You entire post sounds like what Aaron did (the JSTOR database publication, not the suicide) was wrong and no one should ever follow him. When we think some law is unjust, we should not challenge it, because the rattlesnake goverment could bite us, we should just stay quiet and swallow it up. Is it what you are trying to say?
No, that is not what I'm trying to say, or what I said in my post.
I strongly support efforts to roll back increasingly onerous changes in copyright law. (FYI, I want U.S. copyright to go back to the original 28 year limits, and I want to see software patents eliminated.) I can also admire people who commit acts of civil disobedience, even if I don't necessarily agree with their points of view.
The problem is that what Swartz did was not an act of civil disobedience. It was a self-aggrandizing publicity stunt. The entire point of civil disobedience is to admit to what you did and be punished by the authorities in order to publicize what you believe is an unjust law. Had Swartz accepted that initial plea bargain for the single felony conviction, and then read his manifesto to the court during his sentencing, then people would have at least admired his courage and idealism, even if they didn't agree with what he advocated.
Instead, Swartz blamed other people for the mess he got himself into, including his own girlfriend, whom he should have known better than to involve in the first place. The JSTOR publication was a poorly planned ego trip that blew up in Swartz's face, and that is what I disapprove of. It accomplished nothing except to ruin peoples' lives, particularly that of Aaron Swartz.
Convinced she knew nothing that could be used against Swartz, Norton at first cooperated with the prosecutors.
When I read the line above I already knew the story
After reading her story, all I can say is that she and Swartz made the same mistake: being stupid enough to believe that they were smart enough to outwit a determined adversary with almost unlimited resources.
Prisons are full of people with that attitude. It doesn't matter if you're smarter than the guy across the table from you. You won't be smarter than a roomful of people just like him who are working together to take you down.
I am not saying that the prosecutors are not responsible for what happened to Mr. Swartz, they do.
Aaron Swartz is responsible for what happened to Aaron Swartz. Yes, the Feds played hard and dirty, but they didn't invent those tactics with Swartz. When you taunt a rattlesnake, you don't blame the rattlesnake for doing what a rattlesnake does when it bites you.
Aaron Swartz deliberately set out to commit an act of civil disobedience without thinking through the consequences. According to Norton, Swartz desired a career in politics (another indication of his naivete; I could hardly think of anyone less suited for it), and was deathly afraid of what a felony conviction would do to his prospects. Yet instead of keeping his nose squeaky clean (particularly given his interactions with the Feds after the PACER incident), he pulled a stunt that put him squarely in their sights once again. Did he even think to talk to a lawyer before he started downloading the JSTOR database? Apparently not. His ego and his hubris were his downfall.
But Ms. Norton herself ought to be brave enough to admit that because of her own fucked up cocky attitude that led her to think that she could outsmart the prosecutors (and that she talked)
Unfortunately, Swartz pulled her into his mess the moment he called her up for bail money. The fact that he failed to even anticipate the possibility of arrest, and make provisions beforehand, shows just how dumb a smart person can be.
I also had to laugh when I read Norton's account of how she "outwitted" and "infuriated" the prosecutors during her grand jury testimony. She should spend more time around lawyers, and watch how their courtroom "rage" gets turned on and off like a switch. They won the game just by making her life miserable, and making sure Swartz knew about it. Getting an indictment from the grand jury would have just been icing on the cake for them.
But frankly I think she should stop kicking herself for telling the Feds about the manifesto. It was a public document, for God's sake. Swartz was a jerk for blaming her for talking about something he was supposedly proud to put his name to. Everyone is looking for someone to blame, but she did the best she thought she could with a situation she had no control over.
This is a sad, sad case of two smart people who simply weren't nearly as smart as they thought they were. If nothing else, Swartz's death may at least cause some other starry-eyed idealist to think twice before he or she kicks the hornets' nest.
It means these coins are being hoarded. If it was real money this would be damaging the economy.
It is worth pointing out that the current upward trend in BTC prices began right after the difficulty of mining doubled last December. Mining has ceased to be profitable except for the most sophisticated custom hardware, so the supply of new BTC has dried up for the average person using a graphics card.
No new supply = rising prices. The deflationary spiral has definitely begun. The speculators and hoarders are just waiting to cash in, and it won't be pretty when it happens.
They completely left out the notion of a Dyson Sphere in this horribly written "article".
Not to mention the only "threat" they could think of was for someone to build a Death Star (!?) using asteroid resources. The much simpler idea of steering asteroids into re-entry trajectories over the cities of your enemies (e.g. Footfall) completely eluded the writers of the article.
There is no public interest knowing if a woman has had an abortion. If my neighbor carries loaded guns around I want to know about it.
How about a public interest in knowing if your neighbor has a DUI conviction?
After all, you are statistically more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than be murdered by someone using a gun. And you are far, far more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than by someone who owns a legally registered firearm.
So following your "I want to know if my neighbor is a danger to me" logic, then we obviously need interactive online maps with the names and addresses of everyone who has been convicted of drunk driving. Also keep in mind that these are convicted criminals we're talking about, as opposed to a registered gun owner who has complied with the law.
On the contrary. If you're unarmed, there might not be an incentive for the criminal to shoot you. If you're packing, it becomes imperative that he does, or you will shoot him.
Or... the criminal, who doesn't want to shoot you or get shot himself ( because he carries that gun to intimidate his victims) turns and runs, and you wind up not being his victim. Carrying a gun doesn't automatically turn you into a cold-blooded killer willing to murder someone on the spot.
Criminals often carry guns for the same reason gun owners claim they carry guns - self-protection. But in a country where the police is always packing, and potential victims often are, it is a valid argument.
Funny, I thought armed robbers carried guns to shove them in the faces of their victims, and demand that they comply or else. But it is interesting how you can rationalize the need for a criminal to carry a gun in self-defense, yet not do the same for his victims.
If I were a criminal in spe and wanted to burgle a store or home at night to steal valuables, and lived in, say, England, I would be unarmed. If I lived in the US, I would carry a gun to protect my own life.
No, if you were a burglar in the U.S., you wouldn't carry a gun at all, because in most of the country being caught with a gun while burglarizing a home or business automatically escalates the charges against you. The vast majority of burglars will burgle unoccupied homes and businesses to avoid confrontations with the owners for exactly that reason.
