Among patent lawyers, it is widely believed that Wired.com invented the banner ad, and that they lost a chance to be the gatekeepers for online publishers by failing to patent it. Even though banner ads seem like a trivial migration of advertising from paper into electronic documents, apparently the idea was novel enough to have stood a good chance of validity (by the USPTO's loose definitions)
Since then, other companies have attempted to patent more specific aspects of online advertising. Doubleclick.com's patent, for instance, was covered on/. when it came out.
However, the new Amazon patent is (apparently) not for something as general as banner ads, or tracking the users viewing ads- but on selecting ads to run by comparing them with the shopping behavior of a customer.
As usual, that's something which hardly seems worthy of the name "invention". Let us remember: Jeff Bezos agrees that the USPTO accepts patents far too liberally- but as a responsible businessman, he has no choice but to seize every advantage the government offers him.
One could even argue that high-profile abuses of the patent office serve to emphasize it's shortcomings, and set the stage for eventually fixing patent law. Call it a backwards form of civil disobedience, maybe?
To apply for a patent, paperwork must be recieved at the USPTO within 1 year of the invention's public use or publication. "Prior artists" who hadn't thought about filing a patent before will usually find it's too late to start one now.
(Note that once the application process has started, it's possible to drag it on for years and re-apply several times before the patent is granted or denied. Some companies have intentionally delayed the awarding of their patents, as a way to extend the eventual expiration date)
Van Riper had already been retired from military service. He was hired as a contractor to command the OPFOR in a simulation, and quit after not being permitted to fight at the best of his ability.
That "resignation" cut maybe 2 weeks off of 1 month of employment.
The simulation Van Riper was involved with was Millenium Challenge 2002. It was a poorly-executed experiment in futuristic warfighting possibilities. There was no relationship between that simluation and an Iraqi invasion- it assumed the existence of weapons that haven't been built yet, and it also assumed that only a handful of guys commanded the whole US fleet.
Their results weren't valid for 2007, and they certainly don't apply to 2003. Van Riper protested that MC02 was scientifically bankrupt, and he was right. It was so inaccurate that no predictions about actual combat should be based on it.
in the last Gulf War more American soldiers died in training and motor vehicle accidents than actual combat.
That is correct. For a while the ratio was 3 accidental deaths per 1 combat casualty. (And of the combat casualties, more than 1/5 were friendly fire) The US army has lost more men in a single day of training than were killed by Iraqi forces in all of Desert Storm.
In the years since, the Pentagon has tried to recatagorize some accidental deaths as somehow combat-related. (Which isn't completely invalid, as the threat of attack forces people to pay less attention to normal safety)
A programmer who writes 'to the iron' probably has a need to do so- either his hardware is very limited / slow (11 mhz embedded CPU), or his performance requirements are stringent and intense.
In either case, the application might not have the freedom to allow an unknown amount of RAM to be allocated when reading config settings.
I think the root of that difficulty comes from using XML to solve two different problems. One problem is data transmission between systems- which XML was designed for, and handles adequately. When recieving a data chunk from an external source who might not be trustworthy, a safety-concious program really has to read the whole thing and verify it complies with the format. Skipping over some sections to reach the part you're interested in isn't allowed.
But, for data storage within an application (or a set of tightly coupled systems that trust each other to function correctly), XML is less advisable. Traditional (SQL) databases, or hand-rolled file formats, may be a better solution when high speed and scalability are needed.
JoelOnSoftware has an long article on why XML is suboptimal for the latter use.
But a program to read from XML could also be written to use constant memory,
The part which bothers me in practice, is that it can't take constant time. To reach the Nth entry of an XML file, you've got to read through everything that comes before it. (Technically, you should read the rest of the file too, but a 2x factor doesn't matter in the long run).
This has been a problem for some popular applications. For instance,/. just reported on the new Zaurus 5600 PDA, a more powerful followup to the 5500 model. The prior version used XML to store the PIM data, but the newer (faster) model won't do this, as it's simply not scalable to more than 1000 entries.
(Technically, the old Zaurus data format might not've been XML either, since no DTDs were ever published)
I don't know what you mean by 'in theory'. A finite input file requires finite resources. Period.
He probably means "taken to the limit". A way of characterizing the performance of a system- how does it fail, when faced with an overwhelming amount of work? (It's like O-notation, which assumes the problem size is infinite to elimiate lower-order effects from the description)
An infinite input file could require infinite memory to parse it. So what?
The intention probably was to point out that a program which extracts from a non-XML database can be written to use constant memory, regardless of file size (or log memory, to be pedantic). Whereas with XML, the memory used increases as long as the file size does.
(There are tricks which can reduce the memory use, but they usually come down to making assumptions about the formatting of the file, which can lead to skipping over malformed XML chunks)
(I'm not espousing those views, just attempting to translate for you)
The fact that it came from someplace else and wasn't directly written by the OpenZaurus team, doesn't mean their distribution doesn't have an email client. They probably didn't write the kernel either, but no one would claim OZ doesn't have one. If you download and compile OZ, an email client will pop out.
