I have great respect for Aaron's accomplishments and the depth of thought he brought to most problems, but his contribution to Open Government isn't his best work. In particular, its nearly-complete dismissal of transparency as a meaningful intervention suffers from a failure to consider likely counterfactuals. Transparency's impact is probably greatest through deterrence. It shifts equilibria. Aaron's view of it -- at least the one expressed in this chapter -- was ploddingly instrumentalist. Virtually any policy is going to be unsatisfying when viewed through that kind of lens.
My point is that *in practice* the specifics of the exemptions don't matter. They establish a foothold, and a gray zone of consumer use in which even tools that violate the DMCA are available. Put another way: how many people reading this thread will now be ripping DVDs that weren't before Monday's announcement?
Yes, the law matters, and no, it's not good to break it. But the point is that the DMCA's mechanisms create a situation where consumers aren't prosecuted for circumventing DRM, but rights-holders are still empowered to suppress innovation. It's a strange, muddy situation, and an inappropriate way to run a legal system.
With that said, those who point out that the DMCA is unlikely to change through legislative action are of course correct; the article makes an argument, but it's not a call to action. At this point the courts and increasingly-broad exemptions are the best hope for improving the legal situation created by the DMCA.
You might want to reread my post. You're making the same points I did: namely, that the data on the website is poor due to problems with the underlying systems. This is not the fault of the website (though the GCharts mistake is a bit sloppy). However, the same agency is responsible for the site and for collecting the underlying data. It's time for them to correct the more fundamental problems with the system rather than continuing to repackage it.
actually, the contractor that maintains USASpending.gov is REI Systems, based in Herndon, VA. They're not faultless, but the real problems with the site have to do with the underlying data; unfortunately, REI can't do much about that.
I work at the Sunlight Foundation, where we're pretty familiar with the people and data systems powering USASpending.gov. I've seen a lot of comments here saying that the important thing is that the government is publishing something, and that it's understandable that their first pass might not be perfect.
But this isn't their first pass. The underlying data systems -- FAADS and FPDS -- have existed since the 90s, and have been riddled with errors throughout their existence. Instead of fixing the problems, OMB continues to slap new coats of paint on the same lousy data.
It's nice that we've got a new USASpending.gov, and I agree that it would be a mistake to put too much emphasis on a buggy visualization. But the underlying data is terrible, and so far no one is showing the will to fix it. Just look at USASpending's "data quality" tab -- it talks about the completeness of each row. Well, that's great, but it tells you nothing about the thousands upon thousands of missing rows, nor about the rows that massively under- or over-report their dollar amounts.
At Subsidyscope, the project on which I work, we've delved into these problems in more depth. Those who'd like to learn more about the shortcomings of the data systems powering USASpending can find a discussion of the relevant issues here.
I work at the Sunlight Foundation (though not on this project), and I feel I can safely say that we completely agree with you that the government *should* be issuing this data in a more easily usable format.
To be fair, though, it's not always as easy as all that: when you introduce such an infrastructure you need to make sure there are staff resources to handle the data entry, training available to help them do it, and somebody checking the overall data quality. My project's been looking at a lot of grant data, and we've consistently found that the central grant data directory -- a data set called FAADS -- is of lower quality than the reports issued on each program's website in excel, PDF, HTML tables or who knows what else. It doesn't make a lot of sense to people like you and me, but centralized systems really do introduce an added layer of difficulty for the data entry people. Just keeping track of the endless requirements imposed by legislation can be pretty daunting.
...none of which is to say that this shouldn't happen. It should! But it does explain why "publish earmarks" and "publish earmarks in a central location, in a machine-readable format" are two different things, and why the latter is more difficult to successfully ask for. We'll get there, though.
Earmarks make up about 1% of *discretionary* spending. Which is considerably smaller than the overall budget (which includes things like Medicare and Social Security). And if an earmark didn't exist, that doesn't mean the money wouldn't be spent. It just means that the person administering the program under which the earmark falls would be able to allocate that money more freely (presumably to a more efficient use than a senator's pet project).
Earmarks are very easy for journalists to write up as news stories, though, which accounts for them getting so much attention.
Mod parent down. He clearly doesn't understand that the idea of capitalism is to produce new wealth via the use of invested capital. As a sibling poster pointed out, the economy is not zero sum.
