I find your argument flawed. It's like the social security card fiasco. "It's not a national ID number," but the funny thing is, once it's out there, you can hardly do anything without it, unless you want to create a big hassle for yourself (have you ever tried not giving up your SOC# to the dozens of different orgs that demand it - actually illegally?).
If you have a state mandate for cookies like this, then rather than having a veneer of "choice" - i.e., I can "choose" to disable cookies but then (feigned surprise) OH! Most websites don't work! Now people actually have the option to exercise this kind of privacy, rather than just the illusion that they do, and websites will use them judiciously, if at all.
Not saying that this kind of policy is ultimately a good idea, but I do have an immense amount of respect (and surprise) at such an apparent concern for privacy. The list of nations where such things seem on people's minds to this degree is perilously short. Laws like this today, meaningful reforms tomorrow... etc etc.
One very important point. I think if we achieve the kind of meaningful understanding of the human brain that will precede that kind of machine intelligence, we'll have much bigger things on our minds than losing our jobs.
Understanding how the brain works will change everything.
I think you understand, but I want to make this clear.
Yes, the constitution guarantees us a kind of "due process" for various actions by the government - obviously, in this case, searches backed by the authority of the government.
So if the RIAA wants to come out to my ISP and flash a plastic badge it bought at a dime store and say, "but you're not constitutionally protected from my double-secret Acme Dick Tracy search warrant - open up!" I don't even call my lawyer, just the looney bin.
But the DMCA gives their searches the theoretical backing of the government - making them an improper, unconstitutional agent of court, or of law enforcement, or both, depending on how you read it.
This is not a legal gray area. This is heinously, over-the-top not kosher in the American system of government.
Time to try again to answer that age old question.
on
Microsoft's Patent Problem
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Can patents make it more convenient for big wealthy people to fuck the little guy? Or do they create too big of a risk that some big guy might actually get in trouble themselves?
Now, for those new to the debate, lets go over the simple reason why software patents are categorically, provably, and obviously insane.
Assume that the patent office is adequately staffed with an army of geniuses with eiditic memories, who never make poor judgements about what is patent-worthy and what isn't.
Anyone writing code must have to know the entire patent database - millions of patents. They would also have to stay current - thousands of new applications a day, on a slow day.
Impossible? Duh.
"Uh, now what?"
Every piece of software is a ticking patent time bomb - a multi-million dollar civil litigation waiting to happen.
Big players enjoy (and lobby for) patent systems like this because its another tool in the toolbox. You build a portfolio, and it's a great way to cost your competitors millions, threaten their business, their reputation, create FUD, etc. The cases drag on for decades, and hey, it's interesting how whoever has more money to fight them seems to always come out on top.
My greatest dream is that a giant like Microsoft will get snared in its own net, and actually start fighting to end software patents, so at least there'll be one less absolutely awful piece of economy-destroying legislation for our children to enjoy.
I think it was Slavoj Zizek who said that the American Working Class is alive and well and living in China.
Free Trade has become a code word for circumventing labor and human rights laws with geography. It's all well and good for workers who live in equivalent conditions to compete, but do we really want a competition between companies where some have to pay healthcare and minimum wage, and others can get away with tossing their workers bodies in the ditch "no questions asked" when they die on the job?
Now 3rd world high tech is unlikely to be like the 3rd world garment or checmical industries, but the same principles apply. Functional social services and institutions are expensive, and the upper class often doesn't really understand why it should pay.
I love that the aristocrats were the first to jump on the term "class warfare." It's that guilty conscience of theirs.
These are the people to watch
on
Saving the Net
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Very smart.
The author does an excellent job of synthesizing a number of disparate, troubling issues going on in our society at the moment into a very coherent whole.
If you can understand that democracies are only as good as their voters' information systems, or that markets are only as healthy as the exchange of goods, services, and ideas in them is free, then you should be able to appreciate where the author is going.
The reason esoteric issues like telecom and media regulation, and intellectual "property" law end up commanding such a large amount of attention in the community is because both of these, people are realizing, are not just important, but absolutely essential, to maintaining those very important American principles.
A cheap, ubiquitous communications medium. The free flow of information which respects, but it is not outrageously hobbled by, the rights of authors... It's only our economy, and our democracy, at stake.
I think we need a galvanizing issue. I suggest Saving the Net. To do that, we need to treat the Net as two things:
1. a public domain, and therefore
2. a natural habitat for markets
In other words, we need to see the Net as a marketplace that has done enormous good, is under extreme threat and needs to be saved.
Your IP address isn't what's at issue here, although the RIAA's eavesdropping on a peer to peer network does have components of eavesdropping on email or other communication systems in my opinion (look to intent; the RIAA doesn't play by the rules of the system, and for a definite purpose).
