To be fair, that patent was eventually shot down, or so I heard. Basically the USPTO invalidated all of its claims, and then the holder just declined to pay the fees and it expired.
Still, whatever examiner passed it ought to be punished in some sort of humiliating way.
I have heard from a friend who is starting work as a patent examiner that they have totally revamped their recruitment and training programs. Now, instead of going through nominal 'welcome aboard' training and being shoved out onto the floor and told to start processing patents, there's like 8 or 9 months of training, following which you're basically an apprentice to somebody more senior (where they have to approve/rubberstamp your work) for a while.
There still seems to be some obvious issues, like the number of patents you process per day/week influences your promotions, so that there's an indirect reward for pushing more paper, but they do seem to be making some progress.
Still, I wouldn't mind seeing them drag out a Dunce cap for patents like that.
but off the top of my head I can't think of a case where an armed rebellion handed over power directly to a democracy.
Actually, there have been several. Including the one I'm living in (how did you forget that one?); I suppose you could make arguments about whether the American Revolution went directly into a democratic republic, but it didn't take that far of a detour, it just took a while to get going. I'd also argue that the French Revolution counts, in intent if not in results (at least immediately); Belgium in 1830 (established a constitutionally limited monarchy); there's also Portugal in 1974; and although it ultimately was crushed by the Soviets, Hungary in 1956 got pretty close (similarly in 1848, also fell to the Russians). I could probably think of a few others, but I'm tired.
Generally, I think the revolutions that don't turn into a democratic government usually happen that way because they weren't revolutions for democracy at all, rather they were revolutions against the old regime, without a real vision of the future to unite all the players involved. Thus, once the old ruler is deposed, squabbles break out and usually the strongest person is able to step in and take control. In contrast, revolutions where the goal from the beginning is democratic rule (and a necessary consequence of this is a sweeping-away of the old leadership), are much less likely to devolve into chaos or tyranny after they attain power. The problem is that it's hard to tell whether a revolution is really going for democracy until it's all over: everyone is going to claim that they want democracy, regardless of their true ambitions, thus it's pretty much a post facto distinction.
As for your other comments, I'm not sure I believe that it's equally easy to disperse an armed rebellion as it is to disperse a mass protest. The idea that an technologically superior military can simply roll over a partisan army is naive, as both the United States and Russia have discovered to their detriment at various times in recent history. Also, I think almost by definition, the sort of government you'd need to take up arms against and overthrow, wouldn't be one that's very interested in or swayed by a lot of unarmed people standing in the street. (It takes a lot more resources to fight a asymmetric, counter-guerilla war than it does to machine-gun a crowd; while the latter could be done by a few SS-types, the former requires that you have an army and literally wage war on your own people, which historically is a good way to sap your troops' morale and end up getting deposed by your own military.) Even if the immediate result is a government crackdown, this isn't necessarily a bad result: the institution of a curfew or other draconian measures are almost always a PR win for the guerillas/insurgents, and create ill will towards the government; I can think of situations where it might be strategically beneficial to provoke a crackdown for that reason alone.
But the real reason, and in my mind the most compelling one, behind retaining a well-armed populace is less because it would be useful against a tyrannical regime, but because it might make one less likely to occur. That is to say, when combined with other freedoms (as I mentioned in my earlier post; particularly the freedom of speech and assembly), an armed citizenry ought to be harder to oppress en masse, or at least act as a certain level of disincentive against it. In this respect the benefits are hard to quantify, but that's its purpose. It's a trump card of unknown value and worth on the side of the citizenry, a saber that is occasionally rattled but never used, but which a would-be dictator would have to contend with in their plans.
From an unrelated standpoint, I think the whole prevention-of-tyranny is only one of many perfectly good and compelling reasons to arm average people; so I'm not in any way saying that this is a sole justification. I find the self-defense and practicality arguments if anything more convincing, but they're not germane to this discussion really.
(Responding to an AC post which is fairly long; I will quote it at the end of my response rather than the beginning.)
Actually I agree with much of what you mentioned; I also think that the so-called `realist' school of foreign policy and realpolitik are shortsighted and will be treated unkindly by history, since they represent a selling-out of essential values in return for short-term gains, without consideration of the strategic and practical importance of those values. (Or at least underestimating them.)
Overall my general point in my post above was that there are more ways to suppress a revolution besides the balance of weapons: you can suppress a citizenry even if individuals have access to weapons (or access to things to create weapons, e.g. fertilizer bombs, etc.) by stifling communication and nipping dissent in the bud. That was obviously one component of the Saddam regime's stragegy, and a large one at that.
Whether Saddam was widely hated and whether the populace didn't revolt earlier because they didn't want to or didn't have the ability is a bit of an academic argument, and I will not attempt to argue one way or the other. At any rate, Saddam's carrots-and-sticks were enough to keep his people oppressed and in check for a number of years; whether that was more a result of the carrots or the sticks is probably very subjective. (I suspect that the average Sunni might answer that question differently than the average Shi'ite, also.) Not having lived in Iraq at that time, I certainly have no basis for forming a personal opinion.
In general, my point was just that you can to a great degree nullify the anti-tyrannical benefits of an armed populace by denying them the ability to organize and communicate, through surveillance, and through the rapid apprehension and execution of dissenters. People with guns are somewhat harder to push around than people without guns, but it's not impossible by any means. So if you are a person who is wary of ever living under the thumb of an oppressive regime, it is equally important to preserve your right to speak and assemble freely as it is to preserve your right to armament.
I think the answer there is because quite a few people didn't hate his government as much as we'd like to think they did.
