My Pa is a workstation ergonomics specialist for an insurance company, and he says that Aerons suck. They are ergonomically inferior for several reasons, the main reason being that they have no upper back support - the top just slopes away. It looks snazzy but it kills your back. I'm sitting in one right now and I hate it.
A much cheaper and better chair is the Office Master Super Paramount which has good upper and lower back support and is fully adjustable. (Check out models 7578 and 7778.) It's not a fancy-shmancy executive leather chair or anything... but I think for the most part, you have to choose between "fancy-shmancy" and "doesn't destroy your back". The best chairs are actually not that expensive.
It's clear if you had read the paper refered to in the header that it is Tom Perrine's suggestion to modify how Carnivore is installed and maintained so that at least the ISP knows what the data Carnivore is gathering and if it is in accord to a legally obtained wiretap court order.
I'm not sure what paper or header you're referring to (I saw no reference to a paper in the testimony); and Mr. Perrine didn't suggest that directly. But your idea is a very good one, and it follows directly from his concerns over the potential misuses of Carnivore and the differences between it and traditional telephone wiretaps.
Personally I would be much less concerned about potential abuse of Carnivore if they made two basic changes:
Remove all remote access capability; and
Implement some kind of dual-login requirement so both an ISP employee and an FBI agent would have to be physically present to initiate monitoring.
There are so few wiretaps actually performed that any arguments the FBI makes about "convenience" are total hogwash. It should require significant effort to monitor; Mr. Perrine makes an excellent argument for that in his testimony.
I see nothing wrong with trying to mix economic incentives into an inspirational project, but this does not preclude releasing under an open source style license.
Exactly. I don't see anything wrong with it either, I like the Travelzoo model; but there are ways to capitalize on such a user base without keeping the results private. However, keeping the resulting database private and licensing access seems to be Mr McKinstry's intent (though I can't really tell...). Sooner or later, especially if the project is successful, someone will build an open version, and personally I'd be much more interested in helping with that. But if he's going to make the results freely available to other researchers, I'm all for it -- the profit-sharing incentive stuff will simply boost my natural inclination to help such an effort.
Will the MindPixel Digital Mind Modeling Project be open source? Will GAC be an open consciousness? Will your database of MIST stimuli be freely available for the use of other artificial consciousness researchers?
I've discerned some of your intent from the arcondev archives and from Jeff Elman's Finding Structure in Time. You seem to believe that the amount of effort required to carry out your experiment mandates some kind of economic incentive structure to get people to participate; as I understand it, you intend to issue participants stock in MindPixel Corp proportional to their contribution, and then share the profits from any commercial exploitation of the result.
I have two problems/arguments with this: 1) Economic reward as the sole means to incent participation ("production") is an unprovable axiom underlying most economic theory. It totally disregards the human needs to create, communicate, and form communities. The success of the open source software movement has proven this assumption wrong. People can and will participate for other reasons; in fact, the commercial character of your project may disincent some people, especially the audience here. Have you considered other incentives? (I'm not taking issue with the incentive, but rather that it seems to be based in part on keeping the results private.) 2) You yourself have emphasized Elman's point about the "importance of starting small." I think this statement and his initial failures also indicate the importance of starting multiple times. If your project is closed, it will prevent (to borrow a software development term) "forking" the consciousness. A single GAC will tell you less than many GACs.
You hit the nail on the head: "placate the feds..."
This is just a temporary appeasement by AOL to deflect scrutiny until the merger goes through. "Opening" the protocol isn't functionally any different than having everyone reverse engineer it. Just because it's "open" doesn't mean they can't or won't start mutating it again every 3 days once the merger goes through. My money is on a rapid return to this anti-competitive practice the instant the merger is complete.
Opening it up permanently is WAY too forward-thinking for AOL/TW; I think companies that size are prevented by law from making any decision that sacrifices present monopoly for long-term viability. They're only allowed to consider the current quarter, I think that's an SEC regulation.
who's stupid enough to start a war with technology?
Exactly.