The issue is whether or not we still have the sacred, black-letter constitutional requirement for a judge to approve a search warrant... or if we just gave the power of a judge to some random private entity, so that it can invade privacy all over the countryside, without any oversight, at the least provocation... at best being "corrected" later, at great expense and long after the horses are out of the barn door.
It's the whim of the RIAA now, not the judgement of a court... and that's what doesn't fly in this country. Make light of it at your peril - many, many people bled into the earth to secure this right for you. No private citizen, picking suspects at their sole discretion, should decide whose person and privacy should be violated. We have checks and balances for a very good reason.
"Public internet" is a meaningless term here, just confusing the issue - you may as well talk about "public phones." The fact that people have to take precautions to secure their machines in no way relates to their _right_ to privacy - any more than the fact you have to lock your doors to keep out crooks reflects on your 4th Amendment Rights (that's "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." in case you're curious).
Attempting to compare accidentally publishing content on a webpage with someone reverse-engineering a communications system to eavesdrop on its participants AND allowing out-of-band personal information about them be released at someone's whim without the oversight of a judge... It doesn't fit, does it.
That's the real point of all of this. Not that you should be totally secure in your right to privacy against all other concerns, but that a court and a judge have to sign off on breaching that trust. DMCA, incredibly, gives the RIAA (just some private corporate entity) the power of a judge-and-court to arbitrarily invade your private life if (by their own determination) they suspect you've committed a (really underwhelming) crime - and that, I think, is what we're concerned about.
No matter _what_ the suspect is doing, searches at the whim of a corporate entity without the oversight of a judge... I'm sorry, there's no mincing words. it is black-letter unconstitutional, and categorically unamerican.
It's fascinating how many bright people are locked out of the industry right now.
Everything is geared towards big-money projects, which you can't get into unless you're one of the X thousand people already into it. No one gets these gigs; even if you do, you can make a successful game and still come out owing money to the cartel. Of the $50 you pay for a game, it's split (very roughtly) 50% for the store and 45% for the publisher. You have to have a megahit to get ahead.
Ahem. Meanwhile, back in the real world...
There are interesting avenues in cell phones (but our shitty regulatory system set that back about 5 years in the U.S.). Handheld gaming is tantalizing, at least because you don't need 10-20 million minimum to make a handheld game, but even there you get into the same kinds of issues with the platform vendor, their favored publishers, and the mafioso retail system. So in reality most "garage shops" are locked out of that too.
This is a big bummer, because you can produce some pretty amazing games on sub-million budgets (even sub 200,000 budgets) and this is where the real innovation happens - not with the polycount skyscraper competition but with whole new gameplay ideas. Check out shops like Large Animal Games - these places have amazing ideas, there is basically no channel for them to sell their wares.
Online vendors, micropayments, etc. are barely nascent; shareware is actually still near the top of a lot of lists. No game will be Wolf3D or Doom of course... None of these systems will make you a lot of money. But like with a lot of things the internet now allows smaller places to live on this sort of thing that couldn't have before.
There is a big market waiting to happen if we can figure out what comes _after_ shareware; if there's some way to allow the little guys to sell their goods in a cheap, secure way. To cut out the middlemen, in other words.
"If you can't stay apolitical then don't expect government funding."
That is just one of the most amazing statements I've ever heard.
What about funding of church-based programs? School vouchers? Aid to agribusiness? Energy concernes? These are some highly political people and groups who get a lot more government funding than Theo De Raadt.
Come to think of it, even college professors at public universities hold tenure - our society has explicitly acknowledged that in order to do that job properly for the government, you have to be free of intimidation for your political views. This isn't the same as a grant, but perhaps you can see what I'm getting at.
Whether or not it's what happened, are you saying that it's OK for an administration to cut funding for scientific research based on the researcher's political beliefs? And please don't bring up danger again - implying there is danger in Theo De Raadt is preposterous.
"Sence" indeed. We abridge the 1st amendment only when it is a matter of mortal danger, unmitigated theft of intellectual property, or, occasionally, the obscene or profane. We do hold various government employees to much higher standards in the interests of our security. Bomber pilots and CIA analysts as you say.
However, back in the real world, Theo De Raadt is a BSD developer, and his statements are a threat to no one, and to even imply a comparison with Muslim fundamentalists or North Korean communists is to paint yourself a smashing idiot with a possible case of demagogue-taint. If this funding cut is what it looks like, it is the worst betrayal of our principles possible - where a group in power hijacks the notion of security in order to perform political intimidation. It is the grossest violation of our principles as a society.
