Well that 'philosophy' is the difference between encoding video to mpeg-4 in two hours or two weeks.
I hear ya. That reminds me of a military suspense movie I saw. An important part of the movie's plot was that the protagonist/investigator gets hours' worth of human leg work done while an expensive computer does an edge sharpening algorithm to one still image of medium resolution in order to reveal a person's identity. It was a sort of race. Gimp or Photoshop on any PC from the past few years could do it in a blink. On my old 100 MHz 486, that kind of operation would have taken maybe 20 seconds.
Still this focus on comparitive horsepower neglects something Sartre might have pointed out. There are an astronically large number of possibilities.
When you consider truly primative hardware--say, an 8-pin PIC--then it doesn't have that aura of creative opportunity about it. It could very well be because there is such a drastic diminution in capability, in, say, "downgrading" in imagination from significant fractions of a gigabyte of RAM down to several dozen addressable registers, a.k.a. RAM, that the effect might actually be more of a measure of emotion than of technical utility. If there is enough room in, say a cheap PIC chip's ROM to store a program with about 30 RISC instructions, and if the instruction set (actually only ~28 to ~33 instructions in the whole set) then the finity of possibility is much more evident. The permutations ("software possibilities") would be "on the order of" a googol, but that is substantially shy of infinity. ("Substantially shy of infinity" is silly just as infinity minus 8 is silly.) I suppose our perception of "near infinity" is perceived as if asymptotic. Near infinity in possibility might have the definition of "perception of freedom", depending when you ask and how, like choosing the focal length for a camera. Is there really any significant difference between 30 kilometers, a light year and infinity while setting the focal length for a camera? That is a question about the person's notion of significance! It is a cousin of ethics; it is a value judgment.
When a "small mind" thinks in terms of infinitesimally small differences of still non-identical objects or possibilities--say, the adage that you cannot enter the same stream twice--this hair-splitting is what increases the quantity of distinctions. In that case, by virtue of the "thinner slices" being more numerous, there is still immensity of perception because the denominator threatens to hit zero "soon".
When a more macroscopic observer does something like that there is a sort of intinsically jaded sensibility. "Yeah. I know. We've done that already. What we need to be thinking about is..." Is what? Typically some possibility only recently made possible--say nanotubes or three-figure prices on thin computer monitors. Now I'm supposed to pay attention to thin computer monitors? According to the electronics retailer, yes. Why? Does anyone have the guts to answer, "Because it has fallen into your price range and because we need to peddle this high-margin item ASAP to optimize utilization of square footage in our retail electronics store."? Probably not. That is, in turn, because it is handier overall to pretend that this is all "new technology" and that I am supposed to say wow on cue and to refrain from being impressed when not stimulated for impressions.
I am not trying to digress on a rant against marketroids. I am trying to get a grasp on a continuum between a sort of microscopic versus macroscopic notion of scaling perceptions. Either way, microscopic or macroscopic, the effect is the same: excessively large quantities of objects or possibilities come into consideration. Reaction against that, IMO, is "hidden" below the premises that bring about "snide" comments like, "I know. We've done that already. What we need to think about is newer gizmo X." (For example, a microsopic perspective would disagree th
I think you just outdid probably 95% of the salaried music critics from whom I have read in my entire lifetime. (Seriously.)
The thing to do is to enjoy whining about it. I mean it. Back in the 80's, the Dead Kennedys told us our faults in the U.S.A. I'll excerpt from my warped memories:
When they dig this up in a thousand years They'll either laugh or cry. Jock-O-Rama Save my soul. Come lick the bu___ of the beef patrol... Jock-O-Rama on the brain. Redneck-athon drivin' me insane. The future of America--leave it to them. Watch it roll over Niagra Falls
MTV get off the air!
Is my c_ck big enough, Is my brain small enough For you to make me a star? Give me a toot, And I'll show you my soul. Pull my (marionette) strings, And I'll go far.
Well, chick, you're outta luck. 'Cuz I'm rollin' down the stairs, Too drunk to...
The thing is, some of us have bragging rights. While the cute girls were happily bobbing their heads to "You spin me round round, baby, round round--like a record, baby..." (retch, retch) some of us knew that it sucked while it sucked, and some of us said so and how and why. You Brits would call us wankers as a consequence of our principled aesthetic stance. Oh well. It all comes out in the wash, huh? (snicker)
Nirvana invented pretty much nothing. When I stumbled into "...Teen Spirit" while flipping channels on TV, then I realized that not only had punk gotten self-pitiful--it had become immensely profitable. Oops. Didn't the Brits show us the debacle of that stuff with "...Bollocks"? Oh well. Everyone claimed to understand precisely this "misunderstood generation" X. Yeah. Billy Idol's old band.
Last night a little dancer, came dancing to my door. Last night a little nouveau riche, self-absorbed fella fell OD'd to the floor.
Oh I wish I'd been American. It sounds like you missed out on Kylie, Jason, Rick Astley, Sonia and all the other Stock, Aitken and Waterman drivel in the late '80s and early '90s.
What you meant to say was, I've been shakin' For so long.
Naw. We got some of that imported Astley stuff. I'm not bitter though. OTOH, Guinness is bitter, and Budweiser is not. Neither is free as in free Linux.
There used to be a time when the only Utah software company I had heard of was the one that cranked out WordPerfect. Interestingly, back in March of 1998, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R, UT) was particularly attentive when all the scrutiny came upon Microsoft's practices. Back then, the "overnight success in marketshare gains of Microsoft Word" (concurrently with the rollout of Windows 95, "coincidentally") was still fresh on people's minds. I don't know how much pocket lining Senator Hatch got from WordPerfect's owners (which, in the seemingly pathologically sycophantic political culture of the United States compels me to hasten to add that) even though we all know what an honorable and objective thinking and decent-hearted human being Orrin Hatch is. By the way he furrowed his brow literally at Bill Gates on C-SPAN, I would guess that the various reelect Hatch campaign workers were on a first name basis with the folks who gave clerical DOS users the need for those cute microprinted templates to fit around the F1 to F12 keys.
One of the neat things about dealing with practicing Mormons, Muslims and fanatical Dutch Reformed folks is that you don't have to worry about them being drunk. Anecdotally, it also seems to me that they (along with all that is Calvinistic and/or Puritanical in some sane proportion) have the courage to drive their hard bargains in your face where you can see before settling on the terms of the transaction, whereupon such people will stick to those terms. Without exceptions that would conveniently be both memorable and illustrative, I notice these phenomena in the "boring conservative crowd" as opposed to those who are more fun, who are slicker and who are apparently easier to deal with but (as with all that is meretricious) prove to be more slippery to deal with after the handshake. Hmm. Now do we see a pattern here? Utah, sobriety, willful and honest bargaining, folks sufficiently courageous/biased to glare at the world's wealthiest man, Things That Piss Off Microsoft On Purpose and With Purpose? Oh.
I dunno...
Between hitting the Preview button and the Submit button, I read stuff about Alan Ashton: a brilliant man who wound up pretty generous (in addition to other reported virtues, none of which seemed to be the sort of thing to put on a resume while seeking to get hired as a rock star as token junkie/bass player). He sounds like a stand-up guy, and I felt the same about Senator Hatch until I saw him engage in a disengenuous parliamentary prank the other day in the Senate Judiciary Committee. In retrospect, if that's as bad as it gets, then buy stock in Utah Senatorial halo polish production equipment companies.
BTW, now that I have your attention, tell me something. How would this work as a sig? Hypocrisy can outlast civilization, but civilization cannot outlast hypocrisy.
...are people forgetting that copper is priced per traincar load--not per troy ounce? Every time I read about 802.11x, I think, "Golly, that sounds pretty fun, but I really don't think I despise cat 5 cable that intensely anyway," and there is something about a $9 card running about 50 times faster than anyone I know could hope to afford to access the Internet sustainably, most of all knowing that everybody's operating systems can access that card about a trillion times without problems. The number after the dot that is really neat is "3". Yep. You heard it here first. 802.3 is excellent technology. That it's old is (occasionally) beside the point. BTW, I don't mean this as antagonism; I'm just literally wondering if I'm all alone here in this Luddite corner that might find copper at dirt cheap, vetted, reliable, tested, robust, negligible and "happy" 100 Mb/s to be really really really tough to beat. The next thing you know I'll be lobbying Congress to keep people using pocket calculators.
Huh? (blush) Oh yeah. They actually are. Excuse me for the lack of controversy in my opinions. Next time I just might offend you.;-)
Could anyone point out for me a list of benefits for going 64-bit on the "desktop" too?
Let's say you're in your cubicle in the year 2015, and someone tells you to write a software application to help manage the virtual DVD player for all the quaint movies. (Who knows? Maybe there will come a day soon when the sum total of, say, AOL/Time/Warner's content can be bought in a boxed set with the box weighing an ounce in its predominant storage media while the content owners will gripe at the "whole farm" being downloaded by the self-mutating Morpheous 15.0 finding the cops faster than they can find it.) Oops. I digressed.
