There's still the compulsory licensing option. Not a great option, but it works around your argument. Even if we take your MPAA argument to the logical extreme, they can't engage in total censorship at will. They can just make speaking expensive.
That's the point to good legal engineering: laws are written such that greedy self-interest tends to work toward the common good. It's a pity most laws aren't written that way....
The "hardline" is with respect to the 512(c) safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. That is, the "Neener neener, you can't sue our deep pockets" part. And in that, Google takes a very hard line indeed, since reinterpretations here could cost them tremendous amounts of money.
So if I'm reading this article right, it's actually about the MCR1 gene, which produces melanin in the skin and also interacts with the nervous system. That would imply a very strong correlation with redheads, since they usually don't produce melanin very well, but not a perfect one. Are they just using red hair as a high-correlation classifier for test subjects, when what they really care about is very pale skin?
Anecdotally, my wife has very red hair, but she also tans easily. (I'm the pale one.) Lithuanian and African-American ancestry interacted weirdly. I'd assume she has the normal MCR1 gene.
* No, I didn't have a real point. I'm just seizing the opportunity to brag about having a beautiful red-headed wife.
I'm in the same boat. Without a keyboard in front of me, I haven't the faintest clue what my passwords are. They typically look like line noise.
Back in '99, I took a month-long vacation and went backpacking for the duration. When I got back, I spend half a day trying to log back in before I had to give up and have everything reset. If they took away my laptop for a month, I doubt that I'd be able to comply with the hypothetical Judge's order.
I get similar performance after letting FF8 run too long, but my usage pattern is a poster child for the problems with memory and CPU bloat. I open lots of tabs, including Facebook and Gmail, and some heavy Javascript sites required by my job. I leave them open sometimes for days. My only plug-ins are noScript and the JRE. Under my usage pattern, FF often reaches a 400MB footprint.
Now add to that the fact that my home computer is a little MSI Wind U100. 1GB RAM, 1.6GHz Atom processor (2-stage pipeline), and the thrashing is unbearable. Eventually I have to give in and close / restart FF.
I credit most of my troubles to the heavy javascript sites, not FF. I suspect that Facebook in particular is caching massive amounts of data and actually claiming that it uses that memory. At some point I should compare to Chrome to find out, but that's a project from some day when I have the time.
That's what happened here in the USA. Remember, prohibition led to the rise of organized crime in the USA. When we repealed it, organized crime didn't go away - it turned to other illegal activities to survive. Rooting it out was a multi-decade process, still on-going, and a long way from complete. The situation isn't just analogous, it's almost identical: the Cartels have power, and they won't simply let it go. They'll try to hold onto it.
Regarding the assign operation inside the if condition: I believe Java flags it if you do that.
Close. Java doesn't allow implicit casts from int to boolean, even though they use the same data type in the JVM. The assignment "x=5" is also an expression returning the int 5, so that things like "x=y=5" will work. C/C++ treats all non-zero ints as the boolean value true, so "x=5" ==> "5" ==> true, so "if (x=5)" is "if (5)" is "if (true)".
In Java, that can't happen because 5 is an int, and the conditional expression must be a boolean. However, you can make this mistake in Java if you really want:
Mining in space will be important, but it's unlikely to be important or cost effective to get the materials back to Earth. Whatever is ultimately mined in space will likely stay in space to build things there.
Not so. It's easy to get things back to Earth once you get out there. Sure, it's very expensive to get there, but so long as you're prepared to stay for a long time you can amortize over the mission.
The delta-V you'd need to hit a 3-5 years delivery window from the asteroid belt to Earth would be pretty small. There's a small matter of the delivery being, shall we say, postage due. Bit of an, er, impact on the wallet. Not to mention the neighborhood. But it would get there!
Ah, I see it. You're quite right, and I see the point. Using pure set cardinality leaves the probability undefined, but this gives a workaround. I'd have some difficult reading to prove whether the original assertion is correct under measure theory, but I suspect it is.
