are doing.
The OEMs only distribute with partitions because they get bulk discounts from Microsoft for doing so and keeping install media from circulating. So this is a Microsoft issue. And it genuinely pisses me off when I can't restore from partition after modifying partition tables to install Linux. This is even more grating when I did not even break Windows -- installing Visual C++ did!.
Installing and uninstalling software. Figuring out what has broken when Windows suddenly starts complaining that files are missing or corrupted. Wondering why third-party software was allowed to corrupt the OS to the point that booting and shutting down the machine stop working. Figuring out where missing/corrupted files are, and wondering how on earth I fix them ("locate..."?). Trying wade through the install media to find them, or cursing my OEM for giving me crippled "partition" backup. Often needing to carry out a fresh install.
Incidentally, the reason the kids in China were more comfortable with Windows is because the OS *owns* mainland China. It is installed on virtually every machine in the country, as well as on most of the servers (which is why the spam problem is so prevalent). Even small corner stores will often have an older PC in the corner so that the owners people can chat or play solitaire when working. So unless those kids had never seen a computer before (which I doubt if your teacher was in anything other than a small western village), they were probably already exposed to Windows.
Parent post has it right with "disdain for customers". I bought one of their new walkmans for about $300 and the thing was a disaster. The only thing it had right was battery life. ATRAC was irrelevant, the software and method of connecting it to the computer were overly complex and required Windows. And as icing on the cake, the software didn't support Chinese language file names despite being purchased IN CHINA in the middle of their splashly product launch.
It worked for about two weeks before the screen broke after being placed in the same pocket I keep my mobile phone. So I ended up taking a morning off to haul the thing in to the Sony repair depot: the place you're supposed to go to get things fixed on-site. I would have loved to get it fixed elsewhere because it wouldn't actually have been necessary to waste an entire morning of my time if Sony authorized 3rd party repair shops, or even made their spare parts available, but Sony has a monopolistic repair policy, so it was a choice between crossing the city to find them or keeping their worthless hardward.
So I turn up at the repair depot which is covering the entire Beijing market... and end up dealing with someone who is both technically incompetent and customer hostile, which is to say that he seemed to consider lying to people his job description. At first he lied and said there were no spare parts in Beijing. Then he admitted they had the spare parts but couldn't fix it because their "repair guy" was backlogged and it would take several hours to open the casing, replace the screen, and close the casing. Finally he said their "service fee" was going to be about $100 USD, significantly more than the cost of getting my LDC screen replaced on my Fujitsu laptop (which managed to dissemble the computer, replace the screen, and reassemble the computer in about 20 minutes).
So as far as I'm concerned Sony can plummet to the depths of hell. If this is their attitude to the people who actually pay the premium price for their products screw them. I headed out to the computer district and bought a 2GB Chinese mp3 player for $40. The battery life is perfectly reasonable, the thing supports Chinese files names, it works like a regular USB drive and has no problem being stuffed in a pocket. It works like... uh.... a walkman should.
Screw Sony. I won't be dancing on their grave, but I might shovel a bit of dirt on it when I get the chance.
Since this is a substantive post, let me add my own thoughts in the event someone reads down this far:
Java is exceptionally useful for getting things done. It makes it easy to throw a variety of software services together and link them with an easy GUI. I recently developed some recording software (fetch data from microphone, automate file creation and storage) which took a few hours to put together in Java and cost nothing. A cheap recording studio. This would have taken significantly more money and time to develop on a Microsoft platform.
The problem is that if you want to sell software you can't really ask users to download the JRE and manually invoke programs. So the issue is really whether the submitter wants to be able to produce commercial applications for the Windows environment.
So my suggestion is java, java, java.... unless you need to produce software for sale to end-users on the Windows platform, in which case it very difficult to distribute java apps commercially.
His name is Ender. End-er, person who ends, finishes, kills. That being said, I'm more curious if the film is going to be as ripe with homophobia as the book. Great book, but surely Warner Bros can rename the aliens.
We are doing something similar for Chinese at http://www.adsotrans.com/ and it hasn't been a mistake opening the project to user contributions. When mistakes happen they generally tend to be because of human confusion in how the editing system works or the way the backend dictionary is integrated with other software.
