What is this crap about a license taking months to produce and release? They should just release it with a license saying everything made with the kit is in the public domain, with the single exception to that disclaimer of all rights that any derivative must also come with that license. Why would it take more than 5 minutes to agree to release that license, and release it?
You know, you'd think it should be that simple. But to actually build legal code that would implement those protections in enough jurisdictions is a huge undertaking. Setting aside that "public domain" would no longer be an apt description of the license once the "share-alike" provision is attached, I could see how bio-oriented licenses could take that long and more.
See e.g., how much work has gone into the relatively simple Creative Commons licenses in order to make them legally solid, clearly understandable, and inter-compatible. And that's for text, a medium with lots of 'legal infrastructure' to draw from.
Legal stuff takes time, sadly. And an intended licensing result that can be described simply may involve a very complex legal document.
not only that certain areas of the mouse genome undergo more changes, but that changes to those areas are more tolerable by the organism than changes in other areas.
I think a fascinating next step would be to see if, statistically speaking, viruses and transposons were channeled into jumping into these "safer to change" hotspots rather than other, more fragile areas of the genome.
It would seem to make some sense, given all the potential for genomic havok inherent in viruses and transposons' tendency toward hopping into the middle of genes.
This is a fearsomely difficult and touchy topic... for what it's worth, here's what I believe.
There is meaningful bias against females in parts of tech culture. There is also meaningful bias against geeks in parts of female culture, as gurps_npc notes. Doesn't excuse either bias. Gets into philosophical hierarchy/expectation/etc issues I suppose.
Some of the worst cases of anti-female bias I've seen have been driven by other females. I'm not sure what that means.
Men and women are socialized significantly differently.
Men and women are biologically different. There is meaningful evidence that men are simply drawn more strongly to technology (I'll phrase it in terms of interest, rather than aptitude, but that's another variable we should consider). Since men and women *are* different, we shouldn't necessarily expect males and females to be present in equal numbers in technology fields. But we shouldn't use sex differences as an excuse for anti-female biases.
We'd all benefit if participation in tech fields (as well as the rest of society) was wholly meritocratic. It's definitely not right now. I believe females do tend to get unfairly marginalized by some parts of tech culture.
I thought this was an interesting take on sex differences, which could perhaps be applied to explore differences of participation in technology fields.
It's amazing that even "tacked-on", purely mechanical senses such as this headband, or this direction-sensing belt will actually re-wire one's brain (more in the linked article). It may be a mechanical hack, but to your brain, it functions as a sixth sense.
I suppose it depends on the opportunities and contexts you have access to (what classes you teach, whether you can hold a seminar or discussion panel before/after his address, etc). But my primary advice would be:
Be respectful. Think teamwork. Don't try to rain on the parade the college is throwing for him. Nobody will thank you for that. Not that you seem to be leaning that way, but it bears mentioning on Slashdot.
Consider sitting down with Mr. Taylor privately (asap, if it'll be in addition to other things). The article you linked said he seems willing to take outside concerns seriously. It sure seems that he could be a great resource in 1. getting the MPAA to take consumer/citizen concerns more seriously, and 2. helping educate the student body about what's at stake here (on both sides).
Perhaps you could set up a panel on intellectual property/DRM while he's in town (you, him, maybe some other relevant folks), and invite the student body. Man, I'd love to go to that.
I think there's an argument to be made about supporting a balanced blog ecosystem.
Obviously if everybody posts short blurbs, it just doesn't work, for obvious reasons. On the other hand, if *everybody* posts long, well-thought-out articles, it'd be hard to find 1. What you're interested in, since often the shortposters serve the function of aggregating cool things, and 2. Where the 'blogosphere' action is. There'd be fewer conversations, and indeed, short posts are part of a conversation.
Luckily, there appears little danger of everybody posting well-thought-out articles.
Personally, I'm starting to reap the benefits of longer articles on my science/tech blog. Lots of repeat readers. But it's so hard to get exposure when you have fewer chances for 'hits'.
I believe the fundamental reason for Lessig's shift in focus is that he sees systemic money-driven corruption to be the central disabling constraint for implementing enlightened copyright/patent/etc laws.
