... I really like a good science show (like an old NOVA) - but when it makes you think, it's just not what they want....
In some ways it's as if we have factored out television channels from one another, such that they are each like prime numbers with as little overlap as possible... well, as more channels get added, maybe there are very specific composites re-added, but you always know and can select the mix.
For entertainment, this works out well. But we really need to see news and education as different,
and work harder to give people integrated doses.
I'd make the analogy to a diet. It's one thing to have a menu of possible desserts on the menu, it's
quite another to have a menu of vitamins. To be sure, some vitamins are needed in extra doses by some
people, and a few people are allergic to others. But by and large, people need their vitamins.
News and science are like vitamins. People need them, whether they realize it or not. They need to know
what issues are affecting them urgently and they need the raw tools for analyzing things. Confusing that
with entertainment is a disaster for a democracy, which relies on informed choice.
It seems as if many would prefer a "studied" separation from being informed
to actual political autonomy. On the one hand, one would like to assume that part of personal freedom
is the right to decide what one wants, but with that should come the responsibility to decide
what one wants. And my impression is that people who aren't serious about staying inform
fall easy prey to the manipulators, those who do practice the science of harvesting
votes from the easily persuaded by indulging in them through cynical
flattery the fiction that they are still participating. It's hard to point fingers at some particular
case and show that it's happening, but it's easy to know that it is happening. The proof is in the
strong correlation between money invested and minds changed.
People will try to tell us that the current financial problems in the US were a big surprise. But most
rationally informed people have seen this kind of thing coming for quite some time. The same scenario
is playing out for climate change, and the stakes are way higher.
Maybe Science itself needs to invest in superbowl ads and late night informercials.
(Am I the only one who's noticed that when I submit a post lately for preview with a revised
subject line, it shows my subject line in the preview and then re-fills the subject box with the
old subject line, dropping my "clever" replacement? Sigh. Maybe knowledge of web science is falling
off even at Slashdot central...)
Honestly, my main worry is not that criminals or other external parties will misuse the information a government gathers, but that the government itself will misuse that information.
I don't disagree with this. In fact, there's a continuum between the two, especially as lobbyists
control governments and it becomes harder to tell the line between the government and private citizens
with an agenda, between people with "authorized" use of force and people abusing force. It's not a
crisp line. And the founding fathers certainly knew this, which is why they built a distributed government and refused to centralize power from the start--which makes me not understand why the modern
Republican party can favor "original intent", and yet do these kinds of things, which dismantle what I
see as the core of the original intent. "Original intent" must just be a marketing buzz word to them, used as after-the-fact justification for something they wanted to do, because their rhetoric doesn't match their actions, and I can't believe they don't know that the founders meant to limit the power of government, and to reserve to the people the right to defend themselves.
If those same people had
written the Bill of Rights today, I'm quite sure the second amendment would have been extended to
contain a personal right to some sort of defense against cyber intrusion, the little used third amendment would have contained protections against the government commandeering ISPs, the fourth and fifth amendment rights against cyber surveillance, and so on. The intent of the so-intensely-defended second amendment was not to preserve deer hunting for all time, it was to allow the citizenry a way to protect themselves against the encroachment of a too-powerful federal government.
Also, what's especially odd, and it goes again to what you're saying above, is that in the US, there are any number
of talk show hosts (most of whom, in my area, are unabashed Republicans) who outright refer to the Democrats as traitors in the style of the book by that name. It is a travesty that one can think of
mere political opposition that way, and somewhat scary because bad things tend to begin with a dehumanization of the supposed enemy, preparatory to doing something bad to them as a mass. But you'd think the silver lining would be that they would dare not put a bunch of power in the hands of the
government, lest it get in the hands of what they think are traitors as part of the natural process of
the next election. Instead, though, they seem to just blindly do it, and then somehow hope that they can
use the fact of having created so precarious a situation as leverage to say "and therefore you must not
elect a Democrat, for they are criminals and thieves." I just don't get it.
Of course, the article is about the UK, and their history with this is much different. So some of what I'm saying doesn't really apply to them from a literal historical point of view... except that the whole point of studying history, anyone's history, is to not have to live it oneself.
Your idea of a criminal appears to be someone who has already committed a crime. To the government, a criminal is someone who might commit a crime, also known as a citizen.
Excellent point.
But worse, as important as their confused idea of what a criminal is, is their notion of what a criminal
is not. A criminal is not someone who might have the savvy to take this large mass of personal
information and use it for ill. Only the government will have access to the information and the knowledge, and the government is known by its nature not to contain criminals nor people who are friends
of criminals nor people who are susceptible to criminals nor any form of leak that might reach criminals.
To put it another way, they seem to think that what will preserve our status as "free men" is
to be "pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed and numbered!". Something seems suspect in that, since those are exactly what the
criminals will want, too, and while there's a lot of discussion about the criminals they'd like to
catch, there's never any acknowledgment that they might be breeding new kinds of criminals in the
process. And never any discussion of how a foreign government, having successfully infiltrated this
information, might use this information about a citizenry against it in, for example, planning a
highly targeted attack.
Advanced knowledge of the details of people's souls is powerful, the government is right about that.
What they seem to forever overlook is that it is beyond the power of the state to reserve such power
to itself. All they can do is write words in laws that are wishful thinking about how they'd like
to reserve such use to themselves.
If the day comes when someone starts to systematically use this helpful information gathered by the
government against itself, as it surely will, let's hope there are still a few
Max Headroom style "blanks" waiting in the wings to help us out.
Cool. By the way, will they be blacking out (or "modifying") parts of the sky that contain things we're not supposed to see?
And what about Google OrbitView for virtual flights in and out of the satellites (and debris) around
the earth... or Google CanalView for Mars? This could be a big funding source for NASA...
If, at some point in the future, we develop the ability build robots that can use raw materials to create more of themselves, unleashing thousands of them with no direct control mechanism would probably be a bad idea. Until then, there's not much to worry about unless you work for FOX news and need a SCARY and SENSATIONAL headline for the hour.
We don't have reason to worry about robots taking over the world until then, yes. But the intermediate
ground is that research in this area is only rarely going to be used for things like earthquake recovery.
It's going to be very expensive to make so many machines at all, at first, and so will not be vacuuming
the floor in your house. The first applications will be funded by the military, and all in the name of
protecting us.
The problem is that the military (of whatever country) is always indulging the illusion that they have to have it because the other guy will eventually have it, while all the while leaking, in one way or another, the information. So they can end up starting the problem they fear.
Even just putting fear into the enemy (or potential enemy)
that "we" will have it and "they" won't means "we" have to worry
about defense against it since "we" have signaled to "them" an interest in that area and now must protect
the intellectual space. (I've tried to word the "we"/"them" neutrally so it reads as well for the US as abroad, in part because this research is being done abroad. The issues are no less relevant in any
country.)
The practical truth is that the world is not suffering from the absence of swarms (dare I say "gangs") of swarmbots.
This is push technology looking for a market, and with the military and malware markets being
the two obvious prime candidates, which is not comforting, at least to me.
I'm not intending to advocate outright alarm. I'm reacting to a statement that appears to say
that it's ok to ignore this as a problem for now. I don't think the choice is as binary as all that.
Technology does not, itself, cause social problems. But that is not license to assume that no problems
will result that are enabled by technology. If there can be social impact of technology, what causes
the problem is the failure to track and respond to the social implications, and the assumption that
society will (or even can) just automatically "keep up" and "be ready". I'm not big on those stupid headlines either, but then, I wish the public could hear a calm headline and still be interested enough to discuss something. The public doesn't need to panic, and yet it probably
does need to read the story and
listen and do a little discussing.
This program apparently scans the blogosphere... but I wonder what that is. Is that the web?
If I just have a page that expresses an opinion, is it counted as a blog, or do I have to register
it somewhere as a blog? Is an RSS feed required at a site, or on the page, to be a blog?
Does the word blog have to appear in the header or are "essays" counted?
And if I have more than one domain name, how is that counted? Does the text have to be different in two cases in order to be counted as two opinions?
How does one distinguish two distinct people who merely word things like an advocacy group told them
from one person who owns two (or fifty or a thousand) sites and puts the same text on all of them?
Is the site careful to understand the difference between quotation and inclusion for critique?
How much are they investing in tools that allow people to detect and correct misclassification or
is this "all in good fun" and "for entertainment only"?
Perhaps the answers to these are documented, but that almost doesn't matter. The point is that
however they're answered, the answer is arbitrarily chosen and are not The Truth no matter how they
are chosen.
In the olden days, everyone had an opinion on things, but the opinions were distributed,
and people were forced to engage each other interactively in order to discover other opinions. They
might agree or disagree, but it was the conversation that caused them to grow and learn. In the
new world, we can count how many total opinions there are, and avoid ever talking to someone who
disagrees. This takes the dialog and growth part out of the equation. At that point, what difference
does it make how many people agree or disagree, since we'll just be measuring the efficiency of
the cloning process, not the validity of ideas.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Mark Twain
This is perfect for the manufactured consent way of doing things where issues are displayed without depth and championed by more or less annoying, emotional "experts". Rational thought is completely cut off, because anything outside of the "mainstream" represented by the extremes is automatically smeared as the unworkable product of starry eyed idealists or terrorists. [...] No thanks, Microsoft, I'll keep reading blogs and thinking for myself.
I agree this is not leading anywhere good, and thought your remarks put it well.
But I fear that merely turning one's head and refusing to use it
will change the effect very little. It's true that even looking at such data risks imposing some
bias, but the big problem this creates isn't caused by thoughtful people happening to see where an idea
came from, it's caused by people who haven't the patience to think saying "just tell me who to believe
because I can't be bothered to think about this".
