Bank notes have NO intrinsic value, only extrinsic value (you may be confusing terms)
That wasn't confusion, that was irony. It seems silly to accept banknotes for their extrinsic value, and yet to scoff at the idea that virtual currencies could gain value though their interaction with the world.
My point is that even if all transactions are someday made with virtual/electronic currencies, the currency will get you a good or service that is provided in the real world.
Like a jpeg, or a virtual greeting card, perhaps? How about an MP3? Or a software licence? Disc space on a server farm? Some of those real world goods and services can get pretty abstract.
I find it interestng that the only electronic currencies to gain any sort of traction seem to come from online games. Admittedly the Second Life
situation is different to people trading in EverQuest silver. The "silver" represents the results of work one someone's part, while the land can, potentially, be created by fiat.
On the other hand, instead of thinking of it as "land", think of it as buying a trading licence. Once you have the land, you can develop it, sell it on and realise a profit.
I'm not advocating anyone invest, either in Linden Dollars or in Second Life real estate. Those with an interest in online gaming or exotic arbitrage may may differ, but I expect they'll make up their own minds on the subject. Like you, I prefer more tangible investments.
That said, I think Second Life is an interesting experimant. It sounds like they people behind it have done their research, and if it doesn't crash, it'll be an interesting validation of their theories. I'll be watching with interest.
While the banknotes in which you place such faith have intrinsic value because of... umm....
Well, OK, the intrinsic value of banknotes is so low that they have to put special software in laser printers to stop people forging them. So I guess the value is that they are linked to the gold standard. Well, once upon a time anyway...
So maybe its becuase there's only a fixed number in circulation other wise the governments would just print more money to get out of debt and we'd see inflation at work.... which come to think of it...
Let's face it, we've been buying goods based upon abstractions for centuries. Once people got over the basic fright, it all worked ok.
There's no reason why vitual/electronic currencies shoudn't work just as well. They've been mooted about for years. The thing that freaks most people out is that games and gamers are driving the
accpetance of these currencies in the real world.
Yet really, that's not as bizarre as it seems. The game currencies are backed by the hard work of some gamers, and by the demand for virtual goods of others.
A number of posters have quite rightly raised a question of trust regarding the game admins, since they can easily duplicate items and sell them to increase their profits. But then there are trust issues with the bank that prints or guarantees your national currency, since they can print more paper with all the infation that entails.
The Second Life bubble may burst - it probably will, but the fact that you can get an exchange rate at all augers well for virtual property in the long term.
This is an area I'll be watching with interest.
Man, Redmond just legitimised every pirate copy of windows in Indonesia for one dollar per. You couldn't get them out of Europe with a moon sized lever and tactical nuclear weaponry.
...the users that needed Windows from a practical standpoint... would have to pay. So in that sense, restricting people's freedoms... in a marketplace is sometimes neccessary in order to ensure the long term health of the market place.
So, in this instance, are you saying that the consumers' freedomes need to be restricted to stop microsoft pulling a hissy fit, or are you arguing that Microsoft's freedoms must be curtailed for the good of the market?
Sure, but then MS would have to make a MUCH more usable FTP client included in Windows and then SmartFTP/WS-FTP and all the other FTP client developers would be up in arms about that.
I thought it was the pure-ftp people who made the fuss, mainly on account of MS newly awarded patent: "Method and apparatus for the crushing-like-a-bug of miserable open source projects who dare challenge the might that is Microsoft!". You know, they say the USPTO just rubber stamps these things, but honestly, that language is just as tight as can be.
Of course, we may be discussing different imaginary parallel universes here.
Seriously - why go to all the hassle? I dunno. Are you saying anti-monopoly laws are bad? Would you campaign for their repeal? Personally I have more important things on my to do list, but if it's that important to you.
But even if it is, the law stands. If a billion dollar corporation breaks the law, it is foolish to say "oh that's just a silly law". Because when the law works to the advantage of the same corporation, they will pursue it with full vigor. The net effect, in time, will be the general realisation that there is one law for the rich, and another for the poor. Look back at history and see how that usually ends up.
In my book the main failing of the EU were firstly to administer a token slap on the wrist, and secondly, their failure to enforce that ruling.
This is unsurprising, I grant. Nevertheless, it remains unacceptable
Are you sure you're talking about a large corperation going from WinXP to WinXP N? That would take time and money; its not a simple ghosting issue, and corperations would have to re-test and re-evaluate the product.
Ah, I see. The original post talked about OEMs, so Iread you post in that context.
Also, it would make users and businesses pay for MS's mistake; I have not a doubt in my mind that MS would threaten to walk away from the european market entirely until it got its way.. people would scream murder at the EU for the same reason that we hate it when cops ask us not to dirnk and drive. Its for our own good, but we hate them for it.
Nah... Gates and Ballmer browned their trousers when Munich turned to Linux. Imagine them pulling out of Europe - they'd never get back in!
Which now I come to think about it...:D
Nobody likes it when they're freedoms are restricted, but some restriction of freedom, ie, the General Will of a society, is neccessary in order to support civilized social and economic systems. There are very basic freedoms that we simply should not have; say, like taking somebody elses legally obtained personal property.
Sorry, I think I must have missed something. Who is it who's freedoms are or would be being restricted, and how? That's not sarcasm, just honest incomprehension. While I agree with the generalities, I can't tell who they apply to.
Well, of course nobody is going to re-deploy. Thats expensive, time consuming, etc.
What? To change one disk image for another one? How much overhead does that entail? It's not like they have to retool the production line. They don't even need bigger disks.
What I don't understand is why the EU didn't prohibit the sale of the WMPlayer inclusive version. How complicated would that have been?
Try as I might, I just can't see any objection to a national ID card (here in America).
Hmmm... Obviously I'm not a US citizen, but it seems that
noteveryonefeelsthatway. In fact it looks like the US already has their Real ID bill passed, and not everyone welcomed it with open arms.
All the things you mention are abhorrant, but none of them have anything to do with a national ID card. The police can stop you and ask for your papers today in most states. A national ID card won't change that at all. The rules for how the police act are totally seperate from the rules on what constitutes a valid ID.
Fair points and I'll try and address them.