He's done a fantastic job and played a central role in promoting a movement toward enlightened legal treatment of intellectual and creative works. Coffee all around. I don't see him as abandoning this movement, just attacking the problems facing the movement at a deeper, more fundamental level.
My initial reaction is yes, this would be very cool. I question the economics, however:
1. Cost/benefit in terms of land and construction. It'd be *expensive* to build (and keep up) such custom, fragile, and constraint-ridden structures in high-rent NYC.
2. Competition with more conventional year-round greenhouses in NYC's 'burbs.
It's hard to know how these factors would shake out. I wish the scientists all the luck in finding funding, though I think there are other worthy (and competing) ideas that deserve funding just as much as this.
Jonathan *had* to know he might get burned for spilling the beans before Steve. Jobs has a track record of being harsh, almost vindictive in his dealings with companies which betray his trust.
Exhibit A: Samsung runs their mouth about being selected to supply software to drive the next-gen iPod Nano. Apple turns around and drops them.
Exhibit B: ATI runs their mouth about some specs for new macs before Macworld. Apple removes ATI boards from their computers and refuses to offer them as a build-to-order.
Maybe Zonk played a lot of AC/AC2, and I realize questions were constrained due to time, but I was a bit miffed at the choice of questions. Some of that could be that I had 2 of the highest moderated & discussed questions in the call for interview questions, neither of which were asked (one was on virtual economies, the other on gaming addiction). But beyond that, other very highly-ranked questions about e.g., gold farming weren't asked. All-in-all, it seemed this interview was rather softball.
I do appreciate Mr. Anderson's interview. Blizzard devs do not give interviews- perhaps due to people like me calling for 'feet to the fire' questions. But a Slashdot interview is a ton of free publicity, and furthermore, Mr. Anderson seemed to expect some 'feet to the fire' questions: "I don't know if I can make them happy, but I hope I can answer their questions." Instead, we pretty much gave him a free pass.
This has been covered better and in more detail by Ars' John Siracusa. In short, Apple actually wants to allow third-party apps on the iPhone, and developers are salivating at the thought, since (beside it being sexy) it'd be much easier to develop for the "real OS X" that runs on the iPhone than some kludgy mobile phone OS. The problems are two-fold:
1. Cellular networks are fragile. Much more fragile than the larger internet. They tend toward monoculture and proprietary systems, and haven't had the shakedown that standard internet network hardware and protocols have had. So Jobs' quote about him 'not wanting third-party apps bringing Cingular's network down' actually makes some sense (some mobile phone applications have more-or-less done this in the past). And
2. Apple simply doesn't have the design tools, and more importantly, the user interface guidelines, ready for developers.
So, third-party apps on the iPhone will happen. Just in a very measured way.
Here's Siracusa:
Not only does Apple have to figure out what makes a good iPhone application, it has to actually create the APIs to produce such a thing. Okay, so no scroll bars, but surely there will be some standard way of scrolling, some standard gesture recognition engine, and so on. Apple has to create all this, if only for its own internal sanity, before it can really get cranking on iPhone application development.
And like the Mac GUI before it, there will be fits and starts, dead-ends, and bad ideas to shake out in the first few years. Also, an IDE would be nice. Xcode, sure, but some sort of simulator or remote debugger system would help. And, whoops, let's keep revising all those APIs and that IDE to match the best practices as they evolve. Oh, and by the way, we need to ship something that works by June 29th.
Viewed in this context, the calls for third-party iPhone development, and Apple's reaction to them, start to make a bit more sense. It's the prototypical fanboy mistake to imagine that the mothership has infinite resources and skills, and any lack of satisfaction is malicious. The fact is, Apple could not provide a comprehensive third-party iPhone development environment on par with what Mac developers have come to expect by June 29th, even if it wanted to do such a thing--and there are many sound reasons not to. This stuff all needs time to cook.
In the meantime, Mac developers will have to be happy with some simple, widget-like WebKit-base development at WWDC this year. That'll also be a nice gesture of good faith from Apple.
"Trust is the currency of the participation age." -Jonathan Schwartz
This is the $64,000 question. Building a reputation/trust system is very difficult. Honestly, Slashdot is one of the better examples of this (Slashdot's moderation system does alter the flow of the discussion but it does get a downright reasonable signal-to-noise ratio vs other online communities).