The real problem may be that if this catches on, it will still affect those who would like to not
think even if the thoughtful ones don't use it. That's the problem with mass media generally. (And
no, I'm not advocating not having mass media--I'm just saying it's true and it calls for thought.)
When people yield judgment to others, it calls into the question whether democracy can function,
since democracy relies on the idea of each voter thinking.
And the tainting of an idea by who says it is very reminiscent of McCarthy era politics, with a kind
of guilt by association... neatly packaged for the modern world where we can make everyone guilty of
something, and we can police when our friends step out of line with what we thought we could depend on
them to say. Sigh.
The real benefit of having tech-savvy people in office isn't that they could
help program computers, it's that their knowledge of programming could help
straighten out the poor programming of the many computational systems that are
the world itself.
Politicians deal routinely with
simple issues of reliably specified process (due process),
proper abstraction (policies that are neutral as to whom they apply to),
process control (time slicing, fairness, scheduling),
data hiding (privacy), security matters (credentials, privilege),
algorithmic complexity and resource management (budgets),
forward and backward chaining (proactive investment vs reactive budgeting),
side effect, storage management and garbage collection
(literally), APIs and network services (government databases and services),
automation (minimizing overhead and streamlining budgets), modularity (responsibility
and accountability), etc. Modern politicians deal with these issues in a kind of
haphazard way that is both scary and sad to watch.
I'm not saying a Congress of nerds is the way to go, though I'd say it was worth
giving a shot for
a while just to see what they could do by applying some actual schooling.
For a programmer watching Congress tinker at some kinds of systematic processes is like an
Astrophysicist watch an Astrologer explain the heavens.
So forget how a programmer can benefit the programming community while in office. That's small potatoes.
If he really understands programming, the place to apply it is away from the keyboard, directly
focusing on the
real substance of what Congress does (and doesn't).
You are proposing that single people or small groups working in secret is better than peer review in public.
I don't know why you think I said that. I said no such thing.
(I mostly don't even believe such a thing, but as it happens, I wasn't commenting on that at all.)
Nor did I make any proposal at all. I did not moralize. I merely made some observations of obvious truth in response to a claim that the classified internet was safe because it is kept pristine and out of contact with the other internet.
I doubt whether that can be done. And if it is done, it seems unlikely that the classified internet can have any materially large amount of modern software on it because there isn't the budget required to develop such software. This means that any government willing to use cybertechnology obtained from the free internet will far exceed what our government is using, and ultimately means our government will have
to use the freely available technology, too.
Whatever one thinks of the free software movement, its presence in the market and the pressures it creates are undeniable. That's not a proposal on my part. It's just a truth. And it's equally well a truth that
one of those pressures, relevant to this situation, is the pressure to use technology at least as good as your enemies are using. And since our enemies will surely be using free software, our government will be using it, too. That's just a truth. And in the context of my remarks, it's not intended to make any moral point, it's only offered as supporting evidence to refute the claim that the two nets, the regular internet and the classified one, can be kept separate.
Any computer containing classified data is not connected to the internet.
This is exactly my point. If that's our protection, then any one piece of wire can break everything.
And that means we are vulnerable to any accident, to any single mole who gets through, etc.
But moreover, the US could not possibly hire enough people to make this work. To have good computation
on that "other Internet", we need to keep up with what others are doing elsewhere in the world.
In the real world, thousands or perhaps millions of programmers are making a ton of software that
is powerful and, yes, free. And our enemies can use it as well as our friends.
If our classified systems can use none of it, then we can't keep up. Because we have to pay
enough people to recreate everything Richard Stallman and the Church of Free Software has built.
That isn't likely. Forget the monetary value of it, the computational value of it is large. And so
someone is going to download some of that onto the other net because they can't afford not to. That
means it may have bugs and moles in the software. It won't all be possible to audit 100%.
And yet the warfare will be conducted on the internet, our internet. So if they're off safe in
their internet, the government internet, the Good internet, the one full of only safe and friendly software... the one parents wish they could have their kids on.
Being on that safe internet, they won't be able to protect us. Not unless the yield of that
good internet is software that comes back to ours. If it does, software has now made a round-trip from the Bad Internet, the Spock-with-a-beard Internet, where free software comes from, to the Good Internet, and then back to the Bad Internet. And who knows what viruses or deliberate "features" it can have carried in one direction and what data it can have steganographically carried in the other direction.
Rigorous separation of Good from Bad in a world that is connected is not protection.
The problem is that we build technology to save us time and effort and to make sure we don't make
mistakes. But technology makes mistakes too, because it's built by people. And it makes deliberate problems, too, if it comes from places where there are Bad People (if there even is such a black and white concept). And technology does something bad, it makes them much faster than we do.
Our safety used to be in that when we made mistakes, we made them slowly and in distributed fashion.
It reminds me of the Doonesbury comic years ago about Reagan's SDI shield, that was going to protect us from Soviet missiles by a single, always-perfect shield of protective devices. The comic was drawn in crayon, as I recall, with the voice of a little girl explaining that the world was beautiful because SDI was protecting us. Then in the last frame it said something abrupt to the effect of "Oops, one got through. Bye."
What makes this story so scary isn't just that something got broken into, it's the thing in the back
of all our minds that says "my goodness, is that the place where All Knowledge of Everything is centrally stored?" Bad enough when someone breaks into your computer and gets all your bank accounts or passwords, but when someone breaks into The Government and gets all knowledge of launch codes, defensive systems, registries of guns in the US, files on who sympathizes with who, files on who calls who, etc.... well, that info collected with the intent of defending us might suddenly be a liability.
That's why things like the telecom phone tapping, national IDs, etc. are so troublesome. The mere centralization of information at all for any reason is a risk that the Bush administration has been ignoring,
working instead (for all we know, none of this being auditable) to pile all of everything in one fragile
place.
The founding fathers kept trying to decentralize things and minimize what in modern computer terms
we'd call "single point of failure". They distributed power in a way that made it hard to just break
in and take control, right down to making sure there was not a single head of government. It's too
bad that in all the puffery we hear spouted about Constitutional original intent, the modern Republican
leaders don't show more care about that kind of original intent.
To read the full article costs money, but to respond to what's in the summary...
has solved a problem that costs airlines millions every year: what is the quickest way to get passengers aboard an aircraft
I somehow imagine this problem to be one of those where
mathematical proofs about real-world situations don't work well because the problem doesn't
really model
the problem right, so the "solution" is a solution to some other problem than the one at hand.
The airlines charge a lot to be first class. What does that get you? A little free booze,
a better class of snacks, a little more arm room, and real silverware... if you're lucky. There are luxury planes where
there is more to offer in space and amenities, but those planes often have multiple doors, so they can afford special entrances
for first class. On most US domestic flights I've been on, though,
people are paying a lot for
a very small amount of services, and mostly they're paying to be told they're special. In a lot of them, the seats aren't that different between first and coach. (On some of those, they finally
changed the designation of some "first class" seats, admitting they really only, at best, business
class.)
So you're
saying here that the airlines would make more if they didn't tell people that? That would imply
that people are willing to sacrifice being told they're special but still pay for first class.
I doubt that, only because then people might not think it was worth it.
And if those seats revert to coach, I bet the airline can't make as much money, which means that
although people get on and off of planes faster, the planes are making less, not more. Of course, there's
a little to make if one airline is more efficient than another and attracts customers on that basis,
but if they all do it, there's nothing to be saved there.
And then there's the issue that you're betting on best case. The airlines still have to plan in
worst case, for if something gets jumbled. They can't just leave out passengers when someone does
something amiss. And if things go slowly, they can't slip schedules. So it may well be that the
added efficiency doesn't end up making the planes move faster.
And even if it did make the planes move faster, it has to move them a whole flight-worth faster in order for there to be another flight... including there has to be gates at the other end waiting to receive the flight, which will only happen if all of the planes are moving smoothly. Any one getting
fouled can back things up.
Telling them they can't have carry-on would probably help more than strict order boarding.
After all, as soon as one person can't get his luggage into the overhead, he's busy stealing someone else's space, and there's a likely domino effect.
I don't have any brilliant math behind this hunch, but somehow I bet Southwest is more optimal than the
formal math makes it sound... kind of like how people say that Democracy is the worst form of government
except for all the others. In that case, the "basis" for that is that Democracy alleges to optimize
worst case performance, rather than best case performance, making it seem really bad if you're
comparing governments by their best-case performance. With airlines, I suspect worst case behavior
is more important than best case behavior. And if worst case for "strict order" will be "oops, we goofed" and a resulting chaos, then maybe chaos from the outset (a la Southwest) was all that could ever be aspired to in the first place and it's easier to just go with it.
Perhaps what's called for is a book vault, in the spirit of the recently built
Norwegian seed vault.
I'm reminded of something from Max Headroom (a truly brilliant show for anyone who is
not familiar with it, on par with greats like
Blade Runner
and Demolition Man
for its crisp and witty vision of a possible future dominated by television). In the series,
nearly everyone has given up all their privacy information to the computers, of course, except for a
small few who refused, a long time ago, and have no records. They're called Blanks because society can't easily track or understand them. One of them, who is called just Blank Reg in order to have a name at all, gives someone a book at one point and says, "It's a book. It's a non-volatile storage medium. It's very rare. You should 'ave one." The insight of the throwaway remark has the deep understanding and
precision targeting of many of the
throwaway lines in
The Simpsons or South Park.