I'd like to share a quote I feel is quite pertinent, especially to distributed publishing like Gnutella and Freenet, and online anonymity:
"The technology that is now developing and that will dominate the next decades seems to be in total conflict with traditional and, in the main, momentarily still valid, geographical and political units and concepts. This is the maturing crisis of technology. "What kind of action does this situation call for? Whatever one feels inclined to do, one decisive trait must be considered: the very techniques that create the dangers and instabilities are in themselves useful, or closely related to the useful. In fact, the more useful they could be, the more unstabilizing their effects can also be. It is not a particular perverse destructiveness of one particular invention that creates danger. Technological power, technological efficiency as such, is an ambivalent achievment. Its danger is intrinsic. "In looking for a solution, it is well to exclude one pseudosolution at the start. The crisis will not be resolved by inhibiting this or that apparently particularly obnoxious form of technology. For one thing, the parts of technology, as well as of the underlying sciences, are so intertwined that in the long run nothing less than total elimination of all technological progress would suffice for inhibition. Also, on a more pedestrian and immediate basis, useful and harmful techniques lie everywhere so close together that it is never possible to separate the lions from the lambs... "Finally and, I believe, most importantly, prohibition of technology (invention and development, which are hardly separable from underlying scientific inquiry), is contrary to the whole ethos of the industrial age. It is irreconcilable with a major mode of intellectuality as our age understands it. It is hard to imagine such a restraint successfully imposed on our civilization."
What this virus made clear to me is that the news media seems to be afraid of blaming Microsoft for having insecure products, even though they bash them daily in their coverage of the antitrust trial.
Even the Slashdot lead-in doesn't mention Windows, Outlook (aka Outhouse), or VB specifically!!!!!!! Looking at all the other mainstream and niche press coverage of the virus, Microsoft is rarely mentioned before the fourth or fifth paragraph. On Nightline last night, Ted Koppel and guests went off for half an hour on the evilness of whatever fifteen year old unleashed this thing, and they left Microsoft alone. (I think so anyway, I couldn't actually stomach watching it for more than ten seconds at a time.)
My question is, what kind of world do we want?
A) A world where a rebellious teenager can cripple email systems worldwide because the security is so weak, and then we bring down the heavy hand of "justice" on this poor child because they "caused billions of dollars in damages," in the ridiculous hope of somehow disincenting teenage rebellion in the future; or
B) A world where a rebellious teenager cannot cripple email systems worldwide, and we don't have to impose excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishments on the child, and everyone's email keeps working fine.
Stealing MP3s is illegal... the bottom line is that it is theft, plain and simple. Argue it any way you want but it is still theft.
Who am I "stealing" the MP3 from? Did Metallica serve it up to me personally from their Napster server, and when I downloaded it, they didn't have it any more? I don't think so.
Copyright infringement is NOT theft.
There's nothing being stolen. Sure, it's a crime, it's illegal publishing, but that's very different from stealing - the first amendment doesn't protect stealing but it certainly protects publishing! Metallica's recordings are not their "property". The phrase intellectual property makes you think that; don't let yourself be mind-controlled like that. You buy the CD, you own it, you can do whatever you want with it (use it as a frisbee if it's a recent Metallica pop album). You just can't republish the recording because that would be copyright infringement.
But there's no stealing happening anywhere with Napster. Using that word at all just serves to amplify RIAA spin. (Heh, I love the English language, "amplify RIAA spin".)
The real war here is between free speech and the fat wallets of the media empires and the IP laywers (who works for who there, eh?). I personally think it's ironic that the first amendment says "Congress shall pass no law... abridging the freedom of speech..." but the constitutional basis of copyright is "The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" so a must not is being superceded by a may. The Constitution doesn't say there has to be any copyright law at all, only that there can be.
And is "No Leaf Clover" really a "useful Art"?? I kinda dig that song but I'm not sure how "useful" it is.:)
Eventually the market will evolve where they are cheaper.
Where do you live, that CD prices have been going down? When did that start exactly?
Calling it "the beginning of regulation" is ridiculous. Clearly you haven't read Lessig's article yet.
As long as IP still works the same way, and the telcos aren't corrupted to the point where they start doing content filtering (VERY unlikely, as it runs counter to the decades of heavy FCC regulation), then no one can stop people from using the net however they want. Sure, the evil cartels can sue individual web sites, get injunctions at the drop of a hat, and completely trump individual liberties even in places like Norway (which still baffles me!). But that says more about our "justice" system than it does about the future of the net.
Even if the dying-industry cartels like RIAA totally corrupt our justice system (as if they haven't already) so they can knock down any web site they want to, what will they do when something like Freenet becomes widespread???
As long as IP remains the same, distributed publishing technologies like Napster and Freenet will continue to be possible. The more successful the cartels/courts are at suppressing speech on the web, the more motivation we will all have to adopt and improve these technologies.
