In this case I would guess the guy feels two things. (1) need for clean. He said he needs to brush off his surroundings before he goes to sleep. (2) need to have tools 'just in case', which may be another anxiety problem. The comment about not needing a pedometer any more shows he may be helped by REBT (Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy) where finding rational reasons for the compuslions can help defeat them.
Choice of a desert planet. That in itself is not too distinguishing. It naturally leads to 'sandcrawlers' (a big machine that crawls on the sand) and trying to get water ('cause its a desert). People in cauls and covered heads makes sense, as that's what many desert nomads are depicted as doing. You may find in the desert that even when a person's face is shadowed, their eyes and mouth may appear lighted because of the interesting reflective properties of sand.
Biblical names, telling the future (seers or prophets), manipulation of objects or creatures (a bit of a stretch, but moving mountains, Daniel in the lions den, and others) are all biblical stories, around LONG before either of these works.
About the only thing remotely original that may have been taken from the other is a character finding out a 'bad guy' is their father, but that, too, is not a historical novelty.
... creative people turn to existing sources? We have seen so many articles lately of when
creativity is based on other creative sources and in some of them, one group sues over it. I'm getting pretty tired of it.
Yes, if I duplicate your stuff almost exactly and hurt your business, then copyright should kick in. However:
Set designers need to build sets based on existing architecture.
Cartoonists should be able to draw an eyeball even if they saw other green eyeballs in the 60's. [back on that discussion, Blizzard could say both groups stole it from their Warcraft 2 'Eye of Kilrog']
Musicians should be able to use any set of notes, not worrying that a particular set of 4 notes will get them in copyright issues.
Any other creative art (programming, artistry, city planning, construction, &c.) requires the use of elements that are used elsewhere, or that may have been discovered by someone else for the same purpose.
Or in summary:
All great works are based upon the works that came before, and while credit is always appropriate, unless there is some actual harm done in the use, there should never be talks of lawsuits or licensing or copyright violations.
Raising public awareness of the problems of DRM is one front we need to take, but the other is re-discovery of music.
I haven't bought a major label CD for years. I've found more than enough good music through independant and small groups. I've even had a group accept a small payment online and download a few of their songs that I could burn to CD myself. The very few big-label songs I do want I grab off the radio to tape, and if I really want it on CD, I'll record it a few times and remaster it on my PC. Sure it takes a little time, but its fully within fair use.
And Tim Berners-Lee would also love the inclusion of all the glyphs in MathML. The project would make MathML much more attractive, as it offers a solution to the problem brought up in the article: selecting a glyph.
MathML allows selection of symbols, but does not have glyphs associated. (IE: you can tell it to use picture #45, but without a font containing picutre #45, you can't draw it.)
The project would actually support the Math Markup Language.
RE: parent, nodiscriminatory terms could mean they charge everyone $5000 for a license, it doesn't matter if you are IBM, Dell, Corel, Adobe, (big companies) ISVs or small companies, or any of the hobbiests, shareware, Free and Open Source software makers, and so on. As long as its the same for everyone, it isn't discriminatory as long as it is 'reasonable' for corporations. (A company that can afford a few programmers can reasonably afford a few grand for something close to their core business.)
What I'm concerned about is how the Judge made the distinction in what to include as technologies that must be considered separate, and how she stated that OS components, Middleware, and other products were not neccessarily mutually exclusive. There was in her description information that the inclusion of products and technologies that can be distributed separately from the OS, or are trademarked, or (a few other things) would be considered in the middleware category. Would that mean that a certain functionality in another OS that can be separated on OTHER OS's, such as the PCMCIA code in Linux, would mean that code controlling PCMCIA cards in Windows would need to be considered as separate from the OS? Other examples would be window managers vs. the same functionality, and shells?
Continuing with her definition of Middleware, stating Internet Explorer is in the class of middleware -- when programming within the windows shell, much of the stuff actually thought of as 'windows' is actually interpreted inside of Internet Exploder; will the interoperablity clauses affect those as well? Specifically will MS have to provide methods to replace/swap the shell as though it were Middleware?
