Economic downturn, in which discretionary entertainment spending is one of the first things to go
RIAA increasing the per-unit price of a CD. Based on, for example, these statistics (PDF)
$6.2B/488.7M = $12.69/Unit (2000)
$5.9B/442.7M = $13.33/Unit (2001)
(a 5.04% increase, with 2000 US inflation at 3.4%)
i definitely wouldn't put it past some biz-school smartass to say in a boardroom meeting, "hey, let's bump up the price a little, decrease our sales, and create the data that will convince courts to shut down file traders."
I assert that GUI innovations SHOULD be patentable (although I'd like to see a much shorter duration on all software-related patents).
When I was a CS undergraduate, I took the designing user interfaces course.... Some of the ideas we came up with were great. ... New developments in the software world would grind to a halt.... The argument that interface innovations that appear obvious now weren't at the time they were invented is I believe a poor one. A creative person can sit down with a pencil and paper and come up with lots of ideas for possible user interface designs - it's relatively easy for those people who have an inclination for it.... The world would be a poorer place if all these designers patented their ideas and prevented other people from using them.
When *i* was an undergraduate, I majored in human-computer interaction and am currently an interface director and usability practicioner.
Good design is not easy. If it were, why would so many software interfaces be unusable crap? Good interface design is EXTREMELY complex (for most people: difficult) if you are attempting to design an implementable software system that doesn't require the engineers to figure out holographic mind-reading displays (or otherwise add significant engineering overhead).
Name a software product that you would consider to be "excellently designed" -- I can guarantee that the people who built it spent a huge amount of time doing user-centered thinking and design iteration. For example, the Palm Pilot. Its simplicity seems obvious; its functionality seems apparent. That design was the end result of a long process of prototyping, usability testing, and creative brainstorming.
THIS is why user-interaction elements and systems should be patentable. The entire process of usability engineering is to make things that are so effortless and that make so much sense to the user that the user doesn't have to think twice about the software -- they can think instead about their work and their job. Unfortunately, this requires a ton of work, observation, and effort.
Finally, sure, the world would be a poorer place if anyone couldn't go to my website, see a "Gee whiz!" interaction mechanism that someone has paid me to design, test, and build, and then-and-there copy the code into their own software system. Or does that just make ME poorer because someone is expropriating the fruits of my labor without my permission?
This brings me to another interesting point about open-source usability. I've long toyed with the idea of getting a bunch of usability people together as part of the open source movement to do usability testing for open-source software products, at the request of whatever engineers are working on the software. Any thoughts on this?
Wow. I would have expected a usability guy to be less obtuse about human motivations than a pure engineer (Tim Berners-Lee -- "There are no reasons at all in theory for people to change URIs (or stop maintaining documents), but millions of reasons in practice." -- http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI ).
How about these reasons: the content sucks! It was stupid to begin with. It doesn't deserve immortality -- it's too embarassing to live. Most of the stuff I've taken off the web was because because it became dated, useless, outmoded, pointless, or just plain embarassing. Not all information is worth preserving. And reasons to stop maintaining documents: boredom; information isn't popular enough to justify the expense of maintaining it; relevance.
Add in the practical considerations -- people move servers, graduate from school, change DSL providers, software schemas (e.g. flat html to ASP to PHP or whatever). Obviously URIs were NOT well-designed to handle such contingencies.
These things should be apparant a mile away. Why is link rot so horrible anyway, aside from the annoyance of clicking on something that turns out not to be there?
I thought even the revised version had been killed in comittee as reported here - Copyright [CBDTPA] Bill Universally Rejected [slashdot.org]
The CBDTPA is NOT (legally) dead. It is still alive in congress -- we still need to keep our eyes open. The title of the news article that prompted the/. discussion was misleading: "Copyright bill universally rejected"
Company X can tell a marketing company that Y consumers purchased Product Z. They can NOT say that Consumer A purchased Product Z unless Consumer A authorizes it. If the company creates the data, they can use it, but can only associate the data with particular consumers with permission
the problem with this is that it's waaay easier than we think to uniquely identify someone using only a few pieces of information, such as might be obtained by combining a couple of databases.
See work at the Carnegie Mellon Laboratory for International Data Privacy (http://sos.heinz.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/publications . tml)
For example:
L. Sweeney. Uniqueness of Simple Demographics in the U.S. Population, LIDAP-WP4. Carnegie Mellon University, Laboratory for International Data Privacy, Pittsburgh, PA: 2000. ( http://sos.heinz.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/papers/LIDAP- WP4abstract.html )
L. Sweeney. All the Data on All the People, LIDAP-WP3. Carnegie Mellon University, Laboratory for International Data Privacy, Pittsburgh, PA: 2000. ( http://sos.heinz.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/papers/LIDAP- WP3abstract.html )
Piracy is already illegal, why do we need a law that bans the tools? It's like banning guns or cars because they could be used to kill.
because it's too expensive for the music industry to go after individual pirates -- jane and john doe with their napster. why else the ridiculous lawsuits against napster and digital city -- and the DMCA itself? the studios could always have gone after the actual violaters -- the people who are actually making illegal copies and trades. but that's not profitable or efficient enough.
