There is no reason a geek need refrain from using the term "Information technology", since said term describes the an application of "Information Science" (better term than Computer Science, and is used in Europe). I try to be exacting in my words, and I'm not aware of another term that could be used accurately in substitution.
I've thought about this recently, and I strongly disagree. I work on information technology that tends to make us more free, such as encryption. Geek politics isn't about politics; geek politics is about freedom, which is much more important than science and engineering. At least in my book.
I'd absolutely love to be able to just work on technology, but the laws are limiting my ability to do that, and I'm less free because of it (look at the DMCA and similar laws).
Freedom comes first. Information technology tends to provide freedom by empowering persons. I've noted that geek politics tend to resist those who resist empowering technologies, such as encryption and information-sharing; such persons wish to maintain the status quo, which always benefits the incumbents.
It's not about life being too short that you shouldn't 'waste' it on politics; politics is what decides our freedom.
No where in the US's founding documents is it supposed that one own an idea. Through copyright one is merely granted the right to prosecute those those who copy that idea without permission, because society wishes to provide some incentive.
Extending your argument, copyright should last for eternity.
The difference between atoms and 'pattern[s] of ones and zeroes' is well described by Thomas Jefferson:
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
These semantic arguments are not silly and boring. They are crucial to how the debate is framed. If you are charged with said actions, it will fall under violations of copyright law, not theft of property. The morals of each is are starkly contrasted; one is the literal taking of another's physical posessions (ideas are no posessions; ). The other is violating set of chains American society placed upon itself to promote "useful arts and sciences" and is embodied in laws defined by solely by corporations, with no regard to public interest; read Jessica Litman's "Digital Copyright" for how exclusionary and pro-settled-corporations copyright law is set up.
There is nothing inherently morally wrong with reproducing information; it doesn't go against the principles of freedom that are described in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution. This is talked about in at http://www.furinkan.net/display.php?pageid=75
I've come to believe that there is a flip side to the unix philosophy. If you're not going to do one thing well, you should be flexible enough to be able to do everything well.
This allows to the powerful shells we see nowadays (e.g., an ftp client built-in to zsh) and other 'power' programs such as emacs.
By artificial I imply that it doesn't follow from the 'natural' rights described in the Declaration of Independence or Constituation. It does not follow from any true right; it is merely a law created not to further rights, but rather lifestyle.
A 'non-artificial' law (I hesitate to use the term 'natural law') would be one that can be derived from said natural rights.
The only law being broken is copyright violations. Copyright violations are not theft of service.
Once you realize that copyright is artifical chains that the public places on itself for a certain goal, and not a 'right' of authors, then you'll realize that the morals aren't quite so clear cut. Industry's reframing of the copyright debate from "quid pro quo" to "we must have absolute protection" has caused the issue to become twisted and unrecognizable from what the foundations of the US were built on.
Furthermore, the copyright law as it has been implemented is clearly not in line with the generic arguments for it. Copyright has been modified several times over the last century, each time designed solely to protect the industries solely at Congress's bargaining table and to lock out up-and-coming industries, as well as the public. This has caused the US implementation of the law to become quite sick.
Learn your copyright history. I recommend reading Jessica Litman's "Digital Copyright".
I think I can agree with that sentiment. Even with approval voting, for current practical purposes, a finite number of persons must be listed on the ballot. Approval voting and 'nota' choice are orthogonal issues. Write-ins are nice in theory but really have little effect in large elections.
Sadly, you are correct. I was suggesting, however, that instead of trying to vote out current bad politicians, we might have a better off going right for approval voting.
3.) See which state Senators voted against it (whoever is represented by Senator Haynes is in luck, otherwise...). The measure passed the State Assembly, but it might be worth seeing who voted against it there as well.
4.) Vote against them next election. In fact, tell them you're going to do so. Better yet, run against the bastard yourself. It's a cushy job and looks good on a resume at the very least.
Defensive voting is an abomination that we currently are forced to deal with. We should be implementing approval voting.
I think there is one reform that you've missed that you'd probably like. Approval Voting can help solve a lot of our problems. In approval voting, you can vote for as many people as you like. The person with the most votes wins.
