More FUD! I really do not see what Linus's problem is with the GPL3. What it does is add formal protection for 2 sneaky ways to violate the spirit of the GPL that GPL2 lacks. It is also *more* permissive, allowing more ways to comply with the requirements.
The first is "Tivoization". Vendors should not hardwire checks to prevent "unapproved" software from being run. Makes no difference whether these checks are done in the software or hardware. Such a check really is software no matter that it's been hardwired in. With a scheme like that in place, you can't fix so much as a typo let alone a simple bug. Linus is apparently okay with Tivoization.
More serious is the other problem, patents. Microsoft and Novell came up with a way to restrict access to software via patent law rather than copyright law. They'd add some code to free software, then once it had gained some adoption, they'd bring to the surface submarine patents they have on that software, for rent seeking and anti-competitive purposes. GPL3 prevents that by forbidding anyone who contributes code from seeking patent royalties for their contributions. Lest you think that's not a problem, consider SCO.
They won't get us tomorrow. Time is on our side. Nature is on our side. They've been fighting losing battles against technology since the 19th century. They fought against the player piano, AM radio, and cassette tapes and the VCR. They lost. They'd like to kill the public library and the used bookstore, but they aren't strong enough to pull that off. That they "sleaze around behind the curtains" is a sign of how truly weak they and their positions are.
We shouldn't take this lying down of course. No laws can stop this digital revolution, but they can do a lot of collateral damage. Shooting down ACTA unanimously is exactly what needs to happen. They and others who'd like to pull similar stunts must be made to understand that we will not submit to such extreme control, and we aren't fooled by language designed to make it sound like a noble attempt at protecting property rights or children. Unworkable and unenforceable plans meant to attain impossible goals is a terrible reason to turn entire nations into police states constantly snooping on all private communication in order to detect copyright infringement, and worse, stopping and forbidding private communication as punishment for mere unproven allegations. I'd like to see things go further, and have these cartels sued for racketeering and corruption for even trying this ACTA nonsense and all the other things they've done. They should stand trial for DVD region encoding, for instance. For DMCA, ACTA and 3 strikes laws, they should face charges for attempting to suppress free speech, and something similar to interfering with the delivery of mail, as well as the racketeering charges.
Big Media doesn't show proper respect for the people. They and their lawyers also ought to face barratry or SLAPP charges for suing, well, everyone. Hit them hard with fines, and jail time. When they fear to lobby for such extreme measures, fear it so much that they won't dare try it, then we'll have made good progress. Ultimately, freedom to communicate should be as firmly enshrined in law as freedom of speech and religion. The whole point of the US Postal Service being under direct government control was to head off the possibility of commercial interests being in a position to abuse the need to communicate for rent seeking and monopoly schemes. No greedy, control freak cartel leaders should have any reason whatsoever to hope they can dictate what, how, and whether we shall communicate.
The first use of solar energy should be for direct heating, not electricity. Don't do energy conversions for that! Design buildings with large window exposures to direct sunlight (east side for morning, and southern side in the northern hemisphere), and they practically heat themselves.
In the HVAC industry, electric heat has a specific meaning: resistive heating. Run a great deal of current through giant resistors, which causes them to get rather hot. The typical toaster works that way. Electric heat definitely does not mean heat pumps.
Heat pumps are good in mild climates. They are more efficient than resistive heat if the outside temperature is above freezing. Below that, the efficiency of heat pumps drops off rapidly. They are basically no good at all below -10C. For cooling, they are almost as efficient as regular A/C. Because they have to heat and cool, they can't be optimized for cooling only, so the A/C has a slight edge there. Resistive heat is a very effective, simple and robust heating method, but it takes a great deal of power.
Steam is very inefficient. At least, the antiquated steam systems I've seen were terrible. The radiators did not have temperature control, they were basically only "on" or "off", so what I had to do to control it was open the window that was conveniently located directly above the radiator. If it was a little too hot inside, I'd open the window more, and vice versa. It's almost as if they intended the temperate to be regulated in that wasteful fashion.
My impression of MMORPGs is that 90% of the players are men. I never found those a good place to meet women. Hearing of a woman addicted to WoW is like hearing of a woman who sees male prostitutes.
I've also heard that more women than men are obese. Obviously, most men prefer women near a normal weight. It's hard to be enthusiastic about chasing a woman who is so overweight you wonder if she's going to keel over from heart disease in her 50s. I am of the opinion obesity is not the fault of the afflicted, and that it is more of an environmental issue caused by chemicals such as Bisphenol A, fast food, overly car oriented city design, and things like that. So I am willing to date overweight women. Whatever the reason, there's an imbalance. Once the obese of both sexes are removed from the picture, there aren't enough women left for the men.
I also wonder how much China and India's preference for boys has hurt men's prospects even in the West. Too many men, not enough women. I'm sure there's some spillover. We also have not had a big war since WWII. We can't anymore, not with nukes. Wars kill off far more men than women. We've evolved to conceive slightly more boys than girls, who live slightly more dangerously, dying enough that the sex ratio ends up pretty even. Has the necessity of not getting into a hot war further imbalanced the sex ratio?
Obesity is hardly the only potential disqualifier. Mental issues? Aren't women more likely to suffer from depression? Men never get a chance to meet the women whose depression leads them to take themselves out of the picture. I also wonder if a higher percentage of women are perfectly happy to stay single. And I wonder how much the climate of anti-intellectualism has hurt men's prospects. Men's intelligence has a more overt quality. Seems the old meme about glasses ought to be updated to "Women don't accept passes from guys with glasses". Once all the women who hate or avoid nerds, are depressed, don't want men, or have some other issue are eliminated, there aren't many left. Discouraging.
Chasing women is a lot of work. Women have it easy here. Men do all the leg work, while women can sit back and let the men come to them, even complain about all the unacceptable men who they wish wouldn't bug them! Some men even go as far as converting to her religion. Just the way life is. Need a thick skin to handle some of the harsh rejections. Often I get rejected out of hand for being too nerdy. Or so I think. It's impossible to really know. One woman I corresponded with for a month was a "life counselor" who decided that I was seriously messed up and the only way she'd continue to correspond is if I agreed to become one of her customers/patients! I was offended. Felt like the only reason she put a profile up on a dating site was to collect leads for her business. After meeting me just once, another woman informed me that she was deleting her profile! At least she told me, but still... ouch! Yet another I saw a few times decided to dump me on Valentine's day. Said she "wasn't ready", despite being a divorcee. She was handing me a line of course. I have a number of ideas what her real reasons were, but I really do not know.
It sounds like for this case, copyright could be the means to a good outcome. Nevertheless the concept of intellectual property is seriously flawed.
How do I find out who uses my pictures on the internet?
Why should a photographer have to do that in order to receive some compensation? That's a great example of why copyright doesn't work.
It's even worse from the other end. How is a user to find and compensate a photographer? Most people do want to help, want to show appreciation and gratitude, but it's not so easy. It's absolutely ridiculous and criminal that we haven't made this easy to do. We've responded to this genuine problem by letting the special interests throw users into the same category as mooches and thieves. We let them assume the worst, and they have. They've let the moralizing rip, calling us all thieves, pirates, cheats, irresponsible children, destroyers of art and culture, and more. That's not solving anything. Imagine if the WalMart greeter wagged fingers at every customer, telling us all to behave ourselves, dress appropriately, and don't shoplift, vandalize, start a fight, etc. It wouldn't be long before every WalMart shopper got sick of being treated in such a demeaning fashion, and took their shopping elsewhere.
Why should a user have to work so hard to meet such a tiny obligation? There's a lot of friction in the very messy process of compensating artists. Can't we come up with something better? Yes, yes we can. But for now, they've resorted to blaming and suing the customer over their own failure to adopt a viable business model.
peer review is intended to vet the paper BEFORE it's published
Why is that so important? You wait for a formal review if you want. I want to see new work right away. Publish and go! Yes I might waste time on garbage, but the lengthy delay of a review is more costly. If a work is crap, it won't hold up long. Besides, I've seen plenty of crap that was peer reviewed.