I'm hardly a market triumphalist -- personally, I think we ought to be working toward a socialist democracy modeled on Northern European nations like Denmark -- but you need to be at least a *little* informed before you start making radical critiques of the market system.
Yes, economics doesn't change physical reality. But in this case, you haven't proven that physical reality is threatening.
As others have noted, elements don't disappear. Instead their locations are shifted and the price of their extraction changes. Will that change in price be catastrophic? It's possible, but history strongly implies that it won't be. Instead, there are generally marginal sources to which we can turn out attention. It just costs energy (and therefore money). The process that created the earth did not, generally speaking, concentrate elements in incredibly concentrated pockets, Star Control 2 notwithstanding.
The one notable exception is helium, which escapes our atmosphere and disappears into space -- once we've exhausted the supplies trapped underground, helium-based applications may be in trouble. Do you have any reason to believe a similar situation exists with respect to indium, gallium or the rest? Or that these elements are being incorporated into compounds from which they could not conceivably be reclaimed? Are they being sent into the atmosphere in such a way that their reclamation will never be more practical than extraction from seawater? Can you seriously maintain any of these things?
I doubt it.
It's also worth noting that the situation with peak oil is not at all analogous. We primarily extract oil for its energy, not its chemical content. People are worried about running out of that energy. They are not as worried about running out of hydrocarbons to turn into things like pharmaceuticals and plastic (although of course they may have to turn to more expensive sources of these source materials).
RTFA, and pay attention to how FDA approvals work. Once a drug has been approved by the FDA, doctors are able to prescribe it for *anything* they want. It's called "off-label" use, and it happens all the time -- one example is doctors prescribing various drugs designed to treat prostate problems for the purpose of stopping hair loss. Although there are various ethical constraints on this practice, off-label use means that this drug doesn't need to go through expensive trials before cancer patients will be able to buy it -- a desperate patient just needs to find one doctor who's willing to give it a shot. More studies on its efficacy ought to be conducted, and will have to be before it can be marketed as a cancer drug. But I seriously doubt that it will simply be discarded because it's cheap.
There are real problems with our pharma system -- the lack of incentives for vaccine development outside of unpredictable government subsidies is a big one -- but this isn't actually a case of it screwing over anybody. Not yet, anyway.
As others have noted, it'd perfectly reasonable to think that Sony burned a DVD with a clip that used Blu-Ray's compression and bitrate setup. This leaves out the hardware portion of the demo, but would be a relatively fair comparison.
Think of it this way: if you were doing a DVD/SVCD comparison, you could run both off of CDs -- you'd just encode the MPEG2 file for the DVD demo and burn it to a data CD.
Is it a *totally* valid demo? No. But it's not a particularly outrageous lie.
Like it or not, "backup" is the term of art in these circles. And as others have noted, the submitted was pretty clear in identifying piracy as the main application for this hack.
Your statement is not correct. Cable companies like Comcast *DO* pay networks for their content, using your cable fees. This is why cable channels oppose ala carte cable.
I don't like the idea of MMOs putting ads in their games, but it really would be pretty analogous to how cable TV works.
For an individual, it's a bad, bad idea to use real information. I still get bogus invoices asking me for checks for services I never used, thanks to a public WHOIS registration I made years ago.
Privacy should be built into the system -- perhaps there should be a $1 fee for accessing WHOIS records. I should not have to pay godaddy more money in order to register a domain name without opening myself up to fraud and identity theft. Until that happens, I'll be using false info.
Wordpress 1.5 already uses the nofollow tag, so you don't have to worry about comments spam.
Excuse me, but: bwahahahahahahaahaaaaa! Do you run a blog at all? All of the major platforms have support nofollow since it was announced, but it does NOT stop spammers. Most of them are just running spambots to place the links. They don't even bother to check for the presence of nofollow.
I've been running Movable Type for several years. I installed the NoFollow plugin when it was released, but noticed no difference. MT-Blacklist was helpful, but after upgrading from 2.661 to 3.2 last weekend (which makes MT-Blacklist irrelevant), the difference is amazing. The newer releases are much better at weeding out spam than the old, but nofollow has little to do with it.
it's about speech recognition. They've identified a new source of data for identifying phonemes, one that apparently provides cleaner output than working from the audio. Dollars to donuts the resulting words are then just popped into a Babelfish-equivalent.