And here's the poison pill to demonstrate how far I missed the boat: the same arguments I used apply to something as simple as picking a number x from [0,2] and computing the probability that x < 1. Obviously that's 0.5, but the technique I outlined would claim it's undefined.
I'm so glad I don't claim to make my living as a mathematician!
I get the benefit that I can incorporate other GPL'd software without violating their licenses. I'm releasing my source code, which technically satisfies the GPL. But it's useless to everyone else. I assumed that the GPL dealt with this one, but maybe not....?
Two arbitrary lines in a 2D plane will meet with probability 1.0. Two arbitrary lines in 3D space will meet with probability 0.0. (In each case, the exceptions are vanishingly few relative to the norm.)
From a mathematical point of view, this isn't actually true (although it is intuitive). The probability that two arbitrary lines in 2D space will meet is undefined. Going back to basics, there are an unbounded number of possible lines. Without loss of generality, select y=0. (We don't lose generality because we can translate, rotate, and scale the plane to make any other selection equivalent to y=0.) Then the probability that the second line selected meets the first is defined as the number of lines which meet it divided by the universe of lines. Both sets are unbounded, so the probability is undefined (infinity / infinity).
If you'd like to resort to an argument based on transfinite numbers, I don't think it's valid. But it still undercuts the statement. It turns out that the two sets are of equivalent (transfinite) cardinality[1], so I suppose you could argue that the probability is still 1.0. But the same argument applies to arbitrary lines in 3D, 4D, or N-D space[2], so those are also 1.0.
Anybody see any problems there? I'm not a serious math geek, just a professor of computer science.
[1] The set of lines y=mx+b which don't meet y=0 are all pairs m=0, b!=0. The cardinality of that set is equal to the cardinality of the reals. The lines which do meet y=0 are everything else, and has cardinality equal to the set of all pairs of reals. It's fairly straightforward to show by, e.g., interleaving digits of our pair values, that there's an injective function from the pairs of reals to the reals. By inclusion, there's also an injective function from the singleton to the pairs. By the Cantor-Berstein-Schroeder Theorem, this means that a bijective function exists and the sets are of equivalent cardinality.
[2] Lines in N-D space are defined by a set of N real coefficients. We've already shown that the cardinality of the set of reals is equal to the cardinality of the set of pairs of reals. By induction on the number of coefficients, the cardinality of lines in N-D space is also the same as the cardinality of the reals.
This brings up a subtle point of the GPL which I've never researched. Does anybody know how the GPL handles the following hypothetical scenario?
Suppose I write software in a proprietary language. Using a non-free compiler, I can build binaries -- whether they're executables or some other source language, the GPL considers them binaries. If I release the source and the binaries under the GPL, but not the compiler, I presume that this doesn't suffice for the GPL. (Ignoring the fact that there's no copyright infringement if I'm the sole author.) People can't modify the source and build new versions because they don't have the compiler.
At the same time, we don't require GPL distributions to include everything you need to compile, or almost every package would need to include gcc.
Common sense implies that it's OK so long as the compiler is also freely available somewhere. Is there a clause to that effect in the GPL? I've never found it.
Ultimately, this sounds a lot more like people that are mad about no longer being able to endanger other people's lives by running red lights without having to worry about getting caught. I keep see the increased incidents of rear end collisions referenced as to why these cameras are bad, but ultimately, in much of the country we have tailgating laws for a reason, people are supposed to keep plenty of space so that they don't have an accident if the driver ahead suddenly applies the breaks. And rear end collisions are significantly less likely to result in death or serious injury than t-bone collisions, the ones that they're trying to prevent.
If I'm to be completely honest with myself, my gripe is that I believe that the cameras enforce the lights too precisely, with zero leeway. This forces me to be less safe as a driver. If I'm coming to a light and it turns yellow, sometimes I can see it's safer to scoot through it than to screech to a halt. With a camera, I'm a lot less willing to take the chance of a ticket. I should usually have enough time to make it on yellow, but we don't exactly publish the yellow light durations. A number of studies have shown that the yellow light durations are often much shorter than they should be.