I'm volunteering at Citizendium, which is another possible datapoint. We're assuming that real names and respecting verifiable expertise will allow us to benefit in some fashion from existing scholarly reputation systems, and to build a more cohesive community.
Eventually, I think it'll be feasible to layer reputation and credentials (for sites that care) on top of a system like OpenID. People will be able to choose what reputation/credentials to share with which site. Information that you want to follow you (e.g., "I have a BA in Math from UCLA" or "I have excellent karma on Slashdot") will follow you across sites.
But yeah, it's a very difficult problem. Figuring it out is a big, potentially very lucrative issue.
Well. Better the devil you know than the usual political hack that doesn't know anything about tech.:)
Seriously, it's got to be mostly a symbolic move to lure some business/tech folks. I think McCain is probably just throwing a name out there, and that Ballmer would be a poor choice due to his personality and the small fact that he already has, you know, a pretty full-time job. But if McCain's announcement gets voters and candidates thinking that yes, tech policy actually does matter, that's a very good thing.
Behavioral addiction in general, and gaming addiction specifically, are increasingly on society's radar. Now, being addicted to an online game is obviously different from being addicted to heroin- but it can still be extremely serious and destructive for geeks with addictive personalities. Do you think being attentive to gaming addiction is a responsibility of MMORPG developers? What steps has Turbine taken or considered?
Can you talk a little bit about the challenges involved in setting up a virtual economy? Did you employ any professional economists to help design in the design or was it all off-the-cuff?
Of course games shouldn't be more boring (with the caveat that games should stay away from pressing peoples' addiction buttons).
But yes, I think it would be good (for developers and for gamers) for games to break out into more genres. Here's a quote from Rod Humble, Executive Producer of The Sims, which neatly sums up a good way to think about this:
I don't know if there's any fixed lifecycle for the Sims franchise because I think that it can go a lot more places. Part of the mandate that I had when I took over the position is to really break this franchise out into a more mainstream audience. So the way I like to look at the franchise is walk into a bookstore and take every video game you know and just place them on a shelf in the bookstore. And I think you'll find they tend to cluster a lot in certain areas in the bookstore. And I want the Sims to fill up the rest of the bookstore.
Yeah- I would think that, by training people to trust certain TLDs, spoofing URLs with exploits or unicode or traffic hijacking would become much more effective.
A neat idea, but I'm sure phishers would love this.
This is interesting, but not for the obvious reasons.
The poll looks fairly well-constructed, but the problem is that evolution has become extremely politicized. For many, this question wasn't asking about science-- it was a political question (are you with the conservative-christians or the liberal-atheist-scientists?).
I think the real story here is the process by which scientific issues get politicized. It's a process that we really need to understand. John Timmer over at Ars Technica often writes about this.
I think it'll be interesting to see whether changes in community structure and an editorial board (via Citizendium) or a low-overhead karmic moderation system like you mention (via Wikipedia, presumably- just a matter of time) will end up more effective at improving the sorts of articles wikis are currently poor at writing.
It's an exciting time to be interested in free knowledge, that's for sure.:)
After I politely ask you for specific examples and specific suggestions, and you respond with more vague criticisms laced with venom, I'm afraid I can't take you seriously.
I want to discuss. It seems you merely want to vent.
I'm sorry to hear you have such a negative opinion about Citizendium. I will note that no one by the name Derek Lyons is registered on the wiki, so I don't know how much of our process you're familiar with. And you haven't identified any specific policy objections, so I can't really speak to whatever concerns you may have.
But on the subject of how project decisions happen, I feel you're painting an impoverished picture of how (and why) things happen at Citizendium. Certain things are fairly immutable as they're central to the project's DNA (just like at Wikipedia). Of those things that aren't, I fear we're forced to compare anecdotes because you haven't identified any specific concerns, but I personally haven't found policy decisions to be arbitrary or mercurial.* Though if you've limited your participation to the forums I can understand how you might- sometimes issues are spread out over the forums, the wiki, and various mailing lists.
