It's been that way for a while. ICANN stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, after all. IANA was re-parented under ICANN following the death of Jon Postel in 1998.
I agree it wouldn't buy much, but it's probably possible to get back at least a few via only pressure, not legal wrangling. Stanford gave back their/8, for example.
I actually think #1 could be done somewhat more in real interfaces. Computers too often portray their workings as a magical black box, leading to increased trouble diagnosing what's going on and figuring out how to fix or improve it. UNIX programs' traditional progress and status indicators are a nice example of opening that black box. It's harder with very complex programs, but there's increasing interest in AI in exactly what you criticize--- having things like computer-vision algorithms, classification algorithms, etc., give more real-time visualization of their operation, not just their results.
Blaming him would be like blaming some make up guy for making Hollywood starlets set an impossibly high bar for beauty.
Presumably you'd disagree with it as well, but people do frequently blame the movie industry as a whole for such things, if not necessarily the makeup guy in particular.
My main objection to what Forbes does with his money is that he's spent the large portion of the past 20 years not trying to make the world a better place for people in general, but trying to make the world a better place for people who inherit large amounts of money, like himself. His political activity, on which he has spent many millions of dollars, almost entirely revolves around two self-serving goals: 1) abolish the capital-gains tax; and 2) abolish the inheritance tax.
Steve inherited millions of dollars from his dad, so I'm not sure how you could with a straight face consider him a self-made man. Even his "work" is work that his daddy handed to him, the editorship of Forbes magazine. His daughter Moira also owes her job to the family inheritance--- she's publisher at ForbesLife Executive Women.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "a flat tax". People pushing the flat tax, like Steve Forbes, have typically been pushing for a flat tax on wage and salary income, but that excludes capital gains entirely. One flat tax of x% for the working schmucks, and another flat tax of 0% for the trust-fund kids like Steve Forbes.
If it were a flat tax that included capital gains, that might have a better chance of going somewhere, but the major flat-tax proponents have not been pushing that. Though even in that case you would have a bunch of entrenched popular deductions that people would try to pull in, like the mortgage-interest deduction, the deduction on money donated to charity, etc.
But for serious gamers it is common knowledge that remote playing will not ever be as quick as a LAN frag fest.
Possibly true, but possibly also might not matter, if it's still quick enough. After all, playing on the internet isn't as quick as a "LAN frag fest", and yet the vast majority of gamers, even of twitch-heavy games, are playing on the internet, not on LANs.
It seems like a futile effort to try to protect them from one particular kind of propaganda then, since they'll just fall prey to a different kind. Maybe after we banish corporations from politics, we can find a way to banish demagogues?
That's true; it's possible the Supreme Court could've said that non-profit corporations have free speech rights, while for-profit ones don't. But it's not clear on what grounds they would do that. If, as opponents of this decision argue, corporations are not people and therefore not protected by the First Amendment, why would non-profits be protected, since they are also not people?
Wrong definition of "corporate". Corporatism in that context means essentially Scandinavian-style consensus democracy with government mediation amongst interest groups. The "corporate" means interest groups being represented in corporate bodies, not the specific form of the capitalist business corporation. See here.
Part of the problem is that there doesn't seem to be a good way to distinguish between purely "business" corporations, and expressive-association corporations. The Sierra Club is a corporation, for example, and it seems pretty clear to me that the First Amendment should not permit the government to censor the Sierra Club's communications.
I guess I would still blame Congress more, for actually passing the laws, rather than the Supreme Court for failing to invalidate them. Congressmen also swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, which ought to mean not passing unconstitutional laws, even if the Supreme Court would not strike them down.
The article doesn't explain precisely why it's still under copyright, except that it was renewed in 1981 after falling into the public domain, as permitted by the Copyright Act of 1976. But why hasn't it fallen back into the public domain again? Looking through this chart, I can't find any combination of circumstances that would allow an 1887 work, whose author died in 1930, to remain in copyright until 2023.
What's kind of weird, and leads to the purposeless drift in modern American business, is that they're also the ones supposedly telling people what to do, so it's a rudderless ship of automatons following other automatons' direction. Oh, sure, technically their bosses are the shareholders, but shareholders in diffuse-ownership companies exert no real control.