No, that's not it at all. It's because Saddam with the help of other countries (like the USA, the French, China, Russia, and the British especially) was able to buy arms like chemical weapons, tanks, heavy arms, and also surveillance and communication technology to completely suppress his people and run a powerful police state. He ruled the military with an iron fist from the top down, hand picking and constantly micro-managing the military commanders, and even a whiff of insurrection led to executions. He had spies everywhere so no revolution could start because it would be snuffed out immediately. Many of our ancestors hated the British monarchy and Roman rule too, but it still took centuries and the discovery of a new continent before we could break free. Some people have this goofy notion revolutions are easy, that all it takes is revolutionary spirit or something, and have no concept of how repressive government can be. I think those people are clueless and have no appreciation of what they've got. Our revolution owes more to geography more than any "American Spirit" or such romanticism. If not for the inherent freedom an ocean of separation buys the American continent from old world powers we'd likely still be a British colony. Of course once we revolted it helped inspire other colonies to do likewise, call it the domino theory so to speak. But the people of Iraq were very poorly armed by comparison to the Iraqi military under Saddam, and he had far more forces under his control than the US has forces there now, not to mention the inherent advantage of native born troops and spies in dealing with insurrection. Having said that, ME despotism didn't happen by accident. Those same old world pow
I wonder if anyone has run feasibility studies on building datacenters in abandoned underground facilities? They're naturally temperature-controlled: anything more than a few feet down is going to hover around 40-50F, really the only problem you'd have is the possible humidity. But last time I saw specs on servers, they're fine to about 80% RH. You'd obviously have to be very careful about possible flooding issues if it was in an area prone to that, but overall I think you could make use of a lot of old industrial space, reduce or eliminate most cooling costs, and rent out aboveground space to other uses to reduce overhead.
It doesn't even have to be deep, salt-mine type underground: any old building with a sub-basement, or built partially into a hill with a basement, would do fine. There are quite a few old buildings in cities that were built with storage tunnels and cellars that would be suitable, built before the 'truss-and-curtainwall on concrete slab' style of industrial building had become the norm.
if you went to MS and said "We'd like to improve your OS for you", I think they'd jump at the chance, and they'd help you (help them) any way they could.
Do you think they'd still be game if I wanted to improve it by imprisoning all of their programmers and dumping the source code in the ocean?
Oh...you mean they have to think it's an improvement, too? Crud.
I'm certainly heartened to hear that the DRM mandate and broadcast flag have engendered enemies other than just the EFF and FSF -- not that I'm panning either organization in any way, but it's nice to see a more `mainstream' organization bringing the issue out of the technology closet.
Re:That's true, but...
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DRM and Democracy
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I think your example of Iraq is flawed in a number of ways. The question there is not `why didn't gun ownership topple his regime?' But `why wasn't his regime toppled, despite a populace that was relatively well-armed?'
I think the answer there is because quite a few people didn't hate his government as much as we'd like to think they did. Maybe they weren't real fond of it, but generally they didn't hate it enough to take to the streets and start shooting. People will deal with quite a lot of repression for their government, if it keeps the lights on most of the time and the water flowing and the gasoline cheap. Saddam did that, and outside of the Kurds I'm not sure if the general population was ever as rebellious as we here in the U.S. like to think they were.
Second, although I'm as big a proponent of gun ownership as anyone, the value of a single person with a gun is limited. Several people with guns is better, but still probably ineffectual in the long run. But a few thousand people with guns, acting in concert, is an army. So really, in order to make much use of your 2nd Amendment rights, you have to be able to exercise your 1st. It's the ability of people to talk and organize that makes them dangerous, particularly when they're armed.
Conversely, you can keep even an armed populace docile, if you can squash dissent early before it has a chance to grow, and you can keep people from talking about what's bothering them, and realizing that there are other people who feel the same way they do. I suspect Saddam's government operated this way quite effectively. Even if you have a gun, you're a lot less likely to do something by yourself than you are if you're standing with other people who share what you believe.
I very much doubt that the drafters of the Constitution ever thought that any one particular right would act as a check against tyranny by itself; rather, it's a combination of our rights: that of the press, of speech, of assembly, to bear arms, to not have soldiers in our homes, which together make it more difficult for a government to oppress the populace. Without any one of those, our position would be substantially weakened versus an oppressive regime; conversely none of those alone would be able to protect us.
That's true, but in most cases they're only in business because they give good service.
I remember when everyone switched from Yahoo to Google; it seemed like practically overnight everyone was using this new, white, funny-named search engine. They switched because Google gave better search results -- it seemed almost eerily good at turning up what you were looking for in the first few hits.
Despite Brin's protestations, I have no doubt that Google is in business to make money. They've made a lot of it, and they deserve to, because they do a lot of things well.
If somebody comes around who does stuff markedly better than them, then the public will leave Google out to dry.
Of course companies are there to make money: they'll provide whatever service is required to make the most money they can. As long as consumers vote with their business and give it to those delivering the best service, and there's competition in the market, they'll get it. It's when consumers either are apathetic about good service, or there's a limited field of competitors (and a high barrier to entry of new ones), or both, that you see really shitty service as a result.
for another the guy seems to completely ignore open formats which will remain so either by virtue of the GPL or by virtue of the lack of a DRM specification (such as MP3) in the standard. while major outlets may end up drm'ed to hell, there will always be a format allowing people to make an internet stream on their own.
This is true, but only if people can play back data that's been encoded into one of these free formats.
I don't think it's very hard to imagine a future where the most common playback device would only play music recorded in a proprietary format: as much as I like the iPod, it's pretty close. It plays MP3 (patent encumbered, although everyone just seems to ignore that), AAC (semi-proprietary, although documented, probably patent encumbered), and Apple Lossless (proprietary, not sure if it's open or not).
Right now we don't see this as much of a problem -- after all, anyone with iTunes can encode to any of these formats. So if I wanted to make a radio show and distribute it, easy enough. But that doesn't have to be the case: suppose the next-generation of CDs weren't easily rippable, or they just came pre-encoded in one of the proprietary formats. Then there would be no need for the average consumer to have an encoder. It would be like MPEG-2 was a few years ago: you could buy a lot of pre-encoded content, but making your own was a real bitch.
Suppose also that computers by default become incapable of running code that hasn't been signed by an approval authority. Even if somebody wrote a free encoded for the non-free formats (which would probably be illegal to import and use), most people probably wouldn't be able to run it. Similarly with decoders for the free formats.