"but none of them have anything to do with a national ID card". They do however have to do with how the ID card is being sold to the british public. The Id card is being touted as, among other fairy tales, a panacea against terrorism. And yet, as pointed out by an ancestor post, that id is useless unless checked, and to check them widely and efficiently would require measures similar to the ones I describe.
"The police can stop you and ask for your papers today in most states".
But if the card is to have any hope of serving its alleged purpose this would need to be endemic. There were checkpoints like this set up in Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles. I understand that everyone there thought they were a Bad Thing. I sometimes wonder how many of those who say "Harumph! ID cards! Jolly Good Thing Too!" have actually thought through the implications, or whether they would be so keen if they had. Of course, everyone always assumes that they won't be on the receiving end.
"The rules for how the police act are totally seperate from the rules on what constitutes a valid ID".
Arguably perhaps, but for the cards to work as advertised... well I've done that bit. The question is whether the government is planning such repressive measures, or whether they're lying about the cards effectveness whilst harbouring ulterior motives, or whether they are just plain incompetant.
Let me give you a little background here. The UK is the most heavily surveilled nation on the planet. Recent legislation saw the right to silence of an accused criminal removed. We have curfews in some parts of the country now - only for certain age groups at the moment, but that can quickly change. We have travel restrictions; usually applied in cases of overseas football matches but again the mechanism is there and is not limited to football hooliganism. Now they want to remove the right to a trial by jury. Oh and
resign from the charter for human rights as well.
The last journalist to seriously embarrass the government was sacked, along with the director general of the BBC, while the whistle blower in the case was hounded to his grave.
Does anyone else see a trend developing here?
Almost all of the above is the work of the current government. I hope you'll excuse me if I don't fall over myself in my haste to extend them the benefit of the doubt.
What exactly is the downside to having ID standards that are harder to fake?
ID standards and implementations (in the non-code sense of the word) are not the same thing. Let's not confuse matters unnecessarily.
My privacy in only violated by the government when the government forces me to present an ID.
And I've already explained why I find this less than reassuring. All the same, I
think we're losing sight of something fundamental here:
The single best reason why we in the UK should not have ID cards is that we
do not want them. We live in a dem
Which means that for ID cards to be effective as advertised, we'll need cops on street corners checking identity papers. We'll need checkpoints, and of course armed guards since we're hunting terrorists and they can be expected to be armed. Might as well institute a curfew as well, since the terrorists will probably try to evade the chckpoints under cover of darkness...
And I really want to know:what did we do to deserve this. Don't answer that if you're a terrorist - I'm talking to the law abiding non terrorist element on slashdot, plus MP3 downloaders. What did we do deserve the governemnt we supposedly elect treating all of us like criminals? Is there some subtle trend to socail masochism? Are we experimenting with a form of cultural S&M?
So why do we put up with it? There is no such thing as absolute security.
We could turn the entire planet into a giant prison and take turns beating confessions out of one another, and we'd still not have absolute security - its always going to be a tradeoff agains liberty.
So maybe its time we thought a bit more about where we want to draw that line. How much liberty can you sacrifice before the security isn't worth having? How much before lack of domestic liberty becomes its own source of terrorism?
Anyone else find all this reminiscent of Nietzsche ?
"He who battles monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster."
I have no prima facia objection to the cards themselves, that objection is slippery-slope rhetoric.
And speaking of dodgy rhetoric...
You cannot expect the gov. to continue to allow rife fraud simply because a few nutters read too much dystopian SciFi
Why don't we combine the unspported presupposition that fraud is in fact rife, with a similarly unsupported presuposition that the this alleged fraud can only be combatted by means of the
proposed ID card. And while we're at it, we'll throw in a quick ad hominem attack on anyone holding an opposing view. Not bad...
Who gets to use it? Why? How? When?
Who gets to use what, precisely, and how? If you mean the card the answer is whoever holds it (which isn't necessarily the same thing as the person to whom it was issued). If you mean the data behind it... well that's a question we'd all like answered.
You have tax bills, drivers license, healthcards etc etc etc. Its stupid. A single ID card that proves a person's identity (like an 'internal passport') is a Good Thing.
Meanwhile back in dodgy rhetoric land, how does the existence of many other forms of personal ID make the new card a "Good Thing?" If anything, it should make the card unnecessary since there are so many other forms of ID in circulation.
And since the scheme is expensive, unpopular and ineffective for its stated puposes (see elsewhere in this topic) then "unnecessary" should be all the argument needed to bury it.
If the surrounding laws are written to allow unfettered access by nosey cops and capitalist-data-miners then I would be against *THAT IMPLEMENTATION*.
You have an algorithm that can enforce ethical-only access? I'd like to see it.
Or perhaps you would be happy with fettered access to the above? How about cynical and unpopular prime ministers seeking re-election? Or press secretaries seeking leverage to silence noisy BBC broadcasters?
Maybe you were referring to the legislation rather than the code used to implement the database? The trouble here is that
once the data is in place, it becomes a realtivly trivial to change the laws regarding access; usually by burying it in a bill that makes heavy use of the words "terrorist" and "peadophile".
Of course, this assumes the access regularions aren't defined as being changable by minsterial instrument, in which case they could change the rules five minutes after the bill passes and never even have to tell us. So we not only have to trust this government (ha!) but also the next one, and the next, and the next...
And that, now more than ever, is simply too much to ask.
That's an interesting use of the word "discredit". Could we be talking at cross purposes? I'm not at all sure I take your point.
What needs to happen is the open community needs to have something to kindle the fire still, as well as something to unite them a bit more into generating app's that don't have to be compiled to be run. While I know there are some of those what is still lacking is for common users to be able to do this as well.
So what did you have in mind? Binary only precompiled distros? Plenty of those. Apps written in scripting languages like python and perl? Them too.
Or maybe you mean apps that can be easily and boradly customised by relatively naieve users? If so is there a proprietory product that does this already? I'm not being nasty here, just trying to understand your point.
I know linux isn't "after" the commoner crowd however in it I see the largest "mind pool" that in my mind should be able to find ways to make things work in such a manner, make it easier and more intuitive to secure, and make it work with minimalistic user requirements.