In this scenario, with you programming in 2015, there is one movie per file, and each file has about 4.5 gigabytes on it. Let's say you use plain old C programming, and you want to go all the way to the end of the file for some reason. Then you'd use fseek(). I just typed "man fseek" into cygwin. Ha ha! The joke is on me. The second argument to fseek(), which is crucial to choose how many bytes into the file you'll be going, is type "long int". These days that is typically 64 bits. I mean, that is 64 bits anyway. Thus, by a complicated way, we have seen that the difference is practically invisible--"transparent" as it turns out--but that we can presume that that second argument to fseek() can be passed in one measly register without a chapperone. It will run infinitesimally more quickly--like we didn't know that already? Kewuhl! Ok. Maybe that's a bit of an overreaction, but if you think that is is an overreaction, then get off of/., and get a real life (like the folks surfing sportsillustrated.com). Jeez. Do I have to tell you everything?
On a more serious note, I bet this 64-bit advancement is far less important than the 32-bit advancement was. One desktop-oriented way of thinking about this is to note how much graphics work is jobbed out from the main processor these days. For that reason, graphics card vendors can put one or several 64-bit chips on the graphics card, and who cares if each chip can talk Intel-ese machine language? It is very likely that little more than terse commands will need to be given to high performance graphics hardware. Meanwhile, in other bandwidth matters, the RAM is even more of a severe relative bottleneck now. Maybe that in itself is sufficient reason to widen every possible pipe. There is only so high a velocity at which the "fluid" can move through it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but don't such questions ultimately redound to philosophy? Who needs a widget? Before scoffing/flaming/shrugging, gimme just a coupla extra sentences' worth.
I paid more than $100 for the extra 2 megabytes of RAM necessary to get Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS working on my 10 MHz Cyrix-based AT clone (i.e., i80286, 80286, '286, 286, depending when you "label"). It was worth every penny.
The thing that might most merit your attention here is something I learned very quickly after getting just the first few programs to work. The permutations of what I could program might as well be considered infinite. Get this: It is difficult to completely reign in (or even fully to comprehend) the vast and diffuse capabilities of a 10 MHz beige box limited to the 80286 instruction set and bend-over-backwards-in-the-Protected-Mode 16 MB of RAM physical ceiling. This weak piddly hardware has--I said has, not had--more capability than I could explore in ten lifetimes as a creator of software. When the companies continue to crank out traincar loads of what (for now in the "Pre Palladium Rollout Era") is still pretty general-purpose hardware, "limitations" are matters of philosophy of science, which is where I started, come to think of it. I guess my age is showing, but I think (that is, when I think well) it is all (literally) awesome, and it has been thus for about a half century and counting.
...not doing its own research? "Oh. That's just typical Microsoft, yanno. They stand there in abush position and wait. Then when someone actually innovates something, if it cannot be efficiently stolen, Microsoft will buy it."
Come to think of it, I suppose it is more frightening now that Microsoft might actually be inventing something. Do you suppose? Whatever Microsoft comes up with on its own Microsoft can, well, EMBRACE AND EXTEND! Ack! For now I am tempted to drift off to sleep with comfortable thoughts like the August 1995 billboard outside the local yokel Mac vendor: "Windows 95 is Mac '89!"
What are the characteristics of success then? I think I know. I read about it in excerpts from Joseph Schumpeter and a top notch book called The Work of Nations by Robert Reich, who was a Harvard economics professor at the time of the writing. Before I spill those beans, let's think some more about academic competition and how it fits into everything else.
When I was at a heighty tighty university, there was a common expression among the highly motivated and cognitively elite students: "Don't take geography because it's easy. It's easy for everyone else and graded on a curve like everything else. That makes it so easy it's hard." Imagine a bell curve about a thousand feet tall. The last inch separates curve wreckers from washouts. If someone takes an "easy" course of study, the odds are pretty good that the proverbial Real World will do to that person what the GPA-fluffing tactic would do to the person contemplating taking easy/hard geography "for the easy A."
In the long run, there are two measures of personality that correlate most of all with what we would consider elite status in most (superficial?) measures. They are as Joseph Schumpeter said they would be: intelligence and strength of will. Consider three huge winners in recent history: Ross Perot, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. All are stubborn but not equally. One is head-and-shoulders above the others in cognitive sophistication. The other two make up (made up) for it by sticking with the program once it is in place../ of all crowds should know that Perot "making" a huge computer company isn't quite the same thing as the label would indicate, but that's beside the point.
The point is minding--literally minding--a person's business. A mind is not just the "math"; it is the desire also.
I guess I'll leave you with a digression. In Reich's book, he "promised" all drooling greedy people with intellectual properties that the stuff would amortize/rot/depreciate lickety split. You want a company destined for glory over time? Get talented people in fields of sophisticated symbolic analysis first of all to pledge allegiance and second of all to work in ways that leverage recently developed skill. The "expensive" payroll will be more lucrative than traditional capital assets and even more lucrative than the intellectual properties per se.
There is always this American-styled Fort Knox Key mindset that provokes us to spend money on patent fees ten times more often than doing so can pay for itself. "If I could just get that one little thing working right, then money will flow to me as if from a burst dam," people secretly think to themselves while dialing the patent lawyer's phone number. In reality, if you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path somewhere, perhaps paving right over you, perhaps enriching you, perhaps impoverishing you.
9 of 10 patents are financial duds, and 9 of 10 business ventures fail within two years. Risk/reward looks pretty similar, which is why it is intensely ironic that tempers flare so much on the left and right in all of this stuff.
The two are hardly comparable: SECAM was a quirky version of the German PAL system, which has given Europe far better TV quality than the USA for the last several decades. The first time I saw an American TV (what is it, 405 lines instead of 625?!), I thought it was broken...
Broken? I was there! Melonman broke it. I was at the scene of the accident! What the honourable (honou^Hrable) gentleman did not mention was that he was (A) driving in the left lane of a two-lane road at the time and (B) preoccupied with the spectacularly superior hedonic conditions on this side of the Atlantic. Whilst this was happening (^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^ H Meanwhile,) his new fundamentalist/evangelical/but-really-only-kinda-s orta-wink-nudge girlfriend wiped the apple pie off of his hot dog and Harley Davidson chaps, and also from the seat of the spacious 300 horsepower pickup truck whose radio continuously plays country music and jazz and coverage of something like cricket (^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^ H baseball).
;-)
By the way, we got Christopher Hitchens, Spice Girls, Billy Idol and Peter Frampton from you as is greatly appreciated. (For example, how else could we engage in careful consideration of human rights atrocities of nuns who fell thumping on the floor with a wine glass in my hand? See? For that kind of thing, well, WE CRY, "MORE, MORE, MORE!") As you ought to know by, ahem, the decisions we manifest, we love thoughtful consideration of morals and argumentative nuance in matters of politics on the tele (^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H TV). I don't really know who you might have gotten from us. It's really hard to tell, you know, whilst there are only 405 lines of resolution.
BTW, the most famous Brit we know explicitly at 405 lines of resolution is "Your 'oyasinth," a.k.a., Hyacinth Bucket. (^H * 100ish) (Blush.) Oops. This is/. I forgot. Where are my manners? Why am I humming something about lumberjacks? Beowolf clusters and Natalie Portman and p* birds (a pointer to an object of class Ouch in some OOP language or another)?
Disclaimer: I, finallyHasANickname, have been in therapy for anglophilia for quite some time, mates. I read from some bloke that it is incurable. I say, this must not stand. Still, since the early days of the Blair Administration (^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Labor Government ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Labour Government) I have found myself keeping my eye on you blokes, but don't worry about Big Brother kinds of things. How much could there be to worry about, given that only 405 lines...
What about when the shoe is on the other foot? I suspect that you wouldn't have the same cavalier attitude towards Chile if they decided to reduce the terms of their copyright restrictions. Especially if it affected America somehow.
Umm... You mean like Chile suddenly (and hypothetically) enacting legislation to make that the place where you can make illicit copies of some Microsoft product or another? Heck. Legislators in any country can write what they please. Consider that "hundred copies" notion of things. What if Chileans decided that it would be fair to offer 100:1? A hypothetical average Chilean would pay MSFT one percent, and the other 99ish percent are "public domain". In that case, the accidental characteristic of MSFT shares being among the most widely held in the USA, what "affects America" is what affects the hoarders of ideas who kid us that they innovate and own innovation.