Additionally, The complaint "OpenZaurus's email client is unworkable" is a true statement, and a valuable piece of data for someone considering the OZ system. The Zaurus as shipped includes an email client that, while poor in many regards, at least can download from a normal POP3 server. Last I checked, the Opie mailer is IMAP only. (Yes, some people may prefer IMAP, and it may work fine for them. But it's no good to the average user.)
The Zaurus (at least the 5500 and 5600 models) is just as bad as any normal PDA for range.
Also, the IR port is on the left side, making it less convenient to aim at a television than a Palm (you can't grip it like a TV remote).
Finally, the Zaurus has around 10% of a Palm's battery life- nobody wants their remote to lose power every 2 days (Although, the new 5600 model has longer life, and you could always mount a charge cradle on your easychair)
Problem 1 won't happen under the proposal, as there is no "large continuation fee".
However, problem 2 is a concern, and would reduce the total benefit to the public domain. Far fewer than the 98% of unprofitable works would be freed. Many companies will prefer to blanket-renew all their copyrights, without checking if they really have earning potential or not.
And even if it's known that a work has no sales value, companies may wish to keep it restricted for other reasons:
Some publications are embarassing, and would damage their corporate image. For example, Disney doesn't want Song of the South to be seen again. They've also censored the original versions of Alladin and other films.
A richer public domain will reduce the public's need to buy new entertainment products. If 50-year old books and TV shows were available for free, there would be slightly less need to pay money for new ones. (The TV-Land channel, at least, would see it's operating costs decrease)
Even with those shortcomings, the public domain would at least benefit from recieving those works which the copyright owners have completely forgotten about. It's far from perfect, but at least one of the major damages of eternal copyrights is removed: works which are completely lost, because the published copies corrode away before it becomes legal to duplicate them, and the author has already lost the originals.
One additional factor- just because a work isn't being commercially exploited (sold), doesn't mean no corporation has a profit motive to maintain it's copyright.
Big media companies gain by keeping the public domain poor- especially by denying it modern media like film and television. If the Eldered case had won, then PD TV shows would begin to compete with newly produced paid ones.
The new stuff will always have an advantage in FX technology and "bad language", but given how often Hollywood recycles old plots, some amount of sales cannibalization will occur (1947 Fox stealing sales from the 2003 company).
I believe that the largest reason big IP companies want long copyrights is not so that they can keep collecting sales of old works, but so that old works won't compete with their shiny new merchandise.
By that logic the people who worked on aircraft such as the XB-70 and TSR2 should never have been paid anything.
No. Somebody did benefit, or thought he would, even if he didn't travel the world on it (learning new technology is a benefit). And if there really was no benefit at all to the creation of those aircraft, then the guy's shouldn't have been paid, and they shouldn't have done the work.
Humans are not omniscient. They don't magically know how much value a particular action creates. All actions taken by any mortal human are according to percieved truth, not a mysterious "actual truth". The distinction you make between two kinds of knowledge is useless, because people can only ever act on an approximation of true value.
How is this efficent?
Learn the definition of that word. Efficiency is the ratio of outputs to inputs. Efficiency = Output / Input If you pay workers according to outputs (capitalism), efficiency is pushed upwards (the number on top gets bigger). If workers are paid according to input- the amount of time or effort they put in- then their incentive is to increase the number on the bottom, which makes the ratio less.
See? Don't consider this just theoretical, fifth-grade arithmetic either. Just look at a newspaper from 1989- contrary to what Reagan would have you believe, the USSR collapsed because of this kind of inefficiency.
Capitalism's focus on percieved value rather than actual does lead to negative situations, like Coca-Cola earning more because they've tricked consumers into believing their product is better than another- (the ultimate salesman, after all, "can sell ice to Intuits"). But, compared to "communism" (especially as it was implemented in the 20th century), those problems are smaller and more restricted in scope. Individuals who make stupid decisions quickly suffer- a collective making the same mistakes feels the pain later, but more strongly.
You apparently didn't follow the link. The link didn't lead to the story,
I just clicked it again, and it certainly leads to the homepage of the story. There are many related news articles there, but they change constantly. If you had wanted to focus on a specific item, you should've done something like this. Also, you should've labeled it with text like "this story about D&OitMK", not just "Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom".
he demonstrates that the premise is faulty.
It's still not a strong demonstration that traditional publishers' business models are not the most profitable ones.
For one thing, the story refers to 50,000 downloads. 50,000 free downloads, not paid ones. If he's a true artist, who just wants to get his vision out, that's fine. But unfortunately, most "artistic" work today is to satisfy commercial motives. Unpaid distribution doesn't help them.
For a second thing, he got "word of mouth" publicity because what he did was different and strange. Being unique always has publicity value- "Ben & Jerry" ice cream corporation, for instance, spins their charitable stance into major advertising leverage. But that only works because few other corporations take such a stance. It's not a scalable business technique; it only works for a few people.
For a third thing, if Doctorow did earn any money from the publicity (increased sales for the slender, dead-tree version), then that effect cannot be expected to keep working in the future. Today, paper books are more convenient reading for most people. As technology marches on, we'll all get PDAs with 600x800 screens and 15 hour battery lives. Or Kinko's will offer to print a bound paperback for $4.50. Any effects based on "the free version is like advertising for the paid one" will only last until technology improves so that digital copies are easier to use than physical ones.