So if the Swahili project is anything like ours, I'd assume the big issue is encouraging people to become active contributors rather than passive users. Their community of contributors is probably relatively small and generally self-selecting to people reasonably fluent in the language, so the system would probably be self-policing even without an elaborate software system governing access issues. The problems we face aren't technical issues so much as questions of finding the resources and time to improve the project.
So good luck for them in attracting funding/participants. And if anyone is studying Chinese please do check us out. We have a language-learning blog at http://www.newsinchinese.com/ which may also be useful to intermediate/advanced students looking to get away from their textbooks and savouring the poetic eloquence of the the Xinhua News Agency.
your attempt to prove that "they are the same" by sheer repetition isn't getting you anywhere.
I'm not attempting to prove anything. I'm simply telling you what the article says since you criticize it but don't understand it.
Your theory about price doesn't change the fact that my original post didn't address a rise in prices.
Nonsense. You criticized someone suggesting that Bayh-Dole led society to "pay twice" for certain drugs. If you don't see the link between that and higher prices that's because you don't understand the issues at hand. RTFA.
You can't tell the difference between "data" and "anecdote?"/BLOCKQUOTE
You can argue that the variables the author uses are not good proxies for what he wants to measure. You can argue that the individual stories he presents are not representative of the biopharm industry as a whole.
These are methodological issues, and I don't have issues with your raising them. I have issues with your denying the existing of supporting evidence for the author's argument just because you don't like it and disagree with his conclusions. Claiming that an anecdote does not constitute data is just the latest absurdity. If you want to be technical, it constitutes a single data point (N=1). The issues are with its representative sampling and power.
I suspect the problem is that attacking someone on methodological grounds comes off as stupid when you can't (1) offer better evidence, or (2) suggest a better way of quantifying and analysing the issue. You've got a long way to go before you even start to do either.
they wouldn't have had a product to buy. It's impossible to argue a price differential between one scenario where the product is available, and one where it's not.
If you fail to see the objection or believe that it is "impossible" to make this claim I would hazard that you have never taken a course in economics. Or read the article.
The question is whether the marketplace for a particular product is competitive or monopolistic. When a market is competitive products are priced at slightly above their cost of production. This earns the manufacturer just enough profit to keep them from making something else. When there is a monopoly (created by patents) however, manufacturers can charge as much as the market will bear. Their profit rates are much higher because there can be no competition.
Your misunderstanding seems driven by the personal conviction that UNLESS producers are guaranteed supra-market rates of return on investments, they will simply not commercialize research, even if the research costs have been borne by others. This is counterfactual for two reasons: (1) low barriers to entry have not led to a scarcity of generic drugs on the marketplace, (2) experiences in other industries illustrate that the lack of monopolistic control over technologies does not dissuade producers from making high-cost investments in it (ie. the computer industry).
To provide a concrete example of how the article addresses this, and also expose another lie of yours in claiming that the only facts in the piece are on page 4 (possibly because it's the only section you've been forced to read), let us wade out to page 7-8 for a very concrete example:
In October 1990 a researcher named Mary-Claire King at the University of California at Berkeley told the world that there was a breast-cancer susceptibility gene--and that it was on chromosome 17. Several other groups, sifting through 30 million base pairs of nucleotides to find the precise location of the gene, helped narrow the search with each new discovery. Then, in the spring of 1994, a team led by Mark Skolnick at the University of Utah beat everyone to the punch--identifying a gene with 5,592 base pairs and codes for a protein that was nearly 1,900 amino acids long. Skolnick's team rushed to file a patent application and was issued title to the discovery three years later.
By all accounts the science was a collective effort. The NIH had funded scores of investigative teams around the country and given nearly 1,200 separate research grants to learn everything there was to learn about the genetics of breast cancer.
The patent, however, is licensed to one company--Skolnick's. Myriad Genetics, a company the researcher founded in 1991, now insists on doing all U.S. testing for the presence of unknown mutation in the two related genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Those who have a mutation in either gene have as high as an 86% chance of getting cancer, say experts. The cost for the complete two-gene analysis: $2,975.