On the other hand, if you're an armed robber, a home invader, or a carjacker, you're definitely going to be carrying a gun, and not for self-defense. You're going to point it at someone's head and tell him or her to comply, or else.
When guns are outlawed, fewer criminals will have guns.
When guns are outlawed, fewer criminals will have guns. On the other hand, my chances of being a victim of a crime will not be affected in the least. If anything, it goes up, since a couple of 20-year-old toughs can be pretty much guaranteed to come out on top in any confrontation with me or my wife or my parents.
This, I think is a net win, even if some will still have them.
There is no "net win" when the fundamental human right of self-defense is removed for everyone except young, large healthy males. Guns are never going away in America, and for exactly that reason. Guns are not called "the Great Equalizer" for nothing.
Despite all the hysteria about guns in the U.S.A., the fact remains that you are more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than be murdered with a gun. And if you are not a young minority male living in poverty, your chances of being murdered with a gun are far lower still.
I don't quake in fear when I get in my car because I don't fear inanimate objects. For that same reason, I don't fear guns. What I might fear is the actions of other human beings, but I also realize that people who mean to do me harm will do so regardless of the weapons in their possession. The only question is whether I will be a defenseless victim, or a citizen who at least has the potential to defend himself.
Pseudoscientific rant? Bless you. What a shame that the time cube guy isn't around to demonstrate to you what pseudoscience really looks like.
You might be surprised. Check out pseudosci.org. I still get threats about that web site from time to time.
Equally, 'creating interfaces that enable contextual data mining' has been tried before and was either excessively restrictive, too much hassle or plain expensive. That said, it is asinine to scoff at the idea of permitting the great unwashed to get their hands on old journal data, either on the basis that they haven't the resources to do anything interesting with it or under the assumption that nothing they will do will be 'meaningful'. Even if all they do with the stuff is making gigantic, useless word clouds, I can't see the harm in it. If they do better (and someone would), so much the better.
You are reading too much into what I said. I have no beef with anyone who does legitimate research, whether it is in his own basement and on his own dime, or as part of a multi-million dollar academic / commercial team. Good work speaks for itself, regardless of the source.
But I do believe in the old adage of "When all is said and done on the Internet, far more is said than done." People toss out all sorts of "what if" scenarios about the miracles resulting from free-and-open information, but most of it barely qualifies as wishful thinking. The 35 GB JSTOR archive is out there on the Pirate Bay, and if something useful results from it by someone cranking away on his laptop at home, so much the better. We don't need to speculate; the resource is now out there for someone to use. We need only wait.
However, I honestly doubt anything truly useful to the public at large will come of it. Or put it this way: information may want to be free, but good research wants to be monetized. Anything useful would be much more likely to be commercialized and privatized rather than returned to the commons. So no, I'm not scoffing at the idea of individual researchers doing great things on their own, but my own years of experience have taught me strong collaborative teams are far, far more likely to do great things than some brilliant lone wolf in seclusion. And if that lone wolf does do something great, he's far more likely to use it to become rich than donate it for the good of mankind.
Thanks for the link to the OTMI, by the way. It looks like an interesting concept, but given that it seems to have been abandoned since 2009, I'm not persuaded that a huge demand exists to data-mine journal papers in this manner. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but I really do think that 35 GB of JSTOR data is going to do nothing but eat up bandwidth and hard drive space.
I love the way that you assume that JSTOR is run by librarians. None of these services are run by librarians. They may be staffed by librarians but they're almost inevitably run by a guy/gal in a sharp suit who's very much aware of the potential for profit... sorry.
Point taken. Certainly there are a lot of publishing interests represented, and some well-paid executives in the organization, so it is not all puppies and rainbows. Many people in academia and publishing have issues with ITHAKA and JSTOR, and think the subscription fees are too high. But the fact remains that JSTOR and ITHAKA have the contracts with the journals, the journals have the copyrights, and (despite claims to the contrary) not all of those papers were funded by public money and "ought to be free". So you can either pull publicity stunts like Swartz did, or you can work with JSTOR if you want to get work done.
I'm not sure what you consider a 'legitimate researcher'.
I consider it someone who has the ability to do real work, disseminate that work, and accept peer review and criticism about it without going off into a pseudoscientific rant. That says nothing about how well-funded he or she might be.
Real research (how judgmental!) does not always take time and effort and manpower and money.
Of course it does. Are computers free? Is electricity free? And even if you consider your time to be of zero value, what about the time of those people who you ask to review your results? Is it free? There is a cost (if nothing else, an opportunity cost) to any research. Meaningful work doesn't appear out of the vacuum.
If he or she has a lot of spare time on his/her hands and/or insatiable curiosity and/or an unusual approach, we shouldn't really be judging him/her on the basis of whether he/she has received sufficient grant funding to be blessed by JSTOR or some guy called timholman as Worthy.
I am hardly the person to bless any research except my own.:-) But we live in a world of finite resources and finite funding, and a world of copyright restrictions. You're not going to force JSTOR to open up all of their database at zero cost, because what JSTOR does costs money. If you can convince others that contextual data mining of a century's worth of archival journal papers has value, then resources will be allocated to creating interfaces that enable it. Aaron Swartz might have had the influence to do that, but now we'll never know.
Had Swartz chosen to do so, I truly think he could have helped break the JSTOR / ITHAKA stranglehold on academic publishing, and at least forced lower costs or increased distribution of the database. Instead he painted himself in a corner doing something that had a negative impact on the cause he believed in, because he wound up removing himself from the equation entirely.
I don't discount the possibility that you have a better understanding of this than you have exhibited in this post, but you come across as though you have no idea about text analysis.
JSTOR indexes these papers and provides a search engine, yes, but that's not all that much use for somebody looking to extract a large body of information very rapidly from a large corpus of data. JSTOR's search engine is fundamentally intended to facilitate a single task - finding papers of relevance to a keyword/keyword set and reading them manually, one at a time. There's nothing wrong with that use case, but you have to realise that sometimes people are looking to solve different problems using different methods, and for them, JSTOR's indexing efforts are practically worthless. For those people, unless someone goes to the effort of opening JSTOR so they can apply their own toolset, JSTOR is essentially useless.
I do understand the difference, but you're singling out a hypothetical scenario that perhaps one researcher in a thousand might care about.