"GP32 uses radio signals to communicate through solid barriers such as a building (unlike infrared signals that require an unobstructed line of sight to make a connection), you can play games even when your lovely puppy is standing in front of you wagging his tail, blocking your view."
Very thoughtful, thank you. But I can't convince myself that everywhere free trade has gone it was ultimately good for democracy or quality of life. Has it even worked out that way a majority of the time, in our lifetimes? I think about Central and South America (heck, even Mexico), Malaysia, Indonesia... Even on the the deficit chart I see a bunch of countries that are still waiting to see South Korean style prosperity.
One reason I think it's slow is that free trade is not about reform. Businesses are in business to make a profit. If reform happens, what luck. I think it boils down to how much the population's wealth really increases from working in the foreigner's factory, and whether or not their governments can carve out enough to invest in new services, education, etc. Nation building (as opposed to Swiss bank account building).
What troubles me especially about it is that the the foreign investors (big businesses) then have an incentive to maintain the status quo, and they have even more pull with a 3rd world nation (government, media, etc) than they do with ours. In practice I think the sweatshop trickle down effect often leaves much to be desired. I wonder if we can find other, more effective methods than giving businesses carte blance to loot and plunder in exchange for economic (and hopefully social) development. It sounds like psychotherapy. Sometimes it might work, usually it doesn't, but it sure is profitable for the shrink.
That's the bad scenario I imagine, anyway.
I think of the backflips and cartwheels Eastern Europe (for instance Turkey) did to gain consideration for EU membership. The EU didn't say... we'll admit you, and when you're exposed to our wealth as a trading partner that will reform you. They said, "reform, or you can't get in." And with that incentive, they got real results. Those famous Turkish prisons have already started losing their old-world charm.
China is an especially interesting point. I'm not an expert on China and I'd love to learn more specifically about what is improving over there right now. But I gather from my reading that they're doing basically what Japan and South Korea did, which was highly protectionist. They kept their currency very cheap. They instituted lots of tarrifs and restrictive trade policies (and in the case of Japan the Kieretsu just didn't buy from Americans). Do I have this right?
It's near impossible to enforce, and it's not in anyone's economic interests but domestic software developers.
Can you really picture the American government taking an altruistic stand to preserve our domestic software developers?
I thought not.
Our government will sell out cheap (sorry, have sold out cheap) to the big indistry consortia that stands to benefit from that particular kind of cheap labor. This is old news.
Taking the long view on "cheap foreign competition" over the years, the lesson of history is that labor always loses.
Fans of capitalism will announce that even though you're out of work, the economy benefits because as goods (and now services) are cheaper, everyone (businesses and individuals) can afford more, and be more productive, etc. Theoretically you'll get another job doing something else and progress marches on.
Globalization as a whole is tricky, though... simplistic thinking like this doesn't take into account the vagaries of currency markets and national conditions. I'm not qualified to really get into currency and other macroeconomic games, but as for the other... overseas software shops may never be as bad as it is in the garment industry (though I won't bet on it), but generally speaking "free trade" is often just code for "legal loophole" - it allows one to shop around for a "friendly" environment (child labor, inhuman work weeks, totalitarian security, exploitive wages and contracts, "flexible" legal system, no environmental regulations, and even the occasional ability to "disappear troublemakers without too much fuss"). They could never get away with this stuff in America - we have (or had) decent public education and functioning democracy. So they shield themselves in the complexities of trade to do it elsewhere.
Ultimately I think favorably of globalization only as long as there are enormous punitive tarrifs to correct for legal imbalances, and a very healthy reexamination of global economic (and especially currency) policy to insure that games aren't being played. But I am always learning more about the topic and I would love to hear other opinions about this.
All of your reasons sound plausible (except for "unnecessarily taunting Microsoft" - I think of it more as the reverse). But I don't think any of them matter compared to one simple factor you did not mention: size.
Flash player has historically been ~250k. This is downloaded in under a minute even on a modem. It adds little to the size of any web browser. You get a lot of bang for that 250k. Flash is very pretty and in some ways powerful (also very awful to author, but that's another post altogether). IE's ActiveX autoinstall was shooting it out around the world - even without anyone's help it would become ubiquitous. But of course it's also very attractive and easy to bundle.
Compare this with Java. 1.0 was rather small - in the neighborhood of a megabyte, if I recall, or even less? It's been a while. Small enough that Netscape could package it without committing suicide and Microsoft followed suit. 1.1 was a couple of times larger. The browser folks bit the bullet. Barely.
