Yes, this system demonstrates the correlation between the content and the majority opinion, not between the content and the correct information (assuming such objectively exists).
Of course, if you take as an axiom that the majority opinion will, in general, be more reliable than the latest random change by a serial mis-editor, then the correlation with majority opinion is a useful guideline.
Something that might be rather more effective, though perhaps less practical, is for Wikipedia to bootstrap the process much as Slashdot once did: start with a small number of designated "experts", hand-picked, and give them disproportionate reputation. Then consider secondary effects when adjusting reputation: not just whether something was later edited, but the reputation of the editor, and the size of the edit.
This doesn't avoid the underlying theoretical flaw of the whole idea, though, which is simply that in a community-written site like a wiki, edits are not necessarily bad things. Someone might simply be replacing the phrase "(an example would be useful here)" with a suitable example. This would be supporting content that was already worthwhile and correct, not indicating that the previous version was "untrustworthy".
I mean honestly, what is the big problem? I keep reading articles and comments talking about how crappy Vista is and I just shake my head and say I don't get it. I don't know. I guess prejudices are hard to give up.
It isn't just prejudice, but it does depend on how you use your machine.
For example, it seems gamers are generally not Vista fans. There has been a history of abysmal performance, unreliable graphics drivers, networking/sound problems, and the like. Every major gaming review site I've checked in recent months has some tale of woe or other, and unlike the average moan on Slashdot, these are typically backed by hard data showing XP to be a more stable and/or better-performing platform. Even the DirectX 10 hype has mostly been debunked at this point — for example by getting "Vista-only" games to run just fine on XP.
Laptop users seem to be another group with more than their fair share of grudges against Vista. That's a sizeable chunk of the business world who are upset.
Then there's the home entertainment crowd, who take offence at all the artificial, DRM-related limitations imposed by Vista's futile attempts to "secure" content.
And of course, the final kicker for geeks running Windows is... Well, what does Vista actually do that XP doesn't? (Or, for that matter, that a recent release of OS X or a modern Linux distro doesn't, if you're buying or building new kit and not tied to Windows?) There are plenty of technical concerns, and not a few ethical/trust ones, that argue against getting Vista, so what have Microsoft got that's more important? And the answer, from what I've seen so far myself and reading numerous comments and reviews by others, is pretty much nothing.
And unless YouTube and Viacom have some business agreement of which I am not aware, everything you wrote there is utterly irrelevant. It's helpful to understand what you read yourself before you post hostile criticism of others.
How's that, exactly? Posting on-line does not release material into the public domain, however much legally naive individuals and legally unscrupulous corporations might like to believe otherwise.
The submitter said he posted the video on YouTube so he could put it up on his own blog - making use of YouTube as a file host. Assuming the blogger did make (written) commentary on his own blog, but the video is also available on YouTube without commentary, where would fair use come down on the issue?
I'm not a lawyer and obviously don't know what the courts will decide, but I suggest the following interpretation:
A reasonable argument in favour of a copyright exemption is to allow copying a sample of a work to illustrate critical commentary. A sample would be of significant value when used in connection with the commentary, but of limited value in isolation, and thus it would meet the standard fair use ideal of allowing reuse of the material without damaging the market for the original.
Therefore, if the clip on YouTube is of only incidental value when viewed separately, it should be regarded as legitimate. However, if it's a substantial chunk of the original work being republished unmodified and having value in its own right, then it's more than just a sample and it goes beyond just supporting a critical commentary, so it should not be exempt.
This gives a fairly black-and-white test for courts to apply to determine whether material is fair use in such cases, and seems to me to be consistent with the statute law in the US.
Oh noes! Your public domain material will be in the public domain!
Apart from the fact that the material in question does not have to be in the public domain, and that Google's wording doesn't imply that it will become so, the rest of your comment is absolutely right.
Perhaps multiple choice can be effective, but IME it usually isn't.
I'm reminded of a conversation with a friend a couple of years younger than me, back when we were learning to drive. When I took the test, it was all done in one practical session, and when you got back to the test centre at the end, the examiner would ask some questions to check the candidate's theoretical knowledge was OK. Shortly afterwards, they started running a separate theory exam, taken first, which is basically a multiple choice test.
As my friend was getting ready to take her theory test, she we were running through some of the sample questions with me. She read me one of the questions, and I told her the answer. And she said, "But I haven't told you the options yet!"
I just pointed out that in real life, no-one's going to give you a choice of three specific times to turn your lights on. You just have to understand, and know what to do.