This is interesting and important work, but the translation angle is really just one potential application of the technology.
This is an important point that is frequently overlooked: quantum computers will not speed up traditional computing, they will just let us solve classes of problems that are intractable, at the moment.
But you're being too harsh on ASP.NET development. As others have noted, you don't need to use the debug button (and really shouldn't, unless you're *actually* debugging). You can just open a browser window, build and refresh. You don't have to compile PHP, it's true, but doing a build in C# is generally very fast.
You're also glossing over how easy ASP.NET makes some things. DataBinding is a pretty huge time-saver. Accomplishing a given task generally requires that you write many more lines of PHP than it would C# in ASP.NET.
I respect your suspicion at mentions of the buzzword of the moment. But AJAX helps you avoid the need to post back to the server, which in turn means it makes more sense to maintain the page's state on the client side. That makes OO much more applicable to web development: if objects persist, the OO model makes more sense. If you're recreating objects all the time, OO ends up being just a way of organizing functions and data, and doesn't really save you much effort.
Perhaps not web applications -- but apps are made of pages, and pages are procedural. That's all I'm saying. For many simple apps, there's no need for a complex object model. When you get down to it, web programming is about reading and writing strings.
And yes, I'm aware of PHP's potential for OO (I've done a little work with Drupal, for example), and as I mentioned, work in an OO webdev environment professionally. When I write my own one-off personal apps, though, I rarely bother setting up classes. Sometimes the overhead involved in doing something the Right Way isn't justified. PHP is capable of conforming to the Right Way -- but it's in other situations where it shines.
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I have great respect for Aaron's accomplishments and the depth of thought he brought to most problems, but his contribution to Open Government isn't his best work. In particular, its nearly-complete dismissal of transparency as a meaningful intervention suffers from a failure to consider likely counterfactuals. Transparency's impact is probably greatest through deterrence. It shifts equilibria. Aaron's view of it -- at least the one expressed in this chapter -- was ploddingly instrumentalist. Virtually any policy is going to be unsatisfying when viewed through that kind of lens.
I'll admit that my opinion on this is shaped by both personal and professional considerations, but I really do think that Aaron got this one wrong. More here, if anyone's interested: http://www.manifestdensity.net/2013/01/18/how-transparency-works/
My point is that *in practice* the specifics of the exemptions don't matter. They establish a foothold, and a gray zone of consumer use in which even tools that violate the DMCA are available. Put another way: how many people reading this thread will now be ripping DVDs that weren't before Monday's announcement?
Yes, the law matters, and no, it's not good to break it. But the point is that the DMCA's mechanisms create a situation where consumers aren't prosecuted for circumventing DRM, but rights-holders are still empowered to suppress innovation. It's a strange, muddy situation, and an inappropriate way to run a legal system.
With that said, those who point out that the DMCA is unlikely to change through legislative action are of course correct; the article makes an argument, but it's not a call to action. At this point the courts and increasingly-broad exemptions are the best hope for improving the legal situation created by the DMCA.
You might want to reread my post. You're making the same points I did: namely, that the data on the website is poor due to problems with the underlying systems. This is not the fault of the website (though the GCharts mistake is a bit sloppy). However, the same agency is responsible for the site and for collecting the underlying data. It's time for them to correct the more fundamental problems with the system rather than continuing to repackage it.
actually, the contractor that maintains USASpending.gov is REI Systems, based in Herndon, VA. They're not faultless, but the real problems with the site have to do with the underlying data; unfortunately, REI can't do much about that.
I work at the Sunlight Foundation, where we're pretty familiar with the people and data systems powering USASpending.gov. I've seen a lot of comments here saying that the important thing is that the government is publishing something, and that it's understandable that their first pass might not be perfect.
But this isn't their first pass. The underlying data systems -- FAADS and FPDS -- have existed since the 90s, and have been riddled with errors throughout their existence. Instead of fixing the problems, OMB continues to slap new coats of paint on the same lousy data.