The fact that formats like Ogg Vorbis or Xiph exist won't matter if 80% of the population doesn't have an easy way of listening to them. Alternatives like that will always exist for geeks and people interested in technology, but they're pretty far from mainstream. The majority of the population lives at the whims of whatever's available on the the mass market, and given that they're allowed to vote, it's worth keeping an eye on the situation there, even if you and I and all the other people reading this on Slashdot won't be directly impacted.
Actually the slide rule is fairly hard to understand. In some ways it's just as unintuitive as a computer.
You can teach any idiot to use a slide rule, and with a few tries they'll realize that it gives them the correct answers; likewise, you can teach someone how to type things into Mathematica and they'll shortly realize that the answers it gives are usually correct -- but in both cases you could easily spend a semester explaining how the machine gets the answers for them. In the case of the slide rule, you'd have to do a lot of explaining of logarithms, which are not fundamentally simple, especially if you really dig down and try to explain why it is that ln(x)+ln(y) = ln(x+y), and not just pass it off as some kind of self-evident truth.
Most people don't do that, though. They just accept that the tools work, and then use those tools to further the development of knowledge and more complex tools. You can use a slide rule to build a bridge, without really understanding why the side rule works. Likewise, you can use Mathematica to optimize the design of a car, without really understanding what goes on inside the computer.
If we ever as a culture / species lost the knowledge of what was going on inside the computer, then we'd have a real problem. But it's not inherently necessary for everyone to understand why their tools work, all the way down to fundamental principles: in fact it's probably better if everyone didn't have to spend years learning all that, because in the time saved they can learn other things, and use the tools to actually get work done.
We already have tools (microprocessors) that are so complex, no single person can comprehend the design completely. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as people together understand how the design was created (using other tools, I assume). Rather than trying to understand a 40-million-plus element device as the sum of its individual components, you just bundle it together as a single element, and use it in building bigger things.
So even if you developed computer programs that were capable of doing vast amounts of analysis with minimal imput, they'd never "outthink" people, because the next generation of humans, who grew up taking them for granted and appreciating them as 'black boxes' that they could manipulate, would find ways to stretch their limits.
In a way, our ability to assume away complexity and simply deal with things without really understanding them, is a great strength. It's what allows us to use almost ridiculously complex tools without being driven mad by them, and it's what will keep us from being overwhelmed, even as those tools become more and more advanced in the future.
I think there are other issues as well, namely that it's actually easier in a lot of cases to contribute to a project's code, than it is to its documentation.
If I want to modify the software itself, I can grab the latest version from CVS, make my changes, create a patch, and then submit that patch. Maybe it gets taken into the main tree, maybe it doesn't, but in either case there's a known workflow for contributing to the project.
With documentation, it's not so clear. Let's say I wanted to work on the documentation for my favorite project. What do I do? If there hasn't been anything created during development, it can be a pretty daunting task. I think this is why you see a lot of HOWTOs and FAQs, but no real solid documentation: it's very difficult for somebody, especially someone who doesn't read code, to walk into an OSS project and start writing docs. And even then, it's perceived by many as being a really thankless job, even compared to submitting patches into CVS.
I think the adoption of Wikis in some cases have improved the situation somewhat, because they let somebody go in and make a few changes or update the documentation, without feeling like they have to completely rewrite it (though they can), and it also makes the results widely accessible. However, there aren't that many projects with wikis, at least that I've seen so far.
There are a lot of people out there who are interested in OSS and want to make a contribution, but aren't programmers themselves. But there are a lot of people involved in OSS who seem to not really see a need for documentation, or appreciate the effort that's required in making it really good. As long as that's the dominant philosophy, I think you're going to be stuck with the status quo.
What I'd like to see is an agreement at least in principle that documentation is important, and for Wiki-like CMSes to be maintained alongside CVSes, from planning stages on forwards. I know that's a lot to ask of OSS programmers who are used to just sitting down in EMACS and whipping out some code, but I think the results would be worth the effort. There's a reason why commercial projects sometimes have more people working on documentation and specifications than they do on code, and it's not because they need the extra warm bodies to heat the building. It's because good specifications produce good software (in theory), and good documentation produces happy users.
I'd probably have uptime like that on an old home server I have sitting in a closet somewhere, unfortunately it reboots every time the power goes out and the UPS drains.
There ought to be some kind of metric for "software uptime," i.e. the delta between the uptime of your actual services (HTTP, SSH, whatever) and the uptime of the building's mains power / network connectivity, etc. I'm pretty sure quite a few servers I've worked on would be at 100%, or close to it.
Otherwise, any time I start seeing surveys like this, I start to wonder about how they've tried to normalize the variations in hardware setups, connection reliability, power service reliability, etc. I could probably get more uptime if I had a bigger UPS and paid for a better internet line, but it's not that important to me; I suspect even datacenter users eventually have to make a determination of how much they want to spend for that last "9" to the far right of the decimal place, and not everyone's decisions are going to be the same.
Saying that one has 20% more or less downtime than the other doesn't say anything about the absolute value of either one's up/down-time. Both of them could be terrible servers or both of them could be pulling four and five nines, we'd never know from that statement alone.
Trawling through data and pulling out correlations is only one part of science. It's an example of something that might be automatable. But there are many other things that cannot and will not ever be done mechanically -- unless you have a true AI.
There's too much creativity required in science, and creativity isn't something that's programmable. They also aren't naturally curious, and thus will never do any real `discovering' on their own. In short, they have no initiative; thus they will always be the spyglass, but never the explorer.
Regarding whether human error is an ``endearing'' quality, I think that's sort of like saying that the occasional error in a 17th-century astronomical table is endearing. While maybe to you it might have seemed that way, quite a few other people would have preferred the more-accurate versions produced when the first adding and calculating machines were invented. It's not always bad to remove humans from the equation.
Seems to me that you have to draw a line in the sand as to what's human and what's not, and stick to it.
Either you allow abortion, in which case what's being removed from a woman's body isn't human, and ought to be used for whatever research purposes she wants to release it to, or it's human, in which case abortion is murder and ought never to be allowed. Period.
I don't particularly care which way you go on the issue -- personally I fall into the first camp (actually I go further than that, I don't think `human life' in the abstract sense has any inherent value, only lives, but that's a whole different can of worms) -- but pick a side and stick to it. If you don't like the consequences, maybe you're on the wrong side of the argument.