(It's time to go home for the night, and this isn't coming across clarly. Can someone translate this more into readable text if they think they understand? Thanks. frob)
systems whose functioning could decide the life of death of people can not tolerate any kind of misbehavior; systems like... airplane controllers
Um, actually the control decks inside most jets, including military jets, routinely crash. Air-traffic control towers, especially the old ones, also black out more often than most people think.
In talking with programmers and fighter pilots at Hill AFB, I learned that the pilots usually have to restart some computer systems several times every flight.
Many C++ compilers issue errors (things that make it impossible to compile), warnings (things that you may have done wrong) and remarks (things you should be aware of), especially when you turn on all warnings.
Good warnings and remarks include 'operations performed in undefined order' and 'assignment occurs where comparison is expected'.
The first catches the form
*ptr++,*ptr++
and the second catches the form
if(a=b)
. The compiler shouldn't complain about
if( (ptr=fopen(...) == NULL)
, since it DOES have a comparison. In the first example you have problems because of equal precidence and no defined order (RTL or LTR). The second example may work on some compilers and CPU's, like the Intel x86 would assume 'true' if b were non-zero, but would not work elsewhere (M86k, for example).
The point of these warnings and remarks isn't to tell you that you did something wrong (that's an error) but to tell you that your code may not work as expected on all machines.
Just think about what's possible if they Google loses, though....
I had a business plan to [do things] on or relating to [target]. [Target] stopped me from [things], so [target] is responsible for my business plan failing.
Now we have a generic formula for lawsuits, filling in 'things' and 'target' we can get all of these:
That's what I was thinking, too. After reading the lawsuit, they say that Google altered their code specifically against them. A company like Google is bound to have use a revision control system of some kind, so old copies of their source code are available.
The court could trivially appoint an expert (computer programmer)to look at the code and compare it to the new code. As long as it doesn't specifically state something against their company, the center of their case falls out. If there was something against them specifically then google would have a little explaining to do.
Web crawling is a slow process. Somehow I just can't imagine Google slowing down their web searches by attempting to punish companies on a hit list.
Context sensitive seems to be a significant trend....
remove several superfluous panels.... displayed some options for whatever tool was being used.... automatically displays the relevant tools for what you're working on.... Context-sensitivity is a great help since it basically does work for you, finding the stuff you need when you need it.
I agree that context-sensitive is great, but there are times when I want to do something, I expect to find it at a certain location, and the context-sensitive tools have either (worst case) moved to another area or (annoying) disabled the action under that context.
As a developer I can appreciate how much context-aware processes can help the user, but doing too much behind the user's back can annoy users, or have too many ways to do the same thing will increase the learning curve.
But on topic to the original post, [and I'm sure it has already been mentioned, but I'll do it anyway] there are a number of IEEE and ACM sponsored conferences that relate to complex user interfaces. SIGChi, the SIG on Computer Human Interaction, sponsors a bunch of conferences, most of them have several papers each year relating to the original question.
It's not flaimbait, it's a rant. MOD CHIPS GOOD. THEFT BAD.
It's not the mod chip that's the problem, per se, but what it allows. I would love it if you could have mod chips for all your consoles. You can mod everything everywehere. You should be able to use cheat codes and adjust memory to change your scores or get unlimited ammo or powerups.
Do whatever you want with your hardware, BUT DON'T STEAL SOFTWARE WITH YOUR MOD CHIP. Running another OS, or home-built games, or making your own dev-kit, I'm fine with all that. Knock yourself out. But if I lost a thousands of sales because of piracy, I would make you pay back every penny.
Check out Acts Of Gord where in one of his stories some punk kid comes into his game shop and offers to sell some games. He pulls out a bunch of games burned from his own CD-R. Gord just started breaking the CD's and yelling at the guy.