Even when I was at school in the UK quite a few years ago now, the slide downhill was starting: people were moving away from the experimental basis and into rote learning of "science". Leaving aside the fact that teaching by rote is far less effective than teaching through practical experience, that step alone means a whole generation are growing up thinking that science is about an absolute truth, when in fact the whole point is that all you ever have is theories that are consistent with the experimental evidence so far, and which may be falsified by future experiments.
Every year in the UK, after 20 or so years of ever-increasing examination results for school kids, we repeat the same national "debate": government proclaims that standards are rising, parents say that others are just bitter that the kids of today are smarter than we were, school officials tell everyone how much better today's teaching methods are... and university and industry leaders look at the fact that effectively identical exam questions have now appeared on first-year university papers instead of A-levels* where they were a few years ago, or at A-level instead of GCSE*, and they the fact that examination results that used to distinguish the top 5% of the population now only identify the top 25% or more, and they see the reality as clear as crystal.
The rot started when O-levels were dropped in favour of GCSEs, and naturally progressed through a succession of "friendlier" study materials and examination systems that focus on things like "interpretation" and "analysis" — without actually teaching the underlying principles to do those things, nor giving sufficient exposure to basic knowledge to appreciate them. Now we are approaching the final insult: syllabus set by the politics of the day. For example, instead of studying physics and geography, pupils will learn about the perils of global warming. If we carry on this way, then instead of asking things like how global warming really works, what it's doing to our planet's ecosystems, and what if anything we should do about it, tomorrow's scientists are just going to be accepting that Global Warming Is A Fact(TM), and behaves however they were told it behaves in a classroom, and can be solved by political means alone. And this is just one example of a somewhat controversial area of science that is being undermined; it is by no means the only one.
We need to get back to teaching science in science classes, and we need to stop putting up with pathetic kids bleating about how it's too hard and they'd rather do media studies or home economics or some other subject that's regarded as an easier option. There is a place for all these things in education, but they are not interchangeable.
* For our non-UK friends: A-levels are usually taken at 18, and GCSEs at 16. Most pupils would take perhaps 8–10 GCSEs and those who stay on post-16 would typically take 2–4 A-levels.
Excessive propagation of discoloured odorous wastage via transitions along the leadership chain from management to peons may constitute a risk of adverse human resource capability impact.
MS is obviously concerned, they would not be making noise if they were not. I suspect that they have lost their last chance to keep Free Software away from their patent portfolio by doing this.
And that would be unfortunate for several reasons.
For one thing, it will have lowered the FSF to the same level of trying to gets its way through contemptible legal trickery as the very people it claims to oppose. It all but admits that the collaborative ideal isn't as great as it's supposed to be. After all, if so-called Tivoization is against the spirit of OSS and a free, collaborative world is better, surely the philosophical response is to have the community take the same baseline OSS code and build a better product than Tivo on top of it?
For another thing, I would expect any successful legal action brought by the FSF against Microsoft for this to pretty much define the time every big player in the software industry that doesn't already have a big investment in OSS started avoiding it like the plague, particularly anything connected with GPL3. Given that most of the big name OSS development is at least partially backed by commercial sponsors, that could be a serious blow.
And finally, if the gloves are off and the lawsuits start flying, my money is overwhelmingly on Microsoft. The FSF talks a lot of talk about what it thinks the GPL means, but the simple fact is that statements by the FSF are not legislation and the whole topic is almost entirely untested in court. Microsoft, meanwhile, has an army of lawyers with a track record of great success, and it has so much more money to throw at them that the exact scale doesn't matter. If the FSF wants to get itself into a fight that could completely destroy both the organisation and the licensing strategy it has adopted, this would be a pretty good way to go about it.
So: rip your music. Play it on different devices. Make mix CDs for friends.
I was pretty much agreeing with you right up to that point. But making mix CDs for other people crosses the line, IMHO. At that point, you are no longer copying the material for your own personal use, but redistributing it. Taken to its logical conclusion, that argument allows the entire world a copy of the work for free once the first person has bought it.
This is not to say I have anything against you as an artist telling people they are welcome to do this with your own work, if you so wish. I'm just saying I don't think this should be the default. I believe there is an essentially sound balance between copyright to protect the artist and fair use to protect the individual consumer, and allowing the kind of mix-and-distribute behaviour you describe undermines that balance.
It's interesting that the parent was moderated funny. Despite being pitched by the editorial team as a "fake news show", I saw a report not so long ago that demonstrated people in the US who just got their news from The Daily Show actually were typically as well-informed as anyone who got their news from CNN, Fox or MSNBC. The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure they concluded that TDS was relatively light on substance because its focus was comedy, while the major networks were similarly light on substance because they were filled with hype — neither was a particularly good source of informed current affairs reporting. I can't find the exact report now, but as I write this, the Wikipedia article on The Daily Show does cite several similar pieces.