I don't understand why anybody thinks that clones would or should somehow end up being treated as anything other than regular people. So what if their genetic material is "identical" to someone else's -- which it won't be, given small genetic mutations and changes that occur during early development? They'll still be a human being, entitled to all the rights and charged with the responsibilities thereof. And there is no reason why a genetic clone should ever be considered any more the exclusive property of the genetic source than a sperm-and-egg child would be. Clones will still have to grow up and develop, and that process will make them much different from their donor.
There's been too much dark science fiction about clones -- people are so used to thinking of clones as servile androids that they don't even stop to think about how unlikely that would be. As long as we don't differentiate legally between a clone and a sperm-and-egg, we're fine. And there's no good basis for differentiating, really.
As representatives of Don McLean (R-TM), the Capitol Recording Empire (R-TM), and co-representing Madonna (TM), we hereby order you to cease and desist your propogation of the above work. We consider it to be a derivative work of Don McLean (R-TM)'s song American Pie (TM), to which we own publishing rights. Moreover, you have obviously listened to the recording and thought about the lyrics of American Pie (TM) in order to produce your derivative work. We hereby consider this ponderance of the work in your mind to be a "copy" under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This copy was not made with explicit authorization by the agents of Capitol Records, Inc. (R-TM). Finally, to make the copy in your head, you had to listen to a recording of the song in the first place, using what is commonly referred to as a "Compact Disc Player". As these devices are manufactured to "de-scramble" the music, which is recorded onto Compact Discs (CDs) in a format otherwise unintelligible to human cognitive abilities, your use of such a device to render the content on the CD listenable is a violation of the aforementioned Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Thank you for respecting our property rights. We are certain that you will agree with us now that we have brought your attention to this matter. After all, record companies are people too.
I suppose someone will say political contributions are one way of "making a statement". Well, guess what - so is arson. That doesn't mean arson is considered free speech, or indeed speech at all.
I would say that political contributions ought not be protected as free speech. I do think that, in general, they are protected under the notion of property rights -- that is, as long as you acquired a piece of property in a legitimate way, and it is considered yours to dispose of, you should generally be allowed to dispose of it as you wish. Sure, that's not explicitly in the Constitution, but it IS a very big part of our legal tradition, our economy, and our society.
There are certain obvious exceptions, e.g. you can't pay someone to kill someone else. But I'm not convinced that individuals making contributions to politicians is so inherently bad that it ought to be severely restricted.
An interesting point, I think, is why corporations and businesses are allowed to make such large political contributions -- at the heart, why are corporations considered to be people in the eyes of the law? IANAL, but originally the courts held that corporations were people so that they could be named in lawsuits. Frankly, this led to a logical slippery slope that has gotten us into many present-day conundrums.
Corporations and organizations are much different from individuals ("natural persons" as the law puts it). They have different lifespans (indefinite) and different primal motivations (fundamentally businesses are entities for creating wealth, generaly of the monetary kind, but sometimes also the social kind). People's actions are tempered by the fact that your life is finite and the demands of the human psyche for things like love, social contact, happiness, etc. We act towards our physical survival, but once that's taken care of, most act towards -- dare I say -- spiritual survival as well. Corporations don't.
Why not just ban corporations from participating in political discourse at all? Corporations should get no say in how my government regulates my life; I chould have perfect free choice (using amount of money spent) about how much influence any corporation has over my life. The individuals making decisions at corporations will have as much of an opportunity to participate in the political process as anyone else, but they will have to do it as individuals.
You could also play around with this idea and see where it takes you in the realm of copyright law. Should corporations be allowed to hold copyrights at all? Or perhaps we should have some fundamental notion that only the individual creator can be the ultimate holder of a copyright, and corporations are thus more limited in how much control they can have over your MP3s and computers and CDs. The creators of the work are legally protected from having to relinquish total control over their creations in order to merely do business with the rest of the public.
"Corporation" is an entity different from "person"-- not an inherited class. Clearly corporations require certain rights and have certain obligations/responsibilities, but these should be assigned based on corporations' nature as wealth-creating entities rather than assigned just because human beings have those rights as well.
"Wow! You mean I just drag and drop things where I want them and it works? Damn!! That's cool!" and that's what Apple is selling...
It's called "USABILITY".
Palm OS has it.
Apple has it.
The makers of 97% of the computing devices on the market don't have a clue. It's why I have to spend 30 - 45 minutes every time I want to put music on my Digisette mp3 player (thanks to unstable PC software and an even worse device OS), or why some idiot at Creative labs thought that it was acceptable to have BOOT UP (20s) and SHUT DOWN (8-10s) times on my 20g Nomad, or why there is a delay of about 0.5 seconds after any button is pressed.
And how about the cretins at Motorola? I despise my StarTac. The battery is so heavy that I can't operate the phone with one hand -- the weight of the battery flapping around on the earpiece is too much of a counterweight. The buttons are flat, also making it impossible to dial without looking at the keypad. (SUPER for a device that's obviously going to be used in the car.) And don't even get me started about the phone's software. Looked at MS Outlook recently? There are at least FOUR separate interfaces to the address book, none of which are particularly well-thought-out.