Now, backing away from this specific example: alternative business models (less reliant on copyrights) for publishers are viable, but they won't be as profitable as the current ones. Average publishers won't have an incentive to switch over unless they're forced to (prehaps by a legislative weakening of copyright laws, or a refusal to punish violators)
Why should the results matter? Should the person who layed a floor get paid according to the number of people who later walk on it? Should the designer of part of an airliner get paid x amount per passenger?
That hardly even bears answering. Everyone who's been alive in the 20th century should already know this, so I'll be brief:
Results should matter so that marketplace incentives can work. This is the foundation of capitalism (paid according to the value of what you do) vs "communism" (paid as long as you tried your best).
In the cases of floor tilers and aircraft designers- yes!, they should be paid according to the number of people who will benefit from their work. (In a competitive industry, of course, there will be a negative compensation pressure from other people offering to do the work).
If I build or design something that no one will ever use, I don't deserve any money at all. The more people that want to use it, the more cash I can ask for before agreeing to the job. The is the fundamental reason that free markets can be more efficient than central planning, because people doing a useless job automatically won't get paid.
A "fair price" doesn't mean getting paid by the amount of time or effort put in- it should be the results that matter.
A musician who only produces records entertains some people, and she should get paid for it. A touring musician, too, reaches more people through recordings than by the limited attendence in stadiums.
And, studio recording is a full time job- for somebody. If the "musician" just spends 2 days singing music that has been written, arranged, and accompanied by someone else, though, it's not her who's doing the job. But somebody's working, and needs to be paid.
(Note that I agree that major musicians should not earn as much as they do today from recordings, and that those who want more money should do live shows. But making shows their only means of income just isn't fair.)
Unless you did it to everyone all the time it wouldn't work. Or it would work about as well as speeding fines. ie It wouldn't except in known trap areas.
On the contrary- speeding tickets do work. They don't stop a small fraction of people from going much above the limit (unless they think a cop is nearby), and they don't stop the majority of people from going a little above the limit- but that's good enough.
They keep speeding down to a reasonable, safe level, reducing danger to the bulk of society. In US terms, nobody drives 120mph (would surely get caught), and most people won't drive 80mph either (might possibly get caught).
For an offense like copyright violation, it might be sufficient to stop only 90% of the cases. 80% of people are fearful of getting stopped, or wish to be percieved as law-abiding (by self, or by peers), and will self-monitor. 10% of people will try to infringe, but get caught.
And the 10% that's left? That may be an acceptable rate of non-compliance; not enough to harm publishers so their business models fail, and enforcement methods to stop them would probably be more expensive than they're worth.
People speed because most of the time there is no bad result. Copyright violation occurs because people don't think its a bad thing.
I don't know what you mean there. The public in general are willing to do both those things because they don't believe they're bad. And, they're nearly correct.
Copyright violation creates a small, non-zero chance that a large corporation's profits will be reduced. Speeding creates an even smaller, non-zero chance that an innocent child will be crushed to death.
Realistically, individual incidents of either kind of infringement cannot be equated to profit reduction or killing, even though they are the inevitable result if the behavior is widespread.
That's why we have misdemeanors- so the government can take a firm, official stance against a behavior, but not criminalize every offender.
The amount of harm caused by a copyright violation (say, 1% chance of $10 lost) seems similar to that caused by a speed violation (say, 0.001% chance of lives lost), so they should be punished similarly.
The record companies can't win this but there will be a lot of pain before they go. And after that I predict the end of music...
If you think that beginning of music came when the first recording was sold, maybe. I'd be happier if a larger fraction of music produced was for artistic motives, rather than financial ones.
Real muscians make thier money WORKING for it by playing shows. Recorded music should become a marketing tool itself for advertising touring bands.
The skills required to give a good show and to record a good song aren't 100% equivalent.
There are some musicians who may compose beautiful things in their studios, but can't play in front of a crowd to save their lives. Should they be denied compensation for the music?
On the other hand, there are some (Britney Spears, it is rumored) who can't really sing or compose at all, but have a great stage presence and dancing ability, and can pay for electronics to create the music...
Nice theory, but it's unsupported by the facts. For starters, see Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
Please don't say that theories need factual support and then link to a science fiction story...
It doesn't make the argument any more credible. That story is based on the idea that physical property has become so cheap as to be free- so it takes a big stretch to apply it's conclusions to the modern world.
Do you think piracy is going to go away? Do you think that just because the content brokers are out of business, people will decide to give up Kazaa and other pirate-to-pirate (P2P) tools and start paying for their music again? Do you think college kids are going to stop sharing their music collections with anybody who wants to copy them?
Piracy won't be effected. But eliminating the middlemen may significantly reduce copyright infringment. (Word choice clouds the debate. Not just "piracy"- things like "evaporate" polarizes something that's really a continuum. No crime can be eliminated completely, but that's not required)
Copyright infringment has more and more complex motivations than wanting something for nothing:
"Want something for negligibly cheap"
"Want it now, without driving downtown to Best Buy"
"Want it soon, without waiting for the publisher to get around to a New Zealand release"
"Want the good songs and not the album filler"
"Want the convenience of my own mix on my own media"
"Prefers to rely on self or peers to judge music quality- don't want to fund advertisers and playola to influence me"
(Additionally, getting music off P2P isn't "something for nothing"- it's not completely free- it takes some investment of time and effort to find these things and download them. Only worth pennies, maybe, but they "pay" something, just like we "pay" to watch TV by the time wasted in commercials)
Focusing on the thought process of the representative college student: An album of 10 songs often costs more than $1.50 each. Only a minority of that cash goes to recording/editing costs and compensating the musicians- most of it goes to publisher, for marketing and profit. College students aren't fond of those bland men with ties, and are less inclined to give money than if it was going more directly to the artist.