Except that most really good stuff is a labor of love and has been made available for free -- ranging from the alphabet through the number zero to mathematical proofs and much web content (including Slashdot and other community sites). Consider:
"Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain" http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
Some really good stuff is. A fair bit of mediocre stuff is as well. I did write "most" not "all" in my previous post when talking about useful works created in places with IP frameworks.
However, things like books and software have come to be known collectively as "works" for a reason: making good ones typically does require a lot of hard work. Good books and magazines need proofreading, fact-checking, editing, and typesetting. Good software needs things like debugging, usability testing and documentation. Making a good movie needs more than special effects and a big-name leading couple.
Compare fan fiction to serious, published novels. Compare hobbyist computer games with professional titles. Compare home videos on YouTube to films from movie studios (and not just Hollywood, please). Compare FOSS developed by volunteers to software developed under the traditional, commercial model. In each case, while there are a few examples of good, volunteer-produced material, most of the best work is done on a commercial basis, and even the good volunteer stuff isn't particularly better than the good commercial stuff.
Even if you look at borderline cases, compensation plays a role. Much of the most successful FOSS is developed primarily by businesses these days, not amateur volunteers: Linux distros, MySQL, Firefox, and the list goes on. Things like peer-reviewed scientific journals have a strange economic model, but even academics, who are perhaps the most natural example of volunteers working hard to produce good material, publish partly out of enlightened self-interest: they need the reputation and recognition that will get them their next funded project. I post here primarily for personal enjoyment, and if someone finds my comments interesting or informative then that's great, but again I also come here because I find comments by others interesting or informative and in a sense I'm just doing my part to support the community as a whole.
Now, you can get into arguments about the duration of IP protection and how many advances have been made by breaking the rules, and there is some merit in those arguments, but frankly, I think they are straw men here. Most of the time, people do play by the rules, and places that have IP rules produce more useful works on balance than those who don't. And most of the time when people don't play by the rules in the West, they're just being selfish, and if everyone was as selfish as them, then everyone would lose out. This is no different to petty thieves ripping off a store because "the store can afford it", or poor drivers cutting others up because "it doesn't cause accidents", or aggressive people pushing to the front of a queue because "it's only making everyone else one person later".
Unfortunately, all of your arguments overlook one small detail: without copyright, there is little incentive to develop most of the works that are produced in the world.
If you're the teenager with no money or the poor folks from the third world, then the fact that you can take the fruits of someone else's labour for free when those fruits come in digital form may not feel like theft/infringement/whatever, but the bottom line is still that someone worked to produce the material and then didn't get compensated for it. Such policies are unsustainable long term in any economy in the world today: people have to have food, shelter, and the like to survive, and these things are not free. Sooner or later, globalisation says those third world economies will start to level off with everyone else, and then not having a sensible IP framework in place will start to hurt them, too.
You seem like you don't buy this theory, but consider that most of the works we value in the West today are produced in places that do have intellectual property as part of their economic framework. Those that do not, and that by your argument should be more efficient without these "burdens", are not net contributors to the world's knowledge base.
He also... suggests that companies like AT&T and Verizon that "cooperate" with the Administration should be granted immunity from the lawsuits they currently face regarding the issue.
Yes, of course. Putting big business above the law is a tried and tested way to ensure their continued complian^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgood behaviour and respect for the law.
(My current sig feels particularly appropriate today.)
But I am surprised by the number of techies that fell for the phishing attack in the first instance.
Was it the techies or the hiring managers, though?
It seems like the average HR department at a software firm with a C# vacancy would rather hire some guy a couple of years out of college with a bit of C# experience and a MCSD certificate than an experienced pro with a track record of shipping working software using half a dozen different languages including Java and C++. The same sort of firm probably wouldn't hire an DBA with a decade of experience using Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Perl and Python for a MySQL+PHP job. They know the buzzwords, but they are clueless about what they mean in practice. Is it any wonder they are also clueless about security?
It's strange. I hear a lot in the press about businesses and governments holding off on Vista, waiting for SP1, whatever. I hear a lot of techie folks, both on-line and in real life, saying they won't touch it after all the negative PR.
And then I see figures from Microsoft that show adoption progressing at similar rates to their previous major OS releases.
I am forced to ask whether Vista really sucks as much as "they say" and "they" aren't installing it, or whether I'm just hearing views from too many biased sources.
Vista's not perfect, but I'd still gladly choose it over any OS that forces me to compile things myself to get things working properly or buy an entirely new set of hardware just to run it.
Not to be confused with Vista, where the software vendors have to work out how to recompile everything for you and you need to buy an entirely new set of hardware just to run it?