The sad truth is that most mod chips will not be used for making dev kits. They won't be made for imported/exported games (although there are many LEGAL mod chips that do that). Most mod chips are there to allow theft. Games take years to develop, are expensive, and often struggle to make a profit. Anyone stealing games they like ought to be clubbed until they understand what they are doing.
Install mod chip
Steal (copy) cool games
Keep stealing copying games
Notice that there are fewer cool games to steal.
Complain that no one will make cool games that you can steal.
Steal the mediocre games...
Complain because there are no more good games.
So while I fully agree that you can install mod chips, the fact that only 12 of the 7'432'213 chips in existance are not being used for theft should indicate the problem.
Or there are people like me who have ad blocking software, in addition to.hosts entries for known sources. It's not to hard to filter ads, including the ones on/.
My question is this:
Could I sell enough $10 shareware GPG extensions to compensate for not locking in 20 years of patent protection (and the $20,000 to patent it)?
The actual question is not about crypto. If he had been talking about a game idea, or a stream compressor, or any other software algorithm, it is the same question: How do I know if something is worth the money for a patent and commercialization rather than shareware?
Yes, there are probably problems with any crypto idea, but that is NOT the point of the posting.
Actually the Government can sidestep a lot of patent issues. Just as with PKE, they can say "we already knew about it and were using it, so we don't have to pay royalties".
But I don't think your comment really relates to the actual question he asked: do I patent [thing x] and hope to make enough money in a commercial world, or do I release shareware plugins?
It isn't a matter of "do I patent or publish freely?" since in the US, you can patent a year after publishing. If you really care, the steps should be:
Talk to a lawyer and tell him that you have an idea. If it REALLY IS a good idea, the small investment in a good IP lawyer at that point is a good thing.
The idea still needs community work and approval, but you still want to retain ownership should the idea succeed. He should advise you that a patent is a bad idea at that point, a better idea would be one of many publication or trade secret options.
Talk with the community. Post everything about it to all the crypto newsgroups. Get the routines published in the proper community forums and conferences. If it is good enough it will make it into any of the IEEE or ACM conferences. Encourage feedback. That cannot be stressed enough. ANY GOOD SECURITY MECHINISM, PATENTED OR PUBLIC, MUST HAVE ALL ITS PARTS STUDIED CAREFULLY BY EXPERTS. There is no way around that.
Write and publish the extensions. Write the GPG extension, and extensions for the Windows shell, and Outlook, and Eudora, and Pegasus, and everything else. If it doesn't get adopted it won't matter if you patent it since it won't get used.
If at the end of the year it looks profitable, patent it. Your lawyer should have told you that also. If you know that it won't be possible to recoup the money, don't do it.
So that should answer the original question: "Could I sell enough $10 shareware GPG extensions to compensate for not locking in 20 years of patent protection (and the $20,000 to patent it)?" If at the end of the first year you haven't made a dime and haven't had the routine published or accepted in the community, you probably never will.
Our teacher was into fun, and showed us a chunk of sodium cut off of a block, a chunk of potasium cut from a block, and the joys of white phosphorus. [For those who don't know, white phosphorus is stored in some liquid, I think karosene, and after it drys off and is exposed to air, bursts into flame.] He said that one year a not-so-brite student liked his demonstration and stole a bit of white phosphorus. The student stuffed it in his pants pocket. Before the class was over, he had a seriously burned leg and had to go to the hospital.
Our physics teacher, Mr. Jackson, demonstrated all physics principles with explosions. He had two canisters at the front of the room -- O2 and H2. He would fill up balloons with about the right mix of the two gasses, and have darts thrown at them. The darts had cotton swabs attached, doused in alcohol and lit on fire. We would have 'games of skill' where a few people in the class would put up a buck, and he would put up 1, 5, or 10 (based on his attitude) and the people whose experiments resulted in the closest values to the physics models would collect the pot. That's the joys of having an independatnly rich HS teacher. (Mr. Jackson invented the glass Bottle Strecher, and teaches at Viewmont High)
Your analogy to the US as a rich kid giving handouts to classmates who need the money to survive isn't really correct. It may be manipulation, but not needed to survive and grow. I would even go so far as to say that many handouts prevent growth in the places that need it most.