Critics say that Myriad's ultrarestrictive licensing of the technology--one funded not only by federal dollars but also aided by the prior discoveries of hundreds of other scientists--is keeping the price of the test artificially high. Skolnick, 59, claims that the price is justified by his company's careful analysis of thousands of base pairs of DNA, each of which is prone to a mutation or deletion, and by its educational outreach programs.
You are claiming that the patent Myriad took out on testing for this gene was necessary, as otherwise there would be no-one willing to offer tests for this gene on a commercial basis.
This is simply stupid, and about par for the course for the rest of your logic.
If you'd asked me whether the Bayh-Dole Act had increased university patenting, I would have responded, Absolutely! It has certainly increased the number of patents held by my academic research center - we file over 100 applications/year, and this figure grows every year.
Congratulations -- your Nth post and you finally engage with the article under discussion and find yourself actually supporting it -- the Bayh-Dole act has increased patent activity in the research sphere.
These are used for different purposes. They are used to prove different arguments.
Bullshit. They only work to "prove different arguments" if you assume basic research and the commercial licensing of it are two completely separate activities. They are not, and what make your claim even more specious is that the point of Bayh-Dole was to bring the activities closer than they had previously been.
To review, you didn't bother to read the piece, starting making idiotic statements about it using your own and highly questionable assumptions of how the world works, and you got called on them. Cry me a river.
You make a boatload of assumptions that no-one else makes and are surprised that people find the stuff you type completely incomprehensible. Case in point below:
Neither my original post nor any of my ensuing posts discussed whether prices have risen.
To the extent the rise in prices for services reflects monopolistic production, this is what people refer to when they claim to be "paying twice": once for for the research and one for the privilege of buying a product from a single producer at prices far above the cost of production.
At this point, the best defense you've got is that you simply didn't read the article, and have no clue what you're talking about.
Yes -- this might be a good time to review things:
Your original post made three basic mistakes on which quite a few people corrected you. These are (1) that Bayh-Dole did not lead to an increase in the patenting of research, (2) it did not result in higher costs to consumers, (3) it did not have a negative effect on research. The fact that you were assailed so broadly with a roundside of RTFAs suggests exactly who has comprehension problems, or simple issues reading articles before commenting on them.
The article explicitly discusses the relationship between Bayh-Dole and patents, and its revealing that you've shut up about that. Of the two that are left, the second is the weakest. If research and development are separate activites then there is simply no need for drug patenting. Producers will supply materials at their cost of production in competitive markets. Why create monopolies? Thats the theoretical argument anyway. In practice things are more complex and there are heavy financial subsidies for corporate drug development but your assertions about the market are neither practical nor theoretical.
I'm skipping your third claim because it is counterfactual. Asserting that "they have created a host of new drugs since [1980]" is not a logical contribution to a discussion of the negative influence of a singple policy change on the pace and ease of biomedical research. This is doubtless the reason you've been slammed universally for failing to read the piece. You failed to understand the argument and then posted a "rebuttal" which was completely unconnected with the original argument yet drew the opposite conclusions. When you were called on this your defense was to attack Fortune for having a weak empirical base for its assertions. You aren't making a good argument, but neither are they, right?
This is a different claim that the earlier one, and its one we can actually address by comparing the actual article to the things you claim it says. And your first salvo of idiocy was arguing that the piece only had a single metric on which to back its generalizations about problems that the Bayh-Dole act created for research. Even disregarding the various case studies, and reducing our scope of scrutiny to the one page of material titled "Measuring Producitivity", therefore it is amazing to find at least FOUR metrics. In review, these are:
-- publications in key journals -- NME identication by the FDA -- FDA priority reviews -- performance of NASDAQ biotech firms
Anyone can identify problems with these variables. Which makes it strange that the problems you started fixating on were actually addressed in the article. Your dismissal that "quantity is not quality" when it comes to publication is a case in point. Had you actually *read* the article instead of just searched in Slashdot quotes for something to attack, you would have discovered that the piece focuses on "key journals". Now there are lots of reasons to view this figure with suspicion (ie. the internationalization of science SHOULD result in a relative reduction of American contributions), but you picked the stupidest and most implausible.
