You make a great few points... except they're all wrong. Allow me to prevent the flamebait mod that's coming down the pike...
1) Five years ago we had no method of slapping transistors on a chip on the.13 micron scale. Does that mean today we can't do it and it's not commercially viable??? Somehow I think not...
2) The "fab" community (at least the ones who aren't into a certain British rawk group) will do whatever they damn well have to in order to produce what the market wants. They'll piss upwind in January while licking a metal signpost if it'll make them millions (billions?) in profit.
3)When is new technology every not "decades behind" current technology??? current technology is current cuz it was started a decade ago. Cost comes down over time (which is why my Apple IIGS won't sell for the thousand that was paid for it), as cheaper means of production are discovered.
Next time consider that perhaps the tech we have today isn't the pinnacle of existance and we might (believe it or not) be able to improve on it. It's going to take cash flow, a few wrong turns, and lots of people pissing on the parade, but it will happen.
I think you may be missing the whole point... And first off, information doesn't "want" to be free. The people who own certain types of information may "want" it to be free, but it has no consciousness of its own... so there.
As for the "when people start making money from making music, the whole system gets turned upside down" are you fricken insane? Throughout history people have made a living at making music. Perhaps you've heard of them... they're called "musicians" Making music is a very enjoyable activity, and often times people do it out of their own benevolence and allow others to hear it (for example, playing a free concert or on a street corner or whatever). Others choose to charge admission for their concerts (look at all the city orchestras, rock musicians, country freaks, etc). This is how they make their living, so it does contribute to the economy. The thing that fscks it up is when someone tries to make a living off the person trying to make a living by making music. Middlemen sux0rs. They take money away from the artist and charge exhorbitant prices to consumers. That sucks just as much for the artist as for the consumer. So don't go and get all high and mighty with the artists themselves (with the possible exception of Metallica) and get on the backs of the recording companies, they're the ones who are scamming the rest of us. Thanks for being off topic... now I'll never have tru karma.
Wouldn't AOL Instant Messenger updates fall into the "prior art" catagory? You sign into aohell with your user name and password, then download an "automatically executing" file that "optimizes" the ultra-crappy software that you mistakenly installed on your poor box in the first place. I know this was occuring long before 1998...
The CS department at my university has two main servers. Each of these servers has had the benefit of thousands of bored CS majors tinkering with code to run on them. At this point, anyone trying to hack/port scan/bypass security or anything else has so many checks run on him, the people who wrote Carnivore would probably be surprised. And yet, under this law just about every person who wrote a script to run on them would be judged as "intentionally affecting" a computer. Hell, under that definition pressing the S key "intentionally affects" a computer, IT SHOWS A DAMN S ON THE SCREEN! This bill is completely worthless.
The problem is, for the moment dirt can't reform itself into some terminator-like entity and attempt to hunt down the parents of political dissiden.... wait, this isn't a movie. And yet, the plot for T2 doesn't sound all that far-fetched when looked at from a nanotechnological perspective.
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You make a great few points... except they're all wrong. Allow me to prevent the flamebait mod that's coming down the pike...
.13 micron scale. Does that mean today we can't do it and it's not commercially viable??? Somehow I think not...
1) Five years ago we had no method of slapping transistors on a chip on the
2) The "fab" community (at least the ones who aren't into a certain British rawk group) will do whatever they damn well have to in order to produce what the market wants. They'll piss upwind in January while licking a metal signpost if it'll make them millions (billions?) in profit.
3)When is new technology every not "decades behind" current technology??? current technology is current cuz it was started a decade ago. Cost comes down over time (which is why my Apple IIGS won't sell for the thousand that was paid for it), as cheaper means of production are discovered.
Next time consider that perhaps the tech we have today isn't the pinnacle of existance and we might (believe it or not) be able to improve on it. It's going to take cash flow, a few wrong turns, and lots of people pissing on the parade, but it will happen.
I think you may be missing the whole point... And first off, information doesn't "want" to be free. The people who own certain types of information may "want" it to be free, but it has no consciousness of its own... so there.
As for the "when people start making money from making music, the whole system gets turned upside down" are you fricken insane? Throughout history people have made a living at making music. Perhaps you've heard of them... they're called "musicians" Making music is a very enjoyable activity, and often times people do it out of their own benevolence and allow others to hear it (for example, playing a free concert or on a street corner or whatever). Others choose to charge admission for their concerts (look at all the city orchestras, rock musicians, country freaks, etc). This is how they make their living, so it does contribute to the economy. The thing that fscks it up is when someone tries to make a living off the person trying to make a living by making music. Middlemen sux0rs. They take money away from the artist and charge exhorbitant prices to consumers. That sucks just as much for the artist as for the consumer. So don't go and get all high and mighty with the artists themselves (with the possible exception of Metallica) and get on the backs of the recording companies, they're the ones who are scamming the rest of us. Thanks for being off topic... now I'll never have tru karma.
Wouldn't AOL Instant Messenger updates fall into the "prior art" catagory? You sign into aohell with your user name and password, then download an "automatically executing" file that "optimizes" the ultra-crappy software that you mistakenly installed on your poor box in the first place. I know this was occuring long before 1998...
The CS department at my university has two main servers. Each of these servers has had the benefit of thousands of bored CS majors tinkering with code to run on them. At this point, anyone trying to hack/port scan/bypass security or anything else has so many checks run on him, the people who wrote Carnivore would probably be surprised. And yet, under this law just about every person who wrote a script to run on them would be judged as "intentionally affecting" a computer. Hell, under that definition pressing the S key "intentionally affects" a computer, IT SHOWS A DAMN S ON THE SCREEN! This bill is completely worthless.
The problem is, for the moment dirt can't reform itself into some terminator-like entity and attempt to hunt down the parents of political dissiden.... wait, this isn't a movie. And yet, the plot for T2 doesn't sound all that far-fetched when looked at from a nanotechnological perspective.