You are assuming that without some sort of foriegn aid, the given country could not survive or succeed. Aid from the US, EU, and elsewhere increase the financial resources slightly, financial aid is not a requirement for growth. These handouts will boost the riches of the upper and some of the middle classes, but the poor will remain poor, and will be in an even worse position because the economy will have left them behind.
In most of South America (Columbia, Peru, Chile, Brasil, etc.) for example, if [unlikely] some billions of US$ were offered in some sort cash of handout to preserve the rainforests, it would not work. Sure a lot of city dwellers would benefit -- they would have jobs that paid a little more, but rural families would never see a benifit. The money would stay in the cities where the rich would continue to accumulate it, the city people would get trickle-down from government and business, urban people will slowly get trickle-down from the cities, but the businesses will continue to exploit the rural farmers, the people who have to slash-and-burn the rainforests to survive. As the cities and urban areas improve, the rural people still struggle to grow and harvest enough food to survive.
The rich nations are better off offering schooling and sustainable infrastrucure to rural populations, rather than money. Many times we are offering un-sustainable gifts of cash and food, or building roads and pipelines that the people cannot maintain. While those are good for emergencies, I think they are terrible in the long run.
Going way back to the original topic, going to international enforcement of a single country's law over the Internet is really a poor use of resources.
That's the entire problem with regulation attempts on the Internet. Physical location is unimportant. Except for issues that are generally considered bad by the global population, regulation is a messy issue.
I've heard it said that almost all the knowledge of the world is available over the Internet, and most of what isn't can be purchased or ordered through the Internet. If so much is available then the regulation of them are pretty insignificant. Examples from my own viewpoint:
porn: Global consensus seems to be that it's bad for kids, but adults can choose. The regulation problem is finding a global age when the choice is acceptable. 21? 18? 16? 14? Regulation seems to be within a country or within friendly countries.
kiddie-porn: Global consensus seems to be that taking porn pictures of kids will basically ruin their life, so no real complaints when any country crosses international boundaries. Some nations object until their pockets are properly lined with cash.
Shipping Drugs, Alchohol & Tobacco: Global consensus seems to vary based on location and national laws. It seems that trade by major groups is acceptable (since they follow laws and are licensed, pay tarrifs, etc) but minor groups are being attacked -- mainly because of tarrifs and not other laws. Regulation seems to be either "friendly companies that pay taxes and basically don't traffic in narcotics" or criminals who bypass the few restrictions in place.
IP Theft: The only people who really seem to care are the people having their employee's ideas made available. The individuals who assert their IP rights seem to love the extra exposure, and don't mind being sent around the world as long as their name stays attached.
Music & Movies: You don't see India asserting this kind of laws, even though they produce most of the world's feature-length films. That seems to be a US-Only issue, more specific, an issue only with the mega-corps associated with RIAA and MPAA. So when these groups try to get the US to put P2P on the same moral level as kiddie-porn, there are pretty bad reactions.
So from my view, the only people who want a hand in regulation on the Internet are the governments who are afriad of not getting taxes, and mega-corps who can't sell overpriced goods. There was an interesting piece on PBS some time ago that showed who the megacorps were -- note that these companies are the major entities in the MPAA and RIAA.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case I would guess the guy feels two things. (1) need for clean. He said he needs to brush off his surroundings before he goes to sleep. (2) need to have tools 'just in case', which may be another anxiety problem. The comment about not needing a pedometer any more shows he may be helped by REBT (Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy) where finding rational reasons for the compuslions can help defeat them.
Personally, I feel sorry for the guy.
(I had this discussion ages ago, all the movies that everyone said were great had were derived from books).
Choice of a desert planet. That in itself is not too distinguishing. It naturally leads to 'sandcrawlers' (a big machine that crawls on the sand) and trying to get water ('cause its a desert). People in cauls and covered heads makes sense, as that's what many desert nomads are depicted as doing. You may find in the desert that even when a person's face is shadowed, their eyes and mouth may appear lighted because of the interesting reflective properties of sand.