Now you apparently don't want to confront the fact that the article contains information you've denied, and are responding by trying to nit-pick the argument and argue that its various metrics and case studies *really* measure two completely different things: pharmaceutical company activity and basic research. Nevermind that we are evaluating an Act which was supposed to bring these activities closer together -- they are two completely separate activities!
And its at this point that you've truly slipped the surly bonds and earth and floated into the stratosphere of fantasy. The government does not believe it. Researchers do not believe it. Non-profit organizations pouring money into medical research may do believe it. Small children should not believe it but may come to believe it if they watch enough Fox. I just hope your blinders provide some comfort in sheltering you from the terrors of facing the palace of cognitive dissonance you've created for yourself.
Look pal, your argument isn't with me. Its with the researchers who failed to take out and commercialize patents because they didn't own the patent rights to work that was government funded.
If you have issues understanding human rationality you'll have to solve them on your own.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Anonymous Coward is right, actually. Amazon and Netflick are all about building communities around a commercial service (shopping or renting). The gravity centers of those sites hinge on consumption. This seems to be more of just a place just to keep virtual track of the films you've seen and build connections to others based on your shared experiences with those films.
I actually agree with a lot of the parent posts that this sort of thing is not necessarily that difficult to create. And if this guy wants the site to scale he is going to need SOME sort of revenue model and building business models online is NOT easy without capital. But it is a cool idea and power to him for trying. I'll create an account anyway.
Sherry Turkle is great. I've read both her books and particularly like the first one (The Second Self), which must have come out in the 1980s because it talked a lot about Pac Man and Space Invaders.
I think I can answer your question, anyway. In her two earlier books Turkle wasn't really making any political points. What she was doing was writing about how exposure to computers changed the way people thought about themselves and their own consciousness. I actually think that in a lot of cases she simply took the human penchant for metaphor too seriously ("I've got to switch off for a while"), but she has some very interesting things to say about how interacting with machines changed the way children (and adults) came to think about their own consciousness. The significant bits were the questions on how quickly children come to grasp the notion of a private self (you are different from others) as well as their own mortality (do computers die if you turn them off?).
That was the point of the title. Turkle argued that computers are "second selves" because the fact that they emulate consciousness invites us to project our understanding of ourselves onto them. Somewhat like the human tendency towards anthromorphism, only with machines.
The point of this all is that Turkle comes from a field with a very specific view of what constitutes a "normal" growth process for children and consequently what we should consider mature human behavior. It should be possible to think about whether she is right or wrong in her description of changes in human behavior without buying into her judgment about whether the changes are socially and individually positive or negative.
Great. Let students record the materials as well and there is no problem with it.
If the market supports a note-taking service that is wonderful. But neither the professor nor his teaching assistants should profit from providing supplementary educational materials to courses they are grading. There is a genuine conflict of interest.
Students are right to expect fair access. If this professor wishes to treat recordings of his lectures as essential course materials he should put them on the required reading/listening list. This is the normal way of structuring courses. As soon as materials are on the syllabus professors typically work with various libraries on campus to arrange lending access. I have never taken a university course where the necessary materials were not available free of charge to those willing to visit the library.
My issue is with someone putting themselves in a position to profit from turning their classroom into a two-tier system. This is a clear conflict of interest, and the fact that there isn't a lot of money at stake makes this issue even more absurd. This guy could easily find a student willing to record his lectures and put them online.
Hear hear hear....
Students paying tuition are paying for fair access to course materials. Providing these materials selectively and at extra cost to privileged students is unfair and exploitative. It skews the bell curve towards wealthier students and thus obviates the level playing ground provided by a lecture-centric educational system.
If this good professor wishes to charge for his knowledge, he should abandon tenure and leave the university. Once the university is no longer pushing students into his course he can charge what he will for his pontifications. Any bets on whether that will reach $2.50 per download?
Hear hear.
It's never been blocked on the IP level, but that isn't the only form of filtering that is done. I've had keywords on the page trigger connection drops and some articles will just fail to load the page.
