Collections of facts are copyrightable by the people who collect them.
Different people can collect the same facts, as well.
I like that. Let me run a piece of music I like through a digitizer and I will collect several million facts. I can claim copyright on the set of facts I observe.
I view the patent system much as I view the domain naming registry which allows one to tie up domain names and squat on them until someone will meet their price.. like quickly running to the internet registrar and registering the name of popular pizzerias, knowing they will one day branch to internet ordering, and tie up their domain names, so you can exact an exhorbitant fee from them to use their own name, as you registered it first. To start off, you don't even make pizza, you are a "businessman" who sees and "opportunity" to hold some pizza retailer hostage for his own name.
I see the patent system being to ideas much the same as I see the domain name registrar being a party to one set of people who tie up the works so nobody else can do anything until they get paid. An anology is having the kids race to the playground during recess, only to claim the various objects of play and charge a fee for their use. Although this paradigm doesn't really work in school, it works very profitably in the corporate world.
Say, I had a design for a solar powered air conditioner using an Absorption Process using Lithium Bromide as a refrigerant. Now, by dropping the pressure, I can get LiBr to boil at 90 deg. F , separate the water from the brine, cool both using the swimming pool water as a heat sink, then recombine both streams in the house so as to put the condenser at around 40 deg F. This will allow me to cool the house to about 70 deg F on a hot day. Now, if I actually released this design, do you think I will have problems?
Of course I will.
I think there is even a way I can do it with Ammonium Nitrate with a little less efficiency. The neat thing about Ammonium Nitrate is that it is also useful as fertilizer, so that if there is any reason to ever have to purge the refrigerant, the grass would love it.
Ever seen those cold packs that consist of two pouches of liquid which get very cold when you mix them... and are typically used in first aid kits for injured athletes? Probably Ammonium Nitrate. If you have access to a fertilizer store, buy some and try it. Put some ammonium nitrate in a bucket, add water. See how cold it gets. Now imagine if you were pulling a vacuum on it and imagine what it would be like if you could boil it back apart at about 90 deg F or so, and endlessly recombine it in your house. You get the idea.
Don,t worry about the stuff after you've done your experiment... its great fertilizer. Your lawn will love you. Just don't put too much in one place.
But am I free to actually pursue this curiosity as a commmercial endeavor to share with the world?
I would quickly lose all my capital in litigation. I can not afford that.
So my research is just for me, not for the world.
We are not in a position yet to where such research, conducted by individuals, is of such importance as to threaten corporate holdings, where such distribution of technology outside their control, could economically harm them.
They have the money it takes to control Law, and that, quite simply, is the bottom line.
I consider MY name, address, personal info, medical history, credit records, purchasing data, etc, MY own property. I created it. I own it. I *am* the author of my life. And I claim the copyright.
This said, does the Berman Bill give me the right to haxor into any site that I believe may be harboring this data?
Re:Check out the animation I did of the sensor dat
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More on Columbia
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Jack, that has to be one of the best done animated GIF's I have ever seen. Only 125KB too. It even came right up in my old Netscape 3. Just wanted to feed back I appreciated it. Your work put a lot of words into clearer perspective.
If some corporation is going to sponsor the music, I would not hold it against them at all if they figured out how to get their product mentioned in the lyrics.. kinda like some advertisers opt for product placement in movies instead of interstitial annoyances.
I still remember the old Alka-Seltzer ads which spawned a hit song.. "no matter what shape your tummy's in"...
"It would be quite possible for someone like PayPal to implement an aggregated scheme for
micropayments and take the peppercoin business away."
That is what surprises me. I thought they were doing this already, but then I have never signed up for PayPal and am quite ignorant of their operations.
It was my take that they could keep an accounting by providing the consumer one trusted entity to hold their CC info and make aggregated withdrawals, while providing the merchant an aggregated payment for "drop-shipped" services.
The aggregation would eliminate all the clutter on both ends. Each consumer pays PayPal "X[consumerID]" dollars for stuff they ordered, while each merchant recieves "Y[merchantID]" dollars from PayPal for stuff they shipped to wherever at the request of PayPal. One of the prior posts made a funny jab at the log, but I think he was right on.. yes, the logs would probably look like that.. and if you were doing a fraud trace, you could look up those keys in a database and still isolate the transactions...because it is forseeable to me that viral payloads may include a bot to make unauthorized online purchases of viewables or something equally hard to verify.
There may also be the email flurries of spam that tries to make micropayment purchases in your name very similar to those phone scams running around where you are encouraged to dial some number before you realize its handled by some company overseas and the per-minute charges are outrageous and the whole object of the scam was to get you to place the call, thereby justifying collection.
I make an assortment of purchases.. PepperCoin keeps an account with me and pings my CC with the total aggregate sum of my purchases through them on a monthly basis.. therefore my CC is not littered with 5 cents here, 17 cents there, etc. Basically, I see a charge of 78.13 (example). Ok, if I wanted to see what that 78.13 was for, I might log onto my account at PepperCoin and see the exact breakdown to the penny.