These are examples of shit that is REALLY easy to get right with just a small amount of usability testing. This isn't cockpit design, it's consumer electronics.
yesterday, on CNN, in between terrorism and more terrorism, on the ticker at the bottom, i saw something that said "RIAA reports loss of $5B last year, says mostly attributed to CD burning piracy". I've been all over the RIAA and CNN's websites and can find nothing about it. If you find something, please post below
This stuff is dated August 20 2001. A press release does not true news make... however, the numbers below don't match $5 billion:
Specifically, the dollar value of all music product shipments decreased from $6.2 billion at mid-year 2000 to $5.9 billion at mid-year 2001--a 4.4 percent decrease. Unit shipments dropped from 488.7 million at mid-year 2000 to 442.7 million units at mid-year 2001--a 9.4 percent decrease, according to figures released today by the RIAA.
I mean, gee, does it occur to them that decreased CD sales are due to a not-so-hot economy, where people will tend to first cut spending on discretionary products like CDs?
Remember, in 2000, CD sales were up in spite of file trading. And at this time last year, the RIAA was reporting that it had seen record sales in the first half of 2000. Is it really that surprising that they're a few percent off their all-time high, after a year of a tenuous economy?
The warrant notice scares me the most. Does that mean that I can be arrested and then not be presented with a warrant, or that my house could be searched and I could not be presented with a warrant?
from thomas.loc.gov -> HR 3162:
SEC. 213. AUTHORITY FOR DELAYING NOTICE OF THE EXECUTION OF A WARRANT.
Section 3103a of title 18, United States Code, is amended--
(1) by inserting `(a) IN GENERAL- ' before `In addition'; and
(2) by adding at the end the following:
`(b) DELAY- With respect to the issuance of any warrant or court order under this section, or any other rule of law, to search for and seize any property or material that constitutes evidence of a criminal offense in violation of the laws of the United States, any notice required, or that may be required, to be given may be delayed if--
`(1) the court finds reasonable cause to believe that providing immediate notification of the execution of the warrant may have an adverse result (as defined in section 2705);
`(2) the warrant prohibits the seizure of any tangible property, any wire or electronic communication (as defined in section 2510), or, except as expressly provided in chapter 121, any stored wire or electronic information, except where the court finds reasonable necessity for the seizure; and
`(3) the warrant provides for the giving of such notice within a reasonable period of its execution, which period may thereafter be extended by the court for good cause shown.'.
from U.S. Code at cornell's Legal information institute:
t18 s2705:
(2) An adverse result for the purposes of paragraph (1) of this subsection is -
(A) endangering the life or physical safety of an individual;
(B) flight from prosecution;
(C) destruction of or tampering with evidence;
(D) intimidation of potential witnesses; or
(E) otherwise seriously jeopardizing an investigation or unduly
delaying a trial.
so... what, if they believe you'll destroy the evidence they don't have to serve you with the warrant when they search your house?
[IANAL] i guess it's better to not have the warrant served than to lower the standard from probable cause to reasonable doubt, as they did with auto searches. perhaps it's still a deal with the devil, but this, i think, is at least a better balance: police have to have the same standard of proof that they do now, but they can phone a judge and get a phone-warrant and search immediately if there is a risk of flight. if they don't have probable cause, they don't get to search. if they have probable cause, they don't have to have the paper right there.
although i think that diffie and landau make good points, they stop short of offering a solution or alternative route.
sun would do well to step up and offer some sort of open-source super-secure passport-type solution. because there IS human need for something of the sort. people mostly have to spend way too much of their time coaxing their computers to do what they want -- setting up their DSL, filling out all those stupid forms at every single website, whatever. very few people enjoy the types of mundane tasks that passport is trying to save them from. in the same manner, whoever makes setting up a network exactly as simple as plugging in a telephone is going to be really damn rich. it doesn't make people who want such simplicity STUPID: it does mean that they think they have better things to do with their time than set up their preferences on every machine they use. microsoft is trying to capitalize on that.
alternately, the government could pass laws that hold companies liable for letting users' personally identifying information get hacked into. maybe companies would think twice before accumulating all that data in the first place.
Essentially there's no difference between the elderly as a specific group learning computers than any other group. Teach them not to fear the computer, show them a few cool things, and then let them loose. That's how I learned computers, I'm betting that's how you learned computers, and that's probably the best way they can learn them too.
actually, this is dead wrong. I'm a usability engineer. people who did not grow up using interactive (electronic) technologies have radically different techniques for learning technology than do people who grew up with things like calculators, video games, and computers. this disconnect is most obvious in people who are approximately over 40 versus those who are younger than 40.
those who have grown up with digital technologies have a very exploratory method of learning. they punch buttons until they get what they want. people who are older than this -- realize, please, that i am NOT talking about the 50 year old sysadmins or whoever else reads slashdot -- do NOT use this exploration method. they tend to search for step-by-step instructions and tend not to look for hidden functionality (menus). in other words, they tend to approach "learning technology" problems in the way that one would attempt to learn how to use a mechanical object. unfortunately for the elderly, most interfaces today are designed with the implicit assumption that newbies to the interface will try to learn by exploring.
there are other issues in human cognition/physiology that affect how the elderly learn computers as well. for example, the amount of light that the elderly eye can perceive is about half that of a 25 year old. this means it's much harder to read text, look at pictures, and find what you're looking for. motor skills decrease -- it's harder to target icons.
Who will pay to put this stuff online? Such web sites would require huge servers, as they would almost instanteously become common research tools for students, journalists, scientists, and science enthusiasts worldwide.