Some researchers want their work reviewed, but most do not. I've seen people practically write papers on the back of reviewers' efforts, which seems to me to be a bit unfair. The reviewers point out all kinds of mistakes and omissions, and with practically no alteration, the researcher cuts and pastes the reviewers' work into the paper. The reviewers get no credit of course-- difficult to give credit when the reviewers are supposed to remain anonymous.
This is not a hard problem. The mere fact an article appears in a reputable journal is evidence it was properly peer reviewed. This can be replaced with digital signatures. An online journal could sign each approved article. Or if that's too hard, a journal can list on their own website (which itself is verified with a Domain Keys kind of scheme) all accepted papers and their digests, rather like most download site's md5sums.txt and sha1sums.txt files. Wouldn't even have to have the papers themselves, just the digests.
Not that that matters a great deal. Shouldn't limit ourselves to traditional peer review to filter papers. With the improvements we have in communications, we'll see improvements in vetting processes. Meantime, in many ways better than peer review is number of citations. The more a paper is cited, the more significant it is thought to be. Already, that is pretty easy to check, as scholarly websites slowly accumulate papers and link them all together. Of course, have to be careful that measure of excellence is not gamed. You'd also want to consider who cited a paper. Wouldn't be hard to produce a bunch of trash just to pump up the number of citations on another piece of trash.
One of the principles to come out of the Steve Jackson Games case is that the accused can't be deprived of their computer equipment and data. Law enforcement may only make copies of data.
Haven't you realized that's what they want? To shut down the Internet?
They don't say it outright, but they very much wish it was 1985 for the rest of us, when less than half the population had a home computer, and the hard drive, if present, was 20M, mp3 didn't exist yet and even if it had the hardware of those days couldn't decode it in real time, and what little data exchange there was happened over 1200 bit/s modems on local BBSes, a few of which participated in FidoNet. Music piracy was possible but limited and inconvenient, with the cassette tape being the best way. They themselves are quite happy to reap the benefits of modern technology, they just don't like the rest of us being able to do so too.
Don't agree with pirating? Futile, and dated of you. Might as well act disapproving of skirts above the ankle, and shocked over the licentiousness of 60's Rock and Roll. What do you think when you run into some senior who is still upset over Elvis the Pelvis? Who thinks the young are all depraved and they and the nation are going to Hell because of the music they listen to and their general disrespect for the traditions that made the country great. You roll your eyes at their cluelessness, that's what. And you ignore them. Dismiss them as a typical "get off my lawn" senior. No use talking to them.
Sharing is here to stay. No amount of force or cajoling will put this genie back in the bottle. Today, you still have lots of company. You and people of similar mind are why ISPs dare to even think of giving in to Big Media to engage in such idiocy as these 3 or 6 strikes efforts. You disagree with the means, but not the goal. That's enough of a green light for them. Often, means and ends cannot be so easily separated. 20 or 30 or 50 years from now, such attitudes will look utterly ridiculous to most everyone, like asking for sunshine without the heat and acting as if that's such a perfectly reasonable expectation that it need not be spoken aloud because that would be insulting to others' intelligence. "You know, something beggable but not leprosy, which is a pain in the ass to be blunt and excuse my French, sir." If you want to stay relevant, you'll have to accept piracy.
Ultimate glue? That's why I'm interested in Perl 6. It's supposed to be able call C/C++ library functions directly. No more need for wrapper libraries, which is the majority of CPAN. No need for SWIG, which I find bloated.
I tried btrfs, and ended up going back to ext4. Hoped btrfs might be a good choice for a small hard drive, and it is-- it uses space more efficiently. But it's not a good choice for a slow hard drive or the obsolete computer that the small size goes with.
Firefox ran especially poorly on btrfs. I was told this is because Firefox does lots of syncs, and btrfs had very poor performance on syncs. Maybe this improvement in performance on metadata is just the thing to fix that?
I sometimes drive a Ford Anglia. Has a 1L engine, about 39 HP. Does 0-60 in 30 seconds, which is slower than everything except loaded trucks and Model Ts.
You come to appreciate just what jackrabbits most cars are, and that acceleration is not that important. They jump out to a big lead, and then I catch up because they can't make traffic go faster and can't make lights turn green in time to avoid coming to a stop. I get to my destination as fast or almost as fast as with a modern car. There are a few situations where the lack of power can be a problem: a too short entrance ramp to a freeway built 50 years ago and in bad need of a redesign, the highway with 60 mph speed limits and a stoplight every mile (you reach 60 mph just as you approach the next light), trying to turn onto a busy highway at an intersection without a light, and mountain driving. You can't be in a hurry in that car. Forces the driver to take it easier.
It's not a matter of enabling laziness. It's a matter of reducing friction. That's what Apple understands so well. And that's what Google understood when they made their main page very light while Yahoo was busy bloating their search page with ads and bling. Making people wait just one more second, press one more button, click one more link, do just 1 extra action no matter how tiny and insignificant, really does drive away users.
In guidelines I've seen for good writing, particularly technical writing, you are supposed to spell it out the first time you use it, and follow that with the acronym in parenthesis.
It is not that there are problems with the patent system. The problem is the patent system.
Why is the patent system broken? Is it because we've botched it? Didn't execute? Or is it because the idea is fundamentally flawed? Monopolies are so bad that there has to be a lot in any deal for it to be worth our while to honor one. We don't get near enough in exchange for these monopolies our agents pledge us to keep. We run around playing whack-a-mole, to our own detriment because we'd be better off if we let them be. But there's a worse problem than that. The system creates artificial scarcity. It cruelly feeds upon our vain feeling that anyone can be special, that no one else could have come up with some brilliant idea. We don't appreciate how very wrong that is. If Thomas Edison had not found a way to design a practical light bulb, someone else would have figured it out. There were hundreds of smart people independently working on the problem, but we have the cheek to anoint one of them as The Winner, the gold medalist, and everyone else can just rot. Not even a silver medal for the next best design, or the 2nd person to independently arrive at the same design as the winner. Instead, the rest of the field is told they aren't even allowed to compete any more, they have to learn a new game! Or go sit on the sideline for 17 years! And if you do, just as the 17 years is about up, guess what? Another patent to restart the clock! Any who might have eventually come up with a better design are shot down, as if not being first to market isn't already enough of a disadvantage. It was not actually meant to work like that, a patent was only supposed to cover the exact details of a working model, but this has been grossly expanded so that now a patent really does cover the idea itself. And what of cooperative efforts? Same problem on a larger scale. Instead of shutting out all other individuals, it's shutting out all other teams. This is extreme winner take all. Not quite as bad as this legendary Mayan sport in which the losing team was sacrificed to the gods, but very nearly. Shouldn't play for such stakes. No matter what we do, we cannot get this system to work as intended. That's why we should abolish it.
Police are like many organizations-- they have their flaws, but they are a net benefit. Is the patent system a net benefit? I think not. The patent system works about as well as warp drive, which is to say, it doesn't work at all. Yes, warp drive could actually work if we could come up with an insanely powerful energy source to power the drive, if dilithium crystals weren't a total fantasy, etc. Likewise, the patent system could work if we could radically alter our own behavior and nature, assuming such alterations wouldn't make us unable to survive! Anyone who sits on the sideline for 17 years will only extinct themselves.
Assuming Goldbach's conjecture is not true, what kind of numbers would the "anti-Goldbach" numbers be? Huge, for one. Maybe a primorial +/- 1 or +/- 9? That number at least could not be the sum of two primes in which one of the primes is a factor of the primorial. Same idea could work for a "seriously" isolated prime +/- 1, if there is such a thing. I imagine people have tried to come up with numbers that disprove the conjecture.