Okay.. from the merchant's side.. he does not wanna mess with trying to account for a 5 cent sale.. so lets calculate the a 0.005 probability ( thats 5 cents out of 10 dollars ) and assign that probability to a ten dollar token, that the token is any good. So, in effect, the merchant is gambling he is going to get paid - in this case, for the sum of 5 cents, he accepts a 0.005 probability he gets $10. Basically, its just like gambling, where PepperCoin is the "house". But over millions of transactions, statistics would approximate the same return to the merchant as if he tallied all the micropayments.. but the merchant does not have to worry with millions of tiny payments, he works with thousands of larger consistent payments. And is willing to accept the accounting simplicity as tradeoff against any probability error, as well as the overhead of the "house cut". This technique allows the processing of billions of payments without keeping detailed records on each... the only thing going through is the statistical averages of who gets paid what.
Well anyway, thats my *understanding* of how this thing works...
One neat thing is that it appears any identifying information to the purchaser would be lost in the "noise".
comments invited.
And you can daisy chain. Integrated OTA 8VSB tuner and QAM256 tuner (for in-the-clear digital cable channels).
Problem is that by the time these things start really hitting the market, some yodel will come out with some upgrade to the technology that yields a "quantum leap in improved DRM" and render your unit obsolete with the stroke of a pen.
Actually, I guess I am still pissed at the CD industry for finding ways of rendering their CD's which I purchased to be unplayable on my computer, although the P2P MP3's which they were at war with continue to play just fine. And I considered the CD to be a well documented format that looked like something stable enough to invest in. Turns out now buying a CD for me is a risky investment.. worse than the days I used to make coasters on my burner.. except they are not $5 coasters, they are $20 coasters... and it was nothing I did.. its just the luck of the draw that I get one that they didn't tamper with the format, which I thought was supposed to be a standard and everyone agreed upon.
I just don't trust them anymore. They may say they abide by standards, but I am powerless to hold them to it.
AyeRoxor! notes " I'll wait until the kinks are worked out "
I live by that one. I am afraid no sooner than I make a thousand dollar investment, some standards will change, or somebody will come out another way of doing the same thing, but incompatible, just as they do these days with web browser technologies. The display is just way too much investment for it to be a throw-away next year or so when the powers that be want to churn the market again.
I am not a corporation... I flat do not have the resources to replace my infrastructure everytime somebody changes the standards.. I pick one that I believe will be supported for at least 25 years or so. I have little confidence the digital technology has matured enough, and besides there is not enough legacy product out there so that those of us who have already spent our resources to buy this can not exert very much pressure to hold the standards compatible with what we have invested in. Its kinda like if I have an electric car that uses a specific battery and they want to change the battery design in such a manner as to render my investment in the car useless, I really do not have much say in it. They have my money.. it still has value, but that which they sold me has lost its value because it is no longer supported.
Another thing that scares me is that the spectrum space for conventional NTSC channels is wanted by others, and I understand there is a substantial push to encourage us to abandon those frequencies so they can be reassigned to others. Problem is once we give up the "free" TV we have now, just how long will the Digital TV remain attractive when the incentives to get the public to switch over are removed. Could TV, enhanced with interactive digital technologies, get just as irritating to work with as a lot of websites we've stumbled on? You know the ones that once you step on them, they follow you like stray cats follow a cat in heat?
I would have said a couple of years ago, no problem, I would just code around it. But this is high volume, they will be doing it in hardware, and we now have all sorts of law in place to severly deal with anyone who may share how to deal with any annoyances the powers that be dish out.
They proudly talk about their "multi-pronged approaches" in their business plans.. how to ram ads at us, how to force us into compliance, how to deal with those who get around it, etc....however one of those prongs is literally going to have to be rammed up my (insert appropriate bodypart) to get me to part with my money for it.
This is so different I just had to reply as a new sub-post.
Have fun, and good luck (oh, btw, keep this in mind - if emergent behavior is a true thing - and everything points to that it is, as long as feedback loops
exist - then what would you as a human do if one of your neurons suddenly became sentient, and realized that it made up a "whole" greater than the sum of
the parts? Now, look on that as what happens if a human can figure out how a "corporate entity being" is "thinking" - don't you think that being would look
to "exterminate" that rogue unit?)...
You see it too.
I used to work in a tiny aerospace firm. We got bought out by a big firm. They brought in loads of professional executive-suit types that had business-seminar trained personnel skills. Now, instead of being good engineers, we were expected to be "team players" which was a code word for backing up the executive types on wherever they decided to "lead" us, whether or not we could find anything in the laws of physics to support us in such an endeavor. Those of us who stuck by our guns soon found ourselves looking for employment elsewhere.
It was a question of "obedience to authority", as Stanley Milgram so wisely put it. The problem is that many of us, as engineers, could not delegate the responsibility of what we knew would be an inevitable failure, onto someone else. We, as engineers, knew if it wasn't right, it was our fault, no-one else's. Given this, we could not give management the "team-player spirit" they wanted if we weren't confident ourselves that we had the support of the laws of physics to back us up. Therefore, we *had* to go. A manager is worth a helluva lot more than an engineer anyway.. geez, look at the pay scales and who has pads of termination notices in their drawer.
Soon things went haywire, stuff went way over-budget, lots of technical problems, and they ended up selling out to even a bigger corporate entity. I am not privy anymore to how they are handling it...I'm no longer in it.
True, Its not my original idea, I had just seen it elsewhere and noted it had not been brought up in this forum.
And there are few things I would like to see discussed more than this, but there are few forums other than Slashdot where this kind of topic would ever generate any intelligent discussion.