The issue is not so simple as the loss of a thing we're all fond of. It creates the risk of a
catastrophic loss of all of humanity's information, since books are more than just outmoded
relics. What is not outmoded about them is their accessibility and their duration, which even
given the lifetime of paper still well exceeds the lifetime of a typical CD or a storage format.
The area of survivability seems like it comes quickly into play as a serious matter.
This is not to say that it's bad that Google and others have been scanning things, since that
adds redundancy of survivability to the system. But it's to say that there's a risk in the other
direction of the loss of technology that would allow Google to operate, and in that case, books are
a very reasonable backup.
The same is true for physmail junk mail, by the way:
We subsidize it by the lower prices it gets.
The bigger subsidy is with our time.
Yep, that's so. Then again, now that you mention it, the bigger-still subsidy is the failure
to charge for the resource consumption (the trees cut down) and disposals (plastic windows, inks
and dyes, etc). A proper accounting would say that these are costs on all of us in terms of the money
spent by public facilities carting this to junk yards, the space lost in the earth to such junk
yards waiting for it to never decay, the death of the coral reefs and other environmental things
because these pollute our world. And those hugely outweigh the costs of the delivery.
Just as my need to buy spamware and even with that spamware to spend time going through several
hundred junk mail classifications per day to make sure no real mail was misclassified is an
unreasonable (if smaller than "death of the planet") burden to carry in cyberspace.
Many say you should tax things you don't want people to do. And then we go and tax value added,
sales, and earnings... things we want people to do.
It seems odd. Maybe the Right Tax, if there can be said to be such a thing,
would be "added societal burden".
So, for example, a carbon or methane tax, a plastic disposal tax, an inks and dyes in runoff water tax, a litter tax, a going-to-make-others-have-to-buy-a-shredder-or-spamware tax, etc.
The libertarian point of view seems to be that people should leave others alone. And that's very
appealing to me. But only to the ponit that the person I'm leaving alone is not creating a burden
on me by my doing so. The right of someone to be left alone
and not pollute my environment is something
I think is rational. At the point where I'm leaving them alone to fill my email box or my real world
water supply with junk, then they are not leaving me alone, and I think that's why more people don't
rally to that banner.
The basic concept of "small, non-invasive government" seems to me to appeal to more people than those
willing to call themselves big-L Libertarians.
I think the barrier is that the big-L folks often talk a line that sounds more like
a shield for people to wash their hands of responsibility for
shared burdens that really cannot be opted out of.
Freedom and responsibility must go hand in hand.
Do you realize that 'mail to resident' is where SPAM first got started, all those years ago? If it weren't for that then it's postulated less likely that email SPAM would have ever been conceived of in the first place.
I don't think you're selling people short. I think it's "obvious" that it was inevitable that it would be tried. I'll explain why...
I think where you're right is that there is a commonplace two-step meta-pattern
where an idea is tried for an innocent reason
and after succeeding someone tries to repurpose the idea for other purposes.
So in your case, you're suggesting that if 'mail to resident' hadn't happened, variations and repurposing would
not have been able to happen. Probably. But 'mail to resident' wasn't a one-time shot that if it didn't happen
on a certain day wouldn't exist. It would have come another day. And even if not, other equivalently powerful
and repurposable ideas would have.
For example, 'mail to many' is capable of being repurposed in the same way. Multiple-recipients
could be said to be just as enabling. It wasn't in paper mail, after all--a piece of mail mostly went to one
recipient (except those interoffice memo things where you could keep re-forwarding the same junk, checking off
your name). So once the cost of sending to many was lowered to just naming who gets copies, that was also an
enabling factor.
Many years ago (somewhere around 25 years ago, I think), when email was still young (not brand new,
certainly, but still not heavily evolved) and when there were not many machines on the then-ARPANET,
I obtained a piece of software written by someone at a certain texas university that was on the net. I wanted
to reach the author, but had no idea how to find him. So I sent an email to smith, asmith, bsmith, etc.
up to zsmith hoping to find someone at that site that knew the guy I wanted to reach. We didn't get tons
of email back then, so this wouldn't have been obnoxious like it was now... There was no web back then, and no search engine. I don't even know if there was the 'postmaster' convention yet. (Maybe if there was I'd tried it and failed to get a response.) And hsmith replied,
by the way, offering just the helpful info I'd hoped for. The rest of the mail bounced. I never used the technique again, but would
not have hesitated to recommend it to another if they were desperate. My point in telling the story is just to
say that ideas like this do present themselves when people are faced with barriers. It's the natural
way things go.
So I doubt any claim that if 'mail to resident' hadn't happened, SPAM wouldn't have either. Because if someone
could come up with the idea of blasting out a query for benign reasons, someone could conceive of pushing that to whatever limit made financial sense.
You could almost make the case that if 'mail for free' had not been invented, no one would have wanted
to send tons of mail to people who might not care. That would have reduced volume. But there is a large and
thriving junk mail industry even when stamps cost money, so even that isn't true.
I do think that "free email" is the real culprit. We all say we like it, but most of us pay more per year in time
and money getting rid of spam than we would pay to deliver mail. In effect, we all subsidize spam in the guise of
getting something for free... On net (pardon the pun), we don't get email free, and it would be lower cost if we
charged for it.
The same is true for physmail junk mail, by the way: We subsidize it by the lower prices it gets. That's a business decision by the post office, but in the interest of the overwhelming resource usage and waste disposal concerns, I think it's ever more clear it should be at least the same price, if not much higher. But the problem
isn't (any more) send to resident, since now they all swap mailing lists. The problem is, again, 'send to multiple'. And with global warming upon us, the stakes are even higher than with email spam.
'If Intellectual Property is actually property,
why isn't it covered by a property tax?'
I'm going to ignore patent here. Intellectual property is not all of
one kind. I mean here mostly copyright and maybe also trademark,
since these are about creativity, not discovery. But the issues are
so different that raising them together is confusing.
My first thoughts on this matter went to the nature of real property
that allows us to tax it. We don't tax the ownership of a refrigerator.
Why should they be different. I have to assume it's that no one is
busy making more of it, and so the mere holding of it is a tax on others,
who might like to use it. In that sense, if real estate tax can be
justified (and I might later argue that it cannot), then the justification
is that you're taking up a critical resource from the get go.
In fact, though, copyright is not of that kind. If Gone With The
Wind or Cinderella were not created by their respective
authors, then those works are just simply not there at all. (You can
make whatever claims about a million monkeys you want, but we're not
taking more monkeys, we're slaughtering them, and I don't think
they'll have the time.) New works of original authorship don't take
up space. They are made out of nowhere and every new such work
potentially enriches us. So taxing them would be like taxing someone
for making new land. If someone could do that (on demand, I mean, not
the way we're doing it in the artic with all that melting), I would
think twice about taxing it. The making of new land seems a useful
skill in a world that is ever more crowded.
While copyrights on newly authored works don't hurt anyone, there is
ultimately a cost to the world of allowing one person to
continue to hold copyright ownership
beyond a reasonable limit, since at some point the world
needs to build on what others do.
But the notion that someone should have to pay from the first day of
creation for the right to have created that work is the most horrible
and regressive tax I could imagine. It would create a ticking clock
that would limit the bargaining power of new authors in dealing with
publishers, who could afford to outlast the author and just publish
the work when it fell into the public domain for non-payment. It
would favor the big guy over the little guy. None of that is good.
The middle ground that I might consider would be a tax
on long-term extension of copyright. Right now, we continue to
extend the copyright term in order to accomplish that. But perhaps a
middle ground that says that if Disney wants to extend its rights on
a certain work, then it should have to pay heavily for that beyond the
reasonable duration of 50 or so years that all authors might reasonably
claim to allow them to pursue the use of their works within their own
lifetime.
I might even make the claim that real property could use the same
protection. If I work my lifetime to buy a property and then at the
end of my lifetime lose my job and can't pay the taxes to sustain my
ownership, why should I end up with an untaxed refrigerator which I
can keep because it's my property, but not a house I can keep? Where
is the incentive to work for something that can be taxed away as soon
as you own it? I can totally understand a tax on the estate, since my
heirs didn't earn the money, and a reasonable argument might be made
that they should make their own fortunes. Passing along money to help
a young person get started in life, an impoverished person break even in
life, or an aging person retire comfortably is one thing, but ensuring
that a dynastic fortune consolidates the power for one's progeny is
another.
In a sense, the continued use by Disney of intellectual property is
the same kind of moral issue. The Disney of today is enriched,
perhaps unfairly, by the work of prior generations. Taxing that seems
reasonable in a way that is different than taxing you or me fo
An "insider" is created when someone is entrusted with a power to access information (i.e. by being appointed a director, etc.) and that person abuses that trust for their personal benefit.
Computer[to Hacker]: Stop! Access to information on this computer is only entrusted to a specific few. Are you one of them? Hacker: Yes, I am. Here are my credentials. Computer: Ah, yes. I am duly fooled. Access granted. Come inside and be entrusted. [User enters, is entrusted with information, later abuses information he has been entrusted with to his personal benefit.] Legal System: Stop! You are charged with trading on insider information. Hacker: I'm sorry. Although while it worked for me earlier to claim I was one of the entrusted few, now that I have entered and abused your information, I find it convenient to claim I am not trustworthy, have never been inside, and that my source of income is not related to this company.
While I admit there is some wiggle room here for making arguments on both sides,
the role of a judge is to inject some common sense in the gray areas. Otherwise, we'd have a robot there.
I'm not a lawyer and I haven't read the relevant law (no one seems to have cited the specific statutes, and tracking them
down is beyond my skill to do in the time I have handy), but it seems to me there is at least a case to be
made that the information was inside, that the person had to go inside and become an insider to get it, and
that although they may have
gained that access and trust on false pretenses, the information was obtained as a direct consequence
of having established a trust relationship with an agent of the company (the computer).