"Preserving our cultural heritage" is a sort of code phrase for right-tending anything. I'm sure there were Nazis convinced that was their, ahem, "goal", bottom line. Translated into Western-hemispherical Purtugese, "preserving our cultural heritage" might mean preserving Chilean wealth "from Microsoft's greed" in a hypothetical legislative push to look the other way when folks copy without paying. Then the MS-USA (2.0 as always) would be "preserving our cultural heritage" by raising hell and trade barriers and Navy alert status to maintain profits, i.e. "respect for private property", i.e., an integral part of "our cultural heritage." Does Microsoft respect my private property (whose principled superset is our cultural heritage)? Does Microsoft respect yours? Well, sometimes. This digression is not what it seems! The hypothetical condition of Chile looking the other way while folks there hypothetically make illicit copies means the same thing as disrespecting copyright laws and treaties to protect them and the property of their sort. Of course, the MSFT example steers away from the "50 years versus 14 years" debate, but the principles persist the "farcical" nature of the hypothesis.
It's about private property, the specific subset, intellectual property. I get nervous when people introduce fond expressions of preservation of cultural heritage while actually messing with the actual principles of honor, ethics, and justice that should (in a good conservative's heart) be as rigid as Plato's Forms, not some Shadow On Cave Wall 2.0 at US$480 per user license, the embedded turnstyles of which require some bending and altering of the conscience. Then comes social engineering:
the cranking out of new nomenclature: "piracy". Is it piracy if I am a computer genius who solves some important algorithmic riddle and then brag about it on Usenet but still wind up sufficiently naive, say, that I sort of BSD-license an idea but forget attribution requirements or somesuch? If there is a legal crack, Microsoft will steal. You know it. Microsoft will steal from the public domain and its similarly liberal cousin domains. In some senses, Microsoft is really just the archetype as in "Microsofts and wannabes", and that is where I am discussing this stuff.
Mickey Mouse hardly needs protecting? If you have bet the farm on Disney stock, you would look at it all differently. I imagine that it would appear as if there is a hoard at the gates, seeking to loot the glorious (and gloriously private) Mickey Mouse there in the Magic Kingdom. The sad news (when it comes) is really just as simple as the ticket price falling down to zero for Mickey's image's use. "Sucks to be you, huh, Disney?" someone asks with a shrug. Meanwhile, someone's grandma switches from Ensure to Alpo, and nobody notices. Why? Too much was bet on how lucrative Mickey Mouse (of disputable necessity in protection of I.P.) would sustainably be. When "the rich" lose in various corporate ways, I suppose there is some grandma out there who can no longer afford human food. Hence, when my "l
480x640 is a special screen resolution for the dyslyxic. Everything is displayed as though it was rotated 90 degrees. Since dyslexics can tell top from bottom easier than left from right, it makes it easier for them to read lines of text that go from the top to the bottom. There is still the problem where they have problems deciding which line to go to next, but the new PDAs with this resolution will have arrows on the bottom to help them choose.
But duz it |-|A\/E |33t sP33K fonts then? (And could Natalie Portman's grits-soaked Beowolf cluster...) Also ask yourself this: If you're an aficionado with feature-ful-ness-esque-osity why stop at 90 degrees? (Silly! I mean at that granularity. Bip. BIP BIP BIP. BIP just for good measure. Shame on you for even thinking otherwise!) Why not have a place where you can enter the coefficients of Ax^2 + Bxy + Cy^2 + Dx + Ey + F = 0 of the most readily construed conic section on the screen in order to have an automated algorithm deduce theta to rotate the rendered screen image when theta is not n pi over two radians in a condition wherein n is an element of the set of all integers? Yeah. Now we're getting the juices flowing. Lemme kiss my muse. Ok. There. That helped.
Anyway...
Yeah. For inputting the coefficients of the cartesian stuff, there could be banks of binary DIP switches and a URL to point to a n00b's overview of binary numbers with...
Naw.
Go with jumpers. Yeah. Definitely definitely jumpers...
That way when a user has n - 1 jumpers, when n jumpers are necessary, the person can pound on the glass at Radio Shack at 9:00:01 PM while looking at the sign that says, "Notice: Radio Shack, including the aisle with jumpers for pin headers, is open only from 10:00 AM until 9:00:00.000 PM, you dufus. Please go to blahblah.com where popup screens will crash your browser, spend too much on adapter kits in general and always buy version 1.0 of everything you've heard about. Thank you, and please try again."
See the logic in that? With this kind of feature and with this kind of common-bond cultural backdrop--and with spectacularly open architecture as described above--what we get is a real end-user community...
Yeah. All to make it more comfy so that you don't have to tilt your head orthogonally with the axes of the screen. Yeah. Consider this a page at the fuggen patent office, kiddies.
Dayum, I'm good. I should get a Pointy Haired job in the marketing department.
I also hereby serve notice that I own this one too: "My kids don't recognize me anymore because of the demands of the maintenance schedule of my labor-saving devices."
Person A said blahblahblah about "criminal heritage." Person B said,
Two, of the criminals that were sent to Australia, something on the order of 70% (the numbers vary) were non-violent, and under the age of 20. The majority of these criminals were orphans who stole bread, prostitutes and the ilk. These weren't, without many exceptions, murders and real theives. Moreover, a significant portion of the colonists were Black Sheep of wealthy European families, sent to Australia with the combination of hopes that they might not embarass the family further, and that they might redeem themselves.
Lemme get this straight. Their genes are from folks who were not mean and who happened to be down on their luck? Their genes also have the "spilled off" hedonistic parts of the ancient British aristocracy? Sounds like my kind of crowd, that is, after having mellowed it all through several generations of practicing democracy. For that matter, if you mix in a dash extra of respect for private property and some education and healthcare subsidy, well geez--that sounds like my kind of political party. Sigh. Remember when rich American Democrats used to party and when the poor ones used to know how to vote?::::mumbling incoherently about reversing roles::::
Hmm. Say...
You don't suppose that Aussie genetic thingie explains Nevada too by some connection? (Area 51 isn't all that far away from the center of American hedonistic gravity, and the last time I checked, hypnotized Australians stacked up almost as efficiently as cordwood in spaceships for quick trans-global transport, but half of 'em started whining about "abduction" and such after coming to in the desert at night, mah-yeet. Know what I mean? It's like those fuggen union pilots just won't stop their indulgences--oogling at the humans half the goddamned night as if earth were their private zoo! They wouldn't even hide their faces either, the little green morons. I get so mad sometimes... Anyway... Then the press would get wind of it... seems like every fuggen time--and it got to be such a PR hassle that we finally just got FedEx and said hell with the rubbernecking pilots and all their bullshit but I digress...):::::doing vain things to maintain my pompadour::::
What!::::blink blink::::: Oops.:::::hurrying::::: What I meant to say was...
It is my belief that effort expended on developing these yuppie trinkets can find application in other, more important areas.
Good point. Know someethin'? When I was a kid, everyone was saying how handy it was to fund the Apollo project because ("real") industry would put the new technology to use. It could very well be argued that either way it's all just a vague "excuse" to play--a muse by another name. I recall Nietzsche offering something like, "An organism doesn't exist simply to survive and to procreate. It exists to exert its strength." Why climb Mt. Everest? Why figure out a series of rising and falling weighting factors of sinusoidal traces to follow another trace? Why automate the cleaning of a carpet?
Before intellectually masturbating along metaphilosophy, let us remember where Nietzsche "started". Why do X? In the moral sense as a relevant critter, "Because I damned well feel like it, which is self-evident." That gets good mileage in my country, but there is something I think interesting about the object of this testosterone-soaked arrogation (as basis/reason/impetus/etiology). Why do X? In truth, just as a handily designed class in C++, we don't know the answer to that question. It will be answered later.
As a species obsessed (consciously or not) with trying to achieve some sense of immortality, we "tolerate" this ignorance of the future utility of today's inventions "because" it is a very happy thing indeed to know that there is always a chance that one's own will will be infused or otherwise embedded in posterity's everyday life--perhaps through everyday gizmos. It's like a semi-secret iteration of the desire to scrawl graffiti that says, "I was here."
The Enron scandal flourished under Clinton, but ended under the Bush administration.
Once upon a time, President Clinton had to deal with a problem. That problem was that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC, which is pronounced "the ferk") had someone up and quit. Aw shucks. Who to get? Well, our fair President, against his better judgment, got a right wing fanatic from down south to sit in the FERC. Bummer. The poor guy was right in the middle of a good job with a kewl company--trying to get rid of all that public sector crap that carries high voltage power from place to place in Dixieland. Oh well. Duty calls.