Java 1.2 finally arrived. The English-only JRE weighed in at an appaling 5.3 megabytes. Bigger than most web browsers! This insured that it would never see the inside of an internet-mass-distributed client. Only Microsoft could have saved it, by putting it on the Windows CD. And they did! But they were unable to resist embracing and extending it. By making MS Java incompatible with Sun Java, they had deliberately violated their license (in order to "pollute" the Java market), and Sun sued them for it, halting matters on that front for some years.
Fast forward to 2002. English only JRE 1.4 is now weighing in at 8.2 megabytes! Flash 6 is topping out at... ~500k?
Sun gave up on the web client. It was probably a wise move. With Netscape dead, Microsoft was the only game in town, and the only way Microsoft was going to play fair was if a few judges teamed up to force them to. Java wasn't a vector art tool with a tacked-on scripting language... it was a huge and growing general purpose computing platform, and it had grown too big to distribute "casually" over the net... In their defense, Java was designed to meet vastly different needs than Flash. It's much more powerful. But that was the price they paid.
In general, I thought it was possible to do much better in terms of size and initialization time. Beyond spending more time tuning I suggested at the time that they modularize the system; use a small Java framework (~200k) that can download various parts of the API on-demand; then you can do version tagging and the whole thing looks more like ActiveX (or perhaps a Shockwave XTRA) where you reference a package and a version number and it gets transparently pulled from a URL if the client doesn't have it. This way at least users won't have to pull megabytes of CORBA and JDBC and three different GUI API's just to do some vector art or a little stock ticker widget, and there's the chance the whole thing can be doable for real users at large. But it boils down to big scary changes and it's no surprise Sun just threw up their hands and let it go.
You are smart to draw the comparison. It's highly ironic that Java has ended up overshadowed by Flash on web clients, and may someday lose even more ground to it elsewhere... there's a profound lesson about the evolution of software technology in there.
Re:I was going to be a karma whore and
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
There are several posts from Iraq on this very story.
Propaganda victim.
Re:It sounds funny, doesn't it
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1, Interesting
That was really a pleasure to read.
I would add a few things, just tangents.
Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north will welcome the troops. They will also be busily stringing up Saddam's Ba'ath party officials from lamp posts, and chaining them to their bumpers and dragging them through the streets. It will be funny watching the 101st airborne trying to "keep the peace." I wonder if any "embedded" journalists will be allowed to broadcast footage of the nastier stuff.
I wouldn't be surprised to see oilfields sabotaged in other ways than setting fires. Radioactive contamination would be the brass ring, but there are other options as well. It's not clear whether they have the wherewithal or the resolve for that. But it's got to be on the minds of a number of people tonight. "Serious" contamination of Iraqi oil reserves will put a nasty stain on the whole affair.
The U.N. won't even wait for the dust to settle to start clamoring for democracy in "liberated" Iraq. France, Germany, and Russia will champion the cause. After all, they didn't get their share of the goodies. The U.S. will be in the awkward position of needing to prevent a free and open election, since the majority of Iraqi voters won't be satisfied until their oil industry is nationalized and the white people are gone. The U.S. will thus stretch out military rule as long as possible.
The CIA's local representatives will have a field day weeding out "Saddam loyalists" and other "hostile agents" among the Iraqi populace. Whoo boy.
There are a number of Iraqi contenders for the successor government who have been rather painfully jockeying for position for the past several years. To my knowledge, none of them look very good, but who knows. And there's the matter of U.N. election observers. It will not be as easy as having the village elders trek to Baghdad for a little closed-door conference. Not with the world watching.
It will be interesting to watch how far they go. Or should I say how far they get.
Aside from making shitloads of money both on the military/industrial side and the oil side, I'm not clear on our next move either. One theory is that when we ramp up production again, we will seriously disrespect OPEC's price controls.
OPEC wouldn't like that very much. They would have a number of options; expelling American troops, denominating oil transactions in euros, radical trade sanctions, and not least of which, backing insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. You may see where this is going - these are avenues for the conflict to expand.
Re:It sounds funny, doesn't it
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Yeah, it involves whether or not we were invited in, whether or not we depose the leaders of the occupied country, and whether or not we allow its people to elect its leaders in a fair and open election, with free speech... you could also include whether or not we cut a fair and reasonable deal with that country's people for extracting their natural resources.
I wont even call your comment laughable. It's just... brainwashed.
You never went out of your way to learn a thing about this. You just lay back and opened your mouth. Then you pop up here and imagine you have any idea.
Now, argue. Amuse me. You're in for a fun one. I have a good background on the issues. I'll really enjoy taking you apart.
I think we'll start with the Shah of Iran. You know, one of the more notorious times we saddled a country in that region with a puppet regime.
