Yugoslavia had a popularly elected president, and look what happened. An electoral college might have prevented that, because under an electoral college, a pro-serb platform would not have been a winning platform.
The college is helpful when you have geographically distinct voting blocs with very different interests, a situation which any glance at the electoral map will tell you exists in the U.S. today almost as much as it did 220 years ago.
In Illinois, you must write both the presidential and vice-presidential candidates down on your write-in to make a valid write-in vote. Thus, merely writing Nader's name down without his running-mate's will not work.
The electoral college is a heart a statement that when the popular vote is very close, breadth of appeal should be taken into consideration in addition to the popular vote.
At present, 52% of the U.S. populace lives in metro areas of 1 million people or more. To throw out the electoral college makes campaigning on the issues of big cities, at the expense of the rest of the country, could be a victory-earning campaign strategy. With the college, it becomes suicidal.
Or to give a historical example, had Yugoslavia had an electoral college, campaigning for the presidency on a pro-Serb platform would not have been a winning strategy.
Quickly developing documentation in an environment where a large number of users collectively know everything that needs to be known, but it is not exactly clear who knows what, and no single user knows exactly where to begin with documenting what they know.
The wiki helps in this situation by
(1) being a central depository of knowledge
(2) directing creativity: you don't know what other people might find useful of your store of knowledge, but then someone else starts writing about it.
(3) killing self-consciousness over style: the wiki is inherently inconsistent in style, without a clear starting point or index. This has its drawbacks, but also has the advantage that new contributions can be written without regard to the grand scheme of things.
I think the wiki model is great in the size range where the user community is too large to efficiently shout across to the next cubicle to the answer for your question, but too small to cost-effectively document everything in some formal fashion.
Eldred v. Ashcroft started out as Hart v. Reno. To make a long story short, Michael Hart didn't like working with Lawrence Lessig and dropped out of the case, so Eric Eldred stepped up as lead plaintiff. Back then, Eric was pumping a rather large volume of 19th c. American novels through Distributed Proofreaders. Haven't seen much action from his quarter lately, though.
Right now, the CEO of Project Gutenberg is Greg Newby. His response on the gutvol-d discussion list said that they have received letters like this in the past, replied to them, and so far, none have had serious consequences. Though the Margaret Mitchell estate has shown itself to be more litigous than most.
Heck, I remember a word processor with predictive completion in shareware catalogs ca. 1985 or so. Don't remember its name, but, *sigh* another user-interface gem delayed for years by monopolist hegemonies. ~~~~
One method of discouraging this strategy would be to run the tournament based on a ladder system rather than a round robin: the slaves fall to the bottom, where they will never interact with the masters again.
Russia joining Kyoto is a bit of a joke, because its quotas are based on its pollution levels during the Soviet era. It meets its quotas by bringing its fuel economy up to par, and then has enough headspace left over to sell energy to eastern Europe and Germany. Russia is Kyoto's loophole: it allows Europe to meet quotas in part by redistributing production instead of reducing it.
on the flip side, we can't just eliminate the 1976 changes becase GNU DEPENDS on them. Otherwise getting offical copyrights for OSS would be prohibitvily time-consuming and expensive.
I think your implication is that GPL'd software depends on the provision of the Berne-compliant copyright law that copyright is inherent in the creation of the work, rather than requiring registration. But if that is what GPL-released software is depending on, it may be difficult to actually recover damages for infringement, because (at least in the U.S.), infringement suits for registered and unregistered copyrights are very different.
For a registered copyright, the plaintiff may pursue either actual damages (what the infringer made off the work plus what you lost) or statutory damages, which at the court's discretion may range up to $100,000. In addition, the court may, at its discretion, charge the infringer with the plaintiff's legal fees.
For an unregistered copyright, the plaintiff may recover only actual damages, which might be quite small and difficult to compute in either case, and legal fees are unrecoverable. So, while a copyright need not be registered to exist, in many cases it needs to be registered to be worth enforcing.
The U.S. copyright registration fee is only $20, and anyone who releases software under the GPL would be wise to pay it.