You don't host that sort of thing on tiny intel boxes running Linux or NT/2K. This will take big servers, and big bandwitdth. That stuff is NOT cheap.
right now, journal subscriptions are, say, $200 per journal. there IS a market [of institutions] willing to pay for many of them. i would love to pay for scientific journal subscriptions if they were around the same cost as other magazines, and i'm sure i'm not alone here.
so you set up this huge online repository and make people pay to subscribe to it -- $50 a year for individuals or something; several ks for institutions or whatever. the newspaper and legal worlds have Lexis-Nexis, which all of them subscribe to.
an interesting thing about Lexis-nexis, at least as far as newspapers go, is that newspapers functionally pay a bit to contribute to these databases: in high school i worked as a copy clerk at a fairly large floridian newspaper, and they staffed one clerk per night for 8 hours just filtering and uploading the paper's original content. it's not much, but they *were* paying for the dude's wages. the same benefit applies, of course: if the paper gets its stuff in the database, it can be syndicated or simply rise in prestige, thereby attracting better writers, editors, etc.
one of the problems, in my mind, seems to be the difficulty of distinguishing between individual subscribers and institutional or business ones. perhaps someone has already solved this problem? but it seems to rely on either retarded security restrictions or user honesty (ha ha ha).
For providing a service that when used once in any any application, becomes on by default in every application (even when you've manually disabled it), those morons deserve all the laughter and ridicule they can get.
Not only has MS ignored user behavior for years -- for god's sake, a focus group is NOT a usability test, and just because someone thinks the paper clip is cute doesn't mean that it's going to make them more efficient -- but their usability engineers are clearly retarded for not realizing how grossly the thing violates some very simple interaction design heuristics.
for example, attention and fitts' law. let's think of context. someone is using MS Word. let's assume it's not their first time. they have been typing away and move their mouse towards the toolbar. they start to hover the mouse, trying to figure out which of the toolbar buttons they need to click. suddenly -- WIGGLE WIGGLE WIGGLE! little mr. clippy grabs their attention to the lower righthand corner of the screen. their focus is lost, they spend a couple of seconds getting clippy out of their face, and now they have to move their mouse all the way to the other corner of the screen and figure out all over again which button they want to click.
it's like all the Media Lab research that says "computers should recognize when people are frustrated and then apologize! it'll make users feel better!" guess what -- if someone had spent half the time usability engineering the computer that MIT spends enabling the computer to understand my emotions, MAYBE I WOULDN'T BE SO FRUSTRATED TO BEGIN WITH! (disclaimer: obviously the emo-detection has other applications; but turning it into pseudo-usability is off base)
had microsoft spent any bit of time making their styles usable, for example, it would have saved me about a day of work while i was writing my thesis. fuck the office assistant -- how about some well-designed software instead?
Now, this is a pretty interesting situation. While I've always been the first to criticize subscription software (which, essentially, this is - since you can't use Tivo w/o the listings [as of version 2.0 of their software]), it seems to me that we're actually receiving some leverage here - at least when we use the software as a group.
but the big problem with that sort of leverage is this: for it to work, people (at some point) have to be willing to actually cancel the service to get the company to listen. But once you cancel the service, you stop receiving (all or some of) the benefit of the product. If you don't buy another Replay, you can use the current one, which is fair and paid for. If you stop subscribing to TiVo, you have to give up a lot of the convenience that the product brought you.
Take cellphones as a very similar example. Most cellphone companies suck and their services are too expensive (I think) but changing providers is a huge hassle. plus there aren't any really GOOD providers to switch to. Verizon could certainly make me listen to an ad every time i place a call; is the moral outrage going to outweigh the cost of having to change my digits?
I don't think most people are so willing to give up the convenience of services that they've already gotten used to or started relying upon.
Similarly, the Beatles' White Album. I bought that on vinyl, and later on cassette. Am I really required to buy it AGAIN to legally download MP3s that other licenseholders have made?
One would think that this would be legal.
However, the ruling in mp3.com says precisely the opposite: even if the downloader/listener already has legal license to that music, the person who bought the CD that the streaming bits came from is the only person allowed to hear them.
As for the chemical analysis: My chemistry is a bit rusty, as it's been a few years since I did any research in it. However, I DID do research in organic chemistry. It's not entirely impossible for the correct components to form spontaneously. And water does indeed dissolve ammino acids - as it dissolves the components of all other acids.
See *Scientific American,* June -- 1994 (or possibly '95). It's not online. Anyone have the SciAm backissues on CD-ROM?
The article was a description of experiments where amino acids and some other crucial-to-life compounds formed in a "primordeal soup" of chemicals after an electric current was applied (i.e., lightning).
"People have an affinity for "things", especially in the case of the written word. As much as some of us might want to live in a Bauhaus, minimalist world, there's something warm and reassuring about a shelf filled with books.
Yes, but this is all a cultural construct. We've (as in, "we" on/.) been raised to think that education means power, wealth, and admiration (though not necessarily the other way around). Books are symbols of education. So of course physical books are good and a way to show status.
The entire reason that ebooks aren't popular are:
1) who the hell would ever pay the same for an electronic copy as they pay for a print copy? The actual texts are too expensive, given you're not paying for printing, binding, shipping, and bookstore overhead.