But let's assume someone did want access to JSTOR's database for exactly that type of analysis. Do you grab a raw, unindexed bunch of papers and crank away... or do you contact JSTOR and ask to work with them? Keep in mind that JSTOR is essentially a bunch of librarians running a non-profit service. Librarians -love- to see their efforts put to good use. Of course, you'd have to provide some funding to JSTOR to cover their costs in working with you on the project, but on the other hand you'd have their cooperation and access to their index. That's the thing about real research; it takes time and equipment and manpower and money. It doesn't happen for free, even if someone considers his own time to be of zero value.
Now if you want to argue the more extreme case that a legitimate researcher may need that sort of access yet can't afford to pay JSTOR, then I can only say this: 35 GB of JSTOR data is sitting on the Pirate Bay right now. If someone is going to make great things happen with that archive, we need only wait. Personally, I'm betting that nothing is going to come of that torrent but a lot of wasted bandwidth and hard drive space. Eventually the seeding will dry up, and the archive will vanish.
Aaron Swartz had every opportunity to work with JSTOR, Harvard, and MIT to do something truly constructive. He could have solicited funding and support to build the sort of database querying interface you are talking about, and worked with JSTOR to implement it. He could have solicited funding from some Web 2.0 billionaires to bring JSTOR to every public library in the country. He had the brains and he had the influence to make something truly constructive happen. The problem was that those approaches wouldn't have gotten him any notoriety with the "Information wants to be free" crowd.
What Aaron Swartz did to JSTOR was essentially a publicity stunt, and it wasn't even a well-thought-out publicity stunt. Didn't it occur to him that the Feds might have it out for him after his interactions with them following the PACER downloads? Didn't it occur to him to talk to a couple of lawyers before attempting an act of civil disobedience, so that he'd have a better understanding of the possible legal consequences? Apparently not. So now we have a talented guy who ended his life for no good reason.
And, yes, he could have read them, one by one? But could he have done a global search using arbitrarily complex queries? Fed them into a neural network? Indeed, done anything actually interesting with them? Not unless he got heaps of them onto a hard drive.
Do you have any idea what JSTOR does? It indexes those papers and provides a search engine that allows arbitrary complex boolean queries. That's what you get when you sit down in front of that library terminal. In fact, that's why JSTOR (a not-for-profit organization) charges a subscription fee. That's the value they provide.
That mass of JSTOR data on the Pirate Bay is practically worthless. Unless someone goes to the effort of indexing it and creating a search engine for it, it's essentially useless. And if anyone does do that, they'll be doing nothing but re-inventing what JSTOR has already built.
JSTOR charges a subscription fee to libraries to pay for their indexing efforts, their search engine, and their servers. And as a taxpayer, you can go to your local state university library and access JSTOR to your heart's content, because your tax dollars pay that subscription fee and pay for that state university library.
What Swartz did was a pointless stunt. Who is going to go to the effort of duplicating what JSTOR did? Who is going to pay for it? And to what purpose, when those papers are already essentially free to anyone who visits a public university library?
I know the sexier story is that MIT and the government killed Swarts. Just like it was sexier when those Australian DJs killed that nurse. But the reality is that suicide is a major, I believe the biggest killer, for people Swartz's age. So this is not an anomaly death for his age group, it's a common occurrence in society. Mental health is the issue here. Not his trial for 'hacking' or whatever.
I know I'm going to burn some karma for saying this, but Slashdot readers need to get a grip. I remember similar calls for investigating the prosecutors when Hans Reiser was indicted, and how the Slashdot crowd was screaming for blood about the injustice when he was found guilty... right up to the point where Reiser led the police to his wife's body.
Aaron Swartz made two big mistakes. The first was using MIT's network to download the JSTOR documents, and evading their attempts to stop him. Stop and think why MIT didn't try to curtail the Feds' prosecution: Swartz betrayed their trust by doing what he did. How would you feel if you suddenly learned that someone you trusted, and allowed access to your system, was using your network to download material in a way that was guaranteed to get some powerful people up in arms? If you're going to involve other parties in your act of civil disobedience, you should show them enough respect to ask them first.
His second mistake (in my opinion) was listening to the sort of faux bravado that is so prevalent on Slashdot. "Fight them, Aaron! Information wants to be free! Don't cop a plea!" I've read that he was offered a six month sentence in a plea bargain. Rather than take that offer (which would have given him maybe four to five months in a minimum security facility) and come out smelling like a rose for his act of civil disobedience, he decided to fight it out against an opponent with essentially unlimited resources. And where are all the armchair cheerleaders when you're the one walking into the courtroom? Nowhere to be found.
I'm reminded of the vicious attacks on George Hotz (Geohot) by the armchair brigades when he backed down from Sony's threats. Hotz was smart; he realized how futile it would be to ruin his life in a battle he could not win. Sony offered him an easy way out, and Hotz wisely took it. Too bad Swartz (or his attorneys) didn't see fit to do likewise.
Swartz had a history of severe mental depression. Did his impending trial impact his mental state? No doubt. But when you turn down a plea bargain from the Feds, you can bet your bottom dollar they are going to put you through the wringer. In the end, it was Swartz's decision to abuse MIT's network, Swartz's decision to turn down the plea bargain, and Swartz's decision to end his life - not theirs.
Aaron Swartz was a bright and talented guy with a history of mental depression who made some bad choices, the worst of which was to commit suicide. And the ultimate irony? The JSTOR papers that "wanted to be free"? At any time, anyone could have gone to a local public university library, sat down in front of a terminal, and read those articles to his or her heart's content. That's what so ultimately ridiculous about this whole unfortunate mess.
Is Negroponte serious? Who is going to care about a 7" Android tablet at this late date? The market is already saturated with them - just look on Amazon at all the different brands, at every imaginable price point.
The time has passed for the OLPC concept. They've been in catch-up mode ever since the netbook wave hit, and they've fallen even further into irrelevance since the tablet craze took over. This will be yet another overpriced publicity-seeking OLPC flop that never makes it to production.
The "argument" is not "pointless". Ones and zeros have almost no value. They are reproducible, infinitely, for free. But, you want to charge me a dollar just to use one particular combination of ones and zeros?
It never ceases to amaze me how people with a background in computer programming and operations (as you clearly have) will discount their own labor, and the labor of others.
The iOS / Android store model is everything that the Slashdot crowd claims to support in software development. Most of the money goes to the developers, and most of those developers are not rich. In return for putting the effort into writing and maintaining a software package that gives you many hours of enjoyment (or utility), a developer asks for less money that you'd pay to buy a candy bar or can of soda. It is the micropayment support system that everyone used to wish for back in the days of multi-hundred dollar monopoly software prices, and yet somehow, to some people, it is still too much to pay.