The reason I posted is that I find the whole concept to be the greatest thing since the invention of the computer itself. Here we are, surrounded by a sea of code snippets that do all sorts of things. These machines even make themselves. But we don't quite understand the instruction processor yet. This is going to require all the skills of the reverse engineer and the haxor to understand the coding underlying the genome's instruction set and from that build a compiler. The payout is absolutely enormous.
Look at us.. if you consider the three base pair which form a codon, which calls out which amino acid which is to be inserted into the protein being synthesized, as a "byte", our total genome comes to about 1 gigabyte. 1 gigabyte. To code a human! Geez, thats not much!
The ability to code into existence literally anything, have it do precisely what we need, even down to the molecular level, in any scale we want, and then be completely re-cycleable once the task they were designed for is completed, to me, is absolutely awesome.
Like, who wants to worry about overheating power supplies or deteriorating electrolytic capacitors if we can code an organism to pull its power from ambient light and perform the desired task? And that task is not limited to just number crunching either; it can be molecular manufacturing or conversions on a massive scale. I see no limit on the amount of "parallel processing" that can take place.
In short, this technology has me more excited with anticipation than anything I have ever seen or dreamed of.
No sooner that I hit the submit button, that was pestering me.
This whole thing excites me to no end... now if we could only "reverse engineer" and "haxor" this thing, we may understand how its "instruction processor" works, and be able to design some sort of compiler.
Once we have some sort of compiler, as we work with biochemists, there is no telling what kind of stuff we can code. And thats the beauty of it.. we never have to make anything.. we just code it and have it make itself.
The whole idea of this concept makes me dizzy, but it appears to be completely feasable.
By altering its DNA sequence, we can program a biological cell to do dammed near anything. We have the codes for Electric Eels. We have the codes for Photosynthesis. We have the codes to make light. We have the codes to make motion. And its completely recyclable! Foo, if it wears out or no longer provides and intended function, we can even feed it to the cat!
What are we waiting for, fellas! This is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
The Genome is source code!
Re:Come on!! In the era of distributed storage...
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AC, I think you are onto something there.
If the content is worthwhile, people will hold a copy on their systems worldwide. If its just junk no-one's interested in it, nobody in the world thinks it's worth a hoot, then it will fade into oblivion.
That was my great hope in P2P networking. If its decent, even if only one person thought so, it would be kept. Even though the Library of Congress may try to keep everything,there is much variance in demand for the data kept. The fact is that some data may be accessed far more or less than average. The data most desired will be most plentiful, the data least desired will be least plentiful, and the data nobody wants gets dropped into the bit bucket. The neatest thing is that no-one in particular is on the critical path. The production of an entire civilization is maintained within that civilization by the civilization itself.
Well, it was a star-trekish dream of mine that the public as a whole begins thinking as one organism, keeping the good stuff, excreting the junk, sharing useful stuff for all.
It all degrades faster than plain old ink on paper. There are plenty of books that last hundreds of years if kept in appropriate conditions.
What scares me too is a lot of the stuff today is not only on very ephemeral media, its also encrypted so that it is readable only under very special circumstances.
It seems that content is doomed once the technology used to decrypt it is gone.
Well, you are right there.. I do not have any friends on MSN yet. I guess when I do, we will have to work something out.
I just may be unreachable from Microsoft. It would not be the first time as I am rapidly losing compatiblity with Microsoft products as they make their changes. I can no longer see a lot of stuff that was produced in a Microsoft system. If its that important, I'll read it at the College- they have a Microsoft system - and all the support people to keep it going.
I just have to accept that Microsoft is a big boy's game, and I just don't have the ante to play.
I certainly do not mean to push against HTML. It is by far the most easy-to-use form of linking and page layout I could ever imagine. I think you guys did a great job on it. The main thing I get miffed over is how all these guys come in after the fact and make their own bastardized versions that require all sorts of specialized plug-ins to make their content viewable. But there are no telling if these "plug-ins" are honest, or if they are trojans.
The thing I love so much about HTML is that its quite easy to open it up in any ascii text editor and verify what it was supposed to do. No under-the-covers sneakystuff. Although you guys obviously went to great lengths to cover all the bases, there are those who want to do the exact same thing, but different. Like, why would I have to have yet another "plug-in" to listen to an MP3 if I already have a trusted MP3 decoder on my end?
Thats not an HTML issue.. thats an issue of somebody that wants to coin yet another file format and use the flexibility of HTML to implement it.
As for my personal stuff, all of it is plaintext ascii quickies. No formatting. No pictures. The sender did not want to spend a lot of time with the tags. He just wants to tell me a quick note or show me a page link. Netscape itself is intelligent to recognize a link and display it as such. Typically the email I get takes maybe a minute or so to type, and contains maybe 20 words.