The system thought it had asked the appropriate questions of trust. It's unlikely that the hacker
did not know he was answering in a manner that would mislead.
And so, having affirmatively elected himself an insider and worthy of trust in order to obtain the information,
the hacker could be prosecutable now for breaching that trust.
The most sustainable cultures on Earth will survive.
I agree with this statement. What I'm less certain of is whether those cultures will be microbial or human.
If the measure of intelligence is the ability to flexibly overcome life's obstacles,
then in the climatic intelligence test that's coming up,
pitting us against other organisms,
we may be in for a rude awakening... er,... a rude being-put-to-sleep.
I'd make it a mandate to produce students who are...
Your solution advocates a
( ) technical (*) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to solving an education problem.
No, actually. You're picking a fight where none is offered.
All I did was try to critique a proposal in the context
of its own form by addressing the specific issue I cared about, which was
that if you're going to tell people what to teach, this is not what to teach.
Mandate doesn't always mean "legally enforced", and is often used in a sense of
"moral imperative" (which is not as imperative as the term imperative might seem to imply).
Consider the so-called "mandate" a US President often asserts right after election, which
is not always implemented and in some cases isn't given the time of day. Or a sports coach
may make it a mandate to go and win games.
It was just my own personal list of things that I think need teaching, and you can sum it up
by saying I think people should be taught how to think, not what to think. If you have a problem
with that, feel free to say so.
I do think it will require leadership, though, in some form.
If it is government imposed, I'd like it to be open-minded and empowering, not merely
prescriptive. But I'm open to other suggestions as well. Look at Al Gore. There's a leader
with a sense of what's imperative. Even without force of law, he's not doing badly.
Enough economics to know how to calculate which investments are going to pay off and which are just boondoggles lining someone's pockets in the short term at the expense of the long-term good.
The problem is, nobody really knows how to do that.
Fair enough. I didn't mean this literally, by the way. I was just abbreviating (even for the fact
that it was a long post) and didn't do a good job. I don't expect them to be able to make a fortune on the market.
What I'd like them to do is understand the difference between long-term and short-term gain, the idea
of hidden costs due to poor or misleading accounting, the idea that people in a game for the short term
might take different strategies than people in it for the long run,
the idea of industry putting off expense on government and vice versa.
These are all individually simple concepts that even young kids could conceptualize it if it were made
suitably idealized. They show evidence of this kind of reasoning in how they play various games.
They won't have to rush out and solve the world's problems as kids. They just need enough
to understand what questions to ask so they can evolve robust theories of this stuff as they age. Let them find their own answers.
Even if they got to the point of comprehending the hardness of the problem, that would be good.
It would mean they might fear that government or industry might not solve the problem on its own,
and that they had a real personal need to get involved themselves.
I think this is a critical issue, but I'd rather not turn it into
a situation where people are fighting over whether they get to teach the
answer. Rather, I'd make it a mandate to produce students who are capable
of intelligently discussing the questions.
Here's what I'd teach them:
Enough chemistry to understand what a compound is, and how atoms
rearrange in order to make different molecules, and how energy is
required and released in the process. One could teach this from
a fairly young age, even without a full chemistry course. Just so
they're conversant in the concepts and can know they want to learn more.
Enough math to know what exponents are and what the difference is
between a straight line and non-linear curve is. Even if they blur
the huge difference between squares and exponentials, the notion that
one can't simply rely on knowing that if it took x years to do something,
it will take x more years to do twice that, it would be good.
Also, again in the math front, enough math to understand simple
optimization issues--nothing fancy. The ability to optimize the area of a
rectangle is almost enough. They must be able to do simple things like
know when it's good for a few people to do big things and when it's
better for a lot of people to do little things and when neither of
these will work and everyone has to do something big in order for
anything to matter.
Enough math to be able to comprehend the sheer quantity of waste and
pollution in the world.
Enough statistics and probabilities to be able to understand why
something can happen one year, not happen another, and then happen
again... and yet still be a trend. That is, they must understand the
difference between a tendancy toward something and a promise that something
will occur.
Enough logic to understand what it takes to prove and disprove
existential and universal quantifications.
Enough philosophy and morality to understand and discuss risk analysis
and the general good.
Enough politics to understand how it's BOTH the case
that an obviously good idea won't necessarily be adopted by the free
market, and something that is forced by government won't necessarily
fix a problem.
Enough economics to know how to calculate which investments are going
to pay off and which are just boondoggles lining someone's pockets in
the short term at the expense of the long-term good.
Enough history to revive the notion of sacrifice for the greater good
and get people out of the "it's all about me" mode.
Enough biology to understand what an ecosystem is and how one thing affects
another. There was a very good episode of the Wild Thornberrys where the ecosystem
got upset by a small change and there was a big disaster. Required viewing of that
would almost suffice in my eyes. Just enough to be able to understand the significance
of the reefs going away or some plankton going away or polar bears going away in some
sort of operational terms that didn't make it seems "distant and unrelated".
Enough common sense to understand that not all things
labeled bio-degradable, green, or earth-friendly are actually saving
people money. We don't have to teach which ones are, just that the
question has to be asked and that the answers might be deliberately
obscured.
And, just maybe, enough religion to understand that Noah didn't survive the Flood
by sitting back and assuming it was God's will or that God would just take care of him.
And enough to know that the true meaning of Faith is that you have enough confidence
in what you believe that you are not threatened by truth and science.
Bravo to the
United Church of Christ for its recent "not mutually exclusive" stance on science and technology. (I'm not a
member of that church, by the way. I just saw notice of this and thought it was cool.)
Money isn't a reward for work.... Money is a reward for reducing scarcity....
Creative activities, such as writing and performing, are a hobby for the vast number of people who do them, including those who get paid from time to time. A small fraction of people make their living from them, and a vanishing small number of people make a comfortable living from them.
I get in this argument a lot with people, and it always ends up going down the same
rathole, with people thinking I'm saying that I am entitled to money for
work. That isn't how I get to where I do in my sadness about the present situation.
Like you (I suspect), I begin from the point of view of the consumer. Let's take a
different example. I like certain books, and not very many of them get written by
decent authors. So there are a few I wish would spend 100% of their time writing books.
But they can't. Because the world does not reward the writing of books. It rewards the
writing coupled with the marketing. So the books that come out are the books
that are the result of the authors I care about spending their time doing an activity
I wish they did not have to do--marketing their books--and then writing in the rest of
their free time. In the end, they make many fewer books.
Web publishing lets a lot more people publish. So you could say they don't have to spend
time marketing. But they can't then turn to writing, even then. Because now they don't
have a source of income.
Speaking for myself, I'm not a rich person. So I can't just be a patron. What I want
is to pay a fair amount and to get good quality. I have no desire for free books or
free software. I'd rather pay money for decent stuff and be paid for writing decent
stuff (whether books or software). It does me no good to swap my free writing for someone else's because my grocer and auto dealer and so on won't take those in trade.
So I'm left assuming the middle man will take my contribution and funnel it to the
right place. And I don't aspire to be a middle man--that's a different occupation and is not my special skill.
But the middle man isn't going to optimize my personal favorite choice. He's better off making a quick buck on 3 authors willing to work for free than pay money to one author who might write better but will charge money. So his economy of scale is working against the good writers and to the prolific mediocre.
You'd think it was a business opportunity for someone, but I keep looking for forums that offer published writings with authors getting a substantial (not just token) share of the profits, but so far I don't see them. Starting such an endeavor is complicated and more work than I am up to myself, but I still think it would suit the world a lot better than what we're seeing. I don't know what to make of the fact that it doesn't happen, but the fact that it's scarce does not seem to be causing it to come into existence.
I think the world would work best if people could be used in the ways they are skilled,
and could get paid for it. And I'd prefer that worked by capitalistic means than
communistic means. But unfettered capitalism seems objectively to be leading to money
accumulating centrally and on track to be very feudalistic, which is even worse than
communism. The problem with this model of just doing what the world needs in the moment
is that all the planning the world wants you to do can be tossed aside in a moment. A job can require you to have all sorts of training, then toss you out and say "never mind", and all your training is for nothing. The questions, I emphasize, are not just "what about me", but "what do I advise someone who is planning a career?" Telling them "society doesn't care about you, you must be a jack of all trades, don't rely on anything, it's all going to change anyway, there's nothing you can count on" is not very satisfying. Neither is it satisfying to tell a c
The article makes some quite useful observations in terms of categorizing
present trends and is a worthwhile read for that purpose, I think.
But I'm uncomfortable with its "conclusions", if it can even be said to
have any. (It seems to indulge a sense throughout of "this is ok, things
are good, we just need to embrace them".) From the article:
In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path
of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention
has its own circuits.
If I reworded this as:
In short, the money in a networked economy does not go to the people
doing the work. Rather it follows the path of who controls the view,
and that path has its own circuits.
it would sound a lot less benign.
He makes some casual references to the need for trust and the willingness of
people buying to give money to creators. But he overlooks the fact that it's in
the best (financial) interest of the people who are the conduit to do as much as
possible to obstruct the ability to do this.
The industry thrives (for now) on talk of riches that can be achieved in this
new world order if people just contribute freely and hope the money comes somehow,
but the obvious truth is that that works better for the people who get the money
than for the people who don't, and when you're touting that there's no correlation
between where the money goes and where the credit is due, that's not sounding too
good to me.