The essential thing in the US is that the banking system has become quite enamored of easy credit in the last few decades -- the policy of extending credit to essentially anyone for any reason, based on nothing more than an application and a promise to pay it back at some later date. [...] So long as the creditors themselves don't suffer too much financially from fraud (which they don't, thanks to their generous campaign contributions and strict avoidance of responsibility through their merchant contracts) it's a winning business strategy because it also brings in more legitimate customers.
Perhaps you didn't notice, but exactly such an attitude as you described is the reason the US economy is in danger of collapsing into deep recession, and taking a significant chunk of the rest of the world with it. Have you looked at the stock markets in the past fortnight, or noticed the sub-prime mortgage lenders in financial difficulties or outright going bust?
It also makes it much harder to prove that you have been stolen from. I wonder how much of the reduction you claim is due to actual reduction and how much is due to people being unable to prove the crime ever happened.
Interesting theory, but it's much harder to commit that casual fraud in the first place now, so I suspect the effect you describe is insignificant in practice. People got wise very quickly to the fact that you check the amount before keying in your PIN, and the hardware set-up is pretty effective for preventing casual fraud by shop staff and the like, so PIN-verified transactions are usually legitimate.
There's always been the problem of someone using a card to pay for something over the phone or Internet, where no PIN is entered now, but no signature was required before either. You can challenge these with the bank or credit card company just like you always could, and in general the burden is on the retailer to prove that the transaction was in order: in cases of doubt, the bank will typically charge-back first and ask questions later.
We don't just need laws to make companies liable, we need a system in place to make sure that when data breaches do occur, that those affected can restore some semblance of normalcy to their lives with the minimum of fuss. And we need laws in place to define just what data any particular company can collect
Yes and yes. I've been arguing the same way ever since a probably inadvertent mistake by a minimum wage local government staffer screwed up my tax record by linking me to someone else. The mistake itself wasn't too damaging, fortunately, but the really nasty things were the fact that the first I knew about it was when my paycheque was well short one month because of over-charged tax, and that it took me several months contacting several different tax offices to get it fixed. (Hint to tax offices: if I'm complaining that my tax records have been corrupted, possibly by cross-linking with someone else's given the context, then it's not very sensible to stonewall me completely because the address and employer details I'm giving you aren't what's in my tax record. If I'm not currently working for that employer, why are you deducting tax on my wages from them?)
I believe we are long overdue for things like robust privacy/anti-collection of personal data laws, and that such laws should also require that anyone dealing with any sensitive personal information must provide a fast, low-cost, effective mechanism for fixing screw-ups or face unlimited fines in court for any damage resulting and to compensate for any distress and wasted time for the victim. And this should go double for any organisations that you are legally compelled to supply with personal information.
Yes, that will motivate banks to use better security but in the end it all comes down to the fact that people need to do their part to uphold the security that is already there.
The problem with that is that current mechanisms are far too much of a burden for the average member of the public to avoid carelessness and/or social engineering attacks.
It simply isn't reasonable to expect people to create and remember a different, properly secure password for each of numerous services, some of which will only be accessed occasionally, perhaps as little as once per year or less. Nor is it reasonable to expect average people using typical software on typical computers to understand all the dangers of phishing attacks, the need to patch immediately against cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, and other geeky gobbledegook.
Since large organisations only tend to understand responsibilities in terms of the bottom line impact if they fail to live up to them — and that includes the responsibility to obey the law — the law needs to impose a sufficient burden on those handling sensitive personal information improperly that it becomes more economic for them to invest in proper security, both on their own side and in terms of what they expect of their clients. With sufficient pushing in the right direction, we could have not only much better security in terms of software and protocols, but also practically effective means of identifying people more reliably and with less susceptibility to casual crime.
This doesn't need to be rocket science, either: consider that switching from using signatures to using PINs to authenticate card transactions has reduced card fraud by something like 80% in several European countries. The new PIN-based systems are simple enough for almost everyone to understand, were well advertised prior to their takeover, are backed by software and equipment that work pretty well, and are based on the tried-and-tested security policy of combining a physical token with some information known only to the legitimate user. Just like that, you've removed a common mechanism for card fraud, saving businesses billions and saving hassle for thousands of would-have-been victims every year.
We have the technology to do this. A simple card and public key cryptography suffice for most purposes, after all. We just need the will to do it more widely, so the complexity is dealt with by the system and not by the user.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this system demonstrates the correlation between the content and the majority opinion, not between the content and the correct information (assuming such objectively exists).
