By the way, the problem with asking slashdot's opinion is that, if they come up with an idea, it will be harder for you to patent, because of prior art. Not impossible, you just have to eradicate traces, or fake your documents that you had the idea first, but still, it's there.
Very well, then, can you come up with an identity system, that ensures that there are unique ID's, and nobody votes twice or gets to steal someone else's ID, yet the government can't tell who the voters was? How about some public key encryption like system, where one of the keys is your fingerprint, or a set of uniquely descriptive biomeasures that disallows anyone else from using your identity, yet it's impossible or unfeasible to decode from your voter ID who it was in the first place that voted? You could write down your own ID to remember, and it may or may not change over time, but how could you make certain nobody goes off and generates more than one ID for themselves? Is there a technique to insure this based on the 'other' key in your public encryption system, issued by the gov't and made public to everyone? So you'd have 5 keys or something, one functioning as a check against single-person misbehaving trying to get two votes, another serving against the gov't knowing who the voter was, and so on..
I don't think your post should have been modded troll, I don't have mod points, but there is an inertia effect, and new people coming and seeing troll, will find it hard to not do the 'groupthink.'
I read through the crap, and I was just gonna come and say law 0 is missing, but I see a whole lot of people were thinking the same.
Still, imagine if everyone would have a voting ID/password, and in the next election you could vote with it, whether from your home computer, or walking to a public terminal and using the ID there. It would be different from your social security number, and only you, and the government would know which voting ID corresponds to which registered voter/SS number. Unique assignment of ID's is a must, for nobody should be able to vote more than once. Then, once all the voting is done, and all the 280 million people in the US (or whatever percentage votes) would have their votes in a central database, freely downloadable and mirrored by the sourceforge servers when the voting is over. Then anybody could count the votes, without having to rely on corrupt vote-counters and re-counters. Single vote differences could be counted and examined by many people, and even statistics could be verified by other than the press, as the voting happens. Since nobody's social security number would be in there, just voter ID numbers/district info, you could freely disclose it for anyone to count and verify the database. The legitimacy and trust of the system would be very easy to test, since everyone could look up their own vote, and people would certainly come forth very loud when their vote is not there, or it's altered. You could have a second database logging all complaints, some massive bitching outlet, like slashdot. Now any system can be tricked/schemed/subverted, nothing is foolproof. For example, if they really track your identity already, and know which voter ID you are when downloading, and giving you your votes correctly, but modifying someone elses from the other end of the state, in the data presented to you. Well, this would be easy to catch. How about issuing a bunch of voting ID's with no real live citizens - how can you trust the government out to get itself reelected that they won't issue extra, well targeted votes, where the population/census data is within margin of error? There is already nasty scheming in redrawing voting district lines to taylor the system in your own favor, how about a little extra nudge? How about they monitor and assess which users are dumb enough, or senile enough not to be able to check their own vote via a computer - they could still go to a tax professional, and ask them to check their votes. So on and so forth, and most of the trickeries should be pretty catchable, at least a whole different ballgame than the stupid Diebold electronic voting machines that cost zillions and manual recount logistics messes, when you already have computers, online polls, and free heavy duty rdbms's. Why build a separate electronic voting machine system for this purpose, that no citizen gets access to anyway?
This assumes though that the idea of democracy and voting is something good in the first place. As someone put it, democracy is the idea that people know what they want, and get it good and hard too. Perhaps you think you get to elect someone, when you really don't, it's predecided for you, and the press that's owned by powerful interests will paint the picture whichever way they want to. Also, you only get exposed to campaigners with loads of cash - again, powerful interests decide who gets the money to get presented as a choice. As the judge put it, at a citizenship ceremony, "a lot of you come here from countries where even if there was voting, you had a single choice on the ballot, and your job was to choose. Here you get at least 2 choices." Really, how big is the difference between getting a single choice, and being told to choose, or getting two choices, handpicked for you? Does it really matter which of the two you choose if you didn't get to choose them in the first place? There might be benevolent dictator forces around, giving you a sense or feeling that you're in charge, as the citizen, boosting your morale, while in reality, they already made the decisions for you.
As you said it, there IS already an identity system in place. There is Carnivore in the US, China probably has something too. The World, as it is right now, it's organized into countries and nations. How are you gonna come in and tell China how to run their country? The only official entity that could do that with some kind of moral authority would be the UN, which already goes meddles in the internal affairs of countries over human rights violations and stuff. It's a lot more preferable when the UN tells you that you're misbehaving, than if another country tells you. But if there is no consensus in the UN, will you just let a single US corporation, or US military go in and telling people what to do, in their sovereign home land, ignoring the UN's voice?
If you can't trust the compiler that compiles your trusted code, you can't trust the executable produced - duh. What's more obvious than that. The important thing is that the compiler is a single entity, compared to the myriad of software it compiles, so there is less work involved in verifying it, and if it passes, you can then rely on sourcecode inspection of everything else out there. A lot of webservers still use the old Apache, 1.3, instead of 2.0, httpd. Just like current processors can still run old x86 code, maybe this mill of continuous new compiler versions will stop, and you can stick with a single, FDA inspected and approved compiler, for a decade, that produces trustworthy output, even if it doesn't take advantage of the latest and greatest processor features. Debian used to be like that, let things age, but now there is this massive voice out of nowhere to let's get Debian moving with fast speed, with all the Ubuntu bullshit. Nothing wrong with Debian stable waiting 5 years for a release, just like the amish waited and considered, before accepting phones. Unless you are a nukular power plant, or submarine, or hospital, if you don't like the FDA approved gcc produced debian stable from 5 years ago, you can always use a newer, unstable, semi-trustworthy stuff.