Just look at how long it took the TV writers to get what was obviously due them,
and they were very organized. Now imagine how much difficulty a group of uncoordinated
netizens is going to have getting the same, since when any number of them boycott
their "jobs" putting out free content, there are gonig to be any number of others rushing
in to fill the gap for free, causing the content deliverers to say "gee, why should we
pay them at all?"
Lately, I see a lot of TV shows saying the world may not last a hundred years.
And then I see copyright durations proposed to be set at about the same length of time.
So, putting it all together, they mean to have copyright "for all eternity", right?
I propose linking copyright and global warming, so the people with the economic interests to hold their intellectual property for all time are motivated to invest in at least fixing global warming in order to get that privilege. That way, we at least get something out of it--Disney and friends can cure global warming and we'll reward them by extending their copyrights.
If they fail, though, a portion of the projected End Times should have an allocated moratorium on copyright to
allow for a mad free-for-all trying to save the world using any available resources... without fear of being sued for so doing.
Otherwise, the world is going down the suer for sure. (Yeah, that typo was intentional. I guess someone will try to sew me now, so I better zip it.)
(*) Microsoft will not put up with it ...
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
Actually, I think they'll see this as a business opportunity.
The risk here seems to me not that it will fail, but that it will succeed.
That is, that people will start to only trust those big few who can afford to create such
an identification mechanism. That will lead to the big ones reaffirming their "portal" role
and making it harder for new entrants to achieve legitimacy.
On a claim that new entrants are dangerous,
it won't surprise me if (as with the network neutrality issue),
the big ones jump in and say it's essential that they have special status.
They like being special and competing among their (predictable) friends.
I like this technological proposal, btw. I just think it will, like all things, require some
refinement before it's really working. But it sounds like a step forward. And at the same
time something to be wary of... in a calm way.
Slashdot Mirror
In some ways it's as if we have factored out television channels from one another, such that they are each like prime numbers with as little overlap as possible ... well, as more channels get added, maybe there are very specific composites re-added, but you always know and can select the mix.
For entertainment, this works out well. But we really need to see news and education as different,
and work harder to give people integrated doses.
I'd make the analogy to a diet. It's one thing to have a menu of possible desserts on the menu, it's quite another to have a menu of vitamins. To be sure, some vitamins are needed in extra doses by some people, and a few people are allergic to others. But by and large, people need their vitamins. News and science are like vitamins. People need them, whether they realize it or not. They need to know what issues are affecting them urgently and they need the raw tools for analyzing things. Confusing that with entertainment is a disaster for a democracy, which relies on informed choice.
It seems as if many would prefer a "studied" separation from being informed to actual political autonomy. On the one hand, one would like to assume that part of personal freedom is the right to decide what one wants, but with that should come the responsibility to decide what one wants. And my impression is that people who aren't serious about staying inform fall easy prey to the manipulators, those who do practice the science of harvesting votes from the easily persuaded by indulging in them through cynical flattery the fiction that they are still participating. It's hard to point fingers at some particular case and show that it's happening, but it's easy to know that it is happening. The proof is in the strong correlation between money invested and minds changed.
People will try to tell us that the current financial problems in the US were a big surprise. But most rationally informed people have seen this kind of thing coming for quite some time. The same scenario is playing out for climate change, and the stakes are way higher.
Maybe Science itself needs to invest in superbowl ads and late night informercials.
(Am I the only one who's noticed that when I submit a post lately for preview with a revised subject line, it shows my subject line in the preview and then re-fills the subject box with the old subject line, dropping my "clever" replacement? Sigh. Maybe knowledge of web science is falling off even at Slashdot central...)
I don't disagree with this. In fact, there's a continuum between the two, especially as lobbyists control governments and it becomes harder to tell the line between the government and private citizens with an agenda, between people with "authorized" use of force and people abusing force. It's not a crisp line. And the founding fathers certainly knew this, which is why they built a distributed government and refused to centralize power from the start--which makes me not understand why the modern Republican party can favor "original intent", and yet do these kinds of things, which dismantle what I see as the core of the original intent. "Original intent" must just be a marketing buzz word to them, used as after-the-fact justification for something they wanted to do, because their rhetoric doesn't match their actions, and I can't believe they don't know that the founders meant to limit the power of government, and to reserve to the people the right to defend themselves.
If those same people had written the Bill of Rights today, I'm quite sure the second amendment would have been extended to contain a personal right to some sort of defense against cyber intrusion, the little used third amendment would have contained protections against the government commandeering ISPs, the fourth and fifth amendment rights against cyber surveillance, and so on. The intent of the so-intensely-defended second amendment was not to preserve deer hunting for all time, it was to allow the citizenry a way to protect themselves against the encroachment of a too-powerful federal government.
Also, what's especially odd, and it goes again to what you're saying above, is that in the US, there are any number of talk show hosts (most of whom, in my area, are unabashed Republicans) who outright refer to the Democrats as traitors in the style of the book by that name. It is a travesty that one can think of mere political opposition that way, and somewhat scary because bad things tend to begin with a dehumanization of the supposed enemy, preparatory to doing something bad to them as a mass. But you'd think the silver lining would be that they would dare not put a bunch of power in the hands of the government, lest it get in the hands of what they think are traitors as part of the natural process of the next election. Instead, though, they seem to just blindly do it, and then somehow hope that they can use the fact of having created so precarious a situation as leverage to say "and therefore you must not elect a Democrat, for they are criminals and thieves." I just don't get it.
Of course, the article is about the UK, and their history with this is much different. So some of what I'm saying doesn't really apply to them from a literal historical point of view... except that the whole point of studying history, anyone's history, is to not have to live it oneself.
Excellent point.
But worse, as important as their confused idea of what a criminal is, is their notion of what a criminal is not. A criminal is not someone who might have the savvy to take this large mass of personal information and use it for ill. Only the government will have access to the information and the knowledge, and the government is known by its nature not to contain criminals nor people who are friends of criminals nor people who are susceptible to criminals nor any form of leak that might reach criminals.
To put it another way, they seem to think that what will preserve our status as "free men" is to be "pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed and numbered!". Something seems suspect in that, since those are exactly what the criminals will want, too, and while there's a lot of discussion about the criminals they'd like to catch, there's never any acknowledgment that they might be breeding new kinds of criminals in the process. And never any discussion of how a foreign government, having successfully infiltrated this information, might use this information about a citizenry against it in, for example, planning a highly targeted attack.
Advanced knowledge of the details of people's souls is powerful, the government is right about that. What they seem to forever overlook is that it is beyond the power of the state to reserve such power to itself. All they can do is write words in laws that are wishful thinking about how they'd like to reserve such use to themselves.
If the day comes when someone starts to systematically use this helpful information gathered by the government against itself, as it surely will, let's hope there are still a few Max Headroom style "blanks" waiting in the wings to help us out.
Cool. By the way, will they be blacking out (or "modifying") parts of the sky that contain things we're not supposed to see?
And what about Google OrbitView for virtual flights in and out of the satellites (and debris) around the earth... or Google CanalView for Mars? This could be a big funding source for NASA...
We don't have reason to worry about robots taking over the world until then, yes. But the intermediate ground is that research in this area is only rarely going to be used for things like earthquake recovery. It's going to be very expensive to make so many machines at all, at first, and so will not be vacuuming the floor in your house. The first applications will be funded by the military, and all in the name of protecting us.
The problem is that the military (of whatever country) is always indulging the illusion that they have to have it because the other guy will eventually have it, while all the while leaking, in one way or another, the information. So they can end up starting the problem they fear. Even just putting fear into the enemy (or potential enemy) that "we" will have it and "they" won't means "we" have to worry about defense against it since "we" have signaled to "them" an interest in that area and now must protect the intellectual space. (I've tried to word the "we"/"them" neutrally so it reads as well for the US as abroad, in part because this research is being done abroad. The issues are no less relevant in any country.)
The practical truth is that the world is not suffering from the absence of swarms (dare I say "gangs") of swarmbots. This is push technology looking for a market, and with the military and malware markets being the two obvious prime candidates, which is not comforting, at least to me.
I'm not intending to advocate outright alarm. I'm reacting to a statement that appears to say that it's ok to ignore this as a problem for now. I don't think the choice is as binary as all that. Technology does not, itself, cause social problems. But that is not license to assume that no problems will result that are enabled by technology. If there can be social impact of technology, what causes the problem is the failure to track and respond to the social implications, and the assumption that society will (or even can) just automatically "keep up" and "be ready". I'm not big on those stupid headlines either, but then, I wish the public could hear a calm headline and still be interested enough to discuss something. The public doesn't need to panic, and yet it probably does need to read the story and listen and do a little discussing.
I'm reminded of the New Yorker cartoon "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."
This program apparently scans the blogosphere... but I wonder what that is. Is that the web? If I just have a page that expresses an opinion, is it counted as a blog, or do I have to register it somewhere as a blog? Is an RSS feed required at a site, or on the page, to be a blog? Does the word blog have to appear in the header or are "essays" counted? And if I have more than one domain name, how is that counted? Does the text have to be different in two cases in order to be counted as two opinions? How does one distinguish two distinct people who merely word things like an advocacy group told them from one person who owns two (or fifty or a thousand) sites and puts the same text on all of them? Is the site careful to understand the difference between quotation and inclusion for critique? How much are they investing in tools that allow people to detect and correct misclassification or is this "all in good fun" and "for entertainment only"?
Perhaps the answers to these are documented, but that almost doesn't matter. The point is that however they're answered, the answer is arbitrarily chosen and are not The Truth no matter how they are chosen.