Having said that, we're not perfect. We (not just Larry) do need to get up to speed on the nuts-and-bolts issues of wiki management. The numbers of MediaWiki-savvy vandals have shown us that. And personally, I still have qualms about the requirement that users log in to edit. To quote from my blog,
Aaron Swartz compiled some recent statistics on "Who Writes Wikipedia?" - after crunching the numbers on 200 random articles, what he found was that
Insiders account for the vast majority of the edits [mostly grammar and format tweaks]. But it's the outsiders [unregistered users] who provide nearly all of the content... This fact does have enormous policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit.
If most of Wikipedia's content was contributed by vast numbers of anonymous, casual users rather than a core community, then raising the barrier for users to contribute, as Citizendium is doing by requiring that people login to edit, may be disastrous.
I'm not lobbying to change this policy as it's pretty central to Citizendium's DNA-- I just trust/hope the good things we're doing will tend to cancel this out.
Anyway, and I mean this in the least offensive way possible, it's easier to second-guess project decisions and play the vague pundit than to offer specific, actionable suggestions. If you'd like to do so, feel free to drop me an email. You seem like you're a smart fellow and I'd be happy to hear from you.
Mike Johnson Citizendium Executive Committee
*I'd be interested to hear which decisions you found mercurial. You're right that it's important to avoid being so.
To whomever is dumping their mod points on this discussion:
I think it's a childish abuse of the Slashdot moderation system to moderate a considered argument that something is on-topic, off-topic. Have the guts to reply and refute my argument, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
You know, you'd think it should be that simple. But to actually build legal code that would implement those protections in enough jurisdictions is a huge undertaking. Setting aside that "public domain" would no longer be an apt description of the license once the "share-alike" provision is attached, I could see how bio-oriented licenses could take that long and more.
See e.g., how much work has gone into the relatively simple Creative Commons licenses in order to make them legally solid, clearly understandable, and inter-compatible. And that's for text, a medium with lots of 'legal infrastructure' to draw from.
Legal stuff takes time, sadly. And an intended licensing result that can be described simply may involve a very complex legal document.
not only that certain areas of the mouse genome undergo more changes, but that changes to those areas are more tolerable by the organism than changes in other areas.
I think a fascinating next step would be to see if, statistically speaking, viruses and transposons were channeled into jumping into these "safer to change" hotspots rather than other, more fragile areas of the genome.
It would seem to make some sense, given all the potential for genomic havok inherent in viruses and transposons' tendency toward hopping into the middle of genes.
Why do you say that's vandalism? Looks like the article is a work in progress to me.
If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently?
This is a fearsomely difficult and touchy topic... for what it's worth, here's what I believe.
There is meaningful bias against females in parts of tech culture. There is also meaningful bias against geeks in parts of female culture, as gurps_npc notes. Doesn't excuse either bias. Gets into philosophical hierarchy/expectation/etc issues I suppose.
Some of the worst cases of anti-female bias I've seen have been driven by other females. I'm not sure what that means.
Men and women are socialized significantly differently.
Men and women are biologically different. There is meaningful evidence that men are simply drawn more strongly to technology (I'll phrase it in terms of interest, rather than aptitude, but that's another variable we should consider). Since men and women *are* different, we shouldn't necessarily expect males and females to be present in equal numbers in technology fields. But we shouldn't use sex differences as an excuse for anti-female biases.
We'd all benefit if participation in tech fields (as well as the rest of society) was wholly meritocratic. It's definitely not right now. I believe females do tend to get unfairly marginalized by some parts of tech culture.
I thought this was an interesting take on sex differences, which could perhaps be applied to explore differences of participation in technology fields.
It's amazing that even "tacked-on", purely mechanical senses such as this headband, or this direction-sensing belt will actually re-wire one's brain (more in the linked article). It may be a mechanical hack, but to your brain, it functions as a sixth sense.
:)
Wild.
I suppose it depends on the opportunities and contexts you have access to (what classes you teach, whether you can hold a seminar or discussion panel before/after his address, etc). But my primary advice would be:
Be respectful. Think teamwork. Don't try to rain on the parade the college is throwing for him. Nobody will thank you for that. Not that you seem to be leaning that way, but it bears mentioning on Slashdot.
Consider sitting down with Mr. Taylor privately (asap, if it'll be in addition to other things). The article you linked said he seems willing to take outside concerns seriously. It sure seems that he could be a great resource in 1. getting the MPAA to take consumer/citizen concerns more seriously, and 2. helping educate the student body about what's at stake here (on both sides).