Biblical names, telling the future (seers or prophets), manipulation of objects or creatures (a bit of a stretch, but moving mountains, Daniel in the lions den, and others) are all biblical stories, around LONG before either of these works.
About the only thing remotely original that may have been taken from the other is a character finding out a 'bad guy' is their father, but that, too, is not a historical novelty.
frob.
Yes, if I duplicate your stuff almost exactly and hurt your business, then copyright should kick in. However:
- Set designers need to build sets based on existing architecture.
- Cartoonists should be able to draw an eyeball even if they saw other green eyeballs in the 60's. [back on that discussion, Blizzard could say both groups stole it from their Warcraft 2 'Eye of Kilrog']
- Musicians should be able to use any set of notes, not worrying that a particular set of 4 notes will get them in copyright issues.
- Any other creative art (programming, artistry, city planning, construction, &c.) requires the use of elements that are used elsewhere, or that may have been discovered by someone else for the same purpose.
Or in summary: All great works are based upon the works that came before, and while credit is always appropriate, unless there is some actual harm done in the use, there should never be talks of lawsuits or licensing or copyright violations.Frob.
I haven't bought a major label CD for years. I've found more than enough good music through independant and small groups. I've even had a group accept a small payment online and download a few of their songs that I could burn to CD myself. The very few big-label songs I do want I grab off the radio to tape, and if I really want it on CD, I'll record it a few times and remaster it on my PC. Sure it takes a little time, but its fully within fair use.
frob.
Frob.
The project would actually support the Math Markup Language.
As there is no comprehensive mathematics font in existince, the ability does no good.
What I'm concerned about is how the Judge made the distinction in what to include as technologies that must be considered separate, and how she stated that OS components, Middleware, and other products were not neccessarily mutually exclusive. There was in her description information that the inclusion of products and technologies that can be distributed separately from the OS, or are trademarked, or (a few other things) would be considered in the middleware category. Would that mean that a certain functionality in another OS that can be separated on OTHER OS's, such as the PCMCIA code in Linux, would mean that code controlling PCMCIA cards in Windows would need to be considered as separate from the OS? Other examples would be window managers vs. the same functionality, and shells?
Continuing with her definition of Middleware, stating Internet Explorer is in the class of middleware -- when programming within the windows shell, much of the stuff actually thought of as 'windows' is actually interpreted inside of Internet Exploder; will the interoperablity clauses affect those as well? Specifically will MS have to provide methods to replace/swap the shell as though it were Middleware?
(It's time to go home for the night, and this isn't coming across clarly. Can someone translate this more into readable text if they think they understand? Thanks. frob)
In talking with programmers and fighter pilots at Hill AFB, I learned that the pilots usually have to restart some computer systems several times every flight.
frob.
Good warnings and remarks include 'operations performed in undefined order' and 'assignment occurs where comparison is expected'.
The first catches the form
and the second catches the form . The compiler shouldn't complain about , since it DOES have a comparison. In the first example you have problems because of equal precidence and no defined order (RTL or LTR). The second example may work on some compilers and CPU's, like the Intel x86 would assume 'true' if b were non-zero, but would not work elsewhere (M86k, for example).The point of these warnings and remarks isn't to tell you that you did something wrong (that's an error) but to tell you that your code may not work as expected on all machines.
I had a business plan to [do things] on or relating to [target]. [Target] stopped me from [things], so [target] is responsible for my business plan failing.
Now we have a generic formula for lawsuits, filling in 'things' and 'target' we can get all of these:
- increasing PageRank and Google
- complaining about and MacDonald's
- abusing and You
- drug running and Government
The parallels are great.The court could trivially appoint an expert (computer programmer)to look at the code and compare it to the new code. As long as it doesn't specifically state something against their company, the center of their case falls out. If there was something against them specifically then google would have a little explaining to do.
Web crawling is a slow process. Somehow I just can't imagine Google slowing down their web searches by attempting to punish companies on a hit list.