Slashdot Mirror
I find your argument flawed. It's like the social security card fiasco. "It's not a national ID number," but the funny thing is, once it's out there, you can hardly do anything without it, unless you want to create a big hassle for yourself (have you ever tried not giving up your SOC# to the dozens of different orgs that demand it - actually illegally?).
If you have a state mandate for cookies like this, then rather than having a veneer of "choice" - i.e., I can "choose" to disable cookies but then (feigned surprise) OH! Most websites don't work! Now people actually have the option to exercise this kind of privacy, rather than just the illusion that they do, and websites will use them judiciously, if at all.
Not saying that this kind of policy is ultimately a good idea, but I do have an immense amount of respect (and surprise) at such an apparent concern for privacy. The list of nations where such things seem on people's minds to this degree is perilously short. Laws like this today, meaningful reforms tomorrow... etc etc.
Q: But this is America - who would dare rig an election here?
A: The first person that thought they could get away with it.
One very important point. I think if we achieve the kind of meaningful understanding of the human brain that will precede that kind of machine intelligence, we'll have much bigger things on our minds than losing our jobs.
Understanding how the brain works will change everything.
I think you understand, but I want to make this clear.
Yes, the constitution guarantees us a kind of "due process" for various actions by the government - obviously, in this case, searches backed by the authority of the government.
So if the RIAA wants to come out to my ISP and flash a plastic badge it bought at a dime store and say, "but you're not constitutionally protected from my double-secret Acme Dick Tracy search warrant - open up!" I don't even call my lawyer, just the looney bin.
But the DMCA gives their searches the theoretical backing of the government - making them an improper, unconstitutional agent of court, or of law enforcement, or both, depending on how you read it.
This is not a legal gray area. This is heinously, over-the-top not kosher in the American system of government.
Can patents make it more convenient for big wealthy people to fuck the little guy? Or do they create too big of a risk that some big guy might actually get in trouble themselves?
Now, for those new to the debate, lets go over the simple reason why software patents are categorically, provably, and obviously insane.
Assume that the patent office is adequately staffed with an army of geniuses with eiditic memories, who never make poor judgements about what is patent-worthy and what isn't.
Anyone writing code must have to know the entire patent database - millions of patents. They would also have to stay current - thousands of new applications a day, on a slow day.
Impossible? Duh.
"Uh, now what?"
Every piece of software is a ticking patent time bomb - a multi-million dollar civil litigation waiting to happen.
Big players enjoy (and lobby for) patent systems like this because its another tool in the toolbox. You build a portfolio, and it's a great way to cost your competitors millions, threaten their business, their reputation, create FUD, etc. The cases drag on for decades, and hey, it's interesting how whoever has more money to fight them seems to always come out on top.
My greatest dream is that a giant like Microsoft will get snared in its own net, and actually start fighting to end software patents, so at least there'll be one less absolutely awful piece of economy-destroying legislation for our children to enjoy.
I think it was Slavoj Zizek who said that the American Working Class is alive and well and living in China.
Free Trade has become a code word for circumventing labor and human rights laws with geography. It's all well and good for workers who live in equivalent conditions to compete, but do we really want a competition between companies where some have to pay healthcare and minimum wage, and others can get away with tossing their workers bodies in the ditch "no questions asked" when they die on the job?
Now 3rd world high tech is unlikely to be like the 3rd world garment or checmical industries, but the same principles apply. Functional social services and institutions are expensive, and the upper class often doesn't really understand why it should pay.
I love that the aristocrats were the first to jump on the term "class warfare." It's that guilty conscience of theirs.
Very smart.
The author does an excellent job of synthesizing a number of disparate, troubling issues going on in our society at the moment into a very coherent whole.
If you can understand that democracies are only as good as their voters' information systems, or that markets are only as healthy as the exchange of goods, services, and ideas in them is free, then you should be able to appreciate where the author is going.
The reason esoteric issues like telecom and media regulation, and intellectual "property" law end up commanding such a large amount of attention in the community is because both of these, people are realizing, are not just important, but absolutely essential, to maintaining those very important American principles.
A cheap, ubiquitous communications medium. The free flow of information which respects, but it is not outrageously hobbled by, the rights of authors... It's only our economy, and our democracy, at stake.
I think we need a galvanizing issue. I suggest Saving the Net. To do that, we need to treat the Net as two things:
1. a public domain, and therefore
2. a natural habitat for markets
In other words, we need to see the Net as a marketplace that has done enormous good, is under extreme threat and needs to be saved.
No one seems to get this.
Your IP address isn't what's at issue here, although the RIAA's eavesdropping on a peer to peer network does have components of eavesdropping on email or other communication systems in my opinion (look to intent; the RIAA doesn't play by the rules of the system, and for a definite purpose).