Of course, if you take as an axiom that the majority opinion will, in general, be more reliable than the latest random change by a serial mis-editor, then the correlation with majority opinion is a useful guideline.
Something that might be rather more effective, though perhaps less practical, is for Wikipedia to bootstrap the process much as Slashdot once did: start with a small number of designated "experts", hand-picked, and give them disproportionate reputation. Then consider secondary effects when adjusting reputation: not just whether something was later edited, but the reputation of the editor, and the size of the edit.
This doesn't avoid the underlying theoretical flaw of the whole idea, though, which is simply that in a community-written site like a wiki, edits are not necessarily bad things. Someone might simply be replacing the phrase "(an example would be useful here)" with a suitable example. This would be supporting content that was already worthwhile and correct, not indicating that the previous version was "untrustworthy".
I wonder whether nominating an editor on Wikipedia a "karma whore" will result in a net increase or decrease of "reputation" for the nominee. :-)
I mean honestly, what is the big problem? I keep reading articles and comments talking about how crappy Vista is and I just shake my head and say I don't get it. I don't know. I guess prejudices are hard to give up.
It isn't just prejudice, but it does depend on how you use your machine.
For example, it seems gamers are generally not Vista fans. There has been a history of abysmal performance, unreliable graphics drivers, networking/sound problems, and the like. Every major gaming review site I've checked in recent months has some tale of woe or other, and unlike the average moan on Slashdot, these are typically backed by hard data showing XP to be a more stable and/or better-performing platform. Even the DirectX 10 hype has mostly been debunked at this point — for example by getting "Vista-only" games to run just fine on XP.
Laptop users seem to be another group with more than their fair share of grudges against Vista. That's a sizeable chunk of the business world who are upset.
Then there's the home entertainment crowd, who take offence at all the artificial, DRM-related limitations imposed by Vista's futile attempts to "secure" content.
And of course, the final kicker for geeks running Windows is... Well, what does Vista actually do that XP doesn't? (Or, for that matter, that a recent release of OS X or a modern Linux distro doesn't, if you're buying or building new kit and not tied to Windows?) There are plenty of technical concerns, and not a few ethical/trust ones, that argue against getting Vista, so what have Microsoft got that's more important? And the answer, from what I've seen so far myself and reading numerous comments and reviews by others, is pretty much nothing.
So do they have an agreement or are you making a transparent attempt to divert attention from the fact that you were wrong?
And unless YouTube and Viacom have some business agreement of which I am not aware, everything you wrote there is utterly irrelevant. It's helpful to understand what you read yourself before you post hostile criticism of others.
How's that, exactly? Posting on-line does not release material into the public domain, however much legally naive individuals and legally unscrupulous corporations might like to believe otherwise.
The submitter said he posted the video on YouTube so he could put it up on his own blog - making use of YouTube as a file host. Assuming the blogger did make (written) commentary on his own blog, but the video is also available on YouTube without commentary, where would fair use come down on the issue?
I'm not a lawyer and obviously don't know what the courts will decide, but I suggest the following interpretation:
A reasonable argument in favour of a copyright exemption is to allow copying a sample of a work to illustrate critical commentary. A sample would be of significant value when used in connection with the commentary, but of limited value in isolation, and thus it would meet the standard fair use ideal of allowing reuse of the material without damaging the market for the original.
Therefore, if the clip on YouTube is of only incidental value when viewed separately, it should be regarded as legitimate. However, if it's a substantial chunk of the original work being republished unmodified and having value in its own right, then it's more than just a sample and it goes beyond just supporting a critical commentary, so it should not be exempt.
This gives a fairly black-and-white test for courts to apply to determine whether material is fair use in such cases, and seems to me to be consistent with the statute law in the US.
Oh noes! Your public domain material will be in the public domain!
Apart from the fact that the material in question does not have to be in the public domain, and that Google's wording doesn't imply that it will become so, the rest of your comment is absolutely right.
Perhaps multiple choice can be effective, but IME it usually isn't.
I'm reminded of a conversation with a friend a couple of years younger than me, back when we were learning to drive. When I took the test, it was all done in one practical session, and when you got back to the test centre at the end, the examiner would ask some questions to check the candidate's theoretical knowledge was OK. Shortly afterwards, they started running a separate theory exam, taken first, which is basically a multiple choice test.
As my friend was getting ready to take her theory test, she we were running through some of the sample questions with me. She read me one of the questions, and I told her the answer. And she said, "But I haven't told you the options yet!"
I just pointed out that in real life, no-one's going to give you a choice of three specific times to turn your lights on. You just have to understand, and know what to do.
Dumb science down, and you get dumb scientists.
Well said.