Think about it. There is no reason why you should be limited to voting exclusively for one person.
With approval voting primaries lose their prominence. Defensive voting no longer becomes an issue. Third party candidates become viable. Your 'none of the above' option no longer is needed.
Approval voting is simple, understandable, and easy to implement using current voting technology. I'm a firm believer that implementation of approval voting will solve a lot of problems.
Thank you for that link to John Gilmore's essay. It is certainly one of the most moving pieces I've read on the topic in a long time, and gives me a bit of hope, because 1) someone (Gilmore) wrote it and believes in it 2) you linked to it, and probably believe in it too. I've added it to the top of my list of suggested readings.
There is a difference between an address being memorable and and its being to use. True, something like ftobin@2353252352 isn't memorable or easy to use. However the easy-to-use problem can be solved:
The number-domain could be encoded into words (like PGP did for its hex fingerprints) each 2 bytes or so can correspond to a word in a known dictionary. That way, something like ftobin@32523590 could be encoded to ftobin@[charlie whiskey banana paper]. This solution also helps memorability, but doesn't "solve" it in the manner you hope to.
I'm aware that my encoding scheme creates some degree of desirable for certain names, but not to any real great extent, I feel. And it certainly eliminates trademark issues.
However, I'm not so sure the problem of memorable addresses can be solved in the long run.
True, right now we can do name@my.domain.org, because there are so few people actually having addresses. But as as each individual gets at least one address (I highly think that each individual should get many addresses), names almost by definition get less memorable, due to people just being swamped with names.
Remember, the problem with "desirable" memorable addresses is that they create this situation where everyone's climbing over each other for a scarce resource. People get along fine with non-controlled house addresses; hence, I don't quite see a problem with using some sort of encoding scheme as suggested above.
What you're saying makes it sound like it's reasonable for a company like RedHat (who isn't even the developer of the mp3 players in their distribution!) to pay $50,000 face up. Where do you get off?
Open Source software will be used by government wherever possible. This definition includes a superset of free software, and especially includes FreeBSD, Mozilla, the NPL, and other licenses in addition to the GPL.
Perhaps something like a MD5 hash of each webpage you visit being stored on your computer, and a warning displayed if it doesn't match upon future views. Of course this would cause massive false alarms on dynamic sites, but perhaps there could be introduced a standard for putting tags around the actual article on news sites, so they would know what else to filter out?
This will never happen, since it implies that there is structure which denotes what the actual content of the page is. Given such structure, one can simply filter out all the rest of the page (including ads, etc).
Remember, it's only because of the nice, transparent structure of HTML web pages that we're able to do things like block images. You can't do that sort of thing with evil things like Flash.
Power mongers hate structured content, because it lessens their control over their content.
Phone numbers are also arbitrary, and very hard to remember, hence 1-800-CALLATT and the like -- you don't think, "hey, I bet AT&T offers calling service!", you remember the name after its been specifically told to you. And I believe Sprint (or MCI?) even got 1-800-ATTCALL and redirected it to 1-800-COLLECT, just like the problems with DNS. In the early days of phone numbers, even individuals had mnemonic phone numbers; the advantages have long been clear.
This way of thinking only works if there are few such people advertising addresses like that. That is, there are few telco collect services, so it's easy to remember the few 1-800-CALL-THIS-FOR-COLLECT numbers that exist.
The domain names for the internet were similarly 'nice' back in the day when there few names being spewed around. However, imagine several thousand advertisers on TV spouting off call-collect numbers; your 'meaningful' name just lost its value, since it gets lost in the crowd.
The same thing has happened to the internet, and yet hardly signficant percentage of the world owns their own domain. As the number of owners grows, the value of 'meaningful' domains will continue to plummet.
I've also covered the issue of arbitrary domain names in another post.
I think you miunderstand. The email address would be something like ftobin@23523523523525. Doing a directory lookup is used when you only know a weak, non-technical name of something online, such as a legal name, e.g., "Sears". Email addresses don't fall into that category; they are technical descriptions of where to deliver mail.
A co-worker of mine thought of this idea; it seems like a good view of how DNS should be.
