Well, I expected a certain statistical number of this remark for having tried to have an open discussion. Today's science is blurred by a belief that we can pre-judge the answers to questions like this. But I don't think we can.
I don't think we know how intelligence is bootstrapped, and I think it would be a good idea if we asked questions about that before risking giving things the "idea" of being intelligent (for want of a better phrasing).
Ethics is about not being afraid to confront questions, not about being sure you know the answers. I don't know the right answer to some ethical questions, I only know that when you stop asking the questions, you've taken a definite step in the wrong direction.
Nor do I think you can say there is definitively no question here.
Animals do learn, and these are ones that are already remarkably durable. Is anyone doing this experiment asking whether this is a good idea?
I'm actually relative serious when I say: I hope they're disposing of the test subjects afterward and not sending them back to the hive to say: "I figured out the rosetta stone to their technology. Now we'll have no trouble taking over."
I recently re-watched the original Jurassic Park and was properly impacted by someone's remark at some point that they'd be safe from the Raptors untilt hey figured out how to turn a doorknob. It was an excellent point about intelligent creatures. I'm actually not worried a bug is going to drive a car, but I do worry that Einstein's remark "a mind one stretched by a new idea never regains its original shape" might have some applicability here if we make a regular practice of this kind of thing.
We don't need to be artificially creating triggers that put roaches into a more advanced intellectual state ahead of their own natural evolution.
Star Trek teaches us the Prime Directive, which says approximately: don't interfere with the evolution of lower life forms because they may not have the wisdom to use their newfound knowledge for the betterment of mankind. I say we follow that lead in this case.
That's certainly an interesting proposal, too. I'm probably biased toward mine both because I'm "used to it" and "I've thought about it more", but hopefully I can overcome that and look at it more objectively with a bit of time and thought. (My kneejerk fear is that all the "bidding" in yours will somehow devolve into a corrupt system, though I'm not sure of how. As I said, I'll think more. And hopefully others will, too.)
Meanwhile, hopefully someone will at least mod your suggestion up to match mine in visibility. I think it's good for people to have a number of concrete alternatives to visualize so they don't think this issue is full of whining with no implementable alternatives.
At a previous Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, I asked this question of the chairman of the FTC, who was speaking about children's privacy on the net. As you might expect, I got no good answer.
It seems to me that the essential quality of being a child that causes us to make special laws protecting them are:
Kids are not as experienced, so they don't always know the consequences of what will happen to them well enough to protect themselves in advance.
Kids are not fully enabled to protect themselves directly.
Unfortunately, while those two qualities become less true for us in the physical world when we grow up--we learn how to protect ourselves from in-person assault, and how to avoid going places where we might be assaulted--it's far less true in the online world.
In a sense, we are a whole society of children, living day to day in a world of wonder where there are no parents to tell us wisdom that will keep us from getting into e-trouble for the rest of our e-lives. As such, even if the law does apply only to kids, it should apply to all of us kids, even those of us in real-world adulthood.
I am in favour of software patents in principle, but they should only be allowed after serious patent reform has taken place.
I have a concrete proposal for serious software patent reform:
Turn it into something like the Nobel Prize, where you issue only a small number per year, only for things that are truly innovative. Details and rationale here.
When Slashdot publishes something and people get too much traffic (being "Slashdotted"), it makes an impression. I wonder if Slashdot might join this boycott whether that wouldn't make more difference than many of us put together. A kind of "anti-slashdotting" effect.
Alternatively, perhaps someone should construct a trampoline thing like Salon has where in order to gain entrance to the site, you can watch an "ad" (something explaining the issue) to trampoline through. For big sites that were leary of losing cash flow by shutting down, it might still allow them to contribute to the effort.
Copyright isn't for protection of publishers, it's for protection of authors.
A web publisher doesn't care if he has protection on content any more. He just cares if he has content that he won't get sued over and it's always changing.
But individual authors will get ripped off if they post something that a content-hungry megaportal wants to co-opt unless there's copyright.
Copyright enables the de-coupling of the idea of "sharing" from the idea of "giving up all rights". If posting something is the same as giving it away, no one could ever read what you wrote without you having the worry they were stealing it at the same time.
Copyright allows someone like me to post a story I wrote and not have Microsoft or AOL or somebody just take it from me and offer me nothing in return. That's a powerful tool. It might or might not get me money--probably sometimes it does and sometimes not. But losnig that tool will be a loss to already-underpaid authors everywhere.
"We'll catch Google," Balmer went on to explain off-the-record, "After all, Google only has access to what people post on the web, but we've done "instruction-stream prefetch" one better by inventing the notion of "html-page-post pre-index", where we watch what pages our customers are developing as they type it into FrontPage and pre-compile all the index data. Google is forced to spider the web at great expense, but we are the web and we can skip that costly and slow step. We've modified FrontPage to talk directly to our servers so we'll instantly index anything users upload, and our FrontPage customers will naturally be ahead of the game. We'd even have patented that process, too, but some guy named "netsettler" on Slashdot published our cool idea before we got the patent claim submitted and the patent office, in a rare move, denied our claim. That will be the last time his pages show up on our search engine..."
If we wait until there are no risks the shuttle will never fly again.