2) the human eye can't handle low resolutions of computer screens. if we had 1200 dpi, the way magazines and books do, reading on a sufficiently bright screen would be fine. this also assumes that other basic ergonomics and usability standards are met.
"I don't see this as a violation of a user's rights or of a user's privacy. The simple truth is, it's not your bandwidth in the first place. If you're going to use a network provided to you by an educational institution or business, you must adhere to their rules and restrictions. Don't like it? Go out and pay for your own bandwidth"
Oh? The fact that I pay $30,000 a year in tuition, room, and board on campus doesn't in any way translate to me paying for bandwidth? You'd better believe I'm paying for that bandwidth, and unless someone has reasonable/probable cause to believe that I'm doing something illegal, they have no right to be in my files.
Yes, www.kleinbottle.com does in fact sell pseudo-lkeins, or 3D representations of klein bottles. A coworker recently purchased one and it's sitting on his desk.
It's almost ironic how pictures of people being beaten, tortured, brutally killed, and dead on autopsy tables can be readily found on the Internet, but put a fake picture of a kitty on a bottle up and you've got hell.
I very strongly suspect that the reason we get more outraged over torture of [domestic] animals (and children) than we do the torture and deaths of adults is that domestic animals and children are completely dependent on grown adults for their livlihood. Adults can remove themselves from risky situations (to some extent); if you live in a bad neighborhood, you can move, or you don't go out at night, or you install extra locks on your doors. Adults at least have the option of trying to lower the probability that they get doused in gasoline and thrown off a bridge -- adults can carry a gun or learn aikido or travel in protective groups.
But if a pet finds itself in an environment where its only source of food and companionship is malicious, it can't do anything about it.
It's not just the torture that is horrifying: it's the torture of the weak and the helpless. Rape is terrible; rape of your grandmother lying in the nursing home is even worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Possible reasons for falling RIAA sales:
$6.2B/488.7M = $12.69/Unit (2000)
$5.9B/442.7M = $13.33/Unit (2001)
(a 5.04% increase, with 2000 US inflation at 3.4%)
i definitely wouldn't put it past some biz-school smartass to say in a boardroom meeting, "hey, let's bump up the price a little, decrease our sales, and create the data that will convince courts to shut down file traders."
When *i* was an undergraduate, I majored in human-computer interaction and am currently an interface director and usability practicioner.
Good design is not easy. If it were, why would so many software interfaces be unusable crap? Good interface design is EXTREMELY complex (for most people: difficult) if you are attempting to design an implementable software system that doesn't require the engineers to figure out holographic mind-reading displays (or otherwise add significant engineering overhead).
Name a software product that you would consider to be "excellently designed" -- I can guarantee that the people who built it spent a huge amount of time doing user-centered thinking and design iteration. For example, the Palm Pilot. Its simplicity seems obvious; its functionality seems apparent. That design was the end result of a long process of prototyping, usability testing, and creative brainstorming.
THIS is why user-interaction elements and systems should be patentable. The entire process of usability engineering is to make things that are so effortless and that make so much sense to the user that the user doesn't have to think twice about the software -- they can think instead about their work and their job. Unfortunately, this requires a ton of work, observation, and effort.
Finally, sure, the world would be a poorer place if anyone couldn't go to my website, see a "Gee whiz!" interaction mechanism that someone has paid me to design, test, and build, and then-and-there copy the code into their own software system. Or does that just make ME poorer because someone is expropriating the fruits of my labor without my permission?
This brings me to another interesting point about open-source usability. I've long toyed with the idea of getting a bunch of usability people together as part of the open source movement to do usability testing for open-source software products, at the request of whatever engineers are working on the software. Any thoughts on this?
Wow. I would have expected a usability guy to be less obtuse about human motivations than a pure engineer (Tim Berners-Lee -- "There are no reasons at all in theory for people to change URIs (or stop maintaining documents), but millions of reasons in practice." -- http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI ).
How about these reasons: the content sucks! It was stupid to begin with. It doesn't deserve immortality -- it's too embarassing to live. Most of the stuff I've taken off the web was because because it became dated, useless, outmoded, pointless, or just plain embarassing. Not all information is worth preserving. And reasons to stop maintaining documents: boredom; information isn't popular enough to justify the expense of maintaining it; relevance.
Add in the practical considerations -- people move servers, graduate from school, change DSL providers, software schemas (e.g. flat html to ASP to PHP or whatever). Obviously URIs were NOT well-designed to handle such contingencies.
These things should be apparant a mile away. Why is link rot so horrible anyway, aside from the annoyance of clicking on something that turns out not to be there?
the problem with this is that it's waaay easier than we think to uniquely identify someone using only a few pieces of information, such as might be obtained by combining a couple of databases.
See work at the Carnegie Mellon Laboratory for International Data Privacy (http://sos.heinz.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/publication
For example:
L. Sweeney. Uniqueness of Simple Demographics in the U.S. Population, LIDAP-WP4. Carnegie Mellon University, Laboratory for International Data Privacy, Pittsburgh, PA: 2000. ( http://sos.heinz.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/papers/LIDAP
L. Sweeney. All the Data on All the People, LIDAP-WP3. Carnegie Mellon University, Laboratory for International Data Privacy, Pittsburgh, PA: 2000. ( http://sos.heinz.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/papers/LIDAP
because it's too expensive for the music industry to go after individual pirates -- jane and john doe with their napster. why else the ridiculous lawsuits against napster and digital city -- and the DMCA itself? the studios could always have gone after the actual violaters -- the people who are actually making illegal copies and trades. but that's not profitable or efficient enough.