Perhaps you could set up a panel on intellectual property/DRM while he's in town (you, him, maybe some other relevant folks), and invite the student body. Man, I'd love to go to that.
I think there's an argument to be made about supporting a balanced blog ecosystem.
Obviously if everybody posts short blurbs, it just doesn't work, for obvious reasons. On the other hand, if *everybody* posts long, well-thought-out articles, it'd be hard to find 1. What you're interested in, since often the shortposters serve the function of aggregating cool things, and 2. Where the 'blogosphere' action is. There'd be fewer conversations, and indeed, short posts are part of a conversation.
Luckily, there appears little danger of everybody posting well-thought-out articles.
Personally, I'm starting to reap the benefits of longer articles on my science/tech blog. Lots of repeat readers. But it's so hard to get exposure when you have fewer chances for 'hits'.
I believe the fundamental reason for Lessig's shift in focus is that he sees systemic money-driven corruption to be the central disabling constraint for implementing enlightened copyright/patent/etc laws.
He's done a fantastic job and played a central role in promoting a movement toward enlightened legal treatment of intellectual and creative works. Coffee all around. I don't see him as abandoning this movement, just attacking the problems facing the movement at a deeper, more fundamental level.
My initial reaction is yes, this would be very cool. I question the economics, however:
1. Cost/benefit in terms of land and construction. It'd be *expensive* to build (and keep up) such custom, fragile, and constraint-ridden structures in high-rent NYC.
2. Competition with more conventional year-round greenhouses in NYC's 'burbs.
It's hard to know how these factors would shake out. I wish the scientists all the luck in finding funding, though I think there are other worthy (and competing) ideas that deserve funding just as much as this.
You may want to check out dotSUB.com -- a site dedicated to collaborative subtitling of videos. Not a panacea, but it's something.
http://dotsub.com/
I agree.
Jonathan *had* to know he might get burned for spilling the beans before Steve. Jobs has a track record of being harsh, almost vindictive in his dealings with companies which betray his trust.
Exhibit A: Samsung runs their mouth about being selected to supply software to drive the next-gen iPod Nano. Apple turns around and drops them.
Exhibit B: ATI runs their mouth about some specs for new macs before Macworld. Apple removes ATI boards from their computers and refuses to offer them as a build-to-order.
Simply put, don't try to scoop The Steve.
Maybe Zonk played a lot of AC/AC2, and I realize questions were constrained due to time, but I was a bit miffed at the choice of questions. Some of that could be that I had 2 of the highest moderated & discussed questions in the call for interview questions, neither of which were asked (one was on virtual economies, the other on gaming addiction). But beyond that, other very highly-ranked questions about e.g., gold farming weren't asked. All-in-all, it seemed this interview was rather softball.
I do appreciate Mr. Anderson's interview. Blizzard devs do not give interviews- perhaps due to people like me calling for 'feet to the fire' questions. But a Slashdot interview is a ton of free publicity, and furthermore, Mr. Anderson seemed to expect some 'feet to the fire' questions: "I don't know if I can make them happy, but I hope I can answer their questions." Instead, we pretty much gave him a free pass.
1. Cellular networks are fragile. Much more fragile than the larger internet. They tend toward monoculture and proprietary systems, and haven't had the shakedown that standard internet network hardware and protocols have had. So Jobs' quote about him 'not wanting third-party apps bringing Cingular's network down' actually makes some sense (some mobile phone applications have more-or-less done this in the past). And
2. Apple simply doesn't have the design tools, and more importantly, the user interface guidelines, ready for developers.
So, third-party apps on the iPhone will happen. Just in a very measured way.
Here's Siracusa:
"Trust is the currency of the participation age." -Jonathan Schwartz
This is the $64,000 question. Building a reputation/trust system is very difficult. Honestly, Slashdot is one of the better examples of this (Slashdot's moderation system does alter the flow of the discussion but it does get a downright reasonable signal-to-noise ratio vs other online communities).
I'm volunteering at Citizendium, which is another possible datapoint. We're assuming that real names and respecting verifiable expertise will allow us to benefit in some fashion from existing scholarly reputation systems, and to build a more cohesive community.