I code quite happily here on Slashdot, and much prefer the elegant HTML coding scheme over anything else, and quite happily invest the extra time to insert the tags because I know many of the posts I generate may be at least viewed by thousands of people using dozens of different browsers. The idea I can use different fonts, italicize, hotlink to other sites, whatever, is quite powerful as far as my trying to present a readable complex document that will display on whatever pulls it up. But it also means I am willing to take the time on my end to save many people time on their end by neatly formatting the document and making it easy to read. And by the time I post here, the document is much more complex than something like
"Jan's brother is coming along with us to Hemet. See you at 7:30. Diane. "
By no means would I want to blemish HTML. Its just that people who spam me often use HTML as they have a complex document, often with hundreds of kilobytes of linked images. The people who coin these spams often are sitting right on top of a server with high speed links to their editing terminal, and are quite unaware of the several minutes their message is going to take to transfer if they were on a dialup. Even big companies can be completely unaware of how much time their advertising automails can take on a dialup. I even have my own ISP mailing me from an automailer and using the power of HTML to cause lots of image downloading into my machine. Sure it looks pretty, but did I really want to spend two or three minutes downloading that image of the "pleased person's face" expressing exhuberance over yet more stuff thats going to take yet more time to display? But then, I remember, this is a big company I am dealing with. Trying to change them is like trying to change a bank by pushing on it. They are ad-men. They must be paid by the byte. They have no concept of the value of time. They just find someone who is impressed by pretty pictures, and they get funded to push those pictures onto everyone else via spam. HTML just gives them the tools to do it with.
Also, many of them want confirmation that their email spray was productive, as just opening the email at the client end invokes retrieval, hence display of my IP in their server logs, of images linked to in their HTML spam. This confirms to the spammer that he hit someone who opened up and read his spam. It would not take much on his end, especially if he crafted his spams individually, to find out which email addresses spammed results in a hit on his server. This concentrated set of email addys could be valuable to him to sell to other spammers, each doing the same. I am just trying to nip it in the bud by refusing to look at stuff that the mere fact of opening it confirms to the sender that it was read.
HTML is a very powerful tool, but in the wrong hands it can be a nuisance. Just as any other good tool.
This IP issue
might just become another big boost for the litigation industry.
I'm convinced this is true. I have seen way more than sufficient evidence to support my position.
My main concern is that with all this infighting egged on by the IP legislation, we have ceased to be productive as a country, leaving actually producing anything at all to be done outside our borders, outside our law.... We will eventually have to justify our very existence to the world. Basically what I am saying is that this country has just become a parasite, offering nothing to the world - as we expend our resources fighting amongst ourselves, and nobody's producing anything.
No matter how you design or code anything, you are sure to step on something someone has documented. I mostly do analog design.. now there are several circuit topologies for switching power supply design.. but are any of them safe to use outside of an academic lab? Or as mentioned, can one even use a quicksort algorithm without the risk of the letter in the mail? What if I use a m-way search tree in a custom mini-database which keeps track of some activities my robots are doing... can I expect somewhere someone is going to see I am using an m-way tree and hold my company ransom for it?
I can only imagine what it is like in the biochemical industry. I have seen my share of organic synthesis books.. and how similar organic molecules are. You can darned interpret anything you want if you get Congress to back your patent. Its like coming to the building industry because they used copper wire, copper pipe, bricks, nails, whatever in the construction of the building, and you have your lawyers hold them hostage for it.
Scary indeed...
But then my great hope is the Chinese. Hopefully they will look at us and learn. They will be able to innovate and construct and hopefully use their resources for production instead of litigation. It won't bode well over here in the States, but then Congress may have another thing to consider, how do you control the masses of people once they have lost their homes and no longer have money or jobs to pay rent. I do not like to be a fat man in the presence of hordes of hungry wolves.
This is a little late for me to be posting, AC, but I feel your pain.
I was given the same advice 30 years ago.
I took it.
I'm still single.
Weight did not seem to have much to do with it, I am tall, skinny/wiry/muscle-y, but the women I met just drive me up the wall with their illogical wants, such as never liking the clothes I pick out(I like sweatshirts), want new car all the time ( I want my old one cuz I have all the parts to it and know how to fix it), and I can never do anything physical around them cause no sooner than I do, they are unhappy with the way I smell.
I am a very hands-on type and have never had workmen in the house. I do that. Whether its drywall, plumbing, fixing the appliances ( any of them, including refrigeration ), or gardening. But I do get dirty doing it, and I have yet to meet some gal that would go along with me. The first thing they wanna do is hire someone else so we can be "entertained". It's not entertainment if there's not a cash register in sight. I consider building something as entertainment, but show me some gal who gets excited about getting some scrap metal, doing a bit of work with the grinder and welder, and a little paint and carpet, then end up with a stereo rack that not only looks nice, but is so sturdy it would probably hold up the house if the earthquake tried to knock it over. Nah, they want to spend that time in a crowded dance floor, full of noise so fcsking loud you have to yell to get any probability at all to communicate, and unlike using an equally noisy grinder, earmuffs are considered inappropriate attire for such a noisy environment. Although she may consider this fun, I highly do not. My ears rang for several days the last time I did that. Yes, I have sensitive ears... if I go see a movie, I have to make earplugs out of wet tissue paper and insert it in both ears before the movie.
And there's those damned phones. No matter where I go, she's always got that damned thing in her purse and its going off all the time. Why even bother to go out. Its like trying to conduct business when you can't get the other one off the damned phone. I know, I am just old, and never got used to the idea I had to play second fiddle to anyone who calls on the phone.. but that is the paradigm.. if you do not believe me, when you are conducting business with anyone and the phone rings, guess who gets serviced - the person who took his time to appear personally before you, or the one who called? ( Be Quiet! Can't you see I'm on the Phone? ).
So take your "bad luck" with a grain of salt.