It bothers me that I'm more likely to get a ticket by doing what I believe is safer.
On that topic, increased yellow durations are one of the few things which has been shown to reduce accidents with no real trade-offs. But that would require governance by people who actually look at real data and don't need the public to see them "doing something about XYZ problem."
A lot of people seem to want to scream about censorship, but they're missing the point. This is one of the best case scenarios I've seen in relations between companies and security researchers.
For those who can't be bothered to RTFA, here's a summary.
Researchers found a serious flaw. The company developed a fix. It turned out that the fix was flawed. The company told the researchers about the potential impact of giving the talk before the flaw was fixed, and the researchers voluntarily postponed the talk while a better fix is built.
That's it, and it looks like everybody did the best thing they could. Isn't this what we'd want Siemens to do? "You've got a right to give your talk, but we'd like you to postpone it. Here's why. Your call."
My bet is this fuck up will cost her the real case.
Unlikely. I doubt any of this screw-up will be admissible in the real case, as it is irrelevant to the matters under trial there.
What interests me is the results of the "oops" case. A lot of that depends on whether service was properly carried out. If so, then the $11m judgment will probably all go away, but it'll be difficult to get much in the way of sanctions or a successful countersuit. When served for a trial, you need to answer it! Absent a defendant, the judge acted properly. There are no disputed facts, so the plaintiff's assertions are more or less taken as gospel.
If service was improperly carried out, then sanctions are probable, and the judgment goes away instantly.
I remember what Prof. Alan Meltzer (Physics, RPI) said on the matter of using his own textbook. He made a personal point of never using a book he'd written. Either the book should cover everything he wanted the class to cover, and then his lecture is superfluous; or the lecture is necessary to supplement the book, and he wrote a poor book.
I'm not really sure I agree with him, since there's plenty of value in classroom examples which don't belong in a textbook. Nevertheless, the thought bears consideration.
The entire point of IP is to encourage social and cultural development through the protection of initial investment. The fashion industry demonstrates what happens when IP is weakened or non-existant - a disincentive to create and develop and a thriving copy-culture.
Now that's an interesting point. Let me ask you, what's the downside in software development? A good software developer should copy as much as possible — yes, legally, from good sources, etc. The whole point to code reuse is that one guy does it right and everyone can use that "best" solution instead of reinventing a slightly less round wheel.
I believe that a good programmer should feel a disincentive to create. That's something which took me years to learn as a young programmer. I've lost track of the number of times I wrote quick-n-dirty linked lists because that was less work than learning the interfaces to existing solutions. I was wrong, and eventually I figured it out. What's wrong with encouraging programmers to figure it out earlier?
I'm not advocating zero copyright for source code, but a greatly reduced term seems perfectly fine with me. Although there are some strong economics ideas that we don't even need copyright to have a thriving open source community. See, E.g., Michele Boldrin and David Levine's paper on Market Structure and Property Rights in Open Source Industries (PDF).
Ayn Rand was right about one thing--that governments make needless laws to create criminals of its citizens in hopes they'll pay them to not be criminals any more
I've never subscribed to that view. I see the situation as an unfortunate interaction of incentives. I believe that my (USA) legislators make laws to justify their positions. They have to be seen to be doing something, or we might vote for someone else next term. (Active looks better than passive to us voters, you'll never get elected on a platform of "I won't pass new laws.") The accumulation — nay, sedimentation! — of laws just stems from that. Meanwhile, law enforcement has learned that the best way to go after criminals is to stretch those laws to the fullest, and to use the latest and greatest ones which haven't been suitably narrowed by the courts. Since law enforcement is more familiar with the latest mess than the general population, that tends to work.
And, of course, a lot of law enforcement officers know a criminal when they see him. They're also usually right, but heaven help you if one decides that you're it.