I'm thinking of a density and probabilistic kind of argument for Goldbach's conjecture. There are approximately x/ln(x) primes less than x. The chance that any two random numbers less than x is prime is (1/ln(x))^2. The probability that none of the pairs of odd numbers that sum to the even number in question are prime is (1-(1/ln(x))^2)^(x/4). As x gets larger, this quantity shrinks. In other words, the likelihood that an even number will have 2 primes that sum to it goes up as the number gets larger.
Has anyone counted how many ways there are to satisfy the conjecture for particular numbers? Are there more pairs of primes that sum to a particular even number, when that number is larger? There any big even numbers for which there is only one pair of primes that sum to them?
I also thought of trying for an even stronger conjecture. How could Goldbach's be made stronger? How about requiring that every even number x be the sum of not just 1 pair of primes, but the sum of ln(ln(x)) or sqrt(ln(x)) distinct pairs of primes? I'm just tossing those formulas out there, no idea if they're reasonable.
Surveillance? Meh. Focusing on the traffic lights, what I got out of this is that they are still brainless, uncoordinated, and poorly timed. If they weren't, it wouldn't be possible to squeeze large gains out of the system for a few chosen vehicles. How often do you end up stuck at a red for no good reason, waiting for one car or nothing? Just about every trip. What we have in the way of sensors and reflexive responses hardwired into the controls of the lights and periodically tinkered with is clearly not that good.
Are we ever going to get serious about improving traffic lights? It'd be a win on at least 3 fronts: global warming, lost productivity, and jobs. What's the estimate for collective hours lost to traffic jams? Over 100 million. Seems like it ought to be easy to agree that traffic lights need improving and that there is lots of room for improvement, and to devote some resources to the matter.
What are your ideas, other than nuclear? Didn't you say:
People respond better when you come to them with a solution rather than admonishments
If the price of gas shoots up, and it will (assuming Peak Oil is correct), everyone would quickly forget their umbrage at being "admonished", as suddenly, solutions would be more important. Plus, it's the other way around. Cheap gas has changed our lifestyles. The car is king to an unprecedented degree. Why do all those changes, and the fact they weren't all voluntary, get overlooked? We've been manipulated into much of the present day design of our cities. We used to have shopkeepers living above their businesses. Is there any good reason that's no longer acceptable?
One ugly, often unsaid part about all this is status. Car owners like cars because they are a little exclusive. Of course bigger and newer mean higher status. It's such an easy mental shortcut that people like having. Huge parking lots keep unwashed, impoverished pedestrians away from our stores, and that's good because people who don't have cars are more likely to rob! No, of course that wasn't the intention, but people feel that might be one of the effects, and like it. It's similar to the old 55 mph national speed limit in the US. That was passed during the 1970's gas shocks, to save gas, which it does. But then people found it made for safer roads, and some groups tried to keep the national speed limit for that reason.
You think $4/gallon is high? Try $10/gallon! Blame it on the President all you like. Then when you're done uselessly flogging the politicians and the liberals, greens, oil speculators and whomever else you feel might be responsible, think what you're going to do about it. We'd all be wise to prepare for those times. One thing I've done is switched to a plug in electric mower. No battery that way. The cord is of course the big disadvantage, but you learn to work with it. Everything else about the electric mower is a huge plus. Quieter, more efficient, more reliable and durable, no fumes, instant on/off, lower maintenance, cheaper to operate, lighter, and slimmer. It totally blows away the gas powered mower.
There's nothing wrong with science itself. But there are many barriers against doing science correctly. I can't say for sure if the barriers have gotten worse in recent decades. But I think yes, it has become harder to do good science. Why?
The Space Race and Bobby Fischer's day in the sun are long gone. They were good contests, and well-liked, with very positive outcomes, especially when compared to the alternative of nuclear war. In a way, it makes up for science having discovered The Bomb. It was possible that no one would make it to the moon. We were not going to suffer big losses if that had been the outcome. As for Fischer, he looked more and more unstable as the years passed.
But one thing about The Bomb: it demonstrated the power of science, even if very darkly. After that, the Space Race demonstrated the power of science again.
And now? It's really hard to top The Bomb and The Moon. But, by some measures we have. We have the Internet, which has been, among other things, a virtual nuke to the traditional business model of Big Media. Perhaps that's too subtle for the more cretinous among us.
That's what I think is a big factor in the current state of science. We're still in the letdown following the big high of the moon landing, and the awesomeness that is the Internet has not been appreciated enough.
Some of the stretching and outright fraud is a symptom of that letdown. We're straining to meet impossible expectations. It's as if we have to top the Moon to impress the public. One of the more crudely obvious ways to do that is to visit Mars. Send a human to Mars. Except it can't be a mere visit, it would have to be a prelude to colonization. Can we do that? Not presently.
Is there any other reason to suppose that fraud in science is any worse than in the past? Maybe. I think also that science has become more accessible, which on the whole is good. But a bad consequence is that it's easier for quacks, cranks, and cons to fake it.
Finally, there is motivation for the increased fraud: bias against bad news. Right now, one of the loudest message scientists are giving is AGW. The frauds have seized on public dislike of that negative message. They've been riding high ever since Big Tobacco showed them the way with "Doubt is our product", and they've corrupted and captured the social conservatives. The Republican Party has fallen a long way from the sober fiscal pragmatism of the 1950s. In those days, they were the sane, careful counterbalance to the misty and foolish idealism of the Democrats. The book "The Republican War on Science" would have been laughable in the 1960s. Most "squares" were Republicans, while many Democrats were dirty, drug addled, brain rotted, uneducated hippies. No one would have asked if a Republican president was our worst ever, as Rolling Stone did. Now, the Republicans are the crazies in denial.
If they can push you far enough, throw on enough petty, annoying, pointless restrictions, you should revolt. You'll start breaking bad laws, and you'll be a better person for it. You won't be so fearful. You'll see how foolish unthinking obedience to all authority is. You won't walk off a cliff if some authority figure orders it. You'll see that the real purpose of many regulations is to increase the wealth and control of the already rich and powerful. You'll have to exercise your judgment to discern the good laws from the bought laws that are just thinly disguised power or money grabs, but that shouldn't be too hard.
Not exactly what they intended, but then, we know they aren't too bright.
There is no reasonable way to control or regulate copying.
Sadly, I agree with you here.
Very good, except I think you are wrong to be sad about that. Sharing makes the world a better place! What has been much more damaging and destructive is the notion that we should and could treat ideas like physical property. That we should apply concepts meant for scarce things to things that are not scarce has cost us all greatly. We've spent millions on futile enforcement, mean spirited lawsuits and court cases, and bullying of 3rd parties into costly data collection, web site blocking, and other useless enforcement activities. We've squashed more artists and scientists than we've helped because we've been too willing to entertain accusations of infringement that were a mere cover for the real motive of hindering fair competition, or simply grabbing loot as patent trolls attempt to do. A DMCA takedown notice is too easy to abuse, and leapfrogs some important due process. We should have been putting those resources towards building a viable replacement for copyright.
Worst of all, progress has been slowed. No one can know what technological advances we could have had if not for this campaign to preserve and strengthen monopolies we shouldn't want to live with at all. Maybe we could have had a better OS than anything we have now, and this would have made software development easier, and enabled more research. With that, could we have had a cure for AIDS 15 years ago? Or cancer? Maybe Steve Jobs would still be with us? How about a battery good enough to make the electric car viable? We'd be a lot further ahead in dealing with global warming if we had that. One thing we could have had is the digital library. We could have and should have digitized everything years ago. Well, it's coming at last, though slowly.