If each song cost $0.50 or $0.75 (reasonable I think, if advertising and distribution is taken out), then we might come to an equilibrium where it's not fear of law enforcement that makes students pay for their music, but peer pressure. If the cost is reduced, and convenience is increased (with something like micropayments, prehaps), and purchasers feel the money is going straight to the musician (with whom they often feel an emotional bond), then the incentive to "pirate" is much reduced, and the personal guilt from violations is increased. ("Oh my god, I stole like $2.50 from Jewel. I am SO lame! I'll click those 3 payment buttons right now")
Consumers will have much less motivation to load files onto P2P if they're already available for quick download elsewhere. Student roommates won't view duplicating a CD as striking a blow against the establishment. Courtney Love won't proclaim that the labels are robbing her, but instead might remind listeners to double-click the tip jar.
Voluntary compliance is not impossible. I can't claim it will happen, but neither can anyone else prove it won't.
(An additional benefit to the entire culture might be that, with publishing house's ad budgets devastated, popular music will become more varied. There could be less winner-take-all homogenization. Maybe, thousands of musicians will earn $70,000 per year, instead of hundreds getting $millions and the rest washing dishes as day jobs.)
International authorities seem to be heading in 2 different directions for punishing copyright violation:
Big Time: Monitor a perpetrator for 7 months, catalog his transfers, monitor his acquaintances, then print out a 20 kilogram indictment and send the US Marshals to seize his hardware and drag him to jail. On plea bargain, multiple charges of theft > $5,000 might become about 1 year of incarceration. (Generalizing)
The standard of proof is high (or why else did law enforcement work so hard to track him down), and the punishment is severe.
For-profit "pirates" rate this kind of treatment, and heavy P2P sharers may risk it too (the 0.2% that provides 80% of all files). (In fact, someone with ties to organized crime, fraud, or tax-evasion / money laundering will have many worse things facing him in court. The actual copyright violation is a minor concern for gangsters)
Small Fry: Assume that all consumers with the capability to infringe are guilty, and charge them a nominal "levy" to compensate the copyright holders (the top selling "artists", automatically computed). Canada did this for a while with CDR media, now Germany appears to be starting.
In this case, there is no proof at all, but at least the punishment is so light you can't really call it a "miscarriage of justice". However, these fees simply make some high-tech products seem slightly more expensive, and don't create any disincentive to violate copyrights. In fact, they may encourage it, "But I've already paid!"
Does anyone else see an opportunity to create an intermediate category of punishment for copyright violators? Not so large that it'll ruin the offender's life, and not so small that people can ignore it entirely. And certainly not unfairly assuming that 100% of the population is guilty.
How about something of the same magnitude as a traffic violation? Exceeding the speed limit isn't a real crime, as usually nobody was really hurt, so the punishment is light. Copyright violations don't necessarily hurt the "victim" either. So lets treat these things similarly.
Suppose a police department (I'm ignoring questions about whose jurisdiction applies) assigns an officer to fire up Kazaa, and then fire off "tickets" to the first pageful of people who appear to be sharing something obviously copyrighted to someone else. Fees starting in the $30-$60 range for first offenders.
A critical point is arbitration should be similar to traffic court too: If you bother to contest it, you probably get off. Allow anyone who claims the police were mistaken to get off with a warning (but in the future they might investigate closely, if he shows up in the list again). Additionally, the police can only send one citation at a time- the can't count multiple uploads on a single day as repeat offenses.
For this to be possible, of course, an internet service provider would need to give the cops a means of matching IP addresses to people's names. The DMCA is a representative law that would allow this (or a similar law or technical mechanism could).
Now, I don't approve of the DMCA, but given that it's a law already (and more like it are on the way), I would rather it be used to send out minor fees, than throw people in jail. From the looks of things, the current DMCA is being used by corporations to threaten individuals with big crimes. A government agency threatening people with minor fees has at least an ideal of fairness (plus bureaucratic apathy).
A couple of official police citations is all it would take to get parents to rein in their teens' file-sharing habits, and that'd stop 50% of copyright infringement right there.
The Ashcroft DOJ is moving towards more and bigger prosecutions of "cybercrime" like copyright violations. As a compromise, I offer the "traffic ticket" model. It sends a strong message that copyright infringment will not be tolerated, but individuals are protected from excessive or capricious punishment.
PS. The use of "schizophrenic" in my subject is incorrect psychological terminology. Multiple-Personality Syndrome is a different condition than schizophrenia.
"Hyatt" is a character on the "Excel Saga" anime, which features someone who already has double names: "Excel Excel".
(She is not named after the Microsoft(tm) program, although she has used it on the show)
Re:so, in other words....