As an analogy, how can you trust meat that's not FDA inspected? Just cuz a corporation produced it? Corporations are out to make money first, and ensure public safety second, it's never gonna change. That's why we have government regulators, and not privatized regulators. A public government as a regulating agency has much better track record than private regulating agencies, such as Arthur Andersen accounting firms, that can fail miserably on trust. (You have bar exams for lawyers, accountants, nurses, but I don't think any kind of MCSE certification these days is worth the same kind of trust in the computer profession, especially when things are changing so fast that only kids can be experts, because they are the only ones able to learn fast enough to keep up. A lot of this change is artificial though, driven by the need to artificially obsolete things, and force you to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.) Even when corporations fail on public safety, such as in the Ford Pinto case, they only get a slap on the wrist. Not that gov't bureaucracy is not such a nice proposal either, but that's how we have it works with meat, and it seems to work.
He makes another good point too. Just like you don't let kids drive cars, there could be some basic requirements for letting people use computers that can create havoc throughout the world. I believe initially you could just buy the T-model Ford and freely drive it, but these days you need a driver's license, and get regulated by police, while the worth of private regulating agencies such as insurance companies, you can debate. Anything that empowers people, such as cars, can be used for both good and bad purposes, and it's all good if you only put yourself to danger, but when there are others involved, you get regulated. You can accumulate points on your driver's license for misbehaving, or get it suspended for 90 days if you do other stuff. The internet could require some kind of "passing a test," while your home computer you could do whatever you want with.
Unfortunately what I just wrote is very naive. While driving you can catch the driver in the act because he's physically there, before your eyes, but on the net, you could have someone with malicious intent, with a suspended license, use someone else's account, and release something. It's a whole different ballgame. But at least you could have kids before a certain age take a morality test, just to make them aware of responsibility. Kids don't normally break into other people's homes, because parents teach them not to, while parents have no clue of the net, plus the net is a lot more private. Also, on the net it's not a single user that gets affected, like with home breakins. I don't know if anyone has a good answer. The internet is still jus
The reason why we are in Afghanistan is not because of Pakistan, but because it provides a cameleon double view towards India and China. Taking the high-ground in any strategy battle is an advantage.
Right on the money boy. When anybody anywhere in their basement can write a piece of software, put it on the net and supply 5 billion people with it at the same time, how are you going to stop that? Easy, you require "secure", "officially approved", "nonterrorist" software, anything else will be illegal. If you dare write software that doesn't ride on top of a patented, controlled, "managed" dotnet strategy or visionary java technology, you will be a criminal. Because we can "only" monitor and manage and erect security fences around slowass resource-hungry cpucycle-wasting il-compiler languages, freely published and super efficient assembler instructions are "unsafe." Well, for now, because the two CPU competitors are unwilling to close them yet. But soon, lobby enough, and it will be law that even assembler instructions to only be shown to people signing nondisclosure agreements, or chips will themselves get mandatory super-DRM straightjacket features, in the Holy Name of Almighty Security. Forget even simple electricity costs spent on wasted cpu cycles, even when we're clashing toward a world where every ouce of energy will matter - security in the name of keeping your own power is a lot more important than sustainability and energy consciousness. Still, luckily, nobody in their basement can throw together a cpu, it requires something like 40 billion dollars to build a single fab, so you can yank anybody's dogchain any way you please, if you control the fabs. In this sense MS better start buying out CPU producers, such as their Xbox buddy, nVidia, so they can stay in control, at least from the CPU features-side, if only nVidia could subdue AMD and Intel on the CPU front. Good old free market competition is keeping us safe here, you gotta love it when dictatorship isn't quite that easy, but competition and the customer is in charge. As long as Intel discloses their assembler and chip specs, there will be gcc and linux, and they will continue disclosing their specs, as long as AMD is around to compete. And to think that AMD almost suffocated and went under, not so long ago, losing almost a 3rd of its market cap within a single quarter, selling off massive amounts of businesses to stay afloat, just before the first very Athlon was released, every ounce of hope floated on that single chip. And it worked! But how much more fragile and uncertain can this free market get in face of monopoly domination, even on the CPU front?
Let's take the folks at Enron for example, they are skilled in both "power/electrical engineering," and also "financial engineering," at the same time. Shining example of how free market forces should operate in harmony and perfection.
It's people at home where the problem is. Corporate users are easy to control, because they only have a few key people who make decisions and hand out orders, and subordinates just follow them, or they lose their jobs. These key IT individuals can be either ordered by force from the top to switch and spend, or they can be fired, straw men instituted in their places, and the show goes on. The real cash cow is the millions of consumers with their home computers, and getting them to shell out the bucks, cuz finding the stubborn spots and holdouts is possible, but a lot more labor intensive. The real cash cow has always been the home user as opposed to corporate users, and the rise of DOS and Windows can attest to, compared to the commercial Unices. Whoever could afford to choose DOS and Windows at work, could again afford to choose whatever the home desktop computers are using. That's where the real battle is fought.
Yeah, okay, the $5.99 solar-cell hand calculator that extracts enough cubic roots that would take me a day to do manually, is that worth a day's work? That's not a rule you should erect, why shouldn't something that's worth a lot to me, be of very low cost? Let's evaluate something, like oxygen, how much is that worth to you? In the free market something that is very abundant and easy to mass produce may get a very low price compared to what its true worth it, simply because the competitor suppliers are willing to produce it at that price. Especially when demand isn't that stellar. Of course there are always ways to mess with creating artificial demand, or make production artificially difficult. As far as software demand goes, it is important, but it's not a natural requirement to survive, unlike food, shelter and clothing. Soon it may be though - such as for now you're allowed to file your taxes with pen and paper, so you can survive even without owning a computer.
As far as technology goes though, I don't think you can stop computers and technology being cheaper than people in the long run - think of human calculators, human telephone switchboard operators, and if everything goes right, soon human production line workers, janitors, etc. Just because bosses find people cheaper than technology these days, that doesn't mean there shouldn't be an effort to find a way where technology is cheaper than people. If you disagree, and you think we need even more jobs instead, and a way to keep everyone busy, then let's ban automated telephone switchboards, and hire the girls back to manually do the switching for us. Or if you don't like technology at all, you think it dehumanizes people, you're welcome to go out into nature, and make a living with your bare hands. No cars for you, no wheels, no plow, no bows and arrows. Picking up a rock and using it as a tool, well, we can debate about that whether it's technology or not.