DNS is best at providing a mapping from a static legal designators to a dynamic technical namespace. In our case, that means we are mapping from a legally-owned and recognized domain name to a potentially dynamic IP address.
The problem is that the legal referers, domain names, are valuable, since they are human-readable (e.g., example.com). This value causes all the fighting over them that we see today.
To resolve this, domain names not be human readable; they should be more like an IP address, except that it is static, can map to a dynamic address. That is, domain names could be, say, numbers only, e.g., "23598263596".
As to the problem of 'finding' a website, which is currently done by novices by simply typing "company.com", this is what directory services are for. Example of directory services are Google, or DMOZ, where your amount legal power does not equal the size of your presence. That is, just because you are large, you do not automatically get the first hit on Google for "yourname"; your 'site' has to be popular.
It is also important to note that directory services can provide multiple results for a name. DNS only provides one place to go to for "company.com". However, if looked up "company" in Google, you will see multiple results; from those results you can decide whether or not you might be ending up at the correct site. A good example of this is "whitehouse". "whitehouse.com", of course, is porn. But the first hit on Google is whitehouse.gov, and you can easily tell from the Google summary that whitehouse.com is porn.
Furthermore, this system also eliminates squatting, since the static legal addresses have little value. That is, there is no real value beteween "5982352569" and "2352356" as addresses.
The only fight we have is in politics, there is no technical solution to this problem. As much as you would like to think you'll win this battle whipping up some code in C, you are going to find there is nothing you can code that will keep the handcuffs off of your hands.
I wouldn't be so sure. This is what systems such as trust-network, anonymous networks such as GNUnet are supposed to resolve. As long as we're allowed to have general-purpose computers, open networks, and good bandwidth, I think technical solutions can stand up. If we don't have general-purpose computers, or open networks, we've got other issues. Destroying our bandwidth is probably one of the few non-immoral attacks that can be effected, but an attempt at doing so likely won't succeed given the average persons's desire for it (for whatever reason).
I'm leaning towards the idea that the politics will change, not because we affect today's politicians, but because the up-and-coming persons of society are being conditioned differently (supporting things such as Napster). We might just have to out-live the current generation of politicians.
Keep in mind I'm not certain that a new cycle of politicians will help. Greed and powerlust is ageless.
Sorry, but in this case I have to pull out my free market cap. The correct price for an entertainment product is whatever the customer is willing to pay.
This, of course, does not mean that I support measures such as the DMCA (by definition, it implies less free market), or the blob known as intellectual property as the law currently recognizes it.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no reason a geek need refrain from using the term "Information technology", since said term describes the an application of "Information Science" (better term than Computer Science, and is used in Europe). I try to be exacting in my words, and I'm not aware of another term that could be used accurately in substitution.
I've thought about this recently, and I strongly disagree. I work on information technology that tends to make us more free, such as encryption. Geek politics isn't about politics; geek politics is about freedom, which is much more important than science and engineering. At least in my book.
I'd absolutely love to be able to just work on technology, but the laws are limiting my ability to do that, and I'm less free because of it (look at the DMCA and similar laws).
Freedom comes first. Information technology tends to provide freedom by empowering persons. I've noted that geek politics tend to resist those who resist empowering technologies, such as encryption and information-sharing; such persons wish to maintain the status quo, which always benefits the incumbents.
It's not about life being too short that you shouldn't 'waste' it on politics; politics is what decides our freedom.
No where in the US's founding documents is it supposed that one own an idea. Through copyright one is merely granted the right to prosecute those those who copy that idea without permission, because society wishes to provide some incentive.
Extending your argument, copyright should last for eternity.
The difference between atoms and 'pattern[s] of ones and zeroes' is well described by Thomas Jefferson:
Thomas Jefferson, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 6, H.A. Washington, Ed.,1854, pp. 180-181, referenced from http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/23/23214/3438
These semantic arguments are not silly and boring. They are crucial to how the debate is framed. If you are charged with said actions, it will fall under violations of copyright law, not theft of property. The morals of each is are starkly contrasted; one is the literal taking of another's physical posessions (ideas are no posessions; ). The other is violating set of chains American society placed upon itself to promote "useful arts and sciences" and is embodied in laws defined by solely by corporations, with no regard to public interest; read Jessica Litman's "Digital Copyright" for how exclusionary and pro-settled-corporations copyright law is set up.