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The expanded address space allowed in IPv6 fits neatly into what those authors call "good". In fact, abudant addresses will help remove some intelligence that has crept into the internet in the past few years: NAT boxes which assume they know better than the end-user which address he really wanted to send to.
Ending the sarcity of addresses will eliminate one excuse to have intelligence inside the network.
However, IPv6 includes some other changes, including provisions for "flow labels" and QoS, which those authors might not approve of. (At least, those features are still continually disputed)
Re:Prioritizing packets
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Slashdot Mirror
Among patent lawyers, it is widely believed that Wired.com invented the banner ad, and that they lost a chance to be the gatekeepers for online publishers by failing to patent it. Even though banner ads seem like a trivial migration of advertising from paper into electronic documents, apparently the idea was novel enough to have stood a good chance of validity (by the USPTO's loose definitions)
/. when it came out.
Since then, other companies have attempted to patent more specific aspects of online advertising. Doubleclick.com's patent, for instance, was covered on
However, the new Amazon patent is (apparently) not for something as general as banner ads, or tracking the users viewing ads- but on selecting ads to run by comparing them with the shopping behavior of a customer.
As usual, that's something which hardly seems worthy of the name "invention". Let us remember: Jeff Bezos agrees that the USPTO accepts patents far too liberally- but as a responsible businessman, he has no choice but to seize every advantage the government offers him.
One could even argue that high-profile abuses of the patent office serve to emphasize it's shortcomings, and set the stage for eventually fixing patent law. Call it a backwards form of civil disobedience, maybe?
No.
To apply for a patent, paperwork must be recieved at the USPTO within 1 year of the invention's public use or publication. "Prior artists" who hadn't thought about filing a patent before will usually find it's too late to start one now.
(Note that once the application process has started, it's possible to drag it on for years and re-apply several times before the patent is granted or denied. Some companies have intentionally delayed the awarding of their patents, as a way to extend the eventual expiration date)
I didn't know he resigned, /that/ is a shame.
Van Riper had already been retired from military service. He was hired as a contractor to command the OPFOR in a simulation, and quit after not being permitted to fight at the best of his ability.
That "resignation" cut maybe 2 weeks off of 1 month of employment.
The simulation Van Riper was involved with was Millenium Challenge 2002. It was a poorly-executed experiment in futuristic warfighting possibilities. There was no relationship between that simluation and an Iraqi invasion- it assumed the existence of weapons that haven't been built yet, and it also assumed that only a handful of guys commanded the whole US fleet.
Their results weren't valid for 2007, and they certainly don't apply to 2003. Van Riper protested that MC02 was scientifically bankrupt, and he was right. It was so inaccurate that no predictions about actual combat should be based on it.
in the last Gulf War more American soldiers died in training and motor vehicle accidents than actual combat.
That is correct. For a while the ratio was 3 accidental deaths per 1 combat casualty. (And of the combat casualties, more than 1/5 were friendly fire) The US army has lost more men in a single day of training than were killed by Iraqi forces in all of Desert Storm.
In the years since, the Pentagon has tried to recatagorize some accidental deaths as somehow combat-related. (Which isn't completely invalid, as the threat of attack forces people to pay less attention to normal safety)
A programmer who writes 'to the iron' probably has a need to do so- either his hardware is very limited / slow (11 mhz embedded CPU), or his performance requirements are stringent and intense.
In either case, the application might not have the freedom to allow an unknown amount of RAM to be allocated when reading config settings.
I think the root of that difficulty comes from using XML to solve two different problems. One problem is data transmission between systems- which XML was designed for, and handles adequately. When recieving a data chunk from an external source who might not be trustworthy, a safety-concious program really has to read the whole thing and verify it complies with the format. Skipping over some sections to reach the part you're interested in isn't allowed.
But, for data storage within an application (or a set of tightly coupled systems that trust each other to function correctly), XML is less advisable. Traditional (SQL) databases, or hand-rolled file formats, may be a better solution when high speed and scalability are needed.
JoelOnSoftware has an long article on why XML is suboptimal for the latter use.
But a program to read from XML could also be written to use constant memory,
/. just reported on the new Zaurus 5600 PDA, a more powerful followup to the 5500 model. The prior version used XML to store the PIM data, but the newer (faster) model won't do this, as it's simply not scalable to more than 1000 entries.
The part which bothers me in practice, is that it can't take constant time. To reach the Nth entry of an XML file, you've got to read through everything that comes before it. (Technically, you should read the rest of the file too, but a 2x factor doesn't matter in the long run).
This has been a problem for some popular applications. For instance,
(Technically, the old Zaurus data format might not've been XML either, since no DTDs were ever published)
I don't know what you mean by 'in theory'. A finite input file requires finite resources. Period.
He probably means "taken to the limit". A way of characterizing the performance of a system- how does it fail, when faced with an overwhelming amount of work? (It's like O-notation, which assumes the problem size is infinite to elimiate lower-order effects from the description)
An infinite input file could require infinite memory to parse it. So what?
The intention probably was to point out that a program which extracts from a non-XML database can be written to use constant memory, regardless of file size (or log memory, to be pedantic). Whereas with XML, the memory used increases as long as the file size does.