Well, Linux isn't "after" anything. Linux, in fact free software overall is vast and diverse. I see the breadth of the communities interests as one of it greatest strengths, rather than a weakness. I mean there are all the people on KDE and Gnome working hard on user interface and desktop integration issues. You also get eclectic ultrageek projects that are never going to be widely popular.
The thing is that everyone scratches their own itch and works on the projects that interest them. From that viewpoint, I suppose the relatively non-tech users can't really join in the itch scratching process. Perhaps this was your point?
Regarding drobbins, as a gentoo user I feel I owe him a debt of gratitude. I wish him all the best wherever he goes, MS included.
Most of what people think of as Linux, isn't Linux at all. Being able to run that software on as many kernels as possible is a very good thing IMHO.
Alas, as concerns the nomenclature, I fear I am irrevocably mired in popular usage. Although I do respect the right of others to prepend syllables of their own choosing. As long as it's between consenting adults and in the privacy of their own homes, anyway.
However, I am a little baffled by this "could do with a bit of discrediting" idea. I mean (I'll be precise here) the Linux Kernel is arguably the most visible free software project in the world. Surely that makes it a valuable advertisment for what can be achieved, both by free software, and by bazaar style development. To want to see it discredited seems just a touch bizarre to my mind.
- get linux to run well on MS virtual machines, so linux can become just an app running under 2k3, and therefore slowely sink into oblivion.
I thought about that when they announced they'd support linux running in emulation. They could maybe supply a sort of buggy half crippled userspace linux with a view to discrediting linux.
I can't see it working. It might win some points with the PHB brigade, but most linux users are more interested in freedom than cost. If that is the plan, I can see it rebounding against them.
Howabout real time updates for XBox2? Help make MS new platorm even more linux-proof than before. Set a thief to catch a thief, at least from Redmond's viewpoint
If I write the laws then NickFortune's patent is little more then a copyright on the design of the burnt chip but it sounds like you believe in a system where embodying anything which can be reduced to software in hardware prevents others from doing the same thing a different way.
Nope. Actually I agree with you, I just didn't phrase that especially well.
If I write the laws then I'd be tempted to allow a device that does foo by a certain method to be patentable. However, I would say that any such patent does not extend to any software involved in the device. That software may be copyrighted, but not patented.
If after the software is removed from the picture, the remaining device is no longer novel, then you do not have a patent. If the device - sans software - is still patentable, then you can patent it.
This would apply even if the software was embodied in clockwork, or by a systems of rods and levers. Suppose you invent a mechanical novelty nutcracker shaped like a monkey that cracked nuts by whacking them with a little hammer. You could implement that with cogs and levers, and it'd be hard to say why it shouldn't be patented. However the control sequence that defines the monkey's actions would be considered to be software, and would not be covered by the patent. That means that if I later use that sequence of actions in a video game, you couldn't sue me for patent violation.
If you come up with just a new method of manipulating data, no choice of setting or field of use should allow this to become patentable and hence protected from competition.
You see, if we're writing the law here, then we don't need to be consistent with other areas of patents. The entire field of legislation is one gigantic exercise in Case Based Reasoning, and as such is largely a compendium of exceptions and special cases.
So, since we're writing laws, we don't need to be consistent, because I job consists of writing exception handling code to deal with inconsistencies in external reality.
We seem to be agreed that softwate patents are both harmful and unnecessary. So if the only reason to allow them at all is consistency, then it makes more sense to define software patents as a special case.
The only question then is where should we draw the line. If I write the law then the line is: "No software patents, ever! No patents on data, nor on symbols. No patents on sequences of commands. Any patent infringemnt claim against software will always fail, irrespective of the other factors involved."
My experience is based on London, ten years ago. I don't know how well experience from San Francisco or the City of London generalise outside those contexts, but we seem to agree on one thing: wear a tie for the first week, at least. in fact, if it's London, make it a suit and tie, rather than just a jacket.
I like the idea of penalising broad patents and rewarding tight focus.
Still, as I think Bruce
Schneier in a different context, we have to look at the way in which things fail as well as they way they work. The principle risk here is that, having made the duration of a patent a subject for negotiation, it opens the door to the extension of undeserving but carefully worded patents. I'd expect to see companies striving to find wording that sounded superficially specific, but that could be interpretted very broadly.
Of course, that's not hugely different from the way it's done now. Apparently.
The anti-swamping idea is fun too. How could we hack that? Imagine 100,000 holding companies, all with the same single patent-lawyer employee, all with Microsoft as the majority shareholder perhaps. Still, another interesting idea.
Software patents on the other hand...
As for s/w patents - the thing is that I can see a case (yeah Simon, way to make friends and influence people on/. !) for some of them (eg: if I invented PGP, I might want to make some cash out of that).
There's this weird meme circulating that suggests that anyone who is opposed to software patents also disapproves of coders receiving recompense for their hard work and insight.
I say weird because, really, what would stop you making money from an encryption algorithm if you invented one? You can code it up and market it protected by copyright and licence agreements, or you can declare it a trade secret and protect it with NDAs. You can even burn it onto a dedicated chip and patent the device (although still not the software I should hope). With the expansion of laws against reverse engineering and strengthening of copyright, that ought to be enough for anyone to turn a profit.
So why do we need software patents? The only thing that they bring to the table is a mechanism for failing corporations to preserve dwindling revenue streams through anti-competetive monopolies.
In truth, I was throwing an idea out there off the top of my head. I didn't really expect such a detailed response. I think there's something in the inverse-generality idea though.
Well, the detailed response comes from arguing the pros and cons of patent legislation as well as here on slashdot. I hope I've not come across as being bloody mindedly negative;
you have some interesting ideas and I'd quite like to see them developed a little further. I'm still not sold on the software patents though
Perhaps a patent ought to have a natural lifetime specific to the patent, which has to be claimed for in the patent application. Give the patent-examiners the right to barter the lifetime of the patent vs the generality, taking novelty into account.
That might now work as well as you might hope.
To begin with, novelty, as applied to patents, is supposed to be absolute. They're supposed to be granted to ideas that no one ever thought of before. To consider the novelty of patents as being relative is to accept that patents are allowable on ideas that not many people have thought of, or on ideas that are only proposed infrequently. Given the degree to which the current arragenment is abused, it seems foolish to slacken the requirements.