I support the iOS / Android store model, and I say that as someone who has written an open source software utility with thousands of users. I distribute it freely, but that is my choice, not the choice of someone else. I have zero sympathy for those who think they have the right to make that choice for someone who is only asking you to pay one or two dollars for his time and effort.
Google "Tornado Turbine" and look for the January 1977 issue of Popular Science. This idea has been around for a long, long time. Back then, the idea was to take advantage of solar heating of the tower to drive the vortex. I've seen similar ideas that were supposed to take advantage of natural pressure / temperature differentials along cliffs and mountains, etc. None have ever been made to work in any practical way.
When someone fails to check the prior art and starts trumpeting about his or her re-invention of the wheel, then you can just about discount the claims from the start. Why should anyone trust the opinion of an engineer who can't even be bothered to do any background research?
Anil Dash's historical revisionism
on
The Web We Lost
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· Score: 4, Insightful
But we're going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the experience of the Internet than what they know.
Anil Dash seems to remember things a bit differently than I do. We didn't "re-educate" the AOL users. Instead, those users turned the rest of the web into the trash pile so much of it is today.
The Twitter and Facebook fanatics of today (who know and care nothing about the way the web really works) are exactly the same people who would have been obsessively dialing into AOL twenty years ago. Nothing has changed with that demographic, and the idea that we are somehow going to "re-educate" them is laughably naive.
Today, we are still suffering from the consequences of the misguided belief that the average user could be "educated" to properly operate and maintain a general-purpose computer. The result? Huge botnets, DDoS attacks, and exploits at every turn. Love him or hate him, Steve Jobs had it exactly right - build a walled garden to keep those users from doing any more damage to themselves or to the rest of the net.
The "old web" is still out there. No one has taken it away from us. And if the teeming millions have no knowledge or appreciation of it, so what? As long as walled gardens keep them from ruining it for the rest of us, I fail to see the downside.
Really? Most people I've talked to (normal people, not neckbeards) have refused to upgrade to Windows 8 because it's incomprehensible. Go on Youtube and look at the number of hits people are getting on "x relative tries to use Windows 8..." These aren't completely computer illiterate people (some of them are I'm sure), yet compared to what they're used to, Windows 8 is impossible to navigate. It's as if Microsoft dived head first into the tablet market without checking to see if there was any water in the pool first.
My own observation - two weeks ago, I went to the mall to check out the iPad mini (wife is thinking about one for Christmas). Microsoft had rented a kiosk to show Surface tablets not 200 feet away from the Apple store (gotta admire the chutzpah).
In the Apple store, I saw a dozen people playing with iPads or iPad minis, with Apple employees hovering nearby in case of questions. People were tapping and gesturing and doing what you'd expect on an iPad, almost entirely without any assistance from the employees.
Outside, about a half dozen people were clustered around the Surface kiosk talking with Microsoft employees. The difference? The Microsoft employees were having to show the users what to do, step-by-step . No one seemed to be able to just pick one up and make it work. Everyone needed help. The contrast was absolutely remarkable.
Windows 8 is the new Vista. I expect to see the Metro GUI turned into an option for Windows 9, and more heads to roll at Microsoft.
If the school wants to improve attendance, why not:
(a) install a high-resolution IP camera with a vandal-proof enclosure in every classroom (above the teacher's head, facing the students),
(b) upload a high-res image every 2 or 3 seconds to a web server (no audio needed),
(c) and email each parent the daily schedule of his / her child, with clickable links so they can look in the appropriate classroom via a web browser, and verify the child is there.
In fact, it would be relatively straightforward to create a web-based interface so that you could enter the student's name, and the video feed would automatically switch over to the correct classroom camera depending on the time of day. Mom or Dad could just open a window on his/her computer desktop and keep an eye on Johnny or Susie all day long.
No doubt some teachers will freak out at the idea of a camera in the classroom, but I can't imagine that cameras would cost more, or be more intrusive, than an RFID system in the long run.
Note: I have put my money where my mouth is. I live with two foreign PhD students who pay drastically reduced rent. They are also the nicest people people that I have lived with.
"Helping people" and "behaving sensibly to protect yourself and your property" are not mutually exclusive goals. I believe in helping people to, but that doesn't mean I invite total strangers to live in my home, or pick up hitchhikers at 2 a.m. in the morning.
Those two Ph.D. students you live with were vetted by the university that admitted them, and by the government agency that issued their student visas. That is a far cry from inviting some person into your home with no credentials beyond he chooses to tell you.
And as for liability waivers that you download from the web, I'll just pass on what a lawyer friend once told me: "Free legal advice is worth every penny you pay for it."
Also, what kind of startup are you doing where you need incredibly high download speeds? Seriously. There is nothing you could do which would be using such large files that this is an issue and be processable on a laptop.
Excellent point. Ultra-high bandwidth would certainly be useful for startups specializing in (for example) virtual / augmented reality applications, virtual environments, or remote sensing / control. But a guy sitting on your couch in his dirty underwear is not going to be doing stuff like that on his laptop.
On the other hand, there are many not-so-nice things he could do with that extra bandwidth, e.g. download/host lots of torrented movies/music/pr0n, manage attacks and exploits against remote systems, etc. And guess whose door the authorities will come knocking on if he chooses to do so?
While I can admire the idealism behind this concept, from a practical viewpoint it leaves much to be desired.
For example, will Kansas City Hacker Homes bond and insure the hackers, so as to indemnify the homeowners against theft or lawsuits from their "guests"? Very doubtful, which means the burden falls on the homeowner (and his/her insurance policy).
What happens to the homeowner if the hacker decides to skirt the law (e.g. breaking into someone's network, taking drugs, or downloading copyrighted material) while living in the house? What if he runs up hundreds of dollars on your cable bill watching pay-per-view movies? How do you get your money back? Can you even evict him on the spot, or will local laws give him "squatter's rights" for a limited time, as they often do for non-paying renters?
You wouldn't really know anything about this person in your house, besides what he told you. Will Kansas City Hacker Homes provide you with a background check of the hacker's criminal and civil record? Again, highly unlikely.
So basically you're rolling the dice with some total stranger, taking all the risk, and with no promise of getting anything in return. Not a smart move for any homeowner.