The issue is whether or not we still have the sacred, black-letter constitutional requirement for a judge to approve a search warrant... or if we just gave the power of a judge to some random private entity, so that it can invade privacy all over the countryside, without any oversight, at the least provocation... at best being "corrected" later, at great expense and long after the horses are out of the barn door.
It's the whim of the RIAA now, not the judgement of a court... and that's what doesn't fly in this country. Make light of it at your peril - many, many people bled into the earth to secure this right for you. No private citizen, picking suspects at their sole discretion, should decide whose person and privacy should be violated. We have checks and balances for a very good reason.
--
Bill of Rights cramping your style? Try China!
OK... My turn. I call bullshit on this.
"Public internet" is a meaningless term here, just confusing the issue - you may as well talk about "public phones." The fact that people have to take precautions to secure their machines in no way relates to their _right_ to privacy - any more than the fact you have to lock your doors to keep out crooks reflects on your 4th Amendment Rights (that's "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." in case you're curious).
Attempting to compare accidentally publishing content on a webpage with someone reverse-engineering a communications system to eavesdrop on its participants AND allowing out-of-band personal information about them be released at someone's whim without the oversight of a judge... It doesn't fit, does it.
That's the real point of all of this. Not that you should be totally secure in your right to privacy against all other concerns, but that a court and a judge have to sign off on breaching that trust. DMCA, incredibly, gives the RIAA (just some private corporate entity) the power of a judge-and-court to arbitrarily invade your private life if (by their own determination) they suspect you've committed a (really underwhelming) crime - and that, I think, is what we're concerned about.
No matter _what_ the suspect is doing, searches at the whim of a corporate entity without the oversight of a judge... I'm sorry, there's no mincing words. it is black-letter unconstitutional, and categorically unamerican.
That was just so well expressed.
Thank you sir.
...the major video game publishers paid up.
It's fascinating how many bright people are locked out of the industry right now.
Everything is geared towards big-money projects, which you can't get into unless you're one of the X thousand people already into it. No one gets these gigs; even if you do, you can make a successful game and still come out owing money to the cartel. Of the $50 you pay for a game, it's split (very roughtly) 50% for the store and 45% for the publisher. You have to have a megahit to get ahead.
Ahem. Meanwhile, back in the real world...
There are interesting avenues in cell phones (but our shitty regulatory system set that back about 5 years in the U.S.). Handheld gaming is tantalizing, at least because you don't need 10-20 million minimum to make a handheld game, but even there you get into the same kinds of issues with the platform vendor, their favored publishers, and the mafioso retail system. So in reality most "garage shops" are locked out of that too.
This is a big bummer, because you can produce some pretty amazing games on sub-million budgets (even sub 200,000 budgets) and this is where the real innovation happens - not with the polycount skyscraper competition but with whole new gameplay ideas. Check out shops like Large Animal Games - these places have amazing ideas, there is basically no channel for them to sell their wares.
Online vendors, micropayments, etc. are barely nascent; shareware is actually still near the top of a lot of lists. No game will be Wolf3D or Doom of course... None of these systems will make you a lot of money. But like with a lot of things the internet now allows smaller places to live on this sort of thing that couldn't have before.
There is a big market waiting to happen if we can figure out what comes _after_ shareware; if there's some way to allow the little guys to sell their goods in a cheap, secure way. To cut out the middlemen, in other words.
This is better than winning a fucking Academy Award.
Your work has been recognized by the government of Egypt for being "too damn good."
"If you can't stay apolitical then don't expect government funding."
That is just one of the most amazing statements I've ever heard.
What about funding of church-based programs? School vouchers? Aid to agribusiness? Energy concernes? These are some highly political people and groups who get a lot more government funding than Theo De Raadt.
Come to think of it, even college professors at public universities hold tenure - our society has explicitly acknowledged that in order to do that job properly for the government, you have to be free of intimidation for your political views. This isn't the same as a grant, but perhaps you can see what I'm getting at.
Whether or not it's what happened, are you saying that it's OK for an administration to cut funding for scientific research based on the researcher's political beliefs? And please don't bring up danger again - implying there is danger in Theo De Raadt is preposterous.
What a pathetic pair of red herrings.
"Sence" indeed. We abridge the 1st amendment only when it is a matter of mortal danger, unmitigated theft of intellectual property, or, occasionally, the obscene or profane. We do hold various government employees to much higher standards in the interests of our security. Bomber pilots and CIA analysts as you say.