If I had succeeded in snaring one of those gals, I probably would not have a house to work in, nor money to buy any grinding wheels. She would probably be enjoying her new car and accessories while total sum of what little assets I really have go to pay alimony and lawyer bills.
So, don't grind yourself too hard. It's not worth it.
Trouble is you have these people coming up with all sorts of crazy ideas, like they invented the internet, then start pestering people for a fee.
To me thats like claiming I have the rights to indoor plumbing because my great-great grandpa did it, and I have proof. Only thing it would take is an investment in Congress to get my law passed and I could maybe make a nickel a flush.
After reading the article on Watt and his steam engine, I am even more convinced that most of this patenting process is mostly contrived to feed lawyers.
Does this really protect the individual who actually *invented* something or protect the ones who say they have the rights to it and have the resources to protect it.
The post before mine recognizing Newton/Leibnitz and the possiblilty of "patenting" calculus drives the point home.
This seems to me just to be another excuse not to work. My whole country seems to be doing this. It seems everyone is out not to produce anything per se, but to tie up anybody trying to do anything and exact a fee. Somehow this system passes as "free enterprise".
Now, if the patent protection lasted for seven years or so, I would consider it much more appropriate. That way one could profit during the market window, but not tie the works up in perpetuity.
Slashdot Mirror
Different people can collect the same facts, as well.
I like that. Let me run a piece of music I like through a digitizer and I will collect several million facts. I can claim copyright on the set of facts I observe.
This, for the sake of argument... ;)
I see the patent system being to ideas much the same as I see the domain name registrar being a party to one set of people who tie up the works so nobody else can do anything until they get paid. An anology is having the kids race to the playground during recess, only to claim the various objects of play and charge a fee for their use. Although this paradigm doesn't really work in school, it works very profitably in the corporate world.
Say, I had a design for a solar powered air conditioner using an Absorption Process using Lithium Bromide as a refrigerant. Now, by dropping the pressure, I can get LiBr to boil at 90 deg. F , separate the water from the brine, cool both using the swimming pool water as a heat sink, then recombine both streams in the house so as to put the condenser at around 40 deg F. This will allow me to cool the house to about 70 deg F on a hot day. Now, if I actually released this design, do you think I will have problems?
Of course I will.
I think there is even a way I can do it with Ammonium Nitrate with a little less efficiency. The neat thing about Ammonium Nitrate is that it is also useful as fertilizer, so that if there is any reason to ever have to purge the refrigerant, the grass would love it.
Ever seen those cold packs that consist of two pouches of liquid which get very cold when you mix them... and are typically used in first aid kits for injured athletes? Probably Ammonium Nitrate. If you have access to a fertilizer store, buy some and try it. Put some ammonium nitrate in a bucket, add water. See how cold it gets. Now imagine if you were pulling a vacuum on it and imagine what it would be like if you could boil it back apart at about 90 deg F or so, and endlessly recombine it in your house. You get the idea.
Don,t worry about the stuff after you've done your experiment... its great fertilizer. Your lawn will love you. Just don't put too much in one place.
But am I free to actually pursue this curiosity as a commmercial endeavor to share with the world?
I would quickly lose all my capital in litigation. I can not afford that.
So my research is just for me, not for the world.
We are not in a position yet to where such research, conducted by individuals, is of such importance as to threaten corporate holdings, where such distribution of technology outside their control, could economically harm them.
They have the money it takes to control Law, and that, quite simply, is the bottom line.
This said, does the Berman Bill give me the right to haxor into any site that I believe may be harboring this data?
Jack, that has to be one of the best done animated GIF's I have ever seen. Only 125KB too. It even came right up in my old Netscape 3. Just wanted to feed back I appreciated it. Your work put a lot of words into clearer perspective.
If some corporation is going to sponsor the music, I would not hold it against them at all if they figured out how to get their product mentioned in the lyrics.. kinda like some advertisers opt for product placement in movies instead of interstitial annoyances.
I still remember the old Alka-Seltzer ads which spawned a hit song.. "no matter what shape your tummy's in"...
That is what surprises me. I thought they were doing this already, but then I have never signed up for PayPal and am quite ignorant of their operations.
It was my take that they could keep an accounting by providing the consumer one trusted entity to hold their CC info and make aggregated withdrawals, while providing the merchant an aggregated payment for "drop-shipped" services.
The aggregation would eliminate all the clutter on both ends. Each consumer pays PayPal "X[consumerID]" dollars for stuff they ordered, while each merchant recieves "Y[merchantID]" dollars from PayPal for stuff they shipped to wherever at the request of PayPal. One of the prior posts made a funny jab at the log, but I think he was right on.. yes, the logs would probably look like that.. and if you were doing a fraud trace, you could look up those keys in a database and still isolate the transactions...because it is forseeable to me that viral payloads may include a bot to make unauthorized online purchases of viewables or something equally hard to verify.
There may also be the email flurries of spam that tries to make micropayment purchases in your name very similar to those phone scams running around where you are encouraged to dial some number before you realize its handled by some company overseas and the per-minute charges are outrageous and the whole object of the scam was to get you to place the call, thereby justifying collection.