As for letting Pirate Bay and Youtube copy content rampantly without remuneration for the artists, I strongly disagree
Ah, but I did not say they should not be compensated. Let's have rampant copying, with remuneration! Can we do that? Yes, I think we can. We won't remunerate by forcefully extracting a fixed amount of money per copy, we will find another way. And I think there's no choice about it. Copyright in its current form cannot be made to work. The Internet is what has really killed copyright, but don't discount sneakernet empowered with massive hard drives and flash drives. The only reason copyright works at all right now is sufferance. Even as Big Media in an ongoing act of stunning hypocrisy vilifies the entire world population as a bunch of scurvy thieving pirates, it is by the grace of many of us, our choice to pay for a copy even when a free one is readily available, that copyright still functions somewhat.
I'm so glad you solved this intractable business problem.
You're not yet a believer, I see. Sure, there will be problems with patronage, if we go that route. Not least is there will undoubtedly be many ways to con the system. We can resolve enough of them to make it work better than copyright. But first, we have to get started.
Imagine Stairway To Heaven released by Led Zeppelin on Monday 8 Nov, 1971 and then released again by the Monkees Friday Nov 12?
What's wrong with that? Why can't we have a culture in which such an action is not seen as a despicable attempt to cash in on someone else's work, but powerful homage to the greatness of the original artist? And set up a system in which Led Zeppelin would be paid handsomely if that happened, and without hurting or otherwise hindering the Monkees? The Monkees aren't claiming they wrote the song, they're just covering it. In any case, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I also wonder if perhaps you have too narrow a conception of copyright in dismissing it so completely.
That DRM would be attempted to combat unauthorized copying seems self-evident
Well, no, that's not self-evident. The problem is not that there is unauthorized copying. The problem is that there is such a thing as unauthorized copying. There is no reasonable way to control or regulate copying. Time and again, we've seen that trying to control copying is a waste of money. They spend millions on DRM schemes that are so laughably insecure that one 16 year old kid can quickly crack them. They shouldn't have even tried it-- it's not possible to make an effective DRM scheme, and they should know and accept that fact of nature. Meantime, we, the public, are supposed to help finance such idiocy by buying expensive, obsolete media that's had the price jacked up even more to pay for DRM that actually reduces the value by occasionally inconveniencing us? Nothing doing! Nor do I appreciate the implication that I would be a low down, dirty thief if not prevented, and I should accept DRM to help me stay honest. Copying is NOT morally wrong! Then they have the unmitigated gall to impose even further by, for instance, forcing DVDs to play a bunch of commercials? The War on Piracy is an abysmal failure, and it's long past time for us to cut our losses and end this war. Legitimizing copying makes moot DRM and all your talk about rights, transgressions, and shameful ingratitude. That's right, not only let Pirate Bay, Youtube, and Joe
Citizen copy with a will, encourage it!
When you suck $10B annually out of an industry
Yes, that's one of the usual objections. Artists will starve if they can't charge money for copies. We won't have anyone making movies, performing music, writing books, etc. Not true. The answer to this problem has been said many times: Change the business model. Don't try to make money from control and sales of individual copies. There are other ways. One of them is called patronage. There's also advertising, endorsements, and live performances.
Now, I suppose your next objections are that patronage is untried, and it can't possibly work, or be fair. On the contrary, patronage has been around for centuries. Patronage worked for artists such as Mozart. And today, we can do it so much better. As to the objection that it doesn't work, reflect that copyright has big problems. Patronage doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than copyright. That's easy. Indeed, we do have some patronage in place now. For instance, Canada has a levy on blank media. Yet the music industry, by the very act of continuing to sue people for copyright infringement even after the levy was in place, said that wasn't good enough. The problem really comes down to one of greed. We could haggle over the price, but the industry has done its utmost to confuse the issues, deny reality, and bargain in bad faith. We'll just have to drag them kicking and screaming into the present. Or kill them. Won't bother me a bit if that happens. I'm tired of the stench of these dinosaurs. We won't accept horrendous waste in order to prop up obsolete business models.
I know the media and millions of consumers absolutely fawn over Jobs. What exactly has he done that's so great? Really just one thing: ease of use. Going all the way back to the first MacIntosh, Apple has been fanatic about ergonomics, design, and all around friendliness to users, and it's paid off handsomely.
But when you look at some of the other things Jobs did, he doesn't look so great. There's the little stuff like routinely parking in handicapped spots. And his abusive and demanding treatment of employees. Then there's the big stuff such as his hypocrisy and attitude towards freedom. Most of all is that he's only one person. He's given far too much credit, even above the credit he took. We have a bad tendency to focus too much on leaders. What about all the engineers, middle managers, and 3rd parties whose work contributed to Apple? Wozniac gets some credit. Xerox PARC gets an honorable mention. And that's about it.
Apple has been one of the most closed shops ever. Why have there been so few Macintosh clones? There aren't any hardware dealers for MacIntosh clones equivalent to Dell, Gateway, and HP. Do you understand that clones are a big reason why the PC is the dominant platform while the MacIntosh is a niche platform, and lucky to even be that much, rather than out of the business altogether like Commodore? Settling for 5% of the market when they could have had over 50%? I don't call that good leadership. Arguably, that's mostly Sculley's fault, but Jobs didn't make significant changes to that policy. Apple was lucky to survive with that attitude towards openness. Idiots.
In the early 2000s, Mac OS 9 was old, stale, and dying. What did Apple do? Copied a great deal of FreeBSD code to make OS X. How's that for hypocrisy? It worked, and everyone thought Apple was great and Jobs was a genius.
Perhaps the Macintosh didn't matter much anymore. After 2000, it was the iPod that really put Apple on the map. If Apple has risen further, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants in music.
Why did iTunes begin with DRM? Big Media gets the blame for that, but don't think for a minute that Apple didn't like the control it gave them. Customers are the real heroes for forcing both Big Media and Apple to give up the FairPlay DRM.
Leave Scott Thompson alone? No! And Steve Jobs is not the greatest CEO ever. What a sorry, pathetic apologist Mr. Lyons is being! Does he like Lloyd Blankfein, Tony Hayward, Angelo Mozilo, Dick Fuld, Brian Moynihan, Ken Lewis, and Ken Lay too?
Stop being bedazzled by wealth and power, and not caring whether it was ill gotten! Too many people still venerate them, even now, when memories of the most recent disaster perpetrated by our wealthy elite should still be fresh. It's dangerous. Are honest people all idiots, chumps, dupes, and mushrooms? What kind of world does Lyons want for us all?
Yes. Living as I do in the West, I was taught that capitalism was the best economic system mankind had ever invented. We won the contest with the communists, further demonstrating the superiority of capitalism. But now, some of capitalism's big flaws have become more apparent.
Markets need policing, just like sports must have rules and officiating. And the policing must be honest and impartial. But we've reached an impasse. We see problems with bribery and corruption that we've been unable to resolve. We have a lot of rules, and on the basic ones a lot of agreement that they are good and necessary rules. But we also have a lot of bad rules that were deliberately put in place to erect barriers and hinder competition, to render good rules ineffective, and to discredit the very idea of having rules. The Republican Party wants to fire most of our remaining officials and scrap most of our regulations so that they can externalize even more of their costs. BP shouldn't have to pay to clean up the Gulf of Mexico because, you know, accidents happen. Making them pay is not being friendly to business! Sucks to be a shrimper though, sorry man. But Republicans aren't opposed to all regulation and policing. On things like voter ID, the height of the grass in your lawn, and abortions, they want more rules and more policing. Especially if you are forced to buy more equipment and service in order to comply. This is why, for instance, Virginia has such strict regulations against cracked windshields. They claim it's for public safety, of course. Policing and rules are for little people, not "job creators".
The supposed AGW conspiracy hasn't got anything on consumerism. Seeing a medical provider is about as risky as taking your car to a mechanic. You may get an honest diagnosis. Maybe you really do have problems that will require thousands of dollars to fix. Or maybe you don't but they want you to think otherwise so they can take your money in exchange for services that you didn't need. Our society is full of Broken Window sorts of manipulation and fraud.