In the olden days, everyone had an opinion on things, but the opinions were distributed, and people were forced to engage each other interactively in order to discover other opinions. They might agree or disagree, but it was the conversation that caused them to grow and learn. In the new world, we can count how many total opinions there are, and avoid ever talking to someone who disagrees. This takes the dialog and growth part out of the equation. At that point, what difference does it make how many people agree or disagree, since we'll just be measuring the efficiency of the cloning process, not the validity of ideas.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Mark Twain
I agree this is not leading anywhere good, and thought your remarks put it well. But I fear that merely turning one's head and refusing to use it will change the effect very little. It's true that even looking at such data risks imposing some bias, but the big problem this creates isn't caused by thoughtful people happening to see where an idea came from, it's caused by people who haven't the patience to think saying "just tell me who to believe because I can't be bothered to think about this".
The real problem may be that if this catches on, it will still affect those who would like to not think even if the thoughtful ones don't use it. That's the problem with mass media generally. (And no, I'm not advocating not having mass media--I'm just saying it's true and it calls for thought.) When people yield judgment to others, it calls into the question whether democracy can function, since democracy relies on the idea of each voter thinking.
And the tainting of an idea by who says it is very reminiscent of McCarthy era politics, with a kind of guilt by association... neatly packaged for the modern world where we can make everyone guilty of something, and we can police when our friends step out of line with what we thought we could depend on them to say. Sigh.
The real benefit of having tech-savvy people in office isn't that they could help program computers, it's that their knowledge of programming could help straighten out the poor programming of the many computational systems that are the world itself.
Politicians deal routinely with simple issues of reliably specified process (due process), proper abstraction (policies that are neutral as to whom they apply to), process control (time slicing, fairness, scheduling), data hiding (privacy), security matters (credentials, privilege), algorithmic complexity and resource management (budgets), forward and backward chaining (proactive investment vs reactive budgeting), side effect, storage management and garbage collection (literally), APIs and network services (government databases and services), automation (minimizing overhead and streamlining budgets), modularity (responsibility and accountability), etc. Modern politicians deal with these issues in a kind of haphazard way that is both scary and sad to watch.
I'm not saying a Congress of nerds is the way to go, though I'd say it was worth giving a shot for a while just to see what they could do by applying some actual schooling. For a programmer watching Congress tinker at some kinds of systematic processes is like an Astrophysicist watch an Astrologer explain the heavens.
So forget how a programmer can benefit the programming community while in office. That's small potatoes. If he really understands programming, the place to apply it is away from the keyboard, directly focusing on the real substance of what Congress does (and doesn't).
I don't know why you think I said that. I said no such thing. (I mostly don't even believe such a thing, but as it happens, I wasn't commenting on that at all.)
Nor did I make any proposal at all. I did not moralize. I merely made some observations of obvious truth in response to a claim that the classified internet was safe because it is kept pristine and out of contact with the other internet.
I doubt whether that can be done. And if it is done, it seems unlikely that the classified internet can have any materially large amount of modern software on it because there isn't the budget required to develop such software. This means that any government willing to use cybertechnology obtained from the free internet will far exceed what our government is using, and ultimately means our government will have to use the freely available technology, too.
Whatever one thinks of the free software movement, its presence in the market and the pressures it creates are undeniable. That's not a proposal on my part. It's just a truth. And it's equally well a truth that one of those pressures, relevant to this situation, is the pressure to use technology at least as good as your enemies are using. And since our enemies will surely be using free software, our government will be using it, too. That's just a truth. And in the context of my remarks, it's not intended to make any moral point, it's only offered as supporting evidence to refute the claim that the two nets, the regular internet and the classified one, can be kept separate.
This is exactly my point. If that's our protection, then any one piece of wire can break everything. And that means we are vulnerable to any accident, to any single mole who gets through, etc.
But moreover, the US could not possibly hire enough people to make this work. To have good computation on that "other Internet", we need to keep up with what others are doing elsewhere in the world. In the real world, thousands or perhaps millions of programmers are making a ton of software that is powerful and, yes, free. And our enemies can use it as well as our friends.
If our classified systems can use none of it, then we can't keep up. Because we have to pay enough people to recreate everything Richard Stallman and the Church of Free Software has built. That isn't likely. Forget the monetary value of it, the computational value of it is large. And so someone is going to download some of that onto the other net because they can't afford not to. That means it may have bugs and moles in the software. It won't all be possible to audit 100%.
And yet the warfare will be conducted on the internet, our internet. So if they're off safe in their internet, the government internet, the Good internet, the one full of only safe and friendly software... the one parents wish they could have their kids on.
Being on that safe internet, they won't be able to protect us. Not unless the yield of that good internet is software that comes back to ours. If it does, software has now made a round-trip from the Bad Internet, the Spock-with-a-beard Internet, where free software comes from, to the Good Internet, and then back to the Bad Internet. And who knows what viruses or deliberate "features" it can have carried in one direction and what data it can have steganographically carried in the other direction.
Rigorous separation of Good from Bad in a world that is connected is not protection. The problem is that we build technology to save us time and effort and to make sure we don't make mistakes. But technology makes mistakes too, because it's built by people. And it makes deliberate problems, too, if it comes from places where there are Bad People (if there even is such a black and white concept). And technology does something bad, it makes them much faster than we do.
Our safety used to be in that when we made mistakes, we made them slowly and in distributed fashion.
It reminds me of the Doonesbury comic years ago about Reagan's SDI shield, that was going to protect us from Soviet missiles by a single, always-perfect shield of protective devices. The comic was drawn in crayon, as I recall, with the voice of a little girl explaining that the world was beautiful because SDI was protecting us. Then in the last frame it said something abrupt to the effect of "Oops, one got through. Bye."
What makes this story so scary isn't just that something got broken into, it's the thing in the back of all our minds that says "my goodness, is that the place where All Knowledge of Everything is centrally stored?" Bad enough when someone breaks into your computer and gets all your bank accounts or passwords, but when someone breaks into The Government and gets all knowledge of launch codes, defensive systems, registries of guns in the US, files on who sympathizes with who, files on who calls who, etc. ... well, that info collected with the intent of defending us might suddenly be a liability.
That's why things like the telecom phone tapping, national IDs, etc. are so troublesome. The mere centralization of information at all for any reason is a risk that the Bush administration has been ignoring, working instead (for all we know, none of this being auditable) to pile all of everything in one fragile place. The founding fathers kept trying to decentralize things and minimize what in modern computer terms we'd call "single point of failure". They distributed power in a way that made it hard to just break in and take control, right down to making sure there was not a single head of government. It's too bad that in all the puffery we hear spouted about Constitutional original intent, the modern Republican leaders don't show more care about that kind of original intent.
I somehow imagine this problem to be one of those where mathematical proofs about real-world situations don't work well because the problem doesn't really model the problem right, so the "solution" is a solution to some other problem than the one at hand.
The airlines charge a lot to be first class. What does that get you? A little free booze, a better class of snacks, a little more arm room, and real silverware... if you're lucky. There are luxury planes where there is more to offer in space and amenities, but those planes often have multiple doors, so they can afford special entrances for first class. On most US domestic flights I've been on, though, people are paying a lot for a very small amount of services, and mostly they're paying to be told they're special. In a lot of them, the seats aren't that different between first and coach. (On some of those, they finally changed the designation of some "first class" seats, admitting they really only, at best, business class.)
So you're saying here that the airlines would make more if they didn't tell people that? That would imply that people are willing to sacrifice being told they're special but still pay for first class. I doubt that, only because then people might not think it was worth it.
And if those seats revert to coach, I bet the airline can't make as much money, which means that although people get on and off of planes faster, the planes are making less, not more. Of course, there's a little to make if one airline is more efficient than another and attracts customers on that basis, but if they all do it, there's nothing to be saved there.
And then there's the issue that you're betting on best case. The airlines still have to plan in worst case, for if something gets jumbled. They can't just leave out passengers when someone does something amiss. And if things go slowly, they can't slip schedules. So it may well be that the added efficiency doesn't end up making the planes move faster.
And even if it did make the planes move faster, it has to move them a whole flight-worth faster in order for there to be another flight... including there has to be gates at the other end waiting to receive the flight, which will only happen if all of the planes are moving smoothly. Any one getting fouled can back things up.
Telling them they can't have carry-on would probably help more than strict order boarding. After all, as soon as one person can't get his luggage into the overhead, he's busy stealing someone else's space, and there's a likely domino effect.
I don't have any brilliant math behind this hunch, but somehow I bet Southwest is more optimal than the formal math makes it sound... kind of like how people say that Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. In that case, the "basis" for that is that Democracy alleges to optimize worst case performance, rather than best case performance, making it seem really bad if you're comparing governments by their best-case performance. With airlines, I suspect worst case behavior is more important than best case behavior. And if worst case for "strict order" will be "oops, we goofed" and a resulting chaos, then maybe chaos from the outset (a la Southwest) was all that could ever be aspired to in the first place and it's easier to just go with it.
Perhaps what's called for is a book vault, in the spirit of the recently built Norwegian seed vault.
I'm reminded of something from Max Headroom (a truly brilliant show for anyone who is not familiar with it, on par with greats like Blade Runner and Demolition Man for its crisp and witty vision of a possible future dominated by television). In the series, nearly everyone has given up all their privacy information to the computers, of course, except for a small few who refused, a long time ago, and have no records. They're called Blanks because society can't easily track or understand them. One of them, who is called just Blank Reg in order to have a name at all, gives someone a book at one point and says, "It's a book. It's a non-volatile storage medium. It's very rare. You should 'ave one." The insight of the throwaway remark has the deep understanding and precision targeting of many of the throwaway lines in The Simpsons or South Park.