Okay.. from the merchant's side.. he does not wanna mess with trying to account for a 5 cent sale.. so lets calculate the a 0.005 probability ( thats 5 cents out of 10 dollars ) and assign that probability to a ten dollar token, that the token is any good. So, in effect, the merchant is gambling he is going to get paid - in this case, for the sum of 5 cents, he accepts a 0.005 probability he gets $10. Basically, its just like gambling, where PepperCoin is the "house". But over millions of transactions, statistics would approximate the same return to the merchant as if he tallied all the micropayments.. but the merchant does not have to worry with millions of tiny payments, he works with thousands of larger consistent payments. And is willing to accept the accounting simplicity as tradeoff against any probability error, as well as the overhead of the "house cut". This technique allows the processing of billions of payments without keeping detailed records on each... the only thing going through is the statistical averages of who gets paid what.
Well anyway, thats my *understanding* of how this thing works...
One neat thing is that it appears any identifying information to the purchaser would be lost in the "noise". comments invited.
Once the means to collect it was in place.. see what happened?
Problem is that by the time these things start really hitting the market, some yodel will come out with some upgrade to the technology that yields a "quantum leap in improved DRM" and render your unit obsolete with the stroke of a pen.
Actually, I guess I am still pissed at the CD industry for finding ways of rendering their CD's which I purchased to be unplayable on my computer, although the P2P MP3's which they were at war with continue to play just fine. And I considered the CD to be a well documented format that looked like something stable enough to invest in. Turns out now buying a CD for me is a risky investment.. worse than the days I used to make coasters on my burner.. except they are not $5 coasters, they are $20 coasters... and it was nothing I did.. its just the luck of the draw that I get one that they didn't tamper with the format, which I thought was supposed to be a standard and everyone agreed upon.
I just don't trust them anymore. They may say they abide by standards, but I am powerless to hold them to it.
I live by that one. I am afraid no sooner than I make a thousand dollar investment, some standards will change, or somebody will come out another way of doing the same thing, but incompatible, just as they do these days with web browser technologies. The display is just way too much investment for it to be a throw-away next year or so when the powers that be want to churn the market again.
I am not a corporation... I flat do not have the resources to replace my infrastructure everytime somebody changes the standards.. I pick one that I believe will be supported for at least 25 years or so. I have little confidence the digital technology has matured enough, and besides there is not enough legacy product out there so that those of us who have already spent our resources to buy this can not exert very much pressure to hold the standards compatible with what we have invested in. Its kinda like if I have an electric car that uses a specific battery and they want to change the battery design in such a manner as to render my investment in the car useless, I really do not have much say in it. They have my money.. it still has value, but that which they sold me has lost its value because it is no longer supported.
Another thing that scares me is that the spectrum space for conventional NTSC channels is wanted by others, and I understand there is a substantial push to encourage us to abandon those frequencies so they can be reassigned to others. Problem is once we give up the "free" TV we have now, just how long will the Digital TV remain attractive when the incentives to get the public to switch over are removed. Could TV, enhanced with interactive digital technologies, get just as irritating to work with as a lot of websites we've stumbled on? You know the ones that once you step on them, they follow you like stray cats follow a cat in heat?
I would have said a couple of years ago, no problem, I would just code around it. But this is high volume, they will be doing it in hardware, and we now have all sorts of law in place to severly deal with anyone who may share how to deal with any annoyances the powers that be dish out.
They proudly talk about their "multi-pronged approaches" in their business plans.. how to ram ads at us, how to force us into compliance, how to deal with those who get around it, etc....however one of those prongs is literally going to have to be rammed up my (insert appropriate bodypart) to get me to part with my money for it.
I used to work in a tiny aerospace firm. We got bought out by a big firm. They brought in loads of professional executive-suit types that had business-seminar trained personnel skills. Now, instead of being good engineers, we were expected to be "team players" which was a code word for backing up the executive types on wherever they decided to "lead" us, whether or not we could find anything in the laws of physics to support us in such an endeavor. Those of us who stuck by our guns soon found ourselves looking for employment elsewhere.
It was a question of "obedience to authority", as Stanley Milgram so wisely put it. The problem is that many of us, as engineers, could not delegate the responsibility of what we knew would be an inevitable failure, onto someone else. We, as engineers, knew if it wasn't right, it was our fault, no-one else's. Given this, we could not give management the "team-player spirit" they wanted if we weren't confident ourselves that we had the support of the laws of physics to back us up. Therefore, we *had* to go. A manager is worth a helluva lot more than an engineer anyway.. geez, look at the pay scales and who has pads of termination notices in their drawer.
Soon things went haywire, stuff went way over-budget, lots of technical problems, and they ended up selling out to even a bigger corporate entity. I am not privy anymore to how they are handling it...I'm no longer in it.
And there are few things I would like to see discussed more than this, but there are few forums other than Slashdot where this kind of topic would ever generate any intelligent discussion.
The reason I posted is that I find the whole concept to be the greatest thing since the invention of the computer itself. Here we are, surrounded by a sea of code snippets that do all sorts of things. These machines even make themselves. But we don't quite understand the instruction processor yet. This is going to require all the skills of the reverse engineer and the haxor to understand the coding underlying the genome's instruction set and from that build a compiler. The payout is absolutely enormous.
Look at us.. if you consider the three base pair which form a codon, which calls out which amino acid which is to be inserted into the protein being synthesized, as a "byte", our total genome comes to about 1 gigabyte. 1 gigabyte. To code a human! Geez, thats not much!
The ability to code into existence literally anything, have it do precisely what we need, even down to the molecular level, in any scale we want, and then be completely re-cycleable once the task they were designed for is completed, to me, is absolutely awesome.