I don't understand why anybody thinks that clones would or should somehow end up being treated as anything other than regular people. So what if their genetic material is "identical" to someone else's -- which it won't be, given small genetic mutations and changes that occur during early development? They'll still be a human being, entitled to all the rights and charged with the responsibilities thereof. And there is no reason why a genetic clone should ever be considered any more the exclusive property of the genetic source than a sperm-and-egg child would be. Clones will still have to grow up and develop, and that process will make them much different from their donor.
There's been too much dark science fiction about clones -- people are so used to thinking of clones as servile androids that they don't even stop to think about how unlikely that would be. As long as we don't differentiate legally between a clone and a sperm-and-egg, we're fine. And there's no good basis for differentiating, really.
Dear Mr. Grark:
As representatives of Don McLean (R-TM), the Capitol Recording Empire (R-TM), and co-representing Madonna (TM), we hereby order you to cease and desist your propogation of the above work. We consider it to be a derivative work of Don McLean (R-TM)'s song American Pie (TM), to which we own publishing rights. Moreover, you have obviously listened to the recording and thought about the lyrics of American Pie (TM) in order to produce your derivative work. We hereby consider this ponderance of the work in your mind to be a "copy" under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This copy was not made with explicit authorization by the agents of Capitol Records, Inc. (R-TM). Finally, to make the copy in your head, you had to listen to a recording of the song in the first place, using what is commonly referred to as a "Compact Disc Player". As these devices are manufactured to "de-scramble" the music, which is recorded onto Compact Discs (CDs) in a format otherwise unintelligible to human cognitive abilities, your use of such a device to render the content on the CD listenable is a violation of the aforementioned Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Thank you for respecting our property rights. We are certain that you will agree with us now that we have brought your attention to this matter. After all, record companies are people too.
Sincerely,
The Capitol Recording Empire (R-TM)
I suppose someone will say political contributions are one way of "making a statement". Well, guess what - so is arson. That doesn't mean arson is considered free speech, or indeed speech at all.
I would say that political contributions ought not be protected as free speech. I do think that, in general, they are protected under the notion of property rights -- that is, as long as you acquired a piece of property in a legitimate way, and it is considered yours to dispose of, you should generally be allowed to dispose of it as you wish. Sure, that's not explicitly in the Constitution, but it IS a very big part of our legal tradition, our economy, and our society.
There are certain obvious exceptions, e.g. you can't pay someone to kill someone else. But I'm not convinced that individuals making contributions to politicians is so inherently bad that it ought to be severely restricted.
An interesting point, I think, is why corporations and businesses are allowed to make such large political contributions -- at the heart, why are corporations considered to be people in the eyes of the law? IANAL, but originally the courts held that corporations were people so that they could be named in lawsuits. Frankly, this led to a logical slippery slope that has gotten us into many present-day conundrums.
Corporations and organizations are much different from individuals ("natural persons" as the law puts it). They have different lifespans (indefinite) and different primal motivations (fundamentally businesses are entities for creating wealth, generaly of the monetary kind, but sometimes also the social kind). People's actions are tempered by the fact that your life is finite and the demands of the human psyche for things like love, social contact, happiness, etc. We act towards our physical survival, but once that's taken care of, most act towards -- dare I say -- spiritual survival as well. Corporations don't.
Why not just ban corporations from participating in political discourse at all? Corporations should get no say in how my government regulates my life; I chould have perfect free choice (using amount of money spent) about how much influence any corporation has over my life. The individuals making decisions at corporations will have as much of an opportunity to participate in the political process as anyone else, but they will have to do it as individuals.
You could also play around with this idea and see where it takes you in the realm of copyright law. Should corporations be allowed to hold copyrights at all? Or perhaps we should have some fundamental notion that only the individual creator can be the ultimate holder of a copyright, and corporations are thus more limited in how much control they can have over your MP3s and computers and CDs. The creators of the work are legally protected from having to relinquish total control over their creations in order to merely do business with the rest of the public.
"Corporation" is an entity different from "person"-- not an inherited class. Clearly corporations require certain rights and have certain obligations/responsibilities, but these should be assigned based on corporations' nature as wealth-creating entities rather than assigned just because human beings have those rights as well.
It's called "USABILITY".
Palm OS has it.
Apple has it.
The makers of 97% of the computing devices on the market don't have a clue. It's why I have to spend 30 - 45 minutes every time I want to put music on my Digisette mp3 player (thanks to unstable PC software and an even worse device OS), or why some idiot at Creative labs thought that it was acceptable to have BOOT UP (20s) and SHUT DOWN (8-10s) times on my 20g Nomad, or why there is a delay of about 0.5 seconds after any button is pressed.