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More FUD! I really do not see what Linus's problem is with the GPL3. What it does is add formal protection for 2 sneaky ways to violate the spirit of the GPL that GPL2 lacks. It is also *more* permissive, allowing more ways to comply with the requirements.
The first is "Tivoization". Vendors should not hardwire checks to prevent "unapproved" software from being run. Makes no difference whether these checks are done in the software or hardware. Such a check really is software no matter that it's been hardwired in. With a scheme like that in place, you can't fix so much as a typo let alone a simple bug. Linus is apparently okay with Tivoization.
More serious is the other problem, patents. Microsoft and Novell came up with a way to restrict access to software via patent law rather than copyright law. They'd add some code to free software, then once it had gained some adoption, they'd bring to the surface submarine patents they have on that software, for rent seeking and anti-competitive purposes. GPL3 prevents that by forbidding anyone who contributes code from seeking patent royalties for their contributions. Lest you think that's not a problem, consider SCO.
They won't get us tomorrow. Time is on our side. Nature is on our side. They've been fighting losing battles against technology since the 19th century. They fought against the player piano, AM radio, and cassette tapes and the VCR. They lost. They'd like to kill the public library and the used bookstore, but they aren't strong enough to pull that off. That they "sleaze around behind the curtains" is a sign of how truly weak they and their positions are.
We shouldn't take this lying down of course. No laws can stop this digital revolution, but they can do a lot of collateral damage. Shooting down ACTA unanimously is exactly what needs to happen. They and others who'd like to pull similar stunts must be made to understand that we will not submit to such extreme control, and we aren't fooled by language designed to make it sound like a noble attempt at protecting property rights or children. Unworkable and unenforceable plans meant to attain impossible goals is a terrible reason to turn entire nations into police states constantly snooping on all private communication in order to detect copyright infringement, and worse, stopping and forbidding private communication as punishment for mere unproven allegations. I'd like to see things go further, and have these cartels sued for racketeering and corruption for even trying this ACTA nonsense and all the other things they've done. They should stand trial for DVD region encoding, for instance. For DMCA, ACTA and 3 strikes laws, they should face charges for attempting to suppress free speech, and something similar to interfering with the delivery of mail, as well as the racketeering charges.
Big Media doesn't show proper respect for the people. They and their lawyers also ought to face barratry or SLAPP charges for suing, well, everyone. Hit them hard with fines, and jail time. When they fear to lobby for such extreme measures, fear it so much that they won't dare try it, then we'll have made good progress. Ultimately, freedom to communicate should be as firmly enshrined in law as freedom of speech and religion. The whole point of the US Postal Service being under direct government control was to head off the possibility of commercial interests being in a position to abuse the need to communicate for rent seeking and monopoly schemes. No greedy, control freak cartel leaders should have any reason whatsoever to hope they can dictate what, how, and whether we shall communicate.
It can drive my drunken self home on weekends.
My elderly relatives like to remind me that a horse and carriage can do that too. The horse knows how to get home.
The first use of solar energy should be for direct heating, not electricity. Don't do energy conversions for that! Design buildings with large window exposures to direct sunlight (east side for morning, and southern side in the northern hemisphere), and they practically heat themselves.
In the HVAC industry, electric heat has a specific meaning: resistive heating. Run a great deal of current through giant resistors, which causes them to get rather hot. The typical toaster works that way. Electric heat definitely does not mean heat pumps.
Heat pumps are good in mild climates. They are more efficient than resistive heat if the outside temperature is above freezing. Below that, the efficiency of heat pumps drops off rapidly. They are basically no good at all below -10C. For cooling, they are almost as efficient as regular A/C. Because they have to heat and cool, they can't be optimized for cooling only, so the A/C has a slight edge there. Resistive heat is a very effective, simple and robust heating method, but it takes a great deal of power.
Steam is very inefficient. At least, the antiquated steam systems I've seen were terrible. The radiators did not have temperature control, they were basically only "on" or "off", so what I had to do to control it was open the window that was conveniently located directly above the radiator. If it was a little too hot inside, I'd open the window more, and vice versa. It's almost as if they intended the temperate to be regulated in that wasteful fashion.
My impression of MMORPGs is that 90% of the players are men. I never found those a good place to meet women. Hearing of a woman addicted to WoW is like hearing of a woman who sees male prostitutes.
I've also heard that more women than men are obese. Obviously, most men prefer women near a normal weight. It's hard to be enthusiastic about chasing a woman who is so overweight you wonder if she's going to keel over from heart disease in her 50s. I am of the opinion obesity is not the fault of the afflicted, and that it is more of an environmental issue caused by chemicals such as Bisphenol A, fast food, overly car oriented city design, and things like that. So I am willing to date overweight women. Whatever the reason, there's an imbalance. Once the obese of both sexes are removed from the picture, there aren't enough women left for the men.
I also wonder how much China and India's preference for boys has hurt men's prospects even in the West. Too many men, not enough women. I'm sure there's some spillover. We also have not had a big war since WWII. We can't anymore, not with nukes. Wars kill off far more men than women. We've evolved to conceive slightly more boys than girls, who live slightly more dangerously, dying enough that the sex ratio ends up pretty even. Has the necessity of not getting into a hot war further imbalanced the sex ratio?
Obesity is hardly the only potential disqualifier. Mental issues? Aren't women more likely to suffer from depression? Men never get a chance to meet the women whose depression leads them to take themselves out of the picture. I also wonder if a higher percentage of women are perfectly happy to stay single. And I wonder how much the climate of anti-intellectualism has hurt men's prospects. Men's intelligence has a more overt quality. Seems the old meme about glasses ought to be updated to "Women don't accept passes from guys with glasses". Once all the women who hate or avoid nerds, are depressed, don't want men, or have some other issue are eliminated, there aren't many left. Discouraging.
Chasing women is a lot of work. Women have it easy here. Men do all the leg work, while women can sit back and let the men come to them, even complain about all the unacceptable men who they wish wouldn't bug them! Some men even go as far as converting to her religion. Just the way life is. Need a thick skin to handle some of the harsh rejections. Often I get rejected out of hand for being too nerdy. Or so I think. It's impossible to really know. One woman I corresponded with for a month was a "life counselor" who decided that I was seriously messed up and the only way she'd continue to correspond is if I agreed to become one of her customers/patients! I was offended. Felt like the only reason she put a profile up on a dating site was to collect leads for her business. After meeting me just once, another woman informed me that she was deleting her profile! At least she told me, but still ... ouch! Yet another I saw a few times decided to dump me on Valentine's day. Said she "wasn't ready", despite being a divorcee. She was handing me a line of course. I have a number of ideas what her real reasons were, but I really do not know.
It sounds like for this case, copyright could be the means to a good outcome. Nevertheless the concept of intellectual property is seriously flawed.
How do I find out who uses my pictures on the internet?
Why should a photographer have to do that in order to receive some compensation? That's a great example of why copyright doesn't work.
It's even worse from the other end. How is a user to find and compensate a photographer? Most people do want to help, want to show appreciation and gratitude, but it's not so easy. It's absolutely ridiculous and criminal that we haven't made this easy to do. We've responded to this genuine problem by letting the special interests throw users into the same category as mooches and thieves. We let them assume the worst, and they have. They've let the moralizing rip, calling us all thieves, pirates, cheats, irresponsible children, destroyers of art and culture, and more. That's not solving anything. Imagine if the WalMart greeter wagged fingers at every customer, telling us all to behave ourselves, dress appropriately, and don't shoplift, vandalize, start a fight, etc. It wouldn't be long before every WalMart shopper got sick of being treated in such a demeaning fashion, and took their shopping elsewhere.
Why should a user have to work so hard to meet such a tiny obligation? There's a lot of friction in the very messy process of compensating artists. Can't we come up with something better? Yes, yes we can. But for now, they've resorted to blaming and suing the customer over their own failure to adopt a viable business model.
peer review is intended to vet the paper BEFORE it's published
Why is that so important? You wait for a formal review if you want. I want to see new work right away. Publish and go! Yes I might waste time on garbage, but the lengthy delay of a review is more costly. If a work is crap, it won't hold up long. Besides, I've seen plenty of crap that was peer reviewed.