Like, who wants to worry about overheating power supplies or deteriorating electrolytic capacitors if we can code an organism to pull its power from ambient light and perform the desired task? And that task is not limited to just number crunching either; it can be molecular manufacturing or conversions on a massive scale. I see no limit on the amount of "parallel processing" that can take place.
In short, this technology has me more excited with anticipation than anything I have ever seen or dreamed of.
No sooner that I hit the submit button, that was pestering me.
This whole thing excites me to no end... now if we could only "reverse engineer" and "haxor" this thing, we may understand how its "instruction processor" works, and be able to design some sort of compiler.
Once we have some sort of compiler, as we work with biochemists, there is no telling what kind of stuff we can code. And thats the beauty of it.. we never have to make anything.. we just code it and have it make itself.
The whole idea of this concept makes me dizzy, but it appears to be completely feasable.
It can be programmed!
By altering its DNA sequence, we can program a biological cell to do dammed near anything. We have the codes for Electric Eels. We have the codes for Photosynthesis. We have the codes to make light. We have the codes to make motion. And its completely recyclable! Foo, if it wears out or no longer provides and intended function, we can even feed it to the cat!
What are we waiting for, fellas! This is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
The Genome is source code!
If the content is worthwhile, people will hold a copy on their systems worldwide. If its just junk no-one's interested in it, nobody in the world thinks it's worth a hoot, then it will fade into oblivion.
That was my great hope in P2P networking. If its decent, even if only one person thought so, it would be kept. Even though the Library of Congress may try to keep everything ,there is much variance in demand for the data kept. The fact is that some data may be accessed far more or less than average. The data most desired will be most plentiful, the data least desired will be least plentiful, and the data nobody wants gets dropped into the bit bucket. The neatest thing is that no-one in particular is on the critical path. The production of an entire civilization is maintained within that civilization by the civilization itself.
Well, it was a star-trekish dream of mine that the public as a whole begins thinking as one organism, keeping the good stuff, excreting the junk, sharing useful stuff for all.
What scares me too is a lot of the stuff today is not only on very ephemeral media, its also encrypted so that it is readable only under very special circumstances.
It seems that content is doomed once the technology used to decrypt it is gone.
I just may be unreachable from Microsoft. It would not be the first time as I am rapidly losing compatiblity with Microsoft products as they make their changes. I can no longer see a lot of stuff that was produced in a Microsoft system. If its that important, I'll read it at the College- they have a Microsoft system - and all the support people to keep it going.
I just have to accept that Microsoft is a big boy's game, and I just don't have the ante to play.
I certainly do not mean to push against HTML. It is by far the most easy-to-use form of linking and page layout I could ever imagine. I think you guys did a great job on it. The main thing I get miffed over is how all these guys come in after the fact and make their own bastardized versions that require all sorts of specialized plug-ins to make their content viewable. But there are no telling if these "plug-ins" are honest, or if they are trojans.
The thing I love so much about HTML is that its quite easy to open it up in any ascii text editor and verify what it was supposed to do. No under-the-covers sneakystuff. Although you guys obviously went to great lengths to cover all the bases, there are those who want to do the exact same thing, but different. Like, why would I have to have yet another "plug-in" to listen to an MP3 if I already have a trusted MP3 decoder on my end? Thats not an HTML issue.. thats an issue of somebody that wants to coin yet another file format and use the flexibility of HTML to implement it.
As for my personal stuff, all of it is plaintext ascii quickies. No formatting. No pictures. The sender did not want to spend a lot of time with the tags. He just wants to tell me a quick note or show me a page link. Netscape itself is intelligent to recognize a link and display it as such. Typically the email I get takes maybe a minute or so to type, and contains maybe 20 words.
I code quite happily here on Slashdot, and much prefer the elegant HTML coding scheme over anything else, and quite happily invest the extra time to insert the tags because I know many of the posts I generate may be at least viewed by thousands of people using dozens of different browsers. The idea I can use different fonts, italicize, hotlink to other sites, whatever, is quite powerful as far as my trying to present a readable complex document that will display on whatever pulls it up. But it also means I am willing to take the time on my end to save many people time on their end by neatly formatting the document and making it easy to read. And by the time I post here, the document is much more complex than something like
By no means would I want to blemish HTML. Its just that people who spam me often use HTML as they have a complex document, often with hundreds of kilobytes of linked images. The people who coin these spams often are sitting right on top of a server with high speed links to their editing terminal, and are quite unaware of the several minutes their message is going to take to transfer if they were on a dialup. Even big companies can be completely unaware of how much time their advertising automails can take on a dialup. I even have my own ISP mailing me from an automailer and using the power of HTML to cause lots of image downloading into my machine. Sure it looks pretty, but did I really want to spend two or three minutes downloading that image of the "pleased person's face" expressing exhuberance over yet more stuff thats going to take yet more time to display? But then, I remember, this is a big company I am dealing with. Trying to change them is like trying to change a bank by pushing on it. They are ad-men. They must be paid by the byte. They have no concept of the value of time. They just find someone who is impressed by pretty pictures, and they get funded to push those pictures onto everyone else via spam. HTML just gives them the tools to do it with.