Perhaps the thing they hate isn't science, but corporatism.
I'd say it's even simpler than that. People hate things they fear or don't understand, and science is definitely one of them. A corporation engaged in scientific research just provides a convenient aggregated target. The difference is that an anarchist is more likely to act on his or her fear and ignorance than your typical man on the street.
Anarchy is the least stable form of government. As soon as one person says "Hey, let's...(x,y.z)" and some others say "OK", it's broken; there is now a leader and followers.
Not to mention the fact that our own evolution has programmed us to be followers. We are behaviorally predisposed to follow a charismatic leader, because doing so provided enormous survival advantages for the tribe (if not necessarily for individual members) in human pre-history.
Anarchists have always struck me as a bunch of frustrated closet leaders who are all operating under the implicit assumption that things will be run their way one day. The only thing that unites them is their desire to tear down the existing power structure. If they ever succeeded, they would immediately turn on each other.
But tell me, where is this 'endangering people' coming from in the situation where you roll through a 4-way stop when there are no cars even remotely visible on any of the adjoining roads?
You should have paid more attention in your driver's education class. Stop signs aren't put there for the cars / motorcycles / cyclists / pedestrians you see. They're for the cars / motorcycles / cyclists / pedestrians you don't see.
The closest I ever came to having my car T-boned by another car was when a woman drove right through a stop sign as I was passing through an intersection just two blocks from my house. It was not a high-traffic road, and she had gotten used to rolling right through the intersection and blowing past the stop sign because (of course) hardly any one ever drove on that road.
I nearly wound up hitting a tree as I ran off the road to avoid her, but fortunately no one was hurt. She was quite apologetic, but that would have been little consolation if she had killed me or my passengers.
It's good that you stop at all 4-way intersections. Keep doing it, and quit questioning the wisdom behind it.
They didn't "go into" the network. They collected data that was floating on the airwaves around them. The proper analogy isn't with walking into an open door, but taking a photo through an open window. From the street.
Actually, it's more like putting a speaker outside your house, then playing personal information over it for anyone driving down the street to hear, and then getting angry that someone had the gall to record the audio that you were broadcasting to the world at large.
anybody that speaks "patent" know if they have a decent patent or can "we" rip these patents apart like Mouse Dresden does to Vampires??
(just for "fun" lets see if we can come up with prior art and such)
You're wasting your time. Prior art can be found for the great majority of patents. (I do this part-time as a consultant.)
But prior art is irrelevant unless you can afford a couple of good attorneys who bill at $500 / hour, and are willing to devote months if not years of your life to a legal battle. Is it worth $100,000, or even $1,000,000, to invalidate the plaintiff's patent? You can win the battle but lose the war when your small business goes bankrupt from the legal costs.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that is not what I'm trying to say, or what I said in my post.
I strongly support efforts to roll back increasingly onerous changes in copyright law. (FYI, I want U.S. copyright to go back to the original 28 year limits, and I want to see software patents eliminated.) I can also admire people who commit acts of civil disobedience, even if I don't necessarily agree with their points of view.
The problem is that what Swartz did was not an act of civil disobedience. It was a self-aggrandizing publicity stunt. The entire point of civil disobedience is to admit to what you did and be punished by the authorities in order to publicize what you believe is an unjust law. Had Swartz accepted that initial plea bargain for the single felony conviction, and then read his manifesto to the court during his sentencing, then people would have at least admired his courage and idealism, even if they didn't agree with what he advocated.
Instead, Swartz blamed other people for the mess he got himself into, including his own girlfriend, whom he should have known better than to involve in the first place. The JSTOR publication was a poorly planned ego trip that blew up in Swartz's face, and that is what I disapprove of. It accomplished nothing except to ruin peoples' lives, particularly that of Aaron Swartz.
After reading her story, all I can say is that she and Swartz made the same mistake: being stupid enough to believe that they were smart enough to outwit a determined adversary with almost unlimited resources.
Prisons are full of people with that attitude. It doesn't matter if you're smarter than the guy across the table from you. You won't be smarter than a roomful of people just like him who are working together to take you down.
Aaron Swartz is responsible for what happened to Aaron Swartz. Yes, the Feds played hard and dirty, but they didn't invent those tactics with Swartz. When you taunt a rattlesnake, you don't blame the rattlesnake for doing what a rattlesnake does when it bites you.
Aaron Swartz deliberately set out to commit an act of civil disobedience without thinking through the consequences. According to Norton, Swartz desired a career in politics (another indication of his naivete; I could hardly think of anyone less suited for it), and was deathly afraid of what a felony conviction would do to his prospects. Yet instead of keeping his nose squeaky clean (particularly given his interactions with the Feds after the PACER incident), he pulled a stunt that put him squarely in their sights once again. Did he even think to talk to a lawyer before he started downloading the JSTOR database? Apparently not. His ego and his hubris were his downfall.
Unfortunately, Swartz pulled her into his mess the moment he called her up for bail money. The fact that he failed to even anticipate the possibility of arrest, and make provisions beforehand, shows just how dumb a smart person can be.
I also had to laugh when I read Norton's account of how she "outwitted" and "infuriated" the prosecutors during her grand jury testimony. She should spend more time around lawyers, and watch how their courtroom "rage" gets turned on and off like a switch. They won the game just by making her life miserable, and making sure Swartz knew about it. Getting an indictment from the grand jury would have just been icing on the cake for them.
But frankly I think she should stop kicking herself for telling the Feds about the manifesto. It was a public document, for God's sake. Swartz was a jerk for blaming her for talking about something he was supposedly proud to put his name to. Everyone is looking for someone to blame, but she did the best she thought she could with a situation she had no control over.
This is a sad, sad case of two smart people who simply weren't nearly as smart as they thought they were. If nothing else, Swartz's death may at least cause some other starry-eyed idealist to think twice before he or she kicks the hornets' nest.
It is worth pointing out that the current upward trend in BTC prices began right after the difficulty of mining doubled last December. Mining has ceased to be profitable except for the most sophisticated custom hardware, so the supply of new BTC has dried up for the average person using a graphics card.
No new supply = rising prices. The deflationary spiral has definitely begun. The speculators and hoarders are just waiting to cash in, and it won't be pretty when it happens.