There is such a thing as too much technology though, if you cannot learn to control it - such as cellphones going off in the middle of a meeting, and the speaker telling everyone sorry, I HAVE TO pick up the phone because it's ringing. You don't have to, technology shouldn't be in charge of you, but the other way around.
Yeah, most of this support maintanence is mending artificially created problems. Fix today what you broke yesterday that fixed something else that you broke before that. How can you trust that they won't abuse such techniques?
You are often fine and dandy with the way everything works, then you get some new application, such as a new tax program, that requires you to upgrade a component in your OS, that requires you to upgrade your full OS, that requires you to upgrade your hardware, and toss the old stuff in the garbage. Behold the beauty of the free market at work, where "consumers" and their generation of massive piles of shit and waste is the utmost sacred thing in the world, which would be fine, but schemes of administering them even more laxative to keep this sacred process going in overdrive is not.
Also, with intellectual creations the demand is not concrete. You don't know what you want, you just want something - as Frank Barone said, when his son Ray Barone was writing his obituary, Frank complaining about the stuff he heard in it, and asked what do you want then? To which Frank said, "I don't know, surprise me."
I like this nickname, because it has so many sides. First, it's cute, immature, happy, childish. Childish is someone who is overly honest to the point of innocence and hasn't lost the ability to still wonder at a top spinning, a magnet pushing another one apart, or be like a baby dazzled by the colors and textures spinning before his eyes.
2nd, I tend to get overly serious and grandiose sometimes, and then all you have to do is look at the name, to come back to your senses. Imagine bugs bunny telling you these things. But still, don't evaluate what you read based on the mere name or appearance of who says it. It's a good excersize for you.
As far as hiding, yes, I too have a lot to hide, I am nowhere near being a self-actualized person. That doesn't mean I won't boldly go head on in real life under my own full identity. But the nickname is not ridiculous, because it tests your ability to look past it.
Any technology that empowers people can be used both for good and bad. Fire, knives, cars, gas, etc. Tor is not something that's likely to cause an end to the world, there are a lot more potent things to worry about.
Literary authors in the past authored quite a few creations under artistic names. It's especially nice to use names like sillybilly on slashdot, where you can let it go and voice your opinions and abuse your right to freedom of expression to the limit, without having to fear someone disliking a single sentence of yours and hunting you down for it. I mean it's not impossible, nothing's impossible, but it adds an extra fence, extra layer of safety. I don't think I'd like to know everyone's real names here, because I'd get to read much less honesty and there'd be a lot less spicy posts. I like the truth shoved in my face, from both extremes. If there is truly a real problem, the authorities can still jump the hoops, issue the warrants and track somebody down based on ip-address/isp/time of logon/phone#/witnesses.
Yes, captial punishment is a bit of an overstatement, but it grabs your attention, doesn't it. Remember the old days?
You know how when a ship is sinking, it's time to lower the lifeboats, women and children first, then the men, but the captain goes down with the ship? How about compared to the scenario where the captain gets to jump ship first, then the men, and the women and children are left behind to fend for themselves? Isn't that what corporations are like these days, the 2nd scenario? Isn't the CEO like a captain of a ship? If you cannot devote your life proudly to a function, if you do not have something to live for other than yourself, if you lose authenticity in your activities, what kind of life is that?
Is there a way to reward creativity AND the consumption of information, at the same time, instead of pitting one against the other? Such as being rewarded both for coming up with a good novel AND reading such a novel? Imagine if Euclid's Geometry was patented, and kids whose parents can't afford it, "can't touch this." Isn't it a loss to the world if someone isn't properly educated, or exposed to as much information as his interests can keep up with, and allowed to fully develop? A mind is a terrible thing to waste. In academia they used to let you freely read something, then write an essay to prove that you did, but these days you no longer get the stories on handouts, but you have to pay the extortionist class manual fees. If not yet, soon. Can't even resell your books to the next class coming after you, because it's mandatory to buy new ones. Soon it will be illegal to resell books. Soon it will be illegal to cite anything without making a micropayment, because everything will be owned. Not by the creators, but by a single entity, that buys up everything, and whatever you produce, you will have to sign over too, and disclaim even authorship, so that you can get a bit of food in return. And because a single entity will own and control everything, they will be the only ones making the profit too, hence perpetuating this state. When there is a single owner of everything, what's really different from dictators, royalty, and their divine right to be the rulers? Information democracy? No such thing. A lot of the information economy is pitted on drug-like products - games, music, videos, porn - so you could make an argument that such consumption doesn't need be rewarded, but instead you should pay for it. What if the non-information economy centered around a drug economy too, or as some other countries had it, opium economy? The pure free market without constraints and interference and regulation doesn't necessarily regulate itself into some idillic state. Then there are the music critics, and sports-writers like Ray Barone, where you couldn't say just cuz you enjoy your job, and it's like consuming drugs, it doesn't constitute education/work.
That message was to Microsoft. I'd rather see them do a good job, even if via an inferior method, than moaning.
Remember the days nVidia came out top, and all the zoo of graphics companies, including 3dfx, were simply left behind? We were almost left with an nVidia monopoly, thank God for ATI for hanging in there, but still, nVidia won because they were so damn good at what they did. I don't ever remember hearing rhetoric coming from them, they just quietly kept releasing newer and newer products, and the customers weren't bitching, except for cost maybe, that too only lately, but you always had cheap nVidia cards as a choice, unlike having a $30 version of Winblows for 2d vs. a $500 super3d gamer version, or something like that (and now even if I'm happy with my current video card, I wouldn't be allowed to keep it, because I'm forced to buy new ones.) It got to the point where now nVidia has such good cards these days that nobody really cares, it pretty much outperforms any kind of customer need, and the customer is happy, except maybe for overheating and power consumption. Why can't Microsoft do something like that? Be so good at what you do that the question is moot, because your customer base is content. Imagine having to sit here debating the rhetoric over what kind of pipelining is better in 3d graphics cards, and how to squeeze an extra frame rate out of them. Nobody cares. Why? Because it's more than good enough. That should be the example to any kind of free market corporation - the customer comes first, and the less the forcus and rhetoric that's tossed around in the field, the prouder you should feel.