Secondly, the current patent procedure is not known for its rigor, certainly not as it applies to some technical sectors. Patent offices are gaining a reputation for simply rubber-stamping computer patents possibly (let's be charitable here) because they lack the background to effectively. As such, it's difficult to imagine patent clerks in the role of steely-eyed defender of the common weal, standing implaccably against the forces of corporate greed in order to limit the scope of a not-particularly-novel process.
Thirdly, the patent office, at least in the US, is swamped. Microsoft and their ilk are going through the Encyclopedia of Computer Technology and applting for patents for each concept in turn, justifying this bare-faced abuse of the system under the semantically bankrupt unberella of "good business". I even if those patent clerks were inclined to the role of steely-eyed-defender, I doubt they have time to evaluate that sort of trade off.
I know your idea calls for a lot more oversight on patents. Even so, the proposal cedes valuable ground unnecessarily. It opens the way for patents to be considered on relative novelty, allowing a whole new class of bogus patents to be de defended on the grounds that they were "fairly novel". It also opens the way for patenting corporations to badger courts and patents offices both for an extended duration for their own patents by talking up the novelty of the invention.
And for software, the proposal tacitly accepts the legitimacy of software patents.
It's much easier to keep rights that we currently have, then it is to regain them once lost. If we're going to think about how to reform the patent process, we need to make sure we don't conceed more than we gain in the process.
Try again. The lack of a well-thought-out legal distribution model is EXACTLY the reason for rampant piracy. What we have here is the same sort of loophole that brought Napster into existence
Interestingly, there's a parallel with smuggling in England in the 18th century. Smugglers flourished precisely because the tariffs were set too high.
Apologies if the comparison has been done to death in copyfighter circles, but it just occurred to me:)
Once this was realised, tariffs were reduced, and revenues from trade rose dramatically. It's only in the last half century that smuggling of items not banned outright has returned in any great measure, mainly driven by year after year of unthinking duty increases on tobacco and alcohol.
The moral being that if the commodity is avaiable cheaply and easlily enough, people will pay without complaint. And if artifical restrictions and surcharges are imposed, then the problem is never going to go away.
On the other hand, I can't shake this odd conviction that, if they systems hadn't been running windows, we'd have had a FUDstorm out of Redmond: "MAJOR FooOs SECURITY FLAW REVEALED! 'Windows only secure option' says Ballmer". Substituting the name of the OS in question for FooOS, obvuiously.
It hardly constitutes proof, but if it'd have been linux on those systems, ADTI would have issued three press conferences, two books and Major Motion Picture by this stage.
There are a few companies that specialize in wifi access in metropolitan areas (not counting wifi enabled cafes, libraries, airports, malls, etc.) But they're not in the majority of cities. Funnily enough, even my relatively small city, Lafayette, Louisiana has a couple providers...
For that matter there's a company called The Cloud (or something like that) has access points in a couple of the pubs / hotels in my home town.I've not looked at their rates, mainly because taking my laptop down the boozer strikes me as a very slly idea. All the same, I bet they're priced targetting at corporate expanse accounts
*shrug* In the end, especially as a government employee, I just have a problem with the idea that things done by a corporation are automatically bad and things done by the government are automatically good.
I can't disagree with that. A lot of my friends are or were civil servants. Still, the nice thing about having goverment employees is that their career path doesn't depend on them finding innovative new ways to soak the customers for more mony in return for fewer services. And they're not going to get sued by their shareholders for offering a fair deal to their customers.
And anything that gets rid of fair competition (whether due to corporate or government action) is automatically a Bad Thing(tm).;)
I can't really disagree with that either. Except that any governemt supplied service is likely to either infringe on some existing operation, or to raise cries of "we were planning to do that". Which raises the question of when the government can set in.
Look at music history, art history, and any other information-based design work. They've still taken thousands of years to develop. And in thousands of years, I would be suprised if they weren't even more developed.
I agree with your main point (and that of the GP). On the other hand, software knowledge is evolving faster - at least IMHO.
The reason for this isn't to do with physical vs knowledge work, it's to do with information flow and feedback times and the population growth curve. People learn what other people have done, and wether it worked or not, faster today than ever before (well, unless last week was a low worm week, but you get the idea). And when they get this info, they react to it, and then add it back into the feedback loop. On top of this, there are more people thinking about these problems than ever before.
So developemnt times are shortened, and the field matures faster. Of course, the same feedback loop speeds alnost every area of human endeavour - it's just that some like house building are understood in far more detail that others. In these cases, the law of diminishing returns means the speedup isn't so obvious, but I believe its still there.
As an example, think of electronics, by which I mean wires-and-solder, pre-microchip, non-software electrics. As an industry that's what? A hundred years or so, if we count from Edison who made it a commodity rather than Faraday who doped out the theory anyway. I'd say we understand electrics in a similar sort of depth to house building, but we got there in a far shorter time.
Of course if you consider, say, quantum mechanics then there's still a lot to be learned about electrons. Of course, the same can apply to construction work, say if you consider space elevators.
Entirely possible, and no shame in admitting it. Living in the UK all I know of the US wifi networks is what I read on slashdot. And there I was complaining about people applying binary thinking to analogue problems, only to go and assume that corporate wifi rollout was either everywhere or nowhere. I don't know...
I wonder how the value for money compares for the average citizen. I imagine municipal wifi comes off worst in all but the most computer literate of areas, since those without wifi enabled computers (or without computers at all) will see no benefit.
On the other hand, that value will rise over time as more people take advantage of the resource. And if the city does it, they may well do the job properly. A patchy and overpriced corporate rollout could kill a city wifi project just as dead as flat out refusal to implement anything.
I must confess to being a little torn on this one. If there's one lesson that's been taught to us in the UK over the last two decades, it's that national and regional infrastructure are not always best left to the private sector. We used to have a nationalised rail service that everyone complained about, but really all you could say was that it was a little unimaginative. These days we have several privatised rail companies who have been very imaginative, but only when it comes to extracting more money from a captive userbase in exchange for fewer and/or worse services.
I'll have to see if I can find some UK data. You've got me really curious about whether this is a cultural difference or just personal prejudice.