The issue is not so simple as the loss of a thing we're all fond of. It creates the risk of a catastrophic loss of all of humanity's information, since books are more than just outmoded relics. What is not outmoded about them is their accessibility and their duration, which even given the lifetime of paper still well exceeds the lifetime of a typical CD or a storage format. The area of survivability seems like it comes quickly into play as a serious matter.
This is not to say that it's bad that Google and others have been scanning things, since that adds redundancy of survivability to the system. But it's to say that there's a risk in the other direction of the loss of technology that would allow Google to operate, and in that case, books are a very reasonable backup.
Yep, that's so. Then again, now that you mention it, the bigger-still subsidy is the failure to charge for the resource consumption (the trees cut down) and disposals (plastic windows, inks and dyes, etc). A proper accounting would say that these are costs on all of us in terms of the money spent by public facilities carting this to junk yards, the space lost in the earth to such junk yards waiting for it to never decay, the death of the coral reefs and other environmental things because these pollute our world. And those hugely outweigh the costs of the delivery.
Just as my need to buy spamware and even with that spamware to spend time going through several hundred junk mail classifications per day to make sure no real mail was misclassified is an unreasonable (if smaller than "death of the planet") burden to carry in cyberspace.
Many say you should tax things you don't want people to do. And then we go and tax value added, sales, and earnings... things we want people to do. It seems odd. Maybe the Right Tax, if there can be said to be such a thing, would be "added societal burden". So, for example, a carbon or methane tax, a plastic disposal tax, an inks and dyes in runoff water tax, a litter tax, a going-to-make-others-have-to-buy-a-shredder-or-spamware tax, etc.
The libertarian point of view seems to be that people should leave others alone. And that's very appealing to me. But only to the ponit that the person I'm leaving alone is not creating a burden on me by my doing so. The right of someone to be left alone and not pollute my environment is something I think is rational. At the point where I'm leaving them alone to fill my email box or my real world water supply with junk, then they are not leaving me alone, and I think that's why more people don't rally to that banner. The basic concept of "small, non-invasive government" seems to me to appeal to more people than those willing to call themselves big-L Libertarians. I think the barrier is that the big-L folks often talk a line that sounds more like a shield for people to wash their hands of responsibility for shared burdens that really cannot be opted out of. Freedom and responsibility must go hand in hand.
I don't think you're selling people short. I think it's "obvious" that it was inevitable that it would be tried. I'll explain why...
I think where you're right is that there is a commonplace two-step meta-pattern where an idea is tried for an innocent reason and after succeeding someone tries to repurpose the idea for other purposes. So in your case, you're suggesting that if 'mail to resident' hadn't happened, variations and repurposing would not have been able to happen. Probably. But 'mail to resident' wasn't a one-time shot that if it didn't happen on a certain day wouldn't exist. It would have come another day. And even if not, other equivalently powerful and repurposable ideas would have.
For example, 'mail to many' is capable of being repurposed in the same way. Multiple-recipients could be said to be just as enabling. It wasn't in paper mail, after all--a piece of mail mostly went to one recipient (except those interoffice memo things where you could keep re-forwarding the same junk, checking off your name). So once the cost of sending to many was lowered to just naming who gets copies, that was also an enabling factor.
Many years ago (somewhere around 25 years ago, I think), when email was still young (not brand new, certainly, but still not heavily evolved) and when there were not many machines on the then-ARPANET, I obtained a piece of software written by someone at a certain texas university that was on the net. I wanted to reach the author, but had no idea how to find him. So I sent an email to smith, asmith, bsmith, etc. up to zsmith hoping to find someone at that site that knew the guy I wanted to reach. We didn't get tons of email back then, so this wouldn't have been obnoxious like it was now... There was no web back then, and no search engine. I don't even know if there was the 'postmaster' convention yet. (Maybe if there was I'd tried it and failed to get a response.) And hsmith replied, by the way, offering just the helpful info I'd hoped for. The rest of the mail bounced. I never used the technique again, but would not have hesitated to recommend it to another if they were desperate. My point in telling the story is just to say that ideas like this do present themselves when people are faced with barriers. It's the natural way things go.
So I doubt any claim that if 'mail to resident' hadn't happened, SPAM wouldn't have either. Because if someone could come up with the idea of blasting out a query for benign reasons, someone could conceive of pushing that to whatever limit made financial sense.
You could almost make the case that if 'mail for free' had not been invented, no one would have wanted to send tons of mail to people who might not care. That would have reduced volume. But there is a large and thriving junk mail industry even when stamps cost money, so even that isn't true.
I do think that "free email" is the real culprit. We all say we like it, but most of us pay more per year in time and money getting rid of spam than we would pay to deliver mail. In effect, we all subsidize spam in the guise of getting something for free... On net (pardon the pun), we don't get email free, and it would be lower cost if we charged for it.
The same is true for physmail junk mail, by the way: We subsidize it by the lower prices it gets. That's a business decision by the post office, but in the interest of the overwhelming resource usage and waste disposal concerns, I think it's ever more clear it should be at least the same price, if not much higher. But the problem isn't (any more) send to resident, since now they all swap mailing lists. The problem is, again, 'send to multiple'. And with global warming upon us, the stakes are even higher than with email spam.
I'm going to ignore patent here. Intellectual property is not all of one kind. I mean here mostly copyright and maybe also trademark, since these are about creativity, not discovery. But the issues are so different that raising them together is confusing.
My first thoughts on this matter went to the nature of real property that allows us to tax it. We don't tax the ownership of a refrigerator. Why should they be different. I have to assume it's that no one is busy making more of it, and so the mere holding of it is a tax on others, who might like to use it. In that sense, if real estate tax can be justified (and I might later argue that it cannot), then the justification is that you're taking up a critical resource from the get go.
In fact, though, copyright is not of that kind. If Gone With The Wind or Cinderella were not created by their respective authors, then those works are just simply not there at all. (You can make whatever claims about a million monkeys you want, but we're not taking more monkeys, we're slaughtering them, and I don't think they'll have the time.) New works of original authorship don't take up space. They are made out of nowhere and every new such work potentially enriches us. So taxing them would be like taxing someone for making new land. If someone could do that (on demand, I mean, not the way we're doing it in the artic with all that melting), I would think twice about taxing it. The making of new land seems a useful skill in a world that is ever more crowded.
While copyrights on newly authored works don't hurt anyone, there is ultimately a cost to the world of allowing one person to continue to hold copyright ownership beyond a reasonable limit, since at some point the world needs to build on what others do.
But the notion that someone should have to pay from the first day of creation for the right to have created that work is the most horrible and regressive tax I could imagine. It would create a ticking clock that would limit the bargaining power of new authors in dealing with publishers, who could afford to outlast the author and just publish the work when it fell into the public domain for non-payment. It would favor the big guy over the little guy. None of that is good.
The middle ground that I might consider would be a tax on long-term extension of copyright. Right now, we continue to extend the copyright term in order to accomplish that. But perhaps a middle ground that says that if Disney wants to extend its rights on a certain work, then it should have to pay heavily for that beyond the reasonable duration of 50 or so years that all authors might reasonably claim to allow them to pursue the use of their works within their own lifetime.
I might even make the claim that real property could use the same protection. If I work my lifetime to buy a property and then at the end of my lifetime lose my job and can't pay the taxes to sustain my ownership, why should I end up with an untaxed refrigerator which I can keep because it's my property, but not a house I can keep? Where is the incentive to work for something that can be taxed away as soon as you own it? I can totally understand a tax on the estate, since my heirs didn't earn the money, and a reasonable argument might be made that they should make their own fortunes. Passing along money to help a young person get started in life, an impoverished person break even in life, or an aging person retire comfortably is one thing, but ensuring that a dynastic fortune consolidates the power for one's progeny is another.
In a sense, the continued use by Disney of intellectual property is the same kind of moral issue. The Disney of today is enriched, perhaps unfairly, by the work of prior generations. Taxing that seems reasonable in a way that is different than taxing you or me fo
Computer [to Hacker]: Stop! Access to information on this computer is only entrusted to a specific few. Are you one of them?
Hacker: Yes, I am. Here are my credentials.
Computer: Ah, yes. I am duly fooled. Access granted. Come inside and be entrusted.
[User enters, is entrusted with information, later abuses information he has been entrusted with to his personal benefit.]
Legal System: Stop! You are charged with trading on insider information.
Hacker: I'm sorry. Although while it worked for me earlier to claim I was one of the entrusted few, now that I have entered and abused your information, I find it convenient to claim I am not trustworthy, have never been inside, and that my source of income is not related to this company.
While I admit there is some wiggle room here for making arguments on both sides, the role of a judge is to inject some common sense in the gray areas. Otherwise, we'd have a robot there.
I'm not a lawyer and I haven't read the relevant law (no one seems to have cited the specific statutes, and tracking them down is beyond my skill to do in the time I have handy), but it seems to me there is at least a case to be made that the information was inside, that the person had to go inside and become an insider to get it, and that although they may have gained that access and trust on false pretenses, the information was obtained as a direct consequence of having established a trust relationship with an agent of the company (the computer). The system thought it had asked the appropriate questions of trust. It's unlikely that the hacker did not know he was answering in a manner that would mislead. And so, having affirmatively elected himself an insider and worthy of trust in order to obtain the information, the hacker could be prosecutable now for breaching that trust.
I agree with this statement. What I'm less certain of is whether those cultures will be microbial or human.
If the measure of intelligence is the ability to flexibly overcome life's obstacles, then in the climatic intelligence test that's coming up, pitting us against other organisms, we may be in for a rude awakening ... er, ... a rude being-put-to-sleep.