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
Speak for yourself when you say "our lifetimes." Given the rapid advances in biotech and medicine, the Human Genome Project, nanotech, etc., some of us alive today may very well be living for over 100 years.
As for gravity shielding, more power to 'em. Skeptics can eat my shorts. Scientific skepticism is often based on logical fallacies, like discrediting scientists (if Adolf Hitler authored the laws of thermodynamics, would they be any less valid?), or claiming the "null hypothesis" - which is a sham! There is no null, relative to hypotheses. If I claim "XYZ" without experimentation or evidence, anyone who claims "not XYZ" without experimentation or evidence is equally unscientific. To those of you who argue there's no evidence gravity shielding is possible: go ahead and prove that it's impossible! I would argue that Podkletnov's experiments ARE evidence in favor of it, until such time as they are debunked.
A prime example of the null hypothesis gone bad: There are a number of people in the US who believe that giving young children the massive multiple innoculations that most of them get these days can lead to autism. There are many cases of autism manifesting shortly after such innoculations. Congress held hearings into this subject, and the Surgeon General and a bunch of medical "experts" sat there and claimed there was no link. Why did they claim this? Simply because NO ONE HAD BOTHERED TO DO ANY SERIOUS RESEARCH ON IT. In other words, to the scientific establishment, not researching something is proof that it doesn't exist.
That kind of "science" reminds me of Douglas Adams' Hideous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, a man-eating carnivore which will not attack you if you have a towel over your head, because if you can't see it, it thinks it can't see you.
I think you're missing the point. This is the first article, out of hundreds I've seen recently on the patent problem, that actually addresses the "real problem", which IS the PTO. You can't blame corporations for greed, or for taking advantage of whatever corruption they can find. One can even argue that they're required to do so by law - officers of publicly traded corporations must operate with the best interests of their stockholders in mind.
Try this thought experiment: if no law enforcement agency in the country arrested or prosecuted anyone for murder, would you say that "the real problem is all these murderers"?? Or would you say the real problem is that the government is not doing its job?? It would be the latter of course, and it's the same with patents.
It's ironic that the patent system has become so corrupted that it has exactly the opposite of its intended effect. Not only is the inventor no longer protected by the system, she has actually become a victim of it, by being forced to defend her true innovation from the feeding frenzy of IP lawyers and their spurious patents. Open source inventors are especially vulnerable, because participating in the patent process in any way will cost you six or seven figures, which open source developers rarely have. This is why Linux IPOs are a good thing - so companies like Red Hat and VA Linux can hire patent attorneys to defend open source when necessary. OTOH, they also present a target for patent sharks to attack. One of the best defenses against a patent lawsuit is not having any money!
Of course, the real inventors these days have all signed over their entire brains to the companies they work for... but once in a rare while, they are actually rewarded for their effort. Usually not though, especially in Silicon Valley, where the vulture capitalists and the lawyers have perfected the art of the screw. The SF Chronicle ran a pretty good series on that topic recently.
Actually it was Armor of God 2, when he was running away from those weird villagers with the buildings on their heads. They actually threw spears at his Zorb if I remember correctly. Operation Condor was one of those made-for-America montages of real Jackie Chan movies I think. And it sucked. Armor of God 2, OTOH, was totally amazing, I highly recommend it. The chase scene with Jackie on a motorcycle and 7 or 8 black BMWs chasing him was the tops.
Ummm, there are elected judges in most places in the US. Higher court judges are appointed, but municipal judges are often elected. Maybe you've never voted for one because you've never voted, or maybe you live in the boondocks, or on Christmas Island as your email address implies. But I agree with you - it's a bad idea. It seems obvious that having to worry about voters and reelection necessarily corrupts the impartiality of a judge.
The chief architects of the US Constitutional Republic (not democracy), Jefferson and Madison, both had a great fear of what Jefferson called the "tyranny of the majority". Here's a pertinent quote from Fedalist Paper #10 (Madison):
... a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole... and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equiality in their political rights, they would at the same time be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
That being said, clearly there is something wrong with today's representative government, where all power radiates outward from the media and money; where the voice of the individual is unheard; where the interests of constituents are determined not by direct communication with their representative, but rather by polls architected by special interests; where campaigns never end and candidates announce they're dropping out of the presidential race because they've run out of campaign funds 16 months before the election; where politicians refuse to take a stand on any issue for fear of alienating a single campaign contributor; where the voting records of representatives are insignificant compared to their sex lives, because sex makes for better soundbites.