Hear, hear! Space travel is dangerous. So what's the alternative? If we keep all the astronauts at home and they die of old age are they going to feel we "saved" them? They want to go, even if there's some risk. And they know that the people who've invested money in this are not going to send them up with frivolous levels of risk.
Here's my test for acceptable risk:
If there no astronauts can be found who are willing to take the flight, then it's not safe enough. Of if we can't find any funding agencies with experiments or projects to do who are willing to risk the flight, then it's not safe enough. But as long as we're filling the seats and the project bays, and as long as everyone knows the risks and has accepted them, we're good to go.
Go watch Into Thin Air and other books about scaling Mount Everest and imagine what would happen to the mountain climbing business if every time there was an accident, we shut down mountain climbing until we could prove it was safe.
Is there someone reading this discussion that knows what the status of infringement law is when it comes to vague claims like this?
For example, suppose I build a system that uses past viewing histories AND something else. Have I infringed, or have I used a different technique?
What would happen if I patented "using the letter E in the making of recommendations"? Would that mean that anyone who uses the letter E and also does other things to make recommendations is infringing? Or would it mean they are doing "something else"?
It seems to me trivial/obvious that you use "past knowledge" to make recommendations, so I'd be surprised the patent was granted if I didn't know that pretty much all patents like that get granted these days. But beyond the question of obviousness, it's equally obvious that this alone can't really give you the best solution. So am I "doing something else" or "refining this idea" if I use both this info and other info?
This is going to make a mess out of laws for what you can call a person...
Hamlet: What man dost thou dig it [the grave] for? Gravedigger: For no man, sir. Hamlet: What woman, then? Gravedigger: For none, neither. Hamlet: Who is to be buried in't? Gravedigger: One that was a woman, sir, but rest her soul, she's dead.
I wonder if ordinary rules for clinical trials on humans apply to dead people under present law.
And just imagine how the right-to-life movement will deal with dead people needing to be treated as "potential life". As they are so quick to point out with a fetus, technology keeps changing and so you cna't just go by what present-day technology can do, you apparently have to worry about the limit case. I wonder what the limit case is on this end...
... the service man who had kept it running with preventative maintenance had... worked at the prevention so well, none of the machines he serviced ever broke down, so didn't require the "expensive imported parts" nor the "multiple call-outs" to install same.
Just another variant on the supposedly well-understood problem of creating a light-bulb that doesn't wear out, I guess.
Of course, I have similar worries every time someone tells me that the way free software will stay "in business" is not by selling the initial item but by selling support. That sounds to me like a recipe for not building things right the first time... or, at best, a substantial conflict of interest of quite similar kind to the one you describe.
As we pressure companies for cheaper and cheaper everything, we squeeze out the dollars they need to do support, and they outsource it--to us.
Do I want companies to offer good quality and stand by their work? Sure. Do I expect it? Ha. It's bad enough that I generally just hope the price point is low enough that when it breaks I can afford a new one rather than talk to some unhelpful jerk on the phone.
Look at what's happened to watch repair shops. No one repairs watches any more, they just replace them. Same with shoe repair. Heck, in some regions of the company, away from big cities, it's hard to find contractors to repair houses because the people who know how to do the relevant work find it both easier and more lucrative just to build new ones. Other "technology" will probably follow suit, if it hasn't already.
Only an idiot would aim for a job with shrinking pay and demand, while outsourcing is increasing.
Then again, in what other industry do those struggling to pay for college or to get through unemployment amuse themselves by giving away the very craft that they think they're going to sell if they're ever employed later? Don't blame it all on outsourcing. Some of the lessened market demand can be traced straight back to free software. You can't give away huge quantities of something that has intrinsic value and expect it not to have an effect on market pricing.
But the real thing is: Your kid(s) will be into whatever you're into.
I agree with this. Setting an example is critical. Beyond that, here are a few other tips that may work, though I doubt there's any one-size-fits-all wisdom in this business:
Unless you want your kid to be a hermit that lives in the woods with you and bombs places that approve of technology, your kid will grow up in a society that depends utterly on technology. So you might as well introduce them to it as early as it makes sense to do so, allowing it to seem like a natural part of life and not something geeky.
Remember that, like TV, a computer is not a baby sitter. Make sure kids can see uses of computers that serve real life needs, like "finding out what's going on in the world", "looking up a topic you need to know about", "finding TV and movie schedules", "keeping in touch with relatives", etc. The real value of a computer is that it can be interactive, requiring thoughtful input from users, not just feeding them instructions (turning people into computers) like TV does. Find programs that live up to that.
Be very strict about the amount of time they are allowed to waste on games, whether Solitaire or the latest fantasy fighting game, that suck the life out of them and provide nothing in return. An occasional game is one thing, but put a tight limit on it, especially as they get old enough that they should be doing other things with their minds and their lives.
Even though your kids will hate it, prefer a computer that's out in the living room to one in the kid's room, at least until they're old enough that you know whether they can be really trusted in the internet world alone. The simple knowledge that parents might see (or later find) what they're doing will often keep them in check.
Unless you want to be all over the internet in your underwear, or find that your son or daughter is, strongly consider not getting a webcam.
Consider telling your kids that while they may use headphones to listen to movies, they must keep the sound level turns down enough that they can still hear you. Don't let "I couldn't hear you" be a possible answer to why they are being non-responsive. Kids already have too many excuses for not getting things done already without a technical assist from computers.