'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable
Actually, common-law jurisprudence says no. In real estate law, there are statutes governing adverse possession, wherein a party that has continuously used land as if they owned it for a period of time may obtain title to the land, regardless of any previously existing title. The traditional justifications are that land use is better than land disuse, and that otherwise it can become prohibitively troublesome to discover the title holder of a piece of land that has undergone many changes of title, some of which may or may not have been entirely legal.
Given the lengths of copyright terms, the poor documentation of copyright transfers, and the tendency of most copyrighted works to fall out of use after a very brief time (journalism providing an extreme example), it requires no new thought to see where similar statutes might benefit copyright law.
If only it were easy to define when a copyrighted work is no longer in use.
However, the converse, "substantial infringing use," which is the thinking behind the INDUCE act, would also be invalid in his reasoning, because no recording/copying device could ever pass that test.
The fair use doctrine, as traditionally interpreted, makes laws governing the legality / illegality of devices based on their capabilities rather troublesome in the U.S., because almost any device that can be used for exercising fair use can also be used for infringment. In many cases, the only difference between fair uses and infringing uses are intent and scale, and technological measures are particularly ill-suited for judging these things.
In former times, jurisprudence seemed to think the correct approach was to enable infringement in order to enable fair use, and to punish those who actually do infringe in the courts. The alternative approach, to disable fair use in order to disable infringement, has been the experiment of the past decade. Its track record to date has been less than stellar.
And then there was the Superbowl Las Vegas lost millions on. The books opened with Pittsburgh as a 3.5 point favorite, and many people bet on the Steelers at this level. In response, the line moved up to 4, and then 4.5, at which point the bets for Dallas started coming in. In the end, Pittsburgh won by 4, and something like 80% of the bets that were placed on the game were winners.
But a human being misclassifies email, too. An email from an unknown recipient with a plausibly spammish subject line may never be opened because it "looks like" spam. Or an email may just happen to get caught in the "delete-delete-delete" cycle. Rejecting 1 in 25,000 legitimate emails in order to throw out, say, 90% of the spam may actually increase the number of legitimate emails that reach the recipient because with fewer spams sitting in the inbox, they are likely to be more careful with their manual spam filtering.
Someone should forward this to the folks running Kahle v. Ashcroft. This is exactly the sort of phenomena that would support their claim that changing from the old "Only works that are registered / renewed are copyright" regime to the Berne convention "Copyright is inherent in the work's creation" regime "fundamentally changed the landscape of free speech" in a way that warranted constitutional review.
I think we can all safely assume that aliens will prefer peanut-butter M&Ms over regular M&Ms or Reeces
I fear that the aliens will have difficulty comprehending the cultural distinctions beteween the various English-speaking peoples and produce the Vegemite M&M.
Under the usual setup for single-photon data transmission, only half the bits sent do any useful communicating. Both the sender and the receiver have to choose between one of two measurements to make on the bits; if they make the same measurement, they get the same answer, and so have usefully communicated a bit. If they make opposite measurements, they don't have comparable data, and so have communicated nothing. So Alice measures some photons and sends them to Bob, who also measures them. Afterwards, they tell each other what measurements they made (but not what answers they got) over an open channel, and so they know what secret info they both share without ever broadcasting that info.
Now, if we introduce a man in the middle, the middleman doesn't know what measurements to make on the quantum channel. He can do what Alice and Bob do, which is guess randomly, but every time he guesses wrong, he destroys a bit of information. So, he only gets half the quantum channel from Alice, and so can send only a quarter of the info to Bob.
The tampering will become immediately apparent aftwerwards, if Alice and Bob compare a fraction of their shared secret and find that they didn't actually get the same answer when they made the same measurement. This is patent evidence that they have been evesdropped, and so they then throw all their bits away.
The method isn't actually useful for sending messages, so the fact that the middleman intercepted part of the message is irrelevant. It's a method for creating a shared secret, which can then be used for communicating the actual message. A middleman cannot acquire the shared secret without leaving evidence that the secret is more widely shared than believed, and so the secret can be rejected as the basis for sharing sensitive data before that sensitive data is actually shared.