It's nice that we've got a new USASpending.gov, and I agree that it would be a mistake to put too much emphasis on a buggy visualization. But the underlying data is terrible, and so far no one is showing the will to fix it. Just look at USASpending's "data quality" tab -- it talks about the completeness of each row. Well, that's great, but it tells you nothing about the thousands upon thousands of missing rows, nor about the rows that massively under- or over-report their dollar amounts.
At Subsidyscope, the project on which I work, we've delved into these problems in more depth. Those who'd like to learn more about the shortcomings of the data systems powering USASpending can find a discussion of the relevant issues here.
I work at the Sunlight Foundation (though not on this project), and I feel I can safely say that we completely agree with you that the government *should* be issuing this data in a more easily usable format.
To be fair, though, it's not always as easy as all that: when you introduce such an infrastructure you need to make sure there are staff resources to handle the data entry, training available to help them do it, and somebody checking the overall data quality. My project's been looking at a lot of grant data, and we've consistently found that the central grant data directory -- a data set called FAADS -- is of lower quality than the reports issued on each program's website in excel, PDF, HTML tables or who knows what else. It doesn't make a lot of sense to people like you and me, but centralized systems really do introduce an added layer of difficulty for the data entry people. Just keeping track of the endless requirements imposed by legislation can be pretty daunting.
...none of which is to say that this shouldn't happen. It should! But it does explain why "publish earmarks" and "publish earmarks in a central location, in a machine-readable format" are two different things, and why the latter is more difficult to successfully ask for. We'll get there, though.
Earmarks make up about 1% of *discretionary* spending. Which is considerably smaller than the overall budget (which includes things like Medicare and Social Security). And if an earmark didn't exist, that doesn't mean the money wouldn't be spent. It just means that the person administering the program under which the earmark falls would be able to allocate that money more freely (presumably to a more efficient use than a senator's pet project).
Earmarks are very easy for journalists to write up as news stories, though, which accounts for them getting so much attention.
Mod parent down. He clearly doesn't understand that the idea of capitalism is to produce new wealth via the use of invested capital. As a sibling poster pointed out, the economy is not zero sum.
I'm hardly a market triumphalist -- personally, I think we ought to be working toward a socialist democracy modeled on Northern European nations like Denmark -- but you need to be at least a *little* informed before you start making radical critiques of the market system.
Yes, economics doesn't change physical reality. But in this case, you haven't proven that physical reality is threatening.
As others have noted, elements don't disappear. Instead their locations are shifted and the price of their extraction changes. Will that change in price be catastrophic? It's possible, but history strongly implies that it won't be. Instead, there are generally marginal sources to which we can turn out attention. It just costs energy (and therefore money). The process that created the earth did not, generally speaking, concentrate elements in incredibly concentrated pockets, Star Control 2 notwithstanding.
The one notable exception is helium, which escapes our atmosphere and disappears into space -- once we've exhausted the supplies trapped underground, helium-based applications may be in trouble. Do you have any reason to believe a similar situation exists with respect to indium, gallium or the rest? Or that these elements are being incorporated into compounds from which they could not conceivably be reclaimed? Are they being sent into the atmosphere in such a way that their reclamation will never be more practical than extraction from seawater? Can you seriously maintain any of these things?
I doubt it.
It's also worth noting that the situation with peak oil is not at all analogous. We primarily extract oil for its energy, not its chemical content. People are worried about running out of that energy. They are not as worried about running out of hydrocarbons to turn into things like pharmaceuticals and plastic (although of course they may have to turn to more expensive sources of these source materials).
It takes the magical $() selectors of prototype, expands on them, and somehow delivers it all in 19k.
RTFA, and pay attention to how FDA approvals work. Once a drug has been approved by the FDA, doctors are able to prescribe it for *anything* they want. It's called "off-label" use, and it happens all the time -- one example is doctors prescribing various drugs designed to treat prostate problems for the purpose of stopping hair loss. Although there are various ethical constraints on this practice, off-label use means that this drug doesn't need to go through expensive trials before cancer patients will be able to buy it -- a desperate patient just needs to find one doctor who's willing to give it a shot. More studies on its efficacy ought to be conducted, and will have to be before it can be marketed as a cancer drug. But I seriously doubt that it will simply be discarded because it's cheap.