There is nothing inherently morally wrong with reproducing information; it doesn't go against the principles of freedom that are described in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution. This is talked about in at http://www.furinkan.net/display.php?pageid=75
I've come to believe that there is a flip side to the unix philosophy. If you're not going to do one thing well, you should be flexible enough to be able to do everything well. This allows to the powerful shells we see nowadays (e.g., an ftp client built-in to zsh) and other 'power' programs such as emacs.
What utter BS. At the NCSA, they use centralized, efficient security policy administration using Kerberos + AFS.
Jeez I hate Windows people who think they know stuff about the unix world.
By artificial I imply that it doesn't follow from the 'natural' rights described in the Declaration of Independence or Constituation. It does not follow from any true right; it is merely a law created not to further rights, but rather lifestyle. A 'non-artificial' law (I hesitate to use the term 'natural law') would be one that can be derived from said natural rights.
Boy, I wonder which company might be a rival of Pepsi?!
The only law being broken is copyright violations. Copyright violations are not theft of service.
Once you realize that copyright is artifical chains that the public places on itself for a certain goal, and not a 'right' of authors, then you'll realize that the morals aren't quite so clear cut. Industry's reframing of the copyright debate from "quid pro quo" to "we must have absolute protection" has caused the issue to become twisted and unrecognizable from what the foundations of the US were built on.
Furthermore, the copyright law as it has been implemented is clearly not in line with the generic arguments for it. Copyright has been modified several times over the last century, each time designed solely to protect the industries solely at Congress's bargaining table and to lock out up-and-coming industries, as well as the public. This has caused the US implementation of the law to become quite sick.
Learn your copyright history. I recommend reading Jessica Litman's "Digital Copyright".
I think I can agree with that sentiment. Even with approval voting, for current practical purposes, a finite number of persons must be listed on the ballot. Approval voting and 'nota' choice are orthogonal issues. Write-ins are nice in theory but really have little effect in large elections.
Sadly, you are correct. I was suggesting, however, that instead of trying to vote out current bad politicians, we might have a better off going right for approval voting.
Defensive voting is an abomination that we currently are forced to deal with. We should be implementing approval voting.
I think there is one reform that you've missed that you'd probably like. Approval Voting can help solve a lot of our problems. In approval voting, you can vote for as many people as you like. The person with the most votes wins.
Think about it. There is no reason why you should be limited to voting exclusively for one person.
With approval voting primaries lose their prominence. Defensive voting no longer becomes an issue. Third party candidates become viable. Your 'none of the above' option no longer is needed.
Approval voting is simple, understandable, and easy to implement using current voting technology. I'm a firm believer that implementation of approval voting will solve a lot of problems.
Thank you for that link to John Gilmore's essay. It is certainly one of the most moving pieces I've read on the topic in a long time, and gives me a bit of hope, because 1) someone (Gilmore) wrote it and believes in it 2) you linked to it, and probably believe in it too. I've added it to the top of my list of suggested readings.
There is a difference between an address being memorable and and its being to use. True, something like ftobin@2353252352 isn't memorable or easy to use. However the easy-to-use problem can be solved:
The number-domain could be encoded into words (like PGP did for its hex fingerprints) each 2 bytes or so can correspond to a word in a known dictionary. That way, something like ftobin@32523590 could be encoded to ftobin@[charlie whiskey banana paper]. This solution also helps memorability, but doesn't "solve" it in the manner you hope to.
I'm aware that my encoding scheme creates some degree of desirable for certain names, but not to any real great extent, I feel. And it certainly eliminates trademark issues.
However, I'm not so sure the problem of memorable addresses can be solved in the long run. True, right now we can do name@my.domain.org, because there are so few people actually having addresses. But as as each individual gets at least one address (I highly think that each individual should get many addresses), names almost by definition get less memorable, due to people just being swamped with names.
Remember, the problem with "desirable" memorable addresses is that they create this situation where everyone's climbing over each other for a scarce resource. People get along fine with non-controlled house addresses; hence, I don't quite see a problem with using some sort of encoding scheme as suggested above.