Yes and no. For a long time, recording technology led playback technology by a significant margin. The old cylinders and discs contain a lot of sound quality that contemporary listeners couldn't appreciate. As playback devices have improved, so has the quality of the sound produced from playing back the same physical medium. So if we extract a high-fidelity signal from the medium, and you want to appreciate the low-fidelity playback that your grandfather did, it would be perfectly authentic to have your computer overlay an external noise track on the music; it would be a perfectly analagous process to what the phonograph did when it played back a track!
The last two times I tried OpenOffice, I went back to MS Office. My experience was that many of the decisions that were made in the name of cross-platform compatibility hurt my ability to use the software productively. For example, many functions I was used to accessing through hotkeys in MS Office I found were available only through (rather deep) menu trees in Open Office. The one that caused me the most grief was "Fill down" in a spreadsheet being a menu-only function!
Can someone say that things are better now, or do I still have to macro around such frustrations, or what?
Why should you believe the PG2 website when they say they are affiliated with PG? If you are going to infringe a trademark, why not also lie about your relationship with the rightful owner of that mark?
The legalese on the PG texts says that if you are going to redistribute the texts commercially, you must either
(1) Strip the PG header from the text, thereby removing all traces of PG's role in preparing the text you are distributing.
or
(2) Leave the PG header exactly as it is, and pay PG a royalty.
Lots of commercial ebook ventures use the PG library, and for obvious reasons, most choose option 1. The annoying thing about this venture is that it wants to use the PG name.
I'd like to think that "immortals" would be ever-willing to start over, but I'm afraid I'm not that optimistic. In a society of competitive immortals, once you've achieved position, I don't think you can afford to start over.
Consider the first generation of immortals, who find themselves at the top of the spectrum of achievement in business, government, academia, etc., and for the first time in human history, do not feel their impending removal from that position. For them, starting over means leaving those ranks and attempting to re-enter them from among the second generation of immortals.
For the second generation, achieving position is for the first time not merely a matter of being preeminent among your peers, and therefore in position to take the place of the current crop of leaders as they die. To achieve position, one must either out-perform the experienced leaders of a field or create a field from whole cloth. Achievement among the second generation requires not merely ability, but true genius.
The second generation then, may be even more conservative than the first. Starting over for them means "throwing away" not just the few years of one's education, but indeed decades of experience trying to break into the ranks of position and prestige, with no surety that one will be able to do it a second time.
Besides, the 4-8 years mentioned as today's retooling time I think is intimately linked to a human lifetime. If an education today cost instead 8-12 years, I think dramatically fewer people would pursue it. In the immortal society, what's to prevent the act of retooling to swell to decades until the number of people willing to go through the effort to enter a field once again falls to the "room" in that field?
Maybe not its death, but I have a feeling that immortality will be the last scientific revolution. Most of the time, the acceptance of revolutionary scientific ideas has occurred through the death and retirement of those who were invested in previous ideas.
And this doesn't just apply to science. Immortality can be counted on bringing about the stagnation of most aspects of society. I mean now, things change as those who are invested in the way things are die off, but when they can't be counted on dying off, progress must happen rather more slowly.
OK... Just because IBM is out for profit doesn't mean their profit-seeking will hurt Linux. One of the more successful business strategies in the technology world has been to make your product's complemenents ubiquitous, inexpensive commodities.
IBM's products are enterprise-level hardware and technology consulting. If enterprise-level software is more available, the demand for both of these increases. Therefore, it is in IBM's interest to make a high-quality operating system ubiquitous and inexpensive.
It so happens that they have chosen to do so through Linux. The plan is make profit by selling hardware that runs Linux and consulting services for systems that run Linux. At no point is it in IBM's interest to hinder the development or adoption of Linux, since doing so only decreases their potential market.