There are real problems with our pharma system -- the lack of incentives for vaccine development outside of unpredictable government subsidies is a big one -- but this isn't actually a case of it screwing over anybody. Not yet, anyway.
As others have noted, it'd perfectly reasonable to think that Sony burned a DVD with a clip that used Blu-Ray's compression and bitrate setup. This leaves out the hardware portion of the demo, but would be a relatively fair comparison.
Think of it this way: if you were doing a DVD/SVCD comparison, you could run both off of CDs -- you'd just encode the MPEG2 file for the DVD demo and burn it to a data CD.
Is it a *totally* valid demo? No. But it's not a particularly outrageous lie.
Like it or not, "backup" is the term of art in these circles. And as others have noted, the submitted was pretty clear in identifying piracy as the main application for this hack.
Your statement is not correct. Cable companies like Comcast *DO* pay networks for their content, using your cable fees. This is why cable channels oppose ala carte cable. I don't like the idea of MMOs putting ads in their games, but it really would be pretty analogous to how cable TV works.
It really ruins the amazing announcement
Oh please. Steve Jobs != Santa.
For an individual, it's a bad, bad idea to use real information. I still get bogus invoices asking me for checks for services I never used, thanks to a public WHOIS registration I made years ago.
Privacy should be built into the system -- perhaps there should be a $1 fee for accessing WHOIS records. I should not have to pay godaddy more money in order to register a domain name without opening myself up to fraud and identity theft. Until that happens, I'll be using false info.
What about Drupal? Or Scoop? Seems to me that plenty of sites have had a lot of success using those packages.
Excuse me, but: bwahahahahahahaahaaaaa! Do you run a blog at all? All of the major platforms have support nofollow since it was announced, but it does NOT stop spammers. Most of them are just running spambots to place the links. They don't even bother to check for the presence of nofollow.
I've been running Movable Type for several years. I installed the NoFollow plugin when it was released, but noticed no difference. MT-Blacklist was helpful, but after upgrading from 2.661 to 3.2 last weekend (which makes MT-Blacklist irrelevant), the difference is amazing. The newer releases are much better at weeding out spam than the old, but nofollow has little to do with it.
I think I'd like to task you with that, if you have enough bandwidth.
it's about speech recognition. They've identified a new source of data for identifying phonemes, one that apparently provides cleaner output than working from the audio. Dollars to donuts the resulting words are then just popped into a Babelfish-equivalent.
This is interesting and important work, but the translation angle is really just one potential application of the technology.
At the crazy fringes of quantum physics it's not much different from zen buddhism
Actually, it is. You may have just seen a silly movie produced by cultists or read some deeply ignorant books and ended up with some bad conclusions.
This is an important point that is frequently overlooked: quantum computers will not speed up traditional computing, they will just let us solve classes of problems that are intractable, at the moment.
VB.NET is ugly and horrible and deserves to die.
But you're being too harsh on ASP.NET development. As others have noted, you don't need to use the debug button (and really shouldn't, unless you're *actually* debugging). You can just open a browser window, build and refresh. You don't have to compile PHP, it's true, but doing a build in C# is generally very fast.
You're also glossing over how easy ASP.NET makes some things. DataBinding is a pretty huge time-saver. Accomplishing a given task generally requires that you write many more lines of PHP than it would C# in ASP.NET.
I respect your suspicion at mentions of the buzzword of the moment. But AJAX helps you avoid the need to post back to the server, which in turn means it makes more sense to maintain the page's state on the client side. That makes OO much more applicable to web development: if objects persist, the OO model makes more sense. If you're recreating objects all the time, OO ends up being just a way of organizing functions and data, and doesn't really save you much effort.
That's how it seems to me, anyway.
Perhaps not web applications -- but apps are made of pages, and pages are procedural. That's all I'm saying. For many simple apps, there's no need for a complex object model. When you get down to it, web programming is about reading and writing strings.
And yes, I'm aware of PHP's potential for OO (I've done a little work with Drupal, for example), and as I mentioned, work in an OO webdev environment professionally. When I write my own one-off personal apps, though, I rarely bother setting up classes. Sometimes the overhead involved in doing something the Right Way isn't justified. PHP is capable of conforming to the Right Way -- but it's in other situations where it shines.