Eventually, I think it'll be feasible to layer reputation and credentials (for sites that care) on top of a system like OpenID. People will be able to choose what reputation/credentials to share with which site. Information that you want to follow you (e.g., "I have a BA in Math from UCLA" or "I have excellent karma on Slashdot") will follow you across sites.
But yeah, it's a very difficult problem. Figuring it out is a big, potentially very lucrative issue.
Well. Better the devil you know than the usual political hack that doesn't know anything about tech. :)
Seriously, it's got to be mostly a symbolic move to lure some business/tech folks. I think McCain is probably just throwing a name out there, and that Ballmer would be a poor choice due to his personality and the small fact that he already has, you know, a pretty full-time job. But if McCain's announcement gets voters and candidates thinking that yes, tech policy actually does matter, that's a very good thing.
Behavioral addiction in general, and gaming addiction specifically, are increasingly on society's radar. Now, being addicted to an online game is obviously different from being addicted to heroin- but it can still be extremely serious and destructive for geeks with addictive personalities. Do you think being attentive to gaming addiction is a responsibility of MMORPG developers? What steps has Turbine taken or considered?
Can you talk a little bit about the challenges involved in setting up a virtual economy? Did you employ any professional economists to help design in the design or was it all off-the-cuff?
But yes, I think it would be good (for developers and for gamers) for games to break out into more genres. Here's a quote from Rod Humble, Executive Producer of The Sims, which neatly sums up a good way to think about this:
Yeah- I would think that, by training people to trust certain TLDs, spoofing URLs with exploits or unicode or traffic hijacking would become much more effective.
A neat idea, but I'm sure phishers would love this.
This is interesting, but not for the obvious reasons.
The poll looks fairly well-constructed, but the problem is that evolution has become extremely politicized. For many, this question wasn't asking about science-- it was a political question (are you with the conservative-christians or the liberal-atheist-scientists?).
I think the real story here is the process by which scientific issues get politicized. It's a process that we really need to understand. John Timmer over at Ars Technica often writes about this.
I think it'll be interesting to see whether changes in community structure and an editorial board (via Citizendium) or a low-overhead karmic moderation system like you mention (via Wikipedia, presumably- just a matter of time) will end up more effective at improving the sorts of articles wikis are currently poor at writing.
:)
It's an exciting time to be interested in free knowledge, that's for sure.
After I politely ask you for specific examples and specific suggestions, and you respond with more vague criticisms laced with venom, I'm afraid I can't take you seriously.
I want to discuss. It seems you merely want to vent.
I'm sorry to hear you have such a negative opinion about Citizendium. I will note that no one by the name Derek Lyons is registered on the wiki, so I don't know how much of our process you're familiar with. And you haven't identified any specific policy objections, so I can't really speak to whatever concerns you may have.
But on the subject of how project decisions happen, I feel you're painting an impoverished picture of how (and why) things happen at Citizendium. Certain things are fairly immutable as they're central to the project's DNA (just like at Wikipedia). Of those things that aren't, I fear we're forced to compare anecdotes because you haven't identified any specific concerns, but I personally haven't found policy decisions to be arbitrary or mercurial.* Though if you've limited your participation to the forums I can understand how you might- sometimes issues are spread out over the forums, the wiki, and various mailing lists.
Having said that, we're not perfect. We (not just Larry) do need to get up to speed on the nuts-and-bolts issues of wiki management. The numbers of MediaWiki-savvy vandals have shown us that. And personally, I still have qualms about the requirement that users log in to edit. To quote from my blog,
I'm not lobbying to change this policy as it's pretty central to Citizendium's DNA-- I just trust/hope the good things we're doing will tend to cancel this out.
Anyway, and I mean this in the least offensive way possible, it's easier to second-guess project decisions and play the vague pundit than to offer specific, actionable suggestions. If you'd like to do so, feel free to drop me an email. You seem like you're a smart fellow and I'd be happy to hear from you.
Mike Johnson
Citizendium Executive Committee
*I'd be interested to hear which decisions you found mercurial. You're right that it's important to avoid being so.
To whomever is dumping their mod points on this discussion:
I think it's a childish abuse of the Slashdot moderation system to moderate a considered argument that something is on-topic, off-topic. Have the guts to reply and refute my argument, eh?