However, back in the real world, Theo De Raadt is a BSD developer, and his statements are a threat to no one, and to even imply a comparison with Muslim fundamentalists or North Korean communists is to paint yourself a smashing idiot with a possible case of demagogue-taint. If this funding cut is what it looks like, it is the worst betrayal of our principles possible - where a group in power hijacks the notion of security in order to perform political intimidation. It is the grossest violation of our principles as a society.
Opt out.
When any startup company can easily create and distribute a movie without the help of the MPAA or member companies, they lose.
That's it, in a nutshell.
Very thoughtful, thank you. But I can't convince myself that everywhere free trade has gone it was ultimately good for democracy or quality of life. Has it even worked out that way a majority of the time, in our lifetimes? I think about Central and South America (heck, even Mexico), Malaysia, Indonesia... Even on the the deficit chart I see a bunch of countries that are still waiting to see South Korean style prosperity.
One reason I think it's slow is that free trade is not about reform. Businesses are in business to make a profit. If reform happens, what luck. I think it boils down to how much the population's wealth really increases from working in the foreigner's factory, and whether or not their governments can carve out enough to invest in new services, education, etc. Nation building (as opposed to Swiss bank account building).
What troubles me especially about it is that the the foreign investors (big businesses) then have an incentive to maintain the status quo, and they have even more pull with a 3rd world nation (government, media, etc) than they do with ours. In practice I think the sweatshop trickle down effect often leaves much to be desired. I wonder if we can find other, more effective methods than giving businesses carte blance to loot and plunder in exchange for economic (and hopefully social) development. It sounds like psychotherapy. Sometimes it might work, usually it doesn't, but it sure is profitable for the shrink.
That's the bad scenario I imagine, anyway.
I think of the backflips and cartwheels Eastern Europe (for instance Turkey) did to gain consideration for EU membership. The EU didn't say... we'll admit you, and when you're exposed to our wealth as a trading partner that will reform you. They said, "reform, or you can't get in." And with that incentive, they got real results. Those famous Turkish prisons have already started losing their old-world charm.
China is an especially interesting point. I'm not an expert on China and I'd love to learn more specifically about what is improving over there right now. But I gather from my reading that they're doing basically what Japan and South Korea did, which was highly protectionist. They kept their currency very cheap. They instituted lots of tarrifs and restrictive trade policies (and in the case of Japan the Kieretsu just didn't buy from Americans). Do I have this right?
It's near impossible to enforce, and it's not in anyone's economic interests but domestic software developers.
Can you really picture the American government taking an altruistic stand to preserve our domestic software developers?
I thought not.
Our government will sell out cheap (sorry, have sold out cheap) to the big indistry consortia that stands to benefit from that particular kind of cheap labor. This is old news.
Taking the long view on "cheap foreign competition" over the years, the lesson of history is that labor always loses.
Fans of capitalism will announce that even though you're out of work, the economy benefits because as goods (and now services) are cheaper, everyone (businesses and individuals) can afford more, and be more productive, etc. Theoretically you'll get another job doing something else and progress marches on.
Globalization as a whole is tricky, though... simplistic thinking like this doesn't take into account the vagaries of currency markets and national conditions. I'm not qualified to really get into currency and other macroeconomic games, but as for the other... overseas software shops may never be as bad as it is in the garment industry (though I won't bet on it), but generally speaking "free trade" is often just code for "legal loophole" - it allows one to shop around for a "friendly" environment (child labor, inhuman work weeks, totalitarian security, exploitive wages and contracts, "flexible" legal system, no environmental regulations, and even the occasional ability to "disappear troublemakers without too much fuss"). They could never get away with this stuff in America - we have (or had) decent public education and functioning democracy. So they shield themselves in the complexities of trade to do it elsewhere.
Ultimately I think favorably of globalization only as long as there are enormous punitive tarrifs to correct for legal imbalances, and a very healthy reexamination of global economic (and especially currency) policy to insure that games aren't being played. But I am always learning more about the topic and I would love to hear other opinions about this.
All of your reasons sound plausible (except for "unnecessarily taunting Microsoft" - I think of it more as the reverse). But I don't think any of them matter compared to one simple factor you did not mention: size.
Flash player has historically been ~250k. This is downloaded in under a minute even on a modem. It adds little to the size of any web browser. You get a lot of bang for that 250k. Flash is very pretty and in some ways powerful (also very awful to author, but that's another post altogether). IE's ActiveX autoinstall was shooting it out around the world - even without anyone's help it would become ubiquitous. But of course it's also very attractive and easy to bundle.
Compare this with Java. 1.0 was rather small - in the neighborhood of a megabyte, if I recall, or even less? It's been a while. Small enough that Netscape could package it without committing suicide and Microsoft followed suit. 1.1 was a couple of times larger. The browser folks bit the bullet. Barely.