You can't say on one hand that `abortion is ok, it's not human and thus not protected,' while still saying that it's an abomination to do research on those same bunches of material. In fact, while I can marginally accept the opposite view (embryo research is OK but abortion-on-demand is not), allowing abortion for social/personal reasons, where the result is that it just goes into a biohazard incinerator, but not research just seems hypocritial.
It's the same reason I don't like wishy-washy pro-lifers. If you're going to be against abortion, fine: be against abortion. I don't agree with you, but at least I can respect where you're coming from and that you're consistent about it. Personally, I don't really care about fetuses, and I'm more than willing to sacrifice as many of them as it takes, if it improves the lives of actual people who are already here (or prevents their lives from being adversely impacted, as might be the case of an unintended pregnancy). It's not as though they're exactly a non-renewable resource. If people start getting paid to donate zygotes, in the same way that they now donate sperm and eggs and blood and marrow, fine by me. As long as they know what it's being used for and do it voluntarily, more power to them.
So what took you so long Sergey? Why now? Why couldn't you see this was a bad idea from the start? Talk about coming to the party late!
Maybe because it looked like a really good business opportunity back then, and doesn't look so hot right about now? I think perhaps they underestimated the American public's (and more importantly, Congress') interest in the activities of our technology companies in being the enablers of oppression overseas.
You don't just wake up one morning and decide ``hey, remember when we decided to cooperate with an oppressive government overseas? That was really wrong, really fundamentally wrong. Wow, what was I thinking?'' If you actually had any morals, you would have realized that in the first place.
This smells of them realizing after the fact that they made a miscalculation, and now spinning it to look like their consciences came back from wintering in Bali and gave them a wake-up call. It's a nice PR move: they get to look like the moral darlings of the industry, and distance themselves from Yahoo/Microsoft/Cisco/etc., while probably retaining some stake in their former operations in China (run by a native company there, but under a different name).
This is just basic PR and spin-doctoring. They have people that do this for a living: Google apparently just has some very good ones.
People talk about Steve Jobs and Apple having a reality distortion field, but it's nothing compared to Google's. If this were any other company, people would be snorting their coffee all over their keyboards. But because it's Brin and Google, suddenly it becomes deadly serious. It shouldn't be: Google has as much moral authority as any other huge technology corporation, which is to say absolutely none. Whatever they're doing, it's because they think it'll be good for business over time. Maybe what's good for them right now corresponds to what you think of as `good' and `moral.' Congrats -- but don't think that if those two paths diverge, that they'll stay on the `good' one. People like moral corporations, but they like profitable ones better. `Good' and `profitable' are a marriage of convenience at best, and random coincidence at worst.
The Iraq was was "killing people and blowing stuff up." We do it every few years, and then watch reruns on the History Channel in between.
Iraq just happened to be convenient -- it's nice and flat, we have some pretty good maps from the last time we blew stuff up there, and the country's leadership was suitably unsympathetic. Plus they had a lot of nice rusty military equipment to shoot up. Way more impressive than bombing some cave.
In all frankness, I think the real reason we went into Iraq is because the war in Afghanistan didn't last long enough. Everyone was saying it was going to take a while, but in reality the whole place caved in like a house of cards within a few months. This was somewhat unsatisfactory to an American public who were really hoping to see a whole lot of brown-skinned people get the shit kicked out of them in retaliation for 9/11. (Note that an actual connection between 9/11 and aforementioned brown-skinned people not required, although if they're of the same religion as hijackers and also dislike the U.S., it helps.)
Now that we've vented our spleen to the tune of a few trillion bucks, played with our new toys and gotten our war heroes, we'll retreat back to Fortress America for a few years and bitch about the price of gas and how the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Then, a few years down the road when we've mostly forgotten all the bad parts, we'll start developing an itchy trigger finger again, and start looking for a new target.
Every generation has to have its war, lest it fail to stack up to the generation before; thus the ego of the United States is continually refreshed by the blood of foreigners in strange, far-away lands.
The reason the immigration grenade went off in the collective hands of the Republican party, is because the half of them that thought toughening up the laws would make a good campaign issue, evidently didn't consult the other half, who were all funding their campaigns with dollars donated by the agribusiness or construction lobbies. Oops.
Grenades work better when you can agree which direction you're going to throw it in before you pull the pin.
On the bright side, it made it abundantly clear who was actually listening to their constituency and who was listening to their donors, though. It's good to get an issue every once in a while that clarifies things like that.
That sounds suspiciously to me like the argument that a crooked, over-reaching legislator would make in order to justify sitting around and churning out reams of new laws, figuring every once in a while he could sneak something through without the public noticing until it was too late.
Where are these "activist judges" of which you speak? I haven't seen many; but the knee-jerk stupidity of Congress seems pretty much limitless.
If you broaden `copyright' to the entire concept of `intellectual property,' then I definitely agree with you. We're there already.
I've written about this before; we barely manufacture anything here in the U.S. anymore, and agriculture isn't exactly a growth sector. So what do we `make?' Content. Intellectual Property.
There are those who want to see the U.S. as the premier source and producer of intellectual property: music, movies, drug formulae, software, etc. Leaving aside that we've more or less shot our biomedical research programs in the foot (thanks, Mr. President) and now lag behind everyone and their cousin, there's a certain allure to the concept of an IP-exporting economy. It doesn't pollute, it doesn't drain non-replenishable resources, and there's a seemingly endless demand for the stuff.
But if you want to sell IP to the rest of the world, you have to make sure first that they're going to pay up and not just rip it off and sell it themselves. Thus, you see the groundwork being laid today: the ``harmonization'' of copyright and patent laws via international treaty is the key step in maintaining the status quo.
Music, movies, software, pharmaceuticals, and of course brands; these are the products of the economy that quite a few people think is going to drive America in the future, in terms of export goods.