If anybody knows a way to break that series of incentives that doesn't involve warm, fuzzy "just don't do that!" notions, I'd love to hear it. My persistent gripe with people who want to change the world is that they never seem to account for the fact that people will always tend to follow these sorts of incentives, or they will be replaced by those who will.
Fortunately, there's more incentive for computer standards to be comprehensible and implementable. Over time, I think that'll work itself out.
There's plenty of precedent for it. Consider Max Euwe, who was the 5th World Champion of chess, and the amateur heavyweight boxing championship of Europe. (Although I don't think it was at the same time.) It may have contributed to his reputation as being one of the most sportsmanlike world champions — Max was always willing to wager his championship, while many other champions found plenty of excuses not to stake it.
It appears you don't understand his concern. Whatever YOUR goal is, it seems to enable what he's worried about - once you enable the ISPs & content owners (which are rapidly merging into being the same entities) control over what KIND of connection you can have - anonymous or not - they will always default to non-anonymous so they can control what you can access.
Perhaps I'm a little slow here, but I thought I'd addressed his concern: today's existing Internet doesn't go away. It exists in parallel with other (private) networks. You cannot make the situation inherently less anonymous by adding more options, as one can always eschew all other options to stick with the existing Internet. If the existing Internet doesn't change, then mathematically, anonymity is non-decreasing.
Is the concern that ISPs will stop providing access to the base Internet? Economically, that doesn't pass the laugh test. Any ISP that doesn't let you connect to the base Internet will be ridiculously uncompetitive. The only way this could happen is if a legislative solution is enforced. Picture the headline: "Congress votes to disconnect the USA from the Internet!"
One can argue that successful deployment of this sort of solution will change the existing Internet. For example, there is the potential to reduce the traffic load. E.g., if everybody migrates to a spam-free email network (which doesn't actually need an isolated network), the ROI on spam email will finally drop to the point where it largely ceases. With no SMTP traffic (legitimate or spam), it becomes a bit harder to hide your traffic in the background noise. It's even possible that eventually, years and years down the road, the existing Internet could become so undesirable to the typical consumer that people cease to subscribe. Then you might have a real concern, since oppressive regimes could assume that anyone still using it has something to hide. Personally, I doubt the existing Internet would ever come to that point without an equivalent replacement, although there's certainly a hint of "Laslo, I respect you but I graduated" to the discussion.
A larger concern is something you mentioned as a side point: ISPs and content providers are beginning to merge. A lot of the technical design is in place to provide incentives to entrepreneurs. But if an ISP decides to enter the market with a private network offering, they have an unfair competitive edge: they can use their own infrastructure at cost while charging outsiders a hefty fee. Fixing that detail probably takes a legislative solution. That's the sort of thing which really worries me, because it's hard to force a legislative solution against that sort of lobby.
You are the receiver. Your ISP is a carrier. You elect to connect to private networks, who may charge subscription fees of you. For use of the ISP's network, those same private network owners may pay for their provisioned capacity.
...what happens if my ISP decides - of its own free will or because Disney/Government forced it to - to deny anonymous inbound traffic? I don't have any choice of ISPs where I live, and of course they too would be forced to obey such laws.
This is possible, sure. Just as, today, the same lobbying group could attempt to force the government to mandate that your ISP sniff your every packet to detect that you're pirating Steamboat Willie. However, bear in mind that the goal is to add an economic incentive to the ISP to fight restrictions. The ISP wants to sell services to as many private network providers as possible because they are being paid for the reserved capacity. When the copyright cartel meets the ISP lobby in Congress, there's at least a chance that things could improve. As it stands, the only ISP incentive to fight it is the cost of the monitoring equipment, and I'm sure the copyright cartel would be thrilled to provide it to them, along with their own custom software....
...the rest of us are not allowed to keep our own anonymous network, because anonymity is a threat to those in power by making monitoring people harder. Please cease researching growth hormones for Big Brother, it's huge enough already.