Get a computer that allows you to give different privileges to different users and make sure your kids don't have the capability of downloading software onto the machine until they are intelligent enough to avoid downloading very dangerous things. In some cases, this age might never be reached by some children. Don't be afraid to tell them that some things are things they can do when they have their own house, computer, etc. but that you won't tolerate the risk on your own personal machine.
Remember, though, that what is a "computer" is changing now. So the really hard question probably won't be something "neat and pretty" like whether to give them a big blobby box on a desk and a login to Google or Yahoo anyway. The real question will be whether to get the internet-enabled teddy bear, whether they should have a voice-response lightswitch, whether the games they play should be things you pay for or whether they should be funded by ads for toys or foods you don't want to be buying them, etc.
Audio books have all seemed to be switching over to CD-ROM, but it makes me sad. I don't really care about ultra-high fidelity when being read a book. What I do care about is not having it lose my place when I have to stop the car, etc. I rarely stop on a chapter boundary. And it's rare for audio players to remember the CD's their position well under all the circumstances they need to in order to make Audio Books on CD really work.
So I don't doubt there's been a decline in cassette audio books even--it's obvious at the stores. But I think it's premature, at least for that genre.
If you think the numbers are high now, just imagine how high they will be when large flatscreens get cheap...
They don't call theaters "The Big Screen" for nothing.
And besides, in all the rush to have more choices for moviegoers at theaters, the Big Screens you get at theaters are getting smaller while the ones you get at home are getting larger. As theaters make more and more small rooms to watch in that aren't that dissimilar to home, what's the difference other than sharing the room with a lot of noisy strangers.
Eventually, to survive, I predict that theaters will have to go back to the really big screen. Or start featuring other things, like food, just as air conditioning was once a big draw (and might be again if the poor in the US keep getting poorer and return to the days where they can't afford "basic needs" like dvd players and air conditioners).
There may also be a few kinds of specialty movies, like comedies, where a critical mass of people who are smart enough to get the jokes and make others realize it's time to laugh doesn't hurt either...
It's a crime because anyone who knowingly partakes in this sick shit, whether paying or not, is a menace to society.
Look, I don't want to spend any time lauding these people as great folks, but at the same time, I'd like my country to have an orderly set of laws. Hence, please don't take my remarks here in defense of a law as any kind of endorsement of the behavior. (It's such a charged topic that it's sadly hard to even discuss without a prologue of this kind.)
We are a country that is a great experiment in Freedom and a set of laws based on what people do, not what they think. There are many vicious kinds of people who walk the streets--people who would like to kill others, people who would like to take the money of others. People who want to just make each other feel bad. But we don't lock them up for "being bad people".
Should we turn a blind eye to horrible shit because it disrupts soneone's concocted logical view of things?
First, the someone(s) you're taking issue with is not me but Tom Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Adams, and others. I didn't found the nation and make up the Great Experiment, they did. I'm just explaining how it works.
Second, I'm not advocating turning a blind eye to anything. I'm advocating that every citizen be offered "due process". To understand why, refer to Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (the relevant scene prominently quoted here, though the whole play or movie is worth a watch).
You're advocating a policy of "prior restraint" and using a certain degree of circular reasoning to get their. The reason you think merely seeing this content is bad is that you think it identifies people who will do other things (and, implicitly, you believe that making a mere guess of this kind won't come back to bite you personally). You seem to want to catch them in time by just proceeding on this guess before they do something concrete. But what if the mere viewing doesn't mean that? As others have noted--should we lock up the judge and jury? They also viewed it.
And what if it were some other issue? Could the government just guess about all things it thinks citizens might do? Should we lock up people who buy certain chemicals because they might be used in the drug trade or the making of bombs? Should we just assume that anyone who ever tells a lie in some venue is willing in some other venue to cheat on their taxes by lying there, too? We could stop a lot of tax cheats that way. Where does this kind of thing end?
By their nature, Free Societies are not Safe Societies. We buy some of our freedom at the cost of loss of safety. We could be a lot safer if we were not so free. You seem to me to be clearly advocating yielding freedom for safety, and I'm merely noting that while this is a possible thing to do, it's got dangers of its own that go far beyond what you're advocating. For a good analysis of this tradeoff, see William Gibson's Disneyland With the Death Penalty in Wired Magazine (Issue 1.04, Sep-Oct 1993). Or see the movie Minority Report. Or read George Orwell's 1984.
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" --obligatory Ben Franklin quote
... you have a team of lawyers and judges viewing the images to confirm they are indeed pornographic
Yeah, perhaps the defendant was just an aspiring lawyer, or was expecting to be called to jury duty the following week, and was... uh,... just boning up.
By deterring drug users, the demand is reduced so the suppliers have less incentive to stay in business.
Funny, but I thought the haphazard war on drugs drove up the price of drugs giving the sellers more money, increasing crime because drugs are so hard to afford by those addicted, and filling jails with people who quite often are no threat to anyone and mostly just victims of highly selective, or at least erratic, prosecution.