(There are tricks which can reduce the memory use, but they usually come down to making assumptions about the formatting of the file, which can lead to skipping over malformed XML chunks)
(I'm not espousing those views, just attempting to translate for you)
More karma to burn:
o pie-mail2_0.0.9-20030317_arm.ipk
OZ doesn't have an email client. OZ is just the underlying filesystem and system, not the gui or the applications. Opie is the
The phrase "OpenZaurus has an email client" is factual. Here it is (and there may be more)
http://www.openzaurus.org/official/unstable/feed/
The fact that it came from someplace else and wasn't directly written by the OpenZaurus team, doesn't mean their distribution doesn't have an email client. They probably didn't write the kernel either, but no one would claim OZ doesn't have one. If you download and compile OZ, an email client will pop out.
Additionally, The complaint "OpenZaurus's email client is unworkable" is a true statement, and a valuable piece of data for someone considering the OZ system. The Zaurus as shipped includes an email client that, while poor in many regards, at least can download from a normal POP3 server. Last I checked, the Opie mailer is IMAP only.
(Yes, some people may prefer IMAP, and it may work fine for them. But it's no good to the average user.)
The Zaurus (at least the 5500 and 5600 models) is just as bad as any normal PDA for range.
Also, the IR port is on the left side, making it less convenient to aim at a television than a Palm (you can't grip it like a TV remote).
Finally, the Zaurus has around 10% of a Palm's battery life- nobody wants their remote to lose power every 2 days (Although, the new 5600 model has longer life, and you could always mount a charge cradle on your easychair)
However, problem 2 is a concern, and would reduce the total benefit to the public domain. Far fewer than the 98% of unprofitable works would be freed. Many companies will prefer to blanket-renew all their copyrights, without checking if they really have earning potential or not.
And even if it's known that a work has no sales value, companies may wish to keep it restricted for other reasons:
Even with those shortcomings, the public domain would at least benefit from recieving those works which the copyright owners have completely forgotten about. It's far from perfect, but at least one of the major damages of eternal copyrights is removed: works which are completely lost, because the published copies corrode away before it becomes legal to duplicate them, and the author has already lost the originals.
One additional factor- just because a work isn't being commercially exploited (sold), doesn't mean no corporation has a profit motive to maintain it's copyright.
Big media companies gain by keeping the public domain poor- especially by denying it modern media like film and television. If the Eldered case had won, then PD TV shows would begin to compete with newly produced paid ones.
The new stuff will always have an advantage in FX technology and "bad language", but given how often Hollywood recycles old plots, some amount of sales cannibalization will occur (1947 Fox stealing sales from the 2003 company).
I believe that the largest reason big IP companies want long copyrights is not so that they can keep collecting sales of old works, but so that old works won't compete with their shiny new merchandise.
By that logic the people who worked on aircraft such as the XB-70 and TSR2 should never have been paid anything.
No. Somebody did benefit, or thought he would, even if he didn't travel the world on it (learning new technology is a benefit). And if there really was no benefit at all to the creation of those aircraft, then the guy's shouldn't have been paid, and they shouldn't have done the work.
Humans are not omniscient. They don't magically know how much value a particular action creates. All actions taken by any mortal human are according to percieved truth, not a mysterious "actual truth". The distinction you make between two kinds of knowledge is useless, because people can only ever act on an approximation of true value.
How is this efficent?
Learn the definition of that word. Efficiency is the ratio of outputs to inputs.
Efficiency = Output / Input
If you pay workers according to outputs (capitalism), efficiency is pushed upwards (the number on top gets bigger). If workers are paid according to input- the amount of time or effort they put in- then their incentive is to increase the number on the bottom, which makes the ratio less.
See? Don't consider this just theoretical, fifth-grade arithmetic either. Just look at a newspaper from 1989- contrary to what Reagan would have you believe, the USSR collapsed because of this kind of inefficiency.
Capitalism's focus on percieved value rather than actual does lead to negative situations, like Coca-Cola earning more because they've tricked consumers into believing their product is better than another- (the ultimate salesman, after all, "can sell ice to Intuits"). But, compared to "communism" (especially as it was implemented in the 20th century), those problems are smaller and more restricted in scope. Individuals who make stupid decisions quickly suffer- a collective making the same mistakes feels the pain later, but more strongly.
You apparently didn't follow the link. The link didn't lead to the story,
I just clicked it again, and it certainly leads to the homepage of the story. There are many related news articles there, but they change constantly. If you had wanted to focus on a specific item, you should've done something like this. Also, you should've labeled it with text like "this story about D&OitMK", not just "Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom".
he demonstrates that the premise is faulty.
It's still not a strong demonstration that traditional publishers' business models are not the most profitable ones.
For one thing, the story refers to 50,000 downloads. 50,000 free downloads, not paid ones. If he's a true artist, who just wants to get his vision out, that's fine. But unfortunately, most "artistic" work today is to satisfy commercial motives. Unpaid distribution doesn't help them.
For a second thing, he got "word of mouth" publicity because what he did was different and strange. Being unique always has publicity value- "Ben & Jerry" ice cream corporation, for instance, spins their charitable stance into major advertising leverage. But that only works because few other corporations take such a stance. It's not a scalable business technique; it only works for a few people.