For what it's worth, I'd have said there was a perception for many years in the UK that consoles were just for the kiddies.What you had were jumping sprite games like mario and martial arts fighters a la mortal wombats. There was the odd decent game for the consoles, but they tended to appear on the PC pretty quick, so why worry about it? (That's not a criticism of anyone's favourite platform, just a little introspection on how I've tended to think about consoles).
Of course, in retrospect, those same kids grew up and it's their purchasing power that's driving the current wave of console development. That means that the game themes have matured with the audience, and that console games are frequently as sophisticated as those developed forthe PC. (probably more so than some of the gobblers I've paid good money for in my time, but I digress).
I still think the platform that survives is going to be the one with the lowest barrier to entry. That's where all the creativity will be manifest - the platform where a couple of bright folks can get together and code something off-the-wall innovative without having to sit in six months of meetings persuading management that their idea won't sink without a trace only to have the final version chopped to death my PHBs who don't understand what the game is trying to achieve and who feel happier with something that resembles the companies current product line.
Of course, it needn't be a machine at all. Right now flash games are showing a lot of imagination and (relatively) high production values. That's one way to sidestep the hardware lockdown.
Slashdot Mirror
That wasn't confusion, that was irony. It seems silly to accept banknotes for their extrinsic value, and yet to scoff at the idea that virtual currencies could gain value though their interaction with the world.
My point is that even if all transactions are someday made with virtual/electronic currencies, the currency will get you a good or service that is provided in the real world.
Like a jpeg, or a virtual greeting card, perhaps? How about an MP3? Or a software licence? Disc space on a server farm? Some of those real world goods and services can get pretty abstract.
I find it interestng that the only electronic currencies to gain any sort of traction seem to come from online games. Admittedly the Second Life situation is different to people trading in EverQuest silver. The "silver" represents the results of work one someone's part, while the land can, potentially, be created by fiat.
On the other hand, instead of thinking of it as "land", think of it as buying a trading licence. Once you have the land, you can develop it, sell it on and realise a profit.
I'm not advocating anyone invest, either in Linden Dollars or in Second Life real estate. Those with an interest in online gaming or exotic arbitrage may may differ, but I expect they'll make up their own minds on the subject. Like you, I prefer more tangible investments.
That said, I think Second Life is an interesting experimant. It sounds like they people behind it have done their research, and if it doesn't crash, it'll be an interesting validation of their theories. I'll be watching with interest.
Well, OK, the intrinsic value of banknotes is so low that they have to put special software in laser printers to stop people forging them. So I guess the value is that they are linked to the gold standard. Well, once upon a time anyway...
So maybe its becuase there's only a fixed number in circulation other wise the governments would just print more money to get out of debt and we'd see inflation at work.... which come to think of it...
Let's face it, we've been buying goods based upon abstractions for centuries. Once people got over the basic fright, it all worked ok.
There's no reason why vitual/electronic currencies shoudn't work just as well. They've been mooted about for years. The thing that freaks most people out is that games and gamers are driving the accpetance of these currencies in the real world.
Yet really, that's not as bizarre as it seems. The game currencies are backed by the hard work of some gamers, and by the demand for virtual goods of others.
A number of posters have quite rightly raised a question of trust regarding the game admins, since they can easily duplicate items and sell them to increase their profits. But then there are trust issues with the bank that prints or guarantees your national currency, since they can print more paper with all the infation that entails.
The Second Life bubble may burst - it probably will, but the fact that you can get an exchange rate at all augers well for virtual property in the long term. This is an area I'll be watching with interest.
Man, Redmond just legitimised every pirate copy of windows in Indonesia for one dollar per. You couldn't get them out of Europe with a moon sized lever and tactical nuclear weaponry.
So, in this instance, are you saying that the consumers' freedomes need to be restricted to stop microsoft pulling a hissy fit, or are you arguing that Microsoft's freedoms must be curtailed for the good of the market?
I thought it was the pure-ftp people who made the fuss, mainly on account of MS newly awarded patent: "Method and apparatus for the crushing-like-a-bug of miserable open source projects who dare challenge the might that is Microsoft!". You know, they say the USPTO just rubber stamps these things, but honestly, that language is just as tight as can be.
Of course, we may be discussing different imaginary parallel universes here.
Seriously - why go to all the hassle? I dunno. Are you saying anti-monopoly laws are bad? Would you campaign for their repeal? Personally I have more important things on my to do list, but if it's that important to you.
But even if it is, the law stands. If a billion dollar corporation breaks the law, it is foolish to say "oh that's just a silly law". Because when the law works to the advantage of the same corporation, they will pursue it with full vigor. The net effect, in time, will be the general realisation that there is one law for the rich, and another for the poor. Look back at history and see how that usually ends up.
In my book the main failing of the EU were firstly to administer a token slap on the wrist, and secondly, their failure to enforce that ruling.
This is unsurprising, I grant. Nevertheless, it remains unacceptable
Kids today... I don;t know... when _I_ were a lad...
Ah, I see. The original post talked about OEMs, so Iread you post in that context.
Also, it would make users and businesses pay for MS's mistake; I have not a doubt in my mind that MS would threaten to walk away from the european market entirely until it got its way .. people would scream murder at the EU for the same reason that we hate it when cops ask us not to dirnk and drive. Its for our own good, but we hate them for it.
Nah... Gates and Ballmer browned their trousers when Munich turned to Linux. Imagine them pulling out of Europe - they'd never get back in!
Which now I come to think about it... :D
Nobody likes it when they're freedoms are restricted, but some restriction of freedom, ie, the General Will of a society, is neccessary in order to support civilized social and economic systems. There are very basic freedoms that we simply should not have; say, like taking somebody elses legally obtained personal property.
Sorry, I think I must have missed something. Who is it who's freedoms are or would be being restricted, and how? That's not sarcasm, just honest incomprehension. While I agree with the generalities, I can't tell who they apply to.
What? To change one disk image for another one? How much overhead does that entail? It's not like they have to retool the production line. They don't even need bigger disks.
What I don't understand is why the EU didn't prohibit the sale of the WMPlayer inclusive version. How complicated would that have been?
Hmmm... Obviously I'm not a US citizen, but it seems that not everyone feels that way. In fact it looks like the US already has their Real ID bill passed, and not everyone welcomed it with open arms.