If drugs were decriminalized, it seems to me that the prices would go down and with it the number of crimes required by desperate addicts. It also seems to me that addicts would be less afraid of seeking treatment. And crime syndicates less able to make a dollar. Plus the state could make money by taxing, and insure the public health by regulating quality through legitimate sources. And it could save money by letting people who once were found with a few joints of pot out of prison they never belonged in.
I've personally never used drugs. Not even a puff. Never had any use for it. I don't see why that would change even if drugs were legal. I don't think people consult the law to decide whether to do something strange to their bodies--they're either predisposed to do it or not. So I'm not sure I even buy the idea of it being possible to deter that way.
If people commit crimes against real victims, I'm fine about them being arrested. But I don't see arresting them for crimes against themselves, nor for entertaining hypotheticals about what they might do to others. The concept of Thought Crimes would make criminals of us all, and would become the instrument of the dismantling of civilized society.
So your point doesn't make sense to me from a principled point of view. And neither does it make economic sense as a good way for the government to be spending its time when we have real problems in the world.
I believe it is NOT illegal if no real kids are used
I'm not so sure this is true, btw. I'm pretty sure many if not most child porn laws in the US are written to make it illegal even if the material is entirely composed from non-photo sources. The legislature can make up whatever laws it likes, of course. Whether they withstand Constitutional challenges is another matter, and might depend on the composition of the Supreme Court.
And of course there will always remain the odd and unsettling question: might some people who use child porn be helping themselves to suppress the urge to act on their impulses, and might society be even less safe by eliminating an obvious means of sublimating their desires?
I sometimes think people might as well come out and just condemn people with these leanings immediately to death or life in prison, period. What we do to them instead, allowing them to be released as if rehabilitated after a time, then making them identify where they live and putting them at risk of vigilantes, etc. seems less humane. Maybe indeed they are a risk, in which case they ought not be released. To release them as if they were rehabilitated citizens and then not treat them that way seems worse than just leaving them imprisoned.
I don't know the right answers here, but I think society is not really honest with itself on this entire matter. It's something that one can't even have a conversation about without it melting down into a lot of "are you serious?" remarks, etc.
This all begs the question of why viewing anything should ever be illegal. Who is the victim here?
Sure, if someone creates porn from actual people, unwilling to or unable to consent, that's something the creator has done. And maybe if someone has paid to fund that, there's an issue. If this guy has paid, they should go on the money. If he's not, I don't see how they have any good cause even though they may have a case.
When you start to admit victimless crimes, the whole algebra of causality is turned on its head and lots of strange things result, not the least of which is this case.
I'm one of those who has not upgraded from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. It's not the software I dread, it's Microsoft's increasingly ridiculous enforcement of its own personal theory of Intellectual Property rigor. No, I'm not someone who cheats on licenses. I am meticulous about having valid licenses for all the machines in my home/office. HOWEVER, that means (a) I've paid for them and (b) I have the right number. It does NOT necessarily mean that when I have to reload a system, I have the kind of records to know whether the huge box of CD-ROM's I grab from my basement is organized enough to know that I've got the correct one of six disks. That means there's a huge chance as they get stronger with THEIR bookkeeping that one day it's going to start barfing at me about how I appear (to them) to have a disk that isn't the right one for this machine, or I appear to have two machines on the net using the same license. XP is even more strict about licenses than 2000, so I just dread their faulty software ragging on me.
Even just to install the later version(s) of Media Player, you have to agree to some awful license that lets it sniff out your machine and make its own determination (without asking for my input) about whether I'm in violation of their license policies.
And now they have other tools that are starting to do this as well.
And XP is full of "more of same", which is why I have resisted upgrading.
Why should I, a customer who believes he IS in compliance, fear these tools except because I don't trust Microsoft to implement them well and flexibly enough to do anything but screw me? Every time they are wrong, Microsoft gets another sale (or tries to) and I get no recourse. They can deny me bug fixes, upgrades, and so on based solely on their program's opinion of my license management practices.
This problem has to be worse at sites where installation is so complicated that machines are ghosted. Presumably in the ghosting case, you buy a heap of licenses, but then you copy a single image to all the different machines. Well, that's all well and good, but when you get all done, you're all apparently violators.
There's just a limit to what you can mechanically detect. And when you've got as much income as Microsoft plainly has, you need to learn to trust that most people must be paying you and not start to piss them off by treating them like they are cheaters.
They should be investing in tools that allow them to flexibly manage a sense of how many licenses you have at a site, and that don't make me dig around in my basement every time I need to do an upgrade and it wants me to find the original disk from which I installed something to prove I'm a real person. I've given them far too much real money and have been too staunch a supporter of software-for-fee to be treated this way.
Trying to force me into upgrading to a product that treats me worse by cutting support for one that does not is no way to engender my customer loyalty. Maybe if Microsoft doesn't care, it's time to start complaining to the various tools that I (again) BUY on Microsoft's platform and tell them I'm going to be jumping ship from Microsoft and that means I won't be buying their tools any more unless they run on Linux or Apple or wherever I end up. If Microsoft doesn't hear my little voice, maybe it will hear the voices of the tools that I want that are the only reason I buy from Microsoft. Maybe if I could buy Adobe InDesign or Adobe Photoshop for Linux (please don't tell me Gimp is good enough, because it's just not), I wouldn't have to buy Microsoft at all.