Even when I was at school in the UK quite a few years ago now, the slide downhill was starting: people were moving away from the experimental basis and into rote learning of "science". Leaving aside the fact that teaching by rote is far less effective than teaching through practical experience, that step alone means a whole generation are growing up thinking that science is about an absolute truth, when in fact the whole point is that all you ever have is theories that are consistent with the experimental evidence so far, and which may be falsified by future experiments.
Every year in the UK, after 20 or so years of ever-increasing examination results for school kids, we repeat the same national "debate": government proclaims that standards are rising, parents say that others are just bitter that the kids of today are smarter than we were, school officials tell everyone how much better today's teaching methods are... and university and industry leaders look at the fact that effectively identical exam questions have now appeared on first-year university papers instead of A-levels* where they were a few years ago, or at A-level instead of GCSE*, and they the fact that examination results that used to distinguish the top 5% of the population now only identify the top 25% or more, and they see the reality as clear as crystal.
The rot started when O-levels were dropped in favour of GCSEs, and naturally progressed through a succession of "friendlier" study materials and examination systems that focus on things like "interpretation" and "analysis" — without actually teaching the underlying principles to do those things, nor giving sufficient exposure to basic knowledge to appreciate them. Now we are approaching the final insult: syllabus set by the politics of the day. For example, instead of studying physics and geography, pupils will learn about the perils of global warming. If we carry on this way, then instead of asking things like how global warming really works, what it's doing to our planet's ecosystems, and what if anything we should do about it, tomorrow's scientists are just going to be accepting that Global Warming Is A Fact(TM), and behaves however they were told it behaves in a classroom, and can be solved by political means alone. And this is just one example of a somewhat controversial area of science that is being undermined; it is by no means the only one.
We need to get back to teaching science in science classes, and we need to stop putting up with pathetic kids bleating about how it's too hard and they'd rather do media studies or home economics or some other subject that's regarded as an easier option. There is a place for all these things in education, but they are not interchangeable.
* For our non-UK friends: A-levels are usually taken at 18, and GCSEs at 16. Most pupils would take perhaps 8–10 GCSEs and those who stay on post-16 would typically take 2–4 A-levels.
Excessive propagation of discoloured odorous wastage via transitions along the leadership chain from management to peons may constitute a risk of adverse human resource capability impact.
So, can I be promoted now? :-)
MS is obviously concerned, they would not be making noise if they were not. I suspect that they have lost their last chance to keep Free Software away from their patent portfolio by doing this.
And that would be unfortunate for several reasons.
For one thing, it will have lowered the FSF to the same level of trying to gets its way through contemptible legal trickery as the very people it claims to oppose. It all but admits that the collaborative ideal isn't as great as it's supposed to be. After all, if so-called Tivoization is against the spirit of OSS and a free, collaborative world is better, surely the philosophical response is to have the community take the same baseline OSS code and build a better product than Tivo on top of it?
For another thing, I would expect any successful legal action brought by the FSF against Microsoft for this to pretty much define the time every big player in the software industry that doesn't already have a big investment in OSS started avoiding it like the plague, particularly anything connected with GPL3. Given that most of the big name OSS development is at least partially backed by commercial sponsors, that could be a serious blow.
And finally, if the gloves are off and the lawsuits start flying, my money is overwhelmingly on Microsoft. The FSF talks a lot of talk about what it thinks the GPL means, but the simple fact is that statements by the FSF are not legislation and the whole topic is almost entirely untested in court. Microsoft, meanwhile, has an army of lawyers with a track record of great success, and it has so much more money to throw at them that the exact scale doesn't matter. If the FSF wants to get itself into a fight that could completely destroy both the organisation and the licensing strategy it has adopted, this would be a pretty good way to go about it.
So: rip your music. Play it on different devices. Make mix CDs for friends.
I was pretty much agreeing with you right up to that point. But making mix CDs for other people crosses the line, IMHO. At that point, you are no longer copying the material for your own personal use, but redistributing it. Taken to its logical conclusion, that argument allows the entire world a copy of the work for free once the first person has bought it.
This is not to say I have anything against you as an artist telling people they are welcome to do this with your own work, if you so wish. I'm just saying I don't think this should be the default. I believe there is an essentially sound balance between copyright to protect the artist and fair use to protect the individual consumer, and allowing the kind of mix-and-distribute behaviour you describe undermines that balance.
It's interesting that the parent was moderated funny. Despite being pitched by the editorial team as a "fake news show", I saw a report not so long ago that demonstrated people in the US who just got their news from The Daily Show actually were typically as well-informed as anyone who got their news from CNN, Fox or MSNBC. The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure they concluded that TDS was relatively light on substance because its focus was comedy, while the major networks were similarly light on substance because they were filled with hype — neither was a particularly good source of informed current affairs reporting. I can't find the exact report now, but as I write this, the Wikipedia article on The Daily Show does cite several similar pieces.