Easier copying enables people to spread existing materials more widely, so that more people can benefit from them at low cost. But there is a downside. It also drastically reduces the ability of anyone in the market to fund the development of these sorts of compilations. Why should I develop something that will take a huge investment if it will be copied?
This is not an issue of petty rent-seeking. Tell me where can I can download the human genome sequence? Really high quality GIS maps? Drug databases?
There are enormous economic interests tied up with creating databases at present. And the companies which rely on them are forced into business models which control access to the underlying data. Not only is the vast majority of this information simply not being shared, but the kinds of innovation which can happen around these products are sharply limited because access to the materials are limited.
Compare this to something like an open source product released under a non-commercial license. Third parties can access and use the product, and then -- if they do something innovative with it -- can either negotiate to make whatever they have developed commercially available, or redevelop proprietary versions of the open source components they relied upon when prototyping.
As is, the public benefits little from the existence of these materials, while policy is encouraging business models which lock off access to information. Any policy change which would would enable these materials to be distributed more freely would be an enormous social boon.
Of course. The duration of copyright at present is ridiculous and makes mockery of the avowed purpose of having copyright in the first place. But this isn't the point under discussion. If your stance against fairer and more balanced copyright essentially boils down to "well, we can't protect all human effort equally because that means expanding ridiculous forms of protection over all aspects of creative effort rather than just some of them" then you aren't really talking about "balance" at all.
Law differs country by country. I was making a normative argument, incidentally.
There are two answers. You provided the first when you cited the legal argument about social utility. Maximing it requires content to be produced in the first place. And that requires measures to protect creators from unfair competition. The second is a moral argument about the selectivity of protecting the fruits of only certain types of labour. Why should someone who takes an afternoon to write a short story have their works protected but someone who spends a month compiling a business directory?
We live in a world with a tremendous flow in published novels and films, and very few publicly available lists of geneome sequences. This is far from an ideal situation.
Protecting sweat of the brow labour does not adversely affect market competition if the protection does not inhibit the creation of other equal works assuming that such creation is made without unfair reliance on the copyrighted materials.
If someone goes to the work of building a compilation of materials that is expensive to build and maintain, their efforts should be protected. Tough luck if you want to use their game data in a new commercial game YOU are putting out. The law shouldn't protect freeloaders like this. If you want to use their data either license it or go out and collect it yourself.
Assuming you can create an equivalent compilation without stealing the data then your rights should be protected as well. It is not difficult to demonstrate originality in creation when enormous amounts of energy are expended in the process of doing so.
Try Adsotrans or Newsinchinese. They have a much more comprehensive and open source dictionary, and also handle duoyinci.
You're prescriptivist grammar pedanticism are really making my blood boils. It is rise my hackles to a new levels of!
Actually, I thought at first you were arguing over whether the past participle is "risen" or "rose". So I went back and read the parent post.... Yup. Pretty amazing display of illiteracy, that....
Thanks for the links and information about SFC. I'll give it a shot the next time I run into trouble.
China is four times the size of the United States so there are doubtless users out there, but saying that Windows is not as prevalent in China as in the United States is just ignorant. It is more prevalent. I'm not sure what the situation with your professor was, but I've worked with various Chinese versions of Linux, and they almost universally suffer from atrocious design and lack basic software. It is like the Heisenberg priciple of Linux internationalization: you can have quality localization or concurrency and usability, but not both.
I'd imagine the conversation in the room went something like this:
Student A: (using Windows) This sucks. I want World of Warcraft!
The OEMs only distribute with partitions because they get bulk discounts from Microsoft for doing so and keeping install media from circulating. So this is a Microsoft issue. And it genuinely pisses me off when I can't restore from partition after modifying partition tables to install Linux. This is even more grating when I did not even break Windows -- installing Visual C++ did!.Student B: (using Windows) Fuck. Where is the cart racing game?
Student A: Fine, I'll just boot up one of those dancing games? Where it is....
Student C: (using Linux) I just found the Chinese-English dictionary!
Student B: No dancing game? At least they have Solitaire.
Student A: Solitaire is soooo 2002.