Java 1.2 finally arrived. The English-only JRE weighed in at an appaling 5.3 megabytes. Bigger than most web browsers! This insured that it would never see the inside of an internet-mass-distributed client. Only Microsoft could have saved it, by putting it on the Windows CD. And they did! But they were unable to resist embracing and extending it. By making MS Java incompatible with Sun Java, they had deliberately violated their license (in order to "pollute" the Java market), and Sun sued them for it, halting matters on that front for some years.
Fast forward to 2002. English only JRE 1.4 is now weighing in at 8.2 megabytes! Flash 6 is topping out at... ~500k?
Sun gave up on the web client. It was probably a wise move. With Netscape dead, Microsoft was the only game in town, and the only way Microsoft was going to play fair was if a few judges teamed up to force them to. Java wasn't a vector art tool with a tacked-on scripting language... it was a huge and growing general purpose computing platform, and it had grown too big to distribute "casually" over the net... In their defense, Java was designed to meet vastly different needs than Flash. It's much more powerful. But that was the price they paid.
In general, I thought it was possible to do much better in terms of size and initialization time. Beyond spending more time tuning I suggested at the time that they modularize the system; use a small Java framework (~200k) that can download various parts of the API on-demand; then you can do version tagging and the whole thing looks more like ActiveX (or perhaps a Shockwave XTRA) where you reference a package and a version number and it gets transparently pulled from a URL if the client doesn't have it. This way at least users won't have to pull megabytes of CORBA and JDBC and three different GUI API's just to do some vector art or a little stock ticker widget, and there's the chance the whole thing can be doable for real users at large. But it boils down to big scary changes and it's no surprise Sun just threw up their hands and let it go.
You are smart to draw the comparison. It's highly ironic that Java has ended up overshadowed by Flash on web clients, and may someday lose even more ground to it elsewhere... there's a profound lesson about the evolution of software technology in there.
I mean, it worked for drugs... oh wait...
There are several posts from Iraq on this very story.
Propaganda victim.
That was really a pleasure to read.
I would add a few things, just tangents.
Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north will welcome the troops. They will also be busily stringing up Saddam's Ba'ath party officials from lamp posts, and chaining them to their bumpers and dragging them through the streets. It will be funny watching the 101st airborne trying to "keep the peace." I wonder if any "embedded" journalists will be allowed to broadcast footage of the nastier stuff.
I wouldn't be surprised to see oilfields sabotaged in other ways than setting fires. Radioactive contamination would be the brass ring, but there are other options as well. It's not clear whether they have the wherewithal or the resolve for that. But it's got to be on the minds of a number of people tonight. "Serious" contamination of Iraqi oil reserves will put a nasty stain on the whole affair.
The U.N. won't even wait for the dust to settle to start clamoring for democracy in "liberated" Iraq. France, Germany, and Russia will champion the cause. After all, they didn't get their share of the goodies. The U.S. will be in the awkward position of needing to prevent a free and open election, since the majority of Iraqi voters won't be satisfied until their oil industry is nationalized and the white people are gone. The U.S. will thus stretch out military rule as long as possible.
The CIA's local representatives will have a field day weeding out "Saddam loyalists" and other "hostile agents" among the Iraqi populace. Whoo boy.
There are a number of Iraqi contenders for the successor government who have been rather painfully jockeying for position for the past several years. To my knowledge, none of them look very good, but who knows. And there's the matter of U.N. election observers. It will not be as easy as having the village elders trek to Baghdad for a little closed-door conference. Not with the world watching.
It will be interesting to watch how far they go. Or should I say how far they get.
Aside from making shitloads of money both on the military/industrial side and the oil side, I'm not clear on our next move either. One theory is that when we ramp up production again, we will seriously disrespect OPEC's price controls.
OPEC wouldn't like that very much. They would have a number of options; expelling American troops, denominating oil transactions in euros, radical trade sanctions, and not least of which, backing insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. You may see where this is going - these are avenues for the conflict to expand.
Yeah, it involves whether or not we were invited in, whether or not we depose the leaders of the occupied country, and whether or not we allow its people to elect its leaders in a fair and open election, with free speech... you could also include whether or not we cut a fair and reasonable deal with that country's people for extracting their natural resources.
I wont even call your comment laughable. It's just... brainwashed.
You never went out of your way to learn a thing about this. You just lay back and opened your mouth. Then you pop up here and imagine you have any idea.
Now, argue. Amuse me. You're in for a fun one. I have a good background on the issues. I'll really enjoy taking you apart.
I think we'll start with the Shah of Iran. You know, one of the more notorious times we saddled a country in that region with a puppet regime.