For a third thing, if Doctorow did earn any money from the publicity (increased sales for the slender, dead-tree version), then that effect cannot be expected to keep working in the future. Today, paper books are more convenient reading for most people. As technology marches on, we'll all get PDAs with 600x800 screens and 15 hour battery lives. Or Kinko's will offer to print a bound paperback for $4.50. Any effects based on "the free version is like advertising for the paid one" will only last until technology improves so that digital copies are easier to use than physical ones.
Now, backing away from this specific example: alternative business models (less reliant on copyrights) for publishers are viable, but they won't be as profitable as the current ones. Average publishers won't have an incentive to switch over unless they're forced to (prehaps by a legislative weakening of copyright laws, or a refusal to punish violators)
Why should the results matter? Should the person who layed a floor get paid according to the number of people who later walk on it? Should the designer of part of an airliner get paid x amount per passenger?
That hardly even bears answering. Everyone who's been alive in the 20th century should already know this, so I'll be brief:
Results should matter so that marketplace incentives can work. This is the foundation of capitalism (paid according to the value of what you do) vs "communism" (paid as long as you tried your best).
In the cases of floor tilers and aircraft designers- yes!, they should be paid according to the number of people who will benefit from their work. (In a competitive industry, of course, there will be a negative compensation pressure from other people offering to do the work).
If I build or design something that no one will ever use, I don't deserve any money at all. The more people that want to use it, the more cash I can ask for before agreeing to the job. The is the fundamental reason that free markets can be more efficient than central planning, because people doing a useless job automatically won't get paid.
A "fair price" doesn't mean getting paid by the amount of time or effort put in- it should be the results that matter.
A musician who only produces records entertains some people, and she should get paid for it. A touring musician, too, reaches more people through recordings than by the limited attendence in stadiums.
And, studio recording is a full time job- for somebody. If the "musician" just spends 2 days singing music that has been written, arranged, and accompanied by someone else, though, it's not her who's doing the job. But somebody's working, and needs to be paid.
(Note that I agree that major musicians should not earn as much as they do today from recordings, and that those who want more money should do live shows. But making shows their only means of income just isn't fair.)
Unless you did it to everyone all the time it wouldn't work. Or it would work about as well as speeding fines. ie It wouldn't except in known trap areas.
...
On the contrary- speeding tickets do work. They don't stop a small fraction of people from going much above the limit (unless they think a cop is nearby), and they don't stop the majority of people from going a little above the limit- but that's good enough.
They keep speeding down to a reasonable, safe level, reducing danger to the bulk of society. In US terms, nobody drives 120mph (would surely get caught), and most people won't drive 80mph either (might possibly get caught).
For an offense like copyright violation, it might be sufficient to stop only 90% of the cases. 80% of people are fearful of getting stopped, or wish to be percieved as law-abiding (by self, or by peers), and will self-monitor. 10% of people will try to infringe, but get caught.
And the 10% that's left? That may be an acceptable rate of non-compliance; not enough to harm publishers so their business models fail, and enforcement methods to stop them would probably be more expensive than they're worth.
People speed because most of the time there is no bad result.
Copyright violation occurs because people don't think its a bad thing.
I don't know what you mean there. The public in general are willing to do both those things because they don't believe they're bad. And, they're nearly correct.
Copyright violation creates a small, non-zero chance that a large corporation's profits will be reduced.
Speeding creates an even smaller, non-zero chance that an innocent child will be crushed to death.
Realistically, individual incidents of either kind of infringement cannot be equated to profit reduction or killing, even though they are the inevitable result if the behavior is widespread.
That's why we have misdemeanors- so the government can take a firm, official stance against a behavior, but not criminalize every offender.
The amount of harm caused by a copyright violation (say, 1% chance of $10 lost) seems similar to that caused by a speed violation (say, 0.001% chance of lives lost), so they should be punished similarly.
The record companies can't win this but there will be a lot of pain before they go.
And after that I predict the end of music
If you think that beginning of music came when the first recording was sold, maybe. I'd be happier if a larger fraction of music produced was for artistic motives, rather than financial ones.
A side note:
"Blank magnetic media, especially recordable CDs..."
That's a new one. The magnetic CD...
It's an old one. Before the current variety of CDR and CD-RW was created, there were CDs writable with magnetism. They might've been called CD-WORM...
Real muscians make thier money WORKING for it by playing shows. Recorded music should become a marketing tool itself for advertising touring bands.
The skills required to give a good show and to record a good song aren't 100% equivalent.
There are some musicians who may compose beautiful things in their studios, but can't play in front of a crowd to save their lives. Should they be denied compensation for the music?
On the other hand, there are some (Britney Spears, it is rumored) who can't really sing or compose at all, but have a great stage presence and dancing ability, and can pay for electronics to create the music...
Nice theory, but it's unsupported by the facts. For starters, see Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
Please don't say that theories need factual support and then link to a science fiction story...
It doesn't make the argument any more credible. That story is based on the idea that physical property has become so cheap as to be free- so it takes a big stretch to apply it's conclusions to the modern world.