And how about the cretins at Motorola? I despise my StarTac. The battery is so heavy that I can't operate the phone with one hand -- the weight of the battery flapping around on the earpiece is too much of a counterweight. The buttons are flat, also making it impossible to dial without looking at the keypad. (SUPER for a device that's obviously going to be used in the car.) And don't even get me started about the phone's software. Looked at MS Outlook recently? There are at least FOUR separate interfaces to the address book, none of which are particularly well-thought-out.
These are examples of shit that is REALLY easy to get right with just a small amount of usability testing. This isn't cockpit design, it's consumer electronics.
See: http://www.riaa.com/News_Story.cfm?id=446 for the RIAA news story; http://www.riaa.com/pdf/midyear_2001.pdf for the actual statistics.
This stuff is dated August 20 2001. A press release does not true news make... however, the numbers below don't match $5 billion:
I mean, gee, does it occur to them that decreased CD sales are due to a not-so-hot economy, where people will tend to first cut spending on discretionary products like CDs?
Remember, in 2000, CD sales were up in spite of file trading. And at this time last year, the RIAA was reporting that it had seen record sales in the first half of 2000. Is it really that surprising that they're a few percent off their all-time high, after a year of a tenuous economy?
The warrant notice scares me the most. Does that mean that I can be arrested and then not be presented with a warrant, or that my house could be searched and I could not be presented with a warrant?
from thomas.loc.gov -> HR 3162:
SEC. 213. AUTHORITY FOR DELAYING NOTICE OF THE EXECUTION OF A WARRANT.
Section 3103a of title 18, United States Code, is amended--
(1) by inserting `(a) IN GENERAL- ' before `In addition'; and
(2) by adding at the end the following:
`(b) DELAY- With respect to the issuance of any warrant or court order under this section, or any other rule of law, to search for and seize any property or material that constitutes evidence of a criminal offense in violation of the laws of the United States, any notice required, or that may be required, to be given may be delayed if--
`(1) the court finds reasonable cause to believe that providing immediate notification of the execution of the warrant may have an adverse result (as defined in section 2705);
`(2) the warrant prohibits the seizure of any tangible property, any wire or electronic communication (as defined in section 2510), or, except as expressly provided in chapter 121, any stored wire or electronic information, except where the court finds reasonable necessity for the seizure; and
`(3) the warrant provides for the giving of such notice within a reasonable period of its execution, which period may thereafter be extended by the court for good cause shown.'.
from U.S. Code at cornell's Legal information institute:
t18 s2705:
(2) An adverse result for the purposes of paragraph (1) of this subsection is -
(A) endangering the life or physical safety of an individual;
(B) flight from prosecution;
(C) destruction of or tampering with evidence;
(D) intimidation of potential witnesses; or
(E) otherwise seriously jeopardizing an investigation or unduly
delaying a trial.
so... what, if they believe you'll destroy the evidence they don't have to serve you with the warrant when they search your house?
[IANAL] i guess it's better to not have the warrant served than to lower the standard from probable cause to reasonable doubt, as they did with auto searches. perhaps it's still a deal with the devil, but this, i think, is at least a better balance: police have to have the same standard of proof that they do now, but they can phone a judge and get a phone-warrant and search immediately if there is a risk of flight. if they don't have probable cause, they don't get to search. if they have probable cause, they don't have to have the paper right there.
although i think that diffie and landau make good points, they stop short of offering a solution or alternative route.
sun would do well to step up and offer some sort of open-source super-secure passport-type solution. because there IS human need for something of the sort. people mostly have to spend way too much of their time coaxing their computers to do what they want -- setting up their DSL, filling out all those stupid forms at every single website, whatever. very few people enjoy the types of mundane tasks that passport is trying to save them from. in the same manner, whoever makes setting up a network exactly as simple as plugging in a telephone is going to be really damn rich. it doesn't make people who want such simplicity STUPID: it does mean that they think they have better things to do with their time than set up their preferences on every machine they use. microsoft is trying to capitalize on that.
alternately, the government could pass laws that hold companies liable for letting users' personally identifying information get hacked into. maybe companies would think twice before accumulating all that data in the first place.
actually, this is dead wrong. I'm a usability engineer. people who did not grow up using interactive (electronic) technologies have radically different techniques for learning technology than do people who grew up with things like calculators, video games, and computers. this disconnect is most obvious in people who are approximately over 40 versus those who are younger than 40.
those who have grown up with digital technologies have a very exploratory method of learning. they punch buttons until they get what they want. people who are older than this -- realize, please, that i am NOT talking about the 50 year old sysadmins or whoever else reads slashdot -- do NOT use this exploration method. they tend to search for step-by-step instructions and tend not to look for hidden functionality (menus). in other words, they tend to approach "learning technology" problems in the way that one would attempt to learn how to use a mechanical object. unfortunately for the elderly, most interfaces today are designed with the implicit assumption that newbies to the interface will try to learn by exploring.
there are other issues in human cognition/physiology that affect how the elderly learn computers as well. for example, the amount of light that the elderly eye can perceive is about half that of a 25 year old. this means it's much harder to read text, look at pictures, and find what you're looking for. motor skills decrease -- it's harder to target icons.
right now, journal subscriptions are, say, $200 per journal. there IS a market [of institutions] willing to pay for many of them. i would love to pay for scientific journal subscriptions if they were around the same cost as other magazines, and i'm sure i'm not alone here.