A PhD is a "token" that others believe you can do research, without one you'll need some other evidence that you can do that job
Just so. I grant (pardon pun) that I was oversimplifying. I've been in positions where I could have probably worked around this because of open-minded management, my skills and publications. But it was not in academia, and I think that fact was relevant.
And whether it happens in academia or not, it's certainly not the norm. People at some places I've interviewed at both universities and Government sponsored think tanks have come right out and said plainly "expect there to be a pecking order where mostly your lack of PhD will hold you back", even now after nearly 25 years of career experience.
Contrast this with most other places you can work who will tell you that after 5-10 years in the field, if you've not done enough to show that your degree was worth something, they're not going to believe a degree as a credential, they're going to want to see your subsequent work experience. And if you have done something cool, they'll also usually freely say they'll count that as a substitute for formal education.
In fact, it's funny, but some places will advertise they want Masters + 3 years or 5 years with a Bachelors, or some places will say Masters + 10 years or PhD + 5 years, and when you think about it, they're really saying "we count 5 years working on a PhD as 5 years working, or 2 years working on a Masters as 2 years working. Well, gee, since I have to pay to get the Masters and someone pays me to work, I've often wondered why get the degree at all. It just builds up debt and offers sometimes less than you might think if you had already the opportunity for a good solid job for those same two years. Pretty much only in the arena of getting employed by a University or government-funded think tank has a degree ever had a persistent sense of importance, in my experience.
Especially in the modern world, where the interest of business is constantly changing, one of the risks of being in research and academia at all is that your skills can diverge from what business needs. It's easy to convince yourself that you're learning about "what's next", but sometimes industry doesn't go the direction you think or doesn't use the tool you're used to and you're left without the all-important checklist items that modern full-text-search resumes require.
(Others' mileage may, of course, vary. No single person's point of view is going to apply to everyone, so read lots of opinions if you want a real gestalt.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I expected a certain statistical number of this remark for having tried to have an open discussion. Today's science is blurred by a belief that we can pre-judge the answers to questions like this. But I don't think we can.
I don't think we know how intelligence is bootstrapped, and I think it would be a good idea if we asked questions about that before risking giving things the "idea" of being intelligent (for want of a better phrasing).
Ethics is about not being afraid to confront questions, not about being sure you know the answers. I don't know the right answer to some ethical questions, I only know that when you stop asking the questions, you've taken a definite step in the wrong direction.
Nor do I think you can say there is definitively no question here.
Animals do learn, and these are ones that are already remarkably durable. Is anyone doing this experiment asking whether this is a good idea?
I'm actually relative serious when I say: I hope they're disposing of the test subjects afterward and not sending them back to the hive to say: "I figured out the rosetta stone to their technology. Now we'll have no trouble taking over."
I recently re-watched the original Jurassic Park and was properly impacted by someone's remark at some point that they'd be safe from the Raptors untilt hey figured out how to turn a doorknob. It was an excellent point about intelligent creatures. I'm actually not worried a bug is going to drive a car, but I do worry that Einstein's remark "a mind one stretched by a new idea never regains its original shape" might have some applicability here if we make a regular practice of this kind of thing.
We don't need to be artificially creating triggers that put roaches into a more advanced intellectual state ahead of their own natural evolution.
Star Trek teaches us the Prime Directive, which says approximately: don't interfere with the evolution of lower life forms because they may not have the wisdom to use their newfound knowledge for the betterment of mankind. I say we follow that lead in this case.
That's certainly an interesting proposal, too. I'm probably biased toward mine both because I'm "used to it" and "I've thought about it more", but hopefully I can overcome that and look at it more objectively with a bit of time and thought. (My kneejerk fear is that all the "bidding" in yours will somehow devolve into a corrupt system, though I'm not sure of how. As I said, I'll think more. And hopefully others will, too.)
Meanwhile, hopefully someone will at least mod your suggestion up to match mine in visibility. I think it's good for people to have a number of concrete alternatives to visualize so they don't think this issue is full of whining with no implementable alternatives.
At a previous Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, I asked this question of the chairman of the FTC, who was speaking about children's privacy on the net. As you might expect, I got no good answer.
It seems to me that the essential quality of being a child that causes us to make special laws protecting them are:
Unfortunately, while those two qualities become less true for us in the physical world when we grow up--we learn how to protect ourselves from in-person assault, and how to avoid going places where we might be assaulted--it's far less true in the online world.
In a sense, we are a whole society of children, living day to day in a world of wonder where there are no parents to tell us wisdom that will keep us from getting into e-trouble for the rest of our e-lives. As such, even if the law does apply only to kids, it should apply to all of us kids, even those of us in real-world adulthood.
I have a concrete proposal for serious software patent reform:
When Slashdot publishes something and people get too much traffic (being "Slashdotted"), it makes an impression. I wonder if Slashdot might join this boycott whether that wouldn't make more difference than many of us put together. A kind of "anti-slashdotting" effect.
Alternatively, perhaps someone should construct a trampoline thing like Salon has where in order to gain entrance to the site, you can watch an "ad" (something explaining the issue) to trampoline through. For big sites that were leary of losing cash flow by shutting down, it might still allow them to contribute to the effort.
Copyright isn't for protection of publishers, it's for protection of authors.
A web publisher doesn't care if he has protection on content any more. He just cares if he has content that he won't get sued over and it's always changing.