All the things you mention are abhorrant, but none of them have anything to do with a national ID card. The police can stop you and ask for your papers today in most states. A national ID card won't change that at all. The rules for how the police act are totally seperate from the rules on what constitutes a valid ID.
Fair points and I'll try and address them.
"but none of them have anything to do with a national ID card". They do however have to do with how the ID card is being sold to the british public. The Id card is being touted as, among other fairy tales, a panacea against terrorism. And yet, as pointed out by an ancestor post, that id is useless unless checked, and to check them widely and efficiently would require measures similar to the ones I describe.
"The police can stop you and ask for your papers today in most states". But if the card is to have any hope of serving its alleged purpose this would need to be endemic. There were checkpoints like this set up in Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles. I understand that everyone there thought they were a Bad Thing. I sometimes wonder how many of those who say "Harumph! ID cards! Jolly Good Thing Too!" have actually thought through the implications, or whether they would be so keen if they had. Of course, everyone always assumes that they won't be on the receiving end.
"The rules for how the police act are totally seperate from the rules on what constitutes a valid ID". Arguably perhaps, but for the cards to work as advertised... well I've done that bit. The question is whether the government is planning such repressive measures, or whether they're lying about the cards effectveness whilst harbouring ulterior motives, or whether they are just plain incompetant.
Let me give you a little background here. The UK is the most heavily surveilled nation on the planet. Recent legislation saw the right to silence of an accused criminal removed. We have curfews in some parts of the country now - only for certain age groups at the moment, but that can quickly change. We have travel restrictions; usually applied in cases of overseas football matches but again the mechanism is there and is not limited to football hooliganism. Now they want to remove the right to a trial by jury. Oh and resign from the charter for human rights as well.
The last journalist to seriously embarrass the government was sacked, along with the director general of the BBC, while the whistle blower in the case was hounded to his grave.
Does anyone else see a trend developing here?
Almost all of the above is the work of the current government. I hope you'll excuse me if I don't fall over myself in my haste to extend them the benefit of the doubt.
What exactly is the downside to having ID standards that are harder to fake?
ID standards and implementations (in the non-code sense of the word) are not the same thing. Let's not confuse matters unnecessarily. My privacy in only violated by the government when the government forces me to present an ID.
And I've already explained why I find this less than reassuring. All the same, I think we're losing sight of something fundamental here:
The single best reason why we in the UK should not have ID cards is that we do not want them. We live in a dem
And I really want to know:what did we do to deserve this. Don't answer that if you're a terrorist - I'm talking to the law abiding non terrorist element on slashdot, plus MP3 downloaders. What did we do deserve the governemnt we supposedly elect treating all of us like criminals? Is there some subtle trend to socail masochism? Are we experimenting with a form of cultural S&M?
So why do we put up with it? There is no such thing as absolute security. We could turn the entire planet into a giant prison and take turns beating confessions out of one another, and we'd still not have absolute security - its always going to be a tradeoff agains liberty.
So maybe its time we thought a bit more about where we want to draw that line. How much liberty can you sacrifice before the security isn't worth having? How much before lack of domestic liberty becomes its own source of terrorism?
Anyone else find all this reminiscent of Nietzsche ? "He who battles monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster."
Which may arguably constitute a reason for requiring passports on domestic flights. It still doesn't justify this braindead ID card scheme.
And speaking of dodgy rhetoric... You cannot expect the gov. to continue to allow rife fraud simply because a few nutters read too much dystopian SciFi Why don't we combine the unspported presupposition that fraud is in fact rife, with a similarly unsupported presuposition that the this alleged fraud can only be combatted by means of the proposed ID card. And while we're at it, we'll throw in a quick ad hominem attack on anyone holding an opposing view. Not bad...
Who gets to use it? Why? How? When?
Who gets to use what, precisely, and how? If you mean the card the answer is whoever holds it (which isn't necessarily the same thing as the person to whom it was issued). If you mean the data behind it... well that's a question we'd all like answered.
You have tax bills, drivers license, healthcards etc etc etc. Its stupid. A single ID card that proves a person's identity (like an 'internal passport') is a Good Thing.
Meanwhile back in dodgy rhetoric land, how does the existence of many other forms of personal ID make the new card a "Good Thing?" If anything, it should make the card unnecessary since there are so many other forms of ID in circulation. And since the scheme is expensive, unpopular and ineffective for its stated puposes (see elsewhere in this topic) then "unnecessary" should be all the argument needed to bury it.
If the surrounding laws are written to allow unfettered access by nosey cops and capitalist-data-miners then I would be against *THAT IMPLEMENTATION*.
You have an algorithm that can enforce ethical-only access? I'd like to see it.
Or perhaps you would be happy with fettered access to the above? How about cynical and unpopular prime ministers seeking re-election? Or press secretaries seeking leverage to silence noisy BBC broadcasters?
Maybe you were referring to the legislation rather than the code used to implement the database? The trouble here is that once the data is in place, it becomes a realtivly trivial to change the laws regarding access; usually by burying it in a bill that makes heavy use of the words "terrorist" and "peadophile". Of course, this assumes the access regularions aren't defined as being changable by minsterial instrument, in which case they could change the rules five minutes after the bill passes and never even have to tell us. So we not only have to trust this government (ha!) but also the next one, and the next, and the next...
And that, now more than ever, is simply too much to ask.
What needs to happen is the open community needs to have something to kindle the fire still, as well as something to unite them a bit more into generating app's that don't have to be compiled to be run. While I know there are some of those what is still lacking is for common users to be able to do this as well.
So what did you have in mind? Binary only precompiled distros? Plenty of those. Apps written in scripting languages like python and perl? Them too.
Or maybe you mean apps that can be easily and boradly customised by relatively naieve users? If so is there a proprietory product that does this already? I'm not being nasty here, just trying to understand your point.
I know linux isn't "after" the commoner crowd however in it I see the largest "mind pool" that in my mind should be able to find ways to make things work in such a manner, make it easier and more intuitive to secure, and make it work with minimalistic user requirements.
Well, Linux isn't "after" anything. Linux, in fact free software overall is vast and diverse. I see the breadth of the communities interests as one of it greatest strengths, rather than a weakness. I mean there are all the people on KDE and Gnome working hard on user interface and desktop integration issues. You also get eclectic ultrageek projects that are never going to be widely popular.