Student C: Why are there no software applications on this machine?
Student B: Lets hum the music to Kart-Racer while we play.
Student C: (crying) Where is Solitaire? Why are there no games on this machine?
What exactly did you find backwards?
Installing and uninstalling software. Figuring out what has broken when Windows suddenly starts complaining that files are missing or corrupted. Wondering why third-party software was allowed to corrupt the OS to the point that booting and shutting down the machine stop working. Figuring out where missing/corrupted files are, and wondering how on earth I fix them ("locate..."?). Trying wade through the install media to find them, or cursing my OEM for giving me crippled "partition" backup. Often needing to carry out a fresh install.
Incidentally, the reason the kids in China were more comfortable with Windows is because the OS *owns* mainland China. It is installed on virtually every machine in the country, as well as on most of the servers (which is why the spam problem is so prevalent). Even small corner stores will often have an older PC in the corner so that the owners people can chat or play solitaire when working. So unless those kids had never seen a computer before (which I doubt if your teacher was in anything other than a small western village), they were probably already exposed to Windows.
Parent post has it right with "disdain for customers". I bought one of their new walkmans for about $300 and the thing was a disaster. The only thing it had right was battery life. ATRAC was irrelevant, the software and method of connecting it to the computer were overly complex and required Windows. And as icing on the cake, the software didn't support Chinese language file names despite being purchased IN CHINA in the middle of their splashly product launch.
It worked for about two weeks before the screen broke after being placed in the same pocket I keep my mobile phone. So I ended up taking a morning off to haul the thing in to the Sony repair depot: the place you're supposed to go to get things fixed on-site. I would have loved to get it fixed elsewhere because it wouldn't actually have been necessary to waste an entire morning of my time if Sony authorized 3rd party repair shops, or even made their spare parts available, but Sony has a monopolistic repair policy, so it was a choice between crossing the city to find them or keeping their worthless hardward.
So I turn up at the repair depot which is covering the entire Beijing market... and end up dealing with someone who is both technically incompetent and customer hostile, which is to say that he seemed to consider lying to people his job description. At first he lied and said there were no spare parts in Beijing. Then he admitted they had the spare parts but couldn't fix it because their "repair guy" was backlogged and it would take several hours to open the casing, replace the screen, and close the casing. Finally he said their "service fee" was going to be about $100 USD, significantly more than the cost of getting my LDC screen replaced on my Fujitsu laptop (which managed to dissemble the computer, replace the screen, and reassemble the computer in about 20 minutes).
So as far as I'm concerned Sony can plummet to the depths of hell. If this is their attitude to the people who actually pay the premium price for their products screw them. I headed out to the computer district and bought a 2GB Chinese mp3 player for $40. The battery life is perfectly reasonable, the thing supports Chinese files names, it works like a regular USB drive and has no problem being stuffed in a pocket. It works like... uh.... a walkman should.
Screw Sony. I won't be dancing on their grave, but I might shovel a bit of dirt on it when I get the chance.
Since this is a substantive post, let me add my own thoughts in the event someone reads down this far:
Java is exceptionally useful for getting things done. It makes it easy to throw a variety of software services together and link them with an easy GUI. I recently developed some recording software (fetch data from microphone, automate file creation and storage) which took a few hours to put together in Java and cost nothing. A cheap recording studio. This would have taken significantly more money and time to develop on a Microsoft platform.
The problem is that if you want to sell software you can't really ask users to download the JRE and manually invoke programs. So the issue is really whether the submitter wants to be able to produce commercial applications for the Windows environment.
So my suggestion is java, java, java.... unless you need to produce software for sale to end-users on the Windows platform, in which case it very difficult to distribute java apps commercially.
His name is Ender. End-er, person who ends, finishes, kills. That being said, I'm more curious if the film is going to be as ripe with homophobia as the book. Great book, but surely Warner Bros can rename the aliens.
We are doing something similar for Chinese at http://www.adsotrans.com/ and it hasn't been a mistake opening the project to user contributions. When mistakes happen they generally tend to be because of human confusion in how the editing system works or the way the backend dictionary is integrated with other software.