Not to mention the only "threat" they could think of was for someone to build a Death Star (!?) using asteroid resources. The much simpler idea of steering asteroids into re-entry trajectories over the cities of your enemies (e.g. Footfall) completely eluded the writers of the article.
How about a public interest in knowing if your neighbor has a DUI conviction?
After all, you are statistically more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than be murdered by someone using a gun. And you are far, far more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than by someone who owns a legally registered firearm.
So following your "I want to know if my neighbor is a danger to me" logic, then we obviously need interactive online maps with the names and addresses of everyone who has been convicted of drunk driving. Also keep in mind that these are convicted criminals we're talking about, as opposed to a registered gun owner who has complied with the law.
You see where this kind of thinking leads?
Or ... the criminal, who doesn't want to shoot you or get shot himself ( because he carries that gun to intimidate his victims) turns and runs, and you wind up not being his victim. Carrying a gun doesn't automatically turn you into a cold-blooded killer willing to murder someone on the spot.
Funny, I thought armed robbers carried guns to shove them in the faces of their victims, and demand that they comply or else. But it is interesting how you can rationalize the need for a criminal to carry a gun in self-defense, yet not do the same for his victims.
No, if you were a burglar in the U.S., you wouldn't carry a gun at all, because in most of the country being caught with a gun while burglarizing a home or business automatically escalates the charges against you. The vast majority of burglars will burgle unoccupied homes and businesses to avoid confrontations with the owners for exactly that reason.
On the other hand, if you're an armed robber, a home invader, or a carjacker, you're definitely going to be carrying a gun, and not for self-defense. You're going to point it at someone's head and tell him or her to comply, or else.
When guns are outlawed, fewer criminals will have guns. On the other hand, my chances of being a victim of a crime will not be affected in the least. If anything, it goes up, since a couple of 20-year-old toughs can be pretty much guaranteed to come out on top in any confrontation with me or my wife or my parents.
There is no "net win" when the fundamental human right of self-defense is removed for everyone except young, large healthy males. Guns are never going away in America, and for exactly that reason. Guns are not called "the Great Equalizer" for nothing.
Despite all the hysteria about guns in the U.S.A., the fact remains that you are more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than be murdered with a gun. And if you are not a young minority male living in poverty, your chances of being murdered with a gun are far lower still.
I don't quake in fear when I get in my car because I don't fear inanimate objects. For that same reason, I don't fear guns. What I might fear is the actions of other human beings, but I also realize that people who mean to do me harm will do so regardless of the weapons in their possession. The only question is whether I will be a defenseless victim, or a citizen who at least has the potential to defend himself.
You might be surprised. Check out pseudosci.org. I still get threats about that web site from time to time.
You are reading too much into what I said. I have no beef with anyone who does legitimate research, whether it is in his own basement and on his own dime, or as part of a multi-million dollar academic / commercial team. Good work speaks for itself, regardless of the source.
But I do believe in the old adage of "When all is said and done on the Internet, far more is said than done." People toss out all sorts of "what if" scenarios about the miracles resulting from free-and-open information, but most of it barely qualifies as wishful thinking. The 35 GB JSTOR archive is out there on the Pirate Bay, and if something useful results from it by someone cranking away on his laptop at home, so much the better. We don't need to speculate; the resource is now out there for someone to use. We need only wait.
However, I honestly doubt anything truly useful to the public at large will come of it. Or put it this way: information may want to be free, but good research wants to be monetized. Anything useful would be much more likely to be commercialized and privatized rather than returned to the commons. So no, I'm not scoffing at the idea of individual researchers doing great things on their own, but my own years of experience have taught me strong collaborative teams are far, far more likely to do great things than some brilliant lone wolf in seclusion. And if that lone wolf does do something great, he's far more likely to use it to become rich than donate it for the good of mankind.
Thanks for the link to the OTMI, by the way. It looks like an interesting concept, but given that it seems to have been abandoned since 2009, I'm not persuaded that a huge demand exists to data-mine journal papers in this manner. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but I really do think that 35 GB of JSTOR data is going to do nothing but eat up bandwidth and hard drive space.
Point taken. Certainly there are a lot of publishing interests represented, and some well-paid executives in the organization, so it is not all puppies and rainbows. Many people in academia and publishing have issues with ITHAKA and JSTOR, and think the subscription fees are too high. But the fact remains that JSTOR and ITHAKA have the contracts with the journals, the journals have the copyrights, and (despite claims to the contrary) not all of those papers were funded by public money and "ought to be free". So you can either pull publicity stunts like Swartz did, or you can work with JSTOR if you want to get work done.
I consider it someone who has the ability to do real work, disseminate that work, and accept peer review and criticism about it without going off into a pseudoscientific rant. That says nothing about how well-funded he or she might be.
Of course it does. Are computers free? Is electricity free? And even if you consider your time to be of zero value, what about the time of those people who you ask to review your results? Is it free? There is a cost (if nothing else, an opportunity cost) to any research. Meaningful work doesn't appear out of the vacuum.
I am hardly the person to bless any research except my own. :-) But we live in a world of finite resources and finite funding, and a world of copyright restrictions. You're not going to force JSTOR to open up all of their database at zero cost, because what JSTOR does costs money. If you can convince others that contextual data mining of a century's worth of archival journal papers has value, then resources will be allocated to creating interfaces that enable it. Aaron Swartz might have had the influence to do that, but now we'll never know.
Had Swartz chosen to do so, I truly think he could have helped break the JSTOR / ITHAKA stranglehold on academic publishing, and at least forced lower costs or increased distribution of the database. Instead he painted himself in a corner doing something that had a negative impact on the cause he believed in, because he wound up removing himself from the equation entirely.
I do understand the difference, but you're singling out a hypothetical scenario that perhaps one researcher in a thousand might care about.
But let's assume someone did want access to JSTOR's database for exactly that type of analysis. Do you grab a raw, unindexed bunch of papers and crank away ... or do you contact JSTOR and ask to work with them? Keep in mind that JSTOR is essentially a bunch of librarians running a non-profit service. Librarians -love- to see their efforts put to good use. Of course, you'd have to provide some funding to JSTOR to cover their costs in working with you on the project, but on the other hand you'd have their cooperation and access to their index. That's the thing about real research; it takes time and equipment and manpower and money. It doesn't happen for free, even if someone considers his own time to be of zero value.