The thing is that everyone scratches their own itch and works on the projects that interest them. From that viewpoint, I suppose the relatively non-tech users can't really join in the itch scratching process. Perhaps this was your point?
Regarding drobbins, as a gentoo user I feel I owe him a debt of gratitude. I wish him all the best wherever he goes, MS included.
Alas, as concerns the nomenclature, I fear I am irrevocably mired in popular usage. Although I do respect the right of others to prepend syllables of their own choosing. As long as it's between consenting adults and in the privacy of their own homes, anyway.
However, I am a little baffled by this "could do with a bit of discrediting" idea. I mean (I'll be precise here) the Linux Kernel is arguably the most visible free software project in the world. Surely that makes it a valuable advertisment for what can be achieved, both by free software, and by bazaar style development. To want to see it discredited seems just a touch bizarre to my mind.
Still, each to their own, I suppose
I thought about that when they announced they'd support linux running in emulation. They could maybe supply a sort of buggy half crippled userspace linux with a view to discrediting linux.
I can't see it working. It might win some points with the PHB brigade, but most linux users are more interested in freedom than cost. If that is the plan, I can see it rebounding against them.
Howabout real time updates for XBox2? Help make MS new platorm even more linux-proof than before. Set a thief to catch a thief, at least from Redmond's viewpoint
Nope. Actually I agree with you, I just didn't phrase that especially well.
If I write the laws then I'd be tempted to allow a device that does foo by a certain method to be patentable. However, I would say that any such patent does not extend to any software involved in the device. That software may be copyrighted, but not patented.
If after the software is removed from the picture, the remaining device is no longer novel, then you do not have a patent. If the device - sans software - is still patentable, then you can patent it.
This would apply even if the software was embodied in clockwork, or by a systems of rods and levers. Suppose you invent a mechanical novelty nutcracker shaped like a monkey that cracked nuts by whacking them with a little hammer. You could implement that with cogs and levers, and it'd be hard to say why it shouldn't be patented. However the control sequence that defines the monkey's actions would be considered to be software, and would not be covered by the patent. That means that if I later use that sequence of actions in a video game, you couldn't sue me for patent violation.
Basically, it's the Groklaw Definition.
There is one area we disagree:
If you come up with just a new method of manipulating data, no choice of setting or field of use should allow this to become patentable and hence protected from competition.
You see, if we're writing the law here, then we don't need to be consistent with other areas of patents. The entire field of legislation is one gigantic exercise in Case Based Reasoning, and as such is largely a compendium of exceptions and special cases.
So, since we're writing laws, we don't need to be consistent, because I job consists of writing exception handling code to deal with inconsistencies in external reality.
We seem to be agreed that softwate patents are both harmful and unnecessary. So if the only reason to allow them at all is consistency, then it makes more sense to define software patents as a special case.
The only question then is where should we draw the line. If I write the law then the line is: "No software patents, ever! No patents on data, nor on symbols. No patents on sequences of commands. Any patent infringemnt claim against software will always fail, irrespective of the other factors involved."
Hopefully that's a bit clearer ;)
My experience is based on London, ten years ago. I don't know how well experience from San Francisco or the City of London generalise outside those contexts, but we seem to agree on one thing: wear a tie for the first week, at least. in fact, if it's London, make it a suit and tie, rather than just a jacket.
Still, as I think Bruce Schneier in a different context, we have to look at the way in which things fail as well as they way they work. The principle risk here is that, having made the duration of a patent a subject for negotiation, it opens the door to the extension of undeserving but carefully worded patents. I'd expect to see companies striving to find wording that sounded superficially specific, but that could be interpretted very broadly.
Of course, that's not hugely different from the way it's done now. Apparently.
The anti-swamping idea is fun too. How could we hack that? Imagine 100,000 holding companies, all with the same single patent-lawyer employee, all with Microsoft as the majority shareholder perhaps. Still, another interesting idea.
Software patents on the other hand...
As for s/w patents - the thing is that I can see a case (yeah Simon, way to make friends and influence people on /. !) for some of them (eg: if I invented PGP, I might want to make some cash out of that).
There's this weird meme circulating that suggests that anyone who is opposed to software patents also disapproves of coders receiving recompense for their hard work and insight. I say weird because, really, what would stop you making money from an encryption algorithm if you invented one? You can code it up and market it protected by copyright and licence agreements, or you can declare it a trade secret and protect it with NDAs. You can even burn it onto a dedicated chip and patent the device (although still not the software I should hope). With the expansion of laws against reverse engineering and strengthening of copyright, that ought to be enough for anyone to turn a profit.
So why do we need software patents? The only thing that they bring to the table is a mechanism for failing corporations to preserve dwindling revenue streams through anti-competetive monopolies.
In truth, I was throwing an idea out there off the top of my head. I didn't really expect such a detailed response. I think there's something in the inverse-generality idea though.
Well, the detailed response comes from arguing the pros and cons of patent legislation as well as here on slashdot. I hope I've not come across as being bloody mindedly negative; you have some interesting ideas and I'd quite like to see them developed a little further. I'm still not sold on the software patents though
On the other hand, if you want a gig with one of the big banks, then you better be prepared to look like another corporate clone.
You can pretty much extrapolate linearly between those two. Just bear in mind that the jobs aren't distrinuted linearly along the curve.
That might now work as well as you might hope.
To begin with, novelty, as applied to patents, is supposed to be absolute. They're supposed to be granted to ideas that no one ever thought of before. To consider the novelty of patents as being relative is to accept that patents are allowable on ideas that not many people have thought of, or on ideas that are only proposed infrequently. Given the degree to which the current arragenment is abused, it seems foolish to slacken the requirements.
Secondly, the current patent procedure is not known for its rigor, certainly not as it applies to some technical sectors. Patent offices are gaining a reputation for simply rubber-stamping computer patents possibly (let's be charitable here) because they lack the background to effectively. As such, it's difficult to imagine patent clerks in the role of steely-eyed defender of the common weal, standing implaccably against the forces of corporate greed in order to limit the scope of a not-particularly-novel process.