While it's easy to laugh at the overreactions of the U.S. to what seem like pinpricks (I seriously doubt that AllOfMp3.com is going to put Time-Warner out of business), in order to really understand the motivations of some of the political players involved, you have to look at it from their perspective. From a certain point of view, the debate over intellectual property isn't just an academic or semantic one, it's a frightening -- perhaps almost apocalyptic -- one, because they feel that the future of our way of life depends on our ability to convert IP into an exportable good, over and over and over. Without that, it's just a long slide down from top dog to Third World, and if the situation were to ever get that desperate (or were to be perceived as being that desperate -- reality is only important insofar as it's widely perceived), it would easily be something worth going to war over, in both the physical and economic sense.
Can't think of a book that's about that per se, although I'm sure there have to be at least a few.
Just off of the top of my head, the concept was used in the Tad Williams series Otherland. This is probably a spoiler if you haven't read the books, but at some point near to the conclusion of the series it's revealed that the being at the core of the computer network (which is similar to Stephenson's Metaverse, but creepier), called the Other, is actually the mind of a kidnapped boy, whose brain was ripped out of his body and is kept alive in an orbiting communications satellite.
Maybe that's the one you're thinking of?
The scenario is also a fairly common straw man / thought-case in bioethics or philosophy classes (e.g., `is it more or less wrong to grow a brain in a jar than it would be to write a functional AI?'), as well as random academic arguments.
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To be fair, that patent was eventually shot down, or so I heard. Basically the USPTO invalidated all of its claims, and then the holder just declined to pay the fees and it expired.
Still, whatever examiner passed it ought to be punished in some sort of humiliating way.
I have heard from a friend who is starting work as a patent examiner that they have totally revamped their recruitment and training programs. Now, instead of going through nominal 'welcome aboard' training and being shoved out onto the floor and told to start processing patents, there's like 8 or 9 months of training, following which you're basically an apprentice to somebody more senior (where they have to approve/rubberstamp your work) for a while.
There still seems to be some obvious issues, like the number of patents you process per day/week influences your promotions, so that there's an indirect reward for pushing more paper, but they do seem to be making some progress.
Still, I wouldn't mind seeing them drag out a Dunce cap for patents like that.
send your grandma some oggs today.
I would, but the upstream bandwidth of my Ouiji board is capped too low.
Generally, I think the revolutions that don't turn into a democratic government usually happen that way because they weren't revolutions for democracy at all, rather they were revolutions against the old regime, without a real vision of the future to unite all the players involved. Thus, once the old ruler is deposed, squabbles break out and usually the strongest person is able to step in and take control. In contrast, revolutions where the goal from the beginning is democratic rule (and a necessary consequence of this is a sweeping-away of the old leadership), are much less likely to devolve into chaos or tyranny after they attain power. The problem is that it's hard to tell whether a revolution is really going for democracy until it's all over: everyone is going to claim that they want democracy, regardless of their true ambitions, thus it's pretty much a post facto distinction.
As for your other comments, I'm not sure I believe that it's equally easy to disperse an armed rebellion as it is to disperse a mass protest. The idea that an technologically superior military can simply roll over a partisan army is naive, as both the United States and Russia have discovered to their detriment at various times in recent history. Also, I think almost by definition, the sort of government you'd need to take up arms against and overthrow, wouldn't be one that's very interested in or swayed by a lot of unarmed people standing in the street. (It takes a lot more resources to fight a asymmetric, counter-guerilla war than it does to machine-gun a crowd; while the latter could be done by a few SS-types, the former requires that you have an army and literally wage war on your own people, which historically is a good way to sap your troops' morale and end up getting deposed by your own military.) Even if the immediate result is a government crackdown, this isn't necessarily a bad result: the institution of a curfew or other draconian measures are almost always a PR win for the guerillas/insurgents, and create ill will towards the government; I can think of situations where it might be strategically beneficial to provoke a crackdown for that reason alone.
But the real reason, and in my mind the most compelling one, behind retaining a well-armed populace is less because it would be useful against a tyrannical regime, but because it might make one less likely to occur. That is to say, when combined with other freedoms (as I mentioned in my earlier post; particularly the freedom of speech and assembly), an armed citizenry ought to be harder to oppress en masse, or at least act as a certain level of disincentive against it. In this respect the benefits are hard to quantify, but that's its purpose. It's a trump card of unknown value and worth on the side of the citizenry, a saber that is occasionally rattled but never used, but which a would-be dictator would have to contend with in their plans.
From an unrelated standpoint, I think the whole prevention-of-tyranny is only one of many perfectly good and compelling reasons to arm average people; so I'm not in any way saying that this is a sole justification. I find the self-defense and practicality arguments if anything more convincing, but they're not germane to this discussion really.
Actually I agree with much of what you mentioned; I also think that the so-called `realist' school of foreign policy and realpolitik are shortsighted and will be treated unkindly by history, since they represent a selling-out of essential values in return for short-term gains, without consideration of the strategic and practical importance of those values. (Or at least underestimating them.)
Overall my general point in my post above was that there are more ways to suppress a revolution besides the balance of weapons: you can suppress a citizenry even if individuals have access to weapons (or access to things to create weapons, e.g. fertilizer bombs, etc.) by stifling communication and nipping dissent in the bud. That was obviously one component of the Saddam regime's stragegy, and a large one at that.
Whether Saddam was widely hated and whether the populace didn't revolt earlier because they didn't want to or didn't have the ability is a bit of an academic argument, and I will not attempt to argue one way or the other. At any rate, Saddam's carrots-and-sticks were enough to keep his people oppressed and in check for a number of years; whether that was more a result of the carrots or the sticks is probably very subjective. (I suspect that the average Sunni might answer that question differently than the average Shi'ite, also.) Not having lived in Iraq at that time, I certainly have no basis for forming a personal opinion.
In general, my point was just that you can to a great degree nullify the anti-tyrannical benefits of an armed populace by denying them the ability to organize and communicate, through surveillance, and through the rapid apprehension and execution of dissenters. People with guns are somewhat harder to push around than people without guns, but it's not impossible by any means. So if you are a person who is wary of ever living under the thumb of an oppressive regime, it is equally important to preserve your right to speak and assemble freely as it is to preserve your right to armament.