Now if you want to argue the more extreme case that a legitimate researcher may need that sort of access yet can't afford to pay JSTOR, then I can only say this: 35 GB of JSTOR data is sitting on the Pirate Bay right now. If someone is going to make great things happen with that archive, we need only wait. Personally, I'm betting that nothing is going to come of that torrent but a lot of wasted bandwidth and hard drive space. Eventually the seeding will dry up, and the archive will vanish.
Aaron Swartz had every opportunity to work with JSTOR, Harvard, and MIT to do something truly constructive. He could have solicited funding and support to build the sort of database querying interface you are talking about, and worked with JSTOR to implement it. He could have solicited funding from some Web 2.0 billionaires to bring JSTOR to every public library in the country. He had the brains and he had the influence to make something truly constructive happen. The problem was that those approaches wouldn't have gotten him any notoriety with the "Information wants to be free" crowd.
What Aaron Swartz did to JSTOR was essentially a publicity stunt, and it wasn't even a well-thought-out publicity stunt. Didn't it occur to him that the Feds might have it out for him after his interactions with them following the PACER downloads? Didn't it occur to him to talk to a couple of lawyers before attempting an act of civil disobedience, so that he'd have a better understanding of the possible legal consequences? Apparently not. So now we have a talented guy who ended his life for no good reason.
What an incredible, colossal waste.
Do you have any idea what JSTOR does? It indexes those papers and provides a search engine that allows arbitrary complex boolean queries. That's what you get when you sit down in front of that library terminal. In fact, that's why JSTOR (a not-for-profit organization) charges a subscription fee. That's the value they provide.
That mass of JSTOR data on the Pirate Bay is practically worthless. Unless someone goes to the effort of indexing it and creating a search engine for it, it's essentially useless. And if anyone does do that, they'll be doing nothing but re-inventing what JSTOR has already built.
JSTOR charges a subscription fee to libraries to pay for their indexing efforts, their search engine, and their servers. And as a taxpayer, you can go to your local state university library and access JSTOR to your heart's content, because your tax dollars pay that subscription fee and pay for that state university library.
What Swartz did was a pointless stunt. Who is going to go to the effort of duplicating what JSTOR did? Who is going to pay for it? And to what purpose, when those papers are already essentially free to anyone who visits a public university library?
I know I'm going to burn some karma for saying this, but Slashdot readers need to get a grip. I remember similar calls for investigating the prosecutors when Hans Reiser was indicted, and how the Slashdot crowd was screaming for blood about the injustice when he was found guilty ... right up to the point where Reiser led the police to his wife's body.
Aaron Swartz made two big mistakes. The first was using MIT's network to download the JSTOR documents, and evading their attempts to stop him. Stop and think why MIT didn't try to curtail the Feds' prosecution: Swartz betrayed their trust by doing what he did. How would you feel if you suddenly learned that someone you trusted, and allowed access to your system, was using your network to download material in a way that was guaranteed to get some powerful people up in arms? If you're going to involve other parties in your act of civil disobedience, you should show them enough respect to ask them first.
His second mistake (in my opinion) was listening to the sort of faux bravado that is so prevalent on Slashdot. "Fight them, Aaron! Information wants to be free! Don't cop a plea!" I've read that he was offered a six month sentence in a plea bargain. Rather than take that offer (which would have given him maybe four to five months in a minimum security facility) and come out smelling like a rose for his act of civil disobedience, he decided to fight it out against an opponent with essentially unlimited resources. And where are all the armchair cheerleaders when you're the one walking into the courtroom? Nowhere to be found.
I'm reminded of the vicious attacks on George Hotz (Geohot) by the armchair brigades when he backed down from Sony's threats. Hotz was smart; he realized how futile it would be to ruin his life in a battle he could not win. Sony offered him an easy way out, and Hotz wisely took it. Too bad Swartz (or his attorneys) didn't see fit to do likewise.
Swartz had a history of severe mental depression. Did his impending trial impact his mental state? No doubt. But when you turn down a plea bargain from the Feds, you can bet your bottom dollar they are going to put you through the wringer. In the end, it was Swartz's decision to abuse MIT's network, Swartz's decision to turn down the plea bargain, and Swartz's decision to end his life - not theirs.
Aaron Swartz was a bright and talented guy with a history of mental depression who made some bad choices, the worst of which was to commit suicide. And the ultimate irony? The JSTOR papers that "wanted to be free"? At any time, anyone could have gone to a local public university library, sat down in front of a terminal, and read those articles to his or her heart's content. That's what so ultimately ridiculous about this whole unfortunate mess.
Is Negroponte serious? Who is going to care about a 7" Android tablet at this late date? The market is already saturated with them - just look on Amazon at all the different brands, at every imaginable price point.
The time has passed for the OLPC concept. They've been in catch-up mode ever since the netbook wave hit, and they've fallen even further into irrelevance since the tablet craze took over. This will be yet another overpriced publicity-seeking OLPC flop that never makes it to production.
It never ceases to amaze me how people with a background in computer programming and operations (as you clearly have) will discount their own labor, and the labor of others.
The iOS / Android store model is everything that the Slashdot crowd claims to support in software development. Most of the money goes to the developers, and most of those developers are not rich. In return for putting the effort into writing and maintaining a software package that gives you many hours of enjoyment (or utility), a developer asks for less money that you'd pay to buy a candy bar or can of soda. It is the micropayment support system that everyone used to wish for back in the days of multi-hundred dollar monopoly software prices, and yet somehow, to some people, it is still too much to pay.
I support the iOS / Android store model, and I say that as someone who has written an open source software utility with thousands of users. I distribute it freely, but that is my choice, not the choice of someone else. I have zero sympathy for those who think they have the right to make that choice for someone who is only asking you to pay one or two dollars for his time and effort.
Google "Tornado Turbine" and look for the January 1977 issue of Popular Science. This idea has been around for a long, long time. Back then, the idea was to take advantage of solar heating of the tower to drive the vortex. I've seen similar ideas that were supposed to take advantage of natural pressure / temperature differentials along cliffs and mountains, etc. None have ever been made to work in any practical way.
When someone fails to check the prior art and starts trumpeting about his or her re-invention of the wheel, then you can just about discount the claims from the start. Why should anyone trust the opinion of an engineer who can't even be bothered to do any background research?
Anil Dash seems to remember things a bit differently than I do. We didn't "re-educate" the AOL users. Instead, those users turned the rest of the web into the trash pile so much of it is today.