(Microsoft did a similar thing with the PC. By licensing DOS to IBM in a non-exclusive fashion, they left the door open for cloned PC's to run the same operating system, and therefore look and feel the same to the user. And when the PC became a commidity piece of hardware, Microsoft profited. However, their doing so was not a bad thing for the PC in a hardware sense, nor could they have any possible profit-motive in restricting the spread of the PC.)
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Yugoslavia had a popularly elected president, and look what happened. An electoral college might have prevented that, because under an electoral college, a pro-serb platform would not have been a winning platform. The college is helpful when you have geographically distinct voting blocs with very different interests, a situation which any glance at the electoral map will tell you exists in the U.S. today almost as much as it did 220 years ago.
In Illinois, you must write both the presidential and vice-presidential candidates down on your write-in to make a valid write-in vote. Thus, merely writing Nader's name down without his running-mate's will not work.
The electoral college is a heart a statement that when the popular vote is very close, breadth of appeal should be taken into consideration in addition to the popular vote.
At present, 52% of the U.S. populace lives in metro areas of 1 million people or more. To throw out the electoral college makes campaigning on the issues of big cities, at the expense of the rest of the country, could be a victory-earning campaign strategy. With the college, it becomes suicidal.
Or to give a historical example, had Yugoslavia had an electoral college, campaigning for the presidency on a pro-Serb platform would not have been a winning strategy.
Quickly developing documentation in an environment where a large number of users collectively know everything that needs to be known, but it is not exactly clear who knows what, and no single user knows exactly where to begin with documenting what they know. The wiki helps in this situation by (1) being a central depository of knowledge (2) directing creativity: you don't know what other people might find useful of your store of knowledge, but then someone else starts writing about it. (3) killing self-consciousness over style: the wiki is inherently inconsistent in style, without a clear starting point or index. This has its drawbacks, but also has the advantage that new contributions can be written without regard to the grand scheme of things. I think the wiki model is great in the size range where the user community is too large to efficiently shout across to the next cubicle to the answer for your question, but too small to cost-effectively document everything in some formal fashion.
In Soviet Russia, any wiki can freely edit you!
Short piers in Oklahoma ... suddenly I don't feel so bad about the stereotypical American's lack of overseas geography knowledge.
Eldred v. Ashcroft started out as Hart v. Reno. To make a long story short, Michael Hart didn't like working with Lawrence Lessig and dropped out of the case, so Eric Eldred stepped up as lead plaintiff. Back then, Eric was pumping a rather large volume of 19th c. American novels through Distributed Proofreaders. Haven't seen much action from his quarter lately, though.
Right now, the CEO of Project Gutenberg is Greg Newby. His response on the gutvol-d discussion list said that they have received letters like this in the past, replied to them, and so far, none have had serious consequences. Though the Margaret Mitchell estate has shown itself to be more litigous than most.
Heck, I remember a word processor with predictive completion in shareware catalogs ca. 1985 or so. Don't remember its name, but, *sigh* another user-interface gem delayed for years by monopolist hegemonies. ~~~~
One method of discouraging this strategy would be to run the tournament based on a ladder system rather than a round robin: the slaves fall to the bottom, where they will never interact with the masters again.
Russia joining Kyoto is a bit of a joke, because its quotas are based on its pollution levels during the Soviet era. It meets its quotas by bringing its fuel economy up to par, and then has enough headspace left over to sell energy to eastern Europe and Germany. Russia is Kyoto's loophole: it allows Europe to meet quotas in part by redistributing production instead of reducing it.
I think your implication is that GPL'd software depends on the provision of the Berne-compliant copyright law that copyright is inherent in the creation of the work, rather than requiring registration. But if that is what GPL-released software is depending on, it may be difficult to actually recover damages for infringement, because (at least in the U.S.), infringement suits for registered and unregistered copyrights are very different.
For a registered copyright, the plaintiff may pursue either actual damages (what the infringer made off the work plus what you lost) or statutory damages, which at the court's discretion may range up to $100,000. In addition, the court may, at its discretion, charge the infringer with the plaintiff's legal fees.
For an unregistered copyright, the plaintiff may recover only actual damages, which might be quite small and difficult to compute in either case, and legal fees are unrecoverable. So, while a copyright need not be registered to exist, in many cases it needs to be registered to be worth enforcing.