Piracy won't be effected. But eliminating the middlemen may significantly reduce copyright infringment. (Word choice clouds the debate. Not just "piracy"- things like "evaporate" polarizes something that's really a continuum. No crime can be eliminated completely, but that's not required)
Copyright infringment has more and more complex motivations than wanting something for nothing:
(Additionally, getting music off P2P isn't "something for nothing"- it's not completely free- it takes some investment of time and effort to find these things and download them. Only worth pennies, maybe, but they "pay" something, just like we "pay" to watch TV by the time wasted in commercials)
Focusing on the thought process of the representative college student:
An album of 10 songs often costs more than $1.50 each. Only a minority of that cash goes to recording/editing costs and compensating the musicians- most of it goes to publisher, for marketing and profit. College students aren't fond of those bland men with ties, and are less inclined to give money than if it was going more directly to the artist.
If each song cost $0.50 or $0.75 (reasonable I think, if advertising and distribution is taken out), then we might come to an equilibrium where it's not fear of law enforcement that makes students pay for their music, but peer pressure. If the cost is reduced, and convenience is increased (with something like micropayments, prehaps), and purchasers feel the money is going straight to the musician (with whom they often feel an emotional bond), then the incentive to "pirate" is much reduced, and the personal guilt from violations is increased. ("Oh my god, I stole like $2.50 from Jewel. I am SO lame! I'll click those 3 payment buttons right now")
Consumers will have much less motivation to load files onto P2P if they're already available for quick download elsewhere. Student roommates won't view duplicating a CD as striking a blow against the establishment. Courtney Love won't proclaim that the labels are robbing her, but instead might remind listeners to double-click the tip jar.
Voluntary compliance is not impossible. I can't claim it will happen, but neither can anyone else prove it won't.
(An additional benefit to the entire culture might be that, with publishing house's ad budgets devastated, popular music will become more varied. There could be less winner-take-all homogenization. Maybe, thousands of musicians will earn $70,000 per year, instead of hundreds getting $millions and the rest washing dishes as day jobs.)
The standard of proof is high (or why else did law enforcement work so hard to track him down), and the punishment is severe.
For-profit "pirates" rate this kind of treatment, and heavy P2P sharers may risk it too (the 0.2% that provides 80% of all files). (In fact, someone with ties to organized crime, fraud, or tax-evasion / money laundering will have many worse things facing him in court. The actual copyright violation is a minor concern for gangsters)
In this case, there is no proof at all, but at least the punishment is so light you can't really call it a "miscarriage of justice". However, these fees simply make some high-tech products seem slightly more expensive, and don't create any disincentive to violate copyrights. In fact, they may encourage it, "But I've already paid!"
Does anyone else see an opportunity to create an intermediate category of punishment for copyright violators? Not so large that it'll ruin the offender's life, and not so small that people can ignore it entirely. And certainly not unfairly assuming that 100% of the population is guilty.
How about something of the same magnitude as a traffic violation? Exceeding the speed limit isn't a real crime, as usually nobody was really hurt, so the punishment is light. Copyright violations don't necessarily hurt the "victim" either. So lets treat these things similarly.
Suppose a police department (I'm ignoring questions about whose jurisdiction applies) assigns an officer to fire up Kazaa, and then fire off "tickets" to the first pageful of people who appear to be sharing something obviously copyrighted to someone else. Fees starting in the $30-$60 range for first offenders.
A critical point is arbitration should be similar to traffic court too: If you bother to contest it, you probably get off. Allow anyone who claims the police were mistaken to get off with a warning (but in the future they might investigate closely, if he shows up in the list again). Additionally, the police can only send one citation at a time- the can't count multiple uploads on a single day as repeat offenses.
For this to be possible, of course, an internet service provider would need to give the cops a means of matching IP addresses to people's names. The DMCA is a representative law that would allow this (or a similar law or technical mechanism could).
Now, I don't approve of the DMCA, but given that it's a law already (and more like it are on the way), I would rather it be used to send out minor fees, than throw people in jail. From the looks of things, the current DMCA is being used by corporations to threaten individuals with big crimes. A government agency threatening people with minor fees has at least an ideal of fairness (plus bureaucratic apathy).
A couple of official police citations is all it would take to get parents to rein in their teens' file-sharing habits, and that'd stop 50% of copyright infringement right there.
The Ashcroft DOJ is moving towards more and bigger prosecutions of "cybercrime" like copyright violations. As a compromise, I offer the "traffic ticket" model. It sends a strong message that copyright infringment will not be tolerated, but individuals are protected from excessive or capricious punishment.
PS. The use of "schizophrenic" in my subject is incorrect psychological terminology. Multiple-Personality Syndrome is a different condition than schizophrenia.
"Hyatt" is a character on the "Excel Saga" anime, which features someone who already has double names: "Excel Excel".
(She is not named after the Microsoft(tm) program, although she has used it on the show)
The expanded address space allowed in IPv6 fits neatly into what those authors call "good". In fact, abudant addresses will help remove some intelligence that has crept into the internet in the past few years: NAT boxes which assume they know better than the end-user which address he really wanted to send to.
Ending the sarcity of addresses will eliminate one excuse to have intelligence inside the network.
However, IPv6 includes some other changes, including provisions for "flow labels" and QoS, which those authors might not approve of. (At least, those features are still continually disputed)
Why couldn't you log in and help me out with an argument about the "real world"?