Fast forward to May 1999. The California agency for dealing with the physical consequences of the absurd right wing fantasy of "AB 1280", circa 1998 had to route the willy-nilly purchased and sold electric power in California. However, just as forecast an uncharacteristic heat wave swept northern California. It was beyond miserable. Oh my. Why were so many power plants down for maintenance? Why all at once? Why was the schedule for downtime changed? (Psssst. Hindsight informs us that the weather forecast was "beamed in" to the decision making headquarters at Enron down there where the heavenly Governor Bush promised always to look the other way.) The price of a megawatt-hour suddenly went to $400 with no ceiling in sight, and I suppose Ken Lay came in his $700 pants that day. Immediately, the California government commissioned a study. Strangely, a thorough report came through raht quick. There was a murmer about someone gaming the system. With a few more highest level power crises short term, everyone survived in California in 1999. In 2000, the evil science was refined. By 2001, the racket was licensed extortion as is common knowledge. The President of the California Public Utilities Commission (Loretta Lynch) told her top lawyer to dig in and sue the lazy bastards at the FERC, whose notions of laissez-faire included sleeping at the switch while your best friends down south print money through electric wires, choke natural gas lines, game the market, gouge customers, and bankrupt decently managed retail power companies without recourse. Why? Because Bill Clinton wanted to be "nice" to those on his right. The FERC was perverted. Yes. It happened while Clinton held ultimate responsibility. Yes. You can hang this on Clinton. However, when Bush's friends on the FERC kept assisting the milking of the California electric rate payers, after a while the conscience got a little stronger (along with the public outcry that leaked beyond the "lost-to-the-Republicans-anyway" i.e., negligible-to-W.-anyway state of California). When that racket stopped screwing California on schedule, the bets placed at the Enron power/futures/weather casinos in Houston started to lose money for their customers--typically the house itself. Just then there was a Frontline piece on public TV. I watched it. Why was it that all Ken Lay would do was laugh?
Then came August of 2001, when Ken Lay was kind enough to free up the CEO chair for Jeffry Skilling. What a guy!
You know the rest of the story, but now you know the part that we should blame on Clinton. Let the egg drip slowly down your right wing face now. You asked for it.
Remember the old old days when truly in-the-know nerds used to gush about how Microsoft was nothing but a tyrannical adapter kit with slick ads? "Microsoft does not _invent_ anything!" responsible opinionated people would holler, barely beneath the CapsLock decibel level. A very few years have gone by. Now that Microsoft has spent a few pennies on real research and has hired several dozen honest-to-gosh researchers, these relative drops in the bucket twink the right wingers as so much self-righteous armor. D00ds, it's all in the proportions.
It "was supposed to" work like this: The venture capitalist gets the rich guy to pay the up-front paycheck of the researcher, who has signed an NDA. Wow. a New Thing was discovered. The venture capitalist and his pet rich guy cash in. Microsoft put a crowbar into that risk-scales-with-reward system that would have otherwise been progressive and market-corrected. Microsoft "invented" rudeness of a sort. For decades Microsoft went along for the ride without risking in actual R & D capitalism. "You MS-Invent it; we MS-Cash-In-On-It." It was big news when Microsoft FINALLY decided to hire a R&D crew of its own. No more of this strictly coattail hijacking attitude anymore. Why am I the guy to break this "news"? I would expect the/. people to be teaching me about the history here. This is scary.
Dang you. Now I have to think extra to quote you with italics because you put a little italics in there.:-p
As I see it, this is entirely Verisign's fault, and they are currently trying to argue that domains aren't property precisely to avoid the responsibility they have to administrate domains competently
Is it just me, or does everyone else also suffer amnesia--failing to recall the moment when someone held a gun to Verisign's head, compelling the outfit to administrate domain names?
There is a point to that sarcastic style. aug24 had a good point. Just as in the so-called job "market", if you walk up to the door of your own accord in order to do xyz, then it should come as no surprise to you when you bear the responsibility of doing that job.
lmao The "like" was a nice touch. I imagine worst_name_ever flipping his/her head back casually and popping bubble gum. The key word here is casually...
And there are far too many cases such as this with disputed ownership and other such claims. A rethink of the system is necessary. It does nobody any good for people such as this to be able to abuse the system.
Know what? You basically summarized a chapter or two of Rousseau's Social Contract there. Then again, the same could be said of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Private property is such a messy thing. It puts people in a bad mood. The only thing more horrible I can imagine would be, um, its absence. (nod nod) Y'spose?
(And no. I am not accusing anyone of wanting to dispense with private property. As opposed to participating in a possibly emergent zero-ego-sum-game pissing contest, I'm just musing, k? Anybody into musing anymore?)
Hint: Feel free to babble about the "pace" of conceptual development in social conventions of property, internet versus real estate, most of all if you did at least a quick read of some Rousseau or at least "Cliff's" commentary about his "strategy" as a formulator of opinion.
During a conference on C-SPAN, which was something like a roundtable discussion about E-books and such, something like a banquet with about 8 professional speakers/guests, among them was an official from one of the xxAA's. I can't remember. Maybe it was RIAA. He mentioned as part of making a point about something else that, "maybe the current strategy of diluting the p2p public domain might be sufficient to make it no longer cost effective to steal..." That is probably not a direct quote, but if you would hear the direct quote, then you would agree with the way I reported it.
Blank slate? Commoditize warez adults.
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 1
Look. We're starting with a blank slate in this theory, right? Ok. I say we strip out everything almost as did Descartes in Meditations I and II. There is naught but human nature, and along comes Adam Smith and discovers that a person can arrange behaviors and thereby outpace the interest rate, a.k.a. behave as an entrepreneurial capitalist.
I say let us not fake that everyone who becomes her own or his own boss is an industrial capitalist. Let us not continually bend over backwards with specious notions of assets.
If, say, Disney finds enough talented artists who are desperate enough to forego the big bucks (two birds in bush) in favor of a paycheck (bird in hand), then Disney is a financier and insurer of artistry in commerce. The capitalists are the artists who typically own the infamously powerful buzzwords, the means of production. (I know those are typically Marxian fighting words, but I consider both that mindset and its red-faced dectractors obsolete and intellectually boring.) At rock bottom on day one, Disney didn't really own the means of production. Disney predominantly owned and owns the means of distribution. Disney is and was a mercantilist, not a capitalist. Because that company simply buys and sells and juggles and mixes in the risk management services listed above, everyone finds it convenient to pretend that Disney is a capitalist.
In a marketplace that is compatible with the benign aspects of Adam Smith's "invisible hand", conflicts of interest need to be avoided. In other words, companies like Disney need to be scrapped in order for the market to function correctly. (My guess is that the "Disney 2.0" with new restrictions and new freedoms would prosper, but I dare not digress.)
Because, say, Disney, the vendor of artistic effort, is a broker (a mere mercantilist), Disney does not have the moral right in a market economy to command both the supply and demand sides. From pure momentum, Disney feels entitled to enjoy such powers. In a "Smith 1.0 compliant economy", the capitalist should call the shots and should typically "guess" what would serve the market in the most lucrative way.
The brand names should be associated with the capitalists--for those who take substantive responsibility for the creations and who own the means of creation--not the broker or retailer. Then the customers should choose in such a marketplace. When the broker bullies both the supply side and the demand side, it might seem comfy, but so much of the potential of a Smithian free market economy has been bulldozed to pave the way that the system strains. I believe this was the sort of thing on Schumpeter's mind when he almost ridiculed the class of people in so-called lounge suits.
Interestingly, in markets whose products do not have the characteristically high proportion of intellectual value, people become morally outraged to see "Disney-like" phenomena taking place. When the stock broker makes predatory advice to investors, the conflict of interest can be so severe that the Securities and Exchange Commission could come down on a brokerage firm like a cocaine bust. When an accumulator of intellectual properties does essentially the same thing, it is called "the work of an entertainment executive" (or software house executive or whatever in all these perverse constructs of fake capitalism that is actually mercantilistic speculation and legalized market-cornering).
Before flaming me, get one thing straight. Accumulating and centralizing intellectual properties under "one roof" is NOT productive behavior. It is counterproductive behavior that happens to offer unfair strategic advantage to the participants who fund the tricksters engaged in the practice. That practice is the shutting down of markets. It is like stringing chains and padlocks across millions of little virtual Main Streets. So some clown finds someone to finance such tricks. That doesn't make her or him a capitalist any more than it makes Ivan Boesky or Jeffry Skilling's "Get Shorty" engineers capitalists. They are crooks.
The question is, "Which laws?" What should be illegal? It should be illegal for Disney to own a controlling stake in such a vast portfolio of intellectual properties and then to treat that portfolio with pathological jealousy. Disney's job is economic plumbing. Disney matches genuine producers with cash-in-hand buyers. The owning and peddling are two different things. The "warehouse" is not market-corrected as would be the case with troublesome pork bellies and tons of granite or polyethylene. That tempts the "invention" of a new conflict of interest which bad intellectual habits have called a "business model". The broker should be a clean broker. The producer should be a clean producer. When the owner/hoarder and broker are one in the same without recourse, this perversion of incentives invites an entire class of parasites that people forget to identify. (I personally know a Disney executive near the middle ranks. He's a great guy, a hard worker, a fella who could cheer up a badger whose leg just got chopped off. He's not the problem.) The class of parasites I mention here are those who hold Disney stocks without considering that they are actually perverted mutual funds. Those shareholders own chunks of a whole bunch of ventures. Media giants become too big to steer.