But individual authors will get ripped off if they post something that a content-hungry megaportal wants to co-opt unless there's copyright.
Copyright enables the de-coupling of the idea of "sharing" from the idea of "giving up all rights". If posting something is the same as giving it away, no one could ever read what you wrote without you having the worry they were stealing it at the same time.
Copyright allows someone like me to post a story I wrote and not have Microsoft or AOL or somebody just take it from me and offer me nothing in return. That's a powerful tool. It might or might not get me money--probably sometimes it does and sometimes not. But losnig that tool will be a loss to already-underpaid authors everywhere.
Not intentionally. It was just light humor. I was trying to stay on topic.
"We'll catch Google," Balmer went on to explain off-the-record, "After all, Google only has access to what people post on the web, but we've done "instruction-stream prefetch" one better by inventing the notion of "html-page-post pre-index", where we watch what pages our customers are developing as they type it into FrontPage and pre-compile all the index data. Google is forced to spider the web at great expense, but we are the web and we can skip that costly and slow step. We've modified FrontPage to talk directly to our servers so we'll instantly index anything users upload, and our FrontPage customers will naturally be ahead of the game. We'd even have patented that process, too, but some guy named "netsettler" on Slashdot published our cool idea before we got the patent claim submitted and the patent office, in a rare move, denied our claim. That will be the last time his pages show up on our search engine..."
;)
Hear, hear! Space travel is dangerous. So what's the alternative? If we keep all the astronauts at home and they die of old age are they going to feel we "saved" them? They want to go, even if there's some risk. And they know that the people who've invested money in this are not going to send them up with frivolous levels of risk.
Here's my test for acceptable risk:
Go watch Into Thin Air and other books about scaling Mount Everest and imagine what would happen to the mountain climbing business if every time there was an accident, we shut down mountain climbing until we could prove it was safe.
Is there someone reading this discussion that knows what the status of infringement law is when it comes to vague claims like this?
For example, suppose I build a system that uses past viewing histories AND something else. Have I infringed, or have I used a different technique?
What would happen if I patented "using the letter E in the making of recommendations"? Would that mean that anyone who uses the letter E and also does other things to make recommendations is infringing? Or would it mean they are doing "something else"?
It seems to me trivial/obvious that you use "past knowledge" to make recommendations, so I'd be surprised the patent was granted if I didn't know that pretty much all patents like that get granted these days. But beyond the question of obviousness, it's equally obvious that this alone can't really give you the best solution. So am I "doing something else" or "refining this idea" if I use both this info and other info?
Or is that something courts disagree about?
This is going to make a mess out of laws for what you can call a person...
I wonder if ordinary rules for clinical trials on humans apply to dead people under present law.
And just imagine how the right-to-life movement will deal with dead people needing to be treated as "potential life". As they are so quick to point out with a fetus, technology keeps changing and so you cna't just go by what present-day technology can do, you apparently have to worry about the limit case. I wonder what the limit case is on this end...
Just another variant on the supposedly well-understood problem of creating a light-bulb that doesn't wear out, I guess.
Of course, I have similar worries every time someone tells me that the way free software will stay "in business" is not by selling the initial item but by selling support. That sounds to me like a recipe for not building things right the first time... or, at best, a substantial conflict of interest of quite similar kind to the one you describe.
As we pressure companies for cheaper and cheaper everything, we squeeze out the dollars they need to do support, and they outsource it--to us.
Do I want companies to offer good quality and stand by their work? Sure. Do I expect it? Ha. It's bad enough that I generally just hope the price point is low enough that when it breaks I can afford a new one rather than talk to some unhelpful jerk on the phone.
Look at what's happened to watch repair shops. No one repairs watches any more, they just replace them. Same with shoe repair. Heck, in some regions of the company, away from big cities, it's hard to find contractors to repair houses because the people who know how to do the relevant work find it both easier and more lucrative just to build new ones. Other "technology" will probably follow suit, if it hasn't already.
Then again, in what other industry do those struggling to pay for college or to get through unemployment amuse themselves by giving away the very craft that they think they're going to sell if they're ever employed later? Don't blame it all on outsourcing. Some of the lessened market demand can be traced straight back to free software. You can't give away huge quantities of something that has intrinsic value and expect it not to have an effect on market pricing.
I agree with this. Setting an example is critical. Beyond that, here are a few other tips that may work, though I doubt there's any one-size-fits-all wisdom in this business:
Remember, though, that what is a "computer" is changing now. So the really hard question probably won't be something "neat and pretty" like whether to give them a big blobby box on a desk and a login to Google or Yahoo anyway. The real question will be whether to get the internet-enabled teddy bear, whether they should have a voice-response lightswitch, whether the games they play should be things you pay for or whether they should be funded by ads for toys or foods you don't want to be buying them, etc.
Audio books have all seemed to be switching over to CD-ROM, but it makes me sad. I don't really care about ultra-high fidelity when being read a book. What I do care about is not having it lose my place when I have to stop the car, etc. I rarely stop on a chapter boundary. And it's rare for audio players to remember the CD's their position well under all the circumstances they need to in order to make Audio Books on CD really work.
So I don't doubt there's been a decline in cassette audio books even--it's obvious at the stores. But I think it's premature, at least for that genre.