As far as open source vs. proprietary code goes, the debate is not quite settled yet, though I too prefer the open, human readable, make sense formats, vs. the garbage that ado.net webcontrols spit out. How about xml? I thought xml was finally the file format to make things human readable, but to me anything coming from Microsoft these days is more like muddying up everything even more, including the internet that used to be human redable and troubleshootable.
Open source vs. proprietary is like the question what to use when describing a mathematical function, polynomial Taylor series, or sine-cosine expansion Fourier series. Both are answers to the same problem, from different approaches. If Heisenberg comes up with a Taylor-series-like matrix mechanics, and believes it's better than Schroedinger's Fourier-series-like wave mechanics, then instead of him bitchin, I'd rather have him show me the way how his method is better, and makes is easier for me to understand quantum mechanics, than Schroedinger's method does. Now obviously with waves, sines and cosines work simpler than polynomial expansions, but still, if you believe in something, such as matrix mechanics, do the best you can, and show me. I have an open mind, and you never know, they may actually show up with something that's simpler and better. But I still wanna be the customer and decide what I like, and not be forced into a choice because some ideology is shoved down my throat, and it's illegal to disagree with it.
By the way, these professors are already excercising a method of reward system for intellectual creations, and they can generate grades out of nothing - there is no such thing as conservation of grades, though there is such a thing as a 'curve.' This means creativity is not rewarded by a self regulated free market, but by a sort of an expert jury, and it's painstaking work, but hey, whatever doesn't stop someone from going to a public library and borrowing a book for free, I'm all for it. Also, the free market doesn't necessarily regulate itself into anything but producing massive piles of trash, waste and sophisticated exploitation schemes. Not to say that 'wise, intellectually guided 5-year plans' of the old communist block produce something better - you walked into a store, and all you had were size 5 and size 16 shoes, and none in between, because the factories met their 5-year plan the official statisticians gave them, and they were only allowed to produce more size 5's and 16's. Statisticians can't predict demand, but demand by itself is not sacred, because drugs have a lot of demand for instance, and so could miseducation have a lot of demand. We still put faith into professors ability to grade, and intellectual creations, unlike food, shelter and clothing, are not a basic necessity to survive. In fact you can have a ton of garbage quality information produced whichever way you go - self regulating or expert arbitrated. On the other hand, for food, shelter and clothing, demand is sacred.
Now if only grades and education or creativity credits could be turned into food. Anyway, the way things are going now, how long til we ban public libraries? And if we don't and you can keep reading books for free, why can't you use Windows for free?
It just proves that patents CAN stifle creativity, but the jury is not out 100%.
True, there are lots of lawyer companies out there whose only business model is to own and manage patent portfolios and extort money for them. As their main business process they patent all kinds of broad and generic stuff on any technology that has some kind of hope, then they sit on it, in hopes it will turn an investment. For anyone else coming to the field who missed the 'first-post' by a millisecond because the lawyers were quicker, but who would really make the damn thing work, put in the sweat and elbow grease and release an actual product for general consumption, they are shut out.
But then there are companies who invest lots of R&D money into developing a technology, and without patents they'd keep it a secret, possibly losing it to the world if they go bankrupt, and the files could get tossed into the garbage straight from the library shelves. At least this way there is openness, and public record, and in case their competitor simply bribes one of their employees to sell the secret, the initial company can still protect his 'open secret' if it's in a patent form.
And then there are companies of the 2nd case who hire lawyer companies of the 1st case to manage their portfolio and maximize return.
There is no good answer.
In general though, about intellectual property:
While there is such a thing as conservation of mass and conservation of energy, neither of which can be freely generated or destroyed, information is quite the opposite, it's generated and destroyed easily.
Money is something tailored to deal with the conservation-type world, where you can stick an equivalent exchange measure - i.e. this piece of energy worth this much money, let's exchange.
With information it's a lot harder to justify such things. How much is this piece of information worth? Well, you sell it to me for 1 cent, you still get to keep your original that you can keep selling, and you're better off than if you didn't sell to me at all. Marginal cost is 0, long term equilibrium price is 0. Note that this line of argument wouldn't work when you're trying to cut a deal on a car, the dealer can't sell it to you for 1 cent, then go around and sell the same thing it to someone else again.
So while there is such a thing as constancy of money and concept of 'transaction' in sql databases and bank systems, with information the measuring unit or reward system should follow the nature of information, capable of being generated, or even destroyed, with no conservation laws applying. Such an old reward system, back in the days of Newton, Leibniz, Guass, was reputation, fame, and appreciation of colleauges. Such things are generated and destroyed easily. Academia teaches giving proper credit to originators of ideas, and plagiarism can be a reason for dismissal.
Still, reputation and fame doesn't buy you food. It can get you a job that pays for food, but in general it'd be very hard to create a connection between the nonconstancy-world of information-money(whatever shape this takes, abstract, or printed, or ipod-stored-kudo-points) and the conservation-law-ruled material world of food. It would be too easy to abuse such connection, if based on a direct proportional equivalence, and overgenerate the credits and use up all limited food resources pretty fast. Saying that 3 information credits get you 1 food credit doesn't work, there is no such exchange rate. If you could come up with a 'fair' function that maps the infinite domain of information-money to the finite-domain of material-money, things would be easy. Are there such functions that would be fair? For one, you could monitor the current state of the finite-food domain, know how much food is available, and monitor the information-domain, know how many credits you currently have, and adjust the exchange rate on the fly. Still, who'd have the authority to issue information credits? Teachers, professors, juries? You can't just trust Pe
You are right, ethanol is not be the most energy efficient way to obtain the energy stored in a plant, because after all, the bacteria live on converting something of higher energy - sugars - to something of lower energy - alcohols - in the absence of oxygen. If they had oxygen, they could convert the sugar fully to CO2, and then all the energy would be gone. But without oxygen, the process stops with ethyl-alcohol that's released as waste, which is the lowest energy substance they can come up with, and has lost a lot of the energy initally stored in sugars.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, the problem with asking slashdot's opinion is that, if they come up with an idea, it will be harder for you to patent, because of prior art. Not impossible, you just have to eradicate traces, or fake your documents that you had the idea first, but still, it's there.