Now let's take another look at a slightly different market. What about Napster's victims? Which victim squealed the loudest? Because you are reading here, you know it was the cushy executives. (Ok. I mean that they learned to squeal after they got off their lazy asses by reading headlines about Metallica.) The parasites are now being discovered for the parasites that they have always been. Now that there is an extra-legal/illegal marketplace, driven by individual choice, it is evident that markets have been destroyed during decades of media hoarding in music businesses. Now the markets are opening up again. The problem is the turnstile and so on. (I have roughly zero smart opinions about solutions to those specific problems, but I know that it is evidence of previous problems now made obsolete.) In the pre-Napster system, the music "capitalists" owned essentially nothing but ticket booths and turnstiles.
What laws do we need? I suppose we could split the various Disneys of the world into retail peddlers and talent brokerages and project coordination consultancies and brokers of mutual funds with shares of various well documented properties. If, say, Don Knotts still deserves something like 1.5% of the rent for the "Apple Dumpling Gang" videos, that should be described in the prospectus for the prerusal of anyone who wants to buy stock in the intellectual property that comprises the "Apple Dumpling Gang" movie. (The obligation to Don Knotts is a liability of that property in this example.) The aggregated properties are mutual funds.
In other words, I think that the stuff should be unbundled on the supply side, and I think the vertically integrated delivery/bullying mechanisms should be subject to antitrust scrutiny, and I think investors and consumers should be able to poke around at the products they want. Just as various "items" on the stock exchange have ticker symbols and cans of soup have UPC codes, a unified namespace could be created overnight to commoditize the various Disneys and wannabes and to force them to compete or melt away.
I picked Disney because I don't hate Disney, and I don't really like it either. Its products and services seldomly suit my tastes but never offend my tastes. It is the most gray of the huge media hoarders I could think of. My opinion is not about Disney. My opinion is about the way that markets can correct themselves. Investors are always looking for opportunities to be "safe", i.e., to find places where the market cannot be corrected. It is my opinion that such searchers should be perrenially frustrated. When that occurs, Adam Smith's invisible hand is darned near miraculous. The closer we get to the ideal, the more beneficent that "invisible hand" becomes. With the trajectory of intellectual property laws from roughly Bayh-Dole forward, the incentives have become perverse. That should be obvious. Solutions to the problem are never obvious when the nature of the problem is so cleverly hidden. If the opinion you seek is a "blank slate" basis, I say treat the media moguls like the warez kiddies they have always been.
Slashdot Mirror
And have you noticed The Freedom Fries at the A & W Taste a little strange?
I hear ya. That reminds me of a military suspense movie I saw. An important part of the movie's plot was that the protagonist/investigator gets hours' worth of human leg work done while an expensive computer does an edge sharpening algorithm to one still image of medium resolution in order to reveal a person's identity. It was a sort of race. Gimp or Photoshop on any PC from the past few years could do it in a blink. On my old 100 MHz 486, that kind of operation would have taken maybe 20 seconds.
Still this focus on comparitive horsepower neglects something Sartre might have pointed out. There are an astronically large number of possibilities.
When you consider truly primative hardware--say, an 8-pin PIC--then it doesn't have that aura of creative opportunity about it. It could very well be because there is such a drastic diminution in capability, in, say, "downgrading" in imagination from significant fractions of a gigabyte of RAM down to several dozen addressable registers, a.k.a. RAM, that the effect might actually be more of a measure of emotion than of technical utility. If there is enough room in, say a cheap PIC chip's ROM to store a program with about 30 RISC instructions, and if the instruction set (actually only ~28 to ~33 instructions in the whole set) then the finity of possibility is much more evident. The permutations ("software possibilities") would be "on the order of" a googol, but that is substantially shy of infinity. ("Substantially shy of infinity" is silly just as infinity minus 8 is silly.) I suppose our perception of "near infinity" is perceived as if asymptotic. Near infinity in possibility might have the definition of "perception of freedom", depending when you ask and how, like choosing the focal length for a camera. Is there really any significant difference between 30 kilometers, a light year and infinity while setting the focal length for a camera? That is a question about the person's notion of significance! It is a cousin of ethics; it is a value judgment.
When a "small mind" thinks in terms of infinitesimally small differences of still non-identical objects or possibilities--say, the adage that you cannot enter the same stream twice--this hair-splitting is what increases the quantity of distinctions. In that case, by virtue of the "thinner slices" being more numerous, there is still immensity of perception because the denominator threatens to hit zero "soon".
When a more macroscopic observer does something like that there is a sort of intinsically jaded sensibility. "Yeah. I know. We've done that already. What we need to be thinking about is..." Is what? Typically some possibility only recently made possible--say nanotubes or three-figure prices on thin computer monitors. Now I'm supposed to pay attention to thin computer monitors? According to the electronics retailer, yes. Why? Does anyone have the guts to answer, "Because it has fallen into your price range and because we need to peddle this high-margin item ASAP to optimize utilization of square footage in our retail electronics store."? Probably not. That is, in turn, because it is handier overall to pretend that this is all "new technology" and that I am supposed to say wow on cue and to refrain from being impressed when not stimulated for impressions.
I am not trying to digress on a rant against marketroids. I am trying to get a grasp on a continuum between a sort of microscopic versus macroscopic notion of scaling perceptions. Either way, microscopic or macroscopic, the effect is the same: excessively large quantities of objects or possibilities come into consideration. Reaction against that, IMO, is "hidden" below the premises that bring about "snide" comments like, "I know. We've done that already. What we need to think about is newer gizmo X." (For example, a microsopic perspective would disagree th
The thing to do is to enjoy whining about it. I mean it. Back in the 80's, the Dead Kennedys told us our faults in the U.S.A. I'll excerpt from my warped memories:
When they dig this up in a thousand years
They'll either laugh or cry.
Jock-O-Rama
Save my soul.
Come lick the bu___ of the beef patrol...
Jock-O-Rama on the brain.
Redneck-athon drivin' me insane.
The future of America--leave it to them.
Watch it roll over Niagra Falls
MTV get off the air!
Is my c_ck big enough,
Is my brain small enough
For you to make me a star?
Give me a toot,
And I'll show you my soul.
Pull my (marionette) strings,
And I'll go far.
Well, chick, you're outta luck.
'Cuz I'm rollin' down the stairs,
Too drunk to...
The thing is, some of us have bragging rights. While the cute girls were happily bobbing their heads to "You spin me round round, baby, round round--like a record, baby..." (retch, retch) some of us knew that it sucked while it sucked, and some of us said so and how and why. You Brits would call us wankers as a consequence of our principled aesthetic stance. Oh well. It all comes out in the wash, huh? (snicker)
Nirvana invented pretty much nothing. When I stumbled into "...Teen Spirit" while flipping channels on TV, then I realized that not only had punk gotten self-pitiful--it had become immensely profitable. Oops. Didn't the Brits show us the debacle of that stuff with "...Bollocks"? Oh well. Everyone claimed to understand precisely this "misunderstood generation" X. Yeah. Billy Idol's old band.
Last night a little dancer, came dancing to my door. Last night a little nouveau riche, self-absorbed fella fell OD'd to the floor.
So what else is, ahem, "new"?
Next.
What you meant to say was,
I've been shakin'
For so long.
Naw. We got some of that imported Astley stuff. I'm not bitter though. OTOH, Guinness is bitter, and Budweiser is not. Neither is free as in free Linux.
You're from the Show-Me State? Prove it. ;-)
One of the neat things about dealing with practicing Mormons, Muslims and fanatical Dutch Reformed folks is that you don't have to worry about them being drunk. Anecdotally, it also seems to me that they (along with all that is Calvinistic and/or Puritanical in some sane proportion) have the courage to drive their hard bargains in your face where you can see before settling on the terms of the transaction, whereupon such people will stick to those terms. Without exceptions that would conveniently be both memorable and illustrative, I notice these phenomena in the "boring conservative crowd" as opposed to those who are more fun, who are slicker and who are apparently easier to deal with but (as with all that is meretricious) prove to be more slippery to deal with after the handshake. Hmm. Now do we see a pattern here? Utah, sobriety, willful and honest bargaining, folks sufficiently courageous/biased to glare at the world's wealthiest man, Things That Piss Off Microsoft On Purpose and With Purpose? Oh.
I dunno...
Between hitting the Preview button and the Submit button, I read stuff about Alan Ashton: a brilliant man who wound up pretty generous (in addition to other reported virtues, none of which seemed to be the sort of thing to put on a resume while seeking to get hired as a rock star as token junkie/bass player). He sounds like a stand-up guy, and I felt the same about Senator Hatch until I saw him engage in a disengenuous parliamentary prank the other day in the Senate Judiciary Committee. In retrospect, if that's as bad as it gets, then buy stock in Utah Senatorial halo polish production equipment companies.