They've been out in the tins for a few months now. I just got my third one a few days ago. My two-year-old loves them.
As a developer I can appreciate how much context-aware processes can help the user, but doing too much behind the user's back can annoy users, or have too many ways to do the same thing will increase the learning curve.
But on topic to the original post, [and I'm sure it has already been mentioned, but I'll do it anyway] there are a number of IEEE and ACM sponsored conferences that relate to complex user interfaces. SIGChi, the SIG on Computer Human Interaction, sponsors a bunch of conferences, most of them have several papers each year relating to the original question.
frob.
It's not flaimbait, it's a rant. MOD CHIPS GOOD. THEFT BAD.
It's not the mod chip that's the problem, per se, but what it allows. I would love it if you could have mod chips for all your consoles. You can mod everything everywehere. You should be able to use cheat codes and adjust memory to change your scores or get unlimited ammo or powerups.
Do whatever you want with your hardware, BUT DON'T STEAL SOFTWARE WITH YOUR MOD CHIP. Running another OS, or home-built games, or making your own dev-kit, I'm fine with all that. Knock yourself out. But if I lost a thousands of sales because of piracy, I would make you pay back every penny.
Check out Acts Of Gord where in one of his stories some punk kid comes into his game shop and offers to sell some games. He pulls out a bunch of games burned from his own CD-R. Gord just started breaking the CD's and yelling at the guy.
The sad truth is that most mod chips will not be used for making dev kits. They won't be made for imported/exported games (although there are many LEGAL mod chips that do that). Most mod chips are there to allow theft. Games take years to develop, are expensive, and often struggle to make a profit. Anyone stealing games they like ought to be clubbed until they understand what they are doing.
- Install mod chip
- Steal (copy) cool games
- Keep stealing copying games
- Notice that there are fewer cool games to steal.
- Complain that no one will make cool games that you can steal.
- Steal the mediocre games...
- Complain because there are no more good games.
So while I fully agree that you can install mod chips, the fact that only 12 of the 7'432'213 chips in existance are not being used for theft should indicate the problem.frob.
That's because virus scanners are part of the pirated software. How else would 84% of the people know they had a virus?
frob.
Yes, there are probably problems with any crypto idea, but that is NOT the point of the posting.
frob.
But I don't think your comment really relates to the actual question he asked: do I patent [thing x] and hope to make enough money in a commercial world, or do I release shareware plugins?
frob.
- Talk to a lawyer and tell him that you have an idea. If it REALLY IS a good idea, the small investment in a good IP lawyer at that point is a good thing.
The idea still needs community work and approval, but you still want to retain ownership should the idea succeed. He should advise you that a patent is a bad idea at that point, a better idea would be one of many publication or trade secret options.
- Talk with the community. Post everything about it to all the crypto newsgroups. Get the routines published in the proper community forums and conferences. If it is good enough it will make it into any of the IEEE or ACM conferences. Encourage feedback. That cannot be stressed enough. ANY GOOD SECURITY MECHINISM, PATENTED OR PUBLIC, MUST HAVE ALL ITS PARTS STUDIED CAREFULLY BY EXPERTS. There is no way around that.
- Write and publish the extensions. Write the GPG extension, and extensions for the Windows shell, and Outlook, and Eudora, and Pegasus, and everything else. If it doesn't get adopted it won't matter if you patent it since it won't get used.
- If at the end of the year it looks profitable, patent it. Your lawyer should have told you that also. If you know that it won't be possible to recoup the money, don't do it.
So that should answer the original question: "Could I sell enough $10 shareware GPG extensions to compensate for not locking in 20 years of patent protection (and the $20,000 to patent it)?" If at the end of the first year you haven't made a dime and haven't had the routine published or accepted in the community, you probably never will.frob.