Very well, then, can you come up with an identity system, that ensures that there are unique ID's, and nobody votes twice or gets to steal someone else's ID, yet the government can't tell who the voters was? How about some public key encryption like system, where one of the keys is your fingerprint, or a set of uniquely descriptive biomeasures that disallows anyone else from using your identity, yet it's impossible or unfeasible to decode from your voter ID who it was in the first place that voted? You could write down your own ID to remember, and it may or may not change over time, but how could you make certain nobody goes off and generates more than one ID for themselves? Is there a technique to insure this based on the 'other' key in your public encryption system, issued by the gov't and made public to everyone? So you'd have 5 keys or something, one functioning as a check against single-person misbehaving trying to get two votes, another serving against the gov't knowing who the voter was, and so on..
Took the words right off my tongue!
I don't think your post should have been modded troll, I don't have mod points, but there is an inertia effect, and new people coming and seeing troll, will find it hard to not do the 'groupthink.'
I read through the crap, and I was just gonna come and say law 0 is missing, but I see a whole lot of people were thinking the same.
Still, imagine if everyone would have a voting ID/password, and in the next election you could vote with it, whether from your home computer, or walking to a public terminal and using the ID there. It would be different from your social security number, and only you, and the government would know which voting ID corresponds to which registered voter/SS number. Unique assignment of ID's is a must, for nobody should be able to vote more than once. Then, once all the voting is done, and all the 280 million people in the US (or whatever percentage votes) would have their votes in a central database, freely downloadable and mirrored by the sourceforge servers when the voting is over. Then anybody could count the votes, without having to rely on corrupt vote-counters and re-counters. Single vote differences could be counted and examined by many people, and even statistics could be verified by other than the press, as the voting happens. Since nobody's social security number would be in there, just voter ID numbers/district info, you could freely disclose it for anyone to count and verify the database. The legitimacy and trust of the system would be very easy to test, since everyone could look up their own vote, and people would certainly come forth very loud when their vote is not there, or it's altered. You could have a second database logging all complaints, some massive bitching outlet, like slashdot. Now any system can be tricked/schemed/subverted, nothing is foolproof. For example, if they really track your identity already, and know which voter ID you are when downloading, and giving you your votes correctly, but modifying someone elses from the other end of the state, in the data presented to you. Well, this would be easy to catch. How about issuing a bunch of voting ID's with no real live citizens - how can you trust the government out to get itself reelected that they won't issue extra, well targeted votes, where the population/census data is within margin of error? There is already nasty scheming in redrawing voting district lines to taylor the system in your own favor, how about a little extra nudge? How about they monitor and assess which users are dumb enough, or senile enough not to be able to check their own vote via a computer - they could still go to a tax professional, and ask them to check their votes. So on and so forth, and most of the trickeries should be pretty catchable, at least a whole different ballgame than the stupid Diebold electronic voting machines that cost zillions and manual recount logistics messes, when you already have computers, online polls, and free heavy duty rdbms's. Why build a separate electronic voting machine system for this purpose, that no citizen gets access to anyway?
This assumes though that the idea of democracy and voting is something good in the first place. As someone put it, democracy is the idea that people know what they want, and get it good and hard too. Perhaps you think you get to elect someone, when you really don't, it's predecided for you, and the press that's owned by powerful interests will paint the picture whichever way they want to. Also, you only get exposed to campaigners with loads of cash - again, powerful interests decide who gets the money to get presented as a choice.
As the judge put it, at a citizenship ceremony, "a lot of you come here from countries where even if there was voting, you had a single choice on the ballot, and your job was to choose. Here you get at least 2 choices." Really, how big is the difference between getting a single choice, and being told to choose, or getting two choices, handpicked for you? Does it really matter which of the two you choose if you didn't get to choose them in the first place? There might be benevolent dictator forces around, giving you a sense or feeling that you're in charge, as the citizen, boosting your morale, while in reality, they already made the decisions for you.
As you said it, there IS already an identity system in place. There is Carnivore in the US, China probably has something too. The World, as it is right now, it's organized into countries and nations. How are you gonna come in and tell China how to run their country? The only official entity that could do that with some kind of moral authority would be the UN, which already goes meddles in the internal affairs of countries over human rights violations and stuff. It's a lot more preferable when the UN tells you that you're misbehaving, than if another country tells you. But if there is no consensus in the UN, will you just let a single US corporation, or US military go in and telling people what to do, in their sovereign home land, ignoring the UN's voice?
If you can't trust the compiler that compiles your trusted code, you can't trust the executable produced - duh. What's more obvious than that. The important thing is that the compiler is a single entity, compared to the myriad of software it compiles, so there is less work involved in verifying it, and if it passes, you can then rely on sourcecode inspection of everything else out there. A lot of webservers still use the old Apache, 1.3, instead of 2.0, httpd. Just like current processors can still run old x86 code, maybe this mill of continuous new compiler versions will stop, and you can stick with a single, FDA inspected and approved compiler, for a decade, that produces trustworthy output, even if it doesn't take advantage of the latest and greatest processor features. Debian used to be like that, let things age, but now there is this massive voice out of nowhere to let's get Debian moving with fast speed, with all the Ubuntu bullshit. Nothing wrong with Debian stable waiting 5 years for a release, just like the amish waited and considered, before accepting phones. Unless you are a nukular power plant, or submarine, or hospital, if you don't like the FDA approved gcc produced debian stable from 5 years ago, you can always use a newer, unstable, semi-trustworthy stuff.
As an analogy, how can you trust meat that's not FDA inspected? Just cuz a corporation produced it? Corporations are out to make money first, and ensure public safety second, it's never gonna change. That's why we have government regulators, and not privatized regulators. A public government as a regulating agency has much better track record than private regulating agencies, such as Arthur Andersen accounting firms, that can fail miserably on trust. (You have bar exams for lawyers, accountants, nurses, but I don't think any kind of MCSE certification these days is worth the same kind of trust in the computer profession, especially when things are changing so fast that only kids can be experts, because they are the only ones able to learn fast enough to keep up. A lot of this change is artificial though, driven by the need to artificially obsolete things, and force you to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.) Even when corporations fail on public safety, such as in the Ford Pinto case, they only get a slap on the wrist. Not that gov't bureaucracy is not such a nice proposal either, but that's how we have it works with meat, and it seems to work.