But if I support what you're proposing, it's me who'll get trampled, because I'm not going to get one of these MSCE-level crappy certifications from the government, so it'll just stand in the way of me being able to earn my living doing freelance work.
I'd actually go in the other direction. Perhaps to actually argue a case before a court there should be certification, but it's ridiculous that it's illegal to provide legal advice just because you haven't been admitted to some anticompetitive guild, even without anyone being able to prove that your advice was in any way incompetent or negligent. If I'm a self-made expert on some area of the law, why can't I give people advice on it, so long as I don't misrepresent myself as having a JD?
I think the reason CS hasn't gone that way is because of how ridiculously oppressive a government that tried to enforce it would be perceived as. The neighbor kid fixing your computers for $10 would be committing a crime, unlicensed repair work on a computer.
Ideally, as someone who isn't in IT but uses technology, I like to think the IT guys are on my side. If something is broken, and I can't fix it myself, or something could be better and I can't improve it (due to lack of knowledge or resources or access), they're there to help me out. Setting up IT "as a business" fundamentally changes this way of thinking about things, though. My group then sees IT as a cost center: we want to use as little of their stuff as possible, or we might get billed for them doing stuff for us. IT sees us as customers to whom a bunch of crap can potentially be sold, generating revenue for their IT business.
A somewhat optimistic guess is that they'll be restricted to using this defensively. Are they really going to sue Hadoop, the open-source implementation of MapReduce? Hadoop not only implements a version of MapReduce, it even uses its name, so is not at all coy about being a direct infringement of this patent. And yet, I would be surprised if Google sued them, or the many people using it. They certainly haven't said anything yet, as far as I can find--- when things like Amazon Elastic MapReduce were launched, I can't find record of Google saying, "hey, you're stealing our tech!"
Imagine what the U.S.'s technology leadership could've been like if we had put a President in the White House who truly understood this kind of cutting-edge science.
It's a different aesthetic, and to some extent I find the older stuff more interesting as "videogame music", precisely because it has clear technical constraints that gives it some identifiable qualities and drives particular kinds of creativity. Modern games often have interesting music, but it's more or less soundtrack music, like films. It can be well done, but it's not really its own separate kind of music.
How is it "wrong", when you restated exactly what I said? I pointed out that if the first connection was not an intercepted one, the self-signed cert guarantees that subsequent ones are not either. It does not guarantee that the first one was not intercepted, clearly. But it still greatly decreases the odds of a man-in-the-middle attack, since such an attack could only be made on the first ever connection.
(I do, incidentally, have an OOB way to verify my own self-signed certificate on my own server.)
One of the biggest benefits of widespread encryption is just making it harder to snoop on miscellaneous passing traffic from somewhere in between, in a fishing-expedition sort of way (whether by governments, malicious private entities, or the guy sitting next to you in the coffee shop). If most data were routinely encrypted with self-signed certs, that'd successfully stymie most of that.
Stopping an attacker from hijacking sessions or masquerading as the target IP or DNS name, is also an issue, but I think much less widespread. When I use https to read my own webmail on my own server, my primary goal is to keep someone from snooping on my data off the local wireless network, which a self-signed cert does just fine for. And even a self-signed cert will catch man-in-the-middle attacks as long as the first connection, when you save the cert, is not a compromised one--- you'll still see a change in certificates if a subsequent connection is compromised, since that doesn't depend at all on signed-ness.
Indeed, it's not even clear that it improves on what's been going on previously. From huge corpuses of English, computer programs still cannot learn to speak English without a ton of pre-coded knowledge. Even if you give it every single piece of text written in the 19th century, the current state of AI cannot produce an intelligent program that speaks 19th-century English (regurgitating verbatim phrases, or stringing together probabilistic Markov-model sentences, doesn't count).
So why would giving it more text by continually crawling webpages help? The bottleneck isn't the lack of text; it's that AI isn't good enough at doing anything with the text.
Sadly it's been a years-long downwards slide with THX. They used to certify only high-end theatres, then added high-end home theatre setups, then the standards for commercial theatres slowly started slipping until basically everyone who wasn't showing films in a tin can got certified, then they started certifying middle-of-the-road home theatre setups, then individual pieces of home-theatre hardware, and recently even some decent but not exactly world-class Logitech computer speakers.