No, actually. You're picking a fight where none is offered.
All I did was try to critique a proposal in the context of its own form by addressing the specific issue I cared about, which was that if you're going to tell people what to teach, this is not what to teach.
Mandate doesn't always mean "legally enforced", and is often used in a sense of "moral imperative" (which is not as imperative as the term imperative might seem to imply). Consider the so-called "mandate" a US President often asserts right after election, which is not always implemented and in some cases isn't given the time of day. Or a sports coach may make it a mandate to go and win games.
It was just my own personal list of things that I think need teaching, and you can sum it up by saying I think people should be taught how to think, not what to think. If you have a problem with that, feel free to say so.
I do think it will require leadership, though, in some form. If it is government imposed, I'd like it to be open-minded and empowering, not merely prescriptive. But I'm open to other suggestions as well. Look at Al Gore. There's a leader with a sense of what's imperative. Even without force of law, he's not doing badly.
Fair enough. I didn't mean this literally, by the way. I was just abbreviating (even for the fact that it was a long post) and didn't do a good job. I don't expect them to be able to make a fortune on the market. What I'd like them to do is understand the difference between long-term and short-term gain, the idea of hidden costs due to poor or misleading accounting, the idea that people in a game for the short term might take different strategies than people in it for the long run, the idea of industry putting off expense on government and vice versa. These are all individually simple concepts that even young kids could conceptualize it if it were made suitably idealized. They show evidence of this kind of reasoning in how they play various games. They won't have to rush out and solve the world's problems as kids. They just need enough to understand what questions to ask so they can evolve robust theories of this stuff as they age. Let them find their own answers.
Even if they got to the point of comprehending the hardness of the problem, that would be good. It would mean they might fear that government or industry might not solve the problem on its own, and that they had a real personal need to get involved themselves.
I think this is a critical issue, but I'd rather not turn it into a situation where people are fighting over whether they get to teach the answer. Rather, I'd make it a mandate to produce students who are capable of intelligently discussing the questions.
Here's what I'd teach them:
Enough chemistry to understand what a compound is, and how atoms rearrange in order to make different molecules, and how energy is required and released in the process. One could teach this from a fairly young age, even without a full chemistry course. Just so they're conversant in the concepts and can know they want to learn more.
Enough math to know what exponents are and what the difference is between a straight line and non-linear curve is. Even if they blur the huge difference between squares and exponentials, the notion that one can't simply rely on knowing that if it took x years to do something, it will take x more years to do twice that, it would be good.
Also, again in the math front, enough math to understand simple optimization issues--nothing fancy. The ability to optimize the area of a rectangle is almost enough. They must be able to do simple things like know when it's good for a few people to do big things and when it's better for a lot of people to do little things and when neither of these will work and everyone has to do something big in order for anything to matter.
Enough math to be able to comprehend the sheer quantity of waste and pollution in the world.
Enough statistics and probabilities to be able to understand why something can happen one year, not happen another, and then happen again ... and yet still be a trend. That is, they must understand the
difference between a tendancy toward something and a promise that something
will occur.
Enough logic to understand what it takes to prove and disprove existential and universal quantifications.
Enough philosophy and morality to understand and discuss risk analysis and the general good.
Enough politics to understand how it's BOTH the case that an obviously good idea won't necessarily be adopted by the free market, and something that is forced by government won't necessarily fix a problem.
Enough economics to know how to calculate which investments are going to pay off and which are just boondoggles lining someone's pockets in the short term at the expense of the long-term good.
Enough history to revive the notion of sacrifice for the greater good and get people out of the "it's all about me" mode.
Enough biology to understand what an ecosystem is and how one thing affects another. There was a very good episode of the Wild Thornberrys where the ecosystem got upset by a small change and there was a big disaster. Required viewing of that would almost suffice in my eyes. Just enough to be able to understand the significance of the reefs going away or some plankton going away or polar bears going away in some sort of operational terms that didn't make it seems "distant and unrelated".
Enough common sense to understand that not all things labeled bio-degradable, green, or earth-friendly are actually saving people money. We don't have to teach which ones are, just that the question has to be asked and that the answers might be deliberately obscured.
And, just maybe, enough religion to understand that Noah didn't survive the Flood by sitting back and assuming it was God's will or that God would just take care of him.
And enough to know that the true meaning of Faith is that you have enough confidence in what you believe that you are not threatened by truth and science.
Bravo to the United Church of Christ for its recent "not mutually exclusive" stance on science and technology. (I'm not a member of that church, by the way. I just saw notice of this and thought it was cool.)
I get in this argument a lot with people, and it always ends up going down the same rathole, with people thinking I'm saying that I am entitled to money for work. That isn't how I get to where I do in my sadness about the present situation.
Like you (I suspect), I begin from the point of view of the consumer. Let's take a different example. I like certain books, and not very many of them get written by decent authors. So there are a few I wish would spend 100% of their time writing books. But they can't. Because the world does not reward the writing of books. It rewards the writing coupled with the marketing. So the books that come out are the books that are the result of the authors I care about spending their time doing an activity I wish they did not have to do--marketing their books--and then writing in the rest of their free time. In the end, they make many fewer books.
Web publishing lets a lot more people publish. So you could say they don't have to spend time marketing. But they can't then turn to writing, even then. Because now they don't have a source of income.
Speaking for myself, I'm not a rich person. So I can't just be a patron. What I want is to pay a fair amount and to get good quality. I have no desire for free books or free software. I'd rather pay money for decent stuff and be paid for writing decent stuff (whether books or software). It does me no good to swap my free writing for someone else's because my grocer and auto dealer and so on won't take those in trade. So I'm left assuming the middle man will take my contribution and funnel it to the right place. And I don't aspire to be a middle man--that's a different occupation and is not my special skill.
But the middle man isn't going to optimize my personal favorite choice. He's better off making a quick buck on 3 authors willing to work for free than pay money to one author who might write better but will charge money. So his economy of scale is working against the good writers and to the prolific mediocre.
You'd think it was a business opportunity for someone, but I keep looking for forums that offer published writings with authors getting a substantial (not just token) share of the profits, but so far I don't see them. Starting such an endeavor is complicated and more work than I am up to myself, but I still think it would suit the world a lot better than what we're seeing. I don't know what to make of the fact that it doesn't happen, but the fact that it's scarce does not seem to be causing it to come into existence.
I think the world would work best if people could be used in the ways they are skilled, and could get paid for it. And I'd prefer that worked by capitalistic means than communistic means. But unfettered capitalism seems objectively to be leading to money accumulating centrally and on track to be very feudalistic, which is even worse than communism. The problem with this model of just doing what the world needs in the moment is that all the planning the world wants you to do can be tossed aside in a moment. A job can require you to have all sorts of training, then toss you out and say "never mind", and all your training is for nothing. The questions, I emphasize, are not just "what about me", but "what do I advise someone who is planning a career?" Telling them "society doesn't care about you, you must be a jack of all trades, don't rely on anything, it's all going to change anyway, there's nothing you can count on" is not very satisfying. Neither is it satisfying to tell a c
The article makes some quite useful observations in terms of categorizing present trends and is a worthwhile read for that purpose, I think.
But I'm uncomfortable with its "conclusions", if it can even be said to have any. (It seems to indulge a sense throughout of "this is ok, things are good, we just need to embrace them".) From the article:
If I reworded this as:
it would sound a lot less benign.
He makes some casual references to the need for trust and the willingness of people buying to give money to creators. But he overlooks the fact that it's in the best (financial) interest of the people who are the conduit to do as much as possible to obstruct the ability to do this.
The industry thrives (for now) on talk of riches that can be achieved in this new world order if people just contribute freely and hope the money comes somehow, but the obvious truth is that that works better for the people who get the money than for the people who don't, and when you're touting that there's no correlation between where the money goes and where the credit is due, that's not sounding too good to me.
Just look at how long it took the TV writers to get what was obviously due them, and they were very organized. Now imagine how much difficulty a group of uncoordinated netizens is going to have getting the same, since when any number of them boycott their "jobs" putting out free content, there are gonig to be any number of others rushing in to fill the gap for free, causing the content deliverers to say "gee, why should we pay them at all?"
Lately, I see a lot of TV shows saying the world may not last a hundred years. And then I see copyright durations proposed to be set at about the same length of time. So, putting it all together, they mean to have copyright "for all eternity", right?
I propose linking copyright and global warming, so the people with the economic interests to hold their intellectual property for all time are motivated to invest in at least fixing global warming in order to get that privilege. That way, we at least get something out of it--Disney and friends can cure global warming and we'll reward them by extending their copyrights.
If they fail, though, a portion of the projected End Times should have an allocated moratorium on copyright to allow for a mad free-for-all trying to save the world using any available resources ... without fear of being sued for so doing.
Otherwise, the world is going down the suer for sure. (Yeah, that typo was intentional. I guess someone will try to sew me now, so I better zip it.)
Actually, I think they'll see this as a business opportunity. The risk here seems to me not that it will fail, but that it will succeed. That is, that people will start to only trust those big few who can afford to create such an identification mechanism. That will lead to the big ones reaffirming their "portal" role and making it harder for new entrants to achieve legitimacy. On a claim that new entrants are dangerous, it won't surprise me if (as with the network neutrality issue), the big ones jump in and say it's essential that they have special status. They like being special and competing among their (predictable) friends.
I like this technological proposal, btw. I just think it will, like all things, require some refinement before it's really working. But it sounds like a step forward. And at the same time something to be wary of ... in a calm way.