Except that most really good stuff is a labor of love and has been made available for free -- ranging from the alphabet through the number zero to mathematical proofs and much web content (including Slashdot and other community sites). Consider:
"Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
Some really good stuff is. A fair bit of mediocre stuff is as well. I did write "most" not "all" in my previous post when talking about useful works created in places with IP frameworks.
However, things like books and software have come to be known collectively as "works" for a reason: making good ones typically does require a lot of hard work. Good books and magazines need proofreading, fact-checking, editing, and typesetting. Good software needs things like debugging, usability testing and documentation. Making a good movie needs more than special effects and a big-name leading couple.
Compare fan fiction to serious, published novels. Compare hobbyist computer games with professional titles. Compare home videos on YouTube to films from movie studios (and not just Hollywood, please). Compare FOSS developed by volunteers to software developed under the traditional, commercial model. In each case, while there are a few examples of good, volunteer-produced material, most of the best work is done on a commercial basis, and even the good volunteer stuff isn't particularly better than the good commercial stuff.
Even if you look at borderline cases, compensation plays a role. Much of the most successful FOSS is developed primarily by businesses these days, not amateur volunteers: Linux distros, MySQL, Firefox, and the list goes on. Things like peer-reviewed scientific journals have a strange economic model, but even academics, who are perhaps the most natural example of volunteers working hard to produce good material, publish partly out of enlightened self-interest: they need the reputation and recognition that will get them their next funded project. I post here primarily for personal enjoyment, and if someone finds my comments interesting or informative then that's great, but again I also come here because I find comments by others interesting or informative and in a sense I'm just doing my part to support the community as a whole.
Now, you can get into arguments about the duration of IP protection and how many advances have been made by breaking the rules, and there is some merit in those arguments, but frankly, I think they are straw men here. Most of the time, people do play by the rules, and places that have IP rules produce more useful works on balance than those who don't. And most of the time when people don't play by the rules in the West, they're just being selfish, and if everyone was as selfish as them, then everyone would lose out. This is no different to petty thieves ripping off a store because "the store can afford it", or poor drivers cutting others up because "it doesn't cause accidents", or aggressive people pushing to the front of a queue because "it's only making everyone else one person later".
Unfortunately, all of your arguments overlook one small detail: without copyright, there is little incentive to develop most of the works that are produced in the world.
If you're the teenager with no money or the poor folks from the third world, then the fact that you can take the fruits of someone else's labour for free when those fruits come in digital form may not feel like theft/infringement/whatever, but the bottom line is still that someone worked to produce the material and then didn't get compensated for it. Such policies are unsustainable long term in any economy in the world today: people have to have food, shelter, and the like to survive, and these things are not free. Sooner or later, globalisation says those third world economies will start to level off with everyone else, and then not having a sensible IP framework in place will start to hurt them, too.
You seem like you don't buy this theory, but consider that most of the works we value in the West today are produced in places that do have intellectual property as part of their economic framework. Those that do not, and that by your argument should be more efficient without these "burdens", are not net contributors to the world's knowledge base.
In what way is this the same as a spellchecker? The word "predictive" is kinda relevant.
He also ... suggests that companies like AT&T and Verizon that "cooperate" with the Administration should be granted immunity from the lawsuits they currently face regarding the issue.
Yes, of course. Putting big business above the law is a tried and tested way to ensure their continued complian^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgood behaviour and respect for the law.
(My current sig feels particularly appropriate today.)
But I am surprised by the number of techies that fell for the phishing attack in the first instance.
Was it the techies or the hiring managers, though?
It seems like the average HR department at a software firm with a C# vacancy would rather hire some guy a couple of years out of college with a bit of C# experience and a MCSD certificate than an experienced pro with a track record of shipping working software using half a dozen different languages including Java and C++. The same sort of firm probably wouldn't hire an DBA with a decade of experience using Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Perl and Python for a MySQL+PHP job. They know the buzzwords, but they are clueless about what they mean in practice. Is it any wonder they are also clueless about security?
It's strange. I hear a lot in the press about businesses and governments holding off on Vista, waiting for SP1, whatever. I hear a lot of techie folks, both on-line and in real life, saying they won't touch it after all the negative PR.
And then I see figures from Microsoft that show adoption progressing at similar rates to their previous major OS releases.
I am forced to ask whether Vista really sucks as much as "they say" and "they" aren't installing it, or whether I'm just hearing views from too many biased sources.