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It's been that way for a while. ICANN stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, after all. IANA was re-parented under ICANN following the death of Jon Postel in 1998.
I agree it wouldn't buy much, but it's probably possible to get back at least a few via only pressure, not legal wrangling. Stanford gave back their /8, for example.
I actually think #1 could be done somewhat more in real interfaces. Computers too often portray their workings as a magical black box, leading to increased trouble diagnosing what's going on and figuring out how to fix or improve it. UNIX programs' traditional progress and status indicators are a nice example of opening that black box. It's harder with very complex programs, but there's increasing interest in AI in exactly what you criticize--- having things like computer-vision algorithms, classification algorithms, etc., give more real-time visualization of their operation, not just their results.
Presumably you'd disagree with it as well, but people do frequently blame the movie industry as a whole for such things, if not necessarily the makeup guy in particular.
My main objection to what Forbes does with his money is that he's spent the large portion of the past 20 years not trying to make the world a better place for people in general, but trying to make the world a better place for people who inherit large amounts of money, like himself. His political activity, on which he has spent many millions of dollars, almost entirely revolves around two self-serving goals: 1) abolish the capital-gains tax; and 2) abolish the inheritance tax.
Steve inherited millions of dollars from his dad, so I'm not sure how you could with a straight face consider him a self-made man. Even his "work" is work that his daddy handed to him, the editorship of Forbes magazine. His daughter Moira also owes her job to the family inheritance--- she's publisher at ForbesLife Executive Women.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "a flat tax". People pushing the flat tax, like Steve Forbes, have typically been pushing for a flat tax on wage and salary income, but that excludes capital gains entirely. One flat tax of x% for the working schmucks, and another flat tax of 0% for the trust-fund kids like Steve Forbes.
If it were a flat tax that included capital gains, that might have a better chance of going somewhere, but the major flat-tax proponents have not been pushing that. Though even in that case you would have a bunch of entrenched popular deductions that people would try to pull in, like the mortgage-interest deduction, the deduction on money donated to charity, etc.
But for serious gamers it is common knowledge that remote playing will not ever be as quick as a LAN frag fest.
Possibly true, but possibly also might not matter, if it's still quick enough. After all, playing on the internet isn't as quick as a "LAN frag fest", and yet the vast majority of gamers, even of twitch-heavy games, are playing on the internet, not on LANs.
It seems like a futile effort to try to protect them from one particular kind of propaganda then, since they'll just fall prey to a different kind. Maybe after we banish corporations from politics, we can find a way to banish demagogues?
That's true; it's possible the Supreme Court could've said that non-profit corporations have free speech rights, while for-profit ones don't. But it's not clear on what grounds they would do that. If, as opponents of this decision argue, corporations are not people and therefore not protected by the First Amendment, why would non-profits be protected, since they are also not people?
Wrong definition of "corporate". Corporatism in that context means essentially Scandinavian-style consensus democracy with government mediation amongst interest groups. The "corporate" means interest groups being represented in corporate bodies, not the specific form of the capitalist business corporation. See here.
Part of the problem is that there doesn't seem to be a good way to distinguish between purely "business" corporations, and expressive-association corporations. The Sierra Club is a corporation, for example, and it seems pretty clear to me that the First Amendment should not permit the government to censor the Sierra Club's communications.
I guess I would still blame Congress more, for actually passing the laws, rather than the Supreme Court for failing to invalidate them. Congressmen also swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, which ought to mean not passing unconstitutional laws, even if the Supreme Court would not strike them down.
The article doesn't explain precisely why it's still under copyright, except that it was renewed in 1981 after falling into the public domain, as permitted by the Copyright Act of 1976. But why hasn't it fallen back into the public domain again? Looking through this chart, I can't find any combination of circumstances that would allow an 1887 work, whose author died in 1930, to remain in copyright until 2023.
What's kind of weird, and leads to the purposeless drift in modern American business, is that they're also the ones supposedly telling people what to do, so it's a rudderless ship of automatons following other automatons' direction. Oh, sure, technically their bosses are the shareholders, but shareholders in diffuse-ownership companies exert no real control.