If you think the numbers are high now, just imagine how high they will be when large flatscreens get cheap...
They don't call theaters "The Big Screen" for nothing.
And besides, in all the rush to have more choices for moviegoers at theaters, the Big Screens you get at theaters are getting smaller while the ones you get at home are getting larger. As theaters make more and more small rooms to watch in that aren't that dissimilar to home, what's the difference other than sharing the room with a lot of noisy strangers.
Eventually, to survive, I predict that theaters will have to go back to the really big screen. Or start featuring other things, like food, just as air conditioning was once a big draw (and might be again if the poor in the US keep getting poorer and return to the days where they can't afford "basic needs" like dvd players and air conditioners).
There may also be a few kinds of specialty movies, like comedies, where a critical mass of people who are smart enough to get the jokes and make others realize it's time to laugh doesn't hurt either...
Look, I don't want to spend any time lauding these people as great folks, but at the same time, I'd like my country to have an orderly set of laws. Hence, please don't take my remarks here in defense of a law as any kind of endorsement of the behavior. (It's such a charged topic that it's sadly hard to even discuss without a prologue of this kind.)
We are a country that is a great experiment in Freedom and a set of laws based on what people do, not what they think. There are many vicious kinds of people who walk the streets--people who would like to kill others, people who would like to take the money of others. People who want to just make each other feel bad. But we don't lock them up for "being bad people".
First, the someone(s) you're taking issue with is not me but Tom Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Adams, and others. I didn't found the nation and make up the Great Experiment, they did. I'm just explaining how it works.
Second, I'm not advocating turning a blind eye to anything. I'm advocating that every citizen be offered "due process". To understand why, refer to Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (the relevant scene prominently quoted here, though the whole play or movie is worth a watch).
You're advocating a policy of "prior restraint" and using a certain degree of circular reasoning to get their. The reason you think merely seeing this content is bad is that you think it identifies people who will do other things (and, implicitly, you believe that making a mere guess of this kind won't come back to bite you personally). You seem to want to catch them in time by just proceeding on this guess before they do something concrete. But what if the mere viewing doesn't mean that? As others have noted--should we lock up the judge and jury? They also viewed it.
And what if it were some other issue? Could the government just guess about all things it thinks citizens might do? Should we lock up people who buy certain chemicals because they might be used in the drug trade or the making of bombs? Should we just assume that anyone who ever tells a lie in some venue is willing in some other venue to cheat on their taxes by lying there, too? We could stop a lot of tax cheats that way. Where does this kind of thing end?
By their nature, Free Societies are not Safe Societies. We buy some of our freedom at the cost of loss of safety. We could be a lot safer if we were not so free. You seem to me to be clearly advocating yielding freedom for safety, and I'm merely noting that while this is a possible thing to do, it's got dangers of its own that go far beyond what you're advocating. For a good analysis of this tradeoff, see William Gibson's Disneyland With the Death Penalty in Wired Magazine (Issue 1.04, Sep-Oct 1993). Or see the movie Minority Report. Or read George Orwell's 1984 .
Yeah, perhaps the defendant was just an aspiring lawyer, or was expecting to be called to jury duty the following week, and was... uh, ... just boning up.
Funny, but I thought the haphazard war on drugs drove up the price of drugs giving the sellers more money, increasing crime because drugs are so hard to afford by those addicted, and filling jails with people who quite often are no threat to anyone and mostly just victims of highly selective, or at least erratic, prosecution.
If drugs were decriminalized, it seems to me that the prices would go down and with it the number of crimes required by desperate addicts. It also seems to me that addicts would be less afraid of seeking treatment. And crime syndicates less able to make a dollar. Plus the state could make money by taxing, and insure the public health by regulating quality through legitimate sources. And it could save money by letting people who once were found with a few joints of pot out of prison they never belonged in.
I've personally never used drugs. Not even a puff. Never had any use for it. I don't see why that would change even if drugs were legal. I don't think people consult the law to decide whether to do something strange to their bodies--they're either predisposed to do it or not. So I'm not sure I even buy the idea of it being possible to deter that way.
If people commit crimes against real victims, I'm fine about them being arrested. But I don't see arresting them for crimes against themselves, nor for entertaining hypotheticals about what they might do to others. The concept of Thought Crimes would make criminals of us all, and would become the instrument of the dismantling of civilized society.
So your point doesn't make sense to me from a principled point of view. And neither does it make economic sense as a good way for the government to be spending its time when we have real problems in the world.
I'm not so sure this is true, btw. I'm pretty sure many if not most child porn laws in the US are written to make it illegal even if the material is entirely composed from non-photo sources. The legislature can make up whatever laws it likes, of course. Whether they withstand Constitutional challenges is another matter, and might depend on the composition of the Supreme Court.
And of course there will always remain the odd and unsettling question: might some people who use child porn be helping themselves to suppress the urge to act on their impulses, and might society be even less safe by eliminating an obvious means of sublimating their desires?
I sometimes think people might as well come out and just condemn people with these leanings immediately to death or life in prison, period. What we do to them instead, allowing them to be released as if rehabilitated after a time, then making them identify where they live and putting them at risk of vigilantes, etc. seems less humane. Maybe indeed they are a risk, in which case they ought not be released. To release them as if they were rehabilitated citizens and then not treat them that way seems worse than just leaving them imprisoned.