The Twitter and Facebook fanatics of today (who know and care nothing about the way the web really works) are exactly the same people who would have been obsessively dialing into AOL twenty years ago. Nothing has changed with that demographic, and the idea that we are somehow going to "re-educate" them is laughably naive.
Today, we are still suffering from the consequences of the misguided belief that the average user could be "educated" to properly operate and maintain a general-purpose computer. The result? Huge botnets, DDoS attacks, and exploits at every turn. Love him or hate him, Steve Jobs had it exactly right - build a walled garden to keep those users from doing any more damage to themselves or to the rest of the net.
The "old web" is still out there. No one has taken it away from us. And if the teeming millions have no knowledge or appreciation of it, so what? As long as walled gardens keep them from ruining it for the rest of us, I fail to see the downside.
My own observation - two weeks ago, I went to the mall to check out the iPad mini (wife is thinking about one for Christmas). Microsoft had rented a kiosk to show Surface tablets not 200 feet away from the Apple store (gotta admire the chutzpah).
In the Apple store, I saw a dozen people playing with iPads or iPad minis, with Apple employees hovering nearby in case of questions. People were tapping and gesturing and doing what you'd expect on an iPad, almost entirely without any assistance from the employees.
Outside, about a half dozen people were clustered around the Surface kiosk talking with Microsoft employees. The difference? The Microsoft employees were having to show the users what to do, step-by-step . No one seemed to be able to just pick one up and make it work. Everyone needed help. The contrast was absolutely remarkable.
Windows 8 is the new Vista. I expect to see the Metro GUI turned into an option for Windows 9, and more heads to roll at Microsoft.
If the school wants to improve attendance, why not:
(a) install a high-resolution IP camera with a vandal-proof enclosure in every classroom (above the teacher's head, facing the students),
(b) upload a high-res image every 2 or 3 seconds to a web server (no audio needed),
(c) and email each parent the daily schedule of his / her child, with clickable links so they can look in the appropriate classroom via a web browser, and verify the child is there.
In fact, it would be relatively straightforward to create a web-based interface so that you could enter the student's name, and the video feed would automatically switch over to the correct classroom camera depending on the time of day. Mom or Dad could just open a window on his/her computer desktop and keep an eye on Johnny or Susie all day long.
No doubt some teachers will freak out at the idea of a camera in the classroom, but I can't imagine that cameras would cost more, or be more intrusive, than an RFID system in the long run.
"Helping people" and "behaving sensibly to protect yourself and your property" are not mutually exclusive goals. I believe in helping people to, but that doesn't mean I invite total strangers to live in my home, or pick up hitchhikers at 2 a.m. in the morning.
Those two Ph.D. students you live with were vetted by the university that admitted them, and by the government agency that issued their student visas. That is a far cry from inviting some person into your home with no credentials beyond he chooses to tell you.
And as for liability waivers that you download from the web, I'll just pass on what a lawyer friend once told me: "Free legal advice is worth every penny you pay for it."
Excellent point. Ultra-high bandwidth would certainly be useful for startups specializing in (for example) virtual / augmented reality applications, virtual environments, or remote sensing / control. But a guy sitting on your couch in his dirty underwear is not going to be doing stuff like that on his laptop.
On the other hand, there are many not-so-nice things he could do with that extra bandwidth, e.g. download/host lots of torrented movies/music/pr0n, manage attacks and exploits against remote systems, etc. And guess whose door the authorities will come knocking on if he chooses to do so?
While I can admire the idealism behind this concept, from a practical viewpoint it leaves much to be desired.
For example, will Kansas City Hacker Homes bond and insure the hackers, so as to indemnify the homeowners against theft or lawsuits from their "guests"? Very doubtful, which means the burden falls on the homeowner (and his/her insurance policy).
What happens to the homeowner if the hacker decides to skirt the law (e.g. breaking into someone's network, taking drugs, or downloading copyrighted material) while living in the house? What if he runs up hundreds of dollars on your cable bill watching pay-per-view movies? How do you get your money back? Can you even evict him on the spot, or will local laws give him "squatter's rights" for a limited time, as they often do for non-paying renters?
You wouldn't really know anything about this person in your house, besides what he told you. Will Kansas City Hacker Homes provide you with a background check of the hacker's criminal and civil record? Again, highly unlikely.
So basically you're rolling the dice with some total stranger, taking all the risk, and with no promise of getting anything in return. Not a smart move for any homeowner.
I'd say it's even simpler than that. People hate things they fear or don't understand, and science is definitely one of them. A corporation engaged in scientific research just provides a convenient aggregated target. The difference is that an anarchist is more likely to act on his or her fear and ignorance than your typical man on the street.
Not to mention the fact that our own evolution has programmed us to be followers. We are behaviorally predisposed to follow a charismatic leader, because doing so provided enormous survival advantages for the tribe (if not necessarily for individual members) in human pre-history.
Anarchists have always struck me as a bunch of frustrated closet leaders who are all operating under the implicit assumption that things will be run their way one day. The only thing that unites them is their desire to tear down the existing power structure. If they ever succeeded, they would immediately turn on each other.
You should have paid more attention in your driver's education class. Stop signs aren't put there for the cars / motorcycles / cyclists / pedestrians you see. They're for the cars / motorcycles / cyclists / pedestrians you don't see.
The closest I ever came to having my car T-boned by another car was when a woman drove right through a stop sign as I was passing through an intersection just two blocks from my house. It was not a high-traffic road, and she had gotten used to rolling right through the intersection and blowing past the stop sign because (of course) hardly any one ever drove on that road.
I nearly wound up hitting a tree as I ran off the road to avoid her, but fortunately no one was hurt. She was quite apologetic, but that would have been little consolation if she had killed me or my passengers.
It's good that you stop at all 4-way intersections. Keep doing it, and quit questioning the wisdom behind it.
Actually, it's more like putting a speaker outside your house, then playing personal information over it for anyone driving down the street to hear, and then getting angry that someone had the gall to record the audio that you were broadcasting to the world at large.
You're wasting your time. Prior art can be found for the great majority of patents. (I do this part-time as a consultant.)
But prior art is irrelevant unless you can afford a couple of good attorneys who bill at $500 / hour, and are willing to devote months if not years of your life to a legal battle. Is it worth $100,000, or even $1,000,000, to invalidate the plaintiff's patent? You can win the battle but lose the war when your small business goes bankrupt from the legal costs.