But if I support what you're proposing, it's me who'll get trampled, because I'm not going to get one of these MSCE-level crappy certifications from the government, so it'll just stand in the way of me being able to earn my living doing freelance work.
I'd actually go in the other direction. Perhaps to actually argue a case before a court there should be certification, but it's ridiculous that it's illegal to provide legal advice just because you haven't been admitted to some anticompetitive guild, even without anyone being able to prove that your advice was in any way incompetent or negligent. If I'm a self-made expert on some area of the law, why can't I give people advice on it, so long as I don't misrepresent myself as having a JD?
I think the reason CS hasn't gone that way is because of how ridiculously oppressive a government that tried to enforce it would be perceived as. The neighbor kid fixing your computers for $10 would be committing a crime, unlicensed repair work on a computer.
Ideally, as someone who isn't in IT but uses technology, I like to think the IT guys are on my side. If something is broken, and I can't fix it myself, or something could be better and I can't improve it (due to lack of knowledge or resources or access), they're there to help me out. Setting up IT "as a business" fundamentally changes this way of thinking about things, though. My group then sees IT as a cost center: we want to use as little of their stuff as possible, or we might get billed for them doing stuff for us. IT sees us as customers to whom a bunch of crap can potentially be sold, generating revenue for their IT business.
A somewhat optimistic guess is that they'll be restricted to using this defensively. Are they really going to sue Hadoop, the open-source implementation of MapReduce? Hadoop not only implements a version of MapReduce, it even uses its name, so is not at all coy about being a direct infringement of this patent. And yet, I would be surprised if Google sued them, or the many people using it. They certainly haven't said anything yet, as far as I can find--- when things like Amazon Elastic MapReduce were launched, I can't find record of Google saying, "hey, you're stealing our tech!"
Imagine what the U.S.'s technology leadership could've been like if we had put a President in the White House who truly understood this kind of cutting-edge science.
It's a different aesthetic, and to some extent I find the older stuff more interesting as "videogame music", precisely because it has clear technical constraints that gives it some identifiable qualities and drives particular kinds of creativity. Modern games often have interesting music, but it's more or less soundtrack music, like films. It can be well done, but it's not really its own separate kind of music.
How is it "wrong", when you restated exactly what I said? I pointed out that if the first connection was not an intercepted one, the self-signed cert guarantees that subsequent ones are not either. It does not guarantee that the first one was not intercepted, clearly. But it still greatly decreases the odds of a man-in-the-middle attack, since such an attack could only be made on the first ever connection.
(I do, incidentally, have an OOB way to verify my own self-signed certificate on my own server.)
One of the biggest benefits of widespread encryption is just making it harder to snoop on miscellaneous passing traffic from somewhere in between, in a fishing-expedition sort of way (whether by governments, malicious private entities, or the guy sitting next to you in the coffee shop). If most data were routinely encrypted with self-signed certs, that'd successfully stymie most of that.
Stopping an attacker from hijacking sessions or masquerading as the target IP or DNS name, is also an issue, but I think much less widespread. When I use https to read my own webmail on my own server, my primary goal is to keep someone from snooping on my data off the local wireless network, which a self-signed cert does just fine for. And even a self-signed cert will catch man-in-the-middle attacks as long as the first connection, when you save the cert, is not a compromised one--- you'll still see a change in certificates if a subsequent connection is compromised, since that doesn't depend at all on signed-ness.
Indeed, it's not even clear that it improves on what's been going on previously. From huge corpuses of English, computer programs still cannot learn to speak English without a ton of pre-coded knowledge. Even if you give it every single piece of text written in the 19th century, the current state of AI cannot produce an intelligent program that speaks 19th-century English (regurgitating verbatim phrases, or stringing together probabilistic Markov-model sentences, doesn't count).
So why would giving it more text by continually crawling webpages help? The bottleneck isn't the lack of text; it's that AI isn't good enough at doing anything with the text.
(I am an AI researcher, fwiw.)
Sadly it's been a years-long downwards slide with THX. They used to certify only high-end theatres, then added high-end home theatre setups, then the standards for commercial theatres slowly started slipping until basically everyone who wasn't showing films in a tin can got certified, then they started certifying middle-of-the-road home theatre setups, then individual pieces of home-theatre hardware, and recently even some decent but not exactly world-class Logitech computer speakers.