Some researchers want their work reviewed, but most do not. I've seen people practically write papers on the back of reviewers' efforts, which seems to me to be a bit unfair. The reviewers point out all kinds of mistakes and omissions, and with practically no alteration, the researcher cuts and pastes the reviewers' work into the paper. The reviewers get no credit of course-- difficult to give credit when the reviewers are supposed to remain anonymous.
This is not a hard problem. The mere fact an article appears in a reputable journal is evidence it was properly peer reviewed. This can be replaced with digital signatures. An online journal could sign each approved article. Or if that's too hard, a journal can list on their own website (which itself is verified with a Domain Keys kind of scheme) all accepted papers and their digests, rather like most download site's md5sums.txt and sha1sums.txt files. Wouldn't even have to have the papers themselves, just the digests.
Not that that matters a great deal. Shouldn't limit ourselves to traditional peer review to filter papers. With the improvements we have in communications, we'll see improvements in vetting processes. Meantime, in many ways better than peer review is number of citations. The more a paper is cited, the more significant it is thought to be. Already, that is pretty easy to check, as scholarly websites slowly accumulate papers and link them all together. Of course, have to be careful that measure of excellence is not gamed. You'd also want to consider who cited a paper. Wouldn't be hard to produce a bunch of trash just to pump up the number of citations on another piece of trash.
One of the principles to come out of the Steve Jackson Games case is that the accused can't be deprived of their computer equipment and data. Law enforcement may only make copies of data.
Haven't you realized that's what they want? To shut down the Internet?
They don't say it outright, but they very much wish it was 1985 for the rest of us, when less than half the population had a home computer, and the hard drive, if present, was 20M, mp3 didn't exist yet and even if it had the hardware of those days couldn't decode it in real time, and what little data exchange there was happened over 1200 bit/s modems on local BBSes, a few of which participated in FidoNet. Music piracy was possible but limited and inconvenient, with the cassette tape being the best way. They themselves are quite happy to reap the benefits of modern technology, they just don't like the rest of us being able to do so too.
Don't agree with pirating? Futile, and dated of you. Might as well act disapproving of skirts above the ankle, and shocked over the licentiousness of 60's Rock and Roll. What do you think when you run into some senior who is still upset over Elvis the Pelvis? Who thinks the young are all depraved and they and the nation are going to Hell because of the music they listen to and their general disrespect for the traditions that made the country great. You roll your eyes at their cluelessness, that's what. And you ignore them. Dismiss them as a typical "get off my lawn" senior. No use talking to them.
Sharing is here to stay. No amount of force or cajoling will put this genie back in the bottle. Today, you still have lots of company. You and people of similar mind are why ISPs dare to even think of giving in to Big Media to engage in such idiocy as these 3 or 6 strikes efforts. You disagree with the means, but not the goal. That's enough of a green light for them. Often, means and ends cannot be so easily separated. 20 or 30 or 50 years from now, such attitudes will look utterly ridiculous to most everyone, like asking for sunshine without the heat and acting as if that's such a perfectly reasonable expectation that it need not be spoken aloud because that would be insulting to others' intelligence. "You know, something beggable but not leprosy, which is a pain in the ass to be blunt and excuse my French, sir." If you want to stay relevant, you'll have to accept piracy.
Ultimate glue? That's why I'm interested in Perl 6. It's supposed to be able call C/C++ library functions directly. No more need for wrapper libraries, which is the majority of CPAN. No need for SWIG, which I find bloated.
I tried btrfs, and ended up going back to ext4. Hoped btrfs might be a good choice for a small hard drive, and it is-- it uses space more efficiently. But it's not a good choice for a slow hard drive or the obsolete computer that the small size goes with.
Firefox ran especially poorly on btrfs. I was told this is because Firefox does lots of syncs, and btrfs had very poor performance on syncs. Maybe this improvement in performance on metadata is just the thing to fix that?
I sometimes drive a Ford Anglia. Has a 1L engine, about 39 HP. Does 0-60 in 30 seconds, which is slower than everything except loaded trucks and Model Ts.
You come to appreciate just what jackrabbits most cars are, and that acceleration is not that important. They jump out to a big lead, and then I catch up because they can't make traffic go faster and can't make lights turn green in time to avoid coming to a stop. I get to my destination as fast or almost as fast as with a modern car. There are a few situations where the lack of power can be a problem: a too short entrance ramp to a freeway built 50 years ago and in bad need of a redesign, the highway with 60 mph speed limits and a stoplight every mile (you reach 60 mph just as you approach the next light), trying to turn onto a busy highway at an intersection without a light, and mountain driving. You can't be in a hurry in that car. Forces the driver to take it easier.
It's not a matter of enabling laziness. It's a matter of reducing friction. That's what Apple understands so well. And that's what Google understood when they made their main page very light while Yahoo was busy bloating their search page with ads and bling. Making people wait just one more second, press one more button, click one more link, do just 1 extra action no matter how tiny and insignificant, really does drive away users.
In guidelines I've seen for good writing, particularly technical writing, you are supposed to spell it out the first time you use it, and follow that with the acronym in parenthesis.
It is not that there are problems with the patent system. The problem is the patent system.
Why is the patent system broken? Is it because we've botched it? Didn't execute? Or is it because the idea is fundamentally flawed? Monopolies are so bad that there has to be a lot in any deal for it to be worth our while to honor one. We don't get near enough in exchange for these monopolies our agents pledge us to keep. We run around playing whack-a-mole, to our own detriment because we'd be better off if we let them be. But there's a worse problem than that. The system creates artificial scarcity. It cruelly feeds upon our vain feeling that anyone can be special, that no one else could have come up with some brilliant idea. We don't appreciate how very wrong that is. If Thomas Edison had not found a way to design a practical light bulb, someone else would have figured it out. There were hundreds of smart people independently working on the problem, but we have the cheek to anoint one of them as The Winner, the gold medalist, and everyone else can just rot. Not even a silver medal for the next best design, or the 2nd person to independently arrive at the same design as the winner. Instead, the rest of the field is told they aren't even allowed to compete any more, they have to learn a new game! Or go sit on the sideline for 17 years! And if you do, just as the 17 years is about up, guess what? Another patent to restart the clock! Any who might have eventually come up with a better design are shot down, as if not being first to market isn't already enough of a disadvantage. It was not actually meant to work like that, a patent was only supposed to cover the exact details of a working model, but this has been grossly expanded so that now a patent really does cover the idea itself. And what of cooperative efforts? Same problem on a larger scale. Instead of shutting out all other individuals, it's shutting out all other teams. This is extreme winner take all. Not quite as bad as this legendary Mayan sport in which the losing team was sacrificed to the gods, but very nearly. Shouldn't play for such stakes. No matter what we do, we cannot get this system to work as intended. That's why we should abolish it.
Police are like many organizations-- they have their flaws, but they are a net benefit. Is the patent system a net benefit? I think not. The patent system works about as well as warp drive, which is to say, it doesn't work at all. Yes, warp drive could actually work if we could come up with an insanely powerful energy source to power the drive, if dilithium crystals weren't a total fantasy, etc. Likewise, the patent system could work if we could radically alter our own behavior and nature, assuming such alterations wouldn't make us unable to survive! Anyone who sits on the sideline for 17 years will only extinct themselves.
Assuming Goldbach's conjecture is not true, what kind of numbers would the "anti-Goldbach" numbers be? Huge, for one. Maybe a primorial +/- 1 or +/- 9? That number at least could not be the sum of two primes in which one of the primes is a factor of the primorial. Same idea could work for a "seriously" isolated prime +/- 1, if there is such a thing. I imagine people have tried to come up with numbers that disprove the conjecture.