Either I have not explained things adequately or you have misunderstood. The goal is to enable disruptive, innovative network technologies which cannot currently be deployed because they might conflict with the existing technologies. (For a particularly disruptive example, look at Decongestion Control [PDF].) There's no desire to block existing technologies, and I'd fully expect the existing Internet to continue alongside the new networks. Retaining the existing Internet is a primary goal of the research thrust, and I'd reject as unworkable any new architecture that didn't enable it.
Really, the most undesirable thing about the model is that it enables a lot more nickel-and-diming from the ISPs and the network providers. You might pay a base fee for ISP connectivity, followed by an additional fee for access to the base Internet, then you pay a fee to connect to the SpamFreeEmailNetwork, and so forth ad nauseum. But at least you only need to pay for the services you use, and I could see package deals (analogous to cable channel bundles) becoming a selling point, too.
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There's still the compulsory licensing option. Not a great option, but it works around your argument. Even if we take your MPAA argument to the logical extreme, they can't engage in total censorship at will. They can just make speaking expensive.
That's the point to good legal engineering: laws are written such that greedy self-interest tends to work toward the common good. It's a pity most laws aren't written that way....
The "hardline" is with respect to the 512(c) safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. That is, the "Neener neener, you can't sue our deep pockets" part. And in that, Google takes a very hard line indeed, since reinterpretations here could cost them tremendous amounts of money.
So if I'm reading this article right, it's actually about the MCR1 gene, which produces melanin in the skin and also interacts with the nervous system. That would imply a very strong correlation with redheads, since they usually don't produce melanin very well, but not a perfect one. Are they just using red hair as a high-correlation classifier for test subjects, when what they really care about is very pale skin?
Anecdotally, my wife has very red hair, but she also tans easily. (I'm the pale one.) Lithuanian and African-American ancestry interacted weirdly. I'd assume she has the normal MCR1 gene.
* No, I didn't have a real point. I'm just seizing the opportunity to brag about having a beautiful red-headed wife.
I'm in the same boat. Without a keyboard in front of me, I haven't the faintest clue what my passwords are. They typically look like line noise.
Back in '99, I took a month-long vacation and went backpacking for the duration. When I got back, I spend half a day trying to log back in before I had to give up and have everything reset. If they took away my laptop for a month, I doubt that I'd be able to comply with the hypothetical Judge's order.
I get similar performance after letting FF8 run too long, but my usage pattern is a poster child for the problems with memory and CPU bloat. I open lots of tabs, including Facebook and Gmail, and some heavy Javascript sites required by my job. I leave them open sometimes for days. My only plug-ins are noScript and the JRE. Under my usage pattern, FF often reaches a 400MB footprint.
Now add to that the fact that my home computer is a little MSI Wind U100. 1GB RAM, 1.6GHz Atom processor (2-stage pipeline), and the thrashing is unbearable. Eventually I have to give in and close / restart FF.
I credit most of my troubles to the heavy javascript sites, not FF. I suspect that Facebook in particular is caching massive amounts of data and actually claiming that it uses that memory. At some point I should compare to Chrome to find out, but that's a project from some day when I have the time.
That's what happened here in the USA. Remember, prohibition led to the rise of organized crime in the USA. When we repealed it, organized crime didn't go away - it turned to other illegal activities to survive. Rooting it out was a multi-decade process, still on-going, and a long way from complete. The situation isn't just analogous, it's almost identical: the Cartels have power, and they won't simply let it go. They'll try to hold onto it.
Close. Java doesn't allow implicit casts from int to boolean, even though they use the same data type in the JVM. The assignment "x=5" is also an expression returning the int 5, so that things like "x=y=5" will work. C/C++ treats all non-zero ints as the boolean value true, so "x=5" ==> "5" ==> true, so "if (x=5)" is "if (5)" is "if (true)".
In Java, that can't happen because 5 is an int, and the conditional expression must be a boolean. However, you can make this mistake in Java if you really want:
boolean a = true; ...; }
if (a = true) {
Not so. It's easy to get things back to Earth once you get out there. Sure, it's very expensive to get there, but so long as you're prepared to stay for a long time you can amortize over the mission.