Getting more people to vote would certainly reduce the voice of special interests and help counter some of these problems. Voting online might make it easier to vote, but will that really counter voter apathy? A solution that would induce a lot more people to vote (and probably be cheaper too) is a tax deduction for voting.
As for arguments about Net voting increasing the potential for fraud, well, that presupposes that current methods of balloting are less susceptible to fraud, a supposition I find laughable. Living in San Francisco and watching our mayor/crook Willie Clown (whose email address is damayor@marlboro.com, talk about being BOUGHT) collaborate with the 49ers to pass the stadium financing bill, I see how easy it is to manipulate polling, extend voting hours and absentee deadlines only in specific districts, and somehow motivate lots of dead people to vote. (Don't get me wrong - Go Niners!) It seems to me that digital balloting could be more secure, more accurate, and easier to detect fraud... though of course that's assuming it would be implemented by competent goverment IT staff, which is like a double or triple oxymoron.
As a publisher, copyright law is obviously an important topic for you. Do you see the Net as a threat to copyright? What do you think of Congress' current fascination with mucking with and extending intellectual property laws? Isn't copyright supposed to be a tradeoff, granting protection now in exchange for eventual release into the public domain? Doesn't extending the copyright period by 20 years every 20 years defeat this? And do you have any thoughts you'd like to share on the database "protection" bills pending in Congress, or the UCITA extensions, or software patents? (I'm most interested in your thoughts on the latter.)
This has little to do with "mom-and-pop" ISPs or with Linux. AOL does make money as an ISP, quite a lot in fact. This is exactly the same strategy M$ employed against Netscape with IE:
Identify a competitor's primary profit center and destroy it by giving away the "same thing" for free.
MS VP Brad Chase says it straight-up: "AOL might think about it as a profit center. That's not how we think about it." They're not really leveraging their monopoly in "operating systems" (if you can even call Win9x an OS). They're leveraging the many billions of dollars they have in the bank to put a competitor out of business. And guess what? It'll work. The sheep that flock to AOL will have no qualms about flocking to M$. I doubt nationwide free access in the US is a sustainable business model, but M$ only needs to sustain it long enough to gather enough users to fatally wound AOL. I give em a couple of years.
Slashdot Mirror
My Pa is a workstation ergonomics specialist for an insurance company, and he says that Aerons suck. They are ergonomically inferior for several reasons, the main reason being that they have no upper back support - the top just slopes away. It looks snazzy but it kills your back. I'm sitting in one right now and I hate it.
A much cheaper and better chair is the Office Master Super Paramount which has good upper and lower back support and is fully adjustable. (Check out models 7578 and 7778.) It's not a fancy-shmancy executive leather chair or anything... but I think for the most part, you have to choose between "fancy-shmancy" and "doesn't destroy your back". The best chairs are actually not that expensive.
I'm not sure what paper or header you're referring to (I saw no reference to a paper in the testimony); and Mr. Perrine didn't suggest that directly. But your idea is a very good one, and it follows directly from his concerns over the potential misuses of Carnivore and the differences between it and traditional telephone wiretaps.
Personally I would be much less concerned about potential abuse of Carnivore if they made two basic changes:
There are so few wiretaps actually performed that any arguments the FBI makes about "convenience" are total hogwash. It should require significant effort to monitor; Mr. Perrine makes an excellent argument for that in his testimony.
I see nothing wrong with trying to mix economic incentives into an inspirational project, but this does not preclude releasing under an open source style license.
Exactly. I don't see anything wrong with it either, I like the Travelzoo model; but there are ways to capitalize on such a user base without keeping the results private. However, keeping the resulting database private and licensing access seems to be Mr McKinstry's intent (though I can't really tell...). Sooner or later, especially if the project is successful, someone will build an open version, and personally I'd be much more interested in helping with that. But if he's going to make the results freely available to other researchers, I'm all for it -- the profit-sharing incentive stuff will simply boost my natural inclination to help such an effort.
I have three similar questions:
Will the MindPixel Digital Mind Modeling Project be open source? Will GAC be an open consciousness? Will your database of MIST stimuli be freely available for the use of other artificial consciousness researchers?