I don't know the right answers here, but I think society is not really honest with itself on this entire matter. It's something that one can't even have a conversation about without it melting down into a lot of "are you serious?" remarks, etc.
This all begs the question of why viewing anything should ever be illegal. Who is the victim here?
Sure, if someone creates porn from actual people, unwilling to or unable to consent, that's something the creator has done. And maybe if someone has paid to fund that, there's an issue. If this guy has paid, they should go on the money. If he's not, I don't see how they have any good cause even though they may have a case.
When you start to admit victimless crimes, the whole algebra of causality is turned on its head and lots of strange things result, not the least of which is this case.
I'm one of those who has not upgraded from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. It's not the software I dread, it's Microsoft's increasingly ridiculous enforcement of its own personal theory of Intellectual Property rigor. No, I'm not someone who cheats on licenses. I am meticulous about having valid licenses for all the machines in my home/office. HOWEVER, that means (a) I've paid for them and (b) I have the right number. It does NOT necessarily mean that when I have to reload a system, I have the kind of records to know whether the huge box of CD-ROM's I grab from my basement is organized enough to know that I've got the correct one of six disks. That means there's a huge chance as they get stronger with THEIR bookkeeping that one day it's going to start barfing at me about how I appear (to them) to have a disk that isn't the right one for this machine, or I appear to have two machines on the net using the same license. XP is even more strict about licenses than 2000, so I just dread their faulty software ragging on me.
Even just to install the later version(s) of Media Player, you have to agree to some awful license that lets it sniff out your machine and make its own determination (without asking for my input) about whether I'm in violation of their license policies.
And now they have other tools that are starting to do this as well.
And XP is full of "more of same", which is why I have resisted upgrading.
Why should I, a customer who believes he IS in compliance, fear these tools except because I don't trust Microsoft to implement them well and flexibly enough to do anything but screw me? Every time they are wrong, Microsoft gets another sale (or tries to) and I get no recourse. They can deny me bug fixes, upgrades, and so on based solely on their program's opinion of my license management practices.
This problem has to be worse at sites where installation is so complicated that machines are ghosted. Presumably in the ghosting case, you buy a heap of licenses, but then you copy a single image to all the different machines. Well, that's all well and good, but when you get all done, you're all apparently violators.
There's just a limit to what you can mechanically detect. And when you've got as much income as Microsoft plainly has, you need to learn to trust that most people must be paying you and not start to piss them off by treating them like they are cheaters.
They should be investing in tools that allow them to flexibly manage a sense of how many licenses you have at a site, and that don't make me dig around in my basement every time I need to do an upgrade and it wants me to find the original disk from which I installed something to prove I'm a real person. I've given them far too much real money and have been too staunch a supporter of software-for-fee to be treated this way.
Trying to force me into upgrading to a product that treats me worse by cutting support for one that does not is no way to engender my customer loyalty. Maybe if Microsoft doesn't care, it's time to start complaining to the various tools that I (again) BUY on Microsoft's platform and tell them I'm going to be jumping ship from Microsoft and that means I won't be buying their tools any more unless they run on Linux or Apple or wherever I end up. If Microsoft doesn't hear my little voice, maybe it will hear the voices of the tools that I want that are the only reason I buy from Microsoft. Maybe if I could buy Adobe InDesign or Adobe Photoshop for Linux (please don't tell me Gimp is good enough, because it's just not), I wouldn't have to buy Microsoft at all.
Just so. I grant (pardon pun) that I was oversimplifying. I've been in positions where I could have probably worked around this because of open-minded management, my skills and publications. But it was not in academia, and I think that fact was relevant.
And whether it happens in academia or not, it's certainly not the norm. People at some places I've interviewed at both universities and Government sponsored think tanks have come right out and said plainly "expect there to be a pecking order where mostly your lack of PhD will hold you back", even now after nearly 25 years of career experience.
Contrast this with most other places you can work who will tell you that after 5-10 years in the field, if you've not done enough to show that your degree was worth something, they're not going to believe a degree as a credential, they're going to want to see your subsequent work experience. And if you have done something cool, they'll also usually freely say they'll count that as a substitute for formal education.
In fact, it's funny, but some places will advertise they want Masters + 3 years or 5 years with a Bachelors, or some places will say Masters + 10 years or PhD + 5 years, and when you think about it, they're really saying "we count 5 years working on a PhD as 5 years working, or 2 years working on a Masters as 2 years working. Well, gee, since I have to pay to get the Masters and someone pays me to work, I've often wondered why get the degree at all. It just builds up debt and offers sometimes less than you might think if you had already the opportunity for a good solid job for those same two years. Pretty much only in the arena of getting employed by a University or government-funded think tank has a degree ever had a persistent sense of importance, in my experience.
Especially in the modern world, where the interest of business is constantly changing, one of the risks of being in research and academia at all is that your skills can diverge from what business needs. It's easy to convince yourself that you're learning about "what's next", but sometimes industry doesn't go the direction you think or doesn't use the tool you're used to and you're left without the all-important checklist items that modern full-text-search resumes require.
(Others' mileage may, of course, vary. No single person's point of view is going to apply to everyone, so read lots of opinions if you want a real gestalt.)