I wonder if anyone has run feasibility studies on building datacenters in abandoned underground facilities? They're naturally temperature-controlled: anything more than a few feet down is going to hover around 40-50F, really the only problem you'd have is the possible humidity. But last time I saw specs on servers, they're fine to about 80% RH. You'd obviously have to be very careful about possible flooding issues if it was in an area prone to that, but overall I think you could make use of a lot of old industrial space, reduce or eliminate most cooling costs, and rent out aboveground space to other uses to reduce overhead.
It doesn't even have to be deep, salt-mine type underground: any old building with a sub-basement, or built partially into a hill with a basement, would do fine. There are quite a few old buildings in cities that were built with storage tunnels and cellars that would be suitable, built before the 'truss-and-curtainwall on concrete slab' style of industrial building had become the norm.
Oh...you mean they have to think it's an improvement, too? Crud.
I'm certainly heartened to hear that the DRM mandate and broadcast flag have engendered enemies other than just the EFF and FSF -- not that I'm panning either organization in any way, but it's nice to see a more `mainstream' organization bringing the issue out of the technology closet.
I think your example of Iraq is flawed in a number of ways. The question there is not `why didn't gun ownership topple his regime?' But `why wasn't his regime toppled, despite a populace that was relatively well-armed?'
I think the answer there is because quite a few people didn't hate his government as much as we'd like to think they did. Maybe they weren't real fond of it, but generally they didn't hate it enough to take to the streets and start shooting. People will deal with quite a lot of repression for their government, if it keeps the lights on most of the time and the water flowing and the gasoline cheap. Saddam did that, and outside of the Kurds I'm not sure if the general population was ever as rebellious as we here in the U.S. like to think they were.
Second, although I'm as big a proponent of gun ownership as anyone, the value of a single person with a gun is limited. Several people with guns is better, but still probably ineffectual in the long run. But a few thousand people with guns, acting in concert, is an army. So really, in order to make much use of your 2nd Amendment rights, you have to be able to exercise your 1st. It's the ability of people to talk and organize that makes them dangerous, particularly when they're armed.
Conversely, you can keep even an armed populace docile, if you can squash dissent early before it has a chance to grow, and you can keep people from talking about what's bothering them, and realizing that there are other people who feel the same way they do. I suspect Saddam's government operated this way quite effectively. Even if you have a gun, you're a lot less likely to do something by yourself than you are if you're standing with other people who share what you believe.
I very much doubt that the drafters of the Constitution ever thought that any one particular right would act as a check against tyranny by itself; rather, it's a combination of our rights: that of the press, of speech, of assembly, to bear arms, to not have soldiers in our homes, which together make it more difficult for a government to oppress the populace. Without any one of those, our position would be substantially weakened versus an oppressive regime; conversely none of those alone would be able to protect us.
That's true, but in most cases they're only in business because they give good service.
I remember when everyone switched from Yahoo to Google; it seemed like practically overnight everyone was using this new, white, funny-named search engine. They switched because Google gave better search results -- it seemed almost eerily good at turning up what you were looking for in the first few hits.
Despite Brin's protestations, I have no doubt that Google is in business to make money. They've made a lot of it, and they deserve to, because they do a lot of things well.
If somebody comes around who does stuff markedly better than them, then the public will leave Google out to dry.
Of course companies are there to make money: they'll provide whatever service is required to make the most money they can. As long as consumers vote with their business and give it to those delivering the best service, and there's competition in the market, they'll get it. It's when consumers either are apathetic about good service, or there's a limited field of competitors (and a high barrier to entry of new ones), or both, that you see really shitty service as a result.
for another the guy seems to completely ignore open formats which will remain so either by virtue of the GPL or by virtue of the lack of a DRM specification (such as MP3) in the standard. while major outlets may end up drm'ed to hell, there will always be a format allowing people to make an internet stream on their own.
This is true, but only if people can play back data that's been encoded into one of these free formats.
I don't think it's very hard to imagine a future where the most common playback device would only play music recorded in a proprietary format: as much as I like the iPod, it's pretty close. It plays MP3 (patent encumbered, although everyone just seems to ignore that), AAC (semi-proprietary, although documented, probably patent encumbered), and Apple Lossless (proprietary, not sure if it's open or not).
Right now we don't see this as much of a problem -- after all, anyone with iTunes can encode to any of these formats. So if I wanted to make a radio show and distribute it, easy enough. But that doesn't have to be the case: suppose the next-generation of CDs weren't easily rippable, or they just came pre-encoded in one of the proprietary formats. Then there would be no need for the average consumer to have an encoder. It would be like MPEG-2 was a few years ago: you could buy a lot of pre-encoded content, but making your own was a real bitch.
Suppose also that computers by default become incapable of running code that hasn't been signed by an approval authority. Even if somebody wrote a free encoded for the non-free formats (which would probably be illegal to import and use), most people probably wouldn't be able to run it. Similarly with decoders for the free formats.
The fact that formats like Ogg Vorbis or Xiph exist won't matter if 80% of the population doesn't have an easy way of listening to them. Alternatives like that will always exist for geeks and people interested in technology, but they're pretty far from mainstream. The majority of the population lives at the whims of whatever's available on the the mass market, and given that they're allowed to vote, it's worth keeping an eye on the situation there, even if you and I and all the other people reading this on Slashdot won't be directly impacted.
Actually the slide rule is fairly hard to understand. In some ways it's just as unintuitive as a computer.
You can teach any idiot to use a slide rule, and with a few tries they'll realize that it gives them the correct answers; likewise, you can teach someone how to type things into Mathematica and they'll shortly realize that the answers it gives are usually correct -- but in both cases you could easily spend a semester explaining how the machine gets the answers for them. In the case of the slide rule, you'd have to do a lot of explaining of logarithms, which are not fundamentally simple, especially if you really dig down and try to explain why it is that ln(x)+ln(y) = ln(x+y), and not just pass it off as some kind of self-evident truth.
Most people don't do that, though. They just accept that the tools work, and then use those tools to further the development of knowledge and more complex tools. You can use a slide rule to build a bridge, without really understanding why the side rule works. Likewise, you can use Mathematica to optimize the design of a car, without really understanding what goes on inside the computer.