BTW, now that I have your attention, tell me something. How would this work as a sig? Hypocrisy can outlast civilization, but civilization cannot outlast hypocrisy.
Huh? (blush) Oh yeah. They actually are. Excuse me for the lack of controversy in my opinions. Next time I just might offend you. ;-)
Let's say you're in your cubicle in the year 2015, and someone tells you to write a software application to help manage the virtual DVD player for all the quaint movies. (Who knows? Maybe there will come a day soon when the sum total of, say, AOL/Time/Warner's content can be bought in a boxed set with the box weighing an ounce in its predominant storage media while the content owners will gripe at the "whole farm" being downloaded by the self-mutating Morpheous 15.0 finding the cops faster than they can find it.) Oops. I digressed.
In this scenario, with you programming in 2015, there is one movie per file, and each file has about 4.5 gigabytes on it. Let's say you use plain old C programming, and you want to go all the way to the end of the file for some reason. Then you'd use fseek(). I just typed "man fseek" into cygwin. Ha ha! The joke is on me. The second argument to fseek(), which is crucial to choose how many bytes into the file you'll be going, is type "long int". These days that is typically 64 bits. I mean, that is 64 bits anyway. Thus, by a complicated way, we have seen that the difference is practically invisible--"transparent" as it turns out--but that we can presume that that second argument to fseek() can be passed in one measly register without a chapperone. It will run infinitesimally more quickly--like we didn't know that already? Kewuhl! Ok. Maybe that's a bit of an overreaction, but if you think that is is an overreaction, then get off of /., and get a real life (like the folks surfing sportsillustrated.com). Jeez. Do I have to tell you everything?
On a more serious note, I bet this 64-bit advancement is far less important than the 32-bit advancement was. One desktop-oriented way of thinking about this is to note how much graphics work is jobbed out from the main processor these days. For that reason, graphics card vendors can put one or several 64-bit chips on the graphics card, and who cares if each chip can talk Intel-ese machine language? It is very likely that little more than terse commands will need to be given to high performance graphics hardware. Meanwhile, in other bandwidth matters, the RAM is even more of a severe relative bottleneck now. Maybe that in itself is sufficient reason to widen every possible pipe. There is only so high a velocity at which the "fluid" can move through it.
I paid more than $100 for the extra 2 megabytes of RAM necessary to get Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS working on my 10 MHz Cyrix-based AT clone (i.e., i80286, 80286, '286, 286, depending when you "label"). It was worth every penny.
The thing that might most merit your attention here is something I learned very quickly after getting just the first few programs to work. The permutations of what I could program might as well be considered infinite. Get this: It is difficult to completely reign in (or even fully to comprehend) the vast and diffuse capabilities of a 10 MHz beige box limited to the 80286 instruction set and bend-over-backwards-in-the-Protected-Mode 16 MB of RAM physical ceiling. This weak piddly hardware has--I said has, not had--more capability than I could explore in ten lifetimes as a creator of software. When the companies continue to crank out traincar loads of what (for now in the "Pre Palladium Rollout Era") is still pretty general-purpose hardware, "limitations" are matters of philosophy of science, which is where I started, come to think of it. I guess my age is showing, but I think (that is, when I think well) it is all (literally) awesome, and it has been thus for about a half century and counting.
...not doing its own research? "Oh. That's just typical Microsoft, yanno. They stand there in abush position and wait. Then when someone actually innovates something, if it cannot be efficiently stolen, Microsoft will buy it."
Come to think of it, I suppose it is more frightening now that Microsoft might actually be inventing something. Do you suppose? Whatever Microsoft comes up with on its own Microsoft can, well, EMBRACE AND EXTEND! Ack! For now I am tempted to drift off to sleep with comfortable thoughts like the August 1995 billboard outside the local yokel Mac vendor: "Windows 95 is Mac '89!"
When I was at a heighty tighty university, there was a common expression among the highly motivated and cognitively elite students: "Don't take geography because it's easy. It's easy for everyone else and graded on a curve like everything else. That makes it so easy it's hard." Imagine a bell curve about a thousand feet tall. The last inch separates curve wreckers from washouts. If someone takes an "easy" course of study, the odds are pretty good that the proverbial Real World will do to that person what the GPA-fluffing tactic would do to the person contemplating taking easy/hard geography "for the easy A."
In the long run, there are two measures of personality that correlate most of all with what we would consider elite status in most (superficial?) measures. They are as Joseph Schumpeter said they would be: intelligence and strength of will. Consider three huge winners in recent history: Ross Perot, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. All are stubborn but not equally. One is head-and-shoulders above the others in cognitive sophistication. The other two make up (made up) for it by sticking with the program once it is in place. ./ of all crowds should know that Perot "making" a huge computer company isn't quite the same thing as the label would indicate, but that's beside the point.
The point is minding--literally minding--a person's business. A mind is not just the "math"; it is the desire also.
I guess I'll leave you with a digression. In Reich's book, he "promised" all drooling greedy people with intellectual properties that the stuff would amortize/rot/depreciate lickety split. You want a company destined for glory over time? Get talented people in fields of sophisticated symbolic analysis first of all to pledge allegiance and second of all to work in ways that leverage recently developed skill. The "expensive" payroll will be more lucrative than traditional capital assets and even more lucrative than the intellectual properties per se.
There is always this American-styled Fort Knox Key mindset that provokes us to spend money on patent fees ten times more often than doing so can pay for itself. "If I could just get that one little thing working right, then money will flow to me as if from a burst dam," people secretly think to themselves while dialing the patent lawyer's phone number. In reality, if you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path somewhere, perhaps paving right over you, perhaps enriching you, perhaps impoverishing you.
9 of 10 patents are financial duds, and 9 of 10 business ventures fail within two years. Risk/reward looks pretty similar, which is why it is intensely ironic that tempers flare so much on the left and right in all of this stuff.
Ahem.
I thought we were too smart for all that. ;-)
Internet-connected computer
DESCRIPTION OF ALGORITHM:
Broken? I was there! Melonman broke it. I was at the scene of the accident! What the honourable (honou^Hrable) gentleman did not mention was that he was (A) driving in the left lane of a two-lane road at the time and (B) preoccupied with the spectacularly superior hedonic conditions on this side of the Atlantic. Whilst this was happening (^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^ H Meanwhile,) his new fundamentalist/evangelical/but-really-only-kinda-s orta-wink-nudge girlfriend wiped the apple pie off of his hot dog and Harley Davidson chaps, and also from the seat of the spacious 300 horsepower pickup truck whose radio continuously plays country music and jazz and coverage of something like cricket (^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^ H baseball).
;-)
By the way, we got Christopher Hitchens, Spice Girls, Billy Idol and Peter Frampton from you as is greatly appreciated. (For example, how else could we engage in careful consideration of human rights atrocities of nuns who fell thumping on the floor with a wine glass in my hand? See? For that kind of thing, well, WE CRY, "MORE, MORE, MORE!") As you ought to know by, ahem, the decisions we manifest, we love thoughtful consideration of morals and argumentative nuance in matters of politics on the tele (^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H TV). I don't really know who you might have gotten from us. It's really hard to tell, you know, whilst there are only 405 lines of resolution.
BTW, the most famous Brit we know explicitly at 405 lines of resolution is "Your 'oyasinth," a.k.a., Hyacinth Bucket. (^H * 100ish) (Blush.) Oops. This is /. I forgot. Where are my manners? Why am I humming something about lumberjacks? Beowolf clusters and Natalie Portman and p* birds (a pointer to an object of class Ouch in some OOP language or another)?
Umm... You mean like Chile suddenly (and hypothetically) enacting legislation to make that the place where you can make illicit copies of some Microsoft product or another? Heck. Legislators in any country can write what they please. Consider that "hundred copies" notion of things. What if Chileans decided that it would be fair to offer 100:1? A hypothetical average Chilean would pay MSFT one percent, and the other 99ish percent are "public domain". In that case, the accidental characteristic of MSFT shares being among the most widely held in the USA, what "affects America" is what affects the hoarders of ideas who kid us that they innovate and own innovation.
"Preserving our cultural heritage" is a sort of code phrase for right-tending anything. I'm sure there were Nazis convinced that was their, ahem, "goal", bottom line. Translated into Western-hemispherical Purtugese, "preserving our cultural heritage" might mean preserving Chilean wealth "from Microsoft's greed" in a hypothetical legislative push to look the other way when folks copy without paying. Then the MS-USA (2.0 as always) would be "preserving our cultural heritage" by raising hell and trade barriers and Navy alert status to maintain profits, i.e. "respect for private property", i.e., an integral part of "our cultural heritage." Does Microsoft respect my private property (whose principled superset is our cultural heritage)? Does Microsoft respect yours? Well, sometimes. This digression is not what it seems! The hypothetical condition of Chile looking the other way while folks there hypothetically make illicit copies means the same thing as disrespecting copyright laws and treaties to protect them and the property of their sort. Of course, the MSFT example steers away from the "50 years versus 14 years" debate, but the principles persist the "farcical" nature of the hypothesis.