What you're saying makes it sound like it's reasonable for a company like RedHat (who isn't even the developer of the mp3 players in their distribution!) to pay $50,000 face up. Where do you get off?
You're getting your information from a PR person. I'm getting mine from the licensing page. I see no such exception for free decoders.
FYI, all of the licenses you mentioned (FreeBSD is not a license, BSD is), are considered Free Software/Software Libre licenses.
This will never happen, since it implies that there is structure which denotes what the actual content of the page is. Given such structure, one can simply filter out all the rest of the page (including ads, etc).
Remember, it's only because of the nice, transparent structure of HTML web pages that we're able to do things like block images. You can't do that sort of thing with evil things like Flash.
Power mongers hate structured content, because it lessens their control over their content.
This way of thinking only works if there are few such people advertising addresses like that. That is, there are few telco collect services, so it's easy to remember the few 1-800-CALL-THIS-FOR-COLLECT numbers that exist. The domain names for the internet were similarly 'nice' back in the day when there few names being spewed around. However, imagine several thousand advertisers on TV spouting off call-collect numbers; your 'meaningful' name just lost its value, since it gets lost in the crowd.
The same thing has happened to the internet, and yet hardly signficant percentage of the world owns their own domain. As the number of owners grows, the value of 'meaningful' domains will continue to plummet.
I've also covered the issue of arbitrary domain names in another post.
I think you miunderstand. The email address would be something like ftobin@23523523523525. Doing a directory lookup is used when you only know a weak, non-technical name of something online, such as a legal name, e.g., "Sears". Email addresses don't fall into that category; they are technical descriptions of where to deliver mail.
Please correct me if I'm miunderstanding you.
A co-worker of mine thought of this idea; it seems like a good view of how DNS should be.
DNS is best at providing a mapping from a static legal designators to a dynamic technical namespace. In our case, that means we are mapping from a legally-owned and recognized domain name to a potentially dynamic IP address.
The problem is that the legal referers, domain names, are valuable, since they are human-readable (e.g., example.com). This value causes all the fighting over them that we see today.
To resolve this, domain names not be human readable; they should be more like an IP address, except that it is static, can map to a dynamic address. That is, domain names could be, say, numbers only, e.g., "23598263596".
As to the problem of 'finding' a website, which is currently done by novices by simply typing "company.com", this is what directory services are for. Example of directory services are Google, or DMOZ, where your amount legal power does not equal the size of your presence. That is, just because you are large, you do not automatically get the first hit on Google for "yourname"; your 'site' has to be popular.
It is also important to note that directory services can provide multiple results for a name. DNS only provides one place to go to for "company.com". However, if looked up "company" in Google, you will see multiple results; from those results you can decide whether or not you might be ending up at the correct site. A good example of this is "whitehouse". "whitehouse.com", of course, is porn. But the first hit on Google is whitehouse.gov, and you can easily tell from the Google summary that whitehouse.com is porn.
Furthermore, this system also eliminates squatting, since the static legal addresses have little value. That is, there is no real value beteween "5982352569" and "2352356" as addresses.
I wouldn't be so sure. This is what systems such as trust-network, anonymous networks such as GNUnet are supposed to resolve. As long as we're allowed to have general-purpose computers, open networks, and good bandwidth, I think technical solutions can stand up. If we don't have general-purpose computers, or open networks, we've got other issues. Destroying our bandwidth is probably one of the few non-immoral attacks that can be effected, but an attempt at doing so likely won't succeed given the average persons's desire for it (for whatever reason).
I'm leaning towards the idea that the politics will change, not because we affect today's politicians, but because the up-and-coming persons of society are being conditioned differently (supporting things such as Napster). We might just have to out-live the current generation of politicians.
Keep in mind I'm not certain that a new cycle of politicians will help. Greed and powerlust is ageless.
Sorry, but in this case I have to pull out my free market cap. The correct price for an entertainment product is whatever the customer is willing to pay.
This, of course, does not mean that I support measures such as the DMCA (by definition, it implies less free market), or the blob known as intellectual property as the law currently recognizes it.