The delta-V you'd need to hit a 3-5 years delivery window from the asteroid belt to Earth would be pretty small. There's a small matter of the delivery being, shall we say, postage due. Bit of an, er, impact on the wallet. Not to mention the neighborhood. But it would get there!
Ah, I see it. You're quite right, and I see the point. Using pure set cardinality leaves the probability undefined, but this gives a workaround. I'd have some difficult reading to prove whether the original assertion is correct under measure theory, but I suspect it is.
And here's the poison pill to demonstrate how far I missed the boat: the same arguments I used apply to something as simple as picking a number x from [0,2] and computing the probability that x < 1. Obviously that's 0.5, but the technique I outlined would claim it's undefined.
I'm so glad I don't claim to make my living as a mathematician!
I get the benefit that I can incorporate other GPL'd software without violating their licenses. I'm releasing my source code, which technically satisfies the GPL. But it's useless to everyone else. I assumed that the GPL dealt with this one, but maybe not....?
From a mathematical point of view, this isn't actually true (although it is intuitive). The probability that two arbitrary lines in 2D space will meet is undefined. Going back to basics, there are an unbounded number of possible lines. Without loss of generality, select y=0. (We don't lose generality because we can translate, rotate, and scale the plane to make any other selection equivalent to y=0.) Then the probability that the second line selected meets the first is defined as the number of lines which meet it divided by the universe of lines. Both sets are unbounded, so the probability is undefined (infinity / infinity).
If you'd like to resort to an argument based on transfinite numbers, I don't think it's valid. But it still undercuts the statement. It turns out that the two sets are of equivalent (transfinite) cardinality[1], so I suppose you could argue that the probability is still 1.0. But the same argument applies to arbitrary lines in 3D, 4D, or N-D space[2], so those are also 1.0.
Anybody see any problems there? I'm not a serious math geek, just a professor of computer science.
[1] The set of lines y=mx+b which don't meet y=0 are all pairs m=0, b!=0. The cardinality of that set is equal to the cardinality of the reals. The lines which do meet y=0 are everything else, and has cardinality equal to the set of all pairs of reals. It's fairly straightforward to show by, e.g., interleaving digits of our pair values, that there's an injective function from the pairs of reals to the reals. By inclusion, there's also an injective function from the singleton to the pairs. By the Cantor-Berstein-Schroeder Theorem, this means that a bijective function exists and the sets are of equivalent cardinality.
[2] Lines in N-D space are defined by a set of N real coefficients. We've already shown that the cardinality of the set of reals is equal to the cardinality of the set of pairs of reals. By induction on the number of coefficients, the cardinality of lines in N-D space is also the same as the cardinality of the reals.
This brings up a subtle point of the GPL which I've never researched. Does anybody know how the GPL handles the following hypothetical scenario?
Suppose I write software in a proprietary language. Using a non-free compiler, I can build binaries -- whether they're executables or some other source language, the GPL considers them binaries. If I release the source and the binaries under the GPL, but not the compiler, I presume that this doesn't suffice for the GPL. (Ignoring the fact that there's no copyright infringement if I'm the sole author.) People can't modify the source and build new versions because they don't have the compiler.
At the same time, we don't require GPL distributions to include everything you need to compile, or almost every package would need to include gcc.
Common sense implies that it's OK so long as the compiler is also freely available somewhere. Is there a clause to that effect in the GPL? I've never found it.
RMS is not infallible. Mind you, I think he's right in this case, but simple appeal to authority doesn't really prove anything.
Since I'm pretty sure RMS is right this time, I think the use of the discussion here is to provide education to those with flawed interpretations.
If I'm to be completely honest with myself, my gripe is that I believe that the cameras enforce the lights too precisely, with zero leeway. This forces me to be less safe as a driver. If I'm coming to a light and it turns yellow, sometimes I can see it's safer to scoot through it than to screech to a halt. With a camera, I'm a lot less willing to take the chance of a ticket. I should usually have enough time to make it on yellow, but we don't exactly publish the yellow light durations. A number of studies have shown that the yellow light durations are often much shorter than they should be.