Our teacher was into fun, and showed us a chunk of sodium cut off of a block, a chunk of potasium cut from a block, and the joys of white phosphorus. [For those who don't know, white phosphorus is stored in some liquid, I think karosene, and after it drys off and is exposed to air, bursts into flame.] He said that one year a not-so-brite student liked his demonstration and stole a bit of white phosphorus. The student stuffed it in his pants pocket. Before the class was over, he had a seriously burned leg and had to go to the hospital.
Our physics teacher, Mr. Jackson, demonstrated all physics principles with explosions. He had two canisters at the front of the room -- O2 and H2. He would fill up balloons with about the right mix of the two gasses, and have darts thrown at them. The darts had cotton swabs attached, doused in alcohol and lit on fire. We would have 'games of skill' where a few people in the class would put up a buck, and he would put up 1, 5, or 10 (based on his attitude) and the people whose experiments resulted in the closest values to the physics models would collect the pot. That's the joys of having an independatnly rich HS teacher. (Mr. Jackson invented the glass Bottle Strecher, and teaches at Viewmont High)
Well, I gotta get back to work.
frob.
You are assuming that without some sort of foriegn aid, the given country could not survive or succeed. Aid from the US, EU, and elsewhere increase the financial resources slightly, financial aid is not a requirement for growth. These handouts will boost the riches of the upper and some of the middle classes, but the poor will remain poor, and will be in an even worse position because the economy will have left them behind.
In most of South America (Columbia, Peru, Chile, Brasil, etc.) for example, if [unlikely] some billions of US$ were offered in some sort cash of handout to preserve the rainforests, it would not work. Sure a lot of city dwellers would benefit -- they would have jobs that paid a little more, but rural families would never see a benifit. The money would stay in the cities where the rich would continue to accumulate it, the city people would get trickle-down from government and business, urban people will slowly get trickle-down from the cities, but the businesses will continue to exploit the rural farmers, the people who have to slash-and-burn the rainforests to survive. As the cities and urban areas improve, the rural people still struggle to grow and harvest enough food to survive.
The rich nations are better off offering schooling and sustainable infrastrucure to rural populations, rather than money. Many times we are offering un-sustainable gifts of cash and food, or building roads and pipelines that the people cannot maintain. While those are good for emergencies, I think they are terrible in the long run.
Going way back to the original topic, going to international enforcement of a single country's law over the Internet is really a poor use of resources.
frob.
I've heard it said that almost all the knowledge of the world is available over the Internet, and most of what isn't can be purchased or ordered through the Internet. If so much is available then the regulation of them are pretty insignificant. Examples from my own viewpoint:
- porn: Global consensus seems to be that it's bad for kids, but adults can choose. The regulation problem is finding a global age when the choice is acceptable. 21? 18? 16? 14? Regulation seems to be within a country or within friendly countries.
- kiddie-porn: Global consensus seems to be that taking porn pictures of kids will basically ruin their life, so no real complaints when any country crosses international boundaries. Some nations object until their pockets are properly lined with cash.
- Shipping Drugs, Alchohol & Tobacco: Global consensus seems to vary based on location and national laws. It seems that trade by major groups is acceptable (since they follow laws and are licensed, pay tarrifs, etc) but minor groups are being attacked -- mainly because of tarrifs and not other laws. Regulation seems to be either "friendly companies that pay taxes and basically don't traffic in narcotics" or criminals who bypass the few restrictions in place.
- IP Theft: The only people who really seem to care are the people having their employee's ideas made available. The individuals who assert their IP rights seem to love the extra exposure, and don't mind being sent around the world as long as their name stays attached.
- Music & Movies: You don't see India asserting this kind of laws, even though they produce most of the world's feature-length films. That seems to be a US-Only issue, more specific, an issue only with the mega-corps associated with RIAA and MPAA. So when these groups try to get the US to put P2P on the same moral level as kiddie-porn, there are pretty bad reactions.
So from my view, the only people who want a hand in regulation on the Internet are the governments who are afriad of not getting taxes, and mega-corps who can't sell overpriced goods. There was an interesting piece on PBS some time ago that showed who the megacorps were -- note that these companies are the major entities in the MPAA and RIAA.frob.