I'm thinking of a density and probabilistic kind of argument for Goldbach's conjecture. There are approximately x/ln(x) primes less than x. The chance that any two random numbers less than x is prime is (1/ln(x))^2. The probability that none of the pairs of odd numbers that sum to the even number in question are prime is (1-(1/ln(x))^2)^(x/4). As x gets larger, this quantity shrinks. In other words, the likelihood that an even number will have 2 primes that sum to it goes up as the number gets larger.
Has anyone counted how many ways there are to satisfy the conjecture for particular numbers? Are there more pairs of primes that sum to a particular even number, when that number is larger? There any big even numbers for which there is only one pair of primes that sum to them?
I also thought of trying for an even stronger conjecture. How could Goldbach's be made stronger? How about requiring that every even number x be the sum of not just 1 pair of primes, but the sum of ln(ln(x)) or sqrt(ln(x)) distinct pairs of primes? I'm just tossing those formulas out there, no idea if they're reasonable.
Surveillance? Meh. Focusing on the traffic lights, what I got out of this is that they are still brainless, uncoordinated, and poorly timed. If they weren't, it wouldn't be possible to squeeze large gains out of the system for a few chosen vehicles. How often do you end up stuck at a red for no good reason, waiting for one car or nothing? Just about every trip. What we have in the way of sensors and reflexive responses hardwired into the controls of the lights and periodically tinkered with is clearly not that good.
Are we ever going to get serious about improving traffic lights? It'd be a win on at least 3 fronts: global warming, lost productivity, and jobs. What's the estimate for collective hours lost to traffic jams? Over 100 million. Seems like it ought to be easy to agree that traffic lights need improving and that there is lots of room for improvement, and to devote some resources to the matter.
What are your ideas, other than nuclear? Didn't you say:
People respond better when you come to them with a solution rather than admonishments
If the price of gas shoots up, and it will (assuming Peak Oil is correct), everyone would quickly forget their umbrage at being "admonished", as suddenly, solutions would be more important. Plus, it's the other way around. Cheap gas has changed our lifestyles. The car is king to an unprecedented degree. Why do all those changes, and the fact they weren't all voluntary, get overlooked? We've been manipulated into much of the present day design of our cities. We used to have shopkeepers living above their businesses. Is there any good reason that's no longer acceptable?
One ugly, often unsaid part about all this is status. Car owners like cars because they are a little exclusive. Of course bigger and newer mean higher status. It's such an easy mental shortcut that people like having. Huge parking lots keep unwashed, impoverished pedestrians away from our stores, and that's good because people who don't have cars are more likely to rob! No, of course that wasn't the intention, but people feel that might be one of the effects, and like it. It's similar to the old 55 mph national speed limit in the US. That was passed during the 1970's gas shocks, to save gas, which it does. But then people found it made for safer roads, and some groups tried to keep the national speed limit for that reason.
You think $4/gallon is high? Try $10/gallon! Blame it on the President all you like. Then when you're done uselessly flogging the politicians and the liberals, greens, oil speculators and whomever else you feel might be responsible, think what you're going to do about it. We'd all be wise to prepare for those times. One thing I've done is switched to a plug in electric mower. No battery that way. The cord is of course the big disadvantage, but you learn to work with it. Everything else about the electric mower is a huge plus. Quieter, more efficient, more reliable and durable, no fumes, instant on/off, lower maintenance, cheaper to operate, lighter, and slimmer. It totally blows away the gas powered mower.
There's nothing wrong with science itself. But there are many barriers against doing science correctly. I can't say for sure if the barriers have gotten worse in recent decades. But I think yes, it has become harder to do good science. Why?
The Space Race and Bobby Fischer's day in the sun are long gone. They were good contests, and well-liked, with very positive outcomes, especially when compared to the alternative of nuclear war. In a way, it makes up for science having discovered The Bomb. It was possible that no one would make it to the moon. We were not going to suffer big losses if that had been the outcome. As for Fischer, he looked more and more unstable as the years passed.
But one thing about The Bomb: it demonstrated the power of science, even if very darkly. After that, the Space Race demonstrated the power of science again.
And now? It's really hard to top The Bomb and The Moon. But, by some measures we have. We have the Internet, which has been, among other things, a virtual nuke to the traditional business model of Big Media. Perhaps that's too subtle for the more cretinous among us.
That's what I think is a big factor in the current state of science. We're still in the letdown following the big high of the moon landing, and the awesomeness that is the Internet has not been appreciated enough.
Some of the stretching and outright fraud is a symptom of that letdown. We're straining to meet impossible expectations. It's as if we have to top the Moon to impress the public. One of the more crudely obvious ways to do that is to visit Mars. Send a human to Mars. Except it can't be a mere visit, it would have to be a prelude to colonization. Can we do that? Not presently.
Is there any other reason to suppose that fraud in science is any worse than in the past? Maybe. I think also that science has become more accessible, which on the whole is good. But a bad consequence is that it's easier for quacks, cranks, and cons to fake it.
Finally, there is motivation for the increased fraud: bias against bad news. Right now, one of the loudest message scientists are giving is AGW. The frauds have seized on public dislike of that negative message. They've been riding high ever since Big Tobacco showed them the way with "Doubt is our product", and they've corrupted and captured the social conservatives. The Republican Party has fallen a long way from the sober fiscal pragmatism of the 1950s. In those days, they were the sane, careful counterbalance to the misty and foolish idealism of the Democrats. The book "The Republican War on Science" would have been laughable in the 1960s. Most "squares" were Republicans, while many Democrats were dirty, drug addled, brain rotted, uneducated hippies. No one would have asked if a Republican president was our worst ever, as Rolling Stone did. Now, the Republicans are the crazies in denial.
To be a revolutionary, that's what!
If they can push you far enough, throw on enough petty, annoying, pointless restrictions, you should revolt. You'll start breaking bad laws, and you'll be a better person for it. You won't be so fearful. You'll see how foolish unthinking obedience to all authority is. You won't walk off a cliff if some authority figure orders it. You'll see that the real purpose of many regulations is to increase the wealth and control of the already rich and powerful. You'll have to exercise your judgment to discern the good laws from the bought laws that are just thinly disguised power or money grabs, but that shouldn't be too hard.
Not exactly what they intended, but then, we know they aren't too bright.
There is no reasonable way to control or regulate copying.
Sadly, I agree with you here.
Very good, except I think you are wrong to be sad about that. Sharing makes the world a better place! What has been much more damaging and destructive is the notion that we should and could treat ideas like physical property. That we should apply concepts meant for scarce things to things that are not scarce has cost us all greatly. We've spent millions on futile enforcement, mean spirited lawsuits and court cases, and bullying of 3rd parties into costly data collection, web site blocking, and other useless enforcement activities. We've squashed more artists and scientists than we've helped because we've been too willing to entertain accusations of infringement that were a mere cover for the real motive of hindering fair competition, or simply grabbing loot as patent trolls attempt to do. A DMCA takedown notice is too easy to abuse, and leapfrogs some important due process. We should have been putting those resources towards building a viable replacement for copyright.
Worst of all, progress has been slowed. No one can know what technological advances we could have had if not for this campaign to preserve and strengthen monopolies we shouldn't want to live with at all. Maybe we could have had a better OS than anything we have now, and this would have made software development easier, and enabled more research. With that, could we have had a cure for AIDS 15 years ago? Or cancer? Maybe Steve Jobs would still be with us? How about a battery good enough to make the electric car viable? We'd be a lot further ahead in dealing with global warming if we had that. One thing we could have had is the digital library. We could have and should have digitized everything years ago. Well, it's coming at last, though slowly.