He makes another good point too. Just like you don't let kids drive cars, there could be some basic requirements for letting people use computers that can create havoc throughout the world. I believe initially you could just buy the T-model Ford and freely drive it, but these days you need a driver's license, and get regulated by police, while the worth of private regulating agencies such as insurance companies, you can debate. Anything that empowers people, such as cars, can be used for both good and bad purposes, and it's all good if you only put yourself to danger, but when there are others involved, you get regulated. You can accumulate points on your driver's license for misbehaving, or get it suspended for 90 days if you do other stuff. The internet could require some kind of "passing a test," while your home computer you could do whatever you want with.
Unfortunately what I just wrote is very naive. While driving you can catch the driver in the act because he's physically there, before your eyes, but on the net, you could have someone with malicious intent, with a suspended license, use someone else's account, and release something. It's a whole different ballgame. But at least you could have kids before a certain age take a morality test, just to make them aware of responsibility. Kids don't normally break into other people's homes, because parents teach them not to, while parents have no clue of the net, plus the net is a lot more private. Also, on the net it's not a single user that gets affected, like with home breakins. I don't know if anyone has a good answer. The internet is still jus
The reason why we are in Afghanistan is not because of Pakistan, but because it provides a cameleon double view towards India and China. Taking the high-ground in any strategy battle is an advantage.
I think he was very much on the mark, in every respect.
Right on the money boy. When anybody anywhere in their basement can write a piece of software, put it on the net and supply 5 billion people with it at the same time, how are you going to stop that? Easy, you require "secure", "officially approved", "nonterrorist" software, anything else will be illegal. If you dare write software that doesn't ride on top of a patented, controlled, "managed" dotnet strategy or visionary java technology, you will be a criminal. Because we can "only" monitor and manage and erect security fences around slowass resource-hungry cpucycle-wasting il-compiler languages, freely published and super efficient assembler instructions are "unsafe." Well, for now, because the two CPU competitors are unwilling to close them yet. But soon, lobby enough, and it will be law that even assembler instructions to only be shown to people signing nondisclosure agreements, or chips will themselves get mandatory super-DRM straightjacket features, in the Holy Name of Almighty Security. Forget even simple electricity costs spent on wasted cpu cycles, even when we're clashing toward a world where every ouce of energy will matter - security in the name of keeping your own power is a lot more important than sustainability and energy consciousness. Still, luckily, nobody in their basement can throw together a cpu, it requires something like 40 billion dollars to build a single fab, so you can yank anybody's dogchain any way you please, if you control the fabs. In this sense MS better start buying out CPU producers, such as their Xbox buddy, nVidia, so they can stay in control, at least from the CPU features-side, if only nVidia could subdue AMD and Intel on the CPU front. Good old free market competition is keeping us safe here, you gotta love it when dictatorship isn't quite that easy, but competition and the customer is in charge. As long as Intel discloses their assembler and chip specs, there will be gcc and linux, and they will continue disclosing their specs, as long as AMD is around to compete. And to think that AMD almost suffocated and went under, not so long ago, losing almost a 3rd of its market cap within a single quarter, selling off massive amounts of businesses to stay afloat, just before the first very Athlon was released, every ounce of hope floated on that single chip. And it worked! But how much more fragile and uncertain can this free market get in face of monopoly domination, even on the CPU front?
Let's take the folks at Enron for example, they are skilled in both "power/electrical engineering," and also "financial engineering," at the same time. Shining example of how free market forces should operate in harmony and perfection.
You forgot: + PROFIT! Ching ching! With a profit margin of 90%, all the other costs in the price are minuscule.
It's people at home where the problem is. Corporate users are easy to control, because they only have a few key people who make decisions and hand out orders, and subordinates just follow them, or they lose their jobs. These key IT individuals can be either ordered by force from the top to switch and spend, or they can be fired, straw men instituted in their places, and the show goes on. The real cash cow is the millions of consumers with their home computers, and getting them to shell out the bucks, cuz finding the stubborn spots and holdouts is possible, but a lot more labor intensive. The real cash cow has always been the home user as opposed to corporate users, and the rise of DOS and Windows can attest to, compared to the commercial Unices. Whoever could afford to choose DOS and Windows at work, could again afford to choose whatever the home desktop computers are using. That's where the real battle is fought.
Yeah, okay, the $5.99 solar-cell hand calculator that extracts enough cubic roots that would take me a day to do manually, is that worth a day's work? That's not a rule you should erect, why shouldn't something that's worth a lot to me, be of very low cost? Let's evaluate something, like oxygen, how much is that worth to you? In the free market something that is very abundant and easy to mass produce may get a very low price compared to what its true worth it, simply because the competitor suppliers are willing to produce it at that price. Especially when demand isn't that stellar. Of course there are always ways to mess with creating artificial demand, or make production artificially difficult. As far as software demand goes, it is important, but it's not a natural requirement to survive, unlike food, shelter and clothing. Soon it may be though - such as for now you're allowed to file your taxes with pen and paper, so you can survive even without owning a computer. As far as technology goes though, I don't think you can stop computers and technology being cheaper than people in the long run - think of human calculators, human telephone switchboard operators, and if everything goes right, soon human production line workers, janitors, etc. Just because bosses find people cheaper than technology these days, that doesn't mean there shouldn't be an effort to find a way where technology is cheaper than people. If you disagree, and you think we need even more jobs instead, and a way to keep everyone busy, then let's ban automated telephone switchboards, and hire the girls back to manually do the switching for us. Or if you don't like technology at all, you think it dehumanizes people, you're welcome to go out into nature, and make a living with your bare hands. No cars for you, no wheels, no plow, no bows and arrows. Picking up a rock and using it as a tool, well, we can debate about that whether it's technology or not. There is such a thing as too much technology though, if you cannot learn to control it - such as cellphones going off in the middle of a meeting, and the speaker telling everyone sorry, I HAVE TO pick up the phone because it's ringing. You don't have to, technology shouldn't be in charge of you, but the other way around.