I've discerned some of your intent from the arcondev archives and from Jeff Elman's Finding Structure in Time. You seem to believe that the amount of effort required to carry out your experiment mandates some kind of economic incentive structure to get people to participate; as I understand it, you intend to issue participants stock in MindPixel Corp proportional to their contribution, and then share the profits from any commercial exploitation of the result.
I have two problems/arguments with this:
1) Economic reward as the sole means to incent participation ("production") is an unprovable axiom underlying most economic theory. It totally disregards the human needs to create, communicate, and form communities. The success of the open source software movement has proven this assumption wrong. People can and will participate for other reasons; in fact, the commercial character of your project may disincent some people, especially the audience here. Have you considered other incentives? (I'm not taking issue with the incentive, but rather that it seems to be based in part on keeping the results private.)
2) You yourself have emphasized Elman's point about the "importance of starting small." I think this statement and his initial failures also indicate the importance of starting multiple times. If your project is closed, it will prevent (to borrow a software development term) "forking" the consciousness. A single GAC will tell you less than many GACs.
This is just a temporary appeasement by AOL to deflect scrutiny until the merger goes through. "Opening" the protocol isn't functionally any different than having everyone reverse engineer it. Just because it's "open" doesn't mean they can't or won't start mutating it again every 3 days once the merger goes through. My money is on a rapid return to this anti-competitive practice the instant the merger is complete.
Opening it up permanently is WAY too forward-thinking for AOL/TW; I think companies that size are prevented by law from making any decision that sacrifices present monopoly for long-term viability. They're only allowed to consider the current quarter, I think that's an SEC regulation.
Let us now elect
Courtney Love as President
She's smart, and hot too!
who's stupid enough to start a war with technology?
Exactly.
I'd like to share a quote I feel is quite pertinent, especially to distributed publishing like Gnutella and Freenet, and online anonymity:
"The technology that is now developing and that will dominate the next decades seems to be in total conflict with traditional and, in the main, momentarily still valid, geographical and political units and concepts. This is the maturing crisis of technology.
"What kind of action does this situation call for? Whatever one feels inclined to do, one decisive trait must be considered: the very techniques that create the dangers and instabilities are in themselves useful, or closely related to the useful. In fact, the more useful they could be, the more unstabilizing their effects can also be. It is not a particular perverse destructiveness of one particular invention that creates danger. Technological power, technological efficiency as such, is an ambivalent achievment. Its danger is intrinsic.
"In looking for a solution, it is well to exclude one pseudosolution at the start. The crisis will not be resolved by inhibiting this or that apparently particularly obnoxious form of technology. For one thing, the parts of technology, as well as of the underlying sciences, are so intertwined that in the long run nothing less than total elimination of all technological progress would suffice for inhibition. Also, on a more pedestrian and immediate basis, useful and harmful techniques lie everywhere so close together that it is never possible to separate the lions from the lambs...
"Finally and, I believe, most importantly, prohibition of technology (invention and development, which are hardly separable from underlying scientific inquiry), is contrary to the whole ethos of the industrial age. It is irreconcilable with a major mode of intellectuality as our age understands it. It is hard to imagine such a restraint successfully imposed on our civilization."
- John von Neumann, 1955
What this virus made clear to me is that the news media seems to be afraid of blaming Microsoft for having insecure products, even though they bash them daily in their coverage of the antitrust trial.
Even the Slashdot lead-in doesn't mention Windows, Outlook (aka Outhouse), or VB specifically!!!!!!! Looking at all the other mainstream and niche press coverage of the virus, Microsoft is rarely mentioned before the fourth or fifth paragraph. On Nightline last night, Ted Koppel and guests went off for half an hour on the evilness of whatever fifteen year old unleashed this thing, and they left Microsoft alone. (I think so anyway, I couldn't actually stomach watching it for more than ten seconds at a time.)
My question is, what kind of world do we want?
A) A world where a rebellious teenager can cripple email systems worldwide because the security is so weak, and then we bring down the heavy hand of "justice" on this poor child because they "caused billions of dollars in damages," in the ridiculous hope of somehow disincenting teenage rebellion in the future; or
B) A world where a rebellious teenager cannot cripple email systems worldwide, and we don't have to impose excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishments on the child, and everyone's email keeps working fine.
I vote for B.
Stealing MP3s is illegal... the bottom line is that it is theft, plain and simple. Argue it any way you want but it is still theft.
:)
Who am I "stealing" the MP3 from? Did Metallica serve it up to me personally from their Napster server, and when I downloaded it, they didn't have it any more? I don't think so.