so you set up this huge online repository and make people pay to subscribe to it -- $50 a year for individuals or something; several ks for institutions or whatever. the newspaper and legal worlds have Lexis-Nexis, which all of them subscribe to.
an interesting thing about Lexis-nexis, at least as far as newspapers go, is that newspapers functionally pay a bit to contribute to these databases: in high school i worked as a copy clerk at a fairly large floridian newspaper, and they staffed one clerk per night for 8 hours just filtering and uploading the paper's original content. it's not much, but they *were* paying for the dude's wages. the same benefit applies, of course: if the paper gets its stuff in the database, it can be syndicated or simply rise in prestige, thereby attracting better writers, editors, etc.
one of the problems, in my mind, seems to be the difficulty of distinguishing between individual subscribers and institutional or business ones. perhaps someone has already solved this problem? but it seems to rely on either retarded security restrictions or user honesty (ha ha ha).
Not only has MS ignored user behavior for years -- for god's sake, a focus group is NOT a usability test, and just because someone thinks the paper clip is cute doesn't mean that it's going to make them more efficient -- but their usability engineers are clearly retarded for not realizing how grossly the thing violates some very simple interaction design heuristics.
for example, attention and fitts' law. let's think of context. someone is using MS Word. let's assume it's not their first time. they have been typing away and move their mouse towards the toolbar. they start to hover the mouse, trying to figure out which of the toolbar buttons they need to click. suddenly -- WIGGLE WIGGLE WIGGLE! little mr. clippy grabs their attention to the lower righthand corner of the screen. their focus is lost, they spend a couple of seconds getting clippy out of their face, and now they have to move their mouse all the way to the other corner of the screen and figure out all over again which button they want to click.
it's like all the Media Lab research that says "computers should recognize when people are frustrated and then apologize! it'll make users feel better!" guess what -- if someone had spent half the time usability engineering the computer that MIT spends enabling the computer to understand my emotions, MAYBE I WOULDN'T BE SO FRUSTRATED TO BEGIN WITH! (disclaimer: obviously the emo-detection has other applications; but turning it into pseudo-usability is off base)
had microsoft spent any bit of time making their styles usable, for example, it would have saved me about a day of work while i was writing my thesis. fuck the office assistant -- how about some well-designed software instead?
but the big problem with that sort of leverage is this: for it to work, people (at some point) have to be willing to actually cancel the service to get the company to listen. But once you cancel the service, you stop receiving (all or some of) the benefit of the product. If you don't buy another Replay, you can use the current one, which is fair and paid for. If you stop subscribing to TiVo, you have to give up a lot of the convenience that the product brought you.
Take cellphones as a very similar example. Most cellphone companies suck and their services are too expensive (I think) but changing providers is a huge hassle. plus there aren't any really GOOD providers to switch to. Verizon could certainly make me listen to an ad every time i place a call; is the moral outrage going to outweigh the cost of having to change my digits?
I don't think most people are so willing to give up the convenience of services that they've already gotten used to or started relying upon.
One would think that this would be legal.
However, the ruling in mp3.com says precisely the opposite: even if the downloader/listener already has legal license to that music, the person who bought the CD that the streaming bits came from is the only person allowed to hear them.
see... oh... this press release from mp3.com
and
wired news article about a congressman trying to create legislation that says "if they already bought it, they can listen to it!"
Yes, but this is all a cultural construct. We've (as in, "we" on
The entire reason that ebooks aren't popular are:
1) who the hell would ever pay the same for an electronic copy as they pay for a print copy? The actual texts are too expensive, given you're not paying for printing, binding, shipping, and bookstore overhead.
2) the human eye can't handle low resolutions of computer screens. if we had 1200 dpi, the way magazines and books do, reading on a sufficiently bright screen would be fine. this also assumes that other basic ergonomics and usability standards are met.
"I don't see this as a violation of a user's rights or of a user's privacy. The simple truth is, it's not your bandwidth in the first place. If you're going to use a network provided to you by an educational institution or business, you must adhere to their rules and restrictions. Don't like it? Go out and pay for your own bandwidth"
Oh? The fact that I pay $30,000 a year in tuition, room, and board on campus doesn't in any way translate to me paying for bandwidth? You'd better believe I'm paying for that bandwidth, and unless someone has reasonable/probable cause to believe that I'm doing something illegal, they have no right to be in my files.
Yes, www.kleinbottle.com does in fact sell pseudo-lkeins, or 3D representations of klein bottles. A coworker recently purchased one and it's sitting on his desk.
see a picture of the bottle on his desk.
What's that great line...
"No one ever lost any money by understimating the stupidity of the American public"?
I very strongly suspect that the reason we get more outraged over torture of [domestic] animals (and children) than we do the torture and deaths of adults is that domestic animals and children are completely dependent on grown adults for their livlihood. Adults can remove themselves from risky situations (to some extent); if you live in a bad neighborhood, you can move, or you don't go out at night, or you install extra locks on your doors. Adults at least have the option of trying to lower the probability that they get doused in gasoline and thrown off a bridge -- adults can carry a gun or learn aikido or travel in protective groups.
But if a pet finds itself in an environment where its only source of food and companionship is malicious, it can't do anything about it.
It's not just the torture that is horrifying: it's the torture of the weak and the helpless. Rape is terrible; rape of your grandmother lying in the nursing home is even worse.