If we ever as a culture / species lost the knowledge of what was going on inside the computer, then we'd have a real problem. But it's not inherently necessary for everyone to understand why their tools work, all the way down to fundamental principles: in fact it's probably better if everyone didn't have to spend years learning all that, because in the time saved they can learn other things, and use the tools to actually get work done.
We already have tools (microprocessors) that are so complex, no single person can comprehend the design completely. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as people together understand how the design was created (using other tools, I assume). Rather than trying to understand a 40-million-plus element device as the sum of its individual components, you just bundle it together as a single element, and use it in building bigger things.
So even if you developed computer programs that were capable of doing vast amounts of analysis with minimal imput, they'd never "outthink" people, because the next generation of humans, who grew up taking them for granted and appreciating them as 'black boxes' that they could manipulate, would find ways to stretch their limits.
In a way, our ability to assume away complexity and simply deal with things without really understanding them, is a great strength. It's what allows us to use almost ridiculously complex tools without being driven mad by them, and it's what will keep us from being overwhelmed, even as those tools become more and more advanced in the future.
I think there are other issues as well, namely that it's actually easier in a lot of cases to contribute to a project's code, than it is to its documentation.
If I want to modify the software itself, I can grab the latest version from CVS, make my changes, create a patch, and then submit that patch. Maybe it gets taken into the main tree, maybe it doesn't, but in either case there's a known workflow for contributing to the project.
With documentation, it's not so clear. Let's say I wanted to work on the documentation for my favorite project. What do I do? If there hasn't been anything created during development, it can be a pretty daunting task. I think this is why you see a lot of HOWTOs and FAQs, but no real solid documentation: it's very difficult for somebody, especially someone who doesn't read code, to walk into an OSS project and start writing docs. And even then, it's perceived by many as being a really thankless job, even compared to submitting patches into CVS.
I think the adoption of Wikis in some cases have improved the situation somewhat, because they let somebody go in and make a few changes or update the documentation, without feeling like they have to completely rewrite it (though they can), and it also makes the results widely accessible. However, there aren't that many projects with wikis, at least that I've seen so far.
There are a lot of people out there who are interested in OSS and want to make a contribution, but aren't programmers themselves. But there are a lot of people involved in OSS who seem to not really see a need for documentation, or appreciate the effort that's required in making it really good. As long as that's the dominant philosophy, I think you're going to be stuck with the status quo.
What I'd like to see is an agreement at least in principle that documentation is important, and for Wiki-like CMSes to be maintained alongside CVSes, from planning stages on forwards. I know that's a lot to ask of OSS programmers who are used to just sitting down in EMACS and whipping out some code, but I think the results would be worth the effort. There's a reason why commercial projects sometimes have more people working on documentation and specifications than they do on code, and it's not because they need the extra warm bodies to heat the building. It's because good specifications produce good software (in theory), and good documentation produces happy users.
I'd probably have uptime like that on an old home server I have sitting in a closet somewhere, unfortunately it reboots every time the power goes out and the UPS drains.
There ought to be some kind of metric for "software uptime," i.e. the delta between the uptime of your actual services (HTTP, SSH, whatever) and the uptime of the building's mains power / network connectivity, etc. I'm pretty sure quite a few servers I've worked on would be at 100%, or close to it.
Otherwise, any time I start seeing surveys like this, I start to wonder about how they've tried to normalize the variations in hardware setups, connection reliability, power service reliability, etc. I could probably get more uptime if I had a bigger UPS and paid for a better internet line, but it's not that important to me; I suspect even datacenter users eventually have to make a determination of how much they want to spend for that last "9" to the far right of the decimal place, and not everyone's decisions are going to be the same.
Yep, I think you hit the nail on the head.
Saying that one has 20% more or less downtime than the other doesn't say anything about the absolute value of either one's up/down-time. Both of them could be terrible servers or both of them could be pulling four and five nines, we'd never know from that statement alone.
Can't happen.
Trawling through data and pulling out correlations is only one part of science. It's an example of something that might be automatable. But there are many other things that cannot and will not ever be done mechanically -- unless you have a true AI.
There's too much creativity required in science, and creativity isn't something that's programmable. They also aren't naturally curious, and thus will never do any real `discovering' on their own. In short, they have no initiative; thus they will always be the spyglass, but never the explorer.
Regarding whether human error is an ``endearing'' quality, I think that's sort of like saying that the occasional error in a 17th-century astronomical table is endearing. While maybe to you it might have seemed that way, quite a few other people would have preferred the more-accurate versions produced when the first adding and calculating machines were invented. It's not always bad to remove humans from the equation.
Seems to me that you have to draw a line in the sand as to what's human and what's not, and stick to it.
Either you allow abortion, in which case what's being removed from a woman's body isn't human, and ought to be used for whatever research purposes she wants to release it to, or it's human, in which case abortion is murder and ought never to be allowed. Period.
I don't particularly care which way you go on the issue -- personally I fall into the first camp (actually I go further than that, I don't think `human life' in the abstract sense has any inherent value, only lives, but that's a whole different can of worms) -- but pick a side and stick to it. If you don't like the consequences, maybe you're on the wrong side of the argument.
You can't say on one hand that `abortion is ok, it's not human and thus not protected,' while still saying that it's an abomination to do research on those same bunches of material. In fact, while I can marginally accept the opposite view (embryo research is OK but abortion-on-demand is not), allowing abortion for social/personal reasons, where the result is that it just goes into a biohazard incinerator, but not research just seems hypocritial.
It's the same reason I don't like wishy-washy pro-lifers. If you're going to be against abortion, fine: be against abortion. I don't agree with you, but at least I can respect where you're coming from and that you're consistent about it. Personally, I don't really care about fetuses, and I'm more than willing to sacrifice as many of them as it takes, if it improves the lives of actual people who are already here (or prevents their lives from being adversely impacted, as might be the case of an unintended pregnancy). It's not as though they're exactly a non-renewable resource. If people start getting paid to donate zygotes, in the same way that they now donate sperm and eggs and blood and marrow, fine by me. As long as they know what it's being used for and do it voluntarily, more power to them.