Copyright infringement is NOT theft.
There's nothing being stolen. Sure, it's a crime, it's illegal publishing, but that's very different from stealing - the first amendment doesn't protect stealing but it certainly protects publishing! Metallica's recordings are not their "property". The phrase intellectual property makes you think that; don't let yourself be mind-controlled like that. You buy the CD, you own it, you can do whatever you want with it (use it as a frisbee if it's a recent Metallica pop album). You just can't republish the recording because that would be copyright infringement.
But there's no stealing happening anywhere with Napster. Using that word at all just serves to amplify RIAA spin. (Heh, I love the English language, "amplify RIAA spin".)
The real war here is between free speech and the fat wallets of the media empires and the IP laywers (who works for who there, eh?). I personally think it's ironic that the first amendment says "Congress shall pass no law... abridging the freedom of speech..." but the constitutional basis of copyright is "The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" so a must not is being superceded by a may. The Constitution doesn't say there has to be any copyright law at all, only that there can be.
And is "No Leaf Clover" really a "useful Art"?? I kinda dig that song but I'm not sure how "useful" it is.
Eventually the market will evolve where they are cheaper.
Where do you live, that CD prices have been going down? When did that start exactly?
Calling it "the beginning of regulation" is ridiculous. Clearly you haven't read Lessig's article yet.
As long as IP still works the same way, and the telcos aren't corrupted to the point where they start doing content filtering (VERY unlikely, as it runs counter to the decades of heavy FCC regulation), then no one can stop people from using the net however they want. Sure, the evil cartels can sue individual web sites, get injunctions at the drop of a hat, and completely trump individual liberties even in places like Norway (which still baffles me!). But that says more about our "justice" system than it does about the future of the net.
Even if the dying-industry cartels like RIAA totally corrupt our justice system (as if they haven't already) so they can knock down any web site they want to, what will they do when something like Freenet becomes widespread???
As long as IP remains the same, distributed publishing technologies like Napster and Freenet will continue to be possible. The more successful the cartels/courts are at suppressing speech on the web, the more motivation we will all have to adopt and improve these technologies.
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
Speak for yourself when you say "our lifetimes." Given the rapid advances in biotech and medicine, the Human Genome Project, nanotech, etc., some of us alive today may very well be living for over 100 years.
As for gravity shielding, more power to 'em. Skeptics can eat my shorts. Scientific skepticism is often based on logical fallacies, like discrediting scientists (if Adolf Hitler authored the laws of thermodynamics, would they be any less valid?), or claiming the "null hypothesis" - which is a sham! There is no null, relative to hypotheses. If I claim "XYZ" without experimentation or evidence, anyone who claims "not XYZ" without experimentation or evidence is equally unscientific. To those of you who argue there's no evidence gravity shielding is possible: go ahead and prove that it's impossible! I would argue that Podkletnov's experiments ARE evidence in favor of it, until such time as they are debunked.
A prime example of the null hypothesis gone bad: There are a number of people in the US who believe that giving young children the massive multiple innoculations that most of them get these days can lead to autism. There are many cases of autism manifesting shortly after such innoculations. Congress held hearings into this subject, and the Surgeon General and a bunch of medical "experts" sat there and claimed there was no link. Why did they claim this? Simply because NO ONE HAD BOTHERED TO DO ANY SERIOUS RESEARCH ON IT. In other words, to the scientific establishment, not researching something is proof that it doesn't exist.
That kind of "science" reminds me of Douglas Adams' Hideous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, a man-eating carnivore which will not attack you if you have a towel over your head, because if you can't see it, it thinks it can't see you.
That was the coolest translato, but this one is cool too:
In the industry open SOURCE software (OSS) wins increasingly in meaning for the moment.
So OSS "wins in meaning". How true.
I think you're missing the point. This is the first article, out of hundreds I've seen recently on the patent problem, that actually addresses the "real problem", which IS the PTO. You can't blame corporations for greed, or for taking advantage of whatever corruption they can find. One can even argue that they're required to do so by law - officers of publicly traded corporations must operate with the best interests of their stockholders in mind.
Try this thought experiment: if no law enforcement agency in the country arrested or prosecuted anyone for murder, would you say that "the real problem is all these murderers"?? Or would you say the real problem is that the government is not doing its job?? It would be the latter of course, and it's the same with patents.