It's about private property, the specific subset, intellectual property. I get nervous when people introduce fond expressions of preservation of cultural heritage while actually messing with the actual principles of honor, ethics, and justice that should (in a good conservative's heart) be as rigid as Plato's Forms, not some Shadow On Cave Wall 2.0 at US$480 per user license, the embedded turnstyles of which require some bending and altering of the conscience. Then comes social engineering: the cranking out of new nomenclature: "piracy". Is it piracy if I am a computer genius who solves some important algorithmic riddle and then brag about it on Usenet but still wind up sufficiently naive, say, that I sort of BSD-license an idea but forget attribution requirements or somesuch? If there is a legal crack, Microsoft will steal. You know it. Microsoft will steal from the public domain and its similarly liberal cousin domains. In some senses, Microsoft is really just the archetype as in "Microsofts and wannabes", and that is where I am discussing this stuff.
Mickey Mouse hardly needs protecting? If you have bet the farm on Disney stock, you would look at it all differently. I imagine that it would appear as if there is a hoard at the gates, seeking to loot the glorious (and gloriously private) Mickey Mouse there in the Magic Kingdom. The sad news (when it comes) is really just as simple as the ticket price falling down to zero for Mickey's image's use. "Sucks to be you, huh, Disney?" someone asks with a shrug. Meanwhile, someone's grandma switches from Ensure to Alpo, and nobody notices. Why? Too much was bet on how lucrative Mickey Mouse (of disputable necessity in protection of I.P.) would sustainably be. When "the rich" lose in various corporate ways, I suppose there is some grandma out there who can no longer afford human food. Hence, when my "l
But duz it |-|A\/E |33t sP33K fonts then? (And could Natalie Portman's grits-soaked Beowolf cluster...) Also ask yourself this: If you're an aficionado with feature-ful-ness-esque-osity why stop at 90 degrees? (Silly! I mean at that granularity. Bip. BIP BIP BIP. BIP just for good measure. Shame on you for even thinking otherwise!) Why not have a place where you can enter the coefficients of
Ax^2 + Bxy + Cy^2 + Dx + Ey + F = 0 of the most readily construed conic section on the screen in order to have an automated algorithm deduce theta to rotate the rendered screen image when theta is not n pi over two radians in a condition wherein n is an element of the set of all integers? Yeah. Now we're getting the juices flowing. Lemme kiss my muse. Ok. There. That helped.
Anyway...
Yeah. For inputting the coefficients of the cartesian stuff, there could be banks of binary DIP switches and a URL to point to a n00b's overview of binary numbers with...
Naw.
Go with jumpers. Yeah. Definitely definitely jumpers...
That way when a user has n - 1 jumpers, when n jumpers are necessary, the person can pound on the glass at Radio Shack at 9:00:01 PM while looking at the sign that says, "Notice: Radio Shack, including the aisle with jumpers for pin headers, is open only from 10:00 AM until 9:00:00.000 PM, you dufus. Please go to blahblah.com where popup screens will crash your browser, spend too much on adapter kits in general and always buy version 1.0 of everything you've heard about. Thank you, and please try again."
See the logic in that? With this kind of feature and with this kind of common-bond cultural backdrop--and with spectacularly open architecture as described above--what we get is a real end-user community...
Yeah. All to make it more comfy so that you don't have to tilt your head orthogonally with the axes of the screen. Yeah. Consider this a page at the fuggen patent office, kiddies.
Dayum, I'm good. I should get a Pointy Haired job in the marketing department.
I also hereby serve notice that I own this one too: "My kids don't recognize me anymore because of the demands of the maintenance schedule of my labor-saving devices."
Person B said,
Lemme get this straight. Their genes are from folks who were not mean and who happened to be down on their luck? Their genes also have the "spilled off" hedonistic parts of the ancient British aristocracy? Sounds like my kind of crowd, that is, after having mellowed it all through several generations of practicing democracy. For that matter, if you mix in a dash extra of respect for private property and some education and healthcare subsidy, well geez--that sounds like my kind of political party. Sigh. Remember when rich American Democrats used to party and when the poor ones used to know how to vote? ::::mumbling incoherently about reversing roles::::
Hmm. Say...
You don't suppose that Aussie genetic thingie explains Nevada too by some connection? (Area 51 isn't all that far away from the center of American hedonistic gravity, and the last time I checked, hypnotized Australians stacked up almost as efficiently as cordwood in spaceships for quick trans-global transport, but half of 'em started whining about "abduction" and such after coming to in the desert at night, mah-yeet. Know what I mean? It's like those fuggen union pilots just won't stop their indulgences--oogling at the humans half the goddamned night as if earth were their private zoo! They wouldn't even hide their faces either, the little green morons. I get so mad sometimes... Anyway... Then the press would get wind of it... seems like every fuggen time--and it got to be such a PR hassle that we finally just got FedEx and said hell with the rubbernecking pilots and all their bullshit but I digress...) :::::doing vain things to maintain my pompadour::::
What! ::::blink blink::::: Oops. :::::hurrying::::: What I meant to say was...
Good point. Know someethin'? When I was a kid, everyone was saying how handy it was to fund the Apollo project because ("real") industry would put the new technology to use. It could very well be argued that either way it's all just a vague "excuse" to play--a muse by another name. I recall Nietzsche offering something like, "An organism doesn't exist simply to survive and to procreate. It exists to exert its strength." Why climb Mt. Everest? Why figure out a series of rising and falling weighting factors of sinusoidal traces to follow another trace? Why automate the cleaning of a carpet?
Before intellectually masturbating along metaphilosophy, let us remember where Nietzsche "started". Why do X? In the moral sense as a relevant critter, "Because I damned well feel like it, which is self-evident." That gets good mileage in my country, but there is something I think interesting about the object of this testosterone-soaked arrogation (as basis/reason/impetus/etiology). Why do X? In truth, just as a handily designed class in C++, we don't know the answer to that question. It will be answered later.
As a species obsessed (consciously or not) with trying to achieve some sense of immortality, we "tolerate" this ignorance of the future utility of today's inventions "because" it is a very happy thing indeed to know that there is always a chance that one's own will will be infused or otherwise embedded in posterity's everyday life--perhaps through everyday gizmos. It's like a semi-secret iteration of the desire to scrawl graffiti that says, "I was here."
Once upon a time, President Clinton had to deal with a problem. That problem was that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC, which is pronounced "the ferk") had someone up and quit. Aw shucks. Who to get? Well, our fair President, against his better judgment, got a right wing fanatic from down south to sit in the FERC. Bummer. The poor guy was right in the middle of a good job with a kewl company--trying to get rid of all that public sector crap that carries high voltage power from place to place in Dixieland. Oh well. Duty calls.
Fast forward to May 1999. The California agency for dealing with the physical consequences of the absurd right wing fantasy of "AB 1280", circa 1998 had to route the willy-nilly purchased and sold electric power in California. However, just as forecast an uncharacteristic heat wave swept northern California. It was beyond miserable. Oh my. Why were so many power plants down for maintenance? Why all at once? Why was the schedule for downtime changed? (Psssst. Hindsight informs us that the weather forecast was "beamed in" to the decision making headquarters at Enron down there where the heavenly Governor Bush promised always to look the other way.) The price of a megawatt-hour suddenly went to $400 with no ceiling in sight, and I suppose Ken Lay came in his $700 pants that day. Immediately, the California government commissioned a study. Strangely, a thorough report came through raht quick. There was a murmer about someone gaming the system. With a few more highest level power crises short term, everyone survived in California in 1999. In 2000, the evil science was refined. By 2001, the racket was licensed extortion as is common knowledge. The President of the California Public Utilities Commission (Loretta Lynch) told her top lawyer to dig in and sue the lazy bastards at the FERC, whose notions of laissez-faire included sleeping at the switch while your best friends down south print money through electric wires, choke natural gas lines, game the market, gouge customers, and bankrupt decently managed retail power companies without recourse. Why? Because Bill Clinton wanted to be "nice" to those on his right. The FERC was perverted. Yes. It happened while Clinton held ultimate responsibility. Yes. You can hang this on Clinton. However, when Bush's friends on the FERC kept assisting the milking of the California electric rate payers, after a while the conscience got a little stronger (along with the public outcry that leaked beyond the "lost-to-the-Republicans-anyway" i.e., negligible-to-W.-anyway state of California). When that racket stopped screwing California on schedule, the bets placed at the Enron power/futures/weather casinos in Houston started to lose money for their customers--typically the house itself. Just then there was a Frontline piece on public TV. I watched it. Why was it that all Ken Lay would do was laugh?