The U.S. copyright registration fee is only $20, and anyone who releases software under the GPL would be wise to pay it.
Actually, common-law jurisprudence says no. In real estate law, there are statutes governing adverse possession, wherein a party that has continuously used land as if they owned it for a period of time may obtain title to the land, regardless of any previously existing title. The traditional justifications are that land use is better than land disuse, and that otherwise it can become prohibitively troublesome to discover the title holder of a piece of land that has undergone many changes of title, some of which may or may not have been entirely legal.
Given the lengths of copyright terms, the poor documentation of copyright transfers, and the tendency of most copyrighted works to fall out of use after a very brief time (journalism providing an extreme example), it requires no new thought to see where similar statutes might benefit copyright law.
If only it were easy to define when a copyrighted work is no longer in use.
However, the converse, "substantial infringing use," which is the thinking behind the INDUCE act, would also be invalid in his reasoning, because no recording/copying device could ever pass that test.
The fair use doctrine, as traditionally interpreted, makes laws governing the legality / illegality of devices based on their capabilities rather troublesome in the U.S., because almost any device that can be used for exercising fair use can also be used for infringment. In many cases, the only difference between fair uses and infringing uses are intent and scale, and technological measures are particularly ill-suited for judging these things.
In former times, jurisprudence seemed to think the correct approach was to enable infringement in order to enable fair use, and to punish those who actually do infringe in the courts. The alternative approach, to disable fair use in order to disable infringement, has been the experiment of the past decade. Its track record to date has been less than stellar.
And then there was the Superbowl Las Vegas lost millions on. The books opened with Pittsburgh as a 3.5 point favorite, and many people bet on the Steelers at this level. In response, the line moved up to 4, and then 4.5, at which point the bets for Dallas started coming in. In the end, Pittsburgh won by 4, and something like 80% of the bets that were placed on the game were winners.
But a human being misclassifies email, too. An email from an unknown recipient with a plausibly spammish subject line may never be opened because it "looks like" spam. Or an email may just happen to get caught in the "delete-delete-delete" cycle. Rejecting 1 in 25,000 legitimate emails in order to throw out, say, 90% of the spam may actually increase the number of legitimate emails that reach the recipient because with fewer spams sitting in the inbox, they are likely to be more careful with their manual spam filtering.
Someone should forward this to the folks running Kahle v. Ashcroft. This is exactly the sort of phenomena that would support their claim that changing from the old "Only works that are registered / renewed are copyright" regime to the Berne convention "Copyright is inherent in the work's creation" regime "fundamentally changed the landscape of free speech" in a way that warranted constitutional review.
I think we can all safely assume that aliens will prefer peanut-butter M&Ms over regular M&Ms or Reeces
I fear that the aliens will have difficulty comprehending the cultural distinctions beteween the various English-speaking peoples and produce the Vegemite M&M.
Under the usual setup for single-photon data transmission, only half the bits sent do any useful communicating. Both the sender and the receiver have to choose between one of two measurements to make on the bits; if they make the same measurement, they get the same answer, and so have usefully communicated a bit. If they make opposite measurements, they don't have comparable data, and so have communicated nothing. So Alice measures some photons and sends them to Bob, who also measures them. Afterwards, they tell each other what measurements they made (but not what answers they got) over an open channel, and so they know what secret info they both share without ever broadcasting that info.
Now, if we introduce a man in the middle, the middleman doesn't know what measurements to make on the quantum channel. He can do what Alice and Bob do, which is guess randomly, but every time he guesses wrong, he destroys a bit of information. So, he only gets half the quantum channel from Alice, and so can send only a quarter of the info to Bob.
The tampering will become immediately apparent aftwerwards, if Alice and Bob compare a fraction of their shared secret and find that they didn't actually get the same answer when they made the same measurement. This is patent evidence that they have been evesdropped, and so they then throw all their bits away.