Thirdly, the patent office, at least in the US, is swamped. Microsoft and their ilk are going through the Encyclopedia of Computer Technology and applting for patents for each concept in turn, justifying this bare-faced abuse of the system under the semantically bankrupt unberella of "good business". I even if those patent clerks were inclined to the role of steely-eyed-defender, I doubt they have time to evaluate that sort of trade off.
I know your idea calls for a lot more oversight on patents. Even so, the proposal cedes valuable ground unnecessarily. It opens the way for patents to be considered on relative novelty, allowing a whole new class of bogus patents to be de defended on the grounds that they were "fairly novel". It also opens the way for patenting corporations to badger courts and patents offices both for an extended duration for their own patents by talking up the novelty of the invention.
And for software, the proposal tacitly accepts the legitimacy of software patents.
It's much easier to keep rights that we currently have, then it is to regain them once lost. If we're going to think about how to reform the patent process, we need to make sure we don't conceed more than we gain in the process.
Interestingly, there's a parallel with smuggling in England in the 18th century. Smugglers flourished precisely because the tariffs were set too high.
Apologies if the comparison has been done to death in copyfighter circles, but it just occurred to me :)
Once this was realised, tariffs were reduced, and revenues from trade rose dramatically. It's only in the last half century that smuggling of items not banned outright has returned in any great measure, mainly driven by year after year of unthinking duty increases on tobacco and alcohol.
The moral being that if the commodity is avaiable cheaply and easlily enough, people will pay without complaint. And if artifical restrictions and surcharges are imposed, then the problem is never going to go away.
On the other hand, I can't shake this odd conviction that, if they systems hadn't been running windows, we'd have had a FUDstorm out of Redmond: "MAJOR FooOs SECURITY FLAW REVEALED! 'Windows only secure option' says Ballmer". Substituting the name of the OS in question for FooOS, obvuiously.
It hardly constitutes proof, but if it'd have been linux on those systems, ADTI would have issued three press conferences, two books and Major Motion Picture by this stage.
For me, the silence on this issue is eloquent.
For that matter there's a company called The Cloud (or something like that) has access points in a couple of the pubs / hotels in my home town.I've not looked at their rates, mainly because taking my laptop down the boozer strikes me as a very slly idea. All the same, I bet they're priced targetting at corporate expanse accounts
*shrug* In the end, especially as a government employee, I just have a problem with the idea that things done by a corporation are automatically bad and things done by the government are automatically good.
I can't disagree with that. A lot of my friends are or were civil servants. Still, the nice thing about having goverment employees is that their career path doesn't depend on them finding innovative new ways to soak the customers for more mony in return for fewer services. And they're not going to get sued by their shareholders for offering a fair deal to their customers.
And anything that gets rid of fair competition (whether due to corporate or government action) is automatically a Bad Thing(tm). ;)
I can't really disagree with that either. Except that any governemt supplied service is likely to either infringe on some existing operation, or to raise cries of "we were planning to do that". Which raises the question of when the government can set in.
I agree with your main point (and that of the GP). On the other hand, software knowledge is evolving faster - at least IMHO.
The reason for this isn't to do with physical vs knowledge work, it's to do with information flow and feedback times and the population growth curve. People learn what other people have done, and wether it worked or not, faster today than ever before (well, unless last week was a low worm week, but you get the idea). And when they get this info, they react to it, and then add it back into the feedback loop. On top of this, there are more people thinking about these problems than ever before.
So developemnt times are shortened, and the field matures faster. Of course, the same feedback loop speeds alnost every area of human endeavour - it's just that some like house building are understood in far more detail that others. In these cases, the law of diminishing returns means the speedup isn't so obvious, but I believe its still there.
As an example, think of electronics, by which I mean wires-and-solder, pre-microchip, non-software electrics. As an industry that's what? A hundred years or so, if we count from Edison who made it a commodity rather than Faraday who doped out the theory anyway. I'd say we understand electrics in a similar sort of depth to house building, but we got there in a far shorter time.
Of course if you consider, say, quantum mechanics then there's still a lot to be learned about electrons. Of course, the same can apply to construction work, say if you consider space elevators.
Entirely possible, and no shame in admitting it. Living in the UK all I know of the US wifi networks is what I read on slashdot. And there I was complaining about people applying binary thinking to analogue problems, only to go and assume that corporate wifi rollout was either everywhere or nowhere. I don't know...
I wonder how the value for money compares for the average citizen. I imagine municipal wifi comes off worst in all but the most computer literate of areas, since those without wifi enabled computers (or without computers at all) will see no benefit.
On the other hand, that value will rise over time as more people take advantage of the resource. And if the city does it, they may well do the job properly. A patchy and overpriced corporate rollout could kill a city wifi project just as dead as flat out refusal to implement anything.
I must confess to being a little torn on this one. If there's one lesson that's been taught to us in the UK over the last two decades, it's that national and regional infrastructure are not always best left to the private sector. We used to have a nationalised rail service that everyone complained about, but really all you could say was that it was a little unimaginative. These days we have several privatised rail companies who have been very imaginative, but only when it comes to extracting more money from a captive userbase in exchange for fewer and/or worse services.
And everyone still complains.
For what it's worth, I'd have said there was a perception for many years in the UK that consoles were just for the kiddies.What you had were jumping sprite games like mario and martial arts fighters a la mortal wombats. There was the odd decent game for the consoles, but they tended to appear on the PC pretty quick, so why worry about it? (That's not a criticism of anyone's favourite platform, just a little introspection on how I've tended to think about consoles).
Of course, in retrospect, those same kids grew up and it's their purchasing power that's driving the current wave of console development. That means that the game themes have matured with the audience, and that console games are frequently as sophisticated as those developed forthe PC. (probably more so than some of the gobblers I've paid good money for in my time, but I digress).
I still think the platform that survives is going to be the one with the lowest barrier to entry. That's where all the creativity will be manifest - the platform where a couple of bright folks can get together and code something off-the-wall innovative without having to sit in six months of meetings persuading management that their idea won't sink without a trace only to have the final version chopped to death my PHBs who don't understand what the game is trying to achieve and who feel happier with something that resembles the companies current product line.
Of course, it needn't be a machine at all. Right now flash games are showing a lot of imagination and (relatively) high production values. That's one way to sidestep the hardware lockdown.