As for letting Pirate Bay and Youtube copy content rampantly without remuneration for the artists, I strongly disagree
Ah, but I did not say they should not be compensated. Let's have rampant copying, with remuneration! Can we do that? Yes, I think we can. We won't remunerate by forcefully extracting a fixed amount of money per copy, we will find another way. And I think there's no choice about it. Copyright in its current form cannot be made to work. The Internet is what has really killed copyright, but don't discount sneakernet empowered with massive hard drives and flash drives. The only reason copyright works at all right now is sufferance. Even as Big Media in an ongoing act of stunning hypocrisy vilifies the entire world population as a bunch of scurvy thieving pirates, it is by the grace of many of us, our choice to pay for a copy even when a free one is readily available, that copyright still functions somewhat.
I'm so glad you solved this intractable business problem.
You're not yet a believer, I see. Sure, there will be problems with patronage, if we go that route. Not least is there will undoubtedly be many ways to con the system. We can resolve enough of them to make it work better than copyright. But first, we have to get started.
Imagine Stairway To Heaven released by Led Zeppelin on Monday 8 Nov, 1971 and then released again by the Monkees Friday Nov 12?
What's wrong with that? Why can't we have a culture in which such an action is not seen as a despicable attempt to cash in on someone else's work, but powerful homage to the greatness of the original artist? And set up a system in which Led Zeppelin would be paid handsomely if that happened, and without hurting or otherwise hindering the Monkees? The Monkees aren't claiming they wrote the song, they're just covering it. In any case, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I also wonder if perhaps you have too narrow a conception of copyright in dismissing it so completely.
I also wonder if I
You make a number of assumptions.
That DRM would be attempted to combat unauthorized copying seems self-evident
Well, no, that's not self-evident. The problem is not that there is unauthorized copying. The problem is that there is such a thing as unauthorized copying. There is no reasonable way to control or regulate copying. Time and again, we've seen that trying to control copying is a waste of money. They spend millions on DRM schemes that are so laughably insecure that one 16 year old kid can quickly crack them. They shouldn't have even tried it-- it's not possible to make an effective DRM scheme, and they should know and accept that fact of nature. Meantime, we, the public, are supposed to help finance such idiocy by buying expensive, obsolete media that's had the price jacked up even more to pay for DRM that actually reduces the value by occasionally inconveniencing us? Nothing doing! Nor do I appreciate the implication that I would be a low down, dirty thief if not prevented, and I should accept DRM to help me stay honest. Copying is NOT morally wrong! Then they have the unmitigated gall to impose even further by, for instance, forcing DVDs to play a bunch of commercials? The War on Piracy is an abysmal failure, and it's long past time for us to cut our losses and end this war. Legitimizing copying makes moot DRM and all your talk about rights, transgressions, and shameful ingratitude. That's right, not only let Pirate Bay, Youtube, and Joe Citizen copy with a will, encourage it!
When you suck $10B annually out of an industry
Yes, that's one of the usual objections. Artists will starve if they can't charge money for copies. We won't have anyone making movies, performing music, writing books, etc. Not true. The answer to this problem has been said many times: Change the business model. Don't try to make money from control and sales of individual copies. There are other ways. One of them is called patronage. There's also advertising, endorsements, and live performances.
Now, I suppose your next objections are that patronage is untried, and it can't possibly work, or be fair. On the contrary, patronage has been around for centuries. Patronage worked for artists such as Mozart. And today, we can do it so much better. As to the objection that it doesn't work, reflect that copyright has big problems. Patronage doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than copyright. That's easy. Indeed, we do have some patronage in place now. For instance, Canada has a levy on blank media. Yet the music industry, by the very act of continuing to sue people for copyright infringement even after the levy was in place, said that wasn't good enough. The problem really comes down to one of greed. We could haggle over the price, but the industry has done its utmost to confuse the issues, deny reality, and bargain in bad faith. We'll just have to drag them kicking and screaming into the present. Or kill them. Won't bother me a bit if that happens. I'm tired of the stench of these dinosaurs. We won't accept horrendous waste in order to prop up obsolete business models.
I know the media and millions of consumers absolutely fawn over Jobs. What exactly has he done that's so great? Really just one thing: ease of use. Going all the way back to the first MacIntosh, Apple has been fanatic about ergonomics, design, and all around friendliness to users, and it's paid off handsomely.
But when you look at some of the other things Jobs did, he doesn't look so great. There's the little stuff like routinely parking in handicapped spots. And his abusive and demanding treatment of employees. Then there's the big stuff such as his hypocrisy and attitude towards freedom. Most of all is that he's only one person. He's given far too much credit, even above the credit he took. We have a bad tendency to focus too much on leaders. What about all the engineers, middle managers, and 3rd parties whose work contributed to Apple? Wozniac gets some credit. Xerox PARC gets an honorable mention. And that's about it.
Apple has been one of the most closed shops ever. Why have there been so few Macintosh clones? There aren't any hardware dealers for MacIntosh clones equivalent to Dell, Gateway, and HP. Do you understand that clones are a big reason why the PC is the dominant platform while the MacIntosh is a niche platform, and lucky to even be that much, rather than out of the business altogether like Commodore? Settling for 5% of the market when they could have had over 50%? I don't call that good leadership. Arguably, that's mostly Sculley's fault, but Jobs didn't make significant changes to that policy. Apple was lucky to survive with that attitude towards openness. Idiots.
In the early 2000s, Mac OS 9 was old, stale, and dying. What did Apple do? Copied a great deal of FreeBSD code to make OS X. How's that for hypocrisy? It worked, and everyone thought Apple was great and Jobs was a genius.
Perhaps the Macintosh didn't matter much anymore. After 2000, it was the iPod that really put Apple on the map. If Apple has risen further, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants in music.
Why did iTunes begin with DRM? Big Media gets the blame for that, but don't think for a minute that Apple didn't like the control it gave them. Customers are the real heroes for forcing both Big Media and Apple to give up the FairPlay DRM.
Leave Scott Thompson alone? No! And Steve Jobs is not the greatest CEO ever. What a sorry, pathetic apologist Mr. Lyons is being! Does he like Lloyd Blankfein, Tony Hayward, Angelo Mozilo, Dick Fuld, Brian Moynihan, Ken Lewis, and Ken Lay too?
Stop being bedazzled by wealth and power, and not caring whether it was ill gotten! Too many people still venerate them, even now, when memories of the most recent disaster perpetrated by our wealthy elite should still be fresh. It's dangerous. Are honest people all idiots, chumps, dupes, and mushrooms? What kind of world does Lyons want for us all?
Yes. Living as I do in the West, I was taught that capitalism was the best economic system mankind had ever invented. We won the contest with the communists, further demonstrating the superiority of capitalism. But now, some of capitalism's big flaws have become more apparent.
Markets need policing, just like sports must have rules and officiating. And the policing must be honest and impartial. But we've reached an impasse. We see problems with bribery and corruption that we've been unable to resolve. We have a lot of rules, and on the basic ones a lot of agreement that they are good and necessary rules. But we also have a lot of bad rules that were deliberately put in place to erect barriers and hinder competition, to render good rules ineffective, and to discredit the very idea of having rules. The Republican Party wants to fire most of our remaining officials and scrap most of our regulations so that they can externalize even more of their costs. BP shouldn't have to pay to clean up the Gulf of Mexico because, you know, accidents happen. Making them pay is not being friendly to business! Sucks to be a shrimper though, sorry man. But Republicans aren't opposed to all regulation and policing. On things like voter ID, the height of the grass in your lawn, and abortions, they want more rules and more policing. Especially if you are forced to buy more equipment and service in order to comply. This is why, for instance, Virginia has such strict regulations against cracked windshields. They claim it's for public safety, of course. Policing and rules are for little people, not "job creators".
The supposed AGW conspiracy hasn't got anything on consumerism. Seeing a medical provider is about as risky as taking your car to a mechanic. You may get an honest diagnosis. Maybe you really do have problems that will require thousands of dollars to fix. Or maybe you don't but they want you to think otherwise so they can take your money in exchange for services that you didn't need. Our society is full of Broken Window sorts of manipulation and fraud.