It bothers me that I'm more likely to get a ticket by doing what I believe is safer.
On that topic, increased yellow durations are one of the few things which has been shown to reduce accidents with no real trade-offs. But that would require governance by people who actually look at real data and don't need the public to see them "doing something about XYZ problem."
A lot of people seem to want to scream about censorship, but they're missing the point. This is one of the best case scenarios I've seen in relations between companies and security researchers.
For those who can't be bothered to RTFA, here's a summary.
Researchers found a serious flaw. The company developed a fix. It turned out that the fix was flawed. The company told the researchers about the potential impact of giving the talk before the flaw was fixed, and the researchers voluntarily postponed the talk while a better fix is built.
That's it, and it looks like everybody did the best thing they could. Isn't this what we'd want Siemens to do? "You've got a right to give your talk, but we'd like you to postpone it. Here's why. Your call."
Unlikely. I doubt any of this screw-up will be admissible in the real case, as it is irrelevant to the matters under trial there.
What interests me is the results of the "oops" case. A lot of that depends on whether service was properly carried out. If so, then the $11m judgment will probably all go away, but it'll be difficult to get much in the way of sanctions or a successful countersuit. When served for a trial, you need to answer it! Absent a defendant, the judge acted properly. There are no disputed facts, so the plaintiff's assertions are more or less taken as gospel.
If service was improperly carried out, then sanctions are probable, and the judgment goes away instantly.
I remember what Prof. Alan Meltzer (Physics, RPI) said on the matter of using his own textbook. He made a personal point of never using a book he'd written. Either the book should cover everything he wanted the class to cover, and then his lecture is superfluous; or the lecture is necessary to supplement the book, and he wrote a poor book.
I'm not really sure I agree with him, since there's plenty of value in classroom examples which don't belong in a textbook. Nevertheless, the thought bears consideration.
1 April, 2040:
Three-digit Slashdot ID sells at auction for $240,000!
Now that's an interesting point. Let me ask you, what's the downside in software development? A good software developer should copy as much as possible — yes, legally, from good sources, etc. The whole point to code reuse is that one guy does it right and everyone can use that "best" solution instead of reinventing a slightly less round wheel.
I believe that a good programmer should feel a disincentive to create. That's something which took me years to learn as a young programmer. I've lost track of the number of times I wrote quick-n-dirty linked lists because that was less work than learning the interfaces to existing solutions. I was wrong, and eventually I figured it out. What's wrong with encouraging programmers to figure it out earlier?
I'm not advocating zero copyright for source code, but a greatly reduced term seems perfectly fine with me. Although there are some strong economics ideas that we don't even need copyright to have a thriving open source community. See, E.g., Michele Boldrin and David Levine's paper on Market Structure and Property Rights in Open Source Industries (PDF).
Are you thinking of the Nellie Bly case? Or did someone decide to try the experiment again?
I've never subscribed to that view. I see the situation as an unfortunate interaction of incentives. I believe that my (USA) legislators make laws to justify their positions. They have to be seen to be doing something, or we might vote for someone else next term. (Active looks better than passive to us voters, you'll never get elected on a platform of "I won't pass new laws.") The accumulation — nay, sedimentation! — of laws just stems from that. Meanwhile, law enforcement has learned that the best way to go after criminals is to stretch those laws to the fullest, and to use the latest and greatest ones which haven't been suitably narrowed by the courts. Since law enforcement is more familiar with the latest mess than the general population, that tends to work.
And, of course, a lot of law enforcement officers know a criminal when they see him. They're also usually right, but heaven help you if one decides that you're it.
If anybody knows a way to break that series of incentives that doesn't involve warm, fuzzy "just don't do that!" notions, I'd love to hear it. My persistent gripe with people who want to change the world is that they never seem to account for the fact that people will always tend to follow these sorts of incentives, or they will be replaced by those who will.