So if the Swahili project is anything like ours, I'd assume the big issue is encouraging people to become active contributors rather than passive users. Their community of contributors is probably relatively small and generally self-selecting to people reasonably fluent in the language, so the system would probably be self-policing even without an elaborate software system governing access issues. The problems we face aren't technical issues so much as questions of finding the resources and time to improve the project.
So good luck for them in attracting funding/participants. And if anyone is studying Chinese please do check us out. We have a language-learning blog at http://www.newsinchinese.com/ which may also be useful to intermediate/advanced students looking to get away from their textbooks and savouring the poetic eloquence of the the Xinhua News Agency.
I'm not attempting to prove anything. I'm simply telling you what the article says since you criticize it but don't understand it.
Nonsense. You criticized someone suggesting that Bayh-Dole led society to "pay twice" for certain drugs. If you don't see the link between that and higher prices that's because you don't understand the issues at hand. RTFA.
Yes -- this might be a good time to review things:
Your original post made three basic mistakes on which quite a few people corrected you. These are (1) that Bayh-Dole did not lead to an increase in the patenting of research, (2) it did not result in higher costs to consumers, (3) it did not have a negative effect on research. The fact that you were assailed so broadly with a roundside of RTFAs suggests exactly who has comprehension problems, or simple issues reading articles before commenting on them.
The article explicitly discusses the relationship between Bayh-Dole and patents, and its revealing that you've shut up about that. Of the two that are left, the second is the weakest. If research and development are separate activites then there is simply no need for drug patenting. Producers will supply materials at their cost of production in competitive markets. Why create monopolies? Thats the theoretical argument anyway. In practice things are more complex and there are heavy financial subsidies for corporate drug development but your assertions about the market are neither practical nor theoretical.
I'm skipping your third claim because it is counterfactual. Asserting that "they have created a host of new drugs since [1980]" is not a logical contribution to a discussion of the negative influence of a singple policy change on the pace and ease of biomedical research. This is doubtless the reason you've been slammed universally for failing to read the piece. You failed to understand the argument and then posted a "rebuttal" which was completely unconnected with the original argument yet drew the opposite conclusions. When you were called on this your defense was to attack Fortune for having a weak empirical base for its assertions. You aren't making a good argument, but neither are they, right?
This is a different claim that the earlier one, and its one we can actually address by comparing the actual article to the things you claim it says. And your first salvo of idiocy was arguing that the piece only had a single metric on which to back its generalizations about problems that the Bayh-Dole act created for research. Even disregarding the various case studies, and reducing our scope of scrutiny to the one page of material titled "Measuring Producitivity", therefore it is amazing to find at least FOUR metrics. In review, these are:
-- publications in key journals
-- NME identication by the FDA
-- FDA priority reviews
-- performance of NASDAQ biotech firms
Anyone can identify problems with these variables. Which makes it strange that the problems you started fixating on were actually addressed in the article. Your dismissal that "quantity is not quality" when it comes to publication is a case in point. Had you actually *read* the article instead of just searched in Slashdot quotes for something to attack, you would have discovered that the piece focuses on "key journals". Now there are lots of reasons to view this figure with suspicion (ie. the internationalization of science SHOULD result in a relative reduction of American contributions), but you picked the stupidest and most implausible.
Now you apparently don't want to confront the fact that the article contains information you've denied, and are responding by trying to nit-pick the argument and argue that its various metrics and case studies *really* measure two completely different things: pharmaceutical company activity and basic research. Nevermind that we are evaluating an Act which was supposed to bring these activities closer together -- they are two completely separate activities!
And its at this point that you've truly slipped the surly bonds and earth and floated into the stratosphere of fantasy. The government does not believe it. Researchers do not believe it. Non-profit organizations pouring money into medical research may do believe it. Small children should not believe it but may come to believe it if they watch enough Fox. I just hope your blinders provide some comfort in sheltering you from the terrors of facing the palace of cognitive dissonance you've created for yourself.
Look pal, your argument isn't with me. Its with the researchers who failed to take out and commercialize patents because they didn't own the patent rights to work that was government funded.
If you have issues understanding human rationality you'll have to solve them on your own.