Yeah, most of this support maintanence is mending artificially created problems. Fix today what you broke yesterday that fixed something else that you broke before that. How can you trust that they won't abuse such techniques?
You are often fine and dandy with the way everything works, then you get some new application, such as a new tax program, that requires you to upgrade a component in your OS, that requires you to upgrade your full OS, that requires you to upgrade your hardware, and toss the old stuff in the garbage. Behold the beauty of the free market at work, where "consumers" and their generation of massive piles of shit and waste is the utmost sacred thing in the world, which would be fine, but schemes of administering them even more laxative to keep this sacred process going in overdrive is not.
Also, with intellectual creations the demand is not concrete. You don't know what you want, you just want something - as Frank Barone said, when his son Ray Barone was writing his obituary, Frank complaining about the stuff he heard in it, and asked what do you want then? To which Frank said, "I don't know, surprise me."
I like this nickname, because it has so many sides. First, it's cute, immature, happy, childish. Childish is someone who is overly honest to the point of innocence and hasn't lost the ability to still wonder at a top spinning, a magnet pushing another one apart, or be like a baby dazzled by the colors and textures spinning before his eyes. 2nd, I tend to get overly serious and grandiose sometimes, and then all you have to do is look at the name, to come back to your senses. Imagine bugs bunny telling you these things. But still, don't evaluate what you read based on the mere name or appearance of who says it. It's a good excersize for you. As far as hiding, yes, I too have a lot to hide, I am nowhere near being a self-actualized person. That doesn't mean I won't boldly go head on in real life under my own full identity. But the nickname is not ridiculous, because it tests your ability to look past it.
Any technology that empowers people can be used both for good and bad. Fire, knives, cars, gas, etc. Tor is not something that's likely to cause an end to the world, there are a lot more potent things to worry about.
Literary authors in the past authored quite a few creations under artistic names. It's especially nice to use names like sillybilly on slashdot, where you can let it go and voice your opinions and abuse your right to freedom of expression to the limit, without having to fear someone disliking a single sentence of yours and hunting you down for it. I mean it's not impossible, nothing's impossible, but it adds an extra fence, extra layer of safety. I don't think I'd like to know everyone's real names here, because I'd get to read much less honesty and there'd be a lot less spicy posts. I like the truth shoved in my face, from both extremes. If there is truly a real problem, the authorities can still jump the hoops, issue the warrants and track somebody down based on ip-address/isp/time of logon/phone#/witnesses.
Yes, captial punishment is a bit of an overstatement, but it grabs your attention, doesn't it. Remember the old days? You know how when a ship is sinking, it's time to lower the lifeboats, women and children first, then the men, but the captain goes down with the ship? How about compared to the scenario where the captain gets to jump ship first, then the men, and the women and children are left behind to fend for themselves? Isn't that what corporations are like these days, the 2nd scenario? Isn't the CEO like a captain of a ship? If you cannot devote your life proudly to a function, if you do not have something to live for other than yourself, if you lose authenticity in your activities, what kind of life is that?
Is there a way to reward creativity AND the consumption of information, at the same time, instead of pitting one against the other? Such as being rewarded both for coming up with a good novel AND reading such a novel? Imagine if Euclid's Geometry was patented, and kids whose parents can't afford it, "can't touch this." Isn't it a loss to the world if someone isn't properly educated, or exposed to as much information as his interests can keep up with, and allowed to fully develop? A mind is a terrible thing to waste. In academia they used to let you freely read something, then write an essay to prove that you did, but these days you no longer get the stories on handouts, but you have to pay the extortionist class manual fees. If not yet, soon. Can't even resell your books to the next class coming after you, because it's mandatory to buy new ones. Soon it will be illegal to resell books. Soon it will be illegal to cite anything without making a micropayment, because everything will be owned. Not by the creators, but by a single entity, that buys up everything, and whatever you produce, you will have to sign over too, and disclaim even authorship, so that you can get a bit of food in return. And because a single entity will own and control everything, they will be the only ones making the profit too, hence perpetuating this state. When there is a single owner of everything, what's really different from dictators, royalty, and their divine right to be the rulers? Information democracy? No such thing.
A lot of the information economy is pitted on drug-like products - games, music, videos, porn - so you could make an argument that such consumption doesn't need be rewarded, but instead you should pay for it. What if the non-information economy centered around a drug economy too, or as some other countries had it, opium economy? The pure free market without constraints and interference and regulation doesn't necessarily regulate itself into some idillic state.
Then there are the music critics, and sports-writers like Ray Barone, where you couldn't say just cuz you enjoy your job, and it's like consuming drugs, it doesn't constitute education/work.
That message was to Microsoft. I'd rather see them do a good job, even if via an inferior method, than moaning.
Remember the days nVidia came out top, and all the zoo of graphics companies, including 3dfx, were simply left behind? We were almost left with an nVidia monopoly, thank God for ATI for hanging in there, but still, nVidia won because they were so damn good at what they did. I don't ever remember hearing rhetoric coming from them, they just quietly kept releasing newer and newer products, and the customers weren't bitching, except for cost maybe, that too only lately, but you always had cheap nVidia cards as a choice, unlike having a $30 version of Winblows for 2d vs. a $500 super3d gamer version, or something like that (and now even if I'm happy with my current video card, I wouldn't be allowed to keep it, because I'm forced to buy new ones.) It got to the point where now nVidia has such good cards these days that nobody really cares, it pretty much outperforms any kind of customer need, and the customer is happy, except maybe for overheating and power consumption. Why can't Microsoft do something like that? Be so good at what you do that the question is moot, because your customer base is content. Imagine having to sit here debating the rhetoric over what kind of pipelining is better in 3d graphics cards, and how to squeeze an extra frame rate out of them. Nobody cares. Why? Because it's more than good enough. That should be the example to any kind of free market corporation - the customer comes first, and the less the forcus and rhetoric that's tossed around in the field, the prouder you should feel.