Vista's not perfect, but I'd still gladly choose it over any OS that forces me to compile things myself to get things working properly or buy an entirely new set of hardware just to run it.
Not to be confused with Vista, where the software vendors have to work out how to recompile everything for you and you need to buy an entirely new set of hardware just to run it?
The essential thing in the US is that the banking system has become quite enamored of easy credit in the last few decades -- the policy of extending credit to essentially anyone for any reason, based on nothing more than an application and a promise to pay it back at some later date. [...] So long as the creditors themselves don't suffer too much financially from fraud (which they don't, thanks to their generous campaign contributions and strict avoidance of responsibility through their merchant contracts) it's a winning business strategy because it also brings in more legitimate customers.
Perhaps you didn't notice, but exactly such an attitude as you described is the reason the US economy is in danger of collapsing into deep recession, and taking a significant chunk of the rest of the world with it. Have you looked at the stock markets in the past fortnight, or noticed the sub-prime mortgage lenders in financial difficulties or outright going bust?
It also makes it much harder to prove that you have been stolen from. I wonder how much of the reduction you claim is due to actual reduction and how much is due to people being unable to prove the crime ever happened.
Interesting theory, but it's much harder to commit that casual fraud in the first place now, so I suspect the effect you describe is insignificant in practice. People got wise very quickly to the fact that you check the amount before keying in your PIN, and the hardware set-up is pretty effective for preventing casual fraud by shop staff and the like, so PIN-verified transactions are usually legitimate.
There's always been the problem of someone using a card to pay for something over the phone or Internet, where no PIN is entered now, but no signature was required before either. You can challenge these with the bank or credit card company just like you always could, and in general the burden is on the retailer to prove that the transaction was in order: in cases of doubt, the bank will typically charge-back first and ask questions later.
We don't just need laws to make companies liable, we need a system in place to make sure that when data breaches do occur, that those affected can restore some semblance of normalcy to their lives with the minimum of fuss. And we need laws in place to define just what data any particular company can collect
Yes and yes. I've been arguing the same way ever since a probably inadvertent mistake by a minimum wage local government staffer screwed up my tax record by linking me to someone else. The mistake itself wasn't too damaging, fortunately, but the really nasty things were the fact that the first I knew about it was when my paycheque was well short one month because of over-charged tax, and that it took me several months contacting several different tax offices to get it fixed. (Hint to tax offices: if I'm complaining that my tax records have been corrupted, possibly by cross-linking with someone else's given the context, then it's not very sensible to stonewall me completely because the address and employer details I'm giving you aren't what's in my tax record. If I'm not currently working for that employer, why are you deducting tax on my wages from them?)
I believe we are long overdue for things like robust privacy/anti-collection of personal data laws, and that such laws should also require that anyone dealing with any sensitive personal information must provide a fast, low-cost, effective mechanism for fixing screw-ups or face unlimited fines in court for any damage resulting and to compensate for any distress and wasted time for the victim. And this should go double for any organisations that you are legally compelled to supply with personal information.
Yes, that will motivate banks to use better security but in the end it all comes down to the fact that people need to do their part to uphold the security that is already there.
The problem with that is that current mechanisms are far too much of a burden for the average member of the public to avoid carelessness and/or social engineering attacks.
It simply isn't reasonable to expect people to create and remember a different, properly secure password for each of numerous services, some of which will only be accessed occasionally, perhaps as little as once per year or less. Nor is it reasonable to expect average people using typical software on typical computers to understand all the dangers of phishing attacks, the need to patch immediately against cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, and other geeky gobbledegook.
Since large organisations only tend to understand responsibilities in terms of the bottom line impact if they fail to live up to them — and that includes the responsibility to obey the law — the law needs to impose a sufficient burden on those handling sensitive personal information improperly that it becomes more economic for them to invest in proper security, both on their own side and in terms of what they expect of their clients. With sufficient pushing in the right direction, we could have not only much better security in terms of software and protocols, but also practically effective means of identifying people more reliably and with less susceptibility to casual crime.
This doesn't need to be rocket science, either: consider that switching from using signatures to using PINs to authenticate card transactions has reduced card fraud by something like 80% in several European countries. The new PIN-based systems are simple enough for almost everyone to understand, were well advertised prior to their takeover, are backed by software and equipment that work pretty well, and are based on the tried-and-tested security policy of combining a physical token with some information known only to the legitimate user. Just like that, you've removed a common mechanism for card fraud, saving businesses billions and saving hassle for thousands of would-have-been victims every year.
We have the technology to do this. A simple card and public key cryptography suffice for most purposes, after all. We just need the will to do it more widely, so the complexity is dealt with by the system and not by the user.