Fortunately, there's more incentive for computer standards to be comprehensible and implementable. Over time, I think that'll work itself out.
There's plenty of precedent for it. Consider Max Euwe, who was the 5th World Champion of chess, and the amateur heavyweight boxing championship of Europe. (Although I don't think it was at the same time.) It may have contributed to his reputation as being one of the most sportsmanlike world champions — Max was always willing to wager his championship, while many other champions found plenty of excuses not to stake it.
Perhaps I'm a little slow here, but I thought I'd addressed his concern: today's existing Internet doesn't go away. It exists in parallel with other (private) networks. You cannot make the situation inherently less anonymous by adding more options, as one can always eschew all other options to stick with the existing Internet. If the existing Internet doesn't change, then mathematically, anonymity is non-decreasing.
Is the concern that ISPs will stop providing access to the base Internet? Economically, that doesn't pass the laugh test. Any ISP that doesn't let you connect to the base Internet will be ridiculously uncompetitive. The only way this could happen is if a legislative solution is enforced. Picture the headline: "Congress votes to disconnect the USA from the Internet!"
One can argue that successful deployment of this sort of solution will change the existing Internet. For example, there is the potential to reduce the traffic load. E.g., if everybody migrates to a spam-free email network (which doesn't actually need an isolated network), the ROI on spam email will finally drop to the point where it largely ceases. With no SMTP traffic (legitimate or spam), it becomes a bit harder to hide your traffic in the background noise. It's even possible that eventually, years and years down the road, the existing Internet could become so undesirable to the typical consumer that people cease to subscribe. Then you might have a real concern, since oppressive regimes could assume that anyone still using it has something to hide. Personally, I doubt the existing Internet would ever come to that point without an equivalent replacement, although there's certainly a hint of "Laslo, I respect you but I graduated" to the discussion.
A larger concern is something you mentioned as a side point: ISPs and content providers are beginning to merge. A lot of the technical design is in place to provide incentives to entrepreneurs. But if an ISP decides to enter the market with a private network offering, they have an unfair competitive edge: they can use their own infrastructure at cost while charging outsiders a hefty fee. Fixing that detail probably takes a legislative solution. That's the sort of thing which really worries me, because it's hard to force a legislative solution against that sort of lobby.
You are the receiver. Your ISP is a carrier. You elect to connect to private networks, who may charge subscription fees of you. For use of the ISP's network, those same private network owners may pay for their provisioned capacity.
This is possible, sure. Just as, today, the same lobbying group could attempt to force the government to mandate that your ISP sniff your every packet to detect that you're pirating Steamboat Willie. However, bear in mind that the goal is to add an economic incentive to the ISP to fight restrictions. The ISP wants to sell services to as many private network providers as possible because they are being paid for the reserved capacity. When the copyright cartel meets the ISP lobby in Congress, there's at least a chance that things could improve. As it stands, the only ISP incentive to fight it is the cost of the monitoring equipment, and I'm sure the copyright cartel would be thrilled to provide it to them, along with their own custom software....
Either I have not explained things adequately or you have misunderstood. The goal is to enable disruptive, innovative network technologies which cannot currently be deployed because they might conflict with the existing technologies. (For a particularly disruptive example, look at Decongestion Control [PDF].) There's no desire to block existing technologies, and I'd fully expect the existing Internet to continue alongside the new networks. Retaining the existing Internet is a primary goal of the research thrust, and I'd reject as unworkable any new architecture that didn't enable it.
Really, the most undesirable thing about the model is that it enables a lot more nickel-and-diming from the ISPs and the network providers. You might pay a base fee for ISP connectivity, followed by an additional fee for access to the base Internet, then you pay a fee to connect to the SpamFreeEmailNetwork, and so forth ad nauseum. But at least you only need to pay for the services you use, and I could see package deals (analogous to cable channel bundles) becoming a selling point, too.