Also, many of them want confirmation that their email spray was productive, as just opening the email at the client end invokes retrieval, hence display of my IP in their server logs, of images linked to in their HTML spam. This confirms to the spammer that he hit someone who opened up and read his spam. It would not take much on his end, especially if he crafted his spams individually, to find out which email addresses spammed results in a hit on his server. This concentrated set of email addys could be valuable to him to sell to other spammers, each doing the same. I am just trying to nip it in the bud by refusing to look at stuff that the mere fact of opening it confirms to the sender that it was read.
HTML is a very powerful tool, but in the wrong hands it can be a nuisance. Just as any other good tool.
As far as I go, nobody who sends me a personal message ever uses HTML.
So I just code all incoming files with embedded HTML as spam.
If anybody wants to contact me.. just do NOT embed HTML in it.
I'm convinced this is true. I have seen way more than sufficient evidence to support my position.
My main concern is that with all this infighting egged on by the IP legislation, we have ceased to be productive as a country, leaving actually producing anything at all to be done outside our borders, outside our law.... We will eventually have to justify our very existence to the world. Basically what I am saying is that this country has just become a parasite, offering nothing to the world - as we expend our resources fighting amongst ourselves, and nobody's producing anything.
And it scares the kerpookie out of me.
No matter how you design or code anything, you are sure to step on something someone has documented. I mostly do analog design.. now there are several circuit topologies for switching power supply design.. but are any of them safe to use outside of an academic lab? Or as mentioned, can one even use a quicksort algorithm without the risk of the letter in the mail? What if I use a m-way search tree in a custom mini-database which keeps track of some activities my robots are doing... can I expect somewhere someone is going to see I am using an m-way tree and hold my company ransom for it?
I can only imagine what it is like in the biochemical industry. I have seen my share of organic synthesis books.. and how similar organic molecules are. You can darned interpret anything you want if you get Congress to back your patent. Its like coming to the building industry because they used copper wire, copper pipe, bricks, nails, whatever in the construction of the building, and you have your lawyers hold them hostage for it.
Scary indeed...
But then my great hope is the Chinese. Hopefully they will look at us and learn. They will be able to innovate and construct and hopefully use their resources for production instead of litigation. It won't bode well over here in the States, but then Congress may have another thing to consider, how do you control the masses of people once they have lost their homes and no longer have money or jobs to pay rent. I do not like to be a fat man in the presence of hordes of hungry wolves.
I was given the same advice 30 years ago.
I took it.
I'm still single.
Weight did not seem to have much to do with it, I am tall, skinny/wiry/muscle-y, but the women I met just drive me up the wall with their illogical wants, such as never liking the clothes I pick out(I like sweatshirts), want new car all the time ( I want my old one cuz I have all the parts to it and know how to fix it), and I can never do anything physical around them cause no sooner than I do, they are unhappy with the way I smell.
I am a very hands-on type and have never had workmen in the house. I do that. Whether its drywall, plumbing, fixing the appliances ( any of them, including refrigeration ), or gardening. But I do get dirty doing it, and I have yet to meet some gal that would go along with me. The first thing they wanna do is hire someone else so we can be "entertained". It's not entertainment if there's not a cash register in sight. I consider building something as entertainment, but show me some gal who gets excited about getting some scrap metal, doing a bit of work with the grinder and welder, and a little paint and carpet, then end up with a stereo rack that not only looks nice, but is so sturdy it would probably hold up the house if the earthquake tried to knock it over. Nah, they want to spend that time in a crowded dance floor, full of noise so fcsking loud you have to yell to get any probability at all to communicate, and unlike using an equally noisy grinder, earmuffs are considered inappropriate attire for such a noisy environment. Although she may consider this fun, I highly do not. My ears rang for several days the last time I did that. Yes, I have sensitive ears... if I go see a movie, I have to make earplugs out of wet tissue paper and insert it in both ears before the movie.
And there's those damned phones. No matter where I go, she's always got that damned thing in her purse and its going off all the time. Why even bother to go out. Its like trying to conduct business when you can't get the other one off the damned phone. I know, I am just old, and never got used to the idea I had to play second fiddle to anyone who calls on the phone.. but that is the paradigm.. if you do not believe me, when you are conducting business with anyone and the phone rings, guess who gets serviced - the person who took his time to appear personally before you, or the one who called? ( Be Quiet! Can't you see I'm on the Phone? ).
So take your "bad luck" with a grain of salt.
If I had succeeded in snaring one of those gals, I probably would not have a house to work in, nor money to buy any grinding wheels. She would probably be enjoying her new car and accessories while total sum of what little assets I really have go to pay alimony and lawyer bills.
So, don't grind yourself too hard. It's not worth it.
To me thats like claiming I have the rights to indoor plumbing because my great-great grandpa did it, and I have proof. Only thing it would take is an investment in Congress to get my law passed and I could maybe make a nickel a flush.
Does this really protect the individual who actually *invented* something or protect the ones who say they have the rights to it and have the resources to protect it.
The post before mine recognizing Newton/Leibnitz and the possiblilty of "patenting" calculus drives the point home.
This seems to me just to be another excuse not to work. My whole country seems to be doing this. It seems everyone is out not to produce anything per se, but to tie up anybody trying to do anything and exact a fee. Somehow this system passes as "free enterprise".
Now, if the patent protection lasted for seven years or so, I would consider it much more appropriate. That way one could profit during the market window, but not tie the works up in perpetuity.