Then came August of 2001, when Ken Lay was kind enough to free up the CEO chair for Jeffry Skilling. What a guy!
You know the rest of the story, but now you know the part that we should blame on Clinton. Let the egg drip slowly down your right wing face now. You asked for it.
It "was supposed to" work like this: The venture capitalist gets the rich guy to pay the up-front paycheck of the researcher, who has signed an NDA. Wow. a New Thing was discovered. The venture capitalist and his pet rich guy cash in. Microsoft put a crowbar into that risk-scales-with-reward system that would have otherwise been progressive and market-corrected. Microsoft "invented" rudeness of a sort. For decades Microsoft went along for the ride without risking in actual R & D capitalism. "You MS-Invent it; we MS-Cash-In-On-It." It was big news when Microsoft FINALLY decided to hire a R&D crew of its own. No more of this strictly coattail hijacking attitude anymore. Why am I the guy to break this "news"? I would expect the /. people to be teaching me about the history here. This is scary.
Is it just me, or does everyone else also suffer amnesia--failing to recall the moment when someone held a gun to Verisign's head, compelling the outfit to administrate domain names?
There is a point to that sarcastic style. aug24 had a good point. Just as in the so-called job "market", if you walk up to the door of your own accord in order to do xyz, then it should come as no surprise to you when you bear the responsibility of doing that job.
lmao The "like" was a nice touch. I imagine worst_name_ever flipping his/her head back casually and popping bubble gum. The key word here is casually...
Unless you have, like, tanks and stuff.
Know what? You basically summarized a chapter or two of Rousseau's Social Contract there. Then again, the same could be said of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Private property is such a messy thing. It puts people in a bad mood. The only thing more horrible I can imagine would be, um, its absence. (nod nod) Y'spose?
(And no. I am not accusing anyone of wanting to dispense with private property. As opposed to participating in a possibly emergent zero-ego-sum-game pissing contest, I'm just musing, k? Anybody into musing anymore?)
During a conference on C-SPAN, which was something like a roundtable discussion about E-books and such, something like a banquet with about 8 professional speakers/guests, among them was an official from one of the xxAA's. I can't remember. Maybe it was RIAA. He mentioned as part of making a point about something else that, "maybe the current strategy of diluting the p2p public domain might be sufficient to make it no longer cost effective to steal..." That is probably not a direct quote, but if you would hear the direct quote, then you would agree with the way I reported it.
I say let us not fake that everyone who becomes her own or his own boss is an industrial capitalist. Let us not continually bend over backwards with specious notions of assets.
If, say, Disney finds enough talented artists who are desperate enough to forego the big bucks (two birds in bush) in favor of a paycheck (bird in hand), then Disney is a financier and insurer of artistry in commerce. The capitalists are the artists who typically own the infamously powerful buzzwords, the means of production. (I know those are typically Marxian fighting words, but I consider both that mindset and its red-faced dectractors obsolete and intellectually boring.) At rock bottom on day one, Disney didn't really own the means of production. Disney predominantly owned and owns the means of distribution. Disney is and was a mercantilist, not a capitalist. Because that company simply buys and sells and juggles and mixes in the risk management services listed above, everyone finds it convenient to pretend that Disney is a capitalist.
In a marketplace that is compatible with the benign aspects of Adam Smith's "invisible hand", conflicts of interest need to be avoided. In other words, companies like Disney need to be scrapped in order for the market to function correctly. (My guess is that the "Disney 2.0" with new restrictions and new freedoms would prosper, but I dare not digress.)
Because, say, Disney, the vendor of artistic effort, is a broker (a mere mercantilist), Disney does not have the moral right in a market economy to command both the supply and demand sides. From pure momentum, Disney feels entitled to enjoy such powers. In a "Smith 1.0 compliant economy", the capitalist should call the shots and should typically "guess" what would serve the market in the most lucrative way.
The brand names should be associated with the capitalists--for those who take substantive responsibility for the creations and who own the means of creation--not the broker or retailer. Then the customers should choose in such a marketplace. When the broker bullies both the supply side and the demand side, it might seem comfy, but so much of the potential of a Smithian free market economy has been bulldozed to pave the way that the system strains. I believe this was the sort of thing on Schumpeter's mind when he almost ridiculed the class of people in so-called lounge suits.
Interestingly, in markets whose products do not have the characteristically high proportion of intellectual value, people become morally outraged to see "Disney-like" phenomena taking place. When the stock broker makes predatory advice to investors, the conflict of interest can be so severe that the Securities and Exchange Commission could come down on a brokerage firm like a cocaine bust. When an accumulator of intellectual properties does essentially the same thing, it is called "the work of an entertainment executive" (or software house executive or whatever in all these perverse constructs of fake capitalism that is actually mercantilistic speculation and legalized market-cornering).
Before flaming me, get one thing straight. Accumulating and centralizing intellectual properties under "one roof" is NOT productive behavior. It is counterproductive behavior that happens to offer unfair strategic advantage to the participants who fund the tricksters engaged in the practice. That practice is the shutting down of markets. It is like stringing chains and padlocks across millions of little virtual Main Streets. So some clown finds someone to finance such tricks. That doesn't make her or him a capitalist any more than it makes Ivan Boesky or Jeffry Skilling's "Get Shorty" engineers capitalists. They are crooks.
The question is, "Which laws?" What should be illegal? It should be illegal for Disney to own a controlling stake in such a vast portfolio of intellectual properties and then to treat that portfolio with pathological jealousy. Disney's job is economic plumbing. Disney matches genuine producers with cash-in-hand buyers. The owning and peddling are two different things. The "warehouse" is not market-corrected as would be the case with troublesome pork bellies and tons of granite or polyethylene. That tempts the "invention" of a new conflict of interest which bad intellectual habits have called a "business model". The broker should be a clean broker. The producer should be a clean producer. When the owner/hoarder and broker are one in the same without recourse, this perversion of incentives invites an entire class of parasites that people forget to identify. (I personally know a Disney executive near the middle ranks. He's a great guy, a hard worker, a fella who could cheer up a badger whose leg just got chopped off. He's not the problem.) The class of parasites I mention here are those who hold Disney stocks without considering that they are actually perverted mutual funds. Those shareholders own chunks of a whole bunch of ventures. Media giants become too big to steer.
Now let's take another look at a slightly different market. What about Napster's victims? Which victim squealed the loudest? Because you are reading here, you know it was the cushy executives. (Ok. I mean that they learned to squeal after they got off their lazy asses by reading headlines about Metallica.) The parasites are now being discovered for the parasites that they have always been. Now that there is an extra-legal/illegal marketplace, driven by individual choice, it is evident that markets have been destroyed during decades of media hoarding in music businesses. Now the markets are opening up again. The problem is the turnstile and so on. (I have roughly zero smart opinions about solutions to those specific problems, but I know that it is evidence of previous problems now made obsolete.) In the pre-Napster system, the music "capitalists" owned essentially nothing but ticket booths and turnstiles.
What laws do we need? I suppose we could split the various Disneys of the world into retail peddlers and talent brokerages and project coordination consultancies and brokers of mutual funds with shares of various well documented properties. If, say, Don Knotts still deserves something like 1.5% of the rent for the "Apple Dumpling Gang" videos, that should be described in the prospectus for the prerusal of anyone who wants to buy stock in the intellectual property that comprises the "Apple Dumpling Gang" movie. (The obligation to Don Knotts is a liability of that property in this example.) The aggregated properties are mutual funds.
In other words, I think that the stuff should be unbundled on the supply side, and I think the vertically integrated delivery/bullying mechanisms should be subject to antitrust scrutiny, and I think investors and consumers should be able to poke around at the products they want. Just as various "items" on the stock exchange have ticker symbols and cans of soup have UPC codes, a unified namespace could be created overnight to commoditize the various Disneys and wannabes and to force them to compete or melt away.
I picked Disney because I don't hate Disney, and I don't really like it either. Its products and services seldomly suit my tastes but never offend my tastes. It is the most gray of the huge media hoarders I could think of. My opinion is not about Disney. My opinion is about the way that markets can correct themselves. Investors are always looking for opportunities to be "safe", i.e., to find places where the market cannot be corrected. It is my opinion that such searchers should be perrenially frustrated. When that occurs, Adam Smith's invisible hand is darned near miraculous. The closer we get to the ideal, the more beneficent that "invisible hand" becomes. With the trajectory of intellectual property laws from roughly Bayh-Dole forward, the incentives have become perverse. That should be obvious. Solutions to the problem are never obvious when the nature of the problem is so cleverly hidden. If the opinion you seek is a "blank slate" basis, I say treat the media moguls like the warez kiddies they have always been.