The method isn't actually useful for sending messages, so the fact that the middleman intercepted part of the message is irrelevant. It's a method for creating a shared secret, which can then be used for communicating the actual message. A middleman cannot acquire the shared secret without leaving evidence that the secret is more widely shared than believed, and so the secret can be rejected as the basis for sharing sensitive data before that sensitive data is actually shared.
Yes and no. For a long time, recording technology led playback technology by a significant margin. The old cylinders and discs contain a lot of sound quality that contemporary listeners couldn't appreciate. As playback devices have improved, so has the quality of the sound produced from playing back the same physical medium. So if we extract a high-fidelity signal from the medium, and you want to appreciate the low-fidelity playback that your grandfather did, it would be perfectly authentic to have your computer overlay an external noise track on the music; it would be a perfectly analagous process to what the phonograph did when it played back a track!
The last two times I tried OpenOffice, I went back to MS Office. My experience was that many of the decisions that were made in the name of cross-platform compatibility hurt my ability to use the software productively. For example, many functions I was used to accessing through hotkeys in MS Office I found were available only through (rather deep) menu trees in Open Office. The one that caused me the most grief was "Fill down" in a spreadsheet being a menu-only function!
Can someone say that things are better now, or do I still have to macro around such frustrations, or what?
Why should you believe the PG2 website when they say they are affiliated with PG? If you are going to infringe a trademark, why not also lie about your relationship with the rightful owner of that mark?
The legalese on the PG texts says that if you are going to redistribute the texts commercially, you must either
(1) Strip the PG header from the text, thereby removing all traces of PG's role in preparing the text you are distributing.
or
(2) Leave the PG header exactly as it is, and pay PG a royalty.
Lots of commercial ebook ventures use the PG library, and for obvious reasons, most choose option 1. The annoying thing about this venture is that it wants to use the PG name.
Consider the first generation of immortals, who find themselves at the top of the spectrum of achievement in business, government, academia, etc., and for the first time in human history, do not feel their impending removal from that position. For them, starting over means leaving those ranks and attempting to re-enter them from among the second generation of immortals.
For the second generation, achieving position is for the first time not merely a matter of being preeminent among your peers, and therefore in position to take the place of the current crop of leaders as they die. To achieve position, one must either out-perform the experienced leaders of a field or create a field from whole cloth. Achievement among the second generation requires not merely ability, but true genius.
The second generation then, may be even more conservative than the first. Starting over for them means "throwing away" not just the few years of one's education, but indeed decades of experience trying to break into the ranks of position and prestige, with no surety that one will be able to do it a second time.
Besides, the 4-8 years mentioned as today's retooling time I think is intimately linked to a human lifetime. If an education today cost instead 8-12 years, I think dramatically fewer people would pursue it. In the immortal society, what's to prevent the act of retooling to swell to decades until the number of people willing to go through the effort to enter a field once again falls to the "room" in that field?
And this doesn't just apply to science. Immortality can be counted on bringing about the stagnation of most aspects of society. I mean now, things change as those who are invested in the way things are die off, but when they can't be counted on dying off, progress must happen rather more slowly.
OK... Just because IBM is out for profit doesn't mean their profit-seeking will hurt Linux. One of the more successful business strategies in the technology world has been to make your product's complemenents ubiquitous, inexpensive commodities.
IBM's products are enterprise-level hardware and technology consulting. If enterprise-level software is more available, the demand for both of these increases. Therefore, it is in IBM's interest to make a high-quality operating system ubiquitous and inexpensive.
It so happens that they have chosen to do so through Linux. The plan is make profit by selling hardware that runs Linux and consulting services for systems that run Linux. At no point is it in IBM's interest to hinder the development or adoption of Linux, since doing so only decreases their potential market.
(Microsoft did a similar thing with the PC. By licensing DOS to IBM in a non-exclusive fashion, they left the door open for cloned PC's to run the same operating system, and therefore look and feel the same to the user. And when the PC became a commidity piece of hardware, Microsoft profited. However, their doing so was not a bad thing for the PC in a hardware sense, nor could they have any possible profit-motive in restricting the spread of the PC.)