You don't just wake up one morning and decide ``hey, remember when we decided to cooperate with an oppressive government overseas? That was really wrong, really fundamentally wrong. Wow, what was I thinking?'' If you actually had any morals, you would have realized that in the first place.
This smells of them realizing after the fact that they made a miscalculation, and now spinning it to look like their consciences came back from wintering in Bali and gave them a wake-up call. It's a nice PR move: they get to look like the moral darlings of the industry, and distance themselves from Yahoo/Microsoft/Cisco/etc., while probably retaining some stake in their former operations in China (run by a native company there, but under a different name).
This is just basic PR and spin-doctoring. They have people that do this for a living: Google apparently just has some very good ones.
People talk about Steve Jobs and Apple having a reality distortion field, but it's nothing compared to Google's. If this were any other company, people would be snorting their coffee all over their keyboards. But because it's Brin and Google, suddenly it becomes deadly serious. It shouldn't be: Google has as much moral authority as any other huge technology corporation, which is to say absolutely none. Whatever they're doing, it's because they think it'll be good for business over time. Maybe what's good for them right now corresponds to what you think of as `good' and `moral.' Congrats -- but don't think that if those two paths diverge, that they'll stay on the `good' one. People like moral corporations, but they like profitable ones better. `Good' and `profitable' are a marriage of convenience at best, and random coincidence at worst.
The Iraq was was "killing people and blowing stuff up." We do it every few years, and then watch reruns on the History Channel in between.
Iraq just happened to be convenient -- it's nice and flat, we have some pretty good maps from the last time we blew stuff up there, and the country's leadership was suitably unsympathetic. Plus they had a lot of nice rusty military equipment to shoot up. Way more impressive than bombing some cave.
In all frankness, I think the real reason we went into Iraq is because the war in Afghanistan didn't last long enough. Everyone was saying it was going to take a while, but in reality the whole place caved in like a house of cards within a few months. This was somewhat unsatisfactory to an American public who were really hoping to see a whole lot of brown-skinned people get the shit kicked out of them in retaliation for 9/11. (Note that an actual connection between 9/11 and aforementioned brown-skinned people not required, although if they're of the same religion as hijackers and also dislike the U.S., it helps.)
Now that we've vented our spleen to the tune of a few trillion bucks, played with our new toys and gotten our war heroes, we'll retreat back to Fortress America for a few years and bitch about the price of gas and how the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Then, a few years down the road when we've mostly forgotten all the bad parts, we'll start developing an itchy trigger finger again, and start looking for a new target.
Every generation has to have its war, lest it fail to stack up to the generation before; thus the ego of the United States is continually refreshed by the blood of foreigners in strange, far-away lands.
The reason the immigration grenade went off in the collective hands of the Republican party, is because the half of them that thought toughening up the laws would make a good campaign issue, evidently didn't consult the other half, who were all funding their campaigns with dollars donated by the agribusiness or construction lobbies. Oops.
Grenades work better when you can agree which direction you're going to throw it in before you pull the pin.
On the bright side, it made it abundantly clear who was actually listening to their constituency and who was listening to their donors, though. It's good to get an issue every once in a while that clarifies things like that.
That sounds suspiciously to me like the argument that a crooked, over-reaching legislator would make in order to justify sitting around and churning out reams of new laws, figuring every once in a while he could sneak something through without the public noticing until it was too late.
Where are these "activist judges" of which you speak? I haven't seen many; but the knee-jerk stupidity of Congress seems pretty much limitless.
Sure, but you have to have it tattooed on your left ass cheek.
User-agent: worm
Disallow: *
If you broaden `copyright' to the entire concept of `intellectual property,' then I definitely agree with you. We're there already.
I've written about this before; we barely manufacture anything here in the U.S. anymore, and agriculture isn't exactly a growth sector. So what do we `make?' Content. Intellectual Property.
There are those who want to see the U.S. as the premier source and producer of intellectual property: music, movies, drug formulae, software, etc. Leaving aside that we've more or less shot our biomedical research programs in the foot (thanks, Mr. President) and now lag behind everyone and their cousin, there's a certain allure to the concept of an IP-exporting economy. It doesn't pollute, it doesn't drain non-replenishable resources, and there's a seemingly endless demand for the stuff.
But if you want to sell IP to the rest of the world, you have to make sure first that they're going to pay up and not just rip it off and sell it themselves. Thus, you see the groundwork being laid today: the ``harmonization'' of copyright and patent laws via international treaty is the key step in maintaining the status quo.
Music, movies, software, pharmaceuticals, and of course brands; these are the products of the economy that quite a few people think is going to drive America in the future, in terms of export goods.
While it's easy to laugh at the overreactions of the U.S. to what seem like pinpricks (I seriously doubt that AllOfMp3.com is going to put Time-Warner out of business), in order to really understand the motivations of some of the political players involved, you have to look at it from their perspective. From a certain point of view, the debate over intellectual property isn't just an academic or semantic one, it's a frightening -- perhaps almost apocalyptic -- one, because they feel that the future of our way of life depends on our ability to convert IP into an exportable good, over and over and over. Without that, it's just a long slide down from top dog to Third World, and if the situation were to ever get that desperate (or were to be perceived as being that desperate -- reality is only important insofar as it's widely perceived), it would easily be something worth going to war over, in both the physical and economic sense.
Can't think of a book that's about that per se, although I'm sure there have to be at least a few.
Just off of the top of my head, the concept was used in the Tad Williams series Otherland. This is probably a spoiler if you haven't read the books, but at some point near to the conclusion of the series it's revealed that the being at the core of the computer network (which is similar to Stephenson's Metaverse, but creepier), called the Other, is actually the mind of a kidnapped boy, whose brain was ripped out of his body and is kept alive in an orbiting communications satellite.
Maybe that's the one you're thinking of?
The scenario is also a fairly common straw man / thought-case in bioethics or philosophy classes (e.g., `is it more or less wrong to grow a brain in a jar than it would be to write a functional AI?'), as well as random academic arguments.
How do you think they're going to pay those iBiquity licensing fees?