As far as open source vs. proprietary code goes, the debate is not quite settled yet, though I too prefer the open, human readable, make sense formats, vs. the garbage that ado.net webcontrols spit out. How about xml? I thought xml was finally the file format to make things human readable, but to me anything coming from Microsoft these days is more like muddying up everything even more, including the internet that used to be human redable and troubleshootable.
Open source vs. proprietary is like the question what to use when describing a mathematical function, polynomial Taylor series, or sine-cosine expansion Fourier series. Both are answers to the same problem, from different approaches. If Heisenberg comes up with a Taylor-series-like matrix mechanics, and believes it's better than Schroedinger's Fourier-series-like wave mechanics, then instead of him bitchin, I'd rather have him show me the way how his method is better, and makes is easier for me to understand quantum mechanics, than Schroedinger's method does. Now obviously with waves, sines and cosines work simpler than polynomial expansions, but still, if you believe in something, such as matrix mechanics, do the best you can, and show me. I have an open mind, and you never know, they may actually show up with something that's simpler and better. But I still wanna be the customer and decide what I like, and not be forced into a choice because some ideology is shoved down my throat, and it's illegal to disagree with it.
By the way, these professors are already excercising a method of reward system for intellectual creations, and they can generate grades out of nothing - there is no such thing as conservation of grades, though there is such a thing as a 'curve.' This means creativity is not rewarded by a self regulated free market, but by a sort of an expert jury, and it's painstaking work, but hey, whatever doesn't stop someone from going to a public library and borrowing a book for free, I'm all for it. Also, the free market doesn't necessarily regulate itself into anything but producing massive piles of trash, waste and sophisticated exploitation schemes. Not to say that 'wise, intellectually guided 5-year plans' of the old communist block produce something better - you walked into a store, and all you had were size 5 and size 16 shoes, and none in between, because the factories met their 5-year plan the official statisticians gave them, and they were only allowed to produce more size 5's and 16's. Statisticians can't predict demand, but demand by itself is not sacred, because drugs have a lot of demand for instance, and so could miseducation have a lot of demand. We still put faith into professors ability to grade, and intellectual creations, unlike food, shelter and clothing, are not a basic necessity to survive. In fact you can have a ton of garbage quality information produced whichever way you go - self regulating or expert arbitrated. On the other hand, for food, shelter and clothing, demand is sacred. Now if only grades and education or creativity credits could be turned into food. Anyway, the way things are going now, how long til we ban public libraries? And if we don't and you can keep reading books for free, why can't you use Windows for free?
It just proves that patents CAN stifle creativity, but the jury is not out 100%.
True, there are lots of lawyer companies out there whose only business model is to own and manage patent portfolios and extort money for them. As their main business process they patent all kinds of broad and generic stuff on any technology that has some kind of hope, then they sit on it, in hopes it will turn an investment. For anyone else coming to the field who missed the 'first-post' by a millisecond because the lawyers were quicker, but who would really make the damn thing work, put in the sweat and elbow grease and release an actual product for general consumption, they are shut out.
But then there are companies who invest lots of R&D money into developing a technology, and without patents they'd keep it a secret, possibly losing it to the world if they go bankrupt, and the files could get tossed into the garbage straight from the library shelves. At least this way there is openness, and public record, and in case their competitor simply bribes one of their employees to sell the secret, the initial company can still protect his 'open secret' if it's in a patent form.
And then there are companies of the 2nd case who hire lawyer companies of the 1st case to manage their portfolio and maximize return.
There is no good answer.
In general though, about intellectual property:
While there is such a thing as conservation of mass and conservation of energy, neither of which can be freely generated or destroyed, information is quite the opposite, it's generated and destroyed easily.
Money is something tailored to deal with the conservation-type world, where you can stick an equivalent exchange measure - i.e. this piece of energy worth this much money, let's exchange.
With information it's a lot harder to justify such things. How much is this piece of information worth? Well, you sell it to me for 1 cent, you still get to keep your original that you can keep selling, and you're better off than if you didn't sell to me at all. Marginal cost is 0, long term equilibrium price is 0. Note that this line of argument wouldn't work when you're trying to cut a deal on a car, the dealer can't sell it to you for 1 cent, then go around and sell the same thing it to someone else again.
So while there is such a thing as constancy of money and concept of 'transaction' in sql databases and bank systems, with information the measuring unit or reward system should follow the nature of information, capable of being generated, or even destroyed, with no conservation laws applying. Such an old reward system, back in the days of Newton, Leibniz, Guass, was reputation, fame, and appreciation of colleauges. Such things are generated and destroyed easily. Academia teaches giving proper credit to originators of ideas, and plagiarism can be a reason for dismissal.
Still, reputation and fame doesn't buy you food. It can get you a job that pays for food, but in general it'd be very hard to create a connection between the nonconstancy-world of information-money(whatever shape this takes, abstract, or printed, or ipod-stored-kudo-points) and the conservation-law-ruled material world of food. It would be too easy to abuse such connection, if based on a direct proportional equivalence, and overgenerate the credits and use up all limited food resources pretty fast. Saying that 3 information credits get you 1 food credit doesn't work, there is no such exchange rate. If you could come up with a 'fair' function that maps the infinite domain of information-money to the finite-domain of material-money, things would be easy. Are there such functions that would be fair? For one, you could monitor the current state of the finite-food domain, know how much food is available, and monitor the information-domain, know how many credits you currently have, and adjust the exchange rate on the fly. Still, who'd have the authority to issue information credits? Teachers, professors, juries? You can't just trust Pe
You are right, ethanol is not be the most energy efficient way to obtain the energy stored in a plant, because after all, the bacteria live on converting something of higher energy - sugars - to something of lower energy - alcohols - in the absence of oxygen. If they had oxygen, they could convert the sugar fully to CO2, and then all the energy would be gone. But without oxygen, the process stops with ethyl-alcohol that's released as waste, which is the lowest energy substance they can come up with, and has lost a lot of the energy initally stored in sugars.