It's ironic that the patent system has become so corrupted that it has exactly the opposite of its intended effect. Not only is the inventor no longer protected by the system, she has actually become a victim of it, by being forced to defend her true innovation from the feeding frenzy of IP lawyers and their spurious patents. Open source inventors are especially vulnerable, because participating in the patent process in any way will cost you six or seven figures, which open source developers rarely have. This is why Linux IPOs are a good thing - so companies like Red Hat and VA Linux can hire patent attorneys to defend open source when necessary. OTOH, they also present a target for patent sharks to attack. One of the best defenses against a patent lawsuit is not having any money!
Of course, the real inventors these days have all signed over their entire brains to the companies they work for... but once in a rare while, they are actually rewarded for their effort. Usually not though, especially in Silicon Valley, where the vulture capitalists and the lawyers have perfected the art of the screw. The SF Chronicle ran a pretty good series on that topic recently.
Actually it was Armor of God 2, when he was running away from those weird villagers with the buildings on their heads. They actually threw spears at his Zorb if I remember correctly. Operation Condor was one of those made-for-America montages of real Jackie Chan movies I think. And it sucked. Armor of God 2, OTOH, was totally amazing, I highly recommend it. The chase scene with Jackie on a motorcycle and 7 or 8 black BMWs chasing him was the tops.
Ummm, there are elected judges in most places in the US. Higher court judges are appointed, but municipal judges are often elected. Maybe you've never voted for one because you've never voted, or maybe you live in the boondocks, or on Christmas Island as your email address implies. But I agree with you - it's a bad idea. It seems obvious that having to worry about voters and reelection necessarily corrupts the impartiality of a judge.
I have a code.
Ahhhh-CHOO!
That being said, clearly there is something wrong with today's representative government, where all power radiates outward from the media and money; where the voice of the individual is unheard; where the interests of constituents are determined not by direct communication with their representative, but rather by polls architected by special interests; where campaigns never end and candidates announce they're dropping out of the presidential race because they've run out of campaign funds 16 months before the election; where politicians refuse to take a stand on any issue for fear of alienating a single campaign contributor; where the voting records of representatives are insignificant compared to their sex lives, because sex makes for better soundbites.
Getting more people to vote would certainly reduce the voice of special interests and help counter some of these problems. Voting online might make it easier to vote, but will that really counter voter apathy? A solution that would induce a lot more people to vote (and probably be cheaper too) is a tax deduction for voting.
As for arguments about Net voting increasing the potential for fraud, well, that presupposes that current methods of balloting are less susceptible to fraud, a supposition I find laughable. Living in San Francisco and watching our mayor/crook Willie Clown (whose email address is damayor@marlboro.com, talk about being BOUGHT) collaborate with the 49ers to pass the stadium financing bill, I see how easy it is to manipulate polling, extend voting hours and absentee deadlines only in specific districts, and somehow motivate lots of dead people to vote. (Don't get me wrong - Go Niners!) It seems to me that digital balloting could be more secure, more accurate, and easier to detect fraud... though of course that's assuming it would be implemented by competent goverment IT staff, which is like a double or triple oxymoron.
As a publisher, copyright law is obviously an important topic for you. Do you see the Net as a threat to copyright? What do you think of Congress' current fascination with mucking with and extending intellectual property laws? Isn't copyright supposed to be a tradeoff, granting protection now in exchange for eventual release into the public domain? Doesn't extending the copyright period by 20 years every 20 years defeat this? And do you have any thoughts you'd like to share on the database "protection" bills pending in Congress, or the UCITA extensions, or software patents? (I'm most interested in your thoughts on the latter.)
OK, I know, that's more than one question.
This has little to do with "mom-and-pop" ISPs or with Linux. AOL does make money as an ISP, quite a lot in fact. This is exactly the same strategy M$ employed against Netscape with IE:
Identify a competitor's primary profit center and destroy it by giving away the "same thing" for free.
MS VP Brad Chase says it straight-up: "AOL might think about it as a profit center. That's not how we think about it." They're not really leveraging their monopoly in "operating systems" (if you can even call Win9x an OS). They're leveraging the many billions of dollars they have in the bank to put a competitor out of business. And guess what? It'll work. The sheep that flock to AOL will have no qualms about flocking to M$. I doubt nationwide free access in the US is a sustainable business model, but M$ only needs to sustain it long enough to gather enough users to fatally wound AOL. I give em a couple of years.